Healing Notes

Charmian Carr Duets with A&U’s Dann Dulin to Share How Her Family Tragedy Intersected with the Healing Legacy of The Sound of Music

Okay, Charmian Carr, The Sound of Music’s Liesl von Trapp is not "sixteen going on seventeen" anymore. In fact, though Carr is now a proud grandmother and will be sixty later this year, she still bears an uncanny resemblance to her cinematic persona–wrapped in the same vibrancy and warmth as Liesl.

Charmian (pronounced Shar-mee-in) is the unofficial Ambassador for The Sound of Music, and has represented the movie for 20th Century Fox throughout the years. "I’m the one they’ve always come to because Julie (Andrews) won’t do it," she chuckles, insinuating that right from the beginning Andrews wanted to rid herself of the Mary Poppins and Maria Von Trapp image. "And Christopher Plummer won’t do it, as he still calls it The Sound of Mucous!" Carr’s take on his apathy, she says, partially stems from Plummer initially being told that he was to sing in the movie but in the end his voice was dubbed. She continues: "And the rest of the children have changed so dramatically they’re not recognizable. I was twenty-one when I did The Sound of Music, and the next oldest child was fourteen. So I was the logical one to approach to represent the film. And that suited me fine because I had a yearning for travel, and still do."

Carr, who was in competition with Mia Farrow, Lesley Ann Warren, Teri Garr, Shelly Fabares, and Sharon Tate for the Liesl role, danced into moviegoer’s hearts when The Sound of Music opened in 1965, though it certainly was not one of the critics’ "favorite things." Thirty-seven years later, this legendary film keeps growing in popularity and continues to reach generations of fans worldwide. Not many know that the film has been used for healing purposes, which Carr recounts in her latest book, Letters To Liesl, a follow-up to her 2000 book, Forever Liesl. "I’ve talked to women who have taken The Sound of Music video into the labor room while they were giving birth," she remarks nestled cozily in an overstuffed plaid covered chair from her rustic country style home in Encino, California. "One man brought the video to the hospital while his mother was dying. The morphine and Valium were not keeping her out of pain, so while she watched The Sound of Music this woman was laughing and singing. She peacefully died the next morning."

Almost three years ago now, The Sound of Music morphed into Sing-A-Long Sound of Music. What is a Sing-A-Long Sound of Music, you ask? Think Rocky Horror Picture Show–gussy up like your favorite character and croon along with your favorite stars while the movie is screened.

"Let’s start at the very beginning"…The Sing-a-long-a Sound of Music, as it is known in the U.K., supposedly began at a senior facility in Inverness, Scotland. The head nurse wanted the residents’ afternoons to be filled with an activity, so she gathered some Hollywood musical videos and brought them to the home. When she played the movies the residents livened up and sang along. The entire room was aglow with laughter and song! Word soon spread and producer Ben Freedman decided to give the idea a try by screening The Sound of Music for a one-night AIDS benefit. The event sold out but requests kept pouring in, so Freedman decided to add another night. Another sell out! It was as if a light went off in his head. He seized the opportunity and went public. "If I hadn’t heard that story, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here today," Charmian admits as she takes a sip of Chardonnay. As she states in her book, "I believe Sing-A-Long fulfills a basic human need. We humans need to congregate, to join together, to sing and to laugh out loud together. Opportunities to do that are sorely missing from our high-tech insulated lives. The silliness of Sing-A-Long might not be considered chic, but it’s good for the soul, opening the door for grown-ups and children alike to play, to be gazebo dancers, if only for a few hours."

Charmian got involved by accident. In 2000, after filming a British documentary, The Sound of Music Children: After They Were Famous, where the entire cast of the von Trapp siblings reunited in Salzburg, Austria for the first time in over thirty-five years since filming there, Charmian sidestepped to London to promote her book. Part of the tour included her attendance at the Sing-a-long-a at The Prince Charles Cinema, where it originally opened in August 1999. (Today the Sing-a-long-a still plays to weekly multitudes at the same venue). When the crowd saw Carr, they went wild. She even sang a couple of The Sound of Music tunes for them. When she finished, Ben Freedman took her aside and asked if she would consider repeating her performance across America, as he was in the process of bringing it overseas.

Presently, Carr travels around the globe, as the Sing-A-Long has now extended into Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Later this year, it opens in various Asian countries. In Los Angeles last summer, Sing-A-Long was held at the Hollywood Bowl. "The Hollywood Bowl has 17,600 seats," Carr smoothly notes, then elates, "And we nearly sold out! They were even selling obstructed-view seats. And when the producers were originally talking about it they were pooh-poohing it, thinking that it was going to be a big disaster. They were just hoping that they’d break even. And to break even was, I think, 8,000 seats. The Bowl just kept selling, selling, and selling," enthuses Carr. "The same thing happened in New York. They had only two nights booked and ended up having to find a theatre for the third night because they had so many requests for tickets. It stayed another week!"

