Horsman Dolls

My maternal grandfather, Harry Freedman (1895-1967), made dolls for a living.  It was a pretty good living: he supported my grandmother, my mother, and her sister pretty nicely right through the Great Depression and World War II, and they all came out the other side in good shape and went on to live comfortable lives.  Grandpa Harry—sometimes HF when I was little—eventually got both his sons-in-law and a couple of nieces’ husbands jobs after World War II and supported or subsidized, unbeknownst to the rest of his family until after his death, other relatives and in-laws who had fallen on hard times.  Harry was a good businessman, investing in or starting several other concerns in addition to the doll company—but he was also a soft touch.  I recently learned from a cousin on my dad’s side that after my mother and father were married, my other grandfather, Jack (1890-1963), who was a pharmacist, was in danger of losing his Manhattan drugstore; I believe the landlord had raised the rent—a problem that still frequently occurs today. 

When my mother’s parents met my father’s folks after my future parents were engaged, the family lore is that Harry and my paternal grandmother, Lena, immediately adored each other.  (I never knew Lena—she died before I was three years old—but my mother always told me that she was the nicest person ever.  She couldn’t cook worth a damn, Mom told me—except one dish: stuffed cabbage—but she never had a bad word to say about anyone, even the worst good-for-nothing in the family circle!  Harry, on the other hand, who was only 5' 5" tall, was known by his business colleagues as “Little Caesar” (no connection to the pizza business, started in 1959, but may have been a reference to the character played by Edward G. Robinson—who was 5' 7"—in the 1931 movie of that title.)  Out of this inter-family affection, Grandpa Harry bought the building in which Grandpa Jack (JL when I was a boy) had his pharmacy.  Jack, and I presume Lena, knew that Harry’d done this, but none of the rest of either family did.  (I learned this from my cousin only about a year ago.  Jack had died in 1963 and Harry in 1967.) 

(In a curious coincidence, my Grandfather Jack’s drugstore was at 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, which is seven blocks north and a block-and-a-half east of where I now live.  I often pass the site where the building stood—though it’s no longer the same structure.  My dad’s family even lived in an apartment in the same building—“over the shop,” if you will—in the ’30s and ’40s, which is when my mom and dad met and became engaged.  Furthermore, Grandpa Harry’s office, the sales offices of Horsman Dolls, was in 200 Fifth Avenue, known as the Toy Center South, at 23rd and Fifth, literally just up the street from my current apartment, and 1½ blocks west of Jack’s drugstore.  When I first moved to New York and Dad, the family representative on the Horsman board, came up from Washington for board meetings, we’d meet for lunch and if he stayed overnight in New York, he’d stay at my apartment down Fifth Avenue from the Toy Center.)

Harry was a World War I vet.  He fought in France and was wounded so that he was sent home shortly after Armistice Day (11 November 1918)—before most of the other Doughboys came back.  (The family story was that when Harry’s parents got the telegram informing them that their son had been wounded, it read curtly: “Harry Freedman shot in buttocks.”  My grandfather’s family, not very knowledgeable about European geography—my father’s parents were born abroad, but my mother’s family had been Americans for several generations—and knowing only where Harry’d been fighting, pored over the map of France looking for a place called “Buttocks”!  I have no idea if this anecdote is accurate—or even true—but that’s the story and I’m stickin’ to it.)  And so, Harry came home, invalided out of the service, at loose ends, and, having recovered from his wound, one of few able-bodied young men in the States while the war was winding up in Europe.  He began looking for something to do with his life.

Many years earlier, when Harry was a boy and vehicles on New York City streets were still drawn by horses, he was hit by a city garbage wagon and slightly injured.  As compensation for the accident, the city paid him $10,000, a mighty sum in those days (about $280,000 today, calculating from 1905 when Harry’d have been 10).  The money had been put aside for his future, as people used to say, but now Harry, 23 when he got back from France, decided it was time to put it to work and start that future.  The budding businessman started looking for something worthy of his investment and he found a company: the Regal Doll Manufacturing Company of New York City.  Before the war, Regal was known as the German American Doll Company; the reason for the name-change is pretty obvious, I think.  It was a going concern, with plenty of orders and a busy factory on West Houston Street at the southern edge of what is now NoHo, but it needed capital to buy raw materials to fill the orders.  So Harry bought into Regal Doll and became a partner, eventually taking over leadership of the business.  After a few years, Regal Doll Manufacturing changed its name again, becoming the Regal Doll Corporation.

Before the 20th century, dolls in the U.S. were almost exclusively imported from Europe, most frequently from Germany.  Even when American companies started manufacturing domestic products just after the turn of the century, the materials were brought over from Europe.  World War I disrupted that supply chain and the American doll manufacturers like Regal began making a product based largely on local materials.  So when my grandfather invested his nest egg in Regal Doll, it was ripe for success, and the company prospered, making a good-quality, popular-priced doll.   

In the middle of the 19th century, dolls—really the doll’s heads and sometimes the hands and feet—were made of porcelain, either china (shiny and not very realistic-looking) or bisque (matte and much more lifelike).  Homemade dolls could be made of rags, corn husks, carved wood, or any available material, but manufactured dolls were porcelain—and they were highly breakable, a serious drawback for a child’s toy. 

A major improvement came along as early as 1877: the composition doll.  Made of a composite of sawdust, glue, and such additives as cornstarch, resin, and wood flour (finely pulverized wood), composition dolls had the great advantage of being unbreakable, and by the beginning of the 20th century, composition dolls were the most popular kind of doll on the American market.  Horsman (which would be Regal’s successor) secured the rights to the process, which was the principal material for dolls from about 1909 until World War II.  (The two dolls I mention below were composition dolls.)

 

In the ’30s, Regal made a 19-inch-tall doll with composition shoulders and head, composition arms, partial composition legs, cloth stuffed body and stitched hips.  The head had molded, painted hair; blue tin eyes; and a closed painted mouth.  The doll’s name?  The Judy Girl Doll.  My mother’s name was Judith!

Later that same decade, Regal marketed a 12-inch-tall all-composition doll with a jointed body and painted, molded hair; painted blue eyes; and closed painted mouth that came in a cardboard carrying case with a wardrobe and roller skates.  (This doll also came with “sleep” eyes, or “open-and-close” eyes, and a mohair wig over her molded hair.)  This baby’s name?  Bobby Anne.  My mother’s little sister was Roberta Ann, called Bobby.  

By the ’30s, however, Regal’s Manhattan factory was no longer adequate for the growing business and Harry went in search of larger facilities for his burgeoning company.

He found the Horsman Doll Company, the oldest doll-maker in the United States established in New York City in 1865 by Edward Imeson (E. I.) Horsman (1843-1927).  “No other company even comes close to its record of longevity,” says a corporate description on Zoominfo.  E. I. Horsman had retired in the early years of the 20th century and turned the company, one of the pioneers in the manufacture of American dolls, over to his son, but Edward, Jr. (1873-1918), died suddenly at 45 and E.I. returned to the business.  Then E. I. Horsman died in 1927 and the previously greatly successful company fell into serious financial trouble. In the early 1930s, the foundering company had built a large, but under-used factory in the Chambersburg neighborhood of Trenton, New Jersey, so Regal bought it for its new manufacturing base.

Having already purchased Horsman’s newly-built Trenton plant, Regal Doll, now under the direction of my grandfather and his chief salesman, Lawrence Lipson (1896-1959), acquired the nearly bankrupt Horsman Doll in October 1933.  The new leadership and Regal’s solid business position revived the fortunes of Horsman (whose name was pronounced like horse-man and whose logo was a horse’s head) and the new company continued to make dolls under both trade names, Regal and Horsman.  Regal produced a mid-level, less-expensive doll, while Horsman’s product was a higher-quality doll at a slightly higher (but still affordable) price.  By 1937, however, Harry Freedman and Larry Lipson realized that Horsman was the superior brand and in 1940, Regal Doll formally became Horsman Doll and the Regal label disappeared from the market.  (The present-day Regal Toy Company of Toronto, Canada, is a different company unaffiliated with my grandfather’s business.)

