My Forrest Gumpy Life: Our Film Company with a Great Actor

I had some rather good luck in my early years in the sculpture business. One was the result of Fitz

Patrick McGoohan in Braveheart

and Rusty's previous association as the People Tree (a musican group they had when I was a kid) when they met a string of celebrities in their tours with Joey Bishop, Sonny and Cher and other entertainers. They once got involved in a film with the great Irish actor Patrick McGoohan (Silver Streak, the film and TV series The Prisoner).

Somehow Patrick found his way to Montana and attended one of our Montana Logging and Ballet Co. concerts in a tiny rural school in Joliet. He was quite impressed and announced to us that he wanted to join our group! Well this was a terrible idea because, a) he is a famous classically-trained actor and b) we are a bunch of comic dweebs with no real skills. To put him onstage with us would only ruin his reputation. So instead we came up with a fresh new idea: to form an entity with him where we could each use our talents: a film company! So we met with Patrick and began working on a script for a film we would make with him where he could display his marvelous classical acting skill and we could provide any necessary dweebage. But one thing led to another and in the end the project––like so many of the great ideas mentioned in this collection––never got off the ground.

Sen. Max Baucus, Leslie Stahl, me, Bob FitzGerald

Then there were other notables that I came into contact with. Fitz (my sculpture manager for many years) set up an exhibit of my work at his friend Bob Beckel's house in Washington DC. It so happens that one of Bob's neighbors came over for the show and I got to meet the great journalist Leslie Stahl.

It was about that time I got my first professional art exhibition, an unlikely one at Choate, a prestigious Connecticut prep school. The trouble for me was that I had to drive the work there from Montana and to build plexiglass vitrines for each of the 25 or so sculptures to be displayed. I don't know how many people actually saw the exhibition but fortunately when I picked up the work I had made an unexpected sale. What surprised me was the purchaser. It was someone I knew: the famous playwrite Edward Albee. I never got to meet him, but what are the chances that I would actually know who this person was?