“Did anyone tell her I’m a movie star?” Jerry Lewis shakes his head. He looks defeated, standing a few feet to the right of Merv Griffin’s desk, holding a large bomb. He smiles awkwardly at Charlotte Moorman as she finishes arranging her props with one hand. The other firmly clutches the neck of her cello and bow, keeping the instrument upright.
“Take it from the top, Charlotte,” Griffin’s disembodied voice floats over from stage right.
The audience chuckles through a few more moments of silence, as Moorman leans over, grabbing cello strings. “When I play you,” she says with an Arkansas twang, pulling the strings taught, “will you put this over your back?”
Lewis gives it a beat and looks back toward Griffin’s desk, as Moorman demonstrates the motion with her own back. “If that’s what—” the comedian starts, leaning into his dejected, hangdog act. “Yes.”
Aside from Lewis’ presence, the performance is fairly typical of Moorman for the era. Dressed in a formal gown and seated behind a pair of music stands with balloons tied to the front, she runs the bow across the cello for a note. Stretching to her side, she grabs a large cymbal and tosses it like a frisbee, as the camera reacts with a tremble.
She blows a toy whistle and a duck call, before prompting Lewis to hand her the bomb, which she plays by rubbing the bow frantically across it body. Moorman turns on a radio playing The Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine,” released the year prior. The song continues as the piece culminates with her playing the comedian’s back.
It’s a remarkable four minutes of television for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the cellist has brought John Cage’s 1955 composition “26'1.1499” to late night network television. The studio audience laughs throughout, unaware of what they’re witnessing, beyond the wacky antics of some New York bohemian. It’s unclear from the video how much Moorman is specifically playing for laughs as Lewis vamps, but throughout, it’s clear the musician is enjoying herself.
It was a performance in a theater near Times Square five months prior that put Moorman in the national spotlight. Over the years, collaborator Nam June Paik made her a bra out of two small televisions, suspended her with helium-filled weather balloons and smeared her body in nearly 30 pounds of fudge.
“Sometimes I feel Paik doesn’t really think of me as Charlotte Moorman,” she once explained. “He looks on me as a work of his.”
Ultimately, the pair’s “Opera Sextronique” was a bridge too far for the moral standards of 1967. Moorman alternated between an electric bikini and performing completely topless, prompting two NYPD officers to bust up the invite-only performance. The musician was arrested, spending the night in prison and charged with indecent exposure. Paik and Moorman restaged the first two movements as evidence, but ultimately the film was not permitted to be shown to the jury.
Her rise to fame as the “Topless Cellist” earned Moorman a suddenly deluge of opportunities so bring New York’s downtown art scene to nationwide audience. She performed cello renditions of Ornette Coleman compositions and collaborated with Yoko Ono. She founded the New York Avant Garde Festival, directing 15 events over the course of two decades. French composer Edgard Varese called her, ”the Jeanne d'Arc of new music.”
In 1977, Paik and Moorman offered another repeat performance of “Opera Sextronique,” now retitled, “The People of the State of New York Against Charlotte Moorman.” This time, however, the pair of police officers who tossed a coat over her naked shoulders were just actors.
A year later, Moorman was diagnosed with cancer, a disease that would ultimately take her life in 1991. She continued playing through her treatments. Daily morphine shots gave birth to yet another take on her beloved instrument, with Syringe Cello, a sculpture created three years before her death.
Sources:
Topless Cellist by Joan Rothfuss
Charlotte Moorman https://www.eai.org/artists/charlotte-moorman/biography
The Legacy of the ‘Topless Cellist’ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/12/charlotte-moorman-the-topless-cellist
A Feast of Astonishments https://greyartgallery.nyu.edu/exhibition/a-feast-of-astonishments-charlotte-moorman-and-the-avant-garde-1960s-1980s/
Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s’ Review https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feast-of-astonishments-charlotte-moorman-and-the-avant-garde-1960s-1980s-review-1454362570
26'1.1499" https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=13