Martin Milnes: Few people knew Steve better than his lifelong friend, Mia Farrow. And in the early nineteen nineties, when Mia first met Peter Jones, she realized at long last that Steve had found true love.
Mia Farrow: PJ was the love of his life. He was mad about PJ because I I I I met a lot of the guys before that, and they were just, you know he didn't care like PJ was the one. I would pick people up at the bus and stuff like that with him and be different people but PJ was the first person that I was aware of that he really really really deeply loved and wanted it to work out big time. PJ was a baby, but I think I think for a time he he was just he was just besotted with you, wasn't he? You know?
Peter E. Jones: But do you know guess who didn't know that?
Martin Milnes: Welcome to Loving You: The Untold Sondheim. A podcast made by Steve's friends with Steve's friends. This is the first of two deeply special episodes. Throughout this series, we have been privileged to learn much about Steve from his family and close friends. We have also been offered unparalleled insights from Steve's first love, Peter E. Jones. And now, it is finally time for PJ to share with us the complete story of his life and love with Steve. They met in 1991 when Steve was 60 and PJ was 24. By this time, Steve had completed many years of therapy, confronting lifelong traumas inflicted by his mother and exploring his ambivalence regarding his sexuality. Up to this point, Steve had therefore not considered himself ready for a serious romantic relationship. Although he also stated, I think I'd gotten into the habit of being alone. And when I met somebody, the habit got broken. Indeed, PJ was the first person with whom Stephen Sondheim ever fell in love. Steve and PJ's relationship was very much, to quote PJ, a meeting of minds and hearts. This has been verified by Steve's friends both then and now who witnessed their love. However, sadly, there were also unhappier times, with Steve telling friends that only now did he truly understand his own lyric 'Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor / Not going left, not going right.' This is the first time in over twenty five years that PJ has spoken publicly about their relationship. In 1995, at Steve's request, he did speak to a Sondheim biographer, but afterwards, for various reasons, PJ decided that he would never go on record again. However, as PJ explained to us in episode one of this podcast, he is now almost the exact age that Steve was when they first met, which has brought about a great deal of understanding for PJ about their relationship and what they each experienced. Therefore, he feels it is now the right time and place for him to officially share his and Steve's honest and accurate story, preserving forever how their love transformed both their lives. Our two episodes exploring Steve and PJ's story will therefore be PJ's official and only record of events. And as PJ also told us during the first episode, this is as much for Steve as it is for him. PJ has mentioned that the only way to understand their relationship is to understand Steve, but therefore, we also need to understand PJ. What shaped the first person with whom Stephen Sondheim ever fell in love? And what was it about PJ which made him the one to change Steve's life? It is now my privilege and pride to share with you act one of the beautiful love story of Stephen Sondheim and Peter E Jones. PJ, when and where were you born?
Peter E. Jones: I was born in a trunk at the Prince's. I was born in 1966 in rural Wyoming and raised in a little town called Basin, which is aptly named because it was at the base of the Bighorn Mountains, I guess.
Martin Milnes: So paint a picture for us of the town where you grew up. What is Wyoming like at this point?
Peter E. Jones: Well, it's usually ten years behind the times, they like to say. I would say more years in some ways. If anybody has seen the movie Brokeback Mountain, that is a really good indicator of what it was like.
Martin Milnes: So this is as far removed really from the world of Broadway and musical theater as can imagine.
Peter E. Jones: Absolutely. But, yeah, you couldn't really couldn't get much further removed except, being where the Beverly Hillbillies came from.
Martin Milnes: So how did theater come into your life? How did you discover musical theater?
Peter E. Jones: My parents were both amateur musicians, so there was a lot of music in my house. And, we also had this wonderful console stereo that, my mother played a lot. We had fair amount of records and they were mostly country and western but throw in a little Johann Strauss and some occasional exotica and it was a pretty eclectic mix of influences than one might imagine having where I grew up. So I naturally loved records as long as I can remember and had my own little player from an early age playing some of those, records I would borrow from my parents' collection along with some they gave me. The Disneyland label covers of, Doctor Doolittle or Mary Poppins or Bedknobs and Broomsticks that I used to sing to.
Infant PJ: How pleasant. Popping along. Popping along on the bottom of the beautiful ---
PJ's Mom: Pete, enough of that. Get out of your school clothes and get to that piano.
Peter E. Jones: But also, and very important, I watched a lot of Looney Tunes. I love them. Love them. And I realized I love them as much for the music as anything. The top drawer quality of that scoring of those cartoons was something I was lucky to have I wouldn't have known it at the time. It's just that I was lucky to have that kind of an influence.
Martin Milnes: When did you first discover Stephen Sondheim? When did you first hear this name?
Peter E. Jones: I suppose it would have to have been the West Side Story movie soundtrack, which I would have discovered around twelve. It was at a neighbor's house. They had unearthed some records and this gatefold red with fire escape stairs on it of the West Side Story soundtrack. So I might have heard his name associated with Sending the Clowns. I do know that my mother liked the song and she had brought home two different things associated with Send In The Clowns.
One was a sort of cheap brass figurine of a of a clown on a platform and you wound it up and it played. My mother also brought home covers of famous pop hits of the day, and one of them was the Judy Collins version of Sondheim and the Clowns, but it was not Judy Collins. It was some unnamed mystery vocalist who suggested her and had more or less the same arrangement. So, I heard both of those things and I learned to play Sondheim Broke Stephen by ear by listening to that. I did pretty well. There was one chord that I found very hard to get, and any musician who knows a song probably would know what that chord is.
