India Adams
‘Ghost singer’ who dubbed Cyd Charisse and Joan Crawford
INDIA ADAMS, who has died aged 93, was among a stable of singers hired by Hollywood studios to dub the singing voices of dancers or comediennes who lacked the vocal talents to record on film.
“Ghost singers”, as they were known, were Hollywood’s guilty secret. “We were kept hidden in the shadows by the studios, who didn’t want the public to know that their stars didn’t have the voices to hold a song,” India Adams recalled in 2015. “You had to swear on a Bible you weren’t going to tell anybody.” Their salaries were minuscule. “We were paid weekly – very weakly,” she joked.
She was born Patricia Sue Perlin on March 8 1927 and brought up in Los Angeles. Singing by the time she was 10, she turned professional in her teens, combining her studies with a weekly nightclub residency, performing with a threepiece jazz band.
In 1953, spotted by a producer, she was called into MGM for a voice test. Signed the same day, she was put to work immediately, dubbing Cyd Charisse in Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon.
When the film was given its premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York, Dorothy Kilgallen wrote in her “Voice of Broadway” column: “the biggest news around Radio City Music Hall is who is singing for Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon?” India Adams recalled: “I wanted to phone her and say, ‘I did it.’ But I was afraid. So I didn’t.”
One of the songs she had recorded for the film was Two-faced Woman, which did not make the final cut. But it was used for India Adams’s next film, Torch Song, “sung” by Joan Crawford in blackface surrounded by writhing male dancers.
“Joan was every inch the star, but she had compassion,” she recalled. “After filming she sent me a note: ‘I hope that I can do as great an acting job as you did a singing job. You were so sensitive to my every suggestion, and who am I to suggest to you?’”
India Adams worked with the actress again, on Johnny Guitar (1954), but began to tire of ghost-singing. She signed to the RCA Victor label and made her debut album, Comfort Me With Apples. She then left for New York, where she landed starring roles in musicals including Can-can, The
Most Happy Fella and Brigadoon.
She was also a featured singer at The Latin Quarter on Lexington Avenue and the Radio City Music Hall, and returned to the nightclub circuit around New York and the Catskills.
In 1965 she moved to England when her husband, an advertising executive, was posted to London. She sang in BBC television shows, at West End nightclubs and in a variety of television commercials. In 1969 she was Ginger Rogers’s understudy in Mame at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, waiting in the wings for most of the 443-show run: “No matter how many pins I stuck in a doll, she never missed a performance!” she said.
During the 1970s she was a resident performer on the SS United States, and later the QEII. She settled in California in 1981.
A decade later, India Adams teamed up with two other ghost singers, Annette Warren and Betty Wand, for the touring show, Hollywood’s Secret Singing Stars, which they also performed at the 1992 Academy Awards.
India Adams sang into her eighties in supper clubs across California, and worked with a musical improv group, the Spring Chickens, as well as taking several acting roles, including the short The Gestapo vs Granny (2014).
India Adams married Jack Stanley in 1951. They had two sons, but divorced in 1970. In 1974 she married the English interior designer Quentin Rance; he died in 2016.
India Adams, born March 8 1927, died April 26 2020