Helen Reddy

Did You Know?

• Reddy met her second husband, Jeff Wald, at a party thrown by an Australian stage hypnotist to help her pay rent; Wald crashed the party without paying the $5 admission.
• In 2011, Billboard named her the number-28 adult contemporary artist of all time (the number-9 woman).

Early years

Helen Maxine Reddy was born into a well-known Australian showbusiness family in Melbourne. Her mother, Stella Campbell (née Lamond), was an actress, singer and dancer; her father, Maxwell David Reddy, was a writer, producer and actor. She was educated at Tintern Grammar and later Stratherne Girls' School in Hawthorn, mostly to study drama. Her half-sister Toni Lamond and nephew Tony Sheldon are actor-singers.

Reddy had Irish, Scottish and English ancestry; her great-great-grandfather Edward Reddy was born in Dublin in 1855, and her Scottish great-grandfather Thomas Lamond was a one-time mayor of Waterloo, New South Wales. Patsy Reddy, a former New Zealand governor-general, is a distant cousin. Born during World War II, her father was a sergeant in the Australian Army with a unit of entertainers, serving in New Guinea at the time of her birth; he returned to service during the Korean War.

At age four, she joined her parents on the Australian vaudeville circuit, singing and dancing. At age 12, due to her parents' constant touring and arguing, she went to live with her paternal aunt, Helen "Nell" Reddy, who became her role model. Her teenage rebellion in favour of domesticity manifested as marriage to Kenneth Claude Weate, a considerably older musician; after divorce, she supported herself as a single mother to daughter Traci by resuming her performing career, concentrating on singing after having a kidney removed at 17.

She sang on radio and television, eventually winning a talent contest on the Australian pop music TV show Bandstand; the prize was a trip to New York City to cut a single for Mercury Records.

Music career

Reddy recalled her 1966 appearance at the Three Rivers Inn in Syracuse, New York—'there were like twelve people in the audience'—as typical of her early US performing career. Her lack of a work permit made it difficult to obtain singing jobs, forcing trips to Canada. In 1968, Martin St James, an Australian stage hypnotist, threw a party with an admission price to help Reddy pay her rent; there she met her future manager and husband, Jeff Wald. Wald recalled they married three days after meeting and, with daughter Traci, took up residence at the Hotel Albert in Greenwich Village.

Reddy stated she married Wald 'out of desperation over her right to work and live in the United States'. They moved to Chicago, where Wald landed a job as talent coordinator at Mister Kelly's; Reddy gained a reputation singing in local lounges. In 1968 she landed a deal with Fontana Records, a division of Mercury Records. Her first single, 'One Way Ticket', peaked at number 83 in Australia.

Within a year, Wald moved Reddy and Traci to Los Angeles, where he was hired and fired the same day at Capitol Records, the label under which Reddy was to attain stardom. In 1969, Reddy enrolled at UCLA to study psychology and philosophy part-time. After 18 months of career inactivity, she gave Wald an ultimatum; he then made five months of phone calls to Capitol executive Artie Mogull, who agreed to let her cut one single. She did 'I Believe in Music' backed with 'I Don't Know How to Love Him'; the A-side fell flat, but Canadian DJs flipped the record and it became a hit—number 13 in June 1971.

Her stardom was consolidated when 'I Am Woman' reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1972. The song was co-written by Reddy with Ray Burton; she attributed the impetus to expatriate Australian rock critic and pioneer feminist Lillian Roxon.

Film, theatre and television

Reddy was the first Australian to host a one-hour weekly primetime variety show on an American network, along with specials seen in more than 40 countries. Her film career included a starring role in Walt Disney's Pete's Dragon, introducing the Oscar-nominated song 'Candle on the Water', and the role of a nun in Airport 1975, singing her own composition 'Best Friend'. She appeared in the all-star chorale in Sgt. She guest-starred on The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, The Jeffersons, Diagnosis: Murder and BeastMaster. In the mid-1980s she began working in theatre, including Anything Goes, Call Me Madam, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Blood Brothers on Broadway and the West End. She also appeared in four productions of the one-woman show Shirley Valentine.

Personal life

Reddy became a naturalised American citizen in 1974, later resuming Australian citizenship when dual citizenship became available. In the 1970s she helped raise millions of dollars for Democratic political candidates. Three of her forebears left Ireland for Canada, Australia and New Zealand; a distant cousin, former New Zealand governor-general Patsy Reddy, is descended from their mutual New Zealand forebear. Reddy was an enthusiastic genealogist, founding the Tasmanian Genealogical Society.

When asked whether her name had any connection to the Reddy caste from India, she said it was possible she had Indian ancestry but it had not been established. At age 20 she married Kenneth Claude Weate, an older musician, to defy her parents; they separated not long after the birth of their daughter Traci. In 1968 she married Jeff Wald, converting to Judaism before the wedding; they had a son, Jordan, born in 1972.