12 minute read
Chanteuse Mogul
You may know her as the famed “Fascination” torch singer or recall her as a regular showstopper in the glory days of the Kennebunkport Playhouse. Forever glamorous Jane Morgan takes us on a backstage tour of her glittering gowns.
BY GWEN THOMPSON
What inspired you to weed
through your wardrobe now?
Since my husband [film producer and concert promoter Jerry Weintraub] passed away in 2015, I’ve been coming up to Kennebunkport much more, so I’ve had time to work on some projects I’ve been wanting to do. One of them was to find a good purpose for all of my dresses I wore on the stage, because they were packed away in boxes for such a long time and no one was getting to see all these fabulous pieces by famous designers like Kathryn Kuhn, Donald Brooks, Stephen Yearick, Ben Reig, Ruben Panis, Oleg Cassini, Monte Streitfield,
and more. The beading and the sequins and the embroidery and the fabrics are so spectacular they’re like works of art. I had a two-piece suit in white satin covered with ostrich feathers—you’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Most people in show business are either in a show where they get the costumes given to them or they’re in a movie where the movie company provides the clothing they wear in the movie, but there wasn’t anybody who was going to give me clothes to do my act. I had to have all these clothes made myself, and I had to pay for them, and the dresses were many thousands of dollars each, because I always had unique gowns you couldn’t see anywhere else. In the 1950s I did a lot of stage shows and a lot of television, and I had to have gorgeous gowns every time I appeared anywhere. When I did my one-woman show, I’d change several times during the evening so people could see three or four wonderful gowns. I’d wear one in Chicago and then I’d wear it again in Detroit or San Francisco or Houston or wherever I was appearing.
I now have over sixty outfits I’d been using in my shows that are in perfect condition because they were packed away in special boxes made for them. They’re so magnificent it’s hard to believe I even wore these things. Some of them are so intricate and complicated you’d have to have a road map to get into one of them. They weren’t just made, they were built. The inside of the dress was constructed with a lot of support so it wouldn’t fall down while I was walking around for two or three hours on the stage in four-inch heels. My feet are OK, thank God, and I never had to have any work done on my legs, because I guess I got enough exercise doing that kind of a job for years. That’s probably why I’ve stayed healthy for so long. I didn’t just sit and sing—I moved around a lot, so I had to have clothes that would hold up to going up and down the aisle in a theater in the round. When other people pick them up, they say, “How did you ever wear something so heavy?” Because I was carting around thirty or forty
pounds of dress. But I don’t recall that I had pain or discomfort. I was focused on doing a good performance, so if I looked great in it, then I was happy.
Sorting through them must be a mammoth undertaking!
My old friend Bonnie Bien, who assisted me during my appearances at the Kennebunkport Playhouse when she was an apprentice there, traveled around with me as my dresser from the time she was a kid and knew these clothes for fifty years. Now she’s the owner of La Presse, a fashion-industry PR firm in New York, and she came up here and unpacked all the boxes and sorted the gowns and identified the designers. My goal was to find a way to exhibit them, because I don’t need them anymore and I like to take the things that I’ve accumulated in my career and use them to benefit somebody. We started with museums, because these designers are wellenough known to be in a museum. Kathryn Kuhn and Ben Reig have pieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk has given us four rooms to display them in from February 1 through May 21, 2022. At first I thought that’s not the best time of year for the largest numbers of people, but then I thought about how many people have moved up to Maine in the past year from all the cities. It’ll give them something to do when the weather’s not so good and they can’t go swimming. The idea was to create a trav-
eling show we can ship to different museums, so we’re submitting gown images to the Museum at FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology] in New York and to the new Museum of Broadway that’s set to open in Times Square in summer 2022.
When was the last time you wore any of these gowns?
In 2009 I did a show for my husband when he was honored in L. A. with an award at the UNICEF Ball. Tony Bennett was in the show, and Paul Anka, and a lot of celebrities. Muhammad Ali came as a surprise. He wasn’t in very good health by then, but he made the effort because we were very close with him. The plan was for me to appear and sing, and when I came out in this dress that was solid embroidery covered with all
What a Thrill—
a Chat with Jane Morgan on Blueberry Hill
THEY’RE PLAYING HER SONG
“Fascination” was the song that put me over the top as a recording artist. I got paid for every performance of it that was ever played—if it was in a movie, if it was in a TV show, even if it was in a commercial for a TV show. Let’s say I was going to do Ed Sullivan, and he might want to put a clip of me singing “Fascination” in an ad for the Ed Sullivan Show—I got paid for that. Now you don’t get paid for anything, because it all became black market and there were no more royalties paid to the artists. I used to get checks twice a year from MCA, who owned all the masters of all my music, but after people started stealing the music, there was no way to collect it anymore and the lawyers just gave up on it.
THE SECRET OF HER SUCCESS
My mother was a very fine coloratura opera singer, and she taught me to sing at a very early age. She spoke French and German fluently, so when I got to Europe I absorbed French right away and I had some familiarity with German, so it was normal for me to sing in all those languages. Wherever I went to work, I took voice lessons with European maestros in Italy and in France and even in England and Spain. How many Americans know how to sing in French fluently, and Spanish? I also sang in German and in Japanese. Because I spent so many hours training and performing for so many years, I was a good live performer, and I knew how to handle an audience: how to win them, how to hold them, how to keep them interested.
