Then Comes Marriage

by Roberta Kaplan

  “Do you want to get married in Canada?” Edie asked Thea one afternoon in the summer of 2006.

  “Not really,” Thea answered (presumably thinking about how difficult it would be for her to travel). “But if you really want to do it, we can.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Edie said. She certainly did not want to have to schlep Thea all the way to Toronto with all of the necessary equipment—ramps, lifts, et cetera—that would be required.

  That is where the matter stood until the following spring, after Thea had seen one of her doctors. Despite her physical disability, Thea was as sharp intellectually as she had always been. As a psychologist, she continued to see a full slate of therapy patients. She had Edie to boot, so her life was very happy and fulfilling despite the MS. But on this visit, the doctor had terrible news for both of them: Thea’s heart had weakened considerably. Without invasive open-heart surgery to replace a valve (which Thea was understandably not willing to undergo), she likely would not live for more than another year.

  The very next morning after receiving this sobering diagnosis, Thea woke up, turned to Edie, and asked, “Do you still want to get married?”

  “Yes,” Edie answered. “I do.”

  “Me too,” said Thea.

  So in late May 2007, Edie and Thea flew to Toronto with four best women and two best men, along with a box of tools to disassemble and reassemble Thea’s electric wheelchair. Thea and Edie were married in a small ceremony at a hotel connected to the Toronto airport, so that Thea’s wheelchair could be rolled straight into the hotel. More than forty years after they first met, Thea and Edie were, at long last, a legally married couple. What had once seemed like a fantastic dream, something that they could only acknowledge privately between the two of them, was now a matter of legal and public record. Despite Thea’s somber medical prognosis, it was an incredibly life-affirming moment for both of them. This was a couple who had really, really, really wanted to get married.

  ONE FRIDAY NIGHT in 1963, Edie had first made her way to a restaurant in Greenwich Village comanaged by Elaine Kaufman (who later went on to establish Elaine’s on the Upper East Side). A gorgeous, brilliant, and vivacious computer programmer for IBM, Edie had just returned to New York after spending two semesters on a postgraduate math fellowship at Harvard.

  Edie had moved into a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side, far from the bohemian Village, the kind of neighborhood where, as she put it, “I was the only woman in the building who wore blue jeans on weekends.” She was thirty-four, and although she’d dated a few women during her first decade living in New York, she had not yet found lasting love.

  But one night she called an old friend who was also a lesbian. As Edie told her friend how lonely she was, she burst out with a desperate plea. “Oh, God,” she said, “if you know where the lesbians go, please take me there.” The lesbian bar (the Bagatelle) that Edie used to frequent before her Harvard fellowship had closed, and she no longer knew where to go in New York City to meet other lesbians. Her friend told her that the Portofino restaurant in the Village was the place to be on Friday nights, so they made plans to go there together.

  The next Friday night, Edie and her friend were sitting at a table at Portofino when a friend brought a woman named Thea Spyer to their table. Thea was striking, with coal-black hair that fell to her shoulders, piercing eyes, a self-assured manner, and powerful magnetism and charisma. The daughter of a prominent Dutch Jewish family that had done well in the pickle business, Thea carried herself with the poise and self-confidence of an aristocrat. Edie was mesmerized—by her beauty, her intellect, and her bearing.

  After dinner, the four women made their way to a party together, and then eventually to Thea’s place. Thea put on some records, and she and Edie started to dance . . . and dance . . . and dance . . . Edie had always loved dancing, but she could never find a lesbian dance partner who really knew how to lead. But Thea did so effortlessly, and the two of them spun around the small living room like they’d been doing it for years. Their bodies, Thea would later say, “just fit.” Edie kicked off her shoes and danced until she had worn a hole in one of her stockings. (Whenever I think about this scene, which was described in detail in our original complaint in the district court, I can’t help thinking of the famous dance scene in the film The King and I, with Thea, of course, as Yul Brynner and Edie as Deborah Kerr.)

