That Old Feeling

Happy Feet

It’s the little things a guy does that keep the relationship fresh. It’s been seven long years, but just when I think I am so over George Bush, he’ll find a way to give me that old feeling again.

Unfortunately, that feeling is outrage. But it’s a rainy Sunday morning in Paris, and I’d like to focus on something more cheerful.

The photographs above were taken last week when President Bush gave John McCain his endorsement. Apparently McCain is ambivalent about the support, because he kept the President of the United States waiting for several minutes. (Gotta love McCain. He’s living the dream, for all of us.*) A lesser man might have lost his temper, or gone off and signed some legislation until McCain was ready to roll. Not George Bush. He broke into a little dance.

What went unreported was the song to which Bush’s little performance was choreographed. I have a few theories:
“Call Me Irresponsible”
“I Ran So Far Away”
“Shake Me, Wake Me When It’s Over”
“We Didn’t Start the Fire”
"I’m Too Sexy for My Shirt”

If you have any ideas, please write to tell me. I’ll post any ones that make me laugh out loud.

*UPDATE: McCain’s ambivalence has persisted. As of Monday, 10 March, his campaign website still made no reference to Bush’s endorsement. Sorta like he doesn’t want to be reminded of it.

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A Confession (Of Sorts)

Following the recent, high-profile exposures of Margaret B. Jones’ Love and Consequences (in which a young woman from Sherman Oaks purports to be a former gang member from L.A.) and Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust (in which a Gentile purports to be a Jewish refugee raised by wolves — no, really), I am seizing the initiative to clarify a few details in my recent autobiography, A Method to This Madison: How I Survived the Mean Streets of Rio de Janeiro as an Orphaned Black Jewish Lesbian Midget Single Mother and Also Later Discovered the Cure for Cancer.

I am aware that documents and eyewitnesses do not always bear out a few — a very few — of my assertions. However, I very sincerely believe the book to be true in spirit, and I will vouch with every breath for the emotional factuality of every statement I have made.

For example, critics contest my claim that I am the President of France. And I am aware that an exhaustive investigation of back issues of the magazine Paris Match at the laundromat and close observation of the waxworks in the Hall of Fame at the Musée Grévin do indeed indicate that, during the period in question (1985–present), three different people also claim to have held that post. Bolstering their counterclaims is the fact that each of these gentlemen is French. However, my passport and other legal documents do confirm, irrefutably, that I have spent a great deal of time in France. I believe that history will bear me out. Feet first, perhaps, but nevertheless.

Some investigators believe that one of these men, not I, is the current President of France.

I may have exaggerated slightly when I said that I had written A la recherche du temps perdu. Internet sleuths have tracked down royalty statements addressed to one Marcel Proust, which might suggest that he is the author of that novel. However, it is provably true that I wrote the title. A la recherche du temps perdu — I just did it again!

When my editor questioned portions of Chapter 37, which discusses in detail my successful career as a lounge singer in Las Vegas, I provided her with audio recordings that she may have believed supported my claims. However, closer examination may reveal that these are old Vic Damone records with the name “Vic Damone” crossed out, and my own name written over in Magic Marker. What I intended for my editor — and my readers — to understand was that I wanted to sing like Vic Damone. Yet again, the emotional truth of my book is rock-solid.


Unfortunately, by including the above photo in my book with the caption “Here I am on the set of Sweeney Todd with Helena Bonham Carter,” I may have given some readers the impression that I am Johnny Depp. Well, I am — in my dreams. And no one can disprove that.

My birth certificate and school records do suggest that I was raised by a certain Mr. and Mrs. Madison, or Mattislow, a kindly couple in the state of Texas, and not by a foster family of wolves in the forests of Germany. Although there are substantial gaps in the record, experts on animal behavior have told me that the time involved would have been insufficient for any wolf to make me a sandwich or to teach me to play poker, as I wrote in a series of heartwarming scenes in my book. Some of these “experts” have the audacity to allege that inclusion of such scenes only proves that I know nothing about wolves, who lack hands that would be necessary to wield a knife in order to spread the peanut butter, and who are very bad card players.

