Home Free

By Edward Albee As told to Francine Russo

I was an adopted kid. I grew up with these two people in Larchmont, N.Y., in a grand house with servants and all the rest. I didn't like them, and they didn't like me. When I was very young, my values began turning opposite to theirs. They were deeply bigoted, reactionary, materialistic. They expected--demanded, really--that I become a businessman or lawyer, and of course they could never talk about my being gay. Yet from early on, I knew that I wanted to be a writer, that I was gay and that my politics were left.

One morning when I was 19--having been thrown out of everything, including college--a moment came that changed the course of my life. I'd taken one of the cars to a party in New York City the night before. Someone had vomited all over the front seat. But since I got home at 5 a.m., I went to bed without cleaning it up. At 9:30 that morning, when I went down to breakfast in this opulent dining room--9:30 was the deadline--I was met by stony silence from my adoptive parents.

"Good morning," I said.

"Gwmorning," they growled.

"You came in at 5 o'clock in the morning," she said.

"Yes, yes, I did."

"The chauffeur tells me there is vomit all over the car."

"Well, I'm sorry. Yes, I should have cleaned it up, but it was very late."

"And you left the front-gate lights on. And your father had trouble sleeping."

"Oh, gee, I'm sorry."

"Shape up, shape up, or get out."

I put my napkin down and said, "Very well, I'll go up and pack."

I moved out lock, stock and barrel, as they say, turning my back on all that, the money and everything. It was an amazing feeling of freedom, to make my life on my own terms, for better or worse. Of course, I had to figure out how to support myself. I went straight to Greenwich Village to stay with a friend. In a very short time, I arranged a sublet for about eight of us at 60 West 10th Street, the first of many Village apartments over the next decade. I got odd jobs. My favorite was delivering telegrams for Western Union, including death notices to very poor people, who always, it seemed, lived six flights up.

So began an education that lasted 10 years. While doing these odd jobs, I immersed myself in the incredible artistic renaissance that was the Village in the 1950s--the Abstract Expressionist painters, the Beat Generation, the avant-garde playwrights. At the Cedar Tavern we'd meet up with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. At the Carnegie Tavern we'd sit around with Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter and talk music. Seeing my first Beckett play, my first Genet play--they were revelatory. They showed me that theater didn't have to be what I had known thus far. They opened things up for me and were probably responsible for my becoming a playwright.

One day, when I was 28, I decided to write a play myself. Before, I'd written poetry, essays, short stories and two appallingly bad novels. I'd failed at all branches of literature. At my place at 238 West Fourth Street, I typed on a massive old typewriter I had stolen--"liberated," I called it--from Western Union. In three weeks I produced The Zoo Story, based partly on some of the characters I met delivering telegrams.

I gave the piece to a friend, who passed it along to others until it landed in the hands of Stephanie Hunziger in Frankfurt, who's been my German agent ever since. She arranged for a production of it--in German--in West Berlin in 1959, on a double bill with Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. The reviews were favorable, word traveled to New York, and in January 1960 some people put it on in New York, where it ran for 311/42 years.

I never saw my adoptive father again. Twenty-seven years after I put my napkin down at breakfast, I heard that my adoptive mother, now widowed, was ill and lonely. I sighed and made contact with her. We never forgave each other. Still, I'm glad I did it. It may seem very cynical of me, but if I hadn't, I never would have written Three Tall Women. That play was the beginning of a particularly fertile decade for me that produced The Play About the Baby and The Goat, among other things. And it's not over yet. --As told to Francine Russo