Mary Tyler Moore

Lights out.

Mary Tyler Moore has died, and I am taking stock of her legacy. Two brilliant television shows, plus several not so brilliant (including New York News, her short-lived collaboration with Madeline Kahn). An unforgettable, Oscar-nominated performance in Ordinary People. An eternal role model for working women. And a role model for journalists, too.

She often played journalists — even in the TV movie First You Cry — and her influence extends indirectly to Ed Asner’s Lou Grant, Nancy Marchand’s Mrs. Pynchon, and other characters. America seemed to feel differently about journalism in those days. Woodward and Bernstein became national heroes during the run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Dan Rather became not just a reporter but a star. Mary Richards was cut from different cloth, and yet she was to me every bit as much an inspiration.

It can’t really be said that I ever met Mary Tyler Moore. I encountered her once, at the CBS studios on 57th Street. I was walking down a hallway, and as I approached the corner, I heard voices, talking about the Broadcast Center. “It’s an old dairy,” somebody was saying, and I piped up, “Actually, it was a milk-processing plant.” And I turned the corner, and there was Mary Tyler Moore, accompanied by some people from WCBS, the local station, who were giving her a little tour. I was too startled to say anything else, and we passed each other. End of story. Not a meeting to rival Grant and Lee at Appomattox, or Taylor and Burton on the banks of the Nile.

Yet just a glimpse of the woman who played Mary Richards in my own newsroom was intensely gratifying. It occurred to me that afternoon that, although most of us talked (endlessly) about Edward R. Murrow, we were not ever going to be Murrow, or anything like him. We weren’t going to be Eric Sevareid, either, or Walter Cronkite, and only one of us was ever going to be Dan Rather. The rest of us weren’t going to be heroic standard-bearers, or legends or stars. Few of us were going to set examples for the profession, or even break a story. We were mortals. We went to work, we did our paperwork and our petty daily grind, and we were anonymous. Just like Mary Richards.

Mary Richards, of course, had her moments of valor. She went to jail once for refusing to name a source. She coped with outsize personalities — the tyrannical Lou Grant, the idiotic Ted Baxter and even the prima donna Sue Ann Nivens — yet she never seemed to resent her colleagues for making her job more difficult. On the contrary, she loved them and looked forward to coming to work, to being with them.

The people I worked with at CBS held lofty ideals. That’s one reason we held Murrow in such high esteem. Journalism, even TV journalism, was important, a public service, a vocation bigger than any one person: Murrow taught us that, and we believed it passionately. But few of us ever had the opportunity to go to jail for what we believed in, the way Mary Richards did. Many of us grumbled about the outsize personality we had to work with: depending on the day, Dan could embody all the worst qualities of Lou, or Ted, or Sue Ann, or any combination of the three. But most of us admired the guy, and many of us felt affection for him, and quite a lot of us were proud to be working with him.

I went back to my office and wrote a radio piece for Dan, about how Mary Richards was not a bad role model, and that her small-scale, big-hearted professional ideals were ones real-life journalists could aspire to. I hoped we’d hear from Mary Tyler Moore after the piece was broadcast — she might even make a visit to our newsroom, just as Walter Cronkite once visited WJM. But that was the end of it.

And so she touched my life the way strangers sometimes do — and yet unlike anyone else. Then, now, and ever more, she pointed out a path that I follow, and she turned my world on with her smile.

NOTE: Portions of this essay were originally published on this blog in 2007.

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Bob Simon

Strange are the ways of fate, or at least it seems that way when you look at the news these days. Just when everybody is getting excited (or nervous, or worried) about the rediscovery and promised publication of Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman and the return of Atticus and Scout — just when the movie Selma reminds us how arduous was the struggle for civil rights — comes State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore to remind us how little progress some Alabamians have made since — well, ever, really.

And just when everybody is talking about Brian Williams’ exaggerated claims about his wartime reporting and their impact on his career, Bob Simon dies.

A longtime CBS News correspondent, Bob didn’t have to lie about the many times he risked his life to report the news — though really his only extended remarks on the subject are contained in Forty Days, his account of captivity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the first Gulf War. In that case, he explained, capturing the story was his way of getting back at his captors. Beyond that, he didn’t go around trying to impress people.

He didn’t have to. He simply was impressive, just standing there. Easily one of the most cultivated and intelligent people ever to work for CBS News, Bob was “old school” in the best ways, as close to the second coming of Charles Collingwood as we’re likely to get. A fine writer, a tough questioner, an authentically courageous field reporter and a true scholar, and surely the only guy in the newsroom who loved French culture as much as I did. A kind of grace possessed him. You wanted to have dinner with him (something I did on occasion), just to hear what he had to say.

Hard to believe he was 73 — no matter how much experience he crammed into his life. Harder still to believe that, after so many more-perilous scrapes, from Vietnam to Nablus, something as mundane as a car crash could end that life.

It’s 15 years since I worked in television news, and I admit that I don’t watch much TV any more. Yet when I look, I don’t see the like of Bob Simon. I never did. And so, as we fret about the future of American journalism, we have one more thing to worry about. Bob Simon is gone, with no heir in sight.

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Lauren Bacall

When people say (and they do) that New York is like a mistress, I know what they mean. The city is smart and beautiful and sophisticated. We love New York, but it demands a great deal from us in return, and it doesn’t always love us back. To my mind, then, New York looks a lot like Lauren Bacall.

The truth is that I might not have lived here if not for her. When I was still in college, my parents came to town, and we went to see Woman of the Year. My mother was transported by the show, and especially Bacall’s hilarious duet with Marilyn Cooper, “The Grass Is Always Greener.” Mom concluded that New York must be all right if it could put on a show like that. When I declared my intention to move here, she didn’t object.

A few years later, I went to pick up Amanda Green at her parents’ apartment. I got off the elevator, rang the buzzer — and Lauren Bacall answered. There’s no way to prepare for something like that, but eventually I composed myself, told her about my mother and Woman of the Year, and thanked her. “Isn’t it nice to know that you can have an affect on people like that?” Bacall said.

“You’re lucky she was nice to you,” Amanda said to me as we left the building. “She just spent half an hour yelling at me.”

Yes, Bacall was gorgeous, and she could be one of the most caring, loyal friends anybody (including Amanda’s parents) could want, but she was also tough — and if she had qualms about making demands or being outright rude, they didn’t stop her. In contrast to Robin Williams, about whom it seems virtually everybody has a heartwarming story to tell, plenty of people have stories about Bacall’s imperious temperament. And they’re true. Backstage at Woman of the Year, they called her “The Beast,” I was told by a friend who worked on the show.

