Sandy Campbell ’42’s Lasting Gift to Writers by Robert Ober Jr. ’54

Sandy Campbell came to the attention of the literary world in June 2011 with the establishment of the Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell Prizes at Yale University. The charter of this endowed fund stipulates that eight prizes will be awarded each year to the best young Englishlanguage writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama residing in any part of the world. The prizes, perhaps the richest ever offered by any comparable fund, amounted, in 2020, to $165,000 for each of the eight honorees.

BY ROBERT OBER JR. ’54

I BECAME ACQUAINTED with Sandy’s lifelong partner, Donald Windham, shortly after I became Kent’s director of development (DoD) in 1987. Sandy had died suddenly of a heart attack at a house he owned on Fire Island, New York, in June 1988, while vacationing from the Central Park South two-story condo he and Don had long shared. Therefore, I didn’t have the opportunity to meet Sandy, yet Don had spoken so warmly of him, of his career in the theater and of his writings, that whenever we met, either at the condo or the Princeton Club of New York, I felt as if I had gained some understanding of this now-gone alumnus.

After the 50th reunion of Sandy’s surviving classmates on the School’s campus in June 1992—to which Don was thoughtfully invited—I wrote an article for the Quarterly about the two men’s long “partnership,” shying away from the word “gay” which, at that time, might have evoked a bit of controversy; I was informed later, after I had been replaced as DoD, that several alumni had indeed objected to the article.

AN EARLY FRIENDSHIP WITH FR. SILL Sandy, it turns out, had a remarkably close relationship with Fr. Frederick Herbert Sill, the School’s Founder and member of the Order of the Holy Cross (OHC).

According to Don, in the write-up he provided for Sandy’s classmates, “Father Sill, on Sandy’s arrival at Kent in the Third Form at age sixteen, discovered that Sandy had never been baptized, and he promptly baptized him…” The School’s archive has a copy of that ecclesiastical certificate signed by Pater, dated November 6, 1938.

In that same write-up, Don also explained that Sandy corresponded frequently with Fr. Sill after his graduation. Kent School’s archivist located copies of three missives from Sandy to Pater, one of which is revealing about Sandy’s status at Princeton, where he had matriculated upon graduating from Kent.

On April 17, 1946, shortly after attending a Kent “alumni dinner” in Manhattan, Sandy wrote to compliment Pater for the “fine talk you gave… it must have reminded all the men who were there of those Saturday nights in the dining room at Kent.” Then, before describing a small part he had obtained in Cyrano de Bergerac, with José Ferrer and Lillian Gish in the lead roles, and his theater company’s plan to travel for three months around the U.S. before opening on Broadway, Sandy notes that he had been down to Princeton for the day, seeing his Kent classmates: “They all seem to be having a good time and almost made me feel I’d like to be back with them.”

PRINCETON AND BEYOND Sandy had left Princeton shortly after beginning his senior year. The Princeton Alumni Weekly, which at the time also reported information about undergraduates, notes in early 1946 that Sandy was appearing on Broadway in The Rugged Path, a play starring Spencer Tracy. The theatrical opportunities on campus, the Triangle Club and the Theatre Intime, which might have attracted Sandy to Princeton, had gone into “wartime hiatus” in 1943, during his freshman year. Earlier that year, he was identified as the drama critic for the student-run radio station WPRU (the predecessor to today’s WPRB), with an article about the poor choice of movies then being shown at the Garden Theatre opposite the campus. A Princeton yearbook, which might have disclosed more information about Sandy, seems not to have been published in 1946, probably also due to the exigencies of the war.

Don Windham explains in his Reunion write-up that he and Sandy had met in 1942, a few months after Sandy had graduated from Kent. Sandy, he wrote, “was at Princeton on the Army’s student deferment plan,” but “he was called up and received a medical discharge…” Then, he and “I began to share an apartment in New York and lived together for the rest of his life… [he] deciding not to finish college or to enter his father’s… company.” Don had already been rejected by his own draft board because of his sexual orientation.

