11

Seven months after Martin Luther King’s death, in the fall of 1968, I asked Marlene Clark to marry me. I know what you’re thinking. At the time, others asked the same questions. Who is Marlene Clark? And where did she come from?

Marlene was a fashion model and actress. When we were teenagers, she was the most beautiful dark-skinned girl I had ever seen. After we lost touch, I told myself that I was going to marry her if I ever saw her again. Then I saw her.

I had recently returned from my trip to Paris with Jimmy. I spotted her on the street, and I didn’t let her out of my sight. She was beautiful, brainy, and ambitious. I was as lovestruck at thirty-one as I had been at fourteen. She had that effect. One night I took Marlene to see Arthur Rubinstein in concert. She borrowed my mother’s mink coat and looked ravishing. After Rubinstein’s performance, we went backstage and the great musician flirted unabashedly with Marlene. The same thing happened during a weekend we spent at my friend Cornelius Callahan’s mansion in the Hamptons. Marlene and I were among the few straight people there; even the gay men hit on her.

I fell the hardest. I still remember that exact day I decided to make good on my promise to myself to marry her. It was early in our romance, and one of the first warm spring days of the year, one of those magical days when the women in New York City put on their spring dresses after six months in sweaters and heavy coats, and they look magnificent. I stood on 57th Street, waiting to meet Marlene for lunch, enjoying the anticipation of her company.

Then I spotted her moving briskly along the sidewalk. I savored the sight. She was like no one else, walking with long, confident strides and a natural grace, her breasts and hips partnered in a mesmerizing dance. Her eyes were pointed straight ahead, searching for me. I fell in love with her all over again—fully, blindly, and, like Othello, unwisely.

My second wife, Marlene Clark, appeared in many TV shows and movies in the 1970s—here in *Sanford and Son.*

When I went to Hawaii to shoot the movie Lost Flight, a disaster film starring Lloyd Bridges as a commercial airline pilot whose plane crashes in a storm on a remote, deserted Pacific Island, leaving the survivors to struggle among themselves, I missed Marlene. We shot in the lush Hanalei Bay area on Kauai, the same place where the movie South Pacific had been shot, and I invited her to join me in the tropical paradise. When you’re over here, I told her, let’s get married.

Marlene arrived in a terrible mood after the airline lost her luggage. I hadn’t seen that side of her before, and it should’ve caused me to reconsider my plans to marry her. It didn’t. On November 23, 1968, our last day of shooting on Kauai, Marlene and I exchanged vows in a large cave on the beach. Producer Paul Donnelly decorated the cave with flowers. A local minister, who happened to be an extra on the movie, performed the ceremony. Lloyd Bridges served as my best man, and Marlene took my breath away in a white lace mini–wedding dress.

After the movie, Marlene and I shared my studio apartment. The tight quarters did us no favors, but both of us worked. Her film career launched with a role in For Love of Ivy, a comedy starring Sidney Poitier and directed by my old friend Danny Mann. I landed jobs on several TV series produced by Quinn Martin, who liked my work, and writer-producer Aaron Spelling became a lifelong supporter when I co-starred in his movie Carter’s Army, the story of a brigade of Black soldiers led into battle against the Nazis by a racist army officer.

The cast of Carter’s Army included Robert Hooks, Moses Gunn, Glynn Turman, Rosey Grier, and Richard Pryor. Most of us knew each other. Both Rosey, the former pro football player, and Richard, who’d broken through as a comedian but was still searching for the biting voice that would lift him to stardom, were relatively new to acting. Richard had spent the past five years knocking around the New York club scene and had just released his first comedy album, and that gave us enough in common to start a friendship.

I followed Carter’s Army with a role in Lonne Elder’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated play Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, a powerful family drama set in a failing Harlem barbershop whose proprietor shares the ways his dreams have been stifled and his life wasted, while his children scheme to be different. It was easy to relate to the material in this deep play; what young man couldn’t? I got an unexpected bonus when Richard Ward, who played my father and had been an NYPD officer in Harlem before taking up acting, told me that he’d known my grandfather Paddy Bodkin. “He was a good man,” Ward said. “A quiet man. But you didn’t mess with Paddy Bodkin.”

