The Girls on Grant Avenue

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I went out at the Eastern Gate,

I saw the girls in clouds;

Like clouds they were, and soft and

bright,

But in the crowds

I thought on the maid who is my light,

Down-drooping, soft as the grey

twilight;

She is my mate.

--Chinese Love Lyric, 680 B.C.

Clouds of girls drift across the stage. Girls soft and bright, girls fast and funny, girls with dreamy looks and pouty looks, girls with languid smiles and impudent grins, girls with unruly bangs and neat velvety chignons, girls with eyes slanted a little and girls with eyes slanted a lot. Amid all the girls, one stands out in twilight softness. When she first appears, her slow, sloe eyes look down, ever so shy. Then she bounces her head in a pert little Chinese kowtow and the hoarse, sweet husk of her voice sounds hauntingly soft. "Ten thousand benedictions, Sir . . ."

Mei Li, the "picture bride," has traveled far to greet her future father-in-law in the stubbornly Oriental parlor of his San Francisco home. And she has arrived on time. Until now, Flower Drum Song has been nothing but the newest Rodgers and Hammerstein hit musical--brisk, bright, opulently staged, professional. When Miyoshi Umeki glides onstage to star in her first Broadway show, her first four words capture the house. The warmth of her art works a kind of tranquil magic, and the whole theater relaxes.

But that small voice and wistful smile need something to set them off. The need is quickly fulfilled--by Linda Low, a buxom, button-nosed stripper from the Celestial Bar, whom the musical's plot casts as Mei Li's rival. Bold, brassy and bubbling with unabashed sex, Linda belts out a song that tells all:

I'm a girl, and by me that's only great!

I am proud that my silhouette is curvy,

That I walk with a sweet and girlish

gait,

With my hips kind of swivelly and

swervy . . .

The swivel hips belong to Singer Pat Suzuki, and, like Miyoshi, the chubby Nisei is bouncing through her first Broadway part. Whatever else may be said for or against Flower Drum Song, it brings to Broadway two of the most endearing stars in many a season--surrounded by a fascinating Oriental chorus line that will give the most jaded Stage-Door Johnnies a new incentive.

Scouting for the Khan. In a season when all the streets of Manhattan's theater section seem eastbound,* assembling this chorus line took on a scope that recalled nothing less than the recruitment of Kublai Khan's harem. Like the Great Khan's emissaries--who, Marco Polo reported, graded their finds "at 16, 17 and 18 or more carats, according to the greater or lesser degree of beauty"--Rodgers and Hammerstein operatives went to work in Hong Kong, Paris, London, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Director Gene Kelly and Choreographer Carol Haney scoured theaters, nightclubs and Y.W.C.A.s. Co-Author Joseph Fields judged a San Francisco Chinatown beauty contest and watched for talent that would look right on Flower Drum's riotous Grant Avenue.

The scouts could not possibly hope to find a full bag of authentic Chinese, settled for any vaguely Oriental features. Dancer Denise Quan is really Canadian of Chinese origin. Shawnee Smith is American Indian (Hopi) and English. Vicki Racimo is a promising piano student (at Manhattan's Juilliard School) of Filipino-English origin. Mary Huie, of Chinese origin, was working as a clerk for Revlon when a scout spotted her on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue (she thought she was facing an attempted pickup when the stranger approached her with: "How would you like to be in a Broadway show?").

Study in Contrasts. Wherever they come from, all the girls would get a high Kublai Khan rating. Oddly enough, perhaps the easiest of all recruiting jobs involved the 20-carat stars. Early last spring Rodgers saw Pat Suzuki on Jack Paar's television show and recognized her right away as his stripper, Linda Low. After Miyoshi's Oscar-winning performance in the movie Sayonara, both Rodgers and Hammerstein realized that Mei Li's lines had been written for no one else.

The two girls make a fascinating study in feminine contrasts. Miyoshi takes life as it comes, one small step at a time. Pat grasps for it all--hungry, anxious, impatient. Japan-born Miyoshi moves slowly, precisely, with cautious grace; at 29, she is American by solemn determination, but she still lives in the ordered, traditional world of her tight little island home. California-born Pat Suzuki, 28, is American by instinct, chafed by restrictions, careless of customs, and in a hurry. It is possible to see in Pat and Miyoshi the embodiment of the ancient, universal Chinese principles of Yang and Yin--the opposites of active and passive, sun and shadow, fire and water.

