by Barbara Cook
It was the same thing when it came to food; I tried to remember to have radishes in the house—yes, radishes—because he loved radishes, and if I didn’t have them in the refrigerator it somehow meant that I didn’t care about him, that I didn’t love him. I couldn’t just have forgotten them the way we all forget items at the store; no, in David’s mind the missing radishes were somehow symbolic of my lack of caring.
Household chores became a source of real tension. David wanted to be in charge of all home repairs and outdoor work, but after I asked him repeatedly to wash the outdoor window screens and he never quite got around to it, I washed them myself; in the process I overstepped his strictly drawn boundaries as to suitable chores for men and women. Discovering that I had undertaken the work myself, he grew livid, yelling at me: “That is for me to do, not you!” It grew worse on the day I asked him to help me pack two suitcases, work he considered suitable for a woman, not a man. He was so angered by my request that he simply looked at me and said, “I love you, but I don’t like you.” I was devastated.
David’s exacting demands even extended to the appearance of our bed. We had a king-size bed, and because David had grown up with comforters (while I had never even seen one until we slept under one at his mother’s house), I had to try and find a king-size comforter. The problem was comforters weren’t a common store item in the 1950s, which made it very difficult to find the right size; in order to cover our king-size bed we had to buy two regular comforters, and David always insisted that his comforter overlay mine when the bed was made. Always. Inside I may have been thinking, “Oh fuck, first the damn radishes, now the comforters,” but I didn’t say anything. It was just easier to keep my head down—go along to get along. I felt even more stifled because I couldn’t enjoy the great tension release of cursing out loud. I wasn’t allowed to say anything. No “damn,” let alone “fuck.” David considered it unladylike. Inwardly I seethed.
So what did I do? Nothing smart, I can tell you that. I had a little dalliance with a coworker, an affair that did not mean a great deal to me. My coworker told his wife, and she informed him that she was going to call David. I stupidly decided I should tell David first. How cruel of me. His reaction was awful to see. David was a deeply moral person, and on some level I knew he would not be able to handle the information. I begged him to forgive me, to allow us to go back to the way our marriage used to be. Of course that was impossible—there’s no way we could really be together after that, but we lived and slept together for four horrific years after my confession. Of course, the wife never called David and I never really had to tell him.
Now, I think this is all something I unconsciously set up: I was deliberately trying to end my marriage. Point is, if that’s not what you have in mind, you should just keep your mouth shut. A little piece of advice here: if you do have an affair, live with your guilt and don’t tell your spouse. Years down the road, I have often wondered if my having hurt him so terribly with this brief affair may have expiated some of his guilt about success so that now he could allow himself to experience good fortune. What I do know for sure is that after I told him about my affair he suddenly advertised and became a very big New York acting teacher, one making a great deal of money.
As the tension in our marriage increased, alcohol slowly but surely began to appear with increasing frequency. As it usually does, it started off in a very low-key manner. On Saturday nights when I was in The Music Man, for instance, I would allow myself a little treat: some very sharp cheddar cheese, popcorn, and one beer. Occasionally I’d have two bottles of beer. I’d notice it the next day, but that didn’t stop me. David himself was not a big drinker, but he did like a scotch or two.
The combination of liquor with one of my mother’s visits always caused problems. In truth, even after she had moved north late in 1951, months would pass when we would not be in touch. I know that must have been very painful for her because I was her life. She never had many friends in New York; she had her work as a switchboard operator and she had some friends in her office. That’s it. She didn’t go to movies or plays, nor did she go out to dinner with friends. She worked, she took care of her little dog, and she slept. My God she slept, sometimes up to twelve or fourteen hours a day on the weekends. Now I look back and I believe she was not well, but then I just thought that no matter how often I tried to have a good relationship with her she was simply too difficult and so very unpredictable.
It didn’t help that she used to just show up without telling us she was coming, which is what she did on one particular summer day in the early 1960s. We were outside working—I was gardening, which I really enjoyed, and David was taking care of the lawn, his favorite thing. But on the day in question when my mother showed up unannounced I was also drinking scotch—boilermakers, to be precise. Scotch with a beer chaser. Jack Cassidy had taught me how to drink boilermakers during She Loves Me, and there I was, planting the petunias, drunk, falling over backward and laughing.
My mother was appalled.
These visits from my mother made all of the problems in my marriage loom ever larger, because her mere appearance would ratchet up the tension level. I began to realize that my interaction with my mother mirrored the one she’d had with her own mother.
Sometimes we would get along well, but eventually our times together would end badly—a big blowup of one sort or another that would send my mother sulking back home while I tried to repair the damage done to my home life.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but it’s clear to me that as my mother aged she became seriously paranoid. I hesitate to put a label on her condition. In the twenty-first century we know a great deal more about these problems, and perhaps nowadays she could have been helped medically. In the early 1960s, however, we didn’t know enough to call her depressed or paranoid. We just called her incredibly difficult to be around.
