corky hale's story

Background

"I was playing with a band when I was seven years old."

If this vivacious, generous, straight-ahead musical dynamo, were to have a motto, it has to be:

"I always knew what I wanted to do."

She's been playing the piano since the age of three. At seven, she began classical piano studies at the Chicago Conservatory. While there, she was fascinated with the sounds of a teacher playing the harp, so she told her father that she too wanted to play the harp. Presto -- the next year she was playing the harp. Heady stuff for little Merrilyn Hecht from a little farm town in northern Illinois.

Her family were not farmers, but owners of Hecht's, a clothing store chain still in business. She grew up in a spacious house with her brother and two doting parents. Summers were spent at camp, where Merrilyn got the nickname, "Corky". Icy Illinois winters were relieved by annual trips to Florida, which is where her professional career began.

One year, while the family was vacationing in Florida, their hotel featured the Horace Heidt Orchestra. In the lobby, seven year-old Corky was noodling, "Over The Rainbow" on the piano, when Heidt came by and said, "Gee, kid, that's pretty good. I'd like to feature you at night with the band. Let's get you a little jacket like the boys in the band."

"That was my first job. I got the show biz bug at seven."

Corky stepped into the world of professional music and never left. Her parents were not thrilled, looking forward to a more traditional life for their little girl, but Corky knew this would be her career. Besides her classical studies, she learned to love show tunes and standards, but never embraced the country music played on the hometown radio stations. And then she heard the jazz sounds of Stan Kenton.

"That knocked me out. In high school I was listening to Stan Kenton and Woody Herman."

Her favorite music still tends toward jazz, American standards, Jerome Kern, the sounds of Brazil but not Hawaii, and still not country-western.

When Corky was 16, her parents sent her to Stephens College, a school for young ladies, where she spent her last year of high school. Stephens was in the same town as the University of Missouri, and Corky, proficient in piano and harp, quickly met some members of the University band and played piano and harp with them. This did not go over very well with her music teacher, who didn't approve of her playing jazz on the harp. At the end of the year, incredibly, the teacher failed Corky in harp.

"An F in harp, and I got an A in anthropology. It put me a half-point from graduating. My parents ran down from Illinois, and finally (the teacher) raised me to a D+, and I was able to graduate."

After graduation, Corky announced to her parents that she was moving to Hollywood to be a musician. Her father's response was to send her to University of Wisconsin, very close to home. Corky's response was to keep her "show biz bug" alive. While playing piano on campus, the owner of a liquor store heard her music.

"He offered me my own weekly radio show sponsored by the liquor store. I was known back then as Merrilyn Hecht."

Still, Merrilyn Hecht knew where her destiny lay and after her freshman year, she announced that now she was definitely going to Hollywood. A compromise was reached: Her parents would drive her to Los Angeles and enroll her at UCLA. She would live in the sorority house and go to school.

Life as a student lasted only a few weeks. One of her friends told her that she'd never heard anyone play the harp quite like Corky did.

"What I do is play the harp like a piano because basically, I am a piano player."

The friend wanted to introduce Corky to her father, producer of the Freddie Martin Television Show. Corky was all in favor of that, and she got some fraternity boys to help her load her harp on a little truck, and they drove down to the television station where Corky performed for the station.

"I tapped on the sounding board of the harp -- I don't think anyone ever heard that before, and I played "Jealousy." And I was signed...

So that was the end of school."

Meanwhile, back home in Illinois---

"My parents thought I was working very hard at UCLA and living in the sorority house."

-Elizabeth Ahlfors

Corky's career continues -- read on

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