By Marven Moss

    Newman’s widow and partner of 50 years, Joanne Woodward, and Darius Brubeck of Connecticut’s first musical family collaborated with Taylor in their stage presentation of “Jazz Poetry Jazz” that opened at the Westport Country Playhouse and toured New England in the 1970s.
    To escape from the distractions, the concept of blending poetry with jazz improvisations was shaped in part by the collaborators huddled in the children’s  tree house on the Newman’s North Street property. A reviewer extolled the show as “a fantastic evening” with “a marvelous theatricality that was penetrating and . . .   highly amusing.”
    Woodward today lauds Taylor as “a wonderful man, a great teacher and a great friend.”
   “We had one of the nicest trips of my life years ago,” she recalls, “when Doug, Barbara Baxley and I went touring around New England to educate everyone about comedic poetry and original jazz scores.”
    One of Taylor’s early plays was a three-act Broadway drama called “The
Sudden and Accidental Reeducation of Horse Johnson” that Taylor wrote especially for Jack Klugman who appeared onstage with Jill Clayburgh and later became a TV icon as Tony Randall’s sloppy roommate in “The Odd Couple” and the iconoclastic forensics expert in “Quincy, M.E.”
    Now 87, in frail health, an oral cancer survivor and the last movie legends in  the 1957 film classic “12 Angry Men,” Klugman says he is “proud to have worked” with Taylor.
    “My first impression after reading the play,” Klugman remembers, “was that the writer had great integrity and character. But I remained cautiously optimistic about that. I had met many fine, sensitive writers in my day who turned out to be awful human beings. Doug was not one of those. He was bright, curious and talented with a kindness I had rarely seen. It seemed to me that he had written ‘Horse’ from the center of that kindness and that the heart of the play had been transplanted whole cloth from the person who had written it.”
   “Unfortunately, the play did not get the notices it deserved and was not given the time it needed to stand on its own two feet. But we were young men at the time and knew better than to be discouraged. We were both doing something we loved and so we never forgot, in spite of our disappointment, that our work was a privilege granted only to those who understood its rare and extraordinary value.”
    In a profession that callously swallows and brutally grinds down talented dilettantes with fragile psyches and exposes the flaws and insecurities deep inside of all of us, Taylor has endured with bonhomie and style in a hermetic theatrical orbit consistent with his principles and values.
    His arc as a writer extends back over 60 years and covers more than 50 plays. An early mis en scene, “Making It,” premiered at The Actors Studio in New York and was directed by the late Rod Steiger. Today royalties dribble in unpredictably. The amounts are trivial. But that means his work is still being resurrected and produced somewhere in the U.S. and as far away as Australia.
    As an actor with a visceral sense for shading his characterizations, he has  turned in a little gem in a transient appearance in the movie “All You Need is One Big Break.” His first professional costar on stage was no less than Uta Hagen.  He worked extensively with the vulnerably endearing Oscar-winner Sandy Dennis and in the end, when she died of ovarian cancer in 1992 at age 54, Taylor became the executor of her estate.
   Given Taylor’s ear for the language, his lyrical artistry and his guileless vision of the stage as a mirror for life’s essential truths, his natural forte is every actor’s Everest: Shakespeare.
    His Lear is impeccable. But more than that:
    “I would believe him if he decided to play Juliet,” says E. Katherine Kerr, an Obie winner for “Cloud 9” and twice nominated for Drama Desk awards.
    In the business, Taylor is what is known as a “generous” actor which means he unfailingly puts the production ahead of his own aspirations.
    The calm and warmth that flows naturally from him, his genuinely supportive nature and his sensitivity to shyness and timidity in others has transformed a long list of hesitant novices into assertive and articulate performers. 
    His aptitude for inspiring people and tactfully prodding them to look deeper into themselves and be better has assembled an eclectic circle of friends who regard him with extraordinary unabashed affection.
   At one point in the course of his 20-year run of mounting summer productions for the Connecticut Center Acting Ensemble he established at Fairfield University and 26 years of tutoring drama in the continuing education department at the same university, someone counted at least 100 of Taylor’s protégés working simultaneously in the theater somewhere across the U.S. and Canada and even overseas.  
    Kevin Knight, the affable Norwalker who provides a residential refuge for the Saturday morning monologists, says Taylor has convinced him “to trust myself”
and “let the negatives fall away.”
    Elias Kulukundis, an opera singer and actor from Greenwich, credits Taylor’s tutorials with instilling “the feeling of competence and success” that once led to securing a large loan to resuscitate the family shipping business.
