By Victor Greto
LANDENBERG, Pa.– Cliff Anderson is a little out of practice.
After wiping a fine coat of dust from the bench of an otherwise shiny Yamaha piano in the middle of his spacious living room, he begins playing Liebestraum, an appropriately dreamy-sounding melody penned by 19th-century German composer Franz Liszt.
His neck cranes forward to read the notes, and he plays tentatively. But it doesn’t take him long to get it down, his fingers nudging the keys as though fondly tapping the arm of an old friend.
The chief architect for corporate technology at JPMorgan Chase — who works at offices in Manhattan but mostly at the Morgan Christiana Center in Newark — Anderson, 46, has a prodigy-like penchant for performing music, dance and singing.
Structuring and supervising the technology at one of the largest banking institutions in the world with a departmental budget of more than three-quarters of a billion dollars has become an extended creative stop on a career that hopscotched from a farm in southern Alabama to the Broadway stage to an 11-acre spread just over the Delaware border where he helps train and take care of 10 dogs, mostly Wheaten terriers, with his partner, Mark Ungemach. Four of them are foster dogs.
Nearly two years ago, Anderson spent two weeks in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region, helping to rescue dogs.
After the Liszt tune peters out, Anderson plays and sings, “Words He Doesn’t Say,” from the 1987 Broadway play, “Romance, Romance.”
Just like his fingers while playing Liebestraum, his voice begins tentatively, but then strengthens.
But with this song, he stops toward the middle. “It’s been a long time,” he says.
The musical is from the end of a decade when he was just one of thousands of Broadway musical theater wanna-bes, sharing an apartment with an Alabama friend and another wanna-be, Rebecca Luker.
Luker made it, eventually starring in “Phantom of the Opera,” and then “Secret Garden,” among other popular shows. She is now performing as Mrs. Banks in “Mary Poppins.”
Anderson abandoned the Broadway “cattle calls” and found other avenues for his creativity.
“Computer science is all about creativity, it requires an elegance,” says Tom O’Malley, an information technology architect at JPMorgan Chase. O’Malley also is a trained musician, and played the clarinet in musical theater.
“With classically-trained musicianship, there’s theory, and rules about how it’s written and played and divided,” he says.
The tight structure of music and the relentless logic of computers does not constrict creativity, he says.
Just ask anyone who listens to Mozart, or who tries to conduct a stream of computer data over several platforms and is responsible for the daily flow of millions of dollars.
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Anderson grew up on an 80-acre farm in Montevallo, Ala., 60 miles south of Birmingham.
His father maintained the machinery at a Westinghouse welding rod assembly line to keep the family farm afloat, and his mother was a pianist and musician.
“Mom was doing Chopin, while dad was on a tractor,” says Anderson, whose short, compact body shows the result of decades of physical activity, but whose voice betrays no southern drawl.
Anderson learned to read music before he entered kindergarten, and took ballet, tap, jazz and music lessons.
“It all led to the trumpet,” he says, and at 9 he earned a summer scholarship to a conservatory in North Carolina.
At 13, he was playing trumpet with the North Carolina symphony.
But you can’t dance or sing with a trumpet stuck in your mouth, and his happy-feet enthusiasm while watching Gene Kelly dance and sing in those old MGM musicals demanded drastic action.
With a high school friend, Kevin McCoy, the 16-year-old Anderson went down to Orlando, Fla., to get a job at the recently opened Disney World.
“He had a ‘contact’ down there,” recalls McCoy, now a regional service director with an international relief and development organization in Nashville.
“Cliff’s aunt lived in Orlando, and she suggested he get a job, and we thought she had an in. We got down there, and all she said was, ‘I’ll bet they’re hiring.’”
She was right, but McCoy’s and Anderson’s 1977 haircuts were not.
“We got haircuts the day before we left, and when we went into the interview, they told us to get another one,” McCoy says.
They got the job, and paid their dues that first summer, serving fast food. By the second summer they had been properly indoctrinated in the Disney creed and got better jobs.
