Interview: Tovah Feldshuh On The Creation of LILYVILE: MOTHER, DAUGHTER, AND OTHER ROLES I'VE PLAYED

For nearly fifty years Tovah Feldshuh has been entertaining Broadway audiences. Making her debut on The Great White Way in the musical Cyrano, Ms. Feldshuh has continually returned to Broadway, garnering four nominations for the Antoinette Perry Award, all the while working on film, television, and the stages of regional theaters and nightclubs. This great American actress has spent her life giving the world her art as a storyteller, in one way or another.

Well, her resume just got bigger.

Never one to rest on past achievements, Tovah Feldshuh has taken her act to the page and written her first book - a memoir titled LILYVILLE: MOTHER, DAUGHTER, AND OTHER ROLES I'VE PLAYED. Officially released yesterday, April 13th, the book has already been singled out for excellence by Amazon and by Good Morning America. Feldshuh's maiden voyage as an author has produced a fascinating and wildly entertaining book with a unique trajectory and format that she described in a telephone interview with me on March 28th, one filled with laughter and that irreplaceable, inimitable Tovah Feldshuh zest for life.

This interview has been edited for space and content.

Tovah Feldshuh, welcome back to Broadway World: Thank you for chatting with us today!

My pleasure, Stephen Mosher. Thank you for the kind call.

You are one of the leading ladies of the American theater and also of New York cabaret - many actors who work in those rooms during the last year have turned to the internet as a creative outlet. Did you do any of that or was working on this book your sole source of creativity for the last year?

I have had the honor of recording quite a few concerts on zoom. One for the greater Ann Arbor United Jewish appeal, another one for the San Diego Music Festival, and a third one's coming up in Chicago. So those are my TV gigs, but I did them alone with the camera crew, in my living room, and sometimes at the wonderful Birdland nightclub.

So Lilyville is your life story as seen through your relationship with your mother. Would you classify this as an autobiography or a memoir?

It's absolutely a memoir, that's what gives a writer freedom. I'm a first-time author, but that's what gives me tremendous freedom because a memoir is as you see it. I didn't want to write a Broadway actor's, normal autobiography, chronological, et cetera. I wanted to write something that would stop the conveyor belt like any actor wants when they audition they want to stop the conveyor belt. I thought seeing my life through the lens of my relationship with my mother and my mother's relationship with me, (and she lived to over 103 so she had tons of wisdom - caustic wisdom) would have the possibility of hitting the universal core of the parent-child relationship. We had a very interesting 65-year relationship. She lived a long life that had quite an arc. She started out as a very shy, quiet, modest woman who didn't fully communicate with her daughter verbally. Once my father died in 1996, she burgeoned like her namesake. She became the Lily she should have been all her life -she just bloomed and ascended to the throne the matriarch of our family, which was a huge leap and thrill for all of us. And as I Chronicle that arc, we're dealing with 110 years of American women's history from 1911 to 2021: my mother was born before suffrage and I was born in the lap of women's liberation. My mother was born before World Aar One, lived through the Spanish flu, The Roaring Twenties, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, and World War II, all before she was 30 years old. Historically, she had quite an amazing life.

She met my father at NYU when she was 17 and he was 18. They would elope on January 28th, 1933: I have the receipt from the New Yorker hotel that she saved from their first night together as man and wife- it is one of the illustrations in Lilyville. They then live together secretly for two years, when he was at Harvard Law School, announced their engagement in 1935, and got publicly married on the rooftop of the San Moritz Hotel, June 14th, 1935. Pretty spectacular.

What I've learned about losing a parent - if they've given you the best they've got and you have imbibed their virtues, you can have the privilege of making them ubiquitous, of putting them anywhere you want. I visit my mother by the sea. I visit my father by a tree in our beautiful Central Park. They can be everywhere for you when they're no longer contained in their body, and more importantly, you can share the best of them with your audience, if you feel it will benefit them. Obviously, I hope that anybody who's interested in the mother-daughter relationship or a parent-child relationship will get a lot out of Lilyville. And in honor of our theatre community, I have written it in three acts with two intermissions. I do not have chapters; I have scenes, I do not have an introduction; I have an overture. I do not have an afterward; I have Exit Music. I do not have acknowledgments; I have a cast party with honored guests where I thank all the people who made this book possible.

