Remembering Celeste

Darryl Zanuck said, “Stopping Celeste’s star from rising would be like stopping Niagara Falls from falling.”  Luminous and darling, Celeste Holm radiated grace and charm, cultivation and accomplishment, artistry and flair, and, underneath it all, resolute, quiet strength.  

Oscar Hammerstein told her to go home to New York, Hollywood would destroy her.  Grateful as many of us may be to him for his advice and to her for taking it, I can’t help but believe Hollywood would have blinked first.

I wish I’d taken a picture of Celeste when, just home from the hospital after being treated for a paralyzed vocal cord, she went to the piano to demonstrate she could sing again and chose one of the more difficult songs for herself, “My Ship,” and stunned us (all but her husband Frank, that is) by being able to do it, and well!  Or when, though quite frail, she became the biggest surprise at a surprise birthday party for me, rising suddenly not only to sing, but to perform, “I Cain’t Say No,” incorporating every recognizable, adorable Ado Annie gesture, while I thought, “This is in all likelihood the last time she’ll ever sing this.”  I was wrong; by that time I should have learned never to underestimate Celeste.  Several years later, she reprised it at another one.

“I ain't the type that can faint,” she sang.  Nor will her legacy. 

To know what those of us who loved her (the most, I’ll add) thought kept her alive and serenely happy in her last years, please go to "September Song."
 

A Gift to New York

When Oscar Hammerstein died, in 1960, I remember reading that the lights of every Broadway theater would be dimmed at curtain time for one full minute, and thinking how wonderful that was—the ultimate curtain call—for one man to achieve such extraordinary recognition for a life in the theater and his contribution to the art of it. Since becoming a New Yorker, I’ve noted a number of such fitting testaments to men and women whose luster illuminated the theater world. But none moved me the way a tribute to a gift to New York did this past Tuesday evening, when Broadway’s lights were dimmed for Howard Kissel. Through the din of Times Square, I could hear his mellifluous speaking voice in his measured tones, rich with irony and warm with whimsy, as he audibly punctuated his graceful prose.

We’ve lost a cultural icon, an irreplaceable one. Broadway, New York, the world, can ill afford it. Howard knew opera and dance, theater for sure, music of all sorts, and a good film. He knew books and he knew art. And he spoke masterly in the language of all of these. He knew knowledge.

And he could tell a great Jewish joke. Sprinkled with Yiddish. Relishing one, from his lips or another’s, he could laugh quieter and more broadly—at the same time—than anyone I ever came across.

For years, Howard, dance critic Joe Mazo and I would join up and sit together at High Holiday services. Even in synagogue, Howard always seemed to have a better bead on things than we did. Perhaps it was a result of an early goal: you’re unlikely to find this in any theatrical who’s who, but Howard told me he initially wanted to be a Reform rabbi.

For many months over one of those years, we three met for dinner practically every Friday night. Initially, it was to discuss and dissect the topic beloved by us, the performing arts in New York, specifically everything we could cover (plus a few books). The evenings evolved into a notion that we could collaborate on the libretto of a musical, with one of us volunteering to do the primary research, another assigning himself to a working outline, and the third designated to start tracking down the rights. I don’t remember any of us ever producing anything we could even draw a pencil line through. After apologies and excuses as we pulled our chairs closer to the table each week, we plunged into what any three people in New York who love theater do best, “talking theater.”

Howard, whom I can’t imagine comfortable growing up in the Milwaukee of the 40s and 50s, told me he was looking through a book of Bettmann Archive photos when he came across one of a Lower East Side New York storefront shop (one of those entered by descending three stairsteps below the sidewalk), a sign above its store window bearing the proprietor’s name and the store’s merchandise—in Hebrew. “And I knew there was a place where I belonged,” he said.

More than Broadway lights have been dimmed by our loss of him. He’ll be missed. I'll miss him.