Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (26 page)

In the years right after
Cabaret
I felt much more secure not only in my career but also in my life with Jo. A sweet time continued for us; we enjoyed our good fortune, our kids, and each other more than ever. But just as my work began to have its ups and downs, so did my marriage. Although Jo and I had our volatile side, our fights were so frustrating because they were always the same. We would have a disagreement about an emotional issue, and when I would bring it up days or weeks later, Jo more often than not had no idea what I was talking about. “I just don’t remember what happened and you are so definite,” she would say to me. I accused her of forgetting as a way to close herself off and once again became a bully.

We needed someone with authority to help us move the communication forward, perhaps even teach us
how
to fight. So around 1980, we began seeing a couples therapist on West End Avenue. What I realized during those sessions was that we didn’t really know each other when we got married and had a lot of catching up to do. Jo felt pushed around and not heard, which were the last things I wanted her to feel. Through our work with the therapist, I felt that Jo and I had come to a new, better place in our relationship. More than the superficial pleasures we enjoyed from my success in the theater, we were getting to the deep issues that would form a solid bond. Together we were arriving at such a place of intimacy that I couldn’t imagine being happier or more contented with my life. Truly, I was no longer alone.

Encouraged by our therapist, I thought it was time to tell Jo about my past. I had reached a place of such rightness and trust with my wife that I wanted to reveal all of myself to her. Authenticity became an imperative.

It was late in the afternoon—the light was beautiful coming into the bedroom from a window that faced east—and we were sitting on the bed when I said to her, “Honey, I need to talk to you about something.”

Of course I was nervous; this was a precarious declaration, one that I had worked hard to keep hidden from everyone, including myself. But I knew the time was right.

“There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long, long time. But I never did because I wasn’t secure enough in myself, in us. Until now.

“There’s no easy way to say this so I am just going to come right out with it. When we first met I had struggled for years with feelings I had … for men.”

As soon as I made the declaration, a flood of words followed as if they had been dammed up by the idea that I had kept undisclosed for so long.

“It really tore me apart. But, Jo, when I met you everything changed.
Everything
. I was so taken and immediately crazy in love with you. Those other thoughts I once had were no longer important. And loving you all this time has made me know that this is where I always wanted to be. I love you so much, and I don’t want there ever to be any dishonesty between us.”

I had revealed my dark secret and was happy. Who knew how keeping all that inside had affected our marriage? Now we could move on with compassion, love, authenticity … But as I sat there waiting for a response, searching her face for a reaction, any reaction, my elation quickly turned to dread.

I had assumed she would understand my admission as the closing of the door on my past. In my scenario, she would throw her arms around me and say, “I’m so grateful you’ve shared this with me. I love you so much, too.” But she didn’t say that. When I reached out to embrace her, it was clear she had gone away.

As the days went by in slow motion, I hoped that she’d come to me after she had time to process what I had told her. But she never did. We never spoke about it again, and Jo became increasingly impatient, standoffish, and unreachable.

The change in our relationship made me realize that I had greatly misjudged who she was and where she was in her life. I started to wonder if our happiness, our closeness was something I had imagined. For so many years, I knew the revelation of my complex sexuality wasn’t easy to take in. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that she had been looking for some reason to distance herself, and that perhaps she was already on her way out.

I decided that talking about my past had been a mistake and didn’t bring it up again. If she brought it up, maybe then we could talk about it again. But for now, we spoke of other things. We also came to the conclusion that there wasn’t any reason to continue therapy together.

We had been through perhaps more than our fair share of upsets and challenges, but after a bit things always righted themselves—or so I thought. As our marriage hobbled along, I searched for a way to fix this latest upset. I understood from our therapy sessions that she had never forgiven me for not supporting her talent and career. After I made her give up her job in the Broadway musical
She Loves Me
to join me while I was touring with
Stop the World
, Jo hadn’t really worked again. So I proposed that she and I might work together to produce films. I wanted to make it up to her.

Jo had always been astute about the theater, art, and films—always an incisive reader of material. One night, out to dinner with the
Mommie Dearest
producer and Paramount president Frank Yablans, we casually mentioned a project that we had long been discussing, about father-and-son performers in the Catskills. Frank, who was at 20th Century Fox, loved the idea and wanted to set Jo up with an office at his studio where as a producer she could find the right writer for this project. In a matter of days, there was an office with her name on it at Fox, where, as a talented producer to be reckoned with, she felt validated.

Not long afterward, we also began developing a TV movie at CBS about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person voted into public office. Looking back, the subject matter was a sublimation of the conversation Jo and I couldn’t have. But we chalked it up to political beliefs; the issue of gay rights felt natural and important to both of us. Jo and I dove into researching the biopic, interviewing Milk’s associates and reading about his background. Our passion for the subject was apparent, and we made it to the final approval stage. That, however, was when it was dropped without explanation. Word was that someone high up at the network decided that TV wasn’t ready for the Harvey Milk story.

After the project was killed, I started to question our motives in wanting to make a movie about a gay man. Were we distancing ourselves from the information I had told her in our bedroom that afternoon, or trying to find a way to bring up the conversation? In fact I questioned my motives in having told her about my feelings for men in the first place. What had been in it for me? My life—work, our family—was everything I had hoped for. So why did I choose this moment to push the issue? And what happened afterward makes my motive for having told her—that I wanted to bring us closer—even more suspect.