  From that night on, Edie was very interested in Thea. But Thea was taken, living first with one woman and then with another. Every once in a while, Edie and Thea would find themselves together at the same party, and as always they would dance together until Edie’s date and Thea’s live-in lover grew irritated. But no matter how much fun they had or how well they fit together, at the end of each night, Edie would end up going home alone.

  This went on for two excruciating years. Giving up hope, Edie started going to a therapy group, where she sought help accepting the fact that she would never be able to have a successful relationship with another woman. By then, Edie had almost given up on the idea, and over the previous few months, she had been trying to convince herself to just find a nice man with whom to settle down, preferably a man with children who needed a mother. “I did not want to live a life without love,” she would later say, and that was what she feared she was facing. She had almost, but not quite, given up hope. But in the spring of 1965, a friend told Edie that Thea was currently single and that she was going to the Hamptons for Memorial Day weekend. This was Edie’s chance.

  Thea was planning to drop off her friend Jane at the Hamptons home of a lesbian couple Edie knew, so Edie picked up the phone and called the couple. “I’m so sorry to be so presumptuous,” she said, “but would you mind terribly if I came out to visit you this weekend?” To Edie’s great relief, her friends said they’d be delighted to have her. When Edie arrived at their house that Friday, a whole group of women were getting ready to go out for dinner. Afraid she would miss Thea, she told the others, “You go ahead. I’m not hungry.” Edie was afraid that if she left, even briefly, she’d miss the chance to see Thea. So Edie waited. And waited. A few hours later, the group stopped back at the house before continuing on to a bar for dancing. Once again, Edie begged off. She hated to miss the dancing, but she absolutely had to be at the house when Thea arrived, because that might be her only chance to see her. At four a.m., the group stumbled back to the house. And then somebody casually mentioned to Edie that Thea had had to work late and was not arriving until the next morning.

  The next day, the waiting continued. The women staying in the house set out for a picnic on the beach, and once again Edie stayed behind. This was now getting to be ridiculous. Edie was waiting interminably for a woman who might not show up, and who might not have any interest in Edie even if she did. The slow, hot summer day dragged on and on until Edie finally heard a car pull into the driveway. A moment later, Thea and Jane walked in.

  The women greeted each other, and when Edie looked at Thea, wearing a pair of white pants and a white shirt with a rope belt, she could scarcely breathe. Edie, Thea, and Jane went into the kitchen for coffee, and Edie stood slightly behind Thea at the counter, close but not daring to touch her. Here, in Edie’s own words, is what happened next:

  We were each having a cup of coffee, and—how to describe it? It felt like years. It could have been minutes. I almost touched her. I mean, I tell you, I almost touched her and I felt like an idiot. And then finally, her hand was on the counter. I went to put my hand on top of hers, and then withdrew it.

  And Thea’s friend Jane is saying, “Oh, wow. It’s getting late. I better go upstairs and change.” And she is very funny, so part of this is her being funny. She knows that there is something going on.

  There’s a phonograph on the floor in the corner of the living room, and finally Jane went upstairs, yelling, “I’ll be right down!” Thea went over to put something on the phonograph, which involved kneeling down. And when she got up, I grabbed her. And then we took her car an
d went to East Hampton and we made love the whole afternoon.

  After that day, Edie and Thea went out on occasional dates over the next two years, but then Thea wouldn’t call Edie for weeks at a time. Or they would make a plan to have dinner, and Thea would cancel at the last minute. Thea was, as Edie would later say, “a pain in the ass.” Edie had certainly managed to get Thea’s attention, but what did she have to do to keep it?

  Little by little, however, Edie’s charm, their obvious chemistry, and the love they clearly felt for each other began to wear Thea down. One day, as they lay together on a beach in the Hamptons, Thea asked, “Edie, what do you want from me?”

  “Not much,” Edie said. “I would like to date for a year. And if that goes the way it is now, I think I would like to be engaged, say for a year. And if it still feels this goofy joyous, I would like us to spend the rest of our lives together.”