Tell me about the elopement and the later marriage ... was there a "living in sin" point for Mom and Dad, and if so, how do you approach that in the book?

My mother was a virgin till the night she eloped with my father. My father was still at Harvard, they had no money to get married but they wanted to sleep together. So they went down to City Hall and got hitched. She came back to my grandmother, who was British, and she said, "Mummy, I have married Sidney Feldshuh" and my grandmother said, "Just forget it. Absolutely just forget it." And she said, "No, he's my husband, and I'm going with him tonight." And they went to the New Yorker Hotel and launched a marital love affair that would last 63 years. Nobody knew about the secret marriage. Nobody for sure in Dad's family. The Feldshuh's from Patterson, New Jersey never knew that he had married Lillian Kaplan on January 28th - even when he was dying - the day before he died, I said, "Daddy, you're going to tell your sisters, right? About your elopement?" He put his hands to his lips, and went, "Ssssssshh." (Laughing)

You talked about how Lillian blossomed after your dad's death, but she was obviously a woman of great resolve and grit: to what would you attribute that change in her attitude?

My mother was born into an era when women were still in corsets. My mother was brought up in a time where your fate was decided by whom you married, your fate was determined by your match. And for her to marry - a Harvard lawyer who was admitted to the Law School under a strict quota system and even won a scholarship there, was fantastic in my mother's eyes. She knew they had great possibilities as a couple.

In the first years of their marriage, they were poorer than church mice and lived on whatever money they had to commute between Cambridge and New York. Two years later, when they publicly married on the rooftop of the St Moritz on Central Park South, they did so at three o'clock in the afternoon serving tea sandwiches, champagne, and wedding cake, a modest but classy affair.

Then they sailed to Europe, probably at least second class, and moved into a parlor floor of a mansion on 85th and Park Avenue. They had a living room, dining room, and the pantry was turned into a kitchen and a bathroom. They always had class and vision, they just didn't have the money! Not until Sidney became a successful lawyer. By the time I was born, they built a big house in Scarsdale where I was brought up. Lily was taught to let daddy have the spotlight and be happy with the warmth of that light near her. She gave Dad primary focus. I was raised in a patriarchal family. My father would regale us with stories of the courtroom, and my mother was this marvelous, pretty, dutiful, quiet wife. The only thing - she didn't tell me (I don't think she told David my elder brother or me) but she didn't tell me that she loved me until I was 18. When I was at Sarah Lawrence, I said, "Do you love me?" And she said, "Do I love you? I take you to your voice lessons, and I take you to Hebrew school, and I take you to your dance lessons, I take you everywhere." Her response was right out of Fiddler. The trouble was, she did not emotionally express her love in verbal accolades. It was very difficult on me, as a young child, and very silent. When my father died, my mother was a fantastic nurse, fantastic. She ushered him through the last 10 months of his life, which were horrendous for him as he died from the effects of a stroke. She was so capable, quiet but capable. He would pass away, and she became the only one left of all our aunts and uncles - I had six uncles and six aunts (it's a lot to grow up with) and they had all died. My mother was the one senior matriarch left for the Kaplan-Feldshuhs and the family gave her the helm. She was very funny, she was very wise, and she didn't ask for anything from anybody. So she was irresistible. She never tried to take advantage of other people or take more than her share. She let daddy have the light, let him reign. That's why she was not expressive during our childhood.

You mentioned the mother-daughter relationship, which is historically a complicated one. If you were going to write one high concept sentence about the Lily-Tovah relationship as a book club description, how would you say it?

