Oral History: Don Marshall

Donald Marshall Oral History Project
Interview with Donald Marshall
Date of Interview: Friday, March 27, 2009; Provo, Utah
Interviewer: Robert Marshall Egan, Jr.
Transcriber: Robert Marshall Egan, Jr.
Begin

Egan: This is the Don Marshall Oral History Interview. It’s Friday, March 27, 2009 and we’re here in Don’s living room in his beautifully ornate home on Oneida Lane in Provo, Utah. I’ll be conducting the interview, and I am Don’s great nephew, Robby Egan.

Egan: Tell me a little bit about your relationship with my Grandma Millie, your older sister.

Marshall: One of the first things I was going to say about that was that, when I was four, she came home from BYU, she and my brother Tom were old enough that they could have been my parents.

Egan: How far apart are you and Millie?

Marshall: Seventeen, 18 years. And with Tom 18 or 19. They were a year-and-a-half apart. They were very close. But anyway, I was going to say that Millie came home from college, having taken a tap class, and she taught tap to teenage girls in Panguitch. And a couple of boys, but mainly girls. But I was four-years-old and I tagged along, and I started learning the steps. And finally, um, she said, “You know, you ought to be in this show too, we’re going to have a dance review.” So she got mom to make me a little tuxedo out of chintz material. And I had a little black top hat and a cane. And so at four-years-old I introduced the show. And uh, so people say, “Why do you watch American Idol?” Well, any kind of competition I love. My whole life has been competitions. I’m drawn to competitions. So I won a competition when I was about four. I won another one when I was 12, and I won another one when I was 18.
The first one I remember, when we were doing the dance review, I heard two teenage girls say, “I don’t know why he practices”, or “why he has to practice, he never does the same thing twice.” And I thought, “well who would?” You know? And I thought is that wrong to do the same thing over and over? I learned all the steps and I did whatever the music told me to do. You know? At four I just thought that’s the way it was. And, uh, but anyway.
When I was 12, I came home from a Scout night and looked at the Sunday funnies on the floor, and there was a paper, four pages with one fold in the Deseret News called the Newsette. And I looked in there and kids were getting 100 points, 75 points, 25 points, for drawings, poems, stories that they wrote. The whole paper was for young people. Like, I didn’t know how young or how old, but you would see somebody seven sent something, somebody thirteen sent something in. So um, I just started sending things in, I didn’t know what it amounted to, except you got rewarded by points for what you did. And I sent in something and got 100 points, so I was excited. And then suddenly, at the end of like Christmas time, there was a Newsette with the winners of this contest and I was number 13, but I only started midway. And I thought, “I didn’t even know this was a contest”. If I was thirteenth, and I started halfway through, I’m going to win the next one. And I won the next three.

Egan: The next three years?

Marshall: Yes, the next three years. And so then, they gave me a golden medal, and said, “You’re fourteen, and so we’re going to set a rule that fourteen is the age limit, or three wins and you’re out on both accounts.” So, but I won and then I got the gold medal for the first person to ever win it more than once.
So what came of that, is that the woman who was the editor of the Newsette was an author. A well-known author. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for one of her books. And she had me come up, and they did this in the Deseret News. [Don shows a photocopy of a full page spread of him doing various stage acts as a young boy].

Egan: Oh my goodness. “Utah boy wins...” Look how fun. So what year would this have been in?

Marshall: Thirteen.

Egan: Wow. Look at that.

Marshall: And that’s when I won this other contest doing Al Jolson impersonations. Al Jolson never tap danced, but this one did! [pointing to the photo of himself as a young boy dressed up like Al Jolson]. I sang and danced!

Egan: Look at you! Oh my goodness. Donald Marshall, fourteen years old.

