“Nick. We don’t really know each other very well. I’ve always been a little on guard against you.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“Would you like to have lunch?”
“Sure.”
We picked a date. He chose Michael’s on West 55th Street, in which literally every table has been rested upon by the pampered elbows of New York’s literary lions for many a season. I lunched there often but seldom have I witnessed the kind of homage that was paid to Nick from the arriving and departing celebrities.
In the center of the room at a table for eight sat an actress who had written yet another book about dramatic weight loss and early lack of self-esteem. Surrounded by publicists, managers, and agents, she looked but dared not approach.
“She’ll be fat again in a year,” I joked. Nick didn’t laugh.
“I’ve got cancer,” he said. “And I’m going to fight.”
“Well there’s no time to waste,” I said. “Tell me everything.”
He spoke of a feud with Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, his writer’s block on his latest book, and his never having recovered from his daughter’s brutal murder by a crazed boyfriend decades earlier.
“Your movie knocked me for a loop. If this gets me I don’t want to die with regrets.”
He told me he was having trouble resolving the finish of the book, mostly about his main character’s coming to peace with his sexuality; and he also spoke of his still unresolved feelings about Graydon.
“Well, you have to call him,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. I’m a coward. No good at human relationships. Just can’t do it. I failed with my sons too.”
Nick was closing in on eighty-three. I had just entered my seventies. There seemed nothing to lose.
“So, are you gay?” I asked.
“I’m nothing now. I’ve been celibate for twenty years. It just got too difficult for me to deal with.”
“What did?”
“Hiding it. Wanting it.”
“Have you ever talked about it with your sons?”
“God no! I just couldn’t. I’m sure they know. Anyway it’s too late now and I don’t miss it anymore.”
“Why don’t you sit down with Griffin and talk to him about it?”
“Oh he knows. What is there to talk about?”
“Give him the honor of sharing with him his father’s true self.”
“No no no. I can’t. I just can’t.”
“I failed to communicate well with my son, too. So I understand. But it’s the greatest gift you can bestow on your kids, trusting them and—”
Up to the table came a worshipper.
“Oh hi, . . . !”
“Do you know . . . ?”
“Of course!”
“Have you seen . . . ?”
“Did you hear . . . ?”
“Did you know . . . ?”
“Call me!”
He had no desire to return to our subject and we passed our lunch in the familiar territory of work and gossip. I walked him to his next appointment.
“I’m going to have to face Graydon,” he said, “or I won’t be able to finish this book. I’m stuck.”
“Pick up the phone and call him.”
“I will.”
“Let’s do this again, Nick.”
“Okay!”
And during the next year or more, as he fought his cancer, we would manage a dozen or so such conversations at Michael’s, over the phone, and once in Los Angeles at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2009, when he was there covering the Oscars.
Nick was a great reporter and a brilliant observer of human contradictions. He was ruthless in his hates, a voracious gossiper, and a self-admitted starfucker. Faced with cancer, he fought valiantly, doubling and redoubling his efforts to stay in the game.
His fight took him to a clinic in Germany for stem cell treatments. He rallied, lost ground, rallied again, and finally the disease won. Griffin went to get him and bring him home on a chartered plane to die in his tiny apartment surrounded by his books and momentary distractions from visiting celebrities.
It was near the end now as I stood over him, as close as I could get. Is he gone? I wondered. So still, so lifeless. I put my mouth up to his ear.
“Nick. It’s Frank. Wake up.”
He did.
“Oh, Frank. You came.”
He lifted his arms up as if he wanted to be taken out of the bed and I leaned in close. Round my neck they went and I kissed his cheek, now firm against mine.
“Are you going to stay?” he said. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Yes.”
I kissed him back and circled round the bed, never letting go of his hand, and sat in a chair close to his right side. He closed his eyes again and fell back asleep.
Joan came in and laid her hand on his foot before Charlie took her downstairs, and Griffin and I talked quietly across his father’s body. It was countdown time.
Soon a dark-haired woman arrived who would close in on his left. Once an editor of his, she talked of a feud they’d once had, explaining that it was all over now, and she loved him. His eyes flicked open. He had been listening.
“We worked it out, didn’t we?” he said to her.
“Yes we did dear,” she replied.
It was clear she wasn’t planning to leave his side, so I asked him in her presence what he wanted to talk to me about. If it were something personal, I assumed he’d ask her to give us a moment. But he looked up at me with a happy smile and said:
“Frank. I did it. I finished my book. Graydon and I made peace. I think it’s good. I think it’ll sell. I want you to see the new cover.”
He called to Griffin, who brought in a mock-up of the book, now named Too Much Money.
“We changed the title,” he said.
As he talked about the cuts he’d made and the decisions over the title and the marketing for the book, the lady continued to hold his hand, nodding in agreement and approval. Griffin stood by the bed for a while, looking distracted, and then slowly backed out of the room onto the sunporch.
The mock-up lay on Nick’s lap as he talked animatedly about the planned campaign, the marketing budget, and his hopes for sales.
“It’s going to be a hit, I think, Frank,” he said. Toward the end of the book, a character called Gus, the fictionalized Nick, finally outs himself.