But I am also a very bad card player — that’s my point! And a closer reading of the passages under scrutiny reveals that I never said my parents were wolves — only that they had sharp teeth and that I was constantly afraid that they would bite me.

And that fear was wholly justified.

To date, no critics have challenged the other chapters in my book, in which I detail my experiences as a tree surgeon in the Philippine jungles, my service as a Honduran mercenary, my heroic rescue of a shipwrecked boatload of puppies, my leadership of the Russian mafia, my moon landing, my simultaneous editorship of National Review and Slutty Juggz, my winning the Triple Crown in 1987, or my years as lovable Tootie on TV’s Facts of Life. And therefore it is without reservation that I urge you to read my book.

Like any reputable autobiographer, I stand by my every word. Until further notice.

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Leaving Home

Ours is a mobile society, and yet we remain nest-builders as a race. We make of friends our families, and we make of their homes our own.

The prospect, then, of the loss of one of those homes is strangely distressing: it is as if something and yet nothing is being taken away from me.

Today, Jon Feldstein will leave the apartment where he has lived for nearly as long as I’ve known him. When loved ones die, we reassure one other by saying, “He’s going to a better place,” and in Feldstein’s case (happily not mortal), this is provably true. His new apartment is bigger and fancier, and it’s in an exciting neighborhood. He claims there even will be space to lodge me, when I come to visit. But I’ll miss the old place — the shelter I sought when New York was attacked, my forwarding address, my base of operations for exploring Greenwich Village, and the setting for so many parties and flirtations and embarrassments.

It was merely a studio with a glorified alcove and dubious plumbing; the kitchen a former closet, with hardly enough room to make a sandwich. Because of the vintage leaded window panes, air conditioning the place was pretty much impossible, and Jon’s attempts to do so defied the laws of thermodynamics.

These things seldom mattered to us when he was entertaining, as he so often was. When the apartment got crowded and you wanted privacy, you’d retire to the stairwell, and when you wanted air, you’d bribe the doorman and go up to the roof. Jon’s vast collection of housewares, inherited from his aunt Martha, a compulsive shopper, always served, no matter how many we were, though we sometimes ran out of beer, and there were never enough places to sit.

The apartment commanded an excellent view of Christopher Street and Sixth Avenue and their annual parades, and it happened sometimes that random strangers came up by accident and stayed, on Halloween or Pride Day, to celebrate with us all.

On my last weekend in the city, Feldstein threw a party for me, and the tiny room was packed with my friends. But you know, even when he and I were sitting alone, the room was packed with my friends — anyway, the one who counted most.

I guess it’s time to move on. We’ll build new nests, and make of them what we can. And eventually, I’ll memorize the new address.

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Sears R. Jayne

Let us now praise Renaissance men.
(This is The Triumph of Bacchus, by Velasquez.)

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of my college graduation draws nigh, my thoughts turn daily to my professors. They were a remarkable lot, and in coming days I expect I’ll post little portraits of some of them: Barbara Monahan, my “staraya babushka,” who tried so valiantly to teach me to speak Russian; Bruce Donovan, who tried equally to teach me Ancient Greek; James O. Barnhill, who remains for me the living embodiment of the joy of theater. Yet in some respects the best of my teachers, and the one who summed up what we used to call “The Brown Experience,” was Sears R. Jayne.

His physical resemblance to my paternal grandfather, a fellow Midwesterner who died when I was 5, might have earned him my automatic affection, as might his innate kindness, another trait the two men shared. My grandfather was a preacher, and so in a sense was Sears Jayne. But my grandfather’s faith was Methodism, and Mr. Jayne’s was humanism — a concept new to me at the time, though I became at once the truest of believers. For all I know, he practiced some other faith, in his private time, but he converted me.

He taught a survey of Renaissance literature: Montaigne, Erasmus, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Machiavelli, Quevedo, authors who delved deep in the multiplicities of experience and whose works haven’t left my side since. He taught English poetry, too, and I daresay that if he’d taught basket-weaving or a survey of medieval laundry lists, I’d have enrolled in that course, too, and learned something lasting about humanity.

