Uncle Bob

When I was working on my story last month about Denzel Washington’s work while a student at Fordham and now on Broadway in Othello, I kept running across the name of a theater professor: Robert Stone. He had been one of Washington’s acting teachers and the two performed together in Fordham’s production of Othello. Stone, who had had his own career in film, TV, and the stage, including performing in the Paul Robeson-led Othello on Broadway in 1945, would decades later say of Washington’s performance, “He has something which even Robeson didn’t have … not only beauty but love, hatred, majesty, violence.”

Since 1977, when he graduated from Fordham, Washington has kept in his wallet a two-page letter of recommendation written for him by Stone. In 2019 when Washington received the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award, friend and colleague Julia Roberts showed a photograph of the letter, and read from it.

“I say—without hesitation—that Mr. Washington is the finest young actor I have ever known,” Stone wrote. “At age 22 he has a potential for being one of the outstanding actors of the latter part of the 20th Century. If there is such a thing as ‘genius,’ then I assure you, Mr. Washington is one, and God only knows where this can take him.” 

In 2011, Washington established an endowed chair and the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholars in the theater department. And he did so in honor of Stone. “Show me a successful individual, and I’ll show you someone who has had positive influences in his or her life,” Washington said at the award’s announcement. “The late Bob Stone, my mentor…was one of those influences in my life. He believed in me and gave me something to live up to.” He saw the Scholars program as a way of continuing Stone’s supportive work with a new generation of actors. 

But for all of that, there’s little to be found about Stone himself. It’s the same with so many great teachers. They see potential we often don’t, their belief in us changes the very arc of our lives. And yet to most of the world they and their work remain unknown.  

In his encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis wrote that “All it takes is one good person to restore hope.” For Denzel Washington and probably a lot of others who have not had the same opportunities to share stories of him, Robert Stone was that one good person. But who was he?

To find out, I reached out to his niece Sandra Nelson in Chicago. Like her uncle, Nelson did theater at Northwestern University. And over the course of a couple hours she told me about this exceptional man who found God not in the pews but in “the house” (aka the theater); who was passionate about enabling others to love the arts as he did; and who at the end of his life more than anything wanted people to know that they were loved. In a way his story is a glimpse into the stories of so many other great Fordham faculty and staff, past and present. As the playwright Arthur Miller wrote, “Attention must be paid.” 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Growing up in Chicago, did you get to see much of your uncle? 

As a child he was always this uncle who was off doing interesting things. He would come home with fabulous Christmas presents. He gave me a washer and dryer when I was a little girl, to wash my dolls’ clothes. 

In college, I was a speech and English major. I loved to go to New York and go to the theater. Uncle Bob lived in a one-bedroom apartment filled literally with playbills, a huge collection of movies he had taped, and over 5000 records. He had every Broadway musical that was ever recorded up to the year 2000 when he died, and he had them all catalogued. 

I would fly in for a weekend, catch a show Friday night, see two on Saturday, see a matinee on Sunday, he and I’d have a couple of dinners and I’d go back home.

What was it like going to the theater with him? 

It was great. In the earlier years he would know some of the actors. Like Eileen Heckart was in Butterflies are Free, so afterwards we got to go backstage to say hi. I think he called her “Heckie.” 

My absolute love in life as far as actresses or actors was Katherine Hepburn. I saw her in Coco on Broadway, I think Uncle Bob gave me those tickets for Christmas one year. And his friend George Schaeffer, who produced a lot of the Hallmark Hall of Fame shows, did a show in which Hepburn was the lead actress. Uncle Bob asked George to have Hepburn sign a note to me. I still have it to this day.

His favorite restaurant was O’Neill’s Saloon right near his home. We used to go there a lot. Tavern on the Green was always where we would have Sunday brunch, and he’d take me to Sardi’s just because he felt that was the New York experience. And we would go to a lot of shows and then he would talk about them. 

In 1970, when I graduated from college, my parents went to Europe for the first time and I went with them. Then we went again in 1972, the four of us. And Bob had distilled from his own travels the places to see. Going to the Louvre he said, “We’re going to do this, this and this, follow me.” And then he was always getting us to talk—What did we find beautiful in the piece, that kind of thing. My mother was one of those who always had to have the tour guides talking about it, but he had the standpoint of wanting to be there and observe and absorb the experience of being there. And he wanted to enjoy the experience with people. 

