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      in Television

      Dolly Alderton’s ‘Everything I Know About Love’ Is Adapted for TV

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      The writer has turned her memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which plots its central friendship like a grand love story.LONDON — Dolly Alderton peered through the window of her old house in Camden Town, squinting to see inside the kitchen. She had last visited the tree-lined street in London the year before, “with my mates when we were drunk,” she said. When she asked the current tenants if she could look inside, “they said, ‘Did you write a book about living here?’” she recalled. It was, apparently, the first thing the landlord mentioned when advertising the property.On that visit, the 33-year-old writer had been in the midst of turning that memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which premieres in the United States on Peacock on Aug. 25. Both iterations are set in this area of North London — known for its rich rock ’n’ roll history and graffitied canal — where Alderton lived for almost 10 years, and which she jokingly described as “the second-most visited tourist destination in London after Buckingham Palace.”During that decade, Alderton worked as a story producer on the British reality TV show “Made in Chelsea,” wrote a dating column and created a hit podcast, “The High Low,” with the journalist Pandora Sykes. But what defined the period for Alderton was being single, in her 20s and living with friends.When it came to adapting her memoir for the screen, Alderton realized that readers connected with how she had framed her relationship with Farly Kleiner, her childhood best friend, as “epic and grand and romantic” — a love story. In the series, the two are fictionalized as Maggie (Emma Appleton) and Birdy (Bel Powley). With the show’s “ups and downs, tensions and silliness, surprise and excitement,” Alderton said, the seven episodes plot the narrative arc of their relationship like a romantic comedy.Alderton said that she saw Maggie, played by Emma Appleton in the show, “as someone who is 10 tracing paper copies away from me.”Matt Squire/PeacockMaggie’s more sensible best friend, C is based on Farly Kleiner, Alderton’s own childhood best friend.Matt Squire/PeacockWorking Title Films, which made rom-coms like “Notting Hill,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Love Actually” — acquired the film and TV rights for the memoir in 2017, when the book was still at the proposal stage.Eric Fellner, the production company’s co-chairman, also optioned “Bridget Jones” from Helen Fielding’s book. When he read “Everything I Know About Love,” he “thought, this writer has got a similar connection to an audience that Helen Fielding had all those years ago,” he said in a recent phone interview, “and maybe this is the millennial version.” Both writers, he added, “can look at their generation in a brilliantly humorous way.”At a cafe in Primrose Hill, Alderton said that for her generation, “sincerity has become unfashionable” and that coming of age in the 2010s meant growing up in “a very cynical time.” It is against this backdrop that “Everything I Know About Love” is set, in 2012 — “literally the year Camden stopped being cool,” Alderton added. ‌Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as the pop star Self Esteem, was in an indie band at that time. She contributed three songs to the show’s soundtrack, and said the episodes were “so evocative of the ever-competitive alt scene, where everyone is trying to seem like they’re not trying.”Birdy, Maggie and their two housemates, Amara (Aliyah Odoffin) and Nell (Marli Siu), are all “provincial or suburban” and “on the fringes of everything — in not a good way,” Alderton said. When they arrive in Camden, all four are ravenous for some big city experience.This lack of urban initiation is what distinguishes Alderton’s characters from their more aspirational forebears in shows like “Sex and the City” and even “Girls.” Alderton once pined for the glamour of the big city, too, she said. She grew up in Stanmore, a “comfortable” and “beige-carpeted” suburb of North London, she said, where “the buses are slow and infrequent.” As children, she and Kleiner would circle a single cul-de-sac on their scooters, and wander around the shopping mall without ever buying anything. “All we did was talk and dream,” Alderton said, adding that the lack of stimuli gave her brain “an Olympic workout for imagination.”Alderton spent nearly a decade living in the Camden area of London, a period she turned into a best-selling memoir.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesNow, Alderton is one of Britain’s best-known millennial writers. Between her memoir, podcast, a recent novel and her gig as an agony aunt for a British newspaper, many young British women see her as the trusted voice of a close friend.“There’s always women running up to her wanting to talk to her,” said Cherish Shirley, a writer and story consultant on “Everything I Know About Love.” Most days, Alderton said, she meets “amazing, generous, lovely girls” in bars, bookstores or bathrooms who want to talk. “Because I opened up a channel of communication,” she said, “they speak very intimately back to me.”But after the paperback edition of “Everything I Know About Love” came out in 2019, the amount of attention began to feel “unmanageable,” she said. Alderton moved back to her parents’ house for six weeks to spend some time being “really small and really quiet and really hidden away,” she said.For the first time in her career, she also began putting more distance between herself and her work. In adapting her memoir for television, she said she chiseled the show’s protagonist into a character who was less self-aware, and less precocious, than herself.“I see Maggie as someone who is 10 tracing paper copies away from me,” Alderton said. Another divergence from the book is the addition of characters of color, including Amara, a Black British dancer. “Criticism of the book — that I fully accept — is that it was very white,” she said. This was another reason she made the show “semi-fictional,” she said, and Shirley added that Alderton was intentional in bringing together “a mixed group of women from all sorts of backgrounds” to form the show’s writers room, and fill out its world with authentic, diverse characters.Clockwise from left, Birdy (Powley), Amara (Aliyah Odoffin), Nell (Marli Siu) and Maggie (Appleton) in their shared kitchen during a scene from the show.Matt Squire/PeacockIn March, three months before the show premiered on the BBC in Britain, Alderton had “a big wobble” about being thrust into the spotlight again, she said. Surian Fletcher-Jones, an executive producer on the show, instructed her to get “match fit.” Alderton said she stopped drinking for a while, and also started a course of cognitive behavioral therapy, billing the sessions to the production.Simon Maloney, a producer who also worked on Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” emphasized the importance of providing support for female showrunners who draw heavily from their personal experiences, Alderton said. “You can’t drag the story out of a woman like that, and then leave her alone,” she remembered him saying.Alderton described herself as “an oversharer,” but these days, she thinks carefully about how that sharing should take place, and posts less on social media. ‌“What I now realize,” she said, “is people don’t need to go into forensic detail of their emotional lives to get people to like, and then relate, to them.”Fellner revealed Alderton had a studio deal for a film adaptation of her fiction debut, “Ghosts.” She is also researching a novel about heartbreak and loss. “The work I do in fiction is still very exposing,” Alderton said, because it continues to reference her life, even if she is no longer the main character.“That’s enough of my heart, and soul, and brain and life spilled out everywhere,” she said.“What I now realize,” Alderton said, “is people don’t need to go into forensic detail of their emotional lives to get people to like, and then relate, to them.”Ellie Smith for The New York Times More

