Oh for a Muse of Fire!

(Prelude to “I’ll Take Manhattan”)

1

Oh for a Muse of Fire!
That would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, Princes to act,
and Monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

— Opening Chorus, Shakespeare’s Henry V

  When Anne O’Neil drove us around in her decrepit, falling-apart, pre-war, dull brown Willys with six-inch gaps between wooden floor planks, it’s a wonder we weren’t asphyxiated. The muffler leaked carbon monoxide, so we kept the windows open, even in cold weather. Miraculously, nobody ever got their foot caught between the floorboards.

  Few students in U.C.L.A.’s Theatre Arts Department owned cars in 1948, except those with well-to-do parents like Robert Horton who drove a new, sparkling red, four-door Ford convertible. We didn’t know if the well-to-do male doctor he lived with on Manhattan Place in Los Angeles really was his father. Dean had his doubts, but this might’ve been wishful thinking. Bob was a real good-looking guy, shocking red hair, and muscular.

  One late November afternoon in 1948, Anne drove me, Dean and Curtis down to State Beach north of the Santa Monica pier, Curtis bitching all the way in his deep, sonorous voice. “Why are we going to the beach? It’s too cold to go to the beach.”

  Dean, soul child of Noel Coward and Bea Lillie, raising his eyebrows for punctuation, complains, “The beach social season is quite over, and a good thing it is too. How drab can it get?”

  From Anne, familiar sounds, throaty laugh fractured by a giggle, coloring her words, “I want to see the sunset,” grinding gears causing the precarious frame of the Willys to shudder as she turns off Coast Highway onto a pebble strewn shelf of land overlooking the Pacific. Dusty pathways between clumps of dry, lifeless bushes and dull green spears of succulent ice plant slant down to a broad stretch of sand, mocha colored like most California beaches because of oil in subterranean caverns off the coast—nothing like the shining white Long Island beaches I would gambol on years later.

  Tentative rows of breaking waves wander toward shore—tide pausing then receding, rejecting an invitation to linger. Easing himself out of the Willys, turning back to confront Anne, Curtis says, “It’s colder than a witch’s tit.”

  “Language, there’s a lady present,” Anne laughs, following Curtis and Dean out of the car. Dean, short golden hair glanced by setting sun, approaches the edge of the incline, staring down at the puny waves. “What boring surf. The only reason I agreed to come along was to watch surfers, and look at it! One couldn’t even wade in it with any degree of dignity.”

  “I came to watch the sun go down,” Anne says, “not wade in the ocean.”

  Standing to one side, I add tentatively, “I love sunsets over the Pacific, reminds me of when I crossed the Pacific on a troop ship,” quickly realizing nobody is listening. It’s more to the liking of these people (Anne perhaps excepted) to compare sunsets and moonrise with a scene in ballet or opera—for Curtis, German Lieder and pianist Gieseking, or Marian Anderson, or Roland Hayes, or Jussi Bjoerling singing Nessun Dorma. Better I might have said, The sunset reminds me of Jussi Bjoerling’s ringing tones in Nessun Dorma—sun setting into a frozen Nordic sea.

  But the sun is not obliging, sinking now into a fog bank which will reach us before long. Anne has protected herself from the cold, outfitted with a long gray unbuttoned coat covering a purple flowered blouse tucked into brown gabardine slacks. Her silken, wavy, blonde hair catches a breeze.

  Dean studies her. All three of us, Dean, Curtis, and I, agree Anne’s face is inscrutable, brown eyes wide, taking in the view. Handsome woman, reminding one of Ann Todd (Ann without the “e”), the British actress who starred with James Mason in “The Seventh Veil,” and with Gregory Peck in “The Paradine Case.”

  A burnished gold sun descends into a fog bank. “Another sunset in the smog,” Dean says.  Anne stares at him silently.

  “Watch out, Dean,” Curtis says, “she’s putting a hex on you.”

  “How lucky that would be!” Dean chortles.

  Anne has put a hex on me from the moment she first enticed me into associating with these outcasts of U.C.L.A.’s theatre department—not outcasts exactly, but very reluctant be one with those in the department who long for a future as big wheels or stardom, in The Industry. (What fools we were!)  Curtis and I hope to star at the Old Vic in London some day; Anne in a Charlie Chaplin film. Dean’s ambitions, uncertain. (Later in New York, he will study voice, preparing for a career in opera.)

  Quiet intensity—that’s what one remembers about Anne O’Neill—unmistakably, a woman—quirky at times, curious and amused at our sexual desires, but never scolding. Once, driving me home from school when I hinted at the nature of my roommates (gay all the way), she said, “I’ve thought about being a lesbian, but it seems such a waste.” She was closer to Curtis than Dean and I were.

  For a couple of days she failed to show at our afternoon tea klatches in Kerckhoff Hall, explaining the mystery would be revealed with a drive into Hollywood where she led us to the long courtyard entrance to Vic Tanney’s Gym—to Rusty, silent barker for the Gym, a red-head “mechanical man” she’d befriended, enticing people in with jerky movements like a wound-up robot.

  Mime was in vogue from the moment Jean Louis-Barrault appeared in the French film, “Children of Paradise” (Les Enfants du Paradis) at the Beverly Canon Art House in Beverly Hills; Barrault now regarded as the world’s definitive mime. Rusty’s movements lacked the poetic fluidity of the French master.

  “Introduce us,” Curtis says.

  Anne’s quick response, “Not while he’s performing.”

  As Rusty moves forward with robotic precision, Curtis, losing patience, cries out, “I’m Curtis, this is Dean—”  “Curtis!” Anne growls, turning away from us and walking out to the Boulevard. Later Curtis tells me he accused Anne of having an affair with Rusty and she’d answered, “So what?”

  Anne’s fascination with Rusty shouldn’t have surprised us. Over the next several years she would come to idolize Charlie Chaplin. His “City Lights” had premiered at the Los Angeles Theatre downtown in 1931, and now had been re-released, showing at the Beverly Canon. After the last scene, fading from a close up on Charlie’s face, holding the flower, we all fell apart. Anne would have given her soul and body to star in a Charlie Chaplin film.

  Watching her in the sunset, I recall the first time she approached me on our way to the bus stop after the first reading rehearsal of “The White Steed” in Royce Hall 170. During the read-through I’d noticed her staring at me, sitting across from me in the curve of seats surrounding the “theatre-in-the-round” playing area. Not surprising—everyone in the room was watching me closely, waiting for me to fall on my face—this unknown upstart, cast by Wally Boyle in the choice role of the season as Denis Dillon, the drunken Irish school master—and I hadn’t even been to the grueling three-day tryouts!

  “Going to the bus stop?” she asks as we head toward the administration building, making our way through shadows down the short flight of stairs to the depot, nothing more than a roofed shed.

  I ask her where she lives. “With my mother in Venice. I have a car, but she’s using it tonight.” Quiet, gurgling laugh. “Just as well, it leaks exhaust and in this cold breeze with the windows rolled up, you might get asphyxiated—if it’s possible to roll up the windows. Mother doesn’t mind. She can be reckless.”

  We settle in, waiting for the bus to start; it’s the end of the line, so who knows when the driver will finish his sandwich and thermos of coffee. For me, it’s the start of a two hour haul to Highland Park—two more bus transfers, and it’s already close to eleven.