Did he ever talk about how he became an actor? Or a teacher?

I think he loved exploring different characters. He loved literature and I think he appreciated bringing it to life. All of those things just resonated. 

He wrote in a family memoir, “It became very evident to me that theater was dwindling in New York City in ‘62 and that TV work was largely to be had only in L.A. And since my loathing of that town was beyond all description, I decided to hang up the motley and seek other employment, which meant, it seemed, becoming a teacher at long last and against all my former wishes.” 

“My Auntie Bess (his mother’s sister) thought this to be an excellent idea and with the offers of largesse beyond all call of duty she said she’d not only foot my academic bills, but supply me with sustenance during all that time, which we were sure would stretch for a couple years.” 

So then he went to NYU to get his PhD. 

Do you think it was hard for him to leave acting behind somewhat? 

He talked about the fact that he loved teaching and talking about the arts. But he also felt that teaching was another way of performance. Especially as time went on, he felt the student population changed somewhat, and the ability to perform, to know your lesson plan and look at those classes as a performance was what made him a teacher that people appreciated.

I remember my mother and I sat in on a lecture he was doing when they were doing Our Town. It was fascinating. It was wonderful. 

Did you ever feel like he was a teacher to you?  

In high school I probably knew every Broadway musical that was out there, much more so than I knew rock and roll or anything like that. I said to him, “I really need to understand classical music, symphonies, and the opera.” 

The next thing I got was a letter from him saying “I have begun creating a collection for you.” He put together probably 75 reel to reel tapes of operatic and symphonic music for me. And he just kept sending them to me. Along with it came a typed listing of who the artists were, if it was a symphony what were the movements, if it was an opera what were the arias, who was singing them. That was the teacher in him, wanting to help someone appreciate the arts.

I found this in his writings: “I’m not a strongly religious person. Formalized churchgoing is not my idea of proper worship. Wrong or not, I found my own way to believe and to approach my God, and I do believe there is one—not the malignant ogre of Eugene O’Neill, and I certainly hope it’s no white-bearded sage governing eternal fish fries and harp concerts. But I can’t believe that faulty though it is, the world hasn’t evolved through some sort of divine scheme if you want to call it that. This evolution didn’t come about through merely a series of happy coincidences. There was some plan behind it all. 

“…I am always appalled at infinity. Look at the sky: There is no end to it. I’m convinced that there never was a beginning, that there never will be an ending. That’s scary enough. But the alternative is incomprehensible to me. What was here before God? How can there be a final cessation? We’ll never know while we’re on this Earth, but I am convinced that in some form or other we do go to another plane. I hope my actions make me acceptable in some halcyon surroundings for eternity.”

It’s fascinating to me that he ended up teaching at a Catholic school. 

He never talked so much about that. He was a gay man, and the institutional church really had not befriended him. I know that there was a priest, a Jesuit that he was very close to. 

I grew up in a conservative Presbyterian Church. In the late 90s there was a lot of discussion in Presbyterian circles about how you must be chaste in singleness and have fidelity in marriage, marriage being one man to one woman. This rule was in the Presbyterian Rule of Order. And I said to our pastor, I cannot belong to a church where my uncle would not be allowed to serve. 

So I moved my membership to Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. The pastor there was a man by the name of John Buchanan. He always brought into his sermons cultural relevancy both from the standpoint of the arts and sports—he loved the Cubs—and from the newspaper. And along with about five or six key leaders throughout the Presbyterian Church, John started a group called the Covenant Network, which worked very hard to take that out of the Book of Order.

When Uncle Bob was getting to a point where he couldn’t live on his own, we brought him to my mother’s family home where my middle sister was living. They had a kind of a suite of two rooms and a bath that could be more or less closed off so he could feel like he had his own space. And he would say [of the Presbyterian Church], “How can you belong there?” And I asked John, “Would you meet with my uncle? I really think you two would hit it off.” 

John agreed. He gets there and he walks in, and Uncle Bob says, “What do you think of Equus? I think it’s a very religious play.” John hadn’t been in the door two seconds. 

Well the two of them were off and running. They spent the next two hours discussing not only Equus but theology and other plays and poetry and writers that hit on some of these topics. It was beautiful to see, uplifting. And when John left, Uncle Bob said, “Now I understand why you belong to a church like that.”

