Susan Lacy: Of 'American Masters'
Susan Lacy: Of 'American Masters'
As creator and executive producer of the PBS award-winning documentary series "American Masters," Susan Lacy may live in the cutting room, but her eye is fixed on the year 2097.
"What I'm trying to do is make a television library of 20th century cultural giants," she said, seated at the head of the big dining room table in her comfortable Sag Harbor house.
"I want to create an archive that, 100 years from now, history will prove has focused on the people who fundamentally changed the way we think, hear, see, and live. As well as writers, artists, and musicians, it will also include architects, actors, dancers, city planners, and media people."
National Icons
"American Masters," produced by Thirteen/WNET for PBS, premiered in 1986. It has broadcast 75 documentary biographies of such national icons as Charlie Chaplin, Louis Armstrong, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Buster Keaton, Billie Holliday, Eugene O'Neill, D. W. Griffith, Helen Hayes, Aaron Copland, Philip Johnson, and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Albert Einstein also made the cut, for elevating science into art. Recently the series profiled William Styron, and, the week before last, the television pioneer Jack Paar.
Like other notable PBS series - "Great Performances," "American Playhouse," "Masterpiece Theater" - "American Masters," which is distributed throughout the world, has been showered with honors.
Ms. Lacy's programs have won 20 Emmy nominations, five Emmy Awards, three Oscar nominations and one Oscar, nine Cine, Golden Eagles, and three coveted Peabody Awards, of which she is especially proud.
Her first Peabody came 11 years ago for "Unknown Chaplin," a portrait of the cinematographer consisting only of outtakes from his films: what the master, in his fastidiousness, had rejected.
In 1990, "John Hammond: From Bessie Smith to Bruce Springsteen" won another Peabody. When the legendary record producer (father of the blues singer) introduced Benny Goodman to Lionel Hampton in 1935, he spearheaded the integration of African-American jazz musicians into formerly whites-only bands, forever changing the sound and face of American music.
A third Peabody went to "Paul Simon: Born at the Right Time." Made with the cinematographer Christian Blackwood, it documented the rock star's 1991 world concert tour.
Inscrutability Bridged
The ambitious tour, with an international band of 17 musicians, "was the first foreign production allowed into China since 1945," Ms. Lacy said. "The police were nervous, and the Communist leaders sat inscrutably in those big chairs with the doilies on them."
"When the concert began, the Hong Kong element, who knew all the songs from black market tapes, started to swing. Then the place went wild. Even the Communist leaders smiled a little."
"In the end it turned out everyone knew the Chinese words to 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' and belted it out like one big happy family, which shows you music's tremendous power to communicate."
Two Musicians
Ms. Lacy was born in New York City but grew up all over the country as her German-born parents sought their fortunes in post-World War II America. Wilfred Wagner, her father, a musician and a Jew, had fled Nazi Germany during Hitler's rise to power, returning as a member of the U.S. Army occupation forces in 1945.
Smitten by her mother's concert piano playing, the young soldier paid a call. "These two musicians fell in love," Ms. Lacy said. "My mother was neither an anti-Semite nor a Nazi, and I do believe there's a certain naivete, among artists, particularly about politics."
After emigrating to America the Wagners, determined not to "settle down and buy gadgets," subjected Ms. Lacy and her younger brother, Thom, a film composer and writer, to the insecurities of the bohemian life. They failed at various quixotic ventures and eventually went bankrupt.
A 'Normal' Life
Her father finally got a steady job at a college in Virginia, the first time Ms. Lacy had lived in one place long enough to be invited to a birthday party, but that moment of stability ended, too. The county in which they were living refused to desegregate its schools, and her parents, perhaps mindful of Nazi Germany, moved to the North.
Settled in a normal split-level house on a cul-de-sac in a Baltimore suburb, with her father ensconced in a food distribution company that supplied the Pentagon, Ms. Lacy and her family at last were able to put down roots.
"Things really began to get nice," she said, adding that her father never lost his artist's soul despite the business suit. "My parents were making a bourgeois statement for their children's sake, but their hearts weren't really in it."
Early Career
After attending the Women's College of the University of Virginia, where she majored in American studies, she moved to Washington, D.C. While studying for an M.A. at George Washington University, she worked for both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In 1975 she married Bill Lacy and spent four years in Rome, where he was head of the American Academy; back in New York, he served as president of Cooper Union. The couple had one child, Jessica, now at Smith College. They were divorced in 1986. Since then Ms. Lacy has merged households with Halsted Welles, a New York City landscape designer, and his college-aged offspring, Gwynn and Ian.
Telling A Good Story
Ms. Lacy joined Channel 13 in 1979 as senior program executive on its "Great Performances" series, later working as director of program development for "American Playhouse."
Stints with the East Coast office of the Sundance Institute and with Time-Life Video, where she was the consulting producer for Time-Warner's experiments in long-form documentaries, deepened her experience.
These "purely executive" positions made her want to get involved with the "actual making" of her own documentary series, she said, and in the early '80s Ms. Lacy got the idea for "American Masters."
"I wanted to approach documentaries as real films, taking the time and attention to tell a good story well."
Everyone thought she was crazy. Nobody would watch a series about artists, they said. But her first show, "Private Conversations: The Making of the Television Adaptation of 'Death of a Salesman' with Dustin Hoffman," took its bow in 1986.
Work And Life
"We're trying to create programs that search for that elusive and magic place where an artist's life and work collide," said Ms. Lacy.
"It is in that collision that the spirit of an artist exists. It is that spirit that we, and by extension our audiences, want to experience."
In 1995 Ms. Lacy put on a director's hat as well, making her debut with "Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval." Future shows are in the works, among them one on Leonard Bernstein, due next year.
Over the years "American Masters" has received rave reviews for the depth and vision of its documentaries. "Nothing less than astounding," said TV Guide.
The Christian Science Monitor weighed in with "The 'American Masters' series . . . documents 20th century creativity with a tenacious creativity of its own. Taking on individual artists rather than movements, it has provided a broad-based vision of American artistry. . . ."
Such a sweeping format has its stumbling blocks, however. There is the obligation to reflect the diversity of our culture, and the practical demands of putting a show on the air.
"Looking back over the series, I see I haven't always chosen well; there are people I would now pull out."
Her Favorites
Her favorite programs? "Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey," about a blacklisted Hollywood writer who came back from Skid Row to win three Oscars with "Midnight Cowboy," "Coming Home," and "Serpico."
"James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket," about an inner-city kid whose genius and social conscience triumphed over having been born triply cursed as "black, gay, and a writer," as he put it.
And "Martha Graham: A Dancer Revealed" about the transforming vision and inspiring indomitability of the woman who still reigned over American dance at age 94.
Sondheim Has Said Yes
As to the future, Mr. Lacy asked, "Well, a hundred years from now, who will we seem to have left out?" "Bob Dylan," she answered. "And Pollock and de Kooning. I was wrong to have shied away from people who'd already been 'done.' "
"Leonard Bernstein, as I said. His family hesitated because of his homosexuality. Stephen Sondheim has finally said yes, too, as have F. Scott Fitzgerald's relatives."
"Living artists sometimes hang back because our program may seem like a premature obituary, Ms. Lacy said. "As Martha Graham remarked, she'd 'rather live with the legend.' "
"But we emphasize the work, not the private life - we're never prurient - and we hope that, sooner or later, trust will prevail."
