Someone in a big hurry asked Hillel, the great rabbi and scholar, to summarize the meaning of the entire Old Testament, while standing on one foot.
Hillel’s reply: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That’s the whole thing; the rest is the explanation of this. Now go and study it!”
Following in the hallowed tradition of Hillel, Roger Rees—my partner of thirty-three years and my husband for four—has his own standing-on-one-foot philosophy of life, concise enough to fit on a T-shirt, and true enough to come in all sizes: BE JOLLY AND KIND; THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS. Simple, short, and sweetly true. A way to make the world a better place.
In the Jewish tradition, this is called tikkun olam—literally to repair the world. But Roger was raised Church of England. He only converted to Judaism twenty-five years ago. How could he understand tikkun olam better than I do?
It turns out, of course, that Roger understands everything better than I do. Which is why our decades together are such a blessing for me.
And if tikkun olam is making the world a better place, Roger teaches me every day that you make the world a better place by first being a better man. Which for me was to be a man worthy of him, of irreplaceable Rog—the person I knew, from the moment I saw him, was my destiny. In fact, our being together struck us both as “meant to be.” B’shert, as they say. This little story will explain why. It’s a story that dates back to our first meeting.
Actually, a couple of years before our first meeting.
It was 1979, and I was a young actor fresh out of Yale Drama School. On the same day that I received my master’s degree, I wrote a letter to Trevor Nunn, then the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, saying, “Hey, I’m a brand-new Yale Drama MFA, and I’m getting on a plane and coming over to be in the RSC! Just tell me when to show up!” Two weeks later, I got a letter back from Nunn: “Sorry, we don’t hire Americans.”
Well, I was shattered. I mean, I had an MFA from Yale! And here’s this SOB telling me that my MFA was DOA at the RSC.
Instead, I spent a couple of years at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then I came home to New York. It was 1981, the same year that the mammoth eight-and-a-half-hour production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby—directed by John Caird and that same Trevor Nunn—came to New York. Came? It conquered.
I was incensed: A year before Nickleby, Amadeus, another British play, came to Broadway with its fancy British actors and their fancy British accents—and hogged all the attention and all the awards. A year before that, Piaf did exactly the same thing, and regretted nothing.
Now Nicholas Nickleby shows up—and tickets are a hundred bucks a pop!! This was when Broadway tickets were only twenty dollars, you understand. And a hundred dollars to a twenty-five-year-old actor…well, it might as well have been a billion.
So here come the Brits, and the star of the show is on the cover of Time magazine, and the Royal Shakespeare Company is once again sucking up all the oxygen in New York, and I’m working a pathetic gig as an assistant stage manager in a truly awful musical in the basement of St. Peter’s Church in the Citicorp building, and I have had enough!
So I go to Actors’ Equity and I say, “I would like to start a committee to keep British actors out of Broadway.” (British Out of Broadway—BOOB—that was our moniker.)
And literally, while I’m protesting the RSC’s presence on Broadway, my dear friend Kate, a wonderful actress, calls me and says, “Rick, you have to go see Nicholas Nickleby. It’ll change your life.”
And I said, “I wouldn’t go to that play with their hundred-dollar tickets if it was the last show on earth.”
And Kate said, “But it’s everything you love. It’s brilliant. It will change your life.” And I said, “I don’t have a hundred dollars. And if I did, I sure wouldn’t spend it on tickets. I’d spend it on food.”
But the seed was sown. So I ask my father for a hundred bucks to buy food, and I go to the Plymouth Theatre on Forty-Fifth Street to buy a ticket to Nicholas Nickleby instead.
It’s for Saturday, December 5, 1981. I’m sitting in the back on the side, with this giant Yale Drama School chip on my shoulder.
The actors are all milling about in the audience before the show starts. And all the way down front, kneeling at the edge of the stage, I see the most devastatingly beautiful person I’ve ever laid eyes on. I wonder who that is, I thought.
Turns out it was the guy playing Nicholas Nickleby.
By the time the play’s over, more than eight hours later, I’ve learned a million times over that my friend Kate was quite correct. Being in the theater that day has profoundly changed my life.