Martin Milnes: And when did you decide that you wanted to become a composer lyricist?
Peter E. Jones: Oh, well, I started writing songs at 13. They were very much in a pop style of the day, more or less Barry Manilow, Shades of the Carpenters or Bread, but they were not good. I I could imitate quite easily. And it was nothing for me to write those out, these little 32 bar, four fours with a, you know, a quick band. I wrote a a good number of those, and I did that because I had gone to music camp after the seventh grade, and I met girl there who had written a piece that she performed at Kennedy Center. And that was thrilling to me, and I thought, I'd like to do that. So when I came back home, I spent the year writing these little songs, and I went back to music camp with a bunch of songs under my arm. And the the girl who started it all wasn't there, so she didn't know that I turned into a little songwriter because of her. So that was the beginning. Yeah.
Martin Milnes: And what about the passion for musical theater?
Peter E. Jones: Again, from the West Side Story album came a couple of albums from the the really nice library we had for a little hick town in Wyoming. It was quite a good library.
Young PJ: Good morning, Mary.
Librarian Mary: Peter, you here to alphabetize the LPs today?
Young PJ: Yeah. And I can keep the People album. Right?
Librarian Mary: And one other, we agreed, if you ever make up your mind.
Young PJ: Right.
Peter E. Jones: And I had two Streisand albums. The People album and the funny girls soundtrack. Both of which stayed on my record player a long time. I knew every note of it.
PJ's Mom: By the way, our favorite Avon lady was in today and she says she has some 70 for you. I said I doubt you'd be interested in Jo Stafford singing 'The Gentleman Is A Dope'. What? Probably throwing them away by now.
Peter E. Jones: When I was 15, I went to my brother's house for the summer. He lived in another rural place in North Dakota except compared to the little town I grew up in. It was a big city. It was about 40,000 people called Grand Forks. And Grand Forks had this even better library than the one we had, really big library. And the first thing I discovered when I was there was a big trough of cast albums.
Young PJ: I'm never leaving. I wonder if they'll let me alphabetize these.
Peter E. Jones: And so I immediately, you know, salivated over this.
Young PJ: Starting Here, Starting Now, My Fair Lady, Song of Norway Oh.
Peter E. Jones: Oh. Oh. I came across this very strange looking purple LP. It was all purple except for orange print.
Martin Milnes: Ah, you found the Company original cast album?
Peter E. Jones: And it was so intriguing that I was sort of mesmerized by it. I turned it over, and there's that name Sondheim. And that was going with me. So I took that, and I also found at the same time the original cast of Dear World. So I grabbed those two, and that started, you know, me having the show music bug.
Martin Milnes: And is this when you began writing songs in earnest?
Peter E. Jones: I suppose I was thinking about it once that started taking hold, really as much due to Sondheim as anything. Because as much as I would listen to the other things, listening to him was like in the most intriguing, exciting way going to school. Whereas listening to something else like Mame was, you know, going to McDonald's. And I don't mean that with any negativity. I just mean that I wasn't being educated by that music.
It just pampered me and I enjoyed it. But with company, I was learning things and growing with it and being challenged by it. And and one of the things I used to do in my limited scope of understanding music in those days is I would listen to only the cuts that I could handle or that I liked and skip over the others. Then one day, I left it on and it went past into the next one and I started getting more and more intrigued. And so part of what Steve does is it will last a long time in your attention span. Like any good art, it gets better and better.
Martin Milnes: And then in May 1984, age 17, you left Wyoming to study at a private college in Denver.
Peter E. Jones: They had, at that time, one of the only four year degrees in musical theater. And I ended up, within a year of that, writing my first show and being the musical director for my first show. Well, from that moment, I never stopped working. It was one show after another. Somebody who was in the audience of the first show that I did said, we need somebody for our Christmas show. And then they were planning another show, which they did in children's theater. And so I became their musical director and composer.
Young PJ: Okay. Okay. Let's start again from bar 17. You are in octaves. You are in thirds.
Peter E. Jones: And at the same time, I was working a lot in a place called the Schweider Theater, which also did children's shows. So it was all children's musicals I was doing. And I felt, you know, I was on cloud nine. I was a man of the theater. I thought, you know, I had this very naive and glamorous idea of what being a composer lyricist was.
Young PJ: Welcome to the theater, to the magic, to the fun.
Peter E. Jones: And I didn't know anything.
Martin Milnes: How did you come to write to Stephen Sondheim?
Peter E. Jones: So late in 1990, I had just turned 24. My partner at the time suggested that I should write Sondheim because perhaps he took apprentices. So I did. His agent's address was published in some kind of trade journal.
Martin Milnes: What did you say in your letter?
Peter E. Jones: I kept it as tight as possible. I think I outlined that I'd been working in Denver and as a composer lyricist, I would love to learn from you. Do you have apprenticeships? And if so, I would be interested. I included a cassette tape of, I don't know, six songs or so, and an a news article with my picture. And within a week, I got a letter back. I couldn't believe it. And the first thing I noticed, when I saw his name printed on the stationary was that I had misspelled his name when I wrote my original letter to him. I used a v instead of a p h. I was so beside myself on that one. In a nutshell, his letter said, you're doing the right thing by working. Writing and putting it on. You're doing exactly what you should be doing. And you seem serious about it, but I don't do anything like apprentices or anything formal. But if you come to New York, I'd be happy to see you.