One thing Pat and Miyoshi seem to have in common: for as long as either of them can remember, each of them seems to have been rehearsing her part in Flower Drum Song.

Head in a Bucket. Miyoshi's rehearsals began in the green hill town of Otaru, on the big northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, high above Otaru Bay. The last of nine children, all two years apart, she grew up in a jampacked household, the family circle swollen by two servants and seven extra boys, all apprentices from her father's thriving iron factory. No one paid much attention to her, Miyoshi remembers. She was too little. But she managed to steal into the neighborhood Kabuki theater, and had money enough for "ice" candy. Today, onstage, she sings her Flower Drum song:

My father says that children keep

growing,

Rivers keep flowing, too.

My father says he doesn't know why.

But somehow or other they do.

One brother recognized the little girl's love for music and took her for tap-dancing and harmonica lessons. After a while Miyoshi switched to the mandolin. ("I didn't like mandolin, either. When I didn't like, I quit.") Next came piano. Says Miyoshi: "I just loved any sound that you could do it with instrument."

Most of all, Miyoshi would have liked to make music with her own voice, but that was impossible: she had bad throat trouble. Mornings, when she first woke up, she could barely speak. When she finally got her voice cranked up, it came out lower than any of the other kids'. "Children have such high voice," she remembers wistfully. "They read their lessons together, way up there. And I read my lesson, way down there." Then, one day during music class at school, the teacher heard a new voice and asked in surprise. "Who's that?" Suddenly Miyoshi Umeki could sing.

At home she sang incessantly, to the intense irritation of both her mother and father, who disapproved of her fast, American-style tunes (which she picked up from records). So Miyoshi took to walking around the house with a bucket on her head to spare her parents the pain of her songs. After she went to bed, she would duck under her covers and go on singing. When her father refused to buy her a piano, she pasted a pattern of paper keys on the dining-room table and practiced anyway.

Song Is Heart. War came when Miyoshi was 13. After V-J day, when American ships appeared in Otaru Bay, things began to look up again. So did Miyoshi. She looked up at the tall, uniformed foreign sailors and discovered that she liked them. But the discovery was not made without guilt. Miyoshi says: "You can't look at eyes. It's not feminine. You should look down. It's not really insult, it's not pretty." Her English-speaking brother brought three of the Americans to the Umeki home as guests. There were Edward Giannini, a clarinet-playing T-4 in the 417th Army Service Forces Band, Sergeant Joseph Bardner, and a third soldier whose name the Umeki family never learned. They knew him as "G Minor" because he always muttered "G minor, G minor" as he played his guitar.

Through the early winter of 1945, the three G.I.s went to the Umeki home almost every night. Usually the plump 16-year-old sat in the background eating apples, but one night Giannini egged her into trying a song. (At the time, Rodgers and Hammerstein, having triumphed with Oklahoma!, had just opened Carousel.) Miyoshi was still self-conscious because her voice was not the usual high-pitched Japanese voice, but Giannini put her at her ease. "This American man gave me courage," says Miyoshi. "He said, 'Don't feel ashamed of your voice. Song is not only voice; is heart, mind.' "

Until the day they left, the G.I.s kept visiting the Umekis with presents--bacon, shaving cream, hair oil. Miyoshi put the hair oil on her face and tried to brush her teeth with the shaving cream, but she knew a gift when she saw one.

Strange Custom. Although Miyoshi's friends were gone ("My mother was crying too hard, it broke her heart"), there were still some soldiers left in Otaru, and the shy little girl began to sing with G.I. bands in their service clubs. Once she was paid 300 yen (about 90-c-) for a night's work. "Old family have strange custom, girl shouldn't work," she says. "I felt bad, because now I'm getting paid, really working. I guess it's too young to get paid. I gave it to my father."

