Two new “Rockbridge Epilogues” have been published online — one about the notorious, well-remembered Mel Greenberg, who for a week in 1974 delighted Rockbridge County people with hallucinatory promises of stardom in a Hollywood musical about Stonewall Jackson, and the other about Louise Blair Daura, wife of the late Rockbridge Baths artist Pierre Daura.
Greenberg seems to have wandered into Lexington aimlessly after his wife’s death, and fabricated a story that he was a producer planning a movie about Jackson, to be called “Southern Pass,” complete with a “tasteful” nude scene. Greenberg even set up an audition center at the Keydet-General Motel and tested countless area hopefuls for a variety of roles — including women for the bathtub scene.
His scheme, which he made up as he went along, fell apart within a week, but rather than throw him in jail without a key, Lexington almost unanimously celebrated Greenberg — happy for the diversion and entertainment he created in the August doldrums. No one had lost anything of real value, had they?
The article is by Dick Sessoms, a longtime Lexington fixture who worked as an official at both Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University, the latter as alumni director, despite his own graduation from Hampden-Sydney College, not W&L.
In 1996, Sessoms and the late author Katie Letcher Lyle turned the Greenberg story into its own musical, “Free Mel Greenberg!”, which has been produced regionally and Off Broadway in New York City. The new “Epilogues” article provides links to the full script and to a rollicking song-and-dance number recorded in a live New York performance.
The article about Louise Daura recounts the three-\\ plus decades the Richmond- born heiress spent in Rockbridge, after she essentially abandoned her own professional ambitions in order to support her husband’s career and raise their daughter, Martha.
After discussing her first three decades, the article focuses on a poem Louise Daura wrote comparing her early painting with her later years spent in the kitchen — and the latter comes out ahead.
The Daura article is by Bob Keefe, editor of the “Epilogues” series and author of “Rockbridge in 733 Vignettes,” published in 2024. It accompanies a substantial article about Pierre Daura by Lynn Lowry Leech, published as an “Epilogue” earlier this year. “Epilogues” has also created an online survey of Daura’s Rockbridge County paintings.
The articles are available without charge or registration requirement at www.HistoricRockbridge. org.
MEL GREENBERG’S escapade resulted in an exuberant musical comedy called (what else?) “Free Mel Greenberg!”, produced Off Broadway in New York. Here, in the finale, the townspeople, even the judge at his trial, carry him around the stage on a chair, singing of the happiness he brought — a scene that was only partly an exaggeration.