At the time of the purchase, my mother’s family moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where much of Harry’s family also lived, to Fisher Place on the Delaware River in downtown Trenton so my grandfather could be near his business, a scant three miles away.  (The new company’s business headquarters was still located in Manhattan—in the Toy Center South, which had become a home base for the toy industry during World War I.)  Mom (1923-2015) lived in Trenton from then until she was married (not counting prep school in Pennsylvania and college in upstate New York), and my Aunt Bobby (1927-2006) stayed there after marriage (to a man who became a Horsman VP and its in-house counsel) until she and her husband separated in the ’50s.  My grandparents moved back to New York City after World War II, once both daughters were married (my mother in January 1946 and Aunt Bobby in November 1947), living at 68th and Fifth, across from Central Park.  (I said the doll business provided Mom’s family with a comfortable life, didn’t I?) 

From about 1880 to the end of the 1960s, the State of New Jersey was one of the country’s most productive toy-making states.  With over 50 toy companies with names like Tyco (HO scale toy trains), Lionel (model trains), J. Chein (mechanical toys), Remco (remote control toys), Topper Toys (model cars and inexpensive dolls), Courtland (wind-up toys), and Colorforms (creative toys) operating in the state, Regal and Horsman weren’t alone in the Garden State.  In its heyday, Horsman’s Chambersburg plant was touted as the largest toy factory in the United States.  One block square, at its peak the two-building, three-story brick complex at 350 Grand Street in an otherwise residential neighborhood of South Trenton employed 1,200 workers and manufactured hundreds of thousands of dolls every year, earning the nickname “World’s Largest Doll House.”  “Not many people realize it, but if you purchased a doll from 1930 to 1960 it was probably made here in Trenton,” says Nicholas Ciotola, curator of cultural history at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, where an exhibit called Toy World is running just steps away from the Horsman factory.  (The exhibit, in the Riverside Gallery from 15 October 2016-30 April 2017, focuses on the toys manufactured in New Jersey during the 20th century. I went down to Trenton to see it on 7 February so I could check out the Regal and Horsman displays.) 

By the 1940s, Horsman Doll was a great success on the basis of its moderately priced, good-quality, baby dolls that little girls loved.  (It was my mother’s hard luck that she had two sons and no daughters on whom she could lavish Horsman dolls every Christmas and birthday.  The attic of the house in which my brother and I grew up was half-filled with boxed Horsman dolls for our female cousins and the daughters of my parents’ friends—but none for her own children.  Aunt Bobby, on the other hand, had two daughters—the youngest one named Judith.)  The beautiful baby dolls came without fancy names (the child got to name her dolly whatever she wanted; the box didn’t provide a name) or marketing gimmicks, but dressed in lovely doll clothes.  (My grandfather was color-blind but he could tell fine fabric and excellent workmanship; he just needed employees to help him pick out the colors.  In fact, he had the same problem with his own clothes—and sometimes his socks and trousers or jackets and ties really clashed.  But they were made from top-quality fabrics!) 

During World War II, shortages of raw materials dealt the American toy industry a serious blow.  Some essential supplies were imported from overseas, including Axis territory and occupied countries.  Kapok, for example, a fiber from the silk-cotton tree used for stuffing doll bodies, came principally from the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies—and, of course, shipping of any kind was at risk.  Most domestic materials, like the mohair for doll wigs and metal for sleep-eye mechanisms, were diverted to war industries, so little remained available for toy manufacturers.  Some toy companies began making products for the war effort.  Horsman was able to continue making some dolls, but the Chambersburg factory turned part of its manufacturing floor over to soft vinyl prostheses, such as artificial hands for amputee veterans.  After the war, most doll-makers scrambled to return to the production of dolls, but Horsman capitalized on its wartime experience with vinyl.  

For all its advantages as doll-making material, composition was difficult to work with and it was hard to the touch.  Vinyl was a soft, easily-molded, durable, unbreakable plastic that could be sculpted into lifelike faces and was pleasing to a little girl’s touch.  It was the perfect doll material and Horsman was a pioneer in its use in the doll industry.  It wasn’t the first doll firm to use plastic, though in 1947 it was the first to do so on a large scale.  From the post-war years until my family relinquished control of Horsman for the final time (I’ll get to this), its dolls were made with vinyl heads.

In the 1950s, Horsman developed an even more flexible material it dubbed Super-Flex, used for the dolls’ bodies, which for the composite dolls had been made of stuffed fabric and for the all-vinyl dolls were soft plastic that allowed for only minimal manipulation.  Super-Flex permitted the dolls’ knees and elbows to be bent so the dolls could be posed in many different ways.  Later in the ’50s, Horsman introduced further advancements in the dolls’ vinyl skin, giving it an even more like-like feel.

In the same decade, the company introduced Polly, an African-American doll.  (A Polly was included in the NJSM exhibit.)  Horsman wasn’t the first doll-manufacturer to market a black doll—there were African-American dolls available in the 19th and early 20th centuries—but most of the earlier African-American dolls were merely models of the companies’ standard dolls from white molds painted dark brown.  Horsman’s Polly was an attempt to create a black doll with more realistic features.  She was sold from the mid-’50s through the 1970s and ’80s (the latter years by a derivative company that had duplicated Horsman’s original products). 

Horsman dolls were seldom sold under the company name in the ’50s  and ’60s.  Horsman made most of its dolls for retailers like Sears, Montgomery Ward, Gimbels, and Macys and packaged them under the stores’ names.  (Occasionally, I’d hear the name Horsman Doll on a TV show which used them as giveaways for game-show contestants or participants.  I recall that Art Linkletter, 1912-2010, gave away Horsman dolls on his variety and kiddie TV shows between 1950 and 1969.  I always had a little twinge of pride when Linkletter would announce that all the girls on the show would receive a Horsman doll as a gift from the show.  I don’t remember what the boys got.) 

By the 1950s, however, Harry Freedman and his now-partner, Larry Lipson, saw that the doll company had grown to its limit.  It had supported the Freedmans and the Lipsons very well, but it wasn’t going to get any bigger.  Horsman made only baby dolls; it didn’t make “action figures” for boys or any other toys (not since the original Horsman family years) and it didn’t diversify its factory to make other plastic items (aside from that wartime foray).  Like most toy businesses, Horsman’s one big sales period, when it made its annual profit, was Christmas; the rest of the year, business dragged until it was time to gear up for the holiday gift season—and that wasn’t going to change.  Larry Lipson’s son, Gerald (1925-88), would take over the business when his father retired, just as Larry had taken over for Harry—but Gerry’s children were disinclined to run the company and Harry’s grandchildren (there were four of us: my brother and me, and Aunt Bobby’s two daughters) were still little kids.  So the shareholders—the Freedman and Lipson families and a few key Horsman employees, made the decision to sell the company.  A conglomerate, Botany Industries, purchased Horsman Dolls in 1957 in a period of expansion. 

I’m no businessman (and I was very young at the time), but as I understood it later, the deal, in  which my father, by then a member of Horsman’s board of directors, was instrumental, was standard.  Botany agreed to pay off the purchase price over several years, a decade I believe, and if at any point during that period the buyer defaulted on the payments, Botany would forfeit all the money it had paid up to that time and the company would revert to the sellers.  And that’s what happened sometime in the early ’60s—1961 or ’62 as I recall.  Botany had decided that it had over-expanded and over-diversified and had to divest of several smaller acquisitions and downsize (though that term wasn’t in general use quite yet).  So after paying off nearly the entire purchase price for Horsman, Botany backed out of the sale and the Freedmans and the Lipsons got the company back.  I tell people that this is the only real-life instance of which I’ve ever heard of someone actually having their cake and eating it, too. 

