The Magic Maker Read online

  There is no one alive, dear Jack, with whom I’d rather work in presenting recitals of my own songs, and my editions of Purcell, Scarlatti, the German and French folk songs, etc., etc., than you. I hope that we can find a means of bringing this about someday.

  Eventually they did play concerts together, starting with one at Carnegie Recital Hall in November 1960, and in 1966 Jack flew out to California to take part in a major concert of Edmunds’s work, at Berkeley. “You are the most profoundly interesting and thoroughgoing artist I’ve ever worked with,” Edmunds wrote to Jack, and the admiration was mutual. Jack said, decades later:

  He was wonderful, such an interesting man. We did things of Scarlatti’s that he’d found in libraries in Italy, that nobody had ever heard. He had a way of playing the piano like Benjamin Britten — strong hands, a lot of energy. And his mind darted about. . . . Once we were doing a big white-tie concert in Washington, D.C., and we went out on the stage, and John walked right past me and out again. I thought wildly that maybe my fly was open, so I dropped my hands . . . but he came back and sat down at the piano and off we went. He’d forgotten his music — left it at the hotel.

  They could both be a little scattered at times, though the music would never suffer. Jack was devoted to John Edmunds, and championed his work for the rest of his life. One of the most enduring things they had in common was an instinct for combining the power of words with the power of music; for a summer session at the Potomac School in 1965, Edmunds provided Jack with a musical score to which the students were to set their own narrative.

  Jack took this one stage further by intermixing poetry and music in a program called Voyages, which he took on the road for several seasons in the 1960s with the actress-singer Robin Howard and the folk musician Happy Traum. In an interview in 1989 he said that he got the idea for this in Europe, from seeing a program of readings and songs done by Robert Graves and the Scottish singer Isla Cameron. “It’s interesting that in a way, that was the seed of the Revels idea: to gather songs and stories on one theme and put them together.”

  At Potomac, his wife pinch-hit for him if he was away singing. “I covered his classes for him when he was on tour, and they gave me a hard time,” Nancy says. “They wanted this glamorous fellow, and they got this . . . woman.”

  And in the end, the school lost its beloved music director entirely. He was simply too busy, especially in Britain. The Making Music TV series was in full swing, and he was crossing the Atlantic every year, to give concerts or to record, or both. He was, temporarily, a sort of honorary Brit, to the point that when the English Folk Dance and Song Society held its 1958 Diamond Jubilee celebration in London, the singer was not a native-born Englishman but Jack Langstaff. (Ralph Vaughan Williams cut the birthday cake — and was in the audience when Jack, singing the ballad “Sir Patrick Spens,” had a sudden terrible memory lapse. He mouthed to Isla Cameron, who was sitting in the front row, What’s next? And she mouthed back the next line, and on Jack went. History doesn’t record whether Vaughan Williams noticed.)

  Finally Jack was doing so much for the BBC, and had so many friends and colleagues in Britain, that in 1967 he left the Potomac School and took the entire family to London for a year. The only one left behind was John, who was in boarding school.

  But by the time he left, Jack would have had two dry runs for his Christmas Revels.

  Jack’s fascination with the world of folk song and dance hadn’t waned since the adolescent years when he learned to dance the Morris and heard English folk music sung by Appalachian descendants of the settlers who had brought it with them. By the time he was in his thirties he was a major presence at Pinewoods, the camp on Long Pond, Massachusetts, at which the then Country Dance Society of New York ran summer programs, and in 1951 he founded and ran a Folk Music Week there to stress the element of song. This took persistence: after a couple of years the singers had to share their week with dance, and then with recorder playing, but by 1962 Jack and Frank Warner were directing a full Folk Music Week again.

  For the Langstaff children, John, Gary, and Deborah, Pinewoods was an idyllic summer home all through the years when both their parents were teaching at Potomac. They roamed the camp’s twenty-five acres of woodland, they swam in Long Pond, which is the size of a small lake. And above all, says Deborah, now a singer herself, they were all together, dancing and making music with other families whose names have resonance now in the folk world: the Ritchies, the Warners, the Chapins.