LOCAL COLOR
The Brick Store Museum did a show some years ago about my brother [Robert Currier]’s theater, the Kennebunkport Playhouse, that was very successful from the 1930s to the 1970s. I worked there every summer as a child to help out however I could, but then when I got old enough and became well-known, I went back and starred in a lot of his productions with a great many movie stars who did live shows in summer theaters when they weren’t busy doing movies. I did a number of musicals there, and then I started doing my own one-woman show with my songs from all the shows I had appeared in, which gave me another opportunity to wear all those clothes I had collected over the years.
BEFORE MTV, THERE WAS SCOPITONE
It was promoted as a way for people to see the performers they liked in their own homes, like a jukebox with a video of the person performing. It never became an item a lot of people purchased, because there were so many permissions to be obtained and that was very expensive. But if you look me up on YouTube today, you can still see the Scopitone version of me singing “C’est si bon.”
A FAR CRY FROM THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES
When I went to the Grand Ole Opry to sing, I was not a country singer. I sang what were called pop songs in those days. In the late 60s, early 70s I was working with this A&R man who said, “Your voice is well-suited to singing country songs, so why don’t you make an album of them, and then you can come to the Grand Ole Opry and sing?” So I did, and when I went to Nashville, I did a show with Johnny Cash on television where he sang “A Boy Named Sue” and I sang “A Girl Named Johnny Cash” as a duet.
HOLLYWOOD NEIGHBORS
There’s only a few thousand stars on the Walk of Fame, so you’re lucky to get one. My husband [Jerry Weintraub] is on one side of the street and I’m on the other—we’re virtually opposite each other. Jerry made all the Karate Kid movies, all the Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s 12 movies. When I got my star in 2011, he introduced me, and Johnny Mathis came as my sponsor, because you had to have another person in the business to sponsor you as someone who deserved to get the star.
ALL THE PRESIDENTS
The most enjoyment I got out of singing was the times I sang for President George H. W. Bush. The Bushes lived in Kennebunkport, so they were great friends of ours. We went to the White House a lot, and I always performed for the President. When I had parties with the Bushes, all the celebrities showed up, because we had invited the president to our home. I sang for President John F. Kennedy too, and I sang for Princess Diana in England, and I sang for the Queen. I sang for a lot of famous people we entertained in our homes, because first I was on the stage myself with Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Jimmy Durante, and then I got married to a man who knew all the movie stars, so I got to meet the whole gamut of everyone in show business.
kinds of beading and sequins, people literally gasped because they couldn’t imagine me appearing in one of these dresses at my age that I wore when I was twenty-five years old, and they were pretty impressed that I was able to do that. I had three standing ovations in the twenty minutes that I was performing.
You mentioned projects, plural. What other irons have you got in the fire?
I was invited by Michael Feinstein’s Great American Songbook Foundation to be in a documentary about my life and career for their Songbook Sessions series, but I couldn’t leave Kennebunkport because of the pandemic, so last March I did a live video interview with Rene Reyes from the Paley Center for Media via Zoom. It hasn’t been released yet, so stay tuned to Michael Feinstein’s Great American Songbook YouTube channel!
Tell us about your plans for Blueberry Hill Farm?
I’ve owned Blueberry Hill Farm since 1957. I bought it with my brother years ago when he was running the Kennebunkport Playhouse and I was working there. I kept it all these years because I didn’t want it to turn into just one more development where nobody derived any benefit from the land. I have almost forty acres with everything on it: streams, meadows, woods, and 500 tall blueberry bushes. We raise blueberries, and we grow raspberries and strawberries, and we have maple trees to make our own maple syrup to sell. My caretaker and his wife are very good at farming, and we would like to expand into more crops. Since Patten’s Berry Farm closed last year, we don’t have a farm stand anymore in Kennebunkport, so we’d love to be able to open one to replace it. I’m also creating the Jane Morgan Nature School at my farm.
What’s a nature school?
The children start as early as three years old in pre-school, and instead of sitting inside learning how to use a computer, the teaching is all conducted outdoors. You’re out in nature all day exploring and finding the tools you need to help you learn. We want to avoid monotony and give children a chance to learn in a different way. Our method is to let them figure out how to do things themselves. This gives them more initiative and builds up confidence in being able to make decisions instead of sitting in a classroom being told everything to do. When kids are introduced to nature, they get so excited about it, because that’s where kids should be—in nature—learning a great many things that aren’t touched on in school.
Is nature also the main ingredient in your love of Maine?
I always loved Maine. I loved it when I was a kid, I loved it when I could come here with my husband and my children, and I still love it. I think it’s a wonderful place to live because the lifestyle hasn’t grown that complicated. It’s still very much the way it was when I was a child. Nobody bothers you and you can just live your life. I go swimming every day in the pool and I look at the trees and I look at the sun and I look at the moon and I have a chance to enjoy my life without having fourteen things going on every minute. I’m still trying to do too many things at once, but at least I’m doing it in a place where it’s quiet. n
