On the Occasion of Ruth’s Birthday 2021

Ruth Ford with her first husband Peter van Eyck.
Photographed by Carl Van Vechten

One hundred and ten years ago on this day, July 7^th, 1911, Ruth Ford was born, and she lived for a very long time. For 35 of those years she was a big part of my life. All last year I thought of her very often during the worst of the pandemic. I wondered what she might have said about it, what it might have triggered in her memory, what would she have thought about how the government handled the whole situation, how many people she might have known who died from the bug. For the last several years of her life, Ruth hardly left the Dakota. Her life wouldn’t have been much different if she’d been present during the pandemic as a very old person. I wondered what she would she have thought of masks and social distancing?

In the first decades of my knowing her, Ruth was very social, so I think it would have been hard on her to feel isolated, and hard on a lot of her friends, as well. Especially the theatre people, who would have suffered from Broadway going dark, the way the actors today have suffered from the loss of their livelihood. Ruth and Charles were both very lucky with their health and their long lives. If either of them had memories about the 1918 flu, I don’t recall them ever mentioning anything about it. I know that Charles had some of the childhood illnesses of their days—like mumps—he wrote about mumps in one of his old diaries from boarding school. But I don’t remember Ruth ever talking about having had a serious illness herself, unless you count being old—Ruth sometimes seemed to consider her advanced age a sickness that she thought she might recover from.

Ruth Ford at her apartment in Dakota.

Ruth went out rarely as an old lady, but she always liked to talk on the phone. Some of her favorite phone companions were theatre people. She could talk for hours to Claibe Richardson, a composer who was also born in the South like Ruth, with whom she’d worked in the past. He had created the musical score for The Grass Harp, which Ruth had a role in when it ran on 45^th Street at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1971. It was a musical version of the Truman Capote novel, and Ruth sang in it. I would have liked to see her in that show, but I only got to see Ruth on the stage once, in her very last Broadway play. It was the staged version of Harold and Maude, where she played the part of Harold’s mother, in 1980. I really liked seeing her play that part. Her stage career was behind her after that, but she still had many more years of life ahead of her, and I think she enjoyed her life very much.

And I can’t say I’m not glad that she managed to get out safe and sound well before the plague that came a decade after she left.

A happy birthday to you, dear Ruth. You’re always on my mind, and I hope that wherever you are there is a celebration in your honor, and that you’re surrounded by all of your favorites.