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Anonymous
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70.243.210.x | posted: 8/5/2007 at 9:39:16 PM ET
Wow, it's way to quite right now....I'm trying to break the silence
I just got back from my first trip to New York yesterday! It was amazing! I got to see my first actual Broadway shows: Spring Awakening (greatest freaking show ever); 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (James Lapine directed it so how can i refuse?) Anyway, very sad to say that I did not see Bernadette while I was there. I did however stop by Shubert alley  . Anyway, this morning while i was looking at the morning paper, what should I find--BERNADETTE PETERS! She's apparently doing a concert here in Dallas in January. I'm so excited. tickets are on sale now, so if you live in Dallas be sure to go to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra website.
Anyway that's my story.
Someone please post something. an old interview or whatever....i don't care.
Kate
| jmslsu01
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Registered:
6/9/2003
From:
northern VA | posted: 8/5/2007 at 10:48:53 PM ET
Hang on, Kate. Apparently, Bernadette is working on a new recording. Once that's out, I'm sure there will be articles, and discussion of the recording.
Jenn
| Karen
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Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 8/5/2007 at 11:03:09 PM ET
Yeah, I'm hoping that happens soon. It is pretty slow right now. I don't have time tonight, but I'll look around and see if I have any old interviews that haven't been posted before.
At least your trip sounds great!
| Anonymous
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70.243.210.x | posted: 8/6/2007 at 12:07:33 AM ET
lol if you can Karen that would be great. I'm home sick and i have absolutely nothing to do. Can't wait for the new CD!
Kate
| jmslsu01
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Registered:
6/9/2003
From:
northern VA | posted: 8/6/2007 at 7:51:04 AM ET
Hope you feel better soon, Kate. I can't look for interviews/articles now, but I'll try tonight.
Jenn
| Anonymous
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From Internet Network:
70.243.210.x | posted: 8/6/2007 at 11:44:02 AM ET
Oh, your all so nice. Thank you.
Kate
| jmslsu01
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6/9/2003
From:
northern VA | posted: 8/6/2007 at 7:15:03 PM ET
Blast from the past, when Bernadette was a bit more...loquacious in her interviews. This was in the Boston Globe, Dec 20, 1981 edition.
******************
It's 10:30 a.m. and Bernadette Peters, whose tiny frame is wrapped in a pink silk robe, spills out of the bedroom of her suite, wet curls framing her renaissance face. She has stepped from the shower to the interview.The shower was still running. But Steve Martin, wearing make-up, left this message: He's going back to bed. He had to get up for a too-early television appearance. He's tired.
Meanwhile, a maid armed with a vacuum cleaner is humming through her chores. An agent is on the phone, something about the sensational Bernadette Peters pictures in Playboy. And here she is, this little Botticelli blonde, mischief glinting in her eyes, gliding in the room. "Ta-ra! I'm here! Ta-ra!" She continues a pirouette that is simultaneously elegant and slapstick, then flops into a corner of the couch. The photographer, anxious to freeze the action, instantly follows her with his lens.
The questions you would most like to ask Bernadette Peters are questions she has already asked herself. All you have to do is be a good listener, guiding the conversation gently, preventing it from wandering, considering what she says with your heart as well as your ear.
Bernadette Peters is from a Sicilian family of bakers from Queens. Manhattan is home. Her family name is Lazzara. Only now, at the Carlyle, you have to be announced. You have to be on her list of visitors to be accepted into her suite.
She has never married. What is her passion?
It's her work, her career, developing her talents. She is an actress, a dancer, a singer, a flamboyant female whose delicate aura is disarming, misleading. She is not a helpless vanilla creature. She is a small but powerful bundle of dynamite, a woman not in full bloom but exploding with ambition.
It was always this way.
She started singing and dancing as a child in a TV program, "The Children's House." As a teenager, she appeared in the Bowery Lane Theater. Audiences loved her. So did one of her discoverers, Carol Burnett, who had her as a guest frequently on "The Carol Burnett Show."
