A dear friend of mine died suddenly this week and suddenly nothing else mattered.
David Arthur was so many things. An actor, a dancer, a singer, a songwriter, a novelist and the single person in my life who knew the most about Broadway and the American musical theatre.
Our Dear David
Now, being a gay man of a certain age, I do not say the latter lightly. Of course, I have MANY friends who excel in this area, many of whom read this blog and will be quite upset at this statement.
However, none had the breadth of knowledge over so many shows over so many decades. Or still hung on to rare recordings of Bea Lillie, Tallulah Bankhead, Mary Martin, Julie Andrews, et al in _________ or performing __________ on the radio, or performing their nightclub act where they did patter and a song that was cut from ________, or… well, you get the picture.
I met David in the late 1970s through one of the most caring, memorable and certainly most talented people I knew at the time, or ever, the late Brian Lasser. We were walking on the west side of Manhattan to meet this guy who he claimed “is the funniest person I know.”
Funniest?! I’ll be the judge
Now, being a gay man of the certain age, in the 1970s, I can tell you there were A LOT of funny people. But Brian, as usual, was correct.
Can I remember a single thing David said at that first meeting? Certainly not! Only that somewhere there was a story about either Noel Coward or Elaine Stritch (Note: Probably both) mixed with a diatribe of backstage gossip about pretty much every show that was playing at the time on Broadway.
Man, we had so much fun. And neither one of them are around anymore to remind me of exactly what we talked about.
Of course, they are still here…somewhere.
But it’s not quite the same.
Miss you both
Though I do remember Brian telling me about the time he went to see David play Captain Hook in a summer stock production of Peter Pan somewhere in the Midwest and regaling about how hilarious he was.
And how many liberties he took with the “character.”
At one point he had Hook dancing the Charleston back and forth across the stage doing jazz hands.
This reminds me of the time some years later David took pity on me – soooo not a professional dancer – and granted my request for him to teach me how to tap dance.
All my life I wanted to tap dance and was too embarrassed to try it.
I even invented a character for it – the gangster Jimmy DeMarco.
Go ahead with it Chairy!
Jimmy was not tall but somewhat more, well, diminutive, like me – think George M. Cohan adjacent with a tommy gun and a black and white suit. But he had a heart of gold underneath. And he could really, REALLY dance.
It is not a lie to say that for two f’n hours David stood on the linoleum floor in my kitchen and tried, tried and TRIED to teach me to tap.
I was absolutely AWFUL! I mean, like appallingly bad. I could hear what he was telling me to do but my feet just wouldn’t friggin’ do it. He told me eventually they would. And that suddenly I’d “get it.”
I did not have faith
So he stayed with me, kept at it and eventually, EVENTUALLY I managed to do something that approached… not even a time step.
Though he was kind enough to tell me I was….getting it. And would’ve kept going long past those two hours. But now I decided to take pity on him and say we should stop before Jimmy had a heart attack.
This brilliantly funny man, who was flown in to teach honors high school students with three left feet at New Trier High School in Chicago year after year for their big musical, and toured all over the world in Bubbling Brown Sugar, would have stayed in in that hot apartment in West Hollywood coaching a fictional character to dance for as many hours as it took just because I wanted to.
Gosh, it was so……psychotic!
Not at all how I looked, but how David made me feel!
And yeah, I was really, really, REALLY Baaaaaad.
Here’s one of David’s favorite Broadway performers – the great Gwen Verdon – who, of course, he met a bunch of times and also had funny stories about I will tell to one of two of you privately – in a clip from The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s.
There’s nothing like an international tragedy to bring out the wit in people. One doesn’t have to imagine the comic potential in Malaysia Airlines’ second airplane disaster killing hundreds of people because Jason Biggs does it for you.
Hard up for a Hamas joke for the next cocktail party you attend this week? Hey, Bill Maher can take care of it on your end:
And if you happen to be on TV hosting a live show when some horrific news story happens (which, let’s face it, is not an impossibility given the explosion of regular people like us on TV these days), you can always count on some random prankster to call in and lighten things the way this guy, posing as an eyewitness military expert, did for MSNBC’s Krystal Ball this week.
KB: Please tell us what you saw on the ground there in the Ukraine?
Prankster: Well, I was looking out the window and I saw a projectile flying through the sky, and it would appear that the plane was shot down by a blast of wind from Howard Stern’s ass.
KB: So it would appear the plane was shot down – can you tell us any more from your military training of what sort of missile system that may have been coming from?
Prankster: Boy, you’re a dumbass, aren’t you?
Click here to watch the clip… if you can.
We’re all quite witty these days, aren’t we? And nothing’s off limits. Because if you think it is then you don’t understand comedy at all. And you’re too politically correct. Or a hypocrite who will laugh AT things YOU DO like but will become offended if someone pokes fun at something that hits too close to home – like a plane crash.
I mean, hell, even Dick Cheney chuckles in evil, ironic delight at being referred to as Darth Vader – what’s wrong with you?