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      in Theater

      92NY’s New Season Includes Ian McEwan and Tom Stoppard

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      The fall season also features Ralph Fiennes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Katie Couric and Ken Burns.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Katie Couric and Ralph Fiennes are among the array of actors, authors and dancers who will feature in the 92nd Street Y, New York’s upcoming fall season.“It was very important coming out of Covid and coming now into the 2022-23 season to really make a statement that we’re back,” Seth Pinsky, the organization’s chief executive, said of the programming. (The cultural institution has an updated name this year and is known as 92NY, for short.) “Every night is going to be something different, something stimulating.”In a nod to T.S. Eliot, Fiennes will read “The Waste Land” (Dec. 5) on the very stage where Eliot read the poem in 1950. The reading will coincide with the centenary of the poem, which was published in December 1922.Slated early in the season is Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, who will speak about his new book, “Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir,” in a conversation with his longtime friend Bruce Springsteen (Sept. 13).The following day, the filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, Sarah Botstein and Daniel Mendelsohn will preview their forthcoming documentary series, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” followed by a panel moderated by the journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher.The playwright Tom Stoppard, in what is believed to be his only New York talk of the season, takes the stage on Sept. 18 for a discussion about his new play, “Leopoldstadt,” with the German author and playwright Daniel Kehlmann.On Sept. 12, Couric, the journalist and author, will discuss her book “Going There,” with the New York Times investigative reporter Jodi Kantor. Also on the lineup are the Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan, who will read from his new novel, “Lessons” (Sept. 19); the Nigerian novelist Adichie reading from her new memoir, “Notes on Grief,” with the memoirist and CNN anchor Zain Asher (Sept. 11); and Joshua Cohen discussing his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Netanyahus” (Dec. 12).Last year, the Harkness Dance Center at the 92NY brought dance back to its stage. That tradition continues with the tap dancer Leonardo Sandoval and the composer Gregory Richardson (Dec. 22), and a celebration of the late dancer and choreographer Yuriko Kikuchi (Oct. 27), among other performances.The schedule will continue to be filled out with new events over the course of the season. The venue plans to continue requiring proof of vaccination for all attendees; masking requirements will be determined in the coming weeks.A full lineup can be found at 92ny.org. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Shy’ Excerpt: Mary Rodgers on Creating ’Once Upon a Mattress’