Norman Lear also "discovered" her when she appeared in a Los Angeles stage tribute to the late George Gershwin. Lear offered her a guest role in "Maude," which led to the CBS-TV series, "All's Fair."
When Bernadette Peters was 19, she appeared in an off-Broadway musical spoof, "Dames At Sea." She got rave reviews. Then she appeared in a revival of "On The Town." Raves again. And a Tony nomination. More raves for her appearance in the doomed David Merrick's play, "Mack & Mabel," and a second Tony nomination.
One important thing you've got to understand about Bernadette Peters.
She has had her ups and downs.
She's unstoppable.-
"Yuk, safe is boring. I want to grow. You want to know what creativity is? It's tapping places you didn't know, places you didn't know existed inside you. I am very distinctive looking. You want to know something? It's very limiting looking the way I look. When I started in show business, I wanted to get a job, any job, so I auditioned for the chorus. Nobody hired me to be a chorus girl. I stuck out too much. I didn't blend. Know what they wanted? They wanted a California sunshine orange-juice kid. I didn't look like, hey, your well-scrubbed typical American teenager.
"Know what I did? I straightened my hair, one of those blunt cuts. I wore collegiate clothes. But my hair was too hard to deal with, all natural curls. And I didn't like the clothes. So I said: The hell with it.' I said: I am going to be myself.' I said: This is what I am and this is it.' See, I didn't care by then. I wasn't getting work the other way so I decided to be myself. That takes guts. But there's only one of you in the world, so you might as well be the best you can be. Right?
"Being an individual is the most important thing in the world. I should have done it all the time. I thought a lot about myself before being myself. Maybe that was a good thing. It made being individual less scary. Individuality is a great release, don't you think? It frees you. You don't have to scrunch into somebody else's idea of you, a mold. Know what? I'm trying more and more to be me.
"It's a matter of stripping away your fears, one-by-one. We are all layered in fears and they've got to be pulled away. It's like counting backwards from 10 - 10, 9, 8 . . . As the numbers get lower, the peeling away gets easier. You get more and more courage to be yourself. The disappearance of each layer is the very thing that gives you courage.
"I was very insecure. Insecurity is poison. It's like wearing chains. It prevents you from going anywhere. It gets so it becomes hard to meet people, just to say, Oh, hello there!' E------- mean?
"You want to know exactly what I was thinking? OK, I'll tell you. I wa -------- say they're jealous because I have money . . .
"When I was a kid growing up in Queens, I studied Hollywood. I'd hear on the television that so-and-so was getting a divorce. Hollywood meant divorce. Hollywood meant a lot of diamonds and a lot of gowns. Hollywood meant nothing real. But all the time I wanted to be a star, a Hollywood star, but the old myths stuck in my mind. Those myths became my insecurities.
"Guess what happened? I said to myself: If you have a good car, a good home, nice things - is it going to change you?' And then I said to myself: No, no, no, you earned it. So I decided I deserved whatever my success brought. And layer No. 10 of my insecurities was gone! Peeled away!"-
"I'm very strong. Can you tell that I am strong? Well, for a long time, I denied my own strength. I had this real fear of aggression. Know what I did? I played the typical feminine role. Helpless. Flighty. I figured man is strong and a woman satellizes around her man. I tried to tell myself that women are not strong. But underneath I was strong, very strong, and I allowed my strength to surface. How did I do it? I started making one decision, then another, and still another. Then I was making a lot of decisions and I was happy with those decisions. And I began enjoying the results of my decisions. That-- 9 of insecurity gone! Poof!
"I still look fluffy, don't I? Oh I know that. But I can change. You haven't fnorgotten that I'm an actress, have you? No? Well, there are such things as make-up. And wigs. I can change. The thing is that the more you assert yourself, the more you express yourself, the more people hear you. It's all attitude. It's not necessarily the way you look! It's all in being yourself. No, it's more than that! -------way I am."-
"Want to know what my big dream in life is? I don't have a five- year plan, a 10-year plan. I don't have specific objectives. My dream is to grow, to be the best that I can be. I want to be proud of my work. Maybe marriage. Maybe kids. I said maybe. Then my other dream is to be self-assured. Not to have fears that I can't conquer. I am still haunted by fears, little ones. Oh, I'm shy. I can't make myself say, Hello' to a stranger, even if the stranger is someone I think I'd like to know. You want to know what I do? I practice saying hello to strangers.
