THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 17
1
SURVIVORDEPT.
MASTERCLASS
W
hen the cabaret singer Marilyn
Maye turned ninety, in April of
last year, she celebrated with a seven-night
stint at Feinstein’s/54 Below, which she
titled “90 At Last!” For her ninety-first
birthday, she returned with another
set of standards, called “I Wish I Were
90 Again!” Maye is a last-of-her-kind
crooner who can still mesmerize an au-
dience; she interprets the Great Amer-
ican Songbook with an unfussy warmth
that feels transported from a less ironic
age. “I’m a little different animal than a
lot of performers,” she said the other day.
“I sing to you, not for you.”
The secret of her stamina, she said, is
vitamins, which her assistant of thirty
years lays out for her. “She may be killing
me off slowly, because I don’t know what
they are,” Maye said with a laugh. Also,
she never stops working. She holds the
record for most appearances by a singer
on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”—
seventy-six—and has played the same
lake resort in Iowa for sixty-three sum-
ent parties? Somebody who’s mad keen
on Trump and someone who’s not?”
Sandys asked.
“That’s what we’re doing in Atlanta,”
McCarthy said.
“That’ll be almost like in the Andes,
except they don’t eat each other,” San-
dys said, with a mischievous smile. She
was referring to the 1972 crash of Uru-
guayan Air Force Flight 571, whose sur-
vivors were forced to practice cannibal-
ism. McCarthy looked baffled.
“You know, the Andes? The plane
that crashed... ”
“Oh!” McCarthy said, getting it. “No,
hopefully nothing like that!” He laughed
nervously.
“I often wonder on a plane; I look
around and think, If it crashed—”
“Who looks the tastiest?” McCarthy
asked.
“No!” Sandys said. “Which one would
I be friends with!” She laughed. “There’s
not always a lot.”
—Naomi Fry
mers straight. In 2005, after years of liv-
ing and working in the Midwest, she re-
turned to New York to sing at a Jerry
Herman tribute (“I was triumphant, I
have to say”), which led to steady, jam-
packed gigs at the Metropolitan Room
and a new audience that had somehow
missed her first eight decades.
Maye now rents an apartment in
Manhattan and has performances sched-
uled through February. “It’s kind of scary
to book ahead,” she admitted. Between
appearances, she teaches master classes.
On a recent afternoon, Maye and a dozen
aspiring chanteuses were in a midtown
rehearsal room, with a grand piano and
a microphone. Learning to sell a jazz
standard is a bit like studying Yiddish
or letterpress, but singers swear by Maye’s
workshops; Jon Batiste, the thirty-two-
year-old bandleader of “The Late Show
with Stephen Colbert,” is among the
musicians who have audited. (Maye:
“He’s cute as the dickens.” Batiste: “She’s
the real deal, man.”) One woman, a psy-
choanalyst, was attending the class, she
said, because “I live in the world of emo-
tions and people’s self-conscious dy-
namics, and the voice is the medium
through which we often connect our
inner and our outer experience.”
Maye sat at a table, hunched over
sheet music, wearing thick glasses, a white
cardigan, and bright-pink lipstick. A
young woman named Emma K. Camp-
bell sang the 1946 ballad “Tenderly,” as
Maye made notes with a red pencil. “I
want to hear your breath in the line,”
she instructed, when Campbell sang the
arpeggioed word “breathlessly.”
Next, a blond woman who works in
publishing and moonlights as a jazz
singer apologized for having a mysteri-
ous rash on her arm. “Don’t think about
it,” Maye advised. “You got a show to
do, you do it.” She tapped a high-heeled
foot as the woman sang a swinging ren-
dition of “Cheek to Cheek.” Maye told
her to look at someone in the audience
when she sang the line “Dance with me.”
Maye’s career started at the age of
nine, when she won an amateur singing
contest in Topeka; the prize was a thir-
teen-week radio spot. In her teens, she
hosted her own show on KRNT, in Des
Moines, called “Marilyn Entertains.”
Steve Allen caught her in a club in Kan-
sas City, which led to television spots
and, in 1965, a record deal with RCA.“That’s the good part,” Maye recalled.
“The bad part is I was late. Had this
happened in the forties, I think I would
be more of a household name.” But Car-
son kept booking her through the rock-
and-roll revolution. “He would usually
pop into the makeup room and say, ‘You
going to do “Here’s That Rainy Day”?’
And I would say, ‘Johnny, I’ve done it
three times!’ He’d say, ‘Well, that’s all
right. Do it again!’ ” Her contemporar-
ies included Ella Fitzgerald, who called
Maye her favorite white-girl singer. “Most
of our conversations took place in dress-
ing rooms,” Maye recalled. “She’d always
ask me if I liked her new wigs.”
At the master class, Maye watched
Susie Clausen, a real-estate agent from
California who entertains at retirement
homes, perform the standard “HowAbout You?,” accompanying herself on
saxophone. “Her name is going to be
Saxy Susie,” Maye announced. Mid-song,
Clausen lost her place and glanced at the
accompanist. “Don’t look at the pianist,”
Maye said. “It shows insecurity.”
At the end of the class, Maye stood
up and shared an ancient saying: If you
become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll
be taught. The piano started, and Maye
launched into the Rodgers and Ham-
merstein tune “Getting to Know You,”
singing in a soothing near-whisper. When
she got to the line “Getting to feel free
and easy,” she stopped herself. “It isn’t
‘Getting-to-feel-free-and-easy,’ ” she in-
structed. “No. ‘Getting to feel free’”—
inhale—“ ‘and easy.’ See, there are two
thoughts there: free and easy.”
—Michael SchulmanMarilyn Maye