During the time that Botany owned Horsman, the Trenton factory was deemed outdated and beyond upgrading or retooling.  So in 1960, Botany closed the Chambersburg plant and built a new facility in Columbia, South Carolina, a right-to-work state.  That’s where Horsman dolls were made when we got the company back.  (After I got out of the army in 1974, I went to visit an army buddy with whom I’d served in Berlin who was stationed at Fort Jackson.  I took him and his wife out to see the factory—which I’d never seen myself—and watch them make dolls.)  The plant in Trenton was abandoned and, despite some interest a decade or so ago in converting it to residences, it remains unused.  There’s some discussion of preserving it as an example of industrial architecture of the first decades of the 20th century, but I’m not sure how much traction that idea has—the old brick buildings are hardly worth looking at from an aesthetic point of view.  They’re under threat in a gentrifying neighborhood because a developer who controls the property has proposed to raze the entire complex in order to build townhouses. 

Not long after that trip to Columbia, the families put the company on the block again.  Gerry Lipson was retiring and no one from either the Lipson or Freedman families was qualified (or interested) to assume control.  This time, Drew Industries, another conglomerate, bought Horsman—but the terms of the sale were a little different.  Drew issued promissory notes to the shareholders (which now included my two cousins, my brother, and me as a result of the death of Harry’s widow, our maternal grandmother, Valerie, 1900-74, whose estate, with the Horsman shares she’d inherited from Grandpa Harry, went to her grandchildren) that became due over just a few years.  When the purchase was concluded, Horsman Dolls became Drew Dolls, under which name it produced dolls for a few more years, and then Drew Industries liquidated the company and Horsman Dolls, one of the last companies to manufacture dolls in the United States and never made them abroad, passed out of existence.  The dolls from both Regal (including the Judy Girl, Bobby Anne Dolls, and Polly) and Horsman are now all collectors’ items and there are books on them and the companies. 

As a coda, in 1986 the Horsman name was sold—I guess by Drew—to Gatabox, Limited, of Hong Hong, which produced dolls, including reproductions of Horsman classics, under the name Horsman, Limited.  The new company has no connection to either the original E. I. Horsman company or to my grandfather’s business—Gata just bought the name.  That company dissolved in 2002 but was succeeded by a new corporation known as Horsman, Limited, headquartered in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island and it continues to market dolls, but they’re made in Hong Kong now. 

*  *  *  *

Aside from a nice inheritance from my grandfather and a comfortable life growing up because Grandpa Harry engineered a good job for my father after World War II, I didn’t derive any direct benefit from Horsman Dolls.  My two cousins, Aunt Bobby’s daughters, may have had plenty of dolls to play with when they were little girls—and, of course, their father had a good job at the company until he and my aunt split up, but the doll company was never a huge presence in my life.  As a kid, I got some fun out of my dad’s job.  I thought it was kind of neat in the 1950s that he ran a movie-theater company and I got to go to the movies for free a lot and treat my friends—all the theater companies in Washington gave passes to their competitors—and that was thanks to Grandpa Harry, although I really didn’t think of it that way back then.  It was just Dad’s work. 

But there was one benny I got from Horsman that I really took advantage of from time to time—and quite a bit when I moved to New York City after the army.  The company had a ticket broker on retainer for the sales staff so they could take buyers to Broadway shows.  The broker could get seats to just about any show, even ones that were otherwise hard to get into and was an effective way to entertain Horsman clients.  The company made this service available to the families, and when we came to New York, my parents would get tix for the big shows like My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Camelot.  (I wrote about this in my post “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010.)  Later, when I was old enough to come to New York on my own, from prep school in New Jersey or college in Virginia, I used the Horsman perk.  One spring break, I took my two college apartmentmates and another frat brother, all New Yorkers, to three plays, two Broadway shows (Man of La Mancha, The Impossible Years) and my first Off-Broadway drama (Ceremonies in Dark Old Men), courtesy of Horsman Dolls.  

When I came here to live in New York, I tried to see as many shows as I could, taking an acting classmate with me whenever I could, until we sold the company for the last time.  (I knew the sale was coming, probably sooner rather than later, so I was bound to take advantage of the privilege as much as I could before I lost it.)  I figured I ought to spread the wealth around a little.  After all, I wasn’t paying for the tix out of my pocket (they were coming out of my inheritance, in a manner of speaking), but it wasn’t a freebie.  The producers, and therefore the artists, were getting paid, so everyone was benefitting.  When we sold Horsman to Drew, I lost that perk and had to cut way back on Broadway theatergoing.  Broadway ticket prices had gone way up and for the cost of one Broadway seat I could see two or three Off-Broadway productions or more than a half dozen Off-Off-Broadway shows.  It was a deprivation I sorely lamented—the one thing Horsman Dolls gave me that I really appreciated while I had it. 

Berlin Memoir, Part 4

[This is the fourth of eight installments of my recollections of serving in West Berlin, Germany, as a Military Intelligence officer during the early 1970s, a high point in the Cold War.  “Berlin Memoir, Part 4” covers some of the small events of my work and the oddities that were part and parcel of that world.  If you haven’t read parts 1 through 3, I recommend going back and catching up on them before starting on part 4, not only for the background, but because some things are explained and defined in the earlier sections and it might be hard to follow what I’m talking about from here forward without that information.  (Part 1 was posted on 16 December 2016, part 2 on 31 December, and part 3 on 20 January 2017.)]

Working in Berlin was different from working anywhere else.  We did things in Berlin that our sister units in the Zone or elsewhere in USAREUR never heard of.  I said that Berlin got the best of everything—it also got the best personnel.  MI was one of the branches that took only the most qualified applicants, and the best of the best were assigned to Berlin.  I had colleagues, NCO’s, with multiple graduate degrees.  One of my own NCO’s, a buck sergeant, had been Phi Bet in college.  The average education level in my unit was five years of college.  That was the average.  Me, with my measly four-year BA, was below average.  Our unit clerk was one of the most articulate guys I ever met—and he was a corporal or something.  (We had mostly hard-stripers in our unit—only a few specialists.) 

Because of this, and the fact that our unit was so small and we were so segregated because of our jobs, we did quite a bit of fraternizing.  We were a little isolated, though.  First of all, we weren’t part of Berlin Brigade, so our chain of command was different.  Second, we wore civilian clothes and that separated us from the other GI’s in Berlin.  Third, and most significantly, we couldn’t talk to outsiders about our work—and Army people almost always talk shop when they’re smokin’ and jokin’.  There’s a certain level of paranoia that goes with doing intel work in Berlin.  (All those spies I mentioned before weren’t there for their health!)  Anything to do with Berlin was automatically classified higher than the same thing would be anywhere else in the Army.  I had clearances so far above TS, I didn’t know what many of them meant.  That’s not a joke.  My clearances had so many acronyms and initials, I couldn’t remember them all (and I can’t remember most of them at all now).  You ever hear of OFCO-RODCA clearance?  I had that.  (Sounds like some dire disease, don’t it?  The acronyms stand for Offensive Counterintelligence Operation and Reporting of Defense Collection Activities.)  In some cases, the acronym itself was classified! 

