NEW YORK
Time flies every bit as fast in the musical theater as it does elsewhere.
Consider:
"Annie" is currently enjoying its 20th-anniversary revival.
In less than two months, "Cats" will overtake "A Chorus Line" to become Broadway's longest-running show.
And in a rehearsal hall in lower Manhattan, onetime child star Hayley Mills is preparing to go on tour in "The King and I."
Yes, Hayley Mills. That oh-so-adorable British actress who headlined such Disney confections as "Pollyanna," "The Parent Trap" and "That Darn Cat." The 1960s answer to Shirley Temple. This month -- it hardly seems possible -- she turns 51.
To put it another way, barely less unsettling, Mills is five years older than the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in which she is making her American stage debut. (The production begins a five-week run in the Kennedy Center Opera House on Wednesday.) As the English governess who brings breeding and egalitarian principles to 19th-century Siam, Mills has taken on one of the legendary roles of the musical theater. Gertrude Lawrence, Barbara Cook, Constance Towers, Deborah Kerr and Donna Murphy have all gone triumphantly before her. But then pluck was always Mills's stock in trade.
"To do an enormous, very expensive musical like this is a big responsibility," she admits. "The singing is much more physically demanding than you might imagine. I made some musical films in my youth, but I'm not a singer. I'm more like Rex Harrison . . . in drag. To have to dance and leap around while wearing those enormous crinolines merely adds to the burden of the whole thing. So I'm obviously a masochist."
To emphasize Hayley Mills's age would be boorish if she didn't look quite so smashing. The baby fat is long gone, and the button nose no longer seems as prominent as it once did. The all-black outfit she's wearing this particular day sets off her pale skin and blond hair. You have to search hard for signs that this is the mother of two grown sons.
Mills's favorite place for lunch in Manhattan is tucked away in the back of a home furnishings store. Called the Parlor Cafe, it is, in fact, more akin to your grandmother's attic, with purposefully mismatched chairs and tables, and an abundance of chandeliers dripping from the ceiling -- everything, of course, for sale and bearing stiff price tags. Mills's entrance does not pass unnoticed by the midday shoppers.
"The fame of my early youth was always a much bigger thing in America than it was in England," she notes. "I was always rather strangely cut off from it. I'd make a film in Hollywood. Then I'd return to London and go back to school. And the fame kept on growing in America. It was like I was two people, like there was another me. Looking back, I have to admit that I spent quite a bit of my youth being once removed."
Mills's most obvious qualities -- delicacy and a certain reticence -- are not what you expect from one who was so, well, mischievously enterprising on the screen. She can't be called shy, and "dreamy" is overstating it. But she's hardly an extrovert. Only her throaty laugh -- not quite a whiskey laugh, but getting there -- belies the gentility and suggests that there is a considerably gutsier person lurking underneath.
"I've always been grateful for what happened," she goes on. "My films put me in touch with a lot of children, and those children are now grown up and show the films to their children. To a large extent my name has been synonymous with a Disney aura. What I get from people is that I remind them of a period when God was in His Heaven, all was right with the world. Taxi drivers were polite and judges didn't make mistakes. Sounds terribly naive now, doesn't it?
"It's a lovely association to have. But I should have stage-managed myself a bit, like Marlene [Dietrich]. `Marlene will sit here, Marlene wants a light on her there.' I didn't do that. I was a bit like a dog on a lead. I think my past has inhibited my getting the kinds of roles in my mature years I would like. I'm far less likely to be offered Lady Macbeth and, at the risk of sounding frightfully immodest, I think I'd do a rather good job of it."
That's all the complaining you'll hear from her this afternoon, although she does permit herself one of those incongruously raucous laughs.
Girl to Woman
As dynasties go, the Mills family is not quite on a par with the Redgraves, but almost. Hayley's father, John Mills, continues in his 90th year to be a highly regarded actor. Her mother, the novelist Mary Hayley Bell, wrote among other works "Whistle Down the Wind" -- the inspiration for Hayley's 1961 film of the same name and the recent abortive musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Her older sister, actress Juliet Mills, was on London's West End at 16.
It was inevitable that Hayley would follow suit, but as she tells it, the movie career "just sort of happened" in the late '50s. Her father was to star in the movie "Tiger Bay" as a detective running down a murderer, and the director dropped by the Mills house for a conference. The script included the role of a small boy who befriends the killer, but as soon as the director spotted Hayley, then 11 and outgoing, the small boy became a small girl. Hayley was hired.
"The part was perfect for me -- a little tomboyish child, which is basically what I was," she says. "But the opportunity came out of the blue, long before I knew that acting was what I wanted to do. I rather took it all for granted, I'm afraid."
The reviews were laudatory, especially for Hayley, who was judged a natural. Among the impressed was Walt Disney, who was preparing to film "Pollyanna" and needed a young girl who could counter the cloying qualities of the title character. Hayley promptly snagged that role, too, and her meteoric ascent (described, naturally, as "Hayley's comet") was underway.