The odd thing is how little that mattered, at least if you weren’t on the receiving end of the gesture in question. Lauren Bacall was a star. She was not like other people. She was not like other stars. She might love you. She might not. You were lucky in any case — you’d get to tell the story afterward.

And so, since this morning, New York has been a little less itself.

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Julius Rudel’s Lasting Impressions

I met Julius Rudel several times: when I worked at the Kurt Weill Foundation, he was on the Board, and our paths crossed a few times later. He struck me always as serious and self-contained, his words and movements measured precisely to the circumstance. I’d have loved to praise him to his face, yet he really didn’t seem to require anything I had to offer, beyond a cup of coffee or the famous German cold-cuts that Lys Symonette brought to the office to serve to visitors.

Who knows whether, at 24, I had the words to express myself? Through his leadership of New York City Opera and his recordings, through his work with so many singers I admire — first and foremost Beverly Sills and Norman Treigle — Rudel did much to shape my earliest ideas of opera: not as a dusty museum or ruined temple, but as something vital. What do you say to a man who gave you so much?

Rudel died June 26, at age 93, and most obituaries noted his poignant reflection, “I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would outlive” NYCO; many articles also turned to his recently published memoir, First and Lasting Impressions, written with my friend Rebecca Paller. I’d read the book in a gulp and had meant to write about it here months ago, but got caught up in writing my own book. Belatedly, then, I’m urging you to read it — if you haven’t already.

What you’ll find are not so much insights into Rudel’s character or his personal history, nor even a succinct, compelling statement of the artistic vision that led Rudel to program wide-ranging repertoire, with a special interest in contemporary and American works, or to engage so many extraordinary artists during his long tenure at NYCO. Some things one does because they’re so right, they require no explanation. Does anyone really need to be told why a balanced repertory or a balanced diet is essential to good health? Yet Rudel’s matter-of-fact account can’t mask the revolutionary nature of his approach, one that has informed dozens of American opera companies in the years since.

Because Rudel’s economy in writing is so much like the reserve I found in his person, much can be gleaned from the subjects he chooses and those he omits, and how he treats them in his book. He writes of the effects of stardom, or the quest for it, on both Sills and Treigle; in both cases, the toll on friendship proved heavy, and in Treigle’s case, almost immediately.

Rudel writes warmly about his collaboration with Sills, and when describing her apparent collusion with a board member that allowed her alone to take over the direction of NYCO, though they’d planned to share the job, Rudel manages not to say that she betrayed him — but he does note that his wife considered it betrayal. It’s also worth pointing out that Rudel held his peace for more than 50 years, whether from gentlemanly courtesy or from an understandable desire not to get into a public debate with Sills.

The Sills and Treigle stories are remarkable, as I say, because there are few other tales anything like them in First and Lasting Impressions, and very little here that illuminates the character of any of Rudel’s associates. For the most part, the backstage account of his years at NYCO — which are, as he must have expected they would be, the most interesting parts of his book — consists of an almost dizzying recitation of operas programmed and artists engaged, from which the most famous triumphs emerge almost shyly.

What one comes to understand, as others have pointed out, is just how difficult it is to run an opera company. Thus, when Rudel publicly criticized the last director of NYCO, he understood the challenges and risks at stake: he also knew what it took to find solutions, and he saw scant sign of the necessary agility as George Steel tripped — and fell — on the path Rudel had blazed.

For me, Rudel’s lasting impression is first, and perhaps foremost, his legacy as a general director, in the form of a network of operas and singers that enlightens and sustains me still. Yet increasingly over the years, I’ve come also to appreciate him as a conductor, and above all the respect that he brought to the music he performed.* Many other conductors consider bel canto repertory, for example, singer-centric and artistically unrewarding: Rudel consistently found beauty and interest, even dramatic urgency, in the most rum-pa-tum passages, and he understood the value of singers’ own musicianship. Because I grew up listening to Rudel’s recording of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, I was surprised to learn that many conductors and musicologists disdain the score.

In Rudel’s hands, Hoffmann is at once sparkling and ominous, intoxicating and oneiric, very much the artistic masterwork that Offenbach hoped it would be. (And to an artist, is there a more terrifying theme than Hoffmann’s: that the Muse, which makes you great, is allied to the forces that will destroy you?) The long experience Rudel shared with Sills and Treigle, performing this opera together so many times, lends the recording richly theatrical characterizations — and yet when I heard Rudel conduct Hoffmann at the Met, with Alfredo Kraus, years later, he managed to create much the same magic, with artists he didn’t know as well.

Rudel was with Becky Paller the last time I saw him, following the dress rehearsal of Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, one of NYCO’s final productions at Lincoln Center. He was frail, and we didn’t speak long. But at least I had a chance to say to him the most important thing: thank you.

Sills as Cleopatra in Julius Caesar.

*NOTE: Rudel’s respect can be heard even in the recording of the score for which he’s been criticized as most disrespectful: his performing edition of Julius Caesar. With “Early Music” an institution unto itself today, it’s easy now to say that Rudel shouldn’t have made drastic cuts in Handel’s score, but in 1966, no one knew whether New York audiences would tolerate a four-hour opera (at least, not one that wasn’t Wagner’s), and NYCO probably couldn’t afford the overtime pay for it. (Special allowances with the unions had to be made a few years later, when Sills performed a restored edition of Lucia di Lammermoor.) It took a great deal of effort and imagination to bring Julius Caesar to NYCO, and Rudel could far more easily have turned to another work if he didn’t hold the opera in especially high esteem. Just listen to the recording: from the first thrilling notes of the overture, you’ll hear how much Rudel loved this music.

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Matthew Cowles

As Billy Clyde.

The actor and playwright Matthew Cowles has died. Our paths crossed several times, and to this day he’s the only person ever paid to perform a script I wrote: a concert narration for Weill’s Happy End in Princeton, New Jersey. He’s best known for playing Billy Clyde Tuggle, on All My Children, a villain so outrageous that everybody else in soap operas seems dull by comparison — but in life, Matthew was unfailingly kind. Maybe he channeled all his demons into Billy Clyde.

A strutting, scheming pimp, Billy Clyde figured prominently in one of the most satisfying story arcs I saw on All My Children, tormenting Dixie Cooney (Cady McClain) and murdering Tad Martin (Michael E. Knight) in a diabolical explosion that also took Billy Clyde’s life — or so we thought, until Tad returned some time later, and until Billy Clyde showed up again in Pine Valley last year. McClain and Knight brought so much humor to their work and such an easy, appealing chemistry that this viewer somehow didn’t feel guilty for giving a damn about soap opera characters. Matthew stepped between them with a swagger and an irresistible pleasure in his own performance.

