As I sat and watched the dress rehearsal that day, Romeo and Juliet began their famous balcony scene. Five minutes into it, Dad broke his resolve to let the cast slog through to the end. He unfolded himself, stood up, and walked all the way down the aisle, bringing the two actors to a halt. He put aside his notes and began to speak, his demeanor exuding an eerie forced calm. With an almost canine sensitivity, I recognized that tone in his voice. I shifted in my seat, sensing a gathering storm. He directed all of his words toward Devereaux. They were carefully chosen and enunciated, as if he were composing an academic essay.
“The problem with the production as it now stands,” he began, “is that it has no Romeo.”
That quiet declaration hit Devereaux like a rifle shot. He lowered himself to the floor, carefully arranging his powder-blue cape with its dainty pink piping. His eyes were glassy and his body slumped as my father’s gentle critique slowly built in intensity. Peppering his speech with quotes from the text, he described Romeo’s renegade sexuality, his hotheaded irrationality, his feverish fixation on Juliet. With every sentence he grew louder, more passionate, almost angry. Within minutes, his helpful prodding had bloomed into a full-blown tirade.
“If this Romeo tried to vault Juliet’s fence,” he bellowed, “he’d break his stick! If he climbed in bed with her, he wouldn’t know what to do! That’s not Romeo! Love for Romeo is not flowers and perfume. It’s urgent, it’s sweaty. He’s an animal! He’s carnivorous! So is Juliet! If he doesn’t have fire in his loins, then neither does she! You’re giving the other actors onstage nothing! Romeo is not there! And without Romeo, the whole play is as limp as a limp dick!”
I had never seen my father like this. Witnessing his tantrum, I was frozen in my seat, caught between anxiety and relief. I hated to see Devereaux treated so ruthlessly, but I was enormously relieved to see him finally getting the thrashing he needed. His passion spent, Dad instructed Romeo and Juliet to begin the scene again from the top and then strode back to his seat. Devereaux had been shaken to the core, but he climbed to his feet, shook his head and his hands, and began again. The second time through, the scene was transformed. Devereaux never grew into a great Romeo, and the entire play never quite caught fire. But my father’s harsh medicine had been both necessary and effective. From that moment on, Devereaux, Romeo, and the production itself were all mightily improved.
That day I felt that I had seen my father at his very best. His love of Shakespeare and his passion for theater were abundantly on display. He filled me with admiration and pride. Questions hung in the air, of course. Why did he wait until dress rehearsal to tear apart an actor’s performance? Why did he allow Romeo to wear that awful costume, makeup, and hairdo? Why was such a fatuous actor ever cast in the first place? Besides compromising the production, wasn’t this a cruel disservice to the actor himself? Such questions went to the very heart of my father’s strengths as a theater manager. But as I sat watching him in that darkened auditorium, either those questions didn’t occur to me or I scrupulously ignored them. And why should I have cared, anyway? What emotional investment did I have? After all, this was not my career. I wasn’t going to be an actor. This was a lark, a fun summer before I went off to college. It was years before I asked all those questions about my father. When I finally did, the answers would weigh heavily on me.
[11] Veritas
The dreams of an artist die hard. Despite all the fun of my first season with the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, I was still nursing ambitions of being a painter. And so it was that, halfway through my freshman year at college, I set my sights on Skowhegan, Maine, for the upcoming summer. As it is today, Skowhegan was the site of a summer-long art school and the seasonal retreat for a whole colony of high-powered New York painters. In my dorm room I filled out an application, typed out a brief essay, assembled slides of drawings and paintings from my Art Students League days, and sent off the whole package. I was bursting with high hopes and creative zeal. What with the hectic frenzy of the summer festival and the crushing workload of my freshman year, my artistic output had slowed to a trickle. I was counting on a meditative summer in Maine to get it going again. In the weeks after I mailed my application, I awaited word.
While I waited, I went home to my family in Princeton for Spring Break. On my first day back, my father had a bright idea. Since arriving at McCarter Theatre, he had made the acquaintance of Ben Shahn, an authentic American master of painting and printmaking whose home and studio were in nearby Roosevelt, New Jersey. For years Shahn had been a summertime fixture at Skowhegan and a dominating presence at the art school there. To boost my chances of admission, Dad called up Shahn himself and asked if I could visit his studio to talk to him about the summer program. Shahn said yes, and a few days later Dad and I drove out to Roosevelt to meet with him.
When we walked into his bright, airy studio, the bespectacled Shahn was working on a series of small watercolors. He was enthroned like a pasha, surrounded by a happy clutter of drawings, paintings, photos, and art supplies. Afternoon sun poured in the windows, filtered through the spring leaves of birch trees out in his yard. Mozart played softly on the radio. I took in the scene with awe and envy. It was everything I had dreamed of: a serene creative idyll, perfectly conducive to the unfettered flow of art.
But Ben Shahn himself was anything but serene. In his late sixties, he had the big head, broad shoulders, meaty hands, and expansive girth of a longshoreman. He spoke in a deep growl and his manner was brusque. His defiant, left-leaning politics, frequently expressed in his social realist paintings, seemed to color his every word and gesture. He needled and challenged me, rabbinically testing my fiber with irascible good humor. The questions came thick and fast. What have you done? Where have you studied? Whose work do you like? Why do you want this? What do you aspire to? Where do you stand? I burbled my earnest answers, feeling utterly intimidated and inadequate. Then came the biggest question of alclass="underline"
“If you want to be an artist,” he barked, “what the hell are you doing at Harvard?”
I went to Harvard because I got in. This is not the best reason to pick a college, but in retrospect, it’s the best reason I can come up with. In those days, to an even greater extent than today, the very word “Harvard” represented the pinnacle of high school achievement, the ultimate flatterer of a seventeen-year-old’s vanity. The heady aura of the place swept aside all other considerations. This was still the era of Jack Kennedy’s pre-Dallas Camelot, and the place shimmered with his reflected glory. Admittance to Harvard was a gilded invitation to join the company of the best and the brightest, long before that phrase had taken on its dark, ironic overtones. If you got in, you went, simple as that. My letter of admission arrived, I accepted without hesitation, and the following September I arrived in Cambridge and moved into Wigglesworth Hall, my freshman dorm, in the shadow of Widener Library. I was a newly minted Harvard undergraduate, Class of 1967, without knowing a thing about the place and, in fact, without ever having laid eyes on it.