You work around that stuff, it’s hard to socialize with people outside your field.  And if you do make a friend from outside, especially outside the forces, you have to run a file check on him or her.  (Like that guy in The Big Lift!)  Now that’s the basis for a lasting friendship, much less a romance.  “Listen, honey, before we get too serious, I have to do a background check on you.  Would you mind filling out this personal history form?”  That’s a buzz-kill for sure.  While even wives were kept out of the loop when it came to work, they were at the parties like anywhere else.  But it was so awkward to bring a date that no one ever did.  If the Wall made the city claustrophobic, our own security practices made the unit claustrophobic, too.  (This didn’t mean we couldn’t socialize outside the unit.  Dating or friendships were perfectly fine—they just had to stay outside unit functions, even unofficial ones.  And, of course, you couldn’t say much about what you did OTJ.  And you did have to do that file check.  I did one on a woman I met, a Brit—and she turned out to have a very unsavory record.  Nothing criminal or spooky—just very, very flaky—enough to be in the files.  Had to stop seeing her, but I couldn’t tell her why.  “Sorry, Babe.  I had you checked out, and there are some things in your record that won’t do.  See ya.”  That was awkward.)

Anyway, working MI in Berlin wasn’t just nutsy from our own perspective.  There were nuts beyond our control, too.  (I mean the ones who weren’t wearing green suits!)  Berlin Station wasn’t a covert unit, just low-profile, as I said earlier.  We had offices with our name on them—right at the front of the HQ compound, just inside the gate.  In contrast, our sister unit (the 9668’s), the positive intel outfit of 66th MI in Berlin, was covert and lived in unmarked offices near ours.  The “non-existent” CIA unit in Berlin—they weren’t supposed to be there—were in “mismarked” offices hidden away in “Building 7” at the rear of the compound.  Unless you knew what they were, you’d assume they were some esoteric tech-support unit.  (Something to do with maps, I recall.) 

My friend Rich Gilbert, now a lawyer in D.C., who had been an infantry officer in BB and then was in the Public Information Office, told me that there was one thing about my job that used to aggravate him.  Not that I couldn’t talk about what I did or that occasionally I’d have to run off suddenly because of a phone call.  That was just SOP.  It was a look I got when he started telling me about some crazy thing that he came across at work.  For instance, he’d start to tell me about this odd unit he heard about that he’d never run across before and that he didn’t know what it did.  He said I got this look that said to him, “Oh, yeah?  Well, I know what that unit really is—and I can’t tell you.  But you just go on and talk.”  Sometimes he’d stop in mid-sentence and say, “You know all about this, don’t you?  It’s some spook agency, right—and you can’t say anything?”  I guess I’d just smile and keep my mouth shut.  I mean, he knew I couldn’t say anything.  It wasn’t my fault.  One time he launched into one of these monologues—and he was talking about the CIA’s cover ID.  (Ironically, there’s a TV series, on one of the streaming networks I believe, about the CIA in Berlin today, and it’s called—can you guess?—Berlin Station!)

One night some time back I watched a TV show in which the FBI was a central presence.  At one point in the story, a local cop, despite having been warned off, inserted himself into a federal operation and almost compromised it and nearly got a UC agent killed.  In order to get him to back off, the FBI ultimately had to reveal the existence of the UC agent, but this potentially endangered the operation and the agent, so the cop had to be neutralized.  The feds decided to bring him into the Joint Terrorism Task Force—but he would be assigned to the “Legal Attaché in Sri Lanka.”  The Legal Attaché, or LEGAT, was the cover designation of the FBI overseas.  (You remember that the FBI isn’t supposed to operate in foreign countries, just as the CIA isn’t supposed to operate in the States.  Hence the cover name.)  LEGAT was one of the agencies we commonly queried for a records check in a background investigation.  (I also heard a character on another TV show, an FBI agent, refer to an overseas office of the Bureau this way, but the character pronounced it l∂-GAT, as if it were related to the Anne Rice vampire, Lestat.  Silly wabbits.)

Well, anyway, we weren’t undercover that way.  We were the contact point for intelligence for the U.S. Forces in Berlin.  If something came to us and it was in the jurisdiction or operational area of another unit or agency, we made the referral and served as go-between for the initial contact if necessary.  Everyone knew where we were—we had a listed phone number (only one, however; our individual office phones were unlisted—and we answered them with the last four digits of the number, not our names or the unit’s name) and even the German Labor Force guards at the gate knew how to reach us.  This was expressly for “walk-ins”—people off the street who came to the HQ compound and said they had something to report.  If they were old enough to remember WWII or the Occupation, they asked for the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA) or the CIC (the Counterintelligence Corps, the forerunner of Military Intelligence Branch); if they were younger, they asked for the CIA.  No one ever asked for MI as far as I know—but that’s whom they got.  When a walk-in came to the gate and told the guard he wanted to talk to the CIA (or CIC), they sent him to a small outbuilding just to the right of the gate, right next to the corner of the main building where our offices were located.  This was our debriefing and interview room for outsiders, before we let someone into our offices proper.  You’ll see why this disconnect was necessary.

As you might imagine, 99% of walk-ins were nonsense.  Many, even a majority I’d say, were nuts.  The following anecdotes are either from my own experience or from stories my colleagues told—but based on my experience, they’re all true.  One guy I talked to came to report that the Soviets had agents on the moon (no shit) and that he was in contact with them by “eye television.”  (By the way, all these interviews were conducted in German, so there was always one agent and one German legman as translator/interviewer.  My German—and I spoke way better than most other GI’s in the unit—would never have been good enough to get through most of this stuff.  I do remember, though, that what this guy said was Augenfernseh—that’s a literal translation for “eye television.”)  What he meant was that he received images in his mind transmitted from the moon by these Soviet agents.  (Schizophrenia, anyone?)  This same guy also wanted us to know that the Russians were leaving poisoned cigarette butts on the streets so GI’s would pick them up and smoke them.  (I used to see GI’s picking up discarded cigarette butts all the time.  I mean, who could afford 35¢ a pack?  Riiight.) 

As soon as we arrived to interview the walk-in, we’d get his ID documents and all other pertinent info.  The legman, who was an experienced interviewer/interrogator—ours had worked for us longer than any of the GI’s in the unit and probably most of the DAC’s—patted the guy down and we searched any bags he brought.  Meanwhile, before we even started to talk to the guy, the agent called the office and give them the ID info so they could run records checks and search our files.  Some of these walk-ins were frequent fliers: they’d come in before.  Not surprisingly in other instances, we often learned that the walk-in was a mental patient who had walked away from some minimum-security asylum.  When that was true—and I recall that it was in the case of the “eye television” guy—we’d call the hospital and they send someone out to get the guy back.  We’d have to stay with him and talk to him to keep him occupied until the van arrived, never more than a few minutes later.  When there was no such record, we’d talk the guy down—thank him for his help, tell him we’d look into the matter, and say we’d contact him if we needed anything more.  Then we’d escort him back to the gate and see him off the compound.  These were usually guys who’d seen too many James Bond movies.  If we thought the guy was nuts even if he hadn’t come from a hospital to start with, we might get him taken to one.  Rarely, we’d have to call the cops.

Another walk-in was a woman who used to come in every six months or so—had been showing up for a couple of years.  I even remember her name—Hanna Bregemeyer.  Her story was that someone had stolen her identity and was going around being her.  She insisted that we report this to the UN (the UN?) so that they’d make the other person stop being her.  (Are you following this?)  Because her identity had been stolen—we’re not talking stolen ID documents here, by the way (this was long before real identity-theft was ever heard of)—she refused to carry official papers.  She made her own documents.  It turns out that her actual name was Hanna Meyer; B. Reg. stood for bürgerlich registriert, a made-up term she used to mean “registered by the citizen.”  If I recall, she came along one more time while I was in Berlin, then she seemed to disappear.  (Maybe someone finally stole the rest of her.  Who knows?)

One of my friends told me of a young man who came in and reported that spies were poisoning him.  That’s not so weird, as you might guess by now, but what was frightening was what he had brought along as proof.  He had a couple of tote bags with him, and my friend opened one to reveal that it was full of little bottles of the guy’s blood.  When the legman opened the guy’s other bag and found that it was full of handguns, he was summarily bundled off to jail—and probably a hospital after that.