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      In this excerpt from “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” a Broadway musical is born at a summer camp.A hundred-mile drive from New York City, on the fringe of the Pocono Mountains, Tamiment was for much of the last midcentury a resort for singles and a summer intensive for emerging theatrical talent. During the first half of each season, writers assembled an original musical revue every week; in the second half, if they were interested in cranking out a show with a story — and if Moe Hack, the barky, crusty, cigar-smoking sweetheart who ran the place, thought it was a good idea — they would be free to try.Among those who tried in the summer of 1958 was Mary Rodgers, a young composer whose father’s reputation preceded her; he was, after all, Richard Rodgers. Also at Tamiment was the lyricist and book writer Marshall Barer, her mentor and tormentor. Together, with assists from Dean Fuller and Jay Thompson, they would write the musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” a perennial favorite that grew from a summertime opportunity into an Off Broadway and Broadway success starring Carol Burnett. “Mattress” was also an unintentional self-portrait of a displaced young princess trying to find happiness on her own terms.“Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” written by Rodgers (1931-2014) and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of The New York Times, is the just-published story of that princess. Over the course of two marriages, three careers and six children, sometimes stymied by self-doubt, the pervasive sexism of the period and her overbearingly critical parents (not just Richard but the icy perfectionist Dorothy), she somehow triumphed. But in this excerpt about the birth of her first (and only) musical hit — there would be substantial successes in other fields too — she recalls how triumphs can sometimes depend on little more than scrappiness, high spirits and a castoff from Stephen Sondheim.In New York City, Carol Burnett won the role of the Princess, whose sleep is disrupted by the incessant shrilling of the Nightingale of Samarkand, in “Once Upon a Mattress.”Friedman-Abeles/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsMARSHALL FOUND ME a nice four-bedroom cottage for very little money, right down the hill from Tamiment’s main buildings and near a rushing river. He even saw to it that an upright piano was waiting in the living room. And Steve, now flush from “West Side Story,” sold me his old car for a dollar. Off we went like the Joads in early June: 27-year-old me; the kids, ages 5, 4, and 2; and the Peruvian nanny — all of us scratching westward thanks to Steve’s itchy fake-fur upholstery.My von Trapp-like cheerfulness in the face of uncertainty soon crashed, though. The whole first half of the season was, for me, demoralizing. Everybody was more experienced than I. Everybody was, I felt sure, more talented. Everybody was certainly more at ease. At the Wednesday afternoon meetings to plan material for the coming week, when Moe would fire questions at us — “Who’s got an opening number?” — the guys would leap up to be recognized like know-it-alls in math class. If they were little red hens, I was the chicken, silently clucking Not I. “Who’s got a comedy song?” More leaping; more ideas. “Who’s got a sketch?” Woody Allen always did.At 22, Woody looked about 12 but was already the inventive weirdo he would become famous as a decade later. His wife, Harlene, who made extra money typing scripts for the office, was even nerdier, but only inadvertently funny. She looked, and sounded, a bit like Olive Oyl, with reddish hair, freckles, and a bad case of adenoids. Woody, whenever he wasn’t working on his sketches — his best that summer was about a man-eating cake — was either sitting on a wooden chair on the porch outside the barracks, practicing his clarinet, or inside with her, practicing sex, possibly from a manual. He was doing better, it seemed, with the clarinet.I would spend eight hours a day plinking out tunes to accompany Marshall’s lyrics. These were revue songs, with titles like “Waiting to Waltz With You,” “Miss Nobody,” and “Hire a Guy You Can Blame,” fitted to the talents of particular performers with no aim of serving a larger story. “Miss Nobody,” for instance, with its super-high tessitura, was written for a thin little girl named Elizabeth Lands, who couldn’t walk across the stage without falling on her face but was a knockout and had an incredible four-octave range like Yma Sumac.Burnett, left, and Rodgers moving a mattress into the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon Theater) on Broadway in November 1959. The show had premiered earlier that year at an Off Broadway theater, the Phoenix, in the East Village.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMusic did not pour out of my fingers; the process was more like wringing a slightly damp washcloth. With Marshall’s lyric propped up on the piano desk, precisely divided into bar lines as a road map, I would begin with some sort of accompaniment or vamp or series of consecutive chords, then sing a melody that matched the lyric and went with the accompaniment, then adjust the accompaniment to service the melody, which began to dictate the harmony, until I had a decent front strain that satisfied me and, more important, satisfied Marshall, who wouldn’t stop hanging over my shoulder until he liked what he’d heard. Then he’d leave me to clean it up and inch it forward while he took a long walk on the golf course to puzzle out the lyrics for the bridge. Back to me, back to the golf course, back and forth we went, until the song was finished.Even when I did that successfully, I had another problem. My abandoned Wellesley education had taught me the rudiments of formal manuscript making, but Daddy had ear-trained me, not eye-trained me. As a result, I kept naming my notes wrong, calling for fourths when I meant fifths, and vice versa. This made the orchestrations sound upside down. I could just imagine the guys saying, “Get a load of Dick Rodgers’s daughter, who can’t even make a lead sheet.”Actually, the orchestra men, kept like circus animals in a tent apart from the rest of us, were the merriest people at Tamiment. They weren’t competitive the way the writers were. They just sat there with a great big tub filled with ice and beer; you tossed your 25 cents in and had a good time. And I had the best time with them. Especially the trumpeter.Mary, left, with her parents, Dorothy and Richard; her sister, Linda, center; and Zoë d’Erlanger, right, who lived with the family for a time during World War II.via the Rodgers-Beaty-Guettel familyElsewhere at Tamiment, I felt patronized. It didn’t help that Marshall tried to dispel my parental paranoia by preemptively introducing me to one and all as “Mary Rodgers — you know, Dorothy’s daughter?” Between that and the chord symbols, it was enough to drive me to drink.Or pills, anyway.“What’s that you’re taking?” Marshall asked, when he saw me swallowing one.“Valium,” I told him.“Valium!” he screamed. “Why Valium?”“I asked the doctor for something to help me write.”“And he gave you Valium?” said Marshall. “Here. Try this.”He handed me a pretty little green-and-white-speckled spansule.Bingo! I wrote two songs in one day, and, whether because of the Dexamyl or the songs, felt happier than I’d ever been. It completely freed me up. Whatever inhibitions I had about playing in front of Marshall or feeling creative and being able to express it were suddenly gone.The story of me and pills — and, much more dramatically, Marshall and pills — can wait for later; what matters now is that Marshall had for a couple of years been nursing the notion of turning the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” into a musical burlesque for his friend Nancy Walker. Nancy, a terrific comedian, liked the idea but was too big a star by then to be summer-slumming at Tamiment. Still, since Marshall was stuck with me anyway, he figured it was worth a try. Did I like the idea? he asked.As it happens, I did, very much, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I hated it. I did what I was told. At Tamiment, even Marshall did what he was told. Moe said we could write this “pea musical” on the condition that it would accommodate his nine principal players with big roles. Nine big roles? Moe had hired them at a premium, he said, and he wanted his money’s worth.The deal struck, Moe scheduled the show for Aug. 16 and 17. It was now late July.The program for the Tamiment Playhouse performance of “The Princess and the Pea,” as the musical was known that summer of 1958.Jesse Green/The New York TimesTo save time, we custom-cast the show on the cart-before-the-horse Moe Hack plan, before a word, or at least a note, was written. There was, for instance, a wonderful girl, Yvonne Othon, who was perfect for the lead, Princess Winifred: appealingly funny-looking, very funny-acting, and the right age — 20. But there was a significant drawback: She wasn’t one of Moe’s principal players. Meanwhile, Moe wanted to know what we were going to do for Evelyn Russell, who at 31 was deemed too ancient to be the Princess but was a principal player. OK, OK, we’d cast Evelyn as the Queen: an unpleasant, overbearing lady we just made up, who is overly fond of her son the Prince and never stops talking. We would give her many, many, many lines and maybe even her own song. And to seal the deal, even though the Princess was (along with the Pea) the title character, we would cut her one big number; we’d been planning to have her sing “Shy,” a revue song that hadn’t worked earlier in the summer. That was just as well because it was a tough, belty tune and Yvonne couldn’t sing a note. She was a dancer.Lenny Maxwell, a comedian and a schlub, would be Prince Dauntless, the sad sack who wants to get married but his mother won’t let him; since he had limited singing chops, we’d only write him the kind of dopey songs any doofus could sing. We created the part of the Wizard for a guy who, I had reason to know offstage, was spooky; he was practically doing wizard things to me in bed. Meanwhile, Milt Kamen, by virtue of his age (37) and credits (he’d worked with Sid Caesar), was considered by Moe, and by Milt, to be the most important of the principal players, but he too had a couple of drawbacks: He couldn’t sing on key and couldn’t memorize lines. He claimed, though, to be an excellent mime, so Marshall and Jay invented the mute King to function as counterpoint to the incessantly chatty Queen. Marshall brilliantly figured out a way to make his lyrics rhyme even though they were silent: They rhymed by implication.In this way, one role at a time, we wrote the show backward from our laundry list of constraints: a dance specialty for the good male dancer who played the Jester, a real ballad for the best singer, even a pantomime role for Marshall’s lover, Ian, who moved beautifully but, well, fill in the blank.Soon all personnel problems were solved except what to do with Elizabeth Lands. You remember, the gorgeous but klutzy Yma Sumac type? When Joe Layton, the choreographer, and Jack Sydow, the director, started teaching all the ladies of the court — who were meant to be pregnant, according to Marshall’s story — how to walk with their hands clasped under their boobs, tummies out, leaning almost diagonally backward, Liz kept tipping over. Pigeon-toed? Knock-kneed? We never discovered what exactly, but she was a moving violation. Thus was born the Nightingale of Samarkand, who was lowered in a cage during the bed scene while shrilling an insane modal tune to keep the Princess awake.Do not seek to know how the musical theater sausage is made. More

