“Do you know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight?
—Søren Kierkegaard, Epigraph in Rainbow at Midnight, by Lawrence Lipton
My path to the world of the Actors Studio Drama School and Inside the Actors Studio was circuitous. At an important junction in my life, it wasn’t supposed to lead in this direction at all.
In the beginning, I guess I was meant to be a writer. If not, why could I read (uncomprehendingly, to be sure) when I was one and a half? That claim is usually met with derision (with which there’s a good chance it’s being met at this moment), but I can only report what my mother told me. She was a teacher and my father was a poet, and my assumption has always been that he just couldn’t wait for me to be able to read his poetry, so the reading lessons began in the nursery. I suppose, with enough effort and patience, you can teach an infant to do practically anything, as you’d teach tricks to a dog or an organ-grinder’s monkey.
My mother wasn’t given to what Mark Twain called “stretchers,” and when I, as an adult, joined the doubters about my precocity, she offered two proofs. The first concerned a trip to the pediatrician that, according to my mother, nearly cost me my life as it was barely beginning. Since my father was a professional poet, we were always a little short of the ready, to put it bluntly—and mildly. Therefore, when a pediatric visit was scheduled, my mother, who had to be at school at the appointed hour, called upon her brother, who owned a car (which we decidedly didn’t), to drive me there, wait at the doctor’s office and, on his return, deliver me to the doorman of our apartment building, who would take me up to our apartment, where Mother would by this time be waiting.
Mother reported that her brother rolled down the window on the passenger side and handed me through it, an infant in swaddling, to the doorman. This was one of Mother’s proofs, confirmed by my uncle: A package small enough to pass through a car window couldn’t be older than a year and a half.
In Mother’s account, I looked up at the doorman and read the name on his cap, “Lee Plaza,” and the doorman dropped me (with, I think, arguable justification). Kids bounce: I was delivered to Mother only a little the worse for wear. The doorman may have taken longer to recover.
Mother’s second proof involved bus trips up Woodward Avenue to her sister’s house in the suburb of Ferndale. The bus then, as now, was lined with advertisements. According to Mother, I would sit on her lap, peering about and painstakingly piecing together the words on the ads, in a voice piping but piercing enough to draw suspicious stares from the other passengers, who, Mother said, probably thought she was a ventriloquist with a particularly lifelike dummy. She would smile awkwardly and turn me to face out the window. It didn’t help. There were billboards out there, waiting for treble proclamation: “I’d walk a mile for a Camel!”
At three, I was “writing” poetry, in the bardic, oral tradition, every awful lay faithfully transcribed by my father. Fortunately, none survive.
At five, when I entered kindergarten, my mother received a call informing her with regret that her son appeared to be mentally impaired. When Mother arrived at the school in a state of alarm, she was offered a vantage point from which, unobserved, she could watch me in the classroom.
“See?” the kindergarten teacher said. What Mother saw was her son, wandering from one group of children to another as they applied crayons to coloring books, or constructed houses from blocks, or built sand castles. I would watch listlessly, my hands behind my back, then move on, in an unchanging cycle of indifference. “He won’t even sit down,” the teacher said.
Mother breathed a sigh of relief. “Give him a book,” she said. “He’ll sit down.” They did, I did, and Mother went off to her school.
When I was six, my father disappeared one day, just vanished, was gone, without a prior hint or word of warning; and full responsibility for our survival fell to, and upon, my mother. (Decades later, this pattern of parental loss would emerge, as it will in this account, as a dominant theme of Inside the Actors Studio, to my surprise at first, but not for long, as it began to provide significant clues to the lives and drives of my guests, and to mine.)
With my father’s defection, our economic condition went from fragile to fractured, and my mother and I moved into her parents’ home in Detroit’s inner city. For five important years of my life, I lived at 280 Hague Avenue in the kind of nondescript wooden house that looks like every other nondescript wooden house built in the Midwest between 1900 and 1940: See the houses with the big front porches in any Chaplin, Keaton or W. C. Fields movie. Ours sported wooden Doric columns on its porch.
My bedroom at 280 Hague was on the second floor, and since my grandmother was always the first one up, my misty recollection of her is a pleasant one of a white-haired woman in an apron bustling about a big aromatic kitchen. I would run down the stairs, following today’s scent—and the occasions I remember most vividly are those when I would arrive as she took a steaming apple pie from the oven and motioned me to the kitchen table, where she would cut two fragrant pieces of pie, fill two glasses with ice water and sit down next to me to enjoy what was the first, and virtually last, gourmet experience of my childhood. Our customary bill of fare consisted primarily of the Midwestern staples: chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, biscuits. But, like the madeleine-entranced Proust, I’ll never forget the contrast of the hot, assertive pie and the cold, neutral water.
Michigan’s winters are legendary for their relentless grip. Earlier in these pages, I confessed to an inordinate fondness for Christmas. In my novel Mirrors, I seized the opportunity to express my feelings through the character of a young woman: “You know what I like best about Christmas? It’s so—whimsical: normally sane people dragging messy, living trees into neat, dead rooms and using embarrassing words like joy and merry; choirs singing in banks, trumpets braying on street corners; janitors and bartenders hanging tinsel—everything you’d be fired, arrested, ostracized or committed for, any other time of the year.”
Her words, my sentiments, formulated in adulthood, but formed in childhood, trudging home on white snow under a black sky from a Fisher Theatre matinee, enchanted by the movie and the Christmas lights on Grand Boulevard and Woodward Avenue—and by the conviction that suddenly this had become a joyful place and time: Christmas was around the corner…inevitable! One magical day in a decidedly unmagical year.
I harbored no delusions about Santa. My mother was a calm, confident atheist and my father a publicly outspoken one. I don’t know when I first heard Mother’s mantra, “No Santa at six, no stork at ten, no God at twelve,” but it came as no surprise. And yet, somehow, when I was very young, in an unvoiced but undeniable compact, we both believed in the peaceable, hopeful reprieve of Christmas, and celebrated it fervently. On Christmas morning, I arrived at the fireplace before dawn to open the presents whose earthly, familial origins I knew, and counted them meticulously: Ten toy soldiers in a box equaled ten gifts, and a pair of socks two. By this means, I could measure the world’s affection for me and, when the sun rose, could flaunt my bounty before the other kids in the neighborhood, who, I now suspect, applied exactly the same numeric formula to theirs.
Once again, I rely on my mother’s recollection for an account that sums up that time in our lives. On a frigid night early in December, several of Mother’s sisters and cousins were coming over to discuss the imminent holiday. Years later, Mother told me that she stoked the furnace with what, she discovered to her horror, were the last few lumps of coal in the basement. There was no more and at that moment no money for more—and the burly Michigan winter was just beginning to flex its biceps. And here came the family to plan Christmas.
In Mother’s account, as the evening began, she listened distractedly, absorbed by the thought of the last embers dying in the furnace below, with her child lying asleep above, and no more coal or heat until…when? And no one to lean on, since the rest of the family was as afflicted as she. All, that is, except one.
The conversation burbled on, as unattended by Mother as the starving furnace, until her cousin Vera, whose husband was conspicuously, and uniquely, prospering, and who was known to put on occasional airs, said, “Listen, what’s the point of going out and getting each other presents we don’t want or need? Forget surprises. Why not just tell each other what we’d like?”
The idea passed instant muster, prompting Vera to continue. “Okay. For me, all I need is a sterling silver grape scissors.”
Something snapped in Mother, and haunted by the specter of the dying furnace, the empty coal bin, and me stiffening upstairs, she began to laugh. And, as Mother recounted it, the harder she tried to block the dual, dueling concepts of Vera’s grape scissors and the impending Ice Age on Hague Avenue, the more uncontrollably she laughed. The startled family sprang to her rescue as she rolled convulsively off the chair and thrashed on the floor, engulfed by a flood of laughter and tears.
It was years before Mother, a proud and independent spirit, confessed to Vera and the others who had been there on that dark, distant December night that it was Vera’s sterling silver grape scissors that had threatened her sanity, and very nearly her life—and provided her with the therapeutic, cleansing laughter that helped her weather that winter and several more that would be no better climatically or financially.
And it was many years later, when Mother lived near me in New York under substantially improved circumstances, that she opened a gift from Detroit on Christmas morning and passed it to me with a wordless, eloquent smile. It was, of course, a sterling silver grape scissors from Vera.
