Young singers may see the name Elaine Malbin on the juries of important vocal competitions but know little about her except perhaps her recordings with Mario Lanza. There was more, much more. From her appearance on The Milton Berle Show at 13, her solo Town Hall recital debut at age 14 (yes, you read that correctly), her radio shows at 16, her meteoric rise to fame following her television opera debut as Violetta at 20, her countless roles on televised operas, opera house engagements, Broadway, tours across the country, television variety shows, and concerts with major orchestras to her unexpected decision to stop. There was nothing ordinary about her career.
Talking to her in her New York City sun-filled Upper West Side apartment, we laugh frequently as she recounts her remarkable career that now seems even more extraordinary. Our only interruption is Pippin, an attention-seeking Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.
It started when she was 10-years-old. Hortense Silkman, a music teacher at PS 234, stopped at her desk and said, “You have a beautiful voice. I’d like to speak to your parents.” After meeting with them, Malbin’s father, who was in the meat business, talked to a butcher whose daughter studied singing. Soon Malbin was taking two voice lessons a week with Hilma Otto.
“I didn’t have a high coloratura voice as most little girls have; I had a big, beautiful lyrical voice,” Malbin says, remembering those lessons. “Instead of the vocalises that I should have done, we did lots of arias, songs, and operetta. At 13, I was singing ‘Voi lo sapete’ from Cavalleria rusticana.”
One day Otto went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and sat next to Emmy Niclas Kempner, a childhood acquaintance who had become an agent. “Do you have any outstanding pupils?” Kempner asked. “Yes, I have this little girl who is very talented.” Malbin now had an agent.
Kempner decided that Malbin should do a recital in one of the most important concert halls in New York, the Town Hall. So, at age 14, Malbin did a program of 22 songs in five languages with Coenraad V. Bos, one of the preeminent accompanists of his time who collaborated with singers like Frieda Hempel, Helen Traubel, and Elisabeth Rethberg.
For the next few years, Malbin was busy. Composer Don Gillis put her on NBC radio three times a week. She had her own NBC show called Serenade to America, starred in operettas, sang in five Carnegie Hall Pops concerts, did more television guest spots, and recorded. “I probably wouldn’t like those recordings now,” she laughs.
Malbin couldn’t read music initially, but her keen ear and remarkable memory made up the difference. “They played the music at the piano, and I just got it,” she recalls. “Eventually I did learn to read music, but I was not a great sight-reader. I just had the gift. I was extremely musical. I could just absorb everything.”
Her big break came in 1950 when she was chosen to sing Violetta in a live television broadcast of an English version production of La traviata on CBS. Fausto Cleva conducted, and the Germont was Metropolitan Opera star Lawrence Tibbett. This was Malbin’s first Violetta. She was 20.
That Traviata put Malbin on the map. “It was a major performance, and the fact that I was such a young girl got a lot of attention,” she says. “Mr. Bing had already offered me small roles at the Met. Most people would say ‘good,’ but not me. It wasn’t my temperament. Maybe it was just as well because I could have gotten lost there.”
After the Traviata, she went to California to record duets from Traviata and Butterfly with Mario Lanza. Important engagements followed, one after the other. First was the Robin Hood Dell in Philadelphia, an open-air concert series, singing with Jan Peerce and Leonard Warren.
NBC, CBS, and BBC were producing operas on television, and Malbin was a natural for the medium. She sang an astounding variety of roles on TV: Suor Angelica, Madam Butterfly, Nedda in Pagliacci, Giorgetta in Il tabarro, Blanche in Dialogues of the Carmelites, Minnie in La fanciulla del West, Monica in The Medium, Violetta in Traviata, Joan of Arc in the premier of Dello Joio’s The Trial at Rouen, Mimì in La bohème, Sara in the world premier of Tobias and the Angel, Frasquita and Micaëla in Carmen, the title role in Salome, and others. Some she sang on television more than once.
Claudia Cassidy, the Chicago Tribune’s tough critic wrote, “Elaine Malbin’s Salome was so remarkable on Saturday’s telecast that it focused attention not only on her future as a major artist but also on television’s role as a medium of opera. In the opera houses, the most interesting Salomes I have ever known were Mary Garden, Rosa Paula, and Ljuba Welitsch. No two of them the same. On this tiny screen, Miss Malbin held her own.”
Unfortunately, many of these operas have never been released on DVD. They can be seen only at the Paley Center for Media, formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, in NYC.
Televised opera back then was not for the faint of heart. Often the entire cast was performing the opera for the first time, the orchestra and conductor were in another room or building, microphones were planted here and there, and millions of Americans were watching it being broadcast live. No retakes.