In his rolling, somewhat foggy baritone, language was never more ecstatic. One of my most vivid memories is of his reading of Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes,” portions of which quote “If You Lakka Me,” an old song of dubious racial sensitivity but great charm. (Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien sing it in Meet Me in St. Louis.) Hopping and shimmying, swaying and braying, Mr. Jayne attended some other melody than the original. “Under the bam, under the boo, under the bamboo tree!” he howled, until the whole campus seemed to dance along with him.

It was impossible to take any text lightly, or less than passionately, when Sears Jayne offered it to you.

His own words were even more potent. Seldom was the lecture that didn’t end with some or all of the students moved to tears, as we were the morning he spoke of the future. He saw us so worried, he said, about nuclear war and personal relationships and money, and all the rest, and turning to drugs and drink to escape. That saddened him, and he searched for comfort to offer us. Whatever mess the world was in, however beleaguered we might be, he told us, all would be made well on the day when we came home and found our children smiling up at us from the bath.

That huge voice became knotted with emotion as he spoke, and the glass of his spectacles seemed to fog over. We all saw the image of his own daughters, years before, when he was a young man like us.

“It’s going to be okay,” we thought. “Life will go on.” As indeed it has, so far.

He adored us, and it had been the unsettling surprise of the English Department, who had hired him as a star to lure in graduate students, that he preferred us undergraduates. I responded in somewhat like fashion: he taught lecture classes, with discussion sections, and although he encouraged us to attend the sections led by his teaching assistants, for the benefit of exposure to other opinions, I steadfastly attended only those that he led himself.

That may have been selfish, yet I couldn’t force myself to regret it, and it was in keeping with his methodology. He was deeply interested in our responses to literature, and whole essays might be devoted to how we felt about a poem or a book. The final exam in the Renaissance survey course asked which of the authors we’d studied we’d prefer as a father: I chose Cervantes, after lingering wistfully over Rabelais.

To have studied with a teaching assistant would have been to deny myself the full force of Mr. Jayne’s instruction — and my reaction to it.

In poetry class, we were asked to compile an anthology of poems that were meaningful to us personally. I made a point of including Kipling’s “If,” because Mr. Jayne had proclaimed that it wasn’t a poem at all, just a series of statements. But when I was a boy, my mother used to read “If” with such conviction that I believed she’d written it: “And, what is more, you’ll be a man, my son!”

Returning my anthology, Mr. Jayne thoughtfully wrote, “I apologize for insulting your mother’s poem.”

His solipsistic approach pretty much derailed any ambitions I might have harbored for a career in comparative literature, which in the Ivy League in those days (and doubtless still) was subjected to rigorous deconstructions and arcane theories. Mr. Jayne would not endorse these methods, I think, or have much patience with them, either. One of the most astonishing essays I have ever read was his almost entirely theory-free analysis of King Lear. To his eyes, the play is “the tragedy of people who fail to love each other enough.”

He retired at the end of my sophomore year, having at the last minute persuaded me to become an English major, and at the end of his last lecture, current and former students crowded into the hall to bid him farewell. There were readings and tributes, and I presented him with a three-quarter life-size portrait I’d painted (badly, of course) of him in full cry, reading from a little book marked “Sweeney Agonistes.”

I corresponded with him, briefly, after I graduated. I should have kept on writing to him — not least when I discovered The Firebrand of Florence, Kurt Weill’s adaptation of Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, one of the pillars of the Renaissance survey course and the occasion of one of Mr. Jayne’s most unforgettable lessons.

When he was teaching at the University of Virginia, he told us, William Faulkner came as a guest professor. The great author was in his full gentleman-farmer mode in those days, and he arrived in horsey regalia, jodhpurs and boots, a red jacket and a little riding crop.

A young reporter from Life magazine had been assigned to cover Faulkner’s first class, for these were the days when the movements of great authors still made news. It’s likely that if the poor journalist had simply sat in the back of the classroom, as he intended to do, Faulkner never would have noticed him. But he made the mistake of going to Faulkner’s office to ask permission first.

