Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

During my New York years (until I fled the country in 1949 at the age of 25) I frequently read the admirable New York Post because of its status as the only truly liberal daily newspaper in town.  Deplorably, as so frequently happens in the U.S. media world, some unperson eventually bought it and turned it into a truly sleazy tabloid of the most wretched kind, arguably New York’s worst, one I wouldn’t voluntarily touch today even with tongs.  This morning, however, thanks to a wonderful by-product of Google known as “Google Alert”, I found this story in my emailbox, and it’s sent me gallivanting off on an unplanned tangent off Memory Lane.

Some time back in this playpen I wrote about my two first meetings with Edward Albee, first in New York about sixty years ago, the second here in Berlin around 1960, when he came here for his first production of any kind, of his very first play – a disturbing one-act he’d entitled simply “The Zoo Story”.  Berlin’s late and much lamented Schiller-Theater at that time had an almost clairvoyantly prescient Chefdramaturg named Albert Bessler, who’d previously scored a major coup that brought the international break-through of Samuel Beckett; during a visit to Paris, intellectual curiosity had sent Bessler off into the Parisian equivalent of Off-Broadway to catch the original production of En attendant Godot, which he immediately snapped up for production in Berlin.  As long as Beckett lived, he nurtured a unique relationship with the Schiller as a direct result of that, and even though he commanded little or no German he came back to Berlin (more than once, as I recall) to direct his own work here; those productions included a later production of Warten auf Godot that theater fans here still talk about, with two of the Schiller’s brightest lights, Horst Bollmann and Stefan Wigger, perfectly cast as the two wan clowns marooned out in the middle of life while patiently waiting for the daily proclaimed arrival of God[ot] . . . who of course never does turn up for his purported date with them.

Some time around the beginning of the 1960s, after my move from Munich to Berlin in 1956, a letter from Ed Albee in New York took me by total surprise, for since that original purely adventitious momentary encounter about ten or twelve years earlier we’d had no contact whatever with each other.  That first encounter had come about as spin-off from my knowing the composer David Diamond, who on our way to have dinner in Greenwich Village (where David and I lived only a few blocks apart) he wanted to drop something off for the aspiring young composer William Flannigan, who shared an apartment (and, one inferred, considerably more) with Ed Albee, whom at that point one could fairly describe as completely unknown.  That letter to me in Berlin came right out of the blue, with the purpose of reminding me of our New York brush to inform me that the German (Swiss?) actor Pinchas Braun, also a friend of David’s, had impulsively not only translated Albee’s first (one-act) play The Zoo Story into German but also managed to get it accepted for production at Berlin’s first-rate Schiller-Theater.  The letter said that since he knew no one in Berlin, and had never even visited here, he hoped we could meet again.

I vividly recall our reunion encounter, when he came up to the little one-room Kurfürstendamm office my primary employer at that time, Time-Life International, had retained when its postwar Germany bureau had followed the mass journalistic exodus from Berlin to Bonn, the rather jerk-water capital of the brand-new Federal Republic of Germany.  He brought with him a typescript of The Zoo Story in its original English, and he made it quite clear he expected me to read it before the opening.  I did indeed read it, and at our next meeting, when I told him I’d found reading it disturbing, he responded with a thin smile and “I found it disturbing to write.” 

In the likely event you don’t know that two-character play, it involves a profoundly neurotic, arguably psychotic young man who strikes up a park-bench conversation with a total stranger he winds up by maneuvering into fatally stabbing him, with a knife he himself provides.  As his dying words I recall “Thank you.  Thank you.”

The overall high literary quality of the script not only impressed me but also intrigued me, and since our several mutual friends in New York provided abundant conversational material, Ed and I sporadically got together during the play’s rehearsal period.  On opening night I drove by his hotel to take him to the theater, and also took him out on the town after the performance to celebrate the first production of his life a bit.  During rehearsals, naturally Ed had become acquainted with some of the excellent Schiller ensemble, but obviously nobody there had done anything at all about looking after the débutant playwright after that rather low-profile premiere.

Albert Bessler wanted to see anything else of Ed’s he could, so two additional early one-acters, The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith, also had their world premieres in the Schiller-Theater’s Werkstatt.  Following Berlin’s pioneering discovery of Samuel Beckett, thanks to Bessler, the Schiller-Theater to a certain extent preened over its discovery of the promising up-and-comer Ed Albee.  I recall that at the end of The Zoo Story‘s opening performance, we got stopped on the way to my car by a Berlin theater critic I knew slightly.  He asked Ed one question – which rather surprised me since I’d have expected him to write his own answer, in his own critical opinion.  He wanted to know which writers Ed felt had influenced him.  After a brief hesitation, he named – I can’t recall in which order – Tennessee Williams, Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco.  Then off we went for our celebratory dip into Berlin’s exuberant nightlife.