They became part of the jungle crews that took tourists through Adventureland.
“A boat ride takes you through the jungle and we were the narrators,” McCoy says. “It’s a 20-minute ride, and you do about 35-45 trips a day.”
It may have been monotonous, but you become a professional quickly.
“It was right up Cliff’s alley, because after a while, you’re bored so badly, you start making stuff up,” McCoy says.
You improvise. Become creative. And, of course, you’re always on display.
“I was there mentally,” Anderson says. “It resonated with me.”
Especially after he got a job the following summer dancing five or seven times a day in front of Cinderella’s castle. It proved to be great preparation for Broadway.
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To try to make it on Broadway, you have to suffer. Wait tables. Live with people you don’t particularly get along with. Take silly little temp jobs. Even get mugged. And you have to have a cartload of determination.
By the time Anderson began living in New York, he had blitzed through the University of Montevallo in three years, majoring in fine arts and vocal performance, and met several successful Broadway figures, including dancer and choreographer Bob Fosse (“All That Jazz”) and Zoya Laporska, Fosse’s protégé, when Laporska staged “Li’l Abner” in Birmingham.
He returned to dance at Disney World for three more years after he graduated.
Once he reached New York in 1985, the Fine Arts degree looked good on the wall, but not as much as Laporska’s offering of a place to stay near New York. Or finding out when and where the auditions or “cattle calls” took place in Manhattan. Or how to make an attractive portfolio — “Back then it was matte prints with no borders,” Anderson says of the “head shots” he had to have taken.
One of several problems he struggled through after moving north involved Laporska’s place. It was in Bethel, Conn., two hours from the city.
“Picture me, a southern boy, driving into New York City every day in a red Toyota Tercel,” Anderson says. “And I’d never driven in snow before.”
But don’t picture it for too long. Because after a year, with a borrowed $20 bill in his pocket, he returned home. He worked in children’s musical theater in Birmingham, got a job at Opryland in Nashville, and found a niche at the Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Va., where he danced around animatronics figures that must have brought back Disney memories.
The point was to make enough money to try New York again, so he also began to obtain training and temp jobs working with computers.
He moved to Long Island City, Queens, in 1986, and felt he was a veteran.
“I knew the ropes,” he says, and he joined the Actors Equity Association for word of jobs.
Tired of waiting tables, he took temp jobs. And this time, during the mid-1980s, employment mainly centered on the burgeoning use of computers.
“I began to get as lost inside a computer as I did performing in front of people,” Anderson says.
He also realized he had the ability to do what 99.7 percent of his fellow homo sapiens are constitutionally incapable of doing: understand computer manuals.
He soon got an apartment with Rebecca Luker, a fellow university alumnus, in a tiny 5th-floor walk-up apartment in Hell’s Kitchen on 45th Street, paying $800 a month.
When Luker chose to move out after becoming the understudy to the lead in “Phantom of the Opera,” McCoy, who had moved up to New York to work with the Covenant House charity, moved in with Anderson and split the rent.
“Luckily, there are a lot of free things to do in New York,” McCoy says.
While Anderson’s work came sporadically both in computers and on stage, McCoy made all of $15,000 a year.
They saved up all week to go to the movies on the weekends. But after a few months, McCoy packed it in and returned to the South. Soon after Anderson got mugged.
“I came home one day and I knew Cliff was at an audition, and I saw bloody bandages all over the apartment,” McCoy remembers. “He came in after about an hour, and his face was mangled. He had gotten mugged, a block from our apartment, by a couple of teenagers and hit in the face with a two-by-four. He had gone to the doctors, after stopping the bleeding.”
Anderson stayed. “I was impressed he stuck it out, even after I left,” McCoy says.
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By the end of the 1980s, Anderson was working more, in plays such as “A Chorus Line,” where he played Mike and then Al, was part of the chorus in “Cabaret” and played a mole in “Wind in the Willows.”
