Alan and Arlene Alda

MARRIED IN 1957

“We are often asked the secret to a long marriage, and I say, ‘The secret to a long marriage is a short memory.’”

I always love coming here,” Phil said as we entered the beautiful home of Alan and Arlene Alda, high up on the fifty-first floor of a modern New York City high-rise. “It’s amazing what you can buy on a taxi driver’s salary. Wasn’t it just yesterday that you were a cabbie?”

“Yup,” said Alan, “if you consider fifty or sixty years ago yesterday.”

Arlene laughed. “Time flies,” she said.

If it’s true that friendships—like wine—improve with age, then Alan and Arlene are a treasured vintage to us. Marlo and Alan first met while making the film Jenny in 1970; and as with any strong friendship, the good times multiplied once the spouses joined in. At this point we’ve lost count of the dinner tables where we’ve sat across from each other, the holiday parties we’ve attended together, the nonstop laughs we’ve shared.

“We’re doing a book on couples who have been married since forever,” Marlo wrote to Alan in an email. “Know anyone interesting we can talk to?”

Alan’s email back was three words: “Come on over.”

The Aldas’ sunny apartment is, of course, very familiar to us, with its magnificent views of this magnificent city: the Empire State Building, Riverside Park, the twinkling bridges of the Hudson River—and, just to the north, the Bronx, the borough where Arlene grew up, and which she immortalized in her 2015 book Just Kids from the Bronx.

Arlene and her niece, Beverly, in Houston, Texas; March 15, 1957

Two items in the living room tell you a lot about the apartment’s occupants: Near one window stands a professional telescope, which Alan—a passionate science geek—uses to gaze at the stars. And nearby is a beautiful piano made of walnut. In addition to being an award-winning photographer, Arlene is a trained musician—the clarinet is her instrument, but she plays piano every day, “for both the challenge and the pleasure.” She’s not alone when she plays: photos of their three daughters—Eve, Elizabeth, and Beatrice—and seven grandchildren keep her company.

Science and art and love. It’s a nice combination.

If ever a couple had humble beginnings, it’s Alan and Arlene. They met at a party thrown by a mutual friend, which would have been uneventful had a rum cake not fallen from the top of the refrigerator and landed with a splat on the floor. The two strangers, feeling sympathy for the embarrassed hostess, both had the same instinct. They each grabbed a fork, dove to the floor on all fours, and began digging into the cake, prompting peals of laughter in the room.

A couple was born. They spent the next three weeks seeing each other every day and were married eleven months later. That was sixty-three years ago.

But, boy, were those first years tough. Alan was a struggling actor, so he drove a cab at night to keep food on the table for his wife and first daughter.

“In those days, you didn’t automatically get a cab to drive,” Alan recalled. “I’d show up at nine or ten at night and have to sit on a bench for a couple hours until they finally gave me a taxi. I remember the first night, I was sitting there behind two old-timers, and I overheard one of them saying to the other, ‘Yeah, I knew it was a holdup as soon as he got into my cab.’ The other guy says, ‘How did you know?’ The first guy says, ‘Well, he puts this gun to my temple and says “Take me to 42nd Street.” That’s when I knew.’”

The cabbie gig soon became a way of life, Alan said. He’d drive all night, trying to stay awake, then get home at four in the morning, leave the money he’d made on the kitchen counter, and collapse into bed. The following day, Arlene would portion out the cash into envelopes she had labeled.

“The envelopes were my obsessive-compulsive way of dealing with money we didn’t have,” explained Arlene. “Each envelope had a purpose—rent, food, gas and electric, phone, extras. That’s how I organized our finances.”

MARLO: Sounds like a pretty tight budget.

ALAN: It was—and each dollar meant a lot to us. At the time I liked to drink a can of beer at dinner, so I would buy a brand called Fox Head that sold for $1.05 a six-pack. I remember one time not having any beer for a whole week because that $1.05 was needed for rent.

ARLENE: And remember, you could actually buy a whole box of spaghetti at the market for 11 cents. It was great. We could have two full meals of spaghetti for under a quarter.

