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When Michael received my proposal, he asked Bruce if he thought Blitzstein was worth a book, and Bruce encouraged him to take it on.
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He had a close friend in the conductor Bruce Ferden, whose performances I had attended at the New York City Opera and elsewhere, although I had never met him. It was some time, perhaps years later, before I heard from Michael exactly how he came to accept my book. As my agent, Fran made the case that with the offered advance I could not give up all outside work assignments and devote myself full-time to the book, so St. It became qualitatively another enterprise entirely now to be writing for an editor, with deadlines, regular submission of fresh chapters, and pay. Up to then I had been conducting my research in an on-spec void, poking my head up only occasionally for a magazine article here and some program notes there.
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Overnight, the character of my project changed. Michael accepted my book on Tuesday, Oct. Martin’s Press with a special, though not exclusive interest in gay-related subjects. Now that I had delivered some completed chapters to Fran, she got them over to Michael Denneny, a pioneering editor at St. I’d find his name in the phone book, he told me, and in whatever mental state I left the club, I was able to recall his last name as the same as my childhood family dentist. We bonded with one handsome young fellow named Ricky Barnett, and I told him I’d like to call him the following week. The place really got hopping after 4 a.m. Safe sex was, of course, the order of the day, as AIDS had already claimed thousands of lives in New York City alone. 4, a friend visiting from Wisconsin joined me for a night out “with the boys” at a raunchy safe-sex club in Lower Manhattan called the Locker Room. Two big events occurred within a couple of days of each other that October. So I started writing his life from the late 1950s onward, with Orson Welles, John Houseman, Leonard Bernstein, Joseph Stein, Sean O’Casey, Agnes de Mille, Melvyn Douglas, Shirley Booth, Bernard Malamud, and other famous characters populating the composer’s career. I figured editors would not be captivated by the first chapter or two of Blitzstein’s life – his birth and childhood in Philadelphia, then his student years – because they would not recognize any big musical or theatrical names. Editors might not know who Blitzstein was, but at least they wanted to see if I could write. Now, she informed me, she would send out no more proposals unless accompanied by a couple of chapters. My agent, Frances Goldin, put the fear of God in me when she told me that one editor after another at different publishing houses turned down my book proposal because they really didn’t know who Blitzstein was, and I had no previous books or a track record of sales for them to go on. Now I had more time on my hands, and an unemployment check to tide me over. I had completed a mountain of research and interviews, but had not really sat down to start writing. Since 1978, I had been prodding intermittently at a biography of the great radical gay American composer Marc Blitzstein. Silly me, I thought I was so indispensable there!īut as that door proverbially closed, another opened. But that spring, the firm was bought out by another company, which promptly fired almost the entire staff. And I had a stimulating job as publicity manager at the venerable old music publishing firm of G. By June we decided to part company Stephen remained in my Upper West Side apartment until he found his own place. I started off the year with a partner of about six years’ duration, though by then it wasn’t going so well. (A Florida artist has cremated and buried the Confederate flag, as reported in this PW article.