He also had become so adept at working with computers that when Citibank decided to convert its systems from Wang to Macintosh in 1990, he offered to do it all for the lump sum of $40,000 — a price much lower than the bank was going to pay but more than Anderson had made in years.
He succeeded. “Translating the data wasn’t as bad as cleaning it up afterward,” he says. The accomplishment helped determine the rest of his career.
He toured for with a production of the “King and I,” for two years, in the U.S. and in Japan. He was in the chorus and he played the part of Simon of Legree in the ballet.
By the time he returned home from the show in 1991, he realized the money he was making just wasn’t enough, after agent and management fees took 30 percent off the top.
“There wasn’t enough to carry me from show to show,” he says. “The minute I stopped in a show, I didn’t make any money.”
He was making more money working for Citibank.
What hammered the final nail in his moderately successful Broadway career was being part of a cattle call of 800 men trying out for “Miss Saigon.”
“I stood there all morning, then was finally called in,” he says.
The “audition” consisted of lining up with a couple of dozen other guys, removing your shirt, and watching a couple of people in front say, “You, you, you,” pointing to men who fit the profile.
“I was too old to be a chorus boy,” he says about that moment, soon after he turned 30. “I was short and old by that measure.”
He didn’t even go in.
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He not only quit Broadway, he quit Citibank, and chose to open his own computer consulting firm, which included programming and database design for clients such as Citibank and Shearson Lehman.
But consulting can get lonely.
“I was good at analysis and crunching numbers,” he says, “but I also had people skills,” gleaned from Broadway.
Most people don’t have great managers, he says, and when he began working at Computer Sciences Corporation in Manhattan in 1993, he hired dozens of employees who still remember him as their favorite manager.
“Being a great manager isn’t something you fall into,” Anderson says. “It takes a great deal of focus and energy. You have to learn to listen. You want to influence your staff to work together as a team. The only way you do that is you have a depth of relationship with them.”
Cliff hired one of those employees, Bart McLaughlin, in the graphics department early on.
A former session drummer for the Mamas & the Papas who also worked in the theater, McLaughlin says that he just “slid into the job, and if Cliff hadn’t been my manager I wouldn’t have made the change” from theater and music to computers.
Now McLaughlin has one of Anderson’s old CSC jobs, running the graphics and multi-media departments out of an office in the Pan-Am building above Grand Central Station.
By 2000, Anderson was getting restless, McLaughlin says.
“He was doing creative work, had built a real nice department, and he wanted more,” he says. “He started studying real IT stuff, server technology, application architecture. That was unusual; we were considered administrative support staff.”
In 2001, Anderson became chief architect of corporate technology at JPMorgan Chase, responsible for the technical architecture of more than 800 applications and 1,200 servers.
Anderson likens his job as an architect of a planned community.
“You have to make sure each new home fits in the overall landscape,” he says of added programs and servers. “The other part of it is, we keep merging with other companies, and when you do that, you have redundant systems. Everyone that we acquire, we have to bring their data into our system.”
Soon after JPMorgan Chase built and opened a large office in Newark, he decided to move to the Brandywine area.
“Last year I spent so much time down here, I decided this is the place to be away from New York City,” he says.
A lot of his off-time is spent breeding and rescuing Wheaten terriers. He has ten dogs, six he owns and four that foster dogs looking for homes.
He gets the foster dogs from “Wheatens in Need,” a non-profit rescue organization that looks for homes for abandoned Wheaten terriers.
He also trains dogs to compete in the U.S. Dog Agility Association competitions. One Wheaten, Sammi, recently made it to the semifinals in the national competition. In his large front yard, Anderson races his dogs through a series of obstacles.
This aspect of Anderson is no surprise to his friend, Tom O’Malley.
“He used to raise sea horses,” he says. “That’s so weird for words.”
Those are the creatures whose penchant to eat their young requires their owners to separate them out.
“He stopped and went into dog training,” O’Malley says. “Now he’s completely into the agility thing. When Cliff does anything, he does it all the way.”