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      in Music

      Mary Ellin Barrett, Daughter and Defender of Irving Berlin, Dies at 95

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      When the great American songwriter’s character came under attack after his death, Ms. Barrett sought to correct the record with a candid but tender memoir.The songwriter Irving Berlin defined a very American style of sunniness. “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” delighted in competition. “Puttin’ On the Ritz” made social mobility silly. “White Christmas” exalted innocence. With “God Bless America,” Berlin, an immigrant from Russia, wrote the unofficial second national anthem of his adopted home.Yet by the time he died at 101 in 1989, after years of avoiding the spotlight and restricting the use of his music, many puzzled over an apparent gap between Berlin’s art and his character.“The man who wrote such wonderfully romantic songs as ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ ‘Always’ and ‘What’ll I Do?’ appears to have been an egotist and a boor,” the book critic Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote in 1990 in a review of a biography. In a news article the same year, the paper reported that people in the theater and music businesses described Berlin as a “recluse” and “miser.”Then, in 1994, Mary Ellin Barrett, one of Berlin’s three daughters, disputed the criticisms of her father in an interview with The Times and announced a mission: “Presenting the father I knew to the world.” She said she was writing a book.“Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir” was published later that year. In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”Ms. Barrett died on July 16 in Manhattan at 95, her daughter Katherine Swett said.Ms. Barrett’s account of family life helped reconcile Irving Berlin the artist and Irving Berlin the man.Ms. Barrett did not take the position of a biographer, giving a full account of Berlin’s life, or the position of a critic, translating to prose the power of his music and the sources of his creativity. (She instead called him an “inexplicable genius.”)But her account of family life helped reconcile Berlin the artist and Berlin the man.She recalled her father making head-spinning comparisons between their childhoods. Young Mary Ellin got a scar from falling off a swing; young Israel Beilin, as he was then known, got a scar in the berth of the ship he took to America when someone dropped a penknife on him, almost hitting his eye.In the East River, near Mary Ellin’s penthouse home, her father had once, at 8 years old, nearly drowned; when rescued, he was found still clutching the pennies he had earned that day selling newspapers.He often seemed a “shaky, uncertain man,” Ms. Barrett wrote — drumming his fingers, molding the inside of dinner rolls into compact balls, smoking too many cigarettes, chewing too much gum, jumping when the telephone rang, fiddling with his piano.Yet out came hit after hit after hit; between his 20s and his 60s, he wrote about 1,500 songs.Ms. Barrett came to see her father’s drive as the product of anxiety and toughness that lingered from a ghetto childhood. He was “the street fighter,” she wrote, “not noisy and brawling but quiet, dogged,” never shaking the sense that he acted “with his back against the wall, writing, composing, negotiating his way out of a corner.”Mary Ellin Berlin, who was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Manhattan, grew up in a different universe. Her girlhood memories included dinner parties with the Astaires, the Goldwyns, the Capras and Somerset Maugham, who once lay on the floor, balanced a glass of water on his forehead and stood up without spilling a drop.Though she sometimes had to chase her father for attention and felt alienated by the fame of her parents — her mother, Ellin Mackay, was an heiress and a popular novelist — Mary Ellin felt less resentment than enchantment with her good fortune. When she relentlessly invited people to the family’s theater house seats for her father’s 1946 Broadway megahit, “Annie Get Your Gun,” one annoyed friend told her to knock it off.She graduated from Barnard College in 1949 with a degree in music and worked as an editorial trainee at Time magazine, where she met the author and journalist Marvin Barrett. They married in 1952; he died in 2006. Later in her career, Ms. Barrett worked at Glamour and Vogue magazines and wrote book reviews for Cosmopolitan. She published three novels in addition to the book about her father.Ms. Barrett, right, with her sisters Elizabeth Peters, left, and Linda Emmet at Town Hall in New York in 2016, attending a performance of the one-man show “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin.”Eugene Gologursky/Getty ImagesMs. Barrett’s sister Elizabeth Peters died in 2017. In addition to her daughter Ms. Swett, Ms. Barrett is survived by another sister, Linda Emmet; two other daughters, Elizabeth Matson and Mary Ellin Lerner; a son, Irving Barrett; five grandsons; and a great-grandson.When Ms. Barrett was 2 years old, her infant brother, Irving Jr., died on Christmas Day. Although her father, who was Jewish, would later write one of the nation’s best-loved Christmas tunes (her mother was Irish Catholic), her parents came to “hate” the holiday, her mother told her when Ms. Barrett was an adult.As a girl, Mary Ellin did not know that she had ever had a brother. At the time, she considered Christmas “the single most beautiful and exciting day of the year,” she wrote. She saw a revealing parallel looking back at the celebrations of her youth.“The tree was trimmed behind closed doors and revealed to the children in full splendor, with all the presents beneath it, on Christmas morning,” she wrote. “So it was with a show.” More

