Street Gang (52 page)

Clash once told his hometown morning newspaper, the
Baltimore Sun,
that Bartee “can tell people off, especially the cool dudes. He won’t get hurt, and I won’t get hurt, either. He’s the one person—I mean thing—who can get away with it.”
⁷

Kevin’s confidence grew, and when he was in tenth grade, appearing at the Dundalk Heritage Festival, he was spotted by Stu Kerr, a peripatetic television personality and weather forecaster in Baltimore who had been host of local children’s programs and a slew of cheaply produced studio shows like
Dialing for Dollars.
Coincidentally, Kerr and Bob Keeshan were friends, dating back to their days together as postwar pages at NBC Television in New York. Keeshan would occasionally book Kerr on
Captain Kangaroo
to play Scoop, a scatterbrained newsman.

At the time he met Clash, Kerr was developing
Caboose,
a new railroad-themed kids’ show, in which the host would play a train conductor. He invited Clash to come along for the ride, and over the next two years the young puppeteer learned to perform on the job, unknowingly replicating the same technique Henson developed at WRC in the 1950s.

But when he began getting roles in musical theater productions at predominantly white Dundalk High School, things changed.

Clash’s pleasing baritone was developing a round richness by age sixteen. During the winter of his junior year, he snagged the role of Sky Masterson, the romantic lead in a spring musical staging of
Guys and Dolls.
In his 2006 memoir,
⁸
Clash recalled his sense of triumph in landing the part that Marlon Brando had in the 1955 film adaptation. “I was floating on air,” Clash said. “This was a dream role—to have some great acting scenes and perform show-stopping songs like ‘Luck Be a Lady’ and ‘My Time of Day.’ I was also especially pleased that Sky’s love interest, Sarah, was going to be played by a girl who was a friend of mine. Vanessa and I were in music and drama classes together, and she was bright and talented, with a remarkable voice.”

The exhilaration was short-lived, thanks to a phone call Kevin received a few days after the cast list was posted outside the high school’s music room and rehearsals had begun. Dundalk High has traditionally drawn its student body from a largely blue-collar swath of southwestern Baltimore County. Racial tensions were always under the surface, and a cafeteria melee that broke out between whites and blacks at the school made headlines in Baltimore in the 1970s. “It may have had more to do with drugs than race,” said Clash, who was given a ride home that day by the school’s drama teacher after the students were sent home at midday.

On Father’s Day, 2006, Kevin, Gladys, and George Clash sat around an outdoor patio table in suburban Baltimore County. Theirs is a family that values respect and tolerance, hard work and sacrifice, laughter, and gratitude for every blessing. Though Gladys had a framed photograph of Angela Davis atop the family’s RCA television set, she was hardly a black-power militant in the sixties. But she was prideful, as was her husband, and they raised their children to be comfortable in their skin and to stand second to no one.

That explains why a sadness—and a cool, residual anger—still crosses their faces when they recall what happened when the handsome star of their household, the shy child who mustered his courage to perform without his puppets, picked up the receiver on that day in 1976.

On the line was Vanessa, the student chosen to play Sister Sarah, the Salvation Army missionary who parries with inveterate gambler Sky in
Guys and Dolls.
After nervously stumbling over small talk, Clash’s cast mate lowered the boom. “You know, in the musical you and I have to kiss . . . We can’t do that.”

Vanessa’s mother, coaxing in the background, prompted her to ask Kevin to step down from the role. Clash’s heart sank at the bold attempt to undo a decision that wasn’t hers to manipulate: “What she was really saying was, ‘We can’t kiss in front of everyone at school because you are black and I am white.’ ”

Gladys, too, was listening nearby. “When my mom heard ‘step down,’ she went off, pouring words into my ear,” Clash said. “I could barely take in everything she was saying, but I knew that the fury in her was coming out.” It was up to Kevin to clarify things. “I told her I was not the one with the problem, she was,” he said.

Gladys wanted Vanessa to put her mother on, but the parent refused. “I wanted to remind her that this was not about loving her daughter or Kevin coming for dinner like Sidney Poitier in that movie. This was about acting,” she said. “Kevin could have been asked to kiss a block of wood, but the situation was that he was playing a part that required the leading man to kiss the leading lady.”

