During her last days on Earth Lois Weisberg sat in front of a fireplace in Florida. Often in her hands was a slender book: “Pink Medicine and Other Poems,” a collection of poetry she had written during her long and lively life, colorfully illustrated with drawings by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“We all made it and gave it to her last month,” said her daughter Kiki Ellenby. “She was aware that we were doing this and, of course, offered her input. She just had to have projects, had to stay engaged … until the very end.”
As the cultural affairs commissioner of Chicago, Weisberg was an influential and energetic champion of the city’s arts/cultural/entertainment scene. She died Wednesday night in Palmetto Bay, Fla., where she was living near Ellenby’s family. She had been ill for a short time. She was 90 years old.
Chicago born and bred, Weisberg had a remarkable career even before being tapped by Mayor Harold Washington to become the head of his Office of Special Events for six years. In 1989, following Washington’s death, she became head of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s newly created Department of Cultural Affairs. She would be the longest serving member of Daley’s original cabinet, finally leaving because of budget cuts and some contretemps in early 2011.
When she left, Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, which programs the Chicago Jazz Festival, the oldest of the downtown summer music fests, said: “I think that we are all appreciative of her exceedingly creative approach to bringing an understanding of what public art means to the public.”
As commissioner, she created some big events — who could forget the playfully colorful “Cows on Parade,” the 1999 outdoor art exhibit that saw bovine beauties dotting the town? — but her less splashy activities and arts advocacy made a more profound and lasting impact.
She championed the World Music Festival and SummerDance programs. In 1991 she collaborated with the mayor’s wife, Maggie, to create the Gallery 37 arts program for students. It became a model for similar programs across the country and globe, and, in 2000, morphed into After School Matters. She helped nurture and expand neighborhood festivals and programmed and staged Millennium Park events.
“Lois was a visionary,” said Jim Lasko, artistic director of bygone Redmoon Theater. “She understood that a city’s image is wedded to its cultural output. More than that, she understood that its real image, its public persona, was intimately related to its free public events. I learned from her. I will miss her.”
Weisberg seemed to know everybody — the comic Lenny Bruce once lived with her — and that attribute was perfectly captured in the now-famous “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” by author Malcolm Gladwell in a 1999 article for The New Yorker, later expanded on for a chapter in his first best-selling book, “The Tipping Point.”
“Lois is far from being the most important or the most powerful person in Chicago,” Gladwell wrote. “But if you connect all the dots that constitute the vast apparatus of government and influence and interest groups in the city of Chicago you’ll end up coming back to Lois again and again.”
She was born Lois Porges on May 6, 1925, and raised in the city’s Austin neighborhood during the Depression, the daughter of a lawyer and a homemaker; her younger sister, June Rosner, is a longtime Chicago public relations executive.
It was, Weisberg would later recall, “a calm household,” and she also told a Tribune reporter in 1992: “I look back on my life a lot to see how I got to be the way I am. I seem to have a lot of confidence in what I think and in what I do. It’s not that I think I’m so great; I’m a humble person. But I know that I’m going to be able to get something done, and I think that image of myself comes from the fact that my parents always asked me what I thought about things and respected my opinions.”
There was always something charmingly flamboyant about Weisberg in dress and in manner, so it should come as no surprise to those who knew her that when she was young she wanted to be an actress.
“I was in theater productions all through grammar school and high school and loved it,” she told the Tribune. “But one day while I was playing a role in Shaw’s ‘Arms and the Man’ at the University of Illinois, I realized that I didn’t really want to be out on stage. I would rather make things happen behind the scenes. I ended up going to the Northwestern School of Speech and studied to be a director. That made sense to me, being the person who used their creativity to make things happen.”
She met and married Leonard Solomon, owner of a pharmacy on Rush Street, at the heart of the city’s nightclub district, and the brother-in-law of Irv Kupcinet, the city’s premiere chronicler of stars and celebrities in his “Kup’s Column” for the Sun-Times.
The Solomons’ Scott Street home, where they would raise two daughters, Jerilyn and Kiki, was a hangout for literary figures and entertainers, most notably Bruce.
“I didn’t like Lenny Bruce’s work. I just couldn’t stand his jokes, his act, all the words he was using,” Weisberg told the Tribune in 2008. “I did like him, though, and he did have long stays in a bedroom on the third floor of our house. This wasn’t always good. One day my mother rang the doorbell and Lenny answered wearing just a bath towel.”
After she and Solomon were divorced, she began dating lawyer (later judge) Bernard Weisberg.
“On one of our first dates he told me we were going to see Lenny Bruce. All the lawyers loved to see Lenny,” she said. “What could I do? I was crazy about (Weisberg). So, we are in the first row and I do my best to keep my head down but Lenny recognizes me and all during the show he’s walking back and forth. Whenever he gets close to me he leans down and says, ‘Well, hello, Lois.’ After the show I explained my past life to Bernie. He found it very interesting.”
The couple would marry and move into a century-old house in the Lakeview neighborhood where they raised their two sons, Jacob and Joseph. “When I was growing up in the 1970s, my friends’ mothers were grappling with the issue of whether they could raise a family and have a career, too,” said Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and an author. “My mother was past that and already on to the issue of how many careers she could have in one lifetime.”
