Authors: John Lithgow
Curtains
I
was a curtain puller for Marcel Marceau. For decades, the immortal French mime was a yearly one-night-only fixture at McCarter Theatre, presenting his delicate art in hypnotic silence for wildly appreciative full houses. On one of his visits, I was pressed into service. I was assigned the job of raising and lowering McCarter’s massive red-velour curtain for Marceau’s single performance. It was one of many backstage jobs that I undertook at the theater, for piddling wages but mostly for fun, during my two high school years in Princeton. At various times I had run lights, painted sets, fashioned lobby displays, and operated the fly lines that hoisted flats and set pieces up and down. But pulling the curtain for the great Marcel Marceau was the best gig of all. I was humbled by the honor.
In those days Marceau was a one-of-a-kind Gallic superstar, his slight frame and unique persona recognizable everywhere. In performance, his face was painted stark white, with his mouth, eyes, and eyebrows delicately outlined in red and black. He wore white pants cut to halfway down his calves, a striped shirt, a tight, short jacket, ballet slippers, and a little blue hat with a flower sprouting out of it. In this emblematic costume, he performed a show that was simplicity itself. He would present about a dozen short mime pieces, most of them in the character of Bip, his alter ego. Marceau would chase butterflies, struggle against the wind, grow drunk at a cocktail party or seasick on board a cruise ship, all in pantomime. The entire performance took place on an empty stage, without props, sets, or supporting players. Or rather, all of these things were there but invisible, created by the magic of Marceau’s physical gifts, by the eloquent lighting, and by the imagination of the audience. Clearly, the rise and the fall of the curtain was also pretty damned important.
On the day of Marceau’s performance, I watched worshipfully from backstage all through his afternoon technical rehearsal. Although he had been through the drill a thousand times over the years, his preparation was exhaustive and precise. When it came time to rehearse the curtain call, his stage manager instructed me in broken English to raise and lower the curtain in a steady rhythm as Marceau took several bows. This was known as “bouncing the curtain,” and it required that I quickly master a complex new skill. In the wings, I stood in front of two thick ropes. I would pull on one of the ropes to ring down the curtain while the other rope shot up in the opposite direction. When the curtain was almost down, I would grab the second rope and allow it to lift me four feet off the ground. At this point, my counterbalancing weight would reverse the direction of the two ropes, I would drop back down to the floor, then pull on the second rope with all my might. The curtain would “bounce,” barely touching the stage, then gracefully rise up again. For Marcel Marceau I was to repeat this maneuver ten times: five times up and five times down. It was a tricky business, demanding enormous effort and split-second timing, but by the end of the tech rehearsal, I had mastered it.
The evening performance was sensational. Each of the mimed mini-dramas was greeted with clamorous adulation. I and the entire McCarter crew performed our backstage tasks with self-assurance and a sure hand. Marceau had craftily saved his best material for last, and in the final moments of his performance the audience was completely transported. I’d never heard such an ovation.
Then came the curtain call.
I brought the curtain down on cue. After a poetic pause, I switched ropes and pulled it back up again. I switched again, ready to “bounce the curtain.” The second rope hoisted me high off the ground. The curtain reversed course and came back down. I switched ropes and was hoisted up again, the curtain bounced nicely off the stage and went straight back up. Perfection! I switched again, gaining confidence, as the cheers rang out. Down, up, down, up, as Marceau smiled, clutched his heart, and grandly bowed. On the fourth bow, the curtain came down, I switched ropes, and once again I lurched back up in the air. But by this time, my strength was flagging. I lost my grip and fell in a heap onto the stage floor. I scrambled to my feet and stared at the two ropes as they gradually slowed to a stop. Terror engulfed me. I had no idea which one I should grab next. Hoping for the best I reached for the one on the right and pulled on it for all I was worth. I pulled. And pulled. And pulled. And pulled. Bit by bit, the rope offered less and less resistance. The roar of the crowd was oddly diminishing. A ghastly thought slowly dawned on me: Had I grabbed the wrong rope? I turned and looked out at the stage. What I saw filled me with horror.
