Free Then and Now by Barbara Cook Page B

album, and I received a tiny percentage for my work. And when I say tiny, I mean very, very tiny. This recording did not exactly sell like My Fair Lady would five years later. (The cast recording of My Fair Lady was an enormous top-of-the-charts hit, and once all that money was made—and paid out to the artists—record companies moved to make it much more difficult for performers to see any money from a cast recording. The record companies didn’t want to share it with the people singing on the record, so subsequently we were simply paid a flat fee—usually one week’s salary—with no provision for royalties on the album’s future earnings.)
    The closing of the show was terribly disappointing after the warm responses we’d had on the road. My first Broadway musical was now behind me, and the immediate future remained highly uncertain. When, later that year, I was singing at the Blue Angel, Orson Bean was also on the bill, and during a sound check he gave me a pep talk: “Oh, Barbara—it’s great. You’ve got it made now. You’ve done a Broadway show and you don’t have anything to worry about.” Orson’s a nice man, but was he ever wrong! It would be over two years before I landed another show.
    In the meantime, however, it was June 1951 and I was heading back to Tamiment for my second summer. That second year in the Poconos would turn out to be a momentous one for me because it was there that I met David LeGrant, the man who would becomemy one and only husband, and a profound influence on my life in many ways. He was the only acting teacher I’ve ever studied with, a deeply talented man who for unknown reasons was unable to claim his place as a fine director.
    Most important of all, he became the father of my darling son, Adam.

6 • MEETING DAVID LEGRANT
    RETURNING TO TAMIMENT meant I could earn another five hundred dollars for the summer, so I didn’t just think a return to Tamiment would be nice—I was eager. It meant money, fun, and a summer in the country. I never guessed I might acquire a husband along the way.
    Prior to meeting David I’d had a few dalliances, but none of them was really serious. With David it was the real thing. We met in June of 1951, and while David was not a handsome man by conventional standards, I was drawn to his sensitivity, his superb talent, and a certain gentle quality in his personality. He seemed rooted. Solid. Looking back on it now, I think what attracted me most of all was that he seemed to have a lot of the “answers.” He seemed very sure about the basic issues in life, and just a few weeks into our ten-week Tamiment season, we became inseparable. I don’t remember when we started thinking and talking about the possibility of marriage, but by the time the summer had ended and we returned to the city, we thought we might get married.
    There was one big problem, however. My mother. She had recently come to New York to live with me—in many ways it was inevitable that she would follow me to New York because I was her life. She was, however, dead set against my being with David, much less marrying him, and I think the prospect of our marriage may have been the deciding factor in her move to New York—shereally wanted to stop us from marrying. In her view, David was poor as hell, wore tattered clothes, and had no real prospects. I knew about his talent, but even if my mother had been aware of that, it wouldn’t have mattered to her. She just felt he was terrible husband material—he wasn’t handsome, he was penniless, and, worst of all, in her mind, he was Jewish.
    She did everything she could to stop us. At one point there was even a very dramatic scene in the kitchen when she picked up a knife and threatened him. Of course she wasn’t really going to stab David, and she certainly was never physically violent to me when I was growing up, but when you look at photos from