Carr has pushed for most of these Sing-A-Long events to benefit ASOs. Indeed, AIDS has touched Charmian in a personal, tragic way. In 1982, Carr’s actress sister, Darleen Carr’s (a veteran of many television dramas, such as Streets of San Francisco and Simon and Simon, and who was one of The Sound of Music voice dubs for the von Trapp children) two-year-old son had a blood transfusion during an operation. Unbeknownst to the family, the blood was tainted with HIV. The boy died six months later. The hospital doctors reported that he had died from an immune deficiency and unfortunately, they stated that it was a genetic disorder. To avoid future complications, Darleen became sterilized. It wasn’t until the late eighties when a couple who had gone through a similar situation, sued Cedars-Sinai Hospital because they believed their son had died from AIDS. The couple won the lawsuit. The court directed the hospital to write to every parent who had lost a child during that two-year period. Darlene received one of the letters.

"It was a very traumatic time for the whole family," says Carr intently. "I’ve also had some very close friends die from AIDS. And what upsets me especially nowadays, is when I tour, I talk to many young people in their teens and early twenties, and they don’t think AIDS is a problem anymore, so they are not having safe sex," she sighs in shocked disbelief then continues: "And they answer me with, ‘Oh, there are so many new drugs now.’ But they have no idea the complications of these drugs. They have no idea how a patient suffers on these drugs to, quote unquote–get well. It is scary. It’s almost that the cure is worse than the disease. These kids have no clue! No clue. And they’ve got to be told. They need to see these people who are taking these drugs; see the side effects the drugs can cause. I have spoken to doctors, and many say that AIDS has just begun," heralds Carr austerely, sounding more like Captain von Trapp than his daughter, Liesl. "AIDS has become a political thing; like this is no longer popular, we’re bored with this. AIDS lost its celebrity-hood and that’s horrible," she asserts. "And if the entertainment industry can’t be responsible for showing safer sex, than who else has the power, the impact?" Charmian gets up and lets her two labs out in the backyard. She returns, curls up in the sofa chair again and declares, "I have a suggestion. More TV series need to speak out about safer sex within the confines of their script; like, Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, Six Feet Under, etc. Show a condom!" Does she welcome condom distribution in the schools? "Yes," she shouts with open arms. "There not only needs to be condoms available but AIDS education, as well, because the ‘at-home’ policy doesn’t always work. We can’t count on it because a vast majority of parent’s knowledge is negligible."

As a parent, Carr should know. After The Sound of Music, Charmian opted for motherhood instead of movie stardom, though she continued acting in commercials–two hundred in all! She has two daughters, Jennie, 31, a credit card negotiator, and Emily, 27, an architectural engineer. Carr and her dentist husband divorced ten years ago after almost twenty-five years of marriage. When she and her former husband bought their home in the late sixties (the one she still lives in today), she furnished and decorated it herself. When she wanted to draw up plans for a room addition, she took a drafting course at UCLA. Eventually, she got licensed and in 1976, Charmian officially opened doors to a new business: Charmian Carr Designs. Her interest in design was evident as far back as her Sound of Music days. "I used to follow our set designer around and notice his attention to detail. I just loved that. Plus I was even dating an interior decorator at the time."

One of Carr’s more famous clients was Michael Jackson, who, in lieu of bedroom furniture, wanted mannequins–seventeen in all. "He just lives down the street. Rather, he owns it and his parents and some of brothers live there. He still pops in every now and then. He thinks I am one of his close friends and I haven’t seen him in years. He doesn’t really know what it means to be a friend," she says poignantly. "He became a part of my family and was here for dinner regularly. We’d go to Disneyland all the time because he wanted this one room in his house to include different scenes from Pirates of The Caribbean. He could never decide what scenes he wanted so he’d always say, ‘Let’s go back and look again.’ Eventually, we couldn’t return because Thriller (Jackson’s mega hit album) had just come out and he become so popular. He couldn’t go anywhere after that." In the eighties, for close to ten years, Charmian was decorator-in-tow for the King of Pop.

Carr is passionate about her work. When she took a year off to write her book she says she sorely missed the design work. "When I get on the plane touring with the Sing-A-Long or promoting my book, I become Liesl. But when I get back home, I am Charmian. The balance of these two careers keeps me centered."

Liesl has traveled a long way from Salzburg and that idyllic setting in the latticed gazebo during the evening thunderstorm. This lass is all grown up. In fact, as I leave, Charmian kisses me on the cheek and makes me commit to attending the second annual Sing-A-Long Sound of Music at the Hollywood Bowl this summer. My thoughts swirl back to The Sound of Music when Liesl herself is kissed for the first time by the young lad, Rolf. Liesl‘s joyful reaction and mine: "Weeeeeeeeeee….."

For more information, log on to www.singalonga.com.

June 2002