ALAN: Of course, I’d have to work overtime if we wanted sauce.

PHIL: When you think about it, living that way took such nerve. Looking back, do you ever wonder what made you two think you could be married and become parents with no money?

ALAN: We were stupid.

ARLENE: Well, our thought was, we were two college-educated kids who were both smart and both had talent. I had a teacher’s license, and I did teach. Alan was very industrious, and he didn’t mind driving a cab.

ALAN: I was also a doorman, I colored baby pictures . . .

MARLO: You were living the gig economy before there was such a thing. But what about the stress factor of living such a hand-to-mouth existence? That would take its toll on most couples.

ALAN: We both had a positive attitude. It never occurred to me or Arlene that I should quit acting. I never heard from my partner, “Are you sure you want to keep trying to find work as an actor? We have a future to think about.” We both had this irrational idea that we would survive and do okay. And surviving was all I had in mind. At the time, I couldn’t even imagine what having money was like. I would walk the streets of New York, trying to get into casting offices, and I’d pass luncheonettes and hamburger joints, and more than once, the thought occurred to me, “I guess being rich is to be able to walk into any of these places and order anything you want.”

ARLENE: But we had optimism.

ALAN: It was more than optimism. I was aware that I would try to get what I wanted, but I knew I would want what I eventually got. And that’s better than optimism.

MARLO: That’s very Zen.

ARLENE: What he had was something special. He didn’t go to acting school, but he was on the stage with his father when he was very young. He’d watched his father acting, and the confidence he had in himself was evident.

Indeed, Alan had the best theatrical mentor a kid could want. His dad, Robert, was an acclaimed film and stage actor, a singer and dancer, and a veteran of vaudeville and burlesque. As a little boy, Alan enjoyed going to work with his father, where he was surrounded by chorus girls and strippers. That alone gave him an insiders’ view of show business.

“The strippers were not as friendly as the chorus girls,” Alan recalled with a grin. “The chorus girls mothered me and took me up to their dressing rooms, combed my hair, patted me on the head and called me Alfie.”

“Sounds like our marriage—pat you on the head, comb your hair,” said Arlene. “But it was that confidence that drew me in. We were in this together. We wanted something and we were willing to work for it. It never occurred to me that it might not work out. We knew what we wanted, but we were very flexible in case it didn’t work out.”

“Do you think that was a generational thing?” asked Phil.

“Could be,” said Arlene. “It’s shocking to hear kids talk today. They measure everything in terms of dollars and cents. We didn’t think that way. It was not such a monetary society. Of course, everything was more affordable. At one point, we could live in New York with three little kids. But then came the eighties and Reagan and condos, and affordable housing began to disappear.”

Even though the couple agreed that they would take whatever life offered, they never stopped trying to fulfill their dreams. But the work came slowly. For nine full years, Alan struggled to find traction as an actor; so Arlene supplemented the household income by teaching music and performing with a local orchestra and a chamber music group. The couple also made an important decision: they relocated to Leonia, New Jersey, across the Hudson River.

“Until the move, we’d been living in an apartment across from Columbia University,” Alan recalled, “but we wanted a real house with a real yard, where the kids could go outside and play.”

“There was also a practical reason for this,” Arlene noted. “This was the 1960s and the city was a mess—it was bankrupt. Our oldest daughter was starting school, and private school wasn’t even on our radar. I was brought up in public schools and I believed in that system. Unfortunately, our neighborhood school in New York wasn’t good enough, and we didn’t have the money for private school, even if that had been our choice. We wanted the kids to have a community where they could walk to good schools, walk to shops, and have playmates. We found that community.”

Then in 1972, everything—everything—changed.

MARLO: So there you are, just another typical suburban family, putting down roots in New Jersey, and Alan, you land the starring role of Dr. Hawkeye Pierce in a new TV show called M*A*S*H. What did that mean to you at the time?

ALAN: It meant that from 1972 to 1983, I had a steady job.

PHIL: And it wasn’t driving a cab.