Most walk-ins were just poor souls who wanted some attention.  Some were nuts and some were just lonely.  One I spoke to was a 19-year-old kid who’d run out of money, been thrown out by his girlfriend, and just lost himself.  He was pathetic, but not dangerous.  He even broke down crying as the legman questioned him.  No one I ever saw or heard of had any real information.  Anything like that came from other routes.  These included phone-ins, which were seldom any more productive than walk-ins.  That dork who said he was Red Kappel was a phone-in, you’ll remember.  So was the guy who claimed to know one of the Baader-Meinhof gang. 

But sometimes . . . .  One evening when I was on call, I was called by the DA to come in and take a phone call.  The call was from a German man who worked for the U.S. Forces in Berlin and who said he had been in contact with East German agents.  He was scared for several reasons, not the least of which was that German law made contact with Soviet or East German agents a crime.  (The FROG had political crimes on the books.  Membership in the Nazi or Communist Parties, for instance, was illegal.)  I arranged to meet the guy in one of the remote districts—Tegel, I think it was, in the French Sector—at an U-Bahn station.  I got one of our legmen (they were called this, by the way, because they did a lot of the legwork) and went out after the guy.  No show.  We waited around, checked out the area nearby, but no one was around who fitted the description the guy gave us.  We gave up and went back home. 

A few days or a week later, the guy called again, during the day.  I remember it was February 14, Valentine’s Day.  The legman and I went out after him again, and this time he showed at the meeting place.  We took him out to one of the safe houses we used for serious interviews—not the little building on the compound grounds we used for walk-ins; this was a house in town—and sat him down in the dining room at the big table.  The man was scared shitless—he was shaking and nervous and nearly unable to talk.  But we finally got his story—and it’s pretty typical except that his went further.  He had taken a vacation in Bulgaria and had met a woman.  This, too, was common: trips to the Eastern Bloc were much cheaper than similar trips to Western Europe; Black Sea vacations in Bulgaria were very popular among working Germans.  She was from East Berlin, and they arranged to meet there when they got back home.  (West Berliners weren’t actually permitted to cross into the Eastern Sector, but many got around this by registering as a resident of some West German city, using a friend’s or relative’s address.  This was illegal, of course, but very common.) 

So, the man went over to East Berlin and met his new girlfriend at her apartment.  They started up a romance and this continued for several visits.  One day, the man showed up at the woman’s apartment and found a visitor.  An East German intel agent was waiting for him.  “Here’s the situation,” the agent explained.  “Help us out with a few little things and we won’t report you to the West for this meeting.”  Remember, contact with an agent of EGIS (the U.S. Army term for the East German Intelligence Service; in the DDR, it was known as the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—Ministry for State Security—or, infamously, the Stasi) was a crime in West Germany.  Of course, if the guy had simply gone back to the West and reported the meeting and the circumstances, nothing would have happened—the West German Kripos (Kriminalpolizei, or criminal police) knew what went on in the East. 

This was a very common scenario.  But the EGIS agent counts on the fear and ignorance of the target, and if it doesn’t work—well, nothing’s lost but a little time.  If it does work, they get someone on the hook for little effort, and they can play it out as long as it lasts.  Again, nothing has been expended but a little time.  If the guy goes for it, they get him to hand over some seemingly innocuous document—a BB phone book, a tank manual—nothing classified or obviously sensitive.  Maybe they do that two or three times, then they move up a notch.  “If you don’t cooperate more, we’ll report everything you’ve done to the West.  You’ve helped us out now, so you’re not innocent.”  Then they’ll tell him to get a job with the U.S. or other Allied forces—any job will do.  This man was an upholsterer so he got a job with the maintenance service for the U.S. facilities in Berlin. 

When he had done that, the EGIS agent gave him a “concealment device.”  That’s spook-speak for a secret pouch for hiding and carrying documents.  And that was the clinching evidence that this man’s story was true—the device wasn’t something you got at the local stationery store.  It looked like a pencil case, but it had a hidden pocket you could only open with a pin and knowledge of where to maneuver it.  Obviously the EGIS agent was going to start getting the man to steal more important papers and smuggle them into East Berlin.  But that’s where the man got too scared to continue.  He stopped going to East Berlin, but then he started to be afraid of the West German police.  That’s when he called us the first time—but he was too scared to follow through.  In addition, he was an alcoholic, and he started drinking so heavily that he was fired for being drunk on the job.  That’s when he called us the second time and met us.  During the interview, by the way, the man got so nervous that he reached for a vial of pills in his jacket pocket.  The legman literally pounced on the man and grabbed the pill vial.  He was afraid they might have been poison—this guy was that scared.  (They weren’t; they were antacids.)

We finished the interview, got the man’s story, arranged to be in contact again.  I wrote up the interview, turned in the report, and briefed the Ops Officer.  A while later, the “guys who aren’t there” inquired if we would get them together with the man.  They had decided that the story was credible enough that it would be worth trying to double the man.  He was turned over to the folks in Building 7, and we were out of it.  (Berlin Station wasn’t an intel-gathering agency; we were a counterintel unit.  Positive intel was the responsibility of other units; we only ran sources—that’s what they were called—if it was a counterespionage operation.)  The “Company” wasn’t very good about sharing info—they didn’t play well with others—so we seldom learned what they were up to.  Some time later, however, we heard about the upholsterer—the Company got him his job back—but his alcoholism had gotten so bad that even the CIA couldn’t keep him in his job.  He was fired again, and without a job with the U.S. forces, he wasn’t much use to EGIS.  He tried to get a job with the French and the Brits, but failed.  EGIS cut him loose, and so did the CIA.  I have no idea what became of him after that.

Most Germans had family on both sides of the border—either in East Berlin or East Germany.  The division of Germany after the war split almost every German family, and even those without relatives in the East had close friends or circumstances like the upholsterer.  Except for West Berliners, West Germans were free to cross into the East to visit, and thousands did regularly.  (Berliners, however, could travel elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc—just not East Berlin until after 1973.)  A typical scenario would go like this:  Hans from Frankfurt would go every month to visit his mother’s elderly sister in East Berlin.  He’d bring cigarettes, wine, food, other small gifts—some of which were considered contraband.  Maybe he’d also give her money, probably in West Marks because the black-market exchange rate was much better than the official one-to-one rate he’d get if he bought East Marks at the border.  Hans’s aunt could get much more for the West Marks than he could—but possessing western currency was illegal in the East.  One day, Hans would arrive at his aunt’s apartment, and there’d be a strange man in the living room—an EGIS agent.  “We’ve been monitoring your visits to your aunt,” he’d tell Hans.  “We know what you’ve been bringing into the DDR.  Would you like us to arrest your aunt?  Take away her identity papers so she can’t buy food?  Have her evicted from her state-owned apartment?”  Of course, Hans couldn’t let that happen.  “The next time you come over, bring a U.S. military phone book.  It’s not even classified—just a little favor.” 

Maybe the EGIS agent would ask Hans to get a job with the Allies or in a Western embassy.  It would always be something easy and relatively innocuous.  It was both a test and a hook.  If Hans bit, EGIS would ask him for increasingly sensitive stuff, plus the threat to reveal his cooperation to the Western authorities.  (Another way of setting the hook they liked to use was to exploit alcohol, gambling, or drug problems, homosexuality, illicit affairs, indebtedness, and petty or trumped-up crimes committed in the East.  The recruitment always involved a threat and coercion—these were not politically-motivated or paid agents.)  If the hook worked, the Soviets and their friends would get a source in the West for almost nothing.  Whatever benefit they got was all gravy.  If Hans didn’t bite, if he reported the contact, or if it wasn’t a family member he was visiting—say, a woman he met (a very common occurrence)—and he just stopped coming East, the Soviets lost nothing in the attempt.  More than likely, they wouldn’t even bother to punish the relatives in the East—too much trouble—or they’d do something petty like harassing them for a few months, just so the word would get back to Hans in the West. 

