Ghost Singers of Hollywood

In the 120 years of cinema, craftsmen in the dream factories have utilized the technology at hand to overcome the challenges of bringing those dreams to life. Their unique solutions often provide glimpses into otherwise overlooked chapters in the history of making movies. Here is one such chapter...

Musicals are odd ducks. It's really not difficult to grasp why a lot of people don't like musicals. Suspension of disbelief while watching a drama or comedy on the stage or on the screen is one thing, but when characters suddenly interrupt their dialogue to burst into song and dance in perfectly choreographed leaps and reels, reality for many in the audience just checks out.

In the high school of our younger days, things seemed even stranger when adolescent classmates slathered on pancake makeup and dusted their hair with gray powder to masquerade as adults in "My Fair Lady," "South Pacific," and "The Music Man." There was a circle of classmates among the senior high alma mater that belonged to a national (maybe international) society of thespians, and one had to respect their dedication. It is to those resolute teens-pretending-to-be-grownups that this humble endeavor is dedicated.

The musical theater familiar to American and British audiences emerged in the middle of the 19th century. "The Black Crook" (titled for the character of a crookbacked, or hunchbacked, master of black magic), which opened on Broadway in New York City in September 1866, is often regarded as the first modern musical. On the screen, "The Broadway Melody of 1929" has not only been recognized as the first Hollywood musical, but it was, as well, the first musical to feature a Technicolor sequence and the first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

By the 1950s, Hollywood studios were more apt to hire bankable movie stars than trained singers for movie musicals, thus creating a whole new show business profession, that of the ghost singer - a practiced performer who dubs the singing voice of the less than musically inclined star who still gets all the credit. Remember, this was decades before singers of limited talent could enhance their voices digitally with Auto-Tune for the "Cher Effect."

The best known of Hollywood's ghost singers was Marni Nixon, who succumbed to breast cancer July 24, 2016. She was 86. Acclaimed as "the American cinema's most unsung singers," she did the singing for Deborah Kerr in "The King and I" (1956) and subsequently dubbed Natalie Wood's vocals in "West Side Story" (1961) and Audrey Hepburn's in "My Fair Lady" (1964).

Born Margaret Nixon McEathron in Altadena, California, she got her nickname "Marni" from the first letters of her first and middle names. By the age of four, her parents realized she had the gift of perfect pitch. At 11, she won $100 in a vocal competition at the Los Angeles County Fair and decided to pursue a singing career. At 16, she was invited by famed choral director Roger Wagner to become a member of the newly formed Roger Wagner Chorale.

She played bit parts, typically, in her words, "as the freckle-faced brat," in numerous pictures throughout her childhood. She can be seen in the background of "The Grapes of Wrath," "Babes on Broadway," "Song to Remember," "The Emperor Waltz," and, among others, "In The Good Old Summertime."

During her teen years, Nixon also worked as a messenger at MGM. Aware of her musical abilities, the studio turned to her to furnish the singing voices of young actresses, which helped pay for her own voice lessons. Her first assignment of note was to dub a Hindu lullaby for child actress Margaret O'Brien in 1949's "The Secret Garden."

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Marni Nixon recalled meeting Deborah Kerr, who would garner an Oscar nomination for her role as Anna in "The King and I," saying, "I was brought in and had to follow along with her, getting her diction and acting style. She in turn would study how I looked when I hit the high notes." Nixon would do the same with Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn.

The soundtrack album for "The King and I" sold hundreds of thousands of copies. For dubbing Anna's songs on that record, Nixon was paid $420 and was told to keep her mouth shut. "You always had to sign a contract that nothing would be revealed," Nixon said on a 2007 episode of ABC-TV's "Nightline." When she did "The King and I," 20th Century Fox "threatened to sue me. They said, 'If anybody ever knows that you did any part of the dubbing for Deborah Kerr, we'll see that you don't work in town again."

Nonetheless, Nixon became one of Hollywood's worst-kept secrets, initially thanks to Deborah Kerr herself, who praised Nixon's work in a 1956 interview. In December 1964, Nixon was the guest on the game show "To Tell the Truth." The Hollywood Reporter joked that "they found out who was doing Mr. Ed's voice on the television show: it was Marni Nixon's horse."

The real Marni Nixon (center) is about to stand up on "To Tell the Truth."

Nixon was brought in to record for "West Side Story" after producers deemed Natalie Wood's voice inadequate for Leonard Bernstein's daunting music score. Seemingly behind Wood's back, Nixon studied footage of the star singing for the camera, then painstakingly synched her voice up to Wood's lip movements.