I loved hearing that. Such toughness was true of both sides of the family. That summer my father took Corey to visit his eighty-something-year-old mother and some of his twelve siblings in Texas, and it was a great experience. But after Grandma Williams, who was part Irish and part Native American and still as tough as the hardscrabble ground where she farmed, spent time with Corey, she sent word back to me that she was worried about my son, her great-grandson. “How are you raising this boy?” she inquired. “He’s almost ten years old and doesn’t know how to shoot a gun!”

I did my best. While doing Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, I added a recurring day job on a PBS show, and then I landed a minor role as an airline ticket agent in The Out-of-Towners, a Neil Simon comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis. I don’t know how my father managed several jobs simultaneously for much of his adult life. I was so stressed from it that a large boil popped up in the middle of my face the night I shot my scene with Jack and Sandy. It’s all I ever see when I watch that film.

My father’s mother, Mary Williams, a strong woman who had thirteen children!

Career was always important to me, making money and becoming recognized as a great actor, but like my dad, I wanted to be a good provider. I was happiest being around my son. Corey and I were best friends, though he didn’t always understand my work. Seeing me play a criminal who gets arrested on The F.B.I. TV series upset him.

“How come they did that to you?” he asked.

“I played a bad guy,” I said.

“But you’re a good guy,” he said. “Don’t they know that?”

“I’m acting,” I said. “It’s pretend.”

Audrey was an excellent mother, but still young and wanting a life of her own, and so, to give her some time to herself, Corey spent weekends with my parents, who’d moved to a two-bedroom apartment in a Riverton Square building off Fifth Avenue and 135th Street. Sometimes he spent the whole week with them. Corey and my dad were especially close. The two of them were constantly playing practical jokes on each other. Watching them together was a source of great joy for me.

The Riverton complex had a large, fenced-in garden area with a playground, and Corey had a little red bike with training wheels that he rode around the grounds. One day, as I watched him pedal across the playground, I realized he was getting too big for training wheels. I heard him say that some of the older kids were poking fun at him for not riding a two-wheeler. I told him it was time to take the training wheels off. He looked up at me with his big eyes wide open and worry plastered across his face.

“Are you sure?” he said. “I can’t.”

“There’s no such thing as can’t,” I said, a phrase Corey still remembers hearing me say often as he grew up.

That day we took his bike to the Central Park playground at 110th Street. I removed the training wheels and told Corey to pedal while I held on to the seat behind him. He started pedaling and talking and telling me—no, make that imploring me—not to let go while I ran behind him, promising I wasn’t going to let go, until he didn’t hear me responding anymore and realized he had ridden across the playground by himself. Then his entire face turned into one big, beautiful smile. But he was so startled by riding without training wheels that he forgot how to brake and crashed into the bushes.

For his birthday, I surprised Corey with a purple Sting-Ray with a five-speed stick shift, banana seat, and sissy bar. It was a very cool bike. He was such a good, cheerful, appreciative kid, I didn’t mind spoiling him a little. One day I took Corey to FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, a place we often went. It was the largest toy store in the United States, and its shelves never disappointed the imaginations of children of all ages, including mine. We didn’t always buy something, but this time we left the store with a large sailboat that we had eyeballed for months, and we walked to the lake in Central Park.

It’s hard to say if we were doing this for Corey or me. When I was a kid, I watched kids and adults sail boats across this same lake, wishing I had one of my own. Now Corey was going to have the experience I’d always wanted, and I was going to be a kid again through him. However, when we got to the lake, the first thing we saw was another kid—with a motorized boat. He maneuvered it around the lake—and other sailboats—with a remote control. We watched in silence. Corey was mesmerized by the controls in the other kid’s hands. “Dad, look at that!” he said. “That’s cool.”

I put our boat in the water and watched it catch the current and drift out into the lake. Corey stood next to me. The boat did indeed float, and every so often it seemed to catch a slight gust of wind and move forward, but without any input from us. We could only watch and guess where it might end up. But we were doing this together, father and son, and that was the main point. Before heading home, we stopped by the kid controlling the motorized boat and watched. I squeezed Corey’s hand. I knew what he was thinking.