At midnight, I stagger home to my little room on Fifty-Seventh Street. Flip on the TV to a new cable station that, like PBS, aired lots of British programs. A man in a tuxedo addresses the camera: “And now, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.” Turns out it features all the same actors I’ve just watched on Broadway. Including Roger. Then, at three in the morning, the man in the tuxedo approaches the camera again: “And now, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.” All the same actors again! Including Roger!
By the time the sun is coming up on Sunday morning, I’ve spent a whole day and night with the RSC. I’ve forgotten all about BOOB. All I can think of is Roger Rees. I feel compelled to write him a mash note.
I grab a yellow legal pad, and write a letter inviting Roger to come see me do a tap number at a benefit that very night for New York Stage and Film company at the Milford Plaza Hotel. Just down the street from his theater. What could be simpler? I think. Of course he’ll come.
I drop my letter off at his theater on the way to my hotel ballroom. I do my little tap dance. I help raise a little money. But—unbelievably—Roger doesn’t show up. And a few weeks later, just after New Year’s in 1982, the entire Royal Shakespeare Company decamps for England.
And that, I thought, was that.
Nevertheless, I’m obsessed. I turn my sad one-room apartment into a poor man’s shrine to Roger. I find photos, interviews in magazines, ads in old newspapers. It’s infatuation at DEFCON 5. It isn’t sane or pretty. But it’s the real thing.
Fast-forward ten months to September of 1982: I’m working part-time at an ad agency as a copywriter—a skill it turns out I had a knack for, which saved me from waiting tables.
There I am, writing ad copy for a new British musical that’s coming to Broadway called Cats, directed, yet again, by my old nemesis and new-minted hero Trevor Nunn.
And because I’m working on the show, I get invited to the dress rehearsal on Wednesday, September 22, 1982. I’m sitting at the Winter Garden Theatre waiting for this Cats thing to begin, and walking down the aisle comes Roger Rees.
He was in New York for one day, between finishing shooting a new Bob Fosse film in Los Angeles, called Star 80, and starting rehearsals for a new Tom Stoppard play in London, called The Real Thing. He figured he’d swing by the theater to say hi to his pal, Trevor. I watch him down front, chatting and hugging and laughing. I begin to assemble a mental list of things to say to him when this Cats show is over.
Two hours later, it is. Roger is chatting, hugging, and laughing again. I go outside and wait at the stage door to introduce myself to him when he exits. Eventually he comes out onto Seventh Avenue, and I pounce.
I have all my questions prepared, about his performance in Nickleby, his performance in Three Sisters, his performance in Macbeth. I’m so happy! All I can think is, I can’t believe I’m talking to the man I’ve built a shrine to!
Roger seems engaged; I guess actors enjoy talking about themselves. I steel myself for my final question: “Could we have dinner?”
He politely explains he’s only in town for one day, and says no. I ask him again. A second time, he says no. I mull this for a moment.
Then I take a deep breath and say, “I’m not exactly sure why, but I feel if I don’t ask you one more time, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. Are you sure you won’t have dinner with me? I’m really not a stalker.”
He smiles and says, “You might be just a teensy bit of a stalker. But alright.”
The next day, September 23, I leave the office early to dismantle the shrine, and prepare pigeon en croûte in my sad little kitchen. It was inedible, but Roger was perfection.
We talked and talked until four in the morning, made out a bit, sang a few songs to each other, and then it was time for Roger to get in a car to go to the airport. Rog says, “Maybe you’ll come over in six weeks and see The Real Thing. Here’s my phone number in London.”
“I don’t know what it costs to call London, but I’m sure it’s more than I can afford,” I say.
He says, “Here’s my address. Write. Write a lot. Write me lots of letters. I’ll write back.”
That same day, I was offered three jobs: a season at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; an understudy gig for a new cabaret on Forty-Fourth Street; and a full-time copywriter position at the ad agency I’ve been working at part-time for a month.
I took the writing job, because I figured Minneapolis was even farther away from London than New York. And an acting job meant having only one day off a week. At the ad agency, I’d have whole entire weekends off. Which meant I could go to London for two whole entire days. And I’d have a steady paycheck to pay for the trips.