Another scenario was to approach minor criminals in the East like burglars, bootleggers, pimps, or prostitutes who had been caught.  The KGB or EGIS offers a deal: “Go over to the West, get into some position where you can get useful info, and bring it back to us periodically, and we’ll let you go.”  Who wouldn’t agree to that?  Be a refugee in West Germany versus sitting in an East German jail for some months or a year.  Duh.  So what if the recruit cops out as soon as she gets to the West—what have they lost?  They get rid of an undesirable who is now the problem of the FROG.  If the recruit actually does get info and passes it back . . . well, all the better.  It’s a win-win situation—and no expenses except some phony documents for the “refugee” and transportation to some border location.  (This is, of course, why we had screeners at Marienfelde to interview refugees.  You’d be surprised how often someone would admit right away that they’d been sent over by EGIS or the East German cops.  I’m sure it sounds paranoid, but, take my word for it, it was real and common.  And more often than not, mostly harmless—except perhaps to the psyche of the person who’d been approached by EGIS.  It must have been a very strange existence for people like that, caught between the East and the West that way.  And the Soviets used a shotgun approach: fire as many pellets as you can—a few are bound to hit a target.  For many, many reasons—ethics being only one—we could never get away with that.

(Approaching GI’s and other official U.S. personnel was slightly different.  The Eastern agents still looked for exploitable weaknesses like indebtedness or an addiction, but there had to be money in the bargain as well—often in very large sums.  Seldom were the American sources impelled by ideological commitment, though that happened now and then, but other emotional motivations played a role, such as anger or resentment and family loyalty.  This last was particularly effective with naturalized Americans with family still living in Eastern Bloc countries.  The risks, however, for the Soviets or East Germans in the event of failure was much greater.  They nonetheless tried, and surprisingly often considering how limited our attempts to recruit sources in the East were.  Even when a successful recruitment was unlikely, the Soviets and their surrogates used the same logic: the more attempts, the more the chances of success—and a failed recruitment was a small loss.)

The Cold War was a wondrous time—if you’re Franz Kafka!

The upholsterer case was the closest I ever came to an actual spook operation.  (My brush with real spookery was somewhat reminiscent of a German TV mini-series that aired while I was at the German military intel school in Bad Ems: the three-part TV movie, Der Illegale: Biografie eines Spions—“The illegal [agent]: biography of a spy.”  I blogged about this show and its connection to my stint at the Bundeswehr MAD-Schule in “Der Illegale,” posted on 5 July 2009.)  I did some surveillance, some demo coverage, lots of interviews, and a smattering of other tasks—before they made me an accountant.  I even did a couple of stake-outs from a car—like you see on TV.  Do you know what a cop or an agent does when he’s in a car trying to watch someone and he has to go to the bathroom?  It’s a bit of esoteric lore you don’t often learn, but I did.  In Germany, the law requires bars and restaurants to allow pedestrians to use their bathrooms, so that’s option number one—but you can’t really drop the surveillance and leave the subject unobserved.  What if he or she goes on the move while you’re away from your car?  So, the agent keeps a bottle in the car—it’s much harder for female agents than males for obvious anatomical reasons.  Now you know.  It may sound a little disgusting, but it’s a practical necessity. 

I did one vehicle surveillance that involved a brief car chase—a mini-Bullitt.  (Very mini.)  My partner and I had been watching an apartment for a potential visitor we suspected was an EGIS agent.  He’d been courting a lonely, middle-aged German secretary in an Army office.  No one had actually ever seen the man, but the secretary’s phone was tapped and her mail was monitored, so we knew about his visits from the woman’s conversations with her friends.  But he never communicated with her directly, either by phone or mail; he sent her flowers by Fleuropa (the European counterpart of FTD) and made their dates via the messages accompany the bouquets.  I inherited the case, which had been running for a couple of years or more, and it seemed obvious that nothing was happening anymore.  The woman had retired and there hadn’t been any contact from the mystery man for months. 

I determined that we probably ought to end the eavesdropping and close the case, but then the woman reported a new contact from her beau—more flowers arrived—and reported the he was going to come to her apartment for a date.  I set up the vehicular surveillance to see if we could finally see the guy and try to ID him.  We sat across the street from the woman’s apartment at the time set for the date and waited.  No one showed up.  The woman was on the phone indicating that she still expected her gentleman caller, however, so we hung around until a man did arrive and go into the building.  He stayed a little while and then left, and we took off to follow him in his car.  We did just like the cops do on TV until we were able to get a look at the driver, and when he didn’t match the description we had of the subject, we abandoned the chase.  In the end, I concluded that if there ever had been a real man in the secretary’s life, he had long since vanished and she had kept him “alive” with tales to her friends and flowers she sent herself.  In any case, since no breach of security had ever been detected, and since the woman’s access had ceased when she retired, I closed the case.  But I got to do a car chase!

As I said, running sources wasn’t our job (that’s what the 9668’s were there for), which was to keep the other side from doing to us what we were trying to do to them.  We were basically a security unit.  We had three main sections at Berlin Station, aside from Ops, Files, Tech Services (photography, bugging and miking, lock-picking, polygraphy, and so on), and CCU (which, despite its similarity to a medical abbreviation, stood for the Classified Control Unit—a big vault where all our classified files were kept.  The teams were Counterespionage, Countersurveillance, and Personnel Investigations (usually referred to by their initials: CE, CS, and PI).  CE, as you might guess, was tasked with preventing the Soviets and their crew from planting agents in our midst; CS was responsible for detecting, clearing, and preventing listening devices, bugs, electronic spyware, and so on in the facilities in our jurisdiction; PI was just what the name suggests: conducting background investigations on personnel up for security clearances (including getting higher clearances and renewing clearances).  PI was the bread-and-butter of Berlin Station (and all MI units like it around the world).  It was the largest section, and the busiest.  I was briefly OIC of PI Team—before they made me an accountant!  (Piss me off.  I waited for over a year for my own section, doing stints in both CS and CE as an ordinary Special Agent—the same as the NCO’s on the job, with a boss who was maybe six months my senior.  Then I finally got a section on 1 February 1973 and a few months later, on 25 May, Colonel Collins handed me orders to take over the spook bank in the basement!  Believe me, I am not an accountant.  I can only balance my checkbook because I have a calculator!)

[I hope you’ve found my reminiscences of Cold War Berlin interesting and worthwhile.  As I’ve been saying, this series isn’t being released on a regular schedule, so part 5 will appear on 19 February 2017.  So come back sometime later this month to see what comes next.  In “Berlin Memoir, Part 5,” I will talk about some of the common activities of my daily—or at least weekly—life as an MI officer in West Berlin.  I think you’ll find a lot of it absurd almost to the level of Kafkaesque.  I hope you’ll catch it.]

Mac Wellman

[About a year ago, the New York Times published an article about playwright Mac Wellman (Antigone, 2004; Second-Hand Smoke, 1997; The Hyacinth Macaw, 1994; A Murder of Crows, 1992) as a teacher at Brooklyn College.  His teaching techniques and his tutorial points about playwriting are very reminiscent of his own writing—not just in his play scripts, but also in his essays about theater. 

[I‘ve seen three of Wellman’s plays (Sincerity Forever, 1990; Hyacinth Macaw; Energumen, 1985) and an anti-Iraq war collage called Collateral Damage to which Wellman contributed in 1991.  (I posted a brief report on Energumen in “I’m So Confused . . . !” on 4 July 2012,  Unhappily, there’s no report on Hyacinth Macaw.)  As part of my research on Leonardo Shapiro, the founder and director of The Shaliko Company on whom I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater, I looked into another Wellman play, Whirligig, which Shaliko commissioned.  For that same research, I also read Wellman’s wonderful—but idiosyncratic—essay “A Chrestomathy Of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater,” published originally in Yale School of Drama’s Theater magazine (Vol.  24, No. 1, 1993).

