by Erik Tarloff
Don Barlow
A month or so into his contract, Chance asked me if I thought it’d be possible for him to be in a play while doing the show. Could we find a way of accommodating that kind of schedule? I think he was going to read for a part in some Broadway production, and it was apparently one he really hungered after and he thought he had a pretty good chance of scoring. I told him it was fine with me, I’d be glad to help any way I could, but that it wasn’t my decision, he’d have to talk to the producers. Not only was it finally up to them, but they had to deal with all the aspects of producing the show, they had more elements to juggle than I did. Technical crew, unions, craft people, craft services, everything. Putting on a thirty-minute show every day is like planning the Normandy invasion. Only riskier. [laughs]
So several things happened, and ironically, it was in this order: Chance asked Hilda and Ben, they were the ones who produced the show, he asked them if they could work around his being in a play, then he read for the part before they answered, he got a call-back but didn’t get the part, and only at that point did Hilda and Ben, who didn’t realize he’d been passed up, tell him no, it just wasn’t possible. That even if he were the star of the show, it would be too hard to manage, and for someone who was just a supporting player…
And I think that pretty much clinched it for him. On the other hand, he probably wasn’t displeased to have an excuse to walk. It was obvious he wasn’t overjoyed about being on the show, was almost ashamed to be part of it. He used to refer to it as The Loud and the Old. And listen, I always liked the guy, he was smart and could be funny, and he obviously took his craft very seriously, and you have to respect that, but let’s face it, he was also a grumbler. A troublemaker, even if his motives were pure. So when he asked his agent if it would be possible to break his contract, I don’t think Hilda and Ben were inclined to resist very strongly. I’m not saying it was an unmixed blessing—he was turning into the most popular thing on the show, he was getting tons of fan mail, our ratings were up—but he wasn’t the easiest guy in the world to work with. A lot of the cast were quite content to see his back.
Ellie Greenfield Lerner
People sometimes ask me if I’m the woman in black. You know who I’m talking about? That woman who puts flowers on his grave every year? [laughs] She’s almost more famous than Chance now. But it’s ridiculous. Frankly, I don’t even know how anyone knows we were ever a couple. I guess it’s been mentioned in a couple of biographies, but that happened way before he became well known. I was witness to the start of his fame, but it came as a surprise to me, it had nothing to do with my dating him. If anything, it just got in the way. I’ve never written anything about him, God knows, and this conversation right now is the first time I’ve ever talked about Chance to anyone other than my parents and a few close friends. I’ve turned down lots of requests for interviews. I’m a private person. It isn’t anyone’s business. I didn’t date him for reflected glory. I wasn’t dating a movie star, for goodness sake, I was in love with a guy.
I guess there’s just so little known about Chance’s personal life. He was so…I don’t want to say secretive, but just so private—and maybe he was secretive—but I guess any name that becomes known, any person who is on the record as having been romantically linked with Chance, that person automatically becomes a suspect. It’s like when people guess who was Jack the Ripper or something, they always pick someone famous from those times because those are the only names they know. The idea that it was just some anonymous madman never seems to occur to anyone. It has to be the Crown Prince or Walter Sickert or whoever. Not that I’m famous, of course. I’m anything but. Still, after people somehow found out we’d been involved once upon a time, my name got added to the list.
But I mean, honestly, the idea that it might be me is idiotic from almost any point of view. [laughs] For one thing, I live in New York! Do they honestly think I fly across the country every year just to make such a…such a silly, theatrical gesture? So…look-at-me. In order to let the world know I’m bereaved, because if the world doesn’t know it maybe I’m not so bereaved after all. Nope. Sorry. If I had to guess, I’d guess it’s an actress. That’s where I’d look if I really cared about finding out who it is. Maybe someone who had an affair with him or maybe just someone he worked with. Or maybe someone who had a crush on him from afar.
But that whole mystery nonsense, that whole display, it’s the kind of gesture you make if you’re not content to experience your emotions in private but feel you have to let the world know about them, even if you do it incognito. So no, I have a feeling it isn’t just some random fan. I suppose it could be, but I think it’s probably someone in show business. Not necessarily anyone we’ve heard of—probably not, a person like that wouldn’t need the attention—but someone on the fringes. I’m amazed no one’s found her out. She’s been photographed often enough, even if it’s from a distance. Hasn’t anyone approached her or tried to talk to her?
Eppy Bronstein
Chance asked Murray to try to get him out of his contract on The Proud and the Bold. Murray was very upset. He’d been so thrilled to get the boy that job, and it had worked out so well, turned into a regular part. Chance was a real success story, which not too many of Murray’s clients were. He planned to negotiate much better terms when his contract came up for renewal. He was pretty sure his negotiating position was really strong now, he was confident he could get a lot more money for Chance. So he tried to talk him out of doing anything rash. But Chance’s mind was made up, and he argued with Murray, and finally insisted. And Murray had to eat crow and go down there and get Chance out of his contract, which he just hated to do.