"My father he was gone," Miyoshi explains. "I mean, he die. We have little temple in house, and everybody live there, even after die. They always with us. I put money in temple for my father, but my mother said, 'Your father say that it's all right you spend.' So I bought coal for stove."

Whenever there was something special like sweets in the house, it was offered first to the dead in the temple in "God's Room." "We have to leave it with them one day, then we could have it," Miyoshi says. But the hungry girl could not wait a whole day knowing that there was candy in God's Room. She would succumb to temptation and open the temple, despite her fear of ancestral punishment. "I prayed: I have to have this. I got to have this candy. I'm going to take this candy, so please don't grab me.' " Then she would snatch the candy and run. "I really think they going to grab me."

Right in the Eyes. Nights, Miyoshi would listen to the local U.S. Army radio station, to Dinah Shore and Peggy Lee and Doris Day, and try to copy them. After her graduation from school, her teacher took the class to a hotel, gave them a lesson in how to use a knife and fork; then they were deemed ready for the world. But the professional bands were not ready for Miyoshi ("They thought I was the little country bear from Hokkaido"). Eventually, though, she became a hit on Japanese radio and TV. For three years she hardly ever had a day off. Then she decided she must see America.

What little money Miyoshi had when she hit the States, she promptly spent on presents for her family. Night after night she would sing in some small nightclub, say a polite "Thank you" (her only English words at the time). She felt lost; even the strange food bothered her. She sent to Japan for squid, waited until everyone in her apartment house had gone to bed, then cooked the dried delicacy on an electric stove. "They all get up and say, 'What's that awful smell?' "

Miyoshi's live-wire agent booked her all over the country--in nightclubs, auditoriums, small-town theaters. Then she got on Tennessee Ernie Ford's TV show and Arthur Godfrey's morning show. On the Godfrey show, Miyoshi was noticed by Warner's casting director, who brought her to Josh Logan, who hired her for the role of Katsumi in Sayonara.

On the strength of her Academy Award for her Sayonara performance, Miyoshi began to get up to $2,500 a week for singing dates on the road. Jerry Lewis offered her $50,000 for a part in his new movie, Geisha Boy, then R. & H offered her $1,500 a week to play the part of Mei Li in Flower Drum. Pliant and outwardly submissive, yet inwardly serene and sturdy, Mei Li was Miyoshi. Now married to a former TV director, Win Opie, Miyoshi is certain that she wants to continue living in a land where it is really all right to look people in the eyes. "Is nice look at eyes," she says solemnly. "Get to know people that way."

Wham! Pearl Harbor. Half the world away from Otaru, in a bumpy California crossroads hamlet called Cressy (pop. 400), chunky little Chiyoko Suzuki began her rehearsals for Flower Drum just 28 years ago. Youngest of a fair-sized Japanese-American family (a brother twelve years older, and two sisters, eight and ten years older), "Chiby" (Squirt) Suzuki was a loner from the start--a kid who seemed to figure she was expected to take care of herself. She went to a two-room schoolhouse, rode horses bareback, learned to swim in irrigation canals on her father's 100-acre farm, and talked Spanish to the Mexican peach pickers. But it was not much fun. At least, looking back on her childhood, Chiby Suzuki insists: "I could hardly wait to grow up. I didn't like being a kid, because I always had certain feelings I couldn't explain. The only things I could dream about in those days were the trucks going by on the highway all night long. I used to dream of all the places they had been that I would like to go some day."

But there was no place to go. If Chiby got a kick out of anything, it was singing. She sang her earliest solo at 3 1/2, when she visited a Sunday-school class one Easter and laced into White Lilies with such gusto that the rest of the kids quit to let her go it alone. To everyone in town, Chiby seemed like just another American kid; people began to call her "Pat." At a "couple of county things" she stopped the show with her unbridled rendition of I Am an American.

"Then, wham!" says she. "Pearl Harbor."

Along with the rest of the Suzuki family, Pat was shipped to the Amache relocation camp at Lamar, Colo. There life was a matter of school as usual. She did not sing much, and about the only memories she has are of thunderstorms, dust storms, and the Nisei boy scouts who went out every morning in the shifting sand to raise the American flag.

