The Magic Maker Page 2

  I am very grateful to you, and I know I would not be making so much money and things like that if it were not for you teaching me how to sing, and I would never sing if it weren’t for you. And I hope our family will never be seperated [sic] for a very long time.

  With love, Jack

  P.S. “I love you”

  And here is Ken at the same age, two years later, writing a letter headed VERY PRIVATE VERY.

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  I do not want to upset you, but what I am about to tell you is not recent. I have been hinting a little to Daddy. I would like to be a Day Boy.

  The reasons why are: I am and was very, very homesick for you and Daddy. I wouldn’t get into half as much trouble in school. I could help you a lot (though I am not so good at that). I would like it better running errands and sitting with you at the nighttime. I love the choir and I like Mr. Mitchell very much. And I like the school pretty well. . . . I don’t get and neither does Jack get time enough to get help on our work. And you or Daddy could help us. The main point is, if you only knew how homesick we are for you. We don’t get enough time to see you. The expenses are about the same because the laundry is $30 and our food and carfare would be about that much and if not we could earn from funeral singing. PLEASE don’t let it upset you. But I would like to be a Day Boy. Just write or tell me yes or no at the bottom. Please don’t get Mad.

  With much love,

  Kennedy Langstaff

  This heartrending appeal had no effect, though it does presage the warm heart and diplomatic skills of the adult Ken Langstaff. Both boys remained boarders. Sometimes they would be allowed to go home for their three-hour release on Sundays; sometimes their parents would come to visit them at the school. “Ken and I would take them out to Longchamps,” Jack said, referring to an upscale New York restaurant chain. “We’d have a malted, and they’d have a martini.”

  Jack’s voice was so phenomenal that he was soon the pride of the Grace Church boys’ choir; Ernest Mitchell later said he had never had a better chorister. But Mitchell had to fight to keep him. The shy, angelic choirboy had a powerful sense of mischief, and he was always in trouble. He passed notes during the sermon, forgetting that the organist could see him, and once he let marbles bounce out of his pocket down the chancel steps during the quietest part of a funeral. He was fascinated by the organ pipes, which were in separate rooms forbidden to the boys. “I’d take a friend and go up there to explore, and it was OK unless Mitchell came to practice. If he noticed we were up there he’d put on the organ’s thirty-two-foot bombarde — I swear you could hear it two blocks away. . . .”

  He formed a Robin Hood Band of seven or eight boys. “I was Robin Hood, and Ken was Friar Tuck because he was kind of chubby. There was Little John, Will Scarlet, all of them. . . . We made bows and arrows, and when we were taken to Central Park we’d climb up on those rocks there, rescuing fair ladies, doing good deeds.”

  Perhaps influenced by the nature of its home base, the band said prayers at its meetings. Here’s one of them:

  O Lord, help this Band to do Thy will, and to help those who are in need. Guide our acts with wisdom and kindness through Jesus Christ our lord. Amen.

  There was also a list of rules, showing another influence: Meredith Langstaff was a scout leader for years and eventually became head of the Boy Scouts of America in the New York area. His sons never became scouts, but clearly absorbed the same upright principles.

  SOME RULES FOR THE RHB

  1. Reverence to God (at all times).

  2. Never in any way harm a woman or child.

  3. Be loyal to the Band.

  4. Always obey.

  5. Obey all the rules of the Boy Scouts of America.

  6. Stand by and fight to the finish.

  There being nothing in these rules about food, Jack was also very fond of organizing midnight feasts. “The big things I loved were green olives — we could get them at a grocery across the street — and chocolate cake. So we’d hide these, and then we’d have feasts, at night. About two thirty or three in the morning, we’d go down the corridor very quietly and sit and eat.”

  And sometimes they were caught. “The headmaster was a bastard — he’d sit up at night waiting, and then he’d make you stand there in your pajamas for two hours and switch you if you moved.”

