Remembering Joan

Published On: March 30, 2010

Joan Morgan Cirillo (1930-2010) wasn't from around here. This was obvious the moment she opened her mouth and from it emerged the raucous timbre of her native Brooklyn—barely buffed by stints in Ohio, Chicago and decades in Nashville. That her pitch was always passionate was another clue.

Not that Southerners lack fervency for causes. But natives converse with a politeness that veneers strong emotions. With Joan, on the other hand, how she felt about what you said was right out front.

"Huh? You actually liked that movie?" Joan asked when I expressed praise, if faint, for the latest De Niro. "He's been sliding downhill since Taxi Driver." On the other hand she could make your day by telling you, with equal enthusiasm, that your latest article in the Nashville Scene was "the best thing you've ever done, Babe."

I came to know Joan when we worked together at Cheekwood, where she ran media relations. One of her regular tasks was to pitch programs to Clara Hieronymus, the seriously soft-spoken art critic for the Tennessean. "I can still hear her crying 'Hey, Clara!' into the phone," recalls then-director Kevin Grogan. "She just plowed right through the myth that critics were sacrosanct."

Joan did, however, have her household gods. Michael Jordon of her beloved Chicago Bulls was one, as were Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Bruce Springsteen. Unreconstructed liberal politicians also qualified, such as Eugene "Clean Gene" McCarthy, whose anti-war challenge to President Lyndon Johnson made him an icon of the Left.

Joan met McCarthy in 1990, when he participated in a Cheekwood seminar accompanying the photo-exhibit "Life: Through the Sixties" and she was assigned to show him around town. "They took off in her red convertible," as Kevin tells the tale, "and somewhere near Franklin the car started making a funny noise. Gene told her to stop so he could take a look," before determining that nothing serious was wrong. "When Joan returned to the office, she proclaimed: 'Oh my God, Gene McCarthy was underneath my car!'" Kevin laughs. "It could only have been better if Adlai Stevenson had been simultaneously checking out her gear box."

But Joan could be tough on political heroes who might compromise away the compassionate ideals she held so dear. "When's Obama going to get some balls?" she demanded the last time I saw her, already seriously weakened by the cancer that would kill her.

"I've never known anyone more strongly opinionated," Kevin says—even when the subject didn't require attitude. I remember a dinner with Joan and her husband Lee shortly after they'd returned from a London visit with daughter Leslie and her brood. While Joan admitted that the theater was first rate, the museums exemplary and the parks lovely, she still found the British lifestyle deficient.

"Their butter comes in one pound blocks, not sticks!" Joan exclaimed with the triumphant zeal of a prosecutor presenting a murder weapon complete with fingerprints of the accused.

"Are you saying that the culture of Great Britain is inferior to ours because of how they do butter?" I asked incredulously. It took a very long moment before she shifted from scorn to laughter.

Joan's emotional connection to the arts, which she shared with Lee, was perhaps her most sterling characteristic. They were symphony regulars, saw movies the weekend they opened, made an annual trek to see cutting edge theater at the Humana Festival in Louisville, papered their walls with art, read history, bios and novels for daily sustenance rather than dessert.

The arts were what you did if you engaged life to the fullest, and for Joan there was no other way. "She had no personal rheostat, she was either 'on' or 'off'," Kevin says. Well, now Joan is permanently "off," and Nashville is the poorer—and blander—for it.