Debbie Reynolds

Taking stock of the treasure:
With costumes from Singin’ in the Rain.

Unlike most of us, Debbie Reynolds never seemed to question her luck. If she hadn’t become a movie star, who knows what would have happened to her? Can you imagine her waiting tables or teaching school? I can’t. Reynolds was one of the last products of the Hollywood studio system, making her greatest mark in cinema when she was only 19 years old, and she spent the rest of her life celebrating her stardom.

If she ever gave an interview when she wasn’t “on,” I haven’t seen it, and most of her appearances in sitcoms were merely variations on the character Hollywood created for her, out of the raw materials she supplied: forever the energetic innocent. Even when times were tough, she seemed to enjoy her lot in life, as few people do. She might be broke, she might be down and out, but she was always a star.

Reynolds returned the favor, though Hollywood didn’t seem to care. Recognizing that Hollywood movies are an essential part of our culture and our history, she set about collecting memorabilia that no one else seemed to value at all. We’re going to be very sorry, one day, that we didn’t hold on to Reynolds’ prizes, and keep them in one place, as she tried to do. Her own museum failed, and the Hollywood studios declined to establish another museum to take its place. She wound up selling the stuff at auction, and her life’s work went scattering to the winds.

With costumes from My Fair Lady.

Maybe Reynolds understood the value of Hollywood better than other people did because, as a girl, movies were forbidden to her, considered profane in the Nazarene church. But oh, what wonders of magic the movies could perform! Not least transforming a poor girl into America’s sweetheart. She’d lived the legend, and she knew it was real.

Hollywood didn’t seem to appreciate Debbie Reynolds nearly as much as she appreciated Hollywood. For two of her best-known roles, she wasn’t the first choice: Gene Kelly wanted a real dancer to play Kathy Selden in Singin’ in the Rain, and just about everybody involved in The Unsinkable Molly Brown wanted Tammy Grimes to repeat the role she’d created on Broadway. When Reynolds made Mother with Albert Brooks, returning to the big screen after nearly a quarter-century, she delivered her best performance, by turns funny and exasperating and dear.

Somehow the Academy didn’t reward her with what would seem to be a reflex, a nomination for an older actress in a good part, a highpoint in a long career. She went unnoticed that year, and Dan Rather and I took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to protest. Reynolds wrote Dan a sweet note, declaring that the essay was “the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

Now she’s gone, upstaging her daughter one last time — in perhaps the most flattering way, and certainly the most show-biz. Hers was a grand exit, one that we’ll be talking about for years, and one that left us wanting more.

There’s no place like Hollywood.

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Gene Wilder

Gene Wilder was one of a handful of people I knew I’d have to talk to in order to tell the story of Madeline Kahn, the Oscar-nominated, Tony-winning star whom he described to me as his “most talented actress and favorite co-star.”

A lot of fans consider Gene and Madeline one of the all-time-great movie couples. In reality, they made only three pictures together, and in one of those, they don’t share a scene. That’s Blazing Saddles. But Gene was so taken with Madeline that he hung around the set for every single take of her big number, “I’m Tired.”

Afterward, he told Mel Brooks, “If the entire movie is just that one scene, it will be worth the price of admission.” The two immediately started trying to find a part for her in their next movie, Young Frankenstein.

I was keenly aware that, without Gene, I wouldn’t have a book that would be worthy of Madeline herself.

This accounts for some of my eagerness in our first interactions. Something he said when I first wrote to him, led me to believe that he’d be willing to meet face-to-face. So I offered to meet — and Gene’s response nearly exploded out of my laptop. NO, he did not want to see me! He was so skittish that for several nervous minutes I was afraid of losing him altogether.

I wrote back to say that I’d be willing to ask him my questions any way he wanted. Telephone. E-mail. Semaphore. Smoke signals.

He chose e-mail.

As the Fox, outstanding in his field.

At first, Gene seemed a little … terse. He’d write no more than two or three sentences in answer to any question.

Now, my aim in writing my book was to allow the reader to hear voices — not only Madeline’s voice, because I was looking at her first as a singer — but also the voices of the people she worked with. Gene’s answers weren’t what I’d imagined.

Beyond that … was he brushing me off? I picked up his memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger. And then I understood. This was Gene’s writing style. To the point. Terse, if you will, but in keeping with a man, most of whose writing had been movie scripts.

As I looked over what he’d written to me, and compared it with what he’d said about Madeline in other places, I saw that, so far from brushing me off, he was actually giving me his best material.

I was reminded of one of his early movies, The Little Prince. Gene played the Fox. The Fox can’t be tamed, and he’s very shy. For the first time, I understood: when Gene played the Fox, he was typecast. And so I tried to keep myself at a distance where he’d be comfortable with me. He signed his notes “Gene,” but I never addressed him as “Dear Gene.” Maybe that was a mistake, but it’s too late now to undo it.

Over the years, he continued to give me his best material, always answering me promptly. I seldom had to wait more than an hour for a reply to any of my questions.