The growing anger and distance between us created a void that eventually compelled me to turn to friends for comfort. I began spending time with two old friends, both gay men, married to women with kids, who through the years still had the occasional encounter with other men. Confused and lonely, I was searching for closeness and connection.

This wasn’t the first time. A handful of times over the course of our twenty-four years together, I lied to myself and her. Whenever I was exceptionally lonely at home, I sought out men, often in the same boat, most of them married. Years could go by in between these encounters.

I told myself this wasn’t being unfaithful. As I saw it, if I had slept with other women, which I knew was possible,
that
would have been cheating. My intimate male friendships were always with guys who had made the same choice as I in adapting their needs. None of us wanted to throw lives and families into chaos by leaving our wives. No, we would have our time together—and then go quickly home.

But if I had been honest, I would have asked myself what these times with men truly meant. The closest answer I could come up with was that it was about taking care of oneself, the self that existed before there was a wife, the self that I never stopped struggling with. I never looked for what was missing in another woman. I needed the safe haven of men.

Yet I couldn’t imagine my life without Jo and the kids. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone else. She felt differently. Shortly after James went off to college in 1981, not long after our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, Jo told me that she was leaving, and just like that she moved out of our home and never came back.

“These are not invisible men.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Right in the middle of my show’s second number, Randy Newman’s “Short People,” which I sang standing on stilts made of tin cans, the sound system went dead. In that moment, I was suddenly faced with an amphitheater of 7,500 staring ticketholders. That kind of silence on stage is unforgettable.

I was depressed before I even stepped onto the vast stage of the Garden State Arts Center, in New Jersey. But having made a commitment to play this date after thinking, back in LA, that it might take my mind off the pain of Jo’s leaving, I had to go through with it. However, the morning of the show, she called to tell me that Minnie, one of our two beloved Abyssinian cats, had got out of the house in Brentwood, where Jo now lived permanently. She had found the cat’s dead body on the patio, a victim of a coyote attack. I was furious at her for having allowed Minnie out of the house, for leaving, for the whole crappy thing.

And now the sound was out in the massive outdoor theater.

Having been taught as an actor that ad-libbing was unacceptable, I never got good at it. I said something politely, and the sound came on, and the show continued. After a few more numbers, the sound failed again. Then it went back on, then failed again—and something in me exploded.

“If you can’t get this thing working,” I said holding my microphone out in front of me like an assault weapon and looking directly at the sound booth, “then you can stick it up your ass.”

Whoa! There was a collective gasp from 7,500 now-stunned people. As I realized what I had just said, I silently prayed for the stage to open up and swallow me. Mickey Katz’s pride and joy, his firstborn, and the Cleveland Play House’s favorite son had not been raised to lose it onstage. I couldn’t imagine ever being forgiven for such a lewd lapse and utter loss of control. After the show ended, I sped offstage toward my dressing room, not even considering taking a bow, when the stage manager came after me, yelling, “Get back out there!” When I did, I found 7,500 people standing and applauding wildly. I guess the audience understood that I was human even if I couldn’t understand that myself.

I desperately hoped that Jo would change her mind and come back to me, although everyone kept telling me to forget her. Not even the wise and forceful Grandma Fanny, who had spent a lifetime getting people to do what she wanted, could persuade her otherwise. After Jo had gone to visit my ninety-three-year-old grandmother to tell her side of the story, Fanny called me. “It’s no good,
Mein Kind
,” Fanny said. “She’s jealous of you.”

My grandma turned out to be right. Jo was jealous of my career and my certainty. But she was also angry that I had kept her from having a career of her own. However, it was my past with men that she could not forgive. Not only did she refuse to return to me but she also refused to come back to New York. Right after we sold our apartment at 1120 Fifth Avenue, she wanted nothing to do with sorting out the “stuff” of our twenty-four years together. “You do it,” she said. I went through hundreds of photos of all of us in happier times. Pictures of our wedding, the children as babies, trips—Jo didn’t want any of it. Adamantly focused on the future, she was not going to look back.

I moved into a sublet, a third-floor walk-up on West 11th Street where I immediately got sick with a terrible flu, as if everything, even my immune system, had given up. I felt abandoned, rudderless, and totally without value. My whole life was coming undone. I had done everything in my power
not
to be homosexual, no matter the cost, and now the whole construct was falling apart around me. The destruction had such far-reaching effects, just as I had feared. Although they were already young adults who had moved out of the house, Jennifer and James distanced themselves from me. I never had a direct conversation with either of them about my sexuality, but I knew that Jo had to have told them everything.

I didn’t know if the kids were angry with me. So many people we knew, including parents of Jennifer’s and James’s friends, were divorced. Jo and I had created such a strong picture together; we were the couple that had made it. None of our friends could believe it when we split. Hell, I couldn’t believe it.

I wept all the time. I lost my taste for food and forgot to sleep. I watched television every night in some kind of trance, waiting patiently for snow to appear on the screen. I recorded an insane message for my answering machine in Yiddish. I had too much time on my hands. A good friend decided I needed a cat. I didn’t think she was right—look how much good a puppy did Jo and me in the end. But my friend was right. The cat’s name was Betty, and she was a godsend who ended up traveling with me when I went on tour for months.