Mr. Jayne’s office was on the same floor, and when the commotion began, he ran into the hallway to see Faulkner thrashing the journalist with his riding crop, chasing the fellow down the hall, down the stairs, and out the door. Faulkner returned, dusting off his jodhpurs and grinning. To the flabbergasted professors, the Nobel Prizewinner crowed, “I showed that bastard, didn’t I?”

“Now, William Faulkner wrote the greatest novel of my lifetime, which is The Sound and the Fury,” Mr. Jayne said to us. “But the question arises: Does great art excuse bad conduct? And the answer — ”

He paused, as every one of us leaned forward over the seminar table to hear.

“ — is no.”

No preacher ever made the point more indelibly. It was Mr. Jayne’s belief that Cellini halted his autobiography when he read over the manuscript and found himself disgusted by its catalogue of his own excesses.

Be that as it may, in the years since Mr. Jayne’s class, I’ve seen his lesson tested by many artists, those I knew personally and those I did not; I’ve tested it myself. Great art doesn’t excuse bad behavior. (And mediocre art doesn’t excuse even itself.) Mr. Jayne was right. As usual.

I’d like to tell him that, but I fear that I’ll be able to do so only if my grandfather was right, and we meet some day in Heaven.

UPDATE: Sears Jayne died on 11 April 2015, at the age of 94. I’m grateful to his family for making it possible for us to renew contact and to exchange a few e-mails after so many years. His daughter sent along this photo, taken some 30 years before Mr. Jayne’s last class at Brown. Strange to see that familiar face, so much younger than I knew it — younger then than I am now!

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Onkel Kurt

Weill and Lenya

Today is Kurt Weill’s birthday. Had he lived, he’d be 108. But he didn’t live; he died at 50, and it’s with surprise that I calculated this morning that I’ve nearly surpassed him in age, if nothing else. Because of my early employment at the Weill Foundation, I got to know several people who knew him very well: Lys Symonette, Maurice Abravanel, Burgess Meredith, und so weiter. But they were all quite old by the time I knew them, and they’re gone now, too.

Each of them tried to share Weill with me, in pictures, letters, anecdotes, even imitations. Lys used to say that Weill always had a particular little smile on his face, which she found in very few of his photographs, and which she tried to demonstrate for me. But because she looked nothing like him, I’m not sure I got the right impression.

Weill had no children. Which made of us at the Foundation heirs in the legal sense but also in the sense of family. The things you might know about an uncle, even if he died long before you were born, are things that I know about Kurt Weill. Pointless, random bits of information that no biographer could ever use. But they are his legacy, as much as his music, and they make of him my uncle — Onkel Kurt.

For instance. When presented with a problem, I sometimes find myself muttering, “Wir miiiiiissen das Biiiiiiiischlein befragen” — “We must look it up in the little book,” with a heavy, whining southern accent. Some schoolmaster of Kurt Weill’s used to say that, and it became first a schoolboy jest, then a constant refrain when Onkel Kurt played Scrabble. From him it passed to Lotte Lenya, his widow, and from Lenya to Lys, and from Lys it’s been passed on to me. Just like family.

A little anecdote. One night, Weill went to the Metropolitan Opera to hear The Barber of Seville. (Why? It’s hardly the kind of music he ordinarily sought out. Maybe Abravanel invited him.) During intermission, he overheard a couple of women talking.

“I hear Rossini wrote the overture last,” said one.

“Oh,” replied her friend, “I’m glaaaaad.”

And that’s the punchline to the story. What’s the point? I don’t know — excepting perhaps that it reveals the sorts of things that amused Weill. I share the story with you so that it will not be lost.

On another evening at the theater, Weill noticed two other ladies staring at him and whispering. “It’s him!” “No, it’s not!” “Yes, it is!” Finally, one of them approached him.

“Oh, Mr. Romberg, could we have your autograph?”

And Onkel Kurt dutifully signed the program: Sigmund Romberg.

Somebody still has that, I’ll bet.

In matters more consequential, Weill exerts a huge influence on me. His music hit me like a thunderbolt, and it still does. No matter how many people try to copy him, that sound belongs to him alone. And because of it, I’ve gotten to know some extraordinary people, at the Foundation, at the opera house, and in my dreams, where Lenya still makes occasional appearances — checking up on me, giving me news of our mutual friends.