In my tenth year, as my grandmother lay dying, slowly and ingloriously, in the house on Hague Avenue, attended by Mother, the decision was made to spare me this experience by shipping me (literally) to Los Angeles for a summer with Mother’s sister Marian and her family. Living as we do today in a world of nearly limitless options, it’s hard to imagine a world in which there were so few. But that was the case, which meant that I would travel alone, cross-country, for three days.
I have an indelible memory of my mother, with me in one hand and my pint-sized suitcase in the other, nervously touring one railroad car after another, mysteriously looking for something—then stopping abruptly as she spotted a woman traveling with a boy about my age. Depositing me in the seat across the aisle from them, she waited, as nonchalantly as she could, until the woman noticed her, smiled, and asked if we were going all the way to Los Angeles. Provided with the opening I now know Mother was looking for, she replied that she wasn’t, but I was—and waited, anxious, hopeful.
The woman obliged, volunteering to keep an eye on me, and expressing pleasure that her son would have company. Mother’s relief and my anxiety mounted simultaneously as I eyed these strangers. Mother had no choice, and neither did I, and I have a recollection of her, when the final “All aboard” was sounded, backing out of the car with her eyes fixed on me and, I now know, her heart in her mouth. Years later she would say to me, “I don’t know how I could have done that,” and my reply was, “I do.”
I was spared a lengthy and painful Hague Avenue death scene and, instead, spent my tenth summer in what to me was a tropical paradise, at the cost of an unnerving journey made not only bearable but providential by the discovery, on opening my suitcase, of a present Mother had packed in it. Unwrapping it, I found a Grosset & Dunlap edition of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the Famous Temple Notes…Copious notes and comments by One Hundred Eminent Shakespearean Authorities.”
For three days the book was my steadfast companion, falling from my hand only when I fell (peacefully) asleep. Between the gray reality (for me) of Detroit and the sunny unreality of Los Angeles, I devoured every prefatory essay and footnote, and every word of the play that one of the book’s commentators, Hartley Coleridge, noted was “all poetry, and sweeter poetry was never written.” Three dreaded days became three enchanted days, thanks to Mother’s forethought.
The book is still in my library, and opening it as I wrote this account, I discovered that it contained another of Proust’s madeleines: my bookplate. All through my childhood, Mother’s most frequent gifts to me were, unsurprisingly, books, in each of which I carefully pasted the bookplate she’d given me: a silhouetted man, perched on a book being hoisted by a crane to the top of a tall bookstack, with a space at the bottom for my proprietary, if spidery, signature: Jimmy Lipton.
On Hague Avenue, Mother began moonlighting nights and weekends, going door to door, selling Compton’s Encyclopedia. The occasional commissions augmented her teacher’s salary, but on an unforgettable Christmas morning, her real motive was revealed. In front of the fireplace was the premium she’d worked to earn: a free set of Compton’s. For me.
Decades later, after Mother’s death, as my wife and I sorted through the effects of a long and ultimately happy and successful life, we came upon a box that contained the outdated and until then forgotten set of encyclopedia, with my name embossed in gold on each precious volume…which may, in small part, explain why my book An Exaltation of Larks bears the dedication, “To my mother, Betty Lipton, who showed me the way to words.”
I said this book would be about my heroes.
When I was twelve, the family had no choice but to sell my grandparents’ house, which meant that Mother and I migrated further west in the city, on our own now, to a small apartment in a neighborhood where we knew no one and, for some reason, there were few kids, despite the fact that we lived in the shadow of a large Catholic church. We moved in as the summer began, and once we were bestowed, Mother returned to her new post as a librarian, which was slightly but critically better paid than teaching in the public school system.
In that twelfth summer I became what is today called a latchkey kid, which simply meant that six days a week I was entirely on my own in the daylight hours. But once again, Mother’s foresight provided. This time it was a typewriter, used and a little creaky but decidedly serviceable, brought home one night and placed before me on the kitchen table. Mother was silent, I was speechless and the typewriter was momentarily wordless. But not for long.
From that day forward, through every day of a simmering Michigan summer, the encroaching walls of that cramped apartment at 1935 Burlingame echoed back a relentless, rapturous clatter that produced, by September, three novels. Longer than short stories, and even novellas, they qualified as novels in everything but sophistication, craft and quality. But nonetheless, one of Mother’s literary friends was so taken with them that she elected to pack them off to Grosset & Dunlap, the publisher of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the Famous Temple Notes,” providing a tantalizing prospect: Shakespeare and I—the same publisher!
In the submission, I was identified as “an unpublished author,” and for years I treasured a letter from a Grosset & Dunlap editor to Mr. James Lipton, informing me that my three novels didn’t fit into their current list, but urging me to consider them my publisher and submit all future work to them.
That might have led, at the least, to another passionate summer of literary output, but destiny and a few of the more pragmatic members of mother’s family intervened, inveighing against a summer of sloth like the last one. It was high time, they suggested to Mother, with some justification perhaps, that I begin to pull my weight in her ongoing financial struggle.
So, a job was found for me, and at thirteen I began my professional career, washing glass in nitric acid in a photoengraving plant in downtown Detroit. The plant was a cavernous space designed around what looked like a massive bellows camera that transmitted the images in front of its lens to a three-by-three-foot sheet of chemical-coated glass that served as its film.
Once those huge glass negatives had rendered up the positive images that would appear in print, the glass was coated for reuse. Before the recoating, the exposed coating had to be removed by placing the sheets of glass in vats of nitric acid. In order to protect the plant’s workers from the toxic nitric acid fumes, the vats were enclosed in a roofed shed in the middle of the room, with a sink and a single naked light bulb hanging overhead. The shed was my place of employment.
I stood facing the sink, with a vat of nitric acid on one side and a tub of clear water on the other. One by one, as quickly as I could, I hauled the sheets of glass up from the acid and placed them and my hands in the sink under running water. Lifting the glass out of the acid required not only speed but great care, since years of use had broken their edges into jagged shards, waiting for me in the vat. Four or five times a day, the glass would get me, a distinctly unpleasant experience.
Rubber gloves were no solution, since the glass would have sliced through the glove, which would have filled with nitric acid, prolonging the unpleasantness. So the only remedy, such as it was, was yanking my bloodied hand out of the acid and plunging it under the constant stream of cold water in the sink until the bleeding stopped and I could go back to the vat for more glass.
Once the glass was in the sink, I rubbed it clean of the last vestiges of coating with blocks of charcoal, then delivered it to the tub of water, and reached into the acid vat for another sheet of glass.
Everyone who has studied even elementary chemistry knows that nitric acid is a test for protein, turning it yellow; and since I was then, and am now, in large part protein, I passed my thirteenth summer with bright yellow hands, like Mickey Mouse’s, which led me to spend most of my time away from the plant with my hands plunged deep into my pockets.
August approached and, as the temperature in the shed soared and my spirits plummeted, I searched desperately for, and finally came up with, a palliative to my plight. Since the Detroit public schools offered Latin, which I’d taken eagerly, I would pass the rest of the sultry, acidic summer translating every popular song I knew into Latin. In the unlikely event that anyone reading these pages wonders what Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” sounds like in Latin, here, to the best of my recollection, is the kind of Gregorian pop song that shrilled (my voice hadn’t yet fully changed) out of my shed hour after hour:
Nox et dies,
Tu es unica,
Sola tu sub lunam aut sub solem.
Sive prope me, sive procul,
Non nullius momenti est, cara,
Ubi tu es,
De te cogito,
Dies et nox, nox et dies.
Shut away in the shed with my acid and glass, I was unaware of the fact that, as my repertoire grew, so did the ire of my co-workers, in equal—and, in retrospect, understandable—proportion.
“Obnoxiousadj [Latin obnoxious, fr. ob in the way of, exposed to + noxa harm] akin to noxious, a: physically harmful to living beings; b: constituting a harmful influence on mind or behavior.” Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary.
The inevitable day of reckoning came when the boss wrenched the door of my shed open to inform me that the workers were threatening to strike if he didn’t stop me. The rest of the summer was spent under the light bulb, in the fumes, fuming, in silence. September and school rescued me. But my childhood was emphatically over; and there has never been a moment, from that day to this, when I haven‘t been (more or less gainfully) employed.
