It was nice that the media gave Suzanne Shepherd’s death on November 17 a lot of play, largely highlighting her appearances on “The Sopranos” sand in “Good Fellas.”
I’d called her a month earlier to say that I’d finally finished transcribing our interviews of a year earlier, which related to a career accomplishment of hers that largely flew under the mainstream media’s radar.
Shepherd had formerly been married to David Shepherd, who founded the watershed improvisation group “The Compass,” in Chicago in the early 1950s.(Two books have been published about it.) She was herself a Compass member. In 1962, David Shepherd put together a new Compass configuration and booked them into a two-month engagement at the Yachtsman in Hyanisport on Cape Cod.
Ever game to essay new career challenges, Diana Sands was one member of the group; the others were Suzanne, Alan Alda, Reni Santoni, and Ron Weyand. Two years later, Diana and Alda starred together in “The Owl and the Pussycat” on Broadway.
I told Suzanne that I wanted to come over and review my chapter on that summer engagement when I’d finished it. No, I don’t give interview subjects approval over text, but I will work with them to clarify their thoughts, and hopefully record them accurately.
In her late-eighties, and not in good health, Suzanne remained enormously vital. I’m glad I told her in October that I’d started watching her movies. She told me that she’d written a paper on Chekhov when studying at Bennington. I wonder if it exists.
You’ll read a lot about Suzanne and the Compass in our book on Diana.