Martin Milnes: What was your reaction to that letter?
Peter E. Jones: I'm going to New York. At that time, I'd just taken a job. I worked on that project until it was finished in February 1991. And I had a thousand dollars, and I got on a train to New York.
Martin Milnes: Specifically because Stephen Sondheim had said to look him up.
Peter E. Jones: Yes. In this first week, I got jobs very quickly. Playing piano for a ballet class, which turned out to be an excruciating experience. And I got a job doing piano for an improv comedy group. My only time I played in a Broadway house was for that.
I also called Sondheim's office early in the week. And who did you speak to?
I spoke to his secretary whose name was Steven Clar, who is now one of my dearest friends on earth. At the time, obviously, I didn't know who he was. When the phone rang, it was answered with a number.
Steve Clar: 3486.
Peter E. Jones: Which to this little hick from the West
Steve Clar: 3486?
Peter E. Jones: That just threw me. I've hung the phone up. You know? I didn't know what it was. When I called back, having gotten myself together
Steve Clar: 3486.
Peter E. Jones: I said, I'm Peter Jones, and I'd written to mister Sondheim, and he said I could come and and meet him.
Steve Clar: Alright. I'll tell him.
Peter E. Jones: And that all happened in the first week. And then it was clear that my thousand dollars was gonna be gone in no time, and and the place I was supposed to stay fell through after a couple of nights. So it was all a little bit shaky and I thought I might have to leave town but I had yet to hear from Mr. Sondheim. So I called Sondheim's office again.
Steve Clar: 3486.
Young PJ: This is Peter Jones. I called last week
Peter E. Jones: And there was a little pause and Mr. Clar said
Steve Clar: Oh yeah. And what's your story again?
Peter E. Jones: Was thinking aback by that. So I explained, it looks like I'm going to be leaving town soon and I would like to meet him before I leave town. Which is very ballsy of me, not the kind of thing I would do normally. But I thought I'm going to meet him before I leave. Again, Mr. Clar said,
Steve Clar: Alright, I'll tell him.
Peter E. Jones: I went out and mailed two resumes, came back, and there was a message on the machine from Mister Sondheim.
Stephen Sondheim: Hi. It's Steve Sondheim. I'll be leaving town tomorrow, so why don't you come by for a drink at 6PM 246 East 49th near 2nd Avenue.
Peter E. Jones: So that was a Monday, 02/25/1991. And I got dressed in my little thing I had to wear that sort of looked nice, was a black turtleneck and a black and white houndstooth sport coat and a pair of casual dress slacks and sneakers. I was near 2nd Avenue, so all I had to do was get on the 2nd Avenue bus and go down. So I get on the bus and the first strange thing that happens in the evening is that as I'm walking to the back of the bus, right as I'm walking through the aisle, a woman bends over to, I guess, get something she dropped. And my arm bangs her in the head as I as I pass her. I'll I'll just go.
I stopped and I I just beside myself with anguish and apologies and handing her her glasses and running to the back of the bus as fast as I can. And for the whole trip, if I ever looked toward the front, she would catch me looking at her and then rub her temple and and milk sympathy out of me for her.
Martin Milnes: So this is not the most calming environment in which to compose yourself to meet Sondheim?
Peter E. Jones: Well, I don't know. Maybe it was a good thing. It kept me distracted while I was going down there, but it was sort of welcomed in New York.
Martin Milnes: So you get off the bus, get to the house. What happens?
Peter E. Jones: I ring the doorbell and he answered. Personally? Personally, I was to later learn that he would occasionally do that, but it was not a regular thing. But he must have happened to have been down there when the doorbell rang and he welcomed me in, asked if I would like a drink, and he sat me down in a chair and handed me a glass of wine and said, I have to take a phone call, so make yourself comfortable for a few minutes and I'll be right back down. So after he ensconced me, he went upstairs and there I am sitting alone in Stephen Sondheim's house not really knowing what to think. So a few minutes go by and Sondheim comes back down and he grabs his drink and he sits across from me in what I would later learn was the chair he always sat in for interviews. He said
Stephen Sondheim: The phone call I had to take was from my agent who let me know that Assassins is not going to transfer to Broadway.
Peter E. Jones: So this was a little bit of a downer and I did take that into consideration. I was thinking, wow, this is he he can't be happy about this and here he is having to talk to me, you know. But talk he did and proceeded to draw me out.
Martin Milnes: How do you mean draw you out?
Peter E. Jones: He was, he had a very distinct and well rehearsed way of interviewing people. He's used to people being nervous around him and it was a way to relax them by keeping them focused on you know answering basic questions so.
Martin Milnes: Were you nervous?
Peter E. Jones: Yes I was but I wasn't I wasn't so nervous that I couldn't get into the conversation, get into the questions he was asking me. He was very good at it and he knew how to do it without making it turn back at him.
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, so you're from Wyoming. I've never been there, though I think I drove through it in my college days. You've been in Denver how long? You said in your letter that you write mostly children's theater. What? You like writing lyrics? I've never heard anyone admit to that. Why did you study in college?
