by George Takei
* * *
Graduation day, June 9, 1960. It was a bright, sunlit, perfectly cloudless day. Vespers service for students and families in the morning. Daddy hosted a luncheon in a Westwood restaurant at noon. Then came the graduation ceremony on the greens of the UCLA athletic field. It was rather uncomfortable sitting in the sun wearing the black cap and gown. I remember it all so well, but what I remember most from that exhilarating and exhausting day happened after the ceremony.
Daddy and Mama came up to congratulate me. They were beaming. This was the campus they had driven their children around more than a dozen years before. This was the day they had been dreaming about for many more years before that. Today, their son was wearing the cap and gown of academia and holding a rolled piece of document tied with a bright blue ribbon. I handed it to Daddy to examine, and Mama embraced me.
“You did it. I’m proud of you.” Daddy was radiant.
“We did it,” I said as we shook hands. “This belongs to you and Mama, too.”
“So happy.” Mama smiled. “You real college graduate now.” We just stood there smiling and gazing at each other. There were groups of proud parents around us handing gift-wrapped packages to their new graduates.
“We don’t have a package to hand you,” Daddy said.
“Oh, Daddy, you and Mama have given me so much already,” I protested. “This is the best gift you’ve given me,” I said, holding up the rolled diploma. I genuinely meant it.
“Oh, we have a gift for you,” Daddy laughed. “We just can’t hand it to you.” I was puzzled. What could he be talking about?
“You had your heart set on going to New York, but you came here to UCLA because we wanted you to get a degree,” he said. “Well, you did it. You earned your Bachelor of Arts. Now we want you to study some more. We want you to go to summer school at the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon in England. Go there and study to be the best actor you can be.”
I was stunned. Stratford-upon-Avon was Shakespeare’s birthplace. In England! I was speechless. They were sending me to a place I had dreamed and fantasized about for years. As the shock waned, I began to sense the profound import of this extraordinary graduation gift. It meant that they were now fully behind me. They truly believed that I could do it. Daddy and Mama believed in me! I felt a surge of joy, gratitude, and an overwhelming love. I couldn’t hug them tightly enough.
11
Fly Blackbird!
THE SUMMER OF 1960 WAS more than glorious. The Shakespeare Institute alone would have been a sublime experience, and the school was just steps away from the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, where the fabled Royal Shakespeare Company was in residence. But I made it more than Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon. During and especially after my summer session, I roamed all over Britain. I traveled to the medieval walled city of York for the ancient mystery play festival, then to the Scottish capital of Edinburgh for the great international performing arts festival.
From Great Britain, I flew to Madrid and explored Spain. The Mexican Spanish I spoke was as distinctly different from the Castiliano spoken by the Spaniards as my American English was from the English spoken by the British, but they did understand me. Then I went by train to Italy, where I got together with an American friend from UCLA, Michael Colefax, who had been living in Rome. We hitched a ride with a film critic friend of his, Gugliamo Biraghi, who was driving up to the celebrated Venice Film Festival to serve as a judge. The two-day drive up Italy with a literate Italian eager to share his passion for his country was an unforgettable treat.
Then, the crowning jewel on a dazzling three months—Paris! To experience for the first time this most urbane treasuropolis of the civilized world was thoroughly captivating. I discovered the heady grandeur of beaux arts architecture and the magnificence of visionary urban planning; and I was completely charmed by the delightful European tradition of wines with meals. The sheer overwhelming opulence of French civilization was, for me, as for many first-time visitors to the City of Lights, much too much. I drank deeply of the culture. Paris was an effervescent and sometimes gloriously intoxicating high.
* * *
Coming home to America was the morning after the binge. It meant waking up to the cold, hard light of reality. Now, what would I do with my life? I had a nascent but unsteady acting career going. To pursue some regular employment meant potentially impacting both the career and the steadiness of whatever job I might get. Thanks to the real estate investments that my father had made for me, I had the economic cushion to explore other options. While studying for my bachelor’s degree at UCLA, I had found the academic side of theater to be extremely interesting, and the history of American theater especially fascinating. The theater mirrored and was shaped by the forces and events in our country’s history. I decided to go on to graduate studies in theater history at my alma mater. Daddy wholeheartedly endorsed this decision.
UCLA seemed to be the residence of serendipity for me. It was there that Hoyt Bowers from Warner Brothers studio saw me in Portraits in Greasepaint, leading to my first feature film role and to working with Richard Burton. My decision to go to UCLA had led to my being cast in my first television production, the prestigious Playhouse 90, and to working with the director Herbie Hirschman. And it was there at UCLA that my path crossed those of two people who were collaborating on an exciting musical play which was ultimately to take me to New York.
Dr. James Hatch, whom I came to call Jim, was a professor of playwriting at UCLA. He had written Tallest Baby on the River, the play that gave me my award-winning American Indian role. C. Bernard Jackson, whom I came to call Jack, was associated with the dance department at UCLA and had been the musical director of Portrait in Greasepaint. Jim was white, Jack was black, and they were working on a musical titled Fly Blackbird! about the civil rights movement, the drive to gain racial justice in America. Their collaboration was taken directly from the newspaper headlines of the day.
