The off-off-Broadway play I was in when I was twenty-one was ominously titled Don’t Destroy Me. The playwright, Michael Hastings, was English. One night our director told us the agent for the playwright was coming to see the show. The next day the director informed us that after seeing the play the agent had committed suicide. She assured us it had nothing to do with our presentation of his client’s play. I completely believed her. I’m sure I’ll say this again. Who knows what anyone else is living with?
Another time, the director, a lovely woman who teaches today, told me the celebrated actor Hume Cronyn had seen the play and said of me, “He could be very good, once he gets over his problem.” I asked, “What’s my problem?” She replied that Mr. Cronyn hadn’t said, but she could get his number for me if I wanted to call and ask him.
I imagined the conversation. “Mr. Cronyn, this is Charles Grodin. I understand you saw Don’t Destroy Me and said I could be very good once I got over my problem. I was wondering…” I chose not to call.
After one performance my buddy Julie Ferguson from the Pittsburgh Playhouse came to see me. We walked down the street after that, and I think I surprised us both when I put my arm around her shoulder.
Julie was very different. Once we were rehearsing a scene at the Playhouse and I suggested we take a break and get a sandwich across the street. She said okay and went into the ladies’ room. I went to the men’s room, came out, and waited for her outside the ladies’ room. After a certain amount of time, I called out her name. There was no answer, so I went across the street to the sandwich shop, where she was sitting at a booth having a sandwich. I went over to her and said, “I thought we were going to get a sandwich.” She said without hesitation, “You didn’t say with you.”
After that walk down the street with my arm around Julie’s shoulder we eventually became a couple and got married. That’s when the trouble started. Not trouble the way we normally think of it—a different kind of trouble. Neither Julie nor I had ever lived with anyone, and it was almost immediately clear that she just wasn’t all that comfortable sharing living space with someone. The late comedian Milt Kamen once said the reason he never got married was because when he’d come home there’d be someone in his apartment.
Just after we were married, Julie found a stray dog wandering the streets. She seemed way more comfortable with the dog, which she named Buddy, than with me. (I have a feeling that’s not unusual among married couples.) Buddy was a mix of some kind, a nice-looking medium-size dog who Julie brought back to full health. She later worked in an animal shelter.
Julie and Buddy bonded. Buddy seemed to like me considerably less than he liked Julie. When I’d come home he might or might not come over for a pat on the head. When Julie came home he jumped all over her with excitement. As time went on, this behavior continued, except I would describe Buddy’s attitude toward me as decreasing to tolerant.
One day as I was walking down the street in Forest Hills, the neighborhood where we lived in the borough of Queens, a pack of dogs approached me menacingly. Not leading the pack but right in the middle was Buddy. I managed to shout them off. After that, Buddy’s and my relationship, needless to say, just about disappeared.
Although I never had one, I’ve always loved dogs. I find it ironic after my experience with Buddy that far and away my two most commercially successful movies were with a dog.
Julie and I never argued. There was just an ongoing withdrawal on her part. Nevertheless, we had a baby, Marion, who is now a wonderful woman. Julie and I persevered. I should say Julie persevered. I had no problem with Julie other than her determination to almost never speak. I once stopped speaking to her to see if she’d notice. It took a few days before she did. Then one day, after about four years without any arguments, Julie took our baby and moved out.
I think a lot of the problem came from Julie’s relationship with her mother, who was a fine woman but on the authoritarian side. Julie wanted to be on her own to such a degree that if I took her arm while crossing a busy street she would take it away.
After we separated, we resumed the great friendship we had before getting married. Eventually, she filed for divorce, but we remained close friends—partially, of course, because we had a daughter, but also because we always were great friends.
One day long after our divorce she called to tell me that in the middle of the night something caused her to bolt straight up in bed from a sound sleep. After that happened a few more times she saw a doctor and was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor that the doctor felt should come out. When they operated they found that it was the worst kind of malignant brain tumor, for which there was no treatment. Of course, my daughter and I were devastated.
