Tom Lehrer: the man who walked away

I met Tom Lehrer once, and only once. And that was probably once more than he would have preferred.

The famed musical satirist died on Saturday at the age of 97 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But for several decades, his home was Santa Cruz. For 30 years, he taught mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, and stayed in town for many years after that. 

But Lehrer didn’t achieve worldwide fame as a math professor. He was a political comedian whose weapon was a piano, and during the late 1950s and ’60s, he became rock-star popular by singing truth to power in such unforgettable ditties as “The Vatican Rag” and “The Masochism Tango.”

Then he walked away. For good.

When I met Lehrer, it had been years after I had quit trying to. As an entertainment reporter with the Santa Cruz Sentinel, I had dutifully put out any and all feelers and formal requests for an interview with Tom Lehrer. I was met with the silence of the tomb.

It was nothing personal. He rebuffed pretty much all media requests, just as he refused almost all public appearances or performances. 

I met Lehrer in a parking garage, in fact. (Fitting, I suppose — isn’t that where Woodward and Bernstein met “Deep Throat”?) I was chatting up a friend who apparently knew Lehrer socially, and recognized him as he walked past. The friend introduced me and I labored to keep cool. We chatted amiably enough about the weather, or baseball, or the albums of Weird Al Yankovic — frankly, I don’t remember. I felt like Ahab bumping into Moby Dick in the cheese aisle at Trader Joe’s. 

A better reporter would have dropped everything, fished out a recorder, and flung questions at Lehrer, then in his 80s, like a ninja hurling throwing stars. I could have imagined it, but he seemed to be giving off vibes that said, “I know who you are, and I would sooner volunteer for exploratory oral surgery than sit for a vacuous interview with you, or anybody else. Have a nice day.” I let the man go on his way.

Actually, all I wanted to ask him was, “Why?” Not why he retired from performing; that made a certain amount of sense. There’s long been the rumor that Lehrer quit when Henry Kissinger — who many consider a war criminal — won the Nobel Peace Prize. If he had not quit then, there were plenty of other outrages that followed that would have driven him into retirement. 

What I wanted to ask was, why did he resist returning to the stage? In the United States of Entertainment, “retirement” is almost always temporary, unless it’s the product of illness or disability. Unless you’re Greta Garbo, the seductions of the comeback — new relevance, ego boost, the paycheck — are enormous and just about impossible to resist. But resist he did. 

Find a Tom Lehrer fan who remembers him from his heyday, and you’ll likely be struck by that fan’s loyalty and vehemence. People loved this guy, which suggests a Lehrer comeback, whether it was in the Reagan years or Bush era, would have been huge. Lehrer’s catalogue of songs was not large, some three dozen in total. But his wit and his dark humor were unique, particularly in the relatively buttoned-up era when he was popular. And his influence in the comedians and performers that followed him is incalculable.

He not only abandoned his performance career, he even released his copyrights into the public domain. Is there anyone in popular culture who has done that before? 

Satirists — the good ones, anyway — have to confront the absurdities and vulgarities of the world and somehow must find a way to weave humor from it. Perhaps he was just drained from that effort. Perhaps he felt he had said all he needed to say, and that anything new would just be repeating himself. Or perhaps he had lost faith in the power of satire to bring about any kind of meaningful change.

These days, it’s hard to argue with a loss of faith. Since Lehrer’s retirement, satire has been a boom economy. We’ve had the benefit of mountains of satire in a myriad of forms, and look where it has delivered us, into the arms of a spray-tanned, non-sequitur-spouting president who eats the stuff for breakfast. 

Maybe Tom Lehrer just loved the clean and refined world of mathematics, and wanted to live a normal off-stage life. 

The irony is that by so resolutely walking away, Lehrer, the celebrity who renounced celebrity, fulfilled the one commandment of the entertainment world that all entertainers tend to ignore: “Always leave the audience wanting more.”

Well, Lehrer has certainly done that. 

After our brief encounter in the parking garage was done, I was quietly lacerating myself for at least not trying to engage him in a deeper conversation. I remember watching him walk away, stifling an urge to follow him waving a business card. You can predict what Lehrer did, can’t you? He walked away briskly, and he never looked back.