This is the story of a relationship, perhaps the most primal connection of all, a mother and a daughter, a story told like any tale: a map across time, marked with destinations, rest stops, wrong turns, and, at last, coming home. It's an ancient journey, as we know, but it's one worth telling. It's one I want to tell now, through the voice of my mother, Lily, who chose to remain silent for decades. I want to give her voice and excavate the canyons of our relationship. My mother lived a limited life. She was a great wife, house executive, and a very beautiful and loving mother... she just didn't tell us she loved us--ever-- and that was a little bit of a problem. I could also put the book club description another way: "How to aspire to be on Broadway, television, and film, have a husband and two children and still get along with your mother. My mother believed you couldn't have it all, and I lived as if you can."

Growing up as the daughter of Lily Feldshuh, what did the experience show you about what to do and what not to do when it came to raising your own children?

My biggest incite is the value of unconditional love. That was a big one: to make sure the children knew I loved them no matter what - and I expressed it in a way they could hear me. I made it very clear to my children that I love them because they breathe! Our home was one-stop shopping for unconditional love from their mother and from their father Andrew as well. When the children were outside the house they had to earn the love of other people by being decent people, by gauging a room, by seeing what's wanted and needed in a space, by contributing, by being polite. . I'm sure my mother loved us but we couldn't hear her: I was verbal, and she would show her love through deeds. I don't mean deeds like buying me a beautiful dress - I mean, like taking me to Hebrew School, giving me breakfast. I think she confused devotion with the expression of love. I have lots to thank her for, particularly as I grew older because my mother and I found peace. Once Daddy fell sick, we really had 20 years of an extraordinary relationship. She taught me how to care for my mate, G-d forbid anything should happen to him. Having watched my mother try to save my father's life, I feel totally equipped to fight for the lives of those I love. Actually, my brother and I successfully did save my mother's life - it's a big chapter in the book. What else did I learn from Momma Lily? How to project inner strength. I've never been a victim to the casting couch. I've never been seduced in order to get a job. Some signals must've gone out that you didn't mess with me. That came from my parenting, I think a lot of it from my mother, who had tremendous rectitude and a silent strength, and I'm very grateful for it.

You've brought us around to your life in show business. Truman Capote once wrote a book about his famous friends that cost him all of his friendships, and Ann-Margret once wrote a biography in which critics said that she was too nice about everyone. What was your headspace, when it came time to write about the theater and the famous people? How did you gauge which direction to go?

A lot of LILYVILLE has to do with Lily. There are Lily-isms and Tovah-isms between each scene in the book. One of the Lily-isms would be her opinion on 54 Below - "When I was making my debut with Michael Feinstein's prestigious supper club, 54 Below, in New York City, my mother said, "54 Below, that's not a theater, that's a temperature. My daughter, the big Broadway star, now she's playing an igloo!" So that was my mother. I took it to Miss. Saigon and she said, "Isn't the point of theater NOT to have the helicopter?!" (Laughing) She was hilarious, just hilarious. My mother and I went to JFK airport to pick up my daughter, Amanda, who was returning from a summer program in Spain. Amanda, like Lily, has size C bosoms. Amanda came through the gate. My mother took one look at her and one look at me with my size A cup acorns and she says, "Well, I guess it skips a generation!" Welcome to Lilyville! I talk about Patti LuPone(love her), Chris Plummer and Warren Beatty. I talk a lot about Andrew Lincoln and The Walking Dead. They're two famous directors (but you have to get the book to find out who!) that I did not write about kindly. They willfully humiliated me in public, in front of my community. They lacerated me about the level of my work. I guess I wasn't very good, I was very young when all this happened, but the deprecation persisted for two very, very, tough years. I survived it and I got to New York in the chorus of the musical Cyrano starring Chris Plummer and figured I'd be in the chorus the rest of my life, I made my debut at the Palace Theater in 1973, and miraculously, I started to get every job I auditioned for after that. I was a lead in an ill-fated musical called Brainchild with Michel Legrand and Hal David as composer and lyricist - we, unfortunately, closed in Philadelphia and didn't come in. On the heels of Brainchild, I got Dreyfus In Rehearsal, Rodgers and Hart and, Yentl. I was offered Rex without an audition by Richard Rogers because I had worked for him before. One role after another, spiraling, spiraling, spiraling upward- I was shocked that anybody thought I was any good at all because the first picture of myself was that I was never going to be an actor. I might've been a circus performer, but I was never gonna make it as an actor. But I just didn't give up. Our family doesn't give up. All the "no"s, all the "You're not getting this job" - even when I audition now, 50 years later, it doesn't pierce me, the "no" is a familiar thing. Defeat with my mother was so much a part of my childhood, that defeat in an audition was like a feather compared to not pleasing Lily. So her black hole of silence made me rather resilient - you know, that which doesn't kill us, makes us stronger - it made me rather resilient. Like the german doll stehaufmännchen, you push it down it gets right back up. There were defeats: I didn't get the lead in The Winds of War. I was very close to it, then they gave it to Ali McGraw instead. Maybe because she was more famous or beautiful, whatever. That hurt but I didn't give up. I just kept going. Helen Mirren was just announced to play Golda Meir in a big feature about the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That was the central theme of Golda's Balcony that I performed on Broadway as Prime Minister Golda Meir. If you are going to cede a role to another actor, at least cede it to the best. Helen Mirren is the best and I wish her well.

