I have spent the last hour paying bills. No, I don't pay online. I still write out checks and I still go to the post office eager to see what new commemoratives they offer. With my last check I also used my last Kate Smith stamp, a poignant moment.
She was a familiar figure on television in my childhood. Even then I thought it odd that someone so heavy and unglamorous could be a success, and I doubt that she could have had a career today. But look at Susan Boyle. It was the power of her singing that made her a star. I have never been a fan of the score of "Les Miz," but when Boyle's performance appeared on YouTube, I watched it over and over, crying every time.
In the case of Kate Smith, she also had a buoyant, effervescent smile and a voice of enveloping warmth that made people overlook her unprepossessing appearance.
Twenty years ago a friend was trying to produce a musical based on her life. He had secured a commitment for a year from the monumental singer Marilyn Horne to play her. I don't know if there was going to be an original score or just a reprise of Smith's own repertory, but Wendy Wasserstein was going to write the book. She would have brought great understanding to the part, not just because she too was overweight, but because she was so rich in empathy.
There is no mention of it in Julie Salomon's excellent biography, Wendy and the Lost Boys, which brings her so vividly, so endearingly, so heartbreakingly back to life, but every artist's life is full of unfulfilled projects, and this was probably one of many. Salomon deals with far more important issues with tremendous candor and delicacy.
For many years, of course, beginning in the '60s, Smith was a figure of scorn. She was most closely associated, of course, with our secondary national anthem, "God Bless America," at a time when anything patriotic was deemed beneath contempt. Her other great hit, "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain," was a sentimental favorite but sentiment was also highly out of fashion.
I also remember sneering when I read a profile of her that revealed she had a suite on the top floor of a Far West Side motel overlooking New York harbor (now doubtless a sparkling new high rise). She loved watching the boats come in and out but had no desire to travel. Such lack of sophistication was a hideous indictment.
There was also the alleged issue of her anti-Semitism, which seems entirely spurious given her close relationship with Irving Berlin. It did not help that one of her earliest hits was "That's Why the Darky was Born," but if you listen to the lyrics they inevitably remind you of "Old Man River," and that song was also recorded by no less an artist than Paul Robeson.
She was, after all, a woman of her time, a southern woman at that. She was born in Virginia in 1907, not a time or place of great tolerance. Her prejudices, if that they were, were entirely commonplace back then. For years I used to avoid buying classical records by artists who had been sympathetic to the Nazis, but after a while I broke down. By buying those records I was not condoning their political views -- I was learning about great musicianship.
It's interesting to conjecture what Wendy might have made of all this. Could she have gotten us beyond the sense of a woman evoking the innocence of another time? Happily her inimitable style has been preserved on disc. I don't really need the stamps to remind me of the power of her singing.