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A CURIOUS LIFE
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child, little of the fierce, formidable pragmatist was left. She had
mellowed into my gentle and adorable “Grammy.” Comfortable
in that role, she was witty and mischievous, and entertained her
grandchildren with long bedtime recitations of epic poems she had
learned as a girl—“The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Skeleton in
Armor,” “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Only recently did it
occur to me that, fifty years before, in the midst of all that hardship,
she must have bestowed the same storytelling riches on her own
fatherless children.
I picture my father eight years old, bleary-eyed and dressed for
bed in hand-me-down pajamas. It is an evening in 1922. He is with
his two older sisters and his younger brother, huddling around their
mother on a worn sofa in the darkened living room of their Melrose
home. He is a pale, thin boy with reddish-brown hair. He is quiet,
bookish, and a little melancholy, miscast in the role of “man of the
house,” which fell to him when his father died. Tonight’s poem is
“The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes. I
picture young Arthur listening with a kind of eager hunger, mark-
ing the meter, savoring the suspense, and devouring all those exotic
new words. He is only a child, but I suspect he already knows, he
can feel in his bones, that storytelling will define his later life.
And so it did. Growing into adolescence, Arthur commandeered
a little room on the top floor of the Melrose house and immersed
himself in books. Ghostly storytellers had found their most atten-
tive listener: Rudyard Kipling, Washington Irving, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. And as he worked his way through all
these timeworn treasures, he made a life-changing discovery. As
an older man, my father described the moment when he “caught a
fever”: he came across the plays of William Shakespeare. Reading
from a single hefty volume of the Complete Works, the teenage boy
proceeded to methodically plow through the entire vast canon.
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The Lithgow family lived in Yellow Springs for ten years. When
we moved away, I had just finished sixth grade. Those ten years
would prove to be the longest stretch in one place of my entire
childhood. I’ve only been back to Yellow Springs twice for fleeting
visits, and the last visit was almost thirty years ago. Even so, it is the
closest thing I have to a hometown.
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For me, the lazy days of summer in Yellow Springs were a heady
blend of Ring Lardner’s Midwest and Shakespeare’s Cheapside. I
had my share of Little League baseball, Boy Scout camp, the town
pool, even a couple of family car trips to the woods of Kentucky.
But these episodes were brief and unmemorable compared to the
fantastical pleasures of the summer Shakespeare Festival. Toothy,
skinny, barefoot, and nut brown, my buzz cut bleached to near-
white by the sun, I would hang out at the theater for hours on
end, watching rehearsals, chatting precociously with the actors, and
striking up unlikely friendships with them. On reflection, I realize
that they must have been a pretty callow bunch, since none of them
could have been over thirty. But as a child I considered them to be
sophisticated, worldly, seasoned artistes. I was deeply flattered that
they seemed to treat me as a peer. It never occurred to me that they
were merely being nice to the boss’s son.
Acting careers are ephemeral. Many of the young actors from
those days flirted with stardom in the years to come, but few actu-
ally achieved it. Age, of course, has overtaken most of them and
their moment has passed. But devotees of the American theater
scene over the last fifty years would recognize the names of Ellis
Rabb, Earle Hyman, Nancy Marchand, William Ball, Pauline Fla-
nagan, Lester Rawlins, Laurence Luckinbill, and Donald Moffat.
To my young eyes, they were the definitive King Lear, Othello,
Katharina, Puck, Rosalind, Dogberry, Iago, and Justice Shallow,
respectively. And I worshiped them all.
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floppy velvet hats. They even got to speak a few lines. Apparently
I was too young for a speaking part. But I wasn’t too young to be
stricken with sibling envy.
The second summer was no better. Brother David got to play
Lucius, the serving boy to Brutus, in Julius Caesar. Brutus was played
by my father. One sweltering matinee day, David was queasy with
stomach flu. A half hour before the performance, he asked to be
excused. In a near tirade, my father attempted to instill in him the
notion that “the show must go on.” David acceded. He played Lu-
cius that day, waiting on his father and struggling mightily to keep
from vomiting into the bushes in front of a packed house. But after
that, he never wanted to act again.
In time, my beloved brother Dave would craft his own version of
my father’s vagabond lifestyle. It had nothing to do with the theater.
Boy and man, David’s exuberance and animation always verged on
the hyperactive. Hungrily inquisitive, a loquacious talker, and a de-
mon for speed and exercise, he figuratively and literally took flight
from the family business. He fell in love with flying. All the passion,
intelligence, and energy that he might have poured into a career
onstage he channeled elsewhere. He chose a life of aviation—as an
Air Force pilot, an international airline captain, and an official of
the FAA. Lucius in Julius Caesar was his swan song, at the tender age
of twelve. And there was I, sitting in the audience with my sister,
dying, dying, to go on in his place.
The next summer, I finally got my chance. The season included
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I was tapped to play Mustardseed,
one of Titania’s entourage of fairies (sister Robin was cast as Moth).
I searched the script and was thrilled to discover that Mustardseed
actually had lines. Lines! For the first time I would speak onstage!
There were only seven lines in all, and none contained more than
four words (the longest was “Where shall we go?” spoken in unison
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with the other three fairies), but this took nothing away from the
exhilaration of that moment.
As with Sleeping Beauty, my costume was an issue. In its first in-
carnation, it consisted of a long-sleeved, bright-yellow leotard and
a hat made of yellow fake fur. The hat was a miraculous creation. It
had the shape of a tall seed pod, fastened under my chin and point-
ing straight up, rising two feet above my head. The dazzling yellow
of the costume was set off by bronze-colored body makeup on my
bare, spindly legs and several square inches of bold blue greasepaint
around my eyes. I absolutely loved the look. As I took the stage at
the dress rehearsal, I was Mustardseed incarnate.
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ous hat was even worse. “Too showy,” the director had decided. Just
like the leotard, the hat had been splattered with black paint. And to
my even greater horror, it had been cut down to half its size! “What
is it,” I must have wondered, “about me and hats?”
The woman who designed my androgynous Mustardseed getup
also designed every other costume that summer. Of everyone who
worked at the festival in all those years, she has emerged as perhaps
the greatest star. She is the Oscar-winning costumer Ann Roth,
who designed the clothes for The English Patient, The Birdcage, and
over a hundred other plays and films. In 1981, we had occasion to
work together again. She designed my entire wardrobe for the role
of the transsexual Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp.
In one of my last appearances in the film, you may remember that I
am wearing a stunning, broad-brimmed black hat.
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tracks, hoisted me into his arms, and fell backwards onto his butt
with me on top of him. The laughter was earsplitting. It filled me
with joy. Like Bert Lahr, we wore them out.
For a week, I had been a shy, despondent, homesick camper. As
of that night, I was a Scout Camp star. If you hear enough applause
and laughter at a young enough age, you are doomed to become an
actor. After my performance as the damsel-in-distress, my fate was
probably sealed.
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not yet had an art class or art teacher to inspire me, I hadn’t had
anything resembling an epiphany in an art museum, and, although
my parents always made sure that I had the best art supplies in front
of me, they did little else to point me in this direction. Perhaps the
best clue to the source of these artistic urges can be found in my
choice of a role model. At that time, American art was being revolu-
tionized in New York City by the dark energies of Jackson Pollock,
Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. But growing up in quiet,
peaceful, small-town Ohio, I chose to put on a pedestal their polar
opposite. My great hero was that archetype of cheerful American
normalcy, Norman Rockwell.
Imagine my excitement on the day I actually met the man! In
my fifth-grade year, my father took a sabbatical from Antioch to
dip his toe back into New York theater. The rest of the family was
installed in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, three hours north of the
city. Within days of our arrival in Stockbridge, I learned of a breath-
taking coincidence. Norman Rockwell’s painting studio was just
above the candy store on Main Street, about a hundred yards from
our rented house! One day after school I summoned up all my cour-
age and set off to meet the great man. With a Brownie camera in
my hand and a prized copy of Norman Rockwell, Illustrator under my
arm, I marched up the back stairs of the candy store and knocked
on Rockwell’s door. The door swung open and there he was. He
wore a homely brown sweater and corduroy trousers, and he held a
pipe between his teeth. A huge half-finished painting for a Saturday
Evening Post cover was propped on an easel behind him. A nervous,
starstruck eleven-year-old introduced himself, asked for an inscrip-
tion in his book, and requested a photo. The modest, silver-headed
man obliged him.
And so it was that my first breathless brush with celebrity had
nothing whatsoever to do with the entertainment business. I had
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met my idol. “My best wishes to John Lithgow,” the man wrote.
“Sincerely, Norman Rockwell.” I was going to be an artist.
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with light, the room was a beautiful space for practicing yoga. One
day, on a visit home from college, Robin was languidly doing her
yoga on that bathroom floor when my father knocked on the door.
She breezily told him to come in, but he was mortified to think that
he was disturbing her privacy, so he apologized through the closed
door and went away. She heard nothing more from him.
Later that same day Robin was doing some ironing. The ironing
board was set up in a room next to that bathroom. She spread out a
shirt, filled the iron with water, steamed the shirt, and began to press
it. She noticed a strange smell. She steamed the shirt again. The smell
was appalling. Caught between revulsion and hilarity, she realized
what had happened. Earlier that day, Dad had peed into a half-filled
pitcher of water sitting on the ironing board and had forgotten to
empty it. Robin had filled up the iron with that pitcher. She was
steaming her shirt with her father’s diluted urine. The whole episode
uncannily sums up my dad (somewhat at the expense of his dignity):
his sweetness, his courtesy, his ingenuity, his abstraction, and, above
all, his soaring sense of humor. He roared with laughter every time
he told the story on himself. And he told it often.
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