B004YENES8 EBOK (38 page)

My decision to break off the marriage seemed to disconcert nearly everyone in my tiny circle. My sense of isolation was, therefore, more than imaginary, and all the more conflicted by my ongoing feelings of friendship for Corday and concern for her obvious pain at being left behind. I was all over the emotional map, but mostly I was floundering. Barbara didn’t get it and thought that the whole thing was about my affair with the blonde who was playing Cagney.

“So you’re fucking her,” she would say. “What’s that got to do with us?”

It was more complex than that. In fact, when I finally told Corday of the affair in the fall of 1987 (nearly a year after it had begun), the thing with Sharon was all but over. The news of my moving out of our home had everyone we knew abuzz. People, who were supposed to be Barbara’s or our friends, seemed to delight in spreading whatever gossip they could conjure. Sharon and I had kept a very low profile, but it didn’t matter what anyone knew. The
National Enquirer
was out in force, and, of course, Sharon—the single one—became the target of all the speculators as the most likely culprit in the destruction of my one-time happy home. It was mostly guesswork, but the fact was, we
were
having an affair.

This was all complicated by the second merger in a year involving Columbia Studios, one that Barbara would not survive. In the midst of her personal upheaval came a professional crisis as well.

Barbara and I had an incredibly synergistic relationship. We were best friends. As times got rougher and rougher for me in those last days of the seventies and the early months of 1980, Corday would lend emotional support and endorse my dreams of retirement.

“Tell me about the rabbits,” she would say, and I would follow the
Of Mice and Men
Steinbeck reference with a veritable catalogue of what we would do with the rest of our lives and how we would do it. My goal was always to get out of show business; it became hers in support. We constantly assessed and reassessed what we would need to make our escape from Los Angeles and the business. Both of us felt that we could not stay in the City of Angels without being part of the entertainment industry, and so various alternative places and lifestyles came under scrutiny.

When I became, as indeed did she, successful beyond either of our dreams, she remained focused and, as best she could, kept me so. Few couples have so well managed each other’s careers or their respective images. It was one of the most profound relationships of my life. It was, with the possible exception of my mother, the only time in my life I have been loved unconditionally. Sometimes love isn’t enough.

At the end of 1987, I was turning fifty, becoming a grandfather for the first time, losing a ton of money through inexpert management (and some say fraud), and nearing the end of my beloved television series,
Cagney & Lacey
(then the single most important thing in my life). I was cracking. Corday held on tenaciously, believing this would be over the day I awoke to discover I was fifty-one and that the trauma of a birthday ending in a zero would be over. I was in more trouble than that. The plethora of feelings that were assaulting me put me into overwhelm. I all but short-circuited. I forced an end to the marriage and the sale of our home. I was like Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “
In blood stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er
.”

For years, as if a nurturing parent, Corday protected me and took on—as her personal assignment—the task of making me feel good. Despite her own heavy workload, she drove herself to make our home a showplace and to attempt to satisfy my every whim. She constructed our social calendar and filled our lives with peers, family, and activity. Regardless of my raised consciousness, or avowed position as one of Hollywood’s leading feminists, I was a fairly stereotypical male around the house. Corday would often paraphrase actress Lee Grant’s now famous line by saying: “I’ve been married to a chauvinist and I’ve been married to a feminist; neither would take out the garbage.”
⁸²

More than my marriage was in trouble. There was no minimizing the shock I felt at that crucial accounting error and the subsequent venture mistake by my former business manager that would set me back over one million dollars. The collapse of the syndication market, costing me additional millions and causing me to virtually lose touch with any semblance of a reward system, coupled with my stressed-out state at finding myself powerless—particularly at Orion and at CBS, two places to which I had devoted an uncommon amount of time and energy—was just about more than I could bear.

That benchmark fiftieth birthday loomed; more important still was the irrefutable fact that sooner or later I would lose my show—my voice. Even Barbara Corday couldn’t make me feel good anymore.

