In Such Good Company, page 17
“Mimi, you funny little good-for-nothing Mimi
Am I the guy?”
He turns around again, flying back to Maria. He’s courting both of them!
We see Maria and Mimi (split screen), each holding the same photo of Judd, singing:
MARIA AND MIMI:
“Lover, please be tender
When you’re tender
Fears depart
Lover, I surrender to my heart!”
EDDIE: (Voice-over) “He got married…to both of ’em!”
Judd is marrying Maria. They sing:
Judd marries Maria.
JUDD: “Thou swell”
MARIA: “Thou witty”
JUDD: “Thou sweet”
MARIA: “Thou grand! Wouldst kiss me pretty?”
They exchange rings and kiss.
Next, we see Judd marrying Mimi! They sing:
Judd marries Mimi.
JUDD: “Thou swell”
MIMI: “Thou witty”
BOTH: “Thou grand!”
They exchange rings and kiss.
EDDIE: (Voice-over) “Yes, for four years he lived two lives, just hoppin’ back and forth like a sparrow in heat!”
Maria and Judd are in their cozy home snuggling happily. They sing:
MARIA:
“In our mountain greenery
Where God paints the scenery
Just two crazy people together!”
JUDD:
“This can’t be love
Because I feel so well
No sobs, no sorrows, no sighs…”
He checks his watch. Time for Mimi!
JUDD: (Singing)
“So long, farewell
Auf Wiedersehen
Good-bye!
I leave and heave a sigh
I have to fly!”
EDDIE: (Voice-over) “Yeah, and he flew to Mimi! She was ready for him, the lucky devil! Boy was she ready!”
MIMI: (Singing, hot to trot)
“I couldn’t sleep
And wouldn’t sleep
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered
Am I”
JUDD: (Singing apologetically)
“I didn’t know what time it was!
Life was no prize
I wanted love
And here it was
Shining out of your eyes!”
They embrace passionately. He glances at his watch. Oops, time to get back to Maria!
JUDD: (Singing)
“I’m wise and I know what time it is now!
So long, farewell
Auf Wiedersehen
Good-bye!
I leave and heave a sigh
I have to fly!”
EDDIE: (Voice-over) “He sure had the best of both worlds. Let’s see now, whose turn was it next? Oh yeah, Maria.”
Judd is hugging Maria.
JUDD: (Singing)
“A hundred and one
Pounds of fun
That’s my little Honey Bun
Get a load of Honey Bun tonight!”
Maria turns around and we see she is very pregnant!
MARIA: (Singing, patting her stomach)
“June is bustin’ out all over!
All over the meadow and the hill!”
JUDD: (Singing)
“So long, farewell
Auf Wiedersehen, good-bye!”
Judd is back with Mimi, who pleads with him.
MIMI: (Singing)
“Don’t change a hair for me
Not if you care for me
Stay, little Valentine, STAY!”
EDDIE: (Voice-over) “And he did. But only long enough to deliver his mail!”
Judd passionately kisses Mimi. We see Maria at home feeding the baby.
MARIA: (Singing)
“I’m just a girl who can’t say no!
I can’t be prissy and quaint
I ain’t the type that can faint
How can I be what I ain’t?
I can’t say NO!”
Judd is flying back to Maria.
JUDD: (Singing)
“The hills are alive
With the sound of music
With songs they have sung
For a thousand years…”
UH-OH! Engine trouble!
JUDD: (Singing, nervously)
“Whenever I feel afraid,
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune (He tries, but nothing comes out!)
So no one will suspect…
I’M AFRAID!!!”
The plane crashes! We’re back in the hospital room, where Eddie is telling Judd’s story to the nurse, who has fallen asleep from boredom.
EDDIE: “I always said I was the world’s best mechanic. I took care of that plane as if she were mine. Greased her wingtips, flipped her flaps…yeah, the only thing I forgot to do was put enough gas in her. She sure was a special plane, the old Maria-Mimi, she had everything!”
We hear Judd waking out of his coma.
JUDD: (Weakly singing about his beloved airplane)
“The wheels are yellow
The upholstery’s brown
The dashboard’s genuine leather…”
Eddie and the nurse rush to his side. Eddie confesses that his goof made the plane crash and begins to cry. Judd forgives him and they hug.
JUDD: (Singing)
“Climb ev’ry mountain
Ford every stream
Follow every rainbow
Till…you…find…your dream…”
He relapses. Eddie is bereft. The nurse puts her arm around Eddie.
NURSE: (Singing)
“Happy talk
Keep talkin’
Happy talk
Talk about things you like to do
You’ve got to have a dream
If you don’t have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true?”
Suddenly both Maria and Mimi show up! They stare at each other suspiciously and then, uh-oh, Mimi spots Maria’s picture on one side of Judd’s bed…and Maria spots Mimi’s picture on the other side! The strains of “Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You!” are heard! Judd comes to again and sees his wives together. He’s caught!
