A Freewheelin' Time (20 page)

Their voices were so disparate—her extraordinary soprano crosshatching with his intense and unpretty sound—but the dissonance thrilled people. Their convergence was predictable; for folk music, it was a mandate. Professionally, Baez would be good for Dylan. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and set out to get it. She wanted to get his songs to her audience. She was a political person and to continue singing woeful old-time ballads in woeful times wouldn’t work for much longer.

The festival was energizing because the music was so good and the feeling of being on the brink of something big was in the air. Folk music had won the day, moving out to unite discontented kids everywhere who were waiting for a ticket to ride. On the dramatic closing night of the festival when the performers linked arms together on the stage and movingly sang “We Shall Overcome,” the entire audience was on its feet, singing with them.

After Newport, Baez and Dylan’s professional appearances together were exciting and provoked gossip about an affair. At first it was just gossip—then, of course, it wasn’t. What was especially hard for me was dealing with what was private becoming public.

Brecht

In the late spring
of 1963, I’d begun work on a production of
Brecht on Brecht,
a play by George Tabori scheduled to open in July at the Sheridan Square Playhouse. It had been produced a few years earlier at the Theatre de Lys with Lotte Lenya in the cast. The new production, directed by Gene Frankel, was bare bones. Subtitled
An Improvisation,
it was made up of excerpts from Brecht’s writings and songs, interspersed with taped readings from his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. The cast consisted of six actors, three male and three female, who recited monologues or sang or both.

There wasn’t much of a set to speak of—just a few chairs and maybe a table and a large photo of Brecht on a scrim in the background. The Sheridan Square Playhouse didn’t have a raised stage. The audience seating was in front and to the left and right of the performance area, which was in front of the theater’s back wall. There was a backstage room off to one side.

I was the assistant to the stage manager and set designer, Quinton Raines. Quinton was originally from the South and in his late twenties, or early thirties. He was an aspiring playwright, and I later acted in a few showcase productions of one of his plays. He was also a capable carpenter who, as noted previously, would put together crews of artists, actors, and writers to build sets and props for Off-and Off-Off-Broadway plays. There was a regulation that theaters with seating under a certain number could hire a nonunion crew. I learned to use power tools and was extremely proud of the muscles I developed as a result.

Quinton was a bit obsessed with Bobby and would insist on talking with him about philosophy and writing. Quinton had a tendency to pry into people’s lives, especially when he had had too much to drink; he never knew when to back off. I had a hard time with people who drank and soul-talked at me, which was obviously a holdover from experience with my mother. I would get sucked into the situation and not see a way out. Otherwise, Quinton was all right.

Brecht on Brecht
was a very spare production overall: there were the actors, the director, a lighting technician, Quinton, and me. I was thrilled to be working on this play; Brecht had captivated me for some time. I was intrigued by what he had to say and the rhythm of his language.

I wanted to share with Bob my interest in Brecht and my preoccupation with his dilemma as an artist living under both autocratic Communism and democratic capitalism. There is no doubt Bob had heard of Brecht, as Brecht was known in those years, but he might not have read anything by him or seen his plays.

I told him to meet me at the theater earlier than usual so he could catch a few rehearsals. I really wanted him to see the play and one performance in particular: the actress Micki Grant singing “Pirate Jenny.” The song is a tale of the toil and trouble of a hotel maid constantly ordered about by everyone. She sings her song of revenge as the Pirate Jenny on a great ship, the Black Freighter, where all her tormentors are taken prisoner. One by one, she sends them to their death. The hour of her ship had come in.

It is a compelling song of revenge and as sung by Micki Grant, a black woman, it took on another dimension. This was the civil rights era, and listening to her sing the song was a powerful piece of living theater. I knew Bob should not miss it. He sat still and quiet. Didn’t even jiggle his leg. Brecht would be part of him now, as would the performance of Micki Grant as Pirate Jenny.

