HERBERT EYRE MOULTON

The life and career of Herbert Eyre Moulton

Herbert Eyre Moulton

 

*27.07.1927  †27.01.2005

 

was born in Elmhurst, Illinois on July 15^th 1927 as the grandson of Irish immigrants. His great love of theatre and opera lead to a lifetime of wide artistic endeavour. His passion for knowledge inspired him to studies for Roman Catholic Priesthood, Archeology and Literature at University College Dublin and Music at Northwestern University. He sang at the Chicago Opera with the likes of Maria Callas and Jussi Björling and conducted the Camp Gordon Chapel Choir for CBS Broadcasts during the Korean War. For MCA he became Herbert Moore, singing at New York and Chicago Supper Clubs and appearing on Broadway. In Ireland, after studying to become a catholic priest, Herbert spent seven highly productive years singing Gilbert & Sullivan and acting at the Gate, Pike and Gaiety Theatres.

 

Besides film roles and commercial television, he wrote opera librettos, sang at Glyndebourne Festival and performed Shakespeare, Wilde and Musicals in at least on six Dublin stages.

 

He married his wife, experienced opera-mezzo Professor Gun Kronzell, in 1966 and they began touring Europe with mutual concerts. His son Charles E.J. Moulton, himself an acclaimed singer and actor of productions such as “Buddy - The Musical” in Hamburg and “Meistersinger” in Gelsenkirchen, was born in Graz 1969. Together they all moved to Sweden, where Mr. Moulton played such roles as “Sweeney Todd” and Kemp in “Entertaining Mr. Sloane”. In Sweden, he was active as voice-over speaker and coach of the English language. For the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation he spent over 3 decades tutoring the juvenile and elderly about the music and art of America in his programs for radio. His working relationship with the International Theatre spans 3 decades. 6 productions of his plays have been performed here and in over a dozen productions has he played leading and supporting roles at the International Theatre in Vienna. Among his favourites were Pollonius in “Hamlet”, Christmas Present in “A Christmas Carol” as well as his roles in “Our Town” and Tennessee Williams’ “The Last of My Solid Gold Watches”. At the Vienna’s English Theatre he was seen in Joan Kelley’s “Vienna Patterns” and in Arthur Miller’s “I Can’t Remember Anything”. His film credits include Firefox, Dead Flowers, Desert Lunch (with “The Lord of the Rings”star Viggo Mortensen), Faust’s Roulette, Liszt’s Rhapsody and Johann Strauss. The latter proved a success for him as he got to coach the likes of Audrey Landers, Zsa-Zsa Gabor and Mary Crosby in correct English pronunciation in addition to himself playing the part of “Gypsy Baron”-librettist Yokay.

 

In Austria he will be most remembered as the Milka Tender Man. His anthologies also verified its long lasting thrive. “Mark Twain’s America” was performed on numerous occasions in Vienna as was his Edgar Allan Poe-adventure “The Strangest Trip”.

 

Herbert Moulton passed away 2005 at age 77. His remarkable wit and love of living was a great example to us all. Among his other works are the Off-Broadway plays “The Minstrel Boy” and his novel “The Twittering Machine”. He is also the author of many novels, such as “The Lunts on Broadway” and “The Wild Colonial Boy”.

 

For a more personal description of my father, read on.

 

My father Herbert Eyre Moulton went to school in Lombard at St. Petronelle’s Catholic School and rapidly became a humorous addition to the student assembly. His antics and sketches kept his friends laughing and the nuns furious.

Here are some miscellaneous, passionate, coincidental stories from his early days. On one occasion, after ruining another lunch break, he was banned from the cantina all together. The following day he brought a table, a plate, cutlery, napkins and food and ate his lunch gladly outside. The nuns passing by could barely conceal their mirth.

           When it came to bragging about his knowledge about theatre, he was equally cocky. My father saw his first opera at a very early age and it was then clear, just as in my mother’s case, that he wanted to become a stage performer. In music class the next day, the nun was talking about the opera he had seen the evening before and was at fault many a time in her description of the story. Herbert then corrected her, where upon the sister said: “Well, of course, you would know!” Herbert then, truthfully, said: “Yes, as a matter of fact, I would!” He stood up from his chair and told the class the story the way it actually should be told, pronouncing the names in the right way.

