September/October 2009
Alumni Profiles
Morrow Wilson ’61 Finds a Home in the Arts
By Nancy Christie
Although born in New York City in 1940 when his parents were “just passing through,” as he put it, it was 17 years before Morrow Wilson ’61 returned to the city that would become his home. During the intervening years, Wilson, along with his two younger brothers, Jim and Joe, was “in transit” — accompanying his parents to locations ranging from Putney, Vt., to Fayetteville, Ark., as well as numerous points in between.
Morrow Wilson ’61 brushes up on his Nöel Coward in his New York City living room. PHOTO: SINDY MORONEY“I don’t think we stayed any place longer than three years. Two years was the average,” Wilson recalls, explaining that the frequent moves were due as much to his father’s career as a freelance writer as to his parents’ inability to settle themselves happily in any one area.
As challenging as it was, Wilson’s peripatetic upbringing was responsible for two positive outcomes. It strengthened the bond among the Wilson boys and helped prepare him for the isolating aspect of his chosen career as a writer and performer.
“All of the arts, even acting, which I think is the most social of all, [isolates you],” he says. “But facing the blank screen or blank sheet of paper — it’s the toughest.”
As an adolescent, Wilson attended the expensive and exclusive Putney School, which he describes as “a farm at the top of a windswept mountain in Vermont. You would have to get up at 6 a.m. and shovel cow manure if you had Morning Barn!” he recalls. Although the school environment was eccentric, it led him to enter the College in 1957, through the influence of an older Putney student, Steve Scheiber ’60, with whom Wilson was close. “He had enrolled in Columbia and told me it was a really good school,” Wilson says.
The choice proved an important and fortuitous one. Not only did Columbia introduce Wilson to the theatrical world via Barnard, where he participated in productions put on by the Gilbert & Sullivan Society and the Minor Latham Playhouse, but also the English department (Wilson’s major) had what Wilson calls an “all-star” cast of educators.
“I had the benefit of the most marvelous English literature, American literature and humanities education that anyone could have. But more than anything else, Columbia was the right place for me to be,” he emphasizes, adding, “and it was New York City — the center of American culture.”
After graduation, Wilson opted to forgo graduate school, instead pursuing a career first in television and then advertising as part of his novel-writing plan.
“My notion always was that I was going to write serious novels about America’s real worlds, [but] I didn’t want to be a summer intern who goes to work for an advertising agency, say, and after three months as a receptionist, writes a scathing book about how terrible it is. I really wanted to be in the brains of it and know and be a part of the decisions that had to be made. And I was able to do those things and write those books.” However, due to the vagaries of the publishing industry, only M.I.M., a novel about the publishing industry that came out in 1974, has been published thus far.
For years, Wilson held a variety of high-level corporate positions before making the transition to full-time independent actor, singer and writer. “Then I began to take the kind of day jobs you associate with actors, like receptionist or switchboard operator or office manager, and be an actor at night. My acting really began to blossom, and I did 60 plays in a six-year period” — Off-Broadway and off-Off-Broadway productions that ranged from Shakespeare, Chekhov and O’Neill to plays by new playwrights.
Since then, Wilson has played a multitude of “roles” in the creative world, from novelist and playwright to actor, singer and entertainer. His most recent performances were in Measure for Measure in May and As You Like It in July, both at The Players in New York City. He also has worked with his wife, noted actress Rue McClanahan, on several projects, including Nöel Coward 101, which she directed at NYC’s famed Algonquin Hotel in May and June 2008. Currently, Wilson is hard at work on his next novel as well as “polishing up” his Nöel Coward 101 for future performances.
Wilson is an active member in the Screen Actors Guild, Actors’ Equity Association, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild, The Actors’ Fund of America, The Players and the Columbia College Resource Council for the Arts.
His main concerns now “are the work I do as a performer and writer. I’ve got it down to these five things that I really love: singing in supper clubs, acting in Shakespeare and light comedy, and writing novels, which tend to be serious, and plays, which tend to be comedies.”
As for how he defines success, Wilson says, “it’s the doing of it” that’s most important. “Because what else is there? For all its heartbreak and hardship and kicks in the ego … for all that and for all the dogs who knock over the lanterns that burn our manuscripts just when they’re finished, for all that, it’s a privileged life.”