There were plenty. She founded Friends of the Parks, a citizens advocacy group; founded South Shore Recreation, a bi-state citizens group that helped save passenger service on the Chicago, South Bend and South Shore Railroad; co-founded the newspaper Chicago Lawyer; edited and published a weekly literary publication called “the paper” and, as founder of the Chicago chapter of the Shaw Society, produced the George Bernard Shaw Centennial, an international celebration to honor the playwright on the 100th anniversary of his birth. She also has tried her hand at selling antique jewelry and worked in local political campaigns on behalf of such candidates as congressman Sidney Yates. She did public relations work for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, prompting Dr. Henry Betts, CEO/medical director of the institute, to tell the Tribune, “I never knew a more creative public relations person. She really understood how the press and media could help alter public negative attitudes toward disabled persons.”
On Thursday, Jacob Weisberg said: “When (Malcolm Gladwell’s) story about her came out I think she was taken aback because it had never occurred to her that she was a ‘connector.’ She thought of herself as creative person who tried to enrich the life of the place she lived. My mom could have multiple huge creative projects underway, but she never seemed busy. We had dinner as a family almost every night growing up, and after my brother and I left home, we all spoke to her pretty much every day of the next 30 years.”
He tells a story: “I remember being backstage at the Blues Festival one summer when I was in college and seeing my mom rapt in conversation with Keith Richards. He had a blonde under each arm and an open fifth of Jack Daniel’s as well as a lit cigarette in his hand. As soon as their conversation ended, I rushed over to ask if she knew who she’d been speaking to. She had no idea of course, so I filled her in. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But he seemed like such a nice boy.'”
Her other son, Joseph, is a former CIA employee, novelist and the creator/executive producer of the FX series “The Americans.” “With all her accomplishments she was always a mom first,” he said. “Her kids were always the focus. She was determined, never allowing other people’s opinions to get in the way of what she thought was a good idea, a good cause.”
Following her husband’s death in 1999, Weisberg moved into an apartment in a building on Lake Shore Drive in the Lakeview neighborhood. The apartment and a home in Michigan City, Ind., were filled with books, art, letters and antiques. The city place offered a lovely view of Lincoln Park and the lake.
She was an ebullient personality, one who surrounded herself professionally not with political appointees or clout-heavy factotums but with a generation of young, independent and eager creative types, many of whom have gone off to important national positions.
One is Michael Orlove, who spent nearly two decades working as a senior program director for Weisberg and is now director of Artist Communities and Presenting & Multidisciplinary Works for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington.
“We all lost a giant in the world of arts and culture. She was Chicago’s artistic director, innovator and creative genius,” he said. “And for me not only a former boss but a lifelong mentor and friend. She welcomed me and countless others into the DCA family and gave us the capacity, the courage and the confidence to create and make our beloved city flourish. I am forever grateful and know that those incredible experiences have helped shape my life and career.”
But in 2011 it all came to a bitter end, sparked by Mayor Daley’s decision to merge the DCA with the Office of Special Events, part of his plan to close a $655 million budget gap. Weisberg was strongly opposed to the merger. And so she quit.
To some this came as no surprise — she was 85 and long had been under gentle pressure from her four grown children and her grandchildren to “slow down” — the nature of the split flew in the face of what many saw as an extremely friendly relationship between Weisberg, the mayor and his wife.
“One of the main reasons I am leaving is that I am angry about the way the mayor has treated me,” Weisberg told the Tribune. “Not to ask me about (the merger), not to get any input from me about something like this merger, and about privatizing the festivals, strikes me as just wrong.”
She then devoted her time to her eldest daughter Jerilyn Fyffe’s struggle with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that would take her life in April 2011 when she was 62.
It was little wonder that she told a Tribune reporter in 2012: “I’m letting go of the city.”
And she did, bit by bit, gathering and organizing her voluminous papers and spending time not only with her sons and their families in New York City but in Palmetto Bay, south of Miami, near her daughter Kiki and son-in-law Marc Ellenby’s 150-acre exotic fruit farm.
“We have fruit that you never heard of,” she said in that 2012 interview, explaining how she worked at a farmers market helping her grandchildren run a fruit stand. “The lychee is a fantastic fruit. Have you ever had a carambola? They are exotic and very beautiful, and they take a little getting used to. And that challenges me in the same way a program at Millennium Park would.”
She came back to Chicago in late summer 2014 to receive one of the city’s inaugural Fifth Star Awards in ceremonies in Millennium Park. She was also honored for extraordinary support and service to theater in Chicago and received the League of Women Voters Civic Contribution Award, Governing Magazine’s Public Official of the Year Award and the Harold Washington History Maker Award.
In a statement Thursday Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Weisberg “revolutionized the role that arts and culture can play in building a better Chicago.”
Of course, not all of Weisberg’s ideas were successful. Anybody remember the “standstill Christmas parade,” which involved edible floats built out of candy? Or the summer of 2000, when she decided that what the city needed was 300 ping-pong tables placed around town for public play?
But when it comes to a person as full of life and abundant with ideas as Weisberg, that’s a little like saying not all Picasso’s paintings were masterpieces.
As cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who knew Weisberg well, told the Tribune on Thursday: “I am deeply saddened by the news of her death. Lois loved meeting people and delighted in making connections that broadened everyone’s world. Her commitment to making the arts accessible was unwavering and unmatched, and there is no doubt in my mind that our lives are richer for her dedication, passion and vision. She was a true champion for humanity, and she will be missed by us all.”
Survivors also include eight grandchildren, Adena, Aliya, Jody and Levi Ellenby; Lily, Nate and Rosa Weisberg; and Rebecca Fyffe; and three great-grandchildren. Services are scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Monday at Anshe Emet Synagogue, 3751 N. Broadway.
rkogan@tribpub.com
Twitter @rickkogan
