[W]hen Vermonter François Clemmons received a request to appear in this year’s surprise blockbuster film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” he didn’t know the portrait of his late friend, children’s television star Fred Rogers, would become the top-grossing biographical documentary of all time.
Clemmons simply figured he had to decline.
“Can you fly out to California — we’ll take care of everything,” he recalls a production assistant asking. “I said, ‘I’d like to do it, but …’”
When the Alabama native turned Addison County resident first co-starred on the PBS program “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” 50 years ago, the man known to millions as the character Officer Clemmons was starting a career that saw him establish the globetrotting Harlem Spiritual Ensemble and win a Grammy award before moving to the Green Mountains to teach at Middlebury College.
But when Clemmons took the documentary call shortly after retiring, the now 73-year-old was bedridden. He had pneumonia, a blood clot in his left lung, pleurisy and failing kidneys that required near-constant dialysis.
“You name it,” he told the filmmakers. “This body’s barely turning over.”
Producers then suggested meeting in New York City or Pittsburgh before Clemmons found himself on the phone with Academy Award-winning director Morgan Neville.
“I said to him, ‘If you want me before I die, you had better get yourself up here to Vermont.’”
A crew soon invaded Clemmons’ living room. First came the lights, then the camera, then the action — which unexpectedly kept rolling in the days, weeks and months after filming.
“It seemed like blood flowed back into my veins. I was in a wheelchair, and then I went to a walker, and then I went to a cane …”
More miraculous still, he eventually no longer needed dialysis.
“A lot of it had to do with having something to wake up for,” Clemmons says. “Purpose came back into my life.”
It’s a spark he wants to share.
‘The positive influence that you can have’
The word critics agree sums up the film about Mister Rogers in this crass, cynical, politically polarized era is “radical.”
“The most radical thing about him was his unwavering commitment to the value of kindness in the face of the world that could seem intent on devising new ways to be mean,” wrote the New York Times.
“I was floored by this movie,” added the social media editor for the bad-boy website Vice. “It offers some fascinating insight into the life of a pretty strange dude who hated fame and despised television, but adeptly used both (along with some beat-up puppets) to teach kids about human truths.”
With the documentary’s arrival in theaters over the summer and on DVD this fall, Clemmons has juggled interview after interview with media outlets, including NPR.
“I was the first black American to have a reoccurring role on all of children’s television,” he said on the program “Ask Me Another.” “Fred had his way of doing these things without causing, you know, a big explosion. He just invited me on the program, invited me to sing and to be a part of his neighborhood. It seemed sometimes easy for him to do the right thing.”
Clemmons recalled in Vanity Fair how much Rogers cared for him as a friend.
“After Dr. King was assassinated in 1968,” he told the magazine, “I remember Fred Rogers called me and said, ‘Franc, what are you doing? How are you doing?’ … I never had someone express that kind of deep sense of protection for me — and that experience drew Fred and me really, really close.”
Clemmons also remembered on “CBS This Morning” how he played a different kind of cop.
“Growing up, you have a slightly different view of what police officers represent in your community, but your heart will open when Fred explains the positive influence that you can have for young children,” he said in a “Note to Self” segment. “They’ll know that love does exist and that there’s much more that all of us can do when we choose to do it together.”
Clemmons didn’t foresee where any of this would lead when he was studying for a bachelor of music and master of fine arts degrees in the 1960s. He started his career singing professionally with opera companies and symphonies from New York to Los Angeles.
Clemmons won his Grammy in 1976 as part of the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus’ recording of “Porgy and Bess,” having stepped onto the national stage eight years earlier when Rogers, hearing him sing, extended an invitation to join the cast of his television show.
“Hi, Officer Clemmons!” Rogers began a 1969 scene featuring a backyard wading pool. “It’s so warm, I was just putting some water on my feet — would you like to join me?”
“I don’t have a towel,” Clemmons responded.
“You can share mine,” Rogers replied.
The resulting tableau stood in stark contrast to period news footage of a Southern motel owner throwing acid into a segregated “whites only” pool to force black protesters out.
