To read Michael Buter's bio from the Second Program click here.
To read Michael Butler's bio from the L.A. and San Francisco programs click here.
 

Once upon a time, not very long ago, there was a very, very important man who loved flowers and had a lovely flowering garden in Oak Brook, a "protected" residential complex his father had developed near Chicago.

And this very important person had a young, poor gardener, a student who would not tell the important man whether he would return to garden for him the following spring.

"Why not?" asked the important man.

"Because I don't want to commit myself to anything" said the student.

"But you must commit yourself," said the important man.  "Nature commits herself to the seasons."

The important man was intrigued with the young man's firm non-commitment and invited the poor gardener to come to dinner.  The important man was committed to a terrible amount of things, people, and institutions.  he could not understand non-commitment, and something possessed him to understand his young gardener.  They had many talks, and many dinners.  The important man learned that the youngster was troubled because he ws going to be drafted and did not want to go to Viet Nam.

The important man understood this, because he believed the war in Viet Nam to be the worst horror his country had ever been involved in.

"What would you do if our country was attacked?" he asked the gardener.

"I wouldn't fight."

The important man was not sure what his answer would be, and so he asked, "What if that meant your enslavement, your death?"

"My death isn't important."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm nothing."

Now the very important man certainly did not feel or believe that he himself was nothing, but he envied the younger man's ability to reach such a pinnacle of non-commitment.  For the important man, however, this attitude seemed a cop-out in the face of the world's evil.  He did not agree with his gardener, but he wanted desperately to protect the young man's right to feel that way, and to act according to his beliefs.

The important man was, of course, Michael Butler, the scion of the Butler family of Chicago, which has vast industrial and financial interests throughout the world.  The conversations with his gardener occurred in the fall of 1967, when Michael Butler had already lived several lives that would stagger the imagination of even Walter Mitty: exclusive private schools, world travel on his own yacht with John F. Kennedy (who was then a Congressman from Massachusetts), tycoon of the Butler Overseas Corp., organizer of new industries in India, the Middle East and Africa (and writing secret reports on international trade for his sailing companion, who had meanwhile been elected Senator), dealing personally with Arab and Persian kings, directing a South American publishing firm, a resort construction company in the Caribbean and on Fire Island, a sports preserve in Oak Brook, where he's captain of the polo team, founding a fashionable ski resort, and running for State Senator on the Democratic ticket in Illinois' Du Page County, a Republican bastion for the past hundred years.

He lost the election, but surprisingly polled more votes than his heroes Paul Douglas or Adlai Stevenson ever did in that county.  The Party heads ran the results through the computers, extrapolating Butler onto the national scene.  Wow.  This boy could run for national office, and win, said the computers.  The party heads started grooming him.  In 1964 he was one of the campaign managers who won Chicago for Otto Kerner in the gubernatorial race.

The party heads pondered - should they run him for state senate or national office first?

The heads looked at Michael Butler's head.  His hair was long (not very long, but longish).

"The party feels he has to cut his hair," they said in his presence, to each other, not to him.

At that moment, Michael Butler decided to get out of politics.  And not a moment too soon - the deals were on, word came from on high, Kerner resigned, Shriver was posted to Paris, young Stevenson bounced, and Ev Dirksen will probably remain Senator (Republican) from Illinois.

Shortly after his talks with the young gardener, Butler came to New York and happened to see a preview of HAIR off-Broadway, assuming it was about American Indians, a subject in which he is passionately interested.  It turned out to be not about Indians, but about young men and women like his gardener, and it blew, as we say nowadays, his mind.

"The score was overpowering, great, and the whole thing was a big turn-on for me - I saw it immediately as a way of bridging the gap between the new young free-swingers and the great uncommitted semi-establishment people.  Through my gardener friend I'd begun to comprehend the hippies were doing something very important, something the press was distorting, but in HAIR I saw the truth coming out - a public declaration of their freedom that was not a put-down of those who weren't yet steady and willing to join them.  HAIR is a hand offered to everyone, not a shutting off.  It offers hope - and I learned in India, as I wrote Jack Kennedy, that when people have no hope they just die.  HAIR says 'Come and join us, come and see what we are, you people in the middle who aren't satisfied with the Establishment.'"

"Are you against the Establishment?" I asked him.

"I don't put down everything in power," he replied, ingenuously.  "We have to change the mechanism and direct its functioning better - with hippie thoughts."

We are talking up in the tower penthouse of his friend Olivier Coquelin, who runs the Cheetah, where HAIR ran between its off-Broadway and present incarnations.  We are sitting in the smog-filled sun, he in his blue bikini shorts, his lanky browned body and quiet mid-western speech giving off emanations of the slow-burning energy that characterizes his career.  I'd just cabbed up from my pad on the lower East Side, where the Puerto Rican kids were having a ball sloshing in the fire-hydrant showers, flooding the gutters and garbage while aiming powerful streams at passing cars and people.

"I feel more at home down there." he said.  "In fact I wanted our office to be on the lower East Side, but it would have made life tougher for our people who live up here."

Michael Butler has been a successful investor in several Broadway shows.  His only previous involvement with a show that moved from off-Broadway to Broadway - THE GOLDEN APPLE, which was pretty far-out in the '50's, and which I loved - didn't quite make it uptown.  HAIR, as everyone knows by now, did.  It's Butler's first time out as producer.  Luck?  Or instinct plus managerial know-how?

"There's one thing about HAIR that bothers me," I said, "especially because you did such a great thing in offering to give a benefit performance for the resistance.  I don't understand why Claude decides to go into the army - the hippies I know are refusing to go, or avoiding the draft in 1,001 ways."

He nodded, and said, "I do not interfere with authors in any way.  That's my policy."
 

Copyright Natoma Productions.