In 1970, I moved to Los Angeles. Though my roots would always be in New York, and I would always consider myself a New York actor, the TV and movie industry was out West, and I needed to be closer to the work. Marlene was angling for her own shot at stardom, and she was also ready to move. I flew out ahead of her to look for an apartment, but I had a harder time than I anticipated finding a place. One landlord after another turned me down, explaining they weren’t allowed to let “people like me” into their building.

I know this should have upset me more than it did, and I was upset, don’t get me wrong, but I shrugged it off as a reality I wasn’t going to change on my own. But I wanted to be in Hollywood. I remembered hearing that Harry Belafonte had similar problems in New York, and after being denied an apartment at 300 West End Avenue, he bought the entire building. Then, hearing that Lena Horne was also having trouble finding someone who’d rent to her, Harry gave her the penthouse.

Finally, I went into an older building off Hollywood Boulevard that had a vacant apartment with large rooms and picture windows with a view, and I wanted it. I located the manager, who was standoffish at first, but then we got into a conversation about New York theater and the movies and she decided to bend the rules. “I’m not supposed to rent to coloreds,” she said. “But you seem like a nice young man.”

Once we got settled, I went to the LAPD’s Hollywood Division station and asked to pay a number of traffic tickets I had accumulated that were outstanding. I wanted to get them off my record in case I was ever stopped. I didn’t need that potential problem. Still, the cop at the precinct desk looked at me like I was nuts; he’d never seen anyone come in voluntarily to pay their parking tickets, especially, as he told me, a young Black kid.

That was my point. Then I went to the DMV to get a driver’s license. An older man there saw me struggling with the written exam. He sidestepped up to me. “It’s not worth sweating over,” he said. I looked up and recognized actor Gene Raymond. He helped me finish the questions. Finding work was the biggest chore. I went to parties and met casting directors and played the game, as one must do, until I got the lead in writer-director Oscar Williams’s film The Final Comedown.

I followed that with the lead in the West Coast stage production of Lonnie Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men and guest spots on episodes of The Interns, Mission: Impossible, and The Mod Squad. It was good work, but not enough to let me feel my career was advancing the way I had hoped after moving to L.A., and I struggled.

Marlene was equally ambitious, and very early in our new life in Hollywood it was clear that the two of us were too caught up in our own efforts to be much support to each other. Despite my feelings for Marlene, I knew I wasn’t enough for her, not here in L.A., and it was only a matter of time. Then, after dinner one night in Malibu, we went to a party at someone’s house, and when I was ready to go home, she wanted to stay, and that was it. Our marriage was done.

The breakup hit me hard, coming on top of the move and the frustration and disappointment I was having with my career. I got into a dark place. At night, I listened to Sinatra—the sad stuff: Only the Lonely, No One Cares, and In the Wee Small Hours, with their sad songs—“Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” “Glad to Be Unhappy,” “Deep in a Dream,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and “No One Cares.” How had I gone from one of New York’s “most promising” in 1961 to a struggling thirty-three-year-old actor less than a decade later? Was I not serious enough? Was I too serious? Had I deluded myself into believing I could go the distance?

My outlook was further burdened when my father was diagnosed with leukemia. We weren’t told how much time he had left to live. Doctors never tell you that part. They said it might be a year, it might be less, it might be longer, it was impossible to tell. Cancer treatment wasn’t as advanced as it is now. We had to wait and see.

Three generations of Williams men—my dad, me, and my son, Corey, in 1969

My dad assured me that he was okay and still going to work every day. I feel fine, Sonny. Because I was in Ceremonies in Dark Old Men at night, I couldn’t go home to see him for myself. I had to take his word and hope for the best. I had to hope for more time for my dad…and a lucky break or two for both of us.

