Instant Voice

The ultimate cynic is someone who wants to know who was singing backstage while Caruso was mouthing the words. Of course, the ultimate cynic lives in Hollywood. Anywhere else, the star of a musical might reasonably be expected to be a singer. But not out there. When Audrey Hepburn sings I Could Have Danced All Night in Warner Brothers' My Fair Lady, the voice on the sound track won't be Audrey's. It belongs to Marni Nixon, the ghostess with the mostest. A girl with a rubber range, Marni is a redheaded, blue-eyed lyric soprano who can slip into a contralto and sing in the accents of any unmusical star. She was also the voice of Natalie Wood in West Side Story, of Deborah Kerr in The King and I, of Janet Leigh in Pepe.

Marni gets no credit for this; her Lady contract even forbids her to talk about her work. She did, however, go to bat for a slice of the royalties on the West Side Story album and won her fair share. But, she says, "it gets harder and harder to adapt yourself to the person you're dubbing. Eventually you want to play the character yourself." Last week Marni Nixon was actually mouthing the words as well as singing them. Appearing with the Seattle Symphony in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and the Poulenc-Cocteau short opera, The Human Voice, she proved herself a creditable actress, won critics' praise for "superb musicianship," a performance full of "ease and assurance."

She has sung three times with the New York Philharmonic and has cut albums of everything from works of Bach and Villa-Lobos to South Pacific and The Mother Magoo Suite. She has lived most of her life in the Hollywood area and has been a singer since she was ten, when, as Margaret Nixon Mc-Eathron, she won a contest with a smooth Blue Danube at the Pomona State Fair. At 17, she quit high school to work as a messenger at MGM, soon got her first $35 dubbing job as the singing voice of Margaret O'Brien. The Instant Voice, as her husband calls her, is 32 now, makes about $10,000 for a major film dub. Her husband, Ernest Gold, writes movie scores (TIME, Jan. 17), notably for Exodus and Judgment at Nuremberg.

"When I'm singing opera, I'm a very good opera singer," says Marni Nixon in a self-appraisal that contains more professional confidence than mere egotism. "When I'm doing concerts, I have a lot of musicianship. And when I'm doing musical comedy, I have a certain flair there, too. I would love to do a Broadway show. I've been up for several, and it's getting quite close."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.