How sad, How lovely: The Disappearance of Connie Converse
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Hey strangers, here's another classic episode from Strange and Unexplained. It's one of my favorite episodes, How Sad, How Lovely, The Disappearance of Connie Converse, originally aired June 15th, 2023. Enjoy! If there's one thing that televised talent competitions have taught us, it is that anyone you might come across in your day-to-day life could have an exceptional hidden talent that no one knows about.

The guy who bakes your bread at your local bakery. The woman who delivers your mail. Your accountant. Remember Susan Boyle? Or that woman who sang Shallow in the London tube station? Or the Walmart yodeling kid? Innate artistic genius may not be as rare as we like to think it is. Maybe if we placed more value on the arts, more people would be able to identify their artistic strengths at a young age and help grow them.

Imagine what it would be like if we focused as much resources on the arts as we do on math and reading in schools. Imagine if that loaf of bread came with a chorus of I've got a brand new pair of roller skates or your mail person left beautiful little sketches in your mailbox along with your bills. Imagine how much richer our lives would be.

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I'm a writer and an actor who may not have discovered my own innate talent if it hadn't been for my parents who encouraged me, however reluctantly, at a young age. I also know that much of my success, and really anyone's who isn't sucking the teat of nepotism, wouldn't have happened without a lot of luck.

Being in the right place at the right time. Fitting into the exact mold that other people already have in their heads. And finding the people who are willing to bet on you. The subject of today's episode wasn't so lucky. Connie Converse was born Elizabeth Eaton Converse on August 3rd, 1924 in Laconia, New Hampshire, a wee little town with fewer than 20,000 people.

She and her older brother Paul and her younger brother Philip were raised in a strict Baptist household. Their father was a Baptist minister who moved the family to Concord, New Hampshire around the time Philip was born in order to head up the state chapter of the Anti-Saloon League, a lobbying organization dedicated to keeping Prohibition going.

The Converse family were creative and artistic, and the parents encouraged their children to express their creativity in any way except dance. What with your body parts all wiggly around other people's body parts, why everyone knows dancing is basically just fornicating with all your clothes on. In an essay written in 2000, her younger brother Phil said...

With the exception of the dance, which along with cards and drink were forbidden in our preacher's kid household, she took to all the rest of the seven lively arts as though they were second nature. She was a good cartoonist and invented cartoon strips that I thought were better than most in the newspaper.

She was a great cartoonist, in my opinion. Her series called Educating Henry is sardonic and darkly funny. My favorite one has the two regular characters, a girl about 10 or 11, and a boy about 5-ish, presumably Henry, building something out of blocks together. And she says, we might as well not build it too high because of the bomb.

I mean, come on. That's good. She's like a 1950s version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. She used house paints to do murals on our home walls in Concord. I remember especially a large scene of Robin Hood and Maid Marian in Sherwood Forest, still there when the house was sold.

She had an exciting period doing sculptures with plasticine. A 15-inch high statue she did of Columbus looking seaward from a dock became a centerpiece for some weeks one October at the Concord Public Library.

She did a great deal of writing, from poetry and short stories to plays. On Lincoln's birthday, the parents opened the local evening paper to find a long poem about Lincoln by Elizabeth Converse, obviously submitted to the newspaper by an admiring middle school teacher. She had some violin lessons, but did not like the instrument and did not practice.

Can I confess something? I also don't like the violin, especially when it's being practiced by a child. If I wanted to hear that sound, I'd hang around alley cats in heat. Phil was a big fan of his older sister. In the same essay, he wrote...

To me, she was always cis. She detested the name Elizabeth, along with all its many derivatives like Liz or Betty, and misspent some of her youth trying to promulgate a better moniker. She was a genius and a polymath. I do not use the terms lightly. I had spent a career with a lot of people I think of as near geniuses and a much larger set who were at least unimaths.

There are even some actual geniuses in close view, but hopefully the reader may come to appreciate that my admiration, while inexorably colored by my natal hearth, has some objective merit. In a very real sense, sis raised me.

I always wince at mentioning this truth because it sounds as though our mutual parents were on leave for that decade or two. In fact, they were very much there and loving, as well as interesting fonts of intellectual stimulation for the young in their own right. But I did spend more of that time that was psychologically real to me under Sis's thrall, especially after age four or so.

According to Phil, Connie had been valedictorian of her high school class of more than 150 students and apparently won so many senior awards, the other families became, understandably, annoyed by the third time her name was called. The volume in the crowd rose with each subsequent award she was handed until finally, when they called her name for an eighth and final time, the whole Converse family was embarrassed.

After high school, in 1942, Connie won a full scholarship to Mount Holyoke College, from which both her mother and grandmother had graduated. She excelled in her freshman year, studying French, writing for several campus publications, and receiving multiple academic awards. That year, Connie also started teaching herself guitar and piano, and, according to Phil, she quickly became really good at musical improvisation.

Despite her academic success, sometime after her first year or possibly during her sophomore year, Connie abruptly decided to drop out of college and move to New York City. Phil said her parents were devastated and suspected she was just trying to make more distance between herself and them. She certainly wouldn't have been the first or last college student to be like, "Nope," and hightail it to the big city instead, especially having come from such a strict religious household.

I imagine her first few months in college were an awakening in a lot of ways. While her parents had been teetotalers, actively fighting to resurrect the prohibition, Connie's classmates were probably smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap whiskey, and worst of all, they were probably dancing.

And while her parents might have thought Connie would at least be protected from the sins of the flesh, Holyoke being an all-girls school, they may not have considered that Connie might be more tempted by the plethora of young women around her than she ever would have been with co-ed classmates. And who knows? It was probably one of those classmates who said something like, "'You know, in the Big Apple, they got dancing and whiskey on every corner.'"

And before anyone knew what was happening, Connie was packing up her bags and catching a train down to New York City, much to her parents' chagrin. By 1949, Connie was living in Greenwich Village. I feel like a lot of the stories I tell from the mid-20th century feature people just up and moving to Greenwich Village, and I feel like I owe it to younger millennials and Gen Zers who are familiar with New York City to explain that back in the day, Greenwich Village was not what it is today.

One of the main reasons it was such a draw for young artistic types, as well as ne'er-do-wells, was because it was cheap. Even in mid-20th century terms, it was cheap. And don't get me started on the East Village or the Lower East Side. Woof.

Anyway, Connie quickly got a job as an editorial assistant at something called the Institute for Pacific Studies, which, as far as I can tell, was an organization dedicated to the study of Asia. I guess this was before universities found it necessary to include Asian countries in their course offerings. So anyone who wanted to know more had to go to independent organizations such as the Institute for Pacific Studies.

The problem with such institutions, of course, was that much of their staff came from Asian countries, many of which were communist. And of course, communism in the early 1950s, as we all know, was the biggest threat ever known to human existence. The organization Connie worked for found itself caught up in a communism kerfuffle involving Alger Hiss, a government official who was accused of spying for the Soviet Union.

Alger Hiss and the Communism Kerfuffle is my new band name, by the way. And the Institute for Pacific Studies went up in metaphorical flames. And as her younger brother Phil later wrote, "But Sis was somehow burned in the general meltdown and retreated in due time to a less visible or vulnerable job in a printing house. In fact, she joined the printers union and I believe was in this harness when she began to write her songs.

According to a 2016 piece about Connie and the New Yorker by Howard Fishman, quote, in her spare time, she was composing poetry, painting, drawing cartoons, taking road trips and teaching herself to play guitar. She began writing songs and recording them with a Crestwood 404 tape recording machine in her apartment, end quote.

By this time, her younger brother, Phil, had moved to the Midwest, and he and Connie maintained a correspondence that Howard Fishman likened to the letter sent between Vincent Van Gogh and his brother, quote, in its dedicated practice, its intimacy, and its dynamic of one acting as cheerleader for the other's artistic efforts, end quote. Connie sent Phil and his wife, Jean, an original song a month, beginning with her first entirely original song, Down This Road. ♪

Down this road on a Monday morning came a-riding three strangers Down this road on a Monday morning came a-riding

Three strangers There was one wearing green And one a peacock feather And one wearing overshoes Against the wintry weather And they gave me Six white horses For to carry My load And they beckoned Me to follow And they took me Down this road

She kept writing and progressing as a musician, all the while sending them songs for years, ending in 1955 with a song called Empty Pocket Waltz. Why so unhappy? Don't be that way. They'll make me queen for a job, probably. I'll be, I'll be free.

Over those five years, she sent them about three dozen songs. For a 2010 piece in The All, journalist Cord Jefferson wrote, quote, She set her favorite poems to music, with Rue, My Heart is Laden, penned love songs of her own, The Moon Has No Heart, and dabbled in feminist anthems, Roving Woman, end quote.

Phil said the songs were emotionally expressive, even rebellious, and sexual in a way that Connie found hard to be outside of song. In one of her letters to him, she wrote, Being a complex and inward personality, I've always found it difficult to make myself known. I generally conceal my own problems and listen attentively to those of others.

Despite her shyness, IRL, Connie made a small group of friends with whom, besides drinking and smoking, which apparently enraged her parents, she also began to share her songs. Now in her 30s, it seems Connie was having a kind of delayed adolescence. While she had many friends, no one really knew anything about her romantic life or if she even had one.

Many years later, her brother Phil said he thought she might have been gay. If that was the case, she may have kept any romance as a secret because it was not socially accepted at the time. Perhaps she was so deep in the closet she didn't allow herself to have any romantic involvements at all. That would also help explain her feeling like an outsider and not letting even friends get too close to her emotionally. And, of course, her depression. But that is all speculation.

It was around this time that her new set of friends bestowed her with the name Connie, finally freeing her from her given name. She went by Connie Converse from then on. In 1954, one of Connie's friends brought her up to a semi-regular music salon in Hudson-on-Hastings, about an hour north of the city, that was hosted by Gene Deitch, an animator, music enthusiast, and amateur audio engineer. ♪

A decade earlier, while living in Detroit, Deitch had made early recordings of soon-to-be legendary blues musician John Lee Hooker before he was discovered. Deitch also made bootlegs of jazz recordings on his reel-to-reel recorder, as well as live recordings of musician friends, including folk musician Pete Seeger. In a 2011 blog post, Deitch recalled...

Earlier in the mid-1950s, I'd been working in Manhattan and living up the river in the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, having Friday evening recording sessions. One evening in 1954, my best friend and amateur talent scout Bill Burnell brought a young woman carrying a guitar to the

And a 2009 piece in SFGate quoted him saying:

And the 2016 New Yorker piece described Connie this way. She seemed standoffish, a bit arrogant, and apparently unconcerned with physical appearances at a time when women were being culturally prompted toward glamour. Converse wore no makeup, favored long, shapeless dresses, and tied her hair back in a practical bun, like she had just come in from milking the cows, according to one attendee.

And you know me, stranger. I'm not gonna let all these comments about this woman's looks go by without a heavy sigh or two. First of all, Pete Seeger wasn't exactly Elvis. You know what I mean? Do a Google image search for Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger could have easily been a youth pastor or your local minister.

What was Deitch's obsession with Connie's glasses? Like, okay, she wore glasses. Yeah, there's nothing more uncool than being able to see. Am I right? Nerd. I swear to God, people's expectations of others, especially of women, are wild. But regardless, while Deitch was busy getting his panties in a bunch about Connie's glasses, she started to play for him.

She said she wanted to play a song for me that she had just written called One by One. It went straight to my heart. She wasn't the greatest singer, technically speaking, but there was poignancy in her voice. In the 1950s, I didn't know of anyone commercially who sang as personally as...

Ever heard Bob Dylan sing? He sounds like if Marlon Brando had decided to make protest songs. Or like a car horn dying.

And of course there was an undertone of sadness in her voice. She was probably constantly being told that men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses, and gee, you'd be an awful lot prettier if you let your hair down and put on a little lipstick. Also, men love to accuse women of being arrogant and standoffish when they aren't warm and flirty, or even if they're just shy.

Where a man is cool and mysterious, a woman is a cold bitch. In other words, you call it resting bitch face, I call it, I don't want anyone to misconstrue my apparent friendliness as an invitation to come on to me. Anyway, despite finding her plain and physically bland, Deitch recorded Connie's music for a year and a half. In that whole time, she never opened up to him about her personal life.

Regardless of how he might have come around once she started playing her music, most women have an instinct about men who quickly judge them on their appearance. I'm sure she felt safest keeping him at an arm's length, personally. Deitch also got her a spot on the CBS morning show with Walter Cronkite, which was live and unfortunately isn't archived anywhere that I could find.

The piece in The New Yorker describes her from the stills from that appearance as looking nervous. And of course she was nervous. She was performing on live television for the first time. But unless that writer was looking at pictures I didn't get to see, I don't know what he's talking about. She doesn't look nervous to me. Deitch's son Kim would later recall that that performance felt like the beginning of something big. He told The New Yorker he remembered thinking, "'We'll all say we knew her when.'"

But nothing came of that appearance, and even with friends trying to promote her, Connie never played a formal show in New York City or even hired an agent. It's hard to know if she even had meetings with potential agents. The piece in the all claims that when she wasn't writing or recording music, she was working hard to get her music in front of anyone who might be able to do something with it.

And all, it seems, to no avail. No one came calling to usher Connie Converse to stardom, or even to basic record labelled him. In fact, even her parents weren't calling her anymore.

I don't know how exactly they knew about the details of her life in New York City, but apparently they were so angry about her drinking and smoking that they stopped speaking to her. And just to remind you, she was a full-ass, grown, adult woman in her 30s. Nevertheless, her father eventually died without ever having heard one of her songs. ♪

Connie didn't let the lack of professional or familial support slow her down, though. She moved to Harlem into an apartment with a piano in it and apparently, quite suddenly, found a new musical style. In 1956, she sent her brother Phil two original albums that were mostly all the songs she'd written for guitar, with the final track, a song called Vanity of Vanities, being a song she'd written on the piano and seemingly marking a new musical era in her life. ♪

When I came to Tombstone there was a man who could change copper into gold. A brown bucket full of cloudy water and a magic ten penny name.

She titled these albums, Music's Volumes 1 and 2, with the message, quote, "'With love and modest pride, Elizabeth Converse, August 1956,' written on the cover, along with a card that read, "'These reels are strewn with minor mishaps. On the other hand, they're not so bad.'"

Howard Fishman of The New Yorker described her new sound this way, quote, Unrequited love, a theme that haunts the narratives of her entire musical catalog, features prominently in the piano songs, an oeuvre that would culminate in Converse's final and most ambitious compositional endeavor, a cycle of art songs inspired by the Cassandra myth, end quote.

Another five years went by and Connie's career still hadn't gone anywhere. She was understandably frustrated and seemed to feel defeated enough by the lack of interest in her music that she made the decision a lot of us artists struggling to make it in New York City do. She left. In January 1961, she packed her bags and left town again, this time for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her brother Phil and his wife lived.

1961 also happened to be the year that a young, hopeful folk musician by the name of Bob Dylan would move to New York City. Just as the folk music movement started to blossom out of the beatnik era in Greenwich Village, Dylan, 20 years Connie's junior, released his first album, titled Bob Dylan, just one year later. And if you can explain why one of them made it so quickly while the other didn't, without discussing looks or even personality...

I'm all ears. Now, in Ann Arbor, Connie got a job as a secretary at the University of Michigan. After two years in that position, despite lacking any practical experience in the field of political science, she landed a position as the managing editor for the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Connie's liberal-leaning politics, political activism, and feminism helped her fit in and find community at the university, and it seems she abandoned songwriting altogether.

Though I'm sure she was aware that New York City suddenly burst to life in the folk music scene, and I'm sure that didn't feel awesome. Her brother later recalled, She wrote a lot of things in the journal, but she never composed new music. After New York, I think she'd arrived at a place where she decided she wasn't going to make it, and in many ways that really hurt her.

And Phil's son, Tim Converse, later told the San Francisco Chronicle, "I knew there was something special about it. I only have positive memories of her, but my general sense was that she was a sad person and depressed in ways that I didn't understand at the time."

Connie spent 10 years at the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and while her work there was well-received and well-respected, her emotional well-being deteriorated. She stopped speaking to her friends back in New York, and her drinking increased. Her brother told The All, She started to grow more and more tired of the routine. You could see it in her face.

By 1970, when Connie would have been about 46, those closest to her got worried enough about her emotional state that they pooled some money together and paid for her to have a six-month sabbatical in Europe. And strangers, if that's not love, I don't know what is.

No one really knows what she did there for six months or who, if anyone, she spent her time with. But she later said it was the first time in her life she allowed herself to have unproductive fun.

Two years later, in 1972, Yale bought the journal and Connie was out of a job. And even though she'd been depressed, bored, and burned out on the routine of work, as a piece from 2020 in the New York Times described it, that job had at least sustained her day to day. Then, in a misguided attempt to cheer up her semi-estranged, severely depressed daughter, Connie's mother invited her on a trip to Alaska with another one of Connie's mother's elderly friends.

Connie knew that she'd never hear the end of it from her mother during the trip about her drinking and smoking. But her brother said she didn't know how to say no, so she went. But not before announcing to her brother, "I want to go to Alaska like I want to go to the basement." At some point over the next year or so, Connie's mother invited her on another trip to Alaska, this time just the two of them. And she also learned that she was going to have to get a hysterectomy.

Her brother Phil believes these two things may have been the last two straws to push her over the edge. The thought of having to be alone with her mother, who I'm sure harped on her for her lifestyle, and of having this surgery might have just been too much for her to bear. She told her brother, Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy. I just can't find my place to plug into it.

And so, over the summer of 1974, Connie began, once again, to pack up her belongings and wrote a series of letters to loved ones. In a letter to her nephew, Tim, who was 11 at the time, she apparently referenced The Hobbit and said that like Bilbo Baggins, she had to go.

Her older nephew, Peter, said he thought she said she was going back to New York City. But his father, Connie's brother, Phil, recalls that he thought she said something about going out west. In a letter to Phil, Connie wrote, "I've watched the elegant, energetic people of Ann Arbor, those I know and those I don't, going about their daily business on the streets and in the buildings, and I felt a detached admiration for their energy and elegance.

If I ever was a member of this species, perhaps it was a social accident that now has been canceled. And in another letter, she wrote, Let me go. Let me be if I can. Let me not be if I can't. And then, in August of 1974, one week after she turned 50, with her VW Beetle packed up, she drove off and away from Ann Arbor, her family, and anyone who might have known her before. Don't say what

they all. And the vanity must be sheer humanity when some kind soul remarks with great urbanity, lady let me take you home. Of course there's bound to be some little aftermath that makes a pleasant ending from a straight and narrow path. And as I go to sleep, I cannot help but

How glad I am that I was saved from cards and dreams. People say a roving woman is likely not to be better than she ought to be. So when I stray, there's positively got to be someone there to take me home.

Connie's family believed she killed herself, most likely by driving into a lake or a river, because her body was never found and her social security number was never registered as a death.

About a decade later, in the mid-80s, her family tried to hire a P.I. to at least confirm whether or not she was still alive. But the P.I. refused because Connie was an adult who had a right to disappear. If she wanted to be gone, he wasn't about to go sniffing around for her.

A few years after that, someone told Phil they'd found an Elizabeth Converse in a phone book in either Kansas City or Oklahoma. Phil couldn't remember which, but even if he could remember, he told the all, he wouldn't have called the number or shown up at her door. He said, Leaving was her choice, and I would be embarrassed to show up on her doorstep and say, Hey, what's going on? I know it might sound ghastly, but that's how I felt.

If you've ever had a cat, you may know their weird quirk of going off to die alone. I don't know why they do it, but if they can, a cat will either hide in a part of the house you never go to, or leave altogether and go off somewhere and die by themselves. Either they need privacy or they don't want to be a burden. This reminds me of that. Connie Converse was like a cat, going off to be alone, probably to die, though God, I hope not.

Her brother said that a friend of theirs killed herself when they were quite young, and while the community was outraged, Connie, even at the tender age of 11, believed that if anyone had any rights at all, the right to live or die should be the most sacred. So maybe she was just done. But to me, the thought of knowingly driving into a body of water is absolutely terrifying.

The only thing that scares me more than drowning is maybe being forced to watch the entire Fast and Furious catalog. Anyway, while she packed most of what she owned into her tiny car, Connie left behind a filing cabinet filled with recordings, journals, and letters, as well as clear instructions that her brother Phil be put in charge of all copyrights and control of her music.

Decades later, Phil, it seems, gave filmmaker Andrea Cairns access to everything in the cabinet. I don't know how he met her or made that decision, but Cairns would later tell the BBC, quote,

End quote.

And then, in 2004, a very old Gene Deitch was invited to play guest DJ on a WNYC music show called Spinning On Air. He put together a playlist of a lot of early jazz, and he later wrote on his blog...

I suddenly realized that with the opportunity of Big Apple Airtime, I had a chance to sneak in one piece of music that was not jazz and had never been played on the radio. It was my own recording of a song by Connie Converse. So here was a two-hour radio show.

in which I played dozens of early jazz recordings, with just that one exception. My home recording of Connie Converse singing one by one. We are walking If I had your hand I could shine I could shine Like the morning sun Sun

I mean, he could have played all of her songs, but sometimes we take what we can get. Anyway, that one song played on WNYC half a century after it was recorded seemed to finally spark some interest in Connie's music. Record producer Boris Zula heard the song and was sure that someone would jump on making a full album of her recordings any day now.

But three years later, when there was still nothing, Zula got in touch with Connie's brother Phil, who agreed to hand over her recordings, which Zula and his partner remastered.

In 2009, more than 60 years after she first played for Deitch at his salon in New York, and nearly 50 years after abandoning her music, and more than 30 years after driving off, never to be seen or heard from again, a collection of Connie's songs was released in an album titled How Sad, How Lovely, which is a fitting title for Connie's life as well, I think. ♪

Then in 2014, filmmaker Andrea Cairns made a 40-minute documentary about Connie called We Lived Alone. You can watch it on YouTube. And just yesterday, I blind emailed Kate McKinnon, pitching her an idea of a biopic about Connie Converse with her as Connie. I doubt I'll hear back. And also trademark, trademark, trademark. But wouldn't that be amazing if it happened?

As something of a plain Jane myself, who has alternately been too queer and not queer enough for my industry, and who has often felt like an alien around my own kind, I feel Connie deep within my soul. I know what it's like to see my own ideas take wing in someone else many years after I had them. I know what it feels like to feel like you were born too early, or too late.

I'm not the biggest folk music fan. It's just not my bag. That said, I'd rather listen to Connie's music than to Bob Dylan's, or even Joni Mitchell's for that matter. I cannot explain why Connie's career didn't take off, except perhaps that men didn't find her fuckable. And that makes me want to flip a whole lot of tables.

I don't know what happened to Connie, but I like to imagine she did not drive into a lake, but instead, seated beside one perhaps, she has had the privilege and joy of listening to a recording of her own music and can rest in the knowledge that her charm, intelligence, creativity, and talent amounted to something that mattered to people, and that her value was not, in the end, determined by the shallow standards of a fickle business. ♪

Of course, I know that is the least likely scenario, but I like to imagine it anyway. How sad. How lovely. Take us away, Connie. How sad. How lovely. How sure. How sweet. To see that sunset at the end of the street. And the day to a sea of eyes.

And the shadows rising from the... Few to few that will hold your face, your face in a blaze of gold. How sad, how short, how sweet to see that sunset at the end.

of the streetlights going on in the shops and the bars and the lovers looking for the first little stars like life, like a smile, like the fog of love. How sweet

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you or someone you love is Kate McKinnon, please reach out.

Next time on Strange and Unexplained, part one of my favorite queer two-parter episode, Murder in the Name of Love, Alice and Frida. This episode was originally produced by Angela Palladino and Natalie Grillo, with research by Jess McKillop, editing by Eve Kerrigan, and sound engineering by Jennifer Swatek. Our voice actors for this episode were Jordan Kyburnet, Ryan Garcia, and Luther Creek.