Archives for February 6, 2012

Today is my fifty-sixth birthday. So what?

Hitting the double nickel last year inspired me to hold forth at length about this and that, not entirely without reason, seeing as how my first play and second opera were both premiered in 2011. Alas, 56 is a thoroughly uninteresting number, and 2012, while it holds a major event in store for me, promises to be routine in other respects. Assuming that nothing cataclysmic intervenes, I’ll write a hundred-odd pieces, see a hundred-odd plays, spend a lot of time waiting impatiently in departure lounges, and–I hope–finish the first draft of Mood Indlgo: A Life of Duke Ellington. For me that’s standard stuff, and I’m not sure I’d want it any other way, though I do have three never-to-be-acknowledged dreams that I hope will come true between now and year’s end. The first is probable, the second not altogether unlikely, while the third is a dismayingly long shot. (None has anything to do with Satchmo at the Waldorf, in case you’re wondering.)

Birthdays per se don’t mean much to me anymore, save as unwanted reminders of the inexorable approach of the Distinguished Thing. Six years after meeting Mrs. T and surviving a brush with death, I no longer need to be reminded to use well the interval: I’ve got that down pat, though I seize some days more firmly than others. In fact, I’m much more in need of regular reminders of the value of leisure, at which I’m not nearly good enough. If a philanthropist with money to spare were to offer me a smallish chunk of it, I’d ask my employers for a leave of absence and take Mrs. T on a nice long trip, in the course of which I’d endeavor to write as little as possible. But even the longest, loveliest vacation must end sooner or later, and no sooner would we return home than I’d sit down at my desk and go back to work…and do what?

It isn’t quite right to say that I feel the need for a change, since the past few years have been so full of changes. Perhaps a better way to put it is that I’m trying to decide how I want to spend the next part (which may, of course, be the last part) of my life. What shall I do once Satchmo at the Waldorf opens in Lenox and the manuscript of Mood Indigo is shipped off to Gotham Books? Should I embark on yet another biography? Ought I to continue working as a critic? Might I want to try my hand at teaching? Is my first venture into playwriting destined to be a one-shot affair? Above all, I long to know the answer to this question: are my energies best spent as a jack-of-all-trades, or has the time come at last for me to direct my fire at a single target?

The longer I live, the surer I am that the world was made for specialists, and I’ve always been reluctant to settle into a pigeonhole, however commodious. When I played music, I played many kinds of music on more than one instrument. When I became a critic, I wrote about whatever interested me rather than concentrating on a single medium. When I became a biographer, I jumped from subject to subject (first a journalist, then a choreographer, then a jazzman). No sooner was my first opera libretto produced than I started writing my first play. Yes, it’s been fun, but might I have been better served had I concentrated on one thing? While I don’t think it’s right to call me a dilettante–I’ve aspired to professional standards in everything to which I’ve set my hand–I sometimes wonder whether my reluctance to specialize has kept me from doing as well as I might have done in any of my varied lines of work.

Even at fifty-six, it’s not quite too late for me to change my ways, or at least modify them. It’s well within the realm of possibility that I have twenty-odd years of comparatively undiminished energy ahead of me, and I want to use those years in the best and most satisfying way that I can. Up to now I’ve operated on the assumption that life itself would tell me what to do next. Will it do so yet again? Or ought I to take courage in hand and place all my chips on a single number? And if so, should it be one of the numbers on which I’ve successfully bet in the past–or would I do better to try something really different?

Merely to write these words is to smile at their preposterous presumptuousness. I noted seven years ago that “nothing I imagined for myself when young has come to pass: everything is different, utterly so. I’m not a schoolteacher, not a jazz musician, not the chief music critic of a major metropolitan newspaper, not a syndicated columnist, not settled and secure.” You’d think, then, that I’d know better than to suppose that I could ever point myself in any conceivable direction with a reasonable expectation of getting where I thought I wanted to go. Yet here I am, trying once again to figure out what my next move should be.

The truth is that my next few moves are already set in stone. I’ve got a book to finish and a play to see onto the stage, The Wall Street Journal still expects to hear from me six times a month, and Paul Moravec and I are just getting started on our third opera. Nor do I have any particularly bright ideas about what to do after that: I have yet to receive an offer of steady employment from a college or think tank, and no matter how well Satchmo at the Waldorf does this summer, I have no illusions about being able to make anything remotely approaching a living by writing plays, much less opera libretti.