  “What’s your background?” she asks suddenly. “Have you studied acting before?”

  Is this a quiz? Clearly she’s challenging me, but I’m eager to tell, certain the information will reach a larger audience before long. “I was at U.C.L.A. in Campus Theatre for a year before the war, before I got drafted, that’s how Wally Boyle knew me—from four years ago. After I got out of the army I went to Michigan State and a bunch of us from there went up to Mackinaw Island last summer to do summer stock. That’s about it, except for high school.”

  “I’m not sure I can handle all that information.”

  The bus gives a sudden lurch, coughing noxious fumes, growling like an old grizzly bear as it churns down Hilgarde’s sorority row, (lifetime ago, bussing dishes at Phi Mu sorority.)

  Anne intrudes, “You nearly caused a revolution. Every male in the department would kill to get cast as Denis Dillon, and you didn’t even suffer through tryouts.”

  “I didn’t know about them.”

  “It’s a ritual, like going to church. How’d you get away with it?”

  “It’s a long story—”

  “Some other time,” she says.

  “What about you?”

  “Not much to tell, I do a little painting, but I thought at the college level I should give acting a whirl.”

  “I thought you might be a painter, the way you were studying my face at the reading.”

  “Don’t worry, I have no desire to paint your face.”

  The bus suffers to a stop at Wilshire Boulevard. “Here’s my transfer, I live in Venice,” she says, getting up and heading for the exit. “See ya in rehearsals.”

NEXT – “The White Steed” and the Curtis challenge.

“Oh for a Muse of Fire!”

(second entry)

  Back in February, my second week at U.C.L.A., Dr. Walden P. Boyle stops me outside Royce Hall 169, as in 1944, the room still serves as temporary H.Q. for Campus Theatre.  Wally hasn’t changed a bit in five years, the same square-jawed, complacent, circumspect, detached Walden P. Boyle. Chewing words carefully modulated, he says, “I’m directing the White Steed, and you weren’t at tryouts, so what are your plans? You must participate to get your credits in the department. We rehearse mostly at night.”

  “Right now I live at home in Highland Park, but I’m going to move closer to school.”

  “You’ll have to work something out.”

  “Sure—yes, sure I will.”

  “Well, I know your work,” and he retreats into 169. Interview over.

  Several days later, casting for all four spring season productions are posted on a bulleting outside 169. “The White Steed” – the Great Unknown cast as Dennis Dillon.

  “The White Steed” opens in March running for two weeks in Royce Hall 170. “Theatre in the Round.” Breaking away from proscenium stages originated at the University of Washington in Seattle, Ralph Freud tells us. Royce Hall’s large proscenium stage continued as venue for the department’s one “big” production each semester.

  Wally Boyle’s direction is uninspired—after blocking, he reads a newspaper as we rehears, until we are off the book, lines memorized. He offers little, if anything as to interpretation. His musical ear, however is inspired—“Jupiter” from Gustav Holst’s “Planets,” lush grandeur, music fit for a coronation. Hearing the music today brings a rush, taking me back to Dennis Dillon’s humble digs in 170’s arena:

  Little do they know that I can rock the rafters with Rabelais and drink whiskey with Boccaccio! encouraging heroine Nora Fintry who has defied the village’s “Moral Vigilance Committee,” to goad him into climbing up with her on her White Steed joining her rebellion against the new wave of priests, “those little black men from Rome,” priests who are ignorant of Irish history and legends. Dennis trembling with Nora through Act Two’s finale, throwing cups into an imaginary fireplace, shattering so close to the audience, women in the front row of tiered seats gasp. Dennis Dillon’s ringing declaration becoming my own call to arms, imbedded infinitely, echoing through the years:

  Oh God, it’s wonderful. I feel as if I have the taste of blood in me mouth, the taste of the blood of me enemies, the taste of the blood of the men who taught me to love their laws and hate life. I that have warm blood and the laugh of a giant!

  Dennis and Nora embrace hysterically. Lights fade to black.

  The morning after opening night, as Anne and I  rush out of “Movement for Theatre” class in Royce Hall 220, William Donald Curtis makes his entrance, elegantly intense, El Greco painting—gaunt and bony St. Sebastian pierced with arrows, a character from Medieval Miracle Play, not much hair, arched black brows drawn over even blacker eyes, yet strangely warm and receptive.

  “How ja do,” deep, rumbling voice, extending two fingers as I try to curl all of mine around his meager offering.  Anne scowls from the sidelines.

  Dean Hoffmann invades the scene, exploding out of dance class, shouting over his shoulder as he hurries off, “Hail and farewell everyone, can’t stop now—matinee with Pumpkin.” I am not yet close enough to Dean for him to reveal his secrets—is Pumpkin girl or boy? When Dean comes out to us, we learn his Thursday afternoon lover, “Pumpkin,” is the handsome young actor George Nader, appearing in minor roles in films, his career taking off with the infamous sci-fi picture, “Robert Monster” in 1953.

  Nader would become life-long friend of Rock Hudson, but never his lover. His lifetime partner (need I say, not Dean Hoffmann) was Mark  Miller who was personal secretary to Rock Hudson for thirteen years. When George agreed to be outed by Confidential Magazine to protect his friend Rock Hudson, he was consigned to B movie list. “We lived in fear of an exposé, or even one small remark, a veiled suggestion that someone was homosexual. Such a remark would have caused an earthquake at the studio. Every month, when Confidential came out, our stomachs began to turn. Which of us would be it? In 1978 his novel “Chrome” broke new ground, the first gay themed sci-fi novel—gay robots!

  Curtis studies me, seeming to be on the verge of retreating into an intensely private world, his look, not mocking, but curious. Had I possessed an ounce of wisdom at the time, I would’ve realized Curtis constructed this detached air to hide vulnerability, but then, and ever so, I’m willing to accept all eccentricities without question. I was fascinated and anxious to know him better.

  “Let’s go to Tip’s,” Curtis says, and to Anne, “Are you coming with us?”

  Anne snaps back with a soon-to-become familiar sarcastic edge in her voice, “How else are you going to get there? Are you going to walk?”

  It’s obvious Curtis has put her up to arranging this, goading her to seek me out at the first reading of “The White Steed” to discover what makes this upstart tick, who has snagged the plumb male juvenile role of the spring season.

  Tip’s (“Thick Steaks and Thin Pancakes”) has changed little since the days and nights there in 1943-44 drinking coffee and bolting down whatever I could afford with Campus Theatre “greats,” straining to be accepted.

  “Who’s your favorite composer?” Curtis asks, fork capturing a bite of a thin Tip’s pancake submerged in butter and maple syrup, Anne studying him closely.

  A moment’s hesitation, then responding, “Tchai . . . Mozart.”

  “You almost said Tchaikovsky, didn’t you?”

  “No—well, maybe. I like Tchaikovsky.”

  “So do I. Which Mozart?”

  “Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, piano concertos—number twenty-two,” a recording Mickey Feay gave me as a Christmas present. I was a long way from familiarity with any other Mozart piano concertos.

  Now recalling those lonely days listening to recordings in the shack attached to the garage at home on Joy Street. “Also, Wanda Landowska on the harpsichord playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations—I love the harpsichord since when I saw Wuthering Heights, and lots of other music—I’m trying to build up a collection, but it’s expensive.”