           When he was called a worm by a nun, he went down on the floor and crawled, explaining that since he was a worm he must crawl.

He played the wolf in a musical rendition of The Little Red Riding Hood, but was so fat that his suit almost burst open. He had to sing: “For three days I have had no food, no meat, no cake, no pie!” He wondered why people laughed.

At a birthday party, he emptied an entire bottle of whiskey in one gulp and ended up drunk for two weeks.

It was even rumoured that Nell’s brother Marmaduke Eyre had contacts with the mafia. A colourful family.

He would arrive at home with expensive gifts and rather dubious friends, clad in suits and spats, following him up close.

           After graduation, realizing what Herbert wanted to become, he started studying singing and acting in Chicago. He joined the chorus at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and got to work with famous singers like Set Svanholm, Maria Callas, Tagliavini and Jussi Björling. Being an diligent man, he opened the curtain for Callas, watched her milk the audience for applause and handed Björling his beer. Set Svanholm received a pear from the cantina after his last aria in Rigoletto and called out: “Your Welcome!” Ezio Pinza pushed him away, saying “Out of my way, porco!” There was not one famous singer of his day that he didn’t meet there in Chicago.

           Soon enough, though, my father became a name in his own right. He became Herbert Moore and was hired by MCA records as a dinner singer, performing in New York City and Chicago’s Ballrooms as Headlining Big Band Vocalist. His school pal Janice Rule went to Hollywood to film with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, while Janice’s brother Chuck moved to New York with my father, performing and auditioning.

           The two school-pals lived together in one apartment in Greenwich Village and auditioned together and studied acting together. Eventually, Herbert got his play “The Minstrel Boy” performed Off-Broadway. He wrote books and freelanced as a journalist.

           It was the time of the Korean War and as a result things changed. My father got sent to Augusta, Georgia to join the armed forces. His sergeant was a man they called Hog Jaw, who was known for his eloquent wording. “It don’t belong to be did that a way!” (a sentence with many grammatical mistakes) or “Men’s, let go of your c***s and grab your socks!”

           My favourite conversation between my dad and Hog Jaw was the following:

           “Moulton honey, what become of your a*s?”

           “Well, Seargent, you been chewing it off so much there ain’t much left of it!”

           “Moulton honey, how about a couple of weeks in the eatable garbage section?”

           With all of that humour going on, you would think my father took what went on lightly. Still, my father’s favourite cousin Frank had died in the second world war and so my father was never really a aficionado of war. He almost got sent to Korea, but prayed himself out of it. The fact that he was the chorus master of the Camp Gordon Chapel Choir helped. There are still recordings of this chorus and their work available on cassette tape.

           Maybe it was the war or life in general, but after this experience my father had second thoughts about joining the life on the stage. He spent four years studying to become a priest. One of his teacher’s was a man he described as “a floating boat with a cigar”.

He gave the students a test assignment one day: “What is God?” and added: “Have fun!”

           After this excursion into priesthood, my father had a very bad year sometime in the late fifties. His mother, father and girlfriend died the same year. He fled America to travel back to his roots: Ireland.

           What began as a two week vacation ended as a seven year stay and commenced what was probably his most productive professional period. Working with the likes of Milo O’Shea, Michael MacLiomore and Siobhan MacKenna, he performed in most of the theatres of Dublin and played major parts in movies. His work as a model for commercials blossomed and his Irish soul prospered.

           My father’s work in Ireland was, theatrically speaking, a time of thespian brilliance.

           He made films, among them in main roles. One of them was movie named “Attack Squadron” made with lower than low budget money. One of his colleagues uttered these immortal words during a lunch break: “They should call this movie The Nine Commandments. They left out one: thou shalt not steal.” My father’s remarkable self irony remained with him throughout the years.

           His accidental catching of a shark, during a commercial for fishing rods, was something he kept on bragging about until the day he died. His triumph was even mentioned in the local newspaper along with the advertisement.

My father worked with an esteemed composer named James Wilson in Dublin, Ireland. He sang his songs in concerts and wrote several librettos for operas, among others “The Hunting of the Snark” and “The Turning of the Screw”. This man became best friends first with my father and then with my mother. He arranged concerts for them and when I was born, Uncle Jim became my godfather. He kept sending me letters and money and gifts for the remainder of his life. When I came to visit him in his house near Dublin, he was a remarkably cordial host.       