I got up when he wound down, leaned over, kissed him on the forehead, and told him I’d come see him again. His former editor held tight. As I reached the door, I looked into the sunporch and saw Griffin sitting alone, his back toward me, staring out the window. I decided not to invade his solitude.
Forty-eight hours later his father was gone. A man who, even on his deathbed, was unable to speak truth to a son sitting some twenty feet away but preferred rather to look at a mock-up of a new book title, discuss possible profits he would never enjoy, and have his hand held by a formerly estranged colleague. Nick left this earth sadly leaving behind two boys whom he had long since abandoned to carry on without him.
TONY CURTIS
Tony Curtis took no prisoners. Whenever I was in his company over the course of some thirty years, apart from the absurdity of his desperate attempts to look cool, hip, and young, I found him always to be charming, instantly connected, and very funny. He was, as well, ruthlessly honest when he didn’t like someone or something. A no-shit guy who had taken a lot of abuse, often challengingly bringing it upon himself.
One Saturday evening in Malibu in 1989 there were about a dozen of us at a dinner and a private screening at Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews’s magnificent house near Paradise Cove. The conversation turned to a discussion of one of the world’s most famous and beloved actors.
“He was one of my idols,” Tony said. “The guy turns o
ut to be a fucking bore. He knew better than all of us where to put the camera, how to say the line, how to play the scene. He had no humor and no charm. I would do anything to avoid having lunch with him.”
I told Tony that Mel Brooks had told me the same thing about this actor. He said that one day the guy walked into his offices and said, “How do you do, Mr. Brooks? My offices are right next door to yours. I’m so looking forward to our having lunch together.” After the first lunch, Mel said, “I thought I’d kill myself if I had to eat a meal with this guy again. I told my secretary, if Cary Grant calls, I’m not in.”
“Yeah,” said Tony. “He sucked the air out of any room he was in.”
The film they made together was Operation Petticoat. It was directed by Blake Edwards and he concurred about Grant, but added, “It was a huge hit and I would have worked with him again anytime.”
That night the film we watched in Blake and Julie’s screening room was Mississippi Burning. After the lights went up, there was much reverential talk about the subject matter, the direction, and the quality of the acting. Tony was sitting in the last row, silent and placid. After everyone else had had their say, he stood up and held forth for ten minutes, calling it a chickenshit worthless piece of crap.
“They played it so fucking safe. Lousy studio bullshit.”
Watching Tony on television late one night in Sweet Smell of Success, I was impressed by the emotional power of his performance. He was playing a “cookie full of arsenic,” as Burt Lancaster’s character referred to him, and he played his part, a bloodsucking desperate press agent, with unsparing truth and a real measure of dignity.
Thereafter, whenever I saw him in a film, I stopped and watched a little closer. His performances in The Defiant Ones, Spartacus, and Some Like It Hot were deeply committed, honest, and emotionally true. The fact that the overwhelming majority of his films were terrible doesn’t erase the fact that in each of them he was a one hundred percent professional and determined to do his best. The look of him, the sheer overripe face, jet-black hair, and New York accent made him an easy actor to dismiss as just a pretty boy who got lucky. He didn’t make it any easier with a publicly cultivated persona as a wisecracking ladies’ man. But he seemed to me filled with immortal yearnings; acting, writing, painting, constantly creatively expressing himself and looking for validation.
One evening, when I was sitting alone with him in a corner at Blake and Julie’s, he held forth on the art of acting, and his understanding of the necessity to cover up any technique and appear spontaneous and, above all, truthful. “It’s a moveable feast, Frank. You gotta go with the flow and live in the moment.”
Tony had a get-them-before-they-get-you frame of mind that got him in trouble in Hollywood and his handful of really sterling performances didn’t seem enough to overcome the cocky swagger that lessened his reputation as an actor. But those performances are there as a testament to a boy named Schwartz from the Bronx who, in a profession with a staggering attrition rate, climbed to the top, hung in, and defiantly kept punching to the finish.
JILL CLAYBURGH
She stood looking into the mirror above my dressing room table, arranging and rearranging her gorgeous mane of blond hair to look as though it hadn’t been given a thought. It always looked that way. Completely natural and elegantly stylish. Like the woman.
Her makeup was minimal, seemingly nonexistent. Dressed in a belted print dress that accented her tiny, tiny waist and small bosom, she looked nowhere near her forty years. More like a recently graduated Vassar girl (it was actually Sarah Lawrence) about to meet her first potential employer.
It was the spring of 1984. Jill Clayburgh, Raul Julia, and I were in rehearsal for Noel Coward’s Design for Living, directed by George C. Scott, and due to open at New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre several weeks hence.
She was on her way to meet Sydney Pollack for a drink to discuss the female lead in Out of Africa, a film he would be directing later that year. “I don’t know why I’m bothering,” she said cheerfully, “Meryl’s going to get it anyway.” (She did.)
But she stepped back to survey the goods, threw whatever tools she had emptied from her canvas bag back into it, slung it over her delicate shoulder, kissed me on the top of the head, and sailed out the door, her lovely summer dress gently swaying round her hips as her high heels determinedly tap-tapped up the stairs.
