This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 15, 2008 - A long time ago but not so very far away, in a living room in Clayton to be exact, I heard someone use the word groovy in a sentence for the very first time. That person was Frances Deitsch Landesman. For four nights this week, Landesman will be in St. Louis at William Roth’s Gaslight Theatre on Boyle Avenue, which, when she lived here, was quite near the center of her quite seriously groovy St. Louis universe.
Fran Landesman fascinated me. As a refugee from a place I considered then to be hopelessly square, I was excited by any manifestation of bohemianism. Landesman was an exemplar. Quite by chance, I fell into the middle of the charmed circle drawn by her husband, Jay, and his two brothers, Eugene and Alfred. Frances was a singular and independent character in that now long-gone circle, and her talents were – are -- entirely hers. Yet part of her allure was the fact she was married to Jay, whose artistic vision, energy, character and excesses provide a solid definition of the term hipster.
By virtue of her marriage bond, she acquired automatic membership in one of the most culturally significant families of St. Louis and, if you draw the lines to the east and west coasts, of the entire United States. The contributions of the Landesmans to the visual arts, the theater and show business are considerable. Benjamin Landesman, the patriarch, came here to work as an artist at the 1904 World’s Fair. He initiated the tradition in this country, and it has continued in various media through the generations. For example, his great-grandson Dodge Landesman appeared regularly on television in “Ice-T’s Rap School.”
A Landesman contribution of particular consequence to St. Louis was the Crystal Palace, a legendary bar-bistro-theater that originated on Olive Street in what is now Grand Center and moved about a mile west on Olive to settle in for a long residency in what was, in another time, the magic-dusted land called Gaslight Square.
The Palace was testament to the genius of Jay’s brother Fred. He understood, and appreciated, abused, neglected and tossed-off treasures and collected them with aesthetic vengeance. He gathered up such materials as old wrought iron elevator cages, stained glass windows, stained class chandeliers, architectural fragments and, as a Merlin of design, brought all of this disparate stuff together to create environments of limitless visual appeal.
Jay and Fred brought to this fantasy of dancing light and endless reflection entertainment the likes of which the west end of St. Louis had never seen. It became an oasis, and worthies who rarely ventured east of McKnight Road could be found sitting on barstools or at bistro tables in the company of echt anarchists.
For young men and women starting careers, an invitation to play the Palace in St. Louis was desirable. All sorts of entertainers who went on to serious celebrity appeared there early in their careers: Tommy and Dickie Smothers, Barbra Streisand, Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May and so on.
Radiant as their stars may be, Fran Landesman operated in a singular orbit and secured a quite special and enduring place in musical history, launched at the Crystal Palace in Gaslight Square. Landesman writes songs that lodge in your intellect as well as your heart. Always intelligent, poetic, sometimes heartbreakers, they occupy a special place in the sprawling landscape of song.
They have become repertory standards, and you never know when one of them will tiptoe in and take you by surprise, as happens in a Nick Nolte thriller, “Under Fire.” Gene Hackman sits down at the piano and begins to sing Fran’s classic “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” That song has been sung and recorded by all sorts of other folks, including Ella Fitzgerald. Patti Austin’s version of it was inspired by Hackman’s rendition in “Under Fire.”
The music was written by Thomas J. Wolf Jr., and it was one of the songs that formed the quirky, ahead of its time beat-generation musical, “The Nervous Set,” which had its premiere at the Crystal Palace in 1959 and moved on from there to Broadway. “The Nervous Set” was sort of a biography of Jay and Fran and their counter-culture life in the New York City of the 1950s, which they imported to Westminster Place in St. Louis. Fran Landesman, Tommy Wolf and director Theodore Flicker created it.
It has received revivals. However, as one letter writer to the Riverfront Times noted after a 2004 New Line Theatre production here, you really “hadda be there” to understand what made “The Nervous Set” so memorable. But one can get close to the spirit of the original at the Gaslight Theatre when Fran Landesman, a fully alive legend, comes back to St. Louis from her home in London to sings to us from her songbook and to reminisce about the Palace and the Square.
Her shows benefit the Cabaret St. Louis, a new not-for-profit organization presenting cabaret at The Sheldon and the Kransberg theaters as well as the Gaslight Theatre.