Howard

Okay so, from the top.

It's quiet, I think we can... quiet. You know what I mean?

-You know what I mean? -Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

So, it's got the same value, but it doesn't have the little turn there.

Yeah.

-It's a quiet village -Yeah!

And "provincial", you want "chill", right?

-Provincial. -In this poor provincial town.

-Yeah. -Mm-hmm.

Little town, it's a quiet village

Every day, like the one before

Little town, full of little people

Waking up to say

Bonjour Bonjour

Bonjour, bonjour Bonjour

It was the summer of 1990

and we were all gathered in New York City to record the songs

for Beauty and the Beast.

Howard Ashman, and his songwriting partner, Alan Menken,

had already won Oscars, Golden Globes, and Grammys,

and had captured the imagination of a generation.

Right from the moment when I met her Saw her

I said she's gorgeous and I fell

Here in town there's only she Who is beautiful as me

So I'm making plans to woo and marry Belle

-(APPLAUSE) -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

We knew something really special was happening that day.

But what we didn't know was that in nine months,

Howard would be gone.

Howard and I were raised and grew up

on a street called Flannery Lane in Baltimore.

It was a street of row houses.

Each... There was a... would be a row of ten houses

and then a little bit of a break between them,

and... and another row of ten.

Howard loved to tell stories, and my job as his kid sister

was to be the best audience.

We were home alone and... and Howard often was taking care of me home alone.

And he... Howard just said, "Wait here," and left me downstairs,

and I could hear him upstairs.

I heard the door closing,

I heard... I heard things going on, and Howard had wrapped a Turkish towel

from the bathroom and wrapped it around his head like a turban.

So, Howard called me upstairs to his room, which was at the top of the stairs,

kind of a long, thin, steep stairway, and...

the lights were off in the room and the blinds were down.

I remember it being dimly lit.

He put something over the lampshades and he started showing me around,

and it wasn't his room anymore.

He started showing me around this land he had created.

He had done it with little plastic cowboys and Indians

and soldiers, but he had painted them, he had covered them with tissue,

he had put glitter on them, he had made them into characters

of his own, more interesting characters than cowboys and Indians.

And he put them in these little vignettes, these little scenes.

And he took me scene by scene and told me stories

about what I was seeing.

Just, you know, "Look over there, there's Tink," or "There's Peter Pan

"or Tiger Lily," and some of the scenes, there was... there was one with a mirror

that was maybe... It was either a lake or a... ice-skating rink.

He was using every creative part of himself to do that.

He was gonna lead me to this place that was unlike any place

that we would know in Baltimore County, Maryland.

It was Howard having a great time, Howard enjoying himself

and bringing you along on that journey, bringing you along with him.

And Howard used to put on shows in the backyard

and he would write the... write the play

and cast it, and all the kids in neighborhood were in the show.

And every bedspread I ever had, and old sheets and whatever,

became curtains and costumes and I never could throw anything away.

My dad's name was Ray, Ray Ashman.

He had a variety of jobs, but the one I remember had to do with working

for an ice-cream cone factory, and Dad began

by actually delivering the cones on a truck.

Howard's father, at first, when we said

Howard should take dancing lessons,

"No, no, no, no, no. Not a boy, he doesn't take dancing lessons."

Dad was really funny, he was a very funny man.

I learned something from him about storytelling, which is,

I remember once telling him a joke and he laughed, and the next day,

he had taken the joke I told him, the punchline, and he made it into a story

about himself.

You never say, "So there's this guy who walks into a bar,"

you say, "Funniest thing, I walk into a bar," that was my dad.

He took How... He tried to take Howard fishing

and introduce him to baseball, and Howard just was not interested.

They went fishing and they sat on the bank and they put their rod

in the water and they both sat there and Howard wasn't...

And Ray wasn't a fisherman either, but he thought it was the thing you do

'cause, I mean, he's your son and you have to do these things.

So, they sat there and he looked at Howard and Howard looked at him and he said,

"Howard, are you having fun?" and Howard said, "No, not really, Dad.

"Are you?" He said, "Frankly, no. Let's go home."

So they left and they came home, no fish.

My mom was a very semi-professional singer

at one point.

She was on a local TV show once singing.

You know, early on, my mom was the star.

Just the star kinda transferred to Howard,

but there was always this periphery of showbiz.

