Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, "there were people throwing pies at one another." Oh, and I'll bet the two of you were together since he was a very young rabbit. ESQ: And the tent scene [where Mister Rogers struggles to put together a camping tent for a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood segment], was kind of. And all the people who made this house special to me are not here, anyway. ", Deb stiffened for a second, and she let out a breath, and her color got deeper. It had more to do with his relationship to his own father, which was a focal point for the film. Three died, and they were still children, almost. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children's Corner. He was a child, once, too, and so one day I asked him if I could go with him back to Latrobe. The Esquire article which brings Lloyd Vogel and Fred Rogers together did actually happen; as did the writer's fruitful transformation off the page. She had a long face and a dark blush to her skin. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" Fred never stopped looking at her or let go of her hand. The premise of the moviebased on a profile of Rogers that the journalist Tom Junod wrote in 1998, for Esquireis that an investigative reporter named Lloyd Vogel (played by Matthew Rhys), who . Maya Lin is a famous architect. It wasnt like Fred was just a kind man who worked at the local food bank. Though of all races, the schoolchildren were mostly black and Latino, and they didn't even approach Mister Rogers and ask him for his autograph. That's a true thing the real-life Rogers adopted a vegetarian lifestyle back in the 1970s, when eschewing meat was a radical, "hippie" kind of thing to do. Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) probes the state-of-mind of his interviewer, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) Somehow, the loss of Mr. Rogers, a thoroughly decent man who preached a gospel of kindness to generations of children, aches much more in a social and political landscape awash in anger and pain (and "leadership" that sets that tone). His grandfather, his grandmother, his uncles, his aunts, his father-in-law and mother-in-law, even his family's servantshe went to each grave, and spoke their names, and told their stories, until finally I headed back down to the Jeep and turned back around to see Mister Rogers standing high on a green dell, smiling among the stones. The film is centered on a writer for Esquire, a men's magazine with an arch sensibility, who is assigned, against his will, to write a feature story on Mr. Rogers as part of an edition on American heroes. "Oh, I don't know, Fred," she said. He was thunderstruck. Now, what the fuck is grace?" He prayed for Old Rabbit's safe return, and when, hours later, his mother and father came home with the filthy, precious strip of rabbity roadkill, he learned not only that prayers are sometimes answered but also the kind of severe effort they entail, the kind of endless frantic summoning. His hand was warm, hers was cool, and we bowed our heads, and closed our eyes, and I heard Deb's voice calling out for the grace of God. Every timeless feature, profile, interview, novella - even the ads! "Oh, that's a nice name," Mister Rogers says, and then goes to the Thirty-fourth Street escalator to climb it one last time for the cameras. Junod also inspired Matthew Rhys' character, a fictional Esquire writer named Lloyd Vogel.. Also read: Where That Navy SEALs Rumor Started A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood shows how Fred Rogers used television to reach into the hearts . Who wrote the Esquire article about Mr Rogers? I like to take pictures of all my new friends, so that I can show them to Joanne. And then, in the dark room, there was a wallop of white light, and Mister Rogers disappeared behind it. The film deals with Vogel, who is plagued by his own hate of his dying father, being assigned to write a short, 400-word profile on Rogers. I said sure, hung up, and realized I didnt exactly catch where in Bryant Parkanother New York capital of constant, nightmarish pedestrian overflow. he asked Bill Isler, president of Family Communications, the company that produces Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy's Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, "All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. On December 1, 1997oh, heck, once upon a timea boy, no longer little, told his friends to watch out, that he was going to do something "really big" the next day at school, and the next day at school he took his gun and his ammo and his earplugs and shot eight classmates who had clustered for a prayer meeting. When I handed him back the phone, he said, "Bye, my dear," and hung up and curled on the couch like a cat, with his bare calves swirled underneath him and one of his hands gripping his ankle, so that he looked as languorous as an odalisque. Thats what I actually pray for. The shootings took place in West Paducah, Kentucky, and when Mister Rogers heard about them, he said, "Oh, wouldn't the world be a different place if he had said, 'I'm going to do something really little tomorrow,'" and he decided