Still sore over her meager royalty from the soundtrack for "The King and I," Nixon, along with her manager, fought for fairer treatment from the makers of "West Side Story." Leonard Bernstein made what Nixon called the "incredibly generous gesture" of giving up a sliver of one percent of his royalty share, which amounted to a major payday for Nixon after the soundtrack's huge sales.

Audrey Hepburn had capably sung a haunting version of the Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer tune "Moon River" in the 1961 film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and campaigned to do her own singing in 1964's "My Fair Lady." She competently handled the Cockney-laced "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" but struggled with the complexities of "I Could Have Danced All Night." Enter Marni Nixon.

Both Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn (pictured above, "singing" "I Could Have Danced All Night") worked hard to learn the songs in "West Side Story" and "My Fair Lady" and recorded their vocals in the hopes that Nixon's voice would be needed only to fill in on the difficult passages. In her 2006 memoir, I Could Have Sung All Night, Nixon wrote, "I heard later that Natalie Wood was very upset and felt betrayed by the powers that be."

Marni Nixon's other Hollywood assignments included dubbing just the second line couplet from the song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" ("But square-cut or pear-shape / These rocks don't lose their shape") performed by Marilyn Monroe in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953).

Nixon provided the lyrical voice of the angel heard by Ingrid Bergman in "Joan of Arc" (1948). She dubbed Jeanne Crain in "Cheaper by the Dozen" (1950), Ida Lupino in "Jennifer" (1953), and Janet Leigh in "Pepe" (1960). Nixon also "sang" some wordless vocalizing for Sophia Loren in an underwater scene from "Boy on a Dolphin" (1957).

Fifteen years later, Sophia Loren did her own vocalizing in the movie musical "Man of La Mancha" (1972), as did, in an awkward talk-sing fashion, Peter O'Toole, which prompted an incensed Roger Ebert to comment, "Now it's almost obligatory to cast a musical with people who can't sing or dance - and make no pretensions about it. At least when we were getting Natalie Wood, we were getting Marni Nixon's voice. If there's anything worse than dubbing in the voice of a non-singer, it's not dubbing the voice of a non-singer...What favor were they doing us when they let us hear Peter O'Toole sing? Richard Harris is better, and he's no good. He can't sing, but at least he can read lyrics. O'Toole masticates them."

But we digress. In a 1964 interview for the now defunct New York Journal-American, Marni Nixon said, "It's fascinating getting inside the actresses you're singing for. It's like cutting off the top of their heads and seeing what's underneath. You have to know how they feel, as well as how they talk, in order to sing as they would sing - if they could sing."

However, in 1967 in The New York Times, Nixon noted, "The anonymity didn't bother me until I sang Natalie Wood's songs in 'West Side Story.' Then I saw how important my singing was to the picture. I was giving my talent, and somebody else was taking the credit."

Nixon eventually regarded her gift of vocal mimicry as more of a curse than a blessing. She told The New York Times in 1981, "It got so I'd lent my voice to so many others that I felt it no longer belonged to me. It was eerie; I had lost part of myself." It didn't help when, on a 1965 tour with Liberace, the flamboyant showman presented her as "the ghostess with the mostest" (pictured below).

Nixon also performed in cabaret shows with comedy pianist Victor Borge (pictured below).

In 1965, Nixon had a small role as Sister Sophia in "The Sound of Music" (pictured below, center). Apparently, Julie Andrews herself professed to be a fan of Nixon's work.

The previous year, she starred in a 1964 revival of "My Fair Lady" at New York City Center.

Marni Nixon's resemblance to Julie Andrews, who originated the
role of Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady" on Broadway in 1956,
has been frequently mentioned.

Before Hollywood and long afterward, Marni Nixon was respected as a concert singer, performing as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic. Her concerts and recordings included works by Stravinsky, Copland, and Gershwin. She was a recitalist at Carnegie Hall, Tully Hall, and The Town Hall in New York City, as well as a featured singer on one of Leonard Bernstein's televised Young People's Concerts.

As the era of extravagant movie musicals dwindled, Nixon kept herself busy. She won four local Emmy Awards as the host of a long-running, Seattle-based children's show, "Boomerang," in the 1970s. She appeared in a road tour of "Cabaret" and taught at the California Institute of the Arts. A popular guest at nostalgia festivals, she would tell audiences, "I allowed all these actresses to dub their bodies to my voice." Nixon supplied the singing voice of Grandmother Fa in Disney's 1998 animated feature "Mulan" - the character's dialogue was spoken by June Foray (the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel).