My father is not one of the heroes of this account; neither is he a villain. I’m not sure what he is—or, in fact, who. And that may explain a great deal. From the moment he left when I was six, he was invisible, unreachable, unknowable. For a while I clung to the hope that he would return as miraculously as he had vanished, but that illusion eventually faded away, to be replaced by…nothing.
I harbor no hard feelings: I harbor no feelings at all—which may be worse. But I have no way of knowing. After a long-distance divorce, Mother never remarried, and the notion of “father” remains to this day as mysterious to me as the runic alphabet or Planck’s theorem.
For understandable reasons, Mother seldom mentioned my father. Once, when I asked about him, she recalled, without rancor, but without noticeable affection, the game they’d played for years, in which she challenged him with the most obscure words she could find in the massive Webster’s Unabridged. He defined them unerringly, she said, with the exception of a handful of sesquipedalian (a word my father would have fielded effortlessly, and Will Ferrell will have my hide for) scientific terms.
In the wake of my father’s decampment, my paternal grandmother undertook to compensate by inviting me to stay for a week each summer in her apartment near Chicago’s Lake Michigan beaches, a privilege I prized equally for the annual sunburn and the chance to ask her about my father. On one occasion, she recalled the crisis precipitated by her husband’s death of tuberculosis when my father was fourteen. My grandmother told me, with still evident regret, that she had been trapped: My father, as the eldest of her three sons, would have to leave high school immediately for whatever full-time employment he could find.
When she informed the school, she said, a delegation composed of the entire faculty, led by the principal, arrived at her home to tell her he was the most gifted student any of them had ever encountered, and beg her to not to take him out of school.
My grandmother described my grandfather to me as a would-be inventor whose efforts to construct automobiles that would challenge the Model T had left them penniless at his death. So, despite the importuning of my father’s teachers, my grandmother replied that he would have to leave school at once and become the breadwinner.
She told me that, at the end of his first week of employment—on payday!—she waited eagerly in the window for his return. As he rounded the corner, she caught her breath at the sight of a package under his arm, and when he walked in the door, her fear was confirmed: He’d spent most of his first week’s salary on books.
When he pleaded that he needed them, she struck a bargain with him: a quarter of his salary every week for books, three quarters for her and the family. And that, she said, was how they lived until the second brother was old enough to step forward and take the financial reins.
At that point, my grandmother told me, my father took an entrance examination for the University of Chicago, and passed it, she said with understandable pride and exaggeration, with “the highest score in the university’s history.”
In the midst of one of those Chicago visits, my father unaccountably appeared one morning to pick me up from Grandma for the day. I have no idea where he came from, or where he went the next day, or for that matter for the next decade, but for that one day I was in the custody of this spectral stranger. There are large chunks of my childhood that are lost in the mists of time, but I remember every moment of that odd, uncomfortable day.
He took me to the dining room of the Blackstone Hotel for lunch. There was a lot of beef on the table, more than I’d ever seen: We were, after all, in the City of the the Big Shoulders, Hog Butcher for the World. But I was young, skinny and nervous, and I ate little.
From there we went to a small, nearly empty movie theater to watch a gloomy Soviet movie with subtitles. I wondered if it was meant as a reading test. The next stop was a massive department store, Carson Pirie Scott, where my father watched judiciously as the saleswoman tried one sweater after another on my bony frame until my father pronounced a tan-and-brown cardigan perfect.
Finally, at dusk when we returned my grandmother’s, he presented me with a Spiral Student Drawing Book, inscribed in pencil on its cover, “Jimmie—his Book.” An accomplished artist, he’d drawn an ingenious alphabet, each letter anthropomorphized into an elaborate cartoon character—Mr. Hihat H, Miss Icy I, Mr. P. Palooka P, Mr. X. Xipilus X. When I returned to Detroit, I wore the sweater nearly every day—always with the studiedly casual remark that my father had given it to me—until it was threadbare and outgrown; but “Jimmie—his Book” is still in my library, its pages browning and unheeded until it was time to write these pages.
My father resurfaced in San Francisco when he married the writer Georgiana Randolph Craig, and created with her the nom de plume Craig Rice, a collaboration that produced a successful series of twenty-two mystery novels, one of which, Home Sweet Homicide, became a popular film, coauthored by F. Hugh Herbert and Craig Rice, and starring Randolph Scott, Peggy Ann Garner and Dean Stockwell.
But San Francisco, too, turned out to be a way station. With the emergence of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, my father found the perfect calling at last. He had always been a rebel. In his twenties in Chicago, he had been one of the founders of the Dill Pickle Club, along with several fellow members of the celebrated Chicago circle of writers that included Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Harriet Monroe and Carl Van Vechten, the openly gay (in the 1920s and-30s!) novelist, critic, photographer and early champion of African-American culture.
Inspired by the nihilistic counterculturalism of the European Dadaists, the Dill Pickle Club set out to épater the American cultural establishment by acting up at public events, and offering the kind of alternative forms and behavior that had made the reputations of Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
My father made a smooth transition from nihilism to political radicalism, and then, when the Beats emerged in the fifties, fell into lockstep with them—though he might have maintained that they’d finally caught up to him.
When the Craig Rice collaboration, marital and literary, ended in divorce, he made a prescient beeline to Venice Beach, a sleepy seaside corner of Los Angeles cohabited by gooney-bird oil wells, bobbing monotonously up and down, and marginal-income retirees, moving monotonously down, with a sprinkling of artists attracted by the dirt-cheap rents. The community, prior to my father’s arrival, was less generously described by the Los Angeles Times as “a seaside slum, an artists’ colony surrounded by pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers and other outlaws.”
Irresistibly drawn to such an environment, my father quickly became not only an inhabitant, but its spokesperson and poster-poet. Within a year of his arrival, the newly proclaimed (by my father) Venice West was one of the capitals of the Beat movement, and almost exclusively his domain, artistically and philosophically. San Francisco belonged to Ferlinghetti, Kerouac and Ginsberg, but Venice was emphatically my father’s fiefdom, where he lived with his fourth wife, Nettie, and tens of thousands of books, which overflowed every surface in his house, and filled a two-car-garage-turned-library, every book, periodical, and tape recording meticulously catalogued in the Dewey decimal system.
His audiotapes were of particular importance, since, in 1956, he had begun pioneering the oral performance of poetry in a seminal essay, “Poetry and the Vocal Tradition,” in The Nation, declaring, “The printed poem is to the poem what the score is to a piece of music.” In short: incomplete without performance.
In Venice, my father lived the life of a literary lion, surrounded by a swelling community of artists, most of whom paid greater or lesser court to him. Under his aegis, the Venice West Café opened its doors on Dudley Street in 1958, with nonstop performances and exhibitions by poets and artists, infamous and unknown no longer. On nearby Market Street, the Gas House Gallery showed, and sold, the work of Beat artists, and the Grand Hotel offered lodging to the growing number of tourists who made Venice West an obligatory stop after my father’s best-selling book The Holy Barbarians became one of the manifestos (and, for some, the bible) of the Beat Generation.
The book offered not only a literary exploration, but a philosophical credo, in which my father coined some of the terms of art of the Beat Generation, like disaffiliation, which he defined as “a voluntary self-alienation from the family cult [a precept I can affirm he honored steadfastly], from Moneytheism and all its works and ways”; and dedicated poverty, the latter of which may have been easy for him to say (or write), but was difficult to live by, as my mother and I could affirm, since he’d practiced these principles long before he preached them in Venice West.
My father’s poetry wasn’t an easy read: not quite as abstruse as Wallace Stevens’s, but, to borrow a term from another of my father’s bags: close enough for jazz. Consider this excerpt from Fête de l’Âne, subtitled “For Buridan’s Ass” (the animal immobilized by pure reason, starving to death between two precisely equal bales of hay), in his poetic cantata Rainbow at Midnight:
THE HEIROPHANT
Now in the third hour
They lead the beast to the enthronement garlanded with onion, the fool’s rose
See him stand, between two bales of hay,
the epiphenomenal automaton and bray his blasphemous Amen while goliards chant the office of the day.
THE POSTULANT
If rumor is to be believed, the mark
upon his back is cruciform, whereon a veiled figure rides
But whether the Virgin or the Whore it is not given me to see
In matters antinomian the management
is most discreet…I only know
I heard a voice and saw a lifted hand
ignite a torch and put it to the veil
I think the voice cried Reason!
and the hand was red
A mere illusion, surely, nothing
to excite the press, and yet I swear
The air was sharp as urine and the noise
like noises of the newly dead.