Bean Cake. After the war the Suzukis spent a year on a Colorado sugar-beet farm, renting their own land to help make a stake. Then they went home to Cressy. For Pat, it was as bad as ever. "I was kind of a homely kid. I was never a school type--I wasn't rah rah."

When Pat listened to her radio and heard music from the Edgewater Beach Hotel, she wanted to see Chicago. She could visualize just what the lake and beach would look like. When she saw paintings, she wanted desperately to see the places the artists had painted. And she never forgot some advice her father had once given her: "As you get older, you get afraid to take chances. When you're young, you have the drive. You should use your youth."

In 1948 (the year Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote South Pacific) Pat took off for Mills College near San Francisco. It seemed a safe distance from Cressy. She worked as a typist, did odd jobs at school, was a receptionist in a Chinese restaurant. She bounced on to Modesto Junior College, then to San Francisco City College and to San Jose State. She studied voice, biology, philosophy, art, art history, woodworking. During her two years at San Jose State she sang in a small nightclub on weekends, and she began to develop a style. Says Cartoonist Walt ("Pogo") Kelly: "She was a real dish of Yo-Kan, a cute little, sweet little bean cake. She could have licked the brass section of Phil Spitalny's all-girl orchestra with one tonsil."

Waiting for R. & H. "I was a big slob," says Pat of her days at San Jose State. Translated by a friend, this means that she was a nonconformist Nisei. "Pat and I ran around with Caucasians," says the friend. The strained social relations resulted in many heartaches, and when the hurt was deep enough, Pat became deeply Japanese. Once when a boy she was fond of threw her over, Pat sliced off the ponytail hairdo that has since become her trademark. "I'm shorn of my pride anyway," she said, "so I cut my hair." Her parents would have recognized the Oriental sign of disgrace.

Trying to get to Europe in 1954, she made it as far as New York before she ran short of cash. She wound up with a walk-on part in the road company of Teahouse of the August Moon, and one day while on tour she wandered into Seattle's Colony, an offbeat supper club. She talked Owner Norm Bobrow into letting her try a few numbers with the band, brought down the house. Three years later, Pat was still at the Colony. "How long will she stay?" Bobrow's friends kept asking him. He always gave them the same answer: "Until Rodgers and Hammerstein write a musical for her."

Safety in Numbers. R. & H. did not quite write Flower Drum Song for Pat, but at times it seemed close to becoming her show. As Linda Low--hymning "Grant Avenue, San Francisco" with all the fire-cracking verve of Chinatown itself--Pat worked with so much authority that by the time the show opened in Boston, she was practically in command. Stage mikes had to be turned down to keep her lusty voice somewhere within range of Miyoshi's. "Pat have very very sweet voice when she little girl," says her 66-year-old father, Chiyosaku Suzuki. "I like better her singing when young."

Nor does Papa Suzuki entirely approve of his daughter's Flower Drum role. He does not like to think Pat has drifted so far from ancestral tradition. Especially he dislikes the striptease with which she stops the show. "I don't like it when she start taking off like this." He tries a tentative little laugh and begins to peel off his coat. "We see show in Boston and makes Mama to sweat. In Boston, more strip and very small pants. I'm little scared as I think accidentally come off her pants." Says Pat reassuringly: "We ill wear double pants. Pop."

East-West Love. In the philosophical concept of Yang and Yin, the two elements grow and shrink each at the other's expense, but never wholly obliterate each ather, so that the end result is a kind of universal harmony. This is more or less what happens backstage at Flower Drum Song, according to testimony not only from pressagents--those untrustworthy upbeat philosophers--but according to anybody else connected with the show. And practically everybody gives the credit to the Oriental qualities of patience and politeness. Says Production Supervisor Jerry Whyte, a tough veteran of R. & H. shows since Oklahoma!: "I dread to think another show with two principals running nip and tuck like this one. But here you see no rivalry. They have a genuine friendship for each other."

The Oriental spell extends beyond Miyoshi and Pat. Wilbur, the stern-eyed stage-door guard, feels that the Oriental chorus girls are politer and less brassy than the usual types; the director and the choreographer feel that the whole cast is more disciplined and quicker to learn. Says Oscar Hammerstein: "It's a strange flavor they have. They don't fawn, they don't scrape, they listen carefully. I don't think they're any more intelligent than other people, but I think the intelligence is less obscured by neuroticism." Translates Dick Rodgers: "We have no nuts."