Martin Milnes: So focus very much on you.
Peter E. Jones: Yes. Completely on on me. I don't remember if I got any question. I do remember that I said, well, I I just wanna say it's an honor to meet you, and I got that out of the way right away, and he was kind of blase about it.
Martin Milnes: So as the night continued, how did the conversation flow? What happened?
Peter E. Jones: We just continued to talk about the things you would expect. I must have said something about the house, and he started to show me around the house as I picked out different things that I thought were interesting. But I didn't know anything. You know, I was looking at all this stuff, and I didn't have a clue about it. His penchant for puzzle collecting, which he would have many of them hanging on the walls and a lot of interesting things, esoteric things. It was a beautiful beautiful thing to look at. So it went from one of those things to another to another, and then eventually we got to the history of the house. He took me out into the garden, which was a landmark. He was able to point out other luminaries that had lived in this area, in these houses. One of them, of course, was Katharine Hepburn, who was next door. From there, ensued stories about, for example, his housekeeper, whom he engaged in 1970, had, when he found out Hepburn was living next door, he was gung ho to have the job, and, the first time that he was told she was out in the back in the garden, he found some reason to go out onto the 2nd Floor terrace and and with a feather duster and all kinds of things so we could look Dusting the flowers. Yes. So, Steve is telling me stories like this. Yeah. By this time, we had gotten to the 2nd Floor where his study was and that terrace that he was referring to, And there was when he told me another Hepburn story about seeing her come to the window of her of the 4th Floor where her bedroom was and Spencer Tracy coming up behind her and putting his arms around.
Martin Milnes: Was the atmosphere becoming in any way romantic or flirtatious?
Peter E. Jones: Yes. There was an advance made, shall we say. We both disagree about which one of us did it. He thought I put my arm around him, I thought he put his arm around me. That's how we both remembered it. He said he was very self conscious about being an old lech and I said I wouldn't have had the courage to do it. Maybe we both did it and don't know it. But that's it. We put our arm around each other and looked out over the garden in the 2nd Floor, and that was it. It was just chummy and slightly romantic and comfortable. And then we continued the tour and went to the 3rd Floor which had a game room with billiards and a TV room in the front that had posters of all of his shows along the wall. And then up to the 4th Floor where there was a bedroom on one side and on the other side a dressing room. So when we get to the 4th Floor, we had somehow gotten to talk personally enough that he recounted a story about Lenny, as in Leonard Bernstein. Lenny as he referred to him. And he said one of the first times he was working with Lenny, they were about to end things for the day. He was about to leave, and Lenny grabbed him and gave him one of these famous full on the mouth Lenny kisses with tongue. Because Lenny was notoriously tactile with people like this. So he tells me the story. I wish I could remember the context and why he was even telling it to me, but I remember being quite surprised and amused by the story and how charming he was in the way he told it. And it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes later, I got the same surprise.
Martin Milnes: Steve gave you a Lenny kiss.
Peter E. Jones: Yes. Steve gave me a Lenny kiss. Thank you.
Martin Milnes: And was that Lenny kiss from Steve welcome?
Peter E. Jones: It wasn't not welcome or welcome. I was just so shocked, and then thought it was so hilarious that he had just told me a story in which he said, what does this mean? I think what he was trying to do was tell me how unaware he was of his sexuality and his feelings and all of that. And so to get from this maestro, that kind of thing, really shocked him. But then he turned around and did the same thing to me. Now was that because he was sort of plowing the way or or did he not make that connection and it was all subconscious? Who knows? I was fine with it, but remember I was just so bowled over by everything. Like, can I be anything else? You know? I then, to actually take the steam out of things, I said, so you're going out of town tomorrow? And he said, yes. You wanna come with me? I was like, and I think I said something like, I'm not that kind of girl. You know? But anyway, why would I go with you on a trip out of town? He said, oh, no. I'm not going out of town. I have a house in the country, and I go there from Thursday to Monday, and then I come in on Tuesday, and then I go back out. That's a weekly thing, he said. Oh, says I. Okay. So, I stayed the night. So in the morning, I'm getting ready to leave, and he turns to me and says, so do you wanna come with me? And I couldn't resist. The way he asked me, it was such a tender sweet thing, I said sure. So, I played it cool and I went down the stairs hoping against hope that nobody else if there was in the house would see me so I could leave discreetly. 'Twas not to be.
Steve Clar: Well, good morning. Oh, busted.
Peter E. Jones: Mister Clar was at his post and we said hello and and talked a little bit and then I finally went. Although, I went with a bag full of gifts, like scores that I'd always wanted. He had a room in his office in which he kept cast albums and vocal scores and vocal selections, and when somebody wrote and asked for something they couldn't find or when there was somebody who he wanted to give a gift to, he had this stash.
Young PJ: The Scrabble Album on CD, that's for me.
Stephen Sondheim: That just came out, and there's more than there was on the LP.
Peter E. Jones: So I'm leaving two four six with a big bag of goodies, you know, so to speak.
Young PJ: Thank you. Thank you so much. I'll just go into we leave at two. Right? Idiot. Now how do I catch a cab?
Peter E. Jones: So I was to go back to my apartment and pack a bag, then he would be leaving about 02:00 or whatever it was sometime in the afternoon. So I was to be back by then, and he had a little jaguar and off to my first visit to Connecticut.