"Pollyanna" was a big hit in 1960, and she received an honorary Oscar for it. When, two years later, she played twins in "The Parent Trap," the grosses went through the roof. "Summer Magic," "The Castaways" and "The Trouble With Angels" all followed in fairly quick succession. She got to put her footprints in the concrete outside Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Fan magazines gushed. By the decade's end, though, the career had petered out.
Hayley Mills, child star, captured people's hearts. Hayley Mills, grown-up, merely confounded their expectations, and her films reflected the confusion. (One of them, "The Family Way," in which she played a newlywed whose husband has impotence problems, actually got banned on the Cunard ship lines.) When she moved in with film director Ray Boulting, a man some 32 years her senior, her Walt Disney image fell to pieces.
Boulting, whom she later married, is the father of her elder son, Crispian Mills, who has attracted notice of late as a rock singer. (His band, Kula Shaker, will perform Thursday at the 9:30 club.) Boulting and Mills were separated by the time she was 30. She then lived with actor Leigh Lawson, who fathered her second son, Jason, although that relationship wasn't fated to last either; Lawson left her to marry Twiggy. In the words of one friend, Mills's love life has been "fairly tumultuous."
"By my early twenties, I was a bit of an anachronism," she says. "I needed to take stock. I wasn't focused. I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never be a womanly woman and feel what I imagined other women felt. Quite honestly, I didn't know what kind of person I was."
She says she turned to the theater in an attempt to find out. A small repertory company in Leicester offered her the chance to play Irina in "Three Sisters." "I'd never performed before a live audience," she recalls, "and I had to learn a whole new technique. But in a funny way, I felt I was taking charge of my life at last."
"When I made `Tiger Bay,' I remember learning my lines very quickly, as children do. Then, outside to play. I didn't have to go over and over my part. My father would shut himself in his study for hours with a tape recorder and his script. And I thought, `What on earth can he be doing in there? He can't be that slow a learner.' But frankly, I didn't know what else an actor did. You learned your lines and believed what you said when you said it. That was that. It was all so simple."
Crowning Glory
With her sister, Mills has toured Australia and New Zealand in Noel Coward's "Fallen Angels," while the thriller "Dead Guilty" recently allowed her to play a villainess on London's West End for more than a year. "The King and I," however, is her biggest theatrical undertaking to date -- an opulent multimillion-dollar revival that carries the Tony stamp of approval.
Mills headed the production when it first was staged in 1991 in Australia. "She was a gorgeous Anna and I adored her," says Mary Rodgers, composer Richard Rodgers's daughter. "But her voice was small, and there were a lot of complaints in Adelaide that she didn't make enough noise. Instead of falling apart at the seams, like so many performers, she went back to England at her first break and started studying voice. She's been studying ever since. She's got a lot of discipline and guts."
The Australian production was imported to Broadway last year without Mills. (Donna Murphy landed the role.) But the producers, who include the Kennedy Center, seem thrilled she's headlining the touring company. Her name is one that speaks to the American heartland, where theatergoing tastes tend to be conservative and the average patron is middle-aged and affluent. "She's the Molly Ringwald of my generation . . . only better!" explained one enthusiastic woman lined up at the Kenendy Center box office. The center has been selling an average of 1,000 tickets a day and the advance is viewed as healthy, considering that Yul Brynner's ghost still hangs over the musical, daring anyone to touch it.
Juliet Mills predicts that "Hayley's going to be blown away -- to borrow a phrase -- by this tour of America. She hasn't had a real connection with the American audience since her Disney days. I think it's going to surprise her how much affection they have for her. There never used to be anyone named Hayley. It's my mother's surname, not common at all. Now there are little Hayleys running all over America."
A Bit of Bubbly
Mills has barely picked at her lunch, but she claims that anything more would make her sluggish for the afternoon rehearsals. There are those six-foot crinolines to hoist about. By all accounts, her energy is unflagging.
"Well, the wonderful thing about the theater," she says, "is that you are constantly learning. It's always work in progress. As long as I'm in the theater, I will never, I know, get to the point I was at in films -- not moving up, repeating myself, doing less than my best."
As she talks about what has become a "true passion with me," she starts to sound like the Hayley Mills of yore -- the one who hatched clever ideas and raised morale and made people feel good about their Technicolor possibilities.
"When you think how extraordinary human beings are," she says. "I mean, Einstein just used 10 percent of his brain, so how little must we be using? If you keep on doing what you know you can do, where's the challenge and the discovery in that? Think of all we can create. Think of all we can feel! How incredible!"
Suddenly the reserve crumbles away and her eyes shine with conviction. The past and present actually seem to come together. Hayley Mills's younger and older selves are one. And you can't help thinking -- for a fleeting moment -- how incredible indeed.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company