MARCIA HINES:
the disco diva on love and family
When Marcia Hines first arrived in Australia in 1970, she was literally living the dream. She was on her own but wasn’t even remotely afraid. “What’s a 16-yearold got the right to be scared of?” she says laughing.
No, this ambitious American import with dazzling looks and music in her soul, was pumped; dizzy with the wonder of possibility. And as we sit down together some 50 years later, I can sense that sharp-edged joie de vivre still coursing through her veins. Marcia is limbering up to jump on stage once more in a high-energy production of Saturday Night Fever.
“The greatest thing about this Saturday Night Fever is they’ve written me into it,” she beams. The role, which will see Marcia singing two of her own dance hits from back in the day – Your Love Still Brings Me to My Knees and You – is suitably called “Disco Diva”. I can almost feel her hips swinging already.
Marcia is fun and sassy, but she’s also fuelled by an extreme level of hard graft that has kept her on top form when many might be thinking of retiring. Singing is her passion and doing what she loves has been a powerful tonic that has sustained her through the toughest times.
Back then, the teenager from
Boston had watched Donna (“who later turned into Donna Summer”), the elder sister of her best friend, leave their home town to join the cast of Hair in Germany, and it planted a seed. The hippy rock musical “was the toast of the world” she explains, and even though Marcia could have auditioned for the Boston rendition, she had bigger plans.
“I thought I don’t want to be stuck in Boston for the rest of my life … How I knew that, I don’t know,” she adds.Then an actor friend auditioned for the Aussie production. Director Jim Sharman and promoter Harry M. Miller had been trawling the States looking for African-Americans to cast in the show. “They loved him but they said: ‘You’re too polished. What we want are rough diamonds. You happen to know any kids?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I do, I happen to know one girl but she’s under-age and I’ll have to speak to her mother before I even talk to her.’”
Marcia’s fate was in mother Esme’s hands, and as so often proved the case, the Jamaican-born matriarch was her daughter’s champion. “It was my mother who took me to the audition,” recalls Marcia.
Boston bliss
Marcia’s father, Eugene Hines, died when she was six months old, leaving Esmerelda to raise Marcia and her elder brother, Dwight, on her own. In the Hines’ household everything went through Esme. “I had a very strong mother,” explains Marcia. “She’d lost her mother and father in Jamaica within 14 days of each other so
I think if you can endure that, you can endure anything.”
Esme had moved to America when she was 27 going on 28 and came from a relatively wealthy family in Jamaica, so Marcia and Dwight were well supported financially and as a suddenly single mum, Esme rarely had to work. Marcia describes her childhood as “bliss”.
“I was told I was loved and that’s all you really need. We had a really good community of friends and people who cared for us: a great godfather and godmother, and she was very instrumental in me being a musician because she was the lead singer in her choir and she’d play music for me all the time. The man of our family was my godfather, who was just a real gentleman and very protective.”
As she casts her mind back, Marcia conjures up a picture of cultured Boston and a charmed upbringing that shaped the principled, driven woman she was to become. I suspect Marcia always believed she could do whatever she wanted, so long as she worked hard and respected the opportunities she was afforded, and it was an ethos that helped her reach for the stars. “My mother was an important force in my life when it came to how to treat people, my work ethic, kindness and not suffering fools,” she says.
The family was strict and proper with “old-fashioned morals” and Marcia called her godfather Mr
Evans. “Yes I did,” she adds, laughing. “Oh, and my mother had that look when I knew I’d blown it, when it was time to run.” Marcia did well at school where geography was her favourite subject. Music she saved for weekends, because the school teachers didn’t quite get it. By this time Marcia was pretty advanced as a musician.
“I was five when I started singing in Sunday school,” she explains.
“Our religion was Church of England and my godmother’s was Baptist, so I’d go to my church and sing all the hymns and then I’d take her to her church and sit with her in the choir, because she was blind. Children weren’t allowed in the choir box but because I’d lead her up, I could just sit there and behave. I wasn’t allowed to sing along, but I could listen and it was beautiful.”
