Storytellersunplugged

by Janet Berliner

Good thing I wrote my essay ahead of time because I’ve been basically sans computer for over two weeks. Given my particular limitations, that leaves me with little alternative but to read, think, watch television, think, look out of the window at the flowers, think…. I had just finished the rough of my next book when the computer quit. One of the things I think about is the possibility that the universe is telling me that the book sucks. Hey. I’m obsessive. Paranoid. A writer, for G-d’s sake.

In any case, my essay is the flip side of something I wrote about before: Interviews and how to keep them lively. The last time, I insisted that it’s imperative to do your homework. The exception to that rule is the opportunistic interview, like coming upon Sammy Davis, Jr. in a coffee shop in Waikiki and spending the weekend with him and his crew, or meeting Tom Jones, his son and his managers, in a diner–small d intended. At times like that, you take a flying leap and do what you can with the joys and pains of the moment. The worst thing you can do is to do nothing, to let the moment pass, because it surely won’t come again.

So here, for your delight–or not–is my recounting of one such opportunistic meeting:

Barcelona, Spain, is synonymous with castanets, Paella, and sunshine; for me it is the city where I took my younger daughter, Stefanie, en route to meeting my mother in Nice. In Paris, I was overwhelmed by the avant-garde architecture of De Gaulle Airport’s Terminal One, a ten-floor circular structure that looked like a child of the Guggenheim. Our flight to Nice had been canceled, giving us a bonus day in Paris. On the flight, we had met a movie producer who wanted to make a star of Stefanie. He gave us his card, invited us to the Cannes Film Festival, and sent us on a tour of the city in his private limousine. In Nice, I met an Ethiopian prince who put jewels around her neck and proposed marriage–to me. He followed me around Nice until I took refuge in the protection of the Pimp of Nice. En route home, we went upstairs on the plane and were befriended by the Fifth Dimension. I fell in love with Nice and with my uncle who lived there, a Holocaust survivor married to a Spanish lady who could not speak English. We conversed in multi-languages. He had a wonderful mind but could not stay with one language for more than a sentence. He learned that in the camp where it helped avoid the danger of eavesdroppers.

Stefanie remembers the fish soup, eating pizzas at dawn sitting outside at street cafés, women sunbathing without tops, De Gaulle Airport.

What she remembers most is the night in Barcelona when we I met the petite, white-haired lady who was Walt Disney’s first official bird singer. Her name was Marion Darlington Maley.

“When I was a child we lived near a large flock of crows,” she told me, when I asked what led to her unusual profession. “For a long time I laughed like a crow. I guess that was when I became a ‘Bird Lady.”

That was in 1980. The following year, she told a panel on “To Tell the Truth” (Show No. 3421 for unbelievers) what she told me in Spain: “Next time you visit the ‘Enchanted Tiki Room’ at Disneyland or Disneyworld, think of me.” Her appearance was over in a few minutes; not so the continuing delight of the millions of children and adults who hear Marion’s realistic bird singing.

Marion was born in Monrovia, California, a town founded by her family. When I met her, she was living in Southern California, where she befriended parrots, startled cats, and fooled the world into believing in exotic jungles, wicked witches and romantic liaisons in the thick of the forest. “I was Cheetah in a Tarzan movie,” she told me, “as well as the birds, but doing bird singing is my true vocation. Sometimes my bird voice is only a signal call for Indians, but I was also the nightingale in Errol Flynn’s ‘Don Juan.’”

I asked her about the stars with whom she’d worked.

“Audrey Hepburn in ‘Green Mansions,’” she reminisced. I had seen the dress AH wore in that movie. I think it was a size minus three. “Also Sophia Loren, Anthony Quinn, Maureen O’Hara, Eleanor Parker, Robert Taylor, Clifton Webb. Oh and of course, Crosby, Hope, and Lamour.”

Her favorites?

The ‘True Life Adventure Series’ and everything she did for Walt Disney–’Snow White,’ ‘Bambi,’ ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Sleeping Beauty.” She also did a ‘Mickey Mouse’ radio show in the 1930s and ‘Flowers and Trees,’ Disney’s first color cartoon which won him his first academy award.

“Have you done any bird singing lately or are you retired?” I asked.

“I’ll never retire,” she answered quickly. “I’m still on call at the studios.” She had recently done the robin in G.E.s ‘Carousel of Progress’ at Disneyworld. “I’m always ready to do benefits and demonstrations,” she said.

I thought of Ima Sumac’s success and asked about recordings.

“‘Home Songs’ with Ethel Merman. ‘Tweedle, Tweedle, Tweet’ with Pinkie Lee,” she said.

“What about on your own?”

“I can’t sing on key,” she told me, laughing, “that’s why I took up bird singing in the first place. They wouldn’t let me into the choir at school.”

Seems reasonable to me, since I can’t sing in tune. I’ve been told by someone who purports to have gone to school with Barbra that she was once thrown out of the choir at school. I think it was because she wouldn’t sing like everyone else.