The Many Faces of John Lithgow

don’t know if John A. Lithgow ’67 ever crossed paths with Ms. Frances Asher, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if they’d once shared an uproarious cab ride on the streets of old Broadway.

Oh, forgive me. You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? I mean, how could you? You weren’t a student actor in Oak Park, Ill., during the mid-to-late-1990s, after all. Well, Frances is an institution in my hometown of Oak Park, a sort of female version of Corky St. Clair from “Waiting for Guffman.”

She’s an aging actress with a loud voice who never quite made it anywhere on Broadway and settled into a life of teaching theater to small-town bumpkins like me. But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed brassy broad is queen, I suppose, because we naïve little actor-types just worshipped her. Part of Frances’s mystique was her past contact with a special subset of actors to which Lithgow, this year’s Harvard Commencement speaker, belongs.

That subset is comprised of celebrities who, like Lithgow, are absolutely legendary among “Theater People” and who had “That One Thing” that made them somewhat famous among the general population (in Lithgow’s case, his starring role on the late-’90s sitcom “3rd Rock from the Sun”), but who never quite attained the cultural ubiquity of a pretty face like, say, Ashton Kutcher.

Actors like Lithgow are of an older, pre-“Punk’d” breed. Some other names I’d put in this category might be Bernadette Peters and Nathan Lane: they sing, they dance, and they’re multitalented and too smart for media pandering. I would never see how vital they are to American art, until Frances would tell me a lovingly embellished story about how intelligent, funny, and wise they were in a one-on-one conversation.

So why has That One Guy From That One TV Show been selected to speak at Commencement, instead of a great economist or head of state like Kofi Annan? I could rattle off all the Emmy’s he’s won or the good deeds he’s done for the arts on campus, but I don’t think that would do the trick.

There’s only one way I know to convey that John Lithgow is the embodiment of theater at Harvard: by doing my best Frances Asher impression as I tell you some of our memorable phone interview.

ASK A STUPID QUESTION…

“Is this Abe?” queries the voice on the other end of the phone line, stressing my name like I’m a beloved relative. I say yes, and he replies with an emphatic, “Well, hello! This is John Lithgow!” As anyone who has seen Lithgow on TV or Broadway can attest, his voice is a wholly unique mix of nasal delirium and eloquent control—it’s like forty pounds of voice crammed into a five-pound sack. It’s overpowering.

So, right off the bat, I’m flustered and my first couple of questions shows it. I ask him how he was chosen to be Commencement speaker, and only after I speak do I realize that there’s no way he could know the answer to that—“Well, I imagine that I was vetted before they talked to me,” he points out with a chuckle.

I’m overcome by the jitters, but I attempt another query. “Why do you think you were selected as the first professional artist in decades, and the first actor in history, to speak at Commencement?” He pauses. I hold my breath and wait for his answer, fearing that I’ve just asked another stupid question.

“Well,” he says in a somber tone, “I just think somebody has made a grave mistake.”

As I nervously write down his exact words, I realize it’s a rather funny self-effacing joke. I inadvertently giggle. He must have sensed my anxiety, because he erupts into a huge belly laugh.

From that moment on, I learned that Lithgow is what every student on this campus aspires to be, deep down in his or her heart: he’s fifty percent intimidating, fifty percent welcoming, and one-hundred percent in control of his audience. Skills honed during a lifetime of theater give him an unmatchable presence.

Lithgow’s charming theatricality is incited by asking about the actual content of his speech. “I can’t tell you what my speech will be about,” he says, baiting me for the punchline, “mainly because I don’t know yet.” Indeed, the fact that he will know what he’s going to say beforehand at all is something of a change for him. “I do a lot of speaking, but I never read my speeches,” he says.

Although he’s a veteran improviser, he’s willing to conform to Harvard’s demand for a written transcript 24 hours in advance. But don’t expect him to tone down his style too much. Will it be funny? “I think the situation takes care of that,” he says with a giant chortle, “It’s already hilarious that they chose me!”

Lithgow admits that the speaker at his own Commencement, the venerable diplomat and political thinker Edwin O. Reischauer, probably made some very important statements in his address. “But I have no idea what he said,” he guffaws.

Lithgow’s background gives him a different approach: “I intend on being memorable, as all actors do,” he says.

“THE LOEB WONK”

Lithgow’s insistence on making a permanent impression embodies the theater scene at Harvard and, really, any overachieving Harvard student can relate to his experiences as an undergrad that influenced this attitude.

“I really spent more time in theater than I did in my studies, though I took them both plenty seriously,” he says with that mix of guilt and thinly-veiled pride that most extracurricularly-oriented Harvardians show when talking about academics. “I was always a bit of a faker as a student. I didn’t give myself proper time.”

