James Baldwin wrote in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy”: “To be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol, which means that one pays in one’s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others.”

This observation leapt out at me while reading a biography of Alvin Ailey (1931-1989), the pioneering African-American choreographer, taken too soon by AIDS. When he died, protease inhibitors and the “miracle” recoveries were still six to seven years off. Aware of the stigma attaching to AIDS, he asked that his mother be told that he died of a rare blood disorder.

Despite “our insecurities,” Ailey paved the way for serious consideration of blacks in concert dance. His most celebrated ballet “Revelations,” which premiered in 1960 and was revived and reconfigured many times, is said to be the most often seen modern dance of all time.

The Ailey company served as “Cultural Ambassador to the World” because of its extensive international touring, in a time when Cold War fears had crippled other channels of diplomacy. Ailey was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 1988, the year before he died.

Today, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is still going strong, with a new “visible” school (glass-walled rehearsal spaces, etc) on Ninth Avenue in the gentrifying Hells Kitchen section of Manhattan. His choreography is preserved and tended to by numerous dancers with direct experience of Ailey himself, in a way that the Martha Graham company (another one with a specific dance vocabulary) hasn’t been able to equal. There is also a huge amount of video that helps to preserve this most fragile of art forms.

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Legendary film director John Huston wrote to poet James Agee, his collaborator on “The African Queen,” “Maybe friends shouldn’t write about each other until they’re dead—both of them.”

Those were heady days, when literature’s finest were utilized to create scenarios for the Silver Screen. Many of them felt exploited, but the pain was doubtlessly lessened at the bank.

Many people are unaware of Agee’s first screenplay, sent to silent movie legend Charlie Chaplin. It is a dark comedy set in a post-apocalyptic New York, prompted by the atomic bombings that (supposedly) hastened the end of WWII, and the Red-baiting years of relentless investigations, led by Senator McCarthy.

Agee wrote for Time magazine that had sent him to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war. He returned with, shall we say, a certain disillusionment and anger about US policy. He turned that anger into the screenplay, in which Chaplin’s tramp survives nuclear war, only to be ruled over by political technocrats, who want total control over the world via science.

The screenplay first came to light in 1981, but Agee’s heirs objected to it being published, as possibly detrimental to his legacy. A fascinating book about it “Chaplin and Agee” contains their correspondence as well as the screenplay itself. The project never made it to the theater. It’s an “early treatment” of an idea, and probably would have been heavily refined, but Chaplin passed on the idea anyway, so it became “lost.”

Agee’s idolization of Chaplin is evident, as is Chaplin’s bitterness to figures such as Ed Sullivan, who many people don’t know was a rabid Commie hater. He was instrumental in the persecution of many entertainment figures, even if they were only faintly “suspected” of any liberal biases.

“ . . . win the world by simplicity, forcelessness, and love.”

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Clearly, I’m addled by Adlers recently. Today, I’m thinking of Richard Adler (1921-2012), and his short-lived partner Jerry Ross ((1926-1955) who wrote the two iconic back-to-back Broadway hits The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955).

“Steam Heat,” “Hernando’s Hideaway,” “Hey There,” “Heart,” “Whatever Lola Wants.” Quite a line-up of American musical standards. Adler and Ross were unusual in that they both wrote music and lyrics, and their contributions are not separated.

“Damn Yankees” was one of the first musicals I ever saw, in a high-school production in 1966, after I moved to Carson City, Nevada in the middle of third grade. We walked down to the “Blue School,” my elementary school (renamed Mildred Nevada Bray Elementary when I was in sixth grade there) and across the playground was the “big” school, where Yankees was being done. For some reason, my normally dour businesslike father was quite attached to this particular story.

After Ross’ death at age 29, the fountain dried up for Adler, despite further attempts at Broadway shows, including “Kwamina,” whose interracial theme was too advanced for 1961—it ran for barely two weeks.

Adler also organized the famous Madison Square Garden birthday party for JFK, the one in which Marilyn Monroe sang, if you can call it that, “Happy Birthday.”

The surprising point I identified with in reading Adler’s memoir recently, is that his son Christopher (1953-1984) died of AIDS related lymphoma (only two years older than Jerry Ross). He had some wishes to enter the theater world himself, and made a strong beginning, despite the shadow cast by a famous father. He was also gay, participating in the free-wheeling sex/drug/alcohol scene on New York’s Fire Island in the deceptively carefree late 1970s.