Other reviews from the time not only praised Malbin’s voice but also her acting. “Miss Malbin rates an operatic Oscar for her Cio-Cio-San,” wrote critic Louis Biancolli. And Time magazine called her “an actress of imposing ability.”
“Late in my career, I took a class with Stella Adler and I didn’t like it,” Malbin says. “But, for some reason, I was smart enough to read about acting. I bought, and still have, the Stanislavski books. I learned his technique by reading about it, the idea of interiorizing the emotion that comes from within, which it did for me from listening to the music.
“I invented a method of performing the opera for myself where I was the character—I was not Elaine singing something, I was Mimì or Butterfly or whatever and almost put myself in a spell. It was perfect for television because the cameras are close up and every thought is seen on your face. Once the music started, I was no longer Elaine Malbin, so that meant there was no room for nerves.”
After the Traviata, offers were pouring in for opera and Broadway shows in America and England, and she accepted some jaw-dropping challenges. For instance, from October 27, 1952 to January 10, 1953, Malbin sang the entire role of Aida six times a week at the Winter Garden Theatre in a show called My Darlin’ Aida. (Matinees were sung by an alternate.) This was Verdi’s Aida set on a plantation near Memphis during the first year of the Civil War and sung in English. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote, “She has put the music and character together in a fiery and accomplished performance that is completely captivating.”
“It was murder,” says Malbin. “Definitely the toughest thing I have done. No question about it.”
Fausto Cleva was furious with her for accepting the job. Rudolf Bing came to her dressing room and said, “Miss Malbin, you are going to ruin your voice.”
“That’s what everyone was worried about. I didn’t pay attention to what people told me,” says Malbin, laughing. “That was my life. Who would sing Aida six times a week? What’s with her head? And it does take something out of you. But it didn’t ruin my voice, although I needed a rest. I was so young, I could just do it. I was probably a bit relieved when it closed.”
Later, she replaced Doretta Morrow as Marsinah on Broadway in the hit musical Kismet, starring opposite the legendary Julie Wilson, who replaced Joan Diener as Lalume. Malbin and Wilson went on to do the national tour together. “That was my most lucrative job. I got top billing and was paid a percentage of the house. I am still living off the money I made from that show.”
Trying to determine everything Malbin sang is a challenge. She has boxes and boxes of memorabilia in her apartment that desperately need to be organized. A CV from about 1961 lists performances of 26 leading opera roles. It doesn’t include the small roles she sang at the beginning of her career, roles after 1961, or roles much later after coming out of retirement. It also does not include all the operettas and musical theatre and it doesn’t begin to consider how many times she sang a role. There were many tours. CBS and NBC had traveling opera companies, as did Sarah Caldwell, Boris Goldovsky, and many others. She sang with all of them. In the theater, one usually performs eight shows a week—in opera tours, sometimes three times a week.
There were starring roles in other Broadway tours like Song of Norway and Carnival!; performances with most of the leading orchestras in America; and guest appearances on the top TV shows like Jack Paar, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Johnny Carson, Ed Sullivan, Mike Douglas, and Arthur Godfrey, as well as The Bell Telephone Hour, The Voice of Firestone, and others.
Malbin also sang for Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. “When I sang for Harry Truman, he said, ‘I wish Margaret could have heard you.’” (Margaret was Truman’s daughter who wanted to be a singer.)
She sang at Madison Square Garden on a program with Frank Sinatra, who wanted to take her out after the concert. She was flattered but declined—she was seeing someone. Malbin had become a very glamorous lady. She was named one of the 10 best-dressed women in the country in 1956.
Early in her career, a critic had written that her high notes were beginning to develop a wobble, so she went to Bill Herman, who was Jan Peerce’s teacher at the time, to correct it. And she did. “At first I didn’t have a technique, I just sang the way I sang, and later on in my career I learned how to sing,” she says.
“Herman was good for me,” Malbin continues. “I had this big sound for a little girl, and he made you use your body. That worked for me. But I didn’t study with him like Roberta Peters, who took lessons with him every day when she was a child. Herman would say, ‘Roberta and I were worried about you.’ They didn’t have to worry. A lot of people say that he ruined their voice, but he was good for me and my style of singing. He enabled me to do the Butterflys.”
Malbin’s voice was made for the larger roles. “The hardest thing for me to sing was the light, high Bel Canto because I never studied that,” she says. “Late in my career, I sang Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Washington, D.C. That required a different kind of technique. Anna Hamlin, Judy Raskin’s teacher, helped me with that. It wasn’t my best performance, but at least I got through it and got nice reviews.
