Product Description

A poignant and revealing memoir from a legendary entertainer.

Donna McKechnie began her love affair with dance as a child in Detroit. At fifteen, she ran away from home to join a touring dance troupe, and in 1961, she was cast in the Broadway smash hit How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. She soon won acclaim as Michael Bennett's show-stopping muse in Promises, Promises and Company. In 1975, with her Tony-winning performance in Michael Bennett's masterpiece, A Chorus Line, McKechnie vaulted to stardom as a unique Broadway "triple threat" who could do it all -- dance, sing, and act.

Moving among the circles of artists, dancers, and musicians who inspired and challenged her in myriad ways, McKechnie writes about the trajectory of her career as it intertwined with and influenced her personal life and the lives of those around her. Recounting her dazzling career, McKechnie also reveals the dark side of fame: from her parents' troubled relationship to a searing account of her own marriage to Michael Bennett and her inspiring triumphs over depression and the rheumatoid arthritis that nearly ended her career. With affectionate reminiscences of Bob Fosse, Gwen Verdon, Stephen Sondheim, Fred Astaire, and many other well-known friends, McKechnie exhibits all the warmth, sensitivity, and verve that have endeared her to legions of fans over the years.

Filled with behind-the-scenes stories and anecdotes, Time Steps is a candid, funny, and deeply personal memoir by a vivacious woman with an indomitable spirit and an illustrious, ongoing career.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #304586 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1975, singer-dancer-choreographer McKechnie was one of the brightest lights on the Great White Way, winning a Tony for her performance in A Chorus Line, and now theatergoers will be elated to see her autobiography shelved in stores only days before A Chorus Line's October Broadway revival. McKechnie's memories of the original musical's creative genesis serve as the centerpiece, and the other chapters are equally compelling. Her story is one of fierce drive and determination. Leaving Detroit at 16, she ran away from home to dance with a touring troupe, arriving in Manhattan at 17. Following a failed audition with American Ballet Theatre, she performed in Massachusetts musicals, filmed commercials and toured in West Side Story, leaping from the long-run Broadway hit How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1961 to TV (Hullabaloo; Dark Shadows). By the time Stephen Sondheim's Company brought her back to Broadway in 1970, her career was a cakewalk, but the aftermath of a divorce from choreographer Michael Bennett led to a "vicious circle of depression." McKechnie writes honestly, revealing her innermost thoughts, looking back at family, close friends and intimate relationships, while probing her anxieties, low self-esteem and personal pain between the plaudits, raves and theatrical triumphs. 16-page photo insert not seen by PW. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
McKechnie won a 1976 Tony Award for her smart, sensitive portrayal in the innovative, ensemble-written musical A Chorus Line of Cassie, a character based largely on herself. She brings similar sensitivity and openness to her autobiography, written with eminent theatrical biographer Lawrence (Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins, 2001). Not quite a tell-all, McKechnie's memoir reviews with remarkable candor the many highs and lows of a long, varied career: unhappy childhood, entry into show business (she was in a touring production before graduating high school), early Broadway success (in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying; Promises, Promises; and Company), two unhappy marriages, post-Tony career setbacks and comebacks, and myriad battles to overcome arthritis and depression. Her account of the making of Chorus Line, from early group-therapy-like workshops to the final touches for Broadway, is especially fascinating. That that career high was followed by a series of life-disrupting reversals, including a disaster of a marriage to Chorus Line director Michael Bennet, makes her story all the more riveting. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

A Make-Believe Childhood

"The nominees for best actress in a musical are..."

I am sitting in the orchestra section of the Shubert Theatre, on theaisle, seven rows from the front of the stage, next to Michael Bennett,the director of A Chorus Line and my dear friend. I hear the words spokenfrom a podium onstage, and the speaker is Richard Burton. I makea concerted effort to keep breathing and stay in the real world, as I watch the dreamlike scene unfolding before me.

But it's not a dream. Richard Burton is real. The Antoinette Perry Awards are real. And so are the CBS television cameras. It is the spring of 1976, and the awards are being televised live. I hear a voice cut through the charged atmosphere inside the theater. "And the award goes to..."

Did he say my name? Yes, he said my name. "Donna McKechnie." And after my name, time stops. I should get up. I turn to Michael, who grabs my hand and kisses my cheek. I hear the applause accompany my quick, measured steps up the aisle to the stage. Don't rush, I tell myself. Don't fall. Keep breathing. Despite my efforts, I am no longer in the real world. I feel like I am on a high wire, performing a great balancing act, as I climb the stairs one at a time, meeting the gaze of the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen. As Richard Burton presents me with the award, I am still ungrounded, yet manage to be composed as I take the award and turn to the microphone, searching for the first words of my not very well prepared acceptance speech.