He was fastest when I wrote to get his response to Mel Brooks, who insisted, even as I objected, that Gene and Madeline must have had an affair. Quite a few fans still believe this. Madeline herself, Gene had told me, thought it was a good idea. His own stepdaughter believed it to be true. And now Mel — who knew both Madeline and Gene well — told me he couldn’t believe it wasn’t true.

Yet again, Gene’s reply exploded out of my computer. This time in ALL CAPS. NO, he and Madeline never had an affair!

“I want everything I’ve ever seen in the movies!”

When it came time to solicit endorsements for the back cover of the book, Gene obliged. I wrote to thank him, and I never heard back. His birthday rolled around about six weeks after the book was released; I dropped him a note. I didn’t hear back.

Maybe he didn’t like the book, I thought — despite the evidence that he had liked it. (I promise you, my publisher didn’t put a gun to his head when they asked for his endorsement.) Maybe he figured that my book was finished, and therefore that was the end of it.

Or maybe he was only a little more than a year away from death.

Reading his obituary, I realize that our later correspondence followed his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. He must have known that each note to me represented a last chance to express his feelings for a dear friend, whom he missed quite painfully.

He was a helluva guy. Gene was very, very ambitious for himself. But he loved his friends. He made them his co-stars. And he did everything he could to make them look as good as possible.

He wrote The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother specifically for Madeline — and Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise, and himself. Every one of them gets a chance to shine. You see a similar generosity in the scripts he wrote for Richard Pryor and Gilda Radner, too. This was a man who truly cared about the people he worked with.

If you haven’t seen Smarter Brother, I hope you’ll do so soon. It was the first picture Gene wrote and directed, and he also stars. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a beautiful tribute — to Madeline — to Marty — to Dom — and to Gene himself.

Now, Gene didn’t write a movie for me. But he did what he could to help me. And make no mistake — that, too, was his tribute to Madeline.

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Leonard Nimoy

“I have been and always shall be your friend.”

Growing up, my brother and I divided everything, much as Spain and Portugal once divided the globe between them. He got blue, I got red. He got Mickey Mouse, I got Donald Duck. And when we got older, he got Mr. Spock, I got Dr. McCoy. I’m not complaining: Donald and McCoy suited me. And yet since learning yesterday of the death of Leonard Nimoy, I’ve been on the brink of highly illogical tears.

Nimoy’s Spock was a grand creation, “the most human” soul in the universe, as Kirk once said, able to withstand the vagaries of scriptwriting and special effects, rising to the loftiest rank of popular culture. When I was a boy, I saw mostly Spock’s devotion to science — another of my brother’s territories — and his steely resistance to human emotion. I rather liked emotion, and I still do. So I wound up with McCoy.

Yet looking at Spock now, I see something else. Quite a number of people, including the President of the United States, talk about how Spock was different, an alien among earthlings on the Enterprise and a half-human among Vulcans. Yet Spock chose his sides: he held himself to the Vulcan standard. And he failed.

Spock’s failures were glorious to witness. Logic didn’t dictate that he snipe at McCoy, but wasn’t it fun when he did? When spores, or pon farr, or mind control, or some other force broke down his defenses, Spock fell in love or raging lust, he laughed and cried. Emotions were uncomfortable for him, and yet Nimoy made us see that Spock always felt them, that he had to work to keep them down, and that he was terribly lonely as a result.

Somehow he found friends who understood what he felt for them, who recognized what a tremendous gift Spock’s love must be. It took Dr. McCoy longer to realize this — we recall with fondness Bones’ “who, me?” reaction in “Amok Time,” when Spock invites him to be a best man at his wedding. Later, in Star Trek II and the most significant of all mind-melds, we also saw that, in the irascible old country doctor, Spock chose the right vessel for his “most human” soul.

Kirk knew from the beginning that Spock’s deepest feelings were reserved for him alone. It’s not terribly surprising that slash fiction as a genre developed from this relationship, a friendship so loving and so rare that some people can hardly understand it without sexualizing it somehow. That’s a shame.

Star Trek brought my brother and me together at an age when we shared less and less. It also brought us into a circle of friends — oddballs like us, too smart for our own good, too stubborn to fit in with other kids. For earlier viewers of the show, Star Trek presented a vision of a hopeful future, primarily because the Earth hadn’t been destroyed in a nuclear war, and because the bridge was peopled with a black woman, an Asian man, and a resolutely Soviet-style Russian.

For our little gang, though, I believe hope sprang from a different source: the idea that, some day in the future, we would be valued, not bullied, for our intelligence. We would find friends. We would explore the galaxy. We would live out our adventures — as a crew. Just the way we used to pile into a van to attend Star Trek conventions. Maybe we looked silly, but that was only the beginning of our voyages. We were certain of it.

My brother wanted to be so very much like Spock, and in failing, he has succeeded. He feels so deeply that nothing, not science, not logic, not any remedy at all can suppress his emotions — whether he shows them or not. Spock might not approve, but he’d understand.

I might have understood, too, a little sooner, if I’d taken the time to analyze my brother. But teenage boys are not tricorders. It took me years to see that Spock really does live in my brother. There’s beauty in that.

