For two decades, Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Lois Weisberg has occupied a curious niche in Chicago’s civic life, acting as something of municipal tummler, paid to make sure the party never ends and the guests stay happy.
In the process, she has done as much as anybody to transform the identity of what was once a meat-and-potatoes town, lending it her own hyperkinetic panache.
Her neighborhood festivals have spread through the city, while her big downtown events have spread through the calendar, so that the city now marks the passage of spring to fall with Bluesfest, Gospelfest, Jazzfest and the biggest of them all, Taste of Chicago.
She provoked an international giggle with Cows on Parade and sent tourists on bus tours to unlikely neighborhoods. She earned her anti-machine credentials under Mayor Harold Washington, then ended up forging an odd and happy political marriage with Mayor Richard Daley. A preservation group named her a Legendary Landmark, an honor usually reserved for bricks-and-mortar.
Now, friends say, she is considering leaving from her post at the head of a 70-person department with a $19.8 million budget. Her sister, publicist June Rosner, speculates that an announcement could be imminent.
Though she has seemed exempt from age, Weisberg turns 82 Sunday. And she admits she is thinking seriously about some Weisbergian version of retirement.
“I’m torn,” she said in a recent interview. “I’m not having fun like I used to. But every time I start to leave, something comes up.”
The latest is “Niki in the Garden,” an exhibit of whimsical sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle, a French-born supermodel turned artist, scheduled to open Friday at the Garfield Park Conservatory.
“You know her work, don’t you?” said Weisberg, whose descriptions of artists, writers and musicians never dip below the superlative. “She’s internationally renowned.”
Weisberg’s office is in the Chicago Cultural Center, the Loop landmark that she helped rescue, where she sometimes raises her hands to her ears, to block out the overlapping musical performances that now echo through the former library.
But it does nothing to dampen her effervescent conversation, which is often designed to bring people together: “You don’t know her? Oh, I must get you two together.”
An out-of-town reporter once dubbed her the “connector” for her seemingly endless chain of friends. Her son, Jacob, recalls that when he was growing up, Lois and his father, Bernard, held open house for luminaries passing through town: Burgess Meredith, Ralph Ellison, Dizzy Gillespie, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Clarke, Tony Bennett. It was dubbed a salon, but Jacob recalls it as more like a literary boarding house.
“As a child, I thought everyone had an Italian poet or Indian graduate student living in a spare bedroom,” said Weisberg, editor of the online magazine Slate.
Weisberg’s own ample fund of stories invariably begin, “Then there was the time…”
“Then there was the time my mother came over when Lenny Bruce was staying at our house,” Weisberg said, recalling the impression the foul-mouthed 1960s comedian made on the “nice Jewish lady.”
“Bruce had been in the shower and opened the door wearing only a towel.”
Raised in a cultivated and socially concerned household in Austin, then a tony upper-middle class neighborhood, one of Weisberg’s most interesting connections has been with the mayor from Bridgeport.
“He has an infectious enthusiasm,” Weisberg says of Richard M. Daley. “I love him. Did you see the way he leaped out of his chair when Chicago got the Olympic bid?”
Daley has similar praise for Weisberg, the longest serving member of the mayor’s Cabinet.
“Lois is terrific,” Daley said. “Even though she’s been commissioner for 18 years, she never runs out of ideas.”
Their bond transcends not only cultures, but politics.
Weisberg’s second marriage was to Bernard Weisberg, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union and charter member of a group of reformers called the Lakefront Liberals, which fought Chicago-style machine politics through the ’60’s and ’70s.
When a convention was summoned to rewrite Illinois’ constitution, Bernard Weisberg asked a federal court to stop the machine from placing its candidates at the top of the ballot, including the prime spot given to favorite son Richard M. Daley.
“I do not think this is coincidental,” Bernard Weisberg observed, when the case went to court in 1969. He won the point, though both men were ultimately elected as delegates.
Lois Weisberg had been working for non-profit groups, such as Friends of the Parks and the Chicago Council of Lawyers. In 1956, discovering that no other city was honoring the centenary of George Bernard Shaw, she mounted a celebration of the Irish playwright in Chicago.
She had also been collecting the great web of friendships that inspired Malcolm Gladwell to write a 1999 New Yorker profile, “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg.”
That paid off when Washington was elected in 1983. When Weisberg heard Washington, a favorite of the reformers, was looking for a director of special events, she lobbied friends and friends of friends to put in a good word on her behalf.
“It was then I realized it’s all about who your barber is, who your neighbor is,” Weisberg said. “I so wanted that job. I’d been training for it my whole life.”
For Washington, Weisberg developed the city’s blues and gospel festivals and Taste of Chicago, which has become the world’s largest food fest.
Weisberg left her post a few months before Washington died. But soon she resurfaced as Daley’s commissioner of cultural affairs.
“I knew Bernie and Lois as principled opponents of the machine,” said Wayne W. Whalen, a friend for 40 years and a founding member of the political independent movement. “Then one day, I saw she’d become part of the Daley administration.”
Daley needed her to bring a touch of class to City Hall. She needed his funding for her P.T. Barnum-sized ambitions.
But over time, it has become much more than a marriage of political convenience, according to their siblings.
“The only way the mayor and my sister could be more like family would be if she was Irish,” said Rosner.
John Daley, a Cook County commissioner, sees Weisberg as bringing his brother breadth of vision and the candid voice of someone unconditionally committed to the mayor.
“She’s not afraid to tell him he’s wrong,” John Daley said. “Lois travels all over, bringing back something she’s seen and saying to the mayor: ‘Maybe we could do something like this in Chicago.’
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Under Mayor Daley, that included Cows on Parade in 1999, then the fiberglass street furniture of Suite Home Chicago, followed by a summer with 300 game-ready ping-pong tables scattered around town.
She has not limited her vision to the Loop. In 2002, an exhibit of blown-glass sculpture at Garfield Park Conservatory drew 580,000 visitors to a hard-luck neighborhood on the West Side.
“Lois is the grand dame of Chicago culture,” said attorney Terry Newman who has observed her career from the boards of institutions such as the Museum of Science and Industry and Loyola University.
When, over lunch, she told Whalen she was mulling over retirement, he balked.
“I tried talking her out of it,” he said.
She does have her detractors.
Attorney and art collector Scott Hodes has frequently sued the city over its artistic programs, including a case currently in court. (His father, Barnet Hodes, helped build the machine of the current mayor’s father — such are Chicago’s six degrees of separation.)
Hodes charges that Weisberg runs her department with an unacceptable disregard for public accountability.
“It’s a department run off the radar screen for years,” said Hodes, “even to you people in the media.”
Hodes also thinks that Weisberg’s productions are less art than spectacle.
Spectacle has been a part of her repertoire from childhood on, Rosner recalled.
“One morning at summer camp — my sister must have been 15 — we woke up to find that Lois and another junior counselor had wrapped the whole camp in toilet paper,” Rosner said.
For her part, Weisberg has never disguised her feeling for the grand, and her belief that bigger is better.
On a recent afternoon, she was listening to a pitch from a filmmaker. Sensing he might have priced his product too high, he proposed a follow-up meeting between his people and hers. Perhaps, he said, they might mutually decide on a scaled-down project.
But for Weisberg, down-scaling is not an option.
“We never decide that here,” she said.
rgrossman@tribune.com
