By the 1960s, however, the world had become more complicated than it had seemed after the war, before the Russians got the bomb. There was a new war, and while some readers continued to love poetry, poets did not play the tune to which the public danced.
Mom’s statement was true. Not every word that dripped from Dad’s pen was immortal—in fact, most words were not. But some words were, and it was those that kept him up late, striving to say what his muse gave him to say, for the betterment—as he thought it—of the world around him.
When we lived in Washington, I was at an age when being cool was important. Dad would chivy me with the statement that when he was young, the best thing for a teenager was to be hot. Dad was alarmed at the hands-off, pale-eyed, aloof adjective our generation had chosen to use when we approved of something. Dad thought our adjective betokened an unfortunate rejection of joy, and of élan, which would do our generation no good. Our laughter, he said, coming out of our linguistic base of cool, was too often cynical. Now, years later, I perceive that he was right.
Nevertheless, during those years when I lived in Washington, I was troubled by the worlds-colliding anxiety that my father himself might be . . . cool.
My father!
You see, Dad painted poetry with a broad brush. Not only did he draw his poets to the Library of Congress, but he drew mine, too. Occasionally I would come home from school and hear a tale from Dad about how he had spent that afternoon with a person whose face I knew well from a record album cover. How could this be?
Most folksingers passed quickly through Dad’s office, or through our house, but some of them became friends. I came to know Mimi Fariña, younger sister of acclaimed folksinger Joan Baez, and her husband, Dick Fariña, whom I admired greatly. Dick used to read us sections of his almost-finished first novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Here was a handsome young fellow—not so very much older than I (yes, maybe ten years but not fifty!)—married to a seriously good-looking woman, who could sing (the two had recorded two excellent albums that bridged the start of folk rock), and he was finishing a novel I really liked the sound of.
Maybe that’s who I could be!
But then I did not want to be Dick Fariña anymore.
I got a call from Mom. “I don’t know if you know.”
“Know what?”
“Dick Fariña just died.”
“Died!”
“He was killed in a motorcycle crash. In California.”
“But . . . but the book just came out.”
“Yes. Two days ago. I’m sad to have to tell you. I know how much you liked him. He was doing a book signing and he rode away, and . . . well . . .”
I didn’t know what to say. This was a death among my people. “Does Carolyn know?”
“I’m sure she does. She must.”
“Oh, Mom . . .”
“Yes, my dear. I’m sad too.”
Carolyn was Carolyn Hester, the folk music star with the mellifluous voice and the acoustic guitar, who had been Dick’s first wife and with whom our family had developed a solid friendship in Washington. Carolyn, a Texan, had been a central figure in the Greenwich Village folk music scene in the early 1960s. She knew everyone, and she had even allowed the unknown Bob Dylan to play harmonica on several of the cuts on her third album. The closest I ever came to Dylan was Carolyn telling me funny tales of his borrowing her typewriter to knock out a song or two when he was penniless.
Later, when Carolyn would do concerts at Dartmouth and stay at our house, I would be her lighting engineer and man her spotlight from up on the light bridge. Whenever I manned Carolyn’s spot, my friends noticed that she appeared to sing her most tender love songs right at me. I delighted in my friends’ conclusion that she and I were . . . well, enough said.
For a time, when I was in college, I lived on the fringe of the folk music world, mostly doing lights, thanks to Dad’s door opening for me back in Washington. The fact that I already knew some of these people made me able to talk easily with them, at least on the technical subject of their lighting. And I had one lively item that was purely my own to share with them and to laugh about. I had once dated Grace Wing. Who? You know, Grace Slick (née Wing) of Jefferson Airplane.
I remember once dropping her name to Art Garfunkel of Simon & Garfunkel. Our conversation went something like this—
Art, startled: “So you know Grace Slick?”
Me, complacent: “Yup. Dated her.”
Art, curious: “How did that come about?”
