Can I ask you something? What’s it like to work for him? Is he as amazing as he seems?
Clemence was silent for several beats. She rejected the possible platitudes that leapt to her lips. Instead, she looked Andrew directly in the eyes and said as quietly and dispassionately as she could, ‘It has its moments to be sure, but for the most part I’m always invisible. I’m always an assistant.’
This snatch of dialogue comes from my short story “The Assistant” (Bookends Stories of Love and Loss 2014). On a crowded Trailways bus heading to Saratoga Springs, NY, to meet  her husband, my alter-ego Clemence Marguy sits next to a young voice student on his way to perform at a festival in Montreal. They get to chatting about her work as the assistant to the celebrated baritone Derek Howe, whom the young man idolizes. The story has a twist ending because Clemence, who is feeling undervalued and taken for granted by her boss, suddenly realizes through Andrew’s
admiring words, that her work has not gone unnoticed.
The epiphany of the story came to me almost fourteen years after I, myself, had left my decade-long employment as the personal assistant to a world famous operatic baritone. When the singer – let’s use his fictional name from the story, Derek Howen – and I parted ways, I was feeling very much as Clemence describes herself – “invisible.” It has only been in subsequent years, having weathered a number of other life-changing experiences, such as the death of my husband and my return to the workplace, that I have realized how significant that experience had been for me – maddening, exhausting, frantic, irrational at times, but also exhilarating, enlightening, and transformative.
Before I attempt to set onto paper what I learned in those years and what I carry with me to today, I must assure the reader that these “confessions” are rather tame. I am no fan of tell-all memoirs, though certainly, if I were so inclined, there could be a book of stories from my ten years and interaction with a host of colorful characters, foremost among them Derek himself. But I am not. I am more interested in understanding and evaluating my journey and how it has prepared me for where I find myself at present – a journalist again, a freelancer who works closely with theatre companies on creative projects.
When I became Derek Howe’s personal assistant, it was a mid-life career change. After twenty years, I had left teaching English and theatre and being the Chair of the Arts Department in Lake Forest, IL, and I had begun to pursue my life-long passion for writing. With the support of my husband who encouraged me to take the gamble on freelance journalism, I published a massive academic tome on Heldentenors, (We Need A Hero A Critical History of Heldentenors from Wagner’s Time to the Present 1988) which somehow sparked notice in the classical music world. Before long I had enough journalism assignments to fill my dance card, and in an era where print magazines still proliferated, my byline appeared in publications like Opera News, Opera, Opera Now, Grammophone, Opéra International, Classical Music, and Beaux Arts. I reviewed the
Met and other New York events, and I interviewed virtually all of the leading singers of the time.
In one such interview I met Derek Howe, and we had a far-ranging conversation that turned into a candid and articulate cover story for Opera Now. Intellectual, charismatic, passionate about his art, Derek and I clicked immediately, and before long he had asked me to do a few freelance research/writing projects for him – program notes, repertoire research, liner notes. Within two years, I had become his go-to writer and project assistant, and in 1990 he hired me full time.
For the next ten years I continued to do his research, write his programs and liner notes, assist with his publicity and web site, help him create two public television and countless radio specials, do advance work and follow-up on his concert tours, and act as a liaison with everyone on his crowded appointment schedule. Those were the official duties, but then, as the title implies, there were the other tasks: booking travel, running interference, playing hostess backstage, smoothing ripples in interpersonal situations, keeping his image burnished, keeping him on schedule (that was daunting!!), and being expected to solve every emergency that presented itself.
It was a high-energy, fast-paced, often glamorous position with plenty of perks. There was the world travel (in an era when that was still fun). Not only did I visit countless US cities for Derek’s recitals, but I went abroad when there were major projects afoot to Vienna, Munich, London, Paris, Zurich. I frequented the storied opera houses and concert halls of Europe, and I heard glorious music nightly. I met the movers and shakers of the opera and classical music world, many of whom I still count among my friends today. I got to initiate and collaborate on creative projects that enlisted the skills I had acquired in my humanities/liberal arts education. The PBS Great Performances special I helped create was one of the most thrilling things I have ever accomplished; it used my research, writing, knowledge of visual art, acquaintance with singers, as
well as organizational and production skills. The Stephen Foster special for German television gave me the opportunity to create my first scenic design for a professional production, years after I had a minor in theatre design at Sarah Lawrence. It was heady stuff for an Italian- American working class girl from West New York, NJ, who had grown up listening to opera at her grandfather’s knee.
But there was, as in any work, a downside, and most of this hinged on the “personal” part of the title. Derek Howe, like many artists, could be mercurial, self-absorbed, entitled, abrupt, and occasionally just plain unreasonable. Learning to navigate these mood swings, to avoid the confrontations and keep the ship sailing smoothly was a complex exercise in diplomacy, restraint, and psychological maneuvering. There were so many times when I became the front line of defense, acting as a buffer for some well-deserved ire on the part of one of Derek’s colleagues. I remember the night he had mistaken the curtain time (7:30 p.m. instead of the usual 8:00 p.m.) at the Met and missed half hour call. The Met’s Assistant General Manager was livid and demanded I give her his cell phone number, which I had been forbidden to do, just as I was forbidden to call him on it before a
performance. As I was trying to find a solution to accommodate her righteous annoyance, mercifully Derek strode in with an ear-to-ear smile that somehow managed to diffuse the tension.