The poem concludes with:
CHORUS OF INITIATES
Who was it won the cap and bells
with loaded dice? And why did no one but the ass behold the angel of the Lord?
Or hear a voice that cried:
“The cock shall not crow till thou hast denied me thrice.”
No one can say. But this I know:
In the excitement that ensued the ass devoured both bundles of hay confounding the philosophers.
My favorite of my father’s poems is at once the simplest and the cleverest. It was written to honor the “craft or sullen art” of Dylan Thomas when he died in 1953, and was included in a gathering of eighty-four poems by seventy-eight of the world’s leading poets, published on the tenth anniversary of Dylan’s death. A few of the chosen poets elected to write their tributes in Dylan’s singular style. I think my father best captured his singing voice, his reckless romance with words, the rollicking allusions and even his impish hyphenated neologisms.
The poem, bluntly titled “Death of a Poet (for Dylan Thomas),” is in three verses. These are the first and third:
Let’s strike a mean and say his life
Was half as holy as a priest’s. He told
His beads with rosaries of loves
And walked unfrocked among the saints
Dispensing blasphemous indulgences,
Elfin and with silver shod
A tousled head all flittered with
The pollen of wild flowers, his spoor
The scent of unicorn, an antic god.
So young, so soon. Let’s think of him
As one born swaddled in a winding sheet,
His life a brief rehearsal for eternity,
As one who broke the barriers of sense
And suffered all thereafter that one must
Who goes with onagers and deathless birds
Up to that high stone seat where one dies,
Goes mad, or wakes from dreaming to come down
Word-wild, song-struck and with a poet’s eyes.
It’s odd how often God turns up in my godless father’s canon, and how drawn he is to the language and ritual of the Catholic Church. I should have asked him about it when I had the chance.
As Venice’s reputation grew—in a city with an unquenchable thirst for the Zeitgeist—my father joined in the founding of L. A.’s first counterculture publication. Now that Los Angeles had an embryonic Greenwich Village, it was time for a Village Voice. It was called the Los Angeles Free Press, and it featured in each issue an incendiary column called “Radio Free America,” written by my father.
This was the point at which I reencountered him, under significantly different circumstances from our previous visit. Both our lives had changed radically, and I was now in preproduction on my first Broadway musical, Nowhere to Go but Up, for which I’d written the book and lyrics. The producer, the composer and I had flown to Los Angeles for a run-through of the show at the Beverly Hills home of Ernie Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams, because Kovacs had expressed an interest in directing it.
Ernie Kovacs was an astonishingly inventive television pioneer, exploring the comedic possibilities of the still-young medium in ways that, in my opinion, haven’t been surpassed to this day. Television in the sixties possessed the curiosity and courage of a typical adolescent, and so did the still impressionable public, which enthusiastically embraced Kovacs’s hilarious innovations. In the midst of his meteoric rise, he’d read the material our producer had sent him, and invited the composer and me to perform the entire show in his living room for him, his advisors, his friends and potential investors—a classic Broadway backers’ audition.
As we prepared the two-hour performance of the entire show, in which the composer, Sol Berkowitz, would play the music at Kovacs’s concert grand, and I would perform all the parts and sing all the songs, I debated whether or not to invite my father, who was at that moment enjoying his own vogue (and was, therefore, easy to find). I wondered whether this was the moment and the way to reestablish our relationship—whatever that meant—and finally threw caution to the winds and invited him.
On the evening of the run-through, the Kovacs’ vast living room was filled to capacity with le tout Los Angeles. Backers’ auditions were routine in New York, but not in Hollywood, and the Kovacs house was legendary for its grandeur, so the run-through was a hot ticket, and the guests dressed as if for a red carpet.
Into this hotbed of Hollywood luxe came my father, accompanied, as it turned out, by a band of his disciples, all of them, like my father, beaded, sandaled, unshorn and unshaven: dropouts dropping in.
My heart sank as they passed through the riveted crowd to a central couch, on which my father sat, next to a stylish woman who put an involuntary hand on the jewels around her neck as his acolytes sprawled on the floor in front of them.
There was no time to reflect on what I now regarded as my folly, since, at a nod from Ernie, the composer struck up the first notes of the score and in a few moments I began to sing—somewhat distractedly, since, as much as I tried to avoid looking at my father, I couldn’t help noticing his disapproving scowl as he scanned the room, like Robespierre finding himself unfelicitously in the Court of Versailles. It’s not easy to throw yourself into a lighthearted musical comedy performance when a voice inside you is muttering, “The revolution starts here.”
No matter how enthusiastically the audience reacted, laughing at the dialogue and applauding the songs, the glacier on the couch refused to thaw—until midway through the first act when a comedy song brought down the house, at which point I saw my father lean closer to the bejeweled woman and murmur something to her. She nodded, and from that moment on, my father was at one with the audience, joining in the laughter and applause, echoed by his dutiful disciples.
The run-through was a success. Ernie signed on to direct the show, champagne corks popped, and when my father and his group had gone, I asked the woman who’d been next to him on the couch what he’d whispered to her. “He said,” she replied, “‘This is the sharpest social satire since Swift.’”
In fact, Nowhere to Go but Up was a decidedly unseditious farce about two famous prohibition cops whose antics had kept the country laughing through the dry years, but once my father had decided that they, this show and I were au fond antiestablishment, hence crypto-Beats, we qualified for his guiltless approval.
High on the evening’s results, Ernie piled his wife, several of their friends and our team into a Rolls-Royce the size and heft of a Brink’s truck, for a celebratory supper at Scandia. Seated in the front seat next to Ernie, who was waving his ubiquitous cigar as he envisioned scenes on the stage, I heard Edie, in the backseat, chattering excitedly to a friend: “I couldn’t believe it! There he was! In our house!” As I turned toward the backseat, she said, “Did you see him?” Then, abruptly: “Wait a minute…. Are you related?”
“He’s my, uh…my father.”
“Oh, my God!”
At dinner, as Ernie and I planned our meetings for the next week, Edie talked of nothing but my notorious father, and before we parted that night, she’d persuaded me, against every speck of better judgment I possessed, to lead a pilgrimage of Ernie, Edie and their friends to my father’s pad for one of the evenings of poetry and jazz about which he wrote and, clearly, Edie avidly read, in “Radio Free America.”
I called my father, a date was set for the next Saturday night, and all through the week, my phone kept ringing at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Hi, Jim, Edie. Jack and Felicia Lemmon heard about it and they want to come. Okay?”
“Hi, Jim. Vincente and Denise Minnelli are dying to come with us. I said, yes. Okay?”
The numbers swelled for what was clearly perceived as an illicit (therefore daring, therefore worthy) pilgrimage to a dangerous netherworld.
On Saturday evening, a line of Bentleys, Aston-Martins, Jaguars and Ferraris assembled in the driveway of the Beverly Hills Hotel, snorting and pawing the pavement as my rented Ford was brought up to lead the regal procession to Venice West.
The evening went according to plan. The guests, who had dressed up for the event at the Kovacs’, dressed down for this: I especially remember Vincente Minnelli in a lemon-yellow sweater and monogrammed suede shoes, leaning forward, captivated by every anapest and trochee. Several poets, notably my father, read their work, nimbly accompanied by a jazz group. The poetry and conversation were spiced with the bluntest obscenities, scatologies and profanities, commonplace now, but deliciously scandalous then.
A Spartan buffet (dedicated poverty) was offered, and when some of the guests came upon the store of strong chemicals in my father’s bathroom, the atmosphere brightened noticeably. Such a quantity and spectrum of drugs was consumed that night (but not by my father, who insisted he was always high enough “on life”) that I wondered how the guests, some of them “liberated,” I suspect, for the first time, would fare at work in the coming days.
In the short time I was privileged to work with Kovacs, when we went to lunch or dinner, he insisted on driving his wife‘s car, one of the new breed of “compacts,” which he preferred to his lumbering Rolls.
A week after I’d returned to New York, our producer called me with news: Ernie was dead. Late the night before, he’d apparently fallen asleep at the wheel of his wife’s car, the door of which popped open when he hit a tree, throwing him out, to die instantly.
I don’t know what would have happened if he’d stuck to his Rolls—and our show—but in any event, Nowhere to Go but Up failed. In the years since, Sidney Lumet, who directed the show in his musical theater debut, has insisted to me that his inexperience was responsible for the show’s failure. But Sidney’s wrong. The show failed because the book and lyrics are two thirds of a musical, and I just hadn’t written them well enough.
