if the performers were awful, it was probably a jolly crowd. English immigrants had imported their cheery custom of letting prostitutes ply their trade in the upper balconies of theaters. Policemen pocketed bribes and looked the other way while theater critics warned readers that respectable wives and daughters might be mixed with “the abandoned of the sex.”
My parents, Ann and Larry, met during the Metropolitan Opera’s 1945 season, both twenty, eyeing each other on the cheap seats line for weeks. Ann and her friend Rose went to every Saturday matinee. Ann was a petite, raven-haired stunner with a dazzling smile who favored short, curled coifs, mascara, black eyeliner, and vivid lipstick. On theater day she wore her one elegant coat and spike heels.
Larry Florio, an aspiring theater director from Hoboken, New Jersey, was there with friends. He’d just left the army, a slim charmer with wavy brown hair, big brown eyes, and an easy laugh. “My goodness, how good-looking your father is, Donna,” fluttered Miss Scher, my sixth-grade teacher, after parent-teacher night. “Very handsome indeed.” Marie in apartment 5A, my first babysitter, who was a teenager in 1955, still says that he was a dish.
Their 1950 wedding lasted ten hours, because all of the performer-guests were determined to out-sing each other. They’d arranged a dude-ranch honeymoon but realized on their first morning that it was a ridiculous destination for theater people like them. They sneaked around New York that week, going to every show they could afford and avoiding their friends.
My earliest memories are the dusty smells of painted canvas and wood-framed scenery leaning against brick walls at the Amato Opera at 159 Bleecker Street, a former movie theater, where Tony and Sally Amato coached students like Mom through roles like Mimi in La Bohème. If it wasn’t your turn for the lead role, you sang in the chorus, painted sets, and worked the box office.
The theater was scarcely chic. Winos snored and peed on the sidewalk outside the lobby. Dad bribed them to move away with coffee and doughnuts during shows. It was a place for Dad to learn stagecraft with no budget and on the fly. When he rigged a fountain for one scene, he begged the cast not to use the backstage toilet. Inevitably someone forgot. The audible flush was followed by a drooping spray, while the audience tittered.
The Amatos’ idea of nurturing opera singers in the States was radical in the 1940s. Europe, the birthplace of opera, was the place that produced singers. Impresarios from American theaters like the Metropolitan Opera wouldn’t even audition Americans for lead roles. Aspiring singers, many of them first generation from Europe anyway, joined regional companies in Italy, France, Germany, or Hungary. Suitably exotic stage personas were concocted. With a few years of coaching and leading roles under her belt, a Miss Frances O’Brien of Cleveland might return as Madame Francesca DiBrioni of Rome.
• • •
Ann’s parents, immigrants from a village in southern Italy, lost their money in the 1930s Depression. Her home, when my parents met, was a cold-water walk-up in the poor Italian enclave of East Harlem, where only bookies and tough guys had money.
The year before they met, Ann had won a national voice competition. Her prize was two paid years of opera study in Rome. “My sister needed to sing and have a big, exciting life like she needed to breathe,” Vicky, her younger sister, told me. Two years earlier, she’d won a scholarship to elite Manhattanville College, a school for moneyed Catholics like the Kennedys, but she’d had to give it up when her father lost his job. “She tried not to let me hear but she cried every night for weeks,” Vicky said. “My poor sister had to be an office clerk, the last thing she wanted.”
Second chances like Rome didn’t often arrive in East Harlem. But Ann’s father, usually indulgent of his beautiful daughter, became a raging peasant. “I’ll never forget the day that award letter came,” Vicky said. “I could hear Pop screaming from the stairs. Your mother was slumped at the kitchen table. She’d been crying so hard her eyes were swollen shut. I’d never seen my father like this, ever. ‘You’ll leave this house married,’ he was screaming, ‘or you leave it dead.’”
Larry fell in love with the Village and the arts as an NYU student. Ann wanted out of East Harlem. Two romantics, deeply in love, they had a child to complete the happy picture. But it didn’t take long for them to realize that bohemia and a squalling baby were a bad mix. So was a third competitor for center stage, something neither of these charming but insecure and immature people, already shoving each other aside for attention, could handle. Screaming fights rang through apartment 2B at least once a week as I groped the line between smiles and fury, trying to be a good girl and keep them happy with each other and with me. “Your parents shouldn’t have had children,” Dad’s closest friend, a conductor, told me decades later. “And they should have divorced, forgive me, Donna, for saying so. Singers, especially women, blame anything but themselves if they don’t make it. They say, ‘If it wasn’t for marrying or having kids, I would have been a star.’ It’s terrible. Their delusions ruin their lives.”
It wasn’t all bad. When the three of us were laughing and telling each other funny stories, we were happy. Our unconventional lifestyle helped, too. Given our varied theater schedules, we simply weren’t together all that much except on Sundays. Grandma, Mom’s mother, moving downstairs to apartment 1A in 63 Bank when I was eight, eased things. Visits with Dad’s sisters and their husbands and children at my Florio grandparents’ rambling old house in Staten Island helped too. But my real haven, where I found the affection and approval our apartment lacked, was on Bank Street with the neighbors who became my allies and surrogate family.
• • •
Ann and Larry were charismatic raconteurs, and my arrival was one of their favorite stories. Sally Amato’s younger sister, Annie, and Annie’s husband, John Frydel, both opera singers, were our upstairs neighbors at 63 Bank, and their daughter, Irene, was a year and a half older than me. Irene’s first memory is sitting in a lap, watching my pregnant mother sing, alone in the spotlight on a blacked-out stage, in a white ball gown, celebrating her free life in La Traviata, her favorite role. In late October, eight months along, Ann planned a cast party for Dad’s production of Carmen, opening that night. She’d just stopped performing that week and only because her legs swelled. Even heavily pregnant she could still blast full voice, which astounded her coach.
The supermarket cashier eyed her belly and suggested that the groceries be delivered. “Oh, no need,” Ann told her. “The baby isn’t due for another month.” She pulled her heavy cart home and up the steps. As she prepared the food, I announced my own plans: the first of our many disagreements. She lowered herself to a chair and reached for the phone.
As a kid, I learned to keep out of the way before opening nights. Nervous singers wandered around, humming, practicing scenes. They rolled their eyes if I asked them to play. Stagehands hammered, swearing like pirates. Larry yelled at choristers who still weren’t hitting their marks on time. “People! The prisoners have to be in place by the downbeat!” Ann knew she was breaking a cardinal rule with that call.
“Who is this?” snarled Tony Amato, score in hand.
“It’s Ann. I need Larry. My water has broken.”
“Have you lost your mind? It’s two hours to curtain! For Christ’s sake, Ann, call a plumber!” He banged down the phone.
Ann listened disconsolately to the dial tone. What now? She seasoned the chicken, wondering what to do.
Sally, folding programs, glanced sideways at Dad and sidled out the door. She dodged through the Bleecker Street pushcarts, running hard, and made it to Bank Street in minutes. “We’re taking a cab, Ann,” Sally announced grandly. A taxi to New York Hospital on the Upper East Side was a huge expense, but Sally’s conscience was