So I’m grieving today. For Spock and the actor who played him. For the boys we are no more, for the timeworn friendships we made and the vanished dreams we shared. For the sense that the future would always be infinite.

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Loving Elaine Stritch

As a performer, as a person, Elaine Stritch held back nothing — or at least it seemed that way to those of us who watched her. Her insecurities, her stories, her opinions, her mistakes and catastrophes, her forgotten lyrics and foolish choices, her struggles with alcohol and age, the creases in her face and the limits of her vocal range: everything was right up front, along with her talent. People loved her for that.

I missed out on many of Stritch’s most famous theatrical performances, though I caught a few; happily, she left us with plenty of documentation on film and television to return to, to cling to, now that she’s gone. Still, no matter where she was working — even when she was working in London, for mercy’s sake — she was always a creature of Broadway. When she announced her retirement and left New York, not so long ago, we were aghast. The question was not so much how she would survive without New York, but how New York would survive without her. How would we define ourselves, if we were not Elaine Stritch’s chosen people?

She died on my birthday, and before I went to dinner with friends, I had just enough time to dash off a quick sketch — nothing as elaborate as the idea I’d come up with. But I knew that if I didn’t put it on paper (and the Internet), then with my luck, somebody else would. In three minutes and the time it took to scan, I posted the finished product on Facebook.

And then it began to take off: I have no idea how many people have seen it, “liked” it, “shared” it. When I checked the Facebook page for the (excellent) documentary, Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, more than 400 people had shared the drawing; as of this writing, nearly 1,000 people have liked it, on that page alone. I’m told that it’s made its way to Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince.

This has everything to do with Elaine Stritch and nothing to do with me — and yet it’s mine. A very curious sensation, really, to see it travel so far beyond my reach. A very odd kind of publication, for someone who’s sometimes despaired of ever seeing his work in print. I’m glad I had the presence of mind to sign the picture; I wish I’d taken more time with the damned thing. Hell, I wish I’d submitted it to The New Yorker. But I think that Elaine Stritch herself might approve of what I did and the way I did it. I put it out there, for the world to see, just the way she did.

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Armstrong Death a NASA Hoax, Conspiracy Theorists Say

“One small step for a stuntman, one giant hoax for Hollywood.”
At Disney Studios, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
rehearse their 1969 “moon landing.”

HOUSTON, TX -- Reports of the death of Neil Armstrong, allegedly the first man to walk on the moon, are one more example of an elaborate, ongoing hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government, the Tri-Lateral Commission, and Hollywood movie studios, leading conspiracy theorists told reporters today.

“He’s not really dead,” said Thomas J. Doubton, president of the Society for Paranoia Investigations. “It was all done on a soundstage, using advanced techniques developed by NASA in coordination with the Disney people. If you just look at the pictures, you will see that Armstrong is very much alive.”

“It’s all part of an attempt to stimulate nostalgia for the so-called space program,” agreed Doubton’s colleague, G. Gordon Curley, pointing out the uncanny coincidence that Armstrong’s death was reported precisely 43 years, one month, and four days after the elaborately staged “moonwalk.”

Costume by Edith Head.

“In reality, President Obama is just trying to intimidate [Russian President] Vladimir Putin,” Curley said, “in order to prevent the Russians from establishing a base of operations on the moon from which they could use their powerful laser cannons to attack North America.” However, Doubton has disputed Curley’s analysis, saying that no nation on earth currently possesses space-flight technology.

Armstrong, a former stuntman in Hollywood “B” pictures, was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1962 before entering the top-secret “Operation False Lune” program. Wearing costumes designed by Edith Head, Armstrong and the other “astronauts” in the program received extensive dance training from choreographer Hermes Pan, enabling them to look as if they were moving about a low-gravity environment. In reality, conspiracy theorists say, he never left the United States, much less went to the moon.

“We have reason to believe that Armstrong currently resides in Austin,” Doubton said, “where he enjoys horseback riding and gardening.” NASA intends to deploy Armstrong, under an assumed identity, in a top-secret reconnaissance mission to North Korea this year, just prior to the U.S. presidential elections.

“This ‘October Surprise’ will radically alter the outcome of the election,” Curley said. “I’m not free to say more.”

Doubton added that he has been unable to confirm reports that Armstrong was recently stripped of several cycling medals on the grounds that he used rear-projections and computer graphics technology to fake his participation in the Tour de France.

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William Windom’s World and Welcome to It

Windom with his My World co-stars Joan Hotchkiss
and Lisa Gerritsen.

Looking over photographs of the actor William Windom, who died last week at the age of 88, I’m unable now to spot precisely what it was about him that reminded me so much of my father, when I was a boy. The physical resemblance was nowhere near as great as that between my mother and Patricia Neal, upon which people other than myself used to comment quite often; in character, Windom tended to be a good deal more demonstrative in his emotions than Dad, nicknamed “Plato,” ever was. And yet upon hearing of Windom’s death, I do feel a loss.