ALAN: That’s right. I mean, most actors have to change jobs every couple of weeks. If you’re in a play, maybe you’ll run a year, if you’re lucky. I used to be amused at people who would say, “I’ve been in this job ten years and now I have to find a new job.” For the first time, I had steady work.

PHIL: Steady work that would make TV history. And you didn’t just act in it. You wrote and directed many of the episodes. But the show filmed in L.A., and you famously “commuted” to work. What was that like?

ALAN: The first couple of weeks I would talk on the phone to Arlene and the girls several times a day and then fly home every three weeks. But I found that I was missing the life that was taking place every day at home. So, for about four years, I’d fly home every time I had two days off—including every weekend. The more time I spent at home, the more connected I was. One week I remember I flew home three times in one week.

MARLO: Oh, my God. You were the king of the redeye.

ARLENE: He loved those girls so much, and the girls missed him. But as they got older, it became sort of a sad joke. I would get up at 4 a.m. and go to pick him up when the redeye landed. That sounds like a sacrifice, but it wasn’t, because we’d have this whole hour in the car together. That was important. Then we’d get home and he’d fall asleep—and when he woke up at noon, he’d look around and say, “Hey, where are the girls?” They were teenagers—one had an appointment, another one had a lesson. I liked that he got to see me, but sometimes he didn’t get to see the kids.

ALAN: Arlene realized that our job at the time was to be the ones in the rocking chairs when the kids left, saying, “See you later,” and not the other way around.

During the summer, when school wasn’t in session, the entire family would decamp to Los Angeles, but as the girls grew and started college, it became increasingly difficult to get them to leave their own lives.

Meanwhile, Alan’s star was growing brighter. In his various capacities as actor, writer, and director of M*A*S*H, he earned twenty-one Emmy nominations, winning five times, becoming the only person to have won Emmys in all three categories.

The kind of success Alan was experiencing can sometimes attract uninvited admirers. We asked Arlene how she handled that.

ARLENE: You mean jealousy?

MARLO: Yes, for both of you. He’s in L.A., you’re in Jersey. Surely some thoughts are going through your heads. Like, “I wonder if he’s enjoying the company of some young woman on the set,” or “I wonder if she’s enjoying the neighborhood butcher back home?”

ALAN: The butcher—I didn’t worry about.

ARLENE: The baker, maybe.

MARLO: So you have no jealousy bone at all?

ARLENE: No. The only time I feel jealous is when something interferes with the time I spend with him. I’m jealous of the phone calls. I’m jealous of the computer.

ALAN: The computer means nothing to me. It’s just physical.

ARLENE: I mean, it’s not that I don’t understand what jealousy is, but I’m just not prone to thinking about who he’s with and what he’s doing.

MARLO: Even if you’re at a party and some woman is hanging all over him?

ARLENE: Oh, well, I’ve seen that. To me that’s hilarious. I’ll say to him, “Did you see the way she was hanging on you?”

ALAN: And I’ll say, “I thought that was appropriate.”

ARLENE: It doesn’t even register with him.

ALAN: You know what comes to mind is the story of me shooting that shower scene . . .

ARLENE: Oh, in Canada. He was directing and acting in a movie with this beautiful young actress, Veronica Hamel.

PHIL: I remember that movie. It was A New Life.

ALAN: Right. Veronica and I had a shower scene, but we couldn’t find the right location to shoot it, so we shot it in the shower of the apartment Arlene and I had rented in Toronto. So we’re in the shower half-naked—or almost naked—and the camera is rolling. At the very end of the scene, Arlene comes home early, walks by the bathroom, sees us in the shower stall, and says, “What time are we going to lunch?”

MARLO: You’re a far better woman that I am, Arlene.

ALAN: I mean, there was a full crew crowded into this bathroom with us, but I think it shows Arlene’s complete sangfroid about movie kisses.

ARLENE: I mean, maybe it’s stupidity on my part, but things like that just didn’t bother me.

Starlets in your shower or not, it all comes down to trust, the couple noted.

“But trust is an earned thing,” Marlo said. “It takes time to trust people.”