Nixon's first husband was Ernest Gold, a film composer who won an Oscar for scoring the 1960 film "Exodus." Their son, pop singer Andrew Gold, landed a Top 10 spot with "Lonely Boy" in 1977, and his hit song "Thank You for Being a Friend" became the theme of the NBC sitcom "The Golden Girls." Andrew Gold died in 2011 at 59. Nixon's marriage to Ernest Gold ended in divorce, as did her second marriage. Her third husband died in 2015.

Nixon, who continued to perform into her 80s, learned to embrace her heard-but-not-seen fame. Her one-woman show, "Marni Nixon: The Voice of Hollywood," toured the country for years. Her autobiography, I Could Have Sung All Night, published in 2006, was co-authored by a ghost writer, Stephen Cole, whom Nixon ensured was credited prominently on the book's cover and title page.

Feeling betrayed after 1961's "West Side Story," Natalie Wood made dang sure she was credited with her own singing in the 1962 screen musical "Gypsy," based on the early years of burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee and her aggressive stage mother. However, when her title character in "Inside Daisy Clover" (1965) sang onscreen, and when she crooned the romantic ballad "The Sweetheart Tree" in the 1965 Tony Curtis-Jack Lemmon comedy "The Great Race," her vocals were dubbed by Jackie Ward.

A half-naked Natalie Wood looks for her guitar so she can srenade Tony Curtis
with Henry Mancini's "The Sweetheart Tree" in "The Great Race."

Ghost singer Jackie Ward's claim to fame is performing as the lone female voice in multiple tracks on all the studio recordings of "The Partridge Family" in the 1970s. Not surprisingly, she carried out the same function for recordings by "The Brady Bunch." Her voice could be heard on numerous TV theme songs, including "Batman," "Love, American Style," and "Maude" (featuring R&B great Donny Hathaway). Ward (pictured below) warbled in dozens of commercials, most notably proclaiming Rice-a-Roni as "the San Francisco treat."

Singer India Adams dubbed dancer Cyd Charisse's vocals in 1953's "The Band Wagon," with Fred Astaire. A song dropped from the finished film was a seductive dance number featuring Charisse performing "Two-Faced Woman" (pictured below).

A mere two and a half months later, India Adams' recording of that song, "Two-Faced Woman," popped up in another MGM musical, "Torch Song," this time with Joan Crawford performing the number (pictured below).

Not exactly an instance of ghost-singing, but the 1967 James Bond spoof "The Silencers," starring Dean Martin as boozy spy Matt Helm, opens with Cyd Charisse as a stripper lip-synching to Vikki Carr's vocals of the theme song.

...Besides, we wanted to run this cheeky pose of Cyd Charisse
as Sarita in "The Silencers."

But we digress. After "The Band Wagon," as recalled by India Adams, New York City columnist Dorothy Kilgallen "had in her column, 'The biggest news around Radio City Music Hall is who is singing for Cyd Charisse in 'The Band Wagon'? I wanted to phone her and say, 'I did it.' But I was afraid."

"The big difference between me and my group and Marni," Adams noted, "was that she was much later and it was not quite the deep, dark secret that it was when I did it. When we did it, you had to swear on a Bible you weren't going to tell anybody."

According to her entry in Wikipedia, Jo Ann Greer was blessed with "one of the distinctive, elegant voices, yet least-known faces of the successful jazz and pop singers in show business." In a career spanning 50 years, her two moneymakers, big band-singing and ghost-singing, rarely gave her the credit she merited. She performed with Les Brown and His Band of Renown for four decades and also sang with other band leaders, including Lawrence Welk.

In 1952, Rita Hayworth, once adored as one of the most glamorous screen idols of the 1940s, dubbed the "love goddess" by the press and the top barracks pin-up girl for GIs during World War II, had returned to Hollywood following a failed marriage and started work on her comeback performance in "Affair in Trinidad," reuniting her with her costar from the sizzling 1946 film noir classic "Gilda," Glenn Ford.

After several attempts to let Hayworth (pictured above, in "Affair in Trinidad") do her own singing in the film, Jo Ann Greer was brought in. The vocals by Greer, who even had a slight lisp similar to Hayworth's, helped the production become a major box-office hit.

Greer (pictured above right) sang again for Hayworth (pictured above left) in "Miss Sadie Thompson" and "Pal Joey." When the soundtrack albums from the two pictures were released, Greer's name was predictably not listed. Nevertheless, the two enjoyed an amicable working relationship, which found Hayworth attending Greer's recording sessions and dancing barefoot for the singer in front of the microphone so that Greer could follow her breathing and movements as she sang.

