I WROTE WHAT FOLLOWS IN NOVEMBER 2006. I had reason to think about it recently, but when I searched Beats Talking to Myself realized I'd written it soon after John Gilbert's obituary appeared, three entire years before I had the blog. I found my essay using the search function on my computer and am publishing it now--nearly seventeen years later. But the man doesn't deserve ever to be forgotten, so better late than never.
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John Gilbert PR shot as
character in unknown role |
November 2006: Last Sunday my
sister called me to alert me to a death notice in the Times she knew I’d be interested in. As soon as I hung up the
telephone, I located my paper, opened it to the obituary page, and read the
announcement. I was horrified. The words were strung together in neutral, dead
sounding—no pun intended—sentences. I felt desperately sad all day, not so much
because of my friend’s death, but at the indifference with which his passing
was reported.John Gilbert was a
college friend whose influence I still feel. For the first few years out of
college we remained close. By the time we had turned thirty, our friendship
had waned for a variety of reasons, our contact dribbling away to a hello and a
hug whenever our paths crossed. A passerby, glimpsing us on a street corner as
we did our quick catch-up every few years (“How are you, nice to see
you”), might imagine we were old work buddies, next-door-neighbors, or once-removed
mutual friends of someone else. There was little residue visible of what had
once been.
How can I explain
what John meant to me? He was the first agnostic
I ever met—at least the first person who admitted to being one. I was eighteen. He lived a life
of Secular Humanism and explained to me what that meant within days of my first
encounter with him in a freshman drama class. I was dazzled by him. At age
twenty, he already was showing the beginnings of a receding hairline, but
compensated for it by growing the most beautiful, full beard I think I’ve ever
seen. He rolled his own Bull Durham cigarettes and wore ratty, tattered
clothing and work boots to his college classes. In the late ‘50s, that was nearly scandalous.
In addition to
being an extraordinarily talented actor, John was an exceptionally gifted intellectual. He challenged his
professors in a way, I suppose, they either relished or loathed. John resisted
taking things at face value. Instead, he dug deep to reconcile in his head each
particle of information. His acting was self-assured, intense, genuine. He
could be chilling onstage—Hotspur in Henry
IV, as well as hilarious— the drunken livery driver, Malachi, in The Matchmaker. He was never better than
he was as Jimmy Porter in Look Back in
Anger, a part he felt was custom-made for him. His Jamie in Long Day’s Journey into Night was
spectacular; his brooding Hamlet at
Seattle Repertory Theatre was an audience gripper, and regionally he will never
be forgotten as the meanest-ever first-act Scrooge ever in The Christmas Carol, only to become a big-hearted softy in the
final act.
I was in awe of
his talent and enamored of his intellect. I also found him mysteriously
attractive in an out-of-bounds kind of way. He exuded an underlying chemistry of
rage that sizzled and felt dangerous to me. In my freshman year, I yearned to
be in his crowd and worked hard at my acting to gain entry. As a sophomore, he
was a mentor to me as I worked at becoming educated in the arena of social
justice and philosophy. During my junior year when he began to seriously date a
girl, I realized I was a little-bit in love with him, now that he was off
limits. By the time I was a senior we had established an easy
friendship—confiding in each other, discussing serious topics and arguing
fiercely as good friends often do. As a graduating senior, one of my proudest moments
was standing next to John to receive our citations for outstanding acting.
After we were both
married, he and his wife and my husband and I enjoyed occasional social
evenings—drinking and discoursing into the wee small hours. In the mid-sixties,
the upstairs apartment in the house we were renting became available. The
location, only three blocks from the theatre where John was part of the
repertory ensemble, made the apartment exceptionally appealing, so he and his
wife became our immediate neighbors. It was wonderful for us because we could
get together on the spur of the moment and didn’t need a babysitter to just run
upstairs for a few minutes.
In the capacity of
neighbor, John became an easy visitor who often dropped in to chat on
afternoons when he had a break from his acting job. Sitting in our living room with
my toddlers bouncing like Mexican
jumping beans, he’d smoke a cigarette (so different from today’s sensibilities)
while he drank a cup of coffee, chattering away with my small children in a way
that was comfortable and homey. “Uncle” John loved to open their brightly
colored picture-books and read aloud to any or all of them.
I remember one
afternoon when he rapped on the door loudly, then burst into our living room with
a newly purchased LP, and asked me to play it on the Hi Fi. As we listened together
to the newly released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band, he proclaimed—way ahead of the critics—that the creative brilliance
demonstrated in this album would put the Beatles down in history as some of the
most extraordinary popular musicians ever to live.
He was the person
who opened my eyes to social injustice and taught me to be outraged at
socio-economic prejudice in a way it had never occurred to me to be. He was
cynical, smart, passionate about life, and an active socialist. He drank
heavily, smoked non-stop, brooded regularly, and stroked his beard incessantly.
His eyes crackled with intensity; his mouth twitched with energy. His laugh was
infectious and his voice deep and resonant. John was a character many people
recognized on the street in his Greek fisherman’s hat and Levi’s jacket, and
the way he carried himself and strode—wound-up, spring-loaded—was unique.
By the 1970s our
friendship had slowly deteriorated, diluted into a watery imitation of what it
had once been. One of the last times we had a social evening together John began
to shout about Malcolm X being a saint. My
husband was arguing with John and I was cringing over the use of the word saint
applied to anyone advocating so much violence. A part of me wanted to protect
my young children from people like John. My parent-formed values had evolved
into something very different from those of my socialistic and atheistic friend, John Gilbert.
It’s been nearly forty
years since that time. So why was I so upset at the notice of his death?
Because it was flat, written in expository sentences without color. It read
like the story of a man who hadn’t mattered. Oh, it ticked off a few of his
accomplishments, but gave him little credit for his passion, his commitment,
his search for truth and his willingness to stand up for what he believed at
the expense of others’ opinions of him. That man changed the course of my life,
and certainly others’ lives, as well.
A person couldn’t be indifferent to John.
One way or another, he changed you. And that’s what I wanted so much for the readers
of the paper to know. The last sentences written about him in death should
wield the same kind of power he had over life.
R.I.P. John Gilbert, 1939-2006
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