My friend Bud Wright put it most succinctly: 2022 has been a bad year for 96-year-old women.
It’s a commonplace cliché by now for us to reveal how touched we were by the recent death of Queen Elizabeth. Nearly everyone has expressed the same sensation of disorientation at the loss of her reassuring continuity, on the way that she was always there as the monarch of England while so many upsetting events roiled the world and so many other prominent figures came and went. And for those of us with an interest in theater, the same could be said for Angela Lansbury. Both Elizabeth II and Lansbury had started their careers when I was born in late 1951, and both seemed immortal in their abilities to remain effective and celebrated in their work well into old age. I saw each of these women only once in person, but each occasion was indelible, and each for me epitomizes why these two people were so beloved.
In 1976 I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and experiencing what I can now confess, all these decades later, to be the unhappiest year of my academic life. I had gravitated toward schools because they were places where I could be successful. I wasn’t good at much, but I was good at getting good grades. I was one of those types I came to recognize so clearly when I became a teacher myself: a student who knew all the answers on the test but hadn’t actually learned anything of value. In the graduate program at Virginia, I had to face the reality of my mediocrity. There were lots of people in that program who were not only smarter than I was (that was nothing new for me), but who were also better at getting good grades. The department operated on a five-step grading scale. From lowest to highest: Fail, Pass, High Pass (Level 2), High Pass (Level 1), and—the highest possible score—Distinction. As I recall, the Pass level translated to a B on the transcript, and all the others were equivalent to A’s. But in order to proceed to the Ph.D. level, one had to earn Distinctions. I just couldn’t do that. I could get those High Pass Level Ones, but I could never quite reach the level of brilliance and dazzle required to get a Distinction, and I never could figure out why. I had gone to UVA as what they rather ominously called a terminal master’s degree candidate, but I hated thinking that the door to the doctorate was closed to me.
In July of 1976, I was finishing the work for my M.A. and living in a basement apartment on Park Street in Charlottesville, where I was the tenant of an unpleasant landlord whose lovely wife could not offset her husband’s arrogance. It had not been a happy rental. It had not been a happy year. Only a few weeks earlier had I acquired a teaching job for the coming school year after months of searching and no offers. (I had started applying to jobs in the New York City area and had gradually worked my way south; I ended up at a small school in Georgia after months of increasing desperation.) I was a few weeks away from concluding an academic year that had left me shaken, uncertain of myself, and eager to leave Charlottesville forever. Such was my malaise as I walked a couple of miles to the grounds of the University and waited with the hordes of other onlookers for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to emerge from their lunch in the Rotunda. Eventually out they came, and while I know that there were thousands of other people there, in my memory I’m the only person standing on the lawn as the queen walks by, her husband a few steps behind. She smiled so genuinely and so graciously, and for just a moment she seemed to be smiling directly at me, and I packed up that memory and have moved it with me, like a lucky silver dollar or a favorite photograph, wherever I have lived ever since. We never exchanged a word, of course. She was never aware of my existence. But the memory of her visiting the university designed by the man who wrote the document declaring the American colonies to be free of British rule, of her tacit declaration that all was forgiven, that old troubles could give way to new and lasting friendship, gave me a little moment of peace in my troubled heart as I limped my way to the end of a sobering (and, in the long run, enormously beneficial) year of uncertainty and fear that I was never going to be good enough at anything.
Three years later, in 1979, I was enjoying the life of a boarding school teacher, though God knows I still had plenty to learn. I was so ignorant, in fact, that I was merely lukewarm on the topic of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. I thought that A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was his best show, and while I respected his lyrics for West Side Story, I considered his music to be atonal, dissonant, unmelodic, and too cerebral. In short, I was an ignorant little philistine who seriously needed a tutorial in musical theater. My student Steve Murray lent me the double soundtrack album of a new musical, Sweeney Todd, which to my untrained ear sounded terrible—loud factory whistles, dark minor-key ballads, operatic arias, thumping sound effects of recently slain bodies. Then Steve set me straight: “It’s funny,” he said, and that was enough to get me interested in seeing the show. Some months later my friends Bud and Kathy and I went to the Uris Theater (now the Gershwin) to see Angela Lansbury, Len Cariou, and the rest of the original cast perform Sweeney Todd, and that was the day that the scales fell from my ears, so to speak, the day when I began to admire and eventually worship Sondheim. That afternoon I learned that it was possible to create a musical thriller that was darkly comic and gratifyingly gory as I watched two musical professionals perform what I still consider to be the single cleverest song in American musical history, “A Little Priest.”
That was the only time I would see Angela Lansbury in person, but that one encounter was enough to make me a lifetime fan. I’ll admit that after a couple of seasons I tired of “Murder, She Wrote,” but I never tired of Lansbury. She could play a lascivious cockney maid in Gaslight when she was still a teenager. She could play Lawrence Harvey’s coldblooded, amoral mother in The Manchurian Candidate when she was only three years older than he. She could create the character of Mame for Jerry Herman’s eponymous musical. She could play a teapot in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. And at age 83 she could win her fifth Tony for playing a kooky clairvoyant in Blithe Spirit. She was a deftly flexible performer who mastered stage, movies, and television, and she shared her gifts with the world until the very end.
In 2022 we celebrate the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s Ulysses, two modernist works that have bedeviled, challenged, touched, and astonished readers for one hundred years. During all but four of those years the world enjoyed the presence of two extraordinary women who—dare I say it?—may not have been as highbrow as Eliot and Joyce but who engendered greater affection and joy than either one of those male geniuses. I don’t begrudge Eliot and Joyce their literary immortality, but we don’t live in posterity. We live in the here and now, and Elizabeth II and Lansbury’s long presence among us was a blessing.