           It was in Ireland he met his best friend: the stray dog Fred.

           The sheepdog was roaming about with no one to his name and soon Herb and Fred became as indivisible as Laurel and Hardy. Nobody would say: “Look, here is Herb!” Now people said: “Here’s the guy that always comes with Fred!”

           I was two years old when Fred died.

I do have some stray memories of him.

           Charity Eyre and the relatives of west Ireland were farmers and quite wonderful people. Whenever he was there, he could stay in the house and enjoy the life on a farm. George is now, in the year of 2011, my age and would have taken over the Eyre farm by now, his agricultural skills leading him to give advice even to the hotshots of the European Union.

There were commercials, plays and pub crawls with friends in his flat in Grafton street. He would put on his nightie when his guests didn’t want to leave and they would sit on his bed. Milo O’Shea gave him the nickname “Horrible Herb”, but all in good fun. His bouts on the west of Ireland, though, included dear relatives and encounters with mysterious apparitions.

           Herb heard all the strange ghost stories his ancestors had collected and how the two Eyre mansions now were ruins. He heard about how Bronte had taken been inspired to name the main character Jane Eyre after the famous Eyre Family of Eyre Court in west Ireland.

           He also experienced some ghost stories of his own.

           Here, too, are many fascinating ghoul stories from my father’s years in Ireland. Bear with my miscellaneous listing of facts.

           An old man of the family died and his cocker spaniel howled outside his door at the time of his death. The dog knew only by instinct what on inside the room.

           In the kitchen of the Eyre dwelling, there were loud noises of a staff of cooks getting the family breakfast ready around three in the morning. During one morning, my father complained to the lady of the manor that he wasn’t able to sleep. She answered: “Oh, those are just the ghosts. They always make a clamour of reverberation at that time of the break of day!”

           My father took a walk around the Eyre house one day and saw an old woman covered in a scarf and begging for money. She disappeared behind a corner and was completely vanished. Those were the tinkers, it was said. They were Irish gypsies that used to stray about and beg around the countryside. No one had seen them for ages.

           Then there were the stories about a window banging open and shut in the ruin of the old Eyre mansion, regardless of wind or weather. To this day, it is told, that shutter keeps on banging open.

A female friend of his saw an old horse driven carriage with aristocrats in 19^th century clothing venture down the road toward her. There were two valleys in the road. In the second valley, the coach was gone and did not reappear.

           The most mysterious of all these stories was one that one my father experienced himself on New Year’s Eve 1963 after a party in the west of Ireland. My father was intoxicated and tired when he took a short cut home across a field. Friends had warned him not to cross these fields. The bushes that grew there were perilous. The locals were very superstitious about this shrubbery. The fairies lived there, they said, and whenever they cut them down the crops died and a great famine struck the land. Important was also not to cross the field, but to walk around it.

           Alas, the brave hardy American took the chance.

           Somewhere on the field my father lost track of his path and got lost in the snow. He couldn’t find his way back out and started to grow dizzy. He saw lights and chandeliers and people in gala wear and elegant artists performing elegant songs.

           He passed out on the field sometime in the middle of the night. It was just pure luck that a relative of his wondered where Herb was and started searching. He was found in the field sometime in the morning the next day.

           The epilogue of this tale was that he met a good female friend a couple of months later. She told him that she had seen him in Dublin on her posh New Year’s Eve Party that previous New Year’s Eve. He had wandered in and looked around and not said a thing. It was very strange, because she had tried to talk with him and not succeeded. It was a gala evening and the couples wore gala wear.

           That was actually impossible, knowing that he had been on the west coast that evening.

           Apparently, his soul had travelled across the country that night by help of the fairies.

           A funny story concerns my dad arriving with his dog Fred at a friend’s house. He was a welcome guest and only the man of the house knew that he would be there late after his concert.

           Fred was hungry and Herb had bought a heart from a local butcher that he could boil for the dog. He had already put on his nightgown, when he walked down the stairs with the heart and a knife and a lit candle in order to fix some supper for his pet.

