Disney Legend Jodi Benson needs no introduction. You know her voice, not only as Ariel in The Little Mermaid but also as Barbie in the Toy Story films. And she made a memorable on-screen cameo in Enchanted. She talks about all of these projects and the lessons she learned throughout her life and career in her autobiography, Part of My World. In honor of Jodi Benson’s birthday today, I am lucky to share an interview I recently had with her about her book, the story behind the cover, and some of the most memorable anecdotes, like that time Mickey Mouse gave her the key to Disneyland at Studio 54! You can read our full interview right here or check out the video at the bottom of this post.
Alex: Congratulations on Part of My World. Was this something you’d been waiting to do? Why is now the right time to publish your memoir?
Jodi Benson: Never in a million years did I want to write a book. So when Tyndale called me in February of 2020 before the world shut down, I said, "No, I don't have any interest of doing that. I don't want to do a memoir, an autobiography." It just felt really cheesy to me. And then they called back in March, and we went through it again, and they're like, "Well, what if we look at it as little snippets of some stories, of some experiences, and we make it more like a thank you letter, like a love letter to Disney and to Howard and to the people along my journey. Would that be more to your liking?" And I was like, "Yeah." And then my brother is an author and he said, "If one person just picks up the book and maybe reads one little story and they feel, I don't know, encouraged, or maybe they want to try something or they see the mistakes that I make and let's just try something else, let's not do what she did, then would it be worth it?" And I thought, "Yeah, I think I can look at it more in that light." But it was definitely a difficult process for me because it's not something I ever desired to do, but it's out there now, so I'm just going with the flow.
Alex: I can't remember all the details of my formative years. Did you keep journals or diaries or anything that you could look back on?
Jodi Benson: It was really hard. It was really, really hard. That was one of the most painful things was to go back in time, for positive and negative reasons, but it was very hard for me to recall. I do not have a fantastic memory. I homeschooled our kids for 17 years, so I pretty much used up all those brain cells. So everything that happened before the kids is pretty lost to me. So it was just hours upon hours and hours and months of talking for a recording and then transcribing it, so it was a very taxing process.
Alex: Was your process to write the book primarily talking and sharing your experiences and then putting pen to paper?
Jodi Benson: It was all audio. Yeah, no pen to paper. No, it was all audio. That's why it sounds like me. I just wanted it to sound like me, and I definitely didn't want it to sound like I had all this great wisdom to share and got all this great information. I just wanted to be more vulnerable and kind of authentic. And you get what you get, and it's messy. And if it's a little bit encouraging to you, then that's awesome.
Alex: Is the audiobook version your original recording sessions, or did you have to go back and re-record it afterward?
Jodi Benson: I had to go back in and create an audiobook, which was really hard. It was really hard. It was very emotional. It was five very long days of a recording session, but I needed to do the audiobook for people. Obviously, when you're traveling and stuff, holding a piece of paper and your hand is hard, especially nowadays. So the audiobook just made the most sense. And I had to approach the audiobook not as a professional voiceover artist, but as just a real human being where there's a lot of mistakes in it. And I stumble on some words, and I laughed through some words. I cried through some words. So tried to just make it real without correcting it as a VO artist,
Alex: The chapter titles are brilliant. You pull from lyrics not only from The Little Mermaid but from other places in your life and career. I know with an audiobook, getting the rights to melodies can be tough. Did you have to speak the lyrics or were you allowed to sing in the audiobook?
Jodi Benson: Yes, we did have to obviously go through licensing and everything for everything that has to do with the book. Tyndale has a huge legal department that they put that through. But yeah, when it came to the audiobook, I do speak through the lyrics. We chose to do that rather than just singing. I think there may have been a couple of moments that we were thinking about maybe singing a line or two if it felt like that was necessary for the book. So yeah, we definitely had to be careful with all of that and do it the right way.
Alex: How did you settle on which stories you would tell and the title of each chapter?
Jodi Benson: We talked about it right at the beginning once we kind of decided that we weren't doing this chronological order, that we were doing little snippets and little stories so that you could kind pick up the book, just read little one chapter and then put it down. And you don't have to stick through it, and the other chapter doesn't have to affect this chapter, that type of thing. So right at the beginning is when we came up with, "Gee, how do we figure this out?" And so the lyrics just made sense. It just tied it all up, and I felt like it made a great connection.
Alex: One of my favorite stories as a Disney fan was when you talk about Mickey Mouse being in Studio 54. When you look back on it now, does it feel like a premonition that Mickey Mouse was there at your after-party for Smile and then you’d later play such a big role at Disney?
