Drama (29 page)

In those days, everywhere Liv went she was treated like visiting royalty. In every city, she was invited to glittering A-list events to which I would dutifully escort her. Rudolf Nureyev greeted us in his Toronto dressing room after a performance with Canada’s Royal Ballet. Ethel Kennedy hosted us at a lawn party at Hickory Hill, her rambling family seat. We sat on either side of Henry Kissinger at Sweden’s embassy in Washington. We had chummy lunches with the likes of Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Bergman. With fellow partygoers Katharine Graham and Teddy Kennedy, we witnessed a gleeful frat-boy food fight between George Stevens, Jr., and Bob Woodward at Stevens’ Georgetown home. Our show’s press agent engineered an after-theater soiree in honor of Liv and Elizabeth Taylor. On another night we shared an intimate dinner with Richard Burton, Robert Preston, and their wives. Burton began that evening gracious, charming, and sober. Liv and I watched in fascination and horror, exchanging eye-rolling glances, as too much drink gradually turned that splendid man into a boorish, self-loathing sot.

At such moments I could hardly believe that I was in the presence of such powerful, notorious figures, or that I was witnessing such larger-than-life behavior. It was both exciting and unsettling. On the one hand, I was thrilled to be so close to the white-hot center of the celebrity firmament. On the other, I knew very well where I stood. All eyes were on Liv. I was strangely invisible. I was an awkward, ungainly presence, regarded by all as tolerable, perhaps necessary, but vaguely embarrassing—if, that is, they noticed me at all.

In retrospect, my comparative anonymity strikes me as a blessing. Back then, show business was not yet subject to the frantic 24/7 scandalmongering of our present era. Our affair had all the elements of a sensationally lurid tabloid serial, tracking the undoing of four lives. But in our case, the press was merciful. It turned a respectful blind eye to all of us. This was partly the result of a greater degree of circumspection among entertainment reporters in those days, and partly it was because of their worshipful regard for Liv. Whatever the reasons, only a single brief mention of our relationship ever appeared in the national press. In a Q&A feature for her Sunday gossip column, Liz Smith was asked about Liv Ullmann’s love life. Smith succinctly noted a “heavy affair” with her costar in
Anna Christie
. The subtext of the sentence was unmistakable: “Let’s leave these people alone.”

T
he torrid weeks passed by, and we continued to perform our ponderous production of
Anna Christie
. My role was a monster. I’d never worked so hard onstage, and rarely to such little effect. It slowly dawned on me that, for most of the audience, the show’s main attraction was neither the play nor the production but Liv. As I bellowed my way through my speeches on one side of the stage, I would occasionally glimpse the audience gazing at the other side, where Liv was simply standing and listening, staring straight out into the lights. People were transfixed. Who could blame them? She was beautiful, the show was turgidly undramatic, and I was a lousy Mat Burke. But that adoring, misdirected gaze did little to shore up my faltering self-esteem.

The most torturous period of our affair was during the first months of the Broadway run. When the tour ended, the heady swirl of life on the road smashed up against the reality of home. Back in the city, I was surrounded by all the touchstones of my everyday New York life—my apartment, my friends, and, most of all, my son, who had been pining for my return. I was utterly unprepared to leave any of this behind. Reaching out desperately for some semblance of normality, I moved back in with Jean. Liv was aghast. My feckless decision left her feeling abandoned, humiliated, and deeply injured. For weeks I shuttled between her and Jean, bicycling inanely between my apartment and Liv’s hotel suite on Central Park South, in the mad attempt to meet the needs of two very different women. I was frantically shoveling to fill two bottomless pits, yawning on either side of me. It was
Scenes from a Marriage
, but with two separate leading ladies. And through it all, the curtain went up eight times a week on
Anna Christie
at the Imperial Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, like the relentless tolling of a doomsday bell.