A handful of performances define him for me, starting with his starring role in the short-lived sitcom My World and Welcome to It, based on the work of James Thurber. The show ran for a single season, from 1969–70, but in discussing Windom with friends my age (or nearly), I’m struck by how many of us watched then and remember now: in a universe with only three television networks, the chances of a “shared experience” were excellent, and probably any network today would be thrilled to find a show with as big an audience as My World — which was cancelled for lack of viewers.

Dad might have preferred that we think of him as Gregory Peck — and on good days, we did — but he never discouraged us from seeing him as William Windom.

In My World Windom projected a dash of weariness, a dash of bafflement, and of course a great running stream of fantasy, abetted by animation in Thurber’s style — but as a child I saw virtually nothing of the darkness that runs through Thurber’s original material, which as a result startled me when I came to read it a few years later. Surely some of this brighter mood stemmed from a decision by the producers that a television audience needed something gentler to hold onto, week after week. For example, wives in Thurber’s work are irrational monsters, but who could object to the elegant Joan Hotchkiss, playing Windom’s wife here?*

Windom won some:
With his Emmy Award for My World in 1970.

As I grew up, I kept running across Windom, notably as the obsessive Commodore Matt Decker in “The Doomsday Machine,” one of those original Star Trek episodes in which the cheesiness of the special effects (the machine in question looks like a tube of aluminum foil squished at one end — and that’s probably what it was) is overridden by the sheer craft of the other elements of the production: suspenseful direction, surprisingly insightful writing, and a certain loopy grandeur in the acting.

As Commodore Decker.

Here Windom toyed with the kind of inner steadiness that he brought to bear in so many other roles, and that I’ll always associate with him — and with my father. Because the Commodore is William Windom, we understand the enormity of the horror he’s witnessed: he’s a hysterical mess, which is not what we expect William Windom to be. Seeming to regain his bearing, he takes command of the Enterprise, but he’s still a basket case, and here again the stakes are raised. If that paragon of sensible behavior William Windom has lost his mind, then the Enterprise is truly in jeopardy.

As Decker again, looking absolutely nothing like my father.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, a film that features a number of actors who went on to play in the Star Trek universe, Windom is the wily prosecutor, playing very, very big. It’s the paradox of To Kill a Mockingbird that the film remains so credible even when all the forces arrayed against Atticus and Tom are drawn so broadly: how could anybody side with them against the noble, even superhuman restraint of Gregory Peck and Brock Peters? And yet in the real world, the bad guys weren’t always so instantly recognizable (or so hammy), and just as in this movie, the good guys lost. How we react to such reversals defines the grownups we become.

Late in life Windom found a recurring role as the crusty doctor of Cabot Cove in Murder, She Wrote, opposite Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher. The show was almost a comedy, and though heavyset now and quite a bit older, Windom danced nimbly among the piled-up corpses and celebrity suspects. Steady employment on a top-rated show must have been a nice way to cap off a long and varied career — of which the performances I’ve cited here are just a few highlights.

With Lansbury, in Murder, She Wrote.

He told the New York Times that his proudest achievement was playing Richard III, at the American University in Biarritz, following his army service in World War II. While I never doubted his range, I wouldn’t have imagined him a Gloucester, and that’s one indication that, like most actors and very much like my Dad, he left much of his true self concealed from our view. Windom pops up all the time in movies and television, and we never know precisely what to expect from him: and yet we’re glad to see him, no matter what story he enacts for us. Seeing how fondly he’s remembered by so many of my friends, I wonder whether he knew how much we cared.

*NOTE: It seems that absolutely everybody my age found it easy to cherish Windom’s daughter, played by Lisa Gerritsen. She of course went on to enduring renown as the precociously levelheaded Bess Lindstrom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Phyllis. But who among us remembers that she wore a retainer on My World and Welcome to It?

UPDATE: For more information on My World and Welcome to It, I direct you to this site, as informative as it is entertaining. You’re sure to wind up wishing the show had lasted longer.

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Evelyn Lear, the Opera Mom

Evelyn Lear as the Marschallin:
It was never only about her.

It’s incredibly tough to be a singer, especially at the start of a career. Sure, we in the audience may revel in what we see as the glamour of the art form, but for the people who actually do the work, it’s non-stop, sometimes tedious and discouraging. Lessons and coachings aren’t cheap; gigs may be infrequent and not always exactly what most of us would consider lucrative. Yet you can’t ever stop: you’re constantly in training. Life on the road can be lonely and bewildering, and even at home you may not know where to turn for guidance. Oh — and there are always bitter critics and evil bloggers to contend with, too.

As I travel around Opera World, I’m struck by the support that singers offer one another, and how seldom I find the resentful rivalries we think of when we picture more than one prima donna at a time: the dueling divas of Mozart’s Impresario, Mme. Silverpeal and Mme. Goldentrill, are fictional characters. This is in part what I was thinking of, in the context of the wedding of Steven Bryant and Darren Woods, when I wrote the other day about the community that has formed around them: friends, mentors, protégés, and “the families we choose.” I’ve seen singers who liberally and gladly share personal and technical advice, encouragement of all kinds, and, yes, food and housing, too. On occasion, they’ve shared with me, as well.