  Almost against her will, Thea found herself agreeing. Thea had had a series of live-in girlfriends in the past, and she had never imagined that she would settle down again with another woman. Yet as they spent more and more time together, Thea found that she couldn’t deny the powerful connection between them.

  In 1967, Thea rented a house for the summer in the Hamptons where they would spend the weekends together. Edie bought Thea a motorcycle and had it custom-painted white. She then proudly posed for photographs on it, wearing a white bikini to match. The two women were inseparable, sunning on the beach, eating out with friends, dancing until late into the night. But although Edie knew that she only wanted to be with Thea, she always told her, “No commitment. The day you think someone else looks better, you go.” By the end of that summer, however, Thea too knew there was no one else with whom she wanted to be.

  On their way out to the Hamptons one Friday afternoon late that summer, Thea stopped the car, pulled over by the side of the road, and got out. She went down on one knee and took Edie’s hand in hers. “Will you—” she began, but before she could finish the sentence, Edie jumped in to say, “Yes! Yes!”

  “Let me finish!” Thea cried, annoyed that Edie had interrupted her carefully planned proposal. She pulled out a circular diamond pin and presented it to Edie. It was not legal at that time for two women to marry anywhere in the world, but that did not make Thea’s proposal any less real or powerful. Thea pinned the diamond brooch to Edie’s blouse, and thus began what became a very long engagement.

  Thea had chosen a pin instead of a ring for a very specific reason. She had previously invited Edie to speculate about what would happen if Edie showed up at the office one day wearing a diamond engagement ring. Edie explained that that was clearly impossible since everyone at IBM would then ask, “Who’s the lucky guy and when do we get to meet him?” and those were not questions that Edie could or would answer. Edie adored her colleagues at work, but she had not dared to tell any of them that she was a lesbian. But she could wear a diamond pin whenever she liked, and no one would ever ask to meet her fiancé.

  I have told this story of Edie and Thea’s engagement dozens of times by now, yet it never ceases to amaze me. The year 1967, when it happened, was two years before the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village that led to the modern gay rights movement. The idea that two women could have had the courage, the self-esteem, not to mention the foresight to become engaged to each other then is nothing short of miraculous.

  In the 1950s and 1960s the only books that a gay person could read that actually talked about lesbians (as opposed to obliquely referencing them) were pulp fiction. The following passage from such a novel, Three Women, is a reminder of what those times were like:

  She had realized then for the first time that her love for Byrne made her different. But everyone was entitled to love . . . Yet she knew now that they must always hide their feelings, no matter how wonderful their love seemed. The world’s judging eyes condemned them, forced them to sneak and lie. Something in Paula screamed against that pain and injustice, but she did not forget that loving Byrne was as natural and right for her as marriage and children were for others.

  “As natural and right for her as marriage and children were for others?” Edie and Thea not only believed that their love was natural and right, but that they were even entitled to get married. That’s amazing enough when it happens between any couple—gay or straight—today, but it is almost unbelievable that it happened between two women in 1967. (It is worth noting, in the interest of accuracy and true to the pulp genre, that one of the women in Three Women was murdered, the second was her killer, and the third ended up getting married to a man.)

  BY THE TIME of their engagement, Edie had been working at IBM for nearly a decade. She had first moved to New York City in the mid 1950s “in order to be gay,” as she would later put it. Her first apartment was a tiny walk-up with a shared bathroom on West 11th Street, a few blocks from Washington Square Park. It was not glamorous, but it was in the Village where she had wanted to be.

  The biggest problem that Edie had at that time was actually not that she was gay since she, like most gay people in the 1950s, lived most of her life in the closet. Her biggest problem was that she would have to earn her own living. As a middle-class Jewish woman growing up in Philadelphia, Edie, like so many others, had assumed that her husband would end up supporting her financially. While Edie had a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Temple University, that was not much help for a twenty-three-year-old woman trying to make it on her own in Manhattan. As she later explained to Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed: “I wanted to be like everybody else. You marry a man who supports you—it never occurred to me I’d have to earn a living.”

