Yet Another Tale from the Wandering Fulbright: Likely the Last

                        A High Old Time at the Old Vic

    That Fulbright year, we went to everything the Old Vic produced: Hamlet, Twelfth Night, the three parts of Henry VI, Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, and closing with Henry VIII.  We got the Underground from Kew to Waterloo Station on the South Bank of the Thames and hoofed it on down the road, farther south to the beloved Old Vic theatre. All three of us, to sit up in the gods on benches for, I think it was, five shillings. I, in my professional zeal, sometimes went twice to see them.

   Our six-year old Linnea, at the matinee intervals, got her ice cream, and had a fine time.  Especially at the end of Hamlet, when, with John Neville, as that prince of all the princes, lying there dead in as beautiful a pool of light as I had ever seen, I saw Linnea’s eyes flood with tears. In a rapture she upped onto her knees on the bench, threw her arms around me and blurted out, “O, Daddy, thank you for bringing me”. I knew then that her education was assured.

   But what I wanted to talk about is the production of Henry VIII  with Edith Evans, sovereign lady of the English stage back then, as Queen Katherine and none other than John Gielgud, thought by many to be the greatest living actor, as Cardinal Wolsey. It was all the talk of the town. The opening would be a gala.

    Betty and I decided, as soon as we heard of It, that we must bust the budget, just this once, and book really good seats in the center of the orchestra. We just could not miss this sure-to-be historic performance.

   And so, there we were, on opening night, dressed as best we could and nearly breathless. A friendly young usher whispered to us that everyone in the English theatrical establishment who had the night off was in attendance to pay court to Evans and Gielgud. We shuddered a bit as we were shown to our so excellent seats, maybe twenty feet from the stage and center. And the performance began-- with the ritual playing of God Save the Queen.

  

    All went well. At the interval we even splurged on a glass of sherry in the theatre’s upper class bar and were minding our own business…. when we began to hear this remarkable female voice behind us, warm, refined, musical, of deep timbre-- and faintly New York American.

    I sneaked a look and there she was, Maria Callas, the diva of the century, perhaps of several centuries. She also was drinking sherry and bantering with her companions, Lord and Lady Harewood, her closest English friends-- and only ten feet away! I feigned an excuse to turn around. And there the great lady stood, graceful, relaxed, beautiful, all in the grand manner.

   As I dared to stare-- and it was a calamity for me-- there beneath her conservative, smart cocktail dress were… thick ankles! I recoiled inwardly and suddenly with a broken heart. I learned in an instant that the world was indeed badly flawed. The great soprano had been able to get rid of all her excess youthful weight except from around her ankles, and there was nothing under the sun that she could do about it.

   I had to pull myself together for the rest of the play and, upon returning to our seats, saw that Callas was sitting in the row just behind us and a seat or two deeper into the row! Imagine! She was in town to sing Violetta at Covent Garden in a couple days-- to which we had tickets up in the gods of the Royal Opera. Ever since we began listening to her recordings back in Wyoming, I had been besotted with her-- and, I am proud to say, still am.

    And so-- we managed, in the thrill of it all, to behave ourselves. When what to my wondering eyes should appear but Ralph Vaughn Williams just across the aisle from us. And so it went. We were surrounded.

   On stage, Evans and Gielgud were coming up on the famous scene in which the Queen begs Wolsey for his support-- which, of course, he refuses. Everybody in the house was waiting for this great moment.  When it came and the two great actors got into it, suddenly, the stage went dead quiet. Evans and Gielgud froze up, neither able to remember a word of their lines. The audience froze up with them, in that wonderful terror of  the theatre when things go wrong. The Queen and the Cardinal made faint little tries at getting back on track, but no good. They were entirely lost.

   So what did Gielgud do?  He offered Dame Edith his hand; she rose from her chair and its dais, stepped down, and accompanied Gielgud, on his arm, off the stage! Just as though that were the way it was supposed to play. They left the stage  in the grand manner.

   How long were they gone? Who knows?  Time stood still. Until, probably under thirty seconds, they swept back onto the stage and tore the place apart with a performance that truly did “ascend the brightest heaven of invention”. The audience cheered. Callas, right behind us, applauding away like any good old American gal, just like the rest of us. No doubt that she too, in her momentous career, had forgotten her lines.

   We are all of us together in this great mess called life.