Onkel Kurt himself is a bit more elusive. He’s never once appeared in my dreams. But not unlike the narrator of Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, I keep trying to track him down. Years ago, I met his last mistress, who broke down sobbing at his funeral and had to be carried away. (“But you see,” said Lenya as she watched, “I loved him, too.”) By the time I met her, she was a dignified upper-middle-class matron, and officially I wasn’t supposed to know of her amorous past. She didn’t tell me anything about anything — but I studied her minutely.

With David Farneth, I visited Brook House, Weill and Lenya’s home in New City, New York, and I reflected on the fact that my Onkel was a short little guy. People had told me this, of course, but it’s not until you bang your head on the rafters of his house that you really understand.

I used to stay up late at night in the Foundation archive, reading Onkel Kurt’s old letters. They’re wonderfully stylish, in English as in German, and I admire especially his ability to describe his every work as “something completely new and original”: he was shy in many circumstances, but not when it came to self-promotion. An artist needs to know how to do that. Now whenever I write a pitch, I think of him, offering a temporary antidote to all the modesty I was brought up to believe in.

I’d leave the archive and walk up Broadway in the midnight darkness. I’d see old men on the street, and I’d look for Onkel Kurt in them. Sometimes I found him, a little.

Doppelgänger

Curiously, what may have told me the most about him was a little packet of tiny photographs I found in the archive. They’re pictures of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the stars of Burr Tilstrom’s puppet show for children. Weill was a fan, and as he was dying in the hospital, he watched the program faithfully, and wrote asking for pictures. And here they were.

He looked remarkably like Kukla, as he must have realized. I can see him taking the pictures out of their envelope — and smiling. The way Lys remembered him.

How better to explain his music than to tell you that I hear that smile in every song? Playful, ironic, secretive.

I’m not an ideal nephew. Tante Lenya’s beautiful Chinese desk has a big scratch across one side, and I’m the idiot who put it there. But that’s how it is with family. And I love Lenya — and Onkel Kurt — as truly as if I ever knew them.

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Oh, the Humanities!

“Is our children learning?” President Bush once asked, and this morning I’d like to follow up on that question. What is our children learning? I sincerely hope that it’s a great deal of math and science, because on the evidence they’re learning nothing of history and literature.

A new advocacy group called Common Core has released the results of a recent survey, taking a sampling of 17-year-old high-school students and asking them multiple-choice questions. I found the story on the web magazine Slate, which provides sample pages of the quiz (so you can take it yourself) and reports on some but not all of the results. The only question to elicit a near-unanimous correct response, according to Slate, was that which asked who gave the “I Have a Dream” speech; meanwhile, fewer than half the students knew when the Civil War was fought. I was unable to download Common Core’s brochure, which lists other results, but my hair is on fire as it is.

We already knew that America’s children were learning nothing of music and art, because those programs were cut years ago. Nobody seems to have considered the very real possibility that in another generation or two, Americans will be unable to write their own songs: we have outsourced music to countries where it’s still taught. We already don’t know how to listen to music, because we have no music-appreciation courses. Thus Americans fuel the commercial-music industry. We want what’s new, not what’s enduring — because the enduring stuff is too complex for us. We prefer the bubblegum, get bored within six months, and run off to buy more. (At least, those of us who still pay for it.) Of course, “pop” is called that for a reason, but other forms of music — jazz and classical — might be more popular, if only Americans had the tools to understand them properly.

Now it seems we’re in danger of not understanding quite a lot of other things, too. Literary, even Biblical, allusions will be lost on us — which in turn will make it more difficult to explain important concepts to us. We’ll know nothing of our history, which will deprive us of the context with which to understand our present and our future. Some of the kids who took this quiz will be eligible to vote in November. Are we prepared to hand over the country to people so ignorant?

Well, we already handed the country over to George Bush, who until recently used to boast of how little he read (a rude slap at his wife and mother, both of whom are commendable advocates of literacy) and whose grasp of history can be judged in his attempts to draw parallels between the Iraqi war and the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, and the war in Vietnam. Since significant numbers of Americans apparently don’t know when or where these conflicts took place, they may take Bush’s pronouncements at face value — or, as he might prefer it, on faith.

