![]() Gerome Ragni and James Rado at the opening night for Hair, 1968. Walking the museum’s galleries, the pair came across a painting by the artist Jim Dine that portrayed a comb and a clump of hair. Rado, now 85, recently recalled that trip to the Whitney on a phone call from his home in New Jersey. ![]() Friends-and, soon, secretly lovers-Rado and Ragni had met during the run of a play they were performing in together, and they were trying to craft a musical that included songs they’d sung in beatnik coffee houses. He had recently married, but that conventional act didn’t express the sum of his sexuality his work with the off-Off-Broadway Open Theater better reflected his soul. He, too, had attended Catholic University he, too, was short-haired. His friend Gerome “Jerry” Ragni, a far wilder spirit, had been 1 of 10 children in a poor Italian-American family. He was a short-haired, fairly reserved single man with secret yearnings for a freedom that didn’t have a name. He had produced two college musicals and was now writing pop songs and studying with Lee Strasberg. James Rado had served in the Navy and done graduate work at Catholic University, but his heart was in theater. One day in early 1965-in the midst of growing protests against Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, the height of the civil-rights battles in the South, and just as New York’s Beat culture was giving way to a new form of hipness that would soon lure suburban kids to East Village crash pads-two ambitious young musical-theater actor-writers of similar backgrounds, but opposite temperaments, took a stroll to the Whitney Museum.
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