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Passion and Joy

By Andrew Popper

At some point in Ian Franckenstein’s childhood (or so my father told me) he planned to grow up and go on the lecture circuit — to teach America that Frankenstein was the doctor’s name, not the monster’s. Eventually Ian learned to just ignore whatever teasing his schoolmates dished out.

Kay Boyle’s only son led a creative life, largely in theatrical pursuits. He used the stage name Ian Swift in honor of a favorite satirist, and also to simplify the playbills. With Mountain Play, the amphitheater company atop Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, California, Ian played the Wizard of Oz and other Broadway characters. He built sets and, according to Mountain Play’s Facebook tribute, was a “daytime greeter during non-performance days where he would share stories of the Mountain Play filled with passion and joy.” Ian worked, at times, as a bartender and radio disk jockey, and of course is well remembered for his lifelong devotion to Kay.

And he was a formidable raconteur, as I rediscovered the last time we met, in San Francisco in 2019. I’d asked him to show me his father’s Second World War records — long a subject of curiosity for both of us. Soon Ian was regaling me with anecdotes of his own early years, when he would often make the literary rounds in Kay’s company. It was the most natural thing for any of Kay’s children to be on a first-name basis with notables like ‘Sam’ Beckett and ‘Lenny’ Bernstein. There was one memorable occasion, Ian told me — this was an award ceremony for Arthur Miller, and Ian was in his mid-teens — where Kay introduced him to the playwright’s wife, calling out like they were best of friends: “‘Oh Marilyn! I want you to meet my son Ian.’ She [Monroe] curtsied, and I kissed her hand,” Ian recalled. It was a spontaneous gesture, he assured me, and added nonchalantly, “She was kind of seductive.”

A kiss on the hand is quite continental, to be sure; Ian was, after all, a Hapsburg descendant. But there was never a trace of pretense about him. The day we met up in San Francisco, Ian was driving his sturdy old workhorse of a pickup, with his set-ladders mounted on the roof. Just before sunset we went over to Frederick Street for a snapshot were he and Kay had shared a house. The truck had clearly earned its dings and bruises from a thousand trips up and down Mount Tam, and Ian was getting it in shape for a trip back east that would be their last long-distance journey as things turned out.

Later I recalled a line Kay once wrote: “Together we climbed the perilous mountains of life, and somehow survived.”

Ian Franckenstein in front of 419 Fredercik Street, San Francisco, Sept. 2019


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
KBS (May 22, 2024). Passion and Joy. The Kay Boyle Society. Retrieved May 18, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/11pfi


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