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      in Television

      Jennette McCurdy Is Ready to Move Forward, and to Look Back

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      In her memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” McCurdy, best known for her role in“iCarly,” reflects on her time as a child actor and on her troubled relationship with her mother.When Jennette McCurdy was 16, she was in her third year on “iCarly,” the hit teen sitcom on Nickelodeon. Millions of young viewers admired her for her comic portrayal of Sam Puckett, the wisecracking pal of its title character, and she was proud that her lucrative work was helping to support her family.McCurdy was also living under the stringent control of her mother, Debra, who oversaw her career, determined her meals — her dinners consisted of shredded pieces of low-cal bologna and lettuce sprayed with dressing — and even administered her showers.Her mother gave her breast and vaginal exams, which she said were inspections for cancer, and shaved her daughter’s legs while McCurdy remained largely uneducated about the changes her body was experiencing.She struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and anxiety triggered by the constant attention she received as a celebrity, but she felt trapped in her work. She also believed she owed her unfaltering loyalty to her mother, who had recovered from breast cancer when Jennette was very young, only for her cancer to return in 2010, at the height of her daughter’s fame.Debra McCurdy died in 2013, and Jennette, now 30, is still reckoning with the gravitational pull exerted by her mother, who steered her to the trade that gave her visibility and financial stability while she controlled virtually every aspect of her daughter’s existence.When Jennette McCurdy wrote a memoir, which Simon and Schuster will publish on Aug. 9, it was clear to her that her relationship with her mother would provide its narrative force. “It’s the heartbeat of my life,” she said recently.McCurdy as Sam and Miranda Cosgrove as Carly in “iCarly.”Lisa Rose/NickelodeonThe book is titled “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” and its cover bears the image of McCurdy, a narrow half-smile on her face, holding a pink funeral urn with confetti strands peeking over its rim. The presentation might be off-putting to some readers; the author is well aware. But she also feels it accurately encapsulates a coming-of-age story that is alternately harrowing and mordantly funny.When you have grown up as she has, feeling tenderness and anger toward a person you’ve seen wield immense power while fighting for her own life, she said, “You can’t believe how hard and how laughable it is at the same time. That’s completely my sense of humor.”“I feel like I’ve done the processing and put in the work to earn a title or a thought that feels provocative,” she added.Though McCurdy may have the résumé of a seasoned Hollywood veteran, she carried herself like a wide-eyed tourist on a visit to New York in late June. Over afternoon tea at the BG Restaurant in midtown Manhattan, she gazed at fellow patrons, asked for Broadway theater recommendations and chided herself about a transcendental meditation class she’d taken near her home in Los Angeles.“So far, I haven’t seen any results,” she said with a chuckle, “but we’ll see.”When it comes to new endeavors, McCurdy said, “I think things should feel natural. So much of my life was about forcing or pushing things. So when something feels like it’s working, I’ll let that be, and anything else can fall by the wayside.”As McCurdy recounts in her memoir, she was 6 when she started auditioning for acting roles, having been shepherded into the work by her mother, who was her herself discouraged from becoming an actress by her own parents.Growing up in Southern California, McCurdy was cast in TV commercials and shows like “Mad TV,” “Malcolm in the Middle” and “CSI” before landing “iCarly,” which had its debut in 2007. Yet she never had any illusions about who was really benefiting from these accomplishments. As she writes of the moment she learned she had booked “iCarly,” “Everything’s going to be better. Mom will finally be happy. Her dream has come true.”McCurdy endured various embarrassments and indignities at Nickelodeon, where she writes of being photographed in a bikini at a wardrobe fitting and being encouraged to drink alcohol by an intimidating figure she simply calls the Creator. In situations where her mother was present, Debra did not intervene or speak up, instructing Jennette that this was the price of showbiz success: “Everyone wants what you have,” she would tell her daughter.When McCurdy was promised an “iCarly” spinoff, she assumed she’d be given her own show — only to receive a co-starring slot on “Sam & Cat,” which paired her with the future pop-music sensation Ariana Grande.There, she says her superiors on these shows prevented her from pursuing career opportunities outside the show while Grande thrived in her extracurricular work. As McCurdy writes, “What finally undid me was when Ariana came whistle-toning in with excitement because she had spent the previous evening playing charades at Tom Hanks’s house. That was the moment I broke.”McCurdy, as Sam, and Ariana Grande as Cat in Sam & Cat, on Nickelodeon.Lisa Rose/NickelodeonAs McCurdy grew older and more independent, her relationship with her mother became further strained. The book reproduces an email in which her mother calls her “a SLUT,” “a FLOOZY” and “an UGLY MONSTER,” then concludes with a request for money for a refrigerator. When Debra had a recurrence of cancer and died, Jennette, then 21, was liberated — and left to navigate a complex world without her guidance, contending with destructive romantic relationships, bulimia, anorexia and alcohol abuse.