Icons: February 2008 Archives

...the glorious Bernadette Peters!!!

Why we love her? Anyone who has ever seen her in concert or on the Broadway stage knows that she is one of the great divas of her time. A two-time Tony winner, her stage triumphs have included "Annie Get Your Gun," "Sunday in the Park With George," "Song and Dance," "Into the Woods" and "Gypsy" (I love her Mama Rose and think it ranks right up there with Merman's).

Happy birthday and best wishes to this great talent...

...the legendary actress and activist is still going strong and that is a good thing for us all. With HIV-AIDS still a major problem here and everywhere despite advances in treatment, Dame Elizabeth continues to fight the good fight and raise millions for research and care as she has done for 25 years. The photo at right is from mid-December when Elizabeth took to the stage for the first time since the early 80s for a benefit performance of "Love Letters" with James Earl Jones.

She's had an epic life with seven husbands (including Richard Burton twice), four children, many grandchildren, two best actress Oscars, a humanitarian Oscar, and has been named a Dame of the British Empire, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Kennedy Center Honors and the AFI Award.

Then there are those 50-plus movies including such classics as "Giant," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" "A Place in the Sun," "Raintree County," "National Velvet," "Father of the Bride," "Suddenly Last Summer," and my fave "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (that's her with gorgeous leading man Paul Newman, above).

And she's always been a friend of gays dating back to her youth and her close friendship with Montgomery Clift as well as with her "Giant" co-stars Rock Hudson and James Dean. She also had a life-long friendship with Roddy McDowell who she met on one of her first films, "Lassie Coime Home."

There really ain't nothing like this Dame...

I knew that Carol Channing had endured a very long, and very unhappy marriage to her third husband. When she filed for divorce from him in 1998, she confessed that they had rarely had sex in more than four decades together! Can you imagine?

So when I saw Miss Channing a few weeks ago at an event for the Smithsonian, she was with her current husband - and junior high school sweetheart - and they seemed like a coupla lovebirds. So I congratulated her on that when we spoke:

Greg: "I'm so glad you found each other."
Carol: "Oh thank you. You must have a wonderful girl or wife."
Greg: "Actually, if I had anybody it would be a boy."
Carol: "Oh, well that's alright. It's love!"

Anyway, here is a column I have written on Miss Channing that will run in tomorrow's LA Daily News:

Carol Channing may be 87 years old and a certified Broadway legend, but the star of "Hello, Dolly!" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" still feels like there is so much ahead. She's blissfully married to her fourth husband, Harry Kullijian, who was junior high school sweetheart and looked her up after she wrote about him in her 2001 memoir "Just Lucky I Guess." Together, they have been sweeping throughout the state of California working to restore the creative arts to the public school system.

"At my age now, I can lift (kid's) lives," Miss Channing said when we spoke recently. "They cry, the teachers do, to see these wonderful little brains desintegrating right before our eyes and they're looking for something to excite them and so they get into the craziest things. They're not in love with life and that's what the arts brings....I can see these little children growing up, exposed to the arts. Oh boy, it's the greatest high in the world."

If there was ever anyone who is living proof of how the arts can enhance a life, it is this three-time Tony winner and Oscar nominee:"I wanted to lift people's lives from the fourth grade on, my first time on stage in the school auditorium," she said. "I realized, that's what I want to do for the rest of my life, it's like a calling.

Her Broadway career began in 1941 and by the end of that decade, she was a huge star with such credits as "Lend An Ear," "Wonderful Town" and "Blondes." But it was "Dolly" in 1964 that cemented her status as one of the theater's grand leading ladies. She stayed with the show for three years, starred in a 1978 revival then in 1995, came to Broadway one last time for another run as "Dolly" followed by a national tour." The last "Dolly" production was the end of her heading up major theatrical productions. But she is still performing.

"I go from one great theater to another and do my one-woman show, talk about the arts, and introduce my husband," she said.

