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Baker and his wife Mimi rent three floors of a four-story brownstone ("a dilapidation," they call it) on Manhattan's East Side. But the Bakers' beloved sheltering place is a gray shingle and white clapboard summer house on Massachusetts' Nantucket Island. It was built by a whaling captain in 1835, at the height of the island's seafaring prosperity. Its present owners seem comfortable there, and with each other. Tall, handsome and merry of heart, Mimi is a good conversational match for Baker, and people who know the pair well tend to say "they" when talking of them, rather than "he" or "she."
Baker seemed comfortable with himself too a few weeks ago on Nantucket, though he had reason for discomfort. For a year or more he had worked on the script of an ill-fated play called Home Again, with music by Cy Coleman (On the Twentieth Century) and lyrics by Barbara Fried.
He burlesqued the experience in a column: "Just one more script and that island in the Aegean would be mine. I wrote another script... No longer were we doing a musical about a paraplegic cabdriver who falls in love with a tollbooth collector at the Lincoln Tunnel. Somehow, inexorably, because there's no business like show business, the musical had turned into the story of a fast-food-chain heiress who falls in love with a Marine corporal during the Boxer Rebellion."
Home Again was actually about a young man who goes out in the world to seek his fortune, gets married, has kids, moves to the suburbs, etc., etc. It foundered expensively in Toronto and was mercy-killed in April, just before its scheduled Broadway opening. The experience is instructive, "like being lost in a bog," Baker says. "I saw other musicals last year and sometimes asked myself, 'Didn't the producers and directors know they were awful?' I answered that question: 'No, you don't know.' I still think we folded the makings of a good show."
Baker is lean (172 Ibs.) and long (6 ft. 2 in.), although when he was encountered in his Nantucket backyard he was crouching on a brick wall, pulling an anarchy of weeds from between the cracks and muttering at the lawn's first dandelions, the very embodiment of compulsive suburban man. He has a full shock of sandy gray hair, bushy eyebrows of a color that somebody with a window dresser's vocabulary once described as "ginger," and a face easefully lined, like the leather seats of an old Jaguar. Friends say that women tremble in his presence. E.P. Dutton Editor Tom Congdon describes an incident that occurred once when he was walking with Baker on Nantucket: a stunningly beautiful young woman on a bicycle asked for directions. "Russ ambled over to her and started to tell her, in his deep, soft voice, and I could see his effect on her. Her cheeks turned pink, and she had trouble speaking, and when she left, her bike sort of wobbled away."