Marshall: That would have been 1948. I also entered in the Deseret News' Newsette for young readers, I also wrote three mystery novels for them during those two years I was 12 and 13, each one sent to them a chapter at a time to be published every Sunday for six months each. I used to get fan mail from lots of the readers and felt like a real celebrity!
The editor of the Newsette gave me a novel she had written and wrote in it: "For Donald, who will one day be autographing novels for me"; and it's because of that, more than 25 years later, I dedicated my first book of short stories, The Rummage Sale, to her--Olive W. Burt--and took a copy to her not long before she died in her mid-80's.
And in fact, I’ll bet you didn’t know that one of my stories–“Christmas Snows, Christmas Winds”, from Frost In The Orchard–was made into a 30-minute award-winning movie and has played on PBS every December for the past 30 years or so. Also, you may or may not know that the Church had me turn 11 of the stories from The Rummage Sale into a musical which played for three months in Salt Lake in 1980 and then I directed a production of it that played for three months--in three different theaters in Provo/Orem--in 1985, and won 9 out of 12 awards in a 1986 Drama awards ceremony.

Egan: What incredible stories! That is so neat.

Egan: So about TV – was any of this broadcast onto television?

Marshall: Yes. So then they had me sing on TV – and I had never even seen TV! They didn’t have TV in Panguitch yet in 1948. But, uh, Alexander Schriner was the organist for the Tabernacle Choir, and he and I were the guest stars on the Eugene Jelesnik show in Salt Lake. It was just the greatest time in my life, I’m telling you.

Egan: I bet. What a wild ride for such a young boy!

Marshall: But it, it made me think, “You can do anything you want to do,” you know? You just have to make a plan and do it. So I just did it year by year.

Egan: Wow, what fun experiences to have as a young kid. And a great lesson to learn at such a young age, you can do anything. And it’s amazing to look at what you’ve been able to go on and do. That’s so great.

Egan: So was that the first time you had seen television?

Marshall: Well, I didn’t see it then. I hadn’t seen it yet, but then Millie got it, and I lived with her as a Freshman, and so...

Egan: And so how old at that point would Bobby have been? [My Dad]

Marshall: Uh, let’s see, when I lived with her? That was ’53, he would have been four or five.

Egan: So that was the first time you had really seen television then?

Marshall: Yeah. And later on they got it in Panguitch, but after I moved out.

Egan: So, growing up for you, then, in Panguitch, radio I assume...

Marshall: Radio–I used to listen to what was called, uh, um... Burgie Music Box, it was called. And it was from 10:00 to 10:30 at night, in high school. And I would listen to it because it was the top 10, out of order, and some of the new stuff you’d hear for the first time, on The Burgie Music Box, I think for Burgermeister. I heard it without fail, and on a date, we’d clear the dance hall and run out to our cars to listen to Burgie Music Box.

Egan: Was there a certain DJ or MC that hosted the program?

Marshall: He didn’t chat, there was just time to do all these songs.

Egan: Oh ok, so keep going.

Marshall: So he might say, “Number three!”, out of order. But the fun thing, I came to BYU and, I thought I was maybe going into advertising. I knew art was my major, but I liked to write. I knew I was going to have an English minor anyway, and hopefully a music minor and a French minor. I finally did the art major and three minors: Music, English literature, and, uh, French.
So Anyway, what was I going to say? They wanted me to help with the yearbook, so I was on the yearbook staff my Freshman year. And then, I remember in the paper, the Universe, and they didn’t have a music column and I said, “I’d like to do a music column.” So it was called “Discin’ with Don.”

Egan: Discin’ with Don?!

Marshall: Discin’ with Don! And I remember discovering Eartha Kitt, do you remember Eartha Kitt? And she had her first song out then, and I wrote about it and... those were fun days. And I’ve stayed with music ever since. I was probably the only BYU Bishop that had this turmoil of, do I get to my Priesthood meeting on time or do I listen to the end of Casey Kasem’s Top 40?!

Egan: I must get some of that from my Grandma Millie because the thing I am most passionate about is music! It’s just me. It’s in my blood.

Marshall: That’s me too. That’s me. I have often said, if I could only have art, if I had to let literature go, if I had to let art go, music I couldn’t live without.

Egan: So can you think of anything else growing up on the radio, programs you liked or anything you can think of?

Marshall: Well the nearest radio stations were Richfield and Cedar, and they only came on for certain hours of the day – it was quite new. And it was Bergie coming at night out of, I think, California or New York, I’m not sure. I just had my dial set to that all the time. And so I kept up with all the new songs. And even now I do it more than most my age.

Egan: So I’m interested, then, to know more about this book you’ve been writing since 1981, interviewing world renowned movie directors. Can you elaborate?