    “Doug encouraged us all to think we can do better,” recounts Kulukundis. “I also discovered,” Kulukundis adds, “a love of comedy and realized the thing I love more than anything else is to make people laugh.”
   To Stratford actress Nadine Willig, Taylor is a nonjudgmental resource for “thought-provoking ideas.”
    At one of Taylor’s classes, Willig divulged she was going through the unbearable pain of a divorce. “Doug showed up at my job the next day,” Willig  recalls, “with hot coffee and an ear and a shoulder.”
    David Rogers, Westport actor and writer, confides he is unapologetically envious of Taylor’s all-around theatrical versatility and discipline.
    Elliott Mayer of Stamford, publisher of the Thespis Actor’s Ultimate Resource Guide for New York City, lauds Taylor for “a heart of gold” and a teacher who “cares about every one of his students in getting them to realize their potential.”
    “It’s never about him or his ego,” Mayer points out.
   Adds the actor-director and Shakespeare aficionado Ezra Barnes of Brooklyn, NY: “Doug is respected and admired because he nurtures other artists. He’s a great champion of the work of others.”
    Not much in Taylor’s visage—the streaky gray hair with wispy ends, the thick Andy Rooney-like eyebrows, the deeply-etched  half-circles under the eyes, the pudgy silhouette—would need to be exaggerated to produce one of Al Hirschfeld’s revealing caricatures..
   Taylor presents himself with no airbrushing. His eyes look straight into yours. He is absolutely without pretension or any impulse towards self-aggrandizement or sharp edges. Typically he is garbed in a windbreaker over a pullover sweater, and cords or chinos. On his feet he wears sandals or a scuffed pair of size 9 1/2 sneakers.
    “I’ve never seen Doug with a new anything,” reports his longtime pal Lew Robinson of Redding.  
    Even encased in . . . well, drabness, he exudes an effortless charm and a touch of the debonair because of  the clarity and intelligence that radiates from  his eyes and the self-possessed manner in which carries himself even with the stiffness of age.
   At the same time he has left friends exasperated for years by passively resisting when they urge him to wear a hearing aid to capture the low sound registers. In other words, like a lot of us, at times he won’t listen.
    Tayor’s interest in acting started with elocution instruction to correct a speech impediment when he was a boy in San Francisco. In high school, his energy and intensity as a cheerleader drew the attention of a drama coach and led to the stage at the University of California at Berkley and ultimately a life in the euphoric orbit of entertainment.
    To his marrow today Taylor is an unequivocal believer in The Method School of Acting that was ingrained in him by Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse after World War II when Sgt. Doug Taylor of the U.S. Army in Europe was demobilized and followed his dramatic impulses to New York.
    What is The Method?
    Taylor gives a definition expressed by the maestro Meisner himself: “Behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances. And “the reality of doing. Acting is doing. Not pretending to do.”
    In an interview over coffee at a sandwich shop near the cozy bungalow in Fairfield  he shares with his longtime partner and literary collaborator Louise Ladd, the author of 15 books, Taylor adds:
    “Acting is organic, flowing from the inside out.  Essentially it’s the ability to leave yourself alone and let life happen. You are in another person’s life and you relate to the pulses that emanate from them.”  
    What is especially appealing to Taylor about teaching theater and motivating people is that: “You awaken a creative process in people that they didn’t know they have and you watch their talent blossom and change their lives.”
   The best actor he ever saw?
   Taylor’s sense of probity won’t allow him to single out anyone. But he is willing to retrieve the performances etched indelibly in his mind, a list that covers Lee J. Cobb and Arthur Kennedy in “Death of a Salesman,” Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Sir Laurence Oliver in “Oedipus” and “The Critic.”
   So given Taylor’s uncommon virtuosity, his authentic diligence, his inimitable gift for the magic of make-believe, his transcendent no-frills appeal and his extensive footprint of seamless accomplishment, why has greater celebrity eluded him?
    Someone has suggested that Taylor looked too much like Robert Wagner and Hollywood did not need two Robert Wagners. Taylor refutes the theory. “I just stopped acting and became a playright and then a teacher,” he says.
    But beyond that to rise to the upper echelon of any arena calls for a degree of egotism and self-absorption, traits that Taylor does not have in him. As opposed to pursuing money and fame, Taylor has gone wherever his talent and imagination as taken him. His success he measures in friends. .
   His old chum Lew Robison expresses it this way:
  “Doug has been too busy being a human being,” Robinson says.
  So now in his ninth decade Alexander Douglas Taylor is under the seduction of the stage, inseparably embedded in his DNA.  
   He is not looking back. He is looking forward  . . . to life’s endless possibilities.