One of the very greatest and most supportive artists in Opera World has died. Evelyn Lear was an extraordinarily gifted singer, and you’ll be reminded of that as you read her obituaries in other publications in the coming days. Beyond that, however, she was a generous colleague and unstinting mentor to countless other singers, constantly giving back to the world of music, even after she’d stopped performing. As a teacher and as the force behind the Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart Emerging Singers Program (in conjunction with the Wagner Society of Washington, D.C.), she not only ensured that, years from now, you and I would still hear voices worth listening to, she also encouraged young artists in the most difficult moments of their careers — and continued the legacy of her late husband, the bass-baritone Thomas Stewart, who passed away in 2006.

The King and Queen of Opera World:
Thomas Stewart and Evelyn Lear

At Salzburg and Santa Fe and the Met, at the University of Maryland, and virtually anywhere she went, Evelyn Lear embodied the ways in which music brings us together. Darren calls her his “opera mom,” and credits her mentoring with his achievements onstage and in the general director’s office, and it’s telling that, when Darren had a new project underway, Evelyn Lear didn’t merely endorse it, she’d show up for the premiere, too, whenever she could.

Darren’s story is in its way representative of the experiences of other singers I know. To hear him tell it, he was entirely and almost shiny green when he started out, blithely unaware of what he was getting into and yet game to try almost anything music set before him. He might have crashed and burned. Instead, Darren received guidance and encouragement from established artists like Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart (and Marilyn Horne and Frederica von Stade, to name two more), who spotted his talent and his zeal, and who recognized the importance of both. Now he’s doing something similar at the Seagle Colony and Fort Worth Opera and just about everywhere he goes: putting into practice what he learned from these artists. This is how it goes, passed from hand to hand and from generation to generation.

In this sense, what Evelyn Lear did after her career ostensibly ended is as valuable as what she did while she was singing on the great stages of the world. It’s the reason I admire her, much as I admire Marilyn Horne, who continues to make music more beautiful through her work with the Marilyn Horne Foundation, with the Music Academy of the West, and with her master classes and advice. Either of these ladies could have retired altogether and been assured of lasting glory, based exclusively on their performing careers. Instead, they have kept on finding new ways to contribute to the art form and to maintain the high standards they themselves once upheld.

Marilyn Horne and Evelyn Lear: Role models for the rest of us.

You may not be a singer, you may not be an artist of any sort. But if you are serious about what you do, and if you encourage those who are coming up behind you — then you may be as beloved in your time as Evelyn Lear has been in hers. Opera World is grieving today, and not merely because she sang so beautifully.

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The End of the (Dietrich Fischer-) Dieskau Era

The death of German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has just been announced. Although he enjoyed a successful career onstage in opera and on the podium as a conductor, he garnered most acclaim as a Lieder singer and as a recording artist: he is the most-recorded singer in history.

Given the current state of the recording industry, and its rather grim prospects, Fischer-Dieskau is entirely liable to retain that claim to the end of all time. It’s true that his very ubiquity in the record catalogues sometimes annoyed me. (Had he really recorded every song ever written? Could a collection of Patsy Cline covers be next? What did I have to do in order to find a recording by anyone else?) And yet there’s no denying that he was an extraordinary artist who left us with unparalleled documentation of his work.

He was lucky to be born at the right time, at least so far as recordings go, in an era when multiple companies signed many artists and released hundreds of albums each year. Long-playing records opened up new artistic possibilities and new markets; the definition of an acceptable profit hadn’t yet inflated to pop-blockbuster proportions; and, not least because music education was still a priority in the schools, even people who weren’t hardcore Lieder fans might be expected to know who Franz Schubert was, to listen occasionally and perhaps even to purchase a recording of his work. And those who really were hardcore Lieder fans could be expected to purchase multiple copies of the same recording over a lifetime, because their old copies would wear out and need to be replaced.

Never before, never again? Not quite. This happy mix of circumstance had been building awhile, and the twilight hour hasn’t entirely descended yet, as my friend the producer–composer Glen Roven valiantly proves, every chance he gets. But it’s getting more and more difficult for singers to document their work and to share it with a broad listening public: recording contracts are scarce, clips on iTunes or YouTube will take you only so far — and who knows how long it will be before those venues are obsolete, too?

We’ll never have to wonder what Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sounded like, how he interpreted a particular passage, how he approached a given repertory, how he matured as an artist. In a very real sense, his death today changes nothing, because he’ll always be with us, his voice forever in our ears. But even as I’m grateful for that blessing — and it is a very great one — I worry what’s to become of the next German baritone, perhaps one who’s born just today.

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Summer Nights

The death of Donna Summer comes just as the press is assessing the impact of President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage. Many black churchgoers disagree with the President on this issue, and they’re making their feelings known, especially to reporters and pollsters: many resent the linking of gay rights to the civil rights movement, and many believe that the Bible’s proscriptions against homosexuality and promotion of heterosexuality (and, occasionally, of monogamy) do not permit Christians to support marriage equality. Black churches, along with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, were instrumental in the passage of Proposition 8, which ended legal marriages in California, even while Barack Obama won overwhelming support from blacks in the same November election in 2008.

