(2 of 8)
The scouts could not possibly hope to find a full bag of authentic Chinese, settled for any vaguely Oriental features. Dancer Denise Quan is really Canadian of Chinese origin. Shawnee Smith is American Indian (Hopi) and English. Vicki Racimo is a promising piano student (at Manhattan's Juilliard School) of Filipino-English origin. Mary Huie, of Chinese origin, was working as a clerk for Revlon when a scout spotted her on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue (she thought she was facing an attempted pickup when the stranger approached her with: "How would you like to be in a Broadway show?").
Study in Contrasts. Wherever they come from, all the girls would get a high Kublai Khan rating. Oddly enough, perhaps the easiest of all recruiting jobs involved the 20-carat stars. Early last spring Rodgers saw Pat Suzuki on Jack Paar's television show and recognized her right away as his stripper, Linda Low. After Miyoshi's Oscar-winning performance in the movie Sayonara, both Rodgers and Hammerstein realized that Mei Li's lines had been written for no one else.
The two girls make a fascinating study in feminine contrasts. Miyoshi takes life as it comes, one small step at a time. Pat grasps for it all—hungry, anxious, impatient. Japan-born Miyoshi moves slowly, precisely, with cautious grace; at 29, she is American by solemn determination, but she still lives in the ordered, traditional world of her tight little island home. California-born Pat Suzuki, 28, is American by instinct, chafed by restrictions, careless of customs, and in a hurry. It is possible to see in Pat and Miyoshi the embodiment of the ancient, universal Chinese principles of Yang and Yin—the opposites of active and passive, sun and shadow, fire and water.
One thing Pat and Miyoshi seem to have in common: for as long as either of them can remember, each of them seems to have been rehearsing her part in Flower Drum Song.
Head in a Bucket. Miyoshi's rehearsals began in the green hill town of Otaru, on the big northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, high above Otaru Bay. The last of nine children, all two years apart, she grew up in a jampacked household, the family circle swollen by two servants and seven extra boys, all apprentices from her father's thriving iron factory. No one paid much attention to her, Miyoshi remembers. She was too little. But she managed to steal into the neighborhood Kabuki theater, and had money enough for "ice" candy. Today, onstage, she sings her Flower Drum song:
My father says that children keep
growing,
Rivers keep flowing, too.
My father says he doesn't know why.
But somehow or other they do.
One brother recognized the little girl's love for music and took her for tap-dancing and harmonica lessons. After a while Miyoshi switched to the mandolin. ("I didn't like mandolin, either. When I didn't like, I quit.") Next came piano. Says Miyoshi: "I just loved any sound that you could do it with instrument."