Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  In Joss’s hands, The Avengers, too, became a tale of restored hope and chosen family. The film’s superhero team, he said, are people who “should not even be in the same room, let alone on the same team. And that, to me, is the very definition of family.” Joss took the reins of one of the highest-profile blockbusters of the year and turned it into an intimate personal story. And he was rewarded with the highest box office grosses of 2012—over $1.5 billion worldwide. Joss will revisit this dysfunctional family in a 2015 sequel, and as he prepares for the film, he’ll simultaneously oversee its TV spin-off Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Marvel’s first US network series since The Incredible Hulk went off the air in 1982.

  And while fans will no doubt be heartbroken if the series fails to find an audience, they can take solace in the fact that Joss Whedon’s career is a testament to defeat. The defeated, like Buffy and Mal Reynolds, face every challenge and celebrate every victory along the way, even if the final battle doesn’t go their way. The defeated do not fail, because they keep on fighting.

  For much of his life, Joss Whedon has been struck down by defeat far more often than he climbed the winner’s podium. Before he was known for creating a feminist icon or directing the third most successful blockbuster film of all time, Joss was a lonely kid who thought that if he could just crack the code, people would understand what an awesome person he was and love him for it. As Buffy executive producer and Angel cocreator David Greenwalt said, “If Joss Whedon had had one good day in high school, we wouldn’t be here.”

  And if he hadn’t landed in Los Angeles after college, broke and jobless and living with his father, he wouldn’t have found a champion in the elder Whedon, who encouraged him to bypass the traditional path to Hollywood success. If he hadn’t been let down by his first job, on Roseanne, he wouldn’t have learned how the choices producers make can either unite or divide a set, or that it can be good to walk away from what you thought was your dream job. If Buffy the film had been a hit, there would most likely not have been Buffy the television series—nor Joss Whedon the director, a role he honed on the Buffy series after an initial terrible experience with a crew who didn’t like him. If the Writers Guild strike hadn’t shut down Joss’s work on his Fox series Dollhouse, he wouldn’t have had the time to discuss web series ideas with his younger brother and his fiancée, which led to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and a new model for launching original creative content online.

  And if all of these failures had been avoided, the world would be bereft of Joss’s characters. And without them, many people might not have found touchstones of strength and guidance to help them through hard times. Without Joss and Buffy, I, personally, would not have found the fortitude and bravery to confront the man next to me on the bus—to tell him what he had done, so that I could leave that twenty-year burden with him and finally move on.

  Even with an impressive résumé that includes the highest-grossing blockbuster of 2012, two beloved cult series, and significant contributions to several pop culture phenomena, Joss still loses more than he wins. But like his heroes, Joss Whedon not only counts his victories, no matter how small, but shows how his defeats can be counted as wins too.

  1

  A FAMILY OF STORYTELLERS

  Much has been made of Joss Whedon’s ability to reinvent modern storytelling. First, he upended the “blonde girl trapped in an alley” horror trope with the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Five years later, his “high school is hell” approach to the Buffy TV series reignited both teenage dramas and sci-fi/fantasy television. Most recently, he assembled a bunch of outsiders into The Avengers, or as it’s been called, “the perfect comic-book movie.” But he wasn’t the first in his family to find success in Hollywood. He wasn’t even the second.

  Joseph Hill Whedon—he would name himself “Joss” in college—was the third son of Ann Lee Jeffries Whedon, a teacher and author, and Thomas Avery Whedon, a television writer who worked on Captain Kangaroo, The Electric Company, and The Golden Girls. His paternal grandfather, John Ogden Whedon, wrote for such classic TV series as The Donna Reed Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

  In the mid-1920s, John Whedon left his hometown of New York City and headed up the East Coast to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend Harvard University. The school would graduate several members of the Whedon family: Burt Denison Whedon, John’s father, received a bachelor of laws degree in 1903; John’s brother, Roger, graduated in 1929; and John was in the class of 1927. Both John and Roger focused on writing and were named to the literary board of the famed undergraduate humor magazine the Harvard Lampoon. John was elected president of the Harvard Lampoon in 1926 and was a member of another long-lived Harvard institution: the Hasty Pudding Club.

  The oldest collegiate social club in America, which counted Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy among its members, the group staged musicals that were completely written, composed, and produced by students. In the spring of his senior year, John Whedon was chosen to collaborate on Gentlemen, the Queen, the eighty-first annual production of Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

  After graduation, John returned to New York and started writing and editing for several magazines, including the Forum, Harper’s Magazine, Collier’s Weekly, and the brand-new New Yorker, where he later served as managing editor. There he penned Comment essays, Talk of the Town vignettes about life in the city, political commentaries, features, and short stories. John also found a bride, a woman who shared his love for skillfully crafted words and performance.

