Last night I dreamed I met actor Robert Preston, the original leading man in the Broadway hit The Music Man, and ended up performing one of his set pieces for him.
It was pretty wild!
In the dream, I recognized him from a distance (although he was older in my dream than he was when he died in 1987 at age 69–it appears I resurrected that hombre!) and walked over to let him know how much I had enjoyed his long career as an actor.
He smiled at me but didn’t seem much interested in, or impressed by, my compliment, so I assumed he had heard it so many times that it wasn’t a momentous occasion in his later life to hear it again. He had, after all, won two Tony Awards and been nominated for a third, and received other accolades (Best Supporting Actor nominations in motion pictures) during his 50-year career.
So that’s when I said, “I especially loved The Music Man…”
He smiled a little brighter, so then I lit into, “Folks, listen! May I have your attention, please? Attention, please! I can deal with this trouble, friends, with the wave of my hand, this very hand. Please observe me if you will, I’m Professor Harold Hill, and I’m here to organize a River City Boy’s Band! Oh, think, my friend, how could any pool table ever hope to compete with a gold trombone –”
I stopped right there, because he was now beaming! He said to me, “You nailed that — every pause, every nuance.” I had mirrored his performance to a T.
We were in some kind of commuter-type environment — perhaps a NY City subway (I’ve only seen them in movies) and I spotted a stand that had about four hardbound copies of a book about Preston’s career. The covers had different background colors, but it was the same book: an enormous, almost poster-size coffee table edition with full color images inside of his long career as an actor. (Of course, the front cover was of him as The Music Man.)
I asked him if I bought a copy if he would sign it to me. He said, “of course!”
So, I went over to the stand to pick up a copy, but it started flying off the shelf because others had seen our exchange, remembered the magic of the musical, and wanted their own autographed copy.
One of the buyers was Bob Hope! He got his signed by Preston. They exchanged a few words about being “among the last of the elders in the business that were still alive.”
By the time I got hold of the last copy, it was no longer a hardbound, but a truly flimsy softcover whose front cover had been badly damaged, ruining Preston’s face.
I was beyond disappointed, even embarrassed, to present it to him to sign, so I hesitated.
I ached to ask him if possibly he had a hardcover copy that I could buy from him, but that seemed presumptuous … and then I woke up.
The first part of the dream was terrific. That’s the part I’ll remember for a long time.
Does such a book even exist?
I went to Amazon this morning to look for a similar book about Robert Preston’s career, thinking the dream might be pointing me in that direction.
Alas, no. There is no such book. Drat! And he never wrote an autobiography. He, like De, was an intensely private man, and rarely gave interviews except toward the end of his life. (De would have accepted interviews, but Shatner and Nimoy got the lion’s share of requests for interviews during the run of the original series.)
DeForest Kelley and Robert Preston, two of my favorite actors
I have an interesting anecdote about a conversation I had about Robert Preston with DeForest Kelley and his wife Carolyn. I mentioned to them that I dreamed in color for the first time ever at age eleven or twelve after having seen and loved, loved, loved The Music Man in theaters. I joked I was so startled by “Robert Preston coming to Cle Elum to perform as the Music Man right out on my own front lawn for me in full Technicolor!”
Carolyn asked, “What year was that?”
I said, “Gee, I think 1962?”
I asked them, “Do you dream in color?”
Both answered, “Yes,” but then Carolyn said to De (we were on the phone chatting when this conversation happened, as I recall, but I could be wrong about that and I’m not going to look it up, because it would take a week!), “But you didn’t always dream in color. I remember the day you told me you had just had a dream in color for the first time in your life!”
De confirmed that.
Carolyn said, “I think it was around that same timeframe that De said he dreamed in color for the first time.”
I joked, “Because he was in love with Robert Preston?”
De deadpanned, “No.”
I theorized, “That’s about the time motion pictures and TV started showing up regularly in Technicolor. Maybe once we saw that color was an option, our brains started showing us our dreams in color.”
Carolyn said, “You might be right about that!”
Who knows? I sure don’t. But it was the best explanation I could come up with at the time…
For those of you too young to remember Robert Preston, here are some links about him. You’ll love discovering him for yourself by watching The Music Man and other of his movies and TV series!
