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III GIVING THE HISTORY OF RON CHERNOW Along with Remarks on WHO MAY PLAY A FOUNDING FATHER

What did hamilton do with his hands? Did he smoke a pipe?

These were excellent questions, and Ron Chernow wished that he knew how to answer them. Soon after Ron Lin returned from his vacation to Mexico (having folded down many page-corners in Chernow’s book, having called out many ideas to Vanessa as they popped into his brain), he reached out to the author of the biography that had seized his imagination. A friend’s father supplied Ron’s email address, and Lin invited him to see In the Heights.

Onstage, after the show, on the spot, Lin asked him to be the historical consultant for the story he planned to tell. “You mean you want me to tell you when there are errors?” asked Ron.

“Yes,” said Lin. “I want historians to take this seriously.” And, to Ron’s surprise, he meant it. Even as Lin worked on other projects over the next few years, he kept checking in with Ron, asking questions. Would George Washington have seen Alexander Hamilton as a younger version of himself ? (Plausible, Ron thought.) Other times, Lin tried to accrue what called “the small change of everyday life,” the quotidian human details that give a character texture and dimension. Ron loves including such details in his books, which is why they are both popular and esteemed: He won a Pulitzer Prize for a biography of Washington that followed his book on Hamilton. Unfortunately, those details are hard to find about people who lived in the 18th century.

“There’s not a lot on the cutting room floor,” Ron says. “Everything I got is in the book.”

He told Lin that much of the detail that Lin wanted for the show–about smoking and a hundred other things–he would have to invent for himself.

More than mere fact-checking, the eminent historian, who was then 59 years old, gave Lin affirmation. “This was a risky and I’m sure scary thing to do, and I always thought it was important to provide encouragement,” Ron says.

Ask Lin about Ron’s value to the project, and “encouragement” is the first thing he mentions. Both of them recall a crucial day when Lin came to Ron’s house in Brooklyn Heights to try out part of a song and make sure he was on the right track. As it happens, they have different memories of which song Lin performed–a discrepancy that delights him.

“That’s this whole show,” says Lin. “Ron tells you a story and he’s the star of the story. I tell you a story and I’m the star of the story. History is entirely created by the person who tells the story.”

Ron had been helping Lin to accrue this historical “small change” for a few years when he received an invitation to come hear actors sing through part of Act One. He walked into a rehearsal studio in the Garment District and was, by his own admission, “shocked” by what he saw. The men who were

going to sing the roles of Washington, Hamilton, and the other Founding Fathers were black and Latino. Not being a rap listener, Ron hadn’t given much thought to the fact that the people best able to perform the songs that Lin had been writing might look nothing like their historical counterparts.

Lin and Tommy saw no difficulty in making this imaginative leap. In fact, they raised it to a principle. As Tommy would state it again and again in the years that followed: “This is a story about America then, told by America now.”

Within five minutes, Ron was carried away by what he heard. He became what he calls a “militant” defender of the idea that actors of any race could play the Founding Fathers. After the reading ended, he sat on folding chairs with Lin, Tommy, and Jeffrey Seller, the show’s lead producer, and gave a more conventional note, the kind of expert scrutiny that Lin had asked him to provide. The chorus tells the audience that the early songs are set in 1776, but, Ron pointed out, “The Story of Tonight” features two men that Hamilton wouldn’t meet until years later. Ron had noticed that unlike most play wrights and screenwriters, Lin “starts with the presumption that he’ll use the historical facts and see if they work.” He figured the note would stick.

This time, though, Lin defended the liberties he had taken. He explained that he needed a quartet of characters–Hamilton and three friends–that the audience could follow through Act One.

The astoundingly named Irish tailor Hercules Mulligan had to be one of them. So did John Laurens, Hamilton’s closest friend and fellow opponent of slavery. And when the decisive battles of the revolution came, the Marquis de Lafayette would step to the fore. For the sake of dramatic coherence, he needed to roll these guys out early, and roll them out all at once.

Ron saw Lin’s point, and withdrew the objection. He was coming to admire Lin’s skill for compression just as much as his loyalty to the facts. Lin, for his part, isn’t sure how principled a stand for poetic license he was really making that day.

“Some of this is really smart dramaturgical work and some of this is like, I just forgot they hadn’t met yet.”