Jo Ann Greer continued to be in big demand as a ghost singer at Columbia Pictures, laying down vocal tracks for, among others, June Allyson, Esther Williams, and Kim Novak.

Betty Wand (pictured above) began her singing career during the big band era, performing with orchestra leaders Xavier Cugat and Ray Conniff. She dubbed Leslie Caron in "Gigi" (1958), although it should be noted that Caron did her own vocals in the 1953 romantic fantasy "Lili." Ward sang a small portion of Rita Moreno's vocals for Rita Moreno in "West Side Story."

Another singer named Betty, Betty Noyes (pictured above), dubbed the vocals for Debbie Reynolds in "Singin' in the Rain" (19520, a parody of movie musicals that ironically cast Reynolds as a singer hired to dub a stridently discordant movie star (pictured below).

Jean Hagen's flawless, over-the-top, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard squawking
in "Singin' in the Rain" (with flummoxed ghost singer Debbie Reynolds in the
background) earned her an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress. 

Betty Noyes also sang the song "Baby Mine" in the 1941 animated Disney feature "Dumbo," which was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Original Song. Of course, she did not receive credit onscreen for the song.

Popular jazz song stylist Annette Warren dubbed the singing voice for Lucille Ball in the comedies "Sorrowful Jones" (1949) and "Fancy Pants" (1950), both costarring Bob Hope. In 1951, Warren landed the assignment over Doris Day of singing "Bill" and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" for Ava Gardner in MGM's lavish remake of "Show Boat."

In 1991, Annette Warren (pictured above) joined ghost singers India Adams and Jo Ann Greer in the cabaret revue "Voices" at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Betty Wand had previously joined them in a long-running musical revue called "Hollywood's Secret Singing Stars." In April 2016, 93-year-old Warren debuted the one-woman show "I Ain't Done Yet" in San Pedro, California.

Anita Gordon (pictured above) was a former child star who, as a teenager on network radio, achieved renown as a singer on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's program, with Bergen's characters Charlie McCarthy (who was positively "smitten" with the teen) and Mortimer Snerd. She also voiced the part of the Singing Harp in Disney's 1947 animated classic "Fun and Fancy Free," helping Mickey Mouse escape from the giant in the beanstalk.

In the 1960s, Anita Gordon launched a mini-career as a ghost singer, dubbing Pamela Tiffin in "State Fair" (1962) and Jean Seberg in "Paint Your Wagon" (1969).

While deeming Miss Seberg worthy of a ghost singer in
"Paint Your Wagon," filmmakers apparently saw no merit
in covering up Clint Eastwood's reedy whispers or Lee
Marvin's bullfrog croaks with professional vocals.

When "Airport" producer Ross Hunter remade director Frank Capra's 1937 screen classic "Lost Horizon" as a glossy but empty-headed musical in 1973, Peter Finch's vocals were dubbed by a singer named Jerry Whitman, Liv Ullmann was dubbed by Diana Lee (who also dubbed Samantha Eggar in 1967's "Doctor Dolittle"), and Olivia Hussey was dubbed by Andra Willis, best known for her work on "The Lawrence Welk Show" in the late 1960s. At least Sally Kellerman did her own singing, and mercifully, audiences were spared any trilling by costar George Kennedy.

A few years ago, much was made of the fact that the songs in "Les Miserables" (2012) were recorded live on the set by the cast (including Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, and Anne Hathaway) rather than the traditional method of actors lip-synching to previously recorded playbacks.

Anne Hathaway's soul-wrenching live-on-camera rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream"
in "Les Miserables" helped her garner the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich ill-advisedly attempted the on-the-set performing technique in 1975's "At Long Last Love," a misfiring homage to 1930s musicals and the songs of Cole Porter, featuring Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, and Madeline Kahn, in a much-maligned production that was raked over the coals by critics and shunned like a fungal infection by moviegoers.

Eileen Brennan, Cybill Shepherd, and Madeline Kahn bring
new meaning to "hoofing it" in "At Long Last Love."

In the obituary for Marni Nixon, Margalit Fox observed in The New York Times, "In the few movie musicals made today, directors tend to cast actors who are trained singers (like Meryl Streep in 'Into the Woods')." Ironically, Streep, who proved her pipes worthy in "Mamma Mia!" (2008), is currently starring in "Florence Foster Jenkins," a comedic biopic based on the life of the early 20th century heiress and socialite and aspiring amateur operatic soprano who was savagely ridiculed for her lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and any remote shred of musical talent.

"What this means," The Times' Fox concluded, "is that the ghost singers who were once a Hollywood mainstay have now, for the most part, become ghosts themselves."