The show’s writers rose to the occasion, delivering up terrific material: silly plots, yes, but fun dialogue and abundant opportunities for Matthew to chew every scrap of scenery. Matthew loved the role, and he enjoyed the audience response to Billy Clyde’s endless, extravagant awfulness. I don’t know that anybody ever took seriously a character who, for example, once buried a woman alive, but the reactions were mostly good-natured, and Matthew could sort out gracefully the love that viewers felt for a villain they loved to hate.

With Cady McClain in All My Children.

He came to theater naturally: his father, Chandler Cowles, was a sometime actor and the producer who brought Gian Carlo Menotti’s operas to Broadway. Exuding patrician authority and a clubby bonhomie, Chandler was a frequent visitor to the Kurt Weill Foundation, and nothing at all like the scruffy characters his son played. Matthew was a bit scruffy offstage, too, eccentric and almost otherworldly. His eyes were always twinkling, illuminated by the spins and swirls of his constantly active imagination: he was watching, observing, but you could never quite tell what he saw.

We met again in the 1990s, through my foster mother, Madeline Lee Gilford; with her, I visited Matthew and his wife, Christine Baranski, at their home. My friend Bernard came along, and since he knew fewer people at the party than I did, Matthew did his utmost to make him feel welcome at once: speaking French with him and focusing his attention on him. Even at the time, I was struck by Matthew’s thoughtfulness, and of course anybody who cared about Madeline Gilford would rate highly with me: Matthew spoke at her memorial, the last time I saw him.

He found his match in Christine, whose peppery wit (so close to that of the characters she plays) helped to ground him: they amused each other, and they were generous in their affection. Together they brought up two beautiful daughters, whom frankly I envied — despite constant reminders that one must never take actors’ lives at face value — because the girls had two such cool, creative, fun parents.

Years ago, another fellow tried to impress people by telling them that he was the actor who played Billy Clyde: when he died, word spread that Matthew was dead. This news came as a surprise to Matthew. I hoped that something of the sort had happened again this week, that the rumors would prove untrue, and that Matthew, like Billy Clyde, would reemerge, unscathed.

Yet if there’s a lesson here, it’s not that life is a soap opera. It is rather that, if we enjoy what we do, we may excel. Matthew had fun with Billy Clyde, and no one who watched All My Children will ever forget him.

With Christine Baranski.

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Regina Resnik

Seldom have I met anybody better suited to her name than Regina Resnik, the mezzo-soprano whose death has just been announced. Her husband, the late artist Arbit Blatas, was a devoted fan of The Threepenny Opera and created a remarkable series of paintings, drawings, and lithographs of his impressions of the long-running production at the Theatre de Lys in New York. And so Regina and Arbit became “Friends of the Foundation,” who used to drop by from time to time for a chat and (very often) lunch, but seldom for any business. Regina was one of the first true opera stars I ever got to know — though only a little — and quite possibly the first I ever visited in her home.

Regina was nothing if not regal. Did her parents know, somehow, when she was born, just what she’d be like as an adult? With her hair always perfectly coiffed and her bearing always upright, she spoke in low, rounded tones and an intimidatingly cultivated accent. Everything about her intimidated me, actually, and very often when she was about, I’d remember Scarpia’s line: “La Regina farebbe grazia ad un cadavere!” (The queen would pardon a corpse.) She might have made a good Scarpia, actually, though offstage there was nothing nasty about her at all, and really she was phenomenally gracious — like a queen.

For example, when I visited her and Arbit, she made a point of asking me about myself — and she also made a point of appearing interested in what I had to say. I was just learning that there’s no greater gift that a distinguished artist (or monarch) can bestow upon a young person (or subject), and if ever I get distinguished (or coronated), I’m fully resolved to do just what Regina did.

I never saw her onstage, though I knew her work from radio broadcasts and recordings. This surely helped to inspire awe in me: I’d look at her and know that, just below the surface, a volcano waited to erupt. That huge, dark voice was truly a force of nature — one of the few I’ve known that deserved that description.

In my presence, she never talked about her past triumphs: she was always focused on her current projects. I don’t remember these in detail, though the Venice Ghetto fascinated her, and at various times she organized exhibitions, concerts, and a documentary film on that subject. I sometimes had the feeling that, at that stage in her life, she was tying together all the elements of her culture: art and music and her Jewish heritage. That would have been a worthy effort in any case, and yet she made it seem even nobler.

Her association with the Weill Foundation brought benefits beyond the German cold cuts that I set out (in artistic arrangements, of course) at lunchtime. Harold Prince was a board member of the Foundation, and one day he told Lys Symonette that he would be directing a revival of Cabaret on Broadway. Did she have any suggestions as to who might take the role that Lenya created, Frau Schneider? “Regina Resnik!” Lys promptly answered. Prince might have come up with the idea independently, but Lys’ endorsement surely didn’t hurt, and Regina wound up with a Tony nomination in 1987.

For all the polish of Regina’s presentation, there were occasional hints at a wilder, more passionate side to her personality. After all, her portrayal of Carmen had to come from somewhere. And so, for the record, I note that she tended to take a very wide stance when she sat, as if her knees hadn’t gotten the message that she was a Great Lady. That’s among the reasons that I’ll remember this benevolent monarch with as much affection as awe. It was a privilege to spend time in her company.

AFTERTHOUGHT: On further reflection, I see that I’ve neglected to take note of Regina’s sense of humor, which was considerable. One day when she visited the Foundation, I greeted her with a “Reverenza!” in amateurish tribute to her Quickly in Falstaff. She laughed, and I felt indulged — until she responded with her own “Reverenza!” — whereupon I was intimidated again. That voice! It could knock you over.

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Eileen Brennan

She really did love music.

“Music means more to me than anything,” Eileen Brennan said to me. “Even more than dogs! Even more than cats!” It’s one of the best things anybody ever said to me in an interview.

I spoke with Brennan by phone the day before Thanksgiving, 2009. She was distracted by the old movie playing on TV in the background, and her memory wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. She apologized for the latter, but not for the former. “Why don’t you write about dementia?” she wanted to know. “And tell people to get ready for it!”

She’d survived a horrific traffic accident, though she said she didn’t know whether her memory trouble had anything to do with the head injuries she sustained then. She’d also survived breast cancer and an addiction to painkillers; she was a recovering alcoholic, too, perhaps not unlike the woman she played so memorably on thirtysomething, Elliot’s mother.

