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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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!
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.
Such joyous talent. As he was.
“If They Could See Me Now” – Gwen Verdon on The Ed Sullivan Show
notes from a chair 