Authors: Jerry Stiller
“How are you?” she said. “I missed you. It’s been six weeks.”
“I missed you too,” I said. I could smell that sweet fragrance of hers. Her openness suddenly overpowered me. She had come all the way from New York to be with me. Someone in the universe was giving me serious attention. I could not remember ever having been that important to anyone.
“You’ll see the show tonight, then I do my act in the club. I get meals and a place to stay for doing it. You can’t beat that. I feel so successful.”
Her face lit up. I’d finally found someone who liked me and was chasing me. I couldn’t understand it.
That night, after doing
Annie Get Your Gun,
I did my act in the club. The audience, having just seen the theater show, loved seeing the actors now do their cabaret stuff. The room was bathed in candlelight. There were white tablecloths. Sara Dillon, who played Annie Oakley, opened the cabaret show, and I closed it with my Italian soap opera and my parody of
Dragnet
. When I finished I wanted Anne to hug and kiss me for what I had just done. The audience loved me, and now I wanted her to love me because
they
loved me.
Anne said, “Where do you stay?”
I took her bags and we arrived by car at Mrs. Grenfell’s house.
“Come on upstairs, I’ll show you where we’re living,” I said.
“What’s that?” she said, looking at the plaster dog.
“He’s called Creseus. I’ll tell you about it.”
“Does the landlady know I’m coming?”
“I told her we were married,” I said.
“Good. I’ll wear my wedding ring. I bought it at Woolworth’s for five bucks.”
She took out a gold wedding band and put it on her finger.
Once up in the room I said, “How do you like this place?”
“Spooky,” she said.
“Look at this.” I opened the bathroom cabinet. “There’s a hole here in the wall. It’s been cut out, and all these shaving things are her husband’s. His name was Creseus.”
“Like the plaster dog?” Anne said.
I explained the whole strange business of the husband who was dead but somehow still around.
We were in bed. “Do you think Creseus can hear us through that hole?” Anne asked.
“No, but Mrs. Grenfell will if we make too much noise.”
The next morning Mrs. Grenfell met Anne. I knew immediately that she was aware we weren’t married. She said nothing, and permitted Anne to stay for the remainder of the week.
When I got back to New York at the end of the summer of 1953, I was in love with someone whose impulses were pure and trusting. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me.
I started wondering if this was permanent. One night after Anne asked me over for dinner, I remarked casually, “Have you ever been with anyone else?”
“Yes,” she said.
I paused. I hadn’t really expected she would say no.
“What was he like?” I asked, almost not wanting to hear the answer.
“He was an artist. He wore glasses and his eyes ran.”
Was it a joke to make me feel better? To reassure me that their relationship was over?
“What happened?” I asked.
“He left.” There was sadness in her voice.
I asked myself if I could be with someone who had been with another man. Was she still in love with him?
“He was the only one,” she said, as if guessing my thoughts. “I must tell you something else.”
“What?”
“My mother committed suicide.”
We silently looked at one another. I took her hand and held it.
“Do you still want to see me?” she said, as if everything we’d had would end.
“Of course,” I said. I couldn’t comprehend anything that was happening. I could only sit and listen. For a moment I wanted to escape. What was I getting myself into? Until now this had been crazy fun, a crazy adventure. A girl I’d met in an agent’s office liked me. Now it was becoming a little too much. She was so free and open about her feelings. I was scared. Should I stop something beautiful, or should I trust? I wanted to leave, but I knew there would be tears if I did. Did I want to see her cry? Could I say, “I never want to see you again”? But I couldn’t leave. I didn’t know why.
The following weeks we said little but saw each other a lot. I started thinking about my parents, and what my mother, who was ill with cancer, would do if she knew I was seeing a Christian girl. Although Anne had introduced me to her father, I couldn’t bring myself to do the same with my mother. So I kept putting it off, thinking nothing was going to come of the relationship.
I tried to stop seeing Anne because of this, but she’d call or I’d call and we’d meet and walk around the Village. It felt so good being near her.
