One of the enduring mysteries of American show business is the process by which individuals emerge from the crowd scenes and chorus lines to become indelible, enduring, dependably one-of-a-kind institutions. The long life and death of Carol Channing, just a few days short of her 98th birthday last week, is a case in point.
By the standards of success on stage and screen, she was strikingly unconventional. Like many performers, Channing had a slightly uneven childhood. Her father was a West Coast journalist-turned-Christian-Scientist, her mother was a moody, erratic woman who frightened her daughter. But she seems to have discerned from the dawn of consciousness that she was a born performer.
Dropping out of Bennington College at the beginning of World War II, she enjoyed some initial success on the New York stage, followed by a decade of sporadic, erratic employment in nightclubs and the occasional show until she landed the first of her two signature roles: the gold-digging Lorelei Lee in the smash-hit Broadway production of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” in 1949.
Her later fame as the eponymous Dolly Levi of “Hello, Dolly!” starting in 1964 overshadowed her earlier success. But it was her pioneering version of Lorelei Lee’s famous anthem, “A kiss on the hand may be quite continental/ But diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” sung in Channing’s melodiously raspy mezzo-soprano, that fixed her face and voice in the American pantheon. It was, at once, comic and sexy-farcical as well, a little like her Broadway precursor Mae West.
By any measure, Channing was an attractive, even conventionally pretty, woman, but she was also smart enough, and sufficiently sure of herself and her spacious appeal, to play up her google eyes and oversized mouth and always appear as if her bottle-blonde hair had just emerged from a hurricane.
In a 1955 cover story, Life Magazine suggested that “the strange and wonderful charms of Carol Channing [have] always been a problem to Broadway showmen. She looks like an overgrown kewpie. She sings like a moon-mad hillbilly. Her dancing is crazily comic. And behind her saucer eyes is a kind of gentle sweetness that pleads for affection.”
But it wasn’t a problem: The strange and wonderful charms of Channing were her greatest invention and would please old and young worldwide for the following five decades.
How to explain the longevity? Part of the secret, with “Hello, Dolly!” at any rate, was the material. A musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s play, “The Matchmaker,” was a stroke of ingenuity and good timing. The invention of a turn-of-the-century professional matchmaker named Dolly Levi, combined with late-Victorian sets and costumes, a risible union of star-crossed lovers, and hummable anthems, was guaranteed to delight audiences.
“Hello, Dolly!” arrived on Broadway just six weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a little too convenient, of course, to suggest that theatergoers of early 1964 were in search of escape from national tragedy and flocked to “Hello, Dolly!” as a source of relief. But David Merrick’s lavish production, combined with Channing’s strange and wonderful charms, yielded a theatrical event that, in short order, became a national phenomenon.
Channing was up to the challenge; in retrospect, only she could have pulled off the outsize headgear, Victorian pastels, and exuberant songs. And she had the indispensable, show-biz quality of endurance as well. It is worth noting that, in a business notoriously hostile to women in middle age, she was reborn as a star in her early 40s and went on to play Dolly into her mid-70s in three separate revivals in 1977, 1982, and 1994, amounting to nearly 5,000 performances.
Like most performers, Channing yearned to expand her repertoire and enjoyed some modest success in movies — she was nominated for an Academy Award for her musical performance in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 1967 — and was still packing them in for a cabaret act in her 80s. But the offbeat mixture of professional fortitude, singularity, and good humor was her greatest strength.
She had to be disappointed that the movie version of Lorelei Lee was played by Marilyn Monroe, a very different kind of theatrical icon, and the part of Dolly Levi went to Barbra Streisand on film. If this dismayed her, however, she disguised it successfully and kept on singing and laughing and dancing and clowning around. There was only one Channing.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