I’ve refused every request to revive Nowhere to Go but Up, but I’ll always be grateful to it for one thing: opening night.
The show opened on a chilly November night at the historic Winter Garden Theater, where Jolson had sung and, in the years to come, Cats would play 7,485 performances. But on that night when my show opened, I stood alone at the back of the theater, wrapped in a tuxedo and impenetrable gloom, dead certain that Nowhere to Go but Up would fail, deservedly, and slink off in the direction predicted slyly, if unconsciously, in the first word of its title.
As the couples hurried past my post at the rear of the orchestra, women in evening gowns, men in black tie (in the sixties, evening dress was de rigueur at musical opening nights), I had to fight the impulse to apologize to every one of them for my inadequacies, with which the poor innocents were about to be inflicted.
As the house lights dimmed to half, in sync with my mood, the survival instinct in me stirred. On similar dark occasions in my life, I’d devised a strategy for backing away from the brink by dividing myself into two quite separate beings, one who’s in the mess, and one who isn’t.
By this admittedly schizoid means, I was, in theory, afforded a dispassionate, objective observer who could talk sense to me—literally. Not aloud (which would constitute legitimate schizophrenia), but silently, sanely, patiently. Over time, I’d had some interesting colloquies with this alter ego—and one transpired in the Winter Garden Theater that opening night.
“Listen to me,” the Other Me said.
“I’m listening.”
“No! Listen! Really listen.”
“I’m listening!”
“Good—you ungrateful son of a bitch!”
“Ungrateful…?”
“Bet your ass. If a genie had popped out of a bottle five years ago, and promised you that, one night, you’d be standing in the Winter Garden, with the orchestra warming up, and the cast throwing up, and the curtain going up in front of a house full of people who dressed up, only—only—because you sat down one day and wrote, ‘Act One, Scene One,’ would you have said, ‘Yeah, but it’s gotta be a hit; promise me that or forget it’? Not a chance! You know what you’d have said? ‘Just get me there.’”
On the instant, the hovering clouds broke and scudded away, and somehow on that dark November night, the sun shone in the Winter Garden Theater. My tuxedo nearly burst with the elation and good will, toward everyone—even me!—that was surging through me.
And as good fortune would have it, at precisely that moment, an elegant pair of latecomers, dashing from the lobby and spotting the skinny young man in a tuxedo at the top of the aisle, made a logical assumption and thrust their tickets into my hand.
My mother had imparted to me her ardor for the arts, all of them, but our limited means meant limited access. In the case of the theater, a particular enthusiasm of Mother’s, a solution was found. The Cass Theatre, one of Detroit’s two legitimate houses at that time, economized by employing a chief usher who then chose volunteer ushers at a nightly shape-up. The reward was that, once the house was seated, the volunteers could watch the play from whatever vantage points they found.
It took me months of hopping up and down at the back of the Friday shape-up to attract the attention of the almighty chief usher. When he pointed at you, you were entitled for that night to enter a room full of musty maroon jackets, their cuffs frayed, their brass buttons dangling, but their promise dazzling, and pick one that more or less fit. I can remember the empowerment I felt the first time I emerged from that room, an usher! It was several more months of intermittent glory, picked one Friday, ignored the next, before, the chief usher’s will be done, I joined the ranks of the true elite. No more shape-up: straight to the robing room every Friday, a professional, marching imperiously past the pleading plebes.
Through my high school years, I was at the Cass every Friday night during the season, escorting the theatergoers to their seats, then taking the place I’d claimed on the third step of the mezzanine stairs, which, I’d decided, was the best seat in the house.
To this day, whatever the event or venue, I can, unassisted, take my wife and me straight to our seats, a skill that still retains for me the tremor of investiture I felt at the Cass. So, when the elegant couple impatiently handed me their tickets at the Winter Garden, I didn’t hesitate for an instant. Calling on the experience of a distinguished career, I said, “This way, please,” scooped up a couple of programs from the stack at the top of the aisle, and led them to their seats, delivering them with a practiced “Enjoy the show!” just as the house went dark.
As I strode back up the aisle, my feet moving in blithe cadence with the first notes of the overture, I heard a click! It was a ring closing, clicking shut, linking past and present in a moment of startling clarity: an unbroken line from the Cass to the Winter Garden, from the usher to the author. I got here. Anything more than that would be lagniappe, icing on an already generous cake.
As I reread, and relive, these words, I have to admit that this would be a much better tale if Nowhere to Go but Up had miraculously carried the day with the critics. But it didn’t. It failed, exactly as I’d expected it would. But at least it got me there; and it provided me with one of those circular constructions, the closing of the ring, of which I’m creatively and personally fond.
There will shortly be another.
Between my sixth year and my father’s last, I was in his presence no more than a dozen times. One of those encounters was occasioned by the publication of his book The Erotic Revolution, a follow-up to The Holy Barbarians, and, as its title indicates, an ebullient, explicit sexual call-to-arms that advocated premarital sex (or private, consensual sex anywhere, at any time, in any circumstance); the abolition of all laws restricting heterosexual or homosexual conduct; the redefinition of marriage as an “optional” state; and universally legal, free contraception and abortion.
Needless to say, my father was once again in the spotlight, and when his book tour brought him to New York, he called and asked to visit me for the first time in my home. At that time, I lived in what was for me an ideal bachelor’s apartment: a studio under the oxidized-copper eaves of a French limestone town house on East Seventy-third Street, between Fifth Avenue and Madison, one of New York’s stateliest streets in one of its most elegant neighborhoods.
On the appointed day, my father was late, so I went to the street to corral him in the likely event that he’d strayed. As I looked up and down the block, he appeared, beaded, sandaled and thoroughly Beat, rounding the Madison Avenue corner and heading west, his head swiveling right and left, his countenance darkening with every fashionable home he passed. When he caught sight of me, his smile was forced. We shook hands formally, as always, and I invited him into the house. Staring up at it in silent disapproval, he mounted the front steps and entered the foyer, which led, I realized with belated misgivings, to a tiny elevator, whose rosy interior looked like the velvet lining of a Victorian candy box. Decadence upon decadence. I should have taken him up the stairs.
Too late. The elevator opened not into a public hall, but directly, exclusively, into my apartment, another haut monde contrivance that left my father shaking his head. But the worst was yet to come. As he stepped into the room, my father’s head turned slowly, taking in the smoked glass, the baronial fireplace, the Venetian-glass sconces and chandelier, bourgeois horror-upon-horror (I was seeing it all through his eyes now). In the smoldering silence, I could read the classic parent’s plaint that was etched on his stricken face: “Where did I go wrong?”
But at that point, a kind fate intervened: He glanced up at the ceiling. New York had just had torrential rains, and since I was on the top floor, the leaking roof had devastated my ceiling, discoloring the paint and leaving sectors of it hanging in ragged sheets. The painter was unavailable for a month, so my father, neck craning, eyes gleaming, was seeing it at its leprous worst.
The lines vanished from my father’s forehead and his mouth turned up in a paternal smile. “Now, that,” he said proudly, “looks like a writer’s pad.”
On January 28, 1974, my father wrote a letter to me that began, “Nettie and I wish you a somewhat belated happy New Year, but we rarely send cards out. You know of course that I am working on my autobiography and I find that I lack dates and other more exact information and wonder if you could take the time to give me some information…. I’m writing that segment of my autobiography concerning yourself and your mother, and I would like you to give me that information about your professional and personal life that you think would be suitable for this book.”
The letter was signed, in a spectacular Freudian lapse, “With love from us both, Larry and Betty.”
Apart from the fact that my father had signed “Betty” for “Nettie,” the letter demonstrates the fact that we never settled on a term of address. Addressing me was easy: I was Jim or, when I was little, Jimmy or, as my father spelled it on the cover of his illustrated ABC’s, Jimmie. But what was he? Neither of us could ever decide. I didn’t know what to call him, and he didn’t know what to call himself when he wrote or phoned. “Dad”? “Your father”? We never got around to it, and he and I settled, faute de mieux, for the default he chose: Larry.
The first time Kedakai met him, in his Venice home, she was struck by the fact that he and Nettie had to move stacks of books to provide us with places to sit, and, of course, by his beads and long hair; but what struck her most forcibly, she said as we drove away, was the way we behaved toward each other.