Logic was lost on my mother; she became convinced that the people who lived in the apartment above her were banging on the floors at three in the morning night after night in order to disturb her—
“But, Mom, if they’re getting up at three or four o’clock in the morning every day to annoy you, don’t you think that’s disturbing their sleep, too? Why would they do that?”
“The landlord is paying them to do it.”
“What on earth for?”
“He wants to get rid of me.”
Round and round we’d go—arriving back exactly where we started.
She waged a constant war with the superintendent of her building—when she wasn’t telling me that he was her best friend. If she decided that he had done something she didn’t like, he was going to be in trouble, or, more to the point, bereft of tools; when he left tools lying around in the hallway she would steal them, and in the process accumulated a cache of his tools, which she hid away in one of her closets. She certainly didn’t need or want the tools. What she wanted was simply to annoy the super.
I loved my mother, and there were times we’d have fun and get along very well, but it’s the bad times that stick out in my mind because they were so hurtful, going all the way back to her making me believe I had killed my sister and caused my father to leave us.
I genuinely felt sorry for her, and tried to remember what a friend said to me when I was complaining to her about my mother’s behavior; she looked at me and said, “At least she stuck around when you were a kid. She didn’t run away, no matter how tough her life was.” That’s true, and I knew that she loved me. The problem was that I became her life—her whole life. There were no boundaries where she and I were concerned. I was a part of her. She owned me, and as a result she could infuriate me in a way no one else could.
The tension with my mother only added to the increasingly evident strains in my marriage, strains that could no longer be glossed over for one big reason: I had fallen deeply in love with a married man. This was not like my previous and brief affair, which had hurt David so deeply. This was a love affair of genuine feeling and
deep emotion and was to develop into the most important relationship of my adult life. I had met my soul mate.
12 • MATTERS OF THE HEART
ARTHUR HILL AND I met in 1964 when my marriage was starting to crumble and we were working together on the musical Something More! It wasn’t a good show, even though the creative team was first rate: music by my old friend Sammy Fain, lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman, book by Nate Monaster. The problem was that Jule Styne was directing, and he just was not a good director. (Although Jule retained the final credit as director, he was replaced by Joe Layton, who was a dream.) Jule could be tough to work with, but he could also be a very funny man. One day during our out-of-town tryout, we were in a technical rehearsal and a fellow who had maybe three lines in the show was acting up a storm until Jule, who was out in the house, yelled, “No, George, no! Don’t act. Just rehearse.”
The show tried out in Philadelphia, but lasted a mere eleven days in New York City at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. I had found much more luck at the O’Neill with She Loves Me the previous year, but Something More! brought Arthur into my life, and for that I remain very grateful.
Arthur was a very respected actor, an elegant, lovely man who had won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his work in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We liked each other immediately and enjoyed working together. I was very drawn to him but I didn’t know the nature of his feelings for me. We were in the midst of our tryout in Philadelphia, and one night we had a friendly drink together after the show at the Variety Club, which was a haven for actors. He said he would walk me back to my hotel. We left the club and were walking down the hotel hallway when he suddenly grabbed my arm, swung me around and kissed me, saying, “I’ve wanted to do that for weeks.” It was a scene out of every romantic film you’ve ever seen.
There is no question that when things go wrong in a marriage and the romance has vanished, it is very difficult not to feel twinges when you are performing with a romantic leading man; you can feel twinges even in passing with someone who is not your leading man. When Duke Ellington, a very handsome man, stared at me with his beautiful eyes and said, “Miss Cook, I have always admired your work,” and kissed my hand—well, I definitely felt several twinges.
But—my relationship with Arthur was not a passing fancy in any way. This was the real thing, and we fell deeply in love. We actually talked through all of the repercussions before we made love because we both sensed that our bond was so deep that once we made love we’d be sunk. We did, and we were. We simply fell head over heels in love with each other.
That night was the beginning of a relationship that lasted for several years. Arthur, along with David and Wally Harper, became one of the three biggest male influences in my life. He was a true gentleman in every sense of the word. He liked women and in those pre–women’s movement days treated us with respect and courtesy. He loved books and awakened my intellectual curiosity. He itemized every book he read along with comments about them, and made lists of books he thought I’d like. He made me realize that I was smart and that I possessed genuine intellectual curiosity. He taught me about myself, giving me a sense of worth and self-respect that I had never known before.
Arthur told me that I was smart, a straightforward appreciation which contrasted with the musical “love affair” I later developed with Wally Harper. Wally loved my talent, and while he told that to many other people, in all our years together, he never once said that to me. Arthur had no problem simply telling me that I was smart, and that he loved me.
He also gave me a great piece of practical advice about furthering my education, advice which really hit home since I had never attended college. It was the 1960s, the Vietnam War was raging, and everyone was uncertain about the course of world events. I felt a bit at sea intellectually. Arthur simply said to me: “Why don’t you read the New York Times every day cover to cover. You will receive a terrific education.” I did both—read the Times religiously, and received a great education in the ways of the world. He was the exact opposite of David, who needed me locked away in a box under his control. Arthur was handsome, charming, and when we’d meet he would look at me, smile, and ask, “How’s my girl?” I would—there’s no other word for it—melt.