But what was worse…after he’d done what Chance asked, Chance fired him. Just upped and fired him. Told him he was going to look for new representation. He wasn’t thrilled with how Murray had handled everything, he wanted, he said, to “go in a new direction.” That just about broke Murray’s heart. I don’t want to over-dramatize, I’m not saying that’s what killed him—I mean, he didn’t die for another seven or eight years, so obviously it wasn’t what killed him—but something went out of him forever after that. He seemed a little broken. Murray loved the boy and he loved being associated with him, it was as simple as that.
And he was also…I mean, Murray felt Chance was going to be big, a star, and of course Murray turned out to be right on that score. So he’d taken a gamble on the boy, it was an act of faith, the gamble was about to pay off, and suddenly Murray was out of the game. It had been hand-to-mouth for us for years, barely getting by, and this was his shot at something bigger. So losing Chance was doubly devastating to him. Financially as well as personally.
Leon Shriver
So Chance and I had dinner one night at this Chinese place he liked—it wasn’t very good, to be honest, but he didn’t know from good Chinese food, and he liked the fact he could eat there and nobody bothered him—and he suddenly announced he was giving up on New York. He was going to split. I was shocked. It seemed crazy. He had the show, he had a girlfriend, he’d kind of established a life for himself here. He hadn’t been in the city much more than a year, but it already looked to me like a natural fit.
I tried to talk him out of it. He was a friend, for one thing, I liked hanging out with him, but also, he was so talented I figured it was only a matter of time before people started to sit up and take notice. He just needed to be patient. But his mind was made up. He said something along the lines of, “I’ve put myself out there, I’ve given it a shot, I’ve shown what I can do, and all I’ve had to show for it is this lousy soap. And the soap is becoming a trap for me. It’s steady work, it’s easy, the pay is good, but I could find myself doing it for years and suddenly wonder where the time has gone. It’s a dead-end. I’ve got to save myself.”
So I asked him what alternative he had, and he said he was going to give Hollywood a try.
Well, that kind of startled me. He was
such a fanatic about theater, I didn’t think movies would appeal to him at all. So he gave me some rigmarole about how the popularity of TV was going to force movies to become better, more serious, more grown up. That was his story, but I don’t think that was really it. I think he needed a change of scene. New York had defeated him, that’s how he saw it, had knocked him down and chewed him up, and he’d had enough.
Ellie Greenfield Lerner
One night, after we’d had dinner—he’d cooked up some spaghetti, one of his specialties, with a tomato sauce with anchovies and capers and crushed red pepper, really delicious—he suddenly announced he was leaving. Just like that. I waited for him to ask me to go with him, but it didn’t happen. This was basically good-bye. I was devastated.
He wasn’t curt or dismissive about it. You could even say he was sweet. But still, it was all so abrupt. There’d been no warning at all. I cried all night, and he held me and said, you know, “There there,” that sort of thing. But it didn’t make any difference. He wasn’t going to change his mind and he did not say our relationship was going to continue. He was packing up and splitting at the end of the month and that was that. When he left New York, he’d be leaving me as well. I was heart-broken. I mean really crushed. One of those once-in-a-lifetime heartbreaks. It took me more than a year to get over it. Maybe I’ve never completely gotten over it.
His first year away, he wrote me a couple of times from California. Just chatty letters, nothing personal.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t think those letters deserved an answer.
Dorothy Goren Mckenzie
After he left New York, before he went on out to Hollywood, Chance came home for a spell. Not an extended spell, mind you, just a little over a week. We were a stop en route is all. A way station. Still, he did bother to stop, so that was something. He didn’t have to.
Maybe he needed to do his laundry.
He’d been away a long time. Years. He must’ve felt it was only right to come by and say hi to me and to our mom and to Aunt Mary, especially seeing as how we were practically halfway between New York and California, and barely out of his way at all. There was a detour of maybe an hour or two, not much more than that. So he dropped by to say hello, give us all a hug, reacquaint himself. He didn’t have anything to do with my dad, though. I mean, he did say hi to him, he was perfectly polite, at least at first, maybe until the last night, but it’s not like he would have crossed the street to do it. No hug, that’s for sure. My dad meant less than nothing to him. To be honest, I was beginning to feel the same way, and heck, the guy was my dad, he wasn’t Chance’s.
I’d barely seen Chance since he’d left for college. Maybe two Christmases before he dropped out, quick holiday visits, not much more than that. He didn’t come home for summer vacation. Instead, he got some sort of job near where he was going to school. Waiting tables at a local restaurant, I think. So even though he was my brother, or my half-brother to be precise, he was more like a stranger than kin to me by the time he was heading out to La La Land. There’d been some letters along the way, some phone calls. He used to send me a card and some sort of present on my birthday—he always remembered it, which is kind of surprising, considering his rocky relationship with the family—but frankly, I’m not sure he would’ve recognized me if we’d bumped into each other on the street.
That’s an exaggeration, of course. We sent pictures back and forth, and of course I sometimes watched his TV show, so I certainly knew what he looked like. Seeing him on TV, seeing my own brother on TV, was a real mind-blower, as you can imagine. It made my girlfriends squeal. But basically, from any realistic point of view, we were strangers to each other.