Before I begin to speak, my mind is racing with directives from an inner voice that I recognize as my own. Be here. Be here now. Whatever you do, look out there and take all this in. It is a special moment in your life and it may never happen again.

I look out into the theater and see so many people I know. I see Michael, beaming. How marvelous to be able to say in front of millions of people, "Thank you, Michael." I look into the wings on the other side of the stage, and I see the glitter of the Chorus Line finale costumes, and the smiling faces of the other cast members. I say how happy I am and proud to share this honor with the rest of the company, acknowledging the personal and collaborative experience that brought us all successfully here tonight. I think of my mother, who is out there in the audience somewhere, and even though I can't see her, I can imagine her happiness. And I think of my father, who died only a few months before this night. I dare not mention his name with the others I thank. I am determined not to allow those feelings to surface, afraid that I may not be able to continue unless I keep them locked inside.

I finish my thank-you speech, and during the applause, I turn and follow Mr. Burton off the stage. When we reach the shadows of the wings, he turns to me and says, "You deserve it."

All this, and a personal moment too!

I was doing so well, but now have to remind myself again that I'm not dreaming. Remember this moment, dictates my inner voice.

Don't worry, I say to myself, I will.

A Chorus Line won nine Tony Awards that night. It was the show of my dreams as well as my dream come true. Or so it seemed at the time. The chorus dancers portrayed in the musical were drawn from some of the personal stories of those of us in the cast. The script was based on our own struggles and dreams, and the stories we told would become the inspiration for the songs. Some of my childhood memories were given to Maggie and to several other characters, while the role that I performed, Cassie, took on aspects of my life in later years. Maggie's lines reveal part of my childhood drama when she says, referring to her parents, "I was born to save their marriage, and when my father came to pick my mother up at the hospital, he said, 'Well, I thought this was going to help. But I guess it's not.'"

My mother told me that story when I was a teenager, I imagine, as a way to share with me how difficult it was for both of them to adjust to certain realities in their young marriage. She then told me, "I said to myself, if my husband won't love me, I have this baby to love, and she will love me."

It was a sad thing to hear, though it made it easier for me to justify those born-to-help feelings that took hold in early childhood. Yet I know my parents had been deeply in love when they first married, because when I was a teenager I found letters my father wrote to my mother during World War II when he served overseas. Army censors had blacked out some of the words that might have given away location and activity, but what survived were beautiful expressions of his love and longing. He wrote how much he missed my mother and his baby, Donna, and how he couldn't wait to be with us. And he went on about all the wonderful things he was going to do for us when he came home. It is such a poignant letter to read now, because it makes me realize how rarely I saw that loving and affectionate part of my father in later years.

I was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on November 16, 1942. My parents were practically still kids when they met and fell in love and married a few months later. When I first heard the story of how they met on a blind date, I remember thinking how romantic it must have been when passion and the pressures of wartime led them to marry. Had it not been for the war, they might have waited rather than rushing into it the way they did. I always preferred to think it was love at first sight. My mother, Carolyn Ruth Johnson, was nineteen. She left Cass Tech in Detroit, where she was studying commercial art, and soon became a war bride when my father, Donald Bruce McKechnie, was drafted into the army and went off to fight in Europe. As a soldier, he would later distinguish himself taking part in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.

While my father was away, my mother and I lived with her parents, Dillard and Gladys Cowling Johnson, who had a home in Huntington Woods, Michigan. My beloved grandmother was my early salvation. When my inexperienced mother was afraid to lift her wailing baby from the crib, my grandmother was the one who picked me up and bathed me. She and my grandfather were from Albion, Illinois, an early English farming settlement that went back to the seventeenth century. Their background was a mix of English and Irish. My mother was their first child, and then a few years later, her brother Francis came along. The Johnsons moved to Detroit to raise their family. I was their first grandchild, and they both doted on me.

My grandfather was a big, kindhearted man, a former schoolteacher who had gone into the insurance business. He took great pleasure in teaching me numbers and the letters of the alphabet, and I swear to God the first word I learned to spell was "show." That was just after my grandmother took me to Detroit's Fisher Theatre to see my first "movie show," The Snake Pit, starring Olivia de Havilland. In retrospect an odd choice for a four-year-old child. Well, it terrified me. I sat curled up in my seat, with my hands in front of my face, peering through my fingers only when my grandmother said it was safe for me to watch. I sensed her embarrassment after we got home when she said, "I had no idea it was going to be like that!" But I guess she felt that since she paid for the tickets, we had to sit through it, no matter what.

