This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 24, 2011 - Knight Landesman, publisher of Artforum magazine and a member of the artistic Landesman clan that put St. Louis on the international intellectual and performing arts map in the 1950s and early '60s, wrote a bittersweet note to his three brothers on Saturday.
It carried news of the death at 83 of their aunt, Frances Dietsch Landesman. Knight Landesman passed along the email he'd received from Mrs. Landesman's older son, Cosmo. In characteristic irreverent fashion, it said, "This morning Fran went off to that big gig in the sky." She died peacefully on Saturday (July 23, 2011) in the Duncan Terrace house in the Islington neighborhood of north London she and her family moved into "temporarily" in the mid-1960s, having left St. Louis for a talent tune-up.
"I hear it's often the case, one spouse goes, and the other gives up the ghost," Knight Landesman wrote his brothers. And indeed the mere five-month flicker of time between the deaths of Fran Landesman and her only recently late husband of 61 years, Jay, suggests there just may be a sliver of truth in the business about inextricably connected married couples dying in regrettably quick succession.
Fran Landesman lived a rich life. She was reared in an apartment on Central Park West, went to private preparatory schools in New York and studied at Temple University in Philadelphia and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She worked for a while in the fashion business, in which her family figured prominently. She married Jay Landesman in July 1950.
Despite that rather privileged upbringing, her life took a turn toward frustration. Jay Landesman and his family created in St. Louis a world of visual, musical, dramatic and intellectual delight on stage and off in their bistro, the Crystal Palace, in the heart of the long gone Gaslight Square, and Mrs. Landesman was in the middle of all the action and excitement. But Mrs. Landsman's nephew, Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said that while his aunt's songs were getting attention and eventually becoming famous, she wasn't quite so much so. Therein lay the frustration.
"Fran was in many ways the most talented of all" the artists in the Gaslight Square coterie, Rocco Landesman said. "She wasn't warm and fuzzy, and neither were her lyrics, which are acerbic and ironic." He said her work was original and important. "Everybody in the know knew that," he said. "The problem was, the whole world didn't know it.''
Shards of Gaslight Square and the Crystal Palace are found here and there, and thousands of cherished memories form an integral part of our artistic heritage. But as Rocco Landesman suggested, some of the most luminous, enduring and absolutely authentic remains are Mrs. Landsman's songs, those ephemeral currents of innovation and originality that stopped shows at the Palace, then floated out the doors into Olive Street, and from there, on out into posterity.
No shrinking violet, Mrs. Landesman gave vent to her resentments about her lack of celebrity, but as so many in her position have, she didn't sit around behaving tragically about it. Her nephew, a celebrated Broadway producer before going to Washington, said, "You have to give her credit. She couldn't sing a lick, but she went out and sang herself, often accompanied by Miles. She made you listen. She was an original."
She performed in New York and in Great Britain, and in 2008, impresario Jim Dolan brought Mrs. Landesman and her son, Miles, who accompanied her on guitar, to the Gaslight Theater in St. Louis. William Roth's theater -- a hotbed of ideas and dramatic virtuosity -- is on Boyle Avenue north of Lindell, a stone's throw from Olive Street and the ghosts of Gaslight. The Landesmans once lived just around the corner and a block west in Westminster Place before moving to London.
At the Landesmans' Gaslight performances, shows that could have been paralyzingly nostalgic were knife-sharp and thrilling.
"You wouldn't really know what you're in for when Landesman takes the stage. Her eyesight is poor, and she took the steps up to the stage carefully. Her son, the ebullient Miles Davis Landesman, is with her, and she took his arm Thursday evening, and ascended with caution.
"But in a twinkling she left her familial tether, and moved to the microphone with the sort of shoulders-back authority that comes from having been there a thousand-thousand times before. And then she began to sing, or to recite rhythmically, from her large repertory of poems and verse in a voice and with a style that reminds you a little bit of Piaf every now and again. In the end, however, it is pure Fran Landesman, a special, individual gift shared with us all."
Her sons, Cosmo and Miles, survive Mrs. Landesman. There is to be a Farrago Poetry SLAM dedicated to Mrs. Landesman at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art Foyer Bar in London at 7:30 p.m., Fri., Aug. 5. RADA is at 62-64 Gower Street, London, WC1E.