In November 1947, Sandy brought Don to Kent to introduce him to Pater, as noted in my first article. Pater, of course, had suffered several strokes by this time and was living with his nurse in the RAD House (now the Deans’ Office), confined to a wheelchair.

Allen Whittemore, like Fr. Sill a member of the Order of the Holy Cross, in a November 1952 article in the Holy Cross Magazine, relates that Fr. Sill “instantly remembered” any visiting alum’s “name and nickname… And this marvelous memory did not fail him even in those later awful years of his illness.” Pater’s speech was surely affected, as I recall from my own moment with him in the RAD House as a second former, yet Don recalled the visit as both interesting and moving for both him and Sandy. When I apprised my late, inimitable classmate

LEFT TO RIGHT: Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell ’42 in Venice, Italy, as photographed by Tennessee Williams in 1948. A copy of this photo hangs in the John Gray Park ’28 Library at Kent School, while the original is among the Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Arthur Yorke Allen of Pater’s warm reception of the two visitors, Arthur responded, “What a poignant story… Was not Pater’s understanding ahead of his time!”

Sandy participated fully in School life during his four years at Kent. He played club hockey and tennis and made the Honor Roll each year. As a fifth former, he joined the Dramatics Club and, in the summer of 1941 just before his Sixth Form year began, he had the following experience, as described in his book B: Twenty-nine Letters from Coconut Grove:

I worked for a week as an actor in Maplewood, New Jersey. The play was Her Cardboard Lover. The star was Tallulah Bankhead [a stage and screen actress from Alabama who had achieved fame in the U.S. beginning in the 1930s]. I learned my three or four lines and was at the theatre, a big old movie house smelling of dust and scenery paint, early of the Monday of the opening, waiting for somebody to rehearse me. Nobody was there but the men putting up the set. It was nearly seven when the stage manager called for the cloak-room attendant. That was my part… he led me out on the stage, showed me where I should move, and cued me for my lines. Miss Bankhead arrived dressed in tan slacks. She was dragging a lion cub on a leash… “Who’s this?” she asked the stage manager, pointing at me.

“He’s going to play the cloak-room attendant.”

“Oh my God, he’s a child! Darling, excuse me,” she said, coming up to me.

At Kent, Sandy was also a member of a newly founded Shakespearean Society and is pictured in the 1941 yearbook with the membership sitting next to O.B. Davis, who would join Kent’s English Department in 1949. Sandy was also in the French Club for three years, and the 1942 yearbook notes that he “continues to amaze Cap Harrington with his brilliance in two languages.”

After Fr. Sill’s death in July 1952, it appears that Sandy no longer stayed in touch with the School. Nor, indeed with Princeton, after his three-plus years of attendance. Still, Princeton’s Class of 1946 included entries on Sandy in both its 25th Reunion and its 50th Reunion booklets, the latter having been written after Sandy’s death. The Class of 1946 secretary, a gentleman in his nineties, sent me a copy of both entries, as well as Sandy’s submission to his class’s Freshman Herald.

The 50th Reunion booklet gave a comprehensive survey of Sandy’s theatrical career, his two books (the second to be cited below), and his writings and reviews at The New Yorker. The article concluded: “Sandy’s many achievements in the world of the written word and theatre will long be remembered.”

A WRITING LIFE Sandy’s first book, the aforementioned B, comprises twenty-nine letters he sent to Don from Coconut Grove, Florida, where he, Tallulah Bankhead, Tennessee Williams, and other theatrical figures were preparing a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire for Broadway. The book was published by Sandy in a limited edition in Italy, and Don presented a copy to the John Gray Park ’28 Library, as he did with Sandy’s second book.

That book is titled Mrs. Joyce of Zurich ; and, Mr. Forster of King’s, Mrs. Joyce being the widow of the author James Joyce, whom Sandy visited in 1948, and Mr.