The East-West love feast that surrounds Flower Drum Song is no accident, for Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves have reached an almost Oriental serenity in an otherwise hectic and often squalid business. As much as any of their Chinese characters, R. & H. have family feeling. Since they have a permanent production outfit (unlike most other theater men, who fold up after each show), they have given employment to generations of performers. Example: one of Flower Drum's brightest young dancers, Patrick Adiarte, 15, started at eight as one of the younger children in The King and I, kept on playing the parts of older boys as he grew; meanwhile, his mother was a dancer in The King and I. As much as any of the Chinese in Flower Drum Song, R. & H. believe in tradition, have gone to the same opening-night party for 15 years (given by a friend, Jules Glaenzer, vice president of Carder's). On tour they still receive ceremonial visits from long-married and matronly chorus girls who were in one of their early shows.

If Wang Chi-yang, Flower Drum Song's venerable elder, likes the feel of money and distrusts outside financial institutions, so do Rodgers and Hammerstein. Where other producers more often than not must hunt down angels, R. & H. have the problem of fighting off outside investors, mostly use their own capital or that of family members and close friends. And they go about their business with Confucian calm; voices are virtually never raised at an R. & H. rehearsal, except in song.

Saving Grace. Their determined serenity is sometimes derided; says Cole Porter: "I could spot Dick's songs anywhere. There is a certain holiness about them." But with serenity goes an unfailing professional competence. In Flower Drum-Song they do not shrink from such corn as a hula-hooping little girl and that ancient scene about the Chinese maiden who does not understand Western kissing; but there is always a saving grace of humor or taste, or at least professionalism. As their own producers, they ruthlessly cut their favorite songs or scenes if they detect that alarming rustle of inattention among spectators. "What I like about R. & H.," says General Stage Manager Jimmy Hammerstein, Oscar's No. 2 son, "is that they're conditioned to what works. If it works, they keep it in; if it doesn't, they scrap it. They listen with real objective ears."

During Flower Drum's Boston tryout, when Nightclub Comic Larry Storch did not work out in the role of Sammy Fong, he was quickly replaced by a more experienced stage veteran, Larry Blyden. A sentimental song was cut, and Blyden's part was beefed up; Hammerstein spent two days writing the lyrics of a new song, and Rodgers retired to the Shubert Theater ladies' room (which during rehearsals was equipped with a piano) and wrote the music in less than six hours. (His record: South Pacific's Bali Ha'i, which he wrote in five minutes over after-dinner coffee in a crowded room.) Result of the Boston change: Don't Marry Me, one of the brightest numbers in the show.

Big Brother. Throughout the road try-out of any of their shows, and beyond the Broadway opening, R. & H. are omnipresent. In their separate ways, they are intensely paternal toward their cast--Hammerstein gently smiling but a little shy and withdrawn, Rodgers quick, effervescent and always ready with a hug for a chorus girl. Says one member of the cast: "Hammerstein is the Great White Father, but Rodgers is Daddy."

If there is anything about the R. & H. paternalism that the Flower Drum cast dislikes, it is the installation of closed-circuit TV in the St. James Theater, where the show has settled down for its New York run. Not that anyone objects to the stage manager keeping track of the action. But Hammerstein has ordered a cable run to his town house so that he too can monitor the show. Says Larry Blyden: "It's like Big Brother looking over your shoulder. It gives me the willies."

But this is a minor irritation, considering that they will all be around New York for a long time--Great White Father and Daddy, Miyoshi, Pat and all the kids--just a big Oriental family beating their flowery drum. Meanwhile, the girls are getting accustomed to New York. Pat is getting vitamin injections for extra energy, and Miyoshi, in a remarkable East-West synthesis, has taken to champagne. "I can't stop drinking it," she says. "It tastes like sake."

* Rashomon, Kataki, Cry for Happy and The Cool Mikado are all on the way to town. The World of Suzie Wong is pulling in crowds right across the street from Flower Drum.

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