Remembering Fran Landesman

As usual, Fran Landesman put it better than anyone else: “It was a good life. But it wasn’t commercial.”

I happened to be in Londont this summer when the famed poet, cabaret star, and former St. Louisan died on July 23. I attended her funeral service a few days later. My wife, Ann, and I were the only St. Louisans at the cemetery/crematorium in the northern suburbs of London.

I had known Fran longer than anyone else in the room, a relationship that dated back to the 1950s, when she and her husband, Jay, opened the first Crystal Palace and I was a young sports writer who liked to stay up late. The bar was on Olive Street, east of Grand Boulevard, and next door to El Sarape, a Mexican restaurant whose meals were better than its spelling. Jack O’Neill, a great bartender and dear friend, worked there before the Mutrux family lured him to the Gaslight Bar on Boyle, anchoring and naming the neighborhood.

My wife and I were in England on a journey that, coincidentally, marked several celebrations, real and mythical. A granddaughter graduated from college in Nottingham. I also had wanted to return to Stratford-Upon-Avon since my first visit 39 years ago. I always want to spend time in London, and tucked into a pocket was Fran’s phone number.

I usually saw Jay and Fran when I was in the city, often meeting at the Groucho Club in Soho, where Groucho Marx’s line “I don’t want to belong to a club that would accept a person like me,” came to life for people like Jay, one of its founders.

Jay had died in February, at the age of 91. Fran was 83. They had been married 61 years.

Fran last visited St. Louis in the fall of 2008. She performed at the new Gaslight Theater, located a few blocks from the original Gaslight Square, where the second Crystal Palace defined hip for the Beat generation and the swinging ’60s and made St. Louis a mainline stop for comics and poets, singers and cultural commentators. Back then, representatives of popular and rebellious culture suddenly realized St. Louis was a place worth visiting.

At the time, Jay’s family—property owners and operators of a major antique venue—was heavily involved in the cultural life of the city. When the St. Louis Symphony needed a guest conductor on short notice, symphony manager Willie Zalken brought in a young man named Leonard Bernstein, and he spent the weekend with the family. (Needless to say, Bernstein’s conducting debut was a triumph.) The family was wealthy, and Jay and his brother, Fred, were partners in several operations. Fred, less flighty than Jay, also made sure that solvency was retained. (An interesting side note: Jay was originally named Irving, but he changed it, with some claiming an F. Scott Fitzgerald influence of Jay Gatsby.) But Fred had an arts connection, too: His son, Rocco, a successful Broadway producer, is now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The boy from St. Louis and the girl from New York’s Central Park West married in 1950, and they set up housekeeping in St. Louis. Fran was no stranger to the hip scene in Greenwich Village: She ice-skated in Central Park with Timothy Leary and rejected an invitation from Jack Kerouac to run away together because “I’m a poet, too.”

And now she was dead, and we all were in the same city. A couple of messages from friends back home, like singer Anna Blair, helped us find Simon Wallace, her accompanist of many years. The service/cremation was at the East Finchley Cemetery, the colors of summer a dazzling contrast to the dim mood. The collected mourners might have been transported through a time warp from Gaslight Square in the 1950s. Fran and Jay’s older son, Cosmo, a film critic for The Times, wore a dark suit and a somber look; his brother, Miles, a musician and writer, was decked out in plaid shorts and a lime-green jacket. The other 40 or so guests wore a cacophony of costumes—jeans and cut-offs, tie-dyes, skirts of all lengths, Jimmy Choo shoes, battered sneakers, some ensembles looking as if they had been collected from laundry baskets, others neatly pressed. A few wore ties. Black was the primary color. Many tears were shed, mixed with shrieks of recognition. A handful of children stood quietly here and there, all on their best behavior.

A medley of Fran’s songs accompanied the procession of the plain coffin and the snuffling friends, relatives, and acquaintances.

Two songs she wrote with Tommy Wolf in the Crystal Palace days, which have become jazz standards, served as bookends. Kath Best sang “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” and Sarah Moule and Wallace combined on “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” (Both were in the first St. Louis version of The Nervous Set, but there were record-label problems and only the former survived for the Broadway production.) Nicki Leighton-Thomas sang “Scars,” a more contemporary song she wrote with Wallace, and actor and friend Perry Benson sang “Small Day Tomorrow,” with music by Bob Dorough.

Her sons both spoke. Cosmo described finding his mother’s body: “I said, ‘Mom, you have a gig tonight,’ and when she didn’t respond, I knew she was dead.” (In fact, she and Wallace had performed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts on Thursday, two days before she died.)

Two rare moments broke the mood. A young woman in our pew suddenly stood up, hiked her long skirt, and climbed into the pew in front of us. And about two-thirds of the way through the service, the coffin began rolling, off its cart and through an opening in the wall, a startling interruption as we realized Fran was making her final exit.

Back at the house, the scene was reminiscent of the Palace, or its rear patio after closing time. Champagne was opened and platters of food appeared, a couple of them carried in by Miles. People noodled on a dining-room piano; a color photo of the Crystal Palace in its glory days hung on the back of a door. An illegal aroma wafted through the air. Benson and Trevor Laird— another actor, now on a London stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company—recalled growing up in the neighborhood as boyhood friends of Cosmo and Miles, and romping through the house together.

Looking at the rather small kitchen and dining room, I remembered Cosmo’s memoir, Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me, and his description of his parents’ open marriage, when Jay, Fran, and their bedmates of the previous night would often meet the teenagers at breakfast. (Both The New York Times and the London Telegraph obituaries pointed out this part of their relationship.)

Ann and I walked to the corner and caught a bus for central London. We flew home to St. Louis the next day. Looking back on Fran and Jay, I know that he was a great promoter who thought that any publicity was good publicity. Fran was shyer, though later, she became almost comfortable in the spotlight; her five slender volumes of poems show a bittersweet view of life that varied like her mercurial moods. I have fond memories of both, underlined by a night in Chicago when the three of us and author Nelson Algren talked about Somebody in Boots, his semi-autobiographical novel that became A Walk on the Wild Side, starring Dorough. It played for about six weeks at the Palace and vanished forever. Fran was quite interested in getting closer to Algren, who was still getting over Simone de Beauvoir and happy to talk about how “she done him wrong.” Algren, a Cubs fan, wanted to talk baseball. It was interesting, as time spent with the Landesmans always was.

And her death, only five months after his, was wrapped in the skeins of relationships that seem to surround so many deaths. The original Nervous Set company included a young actor named Tom Aldredge and a costume designer named Theoni Vachlioti. They married in St. Louis, made their Broadway debuts in the show, and remained in the spotlight for a half-century—she as a winner of an Oscar and three Tonys, he as a character actor of many roles, from Twelve Angry Men on stage to seven seasons as Tony’s father-in-law on The Sopranos. She died in January, and he died the day before Fran, six months later.