Between Marcel Marceau and the audience was a massive pile of dark-red velour, about eight feet high. It was McCarter’s grand show curtain, lying on the stage like an enormous felled giant. Instead of bringing the curtain back up, I’d brought it down, down, down, piling it up, up, up on the stage. This mountain of fabric was attached to a long metal pipe and a series of tangled wires. These hung down from McCarter’s fly space in full view of the audience, swaying slowly from side to side. The crowd had fallen into a deathly silence. As for Marcel Marceau he was standing erect, with his hands on his hips, his weight on one leg, and a foot turned out. He was staring at me with stony fixity. His immobile face, with its bone-white makeup, its knit brow, and its gashlike red sneer, could only be described as a mask of rage. Predictably, the famous mime said nothing.
The moment was indelible. I cannot say that it had anything to do with my eventually becoming an actor, but it most certainly persuaded me that I had no business being a stagehand.
M
y evening with Marcel Marceau was one of many memorable nights at McCarter Theatre in those two years. Blessedly, it was the only catastrophe. In most cases, I was an engrossed spectator. In my memory McCarter was a kind of conservatory of the performing arts, with me alone making up its entire student body. And the faculty of my private conservatory included some of the greatest figures of that era, in theater, music, and dance.
Where else could you find such a roster of brilliant teachers? Then as now, a parade of world-class artists and ensembles shared McCarter’s stage with its resident theater company, presenting to the university and to the greater Princeton community a vast smorgasbord of performances. And under the protective guise of a staffer’s brat, I became an expert at sneaking in to see them. I would casually stride through the stage door at the back of the theater, pass through the scene shop, costume shop, and rehearsal room, slip into the inner lobby, and mingle with the gathering crowd. Having bypassed the ticket-takers, I would walk into the auditorium with the paying audience, climb up four flights, and perch myself on the top stair at the very back of the balcony.
During the first half of any given performance, I would spot an empty seat far below in the first few rows. I would note down its exact location. During the intermission, I’d seek out the seat and confidently plant myself in it. And for the second half of the evening there I would be, a dozen feet away from Dame Joan Sutherland, Pete Seeger, Rudolph Serkin, Odetta, Isaac Stern, Dave Brubeck, Julian Bream, every major symphony orchestra, and the dance companies of Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, and the American Ballet Theatre. I would bask in the glow of their brilliance and drink it all in. There was even a visit from the Cambridge Circus, a young comedy troupe from England, featuring a tall, thin fellow with an especially anarchic streak. I worked with him forty years later and we deduced that, yes indeed, he’d been there and I’d seen him. His name was John Cleese.
On those nights of cultural cat burglary, I was given the gift of extraordinary artistic riches. But in retrospect I see a strangely forlorn side to it all. On my furtive McCarter capers I was a solitary teen, alone in a crowd of privileged adult sophisticates, creeping around like a spy behind enemy lines. Once again I was straddling two worlds, and in one of them I was a secretive loner.
In the other world, I continued to fly high. All through my senior year I seemed to leap from one shining moment to another. In my schoolwork I got nothing but A’s. As Student Council president I presided over weekly all-school assemblies, crafting a droll, self-deprecating public persona. I initiated a series of after-school concerts featuring solo performances by student musicians. In the foyer of the school library I created a gallery for student art, and its initial offering was an exhibition of my own watercolors. I invited actors from the McCarter Company to speak before meetings of the Tower Thespians, giving myself the unique opportunity of introducing a spirited Shakespearean monologue, performed by my own father. I even created a cottage industry of woodcut Christmas cards and peddled them to the parents of my classmates. My eagerness to please verged on the pathological. At the awards assembly at the end of the year, I routed my competition. Oh, what a good boy was I!
B
ut in the gleaming patina of such a triumphalist year, cracks occasionally appeared. In my year-long victory lap, I experienced a couple of queasy moments. And it’s a good thing that I did: they taught me more than I could ever have learned in schoolbooks.
