Was that Redford? Bob Hirst's Career in Theater

There are things you just wouldn't ask Bob Hirst to do: feed your cat, for instance, while you go off gambling at Tahoe for a couple nights; help put your boat in the water; come along to Costco in case you need a hand lifting that 85-inch flatscreen into your Crosstrek. He's too important for this sort of nonsense, too busy and decent and dignified. He's got Better Things To Do, and if you've spent any time at all at the Mark Twain Project you've seen him Doing Them.So it wouldn't even occur to you to ask him, say, to take a part in a play you'd written. Just the thought of approaching him about doing you this kind of favor would trigger whatever remained of your own sense of decency and you would back away from the idea in deep shame. Altogether apart from that business about his dignity and stature, he had already done you more than enough favors without your even asking—pointing you toward an article or a preface or an editor's note or a footnote or an entire scholar you should have known about on your own; sharing yards and yards of his own standard-setting research; remembering a letter or photograph or haberdasher's bill that would explain everything; listening to you.No. Just the thought of wandering into his hoarder's paradise of an office, hat in hand, if you had a hat, summoning the groundless courage to look him in the eye. . . . “Er, Bob, I know you're busy and all, but I've written this play and, well, it's about Mark Twain, and, well, I was wondering . . . . ”No. It would be like asking Dumbledore to play H-O-R-S-E. This is where you need—if that's the word—a fully-grown child like Bill McClung to grace your life and complicate Bob's. Bill was a serious editor at the University of California Press and one of the most enjoyable and generous and enthusiastic characters I've ever known, as open to the world and curious about it as a kindergartner, and as likely to snare you into his musings and projects and good intentions as a genuine wizard.Bill had accepted a manuscript I had written and then nursed it and me through to publication. Along the way we had managed to become friends and occasional co-conspirators. To have dinner at his house—his and his wife Karen's—with a tableful of good people was to bear his not-always-gentle prodding, cajoling, and challenging about whatever Bill thought needed excavating at the time. He was a man full of questions, and almost as full of schemes.One of those schemes turned on the notion that I was in an absolutely strategic position to write a play. It didn't matter to Bill McClung that I had never written anything like a play, or that I had no real disposition, not to mention talent, to write one now. I had recently published, with his considerable help, a book about what I took to be three formative years in Samuel Clemens’ life—years when he met and married the woman he loved, began to figure out who Mark Twain was to become, and enjoyed the nurturing friendship of a woman named Mary Fairbanks, with whom he corresponded, you might say, enthusiastically. Bill supposed that since I had become familiar with that correspondence, and with Clemens’ love letters to Olivia Langdon and hers to him, I was just the Shakespeare to turn all this promising material into a deathless pageant for the stage. The letters, after all, gave me all anyone would need of these characters speaking for themselves. My job, Bill kindly bullied, would be simply to choreograph this abundant raw material into a couple hours of happy stagecraft. The play, as Mark Twain himself might have said, would write itself.Let's not lose sight of Bob—whom I'm already tempted to refer to as poor Bob—while these machinations were going forward. He was, as far as I know, continuing to fight the good fight in his remarkable office, as innocent as the hundreds of file folders that had come to rest there of the fate that was about to befall him, of the familiar injustice that would see him become the victim of his own good and generous nature.For I was paring and snipping away at those letters, italicizing the ongoing collaboration that developed between Samuel Clemens and Mary Mason Fairbanks as he sought her support and coaching in his impossible pursuit of Livy Langdon. I was appropriating the part of the book that dealt with that collaboration and converting it back to the conversation-in-letters that made it clear to me in the first place.So the play, which Bill McClung and I thought to call Mark Twain in Love, became a conversation between two actors, a Mark Twain and a Mary Fairbanks. They spoke, almost exclusively, the words the actual two had written to one another during Clemens’ courtship of Olivia Langdon, a courtship they themselves likened to a campaign and, sometimes, a siege. “Mother” Fairbanks, who had come to know Clemens during the voyage of the steamship Quaker City and to appreciate his better, higher, truer nature, was temperate, reassuring, predictable and stolid. Clemens, who was sometimes alternately and sometimes simultaneously