by Jess Gregg
If my frequent presence raised some eyebrows, it also brought on a lot of kidding. “Which one are you in love with?” someone asked. I answered lightly that maybe it was their love affair I was in love with. And maybe this was true. My own romances had always flickered out quickly, and I saw no harm in warming my hands at their fire. Why not? At every performance, the patrons at their ringside tables were doing the same thing.
They were married in October, and the next night opened in New York at the elegant Persian Room of the Plaza, for the first time billed as Marge and Gower Champion. It was a stunning debut, although from the way the columnists kept emphasizing Gower’s crew cut, one would have thought his barber had staged the dances. Suddenly, the team was visible everywhere—certifying the virtues of toothpaste in advertisements, appearing weekly on TV with Sid Caesar, beaming out from the cover of Life Magazine. It was breathtaking fun even by proxy. Still, it began forcing a question: what was my place in all this? “The Champs are traveling fast now,” one friend mentioned. “Sometime soon, you’ve got to expect they’ll leave you behind.”
Inevitably, they did sign a long-term contract with MGM, and moved out to Hollywood. I told myself it was as good a time as any for me to return to my own life, and my own kind. And yet, even apart, the bond between us seemed to thrive. We wrote letters. We phoned. Sometimes they came east or I went west. Once, astonishingly, they invited me to go to Paris with them. “Compound interest on that forty dollar loan,” Gower said.
Of all our good times together, it was the most meaningful to me—the one I still go back over, looking for myself and them, as in a crowded photograph. The Paris I had visited in my teens had been disappointing, but this time, I was so immediately dazzled, I could only believe it was the city that had changed. Certainly it was not a Paris I ever saw so exuberantly welcoming again. We were swarmed by French fans who had seen them in Show Boat or Jupiter’s Darling and kept crying out an odd approximation of their names: March et Champion Gové.
But there was another name on everyone’s lips too: Colette. The great writer was dying, our chambermaid at the hotel told us. “We must all pray for her,” she said.
In lieu of prayer, but with the same intent, we bought a translation of her novel, Cheri, and took turns reading it aloud to each other as we went about on subway, bus, and bateau mouche. Remembering her long-ago kindness, I felt an almost personal loss when the fourth morning brought word of her death. Our last day in Paris, we were irresistibly drawn to the gardens of the Palais Royal, that ancient complex of theatres, boutiques, and apartments, where she had lived and was now lying in state. Everyone who had remained in town that hot August seemed to be there, waiting in patient lines on the boulevards and round and round the vast courtyard, slowly trudging by the monumental catafalque that held her. It had been draped with a silk tricoleur, which discovered every faint movement of air, and whipped out, bellied and writhed like some living thing. I still understood French poorly, and Marge and Gower not much better, yet we stood there all afternoon, listening to the eulogies, finding translation enough in the dedicated faces around us, moved by a grandeur so far from our experience. It was right, somehow, that when we left, Gower turned again to the scene and murmured as if to a star after a great performance, “We’ll be back.”
So here I was again, just the me of us. A surprise gust of wind swept the fountain spray over me, breaking my reverie. I glanced toward the gray stone arcades, hoping to see Marge hastening along. She was not in sight, though it was past noon. The shadows, sun-shrunk, scarcely poked out from under my chair, and low crescents of moisture lay inside my dark glasses. She would probably show no signs of discomfort in this heat. Like all dancers, she was used to sweat, and carried its glitter like a further effect of the sequins on her costume. Physical warmth was her milieu, personal warmth her gift. “You can’t compete with it,” Gower would say, in awe and chagrin. “They scarcely know I’m alive when she’s on stage.”
They returned to the theatre and to nightclubs after MGM was forced to its knees by television. Once again, we saw each other regularly, and sometimes as they toured the act, I packed my typewriter and shaving kit and joined them. Yet it wasn’t quite like old times. I could not fail to sense Gower’s increasing restlessness. “I want to quit dancing,” he told me in Miami. “I’m pushing forty, and after that, it’s all downhill for a dancer.”
“What’ll you do instead?” I asked. “Direct?”
He nodded. “But not just the dances. I want to stage the whole bloody show.”
“What about Marge?”
His glance was wry. “Do you even have to ask? This is what she’s been waiting for—the chance to start a family.”
Late that year, she delivered their first son, and they named him Gregg after me. They didn’t retire the act at once, however. Gregg was three before that Christmas day when Gower showed me the script of a musical comedy he had agreed to direct. Called Bye-Bye Birdie, it pictured the national chaos resulting from Elvis Presley’s induction into the army. Marge sang some of the songs for me, and Gower explained the numbers he visualized. Flushed, animated, he looked years younger already. The next time I saw him, he appeared to have aged by decades: Rehearsal!
I was curious to see him at work, but he conspicuously did not invite me. Relentlessly a perfectionist, he never allowed himself to be judged while the work was merely ‘showing progress’. Yet the sad fact was, when I finally was allowed to see a run-through, I didn’t much care for the show. He sensed this as we drove cross-town in a cab, and his eyes dared me to say it. I said it: the characters were so unsympathetic, I kept losing interest. He looked away irritably, and when the cab stopped at my door, only Margie said goodbye.