Chapter 43 

TRIAL BY JURY 

My life was in turmoil, but nearly 200 years ago some circus ringmaster said, “The show must go on,” and ours certainly did. I refer the reader to the Museum of Television & Radio’s archival department, where it is possible to view the 1987– 88 Los Angeles tribute to
Cagney & Lacey
on videotape. For one hour of questions and answers from the audience that overflowed the auditorium of the L.A. County Museum that evening, Barbara Avedon, Barbara Corday, Sharon Gless, Tyne Daly, and I are all on stage, sitting side by side.

I was then newly separated from Corday, who was either in limbo, emotionally fried, or both; Gless and I were (once again) on the cusp of ending our romance, and no one—save for a pharmacist—could ever guess where Avedon might be coming from. The irony is that with all the potential drama at hand, the only person any of us seemed worried about that night was Avedon, who—it might be remembered—had been “abandoned” by erstwhile partner Corday not once, but twice, and fired by me, not once, but twice.

Watching the tapes of that evening, one would never know that anything was amiss. Avedon, indeed all of us, were up to the task. Still, if you ever want to see some real acting, I commend you to those archival tapes.

My affair with Sharon was all but over, as was my life with Barbara. I took temporary digs at a small house in the Hollywood hills. It was a bit of a bachelor pad, but it got much too little wear and tear from this now on-the-loose producer.

At my on-the-set fiftieth birthday celebration in 1987, I got a hug from my terrific associate producer, PK Knelman (now Candaux).

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

Barbara dined out on her “woman betrayed by a sister” story, giving public speeches alluding to her former friend/now home-wrecker Sharon Gless. It wasn’t true, of course. Sharon and Barbara were never friends; they barely knew one another. In the six years of the series we made together, Sharon had only been to our home twice: once for a script conference with Terry Louise Fisher and me that did not involve Barbara, and the other time for a post-
Emmy
party Barbara and I hosted for the entire
Cagney & Lacey
company. Truth did not stop my estranged spouse from creating a real sister-like history, now (of course) desecrated by the blonde backstabber.

What was I supposed to do—attend the awards banquet for Women in Film and call out from the audience that Barbara was not telling the truth? I left her to her fantasy. Sharon had no other choice but to do that as well, and, in the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ blue ribbon panel system, where, in those days, less than twenty votes were tabulated for the final winner, I have always believed that Barbara’s oft-repeated story cost Sharon her third
Emmy
.
⁸³

In a way, and for the longest time, I was the beneficiary of this fabrication; for as long as Barbara chose to believe that it was all Sharon’s fault, there wasn’t much enmity left over for me. I was invited, weeks after the separation began, to the family Thanksgiving feast, and, nearly a year after that in her then-new position as VP of development of the CBS network, (under Kim LeMasters of all people) Corday was heard to tell Mace Neufeld, then visiting the network to discuss some potential project: “I don’t do business with people who are suing
me
(sic).” Since Barbara had never been named as a codefendant in Mace’s suit against me, clearly, our disconnect was not as real from her end as it was from mine.

Tyne Daly was going through her own marital debacle, although it was then not known to most of us. Ms. Daly would make the move from our series to critical acclaim for her role as Rose in
Gypsy
, but by the time she collected the
Tony
for that outstanding performance, her long-standing marriage to Georg Stanford Brown would be over.

Sharon went into rehab at the strong urging of Ronnie Meyer, who had deduced that his client was either a very bad drunk, an alcoholic, or both. Meyer’s diagnosis aside, according to Sharon and her counselor at Hazelden, if La Gless was addicted to anything, it wasn’t booze, it was me.

It
was
a strong thing between us. Every part of my intellect told me to flee that scene. Comedian Mort Sahl admonishes all men to “never fall in love with an actress or any other female impersonator.”

All who knew me (and I am sure it was also true for Sharon) advised strongly against continuing the relationship. Even the venerable Chinese zodiac gave out strong advisories against our pairing. It was continually on and then off. It was beyond capricious.