He stayed with Aunt Mary and Uncle Earl while he was here. There wasn’t much room in our house. He would have had to sleep on a couch in the living room, and there was only one bathroom, so it made sense for him to stay with Mary and Earl, where he’d lived for quite a few years anyway. But also, I don’t think he wanted my dad to be one of the first things he saw in the morning, before he’d even had his first coffee, and I’m positive dad felt the same way about him. So it was better all around.
Mom was thrilled to see him again. They hadn’t seemed to me to be so close back before he left us—although honestly, what did I know? I was just a little girl, nothing made a lot of sense to me—but when he came for this visit, she couldn’t get enough of him. She practically begged him to stay with her and Daddy. But he was firm about not doing it. I think that awoke some painful memories for her, when she’d felt caught between the two of them. She was over at her sister’s all the time, though, just so she could spend more time with Chance.
We’d all been aware of that TV show, of course. It was like…like he’d been to Jupiter and back. A whole different, distant world. Where we come from, you don’t know anyone on TV. Unless they’ve been arrested for armed robbery or manslaughter or something like that, or nowadays maybe for operating a meth lab, then you might catch a glimpse of them on the local news at five.
My dad was kind of ho-hum about it, or pretended to be. He’d just say, “Boy that’s dumb!” Or, “How could anyone waste time watching those lowlifes?” You know, Mr. Refined Taste, Mr. Drama Critic. As if we were watching the show because we admired the characters or were riveted by the dramatic artistry. I’m not saying the show was especially bad, by the way—my mom kept watching after Chance left it, she’d sort of gotten hooked by then—but that obviously wasn’t the reason we were watching. We were watching because Chance was on TV. Any idiot would have understood that unless they chose not to. But anyway, the point is, for Mom and Aunt Mary and me—and sometimes even Uncle Earl, although he tried not to act too impressed, he thought that might make him lose face, especially in front of my dad, ’cause being critical always makes you look smarter than being enthusiastic—it was just beyond anything any of us had ever imagined. Our own Chance on the TV!
So I was antsy about his visit at first. It was more like meeting a celebrity than reuniting with a member of the family. I think we all had that feeling a little bit, but probably me most of all. The last time I’d talked to him face-to-face I’d been a little girl. He’d become a stranger. A famous stranger, as we saw it.
And sure enough, his first night home was super awkward. We had a family dinner, buffet style, Mom and Aunt Mary cooked, kind of potluck, Mom brought over casserole dishes, and both of them cooked up a storm, every dish Chance had liked as a boy. Nobody knew if his tastes had changed, nobody thought to wonder about that. Mom made macaroni and cheese with ham and some weird salad with marshmallows in it, and my aunt made a pot roast and mashed potatoes and a cherry pie for dessert. This was not a dinner your cardiologist would approve of. And judging by the look on Chance’s face…I mean, his eating habits clearly weren’t what they’d once been. But he was a good sport, he dug in, he made all the right noises.
Everybody was there that night, and Chance seemed a little overwhelmed by the fuss, and as I said, it was all pretty tense. My dad was acting pissed off, as was his way, only more so than usual, and Uncle Earl was…I mean, he was already showing signs of the Alzheimer’s, although we didn’t call it that then. “A tad forgetful” is how my aunt described it, but it went way beyond forgetful. He was confused a lot of the time. And Mom was twittering around, anxious and hovering, forcing food on Chance and asking him if he was okay and if he liked his dinner and how was the macaroni and so on, and Aunt Mary was…well, in a funny way, I think she and Mom had a little competition going, a little unspoken contest about whose dishes he liked the better and which of the two of them was closer to him and who’d been the main grown-up in his life. And no one knew if we should mention his TV show or act impressed or even ask him about his life in New York. What I’m saying is, no one knew how to act around him at all. No one could tell if this was a…a resumption of an old relationship or a completely new thing. I just stayed quiet and let the adults make fools of thems
elves. I was too shy to make a fool of myself.
But after dinner, after Earl had gone up to bed and Mom and Dad had gone home, and Mary had fallen asleep in her easy chair in the living room, I stuck around—I’d driven there separately—and me and Chance cleared the table and washed the dishes. I was surprised he did that. Men didn’t usually do household chores in my limited experience, but he didn’t make a big deal of it, me and him just started clearing the table and taking the dishes to the kitchen, and then he put them in the sink and started washing and I started drying ’em as he handed ’em to me, drying ’em and putting ’em away. And while we were doing that, he said, “So, how are you, sis? How are things?” And he sounded like he was interested, like he cared.
And I don’t know, there was something in his tone, something in the way he asked…I just started crying. It was like…see, nobody had ever asked me anything like that before. Nobody showed any interest in how I was feeling or what my life was like. We didn’t ask those kinds of questions. We weren’t supposed to think about those things. And I was going through some tough stuff, and the idea that this guy who was my brother but who also was on the TV and who seemed more like a stranger than a brother, the idea that this guy even thought to ask…well, I just crumbled, you know?
I was having lots of problems with my dad at that point. Maybe that’s typical when you’re a junior in high school, but it didn’t feel like some sort of general adolescent thing. I started describing what was going on to Chance. He was surprised. He said, “But Steve adores you! When you came along, it was like his whole life changed. I was there. I saw it. Hell, I was a victim of it.”