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Portrait by Linda Stein
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I was born September 8, 1925, three days after my parents, Louis Michot
and Adele Domas, moved from Lafayette to Mamou, a Cajun town in
Louisiana where my father would teach agriculture at the local school.
My mother had taught school before marriage. A devout Catholic,
she had seven children in nine years. I was the fourth and only
brunette, which was fodder for my siblings. I was an orphan, they'd tell
me. And I often felt that I was.
Both my parent's
spoke "real French" as their ancestors were from France, (not Acadians
from Canada), which my mother never let us forget. However, they spoke
to us only in English so we never learned this beautiful language.
My
father was the only boy among nine sisters and his father died when he
was ten. He left school at 16, joined the Marines, served in WWI, and
later got a degree from Louisiana State University. While we lived in
Mamou he was a family man and a strict disciplinarian, but his wife had
to stay at home. Any time she did anything in public (which she often
did later on), he was furious. Having been the only boy among nine women
probably influenced this attitude, but it made me aware early on of the
inequality of the sexes, especially in marriage.
When
I was eight we moved to Lafayette, a college town, where he began a new
job with the Veteran's Administration. He spent his free time at the
American Legion hall, so was seldom home and the house resounded with
intense sibling rivalry. When he was home you could hear a pin drop.
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Jacqui, at 18 years old
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The 1930s were the Depression years. Signs of poverty were all
around--unpainted houses, hobos at our door, a scarcity of birds and
small animals (killed for food). Government employees were paid, so we
were ok. In fact my father was able to buy a repossessed four-bedroom
house on a half acre for $6,000.
There aren't many
great memories of my grade school years, but here's one I'll never
forget: At age eight a teacher, putting on a "little operetta," gave me a
lead role as Robin Redbreast.
At the time my mother
was ill and we children were on our own. No one seemed to care about my
comings and goings (or my grades). I attended rehearsals, but otherwise I
was clueless about many things, and somehow I thought the performance
was to start at 8 p.m.
The big night I arrived to
find the auditorium filled, the children on stage and "I Am Robin
Redbreast"--my song!--being played on the piano. In a panic I ran down
the aisle, my paper mache costume flapping, and up the steps to the
stage to finish the song. The audience must have howled. After the
program Miss Whitfield severely reprimanded me, and for the next 30
years every time she bumped into me she would announce loudly, "This is
the girl who ruined my operetta."
Maybe this
influenced my being a loner in my early years. I read a lot, and was
aware of what was going on about me. Why were "negroes" so poor and
badly treated? Thinking I was helping, I sometimes got them into
trouble. Once I urged a black woman to sit in the front of the bus with
me. She murmured fearfully, "Please Missis, NO," so I sat in back with
her, a decision almost as bad. We were lucky the bus driver only made a
menacing remark.
The position of women also scared
me. It seemed women could be clerks or teachers but ultimately had to
marry . I'll never forget the one small paragraph about the great
suffrage movement in my sixth grade history book. Or a radio program
about the suffragists and my father saying "Turn that thing off!" At 16 I
rebelled against the Catholic Church when the priest said, "If it is
between the mother and the child, the mother must go." All this awakened
my awareness of the extreme inequality of women. I think I was born a
feminist.
My mother believed that women were as smart
as men, but she maintained that their greatest calling was as wives and
mothers. I'd say "If men can do it (meaning sex before marriage) so can
women!" She thought I'd end up a whore. It took her a while to accept
the feminist movement, but in 1971 she got her chapter of the Catholic
Daughters to sponsor the Equal Rights Amendment!
The
Depression continued, but a greater horror was Hitler slaughtering Jews,
conquering nations and killing thousands, and the Japanese doing the
same in Asia. In 1941 Pearl Harbor was attacked and we were at war. Men
and boys were joining the services, including my two brothers, Louis and
James. James wasn't old enough, but he plagued our parents until they
gave their approval. Every day we heard of the death of a local boy or
man. One day it was James, killed in the South Pacific.