I
cut a strange figure during that time. I looked like a character from a Dostoyevsky novel. I had lost a lot of weight. I was pale, drawn, and perpetually seized with fatigue. I’d had my hair permed into tight Irish curls for the role of Mat Burke, altering my appearance so completely that friends did double takes when they ran into me on the street. One of them, actor (now director) Don Scardino, hadn’t seen me for months. As I shot by on my bicycle one day, he hailed me from the sidewalk. I pulled over and dismounted. He sized me up and greeted me, with a trace of concern in his voice: “How’s it goin’?” To Donnie’s astonishment, I instantly burst into tears.

I was falling apart. I needed help. Thankfully, I had a place to go. It was a stuffy room in a musty apartment at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. The apartment belonged to a woman I’ll call Miriam. Miriam was my therapist. The room was her office. Six months before, I had sought her out in an attempt to put my emotional life in some kind of order. At the time I had been involved in an earlier extramarital entanglement. That one had been stormy as well, but compared to the cyclone that was battering me now, it had been barely a drizzle.

Miriam was a blocky, wizened little Jewish woman with the demeanor of a chain-smoking tortoise. When I first met with her, the grave rituals of therapy were brand-new to me. I seized on them hungrily. Until that moment, my entire life had been characterized by a fretful eagerness to please. The fear of anyone’s
dis
pleasure had dominated my every thought. Small wonder I had ended up an actor: God forbid that anyone should have known the
real
me. Such fears had taken their toll. They had turned me into a rusty strongbox of dark secrets, waiting to be pried open. When my sessions with Miriam cracked open that box, the relief was overwhelming. The simple act of saying things out loud that I had kept shamefully to myself since childhood sent an electric jolt through my entire system. Exposed to the air, my demons took flight. The sources of my guilt, fear, and shame turned out to be compelling evidence that I was—surprise!—merely human. In those early sessions with Miriam, a great weight was lifted from my shoulders. I practically hyperventilated with optimism and hope. I had no inkling of the turmoil up ahead.

Months later, when I arrived in New York after the pre-Broadway tour of
Anna Christie
, I was in the midst of the biggest emotional meltdown of my life. I went straight to Miriam to pick up where we had left off. My sessions immediately took on a combustible new intensity. A couple of times a week I would stagger into her office, flop into an overstuffed chair, and tearfully recycle the psychic garbage of the past three decades and the past few days. The process was murky and messy. In fits and starts I lurched toward some measure of self-possession. There were no eureka moments and no clear, definable results. I couldn’t even tell whether Miriam was a good or bad therapist. Some sessions were breathlessly illuminating and some were a pointless waste of time. But looking back, it is impossible for me to imagine surviving that chapter of my life without them.

A few months after I went back to Miriam, things got a little weird. My therapy began to echo the antic confusion of the rest of my life. In the misguided belief that she could solve everyone’s problems, Miriam allowed herself to get drawn into the fiery dramatics of my situation. She herself joined the cast of characters of the frenzied passion play that Jean, Liv, and I had been acting out.

Of the three parties in my romantic triangle, I was clearly not the only one in emotional crisis. My hand-wringing indecisiveness had unstrung Jean and Liv as well. Our days and nights, in the apartment, the hotel, and the theater, were filled with drunken rages, frenzied suicide threats, and tumblers of vodka hurled through the air at crowded parties. Such scenes had all the earmarks of lunatic farce, but they were deadly serious and searingly painful. Both women were in just as much agony as I was. In desperation, first Jean, then Liv, made the same crazy decision. They went to Miriam. Miriam was just as crazy as they were: she took them on as patients. That made three of us, all tramping up to Eighty-sixth and Broadway for separate sessions with the same little old Jewish lady. She had taken on the untenable role of Mommy to three squabbling children. Her revolving-door treatment of the three of us was reckless, inexpert, and verging on the unethical. It was further compromised by her starstruck infatuation with Liv and by her transparent hope that my marriage to Jean would survive (when we finally split up, Miriam wept like a jilted teenager). In hindsight, my estimation of her therapeutic skills has slipped considerably. But at the time, we were all crazy enough to try anything.