We tried a number of times to stop seeing each other, but we failed again and again because we loved each other so intensely. We’d part for months, and then one of us would break down and we’d get back together. It was an extraordinary, beautiful time, but oh—so—painful. My feelings were so intense that it was the only time before my participation in the ill-fated musical Carrie that I kept any sort of diary. Just writing a bit helped me to understand some of my feelings.
Arthur had said that if the time came when it was more painful to stay than to go away, then he’d leave, and that time finally came. We were locked in an impossible situation because he was not going to leave his wife and children; unlike me, he was in a good marriage. Being so head over heels in love with somebody is both exhilarating and devastating. He did the right thing in not marrying me—it would not have been a good idea—but at the time that’s exactly what I wanted more than anything in the world and I was devastated.
Both Arthur and his wife ultimately died of Alzheimer’s—his fine, beautiful mind was stilled by that insidious disease. I look back on our time together with so much gratitude, but I regret that after we parted I never had a final conversation with him in which I could tell him how much he had done for me, how much he had helped me. Once on a long plane ride I started writing a letter to him. Perhaps it was the thought of revisiting those intense emotions or the fact that I didn’t want to upset the balance of his marriage, but I never sent the letter.
Arthur did nothing less than change my life and inform my art.
Sometimes in life you gain and lose at the same time.
13 • DRINKING AGAIN
I THINK THAT I started to drink as a result of the emotional distress I was feeling in my marriage. By now Adam was four years old and the marriage had really begun to fall apart. My drinking began to increase, even when I was in rehearsals for a new show. I discovered Armagnac. I’d have some brandy but I’d still also drink beer. I then graduated to martinis. I started with Smirnoff vodka martinis and then moved on to gin martinis. I didn’t realize it while it was happening, but I got to the point where I needed something at the end of the day, and needed it every single day. A Gibson. Make that two or three. Sherry while I made dinner. A post-dinner Armagnac. The list grew.
It didn’t frighten me. I thought, “Well, I’ve got problems. I’m upset, yes, but . . .” I didn’t think I was out of control. Of course that’s precisely what happens with everybody who becomes a drunk. You just don’t know when it happens. You cross over the line, and in my case one day while I was looking the other way I became an alcoholic. It took me a long time to recognize that monumental but simple fact.
It’s not incidental that around this time I became very good friends with Maureen Stapleton. She was certainly one of the all-time great actresses, and I liked and respected her very much, but we also understood each other on yet another level, because we both had major drinking problems.
The basis of our friendship resided in my profound respect for her brilliant talent. In fact, when I was rehearsing Flahooley and was completely clueless about acting, our director, Daniel Mann, had told me, “If you really want to see the finest acting around, go see Maureen Stapleton in The Rose Tattoo.” I had never witnessed anything like it. It all welled up out of her—though I bet she would not have been a great teacher. She’d have that same reaction I have about sense memory for my singing: “Why don’t other people just do this?” In fact, when our mutual good friend the actor Bill MacIntyre once asked Maureen about her technique, she took the Spencer Tracy approach in answering the question: “Learn the lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” Billy believed she really didn’t know how it all flowed out of her. It was pure brilliance, based on impeccable instinct
s.
Maureen cared intensely about her work, to the point where shortly before she would go onstage each night she would throw up from nerves; she wanted to make sure that her performance was as good as she could possibly make it, that she gave her all. The fear that she wouldn’t measure up drove her.
It didn’t matter whether the play or movie itself was good—Maureen always was. I recently happened to watch the movie Airport, and even in the midst of that not-so-great film she delivers a characterization that starts down at her toes. It’s like it comes up from the earth—textured, deep, and instinctive.
But back in the late 1960s, we shared a joint overreliance on alcohol. I remember meeting her on the street one day, and saying, “Maureen, you know something . . . I think I’ve got it figured out. You just drink wine. You only drink wine.” And I meant it—just drink white wine and you’ll be okay. Maureen looked at me and said, “Barbara, do you know how much wine you can drink?!”
Oh God, she was such a funny woman. Here are some of my favorite gems from the wit and wisdom of Maureen Stapleton:
—She had just broken up with some guy and was very upset, drowning her sorrows with a friend at Sardi’s. It got later and later, until only the waiters and Maureen’s table were left. Desperate to go home, her waiter came over and asked, “Will there be anything else, Miss Stapleton?” Maureen looked up and said, “How about a mercy fuck?”
—At some point she needed to be in London to do a play and because she was terrified of flying, she planned to take a ship. She was talking to Carol Lawrence about this trip and Carol said, “Maureen, don’t be ridiculous. Fly Air France. You’ll be there in no time at all and you’ll have a wonderful time on the way. As soon as you’re seated, they’ll hand you a cocktail, then Champagne with a great meal, and after you’ve finished eating, a delicious digestif. Don’t be silly, just fly Air France.” Maureen looked at Carol and said, “Honey, I wouldn’t fly Air Christ!”