  Knee-jerk laugh from Anne, placing her coffee cup carefully on the table, gracing me with a smile. The Curtis Fortress has been compromised.

  He recovers. “Wuthering Heights—it was Alice Ehlers on the harpsichord banging out the rondo. She teaches music at U.S.C., you know.”

  “I didn’t know, that’s interesting.”

  Curtis repressing a smile, eyes opening wide as I skip through thoughts disconnected, “It’s a great score—Alfred Newman—I mean for Wuthering Heights. Music makes a film.”

  “Yes, so it often does,” slurping another slab of pancake in gooey syrup. Before it reaches his mouth, I start humming the intense, shattering opening of “King’s Row.”

  “That’s from King’s Row,” he says.

  “The greatest film score ever!” showing off now—“Erich Wolfgang Korngold.”

  “Yes—well maybe not the greatest.”

  Anne, quietly amused, no longer scowling. Curtis says, “Anne should’ve played Nora Fintry in The White Steed. As for you, well, I would’ve—when you make your final exit from the Canon’s study—I would’ve hesitated, paused for a second—unsure, head bowed perhaps, instead of that stiff upper lip, striding out to find Nora on her White Steed.”

  “Interesting,” again my usual response to cover all bets. I don’t agree with him. I’m more for the glory build-up—heroism and victory, incurable optimism, avoiding all encounters of melancholy and depression. Chest up! Head held high! Gung ho!

  “It would’ve been more Irish,” Curtis says, “poetic uncertainty—leaving us with a sense that Dennis Dillon will never change—never get up on Nora’s White Steed and ride off into the sunset and glory.”

  I manage a faint smile, Anne is scowling again.

NEXT – Careers in the making . . . Dreams and reality.

Theatre Dionysius, Athens, 4^th Century B.C.E.

2,400 years before U.C.L.A. Theatre Arts Department

Oh! for a Muse of Fire

(3^rd installment)

  Why was it so important for me to gain approval—to be with these people, especially Curtis? Shouldn’t I get into the mainstream mix, curry favor with those certain to become the bright lights in the “Industry”? Hollywood movie making called an “Industry” was perhaps enough to turn me away from them, the future casting directors, agents, producers. In those euphoric times after the war, William Donald Curtis rapidly transformed my life, a savant throwing open gates, enticing me across the threshold, keeper of the flame—a Muse of Fire.

  Other accomplices conspired to bind me in their spell—sitting in dark movie houses with Curtis, Anne, and Dean, miraculous films seducing us, warming to Gerard Philippe and Micheline Presle in “Devil in the Flesh,” Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus” and “Blood of the Poet,” stunning Edwige Feuilliere, Olivier’s “Henry the Fifth,” “The Red Shoes,” Noel Coward’s “Brief Encounter” and his war-time epic, “In Which We Serve.” Curtis and I created our own magic that spring season after “The White Steed” closed its two week run, performing in two Tennessee Williams one acts, unveiled in Royce Hall 170, with, unfortunately only one performance to succeed or fail. Ada Friedman, efficient, energetic woman, directs me in Tennessee Williams’ “The Long Goodbye,” a play forms a template for Tennessee’s first Broadway success, “The Glass Menagerie.” Curtis in Williams’ “Auto-da-Fé.”

  At that moment in time, the part of Joe is made to order for me—a young would-be writer closing up an apartment where he’s lived all his life with his mother, now dead, and sister, a runaway. Flashbacks reveal his agonizing past as movers (one played by Al Supowitz/Sargent) carry out the furniture. (All “fucks” in the movers’ dialogue are deleted—although we had no resident censor in the department; perhaps it was Ada Friedman’s aversion to the word.)

  Future film and television producer, George Eckstein plays Joe’s sometimes friend, Silva, who keeps urging Joe to stop brooding over the past and join the “project.” Who could predict that Eckstein, an intense, bespectacled little guy, was to enjoy a career as prolific writer for television and film, as well as producer—sixteen episodes for the series, “Banacek,” and series executive producer; co-producing “The Fugitive” series, writing fifteen of its episodes, and three episodes for “Perry Mason” and nine episodes for “The Untouchables.”

  “The Long Goodbye” ends with dour Eckstein-as-Silva telling Joe to stop taking a morbid pleasure in watchin’ this junk hauled off like some dopes get in mooning around a bone-orchard . . . This place is done for, Joe. You can’t help it. Write about it someday. . . JOE – but not so fast that you can’t even say goodbye.” SILVA – Hello’s the word nowadays. JOE – You’re saying goodbye all the time, every minute you live. Because that’s what life is, just a long, long goodbye! Get out of here now, get out and leave me alone! SILVA – Okay, but I think you’re weeping like Jesus and it makes me sick. . . Remember, kid, what Socrates said,  “Hemlock’s a damn bad substitute for a twenty-six-ounce glass a beer!”

  Joe is left alone. He looks out the window. Children call out in the streets. Joe grabs his small suitcase and goes to the door, looks around the empty flat; slips a hand to his forehead in a mocking salute to the empty room, then thrusts the hand in his pocket and goes slowly out. Children’s laughter and scattered shouting float up to the room—to which director Ada Friedman is inspired to add children’s voices intoning from a vanished world, “Olly-olly-oxen-free!  Olly-olly-oxen-free!”

  That got ‘em, and perhaps that final mocking salute to  the past. A final farewell in “Billy Elliott,” perhaps writer, director, or even Jamie Bell himself—is familiar with Tennessee’s “The Long Goodbye.” Or perhaps, simply, these moments of “long goodbyes” are imbedded in our psyche, Billy leaving his home, probably forever, on his way to London to study at the Royal Ballet Academy, his granny “I’ve could’ve been a great dancer,” hugging him, then pushing him away. Billy pausing at the door, looking around at the home he’ll never see again, taking me back to that parting in “The Long Goodbye.”

  Curtis bursts into the men’s dressing room beneath Royce Hall, standing over me as I remove make-up, announcing in his growling low-pitched voice, “With the exception of Stanley Glenn’s Richard the Second last season, this was the best performance I’ve seen at U.C.L.A.” Cynical sneers from everyone (so I imagine.) but all I care about is Curtis’s approval.

  His own triumph in 170 followed soon after in Tennessee Williams’ one act, “Auto-Da-Fé,” playing Eloi, a frail man in his late thirties, a gaunt, ascetic type with feverish dark eyes, the neurotic son of Mme. Duvenet, played by Beverly Churchill, an especially elegant actress who was to have a good career at U.C.L.A., fading into the mist after graduation.

  The story evolves from an apparently “unclean” photograph Eloi has received in the mail. Finally, he burns down the house, his mother screaming, “Fire! Fire! The house is on fire, on fire, the house is on fire!”

  Curtis is brilliant; the audience, spellbound.

  To celebrate after these and other performances, Anne would drive us—Curtis, Dean, and Dean’s friend, George Ditmar to a bar on the beach in Santa Monica—a beer joint,  Judy Garland’s “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow” inevitably playing on the jukebox; a generally mixed crowd, predominantly male; a kind of bootleg gay bar, which meant it  might be infested with vice squad waiting to lure anyone they could to jail. South of Muscle Beach and the Santa Monica pier, the area was called “Crystal Beach,” a run-down collection of buildings, a moldy bath house, locker room for changing clothes—outside, the smell of salted, buttered popcorn mixed with that of the salty sea.