Martin Milnes: What did you talk about on the way, and how did you feel in this whirlwind being swept up?
Peter E. Jones: It was all too unreal. I just I I didn't. It is curious that I handled it as well as I did. Because when I say to you I'm naive and just inexperienced, I mean it. You know? I guess it proves that there was a special chemistry with us. There was a little part of me that was a bit older than my age and a part of him that was younger than his age. And they met up, and it worked enough that he was comfortable and I was.
Martin Milnes: So what happens when you arrive at Steve's place in Roxbury, Connecticut?
Peter E. Jones: The first thing that happens is he wants to show me around. So we plop the bags in the inside the house. I don't think we even went in the house. So we were walking around the grounds of the house. It was quite a large lawn on both sides of the house and on one side and also some woods.
And, as we're walking around, it started to snow lightly. He was wearing topsider shoes or deck shoes, I think we call them, and they're very thin soled shoes, and their their traction is not their main feature. So as we got over one sort of bumpy area of the lawn, he slipped, didn't fall, and I said,
Young PJ: Do you have any other shoes you might wanna put on? It it is snowing. No. I'll be alright.
Peter E. Jones: We go down to another area. Shows me where the pool is, and there's a pool house, and there are these hedges, and he's very proud of this red British telephone box that he has between the hedges. We climb the the grass to go to another part of it, and he slips again. And I said, oh,
Young PJ: sorry to be a pain, but don't you think
Stephen Sondheim: you Alright. Will all be
Peter E. Jones: And we continue to go around, but on this third pass along the lawn, he slips again, but this time he falls.
Young PJ: Oh, shit. Are you okay? And,
Peter E. Jones: you know, it's already been weird enough, but this went Yes. When I say weird, I mean everything so this this turned it into weirdness, you know.
Martin Milnes: So this was a serious fall?
Peter E. Jones: Yes. He landed on his butt, but he must have somehow landed on his leg in a way because, of course, the upshot was he broke his ankle.
Martin Milnes: So here you are. You're on your own, you're with Stephen Sondheim and he's fallen and broken his ankle.
Peter E. Jones: He's broken his ankle. Of course at the moment we don't know he's broken his ankle but it's very clear that he's in pain. So I help him up and I carry him into the house and we set him down. Now I don't know the house, I don't know anything here and I help him onto somewhere, I don't remember now, but probably onto a couch in the living room. And he asked for the phone, and so he called this friend neighbor next door whose name was also Peter. So right now there are two Steve's and two Peter's. You see how unusual everything is. It's just just weird. So, Peter Wooster comes over, and henceforth, by the way, that's why I'm referred to as PJ because there was already a Peter in the works, shall we say. I don't remember why this is the case either, but he did not go to the doctor right away. It was a whole day at least before he went and came back in a cast and crutches.
Martin Milnes: And you waited at home while he had that appointment?
Peter E. Jones: I waited at his country house while he had that appointment. So there I am. But I think we can safely say that breaking an ankle was the reason we came together because had that not happened, the rest wouldn't have very quickly rolled into place which was that the first time his housekeeper came up from the city to do what he always does every week which is to cook a bunch of food and put it into the fridge and then Steve would microwave them at night and so on. But because now he was in a cast he couldn't stand up and do those things. So the housekeeper said, look I can't stay up here because I gotta be in the city. Will you stay up here and be the helper in all this? I don't know if he was saying it was your fault so you could do this. And so I was like well of course. So a week goes by of me being up there and I'm starting to get very concerned just because I don't understand what it all means. Again, I hate to repeat, but it was somebody I'd barely known a day. We know who this person is on this other level, and I never met any celebrity before.
Peter E. Jones: I'm so happy I'm afraid I'll die here in your
Martin Milnes: And now you had Stephen Sondheim entirely to yourself to ask all the questions that anybody would ever want to ask him, so a captive audience.
Peter E. Jones: Yeah. So there was that, and there was obviously there was the bedroom and the strangeness of being with this musical theater god in a cast in his bed, and he's 36 years old. All of it was very strange.
Peter E. Jones: What would you do if I died like this right now here in your arms that we
Peter E. Jones: But I didn't have the, however you wanna put it, presence of self or wherewithal or I also didn't have the desire to hurt him in any way by leaving. So I was staying because I was asked to and that I could be of help, but he clearly liked it. Didn't say it in so many words, but after about a week, I got up the courage to say, I I don't know. I I'm afraid of this, or I think I should you know, maybe it's time I go,
Peter E. Jones: or I thought I knew how much
Peter E. Jones: And he did say, I would really like you to stay. And it was one of the first times too that I discovered that he didn't have a lot of domestic common sense, shall we say. He used to warm up his own breakfast every morning, and that consisted of taking oatmeal out of a container in the refrigerator and putting it into a double boiler. So he put it into this glass pot that had a glass cover, and that would sit on top of a second pot that was larger and had water in it that was boiling. And that way it would warm up gently, and at a certain point it would be ready, and he would take it off, and he'd make his breakfast. He made his coffee, and he did all this. But now Well, couldn't do that because he couldn't stand up and have the crutches and do it. So this was one of the duties entrusted to me by Luis. I got bored with this after a few days. I did know my way around the kitchen enough.