But the key word here is “survivor,” and what I took away from our conversation was that Eileen Brennan was — and I say this with the greatest possible admiration and affection — one tough, thoroughly adorable, pretty damn crazy old cat lady. “Life is hard, that’s all I have to say to that,” she said to me, and she lived 80 years of incident and enthusiasm.

In The Sting.

Her first inspiration was Jane Powell, she said, and she did perform in musical comedies, including Little Mary Sunshine and the original cast of Hello, Dolly! But I missed those; I know her work in movies and on television, where I feel as if I got a fair sense of her as a person.

Looking back, I’m struck by the infinite variations she brought to her own brand of world-weariness. Even before the picture started, you could tell that an Eileen Brennan character already had seen it all. Sometimes experience made her impatient, as in Private Benjamin or Will & Grace; sometimes she accepted her lot, as in The Last Picture Show or Murder by Death. But she kept going — most often with her sense of humor intact.

In The Last Picture Show.

I got a taste of her real-life impatience when we talked a bit about Off the Rack, a short-lived sitcom she did with Edward Asner. I’ve still never seen it, but Brennan had just run into the actress who played her daughter on the show, and so it was much on her mind. “We got brilliant reviews,” she told me, and yet the show was cancelled after six episodes. The younger actress had said to Brennan, “I don’t know what happened.”

Just a couple of middle-aged people?
Asner and Brennan in Off the Rack.

“Maybe [the network] didn’t want two middle-aged people,” Brennan mused. “And fuck them! We were so happy together. I ran into one of those assholes [the network programming executives] in the supermarket and said, ‘You did the wrong thing, and you were wrong.’”

She said she still missed Asner and Dennis Haysbert, another co-star in Off the Rack: “I cried when the show broke up.” At the time of our conversation, I had recently interviewed Asner, Madeline Kahn’s co-star in Born Yesterday on Broadway, and so, with Brennan’s endorsement, I called his office and passed along Brennan’s phone number. I hope they spoke again — at least a few times.

In Murder by Death.

“I love actors to death,” she told me. “They really mean a lot to me, because they work so hard, and they have to put up sometimes with such shit. I really feel sorry for actors, but I love them. Carol Kane called the other day and said she was offered a thing and said, ‘No, that’s not for me. Call Eileen Brennan.’ You’ve got to remember when you’re working with other actors, don’t put ’em down — because other actors get you work.”

As Mrs. Peacock in Clue.

Brennan and Madeline Kahn met and became friends during the filming of At Long Last Love, when they would commiserate late into the evening about the long rehearsals and the endless takes and retakes, in which all the actors sing live on-camera. At some points, they were getting together on an almost nightly basis, and though their friendship ebbed and flowed over the years, Brennan recalled Madeline with lasting affection.

“If Madeline were here — ” she started to say, then gave an audible shrug. “She missed all this shit that you go through when you get old. I salute her. It’s not easy, not easy at all.”

In Will & Grace.

I’m not overstepping the limits of biography when I suggest that, if Madeline were here, she’d be grieving today for her co-star and friend. And personally, I know that, as an audience, I’m grieving for an actor who brought such life and such wit to her work — and who did so much to teach me the challenges but also the virtue of indomitability. Only death could keep Eileen Brennan down.

And as long as we’re watching her movies —
she may be down, but she’ll never be out.

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Blair P. Coleman

Ann and Blair, on the day he joined our family.

My godparents arrived at that designation rather belatedly and unofficially: it wasn’t until my godmother came to visit me at the offices of Opera News that she suggested the title change, since “my mother’s best friend who took me to the opera when I was 13” was an unwieldy introduction. (And that is, in fact, a significantly shorter version than the one I used as I introduced her to each boss and colleague in turn.) The more I thought about it, though, the righter the word seemed. Ann and Blair had, in various ways, been carrying out the duties of godparents for years already.

And not least in the realm of music. Ann and Blair had season tickets to the performances of the Metropolitan Opera on tour in 1975, and Blair knew far in advance that a schedule conflict meant he wouldn’t be able to use one of the tickets. So Ann invited me, with the result that I heard Beverly Sills — in Rossini’s Siege of Corinth — for the first time. I’d never encountered anything more thrilling in my young life. After the show, we went backstage to meet Miss Sills, and I remember quite distinctly that neither Ann’s feet nor mine ever touched the ground once as we left Fair Park Music Hall and crossed the parking lot. Physically, this was of course impossible, but physics don’t matter much when you’re an opera fan — and from that moment, I was one.

Yes, the credit here goes mainly to Ann, who chose me though she might have invited almost any other escort to the hottest show in town that night. But over the years I began to see that, culturally, I was in many ways created in Blair’s image. And as time went by he took greater delight in sharing with me the singers he loved. It’s because of him that I finally sat down and listened attentively to Leontyne Price and Eileen Farrell, for example, two artists whose work I’d taken (shamefully!) for granted until then. Blair scoured record stores and duped videotapes to improve my own collections — and then insisted on knowing my reactions to what I’d heard, because for him that was the real fun of sharing.

Blair P. Coleman, M.D.

It’s entirely possible that I’d have gravitated to opera sooner or later, even without the influence of Ann and Blair. As a disdainful East German (the worst kind) once remarked to a friend, “Oh, you Americans. Whenever you are ready to be taken seriously as intellectuals, you turn to opera.” Heaven knows, I have always yearned to be taken seriously as an intellectual: it may have been merely a matter of time.

But the reality is that, if I hadn’t gotten that early start, I might not have been up to speed as a young man, when my first job out of college was at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. I might not even have recognized Teresa Stratas when she knocked at the door to my office; without Teresa’s mentoring, I’d have missed out on Rags and the adventure of a lifetime.

If I hadn’t gotten that early start, I’d almost certainly not have been qualified to work at Opera News, and so would have missed a privileged perch from which to watch countless performances that have enriched me aesthetically and also spiritually. I’d almost surely have been too ignorant to seek out Ewa Podles´ or Thomas Quasthoff, to name just two examples. I might never have attended the 9/11 benefit when Leontyne Price came roaring out of retirement to sing the pride of a wounded nation. For want of such experiences, I’d have been much less a person.

On vacation in Colorado.

In much the same way I’d have been less a man without the friendships I’ve found in Opera World, among those artists who uplift me even when they’re not singing. As Ann and Blair have uplifted me, too, and steered both my brother and me through stormy seas.

Did Ann and Blair have any idea what they set in motion the night they placed Blair’s ticket in my hand? Perhaps not — at least, not in any specific sense. But this is what it means to be a godparent or a mentor. You take charge of some aspect of a child’s life like a field of rich soil freshly tilled. You may scatter seeds more than you plant them. And then you watch them grow where they will. A tomato here, a beanstalk there.

