In Honor of Dorothy
Many of us may have heard, recited or paraphrased an epigram of Dorothy Parker’s. Perhaps the one that ends ‘Three Martinis and I’m under the table… four and I’m under the host’, or ‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy’. She became perhaps the most caustic, witty and quotable of writers since Oscar Wilde.
Honor Heffernan is well-versed in these bon mots and hundreds more. She needs to be. Honor and her partner Trevor Knight have created a show called The Whistling Girl that distils in song the genius of the woman who died half a century ago this year. The Whistling Girl, which is taken from the title of a Parker poem, has become a popular touring show and an album of the songs will be released early next month.
Honor has herself been performing as a singer and actor for 45 years. This project, she admits, is one of the most all-encompassing of the Dubliner’s career.
‘Musically, this album is like a culmination of all the styles I’ve ever known as a performer,’ she says. ‘It takes in folk music, blues, rock, jazz, funk even. I never wanted to box myself in to one category.’
She is now known, primarily, as a jazz singer, but after a stint acting and singing with a rock band she fell in to jazz quite by accident, as she explains.
‘I had been appearing in a play in the Abbey and had just been in the film Angel [the Neil Jordan classic was released in 1982], when Shay Healy asked me would I sing some jazz songs on a radio show he was doing at the time,’ she says. ‘He put me with [pianist] Jim Doherty and said “sing some standards” and Jim said “gosh, you’re very good at this”. I had no pretensions or ambitions to being a jazz singer. I found it a challenge and just embraced the opportunity.’ Several albums, and a long career has ensued but she is still surprised that people know her best as the smoky chanteuse, and that is why The Whistling Girl is liberating to her. ‘In 2010, when I brought out a rock album, people couldn’t really get their heads around that because I was labelled as a jazz singer. They didn’t realise, or forgot, that I started singing rock in 1970,’ she says.
‘The Whistling Girl gives me the opportunity to delve into everything I like to do. I play a character. It’s not me, it’s not Dorothy Parker. I’m just a lonely woman in a hotel, surrounded by the words of Dorothy Parker, who channels her personality. That is how we present it. It’s great to have this vehicle because Trevor’s music is astonishing, and Dorothy Parker’s words are just brilliant. I identify with what she is saying, and how she says it so much.’
Like most, Honor had heard the quotes but knew little of her life beyond the legendary tales of Parker and the ‘vicious’ circle of the Algonquin set, who held court in the hostelries of preWorld War II New York.
‘I was the same as everybody else. I had laughed at a few of the quotes but I didn’t know the extent of her achievements as a writer,’ she says.
‘I didn’t know anything about her life, that she was the editor of The New Yorker and an activist who raised over $30million for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
‘I was blown away when I discovered the depth of her character. She had a tough life, she suffered from depression, drank a lot but through her caustic wit and sense of humour she got herself through.’
As well as the nationwide tour, Honor will bring the show to New York, the city synonymous with Parker and her celebrated coterie.
‘That we are going to New York in November with the show is a big deal for us,’ she says. Does she think she could have held her own among the wits of Ms. Parker’s circle?
‘No! I wouldn’t have been sharp enough for them,’ she laughs.
‘They came up with quips at the drop of a hat. I would just love to have sat there and listened. Can you imagine Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Groucho Marx around one table? Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.’
The Whistling Girl album is out on October 6. Honor Heffernan and her band present The Whistling Girl on tour until October 13. See The Whistling Girl Facebook page for details.