Though I fled the country the day after Bush was elected, in 2004, I’m reluctant to blame him automatically for everything that goes wrong in the world. I’m funny that way.

But Common Core identifies Bush’s much-touted “No Child Left Behind” program as a source of the current crisis. The program’s standardized testing places emphasis on basic skills, math and reading, and despite the best hopes of Washington, teacher friends confirm that they have wound up “teaching the test,” to the detriment of other subjects. (One friend is so frustrated that she gets nearly apoplectic any time “No Child” is mentioned.) At the very least, the program warrants a thorough overhaul.

And so, too, may Common Core’s quiz. I mean — really! These questions are pretty tough. Consider this one — which, I repeat, fewer than half of the respondents answered correctly:

15) When was the Civil War?
A) Before 1750
B) 1750–1800
C) 1800–1850
D) 1850–1900
E) 1900–1950
F) After 1950

So many choices! Is it reasonable to expect children to know the answer? I was 10 years old before I realized that none of my relatives had fought in the Civil War — they all talked about it constantly. And from the way my mother scrimped, I was pretty sure the Great Depression occurred while I was in preschool; it was very much part of my own life story. I’m sure that children today have similar difficulties.

So I propose a few sample questions, in the hope of achieving superior results.

1) During the Second World War, the major enemies of the United States were
A) Godzilla and Megalon
B) Germany and Japan

2) Who were Plato and Aristotle?
A) Greek philosophers
B) The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders

3) Who wrote The Canterbury Tales, a poem in Middle English containing stories told by people on a pilgrimage?
A) Geoffrey Chaucer
B) The Cast of TV’s Ugly Betty

4) The first permanent English colony in North America was
A) Jamestown, Virginia
B) Disneyland

5) Who was the commander of the American army in the Revolutionary War?
A) George Washington
B) Banana

Now don’t you feel smarter?

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Lynda Carter

In street clothes and in person, she’s actually better-looking than this.
Which is, in a way, alarming.

By common consent, attending the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta was for the younger of us CBSers “just like summer camp!” In near-shrieking excitation, we were far from home, we poured on and off of buses to get where we were going, we ate every meal together, and we spent much of every day in a tiny cabin.

That was the anchor booth, a flimsy construction that jutted out from a skybox high over the arena. It was dark there and very cold, air-conditioned to sub-Arctic degrees to counter the heat of our lights and cameras. I’d sit in the back, next to the Teleprompter operator, because my job, so far as I understood it, entailed making sure he had the right copy on his screen. This was pure boondoggle, and four years later, the network wouldn’t countenance the inclusion of extraneous personnel: we’d had budget cuts, and we were leaner and meaner. Mostly meaner. (By then, I had a more exalted title, and my presence at both parties’ conventions wasn’t questioned. But in 1988, I was a mere production assistant, and the trip was a reward for services already delivered, not a necessity to the coverage at hand.) To make me look more useful, Dan Rather used to ask for coffee even when he didn’t want any.

There were all kinds of celebrities in Atlanta that week, and some of them deigned to visit the anchor booth. The great Eric Sevareid was part of our team, offering analysis but not commentary; the Rev. Jesse Jackson came by for an interview, wrapping my hand in his and calling me “friend” for the first time. (It’s a measure of his charm that, even though you know he says that mostly to avoid having to learn your name, you really do think it would be nice to be his friend.) And then one day, Lynda Carter walked in.

A decade after the demise of her television show, Wonder Woman, she was still jaw-droppingly gorgeous, her astonishing smile beaming effortlessly as she “toured” the booth. I wasn’t a huge fan of Wonder Woman, but she acquitted herself well, and it’s a shame she hasn’t found more acting work since: she had potential. She remains a hero to plenty of women I know — including several of my colleagues in the booth that day. Yet everyone kept whispering, “What’s she doing here? What’s she doing at the Convention?”

The real answer was that her husband, attorney Robert Altman, was being groomed as a potential successor to party nabobs such as Clark Clifford, his mentor. But I saw another solution.

“Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “She’s a super delegate.”

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