One day the phone rang. I was in my apartment, and veteran casting director Renée Valente was on the other end, saying she was relieved to have gotten ahold of me. I knew Renée from parties, events, and auditions. She was one of the people I’d made a point of meeting when I moved out to L.A., and we had a good relationship. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I need a favor,” she said, and then explained she had a movie that was about to go into production but the actor they cast in the lead had to drop out at the last minute. Was I available to read?

I said yes, and that day several pages of a script were messengered to my apartment. They were from a movie titled Brian’s Song. A note from Renée was paper-clipped to the top page: “Thank you. You’re perfect for this one.”

Renée’s note meant a lot, and I hoped she was right, because I had never gone into an audition feeling as bleak about life.

I wasn’t good at auditions, anyway. In the scene they sent me, I was a football player talking about a teammate who was battling cancer. I don’t recall much more context. The dialogue was heavy. I didn’t need help getting into that headspace, because I was in that place with my dad—hearing that he had leukemia, worrying about his health, not knowing how long he might live but aware that he was going to fight until he had no more fight in him.

I left the audition knowing my delivery had been raw and honest. Renée said I was great, and the movie’s director, Buzz Kulik, gave me the job.

At that point I was able to read the entire script, and I knew it was special, one of those projects that come along once in a lifetime if you’re lucky. Brian’s Song was the story of the real-life friendship between the Chicago Bears’ star running back, Gale Sayers, and their hardworking fullback Brian Piccolo, whose career and life were cut short by cancer. Sayers had written about it in his memoir I Am Third. Both he and Brian Piccolo were rookies in 1965. Sayers was Black, and Piccolo was White. Total opposites, they were assigned as roommates—the first interracial roommates in National Football League history.

Over the next few seasons, they became close friends on and off the field. Then Piccolo was diagnosed with malignant cancer, and their friendship as one battled for his life and the other ran to superstardom showed two very different men whose embrace of those differences revealed the heart and humanity we all have in common. It would have felt contrived if it hadn’t really happened. Brian’s Song was a love story between two men, and the kind of interracial love story America needed—and wanted to believe was possible.

Lou Gossett was originally cast as Gale Sayers. He dropped out after injuring his Achilles’ tendon playing basketball. That’s when I got the call to audition. Renée pitched it as a favor, but it felt like fate, and over the years Lou and I have talked about it, and even he agrees it was meant to be. How else can I explain the headspace I was in—depressed, broken spiritually and financially—and then this once-in-a-lifetime role comes my way?

The part seemed like it had been written for me. I also looked like Gale—much more so than Lou did. In fact, I could have been Gale’s twin brother, that’s how close the resemblance was. Gale and I also shared the same brooding personality and temperament.

I heard Burt Reynolds was the first choice to play Brian Piccolo, but when he passed on the project, they turned to James Caan. It was another stroke of casting destiny. A rising movie star, Jimmy was reluctant to appear in a made-for-TV movie and reportedly said no to Brian’s Song four times. Finally, after reading William Blinn’s magnificent script, he changed his mind. The role was too good to turn down.

Jimmy and I were as different as Sayers and Piccolo. Born and raised in the Bronx, he was outgoing, brash, all rough edges, in-your-face testosterone, and larger than life. He had played varsity football at Michigan State University before transferring to Hofstra University, where he got interested in acting. He had a tough-guy mentality. Hit first, talk later. By contrast, I’d never hit anyone—and didn’t want to. I was quiet and reserved.

I don’t think the two of us would ever have been friends or wanted to hang out together if not for the movie. Yet the moment Jimmy and I met, we had an immediate and undeniable chemistry. It was perfect. It was as if we were already in character, already committed to each other, brothers till the end, and that was something that couldn’t be planned or faked. That magic was either there or it wasn’t—and in our case, it was.

A rare conversation with the very private Chicago Bears Hall of Famer Gale Sayers

To prepare, Jimmy and I spent six days at the Bears’ training camp in Rensselaer, Indiana. We attended meetings, participated in drills, and went through light scrimmages with the players. Jimmy, the former varsity football star, was in heaven. He took part in some actual plays, running the ball against the Bears’ defense, including future Hall of Fame linebacker Dick Butkus. Every time he carried the ball, he bounced back up with a big grin on his face, as if to say, See, I can keep up with the pros.