JUDD: (Singing) “One girl for my dreams”
Maria and Mimi are livid. They remove their wedding rings and throw them on the bed.
JUDD: (Continuing)
“One partner in Paradise
This promise of Paradise
This nearly was mine!”
MARIA AND MIMI: (Singing)
“I’m gonna wash that man
Right outta my hair!
And send him on his way!”
JUDD: (Singing, and dying)
“Adieu, adieu,
To you, and you and you…”
He’s gone. Eddie wails, “Poor Judd is dead!”
Maria and Mimi cry. They’re now widows. They sing about their predicament.
MARIA AND MIMI:
“The broken dates
The endless waits
The lovely lovin’
And the hateful hates
The conversation with the flying plates!
I wish I was in love again.”
They keep singing, and Eddie and the nurse join them. Maria and Mimi come on to Eddie, much to the annoyance of the nurse. They finish with a rousing “I WISH I WAS IN LOVE AGAIN!”
Who should appear as a vision in the sky but Judd! He’s sporting wings and benevolently sings:
Judd goes to Heaven.
JUDD:
“Hello, young lovers
Whoever you are
I hope your troubles are few
All my good wishes go with you tonight
I’ve been in love like you
I’ve had a love of my own like yours
I’ve had a LOVE OF MY OWN!”
Judd floats away into the clouds and the nurse grabs Eddie for herself, leaving Maria and Mimi in the dust.
THE END
—
The writers came up with several more of these mini-musicals, featuring salutes to Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Frank Loesser, Lerner and Loewe, Harold Arlen, Stephen Sondheim, Harnick and Bock, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Jule Styne, and on and on. Sometimes running as long as fifteen minutes, each one was amazingly conceived and produced as our finale. The sets, the costumes, the orchestrations, and the execution were worthy of a Broadway show.
We sang live, the orchestra was live, and we did all of these in one take. The only time we had to prerecord and lip-synch part of a number was when the camera was in a wide shot and we couldn’t have a microphone showing! However, when we did prerecord, we still sang with the orchestra, which made it sound more “live.”
Today there are filmed shows where the music comes from someone sitting at a computer using something called Pro Tools, which is a computer editing program that puts together all the various components of a recording—singers, orchestra, etc. An orchestration is sent overseas to be prerecorded by musicians in a foreign country. The performer then records the song to that orchestration in a sound studio, and will lip-synch the entire number when it’s shot. Also, if there is more than one person in the number, they are often recorded separately, and their voices are put together later in the studio. Pro Tools also has the capability of correcting the pitch of a sour note or changing entire keys without affecting the tempo.
Naturally, when it comes time to shoot the number, there are many takes because of the several camera angles needed.
I realize that I’m comparing film with the live feeling of taping in front of an audience. I know it’s apples and oranges. I understand that this is pretty much the way it’s done today, and I can appreciate that fact. I’m sure cost figures in, but sometimes after all the prerecording and tweaking, when it’s all over, everything is so darned perfect it sounds fake. When I did the movie Annie, we recorded all the songs with the orchestra right there—in the same room—just like when they record a Broadway original cast album.
Frank Sinatra and many other singers of his era also insisted on recording their albums in the same room with the orchestra. To me, this sounds a hundred times better than these manufactured recordings. Tony Bennett still does it that way.
If these mini-musicals were to be taped today, it would be an entirely different ball game because not too many folks in front of, or behind, the camera were raised on live television. Also, many of us were coming from theater back then, which gave us a leg up. Added to that, we mounted our entire one-hour show, often featuring these elaborate fifteen- to twenty-minute finales, in five days, taping the entire thing in front of a live studio audience in less than two hours! I was spoiled. I admit it.
We had brilliant writing, music, costumes, choreography, direction, camerawork, and a crew that became family from the get-go.
And boy, did we have fun.
We got some great news in the fall of 1973: an invitation to be the first television show to premiere at the new Sydney Opera House! We were pretty excited. Joe would produce, of course. Our director, Dave Powers, would be on board, as well as our associate producer, Bob Wright; our associate director, Roger Beatty; our choreographer, Ernie Flatt; our lead dancer, Don Crichton; a couple of our writers; and Vicki, Tim, Harvey, Lyle, and I. We booked the brilliant ballet artist Edward Villella to be our guest star.
But first, we had to get there. Joe and I, along with Harvey, Tim, Lyle, and Vicki, decided to break up the long trip by stopping off in Honolulu at the Kahala Hilton Hotel for a couple of days, so we wouldn’t be laid low by jet lag.
