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| Standing in the spacious kitchen of her then new apartment in 1989, Stockard Channing told the agent, “I’d buy this place only if the owner threw in the chopping block.” While she loves to cook, her “desk” is actually a 19th-century cherrywood table. “Acting is a very strange, nomadic life,” she observed. “If the phone rings and I happen to be in the middle of a soufflé , I let it drop, and I’m out the door to catch the next plane.” © 1989 by Hal Drucker & Sid Lerner (with F. P. Model). Photo: © Sing-Si Ltd. |
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| Stockard Channing in her dressing room at the Studio 54 Theater before a performance of "Pal Joey." Photos: Hal Drucker |
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As Regina Giddens in “ Little Foxes. ” Photo: Joan Marcus |
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With James McDaniel in the stage version of “Six Degrees of Separation.”
Photo: Birgette Lacombe. |
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As Ouisa Kittredge in the film version of “Six Degrees of Separation.”
© MGM. |
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With Donald Sutherland in the film version of “Six Degrees of Separation.” © MGM. |
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In the title role of “Hapgood,” aka “ Mother,” the head of a top-level British intelligence agency. Photo: Ken Howard. |
There I was, like Jean Valjean, descending the deepest reaches of what might well have been the Paris Catacombs. In reality it was a claustrophobic subterranean staircase leading to the “backstage” of the Studio 54 Theater in Manhattan. Did I say backstage? It was more like below-stage. I figuratively brushed away the cobwebs from my face and rapped on the door. The voice inside belonged to a woman whom I had seen and admired on stage in many leading roles over the past couple of decades, but not up close and personal since I interviewed her in her Park Avenue apartment circa 1989 for a coffee table book entitled From the Desk Of: about famous people at their work stations. Fortuitously, for my co-author Sid Lerner and me, from the day our book was published, Stockard Channing became one of America’s most admired and yes –famous – actresses. Although her windowless dressing room was likely more cramped than the hallway of her co-op, she took it in stride, keeping the setting cheery, with a faux Christmas tree and invited me to share her settee for a non-harried conversation two hours before that night’s performance of the revival of Pal Joey. I was reminded that though an imposing presence on the stage, up close and personal, she was petite and certainly more youthful than any 65-year-old woman had any right to be. At that she is 22 years older than Vivienne Segal was when she originated the part of wealthy society matron Vera Simpson in 1940, opposite Gene Kelly as Joey. No one viewing this production could suggest that this Vera Simpson was much too old to have a “horizontally speaking” affair with a young man, in this case, Matthew Risch, who took over as Joey after Christian Hof, late of Jersey Boys, was injured before opening night.
With one notable exception (the respected John Lahr of The New Yorker), the reviewers savaged the production in general, and Risch, in particular, though they were mostly laudatory about Channing.
“I don’t read notices,” she said.
I was flabbergasted. Were I an actor, I doubt if I could have the discipline not to read the critics’ raves, let alone, denunciations.
I suggested that lyricist Lorenz Hart really summoned up the essence of Vera’s hedonistic dilemma with the song:
What is a man? Is he a stimulant? Good for the heart, bad for the brain. Nature’s disgrace since the world began. What is this thing called man?
“Our challenge was to make the lyrics penetrate, to illuminate the fact that here is a woman in such conflict – who is about to drive off that tall bridge. At any rate it’s really an internal monologue about her state of mind. I’m proud to be doing it.”
“Any chance you’ll allow Nicole Orth-Pallavacini (Channing’s standby and sister of a dear friend of mine) to go on for you?” I asked with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek.
She laughed. “No I don’t think that’s going to happen. I hate to say it, I’m pretty sturdy.”
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Channing as Vera opposite Matthew Risch as Joey.
Photo: Joan Marcus. |
How do you keep things fresh?
“It’s that Big Black Giant as Oscar Hammerstein termed it: the audience. I think it’s a show the audiences have embraced and when you feel that energy coming at you, you’re happy to tell the story again. Bottom line is the audiences are getting it and getting what we’re trying to do. It’s a very unusual piece and sometimes people are used to musicals being a lot cuddlier than we are. On the other hand it’s beautifully executed in design and company participation. There have been seven performances with Christian and many more performances with Matt who has been extraordinary taking over. Richard Rodgers’s music itself carries you through, it’s so fabulous. You’ve got two great standards, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered and I Could Write a Book. And that’s quite exhilarating. I love it. It’s about everybody that’s on the stage, the orchestra the whole thing . It’s like riding a big steamship leaving the harbor every night and it’s not just up to you, it’s up to the whole team.”
Speaking of teamwork, I asked, breathes there a TV series that epitomizes the team concept more than “West Wing” did?
