Whistling Dixie
by Kevin Nance
APRIL 15, 2010 TAGS:
One of the greatest nights I ever spent in the theater was with, of all people, Dixie Carter, who died this week at 70. It was 1997, and I’d managed to score a front-row seat at Broadway’s Golden Theatre for an early-run performance of Master Class, Terrence McNally’s wonderful, loosely fact-based play about the opera diva Maria Callas in her twilight years, teaching at Juilliard. A Callas fan, I’d read the script and followed the production’s unlikely rise to the status of a solid hit on the Great White Way with Zoe Caldwell, who had won a Tony Award as Best Actress in the lead role, and later with the stage veteran Patti LuPone, who had recently left to reprise the part in London.
It was the play and its subject, not the casting, that drew me — which was fortunate since, like virtually everyone else in the room, I wasn’t expecting much from Carter. When I had thought of her at all, it was first as one of the wisecracking stars of the popular but brittle sitcom Designing Women, and second as an avatar of the aging Southern belle in the Blanche Dubois mold, except without any of Blanche’s depth and pathos. I hadn’t dreamed that Carter could really act, and certainly not in such a demanding role as the one McNally had written in Master Class.
But from the first moment she strode onstage in chic black, her high cheekbones flaring and dark eyes flashing, Carter owned the part and owned me. I don’t remember breathing. I don’t remember any of the other actors. What I remember is her absolute command of the room, the sense that you didn’t dare talk or cough or move without her express permission. I remember the telling twitch of her long fingers in nervous passages, and the clenching and pulsing of tiny muscles in her face as Callas listens to a young tenor who has revived feelings she isn’t sure she wants to recall. I remember her chesty, seductive, sometimes bullying voice, which turned vulgar and guttural in the passages in which she evoked Callas’ lover and tormenter, Aristotle Onassis, and later, in the play’s most heartrending moment, when Callas forgets herself and sings a brief passage from an aria in which she had been coaching a student. The horrifyingly hoarse, croaking sound Carter produced — which perfectly suggested Callas’ own vocal decline in the years following her retirement from the stage — was the sound of passionate life cruelly diminished, yet still full of a desperate hope as noble as it was deluded.
It broke me down entirely, and, in the next moment, built me back up. There was catharsis, there were tears. There was a clear sense of having been privileged to experience something rare and magnificent. Above all, there was a sense of shock that this experience had come courtesy of an actress who had made a career of tossing off zingers in Filthy Rich and Diff’rent Strokes.
I was a theater critic for more than a decade. I never saw a greater performance.
Where had the real Dixie Carter been hiding all these years?
Other critics felt the same sense of disorientation. “It’s amazing how prominence on a sitcom — even on a well-made one — can color an actor’s reputation,” the New York Times’ Peter Marks wrote before celebrating Carter’s “charisma and command” in the play. When Carter’s casting had been announced, “we admit the words ‘death wish’ crossed our worried brow,” added Linda Winer of Newsday. “Whoopi Goldberg replacing Nathan Lane, we understand. Liza Minnelli in for Julie Andrews, we understand. But how could the sensitive people behind this elegant and prickly performance piece have chosen a TV personality (Julia Sugarbaker in Designing Women) to climb into the Chanel suit owned by the likes of Zoe Caldwell and Patti LuPone? What did the producers think this was? Grease? Who was next? Sally Struthers?”
Carter understood the confusion of the critics and, to her credit, didn’t blame us for it. When I interviewed her a few years later in Nashville — she was in town to perform her successful cabaret act, which she’d perfected in annual gigs at New York’s Café Carlyle, holding her own with the likes of Barbara Cook and Elaine Stritch — she freely acknowledged that she’d been terrified by the reaction of critics to her Broadway turn. “They didn’t expect this from a sitcom actress,” she said with a shrug that implied that, after all, that’s what she was. Or had been.
In fact, Carter knew better than anyone the poison she’d picked during the bulk of her career, and the price she’d paid for it. She’d started out on the soaps — she had a run on The Edge of Night — and did theater now and then, but mostly she’d grabbed for the biggest paycheck she could find. She was selling herself and her talent short, and she knew it. Even Designing Women, which she effortlessly dominated as the wise and witty putdown artist Julia Sugarbaker, was beneath her. In the show’s latter years, to make matters worse, she became the screenwriters’ mouthpiece, delivering on-the-nose homilies about the Deeper Meaning of It All — in this case, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s Clintonesque progressivism. (The same fate later befell the actor James Spader on the later seasons of David Kelley’s Boston Legal.)
Carter’s self-knowledge lent her career a touch of the tragic. “I had a longing to be a great artist, but I had chosen pathways that couldn't possibly allow me to do that,” she told Frank Rizzo of the Hartford Courant in 2003. “For instance, at one point I had chosen to leave the theater and New York to go to Los Angeles to get on a TV series. If you go toward money, which I have time and again, you know it can cut you off from achieving that other longing to do something really, really fine because you know you don't do that in television. You simply don't. God bless Designing Women, and it's certainly the best thing I've ever done in television, and I'm utterly grateful to it. But Designing Women ... Master Class. No comparison.”