Forster being author Edward Morgan Forster, personally known by Don since 1947, and Sandy from 1960. Published in 1989 after Sandy’s death, the second book also included Sandy’s portrayal of the famed actors Alfred Lunt and his wife, Lynne Fontanne. Written with the stylistic aplomb of Sandy’s New Yorker articles (some of those apparently not by-lined), each of the book’s three articles had appeared previously in major American magazines. And, on the cover of this second book is a Paul Cadmus drawing of Sandy from 1943, a year after his leaving Kent, a drawing which Don gave to the School, and is now displayed in the Sandy Campbell Room in the John Gray Park ’28 Library.

Emerging from this lifelong relationship, then, is an extraordinary fund to support young writers who excel in the English language. Before Sandy’s death in 1988, he and Don made a tacit agreement to combine their two estates to achieve this objective; with Don’s death in 2011, it came to fruition.

How large a fund? I asked the director of the Windham Campbell Fund that very question. His response: “The estate value is not public information; but we give away $1.3 million a year and run our whole operation on the interest, so you can probably do the math.”

Don himself came from a rather modest background in Georgia, essentially supported by a widowed mother until his first job in a Coca-Cola factory, “where he rolled barrels through the warehouse and harbored dreams of becoming a writer” (in the words of the Fund’s Director) before he reached New York City. There he did become a writer—a good writer—and was honored by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960. He also acquired some wonderful art through his many friendships; I would admire two quaint “shadow boxes” made by the eccentric artist Joseph Cornell whenever visiting the condo.

But Sandy did come from an affluent family. Sandy’s father, William Montgomery Campbell, owned Magnus Chemicals, which sold various detergents and sanitizing products. In June 1964, shortly after Mr. Campbell’s death in January 1963 in Key Biscayne, Florida, the privately owned company, now located in Garwood, New Jersey—not far from Westfield, where Sandy grew up—was sold to Economics Laboratory of St. Paul, Minnesota. According to the June 19, 1964, issue of The New York Times, the company had 325 employees at the time, and annual sales between $6 and $9 million. The transaction “will eventually involve 185,000 shares of common stock,” which includes 82,000 issued at once, and 29,500 preferred shares, which may be converted after 1969 into 103,000 shares of common stock.

I recalled that Don had mentioned the word “Ecolab” several times during our get-togethers, but it had meant little to me, no more than “Rosebud” meant to those portrayed in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. But “Ecolab” was no longer couched in mystery after I saw the report: It suggested the huge size of this bounty now held by Yale which, thanks to Sandy and Don, will enrich writing in English for years to come.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Michael Kelleher at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for sharing his description of the Fund’s history. The Kent School library staff, headed by Amy Voorhees, and the archive, headed by Katy Armstrong, were as usual patient and helpful in addressing my many requests. The assistant librarian, Joe Russo, arranged for me to spend time with Sandy’s writings and secured several critical newspaper accounts bearing on Sandy’s family.

Several offices of Princeton University responded to my queries for which I am grateful. The Class Secretary of Sandy’s Class of 1946, William N. Hunter, was quick to respond by scanning the materials I cited in the article and forwarding them to me. And the managing editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Brett Tomlinson, thoughtfully tracked down the reference to Sandy’s participation in the Broadway play his senior year, and his role as the radio station’s drama critic his freshman year.

Frederick Sharp, a Kent classmate, advised me on the implications of the Magnus Company’s sale. I found two persons who had met Sandy as a young man: John Scott, a professor emeritus of art history at the University of Florida, who was a senior-year roommate of mine at Princeton, and had been raised next door to Sandy in Westfield, New Jersey; and Dr. Van Joffrion, whom I found in Tennessee after searching for such a surname, after noting Sandy’s reference in Princeton’s Freshman Herald of 1942 to a family member who had attended Princeton, Winston Joffrion ’23.

As I ponder Sandy’s closeness to Fr. Sill and his creation, with Don, of the Windham Campbell Prizes Fund, I wonder whether Kent School’s Alumni Council, in its wisdom, should enroll Sandy, posthumously, to membership in its Sill Society.