My grandmother wasn't overly religious, but she was preoccupied at times with behaving in a proper way. For example, she had very definite ideas about hanging the wash out to dry. She would instruct me to make sure that all the underclothes were hung on the rack in the basement, because she believed it was highly improper for underwear to be seen in public. She was raised to be a lady by a very strict mother, even if she did have a few rebellious episodes in her life, like marrying my grandfather partly to get out of the house.

I have a photograph of her that she gave me many years later. It pictured her in her teens, sitting on the fence on the family farm, dressed as a man. It seems that there was a social club in town that didn't allow women, so she "borrowed" her brother's clothes and snuck in and fooled everyone. I loved her for that. That took a lot of spunk in those days, before Marlene Dietrich wore pants.

My grandfather, Dillard, had a very loving nature. He encouraged me when I was very young to recite poems and nursery rhymes for him, and I remember how happily surprised I was when he gave me a dollar bill for one of my performances. I hardly knew what it meant, but his gesture made a lasting impression. These earliest years while my father was away were idyllic and carefree. I didn't see much of my mother, since she was working as a telephone operator during the day to help make ends meet, but I felt safe and comfortable in the home my grandparents provided for us.

I loved my grandparents' quaint brick house with its faux Tudor leaded-glass windows, and morning glory vines climbing up the trellis. The house was surrounded by acres of fields, and in my memory, my grandmother's flowers were constantly in bloom, and her garden in back was always filled with rows and rows of vegetables and berries. There were few homes near us and few children my age for me to play with, so I created a Lilliputian world in the garden bed, making tiny pebble houses for the ants. And I invented a large "family" of imaginary friends. I remember one time I was sitting in the back seat of our car, chattering away, with my grandmother driving and my mother beside her. They heard me, and my grandmother said, "Donna, who are you talking to?" I told her, "My brothers and sisters up in heaven. I have about a hundred of them up there."

In recollecting that time when I lived with my grandparents, I see a little girl holding a picture. My father was gone almost three years, and practically every night while he was away, before I went to sleep, my mother had me kiss his photograph. Sometimes she would read me his letters full of loving promises. Then one morning a telegram...

Customer Reviews

Christmas Gift
haven't opened it, but fast sihpment, bought for Christmas gift, can't unseal till then but trust sender.

excellent..good pictures. stories,etc.
donna has always been a winner..when i first met donna in charles nelson reilly's musical comedy class, 1962, at the hb studio, in nyc/greenwich village, she was already at the top of her game ..broadway dancer."how to succeed", vocal lessons with bob murdoch, also in "how to succeed".pretty,great dancer/singer & actress.............donna alaways has had that qualiy X......hard working, focused on her career...never wavering.....i am so happy for her success....movies,tv,stage, clubs.....she does it all......i will always watch her career with great interest..p.s., a nice gal, too......JACK R. ENGLISH, BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.........actor/singer/film & tv production............je

A MUST for aspiring performers
TIME STEPS is dancing star Donna McKechnie's autobiography written with the assistance of Greg Lawrence (who also wrote the Jerome Robbins biography DANCE WITH DEMONS and helped Gelsey Kirkland write her bestselling autobiography DANCING ON MY GRAVE). McKechnie's story is a very interesting one on many levels. She ran away from home as a teenager and managed to carve out a career for herself as a professional dancer. Her big break came when she auditioned for producer Cy Feuer who hired her for the chorus of his new Broadway show HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING when she was still a teenager. For several heady years she went from one hit show to another, including her breakthrough moment in PROMISES, PROMISES and her spectacular turn in Stephen Sondheim's COMPANY, culminating in her triumphant Tony-wining performance in the revolutionary Michael Bennett musical A CHORUS LINE. But that turned out to be her last real hit. The next thirty years would not be so easy. She not only battled a dead-end career, but also struggled with a severely debilitating physical illness, a failed marriage, family problems and emotional misery. It's the story of a survivor, but it's not a particularly happy one. McKechnie obviously wanted to be in the spotlight an awful lot to go through this kind of life.

Although the first part of the book is quite gripping, it bogs down in the middle as McKechnie is forced to look inward to solve her unhappiness. Introspection is usually far more interesting to oneself than to others. Even though the book is ultimately more disturbing than uplifting, I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone considering a career in the performing arts. It reveals the grim reality of trying to make a living as a performer, even for someone as beautiful, talented, respected and beloved as Donna McKechnie.