the miracle worker; Priscilla Morgan makes things happen, whether putting Philip Glass on the map or introducing Warren Beatty to Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn.(Brief biography)

Byline: Jean Nathan

Few would expect to find la vie boheme playing out on a sedate Upper East Side street off Fifth Avenue, but the expected has never been a hallmark of Priscilla Morgan, a grande dame of New York's cultural circles who has lived in a garden apartment here for close to half a century. Part superagent, part fairy godmother (and complete incorrigible flirt), Morgan has always been drawn, she says, "to those who devote their lives to the creative process. I find their minds and actions exhilarating." She has built a career on what the writer Ellen Gilchrist calls her "dowsing rod for talent."

To the design scientist Buckminster Fuller, Morgan was "the twentieth century's last half's greatest and most effective shepherdess of many of life's most significant creative regenerations." When asked to describe her influence, the director Arthur Penn cited just one of her spot-on introductions-to the young actor Warren Beatty, who went on to star in his Bonnie and Clyde, a turning point in both men's careers. Isamu Noguchi, her great love of 30 years, was one of many who felt gratitude for her support. As he wrote in a letter to her: "How I can ever be worthy I don't know."

Each day, and despite her soon-to-be-88 years, Morgan can still be found at her rosewood Victorian table, seated on a carved Belter chair, fielding phone calls from far-flung luminaries seeking her advice. Just now, theater director Robert Wilson is on line one from Moscow; the artist Christo is coming in on line two. She'll build a board of directors or arrange for gallery representation, but she'll also find a hotel room in high-season Venice or plan a spectacular wedding, as she did for Willem de Kooning's daughter, Lisa-and even have the wedding dress altered at the last minute to accommodate a cast on the bride's fractured arm. "No request is too big or too small," she says.

If Morgan has known practically everyone who was anyone in the arts, now the wider world can know her, too, with "A Life in Art and Letters: Priscilla Morgan," an engaging exhibition at the Vassar College Library. Drawing on her newly bequeathed archives, it offers an intimate portrait of a life lived inside the creative process. "Priscilla has observed, influenced, and shaped a great swath of the cultural terrain," says _Frances Daly Fergusson, Vassar's president emerita.

Born in 1919 in Poughkeepsie, New York, Morgan got her first exposure to an innovative mind through her father, an inventor who worked with Thomas Edison on the first phonograph and went on to develop the technology for the mass production of the plastic steering wheel before losing his fortune in the Depression. He instilled in his only daughter the message that "everything was possible."

Morgan's first jobs after Vassar were in live-radio production, the perfect training, writes Peter Morais, the show's curator, for her later work in "the care and feeding of artists." An early marriage to a Navy-flier war hero didn't last, although they parted on good terms. In 1951, newly single and excited by the postwar resurgence of American playwriting, Morgan decided to try work as a theatrical agent. She was soon a rising star at _Liebling-Wood, the preeminent agency representing such young dramatists as Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers. Within two years she had formed her own business, representing not only writers but also producers and directors as well as extending her reach to Hollywood. In 1955, she brought her clients with her to William Morris after they acquired her agency.