He certainly did milk theater at Harvard for all it was worth, though: he was a self-proclaimed “Loeb wonk” who performed in “five or six” Mainstage shows, countless Ex productions, directed “The Beggar’s Opera” in his native Adams House, served as president of the Gilbert & Sullivan society…and the list goes on.

An uncannily prescient review of Lithgow was written for The Crimson in 1965 about his role in “Tartuffe,” in which Harrison H. Young ’66 says, “If John Lithgow weren’t the star of this show it wouldn’t be worth seeing. He is. It is. See it. When you grow up you can tell people at cocktail parties you saw him before he was.”

But mention the Hasty Pudding Theatricals to Lithgow, however, and he immediately grunts like a disapproving waiter at a fancy restaurant. “I considered the Pudding beneath my dignity,” he says.

While such statements make Lithgow sound like he was a pretentious theater kid, he makes a compelling and typically Harvardian argument for the merits of his attitude. He says theater at Harvard “was pretty cliquey. There were rival camps; there was ferocious competition for slots. That’s the terrain, but also, we were cutting our teeth. You learn a lot more from that.”

It seems that such a strategy, however cutthroat, worked out for him in the end. Immediately after graduating with a degree in History and Literature, he went to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright Scholarship. Then, after a few years of struggling for work in New York, he started to get some breaks. Three decades later, he has over 30 movies under his belt, four Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, two Academy Award nominations, and several starring roles on Broadway.

Given his devotion to theater, it might seem surprising that Lithgow offers eloquent arguments against the concept of a theater concentration at the College. “I think that if there had been a concentration, I would have been tempted to do it, and I think I would have regretted it in hindsight,” he says, carefully choosing his words. “[Theater] was the most fun because it was so untutored, so unscrutinized—there was this feeling that we could do anything.”

THE PASSION OF THE MISSIONARY

Although he would never put it in such sappy terms, it’s evident that there is a powerful guiding principle in Lithgow’s life: a belief in the radical power of the creative freedom of the arts. He’s recorded a number of children’s albums, writes children’s books, and works for literacy campaigns that, as he puts it, “capitalize on kids’ innate creativity and ability to play.”

He adopts a semi-sarcastic tone of voice while talking about these efforts, so as to avoid sentimentality, but his words are passionate. “I started doing my stuff for kids purely because it was fun, because I had my own kids, and because I do enjoy it. But as I began to do more and more of it, it sort of pleased me that I was going at it with a sort of missionary zeal,” he says, reveling in the grandiose nature of the last two words.

“I regard myself as a kind of Don Quixote, and the windmills are video games,” he laughs. A few “Halo” devotees might disagree with the man on that statement, but his ideology is impressively defiant considering the nature of modern culture.

Lithgow’s belief in the power of artistic creation has left a pretty lasting and visible impact on campus. During his tenure as a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers from 1989 to 1995, he literally invented Arts First weekend. “Of everything I’ve done, it’s right up there with the things I’m most proud of,” he says without a trace of theatrical façade.

He gets as giddy as a schoolboy while he recalls the audacity of the whole endeavor when it got started: “Traditions—it’s very rare that people get to sit down and create them. But we just sat down and said, ‘we’re gonna have a parade, a barbecue, a performance fair…why don’t we take Quincy Street and use every available performance space?’” Somehow, the idea worked, and, 13 years later, Arts First is the defining artistic event at Harvard.

Unfortunately, Lithgow will have to miss it for the first time this year—he can’t really afford to skip out as the star of the new Broadway play, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” twice in a month. “It’s simply not done,” he sighs, with the overdone emphasis of an aging movie starlet, but still meaning every ounce of what he says.

We manage to get through the entire conversation without once mentioning “3rd Rock from the Sun.” While I avoided the topic to prove that I was no more plebian, it also seems that Lithgow just doesn’t reflect about his time as Dr. Dick Solomon anymore.

“What you do as an actor,” he says at one point, in the trance-like tone of voice that actors can’t help but adopt when talking about their craft, “even the very best of it, even in films, is over immediately. I can name ten things I did in the 1970s, and I was really proud of them, but you know what?” He pauses and laughs. “I bet you haven’t heard of a single one of them!”

It’s not an accusation towards me—it’s an admission of acting’s ephemeral nature, and, one gets the feeling he thinks the same of Commencement speeches, too. You can record them on videotape and publish the transcripts, but it ultimately comes down to moving and connecting with the people who are sitting in front of you at one particular moment in time.

No doubt, there are many who might find Lithgow’s theatricality grating—all the Oscar Wilde irony, all the references to individuals as his “good friends,” and so on. But in both style and substance, Lithgow has a wealth of knowledge to offer the Class of 2005 on June 9.

The lucky crowds will exit Tercentenary Field feeling like they had a cab ride with a kind of actor that they just don’t make like they used to.