And so it was that my first breathless brush with celebrity had nothing whatsoever to do with the entertainment business. I had met my idol. “My best wishes to John Lithgow,” the man wrote. “Sincerely, Norman Rockwell.” I was going to be an artist.
Such boyish certitude characterized everything in my life in those days. Back in Yellow Springs after that sabbatical year in Stockbridge, the family seemed to have nestled into a happy midwestern idyll. Our everyday life resembled a sunny novel written by Booth Tarkington. I was in a different school and a different house, but everything else was comfortably the same. My old gang innocently prowled the leafy streets and backyards of Yellow Springs and the woods of nearby Glen Helen. Eric Rohmann was still my best friend, but now we competed for the attentions of the same girlfriend. My family had reached its quorum when my little sister Sarah Jane was born. She was ten years younger than I, and the focus of adoring attention from the other five Lithgows. We seemed to fit into the 1950s like the figures in a wholesome Norman Rockwell painting.
Photograph by Gerald Hornbein.
In school I was gregarious and popular. My schoolmates must have thought that my precocious aestheticism was pretty exotic, but it stirred admiration, never derision. The two sides of my nature were nicely balanced: a cross between Tom Sawyer and a preteen Aubrey Beardsley. My days and nights at the Shakespeare Festival alternated with trips to Cincinnati to root for the Redlegs. My afternoons of landscape painting in the country were counterbalanced by long innings of Little League baseball at dusk. I collected a hundred different titles of “Classics Illustrated,” but I also spent endless evening hours in the summertime playing marathon games of neighborhood hide-and-seek.
Yellow Springs was a likely setting for this duality. To all appearances it was a typical Ohio village, with its whitewashed town hall, its battle monuments, and its Lions Club lunches. But it was part of an Ohio archipelago of liberal-arts college towns, including Oberlin, Gambier, Granville, Kent, Bowling Green, and Berea. And of all those towns, it had by far the most radical, activist, and iconoclastic history. Antioch College was the wellspring of all this radicalism. In the nineteenth century, Yellow Springs had been a major way station on the Underground Railroad, and Antioch warmly embraced the town’s fervent abolitionist heritage. The “Antioch Program for Interracial Education” predated the Civil Rights Movement by several years, and the progressive citizens of Yellow Springs shared the college’s pride in it. My parents were two of those proud citizens. They regularly hired student babysitters from the program for my siblings and me. Our favorite was a vibrant girl named Coretta. A few years after her babysitting days ended, Coretta would marry a young minister from Georgia named Martin Luther King, Jr.
Because of Antioch’s presence, Yellow Springs teemed with pinko bohemians and tweedy anarchists. These were the early Eisenhower years, the era of Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The whole country was seized with anticommunist paranoia. But in Yellow Springs there was a gleeful defiance of the conservative tide sweeping the country. The Lithgow children absorbed the town’s politics by osmosis. Adlai Stevenson was our messiah, Richard Nixon was our bogeyman. Our classmates whose professor fathers had been famously blacklisted walked among us with a special swagger. My parents bought their first television in 1954, just so they could watch the Army-McCarthy Hearings.
Photograph by Axel Bahnsen.
Mom and Dad hardly rated the blacklist. They were staunchly liberal, but far from revolutionary. For them, politics took a backseat to a shared passion for theater. Of the two of them, my father was not the only performer. Early in their marriage, my mother played big roles in productions at the opera house. In later years, she loved to smugly invoke the memory of her Madwoman of Chaillot, her Madame Arcati, and her Green Maiden in Peer Gynt, but I have no memory of any of them. A photo from those days shows her as Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest. With a distinctly Lithgovian pout, she is receiving the attentions of an ardent Algernon Moncrieff (played by an actor named Meredith Dallas, co-director with my father of several of Dad’s Antioch enterprises).
But if Mom was wryly boastful of her brief career onstage, she was equally cocky about her decision to leave acting behind. With a household full of kids, a husband consumed with his theater exploits, and a gang of raucous actors constantly tramping in and out of her home, she took on the role of den mother. Her charges were her own children and the childlike adults that formed my father’s company. If this was a grudging choice, she never showed it. Whatever histrionic urges she had left seemed to be satisfied by wistful evocations of dance recitals when she was a child in Rochester and periodic explosions of the Charleston performed in our living room and at boozy cast parties.
My father’s nature mixed whimsy and furnace-like energy. His enthusiasms shot off in all directions, like an unattended fire hose. He shingled our entire house by himself, he constructed a ten-yard overhead wooden grape arbor in our backyard, he built beautiful maple bedsteads for each of us, he lined the master bedroom with knotty pine boards, he invented extravagant breakfast dishes with names like “bleeding heart omelets” and “eggs spécialité”—all of this with the same jaunty optimism with which he created a Shakespeare Festival. Late one night, at a supper party in our home, I remember lying in bed and hearing him downstairs declaiming to his adult guests. Someone had asserted that the first act of The Tempest was boring. Dad was passionately performing the entire act, playing all the parts, just to prove the Philistine wrong.
Sometimes his whimsy tipped over into recklessness. A typical example of this occurred a few years later. When my sister Robin was in her late teens, she went through a yoga stage. At the time, we were living in a house with a single bathroom. Large and flooded with light, the room was a beautiful space for practicing yoga. One day, on a visit home from college, Robin was languidly doing her yoga on that bathroom floor when my father knocked on the door. She breezily told him to come in, but he was mortified to think that he was disturbing her privacy, so he apologized through the closed door and went away. She heard nothing more from him.
Later that same day Robin was doing some ironing. The ironing board was set up in a room next to that bathroom. She spread out a shirt, filled the iron with water, steamed the shirt, and began to press it. She noticed a strange smell. She steamed the shirt again. The smell was appalling. Caught between revulsion and hilarity, she realized what had happened. Earlier that day, Dad had peed into a half-filled pitcher of water sitting on the ironing board and had forgotten to empty it. Robin had filled up the iron with that pitcher. She was steaming her shirt with her father’s diluted urine. The whole episode uncannily sums up my dad (somewhat at the expense of his dignity): his sweetness, his courtesy, his ingenuity, his abstraction, and, above all, his soaring sense of humor. He roared with laughter every time he told the story on himself. And he told it often.