You know the classic dinner party question? If you could have anyone over for dinner, living or dead, who would you invite?
How about Truman Capote, actor, novelist, screenwriter and author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Art Buchwald, Washington Post humorist, columnist and author; Walter Cronkite, legendary television news broadcaster; Andy Rooney of CBS’ 60 Minutes; Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22; Louis Rukeyser, television host of Wall Street Week; Chaim Potok, rabbi and author of The Chosen; Dr. Michael DeBakey, innovative heart transplant doctor; and Geraldine Ferraro, first female vice presidential candidate? If this group sounds like good company to you, then you would have liked the Temple Shalom Arts Forum in the 1970s when these and many others spoke to at-capacity crowds with slider walls that accommodated 1,500 guests.
In the early ‘70s, Temple Shalom was new. The congregation was small. And the Dallas community was not yet familiar with our temple. Rabbi Saul Besser, z”l, senior rabbi from 1971-1984, set out to change that by creating a super-star lecture series. His secret? “He had the audacity to contact these celebrities,” says Annette Corman, the rabbi’s wife at the time. She adds even more celebrity names to the list: James Michener, Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Gail Sheehy and Leslie Stahl. “He was determined to draw the community to the door of the brand-new building on Alpha Road,” Annette added. Chaim Potok was the inaugural speaker.
Tickets started at “ a paltry” $7 per lecture, or $20 for all three. Years later, the price rose to $35 a year to attend three lectures. When I asked Annette why these celebrities answered the rabbi’s call, she admitted she did not know. She told that the speakers “were not expensive and they were available.” Speaker fees ranged from $500 – $1200 and patron tickets were sold for $300 per couple for the entire year. Patrons were honored with perks such as picking up the speaker at the airport, hosting a dinner in their homes for the speaker and other patrons on the night of the lecture, and reserved seating in the front rows.
Annette told me that William F. Buckley sent beautiful roses to his hosts. She recalled that Pulitzer-prize winner David Halberstam, who reported from the front line of Vietnam, was one of the more controversial speakers. But all were kind. “These people (the speakers) were very kind and human.”
Because the series was so flagrantly star-studded, word got out quickly. SMU and the Meadows Foundation in Dallas reached out to Rabbi Besser to ask if the temple would like to collaborate with them on the speaker program. The rabbi liked this idea, until his contacts at SMU explained that the series would move to the SMU campus. Rabbi Besser unequivocally refused, because his intent for the program was to bring the Dallas community to Temple Shalom. In the rabbi’s mind this was not a fundraiser, it was a public relations venture.
I visited the Temple Shalom archives where I accepted an offer from a kind person in the office to guide me. The room is way in the back of the building behind other rooms. There I met Nathan Axelrod, curator of the archives, and Bill Boyd, his assistant. The shelves are full of binders organized by Nathan with memorabilia since Temple Shalom’s beginning. He easily located the binders from the 1970s and 1980s, and we found letters confirming the speakers and posters to advertise them.
Nathan was not a member back then but read in an early letter that the speaker’s 24-hour engagement included a speaker’s fee, round trip plane ticket, overnight stay at the Fairmont Hotel and meals. A Temple Shalom member who at the time was an airline captain was able to obtain a special rate. Guests would fly first class. Ralph Nader insisted on flying coach.I asked Bill Boyd, who has been a member of the congregation since 1969, which speaker might have been his favorite. “I don’t know about my favorite, but Truman Capote stands out in my mind. He read passages from ‘A Christmas Memory‘ (his autobiographical short story). I sat there thinking…he’s reading about Christmas in the temple! It was strange.”
Paddy Epstein, the first chair of the Arts Forum, kindly chatted with me about some of her memories of the program. “Truman Capote wanted the bimah to be emptied and just one chair turned backward. He wanted the overhead light to be pink and he wanted a box of pink Kleenex,” Paddy recalled. All requests were accommodated. She also shared a story about Navy Officer and oceanographer, Robert Ballard. He brought slides in a carousel to present a slide show about his infamous discovery of the wreck of the Titanic. Paddy’s son was helping as a technical assistant that evening and before the speech began, he dropped the carousel, and all of the slides fell out. He quickly put them back in. “The presentation showed photos out of order, upside down and sideways!”
Temple’s Communications Chair Diane Laner reached out to Jeremy Besser, Rabbi Besser’s son and a high school classmate of Diane’s. Jeremy was able to comb through his father’s old files to find and share many of the letters to and responses from celebrities, including those who attended and those who declined.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sent a kind letter letting Rabbi Besser know that there simply wasn’t enough time during that term to travel from DC to Dallas. Ted Turner and Barbara Walters weren’t accepting outside speaking engagements at the time. Carl Sagan declined, twice, and in his second letter to Rabbi, he wrote “I am pleased by the invitation and find it tempting. However, my current schedule has become so ridiculously saturated with teaching, writing and research commitments that I have been forced to curtail public speaking activities quite severely.”
Eventually speakers demanding higher fees brought the Arts Forum to an end. The costs for this small congregation on Alpha Road became prohibitive. According to Temple Shalom past president Ronnie Weiss, “Declining that offer from SMU to partner led to the establishment of its own Tate Lecture Series which continues to this day.” He adds, “The Arts Forum’s contribution to the Dallas community was remarkable and added substantially to the recognition by the Dallas community of Temple Shalom as an important voice.”
* If you attended and have memories about the Arts Forum to share, please email them to Nathan Axelrod at [email protected] for inclusion in the archives, and for any follow-ups to this story. *
2 Responses
The Arts Forum was before our time at Temple Shalom but it sounds fascinating!!
Thanks Cindy for researching and reporting on this very interesting time in our Temple Shalom history!
Thanks also to Nathan for being the curator of our Archives!
Fascinating history. I had no idea!