Happy Birthday and take care, Raúl

(Originally published March 9, 2022 on blog.stephaniejones.com)

When I was in junior high, our mom treated my sister, brother, and me to a day in New York City during a school break. We started with lunch at Mama Leone’s and then went to see the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of the hit musical “Two Gentlemen of Verona” at the St. James Theatre.

We loved the songs, the dancing, the melodic dialogue, the racy lyrics. And while my sister fell madly in love with Clifton Davis, who played Valentine, I was mesmerized by Raúl Juliá, the then-unknown actor who played Proteus.

After the show, we went backstage for autographs (you could do that then) and were ushered up steep, narrow metal stairs to the dressing room Raúl and Clifton shared.

Although they didn’t know us from men in the moon, Raúl and Clifton welcomed us in, offered us apple cider, signed our playbills, and chatted with us as if we were all old friends. We were only there a few minutes, but it was amazing for us. And it changed my life.

A few days later, I looked them both up in the Manhattan phone book (because I did stuff like that). Clifton wasn’t there, but Raúl was.

So, I called him.

I was startled when he answered and didn’t know what to say. I babbled something about wanting to thank him for being so nice to us. Instead of sounding annoyed or brushing me off, he said, “Stephanie, it is very nice of you to take the time to thank me. But it was my pleasure.”

I then asked him a few questions about where he was from, how long he’d been acting, did he like performing Shakespeare – and he answered me patiently (Puerto Rico, 10 years, yes). When I ran out of things to ask to him, I thanked him for talking with me and told him I hoped I hadn’t bothered him. He responded, “Not at all. Thank you for coming to the play and for calling me. Take care.”

That may have been the first time I ever heard the phrase “Take care” and it surprised me because the more common term then was a hipper “Take it easy.” “Take care” sounded very old-fashioned and polite. But I liked it, so I started saying it, too. Still do.

A few months later, I decided to call Raúl again. As before, he was very kind and patient. He told me he would soon leave “Two Gentlemen” to star in a new musical about a garbageman in space called “Via Galactica.” I told him that I was reading Shakespeare plays and enjoying them, which he encouraged me to continue doing. He suggested I read them out loud so that I could really hear the music of the language. And I did.

My mother worked, my father traveled frequently, and my sister was away at school, so I was often at home alone after school. Reading Shakespeare out loud turned out to be a wonderful way to pass the time.

I thought it would be fun to try to memorize a Shakespeare play and chose “Two Gentlemen of Verona” because I was familiar with it and I knew the songs from the original cast album. It took me weeks of reading and repeating – on the school bus, during study hall, at home after school, in bed before going to sleep, but I managed to do it.

And once I was – as we theatre people say, “off book,” I put it to use. After school, I’d move the coffee table out of the way and perform the play from start to finish. Mind you, I didn’t just recite the lines. I PERFORMED – all the parts, complete with songs and choreography. I was great.

A few months later, “Via Galactica” opened and, while Raúl’s reviews were generally good, the show turned out to be the biggest flop in Broadway history up to that time. I was devastated and was furious with the critics for doing Raúl like that. I even wrote one of them a rather nasty letter berating him for not understanding true art.

Fortunately, my father’s administrative assistant, who was a surrogate mother to me, had gotten tickets for the first weekend after the opening – just in time, it turned out, since that was the day the beleaguered show was closing. I don’t know what the other 100 or so people in the cavernous theater thought of it, but I LOVED the play. And, unsurprisingly, I thought Raul was brilliant in it.

When I went backstage, I found Raúl sitting in a swivel chair, still in his silver lamé spacesuit costume as someone carefully removed his blue face makeup, and Merel Poloway, his then-girlfriend, later his wife, curled up on the sofa reading a book.

He looked tired and a little sad.

I told him that I didn’t care what anyone said, the show was WONDERFUL.“Why can’t they keep it open and let word of mouth build an audience?”

He explained that it cost nearly a million dollars a week to run the play and it was losing too much money to keep open.

He asked me what I’d been up to since he last saw me and I proudly told him that I had memorized “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” His eyes widened and he leaned forward in his chair, “The WHOLE PLAY?”

Yes.

“I don’t even know the whole play. Show me.”

Whereupon, I proceeded to recite:

“O, hateful hands, to tear such loving words! Injurious wasps, to feed on such sweet honey and kill the bees that yield it with your stings. I’ll kiss each several paper for amends.” (I’m pleased to report that I just typed this from memory …)

“Oh, my God, Stephanie! That is FANTASTIC!” he exclaimed, laughing. Merel looked up and smiled.

We talked for a little while longer and then I left him to continue the slow process of undoing his hair and makeup, noting that he winced a little as the show’s hairdresser started to remove the glued-on white wig.

“Take care, Stephanie” he called after me.

Over the next several months I continued to scour the papers for mentions of him to clip carefully and add to the scrapbooks I’d started. I named my goldfish Gabriel Finn after Raúl’s “Via Galactica” character (get it?).