           The wife of the household walked out of her bedroom at that moment just to check the noise and saw Herb walking down the stairs, suspecting a ghostly apparition. My father said: “Calm down, I’m just going to the kitchen to cut up a heart!” The woman screamed. “It’s all right, dear,” he said, “it’s my dog’s.”

The woman ran into her room and wasn’t seen for a week.

           His great sponsor during this time was his rich relative Lady Mayer Moulton, an eccentric millionaire. She advised him to do something about his great singing voice. There were marvellous singing teachers in Germany. That’s where he must go, she alleged.

           This commenced the next section of his life: life on the continent.

           Meeting the famous Gun Kronzell was elation to Herb. He loved opera and soon became her biggest fan. They bought an old Renault that they named Monsieur Hulot, named after the Jacques Tati character. What really grew successful was their musical collaboration. Soon enough, they became Astaire & Rogers and Kelly & Crosby and were rarely seen apart. I grew up attending their concerts. They were marvellous together. That collaboration began in 1966.

           My father was invincibly proud when I was born. He always spoke of the fact that I had smiled when I was born and not cried. Graz was also a place where he could teach, act and pursue his freelance career. Mum was working a lot. Things were going well.

Once we moved to Vienna in 1972, he started teaching English. He worked for the Austrian Radio and soon became the main producer-speaker-author school radio shows about a wide range of topics: Daphne de Maurier, Edgar Allan Poe, Protest Music, Black People Music, American Work Songs, The American Musical. His extensive work in the English speaking theatres of Vienna continued throughout his life. The collaboration was prolific.

           We moved to Gothenburg on 1974 and my father kept on being active as an English speaking actor. Commercials, movies and plays kept on being his forte. Kemp in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the major part in Sweeney Todd, plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill as well as melodramas became part of his resumé. He played a small part in the movie Firefox, opposite Clint Eastwood. He introduced Tomra’s new can recycler to a Swedish 1984 audience. These were all things that characterized his Swedish years. This and countless concerts with my mother were his professional reality.

           That year, in 1984, my mother again returned to Vienna. This time, it was real renaissance for my father’s career. Commercials without end made him a familiar face in Vienna: banks like Länderbank, wine areas like Niederösterreich, cheese brands like Schärdinger, music video producers in the vein of Doro, chocolate brands like Milka, magazines like Kronen Zeitung: they all carried Herb Moulton as a familiar face.

My father became famous as the Milka-Tender-Man, making commercials for a delicious brand of chocolate that still exists twenty years later. He was even recognized in the sauna. Imagine the fun the old senior citizens in the local pool had when they told my dad that they saw had seen him on TV yesterday.

Of course, these bookies and bakers thought he was just doing it for fun. Little did they know that this was the end of a glorious career of five decades as an actor. He had made movies with the likes of Zsa-Zsa Gabor, Alan Rickman, Jeroen Krabbé, Mickey Rourke, Audrey Landers, David Warner and Roger Spottiswoode.

Through his work in the English theatre, as an actor as well as a programme author and dramaturgic collaborator, we were invited to all the premiere receptions and got to commune with famous people.

Here, as well as at our regular visits at the Swedish Embassy Recidence, we met Rue MacLanahan, Larry Hagman, Linda Gray, David Carradine, Anthony Quinn, Helmut Zilk, Dagmar Koller, Claudio Abbado, Alois Mock, Erik Eriksson, Esa-Pekka Salonnen, Nicolai Gedda, Kjell Lönnå, Elisbaeth Söderström, Princess Alexandra of Kent, Ricardo Muti, Otto Schenk and Marcel Prawy. My father was always very valiant. He would wander up to the most famous person and chat them up. It has taken me twenty years to achieve that. Not even now do I possess that courage.

           My father worked as an actor at the Vienna International and English Theatres, playing major parts in all the classics: A Long Day’s Jouney Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Animal Farm, Charlie’s Aunt, Harvey, A Christmas Carol, I Can’t Remember Anything and many more. In the last mentioned play, he wore a full plaster cast after a knee operation and trudged back and forth to the theatre every day. Playing an arthritis patient made it easy to hide his full plaster cast. The reviews were excellent: “Herbert Moulton plays the arthritis patient remarkably well.”

