Archive Columns: Personal

Bob and Me (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1992)

    Aristotle said that politics is the proper study for everyone but after an election year, you’re not so sure.  I’m sick of this stuff!  And all of its issues.  So you won’t find a syllable here about any American sitcom, or notions of domesticity, or conscription, or the free-trade agreement, or why we’re not facing up to the real problem which I have just promised not to mention.

     No, this is going to be about something entirely different.  This is going to be about my relationship with Robert Goulet.

     When I was 17, I was passing thorgh New York with my parents and they treated me to my first Broadway show.  This was the era of hits like Mame and Hello,Dolly! But I chose instead to see The Happy Time which turned out to be one of those clever little musicals that Broadway used to mount before it turned to doing revivals and spectacles and then revivals of spectacles.  Its star was the young Goulet, following his debut as Lancelot in the original Camelot.

     After the show, we were hailing a cab when suddenly, borne on a wave of feminine vapors, a crowd of young girls flooded out of the theater alley, shrieking that they had met Goulet.  Certain that I would be a celebrity myself one day, I looked patronizingly upon this pitiful outburst and then wandered straight down the alley myself.

     The alley had emptied by then however and my footsteps in the dark made the ominous noise footsteps make when walking into a cliché. When I knocked on the grubby industrial door, anemically lit by the typical single bulb, a stagehand answered gruffly and asked what I wanted.

     I said I had come to see Mr. Goulet.

     Expecting to be rebuffed, I was surprised when the man led me back through the dark stage flats, knocked on the star’s dressing room and Mr. Goulet answered smiling, his then-wife Carol Lawrence sitting on a sofa behind him.

     I babbled the predictable idiocies and he graciously shook my hand and thanked me for coming to the show.  Ever since, I have permitted myself, on the admittedly rare times in my life that his name came up, to refer to him as my buddy Bob.

     Twenty-four years later, in the fall of 1992, I find myself with a 9 –year-old son hooked on the original Broadway recording of Camelot and Farley, my wife, notices that my buddy Bob is coming to the Music Fair in the role of Arthur.

     There are times, fortunately, when Fate drops her usual subtlety.

     We went.  At intermission, I wrote a little note and after the show, we made our way backstage.  Buster stood timidly holding his mother’s hand when King Arthur came out and jovially said hello.

     It was over in, well, one brief shining moment.  We shook hands and Goulet winced good-naturedly at the strength of Buster’s handshake.  We chatted amicably for a minute and were gone.

     That’s pretty much the story between Goulet and me, more of a leitmotif than a relationship, I guess.  But, going back to the car, I thought how prettily this 24-year old anecdote of mind had come to a close, passed on, as in the end of Camelot itself, to the still wide eyes of youth.  I later calculated that first meeting to have taken place in 1968, an election year with political problems vastly more grim than the present ones and I took solace in the memory’s merciful habit of sifting and separating life before storing it.  In retrospect, at least, there’s more to life than politics.

     Someday, 50 years from now, Buster will be on a spaceship to Mars or some such spot and, having three months to kill, the talk will inevitably come around to the golden age of the American musical.  He will be able to sigh that as a boy he once met Robert Goulet. Given the decline of culture in his lifetime, this will no doubt roughly be equivalent to having met Brahms or Sarah Bernhardt.

     It is a little thing, but he will have, Buster will, a small connection to that transcendent world, a little sparkling moment like the one, or rather two, that now and then I summon up, recalling the kindness of my buddy Bob.

[ Post script: When Goulet read this in the Inquirer, he called me to thank me.  Nice.]

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