And so I just found a Teflon pot in the, cupboard, and I took it out, and I put the oatmeal in the the Teflon pot, and I warmed it up. He saw me doing this from over his breakfast table, and I heard him pick up the phone, and it was a rotary phone, youngsters. He dialed a number, and I didn't look at him. I just kept doing what I was doing and I heard him dial a number. And then, he said, hi.
Stephen Sondheim: It's me. PJ is heating up the oatmeal in a different pan and different way than you have me do it. Is that alright?
Peter E. Jones: Click. Yes. And later when I saw Luis, he turned to me and he said, can you believe he called me about that? But he didn't know about any of that. So he was taught to do it a certain way. And Luis said to me, I taught him to do it that way because I knew he wouldn't spend his time paying attention to it and it would burn, but if he did it this way, it would heat up very slowly and it would it would be alright.
Martin Milnes: In the weeks and months after this, you and Steve spent time together both in Connecticut and Manhattan. So was this relationship being defined in any way?
Peter E. Jones: You mean as a relationship?
Martin Milnes: Yeah. Or were you dating each other? Because you seem to be together all the time. What, you
Peter E. Jones: know We never dated though. That's an interesting point. It's not like we courted, shall we say. We came together. But we never defined it.
If that answers your question, we never said we are doing this. The circumstance dictated it. And I did occasionally go back to the apartment I was staying, but I also had work for him. He was wise enough to know that if I was gonna be there all the time, I needed something to do. And it turned out that he needed his lyrics put into the digital domain.
Martin Milnes: And so this being the nineteen nineties, of course, well, the early nineties, this is when everything is going digital.
Peter E. Jones: It is going digital. So he had a little Mac computer, and I spent a lot of time typing all those lyrics into Word.
Martin Milnes: And how did you feel about Steve at this point?
Peter E. Jones: Well, it was ambivalent, not, oh, I don't want this. I just did not understand what a big deal it was for him. That was something I couldn't see. That was really the thing I thought why me? Look at all the people he could have. All the young men that must be interested in him. It was something I couldn't understand really for years until I got closer to this age.
Martin Milnes: And what do you think that was with hindsight?
Peter E. Jones: What he saw in me?
Martin Milnes: Yes.
Peter E. Jones: He saw what I couldn't see in me certainly. He saw an individual. He saw aspects of himself I would say of lacking self worth but being talented. Having an interest in things other than what somebody your own age should be interested in. You know, our shared interest in old movies and the fact that he could say Bette Davis and I knew who it was and delighted in it, you know, that meant something to him and it was an avenue of connection.
If I'd been strictly out of the nineteen eighties and nineties, there wouldn't have been a
Martin Milnes: So it was a meeting of minds.
Peter E. Jones: Meeting of the minds. Yeah.
Fosca: They hear drums. You hear music. As to why don't you see where I sang? We are different. You and I are different.
Peter E. Jones: It was my individuality in my way. The quirkiness, I suppose, of me coming from Wyoming, which is unusual. And that certainly was exotic to him, that whole kind of life, you know.
Martin Milnes: Beyond the fact that he was Stephen Sondheim, what did you see in him?
Peter E. Jones: It's colored by the fact that I was confused about so much. The problem with being with him, the problem when you're trying to sort out, when you're with somebody like that, you're trying to sort out what is affecting you because he's who he is and what is reaching you because he's who he is. So I was trying to navigate the fact that because of who he was, I was trying to impress him all the time, which I've seen so many people do over and over again. Every moment is trying to make an impression, trying to either make him laugh, make him think you're smart. People did that left, right, and center that I witnessed over the years, but I myself tried to do it in the beginning. You feel like you have to to earn your place, I guess, And that was not what I needed to do. I had already been welcomed in. I just needed to be me, which is a big lesson, which is something one continues to learn. So there was a lot of murk, very murky things going on. I wanted to be him and that played a large part in being with him. I didn't want to disappoint him. I can say it now that I wasn't particularly sexually driven in the relationship. We did have a chemistry and we were able to be fairly happily sexual together, but it wasn't to me, it was not the thrust of it. It was somehow this meeting of minds that I found preposterous. Is that any kind of answer?
Martin Milnes: When did you start going out with Steve socially? Did you meet his friends at this point?
Peter E. Jones: Not by and large. It was a little bit of piecemeal. The only going out we ever did was going to some show that he was going to. I don't remember going to any kind of social functions. The only one was a party at the house. The reason I remember that party is because a fair amount of the suspects were there. Mary Rodgers, some of his other personal friends that he saw frequently at the time, Patrick O'Neil who was still alive. So that was one thing in which I spent most of the time hiding in the library upstairs with Patrick O'Neil who was also hiding from the rest of the group. I got the tenor of the room right away when people were looking at me like the new young trick on his arm. So I I didn't want any of that, and I went upstairs, and that was that.
Martin Milnes: Was Mia Farrow at this party? When did you first meet her?
Peter E. Jones: Mia was not at that party. I met Mia individually. She actually came down to the house to meet me one afternoon, and I remember distinctly what she was wearing, or at least this is how I remember it. And I wonder how amused she'll be by this. But I remember her looking very parochial, like she was in a school girl's outfit. It was a white, crisply starched looking white blouse and gray wool skirt and Doc Martens shoes. But Mia, I don't remember the color of the socks. We had a nice visit and after it was over I walked her outside to a cab. And I think we said something like, We're going to be friends. I would guess given a couple of conversations we had later on that she related to my situation to a degree because of her own experience being much younger than Frank Sinatra. I think it was being with an older legend was something she understood. And so she was perfectly comfortable talking to me, relating to me in a straightforward way.