One day we were on a bus that made its last stop at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. We had been to a museum uptown. I had literally spent the last dime that I’d made that summer. While still on the bus I looked at the Flatiron Building and thought,
I know how to lose her.I’m busted,no job.When I tell her, she’ll leave me. I’ll tell her I want to break it off
.
“We’re breaking up,” I said.
“This you tell me on a bus?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I looked at her. Her face was like that of a beautiful spaniel with sad, sad eyes. “I’m broke. I can’t support you. There’s nothing going for us.”
“Why don’t you marry me?” was her answer.
“What?! That’s crazy.”
“Why? I love you and I want you to marry me.”
“What if I said I can’t?”
“Then we can’t go on like this.”
I felt something drop inside me. I saw myself without her, and a feeling of emptiness suddenly swept through me.
“How could we live?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “My father will help us. We’ll live in my apartment. I own the lease.”
What was happening? She had just proposed to me. I was penniless, but she loved me. It was a moment I never dreamed would happen.
“We can do it right away,” Anne said. “We can go to City Hall. We’ll get married. I want to meet your mother.”
I wasn’t sure how meeting Anne and the news of our upcoming marriage would affect my mother.
“She’s got cancer and she’s going to die, Anne.” It was the first time I had allowed myself to talk about my mother.
Then my fear of really losing Anne frightened me.
“Okay,” I said, “you’ll meet her.”
At the apartment in the Ravenswood Project in Queens, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table by the window. She didn’t look well. My father had not yet come home from work.
“Mom, I’d like you to meet Anne.”
“Forgive me,” my mother said in perfect English. “I can’t get up.”
“I understand,” Anne said.
“Please, won’t you sit down?” There was a formality in my mother’s voice that I had never noted before. I could tell she knew why we were here.
“You love my son?” she said. The question was so immediate and direct that it pierced my sensibilities.
“I want to marry Jerry,” Anne said.
There were no answering words, no cry of protest. I could see tears in my mother’s brown eyes. They steadfastly refused to fall; my mother’s eyes seemed magnified.
“You love each other?” she finally said.
“Yes. I’ll make Jerry a good wife.”
My mother looked at me. I could not tell what was going through her mind.
“Do you like matzohs?” she said after a while, breaking off a piece and handing it to Anne. “We keep them around even if it’s not Passover.”
Anne broke a little piece off that piece and ate it.
“Two people must really love each other,” my mother said after another long interval. “That’s all that counts.”
“Will you come to the wedding?” Anne asked.
“We’ll be there.”
Anne and my mother kissed.
Three weeks later, on September 14, 1953, we were married. The wedding took place at City Hall. The judge’s chambers were in an office high up in the Municipal Building. It was a space with file cabinets and wooden desks. There were civil-service employees bustling about. Why this bland setting to consummate the feelings we had for each other? As the ceremony was about to begin, the office emptied. The clerks sensed the need for privacy and disappeared into the hallways.
Willie, Bella, Ed Meara, and Ursula Campbell and her husband, Pat, arrived. Anne had known Ursula ever since arriving in Manhattan at age eighteen from Rockville Centre to study acting with Alfred Linder from the Dramatic Workshop. Willie and Bella were meeting Ed for the first time. There were smiles and polite conversation. They were standing together in a corner of the room. What could they be saying? At least they were speaking. They could have been ignoring one another, destroying us by silence. As I went over to them I overheard my mother saying, “What do you think, Mr. Meara?”
“They’re just a couple of crazy kids,” Ed said.
Suddenly all three were laughing out loud. I wanted to hug all of them. I could feel the leap they had made to get to this juncture.
“When this is over,” Ed said, “we’re going over to the Republican Club for a wedding breakfast.”
My father, the lifelong Democrat, asked, “Are we going to have bacon?”
Was it a joke to break the ice another inch?
“No, Mr. Stiller,” Ed said earnestly. “We don’t eat bacon in our house. It can give you trichinosis.”
Judge Ben Shalleck, the uncle of Alan Shalleck, a close buddy of mine from Syracuse, was a former husband of Lillian Roth, the legendary saloon singer. He arrived to perform the ceremony. It seemed to stamp the moment with some sort of showbizzy significance.
“Did you pay the clerk?” Judge Shalleck asked.