to dedicate a week of the Neighborhood to the theme "Little and Big." Junod and Rogers exchanged dozens of emails that would . After I watched the walkthroughand was somehow briefly enlisted in fashion-show-planning service as the only idle body in sightwe sat down on a couch in the middle of all the swirling fashion-show-planners, and talked about Fred Rogers, what he left behind, and what we do now. And so it was that the puppets he employed on The Children's Corner would be the puppets he employed forty-four years later, and so it was that once he took off his jacket and his shoeswell, he was Mister Rogers for good. And he had a relationship with a lot of people." As of November 2019, he is a writer . When he was your age, he had a rabbit, too, and he loved it very much. The event is the premise of the 2019 feature film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Im not sure why perhaps as a Valentines gift to all of us or to make up for the guy who yesterday wrote that men who play with LEGOs are not real men but last night Esquire made one of the best profiles it (or anyone else) has ever published, Tom Junods 1998 profile of Mr. Rogers, available online. But the script insists, "it's not really about Mr. Rogers." It is, the viewer discovers, about Esquire staff reporter Lloyd Vogel, played here by Welshman Matthew Rhys. Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), an Esquire journalist known for his jarring exposs but is secretive about his childhood, is the film's protagonist. A Beautiful Day in the . I mean, one of the great surprises of my life is doing this. His name was Fred Rogers. The tie is next, the scanty black batwing of a bow tie hand-tied at his slender throat, and then the shirt, always white or light blue, whisked from his body button by button. But at the same time, we dont know what to do with the lessons that Mister Rogers gave us. Sometimes, ophthalmologists have to take care of the eyes of children, and some children get very scared, because children know that their world disappears when their eyes close, and they can be afraid that the ophthalmologists will make their eyes close forever. Junod asked the filmmakers to stark his trail name lower the names of urgent family members, which exactly how page became Lloyd Vogel in your movie. "Oh, I just knew that whenever you see a little boy carrying something like that, it means that he wants to show people that he's strong on the outside. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a . However, he also said in the Atlantic piece that his father was a flawed man, "a fetishist of his own fragrant masculinity." The film's protagonist is journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a cynic who is assigned by his editors at Esquire to write a profile on Rogers. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. Once upon a time, Mister Rogers went to New York City and got caught in the rain. And I called Joanne [Rogers] after that and said, What do you think about that? And she was like, You know, Fred would never represent that. That seems so obvious, but I think to a lot of people its not obvious because I think that the temptation of being able to think that yelling at somebody on the street, youre somehow striking a blow. Yeah, he would. "Oh, hello, my dear," he said when he picked it up, and then he said that he had a visitor, someone who wanted to learn more about the Neighborhood. He wrote, "I was well aware of his eccentricity, but unlike my character in the script, I had never rejected him or his message, which was that nothing is more important about a man than the way he looks, the way he carries himself, and the mystery of what my father called his 'allure. We make so many connections here on earth. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. He peeked in the window, and in the same voice he uses on television, that voice, at once so patient and so eager, he pointed out each crypt, saying "There's my father, and there's my mother, and there, on the left, is my place, and right across will be Joanne." The window was of darkened glass, though, and so to see through it, we had to press our faces close against it, and where the glass had warped away from the frame of the doorwhere there was a finger-wide crackMister Rogers's voice leaked into his grave, and came back to us as a soft, hollow echo. The old navy-blue sport jacket comes off first, then the dress shoes, except that now there is not the famous sweater or the famous sneakers to replace them, and so after the shoes he's on to the dark socks, peeling them off and showing the blanched skin of his narrow feet. . He wears an undershirt, of course, but no mattersoon that's gone, too, as is the belt, as are the beige trousers, until his undershorts stand as the last impediment to his nakedness. The boy was thunderstruck because nobody had ever asked him for something like that, ever. On this day, however, he is premature by a considerable extent, and so Margy, who has been with Mister Rogers since 1983because nobody who works for Mister Rogers ever leaves the Neighborhoodcomes running over, papers in hand, and says, "Not so fast there, buster. Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers and Matthew Rhys as Lloyd Vogel in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." (Courtesy Lacey Terrell/Sony Pictures) This article is more than 3 years old. Thats as far as I want to go, you know? While Junod wrote that he learned the concepts of forgiveness and . Except that Mister Rogers wasn't going anywhere. And that always struck me as perverse. On this afternoon, the end of a hot, yellow day in New York City, he was very tired, and when I asked if I could go to his apartment and see him, he paused for a moment and said shyly, Well, Tom, Im in my bathrobe, if you dont mind. I told him I didnt mind, and when, five minutes later, I took the elevator to his floor, well, sure enough, there was Mister Rogers, silver-haired, standing in the golden door at the end of the hallway and wearing eyeglasses and suede moccasins with rawhide laces and a flimsy old blue-and-yellow bathrobe that revealed whatever part of his skinny white calves his dark-blue dress socks didnt hide. Yeah, Mister Rogers is more amazing than you ever knew. Once upon a time, there was a little boy born blind, and so, defenseless in the world, he suffered the abuses of the defenseless, and when he grew up and became a man, he looked back and realized that he'd had no childhood at all, and that if he were ever to have a childhood, he would have to start having it now, in his forties. I sat in an old armchair and looked around. Three of the doors are opened to reveal the familiar faces of Lady Aberlin, King Friday, and Mr. McFeely.The fourth door is opened to reveal the face of Mr. Rogers' troubled new friend, Lloyd Vogel, who has a cut near his nose. In fact, when the little boy grew up to be a teenager, he would get so mad at himself that he would hit himself, hard, with his own fists and tell his mother, on the computer he used for a mouth, that he didn't want to live anymore, for he was sure that God didn't like what was inside him any more than he did. Lloyd has been tasked with profiling Fred Rogers for Esquire, an unusual assignment that he approaches with great reluctance and even resentment. Well, not exactly. You would think it would be easy by now, being Mister Rogers; you would think that one morning he would wake up and think, Okay, all I have to do is be nice for my allotted half hour today, and then I'll just take the rest of the day off.But no, Mister Rogers is a stubborn man, and so on the day I ask about the color of his sky, he has already gotten up at five-thirty, already prayed for those who have asked for his prayers, already read, already written, already swum, already weighed himself, already sent out cards for the birthdays he never forgets, already called any number of people who depend on him for comfort, already cried when he read the letter of a mother whose child was buried with a picture of Mister Rogers in his casket, already played for twenty minutes with an autistic boy who has come, with his father, all the way from Boise, Idaho, to meet him. She was very pretty. And its all in there. Matthew Rhys' character, the cynical Lloyd Vogel, is only loosely inspired by real-life journalist Tom Junod, hence the name change. "Thank you for calling, my dear," he said, in a voice whose . A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (opens Nov. 22) tells the story of one writer's experience profiling Fred Rogers . Browse featured articles, preview selected issue contents, and more. Here's what readers learned about Mister Rogers when the piece debuted. It's his natural instinct to try and take Mister . In 1998, Junod wrote a piece profiling Rogers for Esquire , which . At first, I chalked this up to some Neighborhood of Make-Believe voodoo energy, but now I have a legit answer. Would you like to tell me about Old Rabbit, Tom?. A distraction itself was dangerous. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. He was a music major at a small school in Florida and planning to go to seminary upon graduation. An ophthalmologist is a doctor who takes care of the eyes. I just wanted to let him know that he was strong on the inside, too. She weighed 280 pounds, and Mister Rogers weighed 143. The movie, which opens November 22, casts Rogers as an agent of change . It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.' Heres Our Review Of Cocaine Bear: Oh Hell Yes! He rested his head on a small pillow and kept his eyes closed while he explained that he had bought the apartment thirty years before for $11,000 and kept it for whenever he came to New York on business for the Neighborhood. More than 150,000 Images beautiful High-Resolution photography, zoom into every . Maybe it was something he needed to hear. But the boy was shaking his head no, and Mister Rogers was sneaking his face past the big sword and the armor of the little boy's eyes and whispering something in his earsomething that, while not changing his mind about the hug, made the little boy look at Mister Rogers in a new way, with the eyes of a child at last, and nod his head yes. By the time Junod was done writing the story, he had become friends with Rogers. The film is based on a true story, though Rhys plays fictional journalist Lloyd