Can't Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell, by Eileen Farrell with Brian Kellow. 1999, Northeastern Univ. Press, 255 pp., 29 photos, selected discography, index. Hardcover BK #11 Orig. 29.95, NOW US$24.95 Carol McD. Wallace, reviewing in Opera News "The components of any performer's autobiography—the personal story, the industry gossip, the technical tidbits—are always packaged with a liberal dose of personal myth. Can't Help Singing, Eileen Farrell's autobiography written with Brian Kellow, might as well be entitled Memoirs of the Anti-Diva. She's just a strapping Irish girl with an incredible set of pipes and no tolerance for pretension. As she stalks through the world of professional music in the middle of this century, singing recitals and concerts, opera and pop, she juggles the demands of her singing career with the demands of running a family. When Rudolf Bing calls to invite her to make her Met debut, she's mopping the floor. "Of course the necessary elements of biography are covered. Farrell and Kellow move briskly but colorfully through the Catholic girlhood in lower New England, the career that started in radio, the concerts on the road. A parallel narrative thread covers her romance with New York City policeman Robert Reagan and the birth of her two children. As Farrell enters the big leagues, the pace slows and the concentration of gossipy tidbits increases. Affection heavily outweighs deprecation—Farrell has great respect for the talent and generosity of colleagues such as Thomas Schippers, Leonard Bernstein and Mabel Mercer. She is not a malicious woman, but she cannot abide politics or affectation. (Bing, Michael Tilson Thomas and Richard Tucker come off especially poorly.) "Ruminations about technique are confined to a few passages, but Farrell's enthusiasm for the repertory she sang emerges clearly. The emotional power of that music—and her susceptibility to it—are essential elements in her career. She claims, for instance, never to have recorded Madama Butterfly because 'I couldn't ever get through it without crying.' In our era of specialization, her range seems improbable, and she can't really explain it herself. On the one hand, she maintains, the technical skills required to sing pop and opera—'phrasing and the correct pronunciation and coloring of words'—aren't so different. On the other hand, she suggests, the ability to sing jazz or the blues is 'like dowsing. I can take a forked stick, walk through a field holding it straight out in front of me and tell you exactly the spot where a well should be dug....It's just there, and I think it's the same way with pop singing.' "What makes this book so engaging is Farrell's no-nonsense attitude combined with her sense of humor. She didn't sing opera until mid-career, she claims, because 'The stage direction, lighting, costumes, and cues all sounded like too much trouble—and I didn't exactly think I had the figure for the opera stage.' She knew what she wanted from a singing career: to earn a living making music with people she respected. When it got more complicated than that, she just couldn't be bothered. The point, after all, was singing." The Anti-Diva Michael J. Fressola, writing in the Staten Island Sunday Advance "Pick a page, any page of 'Can't Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell,' and there's a juicy morsel. "She spots Maria Callas alone in a restaurant and introduces herself, fully expecting to be waved away. "But Callas overflows with affection. It was she, after all, who once said that the Metropolitan Opera was obviously not such a big deal because it hadn't, as yet, signed Miss Farrell. "Or she's at a party with the inebriated, hostile, and famously diminutive conductor Eugene Ormandy. 'So, tell me, Farrell, how much do you weigh?' he asks. "Now, Miss Farrell, a pretty woman who had long since made peace with her up-and-down avoirdupois, retorted: 'I'm not going to tell you, Maestro. After all, I wouldn't think of asking you in front of all these people how tall you are.' "Here's the former Grymes Hill housewife slipping into her dressing room with a large bottle of warm Coke. Why? She drank it to warm up her vocal equipment, via a thunderstorm of belches. Beverly Sills, an old friend, once overheard the rumblings. "'Those weren't burps,' Sills recalled. 