Walking up Madison Avenue one afternoon in 1980, passing by Frank Campbell’s funeral home on the northwest corner of 81st Street, I saw coming out of the door my old friend Peter Witt, a theatrical agent, blowing his nose.
“Hello, Peter.”
“Hello, Frank, “ he said, wiping his eyes. “We lost another one.”
“Who died?”
He told me the name of a renowned Broadway star whom he had represented for many years.
“He was such a wonderful actor,” I said.
“Yes, he was. Wonderful!”
“I’m so sorry I never met him.”
“Ach!” he said. “You didn’t miss much.”
So before the next name to drop is mine, and the reviews start coming in, I’d like to take back Center Stage for a moment. A position closer to my nature than the supporting role I have elected to play here.
A good deal of my actor’s life has consisted of packing and unpacking suitcases, playing house in hotel rooms around the world, joining happy and unhappy families for finite periods, serially embracing temporary partners, and indulging passions that flared and fizzled with predictable frequency.
Representatives came and went; as did my successes, missteps, miscalculations, and outright failures. Concurrently, I dropped anchor after anchor along the way: marriages, children, multiple residences, mortgages, family obligations, and close circles of friends. All entered into with fierce commitment.
Racing for that bus to New York in 1953 was not only my adolescent effort to escape a geographical prison, nor was it to answer the call first sounded by happenstance in the wings of my grammar school auditorium. It was, unknown to me at the time, to quiet a panic soundlessly pounding inside an unsettled baby, arms up, yearning to be held, crying out for recognition and validation. I embarked on that maiden voyage anxious to stay in flight as long as I could. And the wilderness in which I wandered as a young boy, believing myself forever lost, never to reach a destination, I have now come to feel is precisely the place to be. There is no lasting comfort, it seems to me, in the safe landing. Better to stay in flight, take the next bus, relinquish control, trust in happenstance, and embrace impermanence.
If fame is indeed fleeting, then so are titles, awards, wealth, position, youth, beauty, and sexual pleasure. So are contentment and happiness. So are pain and suffering.
The finish line, after all, is inevitable. Like the subjects of this book, each of us will live on only in memory. With that in mind, perhaps the best way to navigate the split-second start-to-finish race might be to heed the words of George Bernard Shaw (the last name dropped herein) who wrote:
Life has a way of slipping through your fingers.
But, if you stick to your soul, it will stick to you.
Not a bad piece of advice. And you don’t even have to be famous to follow it.
FL