This idea of accepting a person, a child or anyone as is was a novel concept to me. I had spent a lifetime in a Catholic household where adhering to dogma, rather than self-discovery, was the thing. The church supplied you with a better way to act, to think, to behave. In time I came to question if I had any of my own thoughts at all. I went to grad school. No Catholics anywhere as far as I could tell. It was exhilarating! Critical thinking was the thing. It was at first a mind-expanding drug. Deconstruct your thoughts. Doubt yourself. Doubt everything. Attack your thoughts. Attack everyone’s. Skepticism became the badge of honor. But for me it all led to a kind of sourness, a distrust of anything soft, of beauty, silence, love.

And here was Fred. Accept yourself. Accept others. As is. In Fred’s world I found my own thoughts, and quite literally my own voice, as a writer. I even wrote about him over the years, without much success. Some of the conversations and moments recalled here are from those early attempts to understand — puzzle pieces I continue to play with, all these years later, at random intervals in my day.

Fred and I commiserated about the creative process. We would often sit and talk about confronting the blank page, the blank canvas, the blank song sheet. That place of vast possibility and bottomless terror. “Why is it so scary?” he would say. “It’s so hard.” He told me he would sometimes freeze before being able to jot down a word. He had a writing room, away from the office, away from home, where he showed up on writing days no matter what. Take it on. Enter it. Sometimes in Studio A he would show me how he worked out his doubts about himself and his emotions at the piano. Banging out anything angry or anything glad. He said it helped. I told him my outlet might be something more like shopping or maybe napping. He said either of those could work.

Fred saw creating as a divine act. Inspiration happened in everyday moments. “I remember one time,” Newell told me, “Fred and I were in Ligonier, Pa., in the mountains, and we were filming a nighttime sequence. And we were driving home. And as I pulled onto the turnpike there was somebody, a soldier or sailor hitchhiking. This was like 12 at night maybe. And Fred said, ‘Look at him, he looks so lonely there.’ I said, ‘Fred, we have no room.’ We had a full car of equipment. He let it go. Or, well, I guess he didn’t. A couple of weeks later, he wrote a song.”

Hello there

Are you lonely

Are you a lonely neighbor

Alone tonight

Hello there

If you are lonely

Then you need only say

Hello there

I’m lonely

Hello there

Just say hello

That was the place where Fred and I connected, and it was also the place where he lived. This place of creating, of making stuff, and I know for him it was vital, a lifeline. He said he thought it was for me, too. In fact, he thought it was true for everybody. Fred believed that the creative process was a fundamental function at the core of every human being.

“I think that the need to create has to do with a gap,” he said. “A gap between what is and what might be. Or what you’d like to be. I think that the need to create is the need to bridge that gap. And I do believe it’s a universal need. Unless there is somebody out there who feels that what is, is also what might be.

“I don’t know anybody who has complete satisfaction with everything. Do you?”