Wyatt’s World: Slideshow 
Music
Magic Johnson
She may be a brassy innkeeper from Amarillo, but when Mary Jane Johnson takes the stage with Pavarotti, opera fans everywhere are enchanted.
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But while Mary Jane scores as Minnie, Fanciulla has never sold well in the U.S. “I think in part we are too familiar with the Wild West image,” Patrick Smith suggests. Johnson, for one, didn’t anticipate that her pure-dee swagger would impinge on her ability to sell herself. “I am down to earth,” she says, “but I also approach my craft very seriously and very artistically.” Her frustration is understandable when you realize that her schedule is overrun with Salomes, Turandots, and Lady Macbeths, yet Smith says he knows her only as Minnie (“What else she has done I’m a little hazy on”).
Born to Maxine and Rex Rose, a well-to-do Pampa car dealer, Mary Jane enjoyed an idyllic childhood that prepared her for the stage. For ten years she studied ballet and, in the summer, attended camp in the Ozarks, where she was “always the lead in the play, always princess of the tribe.” She sometimes went to church with the family’s maid, Winnie Dee, where, she recalls, “I was the only white kid in the congregation. They said, ‘Anybody who wants to sing today?’ And Winnie Dee said, ‘My girl does here’ and shoved me up there.” (Johnson’s PBS documentary is dedicated to Winnie Dee.)
The classic popular blonde, Mary Jane was a cheerleader at Pampa High School and a finalist in the Miss Lubbock contest. As a music major at Texas Tech, she sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Red Raider basketball games and fell in love with David, who played forward. They married in 1971 and eventually settled in Amarillo, where they had a daughter, Taylor, in 1977 (a son, Greer, followed in 1984), and David became vice president of operations for the Amarillo area’s 65 Toot ’n Totum convenience stores, a position he still holds. While earning a master’s degree in performance at West Texas State University, Mary Jane progressed from mezzo-soprano to soprano and hit her first high C. She also directed the opera workshop and taught at Amarillo College, frequently taking her students to the Sante Fe Opera, where she started thinking, “Well, now. I want to do that.”
Sometime before age thirty, when her eligibility would have run out, Johnson entered the Metropolitan Opera Auditions for Young Singers’ regional competition in El Paso and won, though she didn’t make it to the last cut of the national finals. Undaunted, she persuaded the Amarillo National Bank to give her a $25,000 loan to pack up her three-year-old daughter and study in New York for a year. “We didn’t have a computer purpose code for opera,” recalls the bank’s president, Richard Ware. “But she had addressed all the practical aspects that appeal to a banker, down to the child care. There was no doubt in her mind.”
After a year of intensive training in New York, she entered Pavarotti’s first International Voice Competition in Philadelphia in 1981 along with more than 500 singers from 33 countries. Though she offended the other judges by singing a German selection in the maestro’s presence, Pavarotti insisted on selecting her as one of the sixteen winners. “He knew I was an important voice,” Johnson says. In fact, Pavarotti devotes a couple of paragraphs to Johnson in his 1995 autobiography, My World. “Mary Jane had a wonderful voice,” he writes, “typical of the kind of people we hope to find.”
Pavarotti hasn’t always approved of the roles Mary Jane has chosen, preferring the repertory of famed coloratura Joan Sutherland. “But my voice was always heavier,” Johnson says. Just last year in Canada, where she was performing the lung-busting Turandot, Pavarotti scolded her. Johnson recalls the conversation: “‘Now, Luciano,’ I said, ‘Sutherland did Turandot.’ ‘She never did it onstage!’ I was just very calming, very pat-pat-pat, very stroke-stroke-stroke. We’re dealing with an ego here.”
Building her repertory with longevity in mind, she started with lighter Italian pieces and progressed gingerly to the heavier Puccini, eventually assaying the German composer Richard Strauss and even Wagner (his airiest piece, The Flying Dutchman). Today, she’s eager to do Wagner’s Tannhäuser, which would open the door to the Brünnhilde roles in his grueling Ring Cycle. “The key to Wagner is endurance,” she says. “Can you last all night singing? When I finish singing a role, I’m very proud that I can resing it that same night. You see, I’ve got a strong throat. I think I could do the Brünnhildes.” If she indeed pulled that off, she’d be in high demand, for few sopranos can manage the role. What’s more, since only the bigger houses can afford to mount the Ring Cycle, she’d be working where she wants to.
But even if that never happens, Johnson is determined to get her due. She recently hired a publicist, a move she has shunned for years. “I had to bite the bullet,” she says, acknowledging that these days a serious singer needs someone to oil the machinery, make the contacts, get the name out. And she realizes she has to watch her own tongue. She recalls being in Chile to play Strauss’ Salome, for which she does the famous seven-and-a-half-minute “Dance of the Seven Veils.” Because the body stocking she was given to wear—to suggest nudity—was so tacky, she did the dance topless on opening night. The director, having watched her dance fully clothed during rehearsal, came into her dressing room afterward. “He said, ‘That was beautiful! Why didn’t you do that during dress rehearsals?’ And I said, ‘You have to pay for tits.’ He looked at me and then started laughing, but for a minute there, I thought he wasn’t going to. I guess I wasn’t that offensive, because he hired me back for two more years.”
She laughs in her warm, throaty way, then sighs. She knows she’s going to have to start behaving herself. “I should have said, ‘Well, you have to pay to see bosoms.’”
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