Much-married actress brought wit and exuberance to lead role in Hello, Dolly!
‘‘George Burns once told me, ‘If men don’t prefer blondes, you’ve wasted a lot of money on peroxide.’ ’’
Carol Channing actress b January 31, 1921 d January 15, 2019
Carol Channing, who has died aged 97, was synonymous with Dolly Levi, the hilarious matchmaking widow in the musical Hello, Dolly!, which took Broadway by storm in 1964. She created the part in the original New York production, sang it in the West End revival of 1979 and was still playing Dolly well into her 70s.
Nearly 6ft tall, with huge dark eyes and a letterbox mouth topped off with outrageous blond wigs, Channing had a deep, rasping voice. Her looks could have made her the younger sister of Danny La Rue, the actor who in 1984 played Mrs Levi in the West End.
When Hello, Dolly!, by Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman, opened on
Broadway it was dominated by
Channing’s exuberantly funny performance. Her account of the title song was an unfailing show-stopper and she won one of the show’s 10 Tony Awards – for best actress in a musical – beating Barbra Streisand, who, much to Channing’s disappointment, sang Dolly in Gene Kelly’s 1969 film version.
Her first taste of stardom had been in 1949 when she created the gold-digger Lorelei Lee in the musical version of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with the most famous number, Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend, becoming her signature tune. As with Hello, Dolly!, the part in the film went to another actress, in this case Marilyn Monroe.
Channing was once described by The Times as ‘‘a caricature of the dizzy blonde: all nitwit charm, large round eyes, a smile like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and tumbling blonde hair which seems to have been styled in a washing machine’’. True or not, it was an image that she seemingly enjoyed cultivating, saying on one occasion: ‘‘George Burns once told me, ‘If men don’t prefer blondes, you’ve wasted a lot of money on peroxide.’ ’’
Carol Elaine Channing was born in Seattle, the only child of George Channing, a journalist at the Seattle Star who was of African-American heritage, and his wife, Adelaide, a possessive mother of German-Jewish descent. Carol was a few weeks old when the family moved to San Francisco, where her father switched jobs to become a Christian Scientist minister. ‘‘It’s just a beautiful city that attracts artists,’’ she said in
2010. ‘‘I had a 50-cent allowance. I’d save it up, buy a ticket, and go all by myself to a Saturday matinee to see every one of those people.’’
Her first taste of acting came when she was
7, and her first pay cheque came from winning a talent competition in 1932. ‘‘The best part wasn’t the money,’’ she recalled in an interview two years ago. ‘‘It was that I also won a trip to Honolulu and took my mother. Boy, did we have a good time.’’
Their relationship deteriorated, however, and Channing later told of being prevented from making friends. ‘‘I do not understand my mother to this day,’’ she said in 1995.
While at Bennington College in Vermont, she had a small part in revue, after which The New Yorker magazine noted: ‘‘You’ll be hearing more from a comedienne named Carol Channing.’’ She dropped out of college, appearing in No For an Answer in New York in 1941, the same year in which she married Theodore Naidish, an impecunious novelist.
He was the first of four husbands, but like his successor, Alexander Carson, he lasted only three years. She and Carson had a son, Channing Carson, who survives her and is better known as the cartoonist Chan Lowe.
Channing enjoyed a long apprenticeship in musicals, Las Vegas nightclubs and cabaret. In 1953 she toured in one of her rare straight parts, as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, and appeared in the Broadway musical Wonderful Town.
As a single mother of a 3-year-old, she would often have to leave her son for long periods. Salvation arrived in the form of Charles Lowe, a television producer who became her manager and third husband. On their wedding day in 1956 he purportedly promised to ‘‘give up’’ being gay for her, yet when filing for divorce in 1998 she claimed they had made love only twice in 41 years; Lowe died before the divorce was finalised.
She later became a figurehead for the gay rights movement and, in 2002, San Francisco designated February 25 as Carol Channing Day. Her espousal of liberal politics earned her a place on Richard Nixon’s infamous ‘‘enemies list’’, which she regarded as her highest honour.
She made only a handful of films, including the 1956 comedy The First Travelling Saleslady with Ginger Rogers. ‘‘It was so awful nobody’s heard of it,’’ she said in 1968. ‘‘We called it Death of a Saleslady. There was no script. Finally Ginger Rogers’ mother wrote the script.’’ Channing later won a Golden Globe and netted an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress playing Muzzy in 1967 opposite Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore in Thoroughly Modern Millie, where she shrieked ‘‘raspberries’’ at odd moments.
In 1986 she starred with Mary Martin on stage in Legends!, but with the elderly Martin unable to remember her lines Channing learnt both parts and acted as a discreet prompt. During one performance she tripped over a vacuum cleaner on set. ‘‘You’d never have known anything was wrong,’’ recalled Gary Beach, her co-star. ‘‘But at curtain call I reached down to grab her hand and she said, ‘Don’t, my arm’s broken’, and it was. They took her to hospital, got it set, and she finished the run in a cast.’’
After Lowe’s death she lived with Roger Denny, an interior decorator, but in 2003 she married Harry Kullijian, her former high school sweetheart who had become a walnut farmer. She had mentioned him in her autobiography, Just Lucky, I Guess (2002). It was read by a mutual friend who rang Kullijian, a widower, urging him to call her. Their wedding invitation featured a blackand-white photograph of them from school. Kullijian died in 2011.
Such was Channing’s dedication to the stage that there was little time for anything else. She told of never taking holidays and having no pastimes. ‘‘What am I supposed to save myself for?’’ she told Vanity Fair. ‘‘Something that I don’t do that well, like tennis? Sitting on the beach?’’