Jodi Benson: Yeah, absolutely. It does. It feels like a full circle. Just from when I think about Howard and Marvin writing Disneyland for me, and then Howard getting hired by Disney and all the powers that be, and the executives coming to see his work in Smile and coming backstage to talk to me because of the song obviously. And then the show Closing tragically and Howard feeling sorry for us and giving a handful of us girls the opportunity as a consolation prize to audition, but never being considered for the movie at all. So just to see all of that and to have opening night be of Smile right before the review came out and killed the show, of which the party completely disbanded at that moment. But to have Mickey Mouse there and giving me the keys to the kingdom that are in my hallway here in the house, and I kind of look through the whole line of it, it's pretty crazy. It's a pretty crazy journey to see how all those pieces of the puzzle were put together.
Alex: Critic Frank Rich comes up quite a few times in the book as somewhat of a dark cloud over your Broadway shows. Have you ever met Frank? Do you think he realizes how much power he had over so many people's lives?
Jodi Benson: I'm sure he did. I'm sure he did. I have seen him in the theater before, but I don't believe I personally went up to him and had a conversation or met him or anything like that. But yeah, he single-handedly killed my three Broadway shows before Crazy for You. So hey. Yeah, the power of the pen. But hey, he had a right to write those reviews. Were they correct? I don't know. Sometimes you have the people's opinion, and then you have a critic's opinion. I think nowadays we have the opportunity to have both. You can have shows that maybe don't get great reviews, but the people love it. And the tickets are selling. And that's really all that the bottom line is, are they selling tickets? And I think with having Frank Rich destroy Smile so quickly, and it was the holiday time, I just don't think they could have rallied enough to try to figure out, how do we promote this to get where the people like it. So just one of those things.
Alex: Now the power of the pen is in your hand, and one of the things that you so beautifully do in the book is share gratitude for the people who have helped guide you along the way, such as Howard Ashman and your former vocal coach. Did you have conversations with those who are still alive about this book as you were writing it?
Jodi Benson: I did contact my vocal coach, Steve. Because I said, I have a pretty nice chapter about our time together and how much of a launching point that was for me in my career and what a huge support he was for me in making the decision to leave in the middle of a semester to start working professionally. So there are several people that I did talk to that are still alive and with us, and of course my important people at Disney. My boss, Rick Dempsey, he read the book, and he was kind of my liaison for the company just to make sure I had stories right. And of course, I prefaced right at the beginning of the author's note that I never wanted to write a book, and also that I probably recalled some things in a distorted way and they're probably not accurate, but give me some grace. And I did the best I could. So it's not like I'm saying the be-all, end-all, my word is the final word. It's just an interpretation of my stories, of different experiences that I went through. And like you said, it came from a spirit of gratitude, wanting to shine the light on various people. So I think I had about 65 stories, so we had to narrow it down to about 24, 25. That was hard to decide what stays, what goes, but we tried to cross the threshold of blending Disney and Broadway and family and homeschooling and physical health. We tried to make it an even feel across the field of the various stories.
Alex: You're very honest in the book about personal struggles that you've had, while not giving away everything. I felt like you still retain some sense of privacy.
Jodi Benson: Right. Yeah. I didn't want it to be airing dirty laundry. And my goal was that everyone could pick up the book and not feel excluded and that anyone could pick up the book and not feel hurt. Those were my two caveats. So I'm sorry. Go ahead with your question.
Alex: In particular, you're very honest about the time that you and Ray had apart and what that was like. Did you let your husband read it? I imagine that was very personal.
Jodi Benson: Very personal. We had to decide, and of course the kids, that was a portion of our lives that the kids didn't really know about. They're 21 and 23. So I said, "You're going to have some questions and we're here for that." But it's not like we kept our life a secret. It just depended on the timeframe that we felt like was the right time to share it with them.
Alex: We recently lost Pat Carroll, the voice of Ursula, and we’ve lost many other voices from The Little Mermaid, including Sam E. Wright (Sebastian) and Rene Auberjonois (Chef Louis). Did you get to know any of them particularly well over the years?