“What way?”
“I don’t know exactly. I can’t find the words.” We drove in silence, away from Venice West, toward another world: Beverly Hills. Finally, Kedakai spoke. “Two writers.”
“Two what?”
“Writers. It was like you and George Plimpton, or Norman Mailer, or Kurt Vonnegut. No, not that close. Like you and Jerzy Kosinski, maybe. Shop talk.”
“That’s all?”
“What did you expect?”
“Well…father and son?”
She turned and looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Chinese. “Did you think so?
“I wouldn’t know. But I thought you might. You’ve got a family.”
She reflected a moment. “Acquaintances, that’s what you were. Yeah, acquaintances. But definitely two writers—talking about work, their work, other people’s work, writing. It’s very interesting to listen to,” she added reassuringly.
Now I was silent, navigating the 405. Finally, I said, “Jesus.” (For the record, my favorite curse word.)
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Kedakai said.
“What feelings?”
“That’s it!” Kedakai exclaimed. “Exactly!”
“That’s what?”
“The answer to your question about the way you behaved: What feelings?”
Shortly after my father’s 1974 letter arrived, I constructed a brief and, I thought, appropriate answer: “When you get to the part about me, why not simply print your January 28 letter to me? That tells the whole story in a nutshell.”
My response was ready to go: The envelope was addressed and stamped. As an afterthought, I showed it to Kedakai. She shook her head. “You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s cruel. And pointless. Really. What for?”
As these pages make clear, Kedakai is much kinder than I, and often smarter. I agreed to a moratorium and finally, in June, as Kedakai doubtless knew I would, composed an anodyne letter that may have been just as revealing in its asepticism, beginning, “Dear Nettie and Larry,” promising to send him at some unspecified future date the promotional material for my new musical, which would, I said, include a bio; and closing with a collegial “Hoping that you’re both well and that the biography is humming along.” Writer to writer.
A month later, in the second week of July, I discovered on the obituary page of The New York Times that a writer of my acquaintance had died in Los Angeles, before I could send him my bio, or he could finish his autobiography. I searched for sorrow, but couldn’t find it, didn’t know where to look for it. More my failing, I’m sure, than his.
Shortly after my father’s death, Nettie proposed that his library go to me. But, since I’d been deeply impressed by the strength of their relationship, I contended that she was the proper custodian of his legacy, and so the library remained with her—fortunately, as it turned out, since there was great interest in it, and a spirited bidding war among several academic institutions, won by the University of Southern California for a substantial figure that went into a trust fund from which Nettie was able to draw when she fell ill. The fund covered the costs of her care for the rest of her life, as well as a permanent USC scholarship in my father’s name. And his library is intact and invaluable at USC.
In 1996, when New York’s Whitney Museum and Minneapolis’s Walker Museum organized an exhibition called “Beat Culture and the New America,” a Whitney curator, seeking rights for the exhibition and the book that would follow it, called to ask me for the name of my father’s literary executor. I said I had no idea, but would try to find out. Since Nettie had long since died, the only source I could think of was the widow of my father’s brother, who said she’d investigate.
A week later, a manila envelope arrived in the morning mail. It contained a note from my aunt and two documents: Lawrence and Nettie Lipton’s last wills and testaments. My father, in the kind of businesslike legal language he had mocked all his professional life as “square,” had appointed Nettie his literary executor, with the stipulation that, on her death, the responsibility would pass to me. Nettie’s will affirmed his wish, and as I sat at my desk, staring down at the two documents, I wondered whether this cup would have passed to me had I not turned out to be the sharpest social satirist since Swift.
Over the years I’ve fielded numerous requests to reprint his work, from the Whitney, of course; from the Chicago Review for my father’s essay “The Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth”; and, of greatest significance, from the permissions manager of the Library of America, who explained that “our permissions budget allows $17.50 per page, for a total of $87.50 and two copies of the publication.”
I granted the permission, and in March 2002 a check arrived in the mail, made out by the Library to James Lipton, The Estate of Lawrence Lipton, for $87.50. I raced upstairs to brandish it at Kedakai. “This is money! From my father! For me!”
I’ve never cashed the check. I haven’t framed it either: far too melodramatic and self-pitying. It’s just there, still in its envelope, in my Lawrence Lipton Executor file: the only penny of financial support I ever received from him—if one doesn’t count the cost of a cherished tan-and-brown sweater from Carson Pirie Scott.
Mother lived a full, productive and, in all the important respects, triumphant ninety-four years. When I moved to New York, so did she, where she had an outstanding career as second in command of B. Altman Company’s prestigious Rare Book, Map and Fine Binding Department on Fifth Avenue until she was in her seventies; then continued to preside serenely over a mini–literary salon for her friends and mine in her apartment near Riverside Drive.
She was so popular in our circle that a hundred of her admirers showed up when Kedakai and I invited them to celebrate her eightieth birthday in our home, where composer Cy Coleman and I serenaded her with songs from the musical we were writing—which prompted Lena Horne, who rarely consented to sing at her own parties and, in my experience, never sang at anyone else’s, to say to me, “I’d like to sing for your mother.”
Cy stayed at the piano, and after a moment’s consultation with him, Lena smiled at my mother, who was seated at the far end of the grand piano, and began to sing, “Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky—stormy weather…”
That began the parade. Burton Lane played and sang songs from his scores for Finian’s Rainbow and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Sheldon Harnick, halfway through his lyric for “Sunrise, Sunset,” from Fiddler on the Roof, forgot the words, and from a nearby couch, Joanna Simon’s operatic soprano picked it up without missing a beat. Tammy Grimes sang Brecht/Weill. Betty Comden and Adolph Green sang—no, performed; just singing was never enough for them—classics they’d written with Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne and Cy Coleman.
It went on for hours. For Mother.
When her career at Altman’s was cut (in her view) short, she volunteered to teach remedial reading in the New York public school system, which she did industriously until a school supervisor found her gasping at the top of several flights of stairs and, with undisguised regret (and a public ceremony to celebrate her service), sent her into a second retirement at the age of ninety.
All her life, Mother had an unshakable penchant for worrying (which somehow coexisted compatibly with the sturdy optimism and penetrating sense of humor that saw her through some menacing storms). The story was told in the family that she once walked into a roomful of relatives wearing a dark frown and, when someone asked, “What’s wrong, Betty?” replied, “I’m worried about something, but I can’t remember what.” To which a sister replied, “That’s all right, Betty. As long as you’re worried.”
On May 7, 1980, I produced at the White House an entertainment to inaugurate the independent cabinet status of the Department of Education. My proposal for the event, which President Carter enthusiastically endorsed, was to invite the participating artists to dedicate their performances to the teachers who had most influenced them, and to bring the teachers with them, to be honored that night at the performance, each one with a Presidential Citation, presented onstage by the artist and the president.
Because President Carter admired Loretta Lynn, and she’d appeared in his Inaugural Gala, I invited her back to Washington for this occasion, with her favorite teacher. A week after she’d agreed to come, she called me, near tears, to “confess” that she shouldn’t have accepted the invitation because the truth was she’d never been to school at all.
“But someone must have taught you something,” I insisted.
“Well, sure,” she said.
“Who?” I asked, suspecting I knew the answer.
“Well…Mama…”
“Bring her,” I said; and the president wholeheartedly approved the decision.
On the night of the performance, in the course of the cavalcade of illustrious poets and painters and dancers and musicians and their mentors, Loretta’s turn came. She performed with her usual canny simplicity, then invited her mother to the stage, where the citation was read and the framed presidential document was presented to her. Each of the mentors had spoken, and now it was Clara Webb’s turn. She stammered once, then raised the citation to shield her face from the audience, tears welling. President Carter stepped forward and took her in his arms as the audience cheered her, and Loretta beamed. It was that kind of evening and, during the four years that I was periodically in its service, that kind of White House.
As I’d prepared the Education celebration, I’d reported to the president that my mother was by any sensible measure a distinguished educator, and he’d insisted she be invited. Late that evening, after the performance and the dinner, with the Marine Concert Band playing, and hundreds of guests milling about the White House, Kedakai and I lost track of Mother and finally found her sitting alone on a brocaded couch outside the Red Room, frowning at Rosalynn, who was posing for a picture with two of the evening’s artists, poet Richard Wilbur and sculptor Louise Nevelson, under the Kennedy portrait.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Mother.
“I’m worried.”