“Careful the things you say! Children will listen,” Mr. Sondheim’s friends reminded me just a couple of weeks ago. I wound up listening to opera. Which led to languages and books, histories and paintings, lives and emotions I’d never have been able to imagine on my own.

Within months of Siege of Corinth, I was back at Fair Park Music Hall, sitting in Beverly Sills’ dressing room, conducting my first-ever interview and launching my journalistic career.

As I’ve played the role of godfather in the lives of my friends’ children — sometimes even less officially than Blair did in mine — I’ve been conscious of the power and also of the chance involved. You can give a kid the Oz books who’ll never crack the spines, and yet when the same kid takes his date to the art museum, you think, “Yeah, some of that inspiration may be mine.” One way and another, my godchildren love theater and old movies and great art and good cooking — and football and calculus, computers and kayaks. I’d hoped at least one or two of my godchildren might develop a taste for opera, but so far I’m still waiting. Patiently. Because that’s how this works. And by the same token, they’re still waiting for me to develop a taste for football.

It’s not about turning out a generation of Mini-Mes. But it is about turning out a generation that you’d like to sit back and have a conversation with. People you’re rather glad to know, and look forward to seeing. People who are — just maybe — a little bit better than they might have been, because of something you once did or said.

Blair at the Fort Worth Opera Festival,
with Ann, Darren Woods, and me.

Blair remained a music-lover to the end of his days. I held out the hope that he’d rally somehow and be able next year to make the trip from Wichita Falls to Fort Worth (as he did so many, many times) for my debut as the Major-Domo in Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos. He loved German composers, after all, and our opening night falls just two days after what would have been Blair’s 90th birthday — and 38 years after the night he gave me his ticket to hear Beverly Sills.

In some spirit, I know I’ll dedicate the performance to him. But, oh! How I’d have liked to have shared the moment with him, to give him a (gentle) poke in the ribs and to say, “Do you see what a fine mess you’ve gotten me into?”

With one of my godsons, Tom.
I’m sure I don’t know what you mean when you say that you see my influence.

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Mike Wallace

Plenty of reporters had asked tough questions long before Mike Wallace ever did. The technique required thorough research and preparation, as well as a certain fearlessness, because sometimes tough questions get tough answers, or a fist in the nose. Thoroughly precedented though it was, Wallace’s style became branded as the 60 Minutes style, so widely copied now that “television newsmagazine” is a genre and not a revolution.

That’s one reason Wallace will be remembered for generations to come, no matter that superstar reporters are a rapidly vanishing species. In stature and influence (which are not the same as power), Wallace was a little below the President of the United States but far above any Senator, Secretary, or Justice. You won’t see that again, any time soon.

During my years at CBS, my view of Wallace was sharply circumscribed, and so others are better able to tell you about him. It’s a shame that Liz Dribben isn’t here to share her memories of Mike, with whom she worked very closely and whom she adored. She fretted more over his failing health than she did her own, it seemed to me.

Equally adoring was the late Frances Arvold, the makeup artist whom Mike used to tease with the dirtiest jokes he knew. “Oh, that Mike,” Franny would say. I’d like to have seen that side of him — but he worked in another building.

What I saw most often was a man ill at ease with the other superstars in our little galaxy. All of them had egos, and all of them clashed whenever their orbits crossed. For example, it didn’t seem from my vantage that either Wallace or Don Hewitt ever fully processed the fact that each owed the other his professional success; their destinies were inextricable, no matter how much each ego wanted sole credit.

And while Mike seemed to like Dan Rather well enough, he did have a habit of making thoughtless, hurtful remarks, not only in statements that got picked up by the press but even in a strangely discordant speech at the party for Dan’s fifteenth anniversary as anchor of the Evening News. Everyone else treated the occasion as a jubilant celebration — Mike seemed to think it was a Friars’ Club roast.

My longest conversation with him may have been over the telephone, shortly after the co-anchoring partnership between Dan and Connie Chung was announced. One print reporter had sniffed that “Dan would never kiss Mike Wallace the way he kissed Connie” at the press conference, and I suggested a snappy reply:

“A candlelit dinner, a little wine, some soft music, and who knows? I might kiss Mike Wallace.”

The line got picked up, and suddenly, Mike himself was on the phone to our office. Dan was on the air, I think, which Mike surely knew, but he couldn’t contain himself. For several gleeful minutes he detailed the many, many reasons he would never — despite Dan’s fondly cherished dreams — kiss my boss.

When Dan called him back, he shut the door to his Inner Sanctum, but I could hear the gales of laughter all the same, and that’s the way I’d like to think of them now. Sure, sometimes I’ve wondered whether dealing with the demons of his depression simply left Mike Wallace unable to deal more consistently and cheerfully with the teeming chorus of prima donnas of the News Division.

But perhaps getting along well with each and every one of his colleagues was not, in fact, his highest purpose; perhaps it’s enough that he reported so many important stories, over a long and uniquely influential career — and that he got on so well with Liz and Franny.

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William Duell

Like the great character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Duell pops up in dozens of roles. Here he is in his recurring role as an informant in the short-lived TV series Police Squad!
I imagine he looked much like this when playing Filch.

The New York Times reports that the character actor William Duell has died, at the age of 88, and in his obituary the Paper of Record very nearly does justice to the length and varied breadth of his career. Long after the heyday of quirky character actors in Hollywood, Duell lent spice and interest to dozens of movies and plays. He was never a star, as we understand these things, but he was a lovely man, whom I had the pleasure of meeting once. The Times does give you some sense of that.

What the Times neglects to mention is that Duell set and held a record for the longest-running performance in an off-Broadway play. Starting in 1954, and ending in 1961, Duell played in the ensemble of the legendary revival of Weill’s Threepenny Opera, in Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation at the Theater de Lys in New York.

As Filch, one of Macheath’s gang, as well as the Mounted Messenger, Duell became a crucial part of one of the most important cultural events in postwar America.

Yes, you do know that face:
Duell in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Outside the tiny theater, the Cold War and the Witch Hunt raged — but inside, dissenting voices rose in song. Blacklisted actors, including my beloved Madeline Gilford, found work in the show, and a steady stream of lefty intellectuals at the box office guaranteed the show its long run.

But it wasn’t only the congregation of those who were already persuaded to whom the Threepenny choir sang. Surely most of the people who have heard Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darrin’s recordings of “Mack the Knife” (which use Blitzstein’s lyrics and incorporate Lotte Lenya’s name among the list of Mack’s conquests) have had no idea where the song came from. I certainly didn’t, when I first heard it.