So in effect, by withholding her verbal expression of love, by making you stronger, your mother fortified your resolve to make your career really happen.

That's right. The experience of my mother limbered me up for "The No." If an actor cannot withstand "The No", you're not going to have a career. I mean, how many zoom auditions have I and my colleagues done during the pandemic, and how many jobs have we gotten from our zoom auditions? Very difficult to do. I just did a miniseries for HBO called Scenes From A Marriage - I was thrilled to play Oscar Isaac's mother, thrilled to be chosen, but they were pretty hot to trot before I even got the meeting with them. I began my work in a time when we were in the room - you always went, you met, you weren't even put on tape. You'd be with the producers, they'd fly into New York. It was very person to person.

Are you finding it difficult adjusting to this change?

Well, If I want to play the game, what choice do I have? If I want to audition for a feature that's due on Wednesday, I have a wonderful assistant, I know how to do Photoshop, or I can do it on my phone. I bought a ring light because my young assistants inform me how to keep up with the time. I was born before the fax machine, so... (laughing) I am constantly learning. I have a Twitter account, I have a Facebook account, I do Instagram. My wonderful publishers are sending books to the people they call the influencers. An influencer, to me, was like Henry Kissinger. I have to say I was at college in the time of Andy Warhol and he predicted 15 minutes of fame for everyone and predicted elements like reality TV - he was quite brilliant, and his predictions have come true.

You have a gift for resilience. You are able to roll with every twist and bend.

What else am I going to do, dearest Stephen? You know, what else am I going to do? If you look at Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who started out as a 10-year-old on a Kindertransport out of Germany into Switzerland as one of 300 out of 500,000 other children under Hitler's Reich who would perish. After 6 years in a Swiss orphanage, she earned a certificate to be a Swiss domestic--- and she ended up first as a sharpshooter for the Haganah and then as Dr. Ruth Westheimer, world-renowned sex therapist. You want to talk about a positive mental attitude? Also, look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the last great role I had before the pandemic - she is another one. She had to teach nine male justices that gender equality did exist. This was when much of the public didn't know what gender equality even looked like.... and she never gave up fighting for it.

You must've been proud to play her.

I'm very proud to have played her. I hope in my lifetime, I will get to play Ruth Westheimer, that would be a big thrill for me. I love to play these women because to spend time inside their souls is a privilege. They're fantastic fully formed extraordinary adults.I feel privileged to play characters who are so life-enhancing - for sure Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Dr. Ruth Westheimer are two of them. I'm still doing those RBG pushups! (Laughing)

I want to ask you a couple of questions about the craft of writing this book. You have always written your own nightclub acts. Do you find that writing a scripted work is greatly different from writing a narrative one?