Me, offhand: “My uncle and aunt live in Wilmette, Illinois, and I was visiting, and Gracie lived down the street, and she and I met, and she invited me to a party, and I went, and then we had a date—I don’t remember, a movie or something. I liked her; she was funny and had a lot of friends.”
Art, now to the important point: “Do you keep up with her?”
Me, punch line: “No, no. I just use her sometimes, with someone like you.”
That made Art laugh. He and Paul Simon were the least affected by celebrity hauteur of the singers who streamed through. I could even talk to them directly about their lighting cues and not merely to their producer.
For a brief time, because I lit a number of their concerts, I was friendly with Ian Tyson and his wife Sylvia—a Canadian folk duo. They were easy to talk to also. They were outgoing and relaxed about any coming performance and seemed to truly enjoy their renown.
I’d love one more time to see the two of them do “Captain Woodstock’s Courtship.” The erotic tension between them, as Sylvia strutted around the stage singing of the seemingly impossible tasks that Ian, as Woodstock, would need to complete before she would lie one night with him on his old straw bed, simply crackled. Sylvia’s required tasks led up to her final task, that Ian should “bring me a priest unmourned to join us one and all.”
Sylvia’s list of requirements worked for me. At the time, I so wished a woman to give me a hint too. I wanted to hear a woman as pretty and as strutting as Sylvia say, “Dikkon, bring me a priest unmourned to join us one and all.”
If a woman were to say that to me, I just knew I would answer her with the same self-assurance as Ian did Sylvia.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
If Dad brought me acquaintance with literary folk—however broadly defined—it was Grandmother who brought me the blandishment of the theater. Overall, Grandmother took special care that I should learn to be a gentleman. She loved the theater, and since, as a widow, she needed an escort to properly attend, she often chose me.
Etiquette and gentlemanliness were very important to Grandmother. For example, when she and I traveled together during my teen years to London, or Switzerland, or Spain, she honored me in a way that made me proud. She would slip money to me under the restaurant dining table, so that I, her escort, had the resources to pay for our meals. For Grandmother, I delighted to dress for dinner, which I hated to do at home. In Madrid and Cordoba, I used my prep school Spanish to order for her: “My grandmother will have . . .” I took care of our hotel bills and managed transportation and luggage. I reserved dinner seatings with train conductors, and I made Grandmother comfortable in the dining car while imagining we were aboard the Orient Express.
When I was very young, Grandmother took me to see Peter Pan, with Mary Martin (a girl, as I was offended to discover) playing Peter and Cyril Ritchard reveling in the best role in the show—Hook. I remember truly praying, just as hard as I could, for Tinkerbell to get well. I remember being enchanted with the flying. I was seeing it with my own eyes. It must be real.
I learned that anything—even an impossible thing—could happen behind the proscenium arch. What a wonderful world that must be. What a wonderful world into which to escape!
At first, Grandmother concentrated on musicals. She felt it was important that I be there when Carol Channing starred in Hello, Dolly!, when Rex Harrison was Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, and when Robert Goulet appeared in that new show Camelot.
Goulet sang as
grandly as everyone expected, but that other guy . . . my goodness, who was that? After the show, Grandmother took me to the stage door to see if I could get an autograph from—what was the name? Richard Burton. (I couldn’t, by the way.)
But it was Mom who took me to Oklahoma, and did so twice—and she cried through most of it. “This is what we fought the war for,” she told me, by which I understood her to mean we did it all for hope, and for goodness, and for loving-kindness, and so that Curly could still drive Laurey to the box lunch social dance in the surrey with the fringe on top.
Later, when I was in prep school and had begun to act myself, Grandmother’s selections included edgier fare. For example, she took me to see Equus, which she had already seen. Equus has a nude scene, about which she gave me no warning. Grandmother and I usually sat in about the sixth row, orchestra center. I was poleaxed when the actress undressed, naked women at that time in my life being as rare as confidence. Grandmother leaned over and whispered, “Such troubled young people, but interesting, don’t you think?”