And then when Howard was about six or so,

we went to see a show.

It was a children's show, kids were on the stage.

When the kids came on and they started to do things,

Howard poked me in the arm and said, "Mommy, I wanna do that. That'd be fun."

So, I... figured out how do it,

introduced him to some people, and we got him into CTA,

Children's Theater Association, and I thought it would be good for him

because he liked to imitate all the characters in... in the show,

in Peter Pan, and he'd do Captain Hook, and he could do anybody you wanted.

and he could do anybody you wanted him to.

You'd just say, "Howard, do so and so," and he would do it.

I had lots of friends who played pianos and sat around

with the Rogers and Hammerstein vocal selections for a long, long time.

When I saw Mitzi Green do Gypsy at... at Ford's in Baltimore and...

Um, I don't remember who did My Fair Lady, but sure, the usual stuff.

I think everybody of my generation sort of grew up on the same shows

and fell in love with the same shows at the same time.

He wrote poems for everything. For birthdays, holidays, anniversaries.

Then, the poems led to stories.

And the stories led to plays and lyrics

and the lyrics always told a story.

And I used to make musicals out of anything that moved

when I was 14 years old. When I was in high school,

I used to just musicalize my... my laundry list

and it was sort of a hobby.

Howard and I were the first in our... in our family to go to college.

And we didn't have parents saying, for instance, "Yale is a good place

"for you to go if you want to go into theater," and we didn't have that.

So Howard's first year was... he went to, um, Boston University

and then he went to Goddard,

and the joke in Goddard is that it was hippiest, dippiest

college ever known to man, you know, they didn't have grades.

It was... it was totally Bohemian.

He seemed perfectly happy there...

...and he did a lot of theater there,

and he got into experimental theater, and it was more off-beat theater.

And my mother's story is,

you know, at one point, he's writhing naked on the floor

right in front of her, it was not a... it was probably not a great moment

for either one of them.

He spent a summer at a theater program and he met Stuart White.

Snooze, at the time his name was. Snooze White.

Ironically, Snooze was also from Baltimore, but they didn't...

had never known each other there.

And by a certain point, during the summer,

they had become a secret couple.

Stuart was a... just a ball of energy,

he was, um, like a sprite.

And he was just a wonderful actor, um, but he was passionate about directing

and that's really what he wanted to do.

And they fell in love.

And when it was time for graduate school, Indiana was the school

that they both applied to, they both got scholarships

by being in the act... in the professional acting company,

and they got to live together, really, you know, um, set up a home together.

I remember Howard seeming very happy there.

I met Howard in 1971

at Indiana University in the theater department.

And I was a freshman and he was part of the Indiana Touring Company

um, as an actor.

Well, I don't think he really thought of himself as an actor,

but he was an amazing actor, but that's not what he wanted to do.

He really wanted to write and direct.

He was going for his master's in playwriting and he was going to do

his take on the Snow Queen for his master's thesis.

He was gonna write the lyrics for the songs and he was gonna direct it.

So everybody, everybody and their brother and sister wanted to be

in this production.

Howard was extremely charismatic and he had all manner of groupies

at all times.

Howard had a sort of a fierce... liveliness.

And Stuart had kind of a boyish flamboyance.

And together, they attracted

huge numbers of people to their company.

Stuart and Howard together were an amazing force to be reckoned with.

And they were a great match 'cause Howard was gonna write

and Stuart was gonna direct, so they made it through

Indiana University together and then moved to New York.

New York in the '70s was really scary and dirty.

It was terrifying.

It was simultaneously glamorous and threatening.

I got mugged a couple of times, but there was a lot of energy,

there was a lot of creative energy and you could... you could feel it.

Howard was not in the coterie of New York theater.

He didn't have a relationship that a lot of the actors and directors

who had been affiliated with Yale.

His friends, we were his friends

from Indiana University, and we were nobodies.

When I first got to New York, I was drawn into a project

as a book writer 'cause at that time, I was something of a playwright,

and I was getting produced a little bit when I first got here.

Little one-acts and things.

When he moved to New York, there was no money coming in

from any of this stuff, and there was a time when he thought,

you know, "Theater is not gonna do it for me

and maybe I should be in publishing."

He was writing cover copy in publishing because he needed money.

He was assigned to edit the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Scrapbook,

and he was just over the moon to be doing this because he had watched it