A story of celebrity and of love at last reclaimed

MODESTO, Calif. - She waits on the sidewalk as he parks the car down the street and, by and by, he toddles up, hooks his arm in hers and purrs, "Come on, Tootsie, let's get something to eat."

The lovebirds walk slowly around the corner and into Galletto Ristorante, where the waitstaff and diners pay no mind to the elderly woman hanging onto her slightly older husband.

But then, Modesto isn't where most people expect to see Carol Channing.

The Broadway legend, best known for her 1960s Tony Award-winning performance in Hello, Dolly!, lives here now. It's a far cry from the glamorous life of greasepaint, curtain calls and sparkly gowns.

"Harry is here - it's all Harry," Channing says by way of explaining, in that so-familiar girlish voice, why she's in Modesto. "The house looks like Harry. It's like living on the inside of Harry."

The love story of Carol and Harry is remarkable: They were childhood sweethearts who parted ways and lost touch for 70 years - until surprising circumstances brought them back together. On May 10, 2003, Channing married Harry Kullijian, her fourth husband.

She's now 88; he's 89. She is recovering from a broken hip and elbow, and a knee replacement. But as she says, "The show must go on. Performers never feel pain."

Instead of whiling away their golden years here and at their second home in Palm Springs, the couple three years ago created a foundation dedicated to putting arts education back into public schools.

To that end, Channing will tread the boards in Sacramento tonight in Carol Channing & Friends: A Benefit for the Arts. She'll sing some of her Broadway standards and talk about her life and the famous people she's known. Joining her will be comedian Jo Anne Worley (Laugh-In), Broadway actress Carole Cook, and singer Joyce Aimee.

Proceeds from the benefit will go to the Carol Channing & Harry Kullijian Foundation for the Arts and Sacramento's California Musical Theatre.

Channing and Kullijian, who started the foundation with a quarter-million dollars of their own money, intend to go beyond fund-raising and plead with elected officials to restore the arts curriculum in California schools, which has fallen victim to budget cuts.

The couple helped buy 25 brand-new musical instruments for West Side Elementary School in Fresno County.

"A lot of our instruments were old and real expensive to keep up," says band director Orville Stephenson. "Now students can spend more time practicing and playing, and they don't have to worry about broken instruments and having to stop and fix them on the spot.

"Harry and Carol's interest is genuine. They have a heart for this."

Since the foundation was launched, the phone rings constantly at the Kullijian-Channing house. Kullijian works day and night, his wife says, and is exhausted most of the time.

"I don't know what I'm doing at 90 years old, doing all this," says Kullijian, who's 89 until December. "You have to give your money, time and talent, and your life.

"This is bigger than Carol and me as individuals. The future of America is at stake, because our children are at stake. We have forfeited one of the most beautiful parts of life by forfeiting the arts."

The Carol-and-Harry story began 76 years ago when he was 13 and she was 12. They both attended Aptos Junior High School in San Francisco's Balboa Terrace neighborhood. She sometimes sang with his orchestra. They encountered the arts at every turn.

"I was fortunate to have a father who was crazy about Milton, Keats and Shelley," Channing says. "I sang with my father all day long, as far back as I can remember. . . . The arts, they're like fertilizer on the human brain, and we're living proof of that."

"Arts became a part of our life: Chaucer, Bacon, Shakespeare and poetry, especially Edgar Allan Poe," says Kullijian. "I loved symphony. She got me into operas."

Meanwhile, they fell hard for each other.

A black-and-white photograph of Channing at 13 and Kullijian at 14 lies on a coffee table in the rambling, ranch-style Modesto house Kullijian had built in the 1950s.

"We were in love. We still are," he says, staring at the faded image.

He kept the photograph all those years, even during his six-decade marriage to Geraldine Amos, who died in 2002. Channing had the original print with her through three marriages and while raising her son, Chan Lowe, now the political cartoonist for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

But Carol and Harry broke up soon after the photo was taken, as their lives went in different directions.

He went off to military school, then enlisted in the Army and served in World War II. She attended Lowell High in San Francisco, where a theater today bears her name. She was then off to Bennington College in Vermont - and after that, New York City.

She made her Broadway musical debut as Eve Arden's understudy in Let's Face It! in 1941. In 1949, she won a Theatre World Award for her performance in Lend an Ear. Her first Tony nomination came six years later, for The Vamp.

Her role as Lorelei Lee in the original Broadway production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949-51) had her singing the hit "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."

But it was in 1964 that Channing took Broadway by storm as matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi - wearing the fabulous red-satin gown that's now in the Smithsonian's Museum of American History - in Hello, Dolly! She later repeated the role in two revivals. She also earned a 1968 Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Muzzy in Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Meanwhile, Kullijian was living in the San Joaquin Valley, farming his 30 acres and running a nursing home in the Bay Area. Though he had kept the photograph, Channing never crossed his mind. As unbelievable as it sounds, "I thought she was dead," he says.

But Channing never forgot about Harry. In her 2002 autobiography, Just Lucky I Guess: A Memoir of Sorts, she wrote:

"Harry was the most exotic, beautiful thing. . . . Harry had silken, bronze skin; long, almond-shaped eyes that stretched almost to his ears; and that sweet, contented smile with which camels in the Holy Land are born."

Then two things happened to bring them back together.

After his wife's death, Kullijian dated a woman he intended to marry. One day, she saw the black-and-white photograph of him and Channing as teenagers.

"We had a little argument, and she says, 'Why don't you marry Carol Channing?' " Kullijian recalls. "She was saying, 'Get lost.' "

A week later, a friend told Kullijian that he was mentioned in Just Lucky I Guess and said he should call Channing. She was living in Rancho Mirage then, and he was on one of his regular sojourns in his RV to the nearby Imperial Valley.

"I was in disbelief, but I thought, 'What the heck, I'll just say hi,' " Kullijian says. "I knew it the moment I saw this figure coming toward me with her gray hair. I knew. We embraced. I said, 'This is the girl I'm going to marry.' And I did.

"There are some times in life two people meet and something happens. I can't describe it. I don't know what it is. It's like I tell her: If you want me to climb the highest mountain in the world, I can do it. I can do anything."