  Every summer we went for a whole month, always in the same house on the shore of the lake, all taking part in the music and dance with the grown-ups. It was an incredible togetherness — and formative for me, that’s for sure.

  Jerry Epstein, Jack’s friend and often accompanist, remembers the impact of hearing him sing at Pinewoods in 1966:

  Jack was singing “All Around My Hat”— I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was looking at the people in the room, coming from the pressure and hassle of New York or Boston or wherever and shedding all of that baggage of civilization, listening to Jack weave his magic. The saying that would not leave my head was “To enter the Kingdom of Heaven you must become as a little child.” It seemed to me that I saw that happening all around me to people who were quite unaware of it.

  The small dedicated world of folk song and folk dance is full of joyous enthusiasts; it’s no wonder Jack felt at home in it. Many folk songs are melancholy, for sure; many are about death and desolation, and some are positively ghoulish. But people who sing and dance together tend to be upbeat by nature and to have a strong sense of community. If the first seed of Jack’s vision of a Christmas Revels came from the family carol parties of his boyhood, the second must have come in the 1950s from the Christmas Country Ball of the Country Dance Society of America. This was a cheery annual event held a week or two before Christmas in New York City, at Hunter College on Union Square West. It was directed by May Gadd, with Philip Merrill conducting, and it was basically a Christmas dance party — but within it were at least three elements, all inherited from English tradition, which would become mainstays of Jack’s Revels.

  In intervals of the communal dancing at this party, there was a Mummers Play, ending with a Morris sword dance, both of which have roots in England’s misty medieval past. There was the “Sussex Mummers’ Carol,” not quite so old; sung by local carolers called Tipteers, it was first written down in Sussex in 1880 and arranged by the composer Percy Grainger (whom Jack had first met in England, and who, like Vaughan Williams, loved to work with folk song). And there was the “Boar’s Head Carol,” sung by Jack at the party while the wassail bowl and a fake boar’s head were ceremonially carried in. This tradition is certainly old; there were as many wild pigs in early Britain as there are deer in modern New England, and the serving of a boar’s head on festive occasions goes back to Roman Britain. The carol dates from the sixteenth century, and to this day it’s still sung in a Christmas procession at Queen’s College, Oxford, as chefs march into the dining hall bearing a platter with the roasted head of a real pig holding an apple in its mouth. As for the wassail bowl, it dates back to the Middle Ages and even to the Vikings; wes hal was an Old English greeting, “Be in good health,” that evolved into a toast in the centuries after England was invaded by thirsty Danes.

  On went the dancing, at the Country Dance Society’s party, until everyone went home exhausted and happy at midnight. It must have been like a dance-focused version of the Langstaff family carol party, just as joyous, just as unforgettable. And its mixture of folk dance, folk song, and the spoken word stayed in Jack’s mind and fermented. In 1957, two years after he began teaching at Potomac, he wove the three major elements into a more complicated pattern and took it public.

  In the New Yorker magazine for December 14, 1957, downpage from listings for the current big musical hits (My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Bells Are Ringing) there is a very small advertisement:

  “It came out of so many things,” Jack said about th
irty years ago, looking back. “The carols, and the folklore I’d taught to children . . . knowing Carol Preston, and May Gadd . . . having played St. George once when I was young . . . and wanting to relate things with early roots to modern forms of art, through Mary Craighill and the young dance company she had in Washington. . . . I thought I could dovetail all those things, which was what always interested me when I was building my own programs.”

  For the first time now, he was building not just a program, but a theatrical performance that was also a community event. It would be a great big public carol party, with Jack as the master of ceremonies, just as his father, Meredith, had presided over the Brooklyn Heights Christmas family gathering. The party would be held twice, in two ambitiously large spaces, each seating about 1,500 people: first at New York’s Town Hall, on West 43rd Street, and six days later at Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University, D.C. Jack made the advance payments for the theater rentals out of his own not very deep pocket, and he had the Colbert agency, who booked his own concerts, as managers.