Vanessa, who eventually gave up the part to take a role in the chorus, apologized months later. The role of Sarah was taken up by an African American, a student who already had a crush on Clash. “She had no problem with the kiss scene,” Clash said.

Gladys Clash and Stu Kerr were the adults who figured most prominently in Clash’s development as a performer, but there was a third.

Clash first came to know of Kermit Love after watching an episode of
Call It Macaroni,
a syndicated children’s program that won a George Foster Peabody award for Westinghouse Broadcasting in 1975. Narrated by children, the documentary series explored extraordinary occupations, like that of Love, a costume designer and marionette maker.

To Clash, the fully bearded Love seemed like a modern-day wizard, and he was determined to meet him. Gladys, not one to be deterred, began calling the local station in Baltimore that aired the monthly show, asking for a contact name and number for Love. To no one’s surprise, she not only got through to him but convinced Love to meet with Kevin during an upcoming school trip to New York. He did, and a lifelong bond was formed.

Not long afterward, Kerr began to talk up his young puppeteer find to Bob Keeshan, who saw a tape of Clash at a children’s convention in New York. While still in high school, Clash took a meeting with the executives at
Captain Kangaroo.

“He was kind of young, but we saw genius right away,” Keeshan told
Newsday
in 1998. “He was always a great puppeteer and actually an incredible craftsman.” Keeshan sent two emissaries to Baltimore to investigate the menagerie of eighty-nine puppets Clash had built, which were crammed onto plastic shelves in his parents’ bedroom. The producer and writer chose five puppets for the show, and Clash began to make frequent appearances during the final two, barely seen, seasons of
Captain Kangaroo
on CBS. Almost cruelly, the network scheduled it at 6:00 a.m., allowing the show to wither and die at an hour when its viewers were either barely awake or still asleep.

In addition to doing puppetry, Clash played a college student on
Kangaroo.
“It was the worst costume,” he said. “Penny loafers and an argyle vest. It was pretty embarrassing.”

Said Keeshan, “We would see how really difficult it was for him to get out from behind the puppets, how he hated to be on camera himself. What’s magic about him is how he just becomes so incredibly reverse of what he is in real life when he gets behind a puppet. [With a puppet] he’s outgoing and funny as can be, and outrageous. Without the puppet, he’s just a nice laid-back young man.”

Clash was determined to join the Muppets, and Love was just as determined to help him. When a call went out for extras to work the
Sesame Street
float in the 1979 Macy’s parade, he recommended Clash. The nineteen-year-old arose in the middle of the night in Baltimore to get to New York in time to perform Cookie Monster, waving to the throngs along Broadway. As the parade dispersed in late morning, he hopped a southbound train back to Thanksgiving dinner in Maryland, exhilarated at having met Jim Henson, however briefly.

For a dizzying spell of time, Clash worked twenty-one-hour days in New York, juggling responsibilities for
Kangaroo
and Love’s syndicated children’s show
The Great Space Coaster.

“I would do
Great Space Coaster
in the morning, then from 2:00 p.m. to like 6:00 p.m., I would do the
Captain,
and then from 6:00 p.m. to midnight I would prerecord
Great Space Coaster,
and then from midnight to 6:00 a.m. I was building puppets for the Captain. Then I would have to go in at 8:30 in the morning. Fortunately I was young and healthy.”
⁹

It was right around that time that he got a call from Jane Henson. “Jim, Frank, and Jerry were in London doing
The Muppet Show,
and they needed puppeteers for
Sesame Street,
” Clash said. They had a special assignment in mind for the six-foot, 180-pound, athletically built puppeteer: the hind end of Snuffleupagus.

“Both Jerry and Richard Hunt had done that job, and it just tore their backs up,” Clash said. “It was my turn, I guess.”

Clash also performed an array of characters, without much distinction, until Hunt literally tossed Elmo into his arms. As Hunt walked away, Clash began experimenting with a falsetto voice that he had used from time to time. “But I really didn’t find Elmo’s soul until I took a trip home to Baltimore, back to the kids in my mother’s care. That’s where I found his innocence, his positiveness, and his sweetness.”