Anyway, Christopher’s hematologist was also MY hematologist, Sanford J Kempin. At the time of Adler’s illness, he was with Memorial Sloan Kettering. I met him when I was at the now-defunct St Vincent’s. I remember him telling me (in 2004) that if this had happened to me 20 years earlier, there was no treatment and I would have died. Well, I’m still here.

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Larry Adler (1914-2001) was generally acknowledged as the greatest harmonica virtuoso of all time. Vaughn-Williams, Malcolm Arnold, Milhaud, and Arthur Benjamin all wrote concertos for him. What? You never heard a harmonica concerto? Where have you been, under a rock? He even collaborated with Elton John, Sting, and Kate Bush.

Born in Baltimore, he went on to take the world by mouth organ storm. In 1935, he began playing a transcription of Ravel’s Bolero, that was in 2/4 time, tricked out as a fox trot. He even played it for the composer, to whom we must grant some leeway, as his brain disease was rapidly progressing at that late stage in Ravel’s life.

Two versions of the anecdote follow:

Larry Adler performed his harmonica transcription of “Bolero” at Paris’ Alhambra theater. According to Gary Giddins: “Ravel requested him to play it in his home. ‘I played it in from of him, feeling like a schmuck. It was so embarrassing and he never moved a muscle. He just listened to me, and when I finished it, he said, “You’ve cut it.” I said, “Well, yes, I had to because I do a vaudeville act and you can’t do just one number in a 12-minute act.” He said, “You know Toscanini?” I said yes. He said, “Toscanini doesn’t cut it.” He was looking at me and I was looking at him and nothing was being said. So out of sheer desperation, I held up my record of Bolero and said, “Maestro, would you sign this for me?” He said he thought the record was a present for him, which amazed me, and I said, “Sure, Maestro,” and left it with him.

Three days later, I received a call from Jacques Lyon, who ran a record shop on the Champs Elysees. He said, “Get over here at once. Maestro Ravel is in my shop and wants to see you.” I rushed over and there was Ravel with a piece of paper bearing his signature.”

Larry Adler in his memoir “It Ain’t Necessarily So”: “I had a call from Jacques Lyon, who ran a record shop, the Sinfonia, on the Champs-Elysees. He said he’d had a call from Maurice Ravel who had heard that I played his Bolero and wanted to hear me. I couldn’t stand before the maitre playing without accompaniment so I brought my record with me. We drove to Montfort l’Amaury, outside Paris, and had a hard time finding Ravel’s house—no one seemed to have heard of him. When we did find it, Ravel opened the door, took the record and before Jacques could even introduce me, put it on. Until then I’d thought it was a good record, it was a big seller and I was proud of it. Standing there while its composer listened to it I was aware of imperfections, of mistakes that I had never noticed. It sounded awful and, though it was on one side of a 78 rpm record, it seemed interminable. When it finished, Ravel spoke to Jacques.

The master he say, you play it very fast. Why?

Hell, I didn’t know why. I hadn’t ever known that I did play it fast. Ravel spoke again.

The master he says you have made cuts, you do not play the whole thing. Why?

I explained that, in music-hall, my act ran fifteen minutes, which was the length of Bolero. I loved the number, I meant no criticism but, to include it, I had to make cuts.

Jacques said: The master he ask, do you know Arturo Toscanini?

Yes, I had met him.

Jacques said: The master, he say that Toscanini plays the whole thing.

Well, he had me there. What could I say? The conversation languished. I held out the record for Ravel to sign. (I had never asked for an autograph before, have never asked for one since. It was pure embarrassment.) Ravel looked surprised.

Jacques said: The master say, he thought the record was for him. Now I was surprised. Ravel had given every sign of loathing the record and me. Then Ravel held up his hands, they were shaking. He said that he had palsy, had written nothing in the past five years. [Adler’s error, Ravel’s last work, Don Quichotte, was composed in 1932.] I apologized and we left. A few days later Jacques phoned me and told me to get to his record shop at once; the master was there. Ravel was bundled in a heavy coat and a scarf though it was a warm day. He said that, by sitting in a dark room and concentrating, he had been able to steady his hand, long enough to write his signature and he had brought it to me. I was touched and honored by Ravel’s gesture but felt guilty as I hadn’t really wanted the autograph.”

