19 A MELODY PLAYED IN A PENNY ARCADE

1969

The Women’s News Service used Barbara Walters and Lee Guber as a case study in a 1969 story about the perils of marriages in which the wife is more famous than the husband. It quoted a psychotherapist as saying the husbands were likely to feel “envious, insecure, and bitter.” Lee said the fact that they were in different businesses was helpful. “As a result, while sharing things, we have a life of our own,” he said. “I don’t counsel her and she doesn’t counsel me.”

A photo with the story showed Barbara beaming into the camera as she held their toddler aloft. Lee is gazing at them. The caption, which misidentified Jacqueline as a boy, read: “Lee Guber, wife Barbara Walters and son… the delicate balance.”

A delicate balance, indeed.

Not even their schedules meshed. Lee was a night owl by nature, eager to go to Broadway plays and then hang out at Sardi’s or Lindy’s with the theater crowd until well past midnight. Barbara was an early bird by necessity, her two alarm clocks going off at 4:30 a.m. so she could arrive at the NBC studio an hour later. During weekends, Lee needed to visit his musical productions; that was when she wanted to catch up on her sleep. They tried compromises that left neither satisfied. Sometimes she would go with him to an evening show, then leave at intermission. During the first days of their marriage, Lee would get up with her during the week and they would have breakfast together, then he would watch Today. That didn’t last. “After a few weeks,” she said, “he would check to see what time my spot would be on the air and stayed in bed until then.” Even that routine grew thin; soon he was just sleeping in.

Over time, the two saw one another less and less often. “Our schedules began to resemble that of my mother and father when he owned the Latin Quarter and she saw him perhaps one night a week,” Barbara said. There was another unwelcome parallel to her father. Lee wasn’t satisfied with his successful enterprise of staging musicals in the suburbs. Like Lou Walters, he wanted to produce on Broadway. Nothing could have alarmed her more.

Lee’s first Broadway show after they were married was Catch Me If You Can, which opened in March 1965 to lukewarm reviews; it closed in less than three months. Two years later, he staged a musical adaptation of The Man Who Came to Dinner, renamed Sherry! It opened in March and closed in May. (She had taped the commentary for a faux newsreel to use in the production, but he ended up cutting it from the show.) The third and final production while they were together was a dark play, Inquest, a sympathetic portrayal of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. It lasted onstage for all of twenty-eight days.

“Lee’s involvement in the theater was driving me further and further away from him,” Barbara said. “It wasn’t entirely his fault. It was the culmination of all the years with my father’s grandiose schemes—the Broadway flops, the failed nightclubs, the aquacade that never got off the ground. I couldn’t bear to pretend to be upbeat time and again while Lee read another bad review. I’d lived through enough openings and sad closings for a lifetime.”

Her father’s latest plight was pressing that unhappy comparison. When the Latin Quarter finally closed in 1969, Lou and Dena and Jackie moved back to Miami Beach, able to afford the rent only for a one-bedroom apartment. Jackie slept on a pull-out couch in the living room. Once when Barbara came to visit, her parents got into a fight so ferocious that her father walked out and didn’t come back until the next morning. She was terrified that he had once again attempted suicide.

It was too much for Barbara to ignore. She used her savings to buy her parents a two-bedroom condominium in what she called a “good” but not “great” building, located in a “nice enough” neighborhood and two blocks from a supermarket. “In retrospect, I probably could have afforded ‘great,’ and I should have bought them a condominium in a better building in Miami Beach,” she said later, still feeling guilty. “But I was still so afraid of the vagaries of television that I didn’t have the nerve to risk more money.”

Lee’s resemblance to her father, his optimism and his flair, was what attracted her to him in the first place. But it was also his resemblance to her father, the recklessness and the risk-taking, that undermined her relationship with him once they were together. He echoed Lou’s confidence that his next enterprise was sure to be a hit. “We’re going over budget, but I just have a feeling that word of mouth will be so great, we’ll get it back,” Lee assured a reporter before his summertime production of Annie Get Your Gun opened at Jones Beach Marine Theater. They were words Lou could have used about the Café de Paris or the aquacade. “I think we’ll get a tremendous ride if we do it well. People will say something’s happening out there.”

But they didn’t get “a tremendous ride” that time, or even a small one. “It looks to me like we’re going to lose a lot of money,” he acknowledged at the end of the summer. “We were dealing with a very fickle lady called the weather.”

His career was on a slide. Her career was on the rise.

He wanted more of her support, more of her time and attention. Instead, she increased her workload by adding a daily syndicated show in 1971 called Not for Women Only, an afternoon gig on top of her morning TV duties. “There are not many husbands who would tolerate Barbara’s absolute career- and ego-centeredness as long as Lee did,” said film critic Judith Crist, Barbara’s colleague on Today. “Their marriage lasted much longer than one would have imagined.”

The chance for a big story trumped a promise to spend time with her family. She was always traveling, Lee complained. “I don’t want a wife one day a month,” he told his brother-in-law.

Lee told friends he was lonely; he was reported to have a mistress. Barbara told friends she was unhappy; she began to draft goodbye letters to him, then tear them up. Finally, they decided to separate. She was about to leave to cover President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China in February 1972. Over a tearful dinner, they agreed he would move out of their apartment while she was away.

They had been married for nine years. Jacqueline was three years old.

In their final weeks together, they were still maintaining the ruse of a happy marriage when Sally Quinn of The Washington Post profiled a day in the life of Barbara Walters. Lee arrived at the apartment at 9 p.m. that night, “quiet and low key.” Sally told me she didn’t realize then that the marriage was in crisis. She asked him: What was it like being married to Barbara Walters? “It’s a melody played in a penny arcade,” he replied, a line lifted from “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” The musical reference to the jazz classic seemed playful, but the full lyrics had a sad context that went unnoted then.

Without your love, it’s a melody played in a penny arcade.

It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, just as phony as it can be.

But it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me.

In June, their separation was still a secret. Barbara included Lee among “the 10 most fascinating men I’ve known this year,” a list that presaged the 10 Most Fascinating People TV specials she would launch two decades later. This list started with Chinese premier Chou En-Lai and included Henry Kissinger, David Niven, Leopold Stokowski, and Joe Garagiola, her genial partner on the Today show. Her husband was the man she found “most” fascinating, she wrote in the kicker of the story, and was the one “who, thank goodness, returns the compliment.”

A month later, their breakup made the gossip columns. “We had problems we couldn’t solve,” she told Earl Wilson in the New York Post, things that were “too painful” to discuss. “A lot is happening for her and a lot is happening for me,” Guber was quoted as saying. “We both have to look after ourselves.” The veteran columnist wasn’t surprised. “The Barbara Walters-Lee Guber bustup had been rumored for years and always denied,” he noted a few days later. In an aside that may have signaled skepticism, he added: “They say that there’s nobody else involved.” New York Daily News columnist Suzy made their separation the top item on a roundup of celebrity gossip. “Barbara, Lee Split,” the column’s headline in The Miami Herald read. “Divorce Ahead?”

Barbara called it the best of times in her professional life, doing “interesting, provocative interviews” and watching her reputation grow. “But all the while, my marriage was falling apart,” she said, making it also the worst of times. That was a tradeoff she was willing to take, then and later. It was a choice she would make even with the man she would call the love of her life.