A Tribute to Joe McPhillips

During his 35 years as headmaster of the American School of Tangier, Joe McPhillips had a passion for directing the annual school play, traditionally performed just before graduation. His friend and fellow Tangier expat Paul Bowles, the American novelist and composer, often helped out by composing original scores. One year, another friend, Yves St. Laurent, flew in from Paris to design costumes for a production of Hippolytus. Joe bugged me for years to come over for a performance, but, alas, the closest I ever got was seeing a rehearsal for A Streetcar Named Desire.

I thought that was pretty racy for an Arab country, even for a city as "international" as Tangier, but the kids were deeply into it. The acting of the girl playing Stella was electrifying, even in AST's plain rehearsal hall. A few days later, Joe telephoned me in Cairo, heartbroken, to say that his dazzling girl had been very seriously injured in a car accident. He was devastated over her misfortune and her disappointment at not being able realize her triumph on stage.

This year, tragically, it was Joe who didn't make it to opening night. On June 11, he died at home in Tangier. His sister Lynn Meador says he had suffered a catastrophic aortic valve blockage and died instantly. His body was found at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs, apparently having taken a fall after a heart attack. Even though he was 71, well past the usual retirement age, he had never shown signs of slowing down. "He told me many times that he would die with his boots on, and that's what he did," Karim Benzakour, his friend and AST colleague, told me afterwards.

Joe McPhillips, during a recent rehearsal of The Zoo Story, at the American School of Tangier /Photo courtesy Karim Benzakour

For the 45 years in all that Joe spent in Morocco and serving AST, we owe him an immeasurable debt of gratitude. Few did more than Joe to embody and promote in this part of the world the best of what America represents for many of its citizens--ideals like excellence, creativity, tolerance, freedom, cultural pluralism, individualism and respect for the individual.

Joseph A. McPhillips III was a southern boy from Mobile, Alabama who went up north to attend prep school at Andover and college at Princeton. He was a larger than life character, out of a Faulkner novel. After Princeton, he served a stint in the U.S. military. Afterwards, he traveled the world and landed in Morocco, where he got a teaching job at AST, founded only a decade earlier in 1950. Joe became friends with the bohemians who also made the trek to Morocco in those days, like William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg and Streetcar's author, Tennessee Williams.

Joe's particular art was teaching. Besides being headmaster, he was guidance counselor and English teacher. He was an incredible inspiration to the hundreds of kids who passed through AST, many of whom ended up in some of America's finest universities. "He was the spirit of the school," Karim Benzakour recalled. "It is difficult to speak about the school without without speaking about Joe. He was the pillar. He was the man. There was no place for being approximate. It had to be perfect, on time, precise and well done. He pushed people to the limit, so that sometimes you said, 'My God!' You questioned yourself whether you can continue." AST graduating classes are tiny--there are only 300 students, K through 12--but Joe often attracted speakers worthy of university commencements, among them Pierre Berge, Bernard Henry-Levy, Oliver Stone, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Princess Lalla Hasna, daughter of the late King Hassan II and brother of Morocco's current monarch, Mohammed VI.

The last time I saw Joe was in May 2004, a few weeks before graduation exercises. He proudly showed me construction work, financed by a $500,000 gift to the school from American painter and Tangier expat Marguerite McBey, for a new gym and swimming pool. Over the years, the American community in Tangier had dwindled and the school's enrollment had become overwhelmingly Moroccan. We talked about his latest project, an American school that he established in Marrakech. Begun in a simple house with one teacher in 1995, he had just inaugurated a proper campus designed by architect Charles Boccara.

That evening, after drinks at his fabulous house overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar--an earlier gift from Marguerite McBey--we had dinner at one of his favorite hangouts, a simple Italian restaurant called Casa d'Italia. He spent most of the evening speaking with great knowledge and eloquence, though it was not his field, about the calamity that the Bush administration had visited on the Middle East. He was dismayed by what he felt was the influence of right-wing Christian fundamentalists from his South on Bush's policies toward the Islamic world. He was so steamed up--this was about a year after the invasion of Iraq--that he planned to spend his annual summer holiday back home volunteering for John Kerry to get Bush out of office.

Joe got Jimmy Buffett, another southern boy, to give this year's commencement address. Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, about division and alienation in America, was the pre-graduation school play, and Albee himself was due to attend but cancelled his trip. In the evening after the last rehearsal, Joe took his fatal fall. It was a theatrical parting worthy of Joe's colorful life, Benzakour remarked to me afterwards. The performances of The Zoo Story played to packed houses, with what seemed like half of Tangier turning up to bid farewell to Joe.

That wasn't the final curtain. When Paul Bowles died in 1999 after a lifetime in Tangier, Joe personally carried his ashes back to the U.S., and had them interred in the Bowles family plot in Lakemont, N.Y. Joe, on the other hand, was determined to stay in Morocco and be buried on the grounds of his beloved school. In the end, the Moroccan authorities said no to that, arguing in effect that if they granted Joe's wish, you'd have alot of other crazy Americans wanting to be buried all over Morocco. So Joe was laid to rest at the Anglican cemetery of Tangier, a city that will never forget him.

--By Scott MacLeod