  Louise Carroll Angell had been deeply involved with the drama club at Pelham Memorial High School in Pelham, New York. In her junior year, she won a rave review from the local paper for her starring turn as Katherine in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. The year prior, she directed The Silver Lining by Constance D’Arcy Mackay, a one-act play that is set in Victorian England and follows Frances “Fanny” Burney as she wrote Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Burney’s novel was noted for its flawed female protagonist, who determines her own path in a harsh and antagonistic world. Carroll made her own way up to Vassar, one of the all-female Seven Sisters colleges of the Northeast, where she served as the editor in chief of the school’s principal student publication, Miscellany News, during the 1930–31 school year. On June 12, 1931, three days after her graduation, she wed John, and they settled into a Greenwich Village apartment on West Tenth Street, a few blocks from Washington Square Park.

  Thomas Avery Whedon was born just over a year later, on August 3, 1932; a daughter, Julia, came four years after. John and Carroll moved their small family out of the Village and in with John’s parents in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens, New York. The extended family lived together in a two-story home on Croydon Road. John and his father commuted into Manhattan—Burt to the law firm of Wing & Russell, his son to the New Yorker.

  By 1939 John had moved into radio, writing for NBC. He worked on Rudy Vallée’s variety show, as well as The Chase and Sanborn Hour and Tommy Riggs and Betty Lou, before taking a lead role writing for the popular comedy The Great Gildersleeve in August 1942. There, with writing partner Sam Moore, he was credited with developing more serialized storytelling for the series and expanding the supporting characters to create a “vivid, realistic image of wartime small-town America.” Carroll entered the radio business as well, joining CBS in 1941 as copy chief in advertising and sales promotion. After five years with The Great Gildersleeve, John once again brought his writing to the stage, and his musical Texas, Lil’ Darlin (cowritten by Moore, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) bowed on Broadway on November 25, 1949.

  Tom remembered the daily commitment his father made to his craft. “When I was a child, my father wrote at home,” he said. “He locked himself in the study, and no one was allowed in there. He worked a real nine-to-five day, and he’d break out for lunch for a half-hour. I kept hearing the typewriter going all the time. The 40 years that I was an active member
of the Writers Guild, everything I wrote was on a manual typewriter. That sound was important to me.”

  In his teens, Tom attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a then-male-only private preparatory school in New Hampshire. By the time he graduated in 1951, his father had changed his media outlet to television. John started writing for Lux Video Theatre, a spin-off of the radio show in which Hollywood stars performed original comedy and dramatic teleplays. But his success was hindered by the witch hunt of the US House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Created in 1938, HUAC investigated people and organizations suspected of having links to Communism or other supposedly subversive ties. In October 1947, the committee held nine days of hearings interrogating over forty people about the alleged Communist propaganda and influence in the motion picture industry. More than three hundred individuals were blacklisted by the studios, with a particular focus on screenwriters who were seen as disseminating Soviet and Communist propaganda through their scripts.

  HUAC held a second Hollywood investigation in 1951, pushing many of those under investigation to cooperate by naming others with Communist involvement. When one of them implicated a writer John had worked with on Gildersleeve, John himself was blacklisted as well. His agent recommended that he relocate to the West Coast full time in hopes that the blacklist wouldn’t follow him. By this time, he and Carroll were living separately; they would finalize their divorce in August 1954.

  John’s move paid off. He spent the next decade writing in Hollywood for such series as the television version of The Great Gildersleeve, Kraft Television Theatre (for which he received an Emmy nomination), Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

  Tom Whedon did not move to California with his father, as he had been accepted into Harvard University’s class of 1957. In Cambridge, Tom both showed off his athletic prowess on the lacrosse field and made a big impression on the Harvard stage. Like his father years earlier, he cowrote the book for the Hasty Pudding musical, 1953’s Ad Man Out. In addition to his time with Hasty Pudding Theatricals, he expanded his range through his work in the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC).

  At the time, Harvard did not admit women into its undergraduate studies program, but it was closely connected to Radcliffe, one of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges. Radcliffe was considered a school of the arts; by the early 1900s, its women had established groups to put on theatrical performances of their own. Students took on every facet of production, from writing scripts and scores to building sets and directing. As Harvard often had men playing women’s roles, Radcliffe women played heroic, dramatic, and romantic male roles. Until World War I, men were completely forbidden to perform in Radcliffe shows.

  However, in 1955, Radcliffe’s main outlet for theatrical and artistic expression, the Idler Club, was shuttered, halfway through the schooling of undergrad Lee Jeffries. An English major with a desire to be on stage, Lee wasn’t deterred—she forged ahead, taking active roles in every possible performance put on by various dramatic groups at Radcliffe’s brother school, Harvard, including the HRDC. She was soon cast in several musicals and plays, including The Seagull and Alice in Wonderland, the latter directed by Tom Whedon. Tom performed in those plays and other HRDC productions as well; he and Lee even appeared opposite each other in the club’s first musical outing, Great to Be Back!, scoring two of the few accolades for the performance in the Harvard school paper’s review of the production: “Lee Jeffries and Thomas Whedon were the stalwarts of the cast…. Miss Jeffries was the only reason for including a tired sequence about planned amusement at the beach, and Whedon met every demand of the evening good-humoredly and ably.”