Of course, his rendition of Pollonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet remains the most memorable, full of wit and brilliance. His poetic collaboration of readings, not only with Melinda May and David Cameron �" but also with myself, was fertile toward the end of his life. They read poetry and prose by many a famous author and their evenings became popular cultural events. Ezra Pound and Edgar Allan Poe were only two of the many writers we covered.

           His film work includes “Mesmer”, “Dead Flowers”, “Wohin & Zurück”, “Business for Pleasure”, “Desert Lunch” and “Liszt’s Rhapsody”, but his favourite film was probably the all-star extravaganza “Johann Strauss”, directed by Franz Antel.

           He starred in the film as the Gypsy Baron �" author Yokai, but his work as speech and dialogue coach was probably the most extensive of his career. There were so many dialects present in this haphazard and chaotic big budget film that my father had a hard time teaching everyone to speak high British English. Audrey Landers and Mary Crosby were Americans, Oliver Tobias was British, Heinz Holecek was Austrian and Zsa-Zsa Gabor was Hungarian. Just imagine the mish-mash, trying to accomplish your job as a dialogue-coach.

           Zsa-Zsa arrived in 1986 Potsdam and had no idea where she was, being used living and working in Hollywood. Finding out she was playing her age (72) and seeing her wardrobe of grey and brown dresses made her furious. She ripped the wardrobe to pieces and had a whole collection of costumes in pink and red made. When she walked on the set in her new gear, the East-German DEFA-camera-man said: “Oh, s**t. Look: Miss Piggy has arrived!”

           My father did his best to tutor her to speak eloquent English. She finally gave up, saying: “Get this awful American man away from me!” Dining with Oliver and Mary (the leading couple of the movie) in a restaurant where Herbert was entertaining them with wild stories about his youth in Chicago was an experience in its’ own right. Zsa-Zsa turned to them and said: “You two are, of course, sleeping with each other!” They said that they were happily married and had no reason in being unfaithful. Zsa-Zsa said that she didn’t understand this, since she never had worked this way herself. The Zsa-Zsa Method? Maybe. Humorous tales come into sight from working with obsessive actors. So it was with Zsa-Zsa, as well. She once told my dad that she resented her famous husband George Sanders killing himself. Not because he did kill himself, but because he didn’t do it in Hollywood like everyone else.

           To sum up my views of my father, I can say only that my father was a good buddy I loved. Spending time with was fantastic. We went on bike rides together. We went to Copenhagen together to see operas and ballets, staying at the Astoria and eating Italian food before the show. We wanted to see a James Bond flick with Danish subtitles and asked the Italian waiter where the Colloseum was. He answered “The Colloseum is in Rome!” He was shocked when he found out we wanted to go to the Colloseum Cinema. Only a few minutes into the movie discovered we were in the wrong cinema. We were a bit confused when we saw Terry Thomas dubbed into French. Eventually, we changed entrance and got to see “For Your Eyes Only” in the right place. It was always fun travelling with dad! My mom and dad are now together in heaven.

 

HERBERT EYRE MOULTON

 

Actor, Author, Opera-, Musical and Jazz-Singer,

Oratory- and Concert soloist, Speech Pedagogue,

Teacher of English as a foreign language,

As film-actor and Gala-Singer for MCA: Herbert Moore,

Chorus Master, Radio Speaker,

Author: Radio programmes for School Radio, ORF,

Bachelor of Arts (Major: Philosophy, Minor: Education),

Vocal range: Baritone

 

FILMS (Excerpt from Vita)

 

1961                     O’HARA’S HOLIDAY

1962                     ATTACK SQUADRON

1980                     TAXI BILDER

1981                     FIREFOX

1985                       WOHIN UND ZURÜCK

1987                     JOHANN STRAUSS

1990                       FAUST’S ROULETTE

1994                       LISZT’S RHAPSODY

1994                       MESMER

1994                       DESERT LUNCH

1996                     BUSINESS FOR PLEASURE

 

THEATRES (Excerpt from Vita)

 

Chicago Lyric and the San Carlo Opera,

President Theatre, New York,

Gate, Gaiety, Olympia, Eblana, Pocket und Pike-Theatres, Milo O’Shea Company, Anew McMaster’s, Dublin Theatre Festivals, Aera Theatre, International Theatre, Vienna’s Emglish Theatre, Hannover State Opera,

Gothenburg Röhrska Museum Theatre