My
early years were plagued by my older sister Beverly. She was pretty and
very smart, but in those days a girl's looks were more important than
her brains. We were constantly compared and some thought I was better
looking. I was known for my singing, and she'd tell me that my voice
"was only so-so"; that I was dumb, that the only beauty to my hair
(which I wore in braids then) was its length, and on and on . After she
graduated and left home I blossomed.
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Singing with college symphony orchestra, 1946
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Now in the local college, I majored
in music and was in one concert after another, playing viola in the
orchestra, singing solo or with a choral group. Teachers like Dr. Ben
Kaplan inspired me. A professor of Sociology, he talked publicly about
equality for Negroes. I became one of his protégés. He'd feed me books
that would strengthen my resolve to leave Lafayette and do something
with my life.
Meanwhile Beverly, in New Orleans
translating mail to and from South America for the war department (she'd
minored in Spanish), married a fellow translator from the U.S Army. The
war now over, she moved to New York City where her husband's Jewish
family lived. Her brother-in-law, a lyricist from Hollywood, was in New
York with friends to produce plays on Broadway. They were all very
liberal, and now proud of me, she encouraged me to move to New York
after graduation. So in 1945, after working the summer at the telephone
company for seed money, I moved to the Big Apple to pursue a career as a
singer.
I loved New York immediately. It was home and
is to this day, no matter where I live. I lived in residences "for
girls studying the arts" and met interesting young women from all over.
For the first time I had Jewish friends. And I met Jenny Rowlands and
Alma McKell, black teachers from St. Louis working on their Master's at
Columbia. They became my lifelong friends.
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From L to R, Jenny Rowland, Alma McKell, Jacqui in YWCA Studio Club NYC 1949
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Things were freer than in the South, but New York society was definitely
white, with blacks as lowly workers living far from Manhattan. When my
friends and I were out together we were stared at, sometimes with
hostility - which especially upset Jenny. One Sunday she invited us to
Harlem, off limits for most whites, to attend their church service. I
went and was graciously greeted by the minister and congregation.
At
age 21 I had my first romance and was introduced to the constant of
single women working on careers and fearful of pregnancy. Several of my
friends became pregnant and were forced to abandon their dreams and
marry.
I always had a boring job, which gave no time
for auditions, so I'd take "sick leave", and then get fired. I
auditioned now and then, but I wasn't good (or smart) enough to land
roles. It seemed that in most cases "girls" were expected to "give out"
if they were to receive roles. Two friends advised that this was the
only way to get a part on Broadway. Both married important producers and
became top Broadway stars.
Postwar society was
increasingly all about marriage and a home in the suburbs, and my
friends were succumbing. At age 25 it seemed that if I didn't marry I'd
be an "old maid" like the pathetic-looking women who summered in the
city. My boyfriend was now a lawyer in DC doing his internship and
talking about marriage, which scared me. It seemed like there was no
escape!
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Age 22, a rare modeling job
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One evening my friend Lillian and I were babysitting for my sister. As
our lives had become humdrum, I said "Nothing happens to us, Lillian,
because we wait for things to happen. Let's call someone." I opened my
address book. "Oh, here's Alvaro Ceballos, Maria's Colombian friend
living in Mexico." Maria from Mexico had shared an apartment with me and
two others. Her friend would be in NYC, and she'd given him our
addresses. We'd all moved on since, so he couldn't reach us. But I had
his phone number.
I called the Park Avenue hotel
where he was staying. "Señor Ceballos is in the suite of John Robert
Powers (the famed model agent) at a party," I was told, and my call was
transferred there. Soon Lillian and I were on the phone with Alvaro,
acting silly, like schoolgirls. "Come over," he said. "We can't, we're
babysitting. You come here." But he was in a party with Powers ' models ,
so we knew he wouldn't leave it. My sister and her husband returned and
we were relating our experience with Sr. Ceballos-- the doorbell rang.
And there he was.