Martin Milnes: Mia said that on another occasion you hid from Steve's psychiatrist Doctor Horowitz and his wife.
Mia Farrow: Once when Peter was in a mood, Peter was really younger then and the Horowitz's were coming over and Steve didn't want Peter to not be there. So he said, will you go out and persuade Pete to come on down? And I'm like, well, I'll do my best. I don't know if you remember that week.
Peter E. Jones: You know, I'm not surprised, but I don't remember it.
Mia Farrow: It was like me asking the kid
Peter E. Jones: Yeah.
Mia Farrow: You know, to come on down pretty please. You know? It'll be fun. He's not mad or anything. The Horowitz's are coming.
They're not a lot of fun, but they're a little fun.
Peter E. Jones: But that's you trying to talk me into it?
Mia Farrow: Yeah. Me too.
Peter E. Jones: And I'm like, no.
Peter E. Jones: I'm gonna suck my thumb in the corner,
Peter E. Jones: and I'm not coming out.
Mia Farrow: Yeah. You did come down. You did. You came down.
Peter E. Jones: I don't know what the deal was except that it was Milton and Carla, and I suppose I was intimidated.
Martin Milnes: So it wasn't always easy for you then.
Peter E. Jones: I didn't understand what was happening with us, and I got a job doing summer stock. And we all know what summer stock's like. It's one big fuck fest. But I through that I met somebody that I thought I wanted to develop a relationship with. You know, and when you're that age you can somehow can entertain that you have more than one going on and you don't have to give up any of them, you know. You can just have them all. You don't think about it and that's what I was doing summer. Mind you, this was before we had decided to commit ourselves to each other too.
Martin Milnes: But you worked through this period? Yes. We worked through these things. And amazingly enough, we did them on the phone. There was a phone booth in the middle of this little town where I was doing summer stock. Proper phone booth. You walked in, closed the door. But it was stiflingly hot in the summer. And I would go down there on my break every day between I was rehearsing one show, performing another at night, and writing a third. And it was pretty regular. We'd go down and ring him up, we'd have our little phone session. We started working everything out. We started to tell each other everything that he told me he loved me, that I told him I loved him, that we wish we had told each other sooner, etc. We just started to lay the cards out on the table. It wasn't all sanguine. It was bittersweet because I had been developing this relationship with somebody in the summer stock company, and we eventually made a cross country trip together. I then eventually landed back in Denver, and I did not get back to New York until the beginning of the year when we had, again, through more phone calls and a couple of meetings, physical meetings where we got together, and we finally worked it out that I would come back and we would be together. It was all very exciting, getting settled into the house, and I do remember Steve saying to me something that was a bit telling now that I look back, but he said to me, I just wanna pick up your entire life and bring it out here. And that's a little telling, isn't it? And I have to say that was, shall we say, a moment that excited me a little too much? Whereas I think back on it now and of course what it's saying is I was not being considered an autonomous being really by either of us.
Peter E. Jones: That gives you an idea of the excitement we had about what was coming. The official date of us getting together was 01/15/1993. And so when I did get back and settled in, we almost systematically started to approach these things, meeting his different friends that were one dinner after another, occasional dinner party and so on. And then there was the deciding about, what I would do next. Do remember him saying to me one day, now you've got to start working on a project. What's it going to be? He was very methodical. It was almost like he had an agenda for my development. So it went from there. A year later on our anniversary, so that would be 01/15/1994, we exchanged rings, but not in a straightforward way. I had a little ring designed for me because I wanted a design as opposed to just a band, but he wanted a plain band. And so we went into Tiffany's, and I do remember the very stoic counter person observing that this person he obviously recognized was selecting a wedding band and that the person with him was not. And that I believe he wore it right out of the store.
Martin Milnes: And what was the reaction from Steve's inner circle?
Peter E. Jones: It was a little bit of a to do, shall we say. Because of course for the friends it was, oh he's finally found the one after all these years which was no pressure you know.
Martin Milnes: Were there different kind of reactions? Were some people welcoming? Were some people very protective of their Steve?
Peter E. Jones: Generally at least on face value things were fairly easy go. There were not animosities thrown at me, shall we say, with the exception of one person and that was the aforementioned Peter Wooster who lived across the street. He wasn't jealous of me but I think he found me gauche and des class A and unworthy of Steve.
Martin Milnes: How was Mary Rodgers with you?
Peter E. Jones: Mary was the last to come around in terms of welcoming me. She was one of the ones who spied me at that first party in the townhouse in the city and I got an attitude from her, know. Just she avoided me, avoided her. But after we got together in '93, I was sitting with her at a big round table at dinner. I had asked her about a not well known TV musical she did called Feathertop, and it had Jane Powell in it.
And she was delighted to talk about that. And she said that Jane Powell was wonderful because she was the only musician in the cast. So she was reliable and great to work with and so on. So I remember her just regaling me with little bits of that. We must have talked a lot about children's theater because she had such a background in that.
