Memories of Magda and Harvey

Tom Reed

Since it opened recently I’d been preparing myself to see the film Milk, and finally did so yesterday. Sean Penn gave such an extraordinary performance as slain City Supervisor and gay rights leader Harvey Milk that he quickly disappeared on screen. I only saw Harvey.

The film took me back to those days and times thirty years ago when I was in my fourth season in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera. The movie reenacts part of the opera that Harvey had attended two days prior to his untimely death. Though I was unaware that Harvey was in the audience, I shall never forget that season’s final performance of Tosca with Italian soprano Magda Olivero, Juan Lloveras, and Georgio Tozzi. At the age of sixty-eight Magda had come out of retirement to sing that season’s final two performances of the Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production that had its world premiere here six years earlier. The chorus had reached the final Saturday of an exhausting twelve-week season that also included the operas Otello, Norma, Billy Budd, Lohengrin, Don Giovanni, Der Rosenkavalier, Fidelio, and La Bohème. In fact we had performed a matinee of La Bohème earlier that day. But the excitement overcame our exhaustion. Three nights earlier Magda’s debut as Floria Tosca had overwhelmed the audience, and this was our last chance to see her Tosca.

The second act in Scarpia’s apartments was indescribable. Choristers completed their costume changes from Act One and crowded into the wings to watch the drama unfold. Magda had worked her spell over the audience, causing a kind of tunnel vision in which all else but her seemed to vanish. When at last she stabbed Scarpia to death, he inadvertently knocked the candelabra from his desk, and several live candles rolled across the stage floor and came to rest still burning. General Director Kurt Herbert Adler, working some of his own special magic, appeared almost simultaneously in the stage left wings. “Of course if something should happen the curtain will come down immediately,” he said to a stagehand who was reaching for a fire blanket. But on stage Magda took no notice of the candles. Her eyes seemed fixed somewhere in another dimension beyond the theater boxes from which Harvey watched. In her long nineteenth-century costume she seemed to float motionless as if she were being drawn forward upon some kind of rolling device. Never looking downward, she drifted around Scarpia’s desk and navigated between the burning candles toward the lip of the stage where she delivered the opera’s only spoken line, “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!” (“And before him all Rome trembled!”). In the wings we stood motionless, many with hands covering our mouths. Chills ran through my body like an electric current. When the curtain descended on Act Two we literally jumped up and down, unable to hear the sound of the audience over our own cheering.

In the final act, I was a member of the firing squad that executed Cavaradossi, and later returned to the stage to witness Tosca leaping to her death. It is this last scene of the opera that is recreated in the movie, beginning with the offstage sound of us soldiers who had just discovered Scarpia’s body. That night when the final curtain descended and Magda prepared to take her bows, I rushed downstairs to remove my costume, wig, and makeup, and then returned to the wings to participate in the remainder of the tumultuous ovation that, if I remember correctly, was recorded by Herb Caen as lasting an astounding twenty-two minutes. Magda would return the following season to perform La Voix Humaine, but Harvey would no longer be with us.

The next afternoon a performance of La Bohème concluded the 1978 season. Before curtain I reported to the men’s makeup area which in those days was located around the corner from our dressing rooms. There I found Rex Rogers, the kindly elder statesman of the makeup department, standing alone with an expression like I’d never seen on him before. As he sponged on my makeup base he said not a word. I didn’t know if I should ask, but finally as he went to paint my eyebrows I asked him if he was all right. I remember with what heaviness he exhaled as he set down the brush and said, “I just can’t shake this feeling. Something awful…something terrible is going to happen. …” Pointing twice to the floor for emphasis, he continued, “And it’s going to be right here.” The next day, across the street at City Hall, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been thirty years. Yesterday at the Opera House we had a rehearsal for the upcoming Adler Fellows Gala Concert, after which we had many hours before the evening’s performance of, once again, La Bohème. So when we were released from the rehearsal I chose to leave my car in the company parking lot and walk to the movie theater to see Milk. Returning to the car later I picked up a sandwich, but was not able to eat it. Sitting in the company lot as the sun set over City Hall I could not put Harvey out of my mind, nor did I want to. He was so present he might as well have been sitting in the car beside me. I wondered if he’d noticed me on stage in the chorus that night so long ago. In the growing darkness the gold atop City Hall dome began to glow like an eternal flame above the place where he left this world. I thought of all that has happened since he departed. … Of how things have changed. … Of how things have not changed. … Of how he said that we have to fight for our rights. … Of how he seems alive. …

Eventually I could sit in the car no longer and found myself drawn to the front of the Opera House across from City Hall looking up at the window of the office where he died. Crossing the street and rounding the corner I climbed the City Hall steps where he stood so often to address the crowds. Inside I ascended the grand staircase he so often used. Passing the Supervisor’s chambers and the office of the Mayor I took the steps to the magnificent rotunda, returning for the first time to the spot where Ed and I were first married four years ago on Valentine’s Day after Mayor Newsom opened marriage to gay couples. Though that marriage was invalidated by the courts six months later, we shall always treasure the memory of that happy day. From the gallery nearby I was able to look down to Harvey’s bust that stands by the entrance close to his office. In front of it a crew was decorating a festive Christmas tree in the very spot where Ed and I were married for the second time last July on our twenty-fourth anniversary after the courts made gay marriage legal throughout the state. As I stood there gazing down at his memorial I thought of how much happiness I’ve experienced, and how much of it I owe to the man whose sculpted image smiles beside the doorway.

Harvey Bernard Milk

May 22, 1930

November 27, 1978

San Francisco Supervisor

January 9 - November 27, 1978

I ASK FOR THE MOVEMENT

TO CONTINUE

BECAUSE MY ELECTION GAVE

YOUNG PEOPLE OUT THERE HOPE.

YOU GOTTA GIVE ’EM HOPE.