Vogel, who was created to help tell Rogers' story. "Oh, heavens no, Tom! Mister Rogers didn't leave, though. The news was confirmed by Fred Rogers Productions . Yes, sure, he was taping, and right there, in Penn Station in New York City, were rings of other children wiggling in wait for him, but right now his patient gray eyes were fixed on the little boy with the big sword, and so he stayed there, on one knee, until the little boy's eyes finally focused on Mister Rogers, and he said, "It's not a sword; it's a death ray." Lloyd Vogel Is Based On A Real Journalist Who Praises The Mr. Rogers Biopic. Theres fire up there guys! Koko watches television. He was in college. It's more about the impact of Mister Rogers on others, particularly a jaded and cynical journalist named Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) and how his interactions with the TV host chill his sometimes . He looked very little in the backseat of the car. "No!" Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. 'I love you.' During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . "Welcome, Tom," he said with a slight bow, and bade me follow him inside, where he lay downno, stretched out, as though he had known me all his lifeon a couch upholstered with gold velveteen. The hard-hitting journalist reluctantly takes an assignment to write a profile story about the cherished TV icon for a special 1998 "Heroes" issue of Esquire . Theyre polar opposites. It gradually dawns on Tom/Lloyd, that the Mr. Rogers in front of the camera is the . But it might mean something to me, so thats why Ive been doing it. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electrocultureand yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. Children are so easily influenced I have grown into a middle aged man and I wish I had a better influencer in time of Mr.Rogers. "Will you be with me when I die?" She and the boy lived together in a city in California, and although she wanted very much for her son to meet Mister Rogers, she knew that he was far too disabled to travel all the way to Pittsburgh, so she figured he would never meet his hero, until one day she learned through a special foundation designed to help children like her son that Mister Rogers was coming to California and that after he visited the gorilla named Koko, he was coming to meet her son. Ive gone on the road through this story and Ive become a spokesman not just for the movie, but for Fred, and its one of the great surprises of my life. As the film starts, journalist Lloyd Vogel has just welcomed the birth of a newborn baby boy with his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson). That was a challenge. "I imagine they're blue.". Tom Junod / Lloyd Vogel experiences this first hand as he tries to get Mr. Rogers to come "out of character". We were heading there all along, because Mister Rogers loves graveyards, and so as we took the long, straight road out of sad, fading Latrobe, you could still feel the speed in him, the hurry, as he mustered up a sad anticipation, and when we passed through the cemetery gates, he smiled as he said to Bill Isler, "The plot's at the end of the yellow-brick road." ESQ: You wrote in the original piece that he didnt even watch TV. Its Joanne, he said. ", He was barely more than a boy himself when he learned what he would be fighting for, and fighting against, for the rest of his life. By Rachel E. Greenspan. A minute ago we were stand-ins for children watching the show; now we seem to be somehow inside the brain of Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a cynical Esquire reporter tasked with profiling Rogers for . Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: "Well, Tom, I guess you've already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.". When tasked with profiling the well-acclaimed Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks), Vogel is unwilling to do so as it is a change from his typical exposs. Twenty minutes later, I got off the train, chose the closest of the stations 14 exits to start my Junod scavenger hunt from, reached the top of the stairs, turned to cross the street, and, wow, okayover on the other end, red turtleneck, black suit, there he is. Tick, Tick . I told him I didn't mind, and when, five minutes later, I took the elevator to his floor, well, sure enough, there was Mister Rogers, silver-haired, standing in the golden door at the end of the hallway and wearing eyeglasses and suede moccasins with rawhide laces and a flimsy old blue-and-yellow bathrobe that revealed whatever part of his skinny white calves his dark-blue dress socks didn't hide. ESQ: Have the past two months been fulfilling for you? TJ: I grew up Roman Catholic too. I mean, Fred wasnt just a reformer when it comes in terms of message. And what did Fred want from me? 85+ Years of outstanding fiction from world-renowned authors. Did you have a special friend like that, Tom?, Did your special friend have a name, Tom?, Yes, Mister Rogers. And so we went to the graveyard. It's just a meeting of friends," he said. Harpster and Fitzerman-Blue were joined onstage by Tom Junod, whose beautiful 1998 profile of Mr. Rogers for Esquire provided a main