There were many such volatile moments in ten years, but after a while I got very skillful in foreseeing, averting, and handling them. What I never learned to accept was the interference of his entourage and the inclination of his wife to think I was her personal servant. Derek, after all, did employ me. She did not, and it took a great deal of tact to establish those boundaries.
Worst of all, however, over the years, and what eventually became one of the deal breakers in our relationship was the issue of intellectual property. All the programs, liners notes, and numerous projects I wrote for Derek were “works for hire.” At first they would originate with my interviewing him, gathering his thoughts and putting these on paper in a stylish and intelligent manner. But after a while as he grew insanely busy, and he trusted me more and more, he permitted me to write for him, confident in what I would create. I respected and appreciated that trust, but over the ten years, it became apparent that the shared byline, which he insisted on in the beginning, no longer reflected the actual process of our collaboration. “The Assistant” captures one such actual maddening conversation:
Rifling through them [papers], he handed Clemence a stack with his scrawled pencil notations in the margins.
‘The notes are great. You tie the Schumann and Whitman together brilliantly. Just add my name to the byline because we did do this together after all.’ He grinned his best boyish smile.
Clemence raised an eyebrow and checked her inclination to reply tartly. What had Derek actually done except read them to make sure he concurred?
Feeling her silence, Derek added, ‘You put my ideas into words so beautifully.’ And before Clemence could answer, he fired off another salvo: ‘Oh, and the translations – I caught a few errors in the German texts, and I’m not comfortable with your putting your name on them as translator. I mean, what does that mean really? You just supplied the English –’
‘That’s precisely what it means!’ Clemence snapped, removing her eyeglasses and pretending to stare pointedly at him, when, in fact, without her glasses she couldn’t see his expression at all.
It was at that point that I felt as invisible as I ever had in my life. When we finally agreed to go our separate ways, our negotations over the intellectual property remained the testiest and were never completely satisfactorily resolved.
And so for quite a few years after my stint as a Personal Assistant, I felt adrift. There were many changes in my domestic life to keep my focus elsewhere. My husband Greg and I were planning our retirement and building a house in Maine, and that absorbed a good deal of my time. We realized that dream in 2009 and enjoyed it together for ten months before Greg’s heart attack.
And then there I was adrift again: a widow in a new state, a new community, all my lifelong friends in New York/New Jersey, desperately lonely and purposeless. In the eight years since that time, I have reinvented myself once more. I returned to writing – both journalism and fiction. I have become a very active and visible force in Maine’s theatre community, creating projects which support and promote the arts and lending assistance to artists and theatres in whom I believe. It is a happy, vibrant new reality. And I realize I could not have done it without the decade with Derek, where I gained all the hands-on professional experience I can access now to contribute to the theatre scene in Maine.
So what were the invaluable take-aways from my years of being Derek Howe’s personal assistant? I honed my organizational skills; I became especially adept at envisioning and structuring the big picture at the same that I meticulously managed every little detail. I learned to anticipate and to prepare for every possible contingency, while never letting on that I was even the slightest bit concerned about these “what ifs?” And when and if Derek dropped the ball, I called up plan B and rarely was anyone the wiser.
I learned to anticipate Derek’s needs and accomplish many of the necessary tasks without troubling him at all, while still keeping him in the loop and making him always feel he was a catalyst in the effort. I learned how his mind worked and how he liked to approach a project, and I made sure to present it to him in that way. I became a master of diplomacy handling both colleagues disgruntled with Derek or handling Derek himself in one of his feistier moods. I became expert in damage control – because inevitably there are screw-ups on the part of agents and colleagues and airlines.
Deadlines are something every journalist understands, but with Derek, I learned the terrifying meaning of “very short notice,” and I was usually able to deliver the seemingly impossible. I remember one occasion when he was ten minutes away from the Toronto airport and called me from the limo to say “Could I please get him on a different flight that did not go through Chicago because there were storm delays and could I call him back before he got to departures so he could go to the right terminal?” Ten minutes later he was booked first class through Atlanta, and I was able to exhale!
Lots of adrenalin, occasional angst, but usually, I felt the satisfaction of a job well done. And I know I was able to hold the position for as long as I did because I believed in Derek and his art and the importance of opera in our lives. And this is perhaps, the greatest legacy of those years that has remained with me until today.
To give that much to your work, especially to give without being highly visible – which is what an assistant does, you have to have faith in the person for whom or the institution for which you work. You have to love what you are creating together and realize that art is collaborative. It is never about me and, even for an artist of Derek Howe’s stature, it is not about him personally. It is about service to an aesthetic ideal of beauty and truth (as Keats said). It is about immersion into a collective process and spirit, about a coming together that along with the creation itself, is what really matters.
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