Fifty-six years ago, the off-Broadway musical Hair was about to premiere as the first-ever production at impresario Joseph Papp’s Public Theater on Lafayette Street in downtown New York City. It was Indian summer 1967, when an heir to a great American paper products fortune, Michael Butler, saw an ad for the show featuring three native Americans and a pair of the more recent tribe known as hippies. Butler, whose family also owned western ranches where tales of the West were told over dinner, was intrigued, and in hours of interviews before his 2022 death, told me the story of his life, and how he came to take over Hair and bring it to Broadway. “I did not notice that two of the braves were white-faced,” he said. “I thought, ‘My God, the Indians have got a show together.’” The saga of the Butlers, from their 17th Century arrival in New England, through centuries of globe-trotting achievements and torn-from-the-tabloids abasements, is told in my new, Flight of the WASP, out November 14th. But you can pre-order it here.