  This didn’t deter Robin Hood from a far more perilous nighttime activity: leading the whole band out of the dormitory window and along the roof. They would inch their way along the ridge of the church roof to the steeple, where Jack had found the little door through which workmen got into the bell tower. In they would go, up and up, past the bells — which, as all good Dorothy Sayers fans know, can be lethal if they start to ring while you’re in there with them. “We knew we had to get out by a certain time; it was exciting. And we’d crawl back along the roof. If you looked down, there was Broadway, way below. I must have been crazy. But nobody ever looked up and saw this little line of kids in their pajamas.”

  He was less fortunate after he took one of his band down to the crypt, where he’d discovered that the blower room for the church’s heating system had a dirt floor. They were pirates this time; they had various piratical things in a box on which they’d signed their names in blood, and they buried it ceremonially under the floor. Unfortunately they kicked so much dust up into the blowers that the church began to grow unaccountably dirty. When Authority investigated the blower room, it found the signs of digging, and unearthed the box.

  “And of course,” said Jack, “there were our names on the top.”

  Authority was not pleased, and no doubt had the headmaster on its side. But not the choirmaster. “Four times the vestry said to Mitchell, ‘You have to get rid of this boy.’ But he didn’t.”

  And Jack loved the singing more than the mischief. He sang “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth”; he sang “Hear Ye, Israel” and other Mendelssohn staples. “And we sang a lot of new stuff . . . Stainer, most of it awful . . . and I think we did the first American performance of the Vaughan Williams Mass. That kind of music really made an impression on me. I was convinced that I wanted to go on just singing oratorio. And besides that, I was with one of the most spiritual men I ever met in my life.”

  Walter Russell Bowie was the rector of Grace Episcopal Church; he was a liberal-minded Southerner who became a friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Harvard, and he was in his forties when Jack was at the choir school.

  “I thought the world of him, “ Jack said. “His son Rusty and I used to get into a lot of trouble together. He had two daughters as well — when I was nine or ten I was madly in love with Elizabeth, aged eighteen. Dr. Bowie had a big influence on me. He used to pray specially for us before we sang, and it really made me feel a connection with God, with a presence, a very powerful thing. I really think I was singing to that, not to the congregation, and if I didn’t sing well I could be really down.”

  He wrote an endearing essay about this when he was fourteen entitled “A Nervous Soloist.”

  The minister is mumbling the last prayer before I have to sing.

  Many thoughts rush through my mind: “I must not be flat, I must sing it joyously and skippingly, I must not be afraid.”

  My hands get wet and cold and my stomach feels very funny and uneasy and I wish I were home in my warm bed.

  I try not to let anyone see how nervous I am and I pray that God will help me and carry me through it.

  Of all the solos to be singing! Bach’s “My Heart Ever Faithful,” it is a fine solo but my hart [sic] is anything but faithful. My mouth is getting dry and I get a sort of lost and sissy feeling and a little faint.

  I must not bite my fingernails.

  Oh! If I could only have a nice long drink of pineapple juice to oil up the larynx.

  The prayer is coming to an end and we sing the “Amen,” I look up. There’s Little John smiling at me, I guess he knows how I feel; and Scarlet over there winks at me.

  The prayer ende
d; I get up and clear my throat and nod to Erny. He nods back and gives me a reassuring glance and starts the introduction. Only two measures to go. I must relax!! but it seems to be impossible.

  I sing my first note and I regain confidence and sing through it all right, forgetting all about the congregation and enter into the spirit of the music.

  But when it is finished I want to sing it all over again.

  “Erny” is of course Ernest Mitchell. He, Dr. Bowie, and the Anglican liturgy of the Episcopal Church all fostered in young Jack not only a sense of the mystical but a great taste for the theatrical side of ritual. “Easter Day was wonderful. We’d go from the school to the big room before the church — I’d lead the choristers, two by two, and we’d make a circle, just as we do backstage today before a Revels performance. Dr. Bowie would give a final prayer just for us, and then you’d hear the organ strike up, and the big doors would open and in we’d go, singing ‘Welcome, Happy Morning.’ Mitchell would bring in the brass, I loved that — the big organ would be going, and another one in another part of the church — it was very exciting.”