And at that time, you'd ask me anything about what I'd done. That was it. But the most important thing was at the end of the evening, she turned to me and said, it took a long time for you to come along. And it was her way of saying love.
Martin Milnes: How did that feel to you?
Peter E. Jones: I loved it. I had a lovely time. Most evenings like that are fairly uncomfortable, and that was because of her, not one of them.
Martin Milnes: How did your family react to this?
Peter E. Jones: It was never a big deal. I waited a while before I dropped the news. Know, I used to make a joke about imagining the first time that they would meet Steve and say, Hi mom, dad. Here's my partner. He's older than you. Because he was five years older than my father and seven older than my mother. So I thought of it that way a lot. I think it was maybe about a year, I'm not really sure when I actually wrote them and said we're together and we're living together. But they were fine about it. They were fine about it.
Martin Milnes: When did they meet him?
Peter E. Jones: They met him in in '94. He had written them a letter and invited them to come and thanking them for having given birth to me or something romantic like that. It was very welcoming of them, and my mother hugged him when she met him. Throughout this period and afterwards, Steve and PJ shared many marvelous moments and so much love. It was a love which became immortalized musically in the score Steve composed during this period, passion. But sadly, as we shall hear in our next episode, Steve and PJ were to encounter further difficulties and heartache. At the time, PJ still had genuinely no idea how much this relationship meant to Steve because he had no concept of what Steve had been like before they'd met.
Fosca: Death, implacable as stone. A love that like a knife, has cut into a life I wanted left alone. A love I may regret, but one I can't forget.
Martin Milnes: But Mia Farrow realized exactly how important PJ was to Steve.
Peter E. Jones: I didn't have a perspective on his past the way you all did.
Mia Farrow: That's right.
Peter E. Jones: You know? Steve Clar told me a story once. He said, normally every morning when the call came for check-in, it was, yeah. Well, 10:00 is this. After you, it was morning. What have you got?
Mia Farrow: It's lovely. It's really loud and made me cry.
Peter E. Jones: But I had no.
Mia Farrow: You didn't have the context I
Peter E. Jones: didn't have the background for that, and nobody told me anything of that nature. So I was, you know, pedaling blind.
Mia Farrow: I don't know if it would have made a difference because you were so young and trying to forge your own way Mhmm. Rightly, as his son would do. You know? Like the little pigs, they get to a certain age. They get to build their own house kind of thing.
He wanted to build your own thing. And rightly, that is a priority when one is young. You're being reflective now as an older person who can look back and say, well, that was what that was. And you didn't know the larger context. I did.
Peter E. Jones: You told me once on the phone, do you remember we might not remember. We were having a call, and I was in that tiny little room on the 4th Floor, and we were talking about this was things were fine at the time. I don't know how we got to this point, but then you said, well, yeah, because, you know, if anything goes wrong, you're out. We were we were agreeing to the fact that I was not the one in power in terms of if their if if their disagreements said and it was sort of you talking from the Frank Sinatra experience and me talking. I remember that distinctly, I don't remember anything about the call other than that.
You know how that is. Do you zero in on the one thing?
Mia Farrow: I I remember the whole context because I missed you. You know? I missed you for his sake, and I missed you for my own sake. Mhmm. You know?
Peter E. Jones: But, yeah, I felt you were his. And you were, and that's okay. It's I I don't mean his in a possessive way. No.
Mia Farrow: You mean that that I was his friend? And Well, that's true. And That is true. But I wasn't not
Peter E. Jones: I I know. I know. I just
Mia Farrow: Got it. We can be friends.
Peter E. Jones: There's there's another Valley of Regret to run down
Mia Farrow: if you want. Oh my gosh. So the valleys of regret.
Peter E. Jones: After the Valley of the Dolls. Yes. The Valley of Regret.
Fosca: I remain your Georgio.
Fosca: We dedicate this episode to the late Stephen Klar, devoted friend and secretary to Stephen Sondheim for thirty five years and much missed friend of PJ.
Mehran James McCullough: In this episode, Stephen Sondheim was portrayed by Alistair McGowan. Young PJ was played by Eddie Andrews. Steven Clar appeared as himself by special arrangement with Claire Stevens. Infant PJ was played by Arthur Magee, PJ's Mom by Victoria Ward, and Librarian Mary by Charlotte Page. Dramatic reenactments were written by Martin Milnes and produced by Peter E. Jones. The music of Stephen Sondheim was played by Colm Molloy. Sondheim and Bernstein instrumental tracks were provided by Broadway Studio Orchestra. Beautiful Briney by Richard M Sherman and Robert B Sherman was performed by Mike Sammes. Perfect Strangers by Mary Rodgers and Martin Charnin was sung by Jane Powell and Hugh O'Brian. Excerpts from Passion by Stephen Sondheim were sung by Donna Murphy of the original Broadway cast and Peter E. Jones. Our dedication to Steven Clar was read by Jonathan Christopher, and I am Mehran James McCullough. Loving You, The Untold Sondheim is produced by Martin Milnes and Peter Jones. The executive producer is Jason Caffrey of Creative Kin Limited. Mix and mastering is by Chris Traves. Stephen Sondheim's music and lyrics are featured courtesy of The Stephen Sondheim Trust. The podcast's original score is composed by Peter E. Jones. The series is written, devised, and directed by Martin Milnes.