“Some experiences so possess you,” John Fowles wrote in his novel
The Magus
, “that the one thing you cannot tolerate is the thought of their not being in someway forever present.”

Sharon’s birthday in 1989 at the Music Center in Los Angeles for Phantom of the Opera. Perhaps the third or fourth time we attended this show, having also seen it in London and New York.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

At the time that was true for me with
Cagney & Lacey
; it is still true of my relationship with Sharon Gless. She has always been my “big deal.” Ms. Gless and I are approaching our sixteenth wedding anniversary
⁸⁴
.
Ozzie & Harriet
it ain’t, but it has been a fabulous adventure.

Marriage is, I think, probably always best defined by the people who are in it, and Sharon’s and mine is a case in point. It has been through many permutations. Neither of us are the people who recited vows to one another at her Malibu Beach home back in May of 1991 with helicopters from the
National Enquirer
looming overhead. I am no longer her Svengali-like knight in shining armor; I am not the powerful producer she fell in love with, and Sharon is no longer a size-eight beauty, earning a veritable fortune on an annual basis. Somehow we have survived life’s changes and come to care about each other as much or more than ever, although (admittedly) we live several miles south of
The Enchanted Cottage
⁸⁵

Sharon and me, flanked by her brother, Michael Gless, and her first cousin, Liz Springer (the former Elizabeth Bauer of Raymond Burr’s
Ironside
series), on the occasion of wedding number one on May 1, 1991, at Sharon’s Malibu Beach home.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

The Rosenzweig clan on the beach at Malibu on the occasion of wedding number two, May 4, 1991. Sharon celebrates the first; I celebrate them both (or else). The gals in the silk suits are my “best men,” daughters Allyn Rosenzweig, Erika Handman (next to Sharon), and Torrie Rosenzweig. Granddaughter Hailey Laws, our flower girl, stands in front of my mother, Myrtle, and on her right is my father, Aaron, who was then about the same age as I am now. Granddaughters Greer Rose Glassman and Zoey B Rosenzweig are not pictured, as they were, at this time, yet to make their appearance on the planet.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

More than once our arguments have become heated enough that the “D” word has been uttered. Divorce should be easy for us. I have had practice at it (twice), our business managers keep most of our money separate, we have no offspring, and there is zero community debt. The last such time we lurched toward such a final solution, just before our tenth anniversary, Sharon stopped screaming at me just long enough to gather up her dignity and to tearfully pronounce, “All right. You can have a divorce. But
you
tell the children.”

“The children” (Erika, Allyn, and Torrie) are mine, two marriages removed, and all in their forties. The other “child” is niece Bridget Gless, and she is nearly the age of my daughters. All I could do was laugh, and then hold her in my arms. We have never mentioned the “D” word since. What, never? Well (with acknowledgment to WS Gilbert), “hardly ever.”

Many years before all this, on the afternoon of May 25, 1988, I received a phone call at the villa I was occupying all by my lonesome
⁸⁶
that overlooked Acapulco Bay. Richard M. Rosenbloom, president of Orion Pictures television division, was calling from Los Angeles with news of the third—and final—CBS cancellation of
Cagney & Lacey
.

“An era has ended,” he said.

I placed international calls to my estranged wife, to Sharon, to Tyne, and to my worthy assistant, Carole R. Smith. Only the first two were initially reachable. Sharon said she was glad she heard the news from me rather than someone else. Barbara, whose life for the last six months had been one of total displacement, sounded strained and a bit bitter on the phone. “An era has ended,” Rosenbloom had said. He didn’t know the half of it.

I did go to work for Weintraub before realizing that there was really very little “there,” there. The corporation Jerry had put together was not a sham, but most of the promised financing never came through—or at least found a quick exit, once the quality of the films produced before my arrival were screened. It was not a great gig after all, but I found Jerry truly fascinating as have so many before and after me. He is a great show business character, worthy of his own biography.
⁸⁷