Arlene nodded. “I guess it goes back to the days we grew up in, and being young,” she pointed out. “That’s when we learned to trust each other. It was a simpler time, and we weren’t wrapped up in technology. Communication was person-to-person. That helped.”

“We’re both lucky to have found each other,” Alan agreed. “We enjoy the time we spend together. And we do simple and simple-minded things. We play cards together. We’ve been playing the same card game for about forty years.”

“What’s the game?,” asked Phil.

“Spite and Malice,” answered Alan, naming a traditional double-solitaire game.

Marlo laughed. “It completely defines who you are.”

“Perfect name for a game,” agreed Alan. “I’m going to teach it to you. It’s really fun. It takes one hour to play one game, and by the end you’re screaming and cursing at each other.”

“Screaming and cursing,” Phil said. “Is that how the Aldas deal with stressful situations?”

“You mean real fights?” Alan asked. “It’s funny, we never had arguments about money—either when we had no money or when we had some. And money is a common problem for most couples. Some people may come from families that take everyone’s viewpoints into consideration and not yell, but maybe more people are like us. We’re passionate. We have strong ideas. I remember one time we made a business mistake because we both panicked each other, but nowadays one of us will temper the other’s fear. I think as time has gone by, we’ve gotten better at figuring out how to work things out.”

ARLENE: You get pretty good at these things after sixty-three years. It makes me laugh because we are often asked the secret to a long marriage, and I say, in my liveliest voice, “The secret to a long marriage is a short memory.” And there’s some truth to that. I can honestly say I can’t remember the details of any of the stresses. At some moments, it seemed like the sky was going to fall in any second—but two days later, we were asking, “What was that all about? Why were we stressing?” The only issue I remember us having is that my style of handling the kids was different from Alan’s.

PHIL: In what way?

ARLENE: I was more organizational and he was more playful. My tendency was to look at my watch and say, “We have to get to school, we have to get dressed, we have to get the food on the table.” Well, now I’ve learned that we didn’t have to do any of that. It was the rule I set up for myself that caused the stress. Alan’s way of dealing with the kids was to play with them. He loved that he could make them laugh. I loved that he could make me laugh. But at the time, I felt he was overindulgent, and he felt I was too strict. Eventually we worked it out.

ALAN: Listen, you can’t avoid disagreements about things—sometimes sharp disagreements—but it’s always important to remember that the person you’re disagreeing with is someone you love. Remembering that one thing colors the interaction in a significant way.

ARLENE: It’s fine to argue. It’s fine to disagree. That’s life and that’s good. It’s good energy. But when you start denigrating a person by calling them names, that is not okay, and you can’t take those words back. They stick.

ALAN: I think that’s what I’m saying. Even before you utter a denigrating word, you have to step back and ask yourself, “Who is that person over there? What stranger am I faced with?” Well, it’s not a stranger. It’s the one you love. And if you can remember that in the midst of a heated disagreement, it makes things much easier.

PHIL: You can do that in the middle of a heated disagreement? What extraordinary control.

MARLO: You both appear to be so in sync. When aren’t you?

ALAN: Well, this is such a small thing, but Arlene doesn’t have the same sense of spatial relationships that I do. So when we walk into a room, she’ll enter and then stop right after the doorway, and I’ll knock her over.

ARLENE: It gets dangerous. It happens mostly in department stores, right? I’ll walk in and I have to see where I am, but he’s behind me saying, “Move!”

ALAN: But, again, that’s an example of a very little thing that could grow into a big thing if you don’t remember who this person is. You have to remind yourself that this lump in front of you is the person you love.

ARLENE: Hey, wait a minute . . .

While Alan’s ascent to stardom had been relatively conventional—small roles led to larger roles, which led to M*A*S*H and beyond—Arlene’s photography career came about in a far more personal way. It began back in the mid-sixties, after the couple’s third daughter was born and Alan’s career was just starting to take off. Although Arlene’s work as a musician and teacher had been satisfying, her role as a loving spouse and parent started to feel limiting. The move to Leonia had solved many problems—especially for the kids—but she began to sense that she’d left a bit of herself behind.