After a year or so, I decided to call Raúl again. When he answered, I said, “I don’t know if you remember me.” He said, “Of COURSE, I remember you, Stephanie! How ARE you?”

I told him I hadn’t memorized any more Shakespeare plays, but I was active in my junior high school’s experimental theatre group. He told me he was rehearsing for a small play, “The Emperor of Late Night Radio,” at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre.

My best friend Karen and I decided we would go to the play and talked The Good Judge into going to theatre one evening after work to buy tickets for us. The date we picked to go was Saturday, March 9, Raúl’s birthday.

The night before the show, we baked Raúl a birthday cake and composed a lovely poem to write on it:

“You are the best actor it’s true. We certainly admire you. You seem to have a certain way of brightening up a matinee”

That was just the first verse. There were several more. But at the last moment, we discovered that, having baked a normal sized layer cake, not an industrial-sized sheet, there was only room for the first line, so that’s all it got.

We also had an icing mishap that turned the icing a strange shade of blue, but didn’t have time to redo it. So, the next morning we headed to NYC on the bus with our blue cake.

Well, WE headed to NYC on the bus, but the cake wasn’t with us. Karen’s father wanted to drive us into the city, but we insisted that we were old enough to ride the bus by ourselves. But since we realized we might have difficulty riding the bus AND carrying the blue cake, we rode the bus with Karen’s father following closely behind in his car, the cake riding along in the passenger seat.

We enjoyed the offbeat play and afterward, took the cake backstage to Raúl. He said it looked delicious, but we never actually saw him eat it, so I don’t know what became of our blue cake with the half-baked poem.

Over the next few years, as Raúl’s profile rose and he appeared on Broadway more regularly, I went to see him whenever possible. During my senior year, the high school Russian class watched him star in The Cherry Orchard and I tagged along. After the show, I went backstage to see Raúl and he came outside with me to say hello to the class. He went out of his way to make sure they knew we were friends, pretty heady stuff for a teenager.

After spending 10 minutes or so talking to my classmates and answering questions, he said goodnight and gave me a big hug. As he walked away, heading for the subway home, he turned back toward us, held his hand to his ear and mimicked a telephone with his thumb and pinkie and said, “Call me!” Life really couldn’t get any better than that.

I didn’t see Raúl again for many years. I graduated high school, went off to college (where his iconic Threepenny Opera poster hung in my dorm room), finished law school and became a lawyer and law professor. As I matured, my obsession with Raúl subsided, but I always followed his career closely, never missed seeing his films, and took great pride in telling people I was his very first fan. I stopped calling him, but every year, sent him a birthday card.

Years later, when I heard Raúl would tour in “Man of La Mancha” before taking the show to Broadway, I made a point of going to see a matinee performance in Pittsburgh. It was his birthday, 30 years ago today.

It was very different than those long ago days in New York when I could just waltz backstage. This time, after the show, there was a crowd of people at the stage door waiting for him, but the stage manager told us he wasn’t likely to come out before the evening performance. So, I left the birthday card I’d brought, asking that he deliver it to Raúl, waited a few more minutes, just in case, but then left when it was clear I wouldn’t see him.

As I headed up the street, a woman rushed out and shouted for me to stop. “Are you Stephanie? Raúl asked for you to wait. He wants to see you.” I went back into the theatre with her and waited.

A few minutes later, Raúl came down. When he saw me, his face lit up, he hugged me and said, “Stephanie! It is so good to see you! You ALWAYS remember my birthday!”

He said he was going back to his hotel and invited me to walk with him. We came out onto the sidewalk together and I assumed he would be mobbed by the crowd. But, oddly, although he made no effort to disguise his identity, no one recognized him. He walked right through clutch of people, softly saying “excuse me, excuse me” every few steps as they moved out of his way and continued watching the stage door for Raúl Juliá to emerge.

For the next half hour, Raúl and I walked and talked. He told me about his two sons and asked me about my life. I told him what I was doing, about my work as a lawyer and law professor, and my involvement with Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.

I also told him how much his kindness had meant to me as a young, insecure, quirky girl and how his encouragement helped bolster my courage to pursue interests that made other kids think I was strange but helped keep me focused and out of the trouble that plagued and tripped up many of the kids who thought I was so strange.

“I’m so proud of you! I always thought you were special,” he beamed. “Even as a child, you had such a spark.”

When we arrived at his hotel, he hugged me goodbye and said, “Thank you for being such a good friend for so many years.”

And as he walked away, he turned and said, “Take care.”

I never saw or talked to him again. Less than three years later he was gone.

But not a day goes by that I don’t think of Raúl Juliá, the man with the kind, expressive eyes, sweet smile, musical voice, contagious, throaty laugh, and a heart large enough to hold in it an odd girl with more nerve than sense who called him up one day because she found his name in the New York City phonebook.

So, Raúl, today, on your 82nd birthday, 50 years after we first met and 30 years to the day after I last laid eyes on you, I remember you, Raúl, as always, and thank you for being who you were and still are to me.

And, I say to you, my friend: Take Care.