Oh my God. I've only written monologues, and very often I have comedians look at it to punch it up, to help me, or I will start improvising a character like grandma Ada, and I'll have a very good writer with me and they'll help me organize the text i create from the improv. You can imagine what it was like to sit there alone with a young assistant and start to speak the book, and then make it cohesive. Finally, I began speaking the text to someone who helped me string the book together- he said to me a very crucial sentence: "What do you know best?" I said, "The best thing I know is theater." And he said, "Organize this book as a theater piece." That was the breakthrough. I wrote the book in three acts, with two intermissions. I had the support of great allies like Lauren Marino, my editor at Hachette or my fantastically gifted colleague Jeff Harnar for whom I performed every word of text. Then there are my extraordinary assistants. I"m talking the book and they're typing furiously getting it all down for nearly 24 months. My current assistant Oliver Shaulson happens to be a linguistics major from Yale, so as we were wrapping up the manuscript didn't I get lucky? We were in the final proofing and he synchronistically came into my life saying, "No, an Oxford comma has to go here, and a semicolon has to go there." Believe me, he was very helpful to me as well as the Hachette proofreaders. I could not have done LILYVILLE alone. I'm so grateful for the three friends that surrounded me for their support and excellent feedback.

Put a picture in my head of what the daily sort of writing process is for Tovah the author.

Well, I was out in Quogue till Thanksgiving. So in January of last year, that's 14 months ago, I rewrote the whole manuscript. I started again, that's where I had my breakthrough about organizing it like a theater piece. I rewrote the entire manuscript so that they were threaded together in this theatrical structure. I would get up, swim my half-mile - and as the months wore on eventually three-quarters of a mile a day, I would get on with my assistant at 12 noon and start to write. I'd just say, let's go there. So I'd dictate, and with a few breaks, I would write, basically, from twelve to five. It was grueling. The manuscript was finished 15 days before it was due - I gave it to my publisher early, August 15th instead of September 1st. Lauren Marino my editor said, "Make this change, this change, this change but basically this is amazing." She felt very good about the book. I made the changes and on the day it was due, September 1st, we gave it to her again.

It's a 320-page manuscript and my editor Lauren Marino said, "You know, it's a little long, but it's good. So if it's good we're going to go with it." She also gave me 16 pages of beautiful paper and color illustrations. It's been a thrill. I don't know, without the pandemic, if I would've been able to devote the time. All I did was write, and I didn't do my first concert till this year. I didn't start singing again till late January 2021... my last concert was in Houston, February 22nd, 2020. I got COVID, probably from those flights, my beloved musical director got it, too, we got it together. I recuperated by March 19th and moved out to Quogue until the end of the year. And that's where Lilyville was totally revamped - at least six days a week, often seven. I barely took a day off: I didn't give up. Stehaufmännchen.

So when's the book LILYVILLE: MOTHER, DAUGHTER, AND OTHER ROLES I'VE PLAYED released?

The book is coming out April 13th and 13 is a very lucky number for the Jewish People. It marks the age where Jewish boys and girls step into womanhood and manhood - the bar and bat mitzvah. . April 13th is a great omen then my mother was born April 18th. Spring will be here, and LILYVILLE is the perfect gift for Mother's Day. It reflects on the universal relationship between a mother and a daughter, a parent and a child. You know, we need our parents. There's no understudy for a mother.

It is currently women's history month. What is something about the woman that Lily was that makes you proud?

The fact that I am the daughter of a woman who was the child of Jewish immigrants. She was born on a dining room table at 1534 Charlotte Street in the Bronx, she survived all the incredible vicissitudes of her early life and carved a life out for herself that was based on the American dream. She gave birth to two children that then could go forth from atop her shoulders forward into history toward a more egalitarian society. Mom might've been quiet but she was capable and she was strong. She gave us that sense of strength. And of course, by not overpraising us, she made us strong. She made us generate our own self-worth from within ourselves. During the six decades that Lily and I grew to understand one another, expectations of women were transformed again and again, by the women's movement, and the sexual revolution, by the subsequent mandate that women must have it all. My mother and I are emblematic of the way these changes created a divide between us, a divide between generations, and the way it is possible to bridge that divide through patience, compassion, and empathy. When Sidney died, his spotlight moved over to her. But long before that, my mother turned to me, when I was 40, and said, "How much longer are you going to blame me?" and I said, "Not another moment." And I"m thinking, "Blame is the lowest form of consciousness." It mental discipline to push the delete button when there's discord, to forgive, to let go. There's a Persian saying I love "A branch, in order to bear fruit, must learn to bend." From different trees, my mother Lily and I bent toward each other more and more with the passage of time, until we were intertwined and the fruitfulness of our relationship nourished everybody around us. I hope it will nourish the reader. This book has a happy ending after a long struggle.