It was two days before I heard from him again. “What was that crap you were saying?” he demanded on the phone. I reiterated my opinion, and he hung up. A moment later, he called back. “This is a show about kids,” he cried. “You’re too old to understand.” It was me who hung up this time. Minutes later, I phoned back. Off and on, we argued for an hour, and the next morning, met for breakfast to toss around ways of humanizing the characters. This was so productive that eventually he had me travel with the show on its out-of-town try-out as his unofficial devil’s advocate.
Notices were mixed when Birdie opened in New York, but the times were more favorable than The Times, and a younger generation made the show an enormous hit. Gower was suddenly catapulted into almost unreachable prominence. He was applauded when he entered restaurants, his phone rang full-time despite a secret number, and the foyer of his apartment was choked with the scripts of musicals and plays sent around for his consideration. “He’ll change now,” people predicted. “They always do.” But I saw no difference in him at this point. When he began work on his next show, Carnival, he asked me once more to go out of town with the production as his sounding board. “I’ve reached a point where people only tell me what I want to hear,” he said. “I need someone that I can’t fire to argue with me.”
It is possible that he came to regret this invitation. Perhaps we both did. I kept picking at what I felt were weaknesses in the new production—lines that didn’t pay off or story points that weren’t clear. Occasionally, he made use of the alternatives I suggested, but more often, in struggling to explain to me why my proposals were sheer nonsense, he would force the right solution out of himself. It was what I was being paid to do, but it put a terrible strain on our friendship.
And there were other strains. Marge had stayed in New York to take care of Gregg, and in her absence, Gower became infatuated with his leading lady. Sweet-voiced and wide-eyed, she had an air of great vulnerability, perfect for the role she was playing. Off-stage, she was capable of seething scenes, although the words she and I exchanged on Easter Sunday were much exaggerated in the re-telling.
“I know how destructive it can be,” Mike Stewart, the red-haired writer of Carnival sympathized.
“How destructive what can be?” I de
manded.
“Jealousy.”
“Jealousy!” I protested. “I was just standing up for Marge!”
Undeceived, he met my eyes. “Of course,” he said.
I never discussed the matter with Gower—our old communication had seemed blocked, of late—and how much of the gossip reached home, Marge never indicated. She looked particularly lovely on opening night in New York, however, and the photographers, waiting for a confrontation between the two women at the party afterwards, had to be content with flashes of them smiling at each other. “All the same,” said one interested bystander, “there’ll be repercussions, you can count on that.”
The only repercussion I could see was that the Champions’ second son, Blake, was born about nine months later. I worked much more happily for Gower on Hello, Dolly, and to celebrate its astonishing success, the three of us visited Greece together. I went into hock for this, since we rented a yacht and cruised around the Aegean Islands, eating artichokes every day, forming a thirst for wine with a pine flavor, and singing “Hello, Dolly” in Greek. (Yasu, Kukla!) Squint lines I had never noticed before became visible against my suntan, and my hair began to show gray. Actually, it had begun turning while I was still in college, but since then, a handy chemical had helped me lie about my age. I scarcely bothered with the messy procedure during our cruise, just as Gower did not trouble to shave. To his dismay, however, his beard was coming in grizzled. Not to worry, I told him, and bought a patent hair dye at an island dispensary. It smelled like brimstone, but quickly restored our color and self-image. It did, at least, until we went up on deck again, and Marge screamed with laughter. In the bright May sunshine, my hair and his beard had turned green.
He called me to join him during the pre-Broadway tour of his next production. My mother had just died, and he thought it would help to plunge me into work. The hours were long, and he was under enormous pressure, yet we had never been so close. I Do, I Do was a complete musical comedy, but without chorus line or change of set, and only two characters. Mary Martin and Robert Preston played them brilliantly, and the words and music were delightful, but to Gower’s mind, something was still lacking. This story of a marriage from the wedding night on, was full of wonderful foreplay, he said, but never quite got around to a climax. I suggested that he find the solution in the study of his own marriage. Dubiously, he tried it, and when it proved useful, continued to sort through his life, finally speaking of things he had never told me about: his father’s desertion, and the genteel poverty he consequently grew up in; the rivalry with his brother, his resistance to his mother’s unyielding demand for excellence. And yet, just when I would think I was finally beginning to understand him, I’d discover that for every door he opened, another would somehow edge shut. He said it all, one day, when he asked me to buy him some toiletries, and, unasked, I included a deodorant. “Are you telling me something?” he asked.
I nodded: “You smell like rehearsal.”
He laughed. “Then it’s lucky nobody gets very close to me.”
It probably wasn’t a remark meant for careful scrutiny, but it kept bumping around my mind over the next two years, sometimes reminding me that he had been more open with me than I had with him. I had, for instance, never told him or anyone about my arrest. And now suddenly it was too late for confidences. I was at work on a