During her time as a New York-based performer, Tulsa’s Lynette Bennett rehearsed and recorded with a young piano player named Barry Manilow, got a kiss from Johnny Carson on his late-night TV show (after making him an honorary Campfire Girl), and broke bread with the classic Hollywood-star likes of Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. Plus, along with her roles on Broadway and in touring shows, she became a staple of what were then known as “industrial musicals,” doing lavish Broadway-style productions for national conventions of automobiles and other big businesses.
Perhaps most impressive is the fact that she did it all without ever having to wait tables or take other non-theatrical jobs to make ends meet.
“That’s right,” she says. “Most actors do. They have to have some way of making a living so that they can pay the rent. But I never did. I was always able to pay the rent – and on time,” she adds with a laugh.
Bennett’s experiences on the Great White Way, touring both stateside and abroad, and working such disparate show-biz jobs as a jingle singer, TV-commercial actress and model for magazine ads, are chronicled in her book Broadway Dreamer, newly released by Babylon Books. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Babylon has also published a good bit of my own work.) It begins impressively – following two-plus pages of critical praise for her various performances – when, as she’s signing the cast’s call board at the Winter Garden Theater for her role in the musical Funny Girl, a “hand with shiny red nails” reaches around her to put another name beside hers. As it turns out, the hand belongs to Barbra Streisand, who then goes on to chat pleasantly with Bennett for a few moments.
“I had done a previous Broadway show, The Yearling, which had a gorgeous score by Herb Martin and Mickey Leonard,” she recalls. “But it didn’t make it. Funny Girl was already a big hit, and Barbara had become a star. So that show, probably, was the high point [of Bennett’s show-business career].”
There are, however, plenty of candidates for that honor. One of them was that appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which was then in its heyday. Singing at an upscale nightspot called the Viennese Lantern at the time, Bennett was booked after the club’s publicist contacted the Carson show with an unusual pitch: the current vocalist at the Viennese Lantern also happened to be, as Bennett writes about herself, “the highest ranking Campfire Girl in the country.”
That was enough to get Bennett on the network show, where she presented Carson with a feather-festooned headdress, tied his and co-host Ed McMahon’s legs together with leather thongs, and gave them both Native American names – all to the delight of the studio audience.
“We laughed and joked for twenty-five minutes,” she notes in the book. “Johnny was swinging. I was giddy, one of those magical performances when each bit of comedy Johnny and I did together clicked.”
Although they weren’t nearly as high-profile, the industrial musicals (also known as “business theater,” a sub-genre celebrated in the 2018 documentary Bathtubs over Broadway) provided more indelible memories. These were live shows done for corporate conventions, with original music, lyrics and dialogue slanted toward a corporate product, and, she says, “They were just smashing. They paid good money and they didn’t stay out of town very long, so that was an actor’s dream – you got your salary, and you went back home, and you were ready for your next audition.
“The first one I did was for Ford Tractors,” she adds with a chuckle, “and it was set in heaven. It was the most beautiful show I’ve ever done. They had Broadway lighting designers, a Broadway director – it was straight from Broadway. It’s hard to say how many of those I did; maybe a half-dozen. And sometimes, it would be on a smaller scale, for regional meetings.
“One time I did one of those that was for just three actors. I was the wife, we had the husband and we had the salesman. That could have been for Oldsmobile. It was just the three of us traveling around, and we were out for a while. But when you’re getting a good salary, you don’t mind traveling a little bit longer.”
Her Barry Manilow connection began at a club in New York, where Bennett saw him and a partner of his opening for Joan Rivers. Bennett was impressed enough with the young pianist and vocalist to go backstage and ask if he’d like to work with her. He became, as she writes, her musical director, and when she decided to do a demo tape – a recording of her singing several songs, which she could pitch to record companies and other entities – Manilow was the one who picked and arranged the numbers, along with conducting and playing on the sessions.
“I booked a studio where I had done jingles,” she remembers. “Because I knew the engineer and the general setup I thought I’d be comfortable there. Barry had picked out three wonderful songs. We had a bossa nova by [Brazilian bandleader Sergio Mendes’s group] ‘Brasil ‘66, ‘Laia Ladaia,’ and that gorgeous ballad ‘But Beautiful.’ And then Barry asked, ‘Do you like overdubbing [vocals]?’
“I said, ‘Yes, I love it,’ and he said, “Okay, let’s do a Donovan song. You’ll sing it, we’ll put down your voice, and then I’ll write three overdubbings and we’ll record it that many more times, so that we have four versions [of the song] on top of each other.’”
After doing the overdubs on that one, “Wear Your Love Like Heaven,” and completing the studio sessions with Manilow and the other musicians, she was ready to show the results to a record company. So she made an appointment with an executive at RCA Victor, a friend of a friend of hers, and showed up “at this lovely, lovely office,” she remembers, wearing “a dark blue mini-dress and white boots, of course. This was the ‘60s.”
In Broadway Dreamer, she describes what happened next.
“He glanced at me. ‘I’ll listen to your demo, but I can tell from looking at you’ – he gestured head to toe – ‘you are not what we’re signing up.’
“That stopped me cold. My look was not what they wanted? What does that mean? ‘Could you elaborate, please?’
“`You look dignified, attractive, like a straight-shooter from the Midwest. That’s not what sells today. We’re looking for kinky, crazy, wild, kid-stuff. Kids buy records.’”
That story illustrates the rude awakenings with some of Lynette Bennett’s Broadway dreams, as do other near-misses and assorted struggles. As her story unfolds, she marries her hometown sweetheart, eventually divorces him, and meets and marries the love of her life, a Methodist minster and missionary named Warren Danskin. The book ends with the beginning of their life together, including a South American honeymoon and, at the end, a flight to London, where a new church assignment is waiting for her husband. (She would end up on the stage in England as well, but that’s a story for another book.)
Through it all, elation and disappointment, the soaring highs and grinding lows, Lynette Bennett had always continued to work at her craft, not only on the New York stages she’d dreamt about as a young girl in Tulsa, but also on television, in magazines and in venues around the world.
The title of her book doesn’t quite say it all. Sure, she was a Broadway dreamer, like millions of others across the globe. She was, however, also something much more special: one of a glittering handful of hopefuls who ended up actually living what they’d dreamed.
