Prime Mime

Marilyn Michaels doesn't have an easy job. When Rich Little wants to do an imitation, he'll hunch his shoulders up for Richard Nixon, tilt his head for Ronald Reagan or maybe whip out a prop cigar for George Burns, but all he really has to do is get the voices right. It's a low-overhead job, and Little has become more than a little rich doing it.

Life is different for Marilyn Michaels, Little's partner in mimicry in a now-familiar Diet 7Up commercial. It takes more than just a voice to capture the essence of Brooke Shields, for instance. Does anyone remember what Brooke sounds like?

But just how does a 5'4" female impressionist approach imitating the willowy Brooke Shields (right)? "With a lot of trepidation," says Marilyn, "a lot of trepidation. Brooke is very, very tall. I had this thing about blowing that bubble while wearing jeans so tight I (concluded on page 98) could barely breathe and, at the same time, making sure that not all of my bosom was popping out. I'm 34 years old. How in the hell am I going to look like a 16-year-old?"

Of course, that's not a challenge most of us face--nor, for that matter, is it much of a challenge for someone like Marilyn, who's been doing impressions since she was seven years old. "I listened to Teresa Brewer and Patti Page and I was able to reproduce those sounds," she recalls. "It has something to do with sense memory, but it's hard for me to explain. I know less about how it's done than about how a magic trick works. But some of our biggest stars can do it. I know that Elizabeth Taylor is a wonderful mimic."

Some kids can sing along with Patti Page records for hours without making a career out of it. But Marilyn's father is Harold Sternberg, a basso profundo recently retired from the New York Metropolitan Opera, and her mother, Fraydele Oysher, was a star of the Yiddish stage. Fraydele toured constantly, and by the age of seven, Marilyn had devised a way of getting Mom to take her along.

"I told her, 'Either you take me with you or I will never eat again. I will never take another morsel of food in my mouth.' And that's the worst thing you can tell a Jewish mother." The extortion paid off in two ways--Marilyn not only got to travel but was put to work as a child singer as well.

By her own admission, she was no Shirley Temple. "I had braces on my teeth, long, dark, braided hair and a different nose," she explains. "I was skinny, and I used to wear these purple horn-rimmed glasses. I told myself that when I reached the ripe old age of whatever, I was going to dye my hair flame red and have my nose fixed."

As it turned out, she didn't dye her hair red. She opted for blonde, and at the age of 15--"as soon as my bones stopped growing"--she rushed to Dr. Sam Shear in New York to have her nose reshaped into something more glamorous. "He was the doctor who was doing everybody--Kim Novak, Zsa Zsa," she remembers now. "He even had a picture of Jimmy Durante with the inscription You'll never get me."

Marilyn kept on singing and eventually landed some club dates on her own in the Catskills. On a whim, she started throwing in a few jokes and impressions between songs; the response--and a bit of sound advice from her mother--persuaded her to make them a bigger part of her act.

"My mother encouraged me to do the impressions because she said that funny people have a longer life in show business," says Marilyn. "She was right. There are girl singers who started in the business when I did and you barely hear of them anymore.

"You can be the finest singer today, but it doesn't matter unless you have a hit record. And having a hit record is certainly not contingent on how good a singer you are. So I feel enormously lucky to have so many facets, to be an actress who can do seven dialects and 50 impressions. Hey, baby, I'm going to work no matter what goes down."

In 1966, Marilyn had one obvious goal: to be the next Barbra Streisand. She recorded two albums--both in the Streisand tradition--and was quickly cast in the role of Fanny Brice for the national company of Funny Girl. It was, of course, a role that Barbra Streisand made famous (and vice versa), and some who saw Marilyn do the show on the road thought she was doing little more than a play-length Barbra imitation. Her Streisand bit remains one of the most effective characterizations in her act; in fact, it's so effective that Streisand reportedly hates it.

"Originally, the Barbra inflections were in my performance," Marilyn admits. "But after doing the show for a year, I was able to get rid of Barbra and begin doing it as myself--and as Fanny Brice. Of course, you have to remember that Barbra, Fanny Brice and I are three Jewish women who sing, have big noses--well, I don't anymore--and come from either Brooklyn or the Lower East Side. Valerie Perrine would not have made a good Fanny Brice."

Her next big step was an ABC Comedy Hour series called The Kopykats, featuring Marilyn as the only woman in a group of some of the country's better impressionists, including Rich Little, George Kirby, Frank Gorshin and Fred Travalena. As a result of the series, she found steady work in clubs and on TV talk and variety shows. But, she claims, the closer she got to really making a name for herself, the more confused she became. "I was afraid of success," she says now, and she found herself plagued by illness and making some bad business decisions. Her biggest blunder came one night in 1975, when Little was filling in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and Marilyn was sitting in the greenroom, waiting to make her appearance. It was hardly her first late-night gig--she'd been on the show so often she'd lost count. But that night, when it appeared that the show was running long and Marilyn wouldn't have time to do the material she'd prepared, she became furious and walked out. "I haven't done The Tonight Show since," she says with a shrug.

There were other problems in her life as well. There was a two-year marriage to Isacc Robbins, an Israeli interior designer. "My mother said, 'What's the matter with you? All good girls get married.' So I got married," she recalls. "My husband was proud of me but very threatened by my work." Later, she had a brief but well-publicized romance with Burt Reynolds. "I usually don't date actors," Marilyn says. "Their egos are like women's egos. It's a race to see who's going to get to the mirror first and who's going to stay there longer. I remember one time, Burt and I went to a party, and after a while, I couldn't find him. When I went upstairs, he was sitting with a bunch of teenaged groupies; they were just sitting there adoring him. I knew at that moment it was going to be difficult going out with an actor. Then Burt started seeing Dinah Shore, who's several years older and obviously a woman who is very secure about her identity and able to handle the situation."

Marilyn has also dated king of the road Roger Miller, composer David Shire and a shy, retiring baseball executive named George Steinbrenner. Her current boyfriend is a New York attorney/stockbroker whom she'd rather not name. "The gentleman I'm seeing now is very proud and not threatened by what I do. That's really nice."

What Marilyn does occasionally verges on the wacky. When she's under pressure, she takes refuge in one of her characters. She's been known to give a man who made an unwelcome pass an earful of Barbra Streisand threatening to break his head, and she has a habit of mimicking any ethnic person with whom she happens to be talking. If a waiter is Puerto Rican, friends tell us, Marilyn recites her order like a bit from West Side Story. If she's talking with a black, she puts on her best Harlem accent, mixed in with what she calls "heavy attitude." Her companions have considered sliding under the table, but Marilyn has so far lived through those encounters--and maintains that she ends up making friends, not to mention getting better service in restaurants.

Oddly, one of the biggest boosts to Marilyn's career success has been that Diet 7Up commercial, which has given her more exposure than anything else she's done in the past ten years. She recently headlined for the first time at Caesars Boardwalk Regency in Atlantic City. And thanks to therapy and a few years of experience, she's no longer making dumb moves such as walking off The Tonight Show. "I still have my troubles," she admits. "but now I know more about myself."