My fascination with Brecht had begun with the cast album of the
Threepenny Opera
that my parents owned.
Threepenny
opened at the Theatre de Lys in 1954 and played there for a long time. I would sit on the floor in front of the cabinet my father had built to hold their record albums and stare at the cover, disappearing into it, the way a child does. The cast was pictured there in costumes of reds, blacks, oranges, and yellows—very fiery. In the picture Lotte Lenya’s hair was orange and her makeup exaggerated; she has a mean expression on her face. The other woman on the cover was prettier but done up the same way, wearing a form-fitting, vibrantly colored dress. There seemed to be something naughty about them. They certainly didn’t look like the women I saw walking around the streets in Queens. The music was raw and raucous and had nothing to do with opera as far as I could tell.

Some years later when I read John Gay’s
Beggar’s Opera,
on which Brecht based his
Threepenny Opera,
one thing led to another and I began to read a lot of Brecht and to learn about his life. Brecht left Germany because of the rise of Nazism and lived in various countries before eventually coming to the United States. Once here he got to know other expatriates and refugees from Nazism and Fascism who worked in Hollywood as writers, and he, too, headed West to join their ranks.

McCarthyism was on the rise, and Brecht was suspected of being a Communist, as were so many others working in Hollywood. Brecht was certainly a Marxist, but he never joined the Communist Party and he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. He was issued a subpoena to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947. Immediately after giving testimony but not names, he left for Europe, wanting no part of an American Inquisition. He went to live in East Germany, only to have his theatrical ideas stifled under the dogma of Communism. Where could he live to pursue his work without interference from the government? His dilemma fueled my questions about what it would be like to live under Communism.

Brecht became a symbol for me during the Cold War. In all the discussions of communism versus capitalism, I was obsessed with the restrictions and censorship imposed on the artist and free thinker by both Western and Eastern governments. I couldn’t see why someone who believed in open expression and an equitable society could be in conflict with the ideals of democracy and Marxism.

I was intrigued by the Cuban revolution of 1959, figuring that a Latin culture might give artists more leeway under Communism—in other words, play up the “party” in Communist Party. The Cuban revolutionaries would add color and soul and a democratic structure to the worthy ideas of Karl Marx. I thought that the ice-cold rule of Stalinism could not survive the warmth of the Cuban sun.

Most of the people I knew, and had known ever since I could remember, were engaged with the discourse of the day, which meant listening to voices coming from everywhere talking about Cuba, civil rights, the threat of nuclear war, and the escalating war in Vietnam. The revolution in Cuba looked like hope for those of us who grew up with the orthodoxy of the old left. Red-diaper babies or not, something was off; the old ways were not working, and the Soviet Union was definitely not the answer. It was in this context that I explored the life and work of Bertolt Brecht.

Intellectually, I understood the hard times American Communists had endured surviving McCarthyism and the blacklist, as had people on the left with whom I identified. Just a flicker of suspicion could get you fired from a job. If you knew someone who might be associated with Communist Party members or you had a name similar to that of someone who might be or were married to or a relative of someone, you were suspect. Many lives were ruined as a result.

As an example close to home, I remember the Hollywood actress Karen Morley
(Scarface, Pride and Prejudice,
and numerous other films of the 1930s and 1940s) and her husband, the actor Lloyd Gough
(Body and Soul, Sunset Boulevard,
and many others), coming around our apartment in Queens when I was a child. They had both been blacklisted in Hollywood because of their membership in the Communist Party (or maybe just an affiliation with it—the subject was always so hush-hush, nothing was ever known for sure). They moved to New York City, where the blacklist still hadn’t taken a firm hold, to look for theater and television work.

In 1954 Karen Morley actually ran for lieutenant governor of New York on the American Labor Party ticket, the progressive political party that was discounted as merely a front for the Communist Party. The ALP was the party of the popular congressman Vito Marcantonio, who had been a protégé of Fiorello La Guardia. Years earlier my mother had worked for Marc, as he was known, giving speeches and writing articles for his campaigns. When we were young children, she took my sister and me with her to Marc’s district office in East Harlem, then predominantly an Italian neighborhood, where we helped stuff envelopes for mailings to his constituents.

