My Summer Reading: Playwright Alfred Uhry

Alfred Uhry, now 74, may boast the greatest ratio of accolades to output of just about any American playwright, having copped two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize across merely a handful of works and an Academy Award for the film version of his best-known play, Driving Miss Daisy; the movie itself won the Best Picture Oscar in 1989 and a further trophy for its beloved star, Jessica Tandy. This autumn, the era-spanning comedy-drama arrives back on the West End in the same starry version, headlined by Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, seen last year on Broadway. Immediately before that begins, the Uhry/Jason Robert Brown musical Parade - first seen locally four years ago at the Donmar - will have ended a revival of its own at the Southwark Playhouse. Call Uhry clearly the man for this London theatre season.

I'm working on the book for a Charles Aznavour musical about Toulouse-Lautrec, so I've been reading a biography of the painter called, oddly, Toulouse-Lautrec. What I kind of like about him is that he was funny and he hated people to feel sorry for him; he wasn't at all maudlin or morose; to that extent, he was kind of like Truman Capote. After all, he did say of himself, "I'm the only man you'll ever meet who's taller sitting down than standing up."

[Excerpt from Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life by Julia Frey (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1994)]

He showed other marks of abnormal physical development: very large nostrils, a thickened tongue, bulbous lips, a lisping speech impediment, a characteristic sniffle and an unfortunate tendency to drool.

Standing unsteadily in his underwear in the half-light, Lautrec might have appeared comic, or merely grotesque, except for the expression in his eyes. Well aware that they were unusually large and his only beautiful feature, he had developed the habit of taking off his pince-nez to gaze at a woman who interested him. They were such a dark brown that there was no difference in colour between the iris and the pupil and the effect was to intensify his gaze. They were quick to reflect his fluctuating moods, for his emotions were intense and easily visible. Melancholy and hostility could abruptly replace hilarity or tenderness. Though he hid behind a verbal barrier of witticisms and repartee, he was easy to offend.

Because of his handicap, Adèle de Toulouse-Lautrec tended to be overprotective of her son. She had always considered him her special "burden" and he remained so in her eyes even as an adult. But their relations were not easy. She seemed to encourage infantile behaviour from him, ambiguously giving into his whims, then provoking his rages with attempts to control him. In 1898, she had rented an apartment in Paris so she could be close to him. This apartment, only a few blocks from Montmartre, where his own studios were always located, was described by a relative as being "at the extreme limit of a neighbourhood where she could decently live".

• Find Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life on Amazon

I remember reading Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom, set in the American Midwest, and I thought that was terrific; I love the way that man writes. It's long, sure, but isn't it fun to get tangled up in something that you can't read in two days? People say that was a novel for our time, but I don't think it was anywhere near as calculating as that suggests; the fact is, you write what you're moved to write, and Freedom was a novel that I really couldn't put down.

[Excerpt from Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (HarperCollins 2010)]

Patty's mother was a professional Democrat. She later became a state assemblywoman, the Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children, and the Arts. Paradise for Joyce was an open space where poor children could go and do Arts at state expense. She was born Joyce Markowitz in Brooklyn in 1934 but apparently disliked being Jewish from the earliest dawn of consciousness. (Patty sometimes wondered if one reason that Joyce's voice always trembled was from struggling so hard all her life to not sound like Brooklyn.) Joyce got a scholarship to study liberal Arts in the woods of Maine, where she met Patty's exceedingly Gentile dad, whom she married at All Souls Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. When young Jack Kennedy got the Democratic nomination, in 1960, it gave Joyce a noble and stirring excuse to get out of a house that she couldn't seem to help filling up with babies. Then came civil rights, and Vietnam, and Bobby Kennedy - more good reasons to be out of a house that wasn't nearly big enough for four little kids plus a Barbadian nanny in the basement. Joyce went to her first national convention in 1968 as a delegate committed to dead Bobby. She served as county Party treasurer and later chairwoman and organized for Teddy in 1972 and 1980. Every summer, all day long, herds of volunteers tramped in and out of the house's open doors carrying boxes of campaign gear. Patty could practice dribbling and lay-ups for six hours straight without anybody noticing or caring.

Patty's father, Ray, was a lawyer and amateur humorist whose repertory included fart jokes and mean parodies of his children's teachers, neighbors, and friends. A torment he particularly enjoyed inflicting on Patty was mimicking the Barbadian, Eulalie, when she was just out of earshot, saying, "Stop de game now, stop de playin'," in a louder and louder voice, until Patty ran from the dinner table in mortification and her siblings shrieked with excitement. Endless fun could also be had ridiculing Patty's coach and mentor Sandy Mosher, whom Ray liked to call Saaaandra. He was constantly asking Patty whether Saaaandra had had any gentlemen callers lately or maybe, tee hee, tee hee, some gentlelady callers? Her siblings chorused, "Saaaandra, Saaaandra!" Other amusing methods of tormenting Patty were to hide the family dog, Elmo, and pretend that Elmo had been euthanized while Patty was at late basketball practice.

• Find Freedom on Amazon

I've actually already begun reading To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild's book about the First World War. I don't know how I got on to this, but it sounded good, which it is; something about it just appealed to me. If I see something in the Sunday [New York] Times or somebody tells me about a book, I write it down. This was one of those.

[Excerpt from To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain by Adam Hochschild (Macmillan 2011)]

Even though I was born long after it ended, the war always seemed a presence in our family. My mother would tell me about the wild enthusiasm of crowds at military parades when - at last! - the United States joined the Allies. A beloved first cousin of hers marched off to the sound of those cheers, to be killed in the final weeks of fighting; she never forgot the shock and disillusionment. And no one in my father's family thought it absurd that two of his relatives had fought on opposite sides of the First World War, one in the French army, one in the German. If your country called, you went.

My father's sister married a man who fought for Russia in that war, and we owed his presence in our lives to events triggered by it: the Russian Revolution and the bitter civil war that followed - after which, finding himself on the losing side, he came to America. We shared a summer household with this aunt and uncle, and friends of his who were also veterans of 1914-1918 were regular visitors. As a boy, I vividly remember standing next to one of them, all of us in bathing suits and about to go swimming, and then looking down and seeing the man's foot: all his toes had been sheared off by a German machine-gun bullet somewhere on the Eastern Front.

The war also lived on in the illustrated adventure tales that British cousins sent me for Christmas. Young Tim or Tom or Trevor, though a mere teenager whom the colonel had declared too young for combat, would bravely dodge flying shrapnel to carry that same wounded colonel to safety after the regiment, bagpipes playing, had gone "over the top" into no-man's-land. In later episodes, he always managed to find some way - as a spy or an aviator or through sheer boldness - around the deadlock of trench warfare.

• Find To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain on Amazon

• Book tickets for Driving Miss Daisy, at Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2, from 26 September

• Parade is running through 17 September at Southwark Playhouse, London SE1