"What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up, Kid?"

When I was very young, 8 years old to be exact, my mother and I would spend part of the week in New York City where I was doing 4 performances each week in “The Sound Of Music” and the rest of the week in our home in Philadelphia, PA. It was a slightly weird and crazy time but I loved every minute. The weekly trip to New York City saved me from the Philadelphia streets.

As I spent more and more time around actors and musicians, I decided that my answer to the infamous question, “What do you want to be when you grow up, kid?” was that I was going to become the next multi-talent who would rule the world of entertainment. I would be an actor, a director, a playwright, and a songwriter, both music and lyrics.

My next acting job came a year later when I was cast in “Sail Away”, a musical starring Elaine Stritch. By that time I was 9 years old and a “seasoned Broadway veteran” (Ha-Ha!). The great Noel Coward not only wrote the script, he wrote the words and the music to all the songs and he directed it. Luckily for me, when I first met Mr. Coward, I was so young and knew so little about theater that I really had no idea who he was, or I would have been scared to death at my audition..

We rehearsed in New York City for some weeks and then we took the show on the road. As our time in rehearsal and on the road progressed, the show changed, Elaine’s role got bigger and more important, new songs were added, old songs removed, dialogue changed - it was exhilarating and exciting and a little frightening to be a part of a brand new show.

Everybody loved my mother – mainly because she didn’t have one ounce of “stage mother” in her. She got me there on time, she helped me learn the few spoken lines I had and she never once complained that her son wasn’t getting enough limelight. She would sit quietly in the back of the rehearsal room or in the back of the theater knitting (her favorite pastime). The day she gave Mr. Coward the sweater she had been knitting for him (a total surprise for him), she became one of Noel’s favorite people and I did as well, by extension. (In later years, when I might accidentally run into him, his first words to me were almost always, “How is your lovely mother, dear boy?”)

I decided that Noel Coward, being an actor and a director and a playwright and a songwriter, would be the perfect person to help me achieve my dream. He gave me one of the songs he had written which had been replaced in the show while we were in Boston and told me to write a new lyric for it. I agonized over every word and every comma for two days and then gave it to him. He read what I had written and then sat down at the piano and played the song, singing it softly with my new lyrics.

When he had finished, Noel looked at me and said, very seriously in a man-to-man voice (and not a man-to-9-year-old-boy voice), “Dear boy, I think you better stick to acting and singing. You do them both well and I believe you will get better and better – but I am afraid you just weren’t there when the writing muse was handed out”. Tough words for a 9 year old to hear, but once the initial sting wore off, I realized he was right.

To this day, over 55 years later, I still wish I had been there “when the writing muse was handed out”. And I still envy people who write books or plays or lyrics or music. But I took Noel’s advice to heart and focused not on being the creator but on being the performer and interpreter of what others have written. And, at the risk of sounding a bit conceited, after all these years I think I’m finally getting pretty good at it.

Thank you, Noel -  you probably saved the ears of the world a lot of pain when you talked me out of writing songs...