5/28/2023 0 Comments Funny lunch box notes![]() Even when he was eventually prodded in his 50s into examining the identity of his Eastern European family and their fate in the Holocaust, it would take him six more years to write a magazine piece about it, and then two more decades for the play to gestate. It was a duality he did not dwell on for decades. Tommy immigrated to England at 8, assuming an identity as British as white flannel cricket pants. Once or twice, when Stoppard was working on the arts page of the Western Daily Press and had more than one story to write, he used a different byline on the second one, so as not to look “too provincial.” It was Tomáš Sträussler, his own name before his widowed mother remarried a British army major she had met in India named Kenneth Stoppard. Pointing out Frank Sinatra, Stoppard said regretfully that the signature had faded from too much sunlight. The bathroom features another whimsical collection, which Stoppard ordered from autograph collectors and booksellers in the ’70s: small, framed, signed publicity stills of Mae West, Marlon Brando, Elvis, Brigitte Bardot and others. The most cherished one, dated 1895 and composed on stationery from the Albemarle Hotel in Piccadilly, is a flinty put-down Stoppard bought at auction as soon as he had money: “Sir, I have read your letter, and I see that to the brazen everything is brass. Housman (the subject of his play “The Invention of Love”) to the Warden of The Fishmongers’ Company and another from Albert Einstein to the National Labor Committee for Palestine. In the hall hang framed letters Stoppard has collected, including one from A.E. There is a bookcase full of first editions of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, which gets raided by “American burglars,” as he calls his novel-purloining friends. He lets Guinness email for him, and he still writes with a Caran d’Ache fountain pen with a six-sided barrel. No tapping, since Sir Tom has no computer and is not on social media. At 85, he retains, as Daphne Merkin once wrote in The New York Times, a louche glamour, “like a lounge lizard who reads Flaubert.” The house Stoppard shares with his third wife, the charming Sabrina Guinness, is exactly what you would expect: elegant, erudite, fey and library-quiet. He settled back on the couch in his sitting room, wearing a green sweater and khakis, still lanky and still with a tousled - but more silvery - mane. The man who writes so brilliantly about time travel was ready to time-travel with me. He would respond vaguely that there must be “some Jewish somewhere.” Borrowing an old Jonathan Miller line, he would say he was “Jew-ish.” He breezily called himself “a bounced Czech.”įifty-five years later, Stoppard is returning to New York with “Leopoldstadt,” a play inspired by his belated reckoning with his Jewish roots. ![]() New Yorkers began asking him whether he was Jewish. When Stoppard landed in New York that year he was the toast of the town, as his biographer, Hermione Lee, writes in “Tom Stoppard: A Life.” Marlene Dietrich came to see his play Walter Winchell drove him around to crime scenes in a car with a siren. (He used to write by cigarette time, laying out a row of matches with his smokes and saying, “Tonight I shall write 12 matches.”) He held up the elegant silver box, and as long as he was at it, took out a cigarette, the first of many he’d smoke over the next three hours. That would definitely be worth a couple lines.” ![]() “And I thought, oh, I’ll show her my cigarette box. “I thought about you coming, and I thought I must try and help you be a success at this interviewing thing,” he said, in his seductively dry tone. ![]() 14 at the Longacre Theater and opens Oct. So Stoppard was ready to lend a hand when I arrived at his dreamy 1790s stone house called “The Rectory” (because it once was one) to talk about the Broadway debut of his heart-rending epic, “Leopoldstadt,” which begins previews Sept. He loved wearing a mackintosh and flashing his press pass, operating in the spirit of a British contemporary, Nicholas Tomalin, who wrote: “The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability.” DORSET, England - Long before he became the august Sir Tom Stoppard, hailed by some as the greatest British playwright since Shakespeare, Stoppard was a teenage journalist in Bristol, making a few pounds a week covering lawn tennis, flower shows and traffic problems. ![]()
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