[So I’m going to republish “A Mentor Whose Only Mantra Is Oddity” by Alexis Soloski below and then close this post with my description of Whirligig.  I hope you all will find both (or at least one, please) interesting.}

“A MENTOR WHOSE ONLY MANTRA IS ODDITY”

by Alexis Soloski

[This article first appeared in print in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 18 February 2015.]

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mac Wellman, the Donald I. Fine Distinguished Professor of Play Writing, sat at the head of a table in a Brooklyn College classroom. It was the first meeting of the semester, and he needed to arrange tutorials with his graduate students. He asked them to draw up a plan for the term’s work: something small, something secret. “Pick something you’re a little afraid of,” he advised in his gentle, raspy tenor.

“Pick something that scares you. Plays that are covered in fur, for instance.”

Since Mr. Wellman joined the Brooklyn College faculty in 1998, he has trained many of New York’s wildest and woolliest playwrights. Annie Baker, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for “The Flick,” studied with him. So did Young Jean Lee, Thomas Bradshaw, Tina Satter and members of Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the National Theater of the United States of America.

This winter and spring [i.e., 2015], JACK, a theater space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is devoting much of its season to recent graduates of the program. The festival is called Damnable Scribbling, a nod to Mr. Wellman’s favored appellation, the one that graces his website: Damnable Scribbler.

There are other places to study playwriting, of course. And other professors to study it with. No one sniffs at a master of fine arts degree from New York University, a certificate in playwriting from Juilliard. But Mr. Wellman’s program has the distinction of turning out audacious writers with very little in common with him or with one another. Try to find the overlap of Ms. Baker’s empathetic neorealism and Mr. Bradshaw’s scabrous provocations. Look for the intersection between Ms. Lee’s canny deconstructions of identity politics and Sibyl Kempson’s rapturous nonsense. Keep looking.

Mr. Wellman, 69, came to playwriting accidentally. As he explained over a glass of rosé at a cafe near his Park Slope apartment, he was hitchhiking in the Netherlands during a junior year abroad when the Dutch director Annemarie Prins happened to give him a ride. He gave her a few of his poems, and she asked him if he had ever considered writing plays. “No,” he told her. “I don’t like plays.” But she persisted, and he obliged her, writing plays for Dutch radio.

In his own estimation, his early poetical plays “were really pretty awful.” It took him a decade of constant theatergoing and constant practice to learn how to write. Since then, he has won three Obies and numerous grants and awards and has completed more than 80 plays, some epic and one only a single word long (“Psychopannychy”). He has written history plays, mystery plays, biographical plays, political plays, science fiction plays and plays composed of gleefully bad grammar.

He loathes what he calls “the theater of the already known” — the predictable, the formulaic, the tasteful, the complacent. As a consequence, his work is strange. He favors, as an article in the journal Postmodern Culture suggested, “wrongness, ceremony and a bit of demonism.”

There’s an exacting attention to language — every sentence, every word, every syllable — that would seem exhausting if the works weren’t so mischievous, so exultant, so fun. (He signed a scheduling email, “See you tamale!” This was not a case of autocorrect.) And he’s fond of impossible stage directions like “something strange happens” or “a furry pause.”

To Mr. Wellman’s annoyance and delight, his students tend to treat him as a cross between a favorite uncle and a minor deity. He teases them, mispronouncing their names or kidding them when they turn serious, but when he offers one of his playwriting koans — “The theater is a very strange and elusive thing to do,” he told his seminar participants — they reach for their notebooks.

Mr. Wellman and his colleague Erin Courtney, who graduated from the program in 2003, design an individual curriculum for each student. They’ll assign readings in philosophy, poetry, structural anthropology, nonsense or an early American novel about a murderous ventriloquist.

Ms. Kempson, who graduated from the program in 2007, wrote in an email: “He taught me that we have the right to read whatever the hell we want, and write whatever the hell we want, whether we’re smart, dumb, worthy, irresponsible, interesting, boring, pious, satanic or confused, and whether we ‘get it’ or not. And he’s right.”

He asks students to write bad plays, to write plays with their nondominant hands, to write a play that takes five hours to perform and covers a period of seven years. Ms. Satter recalled an exercise in which she had to write a play in a language she barely knew.

“I wrote mine in extremely limited Russian,” she wrote in an email. “Then we translated them back into English and read them aloud. The results were these oddly clarified, quiveringly bizarre mini-gems.”

Mr. Wellman explained: “I’m not trying to teach them how to write a play. I’m trying to teach them to think about what kind of play they want to write.”

Alec Duffy, the artistic director of JACK, enthusiastically described the work that emerges from the program as “plays that don’t really behave like plays, plays that feature an adventure in form.”

Mr. Bradshaw, who graduated in 2004, said in an email that Mr. Wellman is “an expert at helping you unlock your mind.”

“He’s not interested in getting you to write like him,” he added. “He never attempts to force a particular aesthetic down your throat. He wants everything that’s unique about you to emerge on the page.”

And once that singular voice emerges, Mr. Wellman will champion it. He follows the careers of his current and former students avidly. He mentioned a dozen or so in the course of an hourlong conversation. Then he sent a follow-up email mentioning more. Then a second email. Then a third. Then a fourth. At the end of the last one, he wrote that he loses sleep worrying about all the writers who haven’t yet received “the attention they deserve!”

Mr. Wellman’s own work no longer receives the attention it once did, although he’s still writing plays, as well as poetry, novels and opera librettos. He’d like to see these new works staged, though he worries about taking opportunities away from young writers like his students.

“I’ve had a lot of productions,” he said as he finished his wine. “I would like to have more. But if it means somebody I think highly of can’t get a production, I don’t need it.”

[Alexis Soloski is a contributor to the New York Times and the theater review-writer for the U.S. edition of The Guardian.  She’’s a reviewer former  for the Village Voice, and a writer for American Theater and Capitol New York. She’s a lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University.]

*  *  *  *

WHIRLIGIG (1989)

[I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his work with The Shaliko Company, his East Village experimental theater company.  While the company began reimagining classic plays (Children of the Gods, based on several Greek tragedies; Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts; and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, included in the first part of my “Faust Clones,” posted on 15 January 2016) and ended with company-built pieces (Strangers, examined in “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 March 2014; The Yellow House; Mystery History Bouffe Goof), in between Shaliko commissioned works by contemporary playwrights.   In the spring of 1989, Shapiro staged Whirligig by Mac Wellman at the Cooper Square Theatre in New York City (producer:  MaryEllen Kernaghan, music:  Charlie Morrow, set designer:  Kyle Chepulis, scenic artist:  Polly Walker, cast:  Geza Kovacs – Man, Cecil MacKinnon – Sister, Elena Nicholas [Prischepenko] – Girl, Michael Preston – Bus Man, Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann – Girl Huns).  The play premièred from 5 April to 7 May 1989, right after Doctor Faustus.  From my research on Shapiro and Shaliko, I compiled a brief examination of this sci-fi-based play.]

From the demons of Hell in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shaliko shifted to demons from space in Whirligig, commissioned from Mac Wellman in 1989.  Described by photographer and writer Allen Frame in a Bomb interview of Shapiro as “William Inge meets Rod Serling meets The Three Stooges,” Shaliko’s Whirligig was a display of pyrotechnical language and sight gags featuring a green-haired runaway girl at a bus station (Elena Nicholas) who meets a metallic spaceman (Geza Kovacs).  Visiting Earth to discover why we are so happy, the Man, known as a Weird, had escaped a marauding band of female space warriors, the Girl Huns (Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann), and the Girl had run away from her goody-goody, materialistic sister (Cecil MacKinnon).  Alisa Solomon characterized the play in the Village Voice as Wellman’s “wry look at our hopeful fascination with the final frontier.” 