Marion dropped out of her successful show business career and moved into a house with her mother to be with her during the last three years of her life. I had married again sixteen years after Julie and I were divorced. I had a baby son whom Julie came to see in the hospital when he was born. She was next door receiving chemotherapy. I never heard Julie express any sorrow for herself.
I would sometimes join Marion on Julie’s medical appointments. One particularly stands out in my mind. A renowned doctor at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering was asking her some questions, which Julie had trouble comprehending due to her gradual loss of faculties. She would look to me for help, and the doctor snapped at her, “Don’t look at him! Look at me!”
After the examination I complained to officials at the hospital, and that brilliant cancer researcher was then limited only to research—no longer seeing patients. Evidently, I wasn’t the first to complain.
Before all this happened and while we were still married, Julie received great acclaim starring in an off- Broadway play. A major agency invited her to meet their agents. At the end of all the meetings, the agent who had brought her in said the feeling was that she wasn’t a “commercial” type. This was before actors like Dustin Hoffman and Gene Wilder redefined what a commercial type looked like. Julie looked more like a tomboy, but she had a unique quality that was so special, many of us felt she would become very successful, but that one rejection caused her to stop her pursuit of an acting career. This has been the case for many gifted young actresses and actors who temperamentally could not handle what feels like constant rejection.
After our divorce, Julie became an outstanding woodworker. She made desks and chairs but never charged enough to make a profit, so she also taught woodworking at a Y in New York. She continued this even after her fatal diagnosis. She would be teaching, feel a seizure coming on, excuse herself, walk into the hall, have a seizure, and return to teach.
When she died, she was fifty-two. She was one of a kind and an inspiration for courage.
My daughter later told me she would go home after her visits with me and tell her mother, “Dad’s great.” Julie would always say, “Yeah, but y’know.” Eventually, Marion asked, “Y’know what?”
Since it’s hard to imagine the mother of a four-year-old child would leave and deprive the little girl of a father, just about everyone thought I left Julie. Even people in my family felt I left my wife and baby. Later a relative of mine who learned the truth said, “I thought that seemed so out of character for you.” I once visited Julie and Marion in Pittsburgh. Her father, a distinguished gray-haired man who was the head accountant for Pittsburgh Plate Glass, chose to not even speak to me as he sat in another room reading a paper.
I wonder what he would have thought had he known what actually happened.
In doing research for this book I read a quote from Julie in an interview I came across from 1972, five years after we were divorced. She said of me, “The thing about you is that everything bad about you is right there up front. As you get to know you, you get better and better all the time.”
Naturally, I was pleased to read the last part of the quote and honestly baffled by the first part. I hope that’s not how everyone perceived me.
Since I’ve written the above, I’ve come across an outline for a play I wrote in the early sixties. It’s about Julie and me. According to the female character, the male character never stops talking, and a lot of the talking is about sports. The female character has no interest in anything the male character has to say.
In fairness to Julie, that rings true. So when Marion said to Julie, “Dad’s a great guy,” and Julie said, “Yeah, but y’know,” and Marion said, “Y’know what?” Julie meant I was always “on” all the time, and Julie was never “on.”
Marion, a headlining and brilliant stand-up comedian, makes me look like the semistrong silent type. That’s why Marion’s experience with me was so different from her mom’s. My nickname for Marion as a kid was “Mouth.” Julie would say to her, “You’re just like your father.”
People who prefer silence really shouldn’t marry talkative types, and vice versa. Everyone can be a great person, but no relationship is reasonably happy with one person talking most of the time. In defense of us talkers, at least Marion and me, if you want to talk, you’ll never get better listeners. If we’re with someone in a room, we’re comfortable as long as someone is talking, and it doesn’t have to be us.
Just before our divorce became final, Julie told Marion, “I think I made a mistake,” but by that point we had both moved on. I think she meant yes, I was a talker, but time had taught her she could always count on me. On one hand it was heartbreaking to hear, because my daughter was raised without a dad at home. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be married to Elissa for twenty-five years and have my son, Nick, if Julie hadn’t left, because I never would have.