“I had a deep-seated conflict when the children were little,” Arlene recalled. “Alan was busy and I was home alone with the three kids. Like a lot of women with young children, I felt stuck. I wasn’t developing my intellect. I wasn’t growing. It wasn’t as if I didn’t love being with those kids. I did. I was like a lioness—I wouldn’t leave them with a stranger. Only my mother, my sister, or Alan could be the babysitters. But I had this sense that Alan was growing and I wasn’t. I remember feeling, I’m going to dissolve into nothing if I don’t take care of myself. I went to a psychologist who helped clarify that there was turmoil.”

“How great that you dealt with it head-on,” Marlo said. “You could have been the woman who walked away. You could have been the miserable wife who stayed and began picking at her husband and children.”

“I realized that this is not good,” Arlene said. “It wasn’t working for me.”

“How old were the girls at this point?” Marlo asked.

“They were little,” Arlene said. “They were six, four, and three, something like that. So when Beatrice, who’s our youngest, went off to kindergarten, I realized I had three more hours in the day. I’d always loved photography. My father loved photography. My brother loved it. So I took a photography class. At that point, my life took off. Photography became an obsession. It was just so wonderful. I felt like I was soaring into a creative new way of looking at things.”

Arlene was so consumed by this new passion, Alan remembered, that their day-to-day life changed noticeably. “I would knock on her darkroom door and say, ‘The kids are asking about dinner,’ and she’d say, ‘Send out for pizza’ or ‘Call Chicken Delight.’”

“That must have been a big change for you, Alan,” said Phil. “Did you ask yourself, ‘How am I going to be able to accommodate this new woman?’”

Arlene answered for Alan. “He loved it,” she said. “The first thing he said was, ‘You need a new camera.’ So we went out and I got a Nikon. It was funny. He’d say, ‘Now get this lens,’ and ‘Get this lens, too.’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t want all these lenses. I don’t know what they do yet. When I need that lens, I’ll buy that lens.’”

“I would be her grip when she’d go out shooting,” Alan added. “There was a lot of equipment, so I carried it.”

Arlene’s “obsession” blossomed into a thriving career—one that eventually produced twenty books, many for children, as well as features in Vogue, People, and Good Housekeeping. And one-person art shows in prestigious galleries. “I’m not a person who has hobbies,” Arlene explained. “If I get interested in something, it becomes full-blown—something I want to do very well.”

It was around this time that Alan began teaching himself to be a movie director, shooting short films on 16-millimeter or Super 8 film, then putting up posters around their town, inviting neighbors to attend mini–Alan Alda film festivals.

ARLENE: He drove me crazy. He would shoot these little movies and do dangerous things. God, it still makes me sick to think about it.

ALAN: They were all little sketches or abstract films, and one was a story about a little girl who finds car keys hanging on a hook in her home and decides to drive the family car around the block—which is an interesting and scary little movie. What was even scarier was the way I shot it. Our daughter Eve, who was, what, eight?

ARLENE: I forget how old she was. It still gives me a stomachache.

ALAN: She was actually at the wheel of the car, and a friend of mine was just out of the frame so he could take over the wheel.

ARLENE: And the brakes.

ALAN: I was on the hood of the car with the camera, shooting through the windshield.

ARLENE: Can you imagine?

ALAN: So, the car is moving, and I’m getting a shot of Eve driving. And I say, “Now put on the brakes.” So, she had to almost slide out of the shot to pretend to put her foot to the brake. And the brake goes on, and the car had just been waxed so I slid right off the hood.

ARLENE: He could have been run over! I mean, I kept saying, “This is your idea! I don’t like your idea!” But I couldn’t stop him. You ask about accommodations? There are certain things I’ll accommodate, but I had to look the other way because I didn’t want to watch.

ALAN: I don’t know if you’re like this, but I have this totally irrational idea that when the camera is turning, I can’t get hurt.

MARLO: I think that, too. It’s make-believe, for God’s sake.