Somehow, whether through Miriam’s intervention or in spite of it, the three of us all survived. The year left us a lot sadder, but a good deal wiser.
Anna Christie
mercifully closed. Jean and I separated for good. I moved out of the apartment I’d shared with her and into a tiny one-bedroom flat on West End Avenue, living alone for the first time in my life. Ian’s days were divided between the homes of his two parents, fifteen blocks apart. My relationship with Liv sputtered along sporadically, depending on where in the world her work took her. A couple of times I traveled with her to Scandinavia, and she returned periodically to visit me in New York. The affair grew less stressful but it was hardly stress-free. Instead of Jean, Liv’s new rival was my solitude. Crouched in my little apartment like an ascetic hermit, I began to savor my solitude like precious oxygen. In solitude I felt as if I was finally learning who I was. I was drunk with it. And it finally won out. Six months after the close of our show, Liv and I finally broke up. Predictably, the breakup was fraught with pain, anger, and tears. But it was a blessed relief for me and the best possible thing for her. It had been an important time for both of us. For me it had been essential. But it was time for us both to move on.

The preceding year had revealed to me some unpleasant truths about myself—my neediness, my fragility, my cowardice, and my fear. These failings had driven me to scenes of wild, irrational behavior that until then I hadn’t thought myself capable of. My ego had crumbled calamitously under all of the pressure, but in time I began the long process of rebuilding it. I struggled to overcome my weaknesses and find new sources of strength. I had learned a basic truth of human nature, that the stress and strain of relationships can change us beyond recognition, blurring the lines between kindness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, love and hate. The great goal in life is to understand and forgive each other and ourselves. These simple insights eased me out of my emotional paralysis and nudged me toward self-awareness. And who knows? It might possibly have added a new dimension to my acting as well. I was in the drama business, after all. Who knew that nothing on any stage or screen could touch the high drama of real life?

A few years later I ran into Liv in the wings of Radio City Music Hall. It was the first time we had seen each other since our breakup. Along with a hundred other celebrities, we were participating in a big benefit event for the Actors’ Fund of America. The moment was dreamlike and surreal. We stood alone in a ghostly half-light filtering into the wings from the vast Radio City stage. A pop orchestra played in the distance. Dozens of stars milled around nearby in the cavernous backstage. Thousands of people rustled in the auditorium just yards away from us. In our own little bubble, Liv and I hugged each other with genuine affection. She told me how happy I looked and I truthfully told her the same thing. To all appearances our lives had righted themselves. I felt a sudden, surprising rush of gratitude. In a flash of rueful irony, I realized that a desperately unhappy year had cleared the way for a much happier life.

L
ife, of course, is not quite so tidy. No story of a family’s dissolution leaves everyone unscarred. The events of that year had taken their heaviest toll on the one person least equipped to deal with them. My son Ian turned six that year. At such a young age, he couldn’t begin to understand the forces that had split up his parents. Jean and I did our best to explain things to him in terms that he could understand, but this was a tall order. She was consumed with bitterness, I with guilt, and we barely understood the situation ourselves. Despite our best efforts, Ian was completely bewildered by our separation. He had been living the life of a happy Upper West Side kid, beating a path between home, school, play dates, and the wilds of Central Park. Suddenly things were not so simple. His days were now encumbered by frequent treks between his parents’ two apartments, by the terse, angry exchanges between the two of them, by the blunt questions of his schoolmates, and by the earnest looks of concern on the faces of his best friends’ mothers. Jean and I struggled to compensate for all these new burdens he carried. We worked harder than ever to make his life active and fun. All things considered, he managed his difficulties extremely well, soldiering on with a good-natured fortitude and courage that belied his young years. But even his best times were tinged with melancholy. He clearly longed for Jean and me to get back together, to restore the Eden of his younger days. But he was too young to understand that this was never going to happen.