Diva Prose: Bernadette Peters
In the chapter “Codes of Diva Conduct” from The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum theorizes the reasons for queer identification with opera divas. While Koestenbaum’s focus is female opera singers, I was introduced to the text in a class on Beyoncé and I find it just as useful in considering other kinds of diva performers. I was so taken with this chapter when I first read it because as I paged through, anecdote after anecdote about Bernadette Peters kept popping into my head.
Thinking about diva-ness in relationship to Bernadette Peters is a curious task because while she’s often called a diva, writers usually clarify that she doesn’t demonstrate the typical negative traits associated with divas, to the point that Frontiers even published an article about her (which sadly neither I nor the interlibrary loan staff at my university have been able to find a copy of) called “The Anti-Diva Diva.” This paradox arises from the slippage between the two definitions of diva—distinguished female singer and temperamental woman.
What follows may at times veer into the “trashy cadences and idioms of” what Koestenbaum calls “diva prose,” as I defend and construct Bernadette Peters as diva through Koestenbaum’s words.
“The diva can’t separate herself from vocation: her body is her art. When she discovers her diva-incipience, she’s discovering the nature of her body, and she coins that body, that inseparability of election and damnation, in a scene of trauma or embarrassment.”Bernadette Peters was nine years old when she first appeared onstage in an out-of-town production of a play called This Is Goggle, directed by Otto Preminger. In Jesse Green’s 2003 profile of Peters reveals that she memorized one reviewer’s description of herself because of how often her mother repeated it: “The audience seemed to be captivated by a tiny tot who had a rear end shaped like a Bartlett pear.” In a 1974 interview with Earl Wilson, she remembered it slightly differently: “She has a rear end like a Bartlett pear, and she comes on stage like a grade school Diamond Lil.” (For those unfamiliar with the reference, Diamond Lil is the titular character from a Mae West play, which Charles Brackett describes in his review of the play for The New Yorker as “completely carnal.”) Not even her age could shield her from the objectification that comes part and parcel with female performance. Peters quit show business for a time when she was high school because “all [she] could think about was how [she] looked.” Perhaps this decision was precipitated by a burgeoning awareness of inappropriate leering from men like the critic who compared her to Diamond Lil. The typical self-consciousness of adolescence could only have been compounded by subjecting herself to scrutiny onstage.
“Not every origin of diva vocation is traumatic. But the conviction ‘I will sing!’ begins with a primary alienation and unhappiness. I am locked up; voice is the key to the prison door, but it is also part of the prison, the body I am inside.” Peters eventually decided to return to performance because of her singing coach, James Gregory. Her older sister took lessons from Gregory and began taking Peters to see him, too. Peters described “wonderful afternoons of just singing my feelings during [our lessons], working out all the things a teenager goes through that way. It was around then that I started thinking this, singing and expressing one’s self, was a great thing to do. I think it must have been around then that it felt like my [career path] and I was pursuing it.”
“Does the diva know where her sound comes from? Or is she a doll, an unconscious commodity?”In 1969 Joyce Haber wrote, “She had the half-dazed responses you’d expect of… one of those do-it dolls by Mattel: you pull the string, it’s still frozenly animated, the wide eyes don’t quite open, the pursed lips don’t quite purse and the recording says, ‘Hi, there.’” Peters has been compared to a doll (usually a Kewpie) too many times to count, and the comparisons didn’t stop when she aged into her 50s and 60s. Haber’s description, in particular, encapsulates why I find the motif so offensive. There’s a suggestion of vacancy, that there’s no substance beneath the lacquered surface. Perhaps the doll comparisons convey Peters’s singular beauty, but it still generates a sense that she’s just a pretty vessel for the genius of the men whose words she sings, rather than an active interpreter and artist in her own right.
“A diva often begins by imitating her mother, even if the mother’s voice hurts.”Peters grew up listening to her mother’s voice, which had a strange, rough quality to it because of polyps on her vocal cords. Peters unconsciously imitated that sound as a child, so her voice seemed older and huskier. She had to be trained out of that habit with vocal lessons, but as Stephen Mark observed, sometimes a “slight rasp” will still show through in her voice. Peters told Mark that she is still occasionally surprised by her voice. “Isn’t it strange that it works that way? I don’t really think about it, but it just kind of happens whenever I’m working on a song.” What must it feel like to hear the echoes of her mother’s husky voice come from her own throat?