'They were symphonies.' "And here's Miss Farrell agonizing because her schedule has kept her from her daughter's Confirmation. Here she is cradling Leonard Bernstein, one of her favorite conductors, grieving over the death of his wife. "Miss Farrell has all kinds of songs to sing in this informal, entertaining biography: Gossip, ditties, songs of musicianship and arias in homage to loved ones. "She's unashamedly opinionated, and at this stage in the game—she'll be 80 in February—she can say whatever she pleases about anyone and anything. "And does. "The daughter of a couple who'd had a brief vaudeville turn as 'The Singing O'Farrells,' she was born and raised in Connecticut and came to New York to study singing when she was about 20, equipped with a stadium-sized natural soprano that needed just a little polishing. "She began to get radio work, first a $50-per-week gig in the CBS chorus and then, once her extravagant gift was noticed, she was handed 'Eileen Farrell Sings,' a half-hour show. "She mixed popular music, hymns, jazz and blues with 'serious' and operatic material. Later, the balance changed, but she remained comfortable in multiple arenas. "Many opera singers 'cross over' to pop or jazz these days (and vice versa; Aretha Franklin sang 'Nessun Dorma.') Few do it well and none have Farrell's flexibility. Looking back on her radio days, more than 50 years later, Miss Farrell's still amazed. "'There I was, a green kid from New England with practically no experience, about to star in her own radio show. You would think I'd have been terrified, but I wasn't. Strange as it sounds, singing was the one thing that didn't terrify me.' "She might have added that speaking her mind never scared her either. 'Can't Help Singing,' written with 'Opera News' editor Brian Kellow, sounds exactly like her—smart-mouthed. "She even repeats some of her most outrageous and widely reported remarks. (Sorry, the really funny ones are unprintable here.) "Her radio show was a hit and it made her famous overnight, so much so that none other than Cole Porter saluted the Farrell phenomenon in a lyric for 'Big Town' from his 1944 show 'Seven Lively Arts,' "'If Ginny Smith and Georgia Carroll and Dinah Shore and Eileen Farrell.' "Around this time, something far more significant—in Miss Farrell's eyes—took place. She met Robert Reagan, a courtly half-Italian, half-Irish cop from Staten Island and fell in love. "She and Reagan married and moved to Staten Island in 1947, eventually settling in a big place on Grymes Hill. "She sang on Island stages regularly and once graced the stage of the old Paramount Theater in Stapleton as a last-minute replacement for Risë Stevens. "Miss Farrell was the anti-diva. Once she and Reagan had kids, they came first. Given the choice: Family or singing (but not both), she would have shut her mouth forever. "A diva would have made a different decision. In hindsight she acknowledges that she might have sung more opera if her husband, who hated her absences, had been amenable. Still, she never whines. "After Reagan's death, she declined to sing in public, although she continued to make recordings. She broke this vow just once, for an AIDS benefit mounted by Leonard Bernstein at Carnegie Hall. "Miss Farrell's operatic career, although brief, has become the stuff of legend. By the time she reached 40, she had added considerable amounts of opera to her repertoire. Then in 1955, she sang the title role in a concert performance of 'Medea' at Town Hall. "The reviews were extraordinary. Winthrop Sergeant wrote in the New Yorker: '[Her] voice seemed limitless in power, magnificent in tone, remarkably sure in its command' "Immediately, the press (music and mainstream) began to wonder loudly: How come the Metropolitan Opera hasn't asked this soprano, a homegrown American singer, to sing? "Finally the Met's notoriously temperamental director Rudolph Bing telephoned with an invitation to sing. A date was set and the rest is history, with a little comedy and some torturous moments thrown in. The debut in 'Alceste,' came Dec. 6, 1960. The new and apparently misconceived production drew boos. But she brought down the house and gave 22 curtain calls. "She spent five seasons at the Met, (mostly 'meat and potatoes Italian opera,' she writes) and left without angst. "But the singer, who had traded Grymes Hill for Manhattan in the early 1960's, had other opportunities: Television (she especially enjoyed horsing around with Carol Burnett), recordings, concerts, and a teaching stint at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. "Fully retired today (she made 'Love is Letting Go,' her last recording, in 1995), she ends 'Can't Help Singing' with simple gratitude and surprise at how well it all turned out."

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