  The pairing continued offstage. “My mother … was extremely intelligent and witty,” Joss said. “I think that’s what attracted her and my father in the first place.” In May 1959, Lee and Tom were married in her home state of Kentucky. Her father, James Harvey Jeffries, a Jewel Tea salesman and another Harvard grad, was living in Louisville with his second wife, Margaret. Her mother, Anna Lee Hill Jeffries, had died in August 1954, five years before her daughter married.

  The Whedons had already relocated from Cambridge to New York City, where Lee was on the administrative staff at Finch College. Finch was a girls’ finishing school that had gotten its accreditation as a baccalaureate liberal arts college seven years before Lee joined the staff. It was founded in 1900 by Jessica Garretson Finch (later Cosgrave), a women’s rights activist who campaigned for suffrage; feeling that her undergraduate studies at Barnard left her without any practical skills, she was determined to establish a secondary school that would give women a well-rounded education and also prepare them to enter the working world. Lee also had a professional life in the theater. She worked at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and took her skills as a musical comedy singer off-Broadway in Oklahoma!, Finian’s Rainbow, Bus Stop, and Riders to the Sea.

  Years earlier, Tom had told his father that he had no intention of becoming a writer, because it was too hard. John had responded, “You’re gonna be a writer.” Sure enough, Tom kept his Harvard-honed theatrical skills sharp, penning musicals such as All Kinds of Giants and Money that eventually found runs off-Broadway.

  The couple had an apartment in an “Italian Renaissance-palazzo-style building” on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A year after they wed, in May 1960, son Samuel arrived; Matthew Thomas was born in February 1962. That same year, Tom started writing for the children’s show Captain Kangaroo.

  It was difficult working with the temperamental Bob Keeshan, who played the titular captain, and soon Tom realized how that stress seeped into his family life. Just as he had listened to his father typing away when he was a young boy, his oldest son, Sam, mimicked his father’s daily habits. “We were living in a Westside apartment with a long hall…. I came out one day, and my son was marching up and down the hall, saying ‘Shit, fuck, shit, fuck,’” Tom said. “He had been listening to his father write.”

  Perhaps it was no surprise when Tom left the series after three years, moving on in 1964 to develop a TV pilot with writing partner Jon Stone and Jim Henson for a series in which Henson’s puppets would retell the Cinderella story from their point of view. (The project would not be picked up, but Henson later redeveloped the idea into the 1969 television special Hey Cinderella!)

  Joseph Hill Whedon was born on June 23, 1964, on Midsummer’s Eve—a date that was probably notable to Lee, a Shakespeare lover who staged readings with friends and family after Thanksgiving dinners. The youngest of the three boys, Joss often felt that he was much smaller and more vulnerable than everyone else. “Was I the weak person who got pounded on? Oh, totally! I was little and cute. I was actually mistaken for a girl very often, because I had lovely, flowing red hair,” Joss says. “Let us take a moment to remember my lovely, flowing red hair!”

  Whether it was his delicate features or delicate sensibilities, Joss was often intimidated by the world around him. “Something that I’ve felt very much as a child was a fear of patriarchy and anybody bigger than me, like my brothers or my father,” he says. He considered his brothers “charming, but merciless” and his father “an incredibly dear man” who was “not necessarily great with kids.”

  Joss’s relationship with his father found common ground in a surprising source: the words and music of Stephen Sondheim. His musicals scored the story of the Whedon home and were a way for Tom to connect with his son. “Some fathers can’t really talk to their sons, but they can throw a baseball,” Joss said. “We’d throw on all the Sondheim albums.”

  Joss had a far less tenuous relationship with his mother, in whom he found an “extremely outspoken, strong and loving” exemplar. “She was very smart, uncompromising, cool as hell,” Joss recalled. “You had to prove yourself—not that she wouldn’t come through if you didn’t, but she expected you to hold your own.” Lee was also a strong role model for many of the children who came through h
er classroom at Riverdale Country School, a private primary/secondary school in an affluent section of the Bronx where she began teaching history when Joss was four. Her son was enrolled in the school himself beginning in the first grade.

  Lee’s feminist leanings started to come through early in her tenure at Riverdale. Though the institution’s upper grades were divided into a school for boys and a school for girls, and she’d been hired to teach at the latter, she was a member of the department that started holding the first academic classes that mixed students from the girls’ school and the boys’ school. In addition to teaching American and European history, she also developed courses on feminism and women in literature, and her other classes ranged from British Authors to Heroes and Anti-Heroes to Socialist and Communist Thought. With another teacher, she created a social studies course in which students studied educational theory, visited schools, and for their final exam, designed their own ideal schools.

  Drama was another of Lee’s great loves that she brought to her career at Riverdale. She created opportunities for students and teachers to work together onstage as well as in the classroom, directing joint student-faculty productions of plays by Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and others and even performing in several plays herself over the years, including Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. She directed all-student casts as well, and the student production of Jane Martin’s Talking With was so successful that she managed to arrange a public showcase production at Symphony Space in Manhattan.

  Lee’s model of strength and nurturance was a source of comfort for young Joss, who called upon her example to shield his own vulnerability. Joss began to take an interest in female characters, and to be excited by stories in which the girl was “let into the club.” He also retreated frequently into his imagination, creating his own stories for his toys and regaling his mother with little strange tales.