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

“It is gone now, the thousand-headed monster whose din comes to me nightly through the thin wall of my dressing room—the monster that for forty years has dared me out into the arena, and whose noise, breathing, odor, have since boyhood unnerved me and sent a fever through my blood. It has departed, leaving only darkness and silence.”

Hard to believe that more than a century ago, the Lower East Side of New York City was the capital of Yiddish theater, with scores of theaters, actors, and productions, all full to the brim with audiences. If we were magically dropped into such a theater as people of today, would we “get it” or would it all seem dated or hokey?

Acting, as we see from the quote above, is a consuming passion for those smitten with it. Sometimes the consumption leaves a void, other times a fulfillment.

Jacob Adler (1855-1926) isn’t the “father” of Yiddish theater, but certainly one of the better known actors. He strived for deeper elements of tragedy in his representations, when the main current of Yiddish theater was a kind of slapstick improvisation. His most famous role was Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” and Lear in a Shakespeare adaptation called “The Jewish King Lear.”

In a time when Shylock was usually portrayed as a stereotypical sniveling, whining, avaricious Jew, (something that still often happens in this play) Adler brought out the conflicted, noble nature of the character.

Adler also fathered many children with his three wives, the most famous of whom is Stella Adler (1901-1992), who along with Harold Clurman founded the Group Theater, and taught “Method” acting to Marlon Brando, among others, at her Stella Adler School of Acting She parted company with the main principles of the Method, however, as evidenced in the closing quotation, good advice for anyone:

“Don’t use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don’t want you to be stuck with your own life. It’s too little.”

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

The first high school musical I was in was “L’il Abner.” I was Evil-Eye Fleagle, henchman for General Bullmoose. Fleagle wore a 1920s oversized zoot suit (made by my stepmother) and had his signature “terrifyin’ paralyzin’ truth whammy” he could apply to anyone.

“Three rousing rahs, a few huzzahs, and a hip hip hip hooray! What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA!”

Bullmoose’s secretary was the busty Appassionata von Climax, something that may or may not have gone unnoticed by the farm folk of Perry, Ohio in 1974. Perry was a lot like Dogpatch, at least to me.

“It’s a typical day in Dogpatch USA, where typical folk do things in a typical way. First we rubs the sleep from our eyes, git our grub and shoo ‘way the flies. We spend what’s negotiable, then we gets sociable, sittin’ around swappin’ lies. And then we drops by to collect unemployment pay . . .”

The residents of Dogpatch are fighting to keep their town from destruction in a nuclear test. The US government decided to find the “most unnecessary” town and blow it up. Mammy’s Yokumberry tonic is produced as evidence of the town’s “necessity,” and an assortment of scrawny hillbilly men are carted off to Washington to test the tonic’s effects on their muscles. (Lance Armstrong, it was already fodder for musical comedy in the 1950s.)

When their wives go to Washington, all their spouses can do is preen, flex and look at their bulging muscles in the mirror, which causes the women to sing “Put ‘em back the way they WUZ! They wuz not known for beauty, but they sho done their duty, and they made the boudoir buzz . . .”

And of course, there’s the love story between Daisy Mae and the clueless but sincere mattress-tester L’il Abner. The Sadie Hawkins Day parade and race is the only day on which the women can capture the men they want and make them marry, ideal for Daisy, since Abner is supremely uninterested in her or anything but loafing.

I was never the romantic lead. I had too much weird self-awareness and an arch sense of humor. And those geeky glasses.

The musical is probably dated, maybe it was already dated in 1974. With its cold war era paranoia, scientific genetic engineering, government incompetence, I think it remains relevant. All this sprang, like a hillbilly version of Proust’s madeleine, when I recently read Edie Adams memoir “That’s All.”

Adams (1927-2008) won the Tony in 1957 for her Daisy Mae. She was a classically trained (Juilliard) soprano, married to zany comedian Ernie Kovacs. Adams was in “Wonderful Town” with Rosalind Russell in 1953. Today Kovacs is largely forgotten, but the two of them were pioneers in the very first days of television, when “anything went.”

Edie did many cigar commercials, back in the “bad old” days when such advertising was rampant. Kovacs was a big cigar smoker, but tobacco didn’t kill him, a car crash did, in 1962. Today, he is remembered more for his tax troubles than his innovative comedy. The couple made a record together, with the title “Music to Listen to Records By” (subtitle: Edie Adams Sings?)

So, that’s today’s garage sale of the mind . . .