  So Edie taught herself dictation and typing in order to find a job as a secretary. Even though she landed a job as the “confidential secretary” to the CEO of the Associated Press, it paid little better than a regular secretary’s salary, and she soon realized that there was no realistic possibility of promotion. She switched to bookkeeping for a while, working for a necktie manufacturing company, but that was no more promising. Finally, Edie realized that she needed a real profession. She had always been good at math, so in 1955, she decided to apply to New York University’s graduate program in applied mathematics.

  Unable to afford the tuition, Edie applied for a secretarial job, knowing that the university covered tuition for its employees. Originally, the university was reluctant to hire her because Edie was so overqualified for the job, but eventually they placed her in a secretarial job at NYU’s Math Institute that was partially subsidized by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) so they could pay her more. She worked from eight to four each weekday, then took math classes in the late afternoons and evenings. In her spare time, with the money she saved from the free tuition, she took piano lessons and tap dancing classes, and on weekends, she went to the Bagatelle to sip coffee and read magazines. It was a busy and exciting life, and although she had not yet found lasting love among the lesbians of Greenwich Village, she did find another kind of love—for computers.

  From the moment that Edie started studying computer programming, she knew that she had found her calling. When she helped out a few fellow students by typing their research papers, they reciprocated by teaching her how to operate the eight-ton UNIVAC computer that took up almost the entire floor of the Math Institute building on the NYU campus. “The first night I was working on the machine, I was terrified,” Edie recalled. She learned how to load tapes and input data on the UNIVAC, which was used by the AEC.

  Edie’s obvious computer skills and her experience led to a full-time job at IBM in 1958. At IBM, Edie was a talented programmer, eventually earning their highest technical rank. She loved her colleagues at IBM but still could not bring herself to reveal to any of them that she was gay. “I never thought I was inferior,” she has explained, “but I was worried that they might think that I was inferior. So I lied all the time.” Edie worked closely with one male colleague who was also gay, and although each knew the truth about the other, neither of them ev
er said anything, even though they worked together for ten years. That was just how life was at that time when most gay people had no choice but to live their lives in the closet. The stakes were just too high.

  During the years when Edie was single, she often went out socially with her IBM friends. “It was an amazing group, just amazing, and the weirdness of it is that I lied to every wonderful person whom I really loved,” she explained. “I mean, we ate lunch together, we drank together after work, we partied together.” She went out with the group on weekends, too—until she got together with Thea. Her colleagues loved to go to wine tastings on the weekends, but Edie could not bring Thea as her date, and she certainly was not going to leave her at home, so she just stopped going. When her colleagues asked why, she made up excuses. And when others noted that Edie seemed to get a lot of calls at work from Thea, she explained that that was because she was dating Thea’s brother, Willy—actually the name of a wooden doll from Thea’s Dutch childhood that the couple kept in a closet in their apartment.

  But as her relationship with Thea grew more serious, Edie hated having to keep it secret. She was still too scared to tell her IBM colleagues, but there was another group of computer programmers she had come to know well—people she did not work with every day but saw twice a year at a biannual conference. Each time the conference rolled around, she sat silently as her friends regaled each other with stories of their children, their spouses, and their family lives. “I knew about everybody’s wife, and how she was, and I knew whose kid was no longer on a three-wheeler but was on a two-wheeler, everything,” Edie remembers. But she never revealed anything about herself. Until one day, she did.

  The night before the conference started, she went out for drinks with a group of fellow programmers. “Guys, the most important thing in my life is happening,” she blurted out. And then she told them about Thea. To her surprise and relief, everyone was supportive. One male friend told Edie the next morning that he couldn’t help fantasizing about Edie with another woman. “Oh, honey,” Edie said, laughing it off. She had spent years feeling petrified that her friends would ostracize her—this, she could handle.