I want to flip that last question around and ask you, what is something about Amanda, the woman that makes you proud?

Oooh, my Amanda, oh my girl. Well, let's start with the fact that she was a major in physics at MIT with a 94.5 average graduating in three and a half years, (said the Jewish mother with chest puffed out over the erudition of her daughter.) My boy's no slouch either - Brandon went to Harvard, and to Oxford, and then back to Harvard Business School. So they're both intellectually extremely capable. Amanda lives like her father and her mother in a two-income home. She's married to the most fabulous man, Joe Ryzowy, they have two young children Rafael and Camille, and she is extremely organized to take on her multi-faceted life... You know, when I would put them to bed, I would put into Brandon and Amanda what I hoped for them. I would say, "I'm the luckiest mother in the world because I have the most empathic daughter" and Amanda would say, "What's empathic, mommy?" I'd say, "That means to feel the tenor of a room, to feel what is wanted and needed in the space. To think to yourself, what can I do to contribute to it? How can I make things better?" The other one was: don't leave something just as you found it, leave it better than you found it. That's what she does for me. I'm mad for my children and they've been very good to me. And then I have this daughter-in-law Jami Kirk - who is simply marvelous to us and visits us every week with Brandon and her delicious daughter Sidney Mei. I can't tell you what joy that gives us. She and Brandon are devoted children as are Amanda and Joel. Andrew and I are deeply grateful to be blessed with their presence in our lives.

Tovah, what has been your secret to not only surviving but doing so as a champion, in a male-dominated world and a business

I don't give up. I tried to empower people first so they can do what I need them to do. It's like my friend, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, always says, "Don't be around negative people." So what I've done in my life is try to make people feel good around me from a basis of truth. My job - my friend - is to make you feel good around me. And then if you ever need somebody and they remember you kindly, usually they're good to you. Sony just gave me the permission to sing on my audiobook. I have to pay a very reasonable fee, but I get to sing "Where's The Bathroom" because somebody at Sony is kind and only took 48 hours to get back to me when we needed a quick permission. Sometimes these things take weeks to go through. So that's one way I've survived: by making people feel valued and respected when I am with them. Particularly now, with COVID we just have to go forth with empathy. When I pass a veteran who's lying on the streets saying, "I'm a vet. I will take money. I will take food. I will take any proposal of marriage." So I said, "is it going to kill me to open my purse, and give the guy a dollar? No.

We have all these jazz bands going in the park - I have enough money to give them something. How can I support Jon Ossoff and Reverend Warnock and Stacey Abrams? They need us. Georgia needs us, we have to preserve one man, one vote. So how can I help? So that's one way I've survived: just trying to be decent. And the other way is that I work very diligently. You give me a role, you can count on me. I will come through for you. I will come through cause I will not stop until it's right. I will not stop.

Tovah, I'm so glad that you said yes to this interview. You are a light in all our lives.

You know, Andy tripped a couple of months ago, it was before the pandemic when we were leaving the theater; as we were crossing eighth Avenue, he went down and in five seconds - they say New Yorkers aren't kind - in five seconds everybody flooded toward my husband to pick him up. I think that's what life's about. You have to try to have the courage to lead with love, not with fear... the courage to lead with love and connection. As our country gets well, my big advice (besides buying Lilyville) to your readers is to take a vacation inside the United States. I think it's your safest bet to stay well. Once you're vaccinated and can get on an airplane and feel comfortable ---visit the beautiful USA. Our country is getting in better and better shape - the stuff that this administration has done in three months, man, alive, I take my hat off to them! We all owe them a thank you note. So God bless this administration.

I'm with you on that one.

Visit the Tovah Feldshuh website HERE.

Buy LILYVILLE... on Amazon HERE.

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