“Of course, but about what?”
“Rosalynn, having to clean up after all these people.”
As I reread the pages of this chapter, it’s odd how I, who was so confident in the second paragraph of this undertaking that “this book won’t be about me,” have dwelt so resolutely on recollections that seem to violate that pledge.
Arguably, even this chapter is fundamentally about the promised “anybody elses” who have shaped me, but I’m too present in it for my taste. The only excuse I can offer is that it’s harder than I thought it would be to confine myself to the shadows. On Inside the Actors Studio, since I’m responsible for the edit, I can remove myself with a flick of the editor’s wrist. It’s not as simple in a book that includes chapters of remembrance like this one, where occurrences and reflections that I thought had been safely dispatched to oblivion come sidling back, demanding attention. For example, Detroit, a benign and honorable place, turns out to be, for me, “Detroit,” an unsettling, quotation-marked concept.
But maybe there’s hope of deliverance, even for as stubborn a case as mine.
In the fall of 2001, a delegation arrived in New York from Wayne State University, which was founded in Detroit in 1868, and is today one of the nation’s foremost urban educational institutions. With thirty-three thousand students, it is the equivalent in the Midwest of the City University of New York. The delegation was led by Linda Moore, dean of the College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts, and their principal purpose in coming to New York, she explained, was to meet with me, an announcement that came as a surprise, since I’d long since reconciled myself to the fact that the university had utterly forgotten me.
In the seventies, my cousin Liz had sent me the Wayne State catalogue, which contained, as a motif on nearly every page, linguistic terms from my book An Exaltation of Larks, without attribution. As I wrote the admissions director, the terms did in fact have an author for whom, a cursory review of their records would have revealed, the university could take credit. My letter wasn’t acknowledged.
So, it was with understandable curiosity that I sat down to lunch with the Wayne State delegation in a restaurant near the university where I now served as a dean. Wayne State’s former apathy had apparently given way to interest as the goal of their mission was revealed: an invitation to join the governing board of the College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts.
From the boot to the boardroom, at an improbable stroke. The delegates explained enthusiastically how I would be brought to Detroit for periodic meetings…and that was when their voices began to fade, crowded out by other voices, other times.
I hadn’t been back to Detroit for twenty-five years—for reasons I couldn’t begin to explain to Dean Moore and her colleagues. So, I sat across the table from them, impaled on the horns of an exquisite dilemma: On the one hand, the thought of returning regularly raised specters I’d banished with difficulty and had no intention of resurrecting; on the other hand, how could I explain why I was spurning their goodwill without sounding, legitimately, like an insufferable snob or an ungracious boor?
My lunch remained untouched as they pressed their suit, singing the university’s praises until, ridden with guilt at this waste of their time, I raised a hand and stumbled through a makeshift explanation of my misgivings that was interrupted by the dean’s gentle question, “Unhappy memories?”
I clutched at the helping hand. “It’s not Detroit’s fault. Good city, good people…it’s just…me. You understand….” I ended lamely, hopelessly.
“Of course.”
“Isn’t there anything you miss?” one of the delegates asked.
A moment’s reflection yielded, “Yes. Sanders hot fudge and Vernors ginger ale.”
The luncheon ended in an amicable standoff: They were gracious in defeat, and I walked back to my office, awash in self-loathing and relief. A week later, a large box was delivered to my desk. It was packed with jars of Sanders hot fudge (incomparably smooth, from the Detroit ice cream emporium that invented the ice cream soda 130 years ago) and cans of Vernors ginger ale (distinctively aromatic and incomprehensibly unavailable in New York).
The care packages kept coming, uninsistently, with no strings attached, but bearing an unmistakable, though always unspoken, message.
Then, a few months later, Dr. Irvin Reid, Wayne State’s president, called to inform me that the board of governors had voted—unanimously, for the first time in his experience at the university, he said—to award me an honorary Ph. D.
Obviously forewarned by the delegation, he added that all I had to do was appear at the commencement in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, receive the doctorate, deliver a commencement address to twenty thousand graduates and guests, and head straight for the airport.
Fed up by now with my temperamental antics, I wasn’t about to waste another moment of Wayne State’s time. “I’d be honored,” I said.
I assumed that by that bold stroke I’d finally crossed the Rubicon—or at least the Detroit River—until the middle of the night before my flight when Kedakai shook me awake because I was screaming, “No! No!” I sat up in bed, awake, aghast, the nightmare still vivid: I was alone in a room. A man approached me and asked casually, “Is that window open?” I said yes, and he walked nonchalantly to it and jumped out, which triggered my horrified cry.
The two characters weren’t hard to identify, since I’ve often appeared in a dual role in my dreams, as myself and as myself observing myself (a sign, perhaps, of incurable solipsism). In my twenties, I had a frequently recurring dream in which I lay in bed in my bedroom on Hague Avenue. The room was exact and unmistakable. The dream always began as I woke in it, opened my eyes and didn’t move. All around the bed, on straight-backed chairs, everyone I would see that day (that was a given) sat stiffly, silently, staring fixedly ahead in what appeared to be a choreographed ritual. At the foot of the bed stood one more person, who ceremoniously handed me the mask I would wear that day. Once the mask was between me and the eyes of the figure at the foot of the bed, who was manifestly the other I, offering today’s disguise, I reached up and surreptitiously slipped off the mask I was already wearing—the one that prevented even me from ever seeing me—and slid the day’s mask into place.
A curiously hermetic nature for someone who would ultimately make a career of trying to draw others out, to the point where the French magazine Télérama described “la méthode de l’omniscient doyen” as “mi-confession, mianalyse (half-confession, half-analysis).” My only defense is the one offered by the character in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel who, when accused of not following his own advice, sniffs, “I am like the signpost that points the way to Paris without ever going there itself.”
I have a weakness for untestable theories, one of which is that somewhere in every single person on this planet resides the same genetic fragment that animates the poetry of Eliot, Frost or Milton. I believe, in short, that a poet lurks in everyone. The proof? Persuade any truck driver, electrician, vagrant, banker, convenience store clerk, doorman, accountant or cop to describe his or her dreams, and you’ll be witness to an intricate web of wildly imaginative constructions that, however surreal, are rich in metaphor, synecdoche and metonymy, the vital stuff of poetry. Tossing words and ideas about like a manic juggler, swapping images at warp speed, jumbling fears and hopes, then reinventing them in vivid flashes and revelatory strokes, the dreamer may never have heard of the poetic secret of compression, but at night when the unconscious rules, he or she wields it with the ease and grace of Keats at the Urn, Matisse at the easel, or Federer at the baseline.
The conviction that the most sensitive and compassionate of arts unites us all gives me hope for the race when the headlines don’t.
A few hours after the nightmare, despite its shrill warning, I jumped through the yawning window into an airplane bound for Detroit. Detroit is unmistakable from the air because of Woodward Avenue, which bisects it, running due north from the river—and Canada, which is, illogically, south of Detroit because of the way Ontario slides under the thumb of the Michigan mitten.
My cousins Jean and Ann met me at the airport and took me directly to a cousins dinner, a sizable affair, since not only did my mother’s parents have eleven children, but so, give or take a kid or two, did the rest of my grandparents’ generation. It goes without saying that the dinner featured, without prompting, Vernors ginger ale and Sanders hot fudge.
Late that night, Ann drove me to the Detroit Athletic Club, where the university had arranged for me to stay. When I lived in Detroit, the DAC, off-limits to everyone but its elite membership, was as remote and exotic as Camelot, especially since I swam on my high school team and the DAC was reputed to house the city’s best pool, a supposition I couldn’t corroborate since I’d never been privileged to test the waters. But now, through the vagaries of time and fate, I was being welcomed to the DAC by a smiling desk clerk who handed me a thick packet, which I assumed contained instructions to the gym, the dining room…the pool.
In my room, I prepared for bed, then glanced again at the packet I’d dropped on the desk. Maybe there were messages from Wayne about tomorrow’s ceremony. I opened the packet and started. On top of the pile, a letter that had been forwarded from my office was crowned by a blue, white and red insignia incorporating France’s new, younger Marianne, over the words Liberté * Égalité * Fraternité and République Française.
Below that, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication crossed the page in an elegant cursive font.
At the left were two words: Le Ministre.