Here Marcia found her vocation, though she didn’t realise it then. “I used to church-hop; I’d go to the mission church to hear the choir, the acoustics in that church were great, and then on a Saturday I might go to the synagogue and check out what was going on there. It was all music as far as I was concerned, but it was just different music and it sounded beautiful.” Marcia’s favourite was gospel.
Nevertheless, as a little girl Marcia confesses she planned to be a nurse. “You know, heroes,” she shrugs. But she kept gravitating towards singing
and her voice was pure and strong. At 14 Marcia won an opera scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music. “That was interesting, not my thing but I learned a lot. I took it for about six months and left. I was into Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, The Supremes. I wasn’t into standing still. I think my mother forgave me,” she laughs. And then came Hair.
Destiny’s child
“I was following a dream. I was following something that had been my passion since I was a little person.” It felt like this was meant to be. Destiny was knocking. Esme didn’t seem fazed at all by the famed nudity in the show and neither was Marcia. “It was the hippy world, and that’s the world I grew up in. It’s so funny. If you blinked you missed it. It was so dimly lit. We came out, disappeared under a beautiful silk parachute; the lights went down and we appeared naked. Then the lights went down again, end of the first half.
“We didn’t walk around butt-naked. I don’t think my mother would have allowed that, and they said to me, ‘you don’t have to do the nude scene’. It was my choice entirely and at first I thought, no, I won’t, but it was so discreetly done and it was a statement as well. I wanted to be part of that.”
It turned out being more of a statement than she had planned, for Marcia was pregnant. She had actually arrived in Australia pregnant but didn’t notice until six months later. Marcia’s legal guardian was Harry M. Miller who had agreed to sign the paperwork so Marcia could join the show. He was keeping a watchful eye on his new charge, who lived in a share house with the rest of the cast, and even though many of the dancers had babies, this would have been quite a surprise. “I was a very late developer and my period wasn’t regular yet, so I didn’t think anything,” she says. “I was doing the show every night and I remember someone saying ‘gee Marcia, you’re a little chubby’.”
Marcia may not have noticed, but her mother certainly had. “I remember calling Mum and saying ‘I’m pregnant’. She said, ‘yes, I know, I could tell by your pictures that you sent home. I was just waiting for you to tell me.’”
The father was Marcia’s boyfriend back in Boston but there was no question of him coming to Australia, it was far too expensive, and Marcia had signed a contract, so she couldn’t return to the US. In any case she was having way too much fun.
Enter Esme. “She said, ‘you’ve chosen a very strange career, so if you can’t take care of your baby, send her home’. I didn’t send her home then, but that support was great to hear and because we were being paid incredible money, I was able to have a nanny and Deni was taken care of.
“Then when we were getting ready to go on tour and I didn’t think the tour was the right place for a child, nanny or otherwise, I took Deni back to Jamaica. The family was in Jamaica for a holiday and Deni was just under two.”
Baby Deni stayed in Jamaica with Esme and the extended Hines family for the next two and a half years and came back to Marcia with a “real strong” American accent. “It was better to leave her in a secure environment,” explains Marcia. “You have to be responsible. You have to think of your consequences before you think of your pleasure. My consequences were I was bringing up a little girl who needed the stability of my mother, who had said, thank God, ‘Marcia, if it’s too hard send her home. She’ll be fine here’.”
In 1975 Esme joined Marcia and Deni back in Australia and they all lived together. “I won’t say my mother was a saint but I think some people just are good mothers and I was really blessed to have a great mother,” says Marcia. “Deni had two parents; her gran and me.”
After Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar followed with the lead role of Mary Magdalene singing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s haunting I Don’t Know How to Love Him. Marcia’s career as a pop singer soared and in the late 1970s she was our best-selling female artist and crowned Queen of Pop. “That was when I first realised I’d been adopted by Australia. Because I wasn’t even a citizen then; that was a great honour.”
She toured country towns with a sell-out show full of “great costumes and great music” and she humbly says “people were so grateful”. Through it all Marcia was never tempted by drugs or drink or any of the trappings that many in her profession succumbed to. “I’ve never been a drinker. I smoked a little when I was younger, but that nightlife thing,
I can’t plug me in [to recharge]. So, I take what I do seriously and that comes first. I’ll leave you today and I have to do a show tonight. I’ll go home and do a vocal warm-up and drink some teas and get ready.”
Marcia is a pescatarian, eating fish and vegetables, and having been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in her early thirties, is careful with her diet. She exercises regularly and looks a picture of health and fitness.
She gathered four husbands along the way and while she never talks about them publicly and is currently single, confesses that she does like
“the idea of being married” which she sees more as a condition of “mateship. Someone you can rely on, talk crap to, complain and vent. That’s a good thing. You can do that to a girlfriend but you’ll come at a different angle from a guy. Guys think so totally differently from girls.”
Impossible sadness
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. In 1981 while away on tour, Marcia received a phone call that will stay with her forever. “My mother called me and we had a system where she never called me. I was the caller. So, I knew something was wrong. She was in Australia. I was in London. Dwight [Marcia’s brother] was in Boston. She said, ‘Marcia, your brother has passed away’. I started crying and she said, ‘you need to try and gather yourself. It’s an unfortunate situation that’s happened. Worse than unfortunate. I buried your grandmother, your grandfather, your dad and your aunties and uncles. It’s time you stepped up and go on to Boston and do what you’ve got to do.’”
Esme simply couldn’t face burying her own child. She stayed in Australia with Deni, passing the mantle of maternal responsibility to Marcia. Dwight, also a musician, was just 27. He had committed suicide, leaving no note. Marcia had seen her brother just six months before and recalls him being happy. This was a huge shock.
“He hung himself. It was horrible. It was worse than horrible. When it came to males, he was the light of my life. Growing up we did everything together. But I’m not mad at him. I think the one thing you have to take is your life, so if that’s what you choose to do, who am I to be mad at you?”
The shock was followed by deep grief. “It was out of the blue. Any suicide is a mystery. What could I, should I, have done? It’s sadder than sad. To watch a parent outlive a child is not a nice thing. Not at all.”
I wonder if losing Dwight made Esme hold on to her granddaughter Deni tighter; certainly Marcia says the duo developed a unique relationship.
“They were really tight. I’m pleased that Deni had the experience of my mother in her life because she had a great sense of humour and a humility.”
Esme was always proud of Marcia’s performances but sadly never got to see her on reality show Australian
Idol. Marcia was depicted as “the nice judge” but she sees it differently. “I was just the honest judge. Good performers don’t tear people to pieces. They try and encourage.” It was a sense of empathy that Marcia had learned at her mother’s knee.
During the making of the show, Marcia lost Esme. Following a stroke, Esme had been living in a nursing home and then she suddenly fell sick and passed away. “It was very quick,” says Marcia. “She died in my arms. That was my gift. It wasn’t awful, but it was the beginning of the end. For me to hold her and to know that she had held me, was pretty nice. But I don’t think she’s ever left me. When I get confused we have a bit of a chat.”
At 65, Marcia says she feels “blessed to have gotten this far; a lot of my friends didn’t even see 35.”
Does she feel older and wiser? “No. I don’t feel wise and I don’t feel old,” she quips. Inside, Marcia says she’s still that little girl who came to Australia with a big dream. “I’ve still got that mischievous side of my personality and still if someone tells me something, I believe what they say. Why would you lie?”
“Any suicide is a mystery ... It’s sadder than sad.”
Saturday Night Fever is at the Lyric Theatre, Sydney, from March 27. To book visit ticketmaster.com.au.
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