“iCarly” ended its original run in 2012, and “Sam & Cat” ran just one season from 2013-14, after which, McCurdy writes, she turned down a $300,000 offer from Nickelodeon if she agreed never to speak publicly about her experiences at the network. (A press representative for Nickelodeon declined to comment.)She was free to reclaim her personal life and pursue other projects, like the Netflix science-fiction series “Between.” But she found it difficult to let go of the resentment from how she’d been treated when she was younger. As she said in an interview, “It felt like all these decisions were being made on my behalf and I was the last one to know about them. That’s really infuriating. It led to a lot of rage.”Even now, McCurdy found that revisiting the era of her child stardom resurfaced raw feelings about a parent, and an industry, that had failed to protect her.“My whole childhood and adolescence were very exploited,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “It still gives my nervous system a reaction to say it. There were cases where people had the best intentions and maybe didn’t know what they were doing. And also cases where they did — they knew exactly what they were doing.”Marcus McCurdy, the oldest of Jennette’s three brothers, said that their mother was consistently volatile when they were growing up.“You were always walking on eggshells — is it going to be nice mom or crazy mom today?” he said. “One day she’d be fine, the next day she’d be yelling at everybody. Every holiday was super overdramatic. She’d lose her mind on Christmas if something wasn’t perfect.”Friends and colleagues from Jennette McCurdy’s time as a child actor said they could sense the tension in her relationship with her mother, even if they did not yet know the exact details.“Jennette can be outgoing, very forward and bright and electric,” said David Archuleta, the pop singer and “American Idol” finalist. “I could also tell she was very guarded, very protective of her mom and they were very close.”Archuleta, whose career was closely controlled by his father when he was a minor, said such arrangements can be destructive for children.“Because you’re always with that parent, they don’t really let you around anyone else,” Archuleta said. “You don’t look at it as a control thing — you look at it as, ‘Oh, they’re looking out for me.’ And they make you feel like everyone is against you.”Over time, Archuleta added, the parent may turn toxic. “It gets to where it’s like, ‘You can’t make any decisions on your own. You can’t do anything on your own. You’re too dumb.’”Miranda Cosgrove, the star of “iCarly,” said that though she and McCurdy quickly became close on the show, she was initially unaware of many difficulties her friend was facing, which McCurdy only revealed as they became older.“When you’re young, you’re so in your own head,” Cosgrove said. “You can’t imagine that people around you are having much harder struggles.”In a softer voice, Cosgrove added, “You don’t expect things like that from the person in the room who’s making everyone laugh.”“So much of my life was about forcing or pushing things,” McCurdy said. Now, “I think things should feel natural.”Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesFor McCurdy, opening up about herself to the wider world has been a long-term process. In her late teens and early 20s, she wrote essays for The Wall Street Journal that shared some of her insights into child stardom. But today she feels she was not fully candid.“If I had been truthful at that time,” she explained, “I would have said, ‘Yeah, I wrote this and then I went and made myself throw up for four minutes afterward.’”A few years ago, McCurdy started writing a new series of personal essays, including several about her mother, and shared them with her manager at the time. “My manager sent me back a nice email that said, ‘This is great — I don’t really know what to do with this.’ I’ll never forget the ‘xoxo’ at the end.” (McCurdy no longer works with that manager.)Instead, she began performing a one-woman show, also called “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” in Los Angeles. Though the pandemic impeded plans to take the show on the road, McCurdy used some of her down time to craft the memoir. “I really wanted to build it out a lot more, get more into the childhood aspect of the story and work through the arc in a way that you only can with a book,” she explained.Marcus McCurdy said he supported his sister’s decision to write her memoir, even if her calling it “I’m Glad My Mom Died” has caused some consternation in the family.“Our grandmother is very upset about that title,” Marcus said, adding that he and his sister share a similar sense of humor. “It’s more of a coping mechanism,” he said. “You can either be like, ‘Woe is me, my life is horrible.’ Or you find the humor in these things that are really tragic.”Archuleta also said it was empowering for McCurdy to write her book. “It’s given her back some of her strength, her confidence,” he said.McCurdy is writing another set of essays about coming into her own in her 20s, as well as a novel. (Its protagonist, she said, is “either who I wish I could be in some aspects, or who I hope I never am in other aspects. But it’s probably me, right?”)Aside from a few watch parties that her family held for her earliest episodic TV work, McCurdy told me, “I’ve never seen any of the shows that I’ve been on.” For her, these were fraught documents of her suffering and unwelcome reminders of the helplessness she felt at the time.A few years ago, after the cancellation of her Netflix series, McCurdy decided to take a break from acting. As she writes in the memoir, “I want my life to be in my hands. Not an eating disorder’s or a casting director’s or an agent’s or my mom’s. Mine.” She did not take part in a recent revival of “iCarly” on Paramount+. But McCurdy said that her experience with her one-woman show has shown her there might be ways that performance could be constructive for her in the future.“It felt significant in repairing some of the really weighted, complicated relationships that I had with acting,” she said. “It felt like finally I’m saying my words and saying things I want to be saying. I’m myself.”Though McCurdy can still find it uncomfortable to reflect on her past, it also makes her hopeful to focus on the present and to see the friends and colleagues who are part of her life because she alone chose for them to be in it.“I have people around me now that are so supportive and so loving,” she said. “It makes me tearful with joy. I feel so safe. I feel so much trust and so much openness.” More