Jill possessed an ineffable, pragmatic optimism that permeated her being. An “I’ll take whatever comes” gutsiness that I admired from the day we met.
It was in 1967. She was twenty-four, I was twenty-nine. We were cast as husband and wife in a television movie to be produced by the then immensely successful David Susskind. It was entitled The Choice. The story was about two men in need of a heart transplant. Their surgeon (George Grizzard) would have to decide whom to give the only one available. Either the young, brilliant violinist (me) or an aging former secretary of state (Melvyn Douglas). I got the heart, and Mel, I think, got an Emmy. Mel’s wife was to be played by the great English actress Celia Johnson.
We would rehearse our tearjerker in New York and shoot in Toronto. The show’s minor claim to fame was in its depicting, for the first time on television, an actual heart transplant performed by a pioneer in the field, Dr. Michael DeBakey. So fragile did the TV network believe the American public’s stomach to be, that only thirty seconds of it were allowed to be aired.
Jill and I were, at the time, each involved in emotionally fraught relationships. She with another actor and I with a registered nurse. Jill was very drawn to the high strung and I was (and still am) a hypochondriac. We had each found perfect, if temporary ideal partners. We bonded immediately during rehearsals and once away from home, sealed our friendship prowling the discos of Toronto, dancing, drinking, and coming dangerously close to a tumble. But it was Jill who kept us out of bed. Things were confusing enough, she reasoned. It was the 1960s though, and disco dance floors may as well have been beds. There was a good deal of caressing, long good-night kisses, and a few times we fell asleep in each other’s arms. Both of our relationships subsequently crashed and burned, but by then our train had passed.
Jill’s career soon started a meteoric rise and by the early 1970s she was a major film star, Oscar nominated for An Unmarried Woman. By 1984, at the time of our production, it was beginning to look like her ship of movie stardom was drifting off course, and while she was not happy about it, she was not the sort of person to blame the business or cry in self-pity. She was handling it.
She was, of course, an actress. And if women, as men often feel, are impossible to know, then actresses up the ante considerably. But Jill was a good egg, with an open and generous nature, free of artifice.
There was, of course, her laugh. Easy to get and infectious to hear. That mass of hair would tumble forward as she bent over in hysterics and then fly back in wild abandon. It became the unifying component in our budding ménage-à-trois with Raul.
The seventeen years between our gigs disappeared and Jill and I were as close as we had been before. And with the addition of Raul, we very quickly became the Marx Brothers of the New York theatre scene, with George C. as our tyrannical but benevolent Margaret Dumont.
At the close of our first week of rehearsal the three of us went to dinner, admitted that George scared the shit out of us, and told one another the parts we’d stupidly turned down in films that earned Oscars for the actors who took them. We were now all married with five children among us. Jill was forty, Raul forty-two, and I forty-six. We were playing lovers, each character having slept with the other separately and together, and each discovering they could not live without each other and would carry on at play’s end forever joined in a hedonistic, unholy trinity.
I knew she was conflicted about returning to the stage and had, at that time, a fear, and even a dislike, of audiences. She hated the idea of being judged by them. Raul and I, on the ot
her hand, were eager racehorses, anxious to gallop. Jill was hesitant about coming out of the gate in the first place. This was exacerbated by a passionate love affair with her first child, Lily, born to her and playwright David Rabe. Lily was as adored as any child I’ve ever seen. Every moment Jill could steal away from the show to be with her, she coveted. But still, she happily enjoyed being “the girl” with three men devotedly at her feet. George C. would have been quite happy to get her off those feet, but she handled him with good grace and lighthearted humor. She was a soft, feminine tomboy. Catnip to any man.
The limited and temporary freedom that backstage life gives actors turns up the sexual burners, and we grew deliciously physical with one another. One matinee, as Raul was pulling off his shirt for a quick change and Jill and I were kibitzing in his dressing room, she suddenly raced across the floor and clawed at his chest. “Oh give me some of that,” she said, “give it to me!” And they began a series of silent film star passionate embraces. In seconds I insinuated myself into the mix and for the next few minutes we became a pulsating Oreo cookie with nothing remotely chaste about where our hands and mouths wandered. It was fast, hot, and dirty, and it was the kind of fun at which actors excel. We brought it all onstage with us and the fact that it was never consummated kept us fully charged sexually in front of our audiences.
Jill was not a great stage actress, which she would have been the first to admit. She didn’t have the killer instinct required to prowl the stage like a predatory lioness, daring the audience to look away from you. She had neither the voice nor the physical stamina for it, and she lacked the will to acquire either. Only later in her career, she told me, did she come to feel truly comfortable onstage. “I get now what you and Raul loved so much about being out there,” she told me. But even back then, with her reserve and uncertainty, she was a game girl.
The play was an enormous success and while we saw less of each other, we made a habit on most matinee days of going to my apartment, often surrounded by our mates and kids, feeding them and ourselves, usually bringing back Jill’s favorite franchise at the time, Chirpin’ Chicken, then racing back for the evening performance.
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