  The program itself was full of his memories and his friends. From his days as a choirboy he had loved the sound of trumpets soaring above massed voices, so he hired the New York Brass Quintet. “We had them up in the audience for the carols — it was very exciting.” Through teacher friends he acquired some singing children from the progressive City and Country School, in Greenwich Village. From Washington, D.C., where after two years at Potomac he now had nearly as many friends as in New York, he brought an experimental dance group recently formed by the dancer Mary Craighill, and he enlisted the Morris team he knew so well from Pinewoods summers. History doesn’t record whether all these people had time for more than one rehearsal, but it probably didn’t matter; the glue that held them all together was the voice, presence, and personality of their singer-director.

  At the single New York performance, he came onstage and spoke to the audience, welcoming them, charming them, and telling them what to expect. Then after a rousing introduction from the brass quintet, the Morris men danced, in half-light, the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, each of them holding a full set of antlers to his head. (This had, and has, an eerie quality in Revels, though in its English village of origin, where it still survives, a line of Morris men and traditional figures dance outdoors to a set of jaunty tunes all day long.) Then up came the lights and back came Jack, to lead the audience in “Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly.” And for the rest of the evening, performance and communal singing alternated.

  The Morris men danced the stick-clashing “Brighton Camp,” and everybody sang “Silent Night.” Mary Craighill’s Washington Contemporary Dance Group danced as Jack sang “The Cherry Tree Carol,” and everybody sang “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Jack and the Craighill company performed “King Herod and the Cock,” everybody sang “The First Nowell”; children processed in to sing and mime I Saw Three Ships On Chris-i-mas Day in the Morning, with its haunting, rising refrain, and everybody sang “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” The Morris men “and some resting actors from off Broadway” performed the traditional death-and-revival Mummers’ Play, with the sword dance from Ampleforth ending in its impressive star-shaped sword lock, and as a finale everybody sang the “Sussex Mummers’ Carol.”

  “And I lost my shirt,” Jack said.

  The New York audience had had a very good time, but it wasn’t large enough to cover the cost of renting Town Hall. “And since my concert manager managed it all, that was a cost. And although we had a very beautiful flyer, of a hobbyhorse, by my friend Ronnie Silbert, we didn’t have any money for advertising — even though we had a great volunteer committee behind us.”

  The committee consisted of twenty-five ladies, and included not only his own mother but Diane’s — and Betty Chapin, wife of Schuyler Chapin, later general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, whose son Hank would one day become a stalwart Revels player of the Fool in several cities, for years. At this point, however, Hank was only six years old. Carol Langstaff was about fourteen, helping backstage.

  Six days later Jack did the same thing all over again in the Lisner Auditorium in D.C. “On the tenth day of Christmas,” reported the Washington Post merrily, “John Langstaff gave to Washington a Christmas Masque.”

  Jack said, “The people from the Potomac School had said, ‘Bring it down here and we’ll get you an audience of fifteen hundred.’ And they did, it sold out — but we’d brought the Morris dancers and the actors from New York, so we made a profit of about fifteen dollars. So for financial reasons, we decided not to do it again.”

  But nine years later, before Jack left Potomac, Fate presented him with a second dry run for the Revels. In 1966, NBC Television, for whom Jack had done his book series, deputed the director Isaiah Sheffer to find a Christmas special, and Sheffer (who later founded and ran Symphony Space, which became the home of the New York Revels) went to Jack. And Jack gave them the script and music from the Christmas Masque with which he had lost his shirt at the New York Town Hall in 1957.

  I did stand onstage and talk to the audience, in those early performances at Town Hall and Lisner, so there was a kind of script. And NBC decided to do it. We used some of the same people — the brass, and Mary Craighill’s dancers from Washington — and again we had some young unknown actors from New York. One of them was Dustin Hoffman, he was the Dragon in the Mummers’ Play. He extemporized too much but he was very funny. . . . Seymour Barrett, who works on my books with me, he orchestrated the songs. There was a big studio with a set like Elizabethan England — snow all over the place, and lovely little lanterns. I hadn’t been expecting that, but when I went into my dressing room there was this Elizabethan costume.”