  How we missed Crystal Beach in later years! wonderfully untamed before they tore down the bath house and hot dog concessions, before parking lots wiped it all away; signs posted, proclaiming NO to every imaginable activity normally associated with pleasurable pursuits. NO alcohol, NO music. . .

  Ah! remember well those glorious Crystal Beach summer days when you could get smashed on beer and run out of the bar into the ocean to frolic in the surf; and if clever enough, make love beneath the waves.

  This calls to mind Wyatt Cooper who, in 1949, lived in a gloomy apartment above Muscle Beach. Wyatt was a theatre major, but we didn’t trouble ourselves to discover much about each other then; so Wyatt’s real ambitions to become “author and screenwriter” were unknown to us.

  Wyatt Emory Cooper was born in Quitman, Mississippi in 1927. When still a child, the family moved to New Orleans. He was, as I remember him, a gentle and elegant man, proud of his Southern heritage; and no reason to think he changed much during ensuing years. Our paths would cross again. In the 1950s he lived in West Hollywood where he became friends with Dorothy Parker and husband Alan Campbell, living nearby, writing a “widely-read profile of Dorothy Parker for Esquire.” A brief stint in New York finds him appearing in “The Strong Are Lonely.” It ran one week.

  I last ran into Wyatt in 1962 in the unemployment line on Santa Monica boulevard after my summer in the “Pilgrimage Play.” He had written the screenplay for “The Chapman Report,” he said. At a barely furnished apartment in West Hollywood, he told me, “They butchered my screenplay—they completely ignored the thrust, in effect, censoring it.” Several weeks later I saw Wyatt riding on Sunset Boulevard near Schwab’s Drugstore in a vintage black limousine with a lady, her faced veiled. Gloria Vanderbilt, as it turned out. He married her on December 24 in 1963.

  From his 1975 memoir: “In my sons’ youth their promise, their possibilities, my stake in immortality is invested . . .” Anderson Cooper is today fulfilling that promise.

3

  Dean Hoffmann, perhaps 27, is a transfer from U.S.C. where he majored in engineering. He allowed me access to his charms with some reluctance one night in his home in Huntington Park where he lived with his mother (absent for the evening). He hesitated a little before we jumped into his upper bunk bed, saying he felt like a roué, even though we were only six years apart. How could I resist his muscular, well-formed body, his wide set brown laughing eyes? (We both agreed, Dean never should’ve served asparagus with dinner.)

  Anne called Dean, “Bone Structure.” He is story teller, rapid-fire raconteur. On campus, spending time with Dean means spending time with his close friend, George Ditmar—indeed older than all of us—a psychology major, tall, thin sardonic cynosure with barbed tongue. We gather most mornings before class beneath small arches fronting the Quad just outside Royce Hall 170. Afternoon tea klatches in Kerckhoff Hall become a ritual. Ditmar is cynical resident critic saying clever things. More than once outside a campus phone booth, I’ve waited for Dean as he chatters away with George on the other end.

  George and I manage a baroque encounter of our own one overcast afternoon on the beach at Point Dume while the others have gone off for hamburgers and cokes. He lives in the valley across the street from the Adhor Milk Farm. His mother calls me his “little man” but our fling is short-lived.

  Dean loves telling stories of operas—especially to the ignorant. Anne doesn’t care a hoot for opera, but Curtis and I allow him to sizzle on, mostly for my benefit—the still wet-behind-the ears neophyte. Ditmar is sure Anne is in love with Dean, no matter how disinterested she seems. Curtis knows better. (Surely, it must be Curtis Anne was in love with—if she loves anyone at the time. Their lifelong friendship perhaps confirms this.)

  Dean confesses he got exposed to opera during the war in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera through “Astor Bar connections.” I picture him, striking, handsome ensign in white and gold naval dress, taking favors from admirers he meets at this watering hole for closeted servicemen and women. But it’s clear, current intimate encounters are to remain secret.

  Anne tries to force me to confront myself with what I really want out of life—to take charge, serve my ambitions by leading, not following, but I’m reluctant—too caught up in the adventure. Revelations materialize in commonplace settings—mostly at Kerckhoff Hall tea klatches, and are consumed eagerly. My offerings are meager.

  Al Supowitz makes an occasional appearance, regaling us with humorous, impromptu tales: a movie review of “Naked Jungle” starring Charlton Heston. Al summarizes the plot—the populace is threatened by man-eating ants on the march. “And here they come again—The Mara-bunta!” he proclaims with reverberating sounds. His future as Alvin Sargent, screenwriter, will garner him Academy Awards. He spins out an irresistible shaggy dog story—rambling through an elaborate tale of “Gloop Makers” aboard a large ship as they test the mysteriously named “Gloop” by sending it through a series of Rube Goldberg tubes. On it rattles and clacks, finally reaching its destination, the side of the ship where it shoots out from the tubes and drops into the ocean. The “Gloop-Makers” listen expectantly, cheering their success as they hear from below the sound from the ocean, GLOOP!  GLOOP!  GLOOP! (Alas! today Al is totally incommunicado, after  his beloved wife died several years ago.)

  Dean and Ditmar on ballet and opera; Curtis on German Lieder and pianist Gieseking (Walter Winchell calls Gieseking a nat-zee). Curtis has seen the marvelously versatile Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic playing on the same night the tragic Oedipus, followed by farcical Mr. Puff in “The Critic.” Curtis, soldier student in a college near London after the war, got to see all Old Vic productions starring Olivier and Ralph Richardson. The Old Vic’s glory days.

  Sharing more wonders, Anne, Dean, and I cram into Curtis’s small rented room in Westwood, listening to 78 rpms; for the first time hearing Jussi Bjoerling sing Nessun Dorma; Marian Anderson’s dusky contralto filling the room with Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble . . . tremble . . . tremble.

NEXT – Theatre Department’s faculty, and more on-stage minor miracles

Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams – 1948

Oh! for a Muse of Fire

4

  The Theatre Arts Department Ralph Freud longed to establish in 1943 now offers majors in Theatre, Film, and Radio-Television with an enrollment exceeding three hundred fifty and a faculty which includes, in addition to Wally Boyle, Eddie Hearn, lean, dour, seldom smiling Technical Director, as intimidating (to me) as a Western movie villain, perhaps because the only role I got out of him in those three years at U.C.L.A. was one line as the Priest in “Twelfth Night.”

  William Melnitz, refugee from Max Reinhardt’s theatre in Berlin, fleeing Germany and the Nazis, finds his way to U.C.L.A., first as German professor, teaching German, remembering him in 1943 German 1 class, his high, shrill voice rings out through the decades: Hier kommt der Tell! Hier kommt der Tell! (Wilhelm Tell, that is). Today, Melnitz is memorialized by the Melnitz Theatre.

  In 1949, Henry Schnitzler, son of Artur Schnitzler, famous Viennese playwright,  makes his entrance—an intense man, spitting out directions pizzicato. He will cast me in two well-remembered, well-cherished roles, the Earl of Warwick (best supporting acting award) in Shaw’s St. Joan, and the droll, mocking La Fléche in Moliere’s “The Miser.”