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

The first thing I saw was a pair of absolutely perfect female legs exiting the rear door of a black stretch limo. This was at Lincoln Center, pre-renovation, when the driveway was at plaza level. It must have been in the late 1980s, dusk, a Film Society of Lincoln Center Honors night or something.

The feet at the ends of the legs made contact with the pavement, and then a slender, silver-haired apparition in a black mink coat stood up, with her back to me. The solicitous chauffeur closed the door behind her.

She had to turn around, however, to make her way to Avery Fisher Hall, and in that instant I realized it was Lauren Bacall. What becomes a legend most? (Remember the old Blackglama mink ads?) Probably not being stared at by an introverted obscure classical pianist, for starters.

She hadn’t had to travel far, after all, her home for many years has been in the famous “Dakota” apartment building on West 72, but a legend doesn’t walk to anything, I suppose.

Betty Joan Perske of the sultry looks and deep voice. Born in 1924. Two-time Tony winner: “Applause” (1970) and “Woman of the Year” (1981, which I saw with my friend Ginny.)

She exploded into the public’s collective eyes with 1944’s movie “To Have and Have Not,” with her co-star and future husband, the love of her life, Humphrey Bogart. This was followed by “The Big Sleep” (1946), “Dark Passage” (1947), and “Key Largo” (1948), always with Bogey. As recently as 1996, she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “The Mirror Has Two Faces.”

I went through a period of reading celebrity memoirs, mainly in my adolescence. Then it started to feel, well, adolescent, like I ought to be reading classics, music history, and “other things.”

Lately, I’ve been on a memoir binge again. I guess I now enjoy the challenge of seeing if any of the subject’s “authenticity” leaks into the finished product. Is it self-serving? Whitewashed? Coy? Frankly dishonest? Inhibited? Charming? Nowadays, everyone has a memoir, and they’re not all of equal value. For actors of a certain generation, it was perhaps even more difficult to be completely open about what happened in their carefully crafted “studio-image,” which rarely matched their true private lives.

In 1978, long before it was routine, Bacall released her memoir “By Myself,” which was updated in 2005, retitled “By Myself and Then Some.” I do think her personality comes through in these pages, at least I read them with “her” voice sounding in my head. Is that my own projection?

She tells about Bogart, his death in 1957 (He was 25 years older than her; and they had two children together.), a brief engagement to Frank Sinatra, and her second marriage, to Jason Robards (1922-2000), an acute alcoholic (They also had one child together.).

The language is as no-nonsense as I would like to believe she really “is.” Does the dream factory have me brainwashed? As LB herself said: “Here is a test to find out whether your mission in life is complete. If you’re alive, it isn’t.”

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Kurt Weill’s epitaph is a lyric from “Lost in the Stars” his 1949 musical, written with Maxwell Anderson

This is the life of men on earth;

Out of the darkness we come at birth

Into a lamplit world, and then—

Go forward into dark again.

Years ago, in the 1940s and 50s, a group of astonishingly creative theater and other artists all seemed to congregate in a small village, New City, of Rockland County, New York, just west of the Hudson River, above New York City. Among them: Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya, playwright Maxwell Anderson and his family, Burgess Meredith and Milton Caniff and his wife, Bunny. They all lived on South Mountain Road, the title of a memoir by Anderson’s daughter Hesper.

For a period in the mid-twentieth century, Anderson was considered America’s “great” playwright. Today, who but the most devoted theater/cinephile remembers “Winterset,” “What Price Glory?,” “The Bad Seed,” “Key Largo,” “Both Your Houses,” “Knickerbocker Holiday,” to name but a few. He truly believed in the social “mission” of theater, a return to the communal/ritual/religious atmosphere of the origins of drama, in ancient Greek culture. He also believed in poetic verse lines, rather than “everyday” street speech.

In “Cry, the Beloved Country,” then “Lost in the Stars,” the greeting of love and farewell is: “Go well, stay well, come well.” “Cry” is a 1948 novel by South African writer Alan Paton. The next year saw “Lost in the Stars,” based on it. When I was a student at Exeter, our required Paton was “Too Late the Phalarope,” rather than “Cry,” so I came late to this important book about racial injustice.

