A CURIOUS LIFE
T
he first time I acted was before I even remember. At age two, I was a street urchin in a mythical Asian kingdom in a stage version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It was 1947, and the show was performed in a Victorian Gothic opera house, long since demolished, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A black-and-white
[1]
Drama_i_xiv_1_320.indd 16/22/11 4:12 PM
John Lithgow
[ 2 ]
photograph from that production shows me at the edge of a crowd of brightly costumed grown-up actors. Standing nearby is my sister Robin. She is four, two years older than I, and also a street urchin. We are both dressed in little kimonos with pointy straw hats, and someone has drawn dark diagonal eyebrows above our eyes, ren-dering us vaguely Japanese. I am clearly oblivious, a faun in the headlights. I stand knee-high next to a large man in a white shift and a pillbox hat who appears to have a role not much bigger than mine. He reaches down to hold my hand. He is clearly in charge of me, lest I wander off into the wings. There is very little in the photograph to suggest that, at age two, I have a future in the theater.But I do. Later that season, in the same old opera house, I was already back onstage. I played one of Nora’s children in
A Doll’s House
by Henrik Ibsen. I don’t remember this performance either (and there’s no photographic record of it), but Robin was there once again, playing another of Nora’s children and steering me around the stage as if I were an obedient pet. In that production, the role of Torvald, Nora’s tyrannical husband and the father of those two children, was played by that same fellow in the white shift from
The Emperor’s New Clothes
. In a case of art imitating life, my onstage father was my actual father. His name was Arthur Lithgow.Thus it was that my curious life in entertainment was launched, before I was even conscious of it, on the same stage as my father. So it is with my father that I will begin.Arthur Lithgow had curious beginnings, too. He was born in the Dominican Republic, where, generations before, a clan of Scottish Lithgows had emigrated to seek their fortunes as sugar-growing landowners. I’m not sure whether these early Lithgows prospered, but they enthusiastically intermarried with the Dominican popula-
Drama_i_xiv_1_320.indd 26/22/11 4:12 PM
DRAMA
[ 3 ]
tion. One recent day, as I was walking down a Manhattan sidewalk, a chocolate-brown Dominican cabdriver screeched to a stop, leaped out, and greeted me as his distant cousin. Young Arthur got off to a bumpy start. Evidently, his father (my grandfather) was a bad businessman. He was naïve, overly trusting, and cursed with catastrophic bad luck. He and a partner teamed up on a far-fetched scheme to patent and peddle synthetic molasses. The partner absconded with their entire investment. My grandfa-ther sued his erstwhile friend, lost the suit, and moved his family north to Boston, to start all over. At this point, his bad luck asserted itself. He fell victim to the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918, died within weeks, and left my grandmother a widow—penniless, a mother of four, and pregnant. Arthur was the third-oldest of her children. He was four years old. Growing up, he barely remembered even having a father.But the situation for this forlorn family was far from hopeless. My grandmother, Ina B. Lithgow, was a trained nurse. She was smart, resourceful, and just as hard-nosed as my grandfather had been soft-headed. He had left her with a large clapboard house in Melrose, Massachusetts, and she immediately set about putting it to good use. She flung open its doors and turned it into an old folks’ home. All four of her children were recruited to slave away as a grudging staff of peewee caregivers, in the hours before and after school. The oldest of these children was ten, the youngest was three. Child la-bor laws clearly did not apply when the survival of the family was at stake.At some point in all this, Ina came to term. She gave birth to a baby daughter who only lived a matter of days. Swallowing her grief, and regaining her strength, she went right back to work.To my father, Ina must have been downright scary as she fought to keep her household afloat. But fifty years later, when I was a
Drama_i_xiv_1_320.indd 36/22/11 4:12 PM