“I was never a lyric coloratura. People tried to impose that on me because I am little, I am short. I never even sang high when I was with the first teacher. I never even thought about a high C. People thought I’d have a dramatic voice, and I was a peanut.”
Now years later, Malbin looks back on her career with awe as she reflects on the most beautiful moments of her career. “Suor Angelica was close to me. My favorite was Butterfly. I was Butterfly. When I would sing the last act, it was just natural for me. I must have sung it over 100 times. On tours, I sometimes did it three or four times a week. That was tough.
“Do you know what was fabulous for me?” she continues. “I was engaged to sing Carmina burana for the San Francisco Opera on a double bill with Die Kluge starring Leontyne Price. Carmina was staged, and I acted it.”
For someone who claims to not be a high-note singer, I remind Malbin that Carmina has an exposed high D. “How I did that, I have no idea,” she exclaims. “It was not my favorite part at all, but I will never forget that reaction. They screamed and screamed and stomped on the floor. That was the most thrilling moment in my singing career in terms of an audience reception.”
And that wasn’t all. “I loved doing Salome. I did it on NBC [with actors John Cassavetes and Sal Mineo lip synching], and then I did it in Salt Lake City to great reviews again.”
In the midst of a burgeoning career and still not even in her prime, Malbin began to think about quitting. “It is a tough life always being on the road, always being by myself,” she confides. “I did another Butterfly on TV and I received this handwritten letter from Bing Crosby, who said, ‘I was in Palm Springs and was supposed to play golf at the club. They had the TV on and when Butterfly started, I couldn’t leave. You were terrific.’ I got wires from Cesar Romero and the famous director Robert Lewis. Even then, I had had it. I was in my 30s.”
And with that, she made the decision to leave singing and focus on something else—a family.
“I had been having an affair with an older man for many years. I was crazy about him, and eventually we got married. But he was quite the ladies’ man, so I tossed him,” Malbin says. “That didn’t help my singing career, because I wasn’t concentrating on my singing. A few years later, I met George [Emanuel] and he was a good husband candidate, so we married. I wanted to have children! He’s a nice guy.”
Malbin didn’t think she could have children and a career. “I always had to go out of town and on the road,” she says, “and I didn’t want to do it anymore and I didn’t pursue it. I just let it go. I wanted to be with my children. I had had a career for so long that I didn’t miss it. Now I am sorry—but that’s what I did.”
A year after marrying Emanuel in 1967, Malbin gave birth to her first daughter. A second daughter followed and, for the most part, Malbin left the stage behind, aside from a few rare appearances. “I just sang a few things that were convenient,” she says. “Laszlo Halasz, the first director of the New York City Opera, was in my neighborhood doing some concerts. He asked me to sing with him. He said to me, ‘Elaine, you are one of the great American singers.’ I will never forget that because I will never be put down by anybody. People say, ‘Oh she was a radio singer or a television singer.’ No I was real opera singer, and that’s the route I took.”
Malbin also sang Tosca and The Old Baroness in Vanessa for Dicapo Opera Theatre. “I think we did Tosca in Great Neck, where I was living,” she remembers. “Michael Capasso asked me if I could sing it, and I said, ‘Of course!’ I did so much, I can’t remember everything.”
Malbin has done some directing, but has something else in mind for working with young singers. “The thing that I could do is to help singers become more expressive stage-wise. I have noticed that the singers are learning that, but it takes too long. They are 30-years-old and they haven’t sung anywhere.”
I tell Malbin that I heard her sing a few years ago, and her voice was in wonderful shape—warm, large, and steady. She sang “And This Is My Beloved” from Kismet and finished with a beautiful, full, and thrilling high B-flat. Does she sing much to keep the voice in shape?
“Now I don’t practice―but just two months ago I sang at the funeral of my good friend Marilyn Greenberg, and everyone said I sang beautifully. I practiced very carefully for four days—that’s all the time I had to prepare. I surprised myself. I sang ‘Memory’ from Cats. I had to warm up first. I sang at my daughter’s apartment and I thought, ‘If I can sing, I’ll sing.’”
I ask if she ever thinks about returning to the stage. “If I was offered something, I would absolutely do it,” she says. “And if I really wanted to do it, I’d practice every day and see what older parts I could play. I had a terrific career, but I was too young to appreciate it. It came too easily.”
She crammed so much into such a small amount of time, I tell her. “Absolutely,” she agrees.
Special thanks to Jane Klain and Rebecca Paller of the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) for their invaluable help and advice.
