Steve Silver - A Very Private Genius
1944 - 1995

I first met Steve Silver in 1975 when he was holding auditions for Beach Blanket Babylon Goes Bananas. By that time, the native San Franciscan had already begun his entertainment business career.

He started as a ticket taker at the hungry i nightclub in 1969, while working on his master's degree in art at San Jose State University. From there, went on to be assistant art director for friend Colin Higgins on the cult classic film Harold and Maude. Next time you watch the film, play special attention to the inside of Maude's railroad-car room, it was Steve's design.

While working with two friends as a street performer, he started a business in the early 1970s called Rent a Freak. The idea was to dress up in wild costumes and attend Pacific Heights society parties and other "happenings," to provide a little edge.

His tap dancing Christmas tree and Mrs. Santa, working as backup singers to a Carmen-Miranda-like character evolved into a show that still defines itself and an entertainment sector that did not exist until he and his collaborators dreamed it up at the Savoy Tivoli in North Beach back in 1974.

By the late spring of 1975, with the help of his mentor and friend Cyril Magnin, all this genius rolled itself into Beach Blanket Babylon Goes Bananas! as it debuted in Fugazi Hall on Green Street in the North Beach district of San Francisco.

When we opened for our six-week run, we were under contract for a percentage of what the house took in. If nobody came, we would not be paid. Opening night was sold out, and the rest, as they say, is history.

On the surface, Steve was a "medium" type of person. Medium height, medium weight, moderately attractive, and well spoken. It was what was inside his head that made him different, as if his view of the world was half in and half out of this dimension.

During the months we were rehearsing that first Beach Blanket show, he directed and watched and listened, and asked us questions about how we thought we should be performing the musical numbers. Then, after the show opened, he would sit in the upper left balcony watching. Not the show. He watched the people watching the show. Utilizing all his magical skills, he decided what "worked" and what didn't.

Beach Blanket Babylon was eternally evolving. Despite the fact that Steve owned and controlled the show, it was always a collaborative effort. I believe that's why it's still running in one of its zany incarnations and has been sold out every night since it opened, the longest-running musical revue….ever.

This was the monumental brainchild of Steve's creativity, but it was also the tool by which he was able to touch so many lives with his philanthropy.

He was tireless in his support of AIDS charities in an era when the virus was stigmatized as a gay man's disease. Together, he and his wife created the Steve Silver/Beach Blanket Babylon Gallery Terrace at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Steve Silver/Beach Blanket Babylon Music Center at the San Francisco Public Library, and supported the UCSF Cancer Center, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the AIDS Emergency Fund. Jo Silver created the Steve Silver Foundation and Beach Blanket Babylon Scholarship For the Arts benefiting Bay Area High School seniors.

This was all high profile giving, but Steve went far beyond that. He cared for the people who worked for him and spent many thousands of dollars helping us (and our children) individually. He was never nosy or obtrusive, but was always willing to help in any way he could.

Show people work on most of the days that are holidays for regular people, and Steve always kept that in mind. He loved to give us parties, and one of my fondest "Steve memories" is of a particular Valentines Day evening.

The show was over and we came dribbling out from the backstage area to find Bud Cort (of Harold and Maude fame) dispensing ice cream from the open moon roof of a VW Bug, parked on the sidewalk in front of Fugazi Hall. There was an entire Ice Cream Parlor set up in the front of the house where we sat, laughed, and had our very own Valentines Day celebration while Steve looked on, smiling.

He was a very private man. A master showman without a lot of personal flair, San Francisco's own Wizard of Oz who worked from his vantage point behind the curtain. His life was his own business until he tested positive for the AIDS virus on his 40th birthday in February 1984.

For six years, he kept the news a secret from his friends and his cast, and as the disease progressed, becoming full-blown in March 1990. He kept his secret as long as he could, using a pseudonym with his doctors and nurses. In June 1991, he told Jo Schuman, his best and closest friend, that he had AIDS. As his sickness progressed, Steve developed a plan for Jo to continue producing the show after his death. They married.

In his last months of life, he and his wife decided to allow us in, and so created "The World of Steve Silver." They gave Ken Swartz, who single-handedly produced, directed, filmed and then wrote the piece, extraordinary access, allowing him to get closer to Silver than anyone else in the local media ever had.

Steve Silver was an intensely private individual whose verbal razzle-dazzle held the world at bay. As he controlled what went in and out of his show, which, for 22 years has had more than 3 million people rollickingly entertained, so did he control what was generally known about him. It was just no one's business whether or not he was gay, who he slept with and what he did with his money.

The behind-the-scenes man always liked to be in control, and was to the end. His tombstone was designed months before his death and put in place. In an example of his sense of silliness tinged with irony, close to the top of the documentary," The World of Steve Silver", he goes to the cemetery where the camera follows him and Jo to look at his newly planted headstone. Cracking customary and typical Silverian jokes, he then brazenly lies down on the grave, "to see if I fit."

He made all of the arrangements for his funeral, selecting Grace Cathedral, where it was held in a non-denominational ceremony full of pomp and circumstance and bittersweet laughter.

"His biggest concern was 'Can I fill Grace Cathedral?' " said friend and protege Kenny Maslow. " Well, it was Standing Room Only."

Most people will never know a person like Steve Silver, and those of us who knew him could only smile knowingly at the grandeur he produced for his "going away party." It was silly and sad, poignant and magnificent, leaving not a dry eye in the house. Masterful.

Behind the altar was a floral arrangement in the shape of a Christmas tree topped with a white Santa cap, alluding to his debut as a dancing Christmas tree.

When Episcopal Bishop William Swing referred to the trees in the Children's Garden located on the church grounds and donated by Silver, he said:

"Steve put us in touch with the child in all of us. He left us with a sense of wonder and magic. His trees will dance in front of the cathedral for the ages. . . . The show will go on."

Glenda Glayzer