The Night That Theater Redeemed My Grandfather

A story of Gratitude

By Steven Leigh Morris

“Long ago it must be, I have a photograph. Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.”

                                                                          —Simon and Garfunkel, Bookends

My grandfather, Lewis Semus (center), my grandmother, Renee (to his right). Location and photographer unknown.

It took almost four years to get around to cracking open the boxes that filled a spare room: Accounting ledgers, bank reports, evidence of my parents’ life.  My father died in 1990, my mom in 2015. Shortly after my mother’s death, my wife and I cleared out their house in the Hollywood Hills before selling it, resulting in these stacks of boxes in our Idyllwild, California home. What stays and what goes? (My siblings live in cities far away.)

Anybody who has lost their parents knows of this weirdness.

Among the tokens I unearthed was a certificate from the West Park County Junior School’s annual athletic competition in Worthing, England — honoring me for placing second in the beanbag race, when I was 9. Why my parents hung onto this, I can’t imagine.

I thought I’d removed all of the invaluable photographs for safekeeping. As I was moving one particular box to the “recycle” stack, four sepia-toned photographs fell out and landed on the floor. Looking up at me with “WTF?” expressions (or so I imagined) were my father, in his 20s, emceeing for a jazz band somewhere in the south of England, where he grew up. There was a wedding portrait of my parents, looking glamorous, on December 15, 1948, also in England. (My parents and their three kids emigrated to a Sonoma County chicken farm from the UK in 1963.) There I was at 10-years old – a thin kid on that chicken farm in Cotati, staring into the camera while cradling a baby chick. That’s how it goes: Images of our former-selves, strangers in many ways, staring back at us through the ether of time. And finally, there was my grandfather, ever the showman, grinning and holding up a bottle of brandy at some gathering. 

My father, Manning Morris, in his mid-20s, emceeing for a jazz band in the south of England.

Now, my grandfather was a difficult man. He, too was a professional emcee, which rendered him a kind of character actor. I remember my grandmother frequently telling him to “stop playing the giddy goat.” In addition to his petulant strategy of trying to set one branch of our family against another, he was also impulsive. My mother wrote her own account of one childhood experience with him. In what must have been the mid-to-late 1930s, before she had entered her teens, he arrived home at their East-End London digs with a large Clydesdale work horse he’d just bought. Inexplicably, he’d imagined that owning a horse was a good answer to the challenges of public transportation in early-mid-20^th century London, though there was no place to stable the beast, and it deposited prodigious quantities of urine and dung onto the street. After what my mother described as a euphoric childhood ride on the horse with her dad through London’s streets – clip clopping turning to a gallop, wind in her face and through her hair – his wife, my incredulous grandmother, ordered him to return the animal and get his money back, which he did.

My parents, Monica and Manning Morris, December 15, 1948.

Had he lived in a later era, he would surely have been diagnosed as bi-polar. He was notoriously moody, swinging from jubilation to what Tennessee Williams once called “fits of melancholy.” He was also a hypochondriac. On one of his visits to our California home, my brother and I lay awake in our bedroom in our respective twin beds. But when our grandfather entered, we both pretended to be asleep. Our grandfather had a thermometer in his mouth, which he removed dramatically. He checked the temperature and muttered loudly in an attempt to wake us, “Not good  . .  Not good you know.” My brother and I both continued to feign being asleep, so as not to engage with this nonsense.

The author on a chicken farm in Cotati, California, age 9.

On one trip from California to visit family in Great Britain, my mother and I returned from an excursion in London to her dad’s home to Sussex. We arrived about an hour late because of a train delay. Opening the door, we were greeted to the sight of my grandfather splayed on the floor convulsing and belching. After an explanation of the train delay, he slowly recovered, but pouted nonetheless through the night.

Our family lore asserts that he was largely responsible for my grandmother’s demise, though he revised the narrative with a more romantic refrain: “She died in my arms.” Living with him, she suffered from chronic high blood pressure and she developed angina. Once her doctor hospitalized her for two weeks for no reason other than to provide her a respite from my grandfather. He was actually barred from her hospital room.   

Lew and Renee, on holiday, somewhere . . .

That said, for me, he was a source of unwavering love and support. When I was six, after a neighbor child bullied me, my parents had to restrain him from beating up the offending kid.

Some 20 years later, I was with a theater company from UCLA (I was a graduate student there) performing two of my plays at the 1980 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, along with an experimental ensemble performance directed by a student from Belgium. This was a mixed experience. I had joined the Belgian student in proposing that UCLA be represented in Edinburgh. We took this idea to the UCLA Theatre Department. Our proposal was summarily rejected.

Being arrogant grad students, we then marched in to the Dean’s office with the same proposal – neglecting to mention that said proposal had just been rejected by the Theatre Department. The Dean of Arts thought ours was a terrific idea and offered to fund it, on the condition that the Theatre Arts Department would administrate it, and send a faculty member to accompany/supervise us. So you can imagine how the politics of all this unfolded, with the Theatre Arts Department being ordered by the Dean to administrate a program they had just told us they wanted no part of.

Our assigned faculty member did all he could to undermine the event, acting out not just against us (at one point feigning a heart attack for which we were evidently responsible, while he clutched a bottle of pills); he also insulted the British theater company with whom we were sharing a church hall for the performances. He shouted at them his abuse. I remember, after this incident, apologizing profusely to the Brits for his rudeness, and their stone-faced response.

Enter my grandfather, now close to 80-years-old, arriving from London to see our performances. (My grandmother had died about two years prior, and he was now lonely and lost.)

In Edinburgh, he was charming, generous, gregarious. He relished our performances, or at least he had the good grace to say he did. We all went out for drinks. My grandfather held court, he regaled us with story after story from the many chapters of his life. I still remember the sight of our student company shrieking with laughter at his jokes, and the way my grandfather’s face started to shine in amazement and delight at this reception. It was emotionally symbiotic, an exercise in weight-lifting – the weight being the burdens of our respective circumstances. It’s not hyperbole to argue that on this occasion, my grandfather was beloved.

I mention this because in the same cardboard box, I’d unearthed a headshot from one of the actresses in my play – who was also my partner at the time – with hand-written thanks, addressed to my grandfather, for all of his support. “You are wonderful,” she wrote. I can only imagine that it landed back in this cardboard box in Idyllwild, after having been retrieved by my mother after her father’s death, when she cleaned out his Sussex home. From Edinburgh to Sussex to Hollywood to the forest of Idyllwild. Rites of passage.

Also in that box were our two reviews – one, a largely scathing assessment from The Scotsman, reporting that my Belgian peer, and his company, weren’t as good as the Mabou Mines, and that I wasn’t as good as Samuel Beckett. That verdict was counter-argued by a love-letter review in London’s The Stage.

In Brian Friel’s gorgeous play Faith Healer, the title character, an itinerate carny-show performer/magician, clings to a faded newspaper clipping in order to verify that during one of his “healings,” something actually happened. Without that verification, life – and the passage of it — really is just a dream. Those who resent drama critics and journalists might want to keep that in mind.

I have a memory, unverified, of seeing my grandfather staring out from a window seat in the express train between Edinburgh and London. The train had not yet departed. We were standing on the platform — my partner and I. He was going home in the wake of what was perhaps his life’s most generous and uplifting performance. Teary-eyed, he stared back at us, waving, as the train slowly pulled out of Waverly station.