“I identify with the diva’s inability to choose her life, though her willfulness and indomitability make us think that she has sculpted her fate.”Peters’s mother, Marguerite Lazzara, got her into show business when she was three and a half years old. Apparently, she got the idea from watching Peters imitate the actresses in the movie musicals she watched on television. Soon Peters was taking singing and dancing lessons and appearing on programs like The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour and Juvenile Jury. When Jesse Green asked Peters if being a child performer was overall a good experience for a child, she said:
I didn't know how to swim. I remember, in Las Vegas, I fell in, once, and they thought I was flailing, but I felt like: “It's pretty down here!” I might have been dying and I was thinking: “Look at the pretty color!” And suddenly my fear of water was gone, and I could have stayed in forever.
There are many layers of meaning in this rich anecdote, but I think one of them is that even though Peters eventually had a deal with her mother that she could quit show business whenever she wanted, by the time she was old enough to make her own choices, she had already been exposed to the “pretty color[s]” of the entertainment world. One has to wonder if return to performance after high school was inevitable; she could never un-know the glamour of show business or the high from a performance. Was returning to that allure irresistible?
Even if Marguerite never introduced her to performance in her youth, Peters often jokes that she took an aptitude test when she was in school and got “minus zero in everything except Theater Arts.” In 1997, Robert Sokol asked her, “If Bernadette Lazzara hadn’t become an actress, what might she have done?” and Peters laughed and answered, “I don’t know. Probably shot herself!” Whether her path was sculpted by fate’s hand or her mother’s, it seems as if Peters’s diva consecration was inevitable.
“Does the diva mother her voice? Or does the diva give voice to her mother?”Marguerite always said, “I’m not one of those stage mothers,” and for the most part Peters agrees with her. Peters once said of her mother, “She was a riot, a bundle of energy, and everyone adored her—she sometimes made lasagna for the entire cast and crew.” Marguerite may not have terrorized the crew, but she did seem to get the typical vicarious thrill of a stage mother from Peters’s success. In 1976, Peters said, “I think mom has always been interested in seeing me become a performer because she always wanted to become an actress herself…. when I was a kid, she fulfilled herself through me. She put me into show business so she could get a taste of the life herself.” But maybe proximity to stardom wasn’t the only reason she pushed Peters into show business. In an interview with Vulture, Peters stopped short of drawing a line between her mother and the quintessential stage mother, Mama Rose. When asked about what feelings were stirred up by playing Mama Rose as an adult so many years after touring in the show with her sister, Peters commented, “There was so much lacking in Rose and that’s why she had to prove herself through her children.” The observation recalls another remark Peters made about her mother in the mid-70s: “She was just a housewife in Queens, so naturally it was more exciting to go on the road with me than staying home and keeping house.” Peters lamented, “I have no middle name. My mom never gave me one. I had the impression she was bored by that time. I was her third kid.” How could a dynamic personality like Marguerite not be bored by the life of a housewife? Can we blame her for looking beyond the domestic sphere to prove herself?
“…governments classed her [the nineteenth-century diva] a prostitute.”Peters once stated in an interview, “My mother loved show business. She wanted to be an actress, but her own mother, who was from the Old Country, wouldn’t let her. As far as my grandmother was concerned, I was as close to a whore as you could be without, you know, getting on your back.”
“In Jean-Jacques Beineix’s film Diva, the diva, Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, an American woman of color, subverts the traditional image of the white diva and reminds us that divas, though usually white, have been linked to racial otherness, darkness, exoticism, and ‘blood.’”While Italians have since assimilated into an umbrella of “whiteness” in the United States, there was still enough prejudice against Italian Americans that Marguerite was told that if she wanted her daughter to be successful in show business, she needed to drop her ethnic surname. Marguerite’s explanation to Bernadette, however, was that the name change was a remedy for the fact that “Bernadette Lazzara” was too long to fit on a marquee. Perhaps this aspiration of whiteness is also why Marguerite began to tint Peters’s dark hair—she lied to Peters that she was putting conditioner in it, but her hair gradually became blonder and blonder. The texture of her hair was another sign of her ethnic difference, and not everyone praised her curls once she stopped straightening them. (We have hair stylist Maury Hopson to thank for getting her to finally embrace her natural hair.) Writers called the hairstyle “a tumbleweed hairdo,” “a nest of ravens in her hair,” and “a rat’s nest.” One journalist even told her that she resembled a “flashy blond sheepdog.” Peters’s pale complexion likely also saved her from the colorism an Italian American woman with darker skin might have dealt with, and, of course, she experienced none of the systemic racism that women of color in the entertainment industry faced.