The new way to be au courant, hip, happening and oh so clever is to publicly comment somewhere on something or, well, anything that is breaking news. And thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Twitter, Instagram and a handful of other people and stuff we all have ample means to do it. Yes, you get Warhol’s 15 promised minutes of fame for doing very little. What he didn’t bargain for is that the words and images you put out there will resonate for days, months or years later – long after your name has faded. Or perhaps even forever, which is a lot longer than that.
Unfortunately, this button does not exist.
I’ve certainly been guilty of this too. I mean, who could pass up a good rant against the extreme right wing, the US Supreme Court or the uncreative choices that double for mass entertainment from the Hollywood film and television industrial complex these days? Not me, it would seem.
Like many of us, I long to be heard by a world that too often seems either too noisy or indifferent to take the time out to listen to my pearls of wit and wisdom. How great that I get to be alive and in the orbit of Facebook, Twitter and many yet to be discovered systems that will now allow me to get my thoughts out there even faster –- perhaps even by boring a virtual hole through the cerebral cortex-ae of all of my millions of followers? You think I’m exaggerating? Hmmph – that’s what she (he?) said years ago.
It took the sudden death of a dear friend of 30 plus years yesterday to make me remember: Wait – it’s actually okay NOT to weigh in on everything – or even anything – if you don’t care to.
This friend, who had an illustrious show biz career in his field and had been sick but died rather suddenly, left very specific instructions for no funeral, no obituary and, really, nothing at all organized to commemorate his death. Having spent a lifetime behind-the scenes presenting the public lives of more famous people than you or I could count in an afternoon, it is not surprising that at some point he learned the hard earned lesson that many of us will eventually realize (and I’m paraphrasing here):
…in the end the spotlight means nothing except the heat of the moment. It’s irrelevant to who you really are or what, if anything, your life was really about. And if you keep chasing it, it will eventually bore a real hole so deep into your soul (Note: your brain will already be gone by this time) that there will literally be nothing left to you at all…
This friend also taught me another valuable lesson, among so many others. And that is that sometimes, more often than one imagines, not commenting might be the best strategy of all. Or at least withholding comments until you’ve had time to think awhile about what’s happened.
First steps are the hardest
My friend lived a lifetime of strategizing in both how to help people sell themselves and also speak to the media and was darned successful at it. It’s not that he wasn’t outspoken and didn’t speak up – it’s just that he knew that to do it all the time meant you were surrendering what little effect one has in the world. But to listen, and then think, and then listen some more before formulating your final thoughts and saying what was on your mind – was not only wiser but ultimately the most potent way of getting your own way.
Broadway legend Elaine Stritch, who died one day prior to my friend and whom I didn’t know personally, might disagree. She spent a lifetime speaking before she fully thought out anything and it seemed to work quite well for her. At least publicly. Or perhaps that was just acting and she kept much of what she really felt deep down inside. The latter just might be more likely, I can hear my friend saying to me and who am I to disagree with him.
She did it her way
No one knew their way around a celebrity better than he did and said celebrities adored him. I mean, can you say you turned down a full-time retainer with show biz’s one-time queen of media manipulation, Madonna, in her eighties heyday – – a moment when a truly skilled person could manage it all and a time, if you can imagine it , long before media was social and when tweeting was the sound of the noisy bird outside your bedroom window you wanted to shoot?
No, I didn’t think so. I thought he was a bit crazy to do so back then but years later I totally get the perils of working for a TRUE QUEEN. Though clearly all he had to do at the time was to take a bit of time to really, really, really think about it.
(Note: I do hope he can forgive me for dropping that one name when referring to him. Though if it’s any consolation, before writing, I did think about it).
In any event, back to the public’s right to know what you and I think about – everything. Do YOU stop and consider why anyone should even care what you think? OK, well I don’t. Not often enough. Forget about cats on Facebook and Instagram – we’re talking about off-the-cuff and immediate thoughts on death, carnage, politics, other people’s family members thrust into the public eye through rape, theft, divorce, robbery, pillaging, as well as attempted murder. On the other hand, it feels good to get it off your chest, doesn’t it? Okay, I’ll answer that, too – yes.
Of course, it is the height of personal irony that all of this is being written to you in a blog – a vehicle whose inherent purpose is to express personal views on a variety of subjects for public consumption. It is also quite paradoxical that you are most likely reading what is being said here through some social media tool whose entire existence has just been tried and found guilty by a jury of one (moi) for the deadened senses of the corrupt social culture we are all so (cue appropriate sarcasm) privileged to live in nowadays.
The Chair excluded, of course
Well, yes, I am nothing if not a contrarian, and an often ironic one at that. But in tribute to my late friend, who was quite savvy about this kind of thing even though he didn’t subscribe to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram – I’m going to from now on take a beat or two, or maybe even ten or twenty-three, before I open up my mouth, pen and fingers to type out my reaction to the grizzly events of the day. Or, well, at least think about doing so. Who knows, with all the pent up, thought out frustration I might become even more contrarily sarcastic than usual in a much more ironically intelligent way – lest you be concerned all of that self-reflection would cause me to lose my edge.
That’s probably the most fitting tribute I can give to a person who always did both – that is aside from shutting up entirely. Which, god knows, is not a real possibility for any of us anymore. Is it?
notes from a chair 