“It was a definite call to social action on Fred’s part,” Clemmons recalls. “That was his way of speaking about race relations in America.”
Some of the film’s press coverage has focused on the fact the Vermonter had to hide his homosexuality for fear sponsors wouldn’t support the program. Rogers frowned on Clemmons wearing a pierced earring on set but befriended his costar off camera.
Clemmons told Vanity Fair that the articles haven’t take into full account that societal norms were vastly different then. “The times have changed significantly. But you cannot underestimate the shunning that was happening to people who had the audacity to express their love for the same-sex back in 1965, ‘67, ‘68, ‘69.”
He recalls that Fred used to tell him on the show, “I love you just the way you are.”
“One day I said, ‘Fred, were you talking to me?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ve been talking to you for years and you finally heard me today.’ No man had ever told me that he loved me like this. My dad never told me, my stepfather never told me. So from then on, he became my surrogate father.”
‘It’s the only thing in life that’s worthwhile’
In time, Rogers encouraged Clemmons to move out of the neighborhood and into the world.
“One day I said to Fred, ‘Why is there no organization that is dedicated to American Negro spirituals?’ And he said, ‘Maybe that’s a sign — a lot of times when you see a vacuum, you’re supposed to fill it.’”
Clemmons went on to establish the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, which brought him to Middlebury several times in the 1980s and 1990s before the college awarded him an honorary doctor of arts degree in 1996 and hired him the following year.
Why would a black man want to settle in one of the nation’s whitest states?
“It needs me the most,” he says. “And you can never undervalue a good job.”
Clemmons served as the Alexander Twilight artist in residence — named after a 1823 alumnus who was the first black graduate of a U.S. college — and director of the school’s Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir from 1997 to his retirement in 2013. He capped his tenure with a final concert and a farewell party. Not long after, he realized he wasn’t well.
“I slept, but I didn’t feel rested,” he remembers. “That was the first sign.”
Clemmons wound up in the hospital for months, inexplicably chained by a tangle of tubes to a myriad of machines.
Everything changed after the filmmakers called.
“I’ve been a specialist 40 years,” Clemmons recalls one doctor saying months later, “and never have I had a patient go on dialysis and come off. What did you do?”
“Pray,” he responded. “I don’t care if you’re Jewish or Islamic or Bahá’í or atheist. Just be there with me. See me in the light.”
Clemmons is back home with his Tibetan terrier, Her Royal Highness the Princess Nepal, and walls full of framed cards and letters from Rogers, who spoke at Middlebury commencement in 2001 and stayed in touch until his death from cancer in 2003.
The Vermonter is just as surprised as everyone else by the public response to the film, which currently tops DVDs about the Beatles, Pope Francis, Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley on Amazon.com’s list of best-selling documentaries.
“I never expected people to understand the profoundness of Fred’s message,” he says. “There’s a real reason to feel he could be boring. But in my heart, Fred is giving us something that this country and the world is hungry for — lessons of the spirit. Everybody thinks you have to have two cars and a house in the suburbs and an education and a $200,000 salary … No, you do not.”
That said, Clemmons wouldn’t refuse help with all the press questions and public inquiries that promise to continue if the film, just named one of 15 on the Academy Award shortlist for best feature documentary, snags an Oscar nomination in January.
“I feel I’m getting the love people want to give Fred,” he says.
Clemmons is putting it to good use.
“Did you know I’ve also had two strokes? I couldn’t say the word ‘persnickety,’ but then everything came back again. I say I had a reboot. You turn the computer off, you wait a few minutes, and then you turn it back on. That’s what I feel happened. You can’t explain it.”
Then again, he can. Many of today’s headlines — be they about wars, border walls, shootings or suicides, discrimination, bullying and harassment, or alcohol and drug addiction and related crimes — are rooted in human disconnection. The solution, he believes, starts with treating everyone the way Rogers taught him to.
“The best thing I can do is share compassion, kindness and understanding, as all the response I’ve received has been like medicine,” Clemmons says. “Unconditional love is a quality Fred had in abundance, and he gave it freely. It’s the only thing in life that’s worthwhile. You have to give it generously as long as you’re able, as long as you’re alive.”
