My first lunch with Joe

(excerpted from the chapter “Malacology”)

Gail moving into office at Public Theater in 1966.
Photo: Gail Papp

I was something of a loner in these early days at The Public Theater. Although I had friendly relations with the small staff from the Great Northern Hotel when we had all moved into the Astor Library building, I seldom went out to lunch like the others did, and I was never on the inside track of office gossip.

My extreme shyness was the result of a geographically unsettled childhood during which I had attended fifteen different public schools from kindergarten to the 12th grade. My sense of strangeness as the perpetual new kid in class at a new school every year had been intensified by the fact that I was an only child tethered to a solitary, adult-centered life at home. As a result, I developed the unshakable feeling that nobody ever recognized me.

My extreme shyness was the result of a geographically unsettled childhood during which I had attended fifteen different public schools from kindergarten to the 12th grade. My sense of strangeness as the perpetual new kid in class at a new school every year had been intensified by the fact that I was an only child tethered to a solitary, adult-centered life at home. As a result, I developed the unshakable feeling that nobody ever recognized me.
The repetition of this anxious experience fostered habits of self-reliance and social disguise. Although I’d been lively as a young child, by the time I grew up I had adopted the invisible cloak of a quiet person with good manners.
Living in this bubble, I was shocked one day when Joe asked me out to lunch. Had he gone mad? This was unheard of. He only went to lunch with the Parks Commissioner, a philanthropist, a director, or actors like Julie Harris, Colleen Dewhurst, George C. Scott, and James Earl Jones. Someone like that.

Now he was asking me? I didn’t know what to make of it. Actually, I felt like hiding, but, as with Joe’s scary request that I take his director’s notes at Troilus and Cressida previews during my first summer, I couldn’t think of a plausible reason to say no. So, as I had done then, I said “Fine.”

From the outset of this first lunch at a nearby restaurant, our conversation was fun and on an equal footing. On the way to the restaurant, we discovered that we both easily read street signs backwards (Rotsa Ecalp) as well as the food on the restaurant’s menu (slessum). We also discovered that we were of like mind in preferring W.C. Fields to Charlie Chaplin, Scriabin to Liszt, and Martin Buber to Swami Muktananda, a popular cult figure in the sixties.

When I mentioned to Joe at lunch that I was surprised a theatrical biography of him hadn’t been written yet, because there was a need for something more personal than the columns of information in Who’s Who, he began to tell me about his boyhood in Brooklyn.
“I grew up in a mixed neighborhood in Williamsburg,” he said. “Aside from Jews, there were Italians, and there was an Irish section close by, and then a block away from there was a group we called the Mohammedans.
“I grew up in a mixed neighborhood in Williamsburg,” he said. “Aside from Jews, there were Italians, and there was an Irish section close by, and then a block away from there was a group we called the Mohammedans. Then not too far from there, a black neighborhood. This was the community, and it was broken up by turf. No way in the world would I leave my block without four or five people going with me, and then you took your life in your hands.”
Somehow I had pictured Joe growing up in the protective embrace of a closely knit family, but evidently, that wasn’t the way things had been and he’d had to fend for himself from an early age.

Joe on the phone at his desk at The Public Theater.
Photo: Gail Papp

The waiter appeared with two glasses of chardonnay that Joe had ordered.
Joe raised his glass.
“There was a lot of violence in my old neighborhood,” he said. “You stayed within a very narrow confine, and the difference between being Jewish and being anything else was an extraordinary difference.”
I took a sip of wine.
“I didn’t know anything about the theater then and spoke like any Brooklyn kid.”
“What did you sound like?” I asked.
“Well, we had to memorize Marc Antony’s funeral oration in school. That’s when Caesar is lying there dead in his blood-stained toga. And Marc Antony says, ‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. You all do know this mantle…’ We would say it this way: ‘If you have teahzz, pree-peah ta shed dem now. You-all do know dis mantull…’ That’s the way we talked.”
Joe said that he’d been able to improve his speech with the encouragement of a wonderful teacher in high school.
I asked about his unusual teenage interest in Shakespeare. I wondered if it had been stimulated by memorizing those speeches from the plays in school.
“No, I think it was because I grew up in a home where Yiddish was spoken,” Joe said. “That was our first language and English was only a second language. Because of that, I became acutely sensitive to the musical sounds of different languages and to the cadences and rhythms of the spoken word.”
Afterward, I interpreted this lunch as a gentlemanly gesture on Joe’s part, which I appreciated. But I certainly wasn’t expecting another meal anytime soon, so I was surprised when he invited me to have lunch again the following week at a different restaurant he thought I’d like.
This time Joe told me that it had taken a war to get him out of New York.
“I joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor and was on a baby aircraft carrier called a Kaiser Coffin.”
“I know about those,” I said. “My father worked on them as a draftsman at Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California during the war. He let me visit him there.”
“Is that so?” Joe said. “Well, the one I was on had an elevator which used to take the fighter planes up to the main deck. It was a marvelous little stage, so whenever we had time off, I would put some shows together. Bob Fosse was in the Navy with me. He was just a kid and I did a show around him. I began to like that. We toured the Aleutian Chain—that’s Kodiak and Attu—then we went to Japan and played at the Ernie Pyle Theater in Tokyo. That was really my beginning, but I never thought I’d do it as a means of making a living. That never entered my mind.”
Joe also talked about studying at the Actor’s Lab in Los Angeles after the war. The G.I. Bill had paid for it.
“I began to read and do things there I’d never done before,” he told me. “I sort of fell in love with live actors on the stage.”
“But you didn’t become an actor,” I said.

“If I had permitted myself to be more vulnerable, I would have continued in the acting profession,” Joe said, “but the ego of an actor is a very difficult thing to have to cope with because you yourself are the instrument.”

Excerpted from a chapter in Gail Papp’s forthcoming memoir

Persuading Joe to Read The Normal Heart

(excerpted from the chapter “The Normal Heart”)

Larry Kramer at the Papps’ cottage.
Photo: Gail Papp
When I first began to read scripts for Joe I discovered that we had similar tastes in plays. I really can’t account for it. We were so dissimilar in so many ways. There was a thirteen-year age difference, a difference in backgrounds, and our personalities were polar opposites. Nevertheless, we were both attracted by powerful language and subjects inspired by what Joe called “the terror and pity” of human existence. I shared his conviction that art was “fighting energy and an affirmation of the struggle to live.”

But I knew that persuading him to read Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart wouldn’t be an easy task because, despite my privileged access to Joe, I had learned that there was never a good time to ask him to read a play. Regardless of the circumstances, it spoiled his mood and interrupted something that had a greater claim on his attention. In addition, Joe was habitually doubtful that recommendations ever proved to be worth their salt, and I was in no way exempt from that standard, so there were many reasons for me to severely test my judgment before recommending a script to him.

Although Joe was often passionate about the plays he produced, at the beginning of the process he was seldom enthusiastic about producing a play, as if the last thing on earth he wanted to do was to take on the responsibility of bringing yet another play to fruition in one of his theaters.

I left the script on our L-shaped dining-working table, but a week passed before Joe picked it up. The first twenty pages were a disaster.
“Gail, I can’t go on with this,” he said, pushing the script away as if he’d just tasted spoiled milk. “This is one of the worst things I’ve ever read.”
“I know, I know,” I said, “but if you read a little further, you’ll see that it has something.”

Putting myself on the artistic line with Joe was a nerve-wracking business. I wasn’t shielded from his stern verdict about the worthiness of a play any more than anyone else was. I felt confident about The Normal Heart, however, not because it was timely or political, but because it had made me cry, something that rarely happened when I read a play.

Reluctantly, Joe picked up the imperfect opus again, protesting every time he turned a page, alternately on strike or grumpy about going on with it, but by the time he got to the end he was in tears, just as moved as I had been.

Excerpted from a chapter in Gail Papp’s forthcoming memoir

The Belasco Project

(excerpted from the chapter “The Belasco Project”)

Joe also told McKellen about his own teenage experience of seeing Hamlet for the first time. “In 1938, when I was in high school they invited a bunch of us kids to go to Broadway and to see Gielgud in one—and in the other was Leslie Howard. And you know we all had taste of some kind. You always have it on the street. You know a good dancer. You know a good piece of music. You know a good baseball player. So you have taste in this area as well.

The two Hamlets that Joe saw on Broadway when he was 17: Left, John Gielgud at the St. James Theatre. Right, Leslie Howard at The Imperial Theatre.
Courtesy of the Papp Estate.
“First of all, I thought the speech was so artificial. Everything seemed affected and sort of pompous to me. Sir John was young and handsome, a beautiful figure on the stage and some of the words affected me, but mostly I thought “Why does he have to speak in that fancy way?” I had already studied Julius Caesar in school and I knew you could say the lines in an American way, even in a Brooklyn way, and still understand them if the passion was there.
“There was a very pretty girl sitting in front of me at the time and she was really getting most of my attention, and so I missed a few things here and there. Probably all the soliloquies.”
Forty-eight years later in 1986, Joe put together a repertory company of actors, mostly young, who were black, Hispanic, Asian and white to perform Shakspeare for high school students.
“The stage will have the same kind of population that is in the schools,” Joe said when he announced it.
“We’ll do Macbeth, As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet. Estelle Parsons, the Director, has a good sense of popularizing—not vulgarizing—Shakespeare, and here and there Spanish will come into the lines.”
But unlike his Shakespeare productions for students in the past which had been performed in school auditoriums, these plays in 1986 were to be done at the Belasco Theater on Broadway.
Not only that. Instead of a few performances for students, these three Shakespeare plays were to be done at the Belasco twice a day, six days a week, for nine months!

Joe and Academy Award-winning actress and director Estelle Parsons celebrate The Belasco Project on May 31,1986.
Photo: Martha Swope

The students who now packed the 1,042-seat Belasco Theater twice a day arrived on chartered buses accompanied by teachers who had prepped them on the plays. Most had never seen a play or been in a theater before. They were similar to our Mobile Theater audiences—more distractible because they were teenagers—but exceedingly quick and 100% interactive with the play, the players, and the characters. Unlike regular theater-going audiences, they got all the humor.
Joe said, “I would prefer that they become part of a general audience. I don’t like a bunch of kids thrown in together because their interests waver and they kid around with one another. But for the most part, when you do get their attention, it’s a remarkable achievement.”
His point was that when a young person is put in touch with the stimuli of artistic endeavor, either as a spectator or as a participant, a new world opens up. It demonstrates to a young person already cultured by her/his own music, dance or a preacher’s rhetoric, that they possess valuable and useful knowledge “in their bones” and that awareness gives them a feeling of confidence and a desire to learn.
“The black, Hispanic or Asian child begins to understand that his own culture is not something to be concealed or wiped out,” Joe said, “but, on the contrary, it is part of world culture and, as such, is to be nurtured and valued.”

Excerpted from a chapter in Gail Papp’s forthcoming memoir

On a dark and deserted road

(excerpted from the chapter “The Globe Theater Birdhouse”)

The Papps’ country cottage in the fall.
Photo: Gail Papp
In the aftermath of a heavy snowfall one winter, Joe suggested that we take a walk along a picturesque back road near our cottage. To protect my Raynaud’s Syndrome-sensitive fingers, I ignited the wicks in my metal hand warmers with lighter-fluid and stuffed them in their blue velvet drawstring bags before setting out on a hike with Joe through the magical landscape of snow-etched trees and glistening white fields.
Captivated by the quiet beauty of the countryside, we stayed out longer than we intended, and as we headed home I began to experience difficulty pushing my boots forward in the snow. Finally, I had to stop.
“I’m afraid I can’t walk any further,” I said to Joe. “My hands are okay, but my feet have frozen up. I can’t push them forward anymore.”
There weren’t any houses in sight that Joe could go to for help, nor could he call a friend because cell phones weren’t invented yet, and the likelihood of our hitching a car ride on this untraveled back road was non-existent. I had been through too many past skirmishes with painful chilblains turning my hands and feet black to think calmly about that happening again.
“You should leave me here, walk home, and drive back in the car,” I said to Joe with, I thought, irrefutable commonsense.

By this time, however, early evening shadows had tinted the snowbanks purple, and he wouldn’t hear of it.
“Now listen,” Joe said, placing his hands on my shoulders and turning me to face him in the middle of the road. “I’m going to hypnotize you.”
I dismissed the idea. “Oh no,” I said. ”People have tried to do that in the past but I’m resistant to hypnosis. I’m not a good subject.”
“I know how to do it,” Joe insisted. “I used to hypnotize guys in the Navy and it always worked.”
I told him that I hated the idea of gazing into his eyes knowing that I was bound to disappoint him.