America of the early sixties was stirring from the social torpor of the Eisenhower years. Beneath the surface of smug complacency flowed a strong tide of activist energy, a current of belief that the country must come to grips with the social corrosion of racial segregation. It emerged powerfully as a movement through “sit-ins” at segregated lunch counters, “freedom ride” bus caravans of college students into southern states with racially discriminatory statutes still on their books, and, most dramatically, in the nonviolent demonstrations led by the charismatic minister Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fly Blackbird! grew out of this political and social ferment. Jackson and Hatch had begun their collaboration on the UCLA campus, but, with strong encouragement from their colleagues, the venturesome duo decided to take their production off campus and open in a commercial house, the Metro Theater on Washington Boulevard. With them came galvanized young students bringing their energy, passion, and ideals. Here was the opportunity to wed craft and beliefs to dynamic social action. A good number of the cast came from UCLA, but, in addition, the administrative, technical, and business expertise came right off the campus.
Among them was a bushy-bearded young filmmaker with whom I had made student films. He practically lived in the dusty recesses of the theater working the complicated technical side of the production. And he was madly in love with the business manager in the front office. Poor Francis, I remember thinking, always lurking up in the darkness of the grids separated from his lady love up front by a vast theater and all of us singing and dancing below. Little could I have guessed that, years later, his name—his full name yet—would be emblazoned from marquees of theaters all over the world. Francis Ford Coppola.
Fly Blackbird! depicted, in song and dance, the high-spirited adventures of a shock troop of idealistic college students, black, white, and one Asian—not so coincidentally named George—as they struggled to right old wrongs. I was cast, naturally, in the role of the Asian student, my namesake, George.
There was a big musical number titled “The Gon
g Song,” a satire on all of Hollywood’s tired “oriental” clichés. Why, it asked, do we have to be subjected in each and every movie having anything to do with “orientalia,” to a reverberant bong on a gong accompanied by a melody built on a pentatonic scale? This was “my” number, although it was performed by a trio also including Big Betty, a brassy, tough-talking student leader, and Tag, a shy, demure follower in the movement.
Big Betty was played by Thelma Oliver, a multitalented singer, dancer, and actor who had also attended Mt. Vernon Jr. High School, although a bit after me. Tag was played by Josie Dotson, whom I knew from some of my theater classes at UCLA. Although she was quiet and reserved in class, I was aware of Josie from the first day because, just as I was the only Asian in the Theater Arts Department in those days, she was the only black student. But for whatever reason, I never saw her performing in any school productions. So when we met again in rehearsals for Fly Blackbird! it was a delightful surprise for me to discover that this sedate, modest classmate could also be a sprightly and captivating performer. In fact, I was utterly charmed by the way she used her large, doleful, fawnlike eyes. But from behind those angelic eyes, I was to learn, watched a canny and subversively creative mind.
I thought that my competition and the real scene-stealer was Thelma. She brought to Big Betty a sass and swagger that could reach out and grab an audience and never let go. As if that weren’t enough to concern another actor on the same stage, I noticed that she had a way of constantly inching herself, bit by consistent bit, downstage of the original blocking. At each rehearsal, she subtly edged herself farther down until her new downstage position got to be the accepted blocking. But we were supposed to be a trio. I wasn’t about to let Thelma downstage me. I kept a wary eye on her and inched downstage along with her each time she did. By the time of dress rehearsals, we were both singing and dancing our hearts out practically leaning over the footlights at the people in the orchestra. Poor reticent Josie, I thought. She was somewhere behind us obediently following the original blocking. Thelma was probably gloating while I, at least, had enough milk of human kindness in me to feel for Josie. The opening was quickly upon us, and the director froze the new positions that Thelma and I had had appropriated.
Fly Blackbird! opened to thunderous ovations and great notices. It was discovered even by distant out-of-town critics like Nathan Cohen of the Toronto Star News. The leads were showered with accolades, but our number, “The Gong Song,” was the showstopper. They were rolling in the aisles. It wasn’t, however, because of Thelma’s and my energetic singing and dancing. The laughs were coming when we were at our precision best. They were coming because of something else.
Behind us, just a beat behind or a step in anticipation of ours, was Josie in a hilarious state of discombobulation. Her great, soulful eyes were the mirrors of her embarrassment. Her lashes fluttered; her lips puckered. Her prim hands were tightly clutched in hysterically demure mortification. Josie was using Thelma and me as her foils as we battled each other with our precise Kabuki high-stepping and our disciplined Hindu head swaying down by the footlights. The coup de grace in Josie’s exquisite orchestration of distress was her final punctuation of a devastatingly delicate comic stumble. Josie’s performance was the very quintessence of the one black person in the world who didn’t have rhythm. Shamelessly, she stole “The Gong Song” from Thelma and me and shattered another stereotype with one hilarious swoop.
* * *
Fly Blackbird! enjoyed a raging good run of almost a year in Los Angeles. The production captured the energy and optimism of the times. It soared musically on the notion that America was a social experiment in the making and that changes were still happening. The audiences were huge and spanned the ethnic spectrum of the city. Over its run, Fly Blackbird! affected an enormous number of people.
