Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (17 page)

Once the initial excitement of our newly married life was over, Jo and I still had our sources of conflict. As with most other couples, our problems were there from the beginning of our relationship. In particular, we continued to argue over Jo’s ambitions as an actress and her fear that having a family would hold her back from pursuing her career. She experienced the vacillations normal for any actor. And as she went from the high of playing the title role in
Peter Pan,
to much success in summer stock, to the very deep low of being turned down for yet another Broadway role, I played up her uncertainty about whether she had the grit and determination to make it in the theater. I never married Jo for her to be a star; I was clear from the onset that I wanted her to devote herself to being a wife and mother. I thought I was being practical, that this path was best for our family. It is hard enough, I reasoned, for one person in a couple to be in the theater, a profession that is so uncertain, stressful, and consuming.

When Jo did work, I was anything but supportive. When she was in a Midwestern summer stock production of
Flower Drum Song
, I flew out to visit her—and took along my laundry! I’m ashamed about it now, but back then I didn’t think twice about carrying my dirty clothes onto the plane for her to wash. Again, I thought I was simply being practical; I didn’t have time to do it before the trip, and I knew there was a washing machine in every theater. But arriving with my full laundry bag was a clear message to Jo, who was rightly stunned and furious.

“I can’t believe you!” she said. “Bringing your laundry to where I’m working? Are you crazy?”

“I had no time to do it.”

“So you brought it for
me
to do?”

“No, I am going to do it,” I said. “Just show me where the washing machine is.”

And that was it. In our fights, there was always so much we left unsaid. Both of us did anything we could to avoid an explosion. We dealt with each other by
not
saying how we really felt,
not
saying the worst. The worst, for me, was that I didn’t want to go to the Midwest to visit her in summer stock. I didn’t like being the husband of the actress. I didn’t want her to be working. Although we never discussed it outright, it was clear she understood that with my dirty laundry, I was saying, “You know where you belong and it’s not here.”

Again I was acting like a bully, but in the end I got what I wanted. Within our first year of marriage, Jo got pregnant, and nothing could have made me happier. I had wanted her to get pregnant on our wedding night—I whispered to her, “I hope we made a baby tonight.” We wound up conceiving during the run of a production of
Tom Sawyer
in Sacramento’s Music Circus in which I played Huckleberry Finn and she was Becky Thatcher, Tom’s girlfriend. The situation was so ludicrous that both of us had a lot of trouble keeping a straight face for the entire run. We were still in the first flush of marriage, and everything made us laugh. It wasn’t our finest work, but we weren’t doing Ibsen, for God’s sake.

Jo’s growing belly was not only the promise of fatherhood but also further proof that I could finally put behind me all the complexities of my childhood and the fear and self-doubt I’d felt for so long. But the pregnancy wasn’t easy. From the beginning, Jo experienced complications, and the doctor ordered immediate bed rest. By this point, we had moved uptown, to 865 First Avenue, at 49th Street, a step we hoped toward a more sophisticated New York life. My great friend Larry Kert, who had originated the role of Tony in
West Side Story
, tipped us off about an apartment available in his building.

I’d met Larry when we were just teenagers trying to make it in LA. Though I could have been the Juvenile Star of
Borscht Capades
, he was singing with Bill Norvis and the Upstarts. From the start, Larry was the funniest, loosest, most handsome and talented person I’d ever known. Everybody was drawn to him. A good horseback rider and excellent gymnast, he was thoroughly masculine. And he was gay, openly gay, even in his teens. He was one of the few young guys I’d met who was so comfortable with himself that his sexuality didn’t seem to be a problem for him.

To me, that was nothing short of a miracle. I was envious of how he embraced his homosexuality, but his experience had no bearing on mine. His family was 100 percent supportive of him. They knew who he was and loved him anyway. That was beyond my comprehension. While I envied his openness, I felt as if the same behavior would never have been accepted from me.

What Larry and I did share was a desire to be on Broadway, where we both struggled to get jobs in the theater. Although we didn’t talk all the time, we checked in with each other periodically, and whenever we did, it was affectionate. Larry and I adored each other.

Years before I met Jo, when I had first moved to New York and was looking for work, Larry and I went out for dinner one night, and we talked for so long that it got too late for him to go home. We wound up back at the Belvedere Hotel, where I was living, and we slept together. It was sexy and brotherly at once. The radio was playing “Danny Boy,” and when I woke in the morning he was gone, but I found a note by my toothbrush, signed “Danny Boy.” Sleeping together didn’t change our relationship; it just made it better. We never stopped caring about each other. When Larry landed the historic role of Tony in
West Side Story
, I went to a run-through of the brilliant musical in New York, without sets and costumes, and then to the out-of-town opening in Washington before its Broadway debut, in 1955.

Larry was living with a dancer, Grover Dale, by the time Jo and I moved to First Avenue. He was part of his own world, where he could be openly gay in his private life. (Everyone supported him. His sister Anita Ellis, a renowned jazz singer, and her husband, Mort, were so close to Larry that they lived in the building, too.) And I was part of my world. The situation between us was never tense. Whenever I was around Larry, I didn’t feel that he felt sorry for me or believed that I was living a lie. Just like any other friend, Larry was happy that I seemed to be getting what I wanted and needed from my marriage. And Jo loved him, too. Everybody did.