“For the diva-to-be, difference is power; she seeks profit in her deviance. For the nondiva, difference only leads to ridicule.”Early in her career, Peters had difficulty landing jobs in the chorus because she didn’t conform to the feminine beauty ideal of the moment: “When you’re a teenager and are supposed to look like Twiggy and you don’t, you feel everything is wrong with you. When I was a teenager, Twiggy was it—straight hair, really skinny, no breasts.” In a desperate attempt to blend in with the chorus line, Peters straightened her hair, but it wasn’t until she gave up battling her curls one humid New York summer that she started working in earnest. “I guess it meant I wasn’t supposed to be in the chorus, but out front somewhere,” she mused.
“We care about the bodies of singers, and not only about the sounds those bodies produce.”Male critics have never shied away from pontificating about Peters’s body as if her shape was the object of criticism rather than her voice or her acting. “One hardly associates her figure with that of an aerialist,” wrote Ken Wallace. Rex Reed commented, “Miss Peters looks like a spongy éclair that has been nibbled around the edges, ready to burst in gastronomic rhythm at the drop of a baton.” Gerald Nachman stated, “Our baby vamp has… a body that fluctuates between fantastic and unlawful. Her face says one thing and her figure quite another.” Tim Radford identified her as one of the few bright spots in Vigilante Force “as a hard little harlot with an unattractive face and a rotten singing voice but a heart (predictably) in the right place and a set of secondary sexual characteristics of an enchanting wobbliness that defies definition. Is that what Huxley meant by pneumatic?” It sickens me that any man would ever feel emboldened to write about a woman’s body in such a way.
“The beauty and magnitude of a diva’s voice resides, so the iconography suggests, in her deformity. Her voice is beautiful because she herself is not…”The consensus today is that Bernadette Peters is a beauty, but I’m not shocked when I read that Peters was surprised that an interviewer asked her if her prettiness ever seemed limiting, or that she didn’t relate to Desirée Armfeldt because of the compliments the character was lavished with. She did not consider herself attractive, particularly in the early years of her career. She “didn’t think [she] was pretty enough or thin enough” and her insecurities must have been exacerbated by uncharitable critics who disparaged her weight or made backhanded remarks about her looks. They called her a “winsome frump” and a “not-quite-pretty-girl.” Once, she even appeared on a list of “deformed” celebrities in the 1980s for her slight underbite.
Bernadette Peters photographed in her dressing room in the Marquis Theatre during her time in Annie Get Your Gun. Photographs by Timothy White.
“Whether bonding or feuding, a diva is never alone; her solitude is peopled with reflections of herself.”When Jesse Green profiled Peters for New York Magazine while Peters was performing in the Follies revival, he noted Peters’s immediate aversion to the floor-to-ceiling mirrors installed in her dressing room at the Marquis Theatre: “Oh, I hate mirrors. “Let’s get rid of that. Can it be taken down? Or can we cover it with, what’s it called, wallboard?” Peters sat with her back to the mirror for the interview. Green points out that it’s the same dressing room Peters used when she was in both Annie Get Your Gun and The Goodbye Girl. Curiously, Peters did a photoshoot in the same dressing room while she was in Annie Get Your Gun with photographer Timothy White which featured mirrors that accentuated or obscured her face.
“Like Dorian Gray, the diva has a peculiarly poignant relation to the fiction of eternal youth, which we all may want, but women and gay men are imagined to want most intensely.”Peters’s graceful aging is often remarked upon, but I dislike reading about it because it’s not a measure by which I believe that any woman should be judged. I recently stumbled across an article by Danish media researcher Anne Jerslev called, “The Look of Aging: Agelessness as Post-feminist Cool?” which examines Jane Fonda, Christine Baranski, and Peters and the characters they play on The Newsroom, The Good Wife, and Mozart in the Jungle in relation to aging and cosmetic surgery. Fonda has been transparent about her use of cosmetic surgery, but while neither Baranski nor Peters have openly discussed having had cosmetic surgery, some viewers remain unconvinced. Jerslev quotes an unscrupulous website that compiled “evidence” of Peters’s cosmetic surgery and finished its case with the assertion that “it can be concluded that Bernadette Peters’ plastic surgery has done so much to save her looks from the effects of aging” (Jerselv’s emphasis). This rhetoric suggests that aging necessarily deteriorates one’s looks and that one should conceal the effects of aging. I don’t take this kind of clickbait material very seriously, but I do think this belief is unwittingly perpetuated by those who celebrate women on the basis of how well they age.