Bob Wright, Dave Powers, and Roger Beatty were going to fly to Sydney nonstop, but something went wrong with their plane, and after the six-hour flight from Los Angeles, they wound up having to stop in Honolulu so that whatever the problem was could be fixed. An hour or two went by while they were waiting by the hotel pool. Unfortunately, they were dressed in warm clothes…sweaters, heavy jackets, etc., which were becoming pretty uncomfortable under the hot Hawaiian sun. Since they weren’t registered at the hotel, as the afternoon wore on without any update on the plane repairs, they decided to buy some cooler Hawaiian shirts from the gift shop and sit outside on the hotel’s beachfront and partake of several mai tais. With the sun shining down on them ever so brightly, Bob, Dave, and Roger…got drunk. Bob was still able to keep it together enough to continue calling the airport, hoping for any news about when the plane was going to resume its flight to Sydney. Still no luck.
It was decided that we should all go out to dinner and get some food into our tipsy trio. The food didn’t help much. The guys were still pretty “jolly,” so Joe said he would take over and keep calling about the flight. However, Bob insisted that he was on top of things (thank you very much) and was perfectly capable of calling the airport from the restaurant to find out if they should go straight out there or needed to return to the hotel.
There is something very funny about a person who has had one too many and tries his best to look, act, and speak as if he’s sober. He speaks and walks very carefully. That was Bob that evening in the restaurant. When we were finished with the meal, he pushed back his chair, very slowly got up, and looking down at the floor, very deliberately put one foot in front of the other as he headed for the telephone, slightly swaying from side to side. After a few minutes, he (again) very slowly made his way back to our table. After some effort to sit down again, he paused, trying to collect his thoughts, and finally he looked at all of us (breathlessly waiting for him to say something!).
“Go…………hotel.”
We teased Bob about that night forevermore. “Go hotel” became our nickname for him.
Bob, Dave, and Roger finally took off safely, and the rest of us had another two days in paradise before we were to follow. The last night in Honolulu, we were all sitting around a little outside bar on the beach that had a thatched roof with a palm tree growing straight up through an opening in its ceiling, stretching out over the roof. It was getting late, and we were having a final nightcap before turning in. As we were getting ready to leave, Tim got off his stool, said “Night all!” and, jumping over the bar, proceeded to climb up the palm tree like a monkey and disappear through the opening. Laughing hysterically, we waited and waited, and he never came down. He was determined to stay up there on the roof and wait for all of us to give up and go to our rooms. We finally did. I’ll bet he practiced climbing on that palm tree earlier in the day, knowing exactly what he was going to do that night.
We all got to Sydney in one piece and started to rehearse. After a few days we got a call from the prime minister’s office. The prime minister, Gough Whitlam, was in Japan, but his wife, Margaret, invited the cast and crew to their residence for a lovely lunch. She was a very tall, cheerful woman and a great hostess. At one point during the lunch, the doorbell rang and Mrs. Whitlam answered it. When she returned to the dining room, she informed me, “There are several newspaper reporters outside and they’d like you and me to come out on the balcony and pose for pictures. Do you mind?” Not at all. We went outside and posed for a few minutes while the cameras clicked away. The next day, a huge picture of Mrs. Whitlam and me was on the front page of Australia’s main newspaper. The caption was “The First Lady of Australia Hosts the First Lady of Comedy.” Very nice…but then…the article went on to talk about how Mrs. Whitlam had invited us to lunch and how we were all having such an “amusing” time except that “Mrs. Whitlam was not so amused when Miss Burnett showed up for lunch bringing with her a gaggle of reporters.”
I couldn’t believe it. I called Mrs. Whitlam, practically crying, and she told me not to pay any attention to the article, because their newspapers liked to make things up.
So much for the Fourth Estate in Australia.
Back to rehearsals: We decided on a musical opening that would have the dancers outside on the steps of the beautiful Sydney Opera House performing to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda.” After that number, we would be inside on the stage, and I would open the show singing “It’s Today!” from the Broadway musical Mame. Harvey, Vicki, and I would do sketches, and Tim would appear as the world’s oldest maestro and conduct the symphony orchestra to the tune of “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Edward Villella had a solo turn, and then our finale would be a fractured version of Swan Lake featuring Edward as the hero and me as the Charwoman, who gets to dance with him.
Fracturing Swan Lake with Edward Villella (if you think this action shot is blurry, you should have been in my shoes!).
We were all staying at the same hotel, which had gorgeous views of the harbor and the opera house, and we would get together in the evenings after rehearsals to try the various wonderful restaurants around town. I noticed that our group began to shrink after a few days, which can happen when you are on location. People split off and form liaisons—major and mini love affairs were blooming like daffodils in spring! I think being halfway around the world must have allowed some folks to throw caution to the wind. Anyway, they all thought their trysts were a big secret. They weren’t, but we all did our best to keep mum. Joe and I felt a bit uncomfortable about all the shenanigans, but these were adults and we weren’t hired on as chaperones!