  Ralph Freud, always a presence, but seldom directing, dropping by the dressing room below Royce Hall before and after performances, more than once goading us to engage in arguments about acting, knocking Lee Strassberg’s “method acting.” It is believed Freud has a list of those who will “make it big time on Broadway.” The question rankles, are we prepared at all for the big time? We don’t ask, we’re too enthralled, comfortably embedded in our fantasy world.

  Oh, for a Muse of Fire! and some of us there were in those halcyon days who believed we had found our Muse—The Theatre, The Theatre! No thought of the real world and how greats had made it to the top. No idea of what would be required after graduation when called upon for more than fanatic devotion and ephemeral dreams. To find success in the theatre, become a working member of the theatre community in New York, would evolve accepting rejection, abandoning any hope of security—Othello’s battle cry, “Farewell content!” Forget visions of “firesides far from the cares that are,” as the miner “fresh from the creeks” yearns in Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” anticipating Manhattan’s cold water flats, menial jobs to get enough money together to study with Sandy Meisner or Stella Adler, or perhaps talented enough to get into Lee Strassberg’s Actors’ Studio to celebrate our craft with Marlon Brando, Kim Stanley. We are three thousand miles away, “transcending the brightest heaven of invention,” exactly where we choose to be, serenely certain of natural progression from school to Broadway.

   “The White Steed” in the spring of 1948 on my return from the war and Michigan State, and summer stock on Mackinac Island, links me irrevocably with the Muse, and for Anne O’Neill and Bill Curtis, their Muse is found recording voice-overs for one of the Theatre Department’s most stirring productions that season—a dance drama of Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic Civil War poem, “John Brown’s Body” presented in Royce Hall. Anne is the voice of Melora Vilas, the daughter of a “hider” evading the war, captivating with her deep, mellow sounds—If I only had a mirror. . . Bill’s booming, thunderous voice issuing forth John Brown’s proselytizing—If it is deemed necessary that I should mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country, let it be done. . .

  Robert T. Lee adapted the poem; designed and directed the pageant. (I remember him not too fondly directing me in the Titanic scene from Cavalcade for “Campus Cabaret in 1943—You’re so  stiff!). The Civil War period is depicted with Linnebach rear projections—blood-red sunsets and other evocative scenic splendors, cast on a huge backdrop scrim silhouetting dancers performing in pools of light, utilizing the whole space of the large stage.

  The department’s post-war artistry in stage design is revealed in Royce Hall. One memorable example is Eddie’s Hearn’s lighting for the summer 1949 production of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” in the moment before Lenny strangles the girl. A barn, huge pile of yellow hay disappearing into a high loft through which a single shaft of brilliant light pierces the opening above, creating a halo of gold around the girl’s flaxen hair. Lenny, haunted, stands outside the glow, then slowly intrudes into the girl’s light. As he’s drawn into her world, his hands circle her throat, the bright yellow shaft of light slowly dims—Lenny and the girl now in space invaded by night’s enshrouding gloom.

  In 1949 student-directed one-acts, including originals, move to a small, prefabricated building, 3G1 behind Royce  Hall. Margaret Ann Curran, leader of “The Moral Vigilance Committee” in “The White Steed,” makes her mark in Tennessee Williams, “27 Wagon Loads of Cotton.” Margaret becomes one of the department’s most durable character actresses in off-beat roles, even though not more than nineteen or twenty. Large boned Maggie, dark Irish girl, two years later would play Madame Arcati in “Blithe Spirit.” Character roles couldn’t tarnish Maggie’s appealing off stage naiveté however.

  In 3G1’s 1949 spring student director series, Maggie plays Flora, young wife of the creepy Jake, my role played with sweaty armpits, in Tennessee Williams “27 Wagon Full of Cotton,” from which the movie “Baby Doll” would be adapted. At an off-campus booze-and-cruise party, she confesses to me she can’t understand Flora getting her kicks from the flick of a horsewhip laid on by Vicarro’s horsewhip, and other masochistic delights, her pleasures voiced off stage. (Maggie doesn’t use the word “masochistic,” a word unknown to her) .

  She asks me for insights, and I do my best to enlighten her. “Well, Margaret Ann, she’s a repressed woman, unable to enjoy normal sex, so when she clutches the purse at that last scene, she’s lamenting an unfulfilled desire to have a child. . .”

  I’m not sure she gets the message, but her final moment in the play is like so many other moments in those years, unforgettable, as  she stands in a white spotlight touching her face, cradling a soft white purse in her arms, advancing slowly and tenderly to the edge of the porch, a full moon shining on her ravaged face, rocking the purse in her arms and crooning,

Rock-a-bye Baby—in uh tree-tops!
If a wind blows—a cradle will rock!
If a bough bends—a baby will fall!
Down will come Baby—cradle—an’—all!

(She laughs and stares raptly and vacantly up at the moon.) – Curtain

  “Curtain” in 3G1 means “lights fade” on a set made from stand-alone, hinged plywood flats. The Department was nearly ten years away from building a performance center; Eddie Hearn was to design it. Building a theatre or two had been delayed, partly by lack of funds, and also from Eddie’s insistence the theatre must be built to perfection, strictly matching his specifications.

  In “27 Wagon Loads of Cotton” Vicarro is played by Paul Levitt, who is without doubt, number one on Freud’s “will make it  big,” an actor on stage and off with a deep, rasping, sexy voice; curly black hair, so perhaps a candidate for the love of my life, but not a chance. He’s not especially appealing to me and likes girls, yet he is one of those rare guys in the department who’s not afraid of queers. He rooms with Curtis for a brief period. They become fast friends.

NEXT – “On the hill” in the Pilgrimage Play.

The Pilgrimage Play Film, 1949

(Dana on right as Disciple James)

Oh! For a Muse of Fire!

5

  In June, 1948, after the exciting spring theatre season at U.C.L.A., still living at home on Joy Street in Highland Park, I get a call from Katheryn Offill, five-foot power house high school drama teacher. A long-time friend of Sid Christie who has played the “Christus” for more than a decade, Katheryn has got me an audition. If I get a part, I will not be able to participate in the required summer theatre program at school. Katheryn doesn’t think much of U.C.L.A. theatre, and would never see me perform there.

  “Sid calls himself Nelson Leigh now,” she says, “since he first took over the role of Jesus. I mean, how could a man named Christie play the Christus?” followed by the  familiar, deep-throat laugh. Nelson had played Jesus more than any other actor during the play’s twenty-one year run in the Pilgrimage Theatre nestled in the hills above Cahuenga Pass across from the Hollywood Bowl.

  In the summer 1935 season, after touring with Ian MacLaren in Shakespearean repertoire, Sid returned to play John the Beloved; in following years, understudying Reginald Pole in the role of Jesus. At the close of the 1936 season, Pole became ill and Sid Christie, changing his name to Nelson Leigh, begins his long run as Jesus.

  On a warm June morning (the same day my kid-sister Jane is graduating from Franklin High School), walking down the sloping aisle of the huge outdoor theatre, noting the hard pew-like benches, I look up to the elevated stage to see a big, strapping man appraising me with his large gray eyes, standing like a Jerusalem Patriarch. I recognize him at once—movie actor, Moroni Olsen, from film, “Notorious,” as FBI agent, and also the detective who interrogates Joan Crawford in “Mildred Pierce.”