   The theatre can be the site of a particular sort of forgiveness.

  We mused on this as we made our way home on a late train to our ancient flat in cold and cozy Kew--  now with this tale to tell.  

                                                       ~~~

Yet Another Tale from the Wandering Fulbright:

Yet Another Tale from the Wandering Fulbright

                                Likely the last                         

                        A High Old Time at the Old Vic

    That Fulbright year, we went to everything the Old Vic produced: Hamlet, Twelfth Night, the three parts of Henry VI, Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, and closing with Henry VIII.  We got the Underground from Kew to Waterloo Station on the South Bank of the Thames and hoofed it on down the road, farther south to the beloved Old Vic theatre. All three of us, to sit up in the gods on benches for, I think it was, five shillings. I, in my professional zeal, sometimes went twice to see them.

   Our six-year old Linnea, at the matinee intervals, got her ice cream, and had a fine time.  Especially at the end of Hamlet, when, with John Neville, as that prince of all the princes, lying there dead in as beautiful a pool of light as I had ever seen, I saw Linnea’s eyes flood with tears. In a rapture she upped onto her knees on the bench, threw her arms around me and blurted out, “O, Daddy, thank you for bringing me”. I knew then that her education was assured.

   But what I wanted to talk about is the production of Henry VIII  with Edith Evans, sovereign lady of the English stage back then, as Queen Katherine and none other than John Gielgud, thought by many to be the greatest living actor, as Cardinal Wolsey. It was all the talk of the town. The opening would be a gala.

    Betty and I decided, as soon as we heard of It, that we must bust the budget, just this once, and book really good seats in the center of the orchestra. We just could not miss this sure-to-be elemental performance.

   And so, there we were, on opening night, dressed as best we could and nearly breathless. A friendly young usher whispered to us that everyone in the English theatrical establishment who had the night off was in attendance to pay court to Evans and Gielgud. We shuddered a bit as we were shown to our so excellent seats, maybe twenty feet from the stage and center. And the performance began-- with the ritual playing of God Save the Queen.

  

    All went well. At the interval we even splurged on a glass of sherry in the theatre’s upper class bar and were minding our own business…. when we began to hear this remarkable female voice behind us, warm, refined, musical, of deep timbre-- and faintly New York American.

   I sneaked a look and there she was, Maria Callas, the diva of the century, perhaps of several centuries. She also was drinking sherry and bantering with her companions, Lord and Lady Harewood, her closest English friends-- and only ten feet away! I feigned an excuse to turn around. And there the great lady stood, graceful, relaxed, beautiful, all in the grand manner.

   As I dared to stare-- and it was a calamity for me-- there beneath her conservative black cocktail dress were… thick ankles! I recoiled inwardly with a broken heart. I learned in an instant that the world was indeed badly flawed. The great soprano had been able to get rid of all her excess youthful weight except from around her ankles, and there was nothing under the sun that she could do about it.

   I had to pull myself together for the rest of the play and, upon returning to our seats, saw that Callas was sitting in the row just behind us and a seat or two deeper into the row! Imagine! She was in town to sing Violetta at Covent Garden in a couple days-- to which we had tickets up in the gods of the Royal Opera. Ever since we began listening to her recordings back in Wyoming, I had been besotted with her-- and, I am proud to say, still am.

    And so-- we managed, in the thrill of it all, to behave ourselves. When what to my wondering eyes should appear but Ralph Vaughn Williams just across the aisle from us. And so it went. We were surrounded.

   On stage, Evans and Gielgud were coming up on the famous scene in which the Queen begs Wolsey for his support-- which, of course, he refuses. Everybody in the house was waiting for this great moment.  When it came and the two great actors got into it, suddenly, the stage went dead quiet. Evans and Gielgud froze up, neither able to remember a word of their lines. The audience froze up with them, in that wonderful terror of  the theatre when things go wrong. The Queen and the Cardinal made faint little tries at getting back on track, but no good. They were entirely lost.

   So what did Gielgud do?  He offered Dame Edith his hand; she rose from her chair and its dais, stepped down, and accompanied Gielgud, on his arm, off the stage! Just as though that were the way it was supposed to play. They were full of bravura and in the grand manner.