 

Teen actress Alison Bartlett—now known as Alison Bartlett O’Reilly—auditioned for a one-day part on
Sesame Street
and nailed it, despite herself. “It was 1985, and I was a student at LaGuardia High School with a bad attitude,” she said. “I almost didn’t take the audition, and I said to my agent, ‘Thank you, but I’m
not
going to get hired for
Sesame Street.’
By that point I was already typecast as the tough kid, the Jodie Foster roles, and I had just played a girl who had been found in an alley.”

Unbeknownst to O’Reilly, Jon Stone had seen her two years before on Broadway, playing a teenage drifter in David Rabe’s
Hurlyburly.

“My agent said, ‘We need to get something on your résumé other than the roles you’ve been doing,’ and I reluctantly agreed to go,” she recalled. “A bunch of girls were there, and I did the compare-and-despair thing, sitting around thinking
Why am I here?
I was in jeans and T-shirt and felt completely as though I didn’t fit in, building walls around myself to hide my insecurities and prejudgments. Then, about two seconds from leaving, they called me in.”

Stone and Lisa Simon were there, as was Marty Robinson, performing with Telly. Though there was a script, the emphasis was on improv, and O’Reilly quickly got into the spirit of the Muppet interplay.

“Jon struck me as a ghetto Santa Claus, and I liked him immediately,” Bartlett said. She got the part, arriving at the studio prepared to play one of Gordon’s students named Gina. She gets lost on the way to a science project meeting on the roof of 123 Sesame Street. The script called for her to get directions from a pair of Honkers, the brightly hued, slightly crazed creatures who communicate only through trumpetlike protrusions growing out of the tops of their heads.

“Everyone in the studio but me was clued in that Marty Robinson and Kevin Clash were going to put me through a kind of fraternity initiation,” she said. “They tortured me while we were shooting, pulling at my knapsack, honking away in my ear, high-fiving each other. They were just trying to see how I would react, but I’m a New Yorker, and I’d been through a lot worse harassment than that. Growing up in Brooklyn helped.”

Gina became a recurring role. “At first she was this feisty, kooky, kind of tough, innocent kid, a questioning type who was hyper and a bit confused,” she said. “I was all over the place with her, nervous and jittery. But she had a spunky spark to her that they liked.”

It was only after the actress was working on
Sesame Street
for a while that she shared this childhood memory with her cast mates: when she was four, Alison and her big sister Holly stood bundled up along Central Park West watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. A home movie shows her wide-eyed and shivery, in a fur coat and muff. But it also shows fate stepping in. “All of a sudden, you see the
Sesame Street
float come into view in the movie, and then Will Lee and Northern Calloway hop off the float and come toward us to shake our hands.”

 

Northern Calloway was becoming increasingly unreliable around the time O’Reilly joined the cast. He was appearing in fewer and fewer scenes because of his inability to remember and deliver lines. All of the sparkle that had characterized his studio work in the 1970s had dulled; all of that talent had become buried and burdened.

Dulcy Singer had compassion for him and did what she could, but from the mid-1980s on, Calloway was becoming less and less a part of
Sesame Street.
A low point came in the 1987 production year, when a story line was developed for Maria and Luis that would lead to a wedding on
Sesame Street,
a first for the show. In real life, then thirty-seven-year-old Sonia Manzano had recently married, and the idea of thirtysomething Maria falling in love with Luis, a tenderhearted Hispanic man she had gotten to know and trust over time, appealed to the producers and writers. As TV relationships go, the match was more than plausible.

But the news of this development was devastating to Calloway, who had for so long played David as Maria’s boyfriend. He thought that if any character should marry Maria, it should be his. But it was never a serious consideration. “It was my idea to do the marriage and I played it cautious,” Singer said. “I thought it would be better to do it with Luis because I didn’t want to open up another kettle of fish. It was enough to get a wedding on the show and have a family without opening ourselves to more difficulties. And I thought it would be a good and helpful thing to show a stable Latino family.”

Singer turned to Jeff Moss to script the wedding episode and provide the words and music, a decision that led to another of
Sesame Street
’s finest hours. Once again, Jon Stone directed.