In celebration of Cherie Mason: an exemplar of
the Opera House mission to use the performing arts to create excellence in all
the ways we perform our lives
Part III of a 4-part series on the life and
distinguished career of Cherie Mason, based on a 2016 interview with Judith
Jerome, founding co-artistic director of Opera House Arts.
Cherie and Ken Mason had met at the Ludgin Agency. Just look at
the two of them; how could they not fall in love and marry? That they were married ad execs (and both also artists) posed no career problems in the beginning. But then Ken
made a decision as seemingly contrary to his advertising career as Cherie’s had seemed to
her theater dreams when she went into advertising. He joined Quaker Oats, in a non-advertising
position, and in a very short time became the first non-family president and
CEO of the company. Then there was a conflict of interest. At McCann Erickson
Cherie was on the General Mills account—a competitor of Quaker Oats. Ad
campaigns for new programs and products were top secret, so she, not unhappily, stepped down from her job.
Cherie doesn’t say that she was tired or disillusioned with
advertising, but surely the field didn’t glow with the same edge of newness
that it had once had. “So I said, now I’m going to go full circle, back to
where I started. And since we don’t need the money, necessarily, I’m going to
see if I can get a job acting.” In advertising Cherie regularly held auditions
for commercials and hired actors, so the agents in Chicago all knew her. “I
asked one of the top ones—am I crazy? Tell me if you think I shouldn’t do
this—but I’d really like to take a fling. She said, ‘Cherie—you’ll be great’. So—I
did it!”
Cherie got work at once, in both radio and television, and shortly
got her SAG-AFTRA card. She did voiceovers, and lip-synching, including a
series of 'the beautiful girl in the bathtub' commercials. [Perhaps this was
the Calgon woman—‘Calgon, take me away?’ Cherie can’t remember now.] “And I did
a lot of animated work. I love doing animals and funny voices. I love comedy.
In fact, I really think of myself as a comedian.” Like her old heroes, Paul
Lynd, Cloris Leachman, and Charlotte Rae. Indeed, even in the most serious role,
Cherie can subtly, suddenly, elicit a welcome burst of audience laughter.
She also did a great deal of work for Public Television in
Chicago, WTTW, fundraising and otherwise. That’s when she got her first contact
lenses. It was the beginning of the use of cue cards, and her glasses reflected
the studio lights.
The only live theater she did in those years was a play for
the National Theater of the Deaf. “The one speaking part was to be played by
the wonderful comedienne, Nanette Fabray.” Fabray herself had a hearing
impairment and did a lot of work with the deaf, including narrating NTD’s first
show, an “NBC Experiment in Television,” titled The Cube. But for this later play, Fabray fell ill. The producers
called Cherie, who took it on with relish.
But Cherie couldn’t have just this one line of work. “With
the extreme energy that I was born with, I had to have something in-between. So
I became a representative for Defenders of Wildlife.” Here her use of
performance and persuasion took a new turn, which involved a great deal of
public speaking. “Oh yes. Oh my. Speaking to the bear hunters of Wisconsin at
their annual meeting,” for example. “I gave my talk about how the bears were
more valuable to them live than dead, for tourist reasons—and I was absolutely
shunned at the coffee break. No one would stand near me. But this was par for
the course. Later a man brushed by me, and said, ‘You make a lot sense, lady.’
It made the whole trip worthwhile.
“One of the great problems in wildlife protection is the use
of the steel jaw leghold trap; it’s not used as widely as it once was because
the wearing of fur is not as important as it once was. But I was on my way to a
speaking engagement in Springfield, Illinois—and at the Chicago airport something
jammed the conveyor belt, and it stopped suddenly. All the alarm bells went
off.” The box in which Cherie had packed the demo traps broke open and steel
jaw leghold traps spilled out all over. “And they came from everywhere, the
police. And here I am with my traps. And so—I held the traps up. There was a
woman who happened to be standing near in a fur coat, and I pulled her into it:
Lady, this is where you fur coat comes from. Well, they hauled me away, made me
stop. But not until I got a few good words in.”
 |
| On Pine Island |
Meantime,“Ken was finishing a book he was working on, and he
wanted ‘time to think,’ as he always said. I could do wildlife work from
wherever I was. And we were both tired. We had worked very hard all our lives,
and we wanted to go now and do something that we just wanted to do. Looking
back on it, it was probably foolish and intemperate: We moved to an isolated
island in a lake in Minnesota, about 30 miles south of the Canadian border,
with no electricity, nothing.” They had bought Pine Island some years before,
as a vacation retreat, but now they moved on to the island fulltime. Transport
to the mainland in in summer was by boat and in winter was by snowmobile. “We
brought three enormous rafts over, with everything we owned—so when we had this
unexpected fire, we lost everything—that was a lesson in life.” [And another
story for another time.]
In Maine Cherie sat on the boards of the Maine Department of
Inland Fisheries and Wildlife for 5 years, and on the Maine chapter of The
Nature Conservancy. It was she who initiated, later with the support of the
Sierra Club, the successful efforts to establish the Rachel Carson Wildlife
Refuge in Wells, ME, winning a $900,000 federal grant to preserve the wetland.
Over the years she gave talks on Rachel Carson all over the state. Between
times she wrote two revered books for young people: Wild Fox and Everybody’s
Somebody’s Lunch, and recorded an audio version of Wild Fox.
Locally, Cherie, with Dud Hendrik and Lloyd Capin founded
Island Heritage Trust, now in its 30th year. She worked on the
Conservation Commission, and for fourteen years had a regular radio show on
WERU. In the beginning it was called “The Environmental Notebook,” but as
consciousness of environmental issues built, she shifted her focus to where she
felt there was the most need, and changed the name of the show to “The Wildlife
Journal.”
Cherie’s environmental work was honored in 1993 when she was
awarded the Tambrands Environmental Women of Action award in Washington DC. And
in 1999 Unity College presented Cherie
Lee Mason an honorary doctorate of humane letters.
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