The first of these moments shows what a rarefied and repressed social circle I was traveling in at Princeton High. One of my classes that year was Advanced Placement Social Studies. Our teacher was a squat, round, wryly cynical man named Mr. Roufberg. One day, Mr. Roufberg surprised us with an unusual assignment. He asked us a simple question: “What is the issue in your life that most concerns you?” He gave us all ten minutes to write down anonymous answers and pass them in. A day later, he reported on the results of his pop survey, rattling off our deep concerns with deadpan bemusement. The answers were heavily weighted toward such ponderous topics as nuclear disarmament, world poverty, and civil rights. I myself had written down some garbage about creeping commercialism.
Then Mr. Roufberg sprung a surprise, hitting us with a kind of sociopolitical ambush. He proceeded to summarize the answers to the same question that had been written by students from his other classes, a few levels lower in the school’s rigid social hierarchy. These answers were stunningly different from ours, far more personal and far more urgent.
Should I go steady?
Should I pet?
Should I have sex?
Should I tell my parents that I’ve had sex?
What’ll I do if I’m pregnant?
Listening to this list, all of us in AP Social Studies felt curiously chastened. We flushed and lowered our eyes. Our skin prickled with embarrassment. We were accustomed to feeling an offhand superiority to the working-class majority of our classmates—smarter, more worldly and sophisticated. Yet here they were, these earnest, impassioned townies, anonymously expressing emotions that we barely allowed ourselves. Creeping commercialism? Who the hell cared? Could it be that we were learning a lot more about social studies and they were learning a lot more about life?
A
nd then there was my hard-earned lesson in political chicanery. My sweet-natured mother turned downright wrathful one day when I bragged about one of my Student Council initiatives. As president, I had proposed to my Executive Committee that we use Student Council funds to purchase several of my Christmas cards to send to members of the high school faculty. The committee had briskly passed the measure and I had handily pocketed thirty-five bucks on the deal. When I came home brandishing a check and crowing about my entrepreneurial coup, Mom’s face turned crimson. In no uncertain terms, she ordered me to return the money and make the cards my personal gift to the school. Then she sat me down and explained to me, in words that seared into my brain, the concept of “conflict of interest.” What I had done, she said, was enough to get me impeached from any elected office out there in the real world. I was seventeen years old by this time. At such an age, I certainly should have known better. What kind of amoral idiot needed such elementary ethical counseling? I learned about conflict of interest that day, but I also learned how blithely corruptible I was. Corruptible and, I might add, unregenerate: I recall, to my shame, that I never quite got around to returning that check.
F
inally there was Patty Brown. Her story was my first real insight into the ugly realities of racism. In those days, the American Friends Service Committee ran a program that brought talented African-American high school students north from segregated schools in the Deep South. The idea was to give them a year-long experience of the fully integrated and presumably more enlightened world of public education in the North. This was 1962, remember, and the civil rights movement was only just beginning to take hold. As such, the program was well ahead of its time. If it was a little patronizing and naïve, it was also bold, idealistic, and worthy.
The program sent two students, a girl and a boy, to join the Junior Class of Princeton High School in my senior year. The girl’s name was Patty Brown. Patty was short, compact, and bespectacled, a smart, vibrant kid with a dazzling smile, a daring sense of humor, and an explosive laugh. It was easy to see what had made her a star student in her Alabama school and a prime candidate for the AFS program. She arrived in Princeton ready to seize this new experience with both hands, and her classmates responded in kind. She and I hit it off instantly and maintained a fun, teasing relationship that entire year.
When spring came around, Patty asked me to take her to her Junior Class prom. She asked over the telephone. Her voice was halting and uncharacteristically shy. Clearly the request had taken all her courage. Near tears, she touchingly added that she would understand if I felt I had to say no. I said yes. And so, for what was surely the first time in the history of PHS, a white male Student Council president would escort a black girl to a school prom. And not only that. The
vice
president, an African-American junior named Art Brooks, invited a white girl and asked Patty and me to double date. I said yes to this, too. Long before its time, we were all set to enact a four-character version of
Hairspray
.