"I'm terribly shy. Acting is a great outlet. On stage, I don't have to worry a--- doing and saying. In real life you have to worry, yes. You ask yourself: Have I spoken when I should not have spoken?
"My mother always told me I was beautiful. I didn't believe her. I didn't like what I saw in the mirror. I didn't think I was pretty enough or thin enough or popular enough. That was another layer of insecurity, something to be peeled away.
"Now I think I am distinctive looking, different looking. I don't think I am gorgeous. At least not in terms of what society thinks is gorgeous. When I love somebody, I love the person that the person is. I love Walter Matthau. To me, he's handsome because of the way he is, not the way he actually looks."-
"I had another hangup, still another insecurity that had to go. I thought that being a success meant that you had to stab someone in the back. The words, career-oriented and ambitious - I used to be afraid of those words. I used to call those words the back-stabbing words. Well, now I know. Having a career is not being bad. You did not have to step on or over anybody. Look, I got here in spite of myself. I got here despite all my drawbacks, all my insecurities. Why? Because I don't think of myself in terms of insecurity anymore.
"If I hear that someone doesn't like me, I say: Oh, they'll change their mind in the future. Later they'll like me. In two or three years, I'll do something that will make that person like me. I've been hired by people who said, before, that they didn't care for my work.
"I've established myself. I know part of this business is rejection. But I know a lot about myself. I can't live in a suburb. I know that just raising a family isn't enough. I've tried to knit. I don't like to knit. I've tried to sew. I made my graduation dress and, gee, I almost had to wear it. It was bad! I hate to crochet. But I love to act. And I act when I sing. When I'm on stage, when I do something exceptional, something I've never done before, I feel I've been someplace I've never been. And it's all happening inside me."
| jmslsu01
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Registered:
6/9/2003
From:
northern VA | posted: 8/6/2007 at 7:34:34 PM ET
And an article from the Los Angeles Times (Oct. 23, 1988 ), when she was filming David.
****************
On March 3, 1983, a father set ablaze the room where his 6-year-old son lay sleeping. The boy received third-degree burns over 90% of his body-but he didn't die. Here is the astonishing story of David Rothenberg, his tragedy and triumph, as seen through the eyes of his remarkable mother. -From the book jacket of "David," a biography by Marie Rothenberg and Mel White
Bundled up in a gray wool coat and pink-and-magenta scarf and gloves to ward off the "February" chill, Bernadette Peters walked slowly through the "Brooklyn" playground. She was taking her young son to school on what was to be one of the last normal days of his life.
Peters looked very maternal, her trademark frizzy hair tightly pulled back and braided. It was a short scene, and as soon as she could she removed her wintry garments. An elementary school on the West Coast may stand in for one on the East Coast, but a hot day in Los Angeles is a far cry from February in Brooklyn.
Peters is not an obvious choice to play Marie, whom she describes as "the mother of all mothers, except for Mother Teresa." A Broadway musical star ("Sunday in the Park With George," "Into the Woods"), she has no children. And her image to date in such movies as "Pennies From Heaven" and "Annie" has been that of a helpless waif.
Yet, Peters says in her distinctively breathy little-girl voice, "I seem to have those motherly instincts. You always find those things in you that are exactly like the character. I could see being in a situation where someone I love is not being cared for the way I want. I have the energy and strength to do something about it."
When Marie Rothenberg discovered that her former husband almost succeeded in deliberately burning their son to death (he claimed that he had intended to kill himself as well, but lost his nerve at the last minute), she virtually moved into the hospital to be with the youngster. She assumed David would die and wanted to make his last hours easier.
"David had 1,000-1 odds against surviving," Peters says. "Marie thought, `What could he be feeling? He goes away on vacation with his father, and his father tries to kill him.' He can't talk and he can't see, but he can hear. She decided that even if he had 2 days to live, 2 hours or just 2 minutes, he'd feel secure, loved and not alone. That's a wonderful thing to do for someone. That strength she gave him made him live."
David Rothenberg is now 12. He lives with his mother and stepfather in Fullerton, and is continually undergoing plastic surgery to reconstruct his face and body. Charles Rothenberg was convicted of attempting to murder his son. Now in Soledad Penitentiary, he will be eligible for parole next year. Meanwhile, mother and son have cooperated with ABC-TV in a 2-hour docudrama, "David," based on Rothenberg's book. It airs Tuesday.
"This is a very, very moving story," says Peters, who insists that the project will not be exploitative. "No pictures of the real David will be used. It's obvious Marie wanted her story told. It's our job to not make it maudlin."
"David" is Peters' first major television work since her 1976 series "All's Fair" with Richard Crenna. She came to the project after completing "Slaves of New York," an upcoming Merchant/Ivory film based on the best seller by Tama Janowitz. Peters plays a hat designer in arty low-rent downtown New York who lives with a boorish artist.
People regarded the character in "Slaves" as "a victim," Peters says, "but I thought of her as someone unconscious. She seemed to be me 8 years ago, someone who didn't really appreciate herself enough. She was in a fog. She didn't know her strength."
At 40, Peters believes that she finally has matured. ("Maybe it took so long because I was working on stage, and I didn't have time to figure out my social skills.") And it's this personal growth that convinced "David" director John Erman ("An Early Frost," "Who Will Love My Children?") that she was right for the part of Marie Rothenberg.
"I directed Bernadette in her first film 18 years ago, `Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies' (with a story by Steven Spielberg)," Erman recalls. "It was an ignominious flop, but we've been friends ever since. I've watched her grow in strength and maturity. . . .
"I think there's a certain place in your life when all of a sudden you change and approach things as an adult. The way Bernadette seems to view the world and deal with people indicates she is no longer a child/victim. She is an adult taking care of herself."
The same transformation occurs with Marie Rothenberg. "Marie starts out as a child/victim," Erman continues. "She's pulled between two men-her ex-husband and her fiance-and she never says what she wants. Then this incident happens. I thought, `Wouldn't it be great to get someone who's just been through that, rather than get someone totally grounded for the last 10 years?' "
Erman has developed a reputation for dealing with touchy subjects. "I seem to be drawn to these morbid pieces," he agrees. "Whatever my dark side is comes out in my work. One thing that got me going on this piece was the power struggle these parents go through. (It) parallels what I went through as a child: both parents trying to claim you and hold onto you and get you to love them more than the other."
While making the movie, he recalls, "the greatest day for me was when we got the real mother and real boy together with Bernadette and the movie boy (Matthew Lawrence) in a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. David was sitting there not talking. All of a sudden, our little boy took out a deck of cards and started doing card tricks. David's eyes focused on this boy with such love. It was heartbreaking. There was a soul there that hadn't been destroyed."
Peters believes that "David" offers "a lesson for all of us. Marie teaches David that people really see what you want them to see. If you want them to see what's inside you, you must teach them to look. And you must teach yourself to show what's inside you-if you have the courage.
"David had to muster up his courage. Because he doesn't look like everyone else, he had to reach down and show his real self. Most people spend all their lives covering up. We're all concerned with externals. David shows his true self, and that's a beautiful thing."
"David" will be televised at 9 p.m. Tuesday on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42.
| Karen
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5/3/2002 | posted: 8/6/2007 at 7:43:11 PM ET
That's great. Thanks Jenn. Is that a newspaper interview or the transcript of a 70s-style therapy sesson? She sounds a tad manic doesn't she? "Satellizes?"
Actually, that interview was reprinted, but in a significantly abridged and rearranged form, in the book Marian Christy's Conversations: Famous Women Speak Out. This is the first time I've seen the full interview. We talked about the book once here:
previous conversation
Edit: Just saw the second interview. She was still doing the psychobabble stuff a little bit (but not as much) in 1988.
| jmslsu01
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From:
northern VA | posted: 8/6/2007 at 7:47:38 PM ET
Rather interesting, right?
Jenn
| Karen
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5/3/2002 | posted: 8/6/2007 at 7:48:41 PM ET
Oh, rawther!!
| jmslsu01
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6/9/2003
From:
northern VA | posted: 8/6/2007 at 7:51:19 PM ET
Oldies but goodies. I don't enjoy reading the later interviews.
Jenn
| Anonymous
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From Internet Network:
70.243.210.x | posted: 8/6/2007 at 8:06:03 PM ET
Thank you so much Jenn! I just ran out to the store to get some medicine and I got into an accident. ugg, some idiot wasn't looking when he was backing out. But this has really helped make my day better. I absolutely love the first interview. Bernadette defiantly does have the gift of gab, very insightful though. I wish she would write an autobiography.
Thanks again.
Kate
| Karen
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5/3/2002 | posted: 8/6/2007 at 9:04:49 PM ET
Okay, I found one. This is from the Dec 1981 issue of Stereo Review. It's an interview with Peter Reilly.
Being around Bernadette Peters can be a grueling exercise in self-control. As she came toward me through the sepulchral elegance of New York's Sherry-Netherland lobby, encased in a brilliantly red dress with a neckline of cut-outs that gave shifting glimpses of a 10+ body and trailing a wake of appreciative bell-boy stares, I had to repress my impulse to touch, stroke, fondle. I settled for a handshake. Upstairs in her suite (slightly smaller but no less ornate than the Winter Palace), I trailed after her into an immense, tall-windowed salon overlooking Central Park. Perching her just over five feet of contours on a sofa large enough to seat the Supreme Court, she crossed her legs, glanced at the marble fireplace half a block away, then at me, and said, "You have very interesting eyes."
"Va-va-vooom!" as Ed Norton used to say on The Honeymooners. If Edward VII, Diamond Jim Brady, Flo Ziegfeld, or Auguste Renoir had walked into the room at that moment and swept her away, I wouldn't have been the least surprised. As it turned out, it was only her press agent, who appeared to take orders for refreshments (coffee for her, Tab for me). Sitting in the harshly bright north light of an early autumn afternoon, Peters looked, with only a little eye shadow and lipstick, as invitingly touchable as she does in the Varga portrait on the cover of her new MCA release "Now Playing." She really does have that Dresden-porcelain skin, those dimples, those big brown eyes, that pouty little mouth. I told her how well I thought the artist had caught her.
"Isn't he great?" she said. "He's eighty-four years old. I dedicated this album to him. I like putting myself in another era; I enjoy it. And I enjoy doing the old songs. The funny thing is that the young people don't know that they're old songs. Like "Mean to Me" on this album--I sing it in Las Vegas and a lot of young people come up and say, 'Gee, where did you find that song?' Or "Don't." I thought everybody associated it with Elvis, but you'd be surprised how few do. But I don't sing old songs just because they're old. What I tried to do in both my albums was to be true to me. I love to sing ballads, something I can relate to. You know I really don't think of myself as a comedienne. I'm an actress. I have to find a reason to say those words."
Not basically a comedienne? How about her subtle send-up of late-Fifties pop in "Dedicated to the One I Love?" Or the outright hilarity of "The Weekend of a Private Secretary," a Thirties gem about a girl who "went to Havana/On one of those cruises/For forty-nine fifty/To spend a few days," had a few Bacardis with a Cuban gent, tried her damndest to miss the return boat, but is now back in the office punching the time clock and plotting how she can meet another Cuban? Listening to both of these later I realized that Peters does always stay completely in character, with no campy Midlerian asides or superimposed cuteness.
"I used to get home from high school in time for the 4:30 movie, and I got to see all those great old pictures. I developed a real love for Ruby Keeler and Rita Hayworth and Mary Martin, just the way they'd stand or look at people or dance. I have a photographic mind, and I remember exactly how they were sometimes when I sing."
[Skipping some of the reviewer's comments on the album] She feels that her long experience in television has helped her in recording. "I was used to the legitimate theater where you sing out. In TV you have to be specific; you have to pay attention to every detail."