  Soon he was performing not only in churches and on the radio, but onstage. It began with ambitious productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at the Choate School, in Wallingford, Connecticut. “The headmaster there was nuts about Gilbert and Sullivan. He put money into it — the costumes all came from Eaves, the best costumier in New York, and a wig man came up. . . . I was asked to come as a boy soprano to sing roles like Yum-Yum in The Mikado and Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore. And then they offered me a full scholarship, and God knows my father wanted me to get a good education.”

  But Jack refused to leave New York. He was still singing lead soprano for Ernest Mitchell and knew Mitchell would hate to lose him, and he felt his family had always raised him with a strong sense of group loyalty. So although they now begged him to move to Choate, he wouldn’t.

  “There were all kinds of meetings, but I would not be swayed. So perhaps my mother said to them, ‘Well, you know we have another boy, Kennedy . . .’ So Ken went, and he sang Josephine — which is really high, my God — and got a scholarship and did very well.”

  In the summers of the depressed 1930s, all three Langstaff boys went on singing, at a little camp at the foot of Mount Washington in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Jack remembered vaguely that when he was really small, the family had rented a villa in the Catskills for the summer, and that when he was seven, he had been sent to Camp Wulamat, on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, where proper little boys then wore uniforms. Now that the family fortunes were declining, he found himself at a camp designed for scholarship boys to sing to the wealthy. It turned into a remarkably useful part of his education.

  Camp Duncan had its beginnings in 1910 when a summer visitor to the Mount Washington Hotel, one George Duncan, organized the Bretton Woods Boy Singers to sing in the Joseph Stickney Chapel of the Transfiguration. Stickney was the bold New Hampshire industrialist who in 1881 had bought ten thousand acres around Mount Washington, eventually building the huge Italianate hotel to attract prosperous summer visitors from Boston, New York, and beyond. He died a year after it opened, in 1903, and in his memory his young widow, Carolyn, put up a handsome gray granite chapel with magnificent Tiffany windows. Today it’s a summer chapel of the Diocese of New Hampshire, with services on July and August Saturdays and a lot of weddings. And the spectacular Mount Washington Hotel, after some hard times, is a well-developed resort. (In July 1944 it was the site of the Allied powers’ Bretton Woods Conference, out of which came, among other things, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).)

  By the time Jack went to Camp Duncan in 1930, the young widow Carolyn Stickney had reached her sixties. She had not only married again — this time acquiring a title by marrying a Frenchman named Prince Aymon de Faucigny-Lucinge — but been widowed again. She is said to have owned hotels in Paris and Switzerland as well as the Mount Washington, but every summer she came back to Bretton Woods, where the choristers knew her simply as The Princess. It was her money that gave them their free summer.

  The boys’ choir at Bretton Woods was now well established as “a scholarship group of outstanding boy singers from the New England area, chosen to sing on Sundays during services at the Chapel of the Transfiguration, under the training and direction of Frank Hancock.” Hancock, an accomplished organist, had been hired for the job when he was twenty-two and still a graduate student at Harvard. Since 1917 he had also been music master at a school in Brooklyn, Poly Prep Country Day School, so he was a friend of the Langstaff family and a regular at the Christmas carol parties. For the New Hampshire summers he brought boys from choirs as far away as Washington, D.C., and Chicago, about fifteen of the best young singers he could find.

  Hancock was known to the boys as “Uncle Frank.” Their life at camp included a variety of classic outdoor activities. “I was Tarzan for a while,” said Jack. “We had an Elephants’ Graveyard in the woods, those kind of things. And we made rafts — cold as hell that river was.” But music was the framework of their days.

  “We rehearsed every day to sing at the chapel on Sundays, all of us in our little cassocks, and our white collars. Frank Hancock played the organ. We sang things like Gounod’s ‘Sanctus’ — he trained us very well.”