Then:
Monsieur,
J’ai le très grand plaisir de vous annoncer que je viens de vous décerner le grade de chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
The letter, explaining that knighthood in the Order of Arts and Letters was awarded to honor cultural contributions in France and the world, was signed by the minister of culture, Catherine Tasca.
Within moments I was on the phone to Kedakai, who, in a patent effort to buoy my frequently flagging spirits (and make sure I got on that plane), had been jollying me for days about the doctorate. Knowing I was now in the line of fire, she was unusually cheery. “Hi, Doc!”
“Forget the ‘Doc,’” I growled. “It’s ‘Sir’ to you. I’ve been knighted.”
The next morning I was picked up by Rick Rogers, the former secretary of The New School, who’d helped establish our drama school there and was now president of a flourishing school, the College for Creative Studies, in the vibrant cultural center that contains the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Wayne State campus. At his invitation, I was to tour his campus, and lunch with him at the DAC before the commencement.
His college, which, not surprisingly, had a substantial automotive-design component, and was strongly supported by Detroit’s auto manufacturers, contained vast, airy classrooms filled with students sculpting automobile-size, avant-garde works of art that were in fact swooping, lunging mock-ups of the cars we may one day drive.
When we finished the tour, an hour remained before our luncheon reservation, and Rick asked, “Anywhere you’d like to go? Anything you’d like to see?” My answer was instantaneous and as unexpected by me as by him: “Yes!”
“Where?”
“Can we go someplace in your car?”
“Sure. Where do you want to go?”
“North on Woodward. I’ll direct you.”
As we drove north, the years spooled away with each passing block. Some landmarks had vanished, replaced for long stretches by sullen emptiness on Woodward’s barren, abandoned flanks. But once we crossed Grand Boulevard, the familiar sights snowballed. To the west, the spire of the Fisher Building rose, a changeless monument to every Saturday afternoon of my childhood in the picture palace it bestrode: the Fisher Theatre, its marquee still promising marvels, but living ones now: It had replaced the Cass and Shubert Lafayette as Detroit’s legitimate theater. As we swept by it, I wondered how it acquired its ushers.
Now every block was familiar, remarkably unchanged, many of the small buildings looking tired and discouraged; but they had looked tired and discouraged then. Inner city then, inner city now. Sacred, bleeding heart. Plus ça change…
“Slow down,” I said.
Euclid Avenue…Philadelphia…Hague.
“Turn right.”
Every brick was in place, every tree. As we crossed John R, I wondered why it had never occurred to any of us to ask, “John R who?”
Half a block later, I said, “Stop.” I got out and stood on the sidewalk. Rick emerged on his side and leaned on the roof of the car, silent. “This is where I lived,” I said. “Two eighty.”
Rick and I stared at the house. It was smaller than I’d remembered, of course: I’d grown. But in every other respect, it was unchanged: the wooden porch, the Doric columns, the brief lawn in front, the shrubbery, the sidewalk where the handle of my Radio Flyer wagon had bounced back and gashed my forehead, occasioning my first stitches and the scar above my right eyebrow that Michelle O’Callahan, Inside the Actors Studio’s makeup person, camouflages before each shoot.
I looked up and down the street. It was, if anything, more genteel than it had been then. Detroit, like every aging industrial city in the post–World War II years, grew like an amoeba, outward, in suburbs, as its aspiring middle class fled the inner city, ceding it to an economic class on its own trajectory up from a lower depth.
The result was the urban demographic doughnut, minority at its center, white in its outer circle, with suburbs spawning rings of exurbs for those prosperous enough to flee the suburbs, in a never-ending cycle of escape and exclusion.
When Mother and I lived on Hague Avenue, Detroit’s inner city was already in transition. On Hague itself, and on all the streets around us, upwardly mobile blacks were eyeing and buying the homes that upwardly mobile whites were leaving. Some of the neighborhoods to the east of us were already blighted then, filling with people trapped in a cycle of poverty that discouraged aspiration.
Now, on this balmy day in the spring of 2002, Rick and I stood in the center of an entirely black community that radiated out for miles until it fetched up at the suburban wall that contained it.
As I stood silent on my peak in Darien, a black woman came distractedly down the block and started up the steps of the house next to 280 (the Faust house once upon a time), and stopped abruptly as she saw us standing stock-still, anomalous, on the sidewalk. After eyeing us in silence for a moment, she came to a decision and descended the steps to ask us, politely but plainly, “What are you doing here?”
“I used to live here. This was my home.” She was silent. “I haven’t seen it in a very long time.”
Her body language sent a less guarded signal. “Has it changed?”
“Not much. I’m surprised. The whole street. It looks the same—maybe a little better. You’re taking care if it.”
She surveyed the street, studying it through our alien eyes, then turned back to us, indicating the north-south street to the east. “Don’t go across Brush. That’s nothing but drugs and guns. They see you there, you won’t come out.”
“Thanks.” I looked up at 280. “I’d like to go inside. Who lives there?”
“A minister.”
“Oh.” I started toward the porch.
“A Muslim minister.” I looked at her. “He’s not there. I saw him go out.” Her words were uninflected, but I came back to the sidewalk.
“I’d love to see the backyard.” She shrugged, friendly, noncommittal, and started back up her steps. “Thanks for the information,” I said. She nodded and went into the Faust house (hers now, of course, but old habits die hard). I looked at Rick. “Want to see our backyard?”
“Sure.”
We went up the walk that flanked 280 on the east. I glanced at the house to the left—Renee (not Renée, Ree-ny) Smith’s house, and at her bedroom window, opposite mine, where we used to lean on the sills and chat about whatever eight-year-olds chat about.
The backyard was precisely as I remembered it: a small square of grass, bordered by flowers and fences, and intersected by a narrow cement walk that led to the back fence and the alley where the tougher neighborhood boys hunted rats in garbage bins by flinging open the lids and spearing the startled animals with sharpened broomsticks pour le sport. One makes do.
Just behind the house, I stopped and pointed at the back fence. “You know what it meant to hit a homer over that fence?” I studied it. “Now we could flip quarters over it.” Rick nodded. I pointed up at a window above the kitchen door. “That was my room. There used to be a porch outside it. We called it the verandah. I guess it fell down.” I moved closer to the house and tried to look into the dining room, but it was in deep shadow.
Returning to the front of the house, I elected to go up on the porch and, cupping my hands around my eyes, peered into the living room in search of the fireplace where my creative accounting had made for some bountiful Christmases. But the room was too dark to reveal itself, and as a passing car slowed at the spectacle of this outsider spying on an innocent citizen, I backed away from the window.
At the top of the porch steps, I looked down at Rick, waiting patiently on the sidewalk. “Two more minutes?”
“Sure.”
Rick got into the car. I stood on the porch, not sure what I was going to do with my two minutes—or why I wanted it. I’d seen all I could see. Two eighty Hague hadn’t disappointed. It was so remarkably unchanged that I could imagine turning around, twisting the knob on the front door and walking into the musty little foyer where the mail waited each morning, then pushing open a second door and turning left into what the family called the library because it contained tall, standing bookcases with heavy leaded-glass doors that used to open with a promising quiver on the mysteries and marvels of my childhood, including and especially some ancient French primers from which I labored to teach myself French. Sometimes I stood on my verandah, the primer in hand, declaiming to the empty backyard in the tongue I assumed this magical language sounded like.
Now, a lifetime later, on the front porch, abruptly, still not knowing why, I sat down on the top step, precisely as and where I’d sat countless times when I was six, seven, eight, staring out at Hague Avenue. What I saw then, I saw now: the line of houses across the street; the tree in front of 280, which was always home base for hide-and-seek; the broken, bumpy sidewalk that had uncomplainingly borne our streaking bikes and cheeky chatter….
Then, suddenly, I knew why I’d come back to Hague Avenue this morning. It turned out that I was looking for something, and, sitting on the step, I found it. In a few hours Wayne State, my university, would confer on me the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters—and last night I learned that the Republic of France had invested me with the title of chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres—two data that pale to invisibility next to the achievements and honors of my countless betters—but, to me, at this moment, perched on the top step of the porch at 280 Hague, man and boy together again, together at last, gazing tranquilly at the street with our arms over each others’ shoulders, they were the last links in an unbroken chain, completing one more circle, from me on the porch at 280 Hague once upon a time…to us on the porch at 280 Hague now. We got here.
Click.
The ring closed.
I stood up, walked to the curb, got into the car with Rick and drove away from Hague. But not from the past, because I didn’t have to anymore.