  Assistant stage manager, lanky Paul J. McGuire, ex Marine colonel, hands me sides for James, “Son of Zebedee,” John the Beloved’s brother. I go at it, voice full blast—remembering Offill in high school shouting from the back of the auditorium as I read for the part of Scrooge in the “Christmas Carol,” “My God, what a voice!”

  JAMES – “Master!  Master!”  PAUL McGUIRE AS PETER – “What troubeleth thee James?”  JAMES – “John the Baptist is dead! Herod hath slain him!” PAUL AS PETER – “John the Baptist dead?—how, James, how?” JAMES – “To satisfy the whim of Salome, his severed head was placed before her on a charger!”

  Deep, booming voices which would project to the far reaches of this outdoor theatre open to the sky were essential, I would learn, for getting cast in the Pilgrimage Play—no microphones to help overcome roaring traffic in Cahuenga pass, abetted somewhat by the theatre’s towering arches at the entrance, rising like the walls of Jerusalem. During performances, searchlights overhead warned off airplanes—to protect the Hollywood Bowl’s acoustics. We didn’t need their protection—nature’s own sounding board rose up behind our stage—a real, Southern California hillside with scrub brushes and knotty California oaks, and an occasional tarantula spider crawling nearby on some nights as we slept in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  Fortunately a deep, rumbling voice wasn’t required for James. I got the part. Moroni Olsen is smiling. He is, as it happens, only assistant director, but has final say in casting, apparently. I will be paid forty dollars a week, nothing for rehearsal time. The following season. I hoped next summer, or the next, I would snag the more identifiable role of John the Beloved who also needn’t have a booming voice. I had all the requirements for John the Beloved—blue eyes to match the robe he wears. (In 1961, I would at last play him.)

  For those of us in minor roles, performing in the Pil Play with no audience reaction whatsoever, no applause at the end when Jesus ascends to heaven, didn’t do much for our careers, or our sensitive egos. Music by way of turgid organ. But there was no stopping the donkey who carried Jesus into Jerusalem, honking off stage unexpectedly—particularly annoying when he chose the quiet Last Supper scene for his intrusive hee-haw.  Someone—the assistant stage manager, no doubt—had forgotten to feed him.

  One afternoon during rehearsals in this my first season, large, happy-with-an-edge, Grady Sutton approached me at the side of the stage. I recognized him at once—one of the cluster of movie actors who played effeminate men in straight roles, appearing in films during the late 1930s and early ‘40s—society playboy who’s tricked into an engagement by Carole Lombard in “My Man Godfrey,” Katheryn Grayson’s date, Bertram Kraler, in the opening reels of “Anchor’s Aweigh.”

  “Are they casting?” he asks me with a quiet, put-on masculine voice, unlike his on-screen persona. Directing him to the stage manager, watching him walk away, head down, I feel for the man with so many film credits, scrounging around for work. He wasn’t cast, and I needn’t have worried. Grady continued to appear in films in later years, even into the 1960s, one of the many easily recognized Hollywood unknowns.

  Cast of the Pilgrimage Play includes some exotic and fascinating people—“picture people” who’d been in films since the silent days—some literally coming out of the woodwork from Hollywood’s golden era, including in 1948 Tempe Pigott, now at the end of a long radio-film career (“Dizzy Dates” a radio show in 1933)—her very name evoked wonder—a somewhat wizened woman we looked upon with deep respect and awe. Stanley Price as Judas Iscariot, “the original Abie in Abie’s Irish Rose on Broadway.”

  (In 1961, I would meet Walter Long playing Peter who “entered motion pictures in the old Essany Company in Chicago in 1909.” He then was house-sitting for Buster Keaton and drinks were brought to the pool on a miniature train freight car.)

  Back to 1948—C. Montague Shaw, the First Pharisee, the oldest member of the cast, “in point of service,” marking his fifteenth year. “Monty” played villains on screen in Warner Brothers costume dramas and had a long career as radio actor.

  Mary Adams played Mary, Mother of Jesus. She began her theatrical career in San Francisco, later in Oakland, Salt Lake City, touring the Western states and Canada. In the 1946-47 Broadway season she played in Hamlet as Gertrude with Maurice Evans. During the war she’d performed with the Entertainment Section of the Army Special Service, serving three years in the Pacific Area. Our close friendship developed in another decade, however—thirteen years later in 1961, standing by my side as Mother Mary once again, with John the Beloved watching a crudely staged crucifixion scene. (1961 was the first year the crucifixion scene was staged.) Friendship with Mary flourished, enduring and endearing, until the end of her life.

  Summer, 1949 – again avoiding the requisite Summer Stock course at U.C.L.A. to appear in the Pilgrimage Play. How could I possibly miss this season? The play was to be filmed, qualifying us for membership in the Screen Actors Guild. My personal take onmaking the film is chronicled in a letter written to friend Bill Curtis. (Bill sent this letter to me in the late 1990s.)

Tuesday, September 6, 1949
523½ Carondelet St.
Los Angeles 5, Calif.

(to) William D. Curtis
 202 E. 12^th St., Marysville,
California

  Dear Bill, Now that my first—and last week under klieg lights has ended I can write to you with some clarity. It was hysterical most of the time, and instead of the actors talking about how good they were, the prime subject of conversation was always where is the camera, and do we get paid for overtime? (We didn’t because we were on a $145 weekly S.A.G. contract.)

  During the last week of the Pil play, our ex-colonel stage manager, Paul McGuire, announced that a movie would be made. The following night the film’s casting director interviewed us and asked each (individually) if we would be willing to work for the minimum weekly of $145. I said I didn’t mind, and I was in without a screen test. The following night shooting scripts were issued, then a one-week shooting schedule. Nobody thought it could be filmed in one week, but it was.

  Well, a week ago last Monday I reported to Hal Roach studios early in the morning for make-up. (The commissary has the delightful name, “B & M Roach Café.”) For some silly reason we weren’t allowed to put on our own make-up. A guy called Dave Newall (Claudette Colbert’s first leading man, he said) slapped pancake on my face and sent me off to wardrobe.

  I was in dressing room #2, wainscoting and a chaise lounge, with other disciples. Arriving at Sound Stage Six we found two sets both used in the Ingrid Bergman “Joan of Arc.” On one side the bastions of Orleans and on the other a medium sized exterior with olive trees “so like those found in the Holy Land” and a monstrous cyclorama. As we entered someone shouted “light-em-all-boys,” and several huge floods exploded; Jesus’s curlers were taken out of his hair and he walked into the exterior setting; the assistant director shouted “Quiet! this is a take!” the sound man waited until the air was purified of extraneous noises; sticks, and “action” and all that.

  We became bored and went off to the Roach Café for coffee.

  On some days the picture was shot “on the hill” at the Pilgrimage Bowl. The best part of this was that we got a free lunch. It didn’t take me long to realize that unless you are a lead, you’re not going to get any special attention. On some days we worked (this consisted of standing around most of the time), but on a day like last Friday we sat around from ten till six before we were even wanted on the set at all.

  I have a couple of fairly close shots of myself. Here’s hoping I look halfway decent. I did see some “rushes” the other day, but they were all mob scenes.

  My final conclusion is that the only value in Hollywood is money, unless – as one disciple put it – you can write your script, play the lead, direct the show and be your own cameraman. It seemed like everything was for the camera and the sound tract. However, there were some bits of fine acting by Judas, and Jesus.