In short, nothing has changed–yet. Maybe it won’t, and maybe that’ll be just fine. Or maybe not. Edward Steichen said it: “Every ten years or so, a man should give himself a good swift kick in the pants!” Am I due?

If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember the following posting from 2005:

Laurette Taylor’s performance as Amanda Wingfield in the original 1945 production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie is the most vividly remembered piece of acting ever to have taken place on an American stage. Yet nothing remains of it but memories and a few still photographs–some of which can be seen here–since Taylor made no sound films save for the brief screen test included in Broadway: The Golden Age (a documentary you’ve absolutely got to see, assuming you haven’t already). The greatness of her acting is thus like the greatness of Nijinsky’s dancing: all who saw her agree on it, but the rest of us must take it on faith.

Or…must we?

After reading that Times story, I did a bit of fugitive Googling, and found something that sent my jaw dropping floorward. It’s from the Web site of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which is where Taylor’s private papers ended up. I was looking at the HRCRC’s description of its Taylor collection when I stumbled onto this statement: “A number of published works and recordings were transferred to the HRHRC book collection….Taylor’s recordings, mostly 78 RPM, include The Glass Menagerie (1945); a 1939 WJZ radio broadcast of Peg O’ My Heart; Among My Souvenirs (1943); a segment of We The People (1945); a Rudy Vallee radio program (1939); and a very early 1913 voice recording trial done of Laurette Taylor in New York.”

Excuse me? Am I the last to learn that that there is a sound recording of some portion of Taylor’s legendary performance in The Glass Menagerie? Or is its existence not widely known to scholars of American theater in general and Tennessee Williams’ work in particular?

Rick McKay, the producer of Broadway: The Golden Age, promptly wrote to assure me that no recording of the original production of The Glass Menagerie exists, in Austin or anywhere else. That, I assumed, was that.

Not so. Over the weekend I received the following e-mail from Reva Cooper, a New York-based arts publicist:

In 2005, you wrote about a Laurette Taylor recording from The Glass Menagerie, and asked if anyone knew where to locate it. I’d heard about it, too, saw your entry on a search about it, and am writing to tell you that I located the recording and just heard it at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The librarian said that due to copyright restrictions, she wasn’t allowed to put it online, so you have to go there to hear it….

The recording you’re interested in is called We, the People, and is an awards ceremony where [Taylor] is honored by a journalism association. As part of the event she reads scenes from Peg o’ My Heart, Outward Bound, and The Glass Menagerie, and discusses her preparation for each of these roles (the scenes aren’t listed, and I just wrote to the librarian in followup to suggest that they be added to the index title, to make it easier to locate).
Her Amanda is fascinating, not at all like later Amandas I’ve seen, much more hardscrabble working class, living in the present in St. Louis, playing against the memory–but suddenly she remembers…and that’s the surprise–much more realistic. And her accent is a bit more lower-class Southern than other actresses have used–she said she copied Tennessee Williams’ accent.

This is–to put it very mildly–staggering news.

Patricia Neal, who saw Taylor play Amanda Wingfield on Broadway, said in Broadway: The Golden Age that she gave “the greatest performance I have ever seen in all my life.” According to Harold Prince, “I knew when I watched it, and I sat in the balcony, you’ll never see greater acting as long as you live.” Given the fact that countless other theater professionals who saw Laurette Taylor’s Amanda in the theater have said pretty much the same thing, I can’t imagine another hitherto-unknown archival document that would be of more compelling interest to scholars and aficionados of American theater in the twentieth century than a sound recording of Taylor reading a fragment of The Glass Menagerie, however brief. Would that I were in a position to catch the next plane to Austin!

Alas, I’ll be otherwise occupied for some time to come, so if anyone who sees this posting has in his possession an air check of the Laurette Taylor episode of We, the People, which aired on CBS from 1936 to 1951, would you please get in touch with me? I’m sure that I’ll make it to Austin sooner or later, but later is more likely than sooner, and I’d prefer not to wait any longer than absolutely necessary in order to hear and report on this priceless memento of a great artist at the peak of her powers.

Caedmon’s 1965 studio recording of Montgomery Clift performing the closing scene of The Glass Menagerie. The music, by Paul Bowles, was used in the original 1945 stage production:

An abridged radio performance of the first part of The Glass Menagerie, starring Clift, Helen Hayes, and Karl Malden, originally broadcast live in 1951 on Theater Guild on the Air:

The other parts of the broadcast are here, here, here, and here.

“A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way, what he has received from another;–and with boundless gratitude to the other. The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.”
Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Priest”