Joss Whedon: The Biography (4 page)

Joseph Hill Whedon was born on June 23, 1964, on Midsummer’s Eve—a date that was probably notable to Lee, a Shakespeare lover who staged readings with friends and family after Thanksgiving dinners. The youngest of the three boys, Joss often felt that he was much smaller and more vulnerable than everyone else. “Was I the weak person who got pounded on? Oh, totally! I was little and cute. I was actually mistaken for a girl very often, because I had lovely, flowing red hair,” Joss says. “Let us take a moment to remember my lovely, flowing red hair!”

Whether it was his delicate features or delicate sensibilities, Joss was often intimidated by the world around him. “Something that I’ve felt very much as a child was a fear of patriarchy and anybody bigger than me, like my brothers or my father,” he says. He considered his brothers “charming, but merciless” and his father “an incredibly dear man” who was “not necessarily great with kids.”

Joss’s relationship with his father found common ground in a surprising source: the words and music of Stephen Sondheim. His musicals scored the story of the Whedon home and were a way for Tom to connect with his son. “Some fathers can’t really talk to their sons, but they can throw a baseball,” Joss said. “We’d throw on all the Sondheim albums.”

Joss had a far less tenuous relationship with his mother, in whom he found an “extremely outspoken, strong and loving” exemplar. “She was very smart, uncompromising, cool as hell,” Joss recalled. “You had to prove yourself—not that she wouldn’t come through if you didn’t, but she expected you to hold your own.” Lee was also a strong role model for many of the children who came through her classroom at Riverdale Country School, a private primary/secondary school in an affluent
section of the Bronx where she began teaching history when Joss was four. Her son was enrolled in the school himself beginning in the first grade.

Lee’s feminist leanings started to come through early in her tenure at Riverdale. Though the institution’s upper grades were divided into a school for boys and a school for girls, and she’d been hired to teach at the latter, she was a member of the department that started holding the first academic classes that mixed students from the girls’ school and the boys’ school. In addition to teaching American and European history, she also developed courses on feminism and women in literature, and her other classes ranged from British Authors to Heroes and Anti-Heroes to Socialist and Communist Thought. With another teacher, she created a social studies course in which students studied educational theory, visited schools, and for their final exam, designed their own ideal schools.

Drama was another of Lee’s great loves that she brought to her career at Riverdale. She created opportunities for students and teachers to work together onstage as well as in the classroom, directing joint student-faculty productions of plays by Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and others and even performing in several plays herself over the years, including Sondheim’s
A Little Night Music
. She directed all-student casts as well, and the student production of Jane Martin’s
Talking With
was so successful that she managed to arrange a public showcase production at Symphony Space in Manhattan.

Lee’s model of strength and nurturance was a source of comfort for young Joss, who called upon her example to shield his own vulnerability. Joss began to take an interest in female characters, and to be excited by stories in which the girl was “let into the club.” He also retreated frequently into his imagination, creating his own stories for his toys and regaling his mother with little strange tales.

By 1970, Tom Whedon was writing for
The Dick Cavett Show
, ABC’s late-night alternative to NBC’s
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
. Joss’s home was often filled with his father’s fellow comedy writers, along with other friends of his parents who were actors, artists, and teachers. Later that year, Tom left late night after being “lured back” to children’s television. Tom’s former writing partner Jon Stone had continued to work with Jim Henson following the failure of their Cinderella
project, and he had gone on to become one of the original producers of Henson’s
Sesame Street
. Now Stone was working with the Children’s Television Workshop to develop a new educational series for PBS geared toward older children.
The Electric Company
would be less about Muppets and more about sketch comedy. (Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno, and Morgan Freeman would be early stars of the series.) Tom joined the project as head writer.

Electric Company
writers poured into the Whedons’ Upper West Side apartment to continue working on the show’s development after business hours. They would arrive starting in the early evening and might stay all night, their writing and planning often fueled by alcohol. “There were always eight or ten or fifteen of us exchanging views and jokes and ideas, and sipping vodka and laughing till all hours,” said Jon Stone.

Young Joss loved it. He soaked up the energy and creative spirit of his parents and their friends, often enlisting them as his audience. “While I really enjoyed all of the funny things my dad was working on, it was really just being
around
someone who was that funny. And all of his friends were comedy writers. So the house was constantly filled with these very sweet, erudite, intelligent guys just trying to crack jokes,” he said. “It just had a great air to it, and what you wanted to do is go into that room and make those guys laugh.”

It was with great excitement that Joss discovered that he
could
make people laugh. “There were times when I didn’t feel as though I was getting attention I deserved, and I learned that if you said something funny, people would stop and listen,” he said.

The Electric Company
, with Tom at the helm, premiered on October 25, 1971. At Riverdale, Lee played a strong role in the movement that led to the merging of the boys’ and girls’ schools into one coed institution in 1972. Perhaps the stress of two enormous undertakings was too much for their marriage to handle. Around this time, they made an amicable agreement to separate.

Joss worked through his feelings by referencing the works of Stephen Sondheim. By the age of nine, he knew all of Sondheim’s
Follies
, a musical that examines two unhappy marriages against the backdrop of a showgirl reunion right before their former theater is demolished. One
number from
Follies
in particular stood out for young Joss. “The Road You Didn’t Take” is sung by Benjamin Stone, an incredibly successful but cold and detached man, who looks back at his life and sees it filled with lost opportunities:

You take one road

You try one door

There isn’t time for any more

One’s life consists of either/or

The character finds himself pondering where the door he didn’t choose might have taken him, and acknowledging that he’ll never know. “The notion that every choice you make means that other possibilities are eliminated forever—as a kid, I found that terrifying,” Joss recalled. “As an adult, I still find it scary.”

Sondheim’s work echoed his personal experiences, he explained. “Sondheim wasn’t someone you would go to if you wanted to be told that everything was perfect. Neither were my parents, for that matter—all concerned were greatly relieved when they got divorced.” The Whedons finalized their split in 1973.

By 1974, the kid who had cut his comedy chops by making seasoned comedy writers laugh was honing his skills daily with his Riverdale schoolmates. “He was always the funniest kid in the world. A witty kind of funny—I wouldn’t ever call him the class clown,” remembers Chris Boal, Joss’s best friend at Riverdale. Despite Joss’s declarations of being unpopular at school, Boal insists that “girls really liked him, because he was funny—not too many ten-year-olds can pull that off.”

The boys met when Boal transferred into the school. He and Joss got into a dispute over a chair, which quickly escalated into a fight. As punishment, their teacher made them sit together at a separate table, and as quickly as their fight had begun, so did their friendship. “We didn’t like sports, we didn’t like Led Zeppelin. We were unusual, we were little geeks,” says Boal, now a playwright. “That was a time when geeky kids were not particularly cool.”

In Chris, Joss finally found a proper cohort. While his brothers were only two and four years older, they towered over Joss. To the younger
boys, Sam and Matt seemed like tough, cool lacrosse players, and they were very popular in school. Sam was like a superhero to them, and a bit of a guardian for Joss—kids wouldn’t mess with him as much because Sam was his older brother. Matt took on the typical middle-brother role of picking on the youngest and his friends (a role Joss and Boal later took on to tease Boal’s younger brother).

The two developed the all-consuming friendship that young boys often do. They were inseparable—Boal’s mother thought of Joss as a son—and inconsolable at times when their plans were overruled by parents. “One time where we were supposed to hang out on the weekend and we couldn’t,” Boal laughs, “we were crying on the phone.” The boys had sleepovers during which they’d have crazy dance parties, with special preference given to Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” and later lie in bed and make up stories about being superheroes, saving the girls that they liked from the guys in the class who were “awful, jocky, and terrible.”

Joss and Boal also realized they were passionate about many of the same things, including movies and comic books. Joss’s own introduction to the illustrated world of superheroes had come from the serendipitous decision that
The Electric Company
do a recurring live-action Spider-Man segment called Spidey Super Stories. The sketches aired from 1974 to 1977 and spawned their own line of comics in the Marvel universe.

In preparation for the Spidey Stories series, Tom brought home a collection of Marvel comic books for research, and he shared them with Joss. “I was like nine, and I’m like, What’s all this? What’s all this that will now obsess me for the rest of my life?” Joss said. “So in a weird way,
The Electric Company
was my gateway and Spider-Man was the guy.” Before long, Joss was attending his first Marvel comic convention, where he bought
Howard the Duck
#1 and, full of geeker joy, got Marvel god Stan Lee’s autograph.