I did not engage in any on-the-field action. I didn’t feel the need to prove my toughness or athletic ability. In fact, I tried to stay out of the way of those large fellas. Shadowing Gale was enough of a challenge. He did not like me watching him and proved nearly as elusive off the field as he was on it. The two of us never sat down and had an actual conversation. He wouldn’t have been comfortable, and I didn’t think it was necessary. Not after his wife, Linda, told me that Gale occasionally wrote poetry and sometimes disappeared to be by himself. I got him. I realized I was painting a picture of myself.

During an exhibition game with the Cleveland Browns, Jimmy and I suited up in uniforms and stood with the real players on the sidelines for the benefit of our cameras. At halftime, I changed back into my clothes and left the stadium. I looked and moved so much like Gale that reporters ran after me, asking why I wasn’t in uniform for the second half.

As the story transitioned from two guys playing a game to one battling cancer, I retreated inward, imagining the way Sayers must have felt as Brian Piccolo dealt with the gravity of his diagnosis, the weight of friendship he must have shouldered, the questions I think many of us end up asking about life and death: Why him? Why not me? Before the somber pregame locker room scene when the running back informs his teammates about Piccolo’s condition, I kept to myself and didn’t speak to anyone all day. I walked onto the set knowing the words couldn’t come out of me easily if I wanted everyone to feel the way I did, to share in my friend’s life-and-death struggle, not just to hear the gravity but also to feel it.

*Brian’s Song* has touched and changed people for decades, and Jimmy and I knew we were blessed to be in that movie.

“Uh, you all know we hand out a game ball to the outstanding player,” I said in a halting manner that left plenty of space between each word. “Well, I’d like to change that. We just got word that Brian Piccolo is…is sick, very sick, and…uh, it looks like he might never play football again…”

I gave the scene and the moment everything I had in me. Everything. To the point where my body weakened and my breathing grew labored and the effort of staying strong for Brian Piccolo was real. As I said, at a certain point, I wasn’t acting anymore. I couldn’t act if people were going to feel the depth of this moment.

Afterward, there wasn’t a dry eye in the locker room, including my own. Even the real Chicago Bears players who were there as extras, and had experienced the actual moment a couple years earlier, had tears in their eyes. Seeing that, I knew I was fulfilling my obligation to the story and the people who had really lived this heartbreak.

Corey visiting me in L.A. during the filming of *Brian’s Song*

Around that same time, Corey came out to visit me in Los Angeles. Audrey had a friend at an airline who was flying out West, and she agreed to chaperone our ten-year-old on the flight. It was Corey’s first cross-country trip. At the airport, he sprinted out of the gate and jumped into my arms, eager to tell me all about the flight. “Dad, did you know they have an upstairs on the plane?” he said. “It’s called a 747. It’s huge!”

Having Corey with me was a welcome antidote to the heaviness of the movie. We worked out together at the Hollywood YMCA, and I took him with me to our set on the Paramount lot. Inquisitive and outgoing, he was a hit with James Caan, Bernie Casey, and the others involved in the movie. Corey had never been on a set before or seen me work in person, and he didn’t have a clue what moviemaking was all about, which became obvious to everyone the day we shot the poignant scene of Gale visiting Brian Piccolo in the hospital.

Corey watched from a chair set on the side. Scenes are shot and reshot from a variety of angles—wide, close-up from one person’s perspective, then from another perspective. Everything is repeated, and it can be slow, tedious, and boring, especially for a kid. At some point, Corey thought, Wow, this is cool. If I make a tiny little noise, I’ll know it’s me when I see this on TV. A few moments later, as Jimmy and I were shooting our scene, we all heard a little boy clear his throat. A-hemmmm.

“Cut!”

Everyone turned toward Corey, who smiled sheepishly, as if to say, What did I do? Why’s everyone looking at me? I spoke to him about the rules. “But everyone’s crying,” he said. “It’s boring just sitting here.” Since we were on one of the busiest studio lots in Hollywood, I gave him permission to go outside and explore the studio, including the soundstages, as long as he promised not to open a door if he saw a blinking red light. It was one of the best days of his life. He was able to see the Brady Bunch set, got David Cassidy’s autograph outside the Partridge Family set, and met his TV crush, Elizabeth Montgomery, on the Bewitched set, which was next door to ours.