I wasn’t able to think.
Speaking of which, here’s another time when I was scarcely able to think. One time in Switzerland, I ran into Brigitte Bardot—literally. Grandmother and I were swinging happily down a street in Gstaad, snow falling in puffy flakes, when I turned swiftly around the corner of a hotel and bumped into a woman wrapped in fur. We both sprang back; she was Brigitte Bardot.
I stammered; Bardot was amused.
Brigitte Bardot!
Grandmother, who took any moment to teach etiquette, whispered her desire to congratulate the sex kitten on a recent performance. But first, she said, I must make the introduction. After all, Brigitte and I had just become acquainted, while Brigitte and Grandmother had not. Try introducing your grandmother to the world’s most famous wearer of the bikini, and doing so in French (which you scarcely speak), while still shivering at the feeling of Brigitte’s fur (and what was bundled up inside of it) having been so splendidly slapped up against you.
This was one time when my savoir did not even have a chance to faire!
In other situations, Grandmother’s etiquette meant that I did not converse with celebrities—she knew when to provide privacy. That same evening, she and I were ushered to a table at an elegant restaurant. She sat on the banquette; I was on the chair across from and facing her. I noticed that the waiter caught Grandmother’s eye and that she tilted her head ever so slightly toward me. This meant that I was to receive the host’s menu and she the subordinate one. Only the host’s menu showed the prices of the dishes; hers did not—for, after all, I was her escort.
I had just adjusted to this nicety when another couple was brought to sit at the table next to ours. A young and very beautiful woman was seated on the banquette next to my grandmother. Her escort sat in the chair facing her, just as I was facing Grandmother. Reluctantly, I drew my eye away from the beautiful woman and glanced at the man beside me. The elegant British movie star David Niven, one of my favorites, was sitting no more than four feet from me.
And there David Niven sat through the next hour and a half. He and his dinner companion carried on a lively conversation, as did Grandmother and I, and not by the slightest glance did Grandmother interrupt their privacy. The eyes of the two of them—Grandmother and Niven—met only once. At one point, two excited diners descended on Niven to ask for an autograph. Politely, Niven complied. As he turned his attention back to his young woman, his eye met Grandmother’s eye. With the merest tilt of her head and the slightest twitch of one eyebrow, Grandmother seemed to say, “What can one do?”
With the merest tilt of his head and the slightest twitch of one eyebrow, David Niven agreed: “Yes, what indeed?”
And then we ordered dessert.
Back in the States, when Grandmother and her theater group of aged ladies from Cambridge drove up to New Hampshire to see me perform Shakespeare on the prep school stage, I was gratified. More so, when they looked at me differently after the curtain came down, it meant a lot to me.
There on the stage at Holderness School, as Petruchio in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, my character’s taming of the shrewish Katherine had gone over very well with the audience. One of Grandmother’s theater friends and a Lakeview Avenue neighbor—possibly my favorite of them all—said this afterward: “Dikkon, I could not take my eyes off you. I think you have a gift.” She paused for a moment. “Do you think you might want to be an actor?”
This was heady stuff for a lad whose father was, until now, always the eye magnet.
My grandmother’s friends were the first to make me feel as I did later when Alec Guinness or Jimmy Cagney or some other established actor would take my acting ambition seriously and give me advice.
But was I really to be an actor? Was I really to make a living by seeming?
It’s because Dylan Thomas used to read me bedtime stories that I was later introduced to Alec Guinness.
In 1964, when I was a college freshman, Sidney Michaels’s play Dylan opened on Broadway. I’d spent the last three years acting—beginning with the role of Petruchio. By college time, theater was pretty much all I did. Before I had even matriculated, I had done a summer of repertory stock work, doing three plays with equity actors and becoming acquainted with Blythe Danner, who did an absolutely hilarious Rosalind in As You Like It.