  Perhaps they put him in those puffy knickers, with tights. He wore it all, anyway, and as before, he sang “The Cherry Tree Carol” for the dancers. And his first daughter, Carol, now twenty-three, sang the Hebridean “Christ Child’s Lullaby.” Isaiah Sheffer directed.

  We rehearsed in the morning and recorded it in the afternoon. It was done in color, and shown on Christmas night. It was beautiful. And they erased it, alas.

  But an audiotape of the televised Christmas Masque survives. Jack sings wonderfully, but sounds a little uneasy when he has to talk. As the Dragon, Dustin Hoffman uses a big deep voice and snarls a lot. (At this point in his life, Hoffman was playing jazz piano as much as acting, but a few months later Mike Nichols cast him in The Graduate and the balance shifted.)

  The following year, off the Langstaffs went to spend their year in Britain. While they were there, an emissary came over from the Shady Hill School, a progressive K–8 private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to invite Jack to become its music director. His success at Potomac had given him a glowing reputation in the world of music education, and Shady Hill wanted to capture him before anyone else did.

  By this point, as singer, teacher, or author, Jack had visited almost every major American city with an active interest in the arts, and the Cambridge/Boston area must have seemed a good fit. After the postwar recovery decade of the fifties, every kind of artistic endeavor was beginning to ferment in the sixties, in the United States as in Europe: theater, music, dance, painting, you name it. But the bubbles weren’t yet visible everywhere. As an arts-obsessed young English journalist, I was sent by my London newspaper to the United States for four months in 1962, and I went home to report rather loftily that the only two places in which a civilized European could happily live seemed to me to be Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco, California. Maybe the Langstaffs agreed.

  “I went to teach at Shady Hill in 1967,” Jack said, “after swearing that I’d never teach again — at least not that age group.”

  Nancy says that they were attracted to the Cambridge area by the fact that their teenage children would now be close to urban amenities, rather than being relatively isolated in McLean, Virginia. (By now John was nineteen, Gary seventeen, and Deborah twelve.) They chose to live in Lexington, a suburban town renow
ned for its school system, and bought an enchanting eighteenth-century farmhouse with small rooms, low ceilings, and a garden in which Jack grew Concord grapes and took up beekeeping. Before long Nancy too began to teach again, at the Cambridge Friends School, which had been founded in 1961 as the only Quaker school in Massachusetts.

  So, having moved to New England, Jack put down new roots, particularly in the world of the arts. For six years he bounced through life in much the same pattern as he had followed at Potomac: teaching, singing at recitals and concerts, touring, recording, turning folk songs into children’s books, and encouraging audiences to sing in new productions of Noye’s Fludde and similar family-oriented operas.

  But at the back of his mind, the vision of a Revels was still simmering. He was entering his fifties now; for more than forty years his life had been twining together the strands spun by his interests and history. The joyous traditional celebration of Christmas; the liturgical splendor of the Anglican Church; the layered, myth-rooted simplicity of folk song and folk dance; the power of music in the teaching of children; the instinctive theatricality of a professional performer — all these were heaped up in the imagination of a musician who found his greatest delight in making audiences not just listen but sing.

  The whole thing was like a bonfire waiting to be set alight, and around 1970 the spark was struck by a visit from the small daughter who had haunted his letters home from war when he was twenty-three. He had dedicated his first book, Frog Went A-Courtin’, to her, decades later: “For my Carol,” the dedication read, “who was the first to give me the fun of singing with children.” Now Carol was twenty-seven, having grown up to become a dancer-singer with an eclectic, very Langstaff mix of talents and tastes: early music, folk song, folk dance, modern dance. She came to visit one day devastated by a professional setback in New York, and Jack, trying to fill the gap, suggested that she help him develop a reincarnation of the Christmas Masque he had done in New York when she was fourteen.