Jodi Benson: Sam and I did a failed Broadway show together while we were doing Mermaid. And so we had that extra connection. And then Sam and Rene and I did publicity circuits every seven years when we would re-release the film and take it out of the vault and we would do the press tours again. So we got to do those together. Pat and I physically together did the opening of both of the parks of our attractions for The Little Mermaid attraction. And then she was supposed to come in person to D23 August 2019 when I hosted our 30th anniversary. But unfortunately, both she and Sam were unable to make the trip, but she joined us virtually, which was really great. So yeah, she had an amazing life, an amazing career, an amazing family. I think she had an incredible journey for her life, and we miss her so much, but grateful that she's had such a full life,
Alex: I was at that panel, it was wonderful. I really enjoyed that.
Jodi Benson: It was a lot of fun.
Alex: They say never judge a book by its cover but I do want to talk about your cover because it really reminds me of the “Part Of Your World” music video you made for the 10th anniversary of the film. You were walking along a beach in a flowy dress and it’s very reminiscent of this cover. Did you feel it all like you were reliving that shoot?
Jodi Benson: Yeah, just a little bit. Well, the way that this cover came up is we tossed it around with my family and with Tyndale back and forth and back and forth. The title and the cover took us forever to come up with. And my family and I did not want Part of My World. We were going for something a little less obvious, but Tyndale … You have 1.2 seconds to choose a book, whether it's online or in person. And we felt like we needed to defer to their creative team that deals with book sales professionally, because that's their job is to sell the book. It's not my job to sell the book, it's their job. And whether it sells or not doesn't affect me. It affects them. So we let them decide on Part of My World. That was hard for our family to let that go because we really wanted to stay away from that title, but that was a deal breaker for … I mean, that was really important for Tyndale. Then when it came to the cover, once we had that, I said, "Well, I think I'm okay." At first, we were battling about the beach, and it was going to be rocks, and it was going to … I'm like, "We don't want it spot-on." But then as a family, we were like, "You know what, as long as it's going to be Part of My World and we're going to work this little fin into the Y, and I think we should do the water." Well, we're shooting at Palm Beach, the island of Palm Beach, where we've had a little condo for 36 years. So that's our beach that we've been to and brought the children to since they were born. And my son, our son is a filmmaker, and our daughter-in-law is a professional fashion photographer for Stitch Fix. So the kids did the shoot, they designed it, picked wardrobe, styling, lighting, and they did the whole shoot with Tyndale. We had a Tyndale team, but it was really my son and my daughter-in-law that ran the whole session. And so we shot over the course of two sunrises and two sunsets, and we had a lot of fun. So because it's the kids' design, they designed the whole cover, they did the font, they did the coloring, everything. Since it's the kids that did it, it's extra special to me.
Alex: That's awesome. I wasn't expecting it to be so much content in that answer, so thank you. Are you able to say what your intended title of the memoir was?
Jodi Benson: We were going back and forth. We had thought about something along the terms of just a one single word, like an uncharted type of thing. But there were so many books that had that title. We had talked about something to do with voice. I don't know, voice was going to just be a single word or my voice, or just something that had nothing to do with the title is kind of where we as a family were leaning towards. But Tyndale was really punching up, like "Treasures Untold," anything that they could grab from a lyric. And then they finally just came out and said, "You know what? We only have this 1.2 seconds. We have got to get the title. We've got to deal with that." So we just switched it up to Part of My World, and I'm living with it. Like I said, it wasn't our first choice, but I think it makes the most sense.
Alex: I will say the title stands out, the cover stands out, and I think it tells people right away in that 1.2 seconds what this is, who you are, and why they should open this up.
Jodi Benson: Yeah.
Alex: What else is on the horizon for you? I know there's a live-action version of The Little Mermaid, the Enchanted sequel Disenchanted, and as the voice of Barbie, it feels only fitting that you appear somewhere in the movie being made. Are you able to talk about anything?
Jodi Benson: No, I'm not involved on camera with Mermaid or Disenchanted, but I am involved with press and publicity around it. So I'll be heading to D23. I'm doing I think six or seven different events for the company in support of various projects and special events and that kind of stuff. And then between Disneyland and Disney World, I do a lot of corporate events. And then I christen our ships and do our maiden voyages. So we just did that whole cycle of the Wish, which was amazing. And I do a lot of corporate concerts for our cruise line as well, which I love, they're so much fun, symphony concerts and cabaret concerts, but then I do conventions. So I have a pretty hefty upcoming convention schedule in person now since we lost those 18 months that we're kind of playing catch up. So there'll be a lot of that coming up for the rest of this year into 2023.
Alex: That all sounds really exciting. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And congratulations again on the launch of your book.
Jodi Benson: Thank you so much. You're so sweet.
You can celebrate Jodi Benson’s birthday by picking up your copy of Part of My World today.
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