   How long were they gone? Who knows?  Time stood still. Until, probably under thirty seconds, they swept back onto the stage and tore the place apart with a performance that truly did “ascend the brightest heaven of invention”. The audience cheered. Callas, right behind us, applauding away like any good old American gal, just like the rest of us. No doubt that she too, in some performances in her momentous career, had forgotten her lines.

   We are all of us together in this great mess called life.

The theatre can be the site of a particular sort of forgiveness.

  We mused on this as we made our way home to our ancient flat, waiting for us all cold and cozy, in Kew, supremely gratified and now with this tale to tell.  

                           ~~~

From the Splendors of the Past

                    Nugent Monck in Norwich

      I was told he was old, crotchety, and unpredictable. and who knows how he would receive me, once I got there-- to Norwich, to visit and learn what I could from the noted Nugent Monck, who had single-handedly established the long tradition of fine, non-professional regional drama in England. There were those who said that Monck knew as good as everything about staging plays. Be that as it may, he had surely known as good as everyone in the grand old days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I was told that he knew all the good old gossip-- and the dirt.

   So, I took the train down to Norwich and by hook and crook found the old man’s house. At eighty-one he was in what would turn out to be the last year of his life: He died two months after I visited him.

    I knocked at his door and in due time this shriveled, awful looking, little old man, 100% frontally naked, opened the door and, with not the slightest sign of interest or enthusiasm, ushered me in. With no preliminaries; he thrust into my hand an old, worn text of King Lear and a fresh Penguin copy of it, saying that some “dreadful man” wanted Harley Granville-Barker’s cutting of the play, and I was to sit right down there in the hallway of his quite ordinary middle-class English domicile and transfer Barker’s cutting to the new copy. Me! standing right there, holding in my hand the great Granville-Barker’s own prompt book for one of the most important productions of Shakespeare in all the modern movement!

   Well, I usually do as I am told, and so sat at a small table in the hallway and went to work, line by line, while old Monck went upstairs to put himself together (put some clothes on) for our visit.

    By the time he came down, I was almost finished with the first act and shocked at how heavily Barker had cut the text. It was a revelation.  And Monck somehow owned the prompt book of that storied production!

   He took me to dinner at a good hotel and seemed to be enjoying himself, even with me. I mused on the slightly salacious turn in his conversation on a young woman and her young gentleman at a nearby table. When  he had outlined our next day’s tour of Norwich, it was back to his house where he had a comfortable room ready for me. I believe I was a little afraid of him….

   Next day, we were off to his famous Maddermarket Theatre that he had founded in 1921. The old hall in which the theatre had been built, Monck told me, was on the site of a medieval oratory where a bad priest had been murdered by his inamorata right in the middle of his mass. And since a mass may never be left unfinished, the ghost of this rotten cleric keeps coming back, “appearing” on the stage, over the site of the altar,  trying to finish his mass.  Monck and all the people of his theatre swear by this: their bona-fide, residential ghost. It really was spooky.

    Then Monck wanted me to see the exact spot in the square where tradition has it that Will Kempe, Shakespeare’s famous actor of fools and clowns, after his break up with the company, dazzled all England  by Morris dancing, non-stop, from London all the way to Norwich. He ended his dance, “right there!” Monck said, pointing at a marker in the cobbles. As I love lore like this, I fell for this juicy bit, imagining that famous funny man with a moving mosh-pit, pressing en masse, behind him, raucous and obscene, following him to the end, to see him drop to the ground in the grand manner, in performative triumph.

    I think I was most seduced (and I must be careful with that word when in reference to Monck) when I learned that Monck had spent ten days in jail in Birmingham, in, I think it was 1919, for the crime of blasphemy. Think of that! He had dared, for the first time ever, to show on stage, one of the medieval mystery plays, the Nativity Play from the beautiful York Cycle. Just think, he sat in jail, doing time, for presenting a piece of medieval religious drama!  What could be more distinguished!

   On my own, I prowled around town a bit, went in awe of the cathedral with its gray-black flinty façade, and felt that I was coming to like Norwich, way out there, facing the eastern fens and the North Sea beyond. Cold, wet, and dark by definition..

   Monck insisted on our having a cab to the station and there he put me on the train back to London. He seemed reluctant, almost tender, to let me go-- poor old guy, so valiant, so brilliant, and now so alone-- and soon, so very soon, dead for all his pains.

    He had even cooked breakfast for me.

