TESTAMENT OF YOUTH

I Sang to Open the Kennedy Center. Trump’s Reign Appalls Me

Tom Hotchkiss was just 11 when he was part of the Kennedy Center’s inauguration.

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The 48-by-56-inch bronze letters reading “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” were newly affixed to the white marble facade when 11-year-old Tom Hotchkiss arrived in 1971 with a dozen others from an all-star summer choir based in Massachusetts. They were there to perform at the opening of a living memorial to the assassinated 35th president, as well as the first cultural center in the nation’s capital.

“It’s big, and you felt part of something that was big,” Hotchkiss told the Daily Beast this week. “You felt excited. You felt pride about being part of something, you felt honored to be part of something that had a history to it.”

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Fifty-five years later, the letters are covered by a tarp and the building is in peril because an opposing tide of history was beginning to form even as the opening thrilled young Hotchkiss.

That very month, 25-year-old Donald Trump moved from his family home in Queens into a studio apartment at 196 E. 75th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan as the new president of his father’s real estate company. Trump would eventually proceed from outer-borough huckster to become the 45th and then 47th president of the United States, but remain so in need of glorification that he would threaten to demolish the Kennedy Center if he could not add his name to that facade.

This prospect is made only more unthinkable to Hotchkiss by a memory of his first sight, which returns to him as a moment of boyhood awe.

“It was a big feeling for a young boy, a big feeling of pride and a great honor to be one of the participants in history,” he recalled. “I had a childlike belief participating in Bernstein’s Mass, that the Kennedy Center was to be a sacramental place - an outward and visible expression of inward grace. A place where the arts move, elevate, and motivate the human spirit.”

A kid’s transcendent moment turned briefly ridiculous when he and the others from the Berkshire Boys Choir were required to visit a security checkpoint.

“It’s not like there were that many people pulling up with 11- and 12-year- olds, you know?” he said. “It’s like, ‘What, you think there are other kids trying to get in here to do this?’”

They entered to see that workers were giving the building finishing touches.

“Elevators had plywood over the floors and walls to protect them from the tradesmen’s tools and equipment,” Hotchkiss said.

And Leonard Bernstein was still working on the opening-night piece. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had commissioned him to compose and conduct a variation on the Catholic Mass that would embrace the spirit of all faiths. Bernstein, who was Jewish, was best known for his Broadway masterpiece, West Side Story. He now had just a few days to complete and stage a stirring mix of hymns, psalms, blues and rock with a libretto based on Catholic liturgy, with added Hebrew and American slang.

“Music was literally brought to us on Xerox copies of manuscript scores that Bernstein was finishing simultaneously,” Hotchkiss remembered. “We would do rehearsals at the Kennedy Center, and Leonard Bernstein was in a studio upstairs, smoking cigarettes, and the rest of the score and filling it out in the parts. While downstairs, the different sections, the choir, the chorus, the different people were learning their parts.”

There were also the Alvin Ailey Dancers, ballet dancers, and Broadway singers.

“Then you had the orchestra,” he added. “It was not a typical theater production.”

Between rehearsals, Hotchkiss and others of the choir went exploring in the way youngsters do at that age.

“We got to sneak into the ‘house’ side and see the impressive red carpet everywhere,” he remembered. “The beautiful constellations of chandeliers hanging in the lobby and halls were amazing. We even got to go in the Opera House and sit in the crushed velvet seats all over the place from the orchestra level to the balconies. The entire Opera House - the walls, floors, carpets, chairs, balconies were red.”

He added, in another memory reprise, “I remember feeling the immense size of the space and the matching immense importance of the occasion to commemorate President Kennedy and this special center for the Arts.”

When dress rehearsals arrived, Hotchkiss and two fellow choir members ventured along the Grand Foyer in costumes, purple pants and extravagant matching shirts.

“It rivaled the puffy shirt for Seinfeld, but way, way ahead of time,” Hotchkiss remembered.

Halfway down the 630-foot passageway, and just across from the main entrance of the Opera House, the trio paused before an eight-foot bust of JFK. The giant head dwarfed them as they gazed up at it in a photo taken by a Life Magazine photographer who happened to be there.

“It seemed like a giant head,” Hotchkiss would remember. “But then again it seemed right since President Kennedy was such a giant to our country and the world.”

Opening night was on Sep. 8. The assassinated president’s widow was still struggling with her grief and chose not to attend even though she had commissioned the piece. But her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, was there, striking a regal pose. Others of the family in attendance included her grandson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The final, final touches by the workers in the Opera House had included a red-and-gold silk stage curtain measuring 47 feet high and 117 feet wide. It pulled back for a two-hour performance of Bernstein’s Mass with baritone Alan Titus as the main celebrant. Hotchkiss was among the sopranos in the choir.

“It’s beautiful music,” he said.

Afterwards, Bernstein gave Hotchkiss sheet music for a section that began with the words, “To God, God who made me young...”

The composer wrote a message to him in red ink across the top,

“Thank you, Tom, for your beautiful cooperation. - Leonard Bernstein.”

Hotchkiss framed the sheet, and it hung on his wall during his later life as an Episcopal priest. The former boys choir soprano was nearing retirement as vicar at Good Shepherd Church in Dallas, TX, last December, when he learned that Trump had decided to change the name of the Kennedy Center.

“When the man who occupies the White House started to want to put his name on there, I was greatly distressed,” Hotchkiss told the Daily Beast. “I was quite clear that I was never gonna say that name along with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They don’t go together.“

Workers affixed identical 48-by-56 inch bronze letters reading “The Donald J. Trump and” to the building’s exterior above the existing “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” But the added words were taken down after a federal judge issued an order citing The John F. Kennedy Center Act.

“Whereas the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy dedicated his life to the advancement of the welfare of mankind; and Whereas the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy was particularly devoted to the advancement of the performing arts within the United States; and Whereas by his untimely death this Nation and the world has suffered a great loss; and Whereas it is the sense of the Congress that it is only fitting and proper that a suitable monument be dedicated to the memory of this great leader; and Whereas the living memorial to be named in his honor by this joint resolution shall be the sole national monument to his memory within the city of Washington and its environs.”

The workers who removed the letters left up a tarp in a literal cover-up of compliance. The center’s Trump-controlled board announced that “financial woes” and safety concerns were forcing it to close. Never mind that Trump had triggered an exodus of patrons and donors. And that the center’s new regime had failed to follow through on maintenance for which there was funding, opting to spend it instead on cosmetic changes such as redoing the presidential box in each of the three performance spaces, and then ripping out the new bathroom floor in one because the White House made known it did not like the beige tiles.

Trump now declared that only he could save the center. And he expected to have his name on it in recognition.

“Because frankly if we don’t do that it’s going to close, it’ll end up being ripped down,” he told the press.

Word of Trump’s threat reached the former choirboy, who had felt so thrilled and honored when he first glimpsed what would become a living memorial to a truly great president who actually merited an eight-foot bust.

“I am beyond distressed. Shocked. Dismayed. Appalled,” Hotchkiss said. “It is hard to believe that one bulldozes or demolishes history and establishes memorials for any purpose. It seems, rather, we seek to build on the good instead of burying it.”

“Demolition appears to be self-aggrandizement at its worst,” he concluded.

However it plays out, Trump will go down in history as a pathological narcissist so determined to add his name to the wall of the facade that he was willing to kill a living memorial.

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Michael DalySpecial Correspondent

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