Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [69]
Even though we traveled around the country, growing up in nightclubs, when Terre and I were little girls, one of our favorite things to do was sit on the floor with our portable pink phonograph and play story records.
Loretta Young reading The Littlest Angel. Bing Crosby’s The Happy Prince. Bozo the Clown, Cinderella, Snow White. We’d lie on our backs and look up at the ceiling and see all the pictures in our heads. It was a great thing to do on a rainy L.A. day.
When Terre’s first child, Dionne, was around five, I was reading to her from the books she had in her room, and I was shocked by how outdated they were. They all told the same old stories, starring the same old prince, promising the same old happy ending. None of the books had any new ideas encouraging Dionne to dream her own dreams.
“I can’t believe you’re giving her the same stuff we grew up with,” I said to Terre. “Didn’t it take us half our lives to get over these stories?”
“That’s all I’ve been able to find,” Terre said. “Why don’t you try?”
Obviously, I thought, my sister hadn’t looked hard enough. So off I went to the bookstore, confident that I would return with an armful of inspiration. But Auntie Marlo had a lot to learn. Not only had nothing changed, but in some cases things had gotten worse. One book I’ll never forget was called I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl! The pictures were cute, but the captions were appalling.
“Boys are pilots, girls are stewardesses.”
“Boys are doctors, girls are nurses.”
“Boys can eat, girls can cook.”
“Boys invent things, girls use what boys invent.”
I almost had a heart attack in the children’s book section.
How could this be? After all the marches, the consciousness-raising, the literature? I thought back to Terre’s and my old records and wondered, How hard could it be to create an album for Dionne, with stories and songs that she could lie on the floor and listen to, and see pictures in her head that would awaken her imagination instead of putting her mind to sleep?
Girls use what boys invent, indeed!
It couldn’t be preachy. It would have to be entertaining and have some razzmatazz. This was not the Littlest Angel generation—these kids had rock concerts blaring from the TVs in their living rooms. And it would have to make kids laugh. That’s the only way they’d get it—and remember it. Who was it who said, “What is learned with laughter is learned well”?
We’d make fun of all the old stories and outmoded ideas of what boys and girls can do. And we’d go to showbiz talent, not kids’ writers, to create the material—people like Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Sheldon Harnick, Herb Gardner and Shel Silverstein.
My friend (and co-producer) Carole Hart and I began to develop the album by sitting around with the writers and talking about our own childhoods, and what we would have liked to change about them.
“I’d like to have heard that it wasn’t a sissy thing for a boy to cry,” Herb Gardner said. And Carol Hall wrote the terrific song “It’s All Right to Cry.”
“I’d like to have read one story about a princess who wasn’t blond and didn’t get married to the prince at the end,” I said. And Betty Miles updated the ancient myth, “Atalanta,” all about a king who holds a cross-country footrace, offering his daughter’s hand in marriage to the young man who wins. But in Betty’s version, the princess (now a brunette) joins in the race, so that if she wins, she can decide for herself whether she will marry at all.
I always loved the last line: “Perhaps someday they will be married, and perhaps they will not. But one thing’s for certain. They will live happily ever after.”
The ever irreverent Shel Silverstein wrote a piece called “Ladies First,” about a spoiled little girl who insists on being given special treatment just because she’s a girl—pushing ahead of everyone to be first in line and constantly announcing, “Ladies first, ladies first.”
At the end of the story, tigers appear and surround a camp of children, and try to decide which one to eat first. Misunderstanding, our little heroine cries out, as always, “Ladies