                                          ~~~~

By the way: Some yeas later in London, in Covent Garden, a performance artist took an empty store-front space, painted it from top to bottom in bright, flat, featureless white, then spread white sand over all the floor and swept clean an oval race course track around the fairly large room.

    Dressed  in black pants and shirt, his face whitened, he proceeded to walk continuously, with an absolutely unchanging pace and without the least expression, for seven days and seven nights. How he solved the problems of his biology, I have no idea. I know only that he walked continuously and steadily.

   He was compelling, beautiful, meaningful to watch in his perfect composure. People came in off the street to watch a bit; some looked in from the sidewalk (pavement) outside. 

I went to see him three times during the week. On the last day. I stood up close to the track. When, in his trance-like  concentration, he passed by me, I whispered at him, “Thank you.” He flinched with the faintest suggestion of a smile and went on. He had heard me!

    At the end his work of art, there was to be a party to which anyone might come. I’ve always regretted that I did not, but on the other hand, the lovely spell of his work might have been wrecked. As it is, I have remained thankful for what he had shown me of the human creature.

   Much as a woman, four years ago, walked home from Denver to Powell, Wyoming-- 520 miles. She was and is still dear to me. I regard her long walk as a work of art that, like the performer’s In London. It thrills and illuminates. I should have thought of Will Kempe.

BREAKING NEWS: A BIG DINNER EVENT

 

JUST TO LET YOU KNOW WHAT WE ARE UP TO.

WE HOPE IT WILL BE AN HISTORIC EVENT

IN A MYTHIC AMERICAN SETTING.

AT THE VERY LEAST IT WILL BE AN IMMENSE PLEASURE

FOR US CLUB MEMBERS ON THIS SIDE ATLANTIC

TO GET TOGETHER, THINK HARD ABOUT OUR BELOVED SPORT,

AND TOAST THE QUEEN.

On Decoration Day

    Harry Briscoe, who makes fly rods and hunts for oil, in his warm and generous way sent thanks to me, of all people, for my service in WWII. I responded with the email below. Harry says that I should post it on this Decoration Day Sunday.

   And so, since I am nothing if not obedient, in or out of the Navy, here it is.

     Dear Harry, I bet you say those nice things to all the girls. 

     When I was close to being sent home, when the war was over in '45, I felt guilty that I had done little to help win the war. I had merely kept the stills cooking, making fresh water, for a Sea Bee outfit stymied on a tiny island in the Philippines. We were an outfit detached to rebuild wrecked rolling stock and commissioned for a longer war with fewer resources, but, in the end, the U.S. got ahead of the war, and so we were not needed after all-- not needed.

   I knew that when I got home this "education thing" (the GI Bill) was waiting. I was sure to reap greater benefits than I ever deserved. And such was the case. I have never ceased feeling that I owe the Nation a great debt. School teaching felt like an appropriate way to pay back the loan of my full life.

  You and my nephew-in-law send out similar gestures of thanks on this big spring holiday. Here in Boulder, the running of its popular foot-race shuts down access to the grave yards and the honored dead lying in them.  But I shall find a way through the blockades.

    I know some veterans who really deserve your kind thoughts; for instance, my 93 year old barber, Fred  Saiz.  But not I, Harry, not I. It may be fairly said of me that I followed orders, did mostly as I was told, and might well have been told to go another place and die-- as did my most excellent of  friends Ralph Metcalf in his first hour of combat on Luzon. I was, all the while, safe and sound down on little Calicoan cooking the salt out of sea water for my buddies to drink and wash their socks in.

   I was barely an 18 year old in a Naval Sea Bee outfit full of middle-aged construction men, the greatest of men, for whose association I am grateful beyond the power of telling. Had I not been given that war, I would never have been given those guys.

  And so, on Decoration Day, I wish I had been really useful and done something more than just privately memorable. Still, I am proud beyond the power of telling that I was part of it, ready to go, got there, and did my lowly job. I was among superb men.

   Back home, in the excitement of my undergraduate education, I felt I must somehow pay back for that education and the benefits accruing to it. I was obligated to the Nation I had served. I was obligated to its community and its welfare. I never got over it. That war was really something. There are things worse than war.

  Thanks for thinking of my good old ship-mates.