What’s more, the Theater de Lys Threepenny inspired a younger generation of smart, progressive kids; its score provided their anthems, and, among those who were artists, the show itself helped to focus their ambitions. When I found out that Madeline Kahn was a Weill fan in her youth, everything about her mind and her sense of theater became clear to me.

Poster from the Theater de Lys production.
Today the theater, on Christopher Street, bears the name
of its most celebrated producer, Lucille Lortel.

Bright young New Yorkers went out and learned about Bertolt Brecht, and tried to adapt his ideas for their own shows — very often in tiny little theaters “off-Broadway,” a locale that hadn’t even existed before Threepenny.

We’re still feeling the effects of those performances and calculating the show’s influence. As a training ground for actors, too, the show was unparalleled: among the cast members over the seven years were Beatrice Arthur, Ed Asner, Estelle Parsons, John Astin, Jerry Orbach, Jane Connell, Jerry Stiller, and hundreds more. Going through the old playbills in the Weill archive, I marveled — and without going through them again, I can’t give you anything like a complete list of the distinguished names. Suffice to say that, for decades, you couldn’t turn on the TV or watch a movie or go to a play without seeing an alumnus of Threepenny.

Some 700 actors cycled through the cast of that show, creating a landmark in American culture — but only one actor stuck it out to the end. His name was William Duell, and I thought you ought to know.

Meeting Duell in a rehearsal studio many years ago, I talked to him about Threepenny. (At the time, I nurtured a little fantasy of writing a book of interviews with the cast of the revival.) He was immensely proud not only of his record-setting run but also of the show itself.

NOTE: William Duell’s obituary in Playbill makes prominent mention of Threepenny, and reminds me that Duell took part in Richard Foreman’s Lincoln Center revival of Threepenny in the 1970s. Although I now recall that Duell himself made a point of mentioning it when we spoke, I’d forgotten completely when I wrote this essay this morning. So I really ought not be so quick to criticize the Times obituary-writer.

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Christina & John

It’s unfair to say that John Kennedy turned me gay. But he certainly didn’t do my love life any favors. When we were in college, John had a natural gift for making himself irresistibly attractive to any girl I had a crush on, with the result that my hopes, as I perceived them, were automatically doomed. What could I do? He was American royalty, the crown prince of the United States, godlike in his beauty. There was simply no competing with him, and I didn’t try.

One of the most acute of my crushes, Christina Haag, would have been out of my league in any case — though for the record John didn’t start to date her until after we had all graduated, and while at Brown she still belonged (like the girl I did date) to that special category of women who were too sensible to fall for him. Christina intimidated me: a sophisticated New Yorker, a Brearley girl, a great natural beauty with professional credits already on her résumé. She was effortlessly elegant no matter what she wore, brilliant, and thoroughly mysterious — in a class apart, even at an age when all women seemed mysterious to me. She often struck me as melancholy, but gracefully so, not in the showy, self-pitying way of other college girls, and she possessed an intense sort of nervous energy that I haven’t seen in other women, before or since.

I played Orsino to her Viola, in Robin Saex’s production of Twelfth Night at Brown, the only time I ever got to play Prince Charming and surely the only way I’ll ever get to kiss Christina Haag. And yet what I remember most is my being absolutely terrified to approach her before the show started. She’d be sitting in a stairwell, hunched over as if to concentrate the aforementioned nervous energy into a full-body fist, vibrating, rocking back and forth as her lips moved. It seemed a great deal of work just to get into the character of Viola, who’s no Lady M. and surely the most insouciant shipwreck victim on record.

On the other hand, look at which one of us went on to Juilliard and a real career. Clearly, she knew what she was doing. And was it an accident that, the only time I ever cried onstage, I was looking into Christina’s eyes, which were Viola’s at that moment and not Christina’s at all?

Meanwhile, John seemed conscious of his destructive power over my romantic life, or anyway he went out of his way to be nice to me, and even invited me to a couple of parties at his house in Providence. We ran in tangential circles, the theater crowd, and some of my closest friends acted with him in plays. He was without fail nicer than he had to be, and smarter than I expected him to be. But I didn’t know him well, to the point that I almost believed him the last time we met, when he told me he didn’t remember me.*

John in Summer:
He used to wander around the Brown campus like this.
No, there was no way to compete with him.

Even before his looks began to prompt favorable comparison with Greek deities, John was a creature of myth. I heard about him long before I ever heard him — long before that evening when I came back to my dorm room to find him chatting with my freshman roommate, who resembled John enough to have been mistaken for him by the paparazzi on registration day. They were talking about football, and John was telling Paul that he didn’t like Dallas, the very town I’d fled only weeks before. He meant the Dallas Cowboys, presumably, but here was my first clue that anything he said would be parsed and analyzed by people he didn’t know, exactly the way I did then: Maybe he doesn’t like Dallas because of … you-know-what.

That’s a terrible burden for any guy on the brink of his 19th birthday, even for one who’s grown up in public. I’ve known other famous people and worked closely with them, and shared their lives in some sense for a time, but I’ll never know what John’s life was really like. I remember one night after a play at Brown, when John was accosted by an old man, who’d driven down from Massachusetts to see the show. (The Tempest, I think.) “I loved your father,” the man said, tears filling his eyes and falling to his cheeks. Coming from Texas, where the Kennedy Mystique is less powerful, when it exists at all, I was stunned by this outburst. Soon, the man could no longer speak, but he stood there, refusing to let John go.

I don’t remember exactly what John answered, but he was gracious about it. How should anybody — much less a 20-year-old — cope at such a moment? And keep on coping, every time it happened, in the full knowledge that it would keep on happening? How does anybody reconcile his own ambitions with those of countless, nameless others, once attached to the lost father and now projecting their hopes and ambitions onto you? There’s really nobody who can answer these questions: John had to figure it out for himself.

What’s interesting to discover is that Christina Haag, who knew John so much better than I did when we were at Brown, and who would come to know him better still, knew him first much as I did. She heard about him; she saw his photographs before she saw him. But gradually destiny drew them close and then closer. They ran with the same crowd when they were in high school, shared rooms in a house when they were at Brown, and only a few years later began an affair. Thereupon she, too, had to figure out a few answers.

Now, in delicate, precise prose that makes me proud to be an alumnus of the same college, Christina has written Come to the Edge, a memoir of their lives together, which seems (at least, until you read it) to defy the code of silence upheld faithfully by all of those who were close to John. And yet it’s an essential document.