It sounds like theater and the arts were a main way in which he accessed or understood God? 

Yes. 

Was he open about his sexuality with the family? 

In all my trips to New York when I was in college, he never indicated to me that he was gay. Uncle Bob was part of a group of actors in Chicago called the Pastime Players. One of the women in that group and Uncle Bob were always close. Growing up I’d think, well, they haven’t gotten married. But he would tell me Eleanor likes cats and he likes dogs and they don’t like the same operas. 

I was married by the time he told me. He was home for my niece’s wedding. There was some party that everybody was going to, but I was home with the kids. And Uncle Bob had come over for dinner. He was smoking a cigarette—We would have what was called “Ciggy Time,” heavy, deep and real conversations about various family or whatever was going on in the world. And he looked at me and said, “I have something to tell you. I’m gay.” And I said, “Okay.”  

And he said, “That’s all you’re going to say?” And I remember clearly I said,  “Well, I’m not surprised, but it doesn’t change anything.” And he said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah. Okay, you’re gay.” And that emboldened him to tell his sister and the rest of the family. But that was the first time it had ever been spoken aloud.

Just before he died, he gave me a special ring from his long-term friend Bob Hartung to give to my son. 

Did his relationship with Denzel continue after Denzel left Fordham? 

It continued (until) the day my uncle died. In February or March of 2000—Uncle Bob died on May 11th—Denzel came to my sister’s house. We surprised him: It was a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, and Denzel came to the house and spent an afternoon with us. He and Uncle Bob had private time, then Denzel came down and spent a couple of hours with the whole family and Uncle Bob. My sister had appetizers and munchies and people had drinks.  I have pictures of him with the family, and shaking hands with my son. I remember Denzel leaning across Uncle Bob and looking me right in the eyes and saying, “I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for this man.”

Uncle Bob did not want any formal church service. We just did a cemetery service at Rose Hill where our family is buried, and then Fordham did a celebration of life. My son went with me and my sisters, and he kept saying, “Denzel’s coming, Mom, Denzel’s coming.” And I said, “No, he’s not honey.” (I think he was filming “Remember the Titans” in Canada.) “Mom, he’s coming,” he said, for over an hour. 

And then he said, “Mom, he’s here.” And sure enough I turn around and Denzel walks through the door. He said he just came to share his respect and to see the Fordham family that had gathered. 

In March of 1977 after Othello, Uncle Bob sent Denzel’s mother a letter. He wrote, “Please enjoy his success with him now and in the future, because a lot of this has come from your perhaps unconscious help. And please let me know at any time in the future if I can be of assistance to him or to you.  I shall not only be happy to try to do so, but more importantly proud,  even as I am now proud to be on that stage with him at the beginning of what I know can be a wonderful career and life for him, and also can be a tremendous influence on all the people who come in contact with him…. Wherever he goes from now, I’ll be watching from back here loving his successes as much as I love him and you, helping him in whatever way I can, and remembering one of the most thrilling weeks I have ever known, this one. God love you all, Bob Stone.”

Wow. 

When he knew he was getting close to death, he began to want to write letters to his friends, but his fingers just weren’t typing right. So he asked me to come and write the letters. And every single letter, he knew the birthday of the person. And he would tell them to always celebrate their birthday and remember how special they are. If people had an email, we did an email that sat in a To Be Sent box. And if it was a letter, I printed it, folded it, put it in an envelope, but I wasn’t to send it. 

He wanted to stay alive until 2000, and then he wanted to stay alive for the Academy Awards. (Denzel was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role that year for his performance in “The Hurricane.”) And he was getting weaker and weaker. And at one point he said, “You have the letters and the emails?” And I said I did. And he said, “Alright, on Wednesday I want you to put the letters in the mail and push send on the computer.” 

On Wednesday I went to see him. By this time he was sleeping most of the time. But he opened his eyes and looked at me and he said “What day?” I said, “Wednesday.” And he said, “Have you?” And I said yes. 

And he closed his eyes and I think those are the last words he ever said. He died Thursday morning. 

It sounds like he was a really special person. 

He was. His favorite quote was from Brideshead Revisited: “To have known and loved one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”