Not that the plot was so easy to follow, or so significant to begin with.  (The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold disparaged it as “nonsense . . . like having the first act of The Tempest suddenly followed by two reels of a schlocky Cinecittà flck about women warriors.”  The Show Business reviewer, Martin Blake, dubbed the plot “whimsical” but “at times unfocused.”)  It was Wellman’s language and the political satire, biting if sometimes obscure, that drove this production.  As James Rasenberger wrote in City Paper: “As a respected poet, Wellman understandably delights in linguistic trickery: his characters speak with twisted eloquence, turning the American idiom inside out and upside down.”  Calling the play’s language “an amazement,” Martin Blake insisted that Wellman “is a poet of formidable power and biting wit,” asserting, “Poets can make great playwrights if they pay as much attention to form and structure as they do words”—though I’m not convinced that Wellman would buy the caveat.

Like all Shaliko work, Whirligig is political—the bus stop in the middle of nowhere is Wellman’s stand-in for a fascist universe.  When the Girl describes her sister, she is describing Wellman’s idea of the American middle class:

This is my good sister, Jennifer.

Jennifer, meet Xuphus.  Xuphus meet

Jennifer.  Jennifer is a normal American

cunt.  She can’t stand the idea someone

might not want to be like her.  She hates

anybody is different, or looks different,

or aspires to strange gods.  She thinks

the Arabs should unilaterally accept UN

resolution 242.  She thinks South Africa

is America’s best friend in Africa.  She

believes in god, Somoza, Swaggart and Margaret

Thatcher.  Look at her, Xuphus, she’s a closet

religious maniac who wants to be reborn so

badly she’d blow the world up gladly.  Pleasure

is lost on her, simple fun means nothing to her.

Human life horrifies her unless it’s a famine

on TV that reminds her how much America is not doing. . . .

Further on, in a speech by the Man, Wellman evoked what is clearly his vision of the rules governing American society:

God curse those who do what is

Forbidden.  And chief among the things

which are forbidden are the combing of hair

not our way, the eating of food not to our

taste, the enactment of dramatic scenes not

to our liking, and the rubbing out of our

very being, when we have merely been

engaged in the working out of our destiny,

as described in the Big Book of Tlooth,

who you may not reckon as amounting to

a pot of piss compared to your god

Tengri, but I assure you it is not so,

because Tlooth [. . .]

is called Tlooth for good reason.  For Tlooth

is truth made manifest and angelic and eternal.

And the truth is eternal, that is why it is

called truth [. . .].

Politics aside, Whirligig was also a very physical play like much of Shaliko’s work.  The small cast included Cecil MacKinnon and Michael Preston, veteran circus performers, and Wellman created a piece for this group.  The playwright had actually been working on something very different when Shapiro told him Shaliko had gotten a grant to commission a play from Wellman. 

I met with Leo’s company, which at that time consisted of the two women, Cecil and Elena, and basically talked with them about what they wanted to do—what sort of theater they liked to do—and tried to figure out a play that . . . .  Both of them were fairly interested in physical theater.  Cecil in particular: she has a background in clown work.  So I tried to figure out something that would do that and then also allow me to do what I wanted to do with language.  And we worked on it, and the result was Whirligig.

The production was also loaded with special effects—low tech, though they may have been.  A body, for example, manages to turn up repeatedly and inexplicably in bus station lockers—among other sight gags.  Show Business’s Blake characterized the FX as “remarkable, featuring an outerspace ride to rival the Hayden Planetariums’ [sic] splashiest shows.”

With a backdrop painted by artist Polly Walker and real bus station lockers designer Kyle Chepulis found somewhere, the production ended with what City Paper reviewer called “one of the most transporting theatrical sights I’ve ever seen.”  In an interview I did with the director in 1992, Shapiro described that moment as we looked through some production photos:

The end of that show—you can’t see it, the pictures don’t show it because it was so dark . . . .  The Ride of the Valkyrie thing was done . . . .  The backdrop, you see, is these stars which are—I don’t remember what they are.  I don’t know if there were holes in the canvas or light bulbs.  I think they were light bulbs.  Anyway, at the end what I did was, I had a strobe go off and over the whole set we dropped black, velvet drops—covered the whole set.  The set disappeared [. . .] and they were covered with stars cut out of glow-tape.  And we had hit them with two strobe flashes so that it lit them as stars for five minutes.  And the last scene took five or six minutes and it was done totally in the dark with these stars, and it was totally illusionistic.  Nobody had any idea how we created this.  Nobody would have guessed it was glow-tape— something so low-tech.  And they did their choreography . . . .  They had helmets that were made out of plexiglass with tubes that had light-emitting diodes in them so their antler-things were lit.  And there was a little light on their eyes that was made by a little, tiny flashlight inside the helmet.  So their faces were lit and their antlers were lit but you couldn’t see their bodies at all.  And they’re in this infinite black and their riding horses.  [. . . .]  And the horses’ heads were hollow and they had a light inside—a colored light—and they were made by Polly.  So you could see the glowing horses’ heads and the faces and the antlers, and they’re doing this sort of riding choreography.  But they’re floating in space.  One is on a chair and one is down and low, and you can’t tell where they are, and so there’s an illusion of infinite space with these things.  It was really beautiful, but it doesn’t show up in any photographs or video because there’s literally no light.  There’s no light that goes out of anything.

           

The press, however, showed little interest.  Frame felt  that Shaliko’s Whirligig, a “highly original satire of the American scene,” was “a sleeper” that had been “underrated by critics.”  The playwright thought that had Whirligig been delayed until the fall of 1989, after he had done Bad Penny in Central Park, Whirligig would have attracted much more press attention.  After liking his first play, Wellman contended, the New York Times “didn’t like a couple of things, then they wouldn’t review me for four years during which time I did Whirligig.”  After Bad Penny, however, Wellman’s work had gotten good coverage. 

Those reviewers who did come, including Feingold of the Voice, mostly conceded that they did not understand the play, but some enjoyed the theatrics anyway; Feingold was not among these last, though Wellman recalled that other Voice critics—Erika Munk and Alisa Solomon—liked the production but did not publish full reviews.  Solomon published a capsule notice in the “Voice Choices” section of the paper in which she described the production as “[b]ending language like blues guitarists bend notes.”  In his notice, Feingold declared that “Whirligig, like earlier acts of Wellmania. rapidly reduces itself to repetitive trash entertainment, in this case the comic-book scit-fi kind.”  The play, lamented the Voice reviewer, “could have been developed into something witty, scathing, painfully true.” 

In City Paper, James Rasenberger affirmed that “the play fully lives up to its title: its plot is convoluted, its meanings obscure—Whirligig is dizzying.”  The reviewer continued, “But this is not the kind of stupefying experimental theatre that leaves one feeling numb.  You may not ‘get’ Whirligig—I sure didn’t—but it is so entertaining and electrifying that it doesn’t matter.”  In TheaterWeek, Neal E. O’Hara wrote that “boy is my head spinning” and reported that once MacKinnon’s Jennifer “arrives on the scene, the dramaturgical fireworks ignite.  And it’s not even the Fourth of July.”

Show Business’s Blake asserted that Whirligig succeeded “mostly because of [Wellman’s] masterful and imaginative use of language.”  He specified: “His monologues are not merely emotional episodes or opportunities for  character development, but twisters of words that fill the theater and set the atmosphere.”  The trade weekly’s review-writer pronounced, “The audience is hypnotized . . . .”  Comparing Whirligig with the work of Twilight Zone’s Serling, “whose influence is palpable,” Blake applauded how well, through Shapiro’s direction and design, the play “communicates a marvelous creepiness.” 

[My quotations from Whirligig were taken from the unpublished text used in the 1989 Shaliko production, but Wellman’s play was published in 1989 by the Theatre Communications Group as part of its Plays in Process series and subsequently in The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).]