Hesper Anderson, Maxwell’s daughter by his second “wife,” was surrounded by these privileged, emotional creators throughout her growing-up years. She recalls the struggles for attention, issues of competition with her elegant mother, a pre-pubescent crush on a much older neighbor that was discouraged at every turn by the “elders,” and her stubborn refusal to accept any of it. Although surrounded by seemingly every material advantage, she, like so many of us, has demons that must be worked through in order to advance.

Her mother, Maxwell’s second wife, committed suicide in 1953, after having committed adultery, which was discovered by him. This in turn led to his “revenge” affair with a woman who would become his next wife. Sounds like a pilot for a soap opera. Hesper ultimately discovers that her parents were never legally married! Lotte Lenya looked on all the marital mix-ups with typical European wry detachment. Her tactic was to invite Weill’s current infatuation to come spend a summer with them. As she gleefully reported, “In a few days, he was so bored with them all.”

Despite Maxwell Anderson’s Pulitzer Prize (1933, “Both Your Houses,” a political satire), he often had to travel to Hollywood to do the hated screenplay writing for major motion pictures. In those years, with money flowing liberally, Hollywood hired the best literary talents to create the raw material for the movies—but then didn’t hesitate to mutilate, revise, and otherwise practically destroy the original creations of the geniuses they had hired. And, in the process, most of them report that their spirits died slowly, day by day. (Many of them turned to copious amounts of “spirits” to cope.) Hesper met Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn on these occasions, Hepburn being particularly kind to her. She saw the celebrities not as stars, but in their daily, often mundane lives.

Advance she did, nevertheless, co-writing the screenplay (father’s footsteps) of 1986’s “Children of a Lesser God” with its creator Mark Medoff.

There’s so much more to this story. I heartily recommend Hesper’s memoir “South Mountain Road” for a glimpse into a rare world, yet a common one—the interior struggle to grow up. (Published in 2000, Simon and Schuster)

“Go well, stay well.”

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

I often irreverently tell my students that if Schubert were alive today, he’d be a country/western songwriter. His songs, though the words are by others, all deal with love and loss, nature, death—storytelling the kinds of basic human issues that our present country music biz values.

Near the very beginning of it all was Roy Acuff, the “Smoky Mountain Boy,” who helped raise the genre from “hillbilly” music to a position of real prominence in the industry. He was a major figure in the Grand Ol’ Opry, and the first living inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Born in 1903 (d. 1992), his career spanned over 40 years. He came from a reasonably well-off family, and received a traditional education. Prior to music, he had tried, with some success, a career in minor league baseball, but a strange reaction to sunlight (combination of sunstroke and nervous condition) scuttled those hopes.

His two greatest hits are “The Great Speckled Bird” and “Wabash Cannonball,” which show his masterful handling of traditional Anglo folk melodies. You can see Acuff perform “Bird” on YouTube. “Wabash” is about a fictional train that carries a hobo to his post-life reward; it was very popular during the Depression, though it originated in the late 19th century.

“I’ll be joyfully carried to meet Him/On the wings of that great speckled bird.” The completely sincere faith embodied in the words and music would be a tonic to more people today. It is a tragedy to go through life without “something.” More than that, I cannot say, and I’m not proselytizing for religion at all! My faith is in the healing and mysterious power of music itself.

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

I know, I know: “Who?” Oh! Charles Aznavour. That guy. Yes, born in 1924, he’s still alive, the son of Armenian immigrants. Besides his enormous contribution to the image of the French chanson, my favorite thing about him is his sister’s name: Aida. So operatic.

Did you know he’s been in more than 60 movies and has composed more than a thousand (!) songs? He worked tirelessly to extend copyright protections to performers as well as songwriters.

His parents were survivors of the Armenian genocide, an issue that still provokes heated rhetoric today. His song “Ils sont tombés” (They fell) is about the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks during and after WWI.

Aznavour has been called the “French Frank Sinatra,” but I always feel that doesn’t identify his unique timbre, not his outlook on life as expressed in the songs. He could sing high like a tenor, but also had a nice lower baritonal quality.

An indefatigable performer, he appeared with luminaries as diverse as Fred Astaire and Luciano Pavarotti. Aznavour’s “farewell” tour lasted nearly four years, culminating in 20 Paris concerts in 2010. He sings in practically every European language imaginable, though naturally focusing on French.

He has had more than honorary roles as diplomat and representative ofArmenia, and founded a charity to assist victims of a terrible earthquake there.

So get out there (or “in” there on YouTube) and investigate some Azna today.

© 2013 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs