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From last night's fireworks show along the East River. 9:35 PM. Photo: JH.
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The Fourth of July, 2007. It has been very quiet in the city since Tuesday afternoon. Plus, the weather has been serene with the sky overcast and the temperatures in the low 70s. I’m one of those who revels in the promise of rain on a warm summer’s day. Especially if I have no commitments and am close to the house.
Felicia Taylor asked me on Tuesday if I would join her and others in talking about the great Beverly Sills who had died here in New York the day before. I declined, because although I’d met Ms. Sills, and dined with her on more than one occasion, I did not know her well enough to engage in a discussion about her.
I met her about ten years ago, invited to a little dinner by Gale Hayman and her then husband Dr. William Haseltine at Mortimers. Her great achievements were already behind her and although we’d never met before, I felt as if we had because of her frequent appearances on television, particularly the Johnny Carson Show. The audience knew her as a jolly woman, quick to laugh and always with a ready smile. Off-camera and off-stage, the personality was less jolly (only in the sense that she wasn’t “on”) although she remained quick to smile, and laughter was not far behind.
As anyone who had seen her on television might imagine, she was a friendly personality, easy to engage in conversation. Despite her very grand and deserved reputation, she had no “airs” about her whatsoever, although her manner was clearly self-confident and self-knowing.
After that I saw her fairly often at gala dinners both at Lincoln Center and elsewhere. Our conversation was never more than brief but always friendly. Mainly I was interested in getting her picture and she was always professional and gracious. I saw her most often at Michael’s at lunch – the last time only several weeks ago -- where her lunch guests were often as famous and/or as prominent as she.
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| Beverly with Nancy Ellison and Bill Rollnick |
She was born in 1929, five months before the stock market Crash, the daughter of immigrants from Romania and Russia. The economics of those times required all but the very rich to find ways to assure income just to eat and to live with a roof over their heads. This was a universal experience in America that before it was over changed laws and radically altered political platforms. Its profound hardship can still be recalled by those of us whose parents endured it, no matter how young they were at the time.
Those in need followed every pathway in securing some kind of productive outcome. Thanks to the phenomena of movies and radio, one of the most common household dreams was a life in Show Business where (according to the newspapers and magazines) stars made fantastic salaries and lived like (imagined) royalty.
Beverly Silverman’s family was no exception. By age three her enterprising mother was preparing the child for a life in the public eye. It was the age of the Great Depression but also the age of Shirley Temple, the movie star toddler who was the second or third highest earner in the United States by the time she was six or seven. The astounding fortunes of the adorable little precocious performer gave rise to a new rendition of the American dream and an industry of anxiously ambitious parents, an army of talent instructors (voice, dance, etc.) and fast-talking talent scouts at the ready.
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Beverly and friends |
By age five Beverly Silverman was taking singing lessons and, it turned out, had a natural personality for performing. She was also naturally equipped with an ability to work hard and to persist. The mother’s dreams of childhood stardom for her daughter were never quite realized, but the training that it provided equipped the girl with persistence augmented by a great natural talent, and the rest is history.
I knew very little about Beverly Sills private life except that she had a long marriage to a man with great family wealth; that during the last few years her husband had been very ill (he passed away last year), and that her children, now grown needed continuing care. It was not a picture of a diva living with crowning glory that her mother had always dreamed of for her, but rather a woman who had enormous personal responsibilities. Behind that effervescence was a life that not a few of us would consider burdensome.
In her obituary in the New York Times by Anthony Tomassini she was quoted as saying, “I have often said I never considered myself a happy woman. How could I, with all that’s happened to me. But I’m a cheerful woman. Work has kept me going.” Against many odds, wisdom delivered a life graced by beauty, giving, and greatness. |
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