As Arlene’s photography became increasingly recognized, Alan was there to support her work, just as she had supported his. After all the challenges they’d faced as a couple—from the 11-cent pasta to the ups and downs of raising a family to the constant separations—it was as if they were finally coasting on the life they’d long ago dreamed of, and the seas ahead were clear and calm.

And then, in an instant, that life was threatened in a terrifying and unexpected way. It was the fall of 2003, and Alan was in Chile taping an episode of his popular PBS documentary series Scientific American Frontiers. He was gazing though a telescope at the Andromeda galaxy when he suddenly became doubled over with abdominal pain, and his stomach ballooned to twice its size.

He was rushed to an emergency room, where doctors diagnosed an intestinal obstruction and told him that he could die without immediate surgery.

“So you’re going to do an end-to-end anastomosis,” he said as surgeons prepped him for the knife.

“Yes, how did you know that?” the doctors asked Alan.

“I did many of them on M*A*S*H,” he said.

Alan would later admit that going for the laugh in the midst of a life-threatening situation was instinctual, but there was little about his condition that was funny. Back in the States, Arlene received the 1 a.m. phone call—the kind every spouse or parent dreads—reporting on Alan’s crisis. It took her a day and a half of connecting flights to get to her husband’s bedside.

“She walked into the hospital room and saw me on the bed,” Alan recalled, “and even though by then I was sitting up and cracking jokes, she fell down on her knees, grabbed my hand, and kissed it. It was a moment of genuine feeling and affection that was so powerful it made me remember the hundreds of times that I’d experienced her real and simple, unforced expressions of love. As time goes on, it’s still unforced. We express our love for each other a lot. Sometimes I wonder if other people do that.”

“It made me realize how precious life is,” Arlene reflected. “You know, there are so many ways we’re very fortunate. There’s a simplicity to our lives that I just love and Alan just loves. Like, if we’re home, I don’t need to cook something elaborate. He has a favorite dish. It’s pasta, any kind of pasta. And I can make that very easily. One night recently we were home and about to binge on some series, and I said, ‘How about rigatoni with just oil and garlic and some little peas?’ And he loved it.”

“I can taste it now,” said Alan.

“You see?” said Arlene. “The appreciation that he shows for this simple thing—it just warms my heart.”

We never want an evening with Arlene and Alan to end, but it was getting late, so we began to make our way out. Before we got to the door, we paused to look at our favorite piece of art in the Alda home—a floor-to-ceiling frame that holds a blue lace dress. It’s an heirloom that perfectly depicts the durability of the couple’s marriage.

We already knew the story behind the dress, but we asked Arlene to tell it again—for the record.

“This was my wedding dress on March 15, 1957,” she began. “I was in Texas, playing the clarinet with the Houston Symphony. It was mid-calf length and white at the time, and it was just right for the very simple wedding we wanted. We had only eighteen guests, which was perfect for us. We didn’t have a photographer at the wedding, so this dress—and one tiny photograph of me wearing it, along with my sister’s five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Beverly, who was our flower girl—are the only real mementos we have of that joyous day. Later on, two of our daughters, Eve and Beatrice, wanted to wear the dress to their rehearsal dinners before their own weddings. Beatrice dyed it blue. And when our fiftieth anniversary came around, all three girls surprised us by having it framed as our gift.”

The dress—once white, now blue

Simplicity and humility have been a constant in Arlene and Alan’s marriage. And there is no doubt in our minds that they could lose all of their material possessions and barely notice, as long as they had each other. And pasta.

Arlene ran her hand along the frame. “This dress has never shredded or fallen apart in any way during these sixty-three years. I wish I could claim that I carefully put it away in an heirloom box after the wedding. Not so. Maybe that’s why our marriage has lasted. Benign neglect. Things were made to last in those days.”

“Is that your advice to young newlyweds?” asked Marlo. “Benign neglect?”

Arlene shook her head. “No, it’s this,” she said. “What you think is important may not be so important. Just relax, laugh, and have fun. Together.”