  I can join Screen Actors Guild now anytime I wish on the strength of the movie. It was filmed on 16 mm in kodachrome color. At least I’m on film now – and that’s important, I guess.  But – if you’ll pardon my vulgarity – apart from the money angle, they can take Hollywood and shove it. The glamour of having someone rush up and powder your face wears out after an hour or so. It was an exciting week, however, and I won’t forget it very soon. Summarily – the lack of imagination is appalling.

  I haven’t seen anyone from school this summer except Bob Rogers who was at the bar in Laguna Beach a couple of weeks ago. I got a “B” from Eddie in Lighting somehow – Freud gave me an “A” for Theatre History. I haven’t read as much as I would like to have. Last week wasn’t conducive to it. However, I’ve managed “Elmer Gantry,” “Gideon Planish” and a very delightful thing by Otis Skinner, “Mad Folk of the Theatre.” Now I’m starting in on Robert Nathan.

  Write me just one before you come back, will you Bill?  Here’s hoping for a more than mediocre fall season.  Don’t break your back picking those peaches! Truly yours,

  The above is (close to) verbatim, although I’ve added “picking those peaches.” I should’ve made a reference to Bill’s summertime occupation, and do so now.

  I wasn’t to see final results of “The Pilgrimage Play” film until 2011! found in the TCM vaults on DVD, and it appears I got a lot more coverage, good camera position, and had many more lines than I remember. Watching it after sixty-years was a trip!

  In my letter to Bill, I also failed to mention my new living situation, moving at last from Highland Park to a three bedroom second floor apartment in the MacArthur Park district, close to Wilshire Boulevard—roommates, Mark Buchoz, his friend, Mickey Feay, and Don Olson, a former hustler Mark had fallen for. I’m now some twenty miles closer to school, and no transfers on the bus (with occasional intriguing pick-ups hitchhiking). Continuing with occasional swipes into the Hollywood scene, usually with Mark, Mickey, and Don—much to the chagrin of a puzzled Bill Curtis—hot, sweaty excursions to Laguna Beach in summertime to splash in the surf and cruise the bars—dancing not allowed. Don’s a good looking kid with troubled brown eyes, his smiles often twisted with frowns as if anticipating something gone wrong, etched there perhaps in his hustling days—now reformed apparently and devoted to Mark.

NEXT – Farewell to Hollywood.

Steve Forrest (Bill Andrews)

Oh! for a Muse of Fire!

6

  Ingmar Bergman tells the story of shooting one day in Sweden when suddenly a flock of wild geese flies across the sky. Bergman, cameraman, crew and actors drop what they’re doing and rush to the summit of a nearby hill to watch the flight. Bergman comments: “And that’s what making films in Sweden is all about.” Similar perhaps to a moment in 1949 in Wheeler Hall at U.C. Berkeley during a performance of Moliére’s “The Miser.”

  Dane Rudhyar, humanistic astrologer (1995-1985) comments, “In their togetherness human beings can produce new values; release transcendent energies.” Such was our tour of “The Miser” in the fall of 1949, culminating in one glorious, unexpected moment, and I wasn’t even on stage when it happened. You can be certain, however, that all of us were there in the wings, listening and hoping a miracle would ignite the cold, unresponsive audience.

  Bill Andrews and I doubled as light crew during the tour, setting up lights on portable grids. Our paths first crossed in Royce Hall 170 at the first rehearsal of “The Miser.” Bill, younger brother of film star Dana Andrews, came over to me and asked with a grin (Bill was never snide), “Where did you get the name Dana?” thinking, I suppose, my mother named me after his famous brother. I answered, “My mother gave it to me. After graduating from U.C.L.A., Bill would change his name to Steve Forrest.

  On tour, bunking next to each other, we were the sum total of  the light crew, he must’ve thought I was one weird guy. I would roll out of my bunk in the morning, proclaiming with a Bette Davis ring, “I think I’m going mad!” I did not like the discomforts of living on the road.

  Bill plays the son of the Miser, Cléante; I, his servant, La Fléche. Much laughter from the audience in Royce Hall 170 as La Fléche in Act I unfolds a huge scroll and reels off a long list of Cléante’s possessions required to secure a loan arranged by La Fléche through a third party. The audience knows, but Cléante and La Fléche do not, that the money-lender is Cléante’s father, the Miser himself. Later in the first act, the Miser and La Fléche get a threnody of laughter as the Miser circles La Fléche, claiming he has stolen money from him, La Fléche pulling inside-out one more empty pocket, taunting—“Look here, another pocket!” stopping the Miser cold, and rocketing the audience into a fit of laughter—a brief show stopper.

  At U.C. Berkley’s only theatre, Wheeler, a lecture Hall, the La Fléche-Miser scene does get so much as a titter; shocking after loud laughter garnered in every performance in 170, and at our first on tour performance at U.C. Santa Barbara (in a real theatre, proscenium arch and curtain), as does the “Ring Scene” in Act Three which literally has stopped the show at every performance in 170 and in Santa Barbara. It’s puzzling indeed when the Berkeley audience sits on its hands through the first two acts—not a titter,  only cold silence, as if to say, Show us, you upstarts from the south! From whence cometh their snobbery? They didn’t even have a theatre for us to perform in! Was it because we hailed from “this backward California of the South,” as U.C.L.A. originally was called?

  Schnitzler’s direction of the Act Three Ring Scene is sure to melt an iceberg. The Miser has given a young girl who secretly yearns to marry his son, Cléante, an engagement ring, the liaison arranged by Frosine, the Marriage Broker. But once given to her, the Miser changes his mind and tries to get it back.

  The chase is on, the Miser circling the stage like a bloodhound tracking her, fingers fidgeting, clawing out to get at the ring, frustration building, the others getting in his way to prevent him from reaching the girl. Frosine—Dorothy White, the actress—waits her moment. A brief, well-placed pause in the action; everyone on stage now stopped dead, the Miser in a panic.

  Audience hushed. Frosine to the girl, clarion voice piercing the silence, “Keep the ring, can’t you if the gentlemen insists!”

  More hushed silence, we hold our breath. Then suddenly a tidal wave—laughter shaking the walls, swelling into thunderous applause. All of us backstage thrilled to the ovation, restraining ourselves from audibly joining in. From that one glorious moment, all is well, the audience awakened, curtain calls to a cheering crowd.

  Performance over . . . on to U.C. Davis. They love us in Davis and during the  reception after the performance, we drink tall glasses of cold, creamy milk from this agricultural college’s dairy farm. I  meet a shy young student. We chat briefly leaning on the mantle of a fireplace—our attraction to each other known only to us. Nothing comes of it. I’ll never see  him again. Time to return. On the train home, we do not drink cold milk. We want to keep the glow of our triumphs alive.

  Why must curtains fall? Why must sets be disassembled to become forlorn replicas in dusty warehouses? Why must it all come to an end? And why could we not sally forth after the tour, performing together in a grand  repertory of plays, reaching immortality as the greatest theatre company ever conceived? Did it not happen elsewhere—in New York at Julliard School in the early 1970s with John Houseman’s company which nurtured Patti Lupone, Christopher Reeve, and Kevin Klein. In Chicago with Gary Sinese and fellow celebrants who formed Steppenwolf.