Jo and I began fixing up our new flat. She had bought a big drawing by Rico Lebrun before we met that I loved, too (she always had a great eye for art). The burlap wallpaper we put up made all our art look great. It was also a great canvas for the furniture we purchased from Design Research, a Boston shop at the forefront of Scandinavian design, where we picked up a modern teak sideboard. We squirreled away money for the finer things, such as our first-anniversary lunch, at Lutèce. Although the French restaurant, famous for its haute cuisine, was only down the street from our apartment, it made us feel as if we were in Paris for the afternoon.

No matter how tastefully our apartment was designed, Jo was miserable while confined to it during the difficult pregnancy. When I returned home after an entire day out—auditioning for an Off Broadway play; lunching with Charlie Baker at the Oak Room, around the corner from William Morris; and working on some new material with a writer for the act—I found Jo lying on the bed per doctor’s orders. She was at her wit’s end. “I told you,” she said. “I knew we should never have done this. You were rushing.”

I felt horrible. Jo was imprisoned in a world of discomfort into which I had forced her. Through the anger and accusations, I could see that she was really frightened. We both were. She didn’t respond to my attempts to make her feel better with tenderness and humor, and I couldn’t blame her. This had all been my idea, not hers. It was my fault, because she hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, just as she hadn’t wanted to get married. The guilt of seeing my wife lying in bed day after day was bad, but nothing compared with what lay ahead.

She was in her sixth month when in the middle of the night she woke up in pain. Weeping, she was having contractions. At 3:00
A.M.
we rushed to the New York Medical College hospital, where we were met by our obstetrician, Dr. Vincent Merendino.

Jo endured a nightmarish labor. And as I watched my wife writhing in pain, Vinnie explained that he didn’t want to give her too much anesthetic, because of the added risk to the baby, who was already in peril. I thought about The Sisters, my mother, and the voice planted inside my head long ago saying somehow it was always my fault. I was heartbroken watching Jo in so much misery, particularly because she was not a complainer. She never wanted to be that vulnerable.

After five hours, she gave birth to a one-and-a-half-pound boy, whom we named Jeremy.

When Jo, worn out from the punishing labor, had finally fallen asleep, I went to the neonatal intensive-care unit to see our baby lying in an incubator. It was like looking at something out of a science-fiction film. I sat staring at him, this incredibly tiny human being, thinking,
How could this be?
Everything from Jeremy’s traumatic entrance into this world to the size of his feet was unbelievable. I left his side only to return to Jo.

Two days after our son’s birth, I was scheduled to open at the Diplomat Hotel, in Hollywood, Florida. I was about to call William Morris to cancel when Vinnie advised otherwise. According to the neonatal experts at the hospital, there was nothing inherently wrong with Jeremy other than his weight. In any case, he would need to be in an incubator for weeks.

“It is just a matter of time,” Vinnie said to me as we talked in a corner of the hospital room where Jo was turning down the tray being brought to her by a nurse. “Each day is one more day that he is closer to being out of danger. But this is going to be very challenging, and there is actually very little you can do here.” He also thought it would be best for Jo and me to be together and for her to accompany me to Florida. I was left to make all the decisions, since Jo couldn’t even eat, let alone think; she was so exhausted and sad. It was impossible in that moment to make the right decision. I had no idea what that even was. It seemed crazy for me to keep the job and take Jo in her fragile state on an airplane. But her OB had suggested I do just that, and in times of great trauma and confusion, it’s normal to default to a passive position and follow doctor’s orders. So I heeded Dr. Merendino’s advice to go to work and take my wife. We flew to Florida the next day.

After we arrived at the Diplomat, I made sure Jo, still in a lot of pain, was comfortable before I went down to the showroom to do a sound check. My performance that night was like nothing I had ever experienced. All the words, music, and jokes were there, but I wasn’t. I was on automatic pilot, the body doing its job and the mind somewhere else.

After the first show, I ran back up to the room to check on Jo, who was still in a lot of discomfort. I saw that she had had a little water and melon. We didn’t talk much but that was all right. What was there to say? It was too horrible to talk.

When I returned to the room after the second show, completely depleted, the lights were low. I turned them out, and after a few minutes lying quietly together in the dark, she said in a still, small voice, “Dr. Merendino’s office called.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He said they did everything they could.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“The baby is dead.”

And that was it. That was all we said. Those two nightmarish words hanging above us in the dark took up all the space.

As irrational as it was, I never imagined that we would lose our child. Even when he appeared so impossibly small. Even when he was in an incubator. “Each day,” the experts said, “was a success.” And that’s all I heard. I had wanted that baby so much, since I held that little girl at the Sovereign Hotel.

If I had allowed myself to know how I felt, I never would have left Jeremy’s side or dragged Jo to Florida for a nightclub act. In that dark hotel room filled with grief, Jo and I held each other and wept.

In my arms, her whole body shivered, her injury complete. I had promised to take care of her, to make her happy, to let nothing bad befall her. And here, feeling this little shaking thing pressed up against me, I realized that I had done just the opposite. I would have done anything in that moment to change what had happened, even though I knew that there was in fact nothing, just nothing, I could do.

I was helpless and culpable, a father and not a father. When a terrible thing you can’t imagine—such as the death of a child—actually happens, it becomes a part of you forever. Jeremy’s death didn’t just shatter my confidence but my very core. The belief I had always had in myself—pushing to find a place for myself in the theater, where I wasn’t sure I was wanted; exploring my sexual desire for men but pushing past it to find the woman of my dreams; persuading Jo to follow me into this adventure of marriage and family—was gone. It was gone, all of it, because I had failed Jo and my son.

I wept with joy and disbelief that our little girl—Jennifer—was in my arms.
Now we will be happy
, I thought.
Everything is just right.