Mark Twain, was by turns triumphant, despairing, joyous and contrite. He managed to produce in his incessant letters to Olivia such a tsunami of persuasion as to lift her from her comfy mooring in landlocked Elmira and convince her to sail the wild sea of his affection. When she accepted him, he said he was ready to “leap a steeple.” Our lead, our Mark Twain, would have his work cut out for him.Not to mention our Mary Fairbanks. She could only have been Dahlia Armon, an editor at the Twain Project in her own right and the embodiment of classy, candid wisdom and abiding self-possession. She was so inevitably right for the part and so good a spirit that I managed the courage to ask her myself to take the role, and her acceptance was so kindly and gracious that she essentially out-Fairbanksed Mary Fairbanks.I can't imagine, even at this safe distance, that I was the one who gave birth to the notion that Bob Hirst ought to be our Mark Twain. Dahlia, after all, was a friend, someone whose time I was used to wasting and whose cat I knew. While I'd be honored, too, to think of Bob as a friend, he was also a sort of institution, more like the Buddha than just another bubba. On those occasions when I would pull myself together and roll into his wonderful office, it was after the manner of a gunboat, ready to fire off whatever armaments my excavations at MTP had enabled me to prepare and then to back away jabbering apologetically.Not so Bill McClung. Bill had the happy affect of a firstborn toddler, always expecting he'd bring a smile to a companion's face and confident he'd make their life more interesting. I couldn't bear to watch at the time, but I imagine him now approaching Bob as if he had the easiest and the most natural favor to ask of him . . . and then asking him to take on the central role in a play called Mark Twain in Love by, well, me. As Mark Twain himself might say, we will now draw the curtain on this painful scene, acknowledging with gratitude as we do Bob's remarkable acquiescence and moving along a few weeks to the play's more remarkable debut.Over the course of its short life on the boards, Mark Twain in Love inspired just a handful of productions, most of them undertaken by a pair of awfully young professional actors that Bill snared like a bird of prey off the teeming streets of Berkeley and that were no more convincing as Clemens and Fairbanks than would have been, say, Snoop and Martha Stewart.But that first performance—opening night!—at the McClungs’ house and attended mostly by the MTP family—was the stuff Tony Awards are made for. Dahlia Armon inhabited Mary Mason Fairbanks as comfortably as a onesie, addressing the all-too-recent Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope with such convincing measures of affection, forbearance and good sense that even a silver miner's pickaxe would have felt the benefit of her good influence. Allowing her to speak Mother Fairbanks’ own words was accidental genius on my part, since Dahlia knew Fairbanks well and spoke with the easy familiarity of an insider.It should go without saying that if Dahlia knew her Mary Fairbanks from the inside out, Bob Hirst certainly knew his Samuel Clemens. Of all the fretting I did about Opening Night, not one bit was occasioned by the fear that Bob didn't know his man. My trepidation had almost entirely to do with the inescapable fact that Bob Hirst, of all people, had been roped into taking part, literal part, in a world of foolishness of which I was virtually the sole creator. Bill McClung may have been our Barnum, but I was the one who was painting Bob Hirst in stripes and causing him to prance around the McClung parlor before a jury of his peers.Well, not prancing exactly. Mark Twain in Love wasn't what you'd call kinetic. My imagination is not the sort of engine to set people in motion, and so our actors, both of them, sat with the play in their laps and read. And they read very well, their evocations of Fairbanks and Clemens, as I said, informed and enriched by the kind of understanding that accretes imperceptibly over decades, if you're that sort of person, and can't be onboarded in a day or a week. Then too, our actors, both of them, were possessed of such unshakable aplomb that not even the work of the greenest playwright could have wrinkled their dignity.I should have known this. Should have known that the likes of Bob Hirst, who had helped and driven and directed me and dozens of people I knew dozens of times, was not about to be perturbed by this peculiar acting assignment or indifferent to the chance to bring new life to Mark Twain's love letters, letters that were pretty lively on their own. Bob's Mark Twain, there at chez McClung, was a Mark Twain I'll always be grateful for. He brought the house down, of course. He and Dahlia were as good as it gets that night, and I as lucky. Bob's performance stands apart, in its particular kindness and tolerance and self-sacrifice, even from the myriad other favors he's done me all along the way.Done so many of us, I should say, all along the way.