So much of what’s been written about John is the handiwork of hearsay: gossip, speculation, fantasy. That cheats anybody who wants to understand John and his singular role in the American imagination (which may, in turn, tell us something about the country and its relationship both to history and to celebrity). When John died, stealing my thunder yet again on the eve of my birthday in 1999, I listened to the news in something like stupefaction as my former boss, Dan Rather, eulogized an amalgam of John’s own father and Dan’s own son.** The person Dan described didn’t exist, and was as much mythological beast (half-Kennedy, half-Rather) as mythological hero — but Dan felt the loss profoundly.

Christina’s description is more accurate, naturally, rounded out and backed up by the journals she kept in her youth, but it’s nonetheless incomplete: she slides past John’s defects. Which, being human, he did have. There’s nothing scandalous or bitter or recriminating about this memoir, and really, we would all like to be recalled so tenderly by an ex-lover. Even John’s mother (described here with special fondness, and a little awe) might like to read this book for the portrait it paints of her son.

Christina’s John is a true romantic, pining after her for a decade before kissing her, then plying her with gifts and notes, going for long walks and taking getaway vacations together. He’s always ready to compliment her outfit, and he speaks easily about his feelings. Even marriage. Even kids. Even baby names. Stuff that my girlfriends despair of ever hearing from their men. Around the time Christina depicts, Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes obsessed over John: how much worse her crush would have been had she realized what a terrific boyfriend John really could be.

Well, almost terrific.

Running like a dark undercurrent through the book are themes barely mentioned by name. Public life takes its toll, and Christina suggests that it’s from a sense of public duty that John renounced the theater he loved (and excelled at***): people expected more from him, and he felt he had to deliver. Moreover, Christina’s acting career often calls her away from John’s side and requires a great deal of her focus; and paparazzi, reporters, and glamorous starlets are not here to make life easier for our protagonists.

The darkest undercurrent, however, is John’s love of risk. Christina never spells it out, barely hinting at it in her title, but a dispassionate reader may wonder whether there’s a connection between John’s death and the daredevil character we see here — in fragile boats and planes and in speeding automobiles, climbing up cliffs or the side of Christina’s apartment building.

Christina, as a character in this book, is still grieving over John’s loss, and maybe that’s true of Christina the woman, too. They never said goodbye, he married someone else, and now he’s gone. How do you get over that? And yet the girl I knew was often melancholy, as I say, and perhaps no more so in this matter than in other sorrows she has faced in her very real life. A lot of things might have worked out differently for her — for John — for all of us. What’s most impressive is that she deals so little with remorse and so much with the sweetness she shared with John. And lest we forget, her story is far from over.

It’s a strange thing to see people you knew as characters in a book — perhaps especially when you’ve got a degree in English and American Literature from Brown University. The urge to deconstruct the narrative is great, and yet these are real people you’re looking at. Start to analyze them, and suddenly you’re heartless. Or worse, by analyzing you’re succumbing to the very sort of speculation that you used to disdain in tabloid columnists, when you’d toss the newspaper aside and say, “That doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to Christina and John!”

Perhaps a similar impulse spurred Christina to write: she hadn’t seen in any account a trace of the man she loved, a guy who deserved to be remembered. Who among us wouldn’t want to speak up, whether that man was a Kennedy or a Shmoe? We do see the real Christina and John here, albeit not whole; mostly Christina offers us realities at which we could never guess, but that we may be able to recognize in our own relationships. For those of us who reside far from them, as indeed most of us do, that ought to be enough.

Young love, when it’s going well, makes princes and demigods of us all, and when it’s over, we who survive must mourn our incalculable, irreparable losses. Parnassus is sealed, Camelot closed. That was true for Christina and John, and for John’s parents, and for you and for me. All we can do is remember — and speak.

Ask ev’ry person if he’s heard the story,
And tell it strong and clear if he has not….

*NOTE: It would have been strategically useful for John to deny any recollection of me at that moment, since I’d arrived at his office with Dan Rather in tow: acknowledging me would give Dan an unfair advantage in the interview they were about to conduct, on the eve of the launch of John’s political magazine, George. On the other hand, I’m not the world’s most memorable person, and John kinda was: surely I remembered him better than he remembered me.

**John Kennedy and Danjack Rather worked together for a time in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

***John possessed no special gift for classical theater, despite several attempts, but he was almost perversely good at portraying working-class thugs. He demonstrated this quite memorably in Santina Goodman’s productions of Rabe’s In the Boom Boom Room and Pinero’s Short Eyes. Thus it was a disappointment to the entire Brown community when he didn’t even audition for Jim Barnhill’s mainstage production of Streetcar, but the fellow who did play Stanley Kowalski, Nick Chinlund, has gone on to a fine career as an actor.

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E.L. Konigsburg

A close friend and former roommate, Elizabeth Chapman, used to work in publicity for a New York publisher. So it was with the benefit of experience that she once advised me: if ever I saw that an author I liked was signing books, I should go. Whereas readings typically draw somewhat larger crowds, and celebrity authors’ signings bring out all manner of fans, a book-signing by a “normal” author offered excellent chances of a conversation, brief but satisfying. Which is to say, something more than, “Could you please sign it ‘To Mittens with all my love’?”

It was with this sage counsel ringing in my ears that I left work in the middle of the afternoon, one day back in the 1990s, and headed downtown to Books of Wonder, the children’s bookstore in Chelsea. I’d seen an announcement that E.L. Konigsburg would be signing, and I hoped to tell her how much her novels — two in particular — meant to me growing up.

Konigsburg burst on the scene in 1968, scoring a double play: she won both the Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor award. No one has done so before or since. Our family held the Newberys in high esteem, and I must have wasted little time before turning to the new laureate’s work. I started with her first book, the Honor recipient, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, then devoured her second, the Medal-winner, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Both books (first pubished in 1967) made a tremendous impact on me, and they’ve stayed with me ever since.


Now I was able to tell her so, because when I arrived at Books of Wonder, Konigsburg and her publisher’s representative had signed the last customer’s books: we were pretty much alone in the store. We must have chatted for half an hour, while I bought new copies of old favorites, and she obligingly signed them all. Captivated by her conversation, I even bought a copy of Talk Talk, a collection of essays, so that her engaging voice would be available to me at any moment.

The more we talked, in fact, the more delighted I was: E.L. Konigsburg was the fulfillment of my childhood ideal, the really cool grown-up, exactly what I’d hoped and suspected she would be. Smart, funny, creative (of course), and interested in everything. Passionate about books and art and education. (She’s a former science teacher.) Resolute in her refusal to talk down to children — or to anyone.

It was like that fantasy of going to a friend’s house after school and finding out that his mom gives a damn. I could imagine her supervising elaborate art projects and quizzing me about what books I liked, playing new music and quoting Shakespeare. In reality, a couple of my friends’ mothers really were like that, as were Ann and Andrea, my mother’s best friends in our old neighborhood in Houston: we kids might spend most of the afternoon tearing down the house, but every now and then, these women would stick their heads in the playroom, challenge our minds, and open our horizons.