Who did she listen to when she was growing up? "Oh, everybody...the Shirelles. I went to high school with one of the Crystals. We had a lot of Frances Faye records around the house. I was crazy about her voice and the way she performed, things like "Miss Otis Regrets" and "Love for Sale." And Martha Davis and Spouse, Garland's "Live at Carnegie Hall," and Sinatra's "In the Wee Small Hours." And Andy Williams--I used to like some of his ballads. But, you know, I had a small record career of my own around then. I recorded a song called "Wait Johnny for Me." That's where I first met Brooks Arthur, who produced both my albums; he played piano on that session. The song was about a girl asking her boy friend to wait for her even though he was graduating. I sort of sang-talked it against a background of the "Pomp and Circumstance" march. Oh, it was so awful. I didn't even tell any of the kids in my class that I'd recorded it, but it was kind of a hit on WMCA here in New York, and it did well in Boston, and I think it topped the charts in Johnstown, Pennsylvania--where they had the flood. I did another one, but that didn't do anything. Then some producers brought me in because they wanted someone who could sound like Cher, the hot act at the moment. Trouble was that I ended up sounding more like Sonny. So that was the end of that."
[Skipping a biographical paragraph] "It was tough when I first went to Hollywood, like starting all over again. It was really Carol Burnett, a woman I admire enormously, who kept me out of the unemployment line. We had just finished working together on the film version of Annie, and she told me that Lucille Ball had done the same thing for her when she first went out there."
What does she think of present-day Hollywood? "It's different from what they tell me it was like in the old days. Then the studios really promoted you from picture to picture. But of course, if they didn't want you any more, it was over. Nowadays, you're more or less in control of your own career. It's better that way. It's scary to have someone else in control.
Does she study singing? "Years ago I went to a wonderful man in New York named Jim Gregory. He taught me how to think while I was singing. But I've always liked songs that tell stories. They have to be 'I' songs with a hook, something that relates to the heart." She giggled, reminiscing. "Of course there was the time I was scheduled to sing "The Star Spangled Banner." I studied it and studied it. I was going to be the first person to interpret it! By the time I got up to sing it, some other voice came out; I didn't know who it was, but it wasn't me. There's no way to 'interpret' that song. But every once in a while I hear what I'm trying to do from another performer. I just saw Lena Horne in her new show, and when she came out and sang "The Lady is a Tramp," it was as if I'd never heard it--the words seemed brand new. She's wonderful!"
You're not so bad yourself, I mused as she trekked with me to the elevator in a cloud of high-Renta perfume. I had come expecting to meet a pocket-size Monroe-like kewpie-doll. Instead, I'd just spent an hour with a straight-on, no-b.s. lady One of the more surprising things about Peters is that she is one of those very few beautiful women who have a sense of humor about themselves and the effect they have on others. But surely the most surprising thing about her was her response to my asking what she would really like most to have in the future. She paused for several seconds and then said, gravely, "Well, someday I'd like to own my own house."
|  moljul
Registered User
Registered:
4/2/2001
From:
New York
Fav. BP CD: I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
Fav. BP Song: Dublin Lady
| posted: 8/6/2007 at 10:26:15 PM ET
Fabulous intervew! Thank you very much. I had never read that one.
We need a section on this site dedicated to collecting all these old interviews.
Kevin, are you listening? 
"Particular mention must be made of Bernadette Peters, who turns up briefly in a sort of sparkly Glinda the Good costume. She's the reluctant muse sent to help Alice with her writing. The muse is dressed like Oz, sounds like Queens and behaves like a bored student adviser." Alice Film Review, The New York Times, December 25, 1990
"I'm one star away from Dolly Parton ... and Raymond Massey is between us. I hope we don't suffocate him." Bernadette Peters receiving her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, April 24, 1987
| Anonymous
Anonymous Poster
From Internet Network:
70.243.210.x | posted: 8/6/2007 at 10:39:09 PM ET
I loved that interview. Thanks for posting Karen. I love her interviews from the 80's they always seem so...philisophical.
Kate
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