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      in Music

      David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

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      An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Hollywood Ending,’ a Cradle-to-Jail Biography of Harvey Weinstein

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      Ken Auletta looks for Weinstein’s Rosebud in this dispiriting account of the former movie mogul’s life.HOLLYWOOD ENDINGHarvey Weinstein and the Culture of SilenceBy Ken AulettaIllustrated. 466 pages. Penguin Press. $30.As you might expect, there aren’t a whole lot of laughs in “Hollywood Ending,” Ken Auletta’s cradle-to-jail new biography of Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul convicted of third-degree rape and another sex felony in New York and awaiting trial on further charges in California. When Auletta calls Weinstein’s relationship with his brother Bob “Shakespeare-worthy,” he is placing the story squarely in the tragedy column of the ledger.But then the Broadway star Nathan Lane makes a brief appearance, like Puck cartwheeling onto the set of “Coriolanus.”The year was 2000, and Weinstein’s cultural capital was perhaps at its peak. He was still running Miramax, the prestigious studio that he and Bob had started in 1979, albeit now under Disney’s incongruous but lucrative oversight. He’d recently founded Talk magazine with the editor Tina Brown, then New York’s nimblest puppeteer of high and low culture. He was hobnobbing with politicians, co-chairing a lavish birthday party and fund-raiser for then-Senate candidate Hillary Clinton at Roseland Ballroom. And he didn’t like some of the jokes that Lane, anyone’s dream M.C., had written for the occasion.“I’ll ruin your career,” Weinstein threatened, in Auletta’s retelling, as he “bellied” the elfin actor into a corner.“You can’t hurt me,” Lane retorted. “I don’t have a film career.”Onstage, Lane tauntingly said: “I’m going to do all the jokes Harvey Weinstein wanted me to cut.”This wasn’t the last time that theater, of a sort, would win the day over the producer’s preferred medium. Auletta attended every day of Weinstein’s trial in 2020, narrating the experience here in four chapters. “Trials are not movies, shot under controlled conditions and subject to revision in the editing room,” he writes. “They are live productions, dependent on the chemistry of their participants, and not a little bit of luck.”Books, of which Weinstein is demonstrably fond — his media mini-empire included a publishing imprint — can be like movies. Auletta effectively, if maybe a little too elegiacally, frames this one in the lengthy shadow of “Citizen Kane.” Auletta is, of course, Jerry Thompson, the reporter looking for his antihero’s Rosebud: the mysterious missing object or influence that will explain his personality. But he is also Citizen Ken, magnanimous and avuncular when he encourages his boss at The New Yorker, David Remnick, to publish the young journalist Ronan Farrow’s investigation of Weinstein’s misdeeds. The New York Times’s Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story five days before Farrow’s piece was published.Ken Auletta, whose new book is “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence.”via the authorThe well-connected Auletta draws on the work of those journalists and his own interviews with major players, including many surely fascinating hours with the beleaguered brother Bob. As for Harvey, he emails some terse responses to questions, and his representatives haggle over possible interview conditions before ghosting his biographer — but “Hollywood Ending” also mines an extensive profile Auletta wrote of him 20 years ago, and its outtakes. At that time, he had heard of Weinstein’s sex crimes, an open secret for years, but was unable to get victims on the record, and so focused on his subject’s bullying and prodigious appetites. (“Kane” is famous for its breakfast montage. Weinstein’s montage would show him mainlining junk food: peanut M&Ms, French fries when interviewing a defense lawyer — ketchup “creating what looked like bloodstains” — Mentos at the trial and, more recently, contraband Milk Duds.)Weinstein’s reputation for sexual trespass had started early, when he was a concert promoter in Buffalo. As he aged, his influence waned — the whole movie industry waned — just as he was seeking younger prey, from a cohort that “increasingly spent their free time on social networks like Facebook,” Auletta reminds, “rather than going to the movies.”After the producer, then in his 60s, lunged from his office couch at Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a 22-year-old Miss Italy finalist, in 2015 — “when he reached for her breasts like he was at an all-you-can-eat buffet,” as Auletta puts it — she did what many previous women who had been in her position, scared of Weinstein’s towering power, had been loath to do: She called the police. A publicist’s attempt to discredit Gutierrez was met with indignant cries that she was being “slut-shamed.” The fourth wave of feminism had arrived with a big splash, pulling Weinstein and his ilk into the undertow.And yet the male foreman of the jury that convicted Weinstein, Auletta points out, cited the testimony and behavior of male witnesses, not female victims — “suggesting,” Auletta writes, “that ‘believe women’ may face a steep uphill climb.’” He proposes instead “listen to women”; but one key woman’s voice is cast as soul-crushingly loud.Searching for Rosebud, Auletta alights, for lack of better explanations, on the Weinstein brothers’ flame-haired and apparently flame-tempered mother, Miriam (for whom their company was named, along with their milder father, Max, a diamond cutter who died of a heart attack at 52). A childhood friend told Auletta that Harvey referred to Miriam as “Momma Portnoy,” after the shrill character in Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”Bob, who somehow avoided growing into a “beast,” as Harvey is repeatedly described here, allows for the possibility of Miriam’s frustration at her life’s limitations. “She could have been Sheryl Sandberg or one of these C.E.O.s of a company. She had that kind of smarts,” he told Auletta. Instead, she proudly brought rugelach to her sons’ headquarters, and had an epitaph worthy of Dorothy Parker: “I don’t like the atmosphere or the crowd.”As there was a roving “fifth Beatle,” so there were a series of Miramax executives nicknamed the “third brother” — loyalists who helped to enable bad behavior — and, chillingly, a sort of “conveyor system to funnel women” to Weinstein’s hotel suites. If you’re not interested in the NC-17 and often disgusting particulars of what happened in those suites, nor in the headsmacking convolutions of nondisclosure agreements, perhaps you’d prefer one of the disgraced protagonist’s recommendations from the more tasteful era he worshiped, Elia Kazan’s autobiography, “A Life,” or a book Weinstein was often seen carrying during trial preparation: “The Brothers Mankiewicz,” by Sydney Ladensohn Stern. Herman Mankiewicz is credited with the screenplay for “Citizen Kane”; his brother, Joe, wrote “All About Eve.”Recalling those great movies, and even some from Miramax’s glory days in the ’90s, feels dispiriting, as the pictures, to paraphrase “Sunset Boulevard,” continue to get smaller. Going along for the ride of Weinstein’s slow rise and fall, even with the able Auletta at one’s side, can feel even more dispiriting, like getting on one of those creaky roller coasters at a faded municipal playland. More