What does this have to do with Donna Summer? The singer, whose first performances were in the church choir of her girlhood, was born-again in the late 1970s; a few years later, as the AIDS crisis exploded, she was quoted as saying that AIDS was God’s punishment of homosexuals. She denied making that statement, but the reputation stuck: namely, that an artist whose success always depended on gay men had no sympathy for her most stalwart champions. It took her years to recover, and even now some gay men are unwilling to enjoy her music.

Donna Summer learned in the 1980s what Barack Obama is learning now, if he didn’t know it already: that relations between black Christians and gays are tense and not easily reconciled, and that anything you say on the subject can alienate your loyal base.

Today, few people seem to remember much if anything about the rift between Summer and the gays — and even less about the flak she caught from Christians whenever she defended gays. (Which she did, many times.) Instead we’re recalling her as the high priestess of disco hedonism, presiding over an endlessly orgiastic night. She was the woman who simulated (or stimulated) 23 orgasms while recording “Love to Love You Baby” and who glamorized promiscuity and prostitution in song.

She was uncomfortable with this image, and yet what she really believed seldom seemed to matter, in those days. We saw her as a sex symbol, the mistress of revels for a generation obsessively committed to revelry. Blame the songs, if you will.

If indeed she never meant the things she sang, that’s perhaps why I can hear in her music a kind of detachment, a disembodiment even while ostensibly absorbed in the pleasures of the flesh. Her voice floats, high and serene, over the thumpa-thumpa instruments, the repetitive and inane lyrics, and the hangover melodies that drill into your head and don’t let go until sometime the next day.

I daresay she’s happier and far better understood now that she’s singing in the choir celestial. She was an unlikely denizen of Disco World, but that may explain why the dancers made her their queen — for a time.

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Wild Things

Maurice Sendak, with a few friends

The author Jean Craighead George has died, just days after Maurice Sendak’s passing, an event that provoked an outpouring of nostalgic tribute and critical appreciation. “Death comes in threes,” they say, and really, I’m not sure the world of children’s literature can stand another such loss. Again and again in their stories and pictures, Craighead George and Sendak evoked the call of the wild, and a child’s fascination with the kinds of danger that lie “outside over there.” Yet what strikes me is the reassurance that both writers offer, too. As Max learns, you can return home after a wild rumpus, and your soup will be waiting for you.

Jean Craighead George

Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain was a veritable pillar on which my childhood home was based, especially because my brother loved the book so much. The book recounts the adventures of Sam, a pre-pubescent Thoreau who goes off to live by himself in the woods. Craighead George writes beautifully of the natural world, and she details her protagonist’s ingenuity so carefully — yet so matter-of-factly — that even modern, mechanized, entirely mother-dependent suburbanites like us found ourselves wanting to follow him into the wild, and believing we were quite capable of doing so.

Reading My Side of the Mountain is something like watching Fred Astaire, whose grace appears so effortless that you think, “I could do that.” Whereas in reality, of course, you could not. Sam himself nearly dies on his mountain, and I daresay that neither Linc nor I would have lasted one paragraph out there. That didn’t stop us from dreaming, and it’s something of a miracle that Linc stayed home.

Portrait of my brother as a young bear

Part of Craighead George’s great achievement lies in her ability to make Sam’s survival seem so cosy: he doesn’t merely live in the woods, he makes a home for himself there. Maybe Craighead George — and Sendak — would have told their stories differently if they were writing for grownups, but the scary parts are always balanced by comfort. I found Higglety Pigglety Pop! absolutely terrifying when I was a boy, yet there it is: Jennie finds peril but also friends and a new kind of home with the World Mother Goose Theatre, and at the story’s end, she assures us she gets plenty to eat. (Granted, she’s eating mops, but what’s important is that she’s not hungry.) Sendak’s Max and Mickey get home safely, too, and so does Craighead George’s Sam.

Utterly terrifying: Jennie’s specialty act

In an exceedingly rare instance of my turning down a book because it was “too girly,” I never read Craighead George’s other masterpiece, Julie of the Wolves. This is especially ironic because there’s no doubt that Julie could have beaten the stuffing out of me — or perhaps my awareness of that fact is really what held me back. But there’s no question that she and Sendak both lent something mystical and exciting to our young lives: not least the prospect that my brother, who also identified so closely with Else Holmelund Minarik’s Little Bear (drawn by Sendak), might run off like Sam or Jennie, and that I’d have to go looking for him, outside over there.

We were very tame children, really, but we dreamed of wildness. Now you know two reasons why.

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Cris Alexander

Cris Alexander as Chip in On the Town.
Frank Sinatra played the part in the movie.

One of the nicest things about my friend Amanda Green, the kick-ass songwriter of such shows as High Fidelity, Bring It On, and the new Hands on a Hard Body, is that she introduced me to her parents, Phyllis Newman, the actress and force for good in the world, and Adolph Green. With his writing partner, Betty Comden, Adolph devised some of the most exuberant musicals ever known, and long before I came here, a couple of these helped to shape my ideas about New York City and what my life might become. Particularly the “Broadway Melody” ballet from Singin’ in the Rain and the entirety, start to finish, of On the Town are responsible for my sense of the energy of the city, that feeling that I have, on good days, that the sidewalks compel me to dance, and possibility beckons from every corner.