My mother on the stump for Vito Marcantonio, Harlem congressman

When Lloyd Gough, Karen’s husband, came over to our house he would tell us stories, play the concertina, and sing drinking songs and sea chanties. My sister and I always demanded more, and he usually obliged.

Years later I saw an announcement that Lloyd was one of many performers playing at a club in the Village. I was eager to introduce him to Bob; I had talked him up a great deal because he was such a happy memory from my early childhood. But to my chagrin Lloyd wasn’t at all friendly; he brushed me off, as if he were ashamed of being seen playing in a folk club. Because of his political beliefs, he had been denied his livelihood as an actor. He was in the dumps—more than a decade of being blacklisted had been very rough for him.

I
thought of the Communists as regimented and doctrinaire, albeit honest and genuine in their desire for a better world. Being immersed in politics meant being a strategist, and that I was not. Bottom line: I knew that I could never sign on to any political organization. It wasn’t in my nature to follow a party line. I would participate, but I would never join anything.

W
ith the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, America had a young president who seemed ready and able to look at the problems at home and in the world in new ways. There was hope that the times would be changing. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Politics are politics, and progress moves at an excruciatingly slow pace.

The civil rights movement was tearing apart the old patterns of society and stitching up new ones while the escalating war in Vietnam was ripping into the fabric of American society in what seemed like irreparable ways. A cultural war was about to break out in many arenas.

Rock and roll was approaching adolescence and kids who had grown up with one foot in folk music and the other in rock were unsteady in their loyalties. Rock was tied to commercialism and selling out. Elvis was a flagrant reminder of that.

A musician will censure and judge music, but not by genre. Bob and I listened to rock and roll, which was part of the musical landscape. He didn’t separate music into categories of worthiness; nor did I. I had grown up listening to all kinds of music. Bob soaked up everything and glommed onto whatever taught him something new. At the height of the folk boom, a variety of music was still being offered in the Village clubs. Jazz, although sidelined by folk music and rhythm and blues, was easy to find at the Vanguard, occasionally at the Village Gate, and at the often relocating Five Spot. Like Beat poetry, jazz was not trendy in the 1960s, but the music was ensconced within the culture. And like the folkies some years down the line, jazz musicians struggled to survive on fewer gigs.

F
or a time, the Five Spot was up and running on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Third Avenue. It was a small and smoky club. One night on our way someplace else, Bob and I stopped in to see Charlie Mingus play with his quartet. That night, the piano player was white and female. The band was in full swing when Mingus, still playing his bass, started to comment aloud to the pianist as she played. His voice got louder and more insistent as he critiqued her abilities.

Go ahead bitch, show me what you can’t do; white lady wanna play jazz: He was vicious and he didn’t let up. I watched, mortified for her. But she continued playing like a pro, her face betraying nothing but concentration. She hit those keys, swung those notes as if her life depended on it. Mingus tormented her to the very end of the set and then said no more. In the sparsely crowded club, people stared into their drinks, pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened. After some applause, Bobby and I left in silence. It took a while to get a grip on what we’d just witnessed.

I
wasn’t attentive to the comings and goings of the business world of folk music, and I didn’t pay much attention to the intrigues of the musicians either, until I was involved with Bobby. The more I saw, the less I wanted to be involved. I was always wary of the confinement of being a member of a scene. I was loyal to friends, no matter their standing in a pecking order. The in-depth discussions about who and what was truly traditional or who and what fit in some category or other were not that important to me, but I did love discovering, and learning about, all kinds of American music. I absorbed the music that grew from the loamy American soil—through cross-pollination over continents—viscerally during that period of my life. I cherish and love it. I grew up prepared to listen and see, and I did just that.