Husbands haven't always such a great topic for Miss Channing. She was quite young when she married writer Theodore Naidish. After their divorce, she married Canadian pro football player Alexander Carson with whom she had a son. That marriage too ended in divorce and in 1956, she married her manager and publicist, Charles Lowe. Although they were married for 42 years, she filed for divorce in 1998 and confessed that the union had never really been a happy one.

That has made her current marriage to Kullijian all the more sweet: "For the first time, everything is in front of me. Everything. It's the happiest time in my life."

Ruby Dee was in town this week for the Oscar nominees luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel but almost missed the opportunity to celebrate her nod for "American Gangster."

"We were waiting for a long time at the wrong hotel, at the Bel Air Hotel," she said, chuckling. "I enjoyed it so much. This was my first time being at such a luncheon and seeing all those people. Michael Moore was at out table and I so enjoyed talking to him and, of course, George Clooney. So many people who I didn't think knew me."

I spoke with the 83-year-old actress, author and civil rights activist by phone Wednesday from her home in New York. She spoke of what it is like, after more than 60 years of making to movies, to be at the center of awards season buzz.

"It's really exciting and I'm seasoned enough now to be able to relax and enjoy this attention," she said. "It's kind of rewarding and satisfying knowing that you aren't existing in a vacuum. It's like getting a bouquet while you can still smell the flowers."

Ruby won the supporting actress prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards a few weeks ago, a surprise victory that greatly enhances her chance of winning the Academy Award. It's something that this pioneer in African-American theater and films thought would never happen.

"When I was younger, I had these dreams like a kid in the candy store with my nose pressed against the glass," she said. "When it doesn't happen for you and nobody like you is getting these things, the laws of dimishishing returns sets in. There's something about racism that undercuts self expectation, especially in the height of your expectation days."

Until Halle Berry in 2001, no African-American actress had ever won the best actress Oscar. So far only three - Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Hudson - have won in the supporting category.

For Ruby, it's been quite a ride - especially following her Grammy win a year ago in the spoken word category which she won with late husband Ossie Davis for a recording of their joint autobiography "In This Life Together." She will receive the Chairman's Award given for special acheivement and distinguished public service at next week's NAACP Image Awards where she is also nominated for "Gangster,"
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"The [awards] scene in California is something else," she said. "It's like Christmas, New Years and Easter all rolled into one for the actors."

Her lengthy film resume includes roles in "A Raisin in the Sun," "The Incident," "The Jackie Robinson Story," "Do the Right Thing" "Jungle Fever," "St. Louis Blues," "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle Fever."

I wanted to know which of her many films that Ruby would like people to be more aware of. She immediately comes up with the politically-charged 1968 drama "Up Tight" which she starred in and co-wrote the screenplay.

"I'd really like to see that film re-released as a DVD," she said. "They entrusted me with the screenplay and it was a thrilling experience for me. Ossie said, "Ruby, I told you, you should be writing."

For a civil rights pioneer who personally knew Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, the ascension of Sen. Barack Obama as the potential winner of the Democratic nomination for president is thrilling.

"I think the world is in an position of heightened expectations," she said. "We are being overcome with our things and our gadgets and our buttons and wires and we're forgeting about the human mechanics, the mechanics of being human. As I watched the man, I'm thinking there's something about his calling our attention to the fact that promise has a spriritual component that we need to put in the mix of our political and social lives."

Ruby has always kept busy with acting roles on film and television but in the years since the death of her husband, Ossie Davis, she has been working non-stop. In addition to "Gangster," she has roles in the independent films "Steam," "All About Us" and "For No. 2." The latter film won Dee the best actress award at the Atlanta Film Festival and won an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival yet is still awaiting distribution.

"I've done so much work since my husband's been gone, I think he's up there doing publicity for me."

Meanwhile, it is still not known whether or not Ruby and the other acting nominees will even be at the Feb. 24 Oscars since the writers strike still casts a shadow over things.

"I'm expecting to go and I would like to go. But I'm a longtime supporter of unions and I'm a WGA member. I wouldn't cross a picket line. I'm hoping they will settle it."