“The diva acquires divinity when her predecessor passes on privilege, stature, beauty secrets, fashion tips, and vocal tricks.”Peters had the chance to see Carol Channing the last time she did Hello, Dolly! and was so awed by her that when she went backstage, Peters kneeled before Channing and kissed her hand. Peters even brought some of Channing’s Dolly to her portrayal of Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, for which she won her second Tony award. Years later when Peters found herself preparing to play Dolly Levi herself, she revisited Channing’s interpretation by watching the recording of her in Hello, Dolly! at the Lincoln Center Library and couldn’t resist incorporating some of Channing’s bits when she assumed the character. After Channing’s death, Peters wrote that she was “love personified.”
Bernadette Peters kneeling before Elaine Stritch at the curtain call for their first performance in A Little Night Music. Photo by Dario Cantatore.
“The love between an aging diva and a diva entering her prime is erotic, but we are not supposed to imagine their bodies as they observe each other with mingled reverence and jealousy.” On the night of their first performance in A Little Night Music, Peters took Elaine Stritch’s hand and knelt before her in a gesture of reverence. During the press for the show, Peters called Stritch an original because “when something comes out of this [Stritch’s] body and this mind and this soul and this being, it comes out like nobody else.” It is interesting that she first locates Stritch’s magnetism in her body, considering Peters chose such a physical act to display her respect for her. For her part, Stritch said that Peters’s sense of humor was the closest she’d ever seen to Judy Garland’s. She explained how exciting it was to act alongside Peters because, “You never know where she’s going.” Peters always surprised her; the direction in which she took a scene was never a “foregone conclusion.” There is a queer comradery between the two women in this interview; their mutual admiration is obvious, but they are slightly out of sync—they never anticipate what the other will say.
“…the diva’s desire for women is not incidental to her power or allure, or to the emotions that motivated actual women to be divas.” Mary Tyler Moore presented Peters with the Sarah Siddons Society’s Actress of the Year Award in 1994. Moore wore “a tuxedo and a huge, jeweled dragonfly pin instead of a bow tie.” Later in the ceremony, halfway through the traditional Sarah Siddons Waltz, Moore cut in on Peters and her partner. Moore and Peters left her partner “standing there as [Moore] and Peters waltzed gracefully away across the dance floor. Moore led.” It is not lost on me that the Sarah Siddons Award Moore handed to Peters was named after the fictitious prize from All About Eve that the coded lesbian character, Eve Harrington, wins at the beginning of the film.
“Marian Anderson’s mother told her, ‘Remember, wherever you are and whatever you do, someone always sees you.’ This advice had sharp meaning for the African-American child, who needed to beware of watchful, threatening, armed presences. But the warning also applies to the performer, who builds an identity from the experience of being watched, and who must learn to police herself.” The writer of Peters’s 1982 Esquire profile wrote: “She guards her words as resolutely as Diana held to her chastity…. She reveals private details with great reluctance. She is direct to a point. Then the misty curtain drops.” When the writer asked, “How would you describe yourself back then [in childhood]?” Peters responded, “Why should I answer that?” After the writer of her 1984 LIFE profile asked about her private life Peters replied, “Just say I’m evasive about it.” When Alex Witchel asks her to describe herself during an interview for The New York Times in 1999, Peters says, “I can’t describe myself. Do I have to?” Richard Jay Alexander, her concert director, told Witchel, “Everyone loves her, but they don’t know her.” Jesse Green wrote of how, “In the politest possible way, she [Peters] makes further inquiry impossible; it would seem like grilling a sparrow.”
In a remark that seems eerily prescient in the age of social media, Peters told Esquire, “In a way I feel that it [keeping private life private] actually serves the public better. If I give away too much, there won’t be a whole person for them to see.”