  Thirteen years after the Miser Tour, in 1962, the production and cast of Kurt Weil’s “Lost in the Stars” produced by Equity Library Theatre West had the potential to become a “band of players” who in their togetherness might release transcendent energies, but when it was over, the same painful farewells and feelings of loss.

  We knew we couldn’t go on forever with the Miser tour, but dream and fantasy linger as we get off the train and return to Royce Hall’s loading docks to relinquish lighting equipment, costumes, set pieces, drunk with our success (some of us literally), itching to tell those we’ve left behind about our wondrous adventure north and our glorious conquest of Berkeley. The “Muse of Fire” has ascended, “the brightest heaven of invention.” Alas, those who were not with us in Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, Santa Barbara, or Davis, would never know, and more than a few not at all  interested.

  Notes written May 17, 1999 – 10:23 pm – Jamestown, New York – Bill Curtis calls—we’ve been in touch, but he seldom phones and doesn’t have e-mail (neither do I at the time). Anne O’Neill (I don’t know her married name) has died in San Francisco after a long bout with emphysema and cancer. This cannot be. At the moment of Bill’s call, I’ve been contemplating the position of planet Mars, seen these days overhead in a clear night sky. It is at 25° Libra; the symbol in Dane Rudhyar’s Astrological Mandala, The sight of an autumn leaf brings to a pilgrim the sudden revelation of life and death.

  Anne is here with me now in this moment in Jamestown, with me as I remember her, one of memory’s precious accumulations—driving the beat-up Willys, challenging me to take charge of my life. Each moment now seems more precious, more filled with possibilities and must be cherished—not only to participate in the grand pageant of  life, but to recall the Miser tour and other celebrations, “moments together with others releasing transcendent energies,” and even in the simplest celebrations—“the sight of an autumn leaf,” celebrations remembered and yet to come. Longing now, as always, for a Muse of Fire that will transcend the brightest heaven of inventions.

  Once, recently, Bill  Curtis told me during a marathon phone conversation (he has neither computer nor internet) that he and Anne thought of getting married, but he wanted a career. Anne did marry, painted, had two sons.

NEXT – Final Farewells

New York beckons

View from the Plaza

Oh! For a Muse of Fire!

7

  In March 1950 after deftly maneuvering through three acts as Charles Condomine in opening night of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” Ralph Freud visits me in my dressing room. “You were good,” he says, then becomes silent, studying me. Unfortunately I’ve always felt intimidated by this man who off and on has been part of my theatrical life since July 1943, and would re-enter it again in 1954. Let’s face it, I didn’t know what to say, how to draw him out. I’d had a good review in The Daily Bruin which should have bolstered my confidence:

  “. . . as Charles Condomine, Dana delivers his lines with a flawless exhibition of control, like martinis, without spilling a drop . . .”

  And now the founder of ’s Theatre Department is in my dressing room for the first time, offering kudos, and all I can do is smile like an idiot. He wants to say more, I’m sure. Our teacher-student relationship has ended. Looking back I think he subtly wished to invite me to become one of his “top ten most likely to succeed.” Was I prepared to meet the demands of making it big on Broadway, to cast aside all comfort and peace of mind to claw my way to the top? I hesitate a moment too long. I should’ve at least called him Ralph. I never would—“Mr. Freud” (pronounced ”Frood”), always.

  After a performance in “Blithe Spirit,” Malvina Fox, casting head at Twentieth Century Fox, enthusiastically takes me by the hand, no doubt wondering, Who is this forty year old sophisticated English gentleman? Have we discovered a new Noel Coward, or Clifton Webb? Foolish me, I should’ve greeted her as forty-ish Charles Condomine with British accent, although close up, age make up couldn’t disguise my 23 years, nor the face of a bubbling American juvenal.

  But did I really want Hollywood? When I leave school in the summer of 1950 to appear in the Pilgrimage Play and get my Actors Equity card, New York beckons. The desire to flee to the great white way infected many of us in the Pilgrimage Play that summer, and here’s a chance to mention Bill Boyett who played the Roman Centurion, doubling as the shaggy blind man.

  Bill (William) Boyett, a dreamy, handsome guy, always seemed to be in the throws of one disastrous romantic entanglement or another. Nothing was going to stop him from venturing to Broadway. I’ll starve if I have to! and he almost did. In New York I was to save him from that fate with a nick-of-time twenty dollar loan, he assuring me payback as he shoved an Equity touring company contract for “Mr. Roberts” across the counter of my teller’s cage. He did pay me back and would enjoy a long and successful career.

  Playing a sailor in the “Mr. Roberts” tour must’ve come easily to  Bill. He had been in the Navy during the war. Married in 1956, further nurturing his life with a gal named Joan; they had two children. From 1955 to 1959 he would play Sgt. Ken Williams, Broderick Crawford’s side-kick on the TV series, “Highway Patrol.”

  Dean Hoffmann graduated from UCLA in 1949. Just as well he never saw me play Charles Condomine in “Blithe Spirit.” He didn’t think much of my “Coward.” He’d seen me in 3G1 in the first act of “Private Lives” directed by Robert Horton. (It was this performance which decided the often indecisive Wally Boyle to cast me as Charles in “Blithe Spirit.”)

  On Dean’s final day on campus we walked down to the bus stop below the Administration Building—a long time since I’d tread the same ground with Anne O’Neill after the first reading of “The White Steed.”

  “We should get together—soon.”

  “Sorry,” he said, “but I’m cutting the umbilical chord with everyone at ”

  We did keep in touch, however, and corresponded often when he moved to New York. When I wrote I was on my way, he answered. “You’ll love it here. New York is the cruisiest town in the U.S.A. Let me know your arrival, when and where, and Ill meet you at the airport or bus terminal, or maybe Grand Central Station! I’ll show you all the wonders of this fabulous city!”

  The 1950 Pilgrimage Play season reaches its final “lights fade to organ music”—always too soon, as usual. We were cursed with overly cautious accountants; we’d had full houses so why not run a few more weeks?

  I move out of the apartment on Highland Avenue, in walking distance to the Pilgrimage Play bowl, rented for the summer, and it’s back to Joy Street and the room at the side of the garage where I spend inordinate hours listening to the Gordon Jenkins 1946 Decca recording, “Manhattan Towers.” Cause when you leave New York, you don’t go anywhere!

  No argument from Mother this time. She’s off to Redding in northern California to marry a man she’s corresponded with who placed a “looking for companion” add in some woman’s magazine. Step father Joe Geers has flown the nest a couple of years ago, and Mother has divorced him. Rumor is he’s taken up with a woman he’d known in old Hollywood days, now living with her in a run-down hotel on skid row the other side of Main Street in downtown L.A.

  I’m on my way to Burbank Airport, duffel bag stuffed with all my possessions—books and records, mostly. Mother, the Joy Street house rented, is out the door with sister Jane and kid brother Robert, hardly taking time to say goodbye.

  Mark Buchoz, Don Olsen, and Mickey Feay will see me off to soaring Manhattan penthouses where I will certainly be invited to scintillate at parties with “short happy people, fat happy people, and a wonderful water named Noah.”

  And the search for a Muse of Fire will continue.

Next – “I’ll Take Manhattan" / "Kitty O’Brien and a Rite of Passage”