EDIE ADAMS: COMING OF AGE AGAIN

What’s this, the “cigar girl” starring in “The Merry Widow”?

True. Edie Adams, associated with the Muriel cigar company for decades, has top billing in the Long Beach Civic Light Opera production of Franz Lehar’s classic operetta Saturday through March 16 at the Terrace Theater.

Still occasionally referred to as the “cigar girl” after almost 20 years of doing the sexy Muriel TV commercial that helped make her famous, Adams landed the “Widow” role less than a month before opening night.

Arriving home from Canada, where she had been working, she barely had walked through the door when she received a call from her agent. He told her she had an audition for the title role of Hanna Glawari--the part Ann Blyth had to give up after undergoing hip surgery.

“Hey, I can’t do it today,” Adams told him. “I’m tired; I need to sleep.”

Fighting a lingering cold, she also was in no condition to sing, operating, as she put it, “on half an engine.”

So, she tried out the next morning and was hired that night.

Adams recalled the hectic days leading up to her audition--and touched upon other highs and lows in her career and private life as well--during a breakfast at a Studio City coffee shop.

Looking as if she had just stepped out of a beauty shop (she once was in the cosmetic business and wrote a book about beauty), Adams had arrived home from rehearsal about midnight eight hours earlier. She seems to thrive on pressure.

Her trip to Canada earlier this month is an example. On Jan. 31, she flew to Canada, sang the Canadian national anthem at the professional hockey game between the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames the following night, performed in a 20-hour weekend telethon Feb. 1-2, returned home (on Mulholland Drive, above the San Fernando Valley) Feb. 3 and on Feb. 4 auditioned for producer Martin Widiott and musical director Steven Smith.

“I thought I would be humming for the conductor, doing a few oohs and aahs,” she said. “But I did scales, all kinds of things. They said they would call me, then I went home.”

Since then, she has been working “about 25 hours a day” rehearsing and trying to fulfill prior commitments.

“ ‘Merry Widow’ is very difficult,” she continued. “At Juilliard (she is a graduate of the prestigious New York music school, where she studied five years), we used to call it the soprano killer.

“It’s very controlled, no kidding around. It’s like getting up on toe shoes after doing a tap routine. Usually you have three to four months’ preparation.”

Adams, who toured in “The Merry Widow” about 20 years ago and in 1972 made her opera debut in the leading role of “La Perichole” with the Seattle Opera Company, received a Tony Award for her 1956-57 performance as Daisy Mae in the Broadway production of “Li’l Abner.”

“I always thought my fellow actors gave it to me for patience,” she said with a laugh.

“ ‘I loves ya, Abner.’ That’s all I ever said. I just stood there in that shredded outfit, bare feet and a lot of legs. It was one of the hardest roles I ever played.”

Describing her voice as suited for operettas but not operas, Adams said she had “fabulous teachers (at Juilliard) who told me to go into musical comedy.

“But the ‘60s was a time of people love, flower children, guitars and folk songs. There was not much of a call for an operetta voice.”

However, the versatile Adams has kept active over the years--nightclubs, movies, TV, stage and more recently condos in Florida, a little-known circuit that pays entertainers big bucks, “comparable to Las Vegas.”

Her private life has kept her on the run, too, having helped raise six children (two natural births) in three marriages.

Since 1977 she had been operating a 160-acre almond ranch in Bakersfield--”Edie’s nut farm,” as she liked to call it. But now, that’s history.

“I bellied up last month,” she said sadly. “What happened is what’s happening to farmers all over America. It foreclosed. We did everything right.

“I don’t know what other farmers in America who can’t sing or dance are doing. They’re the forgotten man, the most maligned. . . . They have nobody to hang onto.”

In a sense, neither does Adams. She has been separated from her third husband, trumpet player Pete Candoli (“Betty Hutton and I shared him”) since 1979. Earlier, she was married to music publisher Marty Mills.

Widowed in 1962, when comedian Ernie Kovacs died in an auto accident in Beverly Hills, Adams could scarcely talk about an even more devastating tragedy that occurred 20 years later.

In May of 1982, her 22-year-old daughter, Mia Kovacs, died from injuries suffered when the car she was driving drifted off Mulholland Drive and overturned.

Adams’ eyes immediately welled up when questioned about the accident that received little publicity at the time.

“I don’t understand it,” she said, almost unable to control her emotions. “She had exactly the same injury as Ernie’s. I try to write about it. I figure if I do, I will be done with it, but now it’s very, very hard.”

The reference was to her autobiography that she has been “desperately trying to finish.” Started in 1962, the book is titled “Coming of Age.” Once a week she attends a writers’ workshop at UCLA, where they “tear it to shreds.”

“I’m coming of age about every seven years,” she said. “It’s funny how it changes, like somebody else wrote it.”

But when it comes to revealing her age, Adams passed, bluntly.

“I will never tell anyone,” she said emphatically. “I always say I am older than Liza Minnelli and younger than Rose Kennedy.”

Last October, Adams drove from Chicago to Detroit to meet Dr. Lawrence Power, the syndicated columnist.

“I had the ‘Reagan operation’ in ‘83,” she said, “and it does get your attention. So I went to see Dr. Power after reading his column. He was absolutely brilliant. I spent a whole day at his clinic, taking tests, examinations. . . .

“He is the only medical doctor who believes it is your responsibility to know your body well enough to tell a doctor what’s wrong. I have changed my life style since talking to him.”

Adams now works out with an exercise coach, walks three miles three times a week but doesn’t jog.

Never a smoker, Adams recalled that when setting up the Muriel commercials years ago she was asked to hold a cigar, “but it didn’t look right.” So she invented a ring to hold it.

“It never actually touched my finger and never touched my lips,” she remembered, “but it looked good.”

Although no longer doing the commercial, she remains under contract to Muriel until 1994.

“I don’t do anything, but others do,” she added, citing a newspaper headline as an example: “Muriel Girl Sings Puccini. . .”

And now, they might add, “The Merry Widow.”