• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As a group of us read the review together in Sardi’s that night, we wondered if he had seen the same show we had performed. Apparently the critic had the same sense, too. “Last evening, the audience was beside itself with pleasure,” he wrote at the close of the piece. “This department was able to contain itself.”

A short time into the run, the production moved from the Martin Beck to the 54th Street Theater. By then I had grown comfortable in the part and was bringing much more to it than the New York Times’ critic had seen on opening night. I had also fallen into a nice daily routine. I went home after the show, then spent the next day relaxing until I went into the city, usually in time to have an early dinner at Sardi’s. I loved their cannelloni. On matinee days, I had it for both lunch and dinner.

During intermission one night, my wife called me. She was frantic. Our ten-year-old son, Chris, had run away and she couldn’t find him. She thought he had been kidnapped. I was distracted the whole second act; two-thirds of my brain was thinking about something else the whole time I was onstage. I raced home after the show and found police cars in the driveway and cops and bloodhounds searching through the woods behind our backyard.

They found Chris sound asleep under a tree, oblivious to the surrounding panic. It turned out that he’d had an argument with his younger brother, Barry, and my wife had sided with Barry, a decision that Chris thought was unfair. So he decided the hell with such injustice, and he ran into the woods.

From then on, I knew that boy was going to be a handful—and I turned out to be right. But he was always a good kid, and eventually he became a lawyer, a good one, too—the state district attorney in Salem, Oregon, in fact.

In some ways, those sorts of interruptions of the normal routine weren’t unusual. There was one night, for example, when I got caught in a blizzard on my drive into Manhattan and never made it to the theater. I had left home a little later than usual, after having an early dinner with Margie and the kids, and about halfway into the city, my Corvette ran into an enormous snowdrift. It was snowing hard, almost whiteout conditions, and the highway was no longer navigable.

I wasn’t the only one who got stuck, either. There were a few of us, and we got out of our cars, nodded and said hi, and started walking. I wasn’t that bundled up, and along with a couple of others, we thought we might freeze to death in the biting wind and snow.

We came to a restaurant, though, one of those diners right off the highway, and went inside. A bunch of other people had also taken shelter there. Making the show became moot. I spent the night in a booth, drinking coffee, talking, and waiting for the storm to let up.

The next morning, I caught a ride back home on a snowplow. The snow didn’t stop for days, and then it took a couple more before it began to melt. When I finally went back to get my Corvette, I found it in two pieces. A snowplow had come along and blindly cut it in half.

During one show, I looked out and recognized Fred Astaire out front, in the house seats. He was one of my idols. Imagine trying to dance in front of Fred Astaire. I had a long moment when I thought my so-called India-rubber legs might not only freeze mid-dance, but actually walk offstage on their own accord and refuse to go back on.

Another night we were told Cary Grant was in the house. I couldn’t see him during the performance, but afterward I was in my dressing room and there was a knock on the door. I opened it up, and there was Cary Grant. When I saw him, I prayed my eyes didn’t betray my surprise. Before I could think of what to say to him, he pushed me aside and started going through my closet. I wore my own suits in the show, some of which were tailored and quite handsome, and my assistant, Frank, had hung them neatly.

“These are very nice,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Actually, I was given the After Six Award as the best-dressed on Broadway.”

“Well done, young