She nodded. “The whole West Wing series is one of the great achievements in television making. It benefited by such good writing from Aaron Sorkin, and so many extraordinary players. It’s Shakespearian, because it exists at so many levels, like Upstairs, Downstairs, onstage, backstage. And you had such an admixture of characters; you had formal speech-making material, civilized sorts of behavior and other times, more of a low-life behavior. But I really respected it. The first two seasons, beginning in 1999, I only did a few episodes as the First Lady, Abbey (Abigail Ann) Bartlet (opposite Martin Sheen as Josiah Edward “Jed” Bartlet, president) but for some reason I was treated as sort of a supporting role player, but in 2001 I became a regular cast member.” In 2002, Channing won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.
“It was one of the most exciting times of my life,” Alan Alda told me in an earlier interview, alluding to his performance on West Wing as Senator Arnold Vinick, a Liberal Republican running against the underdog Democratic candidate, Matt Santos, played by Jimmy Smits. Much of the dialogue was extemporaneous.
That whole plot line reinvigorated the show, I suggested.
“The writers got very interested in writing that character,” said Alda, “because they got a chance to see things from the other side of the aisle. It’s no good seeing it from one angle at a time.”
Channing’s favorite episode?
“I was in the White House kitchen making a ham sandwich when I talk about my predicament, the possibility of losing my medical license, and Jed, in spite of his MS diagnosis, deciding to go for a second term, without consulting with me.”
It was in Channing’s real kitchen that I first interviewed her, accompanied by co-writer Sid Lerner and the late photographer Sing-Si Schwartz. Quoting from the pages of From the Desk Of: I wrote: “It would not be too farfetched to say that Stockard Channing “lives” in the kitchen. With its high ceilings, tiled floors – “the original owner had a home in Florence and actually brought in Italian workers to lay the tiles.” Her gourmet cook status is evidenced by the hanging pots, scattered cookbooks and restaurant guides, the “industrial strength” six-burner, two-oven stove. And bottles of what she euphemistically called “homemade vinegars” – wines that had gone bad.
Channing was born Susan Antonia Williams Stockard in New York City on February 13, 1944, daughter of Mary Alice ( née English), who came from a large Brooklyn-based Irish Catholic family, and Lester Stockard, a shipping agent. She grew up on the Upper East Side.
“I do remember going with my father to see Leslie Caron in the movie Lili. And I stayed through it a second time. I never saw that many stage plays when I was growing up. My parents mostly took me to musicals. When I was in college I went to London and went to the theater; that was the way it was. When I started here on the stage, English actresses appealed to me. I always admired Maggie Smith later Judi Dench. I never wanted to be a glamour movie star, I was drawn to the acting part of it.”
She is an alumna of Chapin’s, a private school for girls in Manhattan, and later The Madeira School, a Virginia boarding school for girls. Channing majored in history at Radcliffe College, and graduated in 1965. She married her first husband, Walter Channing, when she was 19 and maintained the amalgamated name after they divorced. She was married three other times and has since been together for more than 20 years with Dan Gillham, a cinematographer.
While at Cambridge, she played Jenny in Weill/Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Isabella in Measure for Measure, among some 35 plays. After serving the obligatory apprenticeship, in 1971 she made her professional Broadway debut in the chorus of the musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona, working with playwright John Guare (“I eventually took over the lead.”) Channing later did the Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves in 1986, which included the young, relatively unknown, Ben Stiller.
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As Betty Rizzo in the movie version of Grease © Paramount Pictures. |
She had made her screen debut in 1971's The Hospital, a comedy that starred George C. Scott and Diana Rigg. “I had exactly one line in the movie, and I can’t even think of what the line was.” It wasn't until 1978, however, that Channing would win her most memorable film role to date — tough gal Rizzo, leader of the Pink Ladies in the movie version of the musical Grease. Although she was cast as a teenager, Channing was 34 when she was chosen for the film.
In 1985, she won the coveted Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.
There followed a succession of plays starring Channing, at Lincoln Center Theater, all of which I had the privilege of seeing and reviewing. They included Ouisa Kittredge in Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (1990) which in 1993 was reprised as a film and nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe, Guare’s Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992), the great English playwright, Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood (1994) and as Regina Giddens in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1997). A Roundabout Theater production of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter (1999) had Channing playing opposite the always splendid Laurence Fishburne.
“So you saw Vivienne Segal,”she said reverentially as she began preparing herself in front of the make-up mirror. I had the sense she would play to some 10 year old in tonight’s audience who would recall in mid-century, “I saw Stockard Channing as Vera Simpson.”
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