And I’d be writing; and Roger had told me to write.
Over the next six weeks, I followed Roger’s direction. I wrote and wrote. Copious letters, typed and in longhand. I wrote about my hopes, my fears, my opinions, my passions—pages and pages—surrendering to that great feeling when you don’t want to hold anything back. You know, intimacy. And amazingly, astonishingly, intimately—Roger wrote back.
The Friday before Thanksgiving, I boarded a plane to London. The next morning, I was standing in Heathrow Airport at the crack of dawn, waiting for Roger. He’d promised to meet my plane. I was suddenly terrified: what if he didn’t remember what I looked like?
I mean, I knew what he looked like, of course. He’d been on the cover of Time magazine. But what if he walked right past me and I was left standing at the gate—and suddenly, there he was! Right in front of me, sporting a thick black beard for his part in the play—which had opened the week before and was a smash hit for Stoppard and his stars, Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees. Somehow, even after six weeks of rehearsal and opening a play and being at the center of another whirlwind of attention on the other side of the world, Roger still remembered who I was. Golly.
We hop into his car, and he drives me through London to his house, south of the river Thames. The house is next door to his mother’s house. And, it being Saturday, Roger has a matinee. So he introduces me to his mum, hands me a ticket to his show that night, tells me which tube train to take to the West End, and leaves.
The play, thank goodness, is wonderful. And Roger is wonderful in it. I spend the next ten days falling and falling and falling. Rog is by now introducing me as “my chap.” I don’t want to return to New York, but I board the plane with a goofy smile, because I am deeply, profoundly, molecularly in love.
I write more letters to Roger, and he writes back. It becomes a thing for us, letter-writing. A way to bridge the three thousand miles that separate us.
The other bridge was British Airways. I’m so besotted, I’m showing up at the British Airways ticket office every Friday for a standby ticket to London, arrive on Saturday, come back Sunday night.
A couple of months of these standby weekends, and bushels of letters later, the woman at British Airways asks me why I take so many trips, and I tell her I’m in love. “Do you believe in love?” I ask her.
She smiles and tells me to leave my passport at my office, and, for a year, she calls me every Friday morning to let me know whether it’s a good weekend for standby. Sometimes she even upgrades me, “because,” she says, “I too believe in love.”
Three years later, three years of long-distance love and letter-writing, and flying to London, Germany, Switzerland, Los Angeles—wherever he was working—Roger and I, firmly a couple and besotted with each other, are at his house in London, painting the front room. Ecstatic domesticity.
He’s got a file cabinet against one wall. Best way to move a file cabinet—first you take out all the drawers, then you move the metal shell away from the wall, paint the wall, move the metal shell back, and replace the drawers.
I’m putting the top drawer back into the cabinet, and I notice a tab on top of the file in front. It says: RICK’S CORRESPONDENCE.
And I say, “Awww that’s so sweet. You saved my letters.”
I was so flattered. I mean, I saved everything from Roger, even the hairs from his comb.
I was obsessed, this I knew. But it never occurred to me that he would save anything from me.
Roger smiles. He says, “You wanna really freak out?” And he comes over to the file drawer, leafs through to the very front of it, and pulls out a folded piece of yellow legal paper.
“I don’t know why I saved this,” he says, “but I did.” It was the letter I’d written him a year before we met.
That’s the moment I learned that, while I was standing outside of Cats thinking I can’t believe I’m talking to the man I’ve built a shrine to! Roger was standing there thinking I can’t believe I’m talking to the guy who wrote me that letter.
Thirty-three years ago. Like I said, meant to be.
For thirty-three years, my knowing this wonderful person has made me a better man. Which makes it only fair that I work and write every day—letters, radio, and TV commercials, movie trailers, birthday cards, even a few Broadway shows—but I write and write and write. Because if you can get the right words in the right order you can nudge the world a little. You can make the world a better place.
That’s what Roger’s made me want to do from that first September 23, when he said, “Write.” Try to make the world a better place. Tikkun olam.
Thank you, Roger. Shabbat shalom.