  Every day too they rehearsed secular music, of a kind not likely to be heard in choir schools. For the summer state of New Hampshire, they were a kind of mini version of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, giving about thirty concerts in the fashionable hotels of the White Mountains. For those of them who would end up as professional singers, it was a gentle introduction to touring.

  “We had to wear black knickers, white shirts, and great big black bow ties,” Jack said. “And black patent leather shoes. We drove around to the concerts in a ratty old bus — Frank had hired a tenor straight from Juilliard to sing and be his assistant, and the tenor drove the bus. Some of the stuff we sang was awful — Victor Herbert, ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s.’ The three Langstaff boys sang ‘Three Little Maids from School,’ wearing these hats . . . And Ken once sang ‘O Promise Me’ — it was a riot. But they loved it.”

  At thirteen, he said in a letter home:

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  Thanks very much for the funny papers you sent and thanks for sending Iolanthe. Ken already knows the Hansel and Gretel duet. We gave a concert at the Mount Washington last night and the Princess gave us another dinner and $2.50 each making $5 for Ken and I.

  Will you please give us permission in your next letter to buy maple sugar and syrup for this winter with the $5.

  How is my solo medal? I hope it is not lost.

  “I love you.”

  Jack

  The money was an important part of the Bretton Woods summers. “All these wealthy people would come to the hotel concerts, and we’d all take turns passing the hat. Uncle Frank’s black hat, it was. All of us except me, that is — I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, going around asking for money. But at the end of the summer he’d dole it out, all these coins, dividing it according to what solos we’d had. I’d go home with maybe sixty dollars, and in the thirties that was a lot of money.”

  Like many performers, he was still shy, in spite of all those solos. To the end of his days, Jack Langstaff could command any audience anywhere with his professional persona, but would flinch from exposure as an unprotected private civilian. At Bretton Woods it wasn’t only the prospect of passing a hat that made him recoil. “My parents borrowed a car once in a while and came up to see us — my father never drove a car but my mother loved to drive. And I’d go and hide in the woods when they arrived, because I was so shy at having them around. . . . I was incredibly shy. I could get up and sing at concerts because I felt that wasn’t me, but when people came to talk to me afterward I’d just look at the floor.”

  The “solo medal” mentioned in his letter was a gold medal a
warded him for the years he was the principal soloist in the Grace Church boys’ choir. By the summer of 1935, when he was fourteen, although he had left the school, his voice had not yet broken, and he was still going back to sing solos as a paid outsider. This was the point at which he refused to go to Choate, giving up a scholarship rather than stop singing for Ernest Mitchell while he was still a soprano. Instead he went on half scholarship for some months to Poly Prep, where Frank Hancock was music master, and again went up to Hancock’s Bretton Woods choir with his brothers for the summer.

  Mitchell sent him a letter while he was there. This gave Jack great pleasure, but when he next wrote to his parents it was only to ask for the funny papers and a boomerang, and to report that “in one of the songs we are doing for our concert I take a high B obligato above the chorus and I can take it easy as anything.” It was Ken, now twelve, who forwarded them the Mitchell letter.

  Dear Jack,

  I enclose check for funerals. Thank you for your very nice letter in June.

  And now let me thank you for your perfectly splendid work as a choirboy and soloist at Grace Church. I have had a lot of good choirboys but never had a better one than you. In fact, I think you head the list! My heartfelt thanks to you, Jack, for your magnificent work in Grace Church Choir.

  Best wishes for a pleasant summer.

  And do not work your voice too long! Better save it for future years.

  Sincerely yours,

  Ernest Mitchell

  The check was for $19. Ken wrote, “Jack and I thought it best to give the money to Uncle Frank to settle our accounts. But in your next letter please tell us what to do with it. We promise not to spend it.”

  When that summer was over, Jack didn’t go back to Poly Prep, which he said he had hated from the moment when he turned up wearing shorts and found every other boy in long pants. Instead he found himself finishing the year at the Woodward School, where once he had been in kindergarten (and where Arlo Guthrie would go into sixth grade, thirty years later). They probably let him in, he said, because his mother was teaching music there at the time.