I told him I hadn’t.
“That’s okay, it’ll be my wedding present to you. What about the blood test? You’ve got the results?”
“I do,” I said. Ten days earlier Anne and I had gone to Bendiner & Schlesinger, the pharmacists near Cooper Square, and the results were fine.
“Good.” The judge’s voice now took on an official tone. He conducted a simple ceremony, and Anne and I exchanged vows. When it was over we all piled into a car and headed for the Republican Club. I looked over at Anne and knew I would never be alone again.
A
nne and I were married three months and still living in the Village. I got a call from Ray Boyle, who, before I knew Anne, had directed Jack Klugman, Gerry Jedd, and myself in a production of
The World We Make
at Equity Library Theater. Ray was now casting for John Houseman at the Phoenix Theater. Houseman needed three Volscian servants for
Coriolanus
, which he was directing with Robert Ryan in the title role. The Phoenix producers T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton were bringing classic theater with Hollywood stars to Second Avenue. Ray thought that Jack Klugman, Gene Saks, and I would be perfect as the three servants. Without auditioning, we were cast in those roles.
Addressing the cast on the first day of rehearsals, Houseman spotted the three of us sitting in the orchestra.
“I’m told you boys are the funniest guys in New York,” he said. “I’ve never seen your work, but Mr. Boyle says you’re terrific, and I trust Mr. Boyle. I’m also aware that if you leave comedians alone, they come up with the right stuff. We’ve got four weeks’ rehearsal. Your scenes are all self-contained. Come back in three weeks and we’ll see what you’ve got. Good-bye.”
As we hit the street Jack Klugman asked, “What does he mean, our scenes are self-contained?”
“We have no director,” Gene said.
We agreed to meet the next day to rehearse in a rented space. From the outset it was clear we were coming from three different directions in style and interpretation, and in short order our rehearsals ground to a
halt. Three days before we were to present our results to Houseman, Gene, the elder statesman of our trio, said: “We have nothing to show. We need a director.” He suggested Frank Corsaro, which suited me fine since Frank had directed me in
Peter Pan
.
As a favor, Frank came down to help us. In a few hours he put a scene together for us. When John Houseman watched it the next day, he shouted, “Marvelous! I knew when you leave comedians alone, they’ll always come up with it.”
My parents had just moved to another project, the University Houses in the Bronx. It was yet another mandatory move forced by the city because of my father’s increased salary. My mother’s condition was worsening.
One of her breasts had been removed. She was being treated with male hormones, one of the therapies being tested on cancer patients at the time. Her face, once beautiful and womanlike, was growing hairs. She was appalled at her appearance. Her womanliness was being taken from her.
“Look at me, I’m becoming a man,” she would say. “They didn’t tell me it would be like this.”
“It’s to make you better, Mom,” I tried to persuade her.
She would hear none of it.
“I’m a woman,” she said. “What are these hairs doing on me?”
“It stops the cancer, Mom,” I said, hoping against all hope that I was right.
One day I arrived in the Bronx and discovered crowds of people in front of my mother and father’s apartment building. There in front of me was my mother lying on the street in front of a truck, on her back but alive. As I rushed toward her I asked the police what had happened.
“She walked right into it.”
“It looks like she tried to kill herself,” some idiot shouted.
My mother, seeing my face, looked up, struggled to her feet, and said, “I’m all right, Jerry. Let’s go upstairs.”
The Phoenix Theater meanwhile kept me working by casting me in its Critics Circle Award winner,
The Golden Apple
. After the evening performances Anne and I would drive to the Bronx and spend the nights with my mother. My father was driving a bus at night, so we watched over my mother in shifts.
The Golden Apple
was so well received that it moved from Second Avenue to the Alvin Theater on Broadway.
I like to think that my mother was proud of my being on Broadway. On the days there were no matinees, I would drive her around the city, take her to a park, or to eat in a cafeteria. I’d often pull the car onto an abandoned Hudson River pier, and together we’d watch the sun set over New Jersey before the evening show. At these moments I dreamed there’d be a miraculous cure, and that she would live, but I also knew that was unrealistic. Was I hastening her death by marrying Anne?