Meeting Phyllis and Adolph altered my perspective, because suddenly, it wasn’t enough any more to strive to be the sort of person whom Gene Kelly might play in a movie. No, from that moment on, I wanted to be Adolph Green.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green

I still do. A paragon of easy sophistication, an accomplished, even magical writer, a sly charmer, and — not least — a man whose record collection filled an entire room of the Greens’ apartment, with shelves that lined every wall from floor to ceiling. When you’re Leonard Bernstein’s former roommate and sometime collaborator, as Adolph was, it’s only natural that you learn a few things about music — but clearly Adolph was prodigious in his own right.

Nobody who comes to New York does so without expectations, and like mine, our expectations of the city evolve over time. That’s true as well for the character Gene Kelly plays in the “Broadway Melody” ballet, and it was probably true for another immigrant from the American Heartland, Cris Alexander, an actor and photographer who passed away this month at the age of 92.

Photograph of a book
with a cover photograph by Cris Alexander.

Alexander came to New York from Oklahoma; his first job on Broadway was as one of three sailors on leave in a little show called On the Town. He played Chip, the sailor of the three with the most fixed and precise expectations of New York City — all of which are derived from an out-of-date guidebook and easily dispatched by the brash taxi driver who advises him to forget sightseeing and “Come Up to My Place.”

Among Alexander’s co-stars were Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who, not content with writing the show, had created roles for themselves to play, as well, and that sort of chutzpah is very much a part of the mystique of the city for me. You get together with a few talented friends (such as the show’s composer, the aforementioned roommate Mr. Bernstein), you have a great time, and somehow the result is a terrific show.

Comden and Green had done something similar already with their nightclub act, called the Revuers, which also embraced Judy Holliday; later in their careers, Comden and Green recorded several Revuers numbers, which remain as fresh and funny today as when they wrote them.

Jeri Archer as Belle Poitrine, the “author” of Little Me.

The other credit for which Cris Alexander is best known is Little Me, a spoof of Hollywood autobiographies by Patrick Dennis, for which Alexander — a successful professional photographer — provided the pictures, combining stock images with original, artfully staged creations. What we see is a bunch of friends putting on silly costumes and horsing around. But considering who the friends were, we’re also seeing something quite special.

Among the friends, for example, are Dennis himself; his Auntie Mame of stage and screen, Rosalind Russell (also star of Bernstein and Comden and Green’s Wonderful Town, which co-starred Cris Alexander); Alice Pearce, the original Lucy Shmeeler of On the Town on stage and screen (as well as the original Gladys Kravitz); and Shaun O’Brien, a dancer with New York City Ballet.

Nice friends: Rosalind Russell’s cameo appearance in Little Me.

Most of these folks wound up creating more lasting and significant art in other places and other ways. Little Me itself went on to be a Broadway musical, with a book by Neil Simon, though not a terribly successful one. But what fun these people had! You look at the pictures and envy them — and the New York they used to call their home.

There are days when I don’t feel like Gene Kelly, when I feel as if the ongoing party that is New York City came to an end just as I arrived here. Comden and Green used to perform at parties, and A Party was the name they gave to their duo act when they took it to Broadway in the 1970s. But all I’ve got is the cast album.

It’s harder these days to put on any kind of a show, harder just to get a group of friends together — no matter how talented they may be. (Amanda Green, for example, is constantly on the go. Just try to keep up with her.) In a city that is more and more focused on money and less on art, certain kinds of possibility are dwindling, or gone already.

What a party!
Alexander used to host and photograph dress-up parties, which in turn inspired Patrick Dennis to write Little Me and a second book, a spoof of White House memoirs, First Lady: My Thirty Days Upstairs at the White House, by Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield.
(My own copy of that book has gone missing.)

And yet other possibilities are just beginning. Shaun O’Brien and Cris Alexander were partners for more than six decades, and last year, they married in New York State. They died just two weeks apart, in Saratoga Springs, City Ballet’s second home, where they made their retirement. O’Brien went first; a friend told the New York Times that Alexander had died of a broken heart.

Maybe they didn’t need any official imprimatur to certify their relationship, but it was only last year that they could marry legally — and they did. What a happy final chapter to what was, as Alexander put it, “a lovely life.”

Shaun O’Brien

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Songs of Innocence

I spend a great deal of my time listening to music and trying to understand how it does what it does — that voodoo that it do so well, if you will. This process of exploration and meditation began early, pretty much from the cradle, and so the nearly simultaneous deaths recently of songwriter Robert B. Sherman (5 March) and singer Davy Jones (29 February) strike me as especially worthy of comment. In both cases, because I heard them when I was so young, these men helped to define song for me.