Later, at the end of the day, we saw Elizabeth walking to her car. Corey was impressed when I said hello to her. “Dad, you know Samantha?” he said. “That’s cool!”

Shooting the movie’s final scene required everything I had in me as an actor, yet by this time in the production I wasn’t acting as much as I was sharing a study in human emotions that I had internalized and needed to get out of me. With Brian Piccolo nearing the end of his battle, Gale Sayers accepts the George Halas Award for courage and he gives the speech—the one people still quote to this day. I learned the lines and practiced the speech without going too far. I didn’t want it to feel in any way mechanical. It was the essence of the entire movie, the moment everyone hoped would never arrive but knew was inevitable. Yet the speech wasn’t about death. It was about life, and the love these two men shared.

“I’d like to say a few words about a guy I know, a friend of mine,” I said slowly, thoughtfully, summoning each word as if it was a weight I had to lift, which I did in a way that calls to mind something Miles Davis once said about music: that it’s not the notes you play but those you don’t play that give you the full range of expression.

“His name is Brian Piccolo,” I continued, “and he has the heart of a giant and that rare form of courage which allows him to kid himself and his opponent—cancer…I love Brian Piccolo, and I’d like all of you to love him, too. And tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him.”

Brian’s Song aired on November 30, 1970, and fifty-five million people watched and cried their way to the end. It was the biggest audience ever for a TV movie. The following week it received an encore in movie theaters, a tribute to its popularity. Michel Legrand’s musical score was an instant classic. The movie touched a nerve across America. Most people wanted to believe that we could acknowledge our differences and love each other because of them, not despite them, the way these two football players and friends did.

The experience left me honored and humbled. Both Jimmy and I received Best Actor Emmy nominations for our performances. “How do you split an Emmy?” one critic wrote. “They both deserve to win.” Those nominated rarely if ever admit they feel deserving, but the recognition seemed important and warranted based on the impact of our work. But neither of us won. The Emmy went to Keith Michell for The Six Wives of Henry VIII. I suppose that reflected Hollywood and the politics of the time.

It was a missed opportunity. The Television Academy should have given both of us a statue; it would have said that yes, Brian’s Song made history, and it also underscored an important message about the power of art and movies to affect people, and the fact that our movie had accomplished something special by getting tens of millions of people to see color and then to see past it, to see the humanity we all share.

But Brian’s Song was bigger than any single award. It’s in its own timeless category, as happens when movies they are beloved and important to people. Many years later, I was in Atlanta and a guy who looked to me like a stereotypical southern redneck—burly, crew cut, worn blue jeans, a pack of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket—walked straight up to me on the sidewalk outside my hotel. For a moment, I feared there might be trouble. But even though we’d never met, it turned out we were old acquaintances who had shared a deep experience once. “I just want to tell you that I watched Brian’s Song, and I never thought a colored man would make me cry the way you did,” he said. “It changed me.”

He wasn’t the only one who approached me. I remember being approached by another man in or around Atlanta when I was making a movie there in the ’80s. In a baseball hat, overalls, and flannel shirt, he looked like the last man who’d be in touch with his feelings, but he said, “If I am feeling heavyhearted, I will go into my library, lock the door, and watch Brian’s Song and have myself a cry.”

I have lost track of how many times that happened to me back then. But I do know with certainty that it’s never stopped happening, which is the biggest compliment an actor can get, to be told their work moved someone, changed someone’s perspective, and in this case, to be told it helped someone shed their hatred and feel love.

The most meaningful and lasting response, though, came from my parents. My mother and father watched the movie together. My father, who was going through his own cancer treatments, was emotional from start to finish. But not for all the obvious reasons. It was even more personal for him.

“He was very proud of you,” my mother told me. “He saw that his Sonny was going to make it.”

I did, too.