Helping a ’60s kid crash the Shubert dressing room
My 11th-grade English teacher, Mr. Topitzer, did something special for me which no other English teacher would have known how to do at Hamden High School 10 miles from Yale and New Haven.
He taught me how to crash the star’s dressing room at New Haven’s Shubert Theater at 247 College St. and get the star’s autograph. He knew I was in the drama club and was a bit star struck.
He gave me secret directions to the dressing room, which wasn’t back stage at the Shubert, but was instead actually two feet from a row of seats near the stage, behind a door-sized velvet curtain under a box seat.
It looked like that curtain was covering a 8-foot window. It was actually covering a tiny hallway and all you had to do was part the curtain and step in.
Who would think the star’s dressing room would be hidden in plain sight, especially at the famous Shubert Theater, which is a try-out venue for world premiers?
Once I was in the tiny hallway behind the velvet curtain, there would be one wooden door, according to Mr. Topitzer, who told me “Just knock and ask to speak to the star.”
As it turned out the the dressing room was also tiny and the minute the door was cracked the star was right in your face as they took off their makeup.
How did Mr. Topitzer know all this? And how did he know I would love to crash the star’s dressing room? He was 28 and a new teacher. I was 16 and a high school junior.
I never asked him about his theater bona fides, but his obituary 50 years later in in 2010 says: “After retirement in 1992, Neil Topitzer acted with several theatre groups in the New Haven area and also studied acting at the New School and HB Studio in NYC.”
Mr. Topitzer’s directions worked like a charm. If the star was female I always brought a rose as an offering . It didn’t hurt that I was 16 years old and 6’2”, wore a suit and tie, and had a baby face, either.
The actress Carol Burnett, who was 27 at the time, gave me a kiss when I handed her the rose. Tallulah Bankhead, who was 60, brushed me off in her baritone voice with a “Bless you dahling, bless you.” When she signed my program she asked “How do you spell your name dahling?” I started “K-e-a-n-e” and she interrupted “I can’t be bothered with the last name dahling” so I retreated to “Paul.”
It was a glorious Bankhead brush off, well worth my embarrassment.
John Voigt — or maybe it was Troy Donahue — seemed unimpressed by my wet-behind-the-ears innocence. And I can’t even remember who starred in “A Man for All Seasons.”
All this I duly reported to Mr. Topitzer, who was impressed that his directions worked so easily.
He gave me another tip, too: He told me the playwright Thornton Wilder hung out at The Olde Heidelberg Restaurant on Chapel Street in New Haven..
Frankly, I didn’t know who Thornton Wilder was but I was impressed that Mr. Topitzer did.
I hung out there from 1962 to 1975 and never saw Thornton Wilder at all. Mr. Topitzer struck out on this one.
Finally, in 1975, after waiting 13 years I was sitting in The Olde Heidelberg and who should walk in but Thornton Wilder himself and sit in his favorite circular booth alone.
My friend and I asked to sit with him and surprise he said yes, cheerily.
I was on the Hamden Bicentennial Commission at the time and I later exchanged two letters with Mr. Wilder who also lived in our town of Hamden.
Then he died on Dec. 7, 1975, at age 78. I convinced Hamden’s Bicentennial Commission to express their condolences to Wilder’s lifelong companion Miss Isabel Wilder who was then 75, and to delicately request that she donate the desk and furniture from her brother’s study to the Bicentennial Commission, which would display it permanently.
Wilder had won three Pulitzer Prizes for “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” (1927), “Our Town” (1938), and “The Skin of Our Teeth” (1942).
Today in 2022 Thornton Wilder’s study is on display on Hamden’s Miller Memorial Library thanks to our request of Miss Wilder.
Miss Wilder and I became friends for 20 years until her death at age 95 in 1995. She took an interest in my career, and when my mother died in 1985, leaving my father alone as a widower at 72, Miss Wilder wrote me a candid letter of advice on Oct. 8, 1986, almost like a surrogate grandmother: “I am going to talk turkey... You should not waste a minute making clear to him what you can do as a son AND FIND OUT AND MAKE AN UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN THE TWO OF YOU WHAT HE EXPECTS OF YOU...” (her caps.) Miss Wilder would help me through my father’s death six years later in 1992 when she herself was 92.
Without Mr. Topitzer (and he will always be “Mr.” to me) I would not have such vivid memories of New Haven’s Shubert Theater. And I would not have had the 20-year friendship with Miss Wilder, who became literary executor of her brother’s estate and published several of his works after his death.
Thank you, Mr. Topitzer. Thank you for being the unpaid teacher of a drama tutorial offered only to me and who went to such lengths to encourage my interest in theater.
Thank you for being the unpaid teacher of a drama tutorial offered only to me and who went to such lengths to encourage my interest in theater.