Still Going Strong Carol Channing Has What It Takes To Be A Star And Her Timeless Talents Are Still Worthy Of Wonder

Carol Channing, 74, has just galloped off the stage of the Capitol Theatre in Salt Lake City, having belted out performance No. 4,000-and-something of “Hello, Dolly!” Now, she is in a dressing room which has only the sign “What’s-her-name” on the door.

“This company treats me like … well, you saw the name on the door,” says Channing, with her patented squeal expressing mock outrage. “They can’t remember my name. It seems the choreographer, on the first day of rehearsal, told the boys, ‘I want you all to turn around and face the red stairway when what’s-her-name comes down.’ And it stuck.”

Chances are, they really do know her name. This wildly successful 47-city tour never would have happened without Carol Channing. In fact, the original Broadway version in 1964 never would have happened without her.

Channing is Dolly Levi, and when Barbra Streisand tried to take over the role in the movie version, the result was a big fat flop.

And as popular as Channing was on Broadway in the ‘50s and ‘60s (she also created the role of Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”) she has probably never been as popular as she is right now.

Time magazine, in a full-page story last September, said she is “capable of delivering an ageless performance that reminds theatergoers of what it’s like to be a star.”

Entertainment Weekly, a magazine not prone to fawn over aging Broadway stars, called her a “surprising, in-your-face success” in a story on May 26.

And Alan Stern of the Denver Post said, “She’s become a national monument, sort of like Mount Rushmore. God knows why they made it … But you’ve got to see it at least once in your lifetime.”

Our chance to see the Carol National Monument comes on the Fourth of July and continues through July 9 at the Spokane Opera House. Don’t worry too much about seeing an understudy in her place - she never missed a single show during the original Broadway run (1,273 performances), and she has only missed two in the thousands of revival performances she has done since.

She has an excellent excuse for missing those two: She was in New York last month collecting a Tony Award for lifetime achievement. The only other person who has won a lifetime achievement Tony is Jessica Tandy.

Channing pretends to be baffled about why she got hers.

“They gave me this wonderful lifetime achievement award, when I’m only halfway through with my life,” says Channing.

But she is overwhelmed by the award, and she claims to come up with only one explanation for it: The older you get, the more lovable you become.

“Nobody resents you anymore,” says Channing. “They don’t feel you’re their competition, or something.”

She didn’t get to say much during her acceptance speech, partly because she was uncharacteristically speechless (she delivers an impromptu curtain speech after almost every performance of “Hello, Dolly!”), but mostly because her allotted time was eaten up by “my wonderful standing ovation.”

“I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s just too bad, but I’m not going to cut this off.”’

Nobody basks in applause the way Channing does, but she never seems desperate for it - just thankful. And she has been thankful for it ever since she first set foot on a stage at age 7.

“I had to get up on the school auditorium stage,” she said. “Somebody nominated me for secretary of the student body, and the procedure was, you should tell your fellow students why they should vote for you.”

Her knees were shaking. She didn’t know if she could even croak out a single word. She was an only child, and she was used to being alone, in her room, talking only to the mirror.

But then she got up the nerve to start her speech, and an amazing thing happened.

“I heard them laugh,” she said. “And I realized they liked to laugh at the same things I laugh at. And I suddenly was no longer an only child. And I thought, ‘That’s the most wonderful thing in the world!’

“And when I realized that, I ran into the cloak room and cried. And I thought, ‘I’d do anything to get back on that stage, the safest place in the world to be.’ And I talked to my father about it, and he said, ‘Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”’

Her father then said the words that would change her life.

“He said, ‘At age 7 you can lay down your life for something, or at 97. But these are the fulfilled people. These are the people who are happier than the ones who haven’t dedicated their lives to something.”’

So she began to develop a comic persona that was like no one else’s. She had a voice that sounded like Louis Armstrong one second and Betty Boop the next. She had the physical comedy skills of Red Skelton, along with the leggy grace of a showgirl. She was soon getting small parts in Broadway shows.

Even with all of that, she needed luck to become a star, and it came in the form of an Al Hirschfeld drawing on the front page of the New York Times theater section in 1948. The drawing illustrated an article about “unknown show-stoppers,” and Channing, who had a part in the intimate revue “Lend An Ear,” fulfilled both criteria.

“There was this drawing of me, and I thought, ‘That’s the funniest character. No wonder people are laughing,”’ she said. “Anita Loos (the creator of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”) saw the drawing and said, ‘There’s our Lorelei Lee.”’

Her 1949 debut as Lorelei Lee catapulted her into fame. Her signature song, “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” became, in Channing’s words, “my ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.”’

Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote these words the morning after opening night: “Let’s call her portrait of the aureate Lee the most fabulous comic creation of this dreary period in history … She goes through the play like a dazed automaton - husky enough to kick in the teeth of any gentleman on the stage, but mincing coyly in the highheel shoes and looking out on a confused world through big, wide, starry eyes. There has never been anything like this before.”

It was the role of a lifetime, until her next role of a lifetime came around in 1964 with “Hello, Dolly!”

“Two smash hits,” marvels Channing. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

She has revived “Dolly” a number of times, but this one, she says, is the most gratifying of all. For one thing, the company gets along so well, it’s almost eerie.

“I have to tell you the truth,” she says. “We think we’re a blessed company. Have you ever felt a production had a guardian angel? I’ve never felt that before. But that’s the way I feel.”

But Channing, the seasoned trouper, knows that all this feel-good stuff doesn’t matter to the audience.

“Of course, it’s up to you to say whether that comes across the footlights or not,” she says.

The consensus of both critics and audiences is: It does.

That’s largely due to her energy, which doesn’t appear to have faded significantly. She has so much energy, she takes it for granted.

When asked how she does it, night after night, she looks perplexed and says only, “The time to fall asleep is not in the middle of a performance.”

Meanwhile, Channing has spent an entire year basking in the equivalent of that Tony Awards standing ovation.

“Oh, this is the happiest year of my life,” says Channing. “Not the best, but the happiest. The most harmonious.”

And that’s because, at age 74, she’s doing exactly what she wanted to do at age 7.

“I do believe that someone who’s truly funny lifts my life like nothing else,” she says. “When people say, ‘What do you want on your tombstone?’, I say, ‘She made us happy. She lifted people’s lives.”’

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo