GET THE HELL OUT OF TOWN - Forrest Tucker

GET THE HELL OUT OF TOWN

(FORREST TUCKER)

In 1975, New York City was practically insolvent. In response to the worst financial crisis in its history, the Municipal Assistance Corp. (MAC) was formed by New York State to sell billions of dollars in bonds to keep the city solvent. Though I had nothing to do with the crisis, either as a contributing cause or a possible cure, I was a participant in a banking industry meeting where the city’s crisis became the focal point. At the time, I was the partner responsible for the banking industry at a major consulting firm and was often asked to speak at industry functions. I’d been invited to speak at a BANK ADMINISTRATION INSTITUTE conference in New York whose original theme (new services for consumers and corporations) was jettisoned at the last minute, in favor of the more pressing financial matters facing New York City. However, even though the focus of the BAI meeting had undergone drastic change, for some reason, they kept me on the program.

Harrison J. Goldin, the Comptroller of The City of New York, had been scheduled to lead off as the keynote speaker and I was to follow him. On the morning of the day before the meeting, I received a phone call informing me that I would now be the opening speaker as Mr. Goldin would be in a critical early morning meeting with Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Frères partner who was serving as chairman of MAC. This was the meeting that everyone had been waiting for, where Gotham’s fiscal future might be determined. Not only was I moved up, but they also requested that I be prepared to extend beyond the 35 to 40 minutes originally allotted in the event that Mr. Goldin might meet with further delay. So, not only was I to address an assemblage of desperate bankers who would be sitting on the edge of their seats awaiting Mr. Goldin’s report on his do-or-die meeting with Felix Rohatyn, with little or no interest in what I would have to say, I might also have to do a song and dance, vamping to fill time.

I did a lot of speech making in those days, and always felt comfortable no matter what I was asked to talk about. My philosophy was that, to the extent that I was an invited speaker standing at a lectern before any audience, a majority of them had to assume that I had something worth listening to or I wouldn’t have been invited and they wouldn’t be there in the first place. But this was different. In the final analysis, whether or not I knew what I was talking about or how well or poorly I spoke was not the issue. All this audience would want to hear was Jay Goldin’s report of what happened at the mountaintop, the newly developed plan for the city’s rescue. With Goldin waiting in the wings, the only thing they’d want to hear from me would be, “And in conclusion, -----“.

That evening, rather than going home to Connecticut, I decided to stay in town to work out changes in my speech to make it more appropriate to the evolving situation. I took a room at the New York Athletic Club and spent a futile few hours trying to figure out what to do, making no progress at all. At about 9 o’clock I gave up, deciding I’d have to wing it at the meeting and it really didn’t matter anyway, and went down to have a drink in the 3rd floor grill. At this time of night, the bar was usually not very busy and there was only one other customer. I ordered my Johnny Walker Black and water, reached for the pretzels, gazed over at my bar mate and found myself looking into a familiar face. It didn’t take long to realize that it was Forrest Tucker.

It would have been difficult not to recognize him – his career included a score of movies in the 1940’s and 1950’s (eventually AUNTIE MAME), television (especially F TROOP) and stage, both Broadway and national touring companies – plus, at 6’4” or so, he was hard to miss.

We introduced ourselves and started talking just as any two members of a club might do. He was older than I and quite famous in his own right, so early in our conversation I addressed him as Mr. Tucker. He shushed me and said, “Just call me Tuck, ..…like all my friends do.” When he found out I lived in nearby Connecticut, he asked me why the hell I was staying here at the club and not at home with my family. I explained the whole speech business and his reaction was simple. As close as I can recall his words and his tone of 30+ years ago, his advice went something like this.

“Just do what I do. When you’ve got an audience that ain’t listening, there ain’t much you can do. You can’t change the script, you can’t talk faster, you can’t talk louder. You just talk softer so they got to concentrate harder to hear you. And if they don’t even try, fuck ‘em, they don’t deserve you anyway. Say your piece and get the hell out of town.”

When I finally stopped laughing, I asked him why he was staying at the club. He explained that he’d just that day wrapped up rehearsals for the National Company of the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winning drama THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON and would be leaving late tomorrow to start touring the country. He didn’t particularly like hotels and, besides, here at the club he couldn’t get into trouble. If he were out drinking in public at some bar or other, there was a good chance he’d attract attention and either do something unwise or, more likely as had happened to him several times in the past, be accused of doing something he hadn’t done. There was safety here in the all-male NYAC.

So, we spent the next two hours drinking and talking, and I found him to be a delightful companion, not at all impressed with his own celebrity. It was a rambling conversation, with my asking him about the people he had worked with (Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Hepburn & Tracy, et al) and while I only remember sketchy details about what he said, I do recall that he didn’t have a nasty word to say about anyone. As it approached 11pm, I made my excuses. I had to be up early to get downtown for the banking conference, so we shook hands goodbye and I left my new acquaintance Tuck alone at the bar, never expecting to see him again. I could not have been more mistaken.

The next morning I did my thing, made my mostly original, inappropriate for the occasion, only slightly altered speech as if nothing else mattered, recording it for later transcription. I also tried Tuck’s approach of speaking more softly but that didn’t seem to make any difference. After about 30 minutes of torture, my deliverance arrived. I caught sight of the event coordinator standing with Jay Goldin off stage to my left, and gesticulating for me to finish. I abruptly concluded my remarks, received a slight smattering of polite, though relieved applause from an audience that couldn’t have known (or cared) that I was more relieved than they. The coordinator walked out on stage, thanked me for my ‘insightful’ comments and announced that Mr. Goldin had arrived and would address the assemblage in about 10 minutes. As the audience started to take their comfort break, I began to unhook the tape recorder I had set up in the lectern. The coordinator asked me if I had a blank tape and, if so, could I leave the recorder in place so they could tape Mr. Goldin’s remarks. I had no desire to stick around any longer than necessary, just wanted to get back to my office, and agreed to leave my tape recorder for Mr. Goldin’s use as long as he promised to return it to my office within a few days.

I got back uptown to my office just before 11am and, by the time I got caught up on what I had to do, it was almost 1:30 in the afternoon. I left my office and walked down to Sardi’s Restaurant on West 44th Street in the theatrical district. As I strode through the front door and turned right into the ‘little bar’, I was greeted by the bartender, Croatian Freedom Fighter Jack Custera and by most of the people at the bar. (I had been there once or twice before). Surprisingly, I was also greeted by a very tall man called Forrest Tucker whom I had last seen less than 15 hours ago. He had a flight out of La Guardia in a few hours, heading for the first city on the national tour of THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON, and decided to drop in at Sardi’s before heading out. He asked for an update on the morning’s proceedings and I told him that I followed his advice and the only thing that worked was “…say your piece and get the hell out of town.” At about 4 o’clock, we left Sardi’s together, he hailed a cab, dropped me at Grand Central Station for my commute ride home and continued on to La Guardia to catch his flight. Once more, I never expected to see him again and once more I was wrong.

Early the next morning, I flew from New York to St. Louis, to have lunch with the owner of a credit card processing company with whom I had done business over the last several years. He picked me up at the airport and, after brief tour of his new facility, drove me to a downtown restaurant where he was obviously well known. As we walked into the restaurant and the Maitre d’ enthusiastically greeted my host, I also received an enthusiastic greeting. From my left came a shout in a recently familiar voice, “Hey Jack. What the hell you doing here?” Forrest Tucker was sitting in booth against the wall, one long arm waving over his head and a big smile on his face. I tried to stay cool and nonchalantly waved back with a “Hey Tuck. Just had to get the hell out of town.” He laughed and winked and returned to his companions and I proceeded as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. My host was astonished and, as much as he tried to get me to explain, I pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

So, within the space of less than three days, I had three accidental meetings with Forrest Tucker in three different places in two cities a thousand miles apart. As he had suggested, both of us had said what we had to say and then got "the hell out of town.”

STRANGERS ON A PLANE - Charles Collingwood

STRANGERS ON A PLANE

(CHARLES COLLINGWOOD)

The Saturday morning flight home from Mexico City was not the flight I had intended to take. I’d been commuting back and forth every other week between New York and Mexico City since September 1968 and now, in the Spring of 1969, expected to be doing the same for at least the rest of the year. My bi-weekly schedule was pretty well set. A late Tuesday afternoon flight on Air France from Kennedy to Mexico City (one of the best traveling, eating and drinking experiences you could ever imagine), three days in Mexico City overseeing an important assignment for the largest bank in the Republic and meeting with the client, and Friday night’s return flight to New York on Aeronaves de Mexico (not one of the best traveling, eating and drinking experiences you could ever imagine).

However, something came up. My regularly-scheduled Friday afternoon progress report to the chairman of the bank, had to be postponed until Friday evening, so I wouldn’t be able to fly out until the following morning. I was able secure a 1st Class seat on Saturday morning’s Eastern flight to New York and that’s when and where I had the great good fortune to meet Charles Collingwood for the first time.

We were accidental seatmates in the 3rd or 4th row on the left side of the 1st class cabin, he the window, I the aisle, and I recognized him immediately. Notwithstanding the early hour, when the stewardess offered coffee or tea before take-off, we both ordered scotch. Having thus established a basic commonality, we introduced ourselves, I handed him a business card and he reciprocated. His card was elegant in its simplicity: “Charles Collingwood – Chief Foreign Correspondent”, with the London address of CBS News - 100 Brompton Road - and a telephone number. (To this day, I still use this business card as a permanent bookmark in my copy of his excellent Viet Nam novel THE DEFECTOR.)

Charles Collingwood died in 1985 at the age of 68. Today, in the year 2009, many people may not recognize his name. However, forty years ago he was probably as well known as almost anybody on the planet, including most people on television, and infinitely more experienced, eloquent, polished, wise, witty and urbane than all of them. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in 1939, he was soon tapped by CBS’s Edward R. Murrow who was assembling a small group of on-air journalists, young men who would cover the fighting in Europe and who would quickly come to be known as ‘Murrow’s Boys’. Along with Charles Collingwood, the group included Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid and Ed Murrow himself, the cadre that would come to define ‘broadcast journalism’. Collingwood covered the fighting in North Africa, reported on the Normandy Invasion from Omaha Beach, the liberation of Paris and continued his international reporting with his many visits to and reports from Viet Nam. In addition to being CBS’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, he had also spent several years covering the White House, hosted Jackie Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House, and had stepped in for Walter Cronkite when Cronkite was overcome with emotion at JFK’s assassination. He also hosted CBS’s award-wining program, Eyewitness to History. All of which accounted for my shocked delight at the prospect of spending the next four or five hours in his company.

I tried to remember some of his history as we touched glasses and had the first of many scotches we’d share during this flight and several others. (He requested Dewar’s and, as they had no Johnny Walker Black on board, I had the same.) The remaining hours of our original flight together were an absolute delight. He was a storyteller and he most certainly had the stickers on his luggage to validate his stories. I was most interested in what he’d have to say about Viet Nam. He’d been covering that part of the world for several years and I remembered the CBS speciaI on Hanoi that he’d hosted about a year earlier. He was more than happy to talk about the time he spent in Hanoi, not only because of his reporter’s inclinations, but because his Hanoi-based novel, THE DEFECTOR, was about to be published. For some reason, what I remember most clearly was his description of the topsy-turvy nature of daily life in Hanoi; how, in reaction to the U.S. bombing in the daylight hours, most of the daily activities were conducted before sunrise and late in the day, the several hours before sunrise being the busiest of the day.

He seemed to really like the Vietnamese people, and was very knowledgeable of and sympathetic to their history – a century of French involvement ending with the Indo-China War followed by the awful situation in which they now found themselves, living in the midst of a battleground of political ideologies. But he never really felt that comfortable amongst them. Being a tall ‘round-eye’ he always was a curiosity to the locals and, being who he was, he was a focus of attention of the officials.

He was in his early 50’s, I was 37 and, as much as he was willing to share his experiences with this relative youngster, he also seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. He had the reporter’s mind’s eye for detail and questioned me closely on my combat experience in Korea, limited as it was and insignificant when considered in respect to his having reported on the Normandy invasion from Omaha Beach. He was also very interested in my initial reactions to Mexico City. I’d mentioned that my first night there in September 1968, days prior to the opening of the 1968 Olympic Games, was spent looking down from the 16th floor cocktail lounge of the Hotel del Paseo on the riots unfolding on the Paseo de la Reforma below. I said that I’d felt like Dante looking down on Chaos below and was despairing as to how successful my next year in Mexico might be. However, over the next few months I grew to recognize Mexico City for the cosmopolitan place it was and enjoyed working there. He had many questions about how I was able to interact with the Mexican businessmen and I tried to describe to him exactly what I was trying to accomplish. Our conversation throughout the flight was non-stop. I was absolutely fascinated at whatever he had to say, realizing the depth of experience underpinning all of his observations. I was also touched that he expressed interest in what I had done, even though I recognized the possibility that his interest, in some part, may merely have been to make conversation. In the course of our conversation, we realized that there were several similarities in our schedules. We were both commuting back and forth from home (he from London, I from New York) to Mexico (he to Puerto Vallarta, I to Mexico City). While I was doing it every other week, he was doing it more or less monthly.

At the time, Charles and his wife, Hollywood actress Louise Allbritton, lived principally in London but also had a place in Puerto Vallarta and were very friendly with two other part-time inhabitants, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who had a place in the section of Puerto Vallarta that came to be known as ‘Gringo Gulch’. As a matter of fact, his novel THE DEFECTOR is a story that opens in Puerto Vallarta (or Puerto Secreto, as he calls it in the book) and ends up in Hanoi.

As we were getting ready to land in New York, we decided that, because we had similar schedules and seemed to be fairly compatible seatmates, there was a good chance we’d meet again on a future Saturday morning flight to New York. From that point on, we both looked for each other and managed to share three more flights to New York over the rest of 1969.

This last time we spoke had to have been in late November or early December 1969. I can mark the time because one of the things we discussed was President Nixon’s televised “Silent Majority” speech to the nation on November 3,1969. I remember the date of the speech precisely as it occurred on my 37th birthday. The main thrust of Nixon’s speech was his laying out a plan to end the war in Viet Nam through a combination of diplomacy, negotiation and Vietnamization, requesting the support of the ‘great silent majority’ of the American citizenry. But there were also allusions to secret channels of communications, secret meetings with the North Vietnamese and others using both official and unofficial conduits, all of which had been going on for some time.

I had wondered whether Charles might have been one of those conduits, or even something more sinister, but was hesitant to ask not wanting to stick my nose in where it might not be welcome. However, I am not normally reticent and, to the extent that we were experiencing a weather delay and had been in the air, drinking for about 5 ½ hours, I suppose I was even less so. As we returned to scotch after having had wine with the meal, I plunged right in with something like, “Nixon hinted at secret meetings with the Viet Cong using unofficial approaches. You’ve been in and out of North Viet Nam several times since he was elected a year ago. Have you been one of those sneaky types?” The drink that had loosened my tongue had done more to him. His initial reaction was anger and I was afraid I’d gone too far. He said something like, “Don’t ever ask me anything like that!” Then he quickly cooled and smiled and we moved on to something else. To this day, I don’t know whether it was that I had hit a nerve, whether he had done something clandestine and didn’t want it known or, was it just the booze after all. There were stories about his drinking, but in our few times together, this was the only time I was even suspicious that he might be showing the effects. At any rate, I was careful where I tread after that, not wanting to ruffle any more feathers and jeopardize an acquaintanceship I enjoyed.

After calming down, he reached under his seat, slid out a soft leather zippered case and pulled out a paperback book, his Viet Nam novel THE DEFECTOR. He handed it to me, possibly as a peace offering, and said he hoped I’d enjoy it. At my request he signed it for me, just his name, and after we landed at New York’s JFK airport and said our goodbyes, I never saw him or talked to him again. However, I did read his novel, a story about a well-known journalist employed by a large television network as its premier foreign correspondent who is recruited by a shady CIA type. The mission - to secure permission from North Vietnam to visit and report from Hanoi, and while there covertly approach and assist an important North Vietnamese official whom the CIA believes wants to defect.

Now, by nature I’m not constantly on the lookout for conspiracies, but there seemed to be just a few similarities between the plot of Charles’ novel and my question to him which was met with a brief, though heated, reaction. Nevertheless, I draw no conclusions and make no accusations, especially since he’s no longer with us to set me straight.

I wish he were.

Incidentally, a few years later, one of my wife's cousins from her birthplace in Italy was spending a few months with us at our home in Ridgefield, Connecticut. After having exhausted all the sight-seeing opportunities in Manhattan, we decided to take her to Washington, D.C. for a weekend and, to give her some sense of current events, we booked two adjoining rooms at The Watergate Hotel, a place which was all over the news in those days. On Saturday afternoon, October 20, 1973, we took a tour of the White House and Anna, my wife's cousin was fascinated with the place. The one disappointment was that we were not allowed to see the Oval Office, the only reason given was that it was being used at the time. It wasn't until a few hours later, back at our rooms at The Watergate, that a television news flash provided a fuller explanation. This was the so-called "Saturday night massacre" where President Nixon's Watergate scandal deepened with his firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, followed by the resignations of Attorney General Eliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus.

The other casualty of that momentous weekend was my signed copy of Charles Collingwood's book, THE DEFECTOR. When we returned home on Monday afternoon, we found about a foot of water covering the lower level of the house, the result of a leak in our water heater. Among the waterlogged items in the lowest shelves of the bookcases in my office, were my high school and college yearbooks and THE DEFECTOR. I was at least partially able to rescue the yearbooks, but Charles' paperback was destroyed. I replaced it with a hard cover copy. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to ask Charles to autograph it.

I wish I had.

AFTERWORD

Just as an aside (and only slightly concerning Charles Collingwood), in mid-1970 my wife Maria and I took a weeklong holiday split between Mexico City and Puerto Vallarta. We normally would spend at least two weeks on any holiday we took but I’d been away from home frequently over the previous 18 months and she’d just given birth to our second son in February. We decided we needed some time together and she certainly had earned a holiday. She was also curious to see what all my raving of Mexico City was about.

We spent a long weekend being shepherded around the Capital and surrounding areas of interest by several of the friends I’d made over the last year and a half. After three days, Maria had seen enough of Mexico City and we were both exhausted. Remembering Charles’ suggestion about hotels in Puerto Vallarta, I’d followed his advice and made reservations at the Camino Real. This was a new hotel in Mismaloya, the locale in which THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA was filmed, not far from downtown Puerto Vallarta. Maria and I flew over to Puerto Vallarta, checked into the Camino Real and spent a delightful four days relaxing in the sun on the hotel’s beach on the Pacific Ocean's Bahía de Banderas. We really had no desire to do anything but relax and, to the extent that I knew Collingwood was not in Puerto Vallarta but elsewhere either plugging his book or on some other mission, I was not particularly keen to leave the hotel grounds. However, on the day before we were scheduled to leave for home, I grew a little curious as to what the town might be like and figured that this might be the only chance I’d ever have to see it.

Maria was content to stay on the beach, she’d done enough sightseeing in Mexico City to last her for a while, so I found a taxi driver out front who claimed to know everything about Puerto Vallarta, and had him give me the tour. The town had been a backwater resort, well off the beaten path, visited mostly by vaguely creative types, poets, dreamers and homosexuals looking for cheap surroundings and kindred souls. Director John Huston’s filming of THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA there in 1963 changed all of that. The world press converged on the three-ring circus featuring the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor extra-marital affair, the battles between the film’s stars, principally Burton and Ava Gardner, and the battles between the stars and the director. The sleepy little coastal town had become an international curiosity and was experiencing all the growth and development that came with the territory.

After a general tour of the town, my driver’s premiere destination was the Burton/Taylor house, a place called the Casa Kimberly. It was an enormous spread up on a hill beyond a church in a section of town that by now had come to be called "Gringo Gulch." The driver told me that the house had spectacular views of the Bay of Banderas, and the city of Puerto Vallarta itself. I declined his offer to go up the hill to get a closer look, asking him instead if he knew where the Collingwood’s lived. Obviously, Charles was not as big a draw as Cleopatra and her Antony, and the driver came up blank. But I did remember a bar that Charles had mentioned (I can’t recall the name now, 40 years later) and had the cab driver take me there and wait while I went in for a drink (he refused my offer to join me). Charles had said it was one of the best places in town to get a dry martini and one of the few places where they had Gordon’s Gin. The martini was bracing and, though it’s not my preferred poison, I enjoyed it and the specter of Charles’ company as I drank it.

I got back to the Camino Real late that afternoon and, after rejoining Maria on the beach, decided to take my last swim in the Bay. It almost turned out to be just that, my last swim, as I forgot about the warnings we’d been given about the Bay and the strong ocean-bound pull of the current. The next half hour or so in the water was a struggle to….….but, as Charles Collingwood might have said, that’s another story.

IF YOU'VE GOT THE RIGHT TENOR - Robert Rounseville

IF YOU’VE GOT THE RIGHT TENOR,
YOU ONLY NEED ONE

ROBERT ROUNSEVILLE

Within a ten-minute span on a winter morning in 1972, I received two telephone calls in my office in Manhattan, across Sixth Avenue from Radio City Music Hall. When my secretary buzzed me about the first call, she calmly informed me that there was a call for me from the White House. I took the call and, I’m sorry to admit, it was not The Man calling for my advice on some particularly thorny national security problem. Rather, it turned out to be from a friend with whom I used to work at another consulting firm, bringing me up to date on his current government assignment. My secretary, who had only recently been assigned to me, was getting used to fielding some pretty odd telephone calls, and the White House call didn’t faze her. But the second call was another matter.

Right after I finished the conversation with my friend in Washington, there was another call. Instead of buzzing me, she dashed into my office almost breathless.

“There’s a Robert Rounseville calling you. Is it really the Robert Rounseville?”

I assured her that it was the Robert Rounseville and motioned for her to sit as I picked up the phone. I explained the situation to Mr. Rounseville, that I had a fan of his in my office, and asked if he’d be kind enough to say hello to her. He did, they spoke for a few moments and, from that point on, I had a secretary who’d walk through fire for me. The White House had gotten no rise from her. Robert Rounseville had taken her breath away

Captain Bob (he invariably wore a Greek fisherman’s cap) was a well-traveled and world-renowned tenor, appearing in operas, concerts, Broadway, movies and television long before The Three Tenors of current fame. My earliest exposure to him was in the movie THE TALES OF HOFFMANN in the early 1950’s, still one of my favorite movies of all time. Between then and a fatal heart attack in 1974 at only 60 years of age, Bob displayed an amazing range of talent. He starred in the world premiere of Igor Stravinsky's opera THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, as Mr. Snow in the film of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s CAROUSEL and in the title role on Broadway in the original production of Leonard Bernstein's CANDIDE, opposite another favorite of mine, Barbara Cook. He also appeared on television in several English-language versions of well-known operas and made studio recordings of other operas and operettas - and we’re not yet out of the 1950’s. Into the 1960’s he appeared in many revivals of operettas and musicals at the New York City Center, such as BRIGADOON and SHOW BOAT. In 1965, he was back on Broadway as the Padre in the original stage version of MAN OF LA MANCHA, a role he remained in for six years.

Initially, Bob and I had a nodding acquaintance arising from our both frequenting a few of the same watering holes in Manhattan’s theater district. We’d occasionally bump into each other, say hello, and even have small polite conversations. The first time we spent any time together was in the latter part of 1969 during a late evening ride on a commuter train traveling from New York’s Grand Central Station to our common destination, the town of Katonah in Westchester County. We were standing next to each other in the bar car and spent the hour-long ride drinking and talking. We found that we had several friends in common and, as Bob was in a garrulous mood and was an excellent storyteller with many an interesting story to tell, he did most of the talking and I did most of the listening. The only thing I remember saying that night was about when I had recently gone to see MAN OF LA MANCHA for the second time. I can’t remember who had the lead role of Cervantes/Quixote at the time (I had seen Richard Kiley in the original cast) but, that night, a replacement went on, an Israeli actor named Gideon Singer. I told Bob that it felt the same as if I were sitting through FIDDLER ON THE ROOF starring Desi Arnaz.

When the train finally pulled into Katonah NY, we both got off. I lived in Ridgefield, CT, just across the state line, about 20 miles away and had my car at the station. He lived in Katonah so I offered to give him a ride home. I was more than repaid for the favor when he agreed to my bold request for him to sing while we drove to his house. At the time, my wife Maria and I had one son who was almost two-years old and were expecting another in two months time, so I asked him to sing one of the songs he sang in Carousel, ‘WHEN THE CHILDREN ARE ASLEEP.’ He joyfully granted my request (he really did love to sing), I had a private concert from this world-renowned tenor and he had an even more committed fan. (I have to admit that I joined in, tentatively at first, making it a duet without the harmony.)

We became pretty close friends after that and he’d often call me at my office (to my secretary’s delight), I’d call him at his studio in Carnegie Hall or we’d meet for lunch or a drink. I even had him meet me at my office once, again to my secretary’s delight, as she sat chatting with us after the initial shock wore off.

I also went to visit him at his Carnegie Hall studio once, not too long before he died. Bob had often talked about a one-man show he was trying to put together, with the help of Bob Lipsyte, one-time sports columnist for the New York Times, now a well-respected author of fiction and non-fiction. He gave me a copy of a draft that Lipsyte had put together (it may be still somewhere in my files), asked me to read it and wondered if I could help him find financial backing. I contacted several people I knew who might be interested in such a project but, before I was able to drum up any real interest, Robert Rounseville died. That beautiful voice was stilled and that vibrant personality was laid to rest.

Captain Bob had died suddenly, August 6, 1974, stricken by a massive heart attack and collapsing doing one of his favorite things, teaching a singing class, in one of his favorite places, his Carnegie Hall studio.

As I said at the outset, my secretary was fairly new to me and, before Robert Rounseville called my office, probably hadn’t yet decided whether or not I was worth the effort. The call from ‘Captain Bob’ changed all of that. And for me personally, knowing ‘Captain Bob’, even for only the latter years of his all-too-short life, was a joy.

.....And the opportunity to sing a duet with him during a late night drive was a gift from the gods.

JACK DEENEY