Next in the succession of Ed’s larger plays came, as I recall, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – and that original production’s overwhelming success overnight made Ed a major international theatrical celebrity.  Understandably, Albert Bessler and his Intendant Boleslaw Barlog (who’d almost single-handedly revived post-war Berlin theater in 1945, including the discovery of a young unknown named Hildegard Knef) took it for granted that Berlin’s Schiller would automatically get the rights for the next production anywhere.  As my almost always reliable memory tells me, Bessler and Barlog even actually got those rights all sacked and contractually sewed up, in spite of formidable competition from all sides.

Then, alas, sheer opportunism raised its ugly but perhaps inevitable head.  At that time Ingmar Bergmann, internationally the unrivalled big noise among cinéastes, had taken charge of Sweden’s national theater in Stockholm (which incidentally had played a major part in the international career and standing of an earlier American playwright, the Nobel laureate Eugene O’Neill).  When Bergmann personally requested the rights to the first production of Woolf following its sensational world premiere, Albee with no perceptible ado caved in, retracted those rights from the Schiller, and gave them instead to Bergmann.  I’d imagine the Schiller’s administration could have, had it wanted to, sued Ed’s pants off, but for whatever reason it didn’t.  Berlin’s avid theater audience did get to see later productions of Ed’s plays, but it had to wait a long, long time before that Woolf wound healed.

This change of paragraphs denotes the passage of some thirty-odd years and my wrenching trans-Atlantic move from Berlin to California.  Meanwhile Albee’s name had become, at least among those who followed the arts, a household word.  When the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned his expected arrival to participate in some sort of national journalistic congress, I enthusiastically looked forward to a reunion, and until that congress opened, I (so to speak) dined out on my proud story of how I, myself, personally, had played at least a peripheral part in the Berlin discovery of this meanwhile major literary celebrity.

A reception marking the Congress’s opening provided the first occasion to bring Ed and me back together.  When I went up to him and launched into my “Ed, you remember that time in Berlin” routine, he aloofly regarded me with dead-fish eyes until I rather swiftly, under those circumstances, reached the end of my brief summary.  He then, with equal lack of any perceptible emotion of any kind, coolly told me No, he had no such memory whatever of such an alleged encounter, leaving hanging in the gelid air between us the unspoken accusation that I’d made the whole thing up.

That response almost totally struck me dumb - but it also took me so totally by surprise that I plunged incredulously on, offering bits and pieces from those several Berlin encounters of ours I thought he couldn’t possibly have forgotten – but no, he said, he had absolutely no such memory.  Finally, as if finally, graciously, taking pity on the floudering, allegedly total stranger before him, he did say: “Well, so many years ago….”

Between Berlin and that wounding encounter, in a New Yorker account of some New York opening of his, it had attracted my attention that several cast members mentioned had consistently referred to him as Edward, which in that context automatically had a certain unusual formality.  I’d first met him and had ever since thought of him as Ed Albee, and I addressed him as Ed on that traumatic occasion in San Francisco.  Might he conceivably have risen so high that he regarded that on my part as some sort of lèse-majesté…?

During my only transcontinental drive from the East-Coast Berkshires to California in 1982, I’d dipped down for my only sampling of Florida, on assignment to cover a big-time (one-time?) arts festival in Miami for Germany’s weekly newspaper Die Zeit, and the opulent programming included the world premiere of some Albee play that proved disappointingly minor, since mercifully forgotten.  Presumably its famous author had come down from his Long Island home for that event, but it didn’t even occur to me to make my presence known to him.

Before I left San Francisco in 1995 to return for all time to my beloved Berlin, I enjoyed the first reunion in years there with another major American playwright and his wife both of whom I’d known since the early 1940s in New York, him then as a young up-and-comer: my fellow Texan Horton Foote (recently, at 91, celebrated in The New York Times Sunday Magazine) and his wonderful wife Lillian, with Horton invited for some slap-up production of one of his plays by Frisco’s outstanding American Conservatory Theater.  Over lunch, I naturally told him about the stiff-arming brush-off Ed had given me there not long before that.  It came as no surprise to Horton; he made no comment except a casual “Oh, yes – he’s known for that sort of thing.”

So there you have forseeably the last word I’ll ever write about Ed[ward] Albee.  I’d fully intended to devote this Berlin morning to something quite different . . . but that statement leads me back onto another tangent off Memory Lane to a poem that at least partially branded itself into my brain back in an English class at El Paso’s Austin High School about a thousand years ago.  Anybody reading this still recall the American poet Richard Le Gallienne?  (My linguistically punctilious mind has always stumbled over that inconsistent surname: how in blazes can the obviously feminine Gallienne conceivably have acquired the masculine article Le?  Can anyone reading this plausibly explain that for me?)  Anyway, here you have that little poem – in only eight lines, the story of my life:

I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.

And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand —
So what could I do but laugh and go?