Marshall: Well now first of all, because I was the seventh at home, and my mother had been a housewife for 20-some-odd years by the time I was in Kindergarten and especially first grade. And at that time she left the house and went down to help my dad in the drug store. So I would come home from school and I was there all alone, and they knew I loved to draw, and write stories, so they didn’t worry about me at age six. And I would go down to the drug store and play. But my dad, I remember him saying, “Quit talking to yourself, people will think you’re crazy.” And my mother worried about me just hanging around the drug store so a half a block away was the Gem theater, and for fourteen cents, I could go down and watch a movie. And in those days, nothing was rated because there was really no reason. You know, no sex, no language. So I went down and I saw every change of reel for the next, well what? Ages six to 18, so for the next 12 years. And so I became the person in the drug store that would answer everyone’s questions. I worked at the gift wrap and people would come up to me and say, “Who played Newell’s mother-in-law in such and such a movie?” And I knew. And I became the place where people would come to find out, “Now what was the name of that actor?” and, “Who directed that movie?” And I just grew up knowing all that.
So I grew up with movies and became fascinated with foreign film after my mission while I was in college. Someone who had been on a mission in France and one in Italy had seen a couple of films they wanted me to see. When they played at a little theater, I believe in Salt Lake, a little art film theater, we ran up to see them and thought, “Oh my gosh, this is something else.” And so the first three films I saw that hooked me on foreign film and made me love reading subtitles was, uh, The Virgin Spring by Ingmar Bergman, La Strada by Federico Fennini, and the third one was... it’s left me for a moment here... I’m going to have to think. It may have been Japanese, I can’t remember right now. But from then on, I was, I was really hooked on foreign film.

Egan: Wow, so this book you’re writing is a compilation of interviews conducted with some of these international cinema directors, correct?

Marshall: Yes, that’s right. It started with, what, eight? Then became twelve, then twenty, and now I’m somewhere over seventy.

Egan: Who are some of the directors you’ve interviewed? Any names I would recognize?

Marshall: Maybe a few of them; Robert Altman (America), Ingmar Bergman (Sweden), Zhang Yimou (China), Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy) Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece)----and there are about 70 others.

Egan: So you’ve traveled the world. Several times. Is there an experience that stands out from the rest in your travels?

Marshall: Well, in my travels once, I was driving that new Karman Ghia Volkswagen convertible in southern Austria on my way to Yugoslavia, and suddenly turned in the opposite direction and started heading to Italy. I was furious with myself and kept telling myself how that would now foul up my entire schedule since I was nearing the end of my trip and, literally, had every single day planned out – and had to stick to it in order to see the six or seven countries left on my tight schedule. But my car just kept taking me south to Italy instead of southeast to Yugoslavia, until I finally reached Venice by midnight. I ended up spending the entire night just wandering in the dark and exploring those tiny streets and hundreds of little bridges built over the canals. And then, by morning, kicking myself for doing Venice out of order, I got back in my car early that morning and headed toward Skopje, Yugoslavia, where I should have spent the night instead of all the way down in Venice. However, as I neared the city of Skopje that evening, I was shocked to see thousands of refugees pouring out of there with bundles of things on their backs, and learned that the city had been hit by an earthquake the night before, and 7,000 people were not only buried under the rubble, but everyone had to vacate the city immediately, because they thought they were going to have to just go in with steam shovels and bury the whole city. In shock, I literally sort of walked backwards among the refugees (to not be seen by the policemen brought in to supervise the migration out of there) and made my way into the ruins, where I learned that the student hostel where I would have stayed the night of the earthquake had been totally destroyed. I took lots of pictures until police literally pushed me back onto the trail where people, moaning and in tears, were still dragging whatever belongings they could up out of the ruins. Anyway, that was in 1963–and three years ago, I went back and visited that now-rebuilt city, the capitol of Macedonia, and, in fact, even did one of my director interviews there with the highly talented and super-friendly new young director who did the terrific prize-winning film, Before The Rain.

Egan: Wow, what an amazing experience.

Marshall: Well, I don't know what that has to do with anything other than the fact that, like my knowing the girl I was going to marry was on the other side of the door of the Maeser Building, I was reminded once again that I certainly have Someone watching out for me and guiding me, throughout my life.