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Her performance proved a triumph, demolishing even those reviewers who held the show at arm's length. Walter Kerr in the Times boomed: "Yes, Yes, Alexis! No, No, Follies" Even Curmudgeon John Simon fell for the star at the expense of an early 19th century English clergyman: "Alexis, and not Sydney," he burbled in New York magazine, "is the Smith of Smiths." Says she with the obligatory amount of modesty: "The acclaim is not that important. Listen, how many people's opinions do you really respect? Four or five? More than that is just pleasantry." But it is something more: the ovations of total strangers who agree that Alexis is proof of the pop poster's bottom line, TODAY is THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
As with Alexis, the musical has given new life to a handful of other ex-luminaries:
DOROTHY COLLINS. Remember her? The singing companion of Snooky Lanson on television's Your Hit Parade. The put-on artist of Candid Camera! A local talent contest winner from Windsor, Ont., she was discovered by her first husband, Bandleader Raymond Scott, 17 years her senior. Her second, Tony Award Singer Ron Holgate (1776), is ten years her junior (she is 44). She has two children by her first marriage, one by her second. All three live with the Holgates in a pleasant Dutch colonial house in New Jersey. Dorothy's homebody role in Follies, like Alexis Smith's elegant one, seems perilously close to typecasting. She is delighted to be in a smash, she says, but she would be just as happy to stay at home as the maturing Girl Next Door. "I like to clean house. I know. Crazy Sally, crazy Dorothy. But help is such a problem these days."
YVONNE DE CARLO. She played Lola Montez, Calamity Jane, Salome and Moses' wife. She was the Flame of the Islands, the Buccaneer's Girl, the River Lady, the Scarlet Angel and the Captain's Paradise. Best cleavage forward, Yvonne De Carlo (real name: Peggy Middleton, of Vancouver, B.C.) steamed her way through Hollywood, sometimes seriously but often as conscious self-parody. The wife of Hollywood Stunt Man Bob Morgan and mother of two boys, De Carlo, 48, is an exemplar of the John Wayne philosophy: go west and turn right. "The whole company kids me," she says. "They call me the fascist rightwinger of the cast. One day Hal Prince and Alexis and I were talking about how expensive things could be. I said I knew what they meant because I was buying a box of Luger bullets in Virginia City, and I was amazed at how expensive they were. There was this shocked silence. I love to shoot, a lot of people do; so what? It's just target practice. I would never shoot an animal. Only targets —or people if they were attacking my house."
ETHEL SHUTTA. At 74 she could collect social security. Instead Ethel Shutta (pronounced Shuh-tay) gives her all as the old firecracker who makes Broadway Baby an incendiary number. "I'm the only woman in the cast who remembers Ziegfeld," she says. "In 1925 I was in the Follies as the comedienne." Her song: I'm in Love with Eddie Cantor. When her two sons were attending school at Horace Mann in The Bronx,