In the spring of 1971, one of the most unlikely hits in America belonged to an Australian nightclub singer most of the country had never heard of. Helen Reddy had arrived in the United States in 1966 with a small daughter, very little money and a show-business pedigree — her parents were vaudeville performers back home — that counted for nothing in New York. A 1968 single for Fontana, One Way Ticket, had reached No. 83 in Australia and gone nowhere in America. For five years she had sung wherever she could: bars, weddings, Catskills resorts, a Montreal nightclub that barely covered her bus fare. Her entire American future now rested on a one-off single deal with Capitol Records, and on the song she cared about least on that single: a ballad from a controversial new rock opera, written for Mary Magdalene. She had not wanted to record it. The singer Capitol asked first had actively hated it. It became her first hit, and the reason she had a career at all.
A Melody in Search of a Lyric
The tune itself had been waiting around for years. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s melody was first published in the autumn of 1967 with an entirely different set of words, as a song called Kansas Morning; its main theme has even drawn comparisons to a theme in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. In December 1969 and January 1970, as Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice completed their rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, Rice fitted the old melody with a new lyric to give Mary Magdalene her solo moment — the pair’s agent David Land had to buy the rights to Kansas Morning back from the publisher Southern Music for the princely sum of £50.
Yvonne Elliman, cast as Mary Magdalene on the original concept album, was initially puzzled by the romantic lyric: she had assumed the Mary she was playing was the mother of Jesus. She recorded the song in a single take at Olympic Studios in June 1970, and when the Jesus Christ Superstar album appeared that September, her performance was widely judged its high point. The Rough Guide to Cult Pop later wrote that it is rare to hear a singer combine such power and purity of tone in one song, and that none of the famous singers who covered the ballad afterwards came close. The album around it became a phenomenon in its own right, spending the better part of two years on the American charts and three weeks at No. 1 in 1971, despite — or partly because of — the controversy its rock-and-roll treatment of the Passion stirred up. Elliman’s identification with the role became total: she played Mary Magdalene in the original Broadway production, which opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on 12 October 1971, and again in Norman Jewison’s 1973 film. Yet when the album’s first single was chosen, the nod went to Superstar, sung by Murray Head. Mary Magdalene’s ballad sat on the album, admired and unissued — although an eager Karen Wyman cut a single version for MCA/Decca as early as November 1970, which bubbled under to No. 101 in Record World, and a group called the Kimberlys even took a medley of the song with Everything’s Alright to No. 99 on the Hot 100 in March 1971.
The Song Linda Ronstadt Called Terrible
Capitol Records executive Artie Mogull heard something the others had missed: he was convinced the Elliman track was a smash waiting for the right single. His first pitch went to Linda Ronstadt, then on Capitol’s roster, who sent it back with a verdict for the ages — she hated the song; she thought it was terrible. Mogull turned instead to Reddy, for two converging reasons. He had caught her on The Tonight Show on a night when guest host Flip Wilson, an old friend from the club circuit, had booked her. And for five months her husband and manager Jeff Wald had been calling Mogull three times a day, asking him to let Reddy cut a record — Australian accounts of the siege add that when Mogull finally relented, his condition was that Wald not call him for a month. The deal Mogull offered was modest to the point of cruelty: one single, take it or leave it.
Reddy took it — but her heart was set on the other side. The song she actually wanted to record was Mac Davis’s I Believe in Music, and she agreed to cut the Lloyd Webber ballad only so that it could serve as the flipside. Producer Larry Marks recorded both songs at A&M Studios, and there the plan quietly inverted itself. Reddy, by her own account, was paralysed by nerves: “I had waited years for this shot and I didn’t think there would be another one.” Her anxiety stiffened the performance of I Believe in Music into ineffectuality, but it made I Don’t Know How to Love Him sound convincingly plaintive — a woman genuinely unsure how to feel. That reading clinched the decision to make the ballad the A-side. The single was released in January 1971.
A Slow Climb, a Stack of Phone Bills and a Chart Duel
Nothing about the record’s rise was quick. It found its first foothold at WDRC in Hartford, Connecticut, where listener requests began to build — some of them, Reddy cheerfully admitted, originating in Los Angeles: her visiting teenage nephew, an Australian actor with a gift for voices, had been phoning in requests, as had a number of her friends. “I may have made a call or two myself,” she confessed. Behind the scenes, Wald was working the record like a man possessed. A 1974 Billboard tribute, written by Cynthia Spector, described how he stayed on the phone morning to night, “cajoling, bullying, wheedling airplay from disk jockeys”, spending $4,000 of his own money — his own telephone credit card, his American Express card — to wine and dine anyone who would listen to his wife.
The single crept onto the Hot 100 at No. 99 in late February 1971 and climbed for months — twenty weeks on the chart in all, five of them inside the Top 20 — breaking into regional Top Tens in Dallas and Denver in March but not reaching the national Top 40 until May. Success triggered a remarkable complication: MCA Records now rushed out Yvonne Elliman’s original album track as a competing single. From 15 May to 26 June 1971, two versions of the same brand-new song sat in the American Top 40 at once. Reddy’s held the upper hand throughout, peaking at No. 13 for three weeks from 5 June; Elliman’s stalled at No. 28. Reddy’s record also reached No. 12 on the Easy Listening chart. In her native Australia the single was a sensation: No. 2 on the Go-Set chart for two weeks in August 1971, and ultimately the country’s No. 8 hit of the entire year. Europe followed in the wake of the stage show — No. 14 in Sweden in March 1972, where the Stockholm production of Jesus Christ Superstar had just begun a record-setting run, and No. 23 in the Netherlands that April.
The Door It Opened
The consequences were immediate and total. Capitol tore up the one-off arrangement and signed Reddy to a long-term contract, releasing her debut album, I Don’t Know How to Love Him, in August 1971971. The album peaked at a modest No. 100 and her follow-up single, a version of Van Morrison’s Crazy Love, stalled at No. 51 — but the LP quietly contained the first arrangement of a song she had co-written called I Am Woman, which in a 1972 re-recording would top the Hot 100 and make her a star outright. The debut album itself was certified Gold in 1974, carried there by the career the ballad had started.
The song, meanwhile, went on travelling without her. It reached No. 1 in Ireland in December 1971 in a version by Tina and Real McCoy. Britain staged its own free-for-all in early 1972, when Petula Clark’s recording (No. 42, her last UK chart appearance for sixteen years) competed with Elliman’s, belatedly issued as a double A-side with Superstar (No. 47). Tim Rice himself declared Cilla Black’s 1972 recording “the definitive version”. Peggy Lee recorded it in 1971; Elaine Paige and Sarah Brightman carried it into the theatre-songbook repertoire; Sinéad O’Connor included it on her 2007 album Theology; Melanie C sang it as Mary Magdalene on the Jesus Christ Superstar arena tour of 2012; and it has turned up everywhere from Glee to talent-show finals, the perennial test of a singer who wants to prove she can act a song as well as sing it. None of that diminished what Reddy’s record had accomplished. Reddy never did learn to love the circumstances of its making — the nerves, the phone bills, the one-off deal that felt like a last chance. But the song she didn’t want, cut in a single anxious session as somebody else’s B-side, turned out to be the door her whole career walked through.