“But a diva is a solitary woman, not a country; all she wants is sovereignty over herself.” In an interview with Joan Saunders Wixen from late 1981, Peters confessed, “It’s like I’m in chains lately. I guess I’ve always been in chains, only lately I’ve been struggling to get out…. I came from a typical Italian family in Queens where the women get married early and have kids, where women are taught you mustn’t compete in the world and be strong or else men aren’t going to like you.” At the time Peters’s relationship with Steve Martin attracted a lot of media attention because of their highly anticipated film, Pennies from Heaven (1981). The first film they starred in together, The Jerk (1979), was a box office smash, but the misunderstood Pennies would not fare nearly as well; audiences expected another comedy, not a thoughtful, formally innovative musical drama.
In the interview for Esquire, Peters revealed that she had been influenced by The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence, a pop psychology book by Colette Dowling that was published the year before. Peters said, “Sometimes I think marriage is what I want, and sometimes I think it’s just a convention.” Intrigued by a diamond ring on her hand, the interviewer commented:
“That looks like an engagement ring on your hand.”
“Doesn’t it,” she says with a mischievous grin. “But it’s just a solitaire diamond set in a nice way.”
Unwittingly, she could have been describing herself.
Within a few months, her relationship with Martin was over. It would be another fifteen years before she married for the first time at forty-eight years old.
“Diva iconography casts the successful, prominent woman (the woman who makes a large fee and a large sound) as a diseased anomaly: or it portrays her failure to make sound as a disease, a bloody lapse.”Would any exploration of Peters’s public persona be complete without acknowledging Michael Riedel’s spiteful campaign against her while she starred in Gypsy? Many critics believed she was miscast because she was physically a sharp departure from the Merman type, but Arthur Laurents and Sam Mendes wanted her for the part because she resembled the real Rose, who was a petite, blonde, man-killer. Peters missed some performances at the beginning of the show’s run due to a respiratory infection and Riedel speculated that the role was too vocally demanding for her. Riedel went so far as to put her face on an image of a milk carton in his New York Post column, with the message “Have you seen this woman?” She ultimately recovered and gave a breathtaking performance of “Rose’s Turn” at the Tony Awards. A potentially (probably?) apocryphal story has been circulated by musical theatre fans that she performed against doctor’s orders—I’ve read claims that she was afflicted with anything from a 103-degree fever to pneumonia to a collapsed lung.
“Giving flowers, the audience caters to the diva’s pleasure. Or does the fan toss flowers selfishly—to make a mark on the evening?”In 2019, I skipped my college commencement ceremony to drive up to see my first Bernadette Peters concert in Morristown, New Jersey. One of the highlights of that concert was when an audience member launched a bouquet of flowers like a missile from the mezzanine. Peters was startled, to say the least.
“The gift of flowers will never be reciprocated. Like a fan letter, it is a tribute to the void: a gesture of faith and despair.”I was so moved after I saw Peters in Hello, Dolly! the second time (and I would have been many, many more times if I was wealthier or lived many miles closer to the Shubert Theatre) that I wrote her a fan letter. For a while I saved the draft that I copied my message from onto the stationary I bought especially for the occasion, but I threw it out without rereading it a few weeks ago, embarrassed of my painfully earnest devotion to this diva.
“…the context for this adulation—the love that queer fans send across the footlights—remains unspeakable and internal.”The first time I saw Peters in Hello, Dolly! was from the mezzanine. It was my first time watching her perform in person and I had no way of anticipating how enchanted I would be. When I left the theatre, I knew that I had to see her again no matter the cost. A few weeks later I made the seven-hour drive, crashed with a friend interning in New York, and saw the show again in the front row. It was the same day as New York Pride, so after I watched part of the march, I changed out of my rainbow gear into a black-and-white checkered dress, with only my friend Amita covering me for decency. I caught the subway to the Shubert and, breathless, I took my seat in the front row. During the curtain call, Peters walked along the edge of the stage shaking the outstretched hands of audience members—including mine. I have never felt as much unadulterated, heart-bursting-out-of-my chest joy as I did in that moment.
One of the last performances I saw before COVID–19 struck the U.S. in full force, was a Bernadette Peters concert in my hometown, Virginia Beach. I sat in the front row (if I can afford front row seats to see a diva, I will always spring for them) and as Peters sang her encore number, “Kramer’s Song,” she left the stage and walked in front of the first row, so she could look directly into the eyes of the audience members. An elderly woman next to me extended her hand for Peters to squeeze—she, too, was compelled to feel the pressure of Peters’s hand against her own. I was too shy to do the same with her just inches away, without the footlights separating us, but she must have seen my beaming face looking up at her.