Blythe was a very concentrated actress, not to be distracted. Sometimes a subtext runs parallel with the actual play. The subtext is the surreptitious effort by the actors (usually it’s the actors and not the actresses) to insert some distraction into the performance, which the audience won’t see, but which will so crack up the victim of the joke that she (it’s usually an actress, and the prettier the better) will need to turn upstage. You only turn upstage when you need to compose yourself . . . and therefore admit that the joke worked.
But Blythe was of steel. Whatever we did, however hard we tried—and after many performances everyone, by now, was in the battle to get Blythe to turn upstage—nothing we did worked. She was one controlled actress. Until the last try.
One set of As You Like It is the enchanted Forest of Arden. Rosalind flees there when she is falsely accused of treason by her uncle. The forest is where she meets the man she will love, as well as other colorful characters. The way we built the forest was to suspend many “tree trunks” by ropes from the fly loft, so the audience saw a deep and wide forest of trunks through which Rosalind and Orlando, her lover, could flit and taunt and flirt with one another. The tree trunks were stage flats—the flat “walls” used in stage scenery—one flat per tree. Each flat was about a foot wide. Their front sides were painted as trees, but of course their back sides (facing upstage) were not.
At a dramatic moment in the action, there was one particular tree trunk behind which Rosalind hid. She went racing silently through the forest, saw this particular tree trunk, and leaped behind it, only to turn instantly and peer out from behind it. In turning, her face was no more than six inches from the back of the tree trunk flat.
One of our conspirators was inspired to paste a Playboy centerfold on the back of the tree trunk, just where Blythe would see it as she turned.
It worked!
Blythe turned upstage!
(Probably nowadays this would be sexual harassment, but it was funny at the time, and Blythe did have a sense of humor.)
But let’s get back to Michaels’s play Dylan.
The second act of the play is set in our house in Cambridge. One of the scenes occurs in my bedroom. Dylan is alone in my room, with me in my bed—you don’t see me in the scene; there’s just a bed, and I don’t have lines—and, somewhat drunk, he philosophizes about life with me, while downstairs Dick and Betty are throwing a party for him. Now and then, poet John Malcolm Brinnin, who directed the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and was the first man to inveigle Dylan to come to America, pops into my room and complains that people are wondering where Dylan has gone.
Well, it is safe for Dyla
n to be in my room. People can’t get at him. (And Mom can’t reject him.) And I am easy to talk to. Eventually, though, he leaves and goes down to the crowd. In real life, I probably trooped after him and sat on the stairs.
It’s not every day you find yourself depicted on Broadway, so our entire family went to New York for the opening. Friends of my parents from the war, the Clayburghs, who knew New York theater society well, arranged the outing. They came to the show also, and with them came their daughter, Jill, whom I had known and liked for a long time, and who was two years older than I. I remember being quite impressed with Jill this time, with her New York sophistication that so outshone my own. It had come to me during the past several years that girls are, well, intensely interesting. Perhaps because of this evening, the connection between Jill and the theater always seemed to me to be inevitable, and I enjoyed it later when I would come across her on the stage or in the movies, just as much as I enjoyed it when she would drop by at Undercliff.
Dylan was a success that opening night and ended up running for about 270 performances. After the curtain, we all made our way to an elegant Manhattan apartment and joined a throng awaiting the play’s star, Alec Guinness. That man duly arrived, and Dad took me over to introduce Guinness to the very child he had been talking to onstage just an hour before, now all grown up.
Guinness was amused by this encounter, and he had the graciousness to quiz me about my acting and my career plans. We spoke for perhaps forty-five minutes, with interruptions. I was deeply pleased by the man’s attention.
Back when Dad was not much older than I was that night, he had roamed in Ireland. For a while, he had hung around and dined with William Butler Yeats and his circle. Like Dad conversing with Yeats, I tried my very best to say things that wouldn’t seem trite to this great actor. And Guinness left me with advice, good for any young thespian—and for anyone else, for that matter.
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 10