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      in Theater

      Kenward Elmslie, Poet and Librettist, Dies at 93

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      He collaborated on operas with Jack Beeson and Ned Rorem and published numerous poetry books. Late in life, he was victimized by theft.Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poetry, opera librettos and stage musicals, and who late in life made headlines when his chauffeur bilked him out of millions of dollars and several valuable artworks, including one by Andy Warhol, died on June 29 at his home in the West Village. He was 93.The poet Ron Padgett, a friend since the 1960s, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Elmslie had been dealing with dementia for many years.Mr. Elmslie, a grandson of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, became interested in musical theater while in high school, and in 1952 he met and became a lover of John Latouche, a lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and others and had numerous Broadway credits. Mr. Elmslie is said to have helped Mr. Latouche on some of his projects, generally uncredited.After Mr. Latouche’s death in 1956, Mr. Elmslie continued to live in the house they had shared in Vermont, alternating between there and Manhattan. And he began to have success himself as a lyricist and librettist.He provided the libretto for the Jack Beeson opera “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” which was first performed by the Juilliard Opera Theater in New York in 1957. In 1965 he worked with Mr. Beeson again, on “Lizzie Borden,” an embellished version of the famed ax-murder case, which premiered that year at City Center in New York. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.“The performers, the composer, the librettist, the designer and the director shared the bows at the end,” Howard Klein wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Many bravos were heard.”Ellen Faull and Richard Krause in a scene from the Jack Beeson opera “Lizzie Borden,” for which Mr. Elmslie wrote the libretto. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.NET Opera, via PhotofestMr. Elmslie’s other opera credits included the libretto for Ned Rorem’s “Miss Julie” (1965). He also dabbled in songwriting — his “Love-Wise,” written with Marvin Fisher, was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1959 — and in theater, even accumulating a Broadway credit as book writer and lyricist for “The Grass Harp,” a musical based on a Truman Capote novel that opened in 1971 but, unloved by critics, closed days later.W.C. Bamberger, in the introduction to “Routine Disruptions,” a 1998 collection of Mr. Elmslie’s poems and lyrics, wrote that it was during lulls in his opera and lyric-writing work that Mr. Elmslie began trying his hand at poetry. He was plugged into the New York art and literary scene and had befriended Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and other poets. His first collection, “Pavilions,” appeared in 1961, followed by more than a dozen others, including “Motor Disturbance” (1971) and “Tropicalism” (1975).In the 1970s, as editor of Z Press and its annual Z Magazine, Mr. Elmslie published many of the poets he admired. His own work defied categorization. There was plenty of wit, as in “Touche’s Salon,” which shamelessly dropped names to evoke a 1950s gathering at Mr. Latouche’s penthouse:Meet Jack Kerouac. Humpy and available.His novel On The Road is unreadable. And unsalable.John Cage is sober, Tennessee loaded.Better not ask how his last flop show did.But his more serious poetry could be ambitious, as well as dense. Mr. Ashbery once said that it was like the notes of “a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.”Mr. Elmslie came to combine his various hats — librettist, songwriter, poet — both in his books, some of which were collaborations with visual artists, and in his poetry readings, which might find him in costume delivering a song in addition to reading his verses. Susan Rosenbaum, reviewing his 2000 book, “Blast From the Past: Stories, Poems, Song Lyrics & Remembrances,” in Jacket magazine, noted that the printed page didn’t do justice to his wide-ranging interests.“For an artist as multitalented as Elmslie, the book is a limiting format: One wants to see and hear his musical works in performance, to visit the galleries where his visual collaborations are displayed,” she wrote. “But the very ability to elicit this desire — to reveal poetry’s affinities with song, theater and visual art — is a measure of the talent of this unique poet.”Kenward Gray Elmslie was born on April 27, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, William, met Constance Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer’s youngest daughter, when he was working as a tutor for another of the Pulitzer children. They married in 1913.Kenward grew up in Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C., and graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with an English degree. In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, he mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. More