The Crime Lady: Farewell To a Dear Friend

Dear TCL Readers:

I’d meant my first newsletter of 2022 to be about other things. And in time, it will. But for now, all my thoughts are about yesterday’s sudden passing of Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal theater critic, playwright, librettist, biographer of H.L. Mencken, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, and above all, a tremendous friend of the arts. He was also my friend, my neighbor, and one of the best and kindest people I will ever know.

We met on the Internet. Because isn’t that how friendships start? That’s how they did, so often, for me, especially in my early twenties. Terry had started his blog About Last Night in 2003 and it was, along with a handful of others — Gawker, Maud Newton’s site, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift — that made me miss and long for New York when I’d left it the first time.

When I started my old crime fiction blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, in October 2003, Terry graciously linked to it, with what I recall as pretty effusive praise. He would do that for as long as I knew him, and it was never, ever bullshit. That ability to be genuine, open, earnest, even in the midst of growing toxicity wherever you looked, was a true gift.

We met in person, I think, in September 2004. I hadn’t moved back to Manhattan yet, but would fly in whenever I had the chance to see friends and commune with the city I wanted nothing more than to make my own again. Terry and I went to see a show, and I’m sure we lunched at Good Enough To Eat (a place that Laura Lippman called “his Sardi’s” — it was also where I first met his beloved second wife, Hilary), but the moment I knew we would be friends for life happened in the most mundane, and thus the most extraordinary, circumstances.

We were supposed to go to the theater together, and eat afterwards. But when I arrived outside his apartment building on the Upper West Side, Terry was there — and he needed help carrying a large painting upstairs. He took one side, I took the other, and we looked into each other’s eyes and somehow, I knew. He did, too. No words, no need. There may have been laughter. We’d cemented the friendship.

There was ebb and flow, because many friendships have that. But even when months passed or when circumstances conspired to put distance between us — happily, with relief, mended for good in the fall of 2014 — whenever we would meet up, it was as if the months and distance melted away. To spend time with Terry was to see shows and not care if they were stellar or stinkers (does anyone remember Lennon: The Musical? Or Renee Fleming’s attempt to star in a straight play? They shouldn’t. I do, because Terry and I would discuss at intermission, and really dissect it over post-show dinner.)

It was a real thrill, though, to see Satchmo at the Waldorf during its off-Broadway run. Few critics can successfully cross over to the other side as playwrights, but I never doubted Terry could. Seeing John Douglas Thompson act out Terry’s words, the staging, the pitch, all of it was a joy.

There’s so much more I can say, but what I come back to most of all is Terry’s generosity. He lifted up other artists and writers, and was endlessly curious about up-and-comers. On Twitter, so many others have noted that he was a positive presence, and that his posts gave them encouragement, comfort, and enthusiasm. It was earned, and it was genuine, because he was a “pay it forward” kind of man.

I lost count how many kindnesses he directed towards me. Writing the recommendation letters that helped get my green card and many years later, my first residency at MacDowell. Writing a glowing review of Women Crime Writers (which was considered ethically kosher because he wasn’t friends with the dead authors, after all). And a few months ago, reading an early draft of Scoundrel and offering invaluable notes.

“You have done a REALLY MASTERLY job, Sarah. I was enthralled all the way through,” he said of the book. Those words meant the world to me then, because Terry’s own journey to New York City happened in large part because of the largesse of William F. Buckley, who would become a mentor and friend. It was important that I get Buckley, the person, right on the page. He judged that I had. And those words mean even more to me now.

I’ll close with Terry’s capacity for love, and how transformed he was by it. When I moved to Upper Manhattan a few months before the pandemic, we realized we were living just around the corner from one another. I got to witness him and Hilary in their final months together, before the double-lung transplant (and the infection that killed her.) During lockdown, via direct messages, I could comfort him in his grief, and feel comforted in my own isolation. He wrote a memoir of his life with Hilary, and I was lucky enough to read a draft. I hope it will find publication, though I also suspected it was somehow incomplete.

That’s because a few months after finishing that draft, he found new love, and my direct messages would be lit up with Terry’s buoyant feelings. “I sure hope it makes you smile to see your ancient pal acting like a teenage boy,” he wrote me last summer, and it did.

We last saw each other in person in mid-June. He had booked a Zipcar to visit Cheril, but something had gone awry and he couldn’t get into the car. He needed a wifi connection and a glass of water, and my apartment was just steps away from the parking lot. At one point, Cheril called, so I heard her voice. It was warm, lovely. The car rental situation got sorted. He headed out to Long Island a week later. And they were barely apart thereafter.

Terry Teachout packed more into his far-too-short life than most of us can even fathom. He loved, and was loved in return. He was an indelible part of the arts, and changed the life of countless artists. He wrote with utter clarity and purpose and is a model for how to write with efficiency without ever losing one’s inner voice. And my god, that unmistakable laugh. To know we’ll never hear it again is gutting.

Goodbye, my dear friend. I already miss you terribly. We’ll catch up some other time.

Until next time, I remain,

The Crime Lady