In the case of Jones, he also helped to define rock’n’roll, through his work with the “pre-fab four,” the Monkees. I’d had virtually no exposure to rock when the band’s television show first aired, in 1966, and that show’s principal influence, Richard Lester’s movies with the Beatles, remained unknown to me until I was in college. What the Monkees did was rock only in the most generous interpretation, having mainly to do with instrumentation. If it’s got a drum set and an electric guitar, it must be rock’n’roll. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The Monkees in their hey-hey day:
Jones, Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, Mickey Dolenz

Most of the songs for which they’re best known were written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, the team also responsible for “I’m Gonna Blow You a Kiss in the Wind,” Serena’s serenade in a seminal episode of Bewitched, which incited me to something like hysteria when I first saw it. But this wasn’t the response of a rock fan, it was the response of a diva-worshipper. (Imagine! Elizabeth Montgomery — one of my first crushes — singing!)

When Serena Met (and Kidnapped) Boyce & Hart.
Photo from the indispensable Harpies Bizarre,
your one-stop Bewitched website.

Real rock is rebellious, subversive: the Monkees, and most especially Davy Jones, were merely cheeky. The band tried to take their music closer to the edge, famously inviting no less an avant-gardist than Frank Zappa to appear on their show and increasingly attempting to exert their own tastes in the selection of their repertoire. It turned out that this wasn’t exactly what the public wanted, and we all moved on, mostly, except for the occasional burst of nostalgia. Let’s face it: “I’m a Believer” is a great song, and you don’t ever want to forget it.*

What would a real rocker have done with Marcia Brady?
Still, these two paved the way for Riff Randall (P.J. Soles) and Joey Ramone in Rock’n’Roll High School.

Soon I would discover rock that was more serious and far more subversive; thanks to a school friend, the late Keith Kaski, I even discovered punk rock while it was still more or less current. For a long time, the most significant thing for this audience about Davy Jones was that his success with the Monkees led directly to the invention of Ensign Pavel Chekov and the casting of Walter Koenig on Star Trek.

Pleasant Walley vass a Russian inwention.
From one of Chekov’s first episodes, when Koenig wore a Davy Jones wig because his own hair had yet to grow out.

If as a child I had no exposure to rock, the responsibility lies largely with my parents, particularly with my mother, who was and is a devotee of the classic Broadway musicals, especially those of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Lerner & Loewe. Thanks to My Fair Lady, Mom was a Julie Andrews fan even before I was born, and it was a matter of course that both she and I would love Mary Poppins, in which the Sherman Brothers’ songs play such an important role.

To this day, I can remember every lyric, and sing passably approximate pitches, to every song from Mary Poppins. Here, too, quite a lot went over my head, though it’s noteworthy that so many of the songs continue to give me pleasure as an adult because they have grown along with me: “Take heart, for Mrs. Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again!” makes sense to me now, though it surely didn’t then, and only a couple of years ago did I understand the veiled reference to date rape in “Jolly Holiday.”

“You’d never think of pressing your advantage…”

Of course, when I first heard the Mary Poppins score, I was so naïf, I actually believed there was a place on earth where people talked with an accent like Dick Van Dyke’s “Cockney.”** My ideas about London — about love — about music — were still very much unshaped.

The Sherman Brothers’ songs were very much a part of my world, a “Small World, after all.” As that song proves, the brothers knew how to write tunes that are unforgettable, whether you want them to be or not. Catchy melodies and a playful spirit make an unbeatable combination for the Winnie-the-Pooh songs, but because the Shermans didn’t talk down to their young listeners, there’s often a great deal going on at once.

The wonderful thing about Tiggers
is Tiggers have wonderful songs.

Consider the Pooh theme song, which begins with a lilting, wistful prelude about “Christopher’s childhood days,” automatically guaranteeing that a specific nostalgia will be passed along to us, too (and it’s worked out exactly that way for this listener), before launching into a jaunty march that somehow manages to capture the rhythm at which you think a stuffed bear would probably walk.

At their best, the Shermans’ songs manage to run deeper still, most notably perhaps in “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins. As the New York Times obituary noted, Robert B. Sherman was among the first U.S. soldiers to enter the Dachau concentration camp, an experience that marked him, and his was the darker personality of the two brothers. It’s for others to say whether the tension between Robert’s pessimism and Richard’s optimism was like that between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and one source of the strength of their songs.

Walt Disney with the Sherman Brothers.

But as I listen in hindsight, as it were, I marvel at how much they were able to convey, without forcing me to grow up too quickly — something the Monkees did to a lesser yet similar degree. These were among the building blocks of my appreciation of music, and if I later grew to love opera and punk rock and all the other music I admire, it’s because inspired craftsmen like the Shermans and appealing performers like Jones gave me such a good start.

Finally, in the context of this discussion, it must be underlined that Robert B. Sherman was not Bobby Sherman, nor even any relation. Thank you.




*NOTE: “I’m a Believer” is an exceptional Monkees song not only in its enduring excellence but also in that it was written by Neil Diamond, rather than by Boyce and Hart. Tom Stoppard memorably paid tribute to it in his play, The Real Thing, which means there’s a very good chance that Jeremy Irons still remembers all the words to the song.

**I’ve always wondered why Julie Andrews — Eliza Doolittle, for mercy’s sake — didn’t take Dick Van Dyke in hand and teach him ’ow to talk proper.

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