One of them was me. I gained friends and insights that led me to a deeper understanding of this ever-changing, ever-developing new breed of humans called Americans. As a people, we may have varied histories tracing back to the Mayflower or to slave ships, to split-rail corrals or to barbed wire fences. But, whatever our histories, however tortured and adversarial they may have been, our destinies are bound inextricably together. We have a common future. Our challenge lies, not in carrying the weight of our pasts like anchors, but in working in concert to build that common tomorrow. With Fly Blackbird! we achieved this smashingly well.
During the run, I met many people who shared the ideals that we sang and danced about so lustily from the stage of the old Metro Theater. Among the many that came backstage to congratulate us was one of the people with whom I was to become forever linked as a colleague, Nichelle Nichols. It was an occasion I would have remembered even if we never met again. She was immediately striking. At a time when black women were still laboriously straightening their hair, Nichelle wore hers in an authentic and astonishingly frizzy “Afro.” She was at once natural and sophisticated, straightforward and radical. From the very first encounter, I was introduced to the essential Nichelle.
A cherished gift from the run of Fly Blackbird! was the memory of a meeting that still burns incandescently. We were often asked to perform musical numbers from the production at various rallies and fund-raisers. The biggest and most significant of these events was a giant rally at the Los Angeles Sports Arena with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The immense hall was packed. Dr. King was virtually the personification of the civil rights movement and the most compelling orator of the times. People had traveled from throughout the southwest to be there. We considered it a signal honor to be performing at this event.
The Fly Blackbird! company was seated in a specially designated section of the grandstand at the opposite end of the hall from the podium where Dr. King would be speaking. We sang the title song, “Fly Blackbird!” and the soul-stirring finale from the show, “Wake Up, the Dawn Is Breaking.” Then Dr. King entered the hall. Across the vast distance of the arena, he was only a tiny moving figure. But like a single, massive organism spontaneously surging to life, the entire assemblage rose up in a great thunderous ovation. The sound continued on and on—a giant roar of love, gratitude, inspiration, and hope.
It was a long time before Dr. King could begin to talk. But when he did, immediately a dense hush fell over the crowd. There was pure silence. Only his rich, sonorous voice broke it. He began speaking in his elegantly relaxed tone of his travels across this country. He spoke of the big cities, the great plains, and of the savannas and swamps of his native South. He spoke of the reality that he saw there and of the struggle that America has had with the ideals it holds so dear. And as he spoke, his words seemed to have direct resonance for me as a Japanese American.
Then he looked out over the immense assemblage before him, and he spread out his arms. His voice took on a rolling cadence as he spoke of his hope for our country. The good people of America, he said, people like those he saw before him, of all colors, all faiths, and all backgrounds linked together by a common subscription to the ideals of this country, were the hope for the future of our nation, indeed for the destiny of the human race. His voice swelled, the rhythm building to crescendo, and the majesty of his vision became towering as his mighty oratory carried our spirits soaring up to the rafters.
The massive assemblage of people there in the Los Angeles Sports Arena was transformed into a single, dynamic entity. We swayed in unison, we clapped in concert, we shouted as one. Dr. King possessed that rare power to reach out and touch so many so personally and then to bond them together and inspire them to that most extraordinary of political acts—nonviolent action.
I was spellbound. As the audience exploded in applause around me, I understood for the first time the awesome power of the spoken word combined with the grandeur of great ideas. This was true theater. This was theater in its highest form, and Dr. Martin Luther King was the ultimate theater artist. He was the megastar of American ideals.
After the rally, the cast of Fly Bla
ckbird! was taken back to be introduced to Dr. King. It seemed as if everybody in the arena was now pushing in backstage to touch him. We had to wait in a long line for quite some time for our quick meeting. Dr. King must have been exhausted, but even for my brief handshake, he had warm, gracious words to share.
“Thank you so much for your contribution to the afternoon,” he said to me. “You were wonderful. Thank you very much.”
They were only a few simple words, but they were words I will never forget. His handshake was easy and gentle. It was only for a fleeting moment, but I will always cherish that touch.
* * *
After ten months, Fly Blackbird! was closing. The irrepressible musical could have run much longer in Los Angeles. But Jackson and Hatch had sold the rights for a New York production to a Manhattan producer named Helen Jacobson. Fly Blackbird! was flying across the country to newer heights. It was going to the Big Apple.
The New York production was to be a completely fresh mounting of the musical with a new director, Jerome Eskow. If the actors from the Los Angeles production wanted to be considered for their roles, they were welcome to try out, we were told. They would, however, have to come to New York at their own expense and audition anew with no guarantees. New York was going to be as tough and hard as we had been forewarned.
I thought, however, that this was another stroke of luck. I knew that, somehow, I would eventually be going to New York. It was the focal point of all my fantasies. But I never dreamed that I would be going there with a tailor-made opportunity! Many of the characters in Fly Blackbird! were created for and by the actors that played them. Some even had the same names as those of the players . . . like George. George was really me.