   Gordon

The Very Flesh of Charles Laughton

 

       

             How to write “Laughton” ten times and write the

                      beautiful word Plangent the very first time

                     It occurs tom me, and sadly, that there is

                     an entire generation who know little about

             Charles Laughton, one of the greatest of stage and screen,

    In London, that year, Charles Laughton, having taken up the cause of a new, young, and not very good playwright, put his great influence and fame behind a production of this young man's new play. Laughton would even star in it. What an opportunity that was for us to see this great actor in person, live, on stage! We could hardly contain our excitement when we found ourselves at a matinee of the production in a West End theatre, the name of which I cannot now remember.

    Anyhow, the  play began and we were at once drawn into the magnetism of Laughton's personality, his peculiar body, and mesmerizing voice. The play itself was of little interest: it was all Laughton, bumbling around up there, snorting and huffing about in a depressing bachelor flat, the likes of which London is replete.

   Well, quite soon, at Laughton’s  every turn, there was a bit of applause and silly, nasal  male laughter. These tenders of adoration became more and more frequent, louder, and  disturbing, They turned into big clapping, roaring laughter, and remarks on how he loved the play and Laughton. The audience was terribly on edge and getting angry.

    Suddenly, Laughton stepped out of character and called for the curtain to be brought down. We in the audience sat in stunned silence-- until Laughton came out from behind the curtain to the apron of the stage to tell us that he really could not go on with this mischief in the audience and that the house management would have to see “this fellow” out of the theatre before he could go on-- and that he would be back when the offender was removed. So the curtain closed on him, the house lights came up, the ushers found the seriously drunken "fellow" and threw him out.

    When calm was restored in the theatre, Laughton again came front to tell us  how sorry he was for this embarrassment  to the production and the theatre  and that now he proposed to continue with the play if that suited us in the house. He became so very charming and humorous, He asked us what it is he ought to do. Should he go back and start again at the top of the act? Or should he recommence right where he had brought the curtain down before? He bantered with us, encouraging us to decide our pleasure. The finest sort of happiness swept through the crowd: we were all simply and over-whelmingly charmed. All that funny bantering with the great man. We decided that he should start again, back where he left off. That was fine with him; so he had the curtain taken out and proceeded to lecture us  quite "sternly" like a funny old uncle. He was, by God, going back into that set and climb up on that bed and pretend to go to sleep and if he heard one peep out of any of us, he would again stop the play and have us all thrown out into the street.

    He  then made a "big  production " of  getting his fat, lumpy body up on the bed, smiled, and waved a  cute little wave to us out in  the house and fell instantly to snoring.

    And so, we had shared this once in a lifetime, intimate moment with this great artist, a brief moment when we felt swamped in happiness. We went back to watching him at his work in this altogether forgettable play, but suffused with this gift that he had given us. Charles Laughton had recognized us, his audience, with  warmth and generosity. He had shown us himself -- and recognized in us his life's greatest treasure: an audience.

    A moral to this story? I believe that we all attend live performance with the shyly hidden desire to see something go wrong. One of the joys of the theatre is to see how actors can get out of trouble, perhaps as a model of the way we can, with an active imagination, get out of our own all too real troubles in life.

                                                          ~~~~

By the Way: My boss at the British Drama League took Betty aside and asked her how Americans made the good coffee of which she had heard. It was revealed that Miss MacKenzie just kept on adding a bit more ground coffee on top of that already used until the basket would hold no more. Miss MacKenzie was a survivor of the not so remote  bombing of London.

Navy Beans

 

                    A GOOD S0UP

    Betty got out a can of beans as part of a routine lunch today.

They were Navy beans, those little white ones, famous in the famous Navy bean soup in U.S. Senate dining room in Washington. For a split instant, the sight of those beans took me back to being there in the Capitol, risking a too short spoon in just that soup, in just that dining room, in an effort to do what we could against the war in Vietnam.

   In that instant, in spite of all our anti-war politics, I was in awe of the undoubted grandeur and the immense integrity of the Congress under that great dome.

    There were all those great men-- and single senate woman-- moving about the place.

   Perhaps it is because I am now almost double that age, that I feel that a visit there today to eat the senate’s bean soup would only fill me with contempt for how small and mean and dumb so many of those people have become.

    I am much better off lunching out of a can of beans with Betty here in Boulder where we know what to think. And think how splendid it was to meet Senator Fulbright going into the men's room that day.