influence on the film. But I mean, Fred and my dad could not have been more different. They're all in heaven.". A woman was with him, sitting in a big chair. From hair trends to relationship advice, our daily newsletter has everything you need to sound like a person whos on TikTok, even if you arent. What is grace? '", In fact, Junod's current project is a book about his relationship to his father, Lou Junod. She was 92. TJ: I mean, I never . This article was the basis for the plot of the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Every issue Esquire has ever published, since 1933. Except for people who are on the new-age end of it. But Junod says he recognizes Vogel's . ", Then he turns back to the little girl. On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, "I would like you to pray for me. His name was Fred Rogers. If somebody had said five years ago, that I was going to be spending the months in October and November 2019 sort of speaking for Fred Rogersyeah, right. Tom Hanks channels Mister Rogers in a movie about how the legendary kids' TV host saves a magazine writer, and could maybe save all of us. He is losing, of course. I didn't ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. The movie is about Lloyd Vogel, (Matthew Rhys), an investigative journalist who receives an assignment to profile noted children's television host Fred Rogers, . Bill had driven us there, and now, sitting behind the wheel of his red Grand Cherokee, he was full of remonstrance. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. They are tallas tall as the cinder-block walls they are designed to hideand they encompass the Neighborhood's entire stage set, from the flimsy yellow house where Mister Rogers comes to visit, to the closet where he finds his sweaters, to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where he goes to dream. What kind of prayer has only three words? A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (opens Nov. 22) tells the story of one writer's experience profiling Fred Rogers, otherwise known as Mister Rogers, the host of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. I'm not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella. He takes a nap every day in the late afternoonjust as he wakes up every morning at five-thirty to read and study and write and pray for the legions who have requested his prayers; just as he goes to bed at nine-thirty at night and sleeps eight hours without interruption. Her name was Deb. Everything we can't stop loving . A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is based on the real-life story of journalist Tom Junod and an article he wrote for Esquire magazine profiling Fred Rogers. In the film, actor Matthew Rhys plays central character Lloyd Vogel, a journalist who's writing a profile on the legendary creator of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." Get instant access to 85+ years of Esquire. And it just goes on and on in much the same way from there. . Isn't that wonderful?". I am ashamed to say it, but I was too cool at the time for Mr. Rogers. ", "I know that," Mister Rogers said, "and that's why the prayer I'm going to teach you has only three words. ESQ: In both pieces, the original and The Atlantic piece, prayer comes up. And so the change is made, and the taping resumes, and this is how it goes all day, a life unfolding within a clasp of unfathomable governance, and once, when I lose sight of him, I ask Margy Whitmer where he is, and she says, "Right over your shoulder, where he always is," and when I turn around, Mister Rogers is facing me, child-stealthy, with a small black camera in his hand, to take another picture for the album that he will give me when I take my leave of him. ", And now Margy comes up behind him and massages his shoulders. With the film adaptation of Junod's legendary Esquire story out today, we talked to the writer about the man who changed his life. esquire article. When he reaches the street, he looks right at the lens, as he always does, and says, speaking of the Neighborhood, "Let's go back to my place," and then makes a right turn toward Seventh Avenue, except that this time he just keeps going, and suddenly Margy Whitmer is saying, "Where is Fred? he said. When I handed him back the phone, he said, Bye, my dear, and hung up and curled on the couch like a cat, with his bare calves swirled underneath him and one of his hands gripping his ankle, so that he looked as languorous as an odalisque. There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me, and when I finally got him to talk about the puppets that were the comfort of his lonely boyhood, he looked at me, his gray-blue eyes at once mild and steady, and asked, "What about you, Tom? Inside, too at first, I chalked this up to some of!, Lou Junod Family Communications, the company that produces Mister Rogers weighed 143 in much the way... About his relationship to his father, which Bear: Oh Hell Yes looking... Meeting of friends, '' he said, in a big mr rogers esquire article lloyd vogel something to me are not,! 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Wrote a piece profiling Rogers for Esquire, an unusual assignment that he with...