Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

A coincidental message this morning touched off this new stroll down my own personal Memory Lane.  It came from an email buddy in San Francisco (apropos of a recent flap down in Astraya over Albee’s quasi-bestiality play “The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia?”) and reported: “I saw this play when it was produced here by the American Conservatory Theatre.  The work is definitely strange, but it’s also excellent and not really about [what one Australian review had euphemistically called] goat-shagging….”

Until I moved to Europe in 1949, I lived in a $31-a-month hovel at No. 184 in an unfashionable part of Greenwich Village’s West 10th Street, west of 7th Avenue.  (An up-&-comer named L. Bernstein resided in a fifth-floor walk-up “floor through” over in the chic block between 5th and 6th Avenues, not far from the 69 Washington Place abode of the lovely Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, who a few years later married him.)  Another already professionally prominent musical neighbor, the composer David Diamond, lived in an apartment over a garage located only a few blocks west of me on even less fashionable Hudson Street, which for him had the advantage of permitting musical performance at any hour of the day or night without anybody within earshot who might complain.  In those days David eked out his income from ASCAP by playing fiddle in the pit of such Broadway musicals as “Brigadoon”, but he wanted to get back into serious practice so he dragooned me into joining him to read through virtually the entire extant sonata repertoire for violin and piano. 

David cooked almost like a professional, and one Christmas (probably 1948) he invited a select group of gourmet musical friends (among them Aaron Copland) for dinner to hear us two unveil the brand-new sonata he’d just finished, intended for Joseph Szigeti, who soon after that played its more formal world premiere as the highlight of a Carnegie Hall recital.  (I remember that dinner primarily because of my shock at discovering, when I asked the Music Editor of “Time” to turn pages for me, that in spite of his enormous influence within the musical profession he could not read music - another story, perhaps, for another time….)

One evening David and I planned to try out some Village restaurant over in the fashionable neighborhood, and when he stopped by to pick me up he said he wanted to make a stop en route to drop off something or other with an aspiring young composer named William Flannigan, whose name I knew only for its occasional appearance as a byline over sporadic free-lance reviews in either the “Times” or its long-dead only rival, the “Herald-Tribune”.  There I met, sharing Flannigan’s apartment, his evident lover, a still unknown but exceptionally gifted stripling writer informally introduced to me as Ed Albee.

Some time after I’d spent a total of seven years (1949-56) in both Paris and Munich, David Diamond re-introduced Ed into my life.  From New York (or possibly from Italy, where he lived for a fairly long time) he wrote me that Ed’s first play ever, a one-act called “The Zoo Story”, would soon have its world premiere in the workshop of Berlin’s topnotch municipal Schiller-Theater, and that I might expect a telephone call from him.  The improbable chain of events leading up to that development had begun when David, impressed by reading that maiden effort of Ed in typescript, had sent it to an actor friend in Switzerland (whose name I recall as Pinchas Braun), whom it in turn impressed sufficiently for him not only to translate it on speculation into German but also send it to Albert Bessler, the Schiller-Theater’s almost clairvoyant Chefdramaturg who had some time earlier become the first outsider to “discover” Samuel Beckett when he saw the modest Parisian world-premiere production of “En attendant Godot“.

Sure enough, Ed soon after that did check in with me in Berlin, where he’d just arrived to attend every rehearsal of his very first play - and where he at that point knew nobody except me.  At that time I worked primarily for Time-Life International, in a one-room office located bang in the heart of downtown West Berlin at Kurfürstendamm 12, and when Ed came up to say hello he also laid on me a typescript of “The Zoo Story” in the original English, which he made clear he expected me to read.  We met several times after that for a meal - in view of his lack of German and almost total lack of personal contacts I extended myself to look after him - and at our next such meeting I told him I’d found his script “disturbing to read.”  He came back with “Well, I found it disturbing to write.” 

The night of its Berlin premiere I collected Ed at his hotel and drove him to the theater, then afterwards played guide on a pub-crawl to a few of Berlin’s more characteristic dives.  As we left the theater, we ran into a Berlin theater critic I knew slightly and he seized the occasion to ask Ed which writers he acknowledged as influences.  I recall two, possibly the only ones he mentioned: Beckett and Eugène Ionesco.

Fast-forward with me now to San Francisco, where I’d settled in 1982.  Ed turned up for some special occasion that had enticed him all the away across the continent from the home he’d established out at the easternmost tip of New York’s Long Island.  I sincerely looked forward to a reunion at the gala reception that opened that San Francisco event - where the celebrity Albee I soon discovered now preferred the more formal given name Edward accorded me a stony basilisk stare and the totally flummoxing statement that he had no recollection whatever of our fairly numerous meetings in Berlin, leaving hanging in the air the clearly implicit charge that I’d invented the whole story.  That so completely stunned me that I didn’t pursue the point but simply slunk away.

The celebrity who’d become Edward Albee showed his sense of loyalties in another situation, involving his brand-new first full-length play, the masterpiece that swiftly became world-famous as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”  After “The Zoo Story”, the Schiller-Theater’s Albert Bessler had also produced another early Albee one-act, “The Death of Bessie Smith”.  During those rehearsals we also saw a good deal of each other, and at one such meeting he told me about the death of another American musical phenomenon, the uniquely great blues singer Billie Holiday - hospitalized for incurable heroin addiction, with a wad of greenbacks adhesive-taped to one leg for buying further heroin even from her hospital bed.

The mere existence of the brand-new “Virginia Woolf” script had made theatrical news, and the ever alert Bessler had taken it totally for granted that Ed would also give this script to Berlin’s Schiller-Theater.  As I recall, those negotiations had already almost reached conclusion when one of the world’s major theatrical celebrities, Ingmar Bergman, then in charge of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater (which had blazed the international trail of an earlier American playwright, Eugene O’Neill, who eventually also won Sweden’s Nobel Prize for Literature), got into direct contact with Albee and actually requested rights to the world premiere.  “Zoo Story” or no “Zoo Story”, “Bessie Smith” or no “Bessie Smith”, Edward Albee gave the coveted world-premiere rights not to his first champion Bessler but to Bergman.

During the early 1980s, driving from upstate New York to California, I swung down for my introductory visit to Florida, and in Miami I attended the first and last presentation of some ambitious new festival (the name of which I’ve forgotten), where the highlights included the world premiere of some minor Albee play I saw but have meanwhile also completely forgotten.  I had to assume that the world-famous author had attended the rehearsals, but for understandable reasons I didn’t even bother to enquire….