For the next two hours he kept us
in stitches, telling fascinating stories. I felt a twinge of
disappointment when he mentioned he had three small daughters, but
otherwise he was just an interesting friend of Maria's. He invited me to
lunch the next day. I'd quit my job to have more time to audition, so I
couldn't refuse a good meal.
This was the beginning
of my accompanying Señor Ceballos all over the city, dining in nice
restaurants, seeing Broadway shows at the cost of merely listening to
his problems. He'd divorced his wife and left her almost everything, and
her brothers , powerful politicos, were trying to destroy him. (In
those days divorce was a disgrace, and there was no remarriage for women
in Mexico.) He wasn't allowed to see his daughters, and had lost his
business and his friends. The story began to bore me, but it was
pleasant being with him. And unlike dates in those days, he never
touched me.
One night at a Latin café in the Village
we bumped into a woman from Lafayette out with Mexicans Alvaro knew.
(Small world!). From then on we experienced New York as a group, often
ending up in Señor Ceballos's suite. Lillian sometimes joined us. One
evening I was trying to leave the after-dinner party because I had an
audition the next day, but Alvaro kept begging me to stay. Suddenly
Lillian burst out: "Can't you see he's in love with you!?"
This
released something in me that had been dormant. I cared for him, too! I
later made the move that changed our relationship--and my life! Years
later an astrologer, doing my marriage chart for a class, pointed to a
group of planets and said, "Here she says, if I'm going to marry, it
will be different."
Well it was different! The first
years were a roller coaster ride. We had three children and lived in the
suburbs, but there was constant harassment from his ex-family trying to
get him to return to his "real wife." More seriously, the U.S.
Immigration Department was trying to deport him. During WWII, living in
New York City working with the Voice of America for the war effort he
had signed a document saying that since he would not serve in the war,
he was relinquishing citizenship rights. He had a work visa, which he
could renew yearly, but after the war he'd gone to Mexico to start a
coffee business and hadn't updated it.
Thousands of
foreign men had married American women during the war and now wanted
citizenship, so this was a test case. After several years he lost and
was deported, which meant that our children and I were also deported.
He
had to leave immediately. He returned to his native Bogota, Colombia
where he would go into business with his brother. I sold our house,
packed and moved to Bogota . I was reluctant to leave my beloved New
York, but those years in Bogota were one of the most pleasant eras of my
life. My husband continued his import/export business but also opened a
boiler factory, which satisfied his creative nature.
Bogota
had only one million people then (today it is about 11 million). I
became involved in the American theater, taught school, was active in
the American Women's Club - which I was advised was the only way I'd
survive in that macho country. I had a second daughter and did what I
could to help women in poverty. There were ups and downs, as my husband
was doing business with the States and the peso and the dollar were
usually at odds, but in general we had a good life. Friends I made there
are friends for life.
At
an audition I heard beautiful voices, met the singers and an incredible
Italian voice teacher. With such voices Bogota should have an opera
company, I thought. So I started the Teatro Experimental de la Opera. At
first it was scary to get the courage to call prominent people for
help-but soon we had an impressive board of directors. My husband had
always been proud of my singing, but the opera was another thing.
Perhaps, someone suggested, he thinks you're having affairs with the
tenors. Yet he knew my passion was the opera and I had no interest or
time to play around. For whatever reason, two weeks before the opening
at the Teatro Colon, he left home.
Somehow I managed
to survive the opening of the opera, even singing the role of Azucena in
"Il Trovatore." But afterwards I collapsed. All Bogota knew what was
going on, and whereas before I was admired, now El Tiempo reported that
"La opera destruyo un matrimonio." (The opera destroyed a marriage.)
Everyone
was telling me to "get him back. ...he was a good man, a good husband, a
good father." Some even felt he was right! I was miserable. A friend
returned from a stateside visit, and hearing my story, handed me "The
Feminine Mystique." I read it that night, and knew immediately -- it
wasn't him, it wasn't me, it was society. And society had to change!
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