But Master Class seemed to mark a turning point for Carter, who devoted most of her subsequent years (other than in an Emmy-nominated turn on Desperate Housewives) to theater, cabaret and projects with her husband, Hal Holbrook. “You have to take a huge loss financially to do a play,” she told the Washington Post. “But it’s worth it to me to be in a really good play.”
Better late than never.
Kevin Nance, a freelance writer based in Chicago, writes regularly for Obit.
It was the play and its subject, not the casting, that drew me — which was fortunate since, like virtually everyone else in the room, I wasn’t expecting much from Carter. When I had thought of her at all, it was first as one of the wisecracking stars of the popular but brittle sitcom Designing Women, and second as an avatar of the aging Southern belle in the Blanche Dubois mold, except without any of Blanche’s depth and pathos. I hadn’t dreamed that Carter could really act, and certainly not in such a demanding role as the one McNally had written in Master Class.But from the first moment she strode onstage in chic black, her high cheekbones flaring and dark eyes flashing, Carter owned the part and owned me. I don’t remember breathing. I don’t remember any of the other actors. What I remember is her absolute command of the room, the sense that you didn’t dare talk or cough or move without her express permission. I remember the telling twitch of her long fingers in nervous passages, and the clenching and pulsing of tiny muscles in her face as Callas listens to a young tenor who has revived feelings she isn’t sure she wants to recall. I remember her chesty, seductive, sometimes bullying voice, which turned vulgar and guttural in the passages in which she evoked Callas’ lover and tormenter, Aristotle Onassis, and later, in the play’s most heartrending moment, when Callas forgets herself and sings a brief passage from an aria in which she had been coaching a student. The horrifyingly hoarse, croaking sound Carter produced — which perfectly suggested Callas’ own vocal decline in the years following her retirement from the stage — was the sound of passionate life cruelly diminished, yet still full of a desperate hope as noble as it was deluded.
It broke me down entirely, and, in the next moment, built me back up. There was catharsis, there were tears. There was a clear sense of having been privileged to experience something rare and magnificent. Above all, there was a sense of shock that this experience had come courtesy of an actress who had made a career of tossing off zingers in Filthy Rich and Diff’rent Strokes.
I was a theater critic for more than a decade. I never saw a greater performance.
Where had the real Dixie Carter been hiding all these years?
Other critics felt the same sense of disorientation. “It’s amazing how prominence on a sitcom — even on a well-made one — can color an actor’s reputation,” the New York Times’ Peter Marks wrote before celebrating Carter’s “charisma and command” in the play. When Carter’s casting had been announced, “we admit the words ‘death wish’ crossed our worried brow,” added Linda Winer of Newsday. “Whoopi Goldberg replacing Nathan Lane, we understand. Liza Minnelli in for Julie Andrews, we understand. But how could the sensitive people behind this elegant and prickly performance piece have chosen a TV personality (Julia Sugarbaker in Designing Women) to climb into the Chanel suit owned by the likes of Zoe Caldwell and Patti LuPone? What did the producers think this was? Grease? Who was next? Sally Struthers?”
Carter understood the confusion of the critics and, to her credit, didn’t blame us for it. When I interviewed her a few years later in Nashville — she was in town to perform her successful cabaret act, which she’d perfected in annual gigs at New York’s Café Carlyle, holding her own with the likes of Barbara Cook and Elaine Stritch — she freely acknowledged that she’d been terrified by the reaction of critics to her Broadway turn. “They didn’t expect this from a sitcom actress,” she said with a shrug that implied that, after all, that’s what she was. Or had been.
In fact, Carter knew better than anyone the poison she’d picked during the bulk of her career, and the price she’d paid for it. She’d started out on the soaps — she had a run on The Edge of Night — and did theater now and then, but mostly she’d grabbed for the biggest paycheck she could find. She was selling herself and her talent short, and she knew it. Even Designing Women, which she effortlessly dominated as the wise and witty putdown artist Julia Sugarbaker, was beneath her. In the show’s latter years, to make matters worse, she became the screenwriters’ mouthpiece, delivering on-the-nose homilies about the Deeper Meaning of It All — in this case, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s Clintonesque progressivism. (The same fate later befell the actor James Spader on the later seasons of David Kelley’s Boston Legal.) Carter’s self-knowledge lent her career a touch of the tragic. “I had a longing to be a great artist, but I had chosen pathways that couldn't possibly allow me to do that,” she told Frank Rizzo of the Hartford Courant in 2003. “For instance, at one point I had chosen to leave the theater and New York to go to Los Angeles to get on a TV series. If you go toward money, which I have time and again, you know it can cut you off from achieving that other longing to do something really, really fine because you know you don't do that in television. You simply don't. God bless Designing Women, and it's certainly the best thing I've ever done in television, and I'm utterly grateful to it. But Designing Women ... Master Class. No comparison.”
But Master Class seemed to mark a turning point for Carter, who devoted most of her subsequent years (other than in an Emmy-nominated turn on Desperate Housewives) to theater, cabaret and projects with her husband, Hal Holbrook. “You have to take a huge loss financially to do a play,” she told the Washington Post. “But it’s worth it to me to be in a really good play.”
Better late than never.
Kevin Nance, a freelance writer based in Chicago, writes regularly for Obit.
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