Konigsburg has written many books (and won a second Newbery Medal, in 1997), representing the broad spectrum of her interests, from baseball to Renaissance art; some are set in the American suburbs, others in the historical past. But Jennifer and The Mixed-up Files will always be special to me. To this day, I’ve seldom encountered any novels, for any reading public, that were more imaginative or more honest.*

The Mixed-up Files tells of a sister and brother who run away from home and “hide out in” the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Konigsburg’s ingenuity was so great in detailing exactly how it would be possible for two kids to live in the museum, that the Met had to change its security procedures: her scheme really would have worked, and real kids must have been tempted to try it. It’s like My Side of the Mountain, only with paintings. The subsequent movie adaptations** required the Met to overhaul security all over again, and yet it seems a small price to pay, since hardly anything ever devised can have done more than the Frankweiler story to get children excited about museums — and about art.

The heroine, Claudia, becomes obsessed with the statue of an angel, and sets out to learn whether its sculptor was Michelangelo; the answer, she believes, lies with the donor, the eponymous Mrs. Frankweiler. But clear-cut answers are hard to come by in real life, and Claudia has to do a great deal of growing up before she arrives at the truth.

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth tells of the friendship between two lonely girls. Jennifer declares herself to be a witch and takes on Elizabeth as her apprentice; their sorcery games are depicted with Konigburg’s habitual attention to detail. But they also represent a power struggle between the girls, and the ups and downs of their friendship are often painfully evocative. There’s nothing cutesy or condescending — or melodramatic, for that matter — about this tale, which remains one of the most probing psychological portraits of childhood I’ve ever read.

Both books are illustrated with Konigsburg’s own pen-and-ink drawings. She’s a polymath, not a professional artist, and the sometimes-amateurish quality of the drawing lends her stories a quirky accessibility: the lack of polish makes them seem more real. And as a (naïf?) child reader, my only clue that Jennifer is black came from Konigsburg’s illustrations.

Konigsburg told me that hearing from grown-up fans is a particular pleasure for her; apparently, it’s not unheard-of for two people to discover a shared enthusiasm for her books, then to fall in love and marry. A few have even named their children after Claudia and Jamie Kincaid.

I can’t remember all the things we discussed that afternoon, but we closed down the shop, and I was running late for the Evening News. I hurried back to my office on a kind of golden cloud, with extra copies of Mixed-up Files for colleagues who hadn’t read it yet. And I phoned Elizabeth Chapman with the happy report that the author had more than lived up to my most cherished expectations.

Not for the first time, I wished that I’d known E.L. Konigsburg when I was growing up. But then, it occurred to me: I had known her, in a way, all along.

UPDATE: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has embraced Mixed-up mania, at least enough to provide answers to “Frequently Asked Questions” about the book. The questions and answers can be found on the museum’s website, here. (Thanks to Michael Leddy for bringing this to my attention.)


*NOTE: Konigsburg’s gift for clear-eyed, realistic characterization is wonderfully demonstrated in Jamie Kincaid, the heroine’s brother in Mixed-up Files. He’s a smart-aleck, very funny without being a miniature Henny Youngman (as so many sassy kids in the movies are), while Claudia’s affection for him (sometimes mingled with exasperation) is always wholly believable.

**The first of these adaptations, starring Ingrid Bergman as Mrs. Frankweiler, featured the young Madeline Kahn in a cameo role. A later adaptation starred Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Frankweiler. There have been stage adaptations, as well, including at least one opera.

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Mary Cleere Haran

It says something about the talents of Mary Cleere Haran that one of her biggest fans was Jack Gilford. Jack had seen plenty of great nightclub singers in his time — he used to share a dressing room with Billie Holiday, after all — and he knew the real deal from the wannabe. Nobody was more real than Mary. She had it all: looks, brains, sophistication, and a voice that Jack always said was “like butter.” He was smitten from the start. And who wouldn’t be?

My own direct contacts with Mary were fleeting, sporadic, and few: mostly, I was just another fan who happened to know her in-laws. I can tell you only a few things about her: that she was a great artist and a terrific lady, and that, with her death yesterday, people I love are grieving.

We had this much in common, Mary and I: we were made a part of the Gilford family — more conventionally in her case than in mine, I admit. Mary was married for a time to Jack and Madeline Gilford’s older son, Joe, and together they brought into the world a sweet, funny kid named Jake, who narrowly avoided being named Jesus.

The story goes that, in December, with Mary ready to deliver any minute, Madeline locked her and Joe in the garage at Freedonia, the Gilfords’ country house. “Ma, let us out!” Joe cried.

“Are you out of your minds?” Madeline answered. “Your name is Joseph, her name is Mary, we’re right outside Bethlehem [Connecticut], and it’s almost Christmas. There’s no way I’m letting you out of there!”

Madeline relented, of course, and Jake managed to wait until after Christmas to be born, just to avoid any possible confusion in credulous minds.

Mary sang pop music with the grace and gusto of the greats gone by, but she wasn’t a stereotypical chantoozy. For starters, no matter what was going on in her personal life, you didn’t hear it in her voice; the resemblance between her and Billie Holiday began and ended with the fact that they both knew Jack. In performance, Mary maintained a witty reserve that, in the old days, used to be called “class.”

Mary Cleere Haran sings “For Now” from Avenue Q:

When there was emotion in a song, she served it up straight, and didn’t try to milk it. Her own troubles weren’t the point, she understood as if by instinct, and nobody knew better than she how to put over a funny lyric. Lorenz Hart never seemed wiser, more honest, more gifted, or more present than when Mary sang his songs.

Moreover, she was brilliant, a peerless authority on her subject, a passionate researcher whose acts and albums are like survey courses. She wrote, she interviewed, she poked around in archives, and she came up with treasures. Just one example: there’s a revival of interest in Doris Day’s work now, and much of the credit goes to Mary, who helped to produce a PBS documentary on Day, and who also performed material associated with her.

She was getting her act together — in every way — when she died. I can’t count the disappointments and the unfulfilled promises: I can’t imagine where she might have taken me, musically, because she was so far ahead of me and knew the path so well. There are so many songs she might have sung, and so many questions I might have asked her.

At least she knew that I was a fan, for Madeline introduced me to her as such. Mary looked from me to Bernard, and back to me again before saying wryly, “Of course you are.” Evidently there was something about us that reminded her of her other admirers.

Maybe it was my resemblance to Jack. People are always commenting on it.

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