where
or when
After reading a biography of lyricist John Latouche and while working on a piece on “My Favorite Broadway Songs,” I much later discovered her “Lazy Afternoon” from The Golden Apples, which easily made “My Favorite’s” cut.
But I must have seen her as well on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show, The Mel Torme Show or The Perry Como Show; and, of course, I saw her, without knowing it, in The Ritz, in which even the handsome Treat Williams couldn’t make me divert my gaze from her.
When last year an e-mail message suggested I might watch the Don Wingate
special streaming-live production of Kaye Ballad: The Show Goes On, I
immediately signed up and waited patiently until 7:00 only to be told that I
could not enter the platform such I was viewing it through with two
connections—the same problem Criterion had for a few weeks before they fixed
it, despite the fact that my Wifi connection was my only entry onto the site.
I
was highly disappointed, but knew that it would eventually show up somewhere
else, which it did this past week when I watched it with great delight on the
Los Angeles Laemmle Movie Theater streaming service.
So I discovered I was not the only one who had developed a crush on this woman just because of her immense talent and openness. It seems that everyone—except Phil Silvers who treated her badly and cut most her songs from her first full Broadway show, Top Bananas—was her “very best friend.” Marlon Brando, Carol Channing, Eve Arden, Julie Andrews, Mimi Hines, Spike Jones (with whose crazed orchestra she first performed), Ethel Merman, Desi Arnez, Jerry Lewis (“I must have been the only American who truly adored him”) Judy Garland, Andy Warhol, Betty Davis, Alice Ghostley, Doris Day, Steven Allen, Woody Allen, Donna McKechnie, Liliane Montevecchi, Jerry Stiller, Ann Margaret…the list goes on. Many of these and others she also helped in their careers, since she often premiered the songs they later made famous, including “Fly Me to the Moon,” “My Man,” and “Cabaret” long before they tickled the vocal chords of Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Barbra Streisand, and Liza Minelli.
Singing for years in the most noted nightclubs in New York, including
The Bon Soir, The Blue Angel, El Morocco, and elsewhere in Chicago, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles, she would draw in the crowds and celebrities like
Garland, Merman, Davis, Betty Hutton, and others just to watch her sing
brilliant imitations of their own renowned performances.
When one of the celebratory guests of The Show Goes On asks why, after she had become so incredibly famous hadn’t Ballard risen the very top of many legends with whom she was friends. He argues that it was, in part, the era in which she lived which demanded pigeon-holing performers. “The trouble was that Kaye Ballard was just too versatile,” he concludes.
It
was certainly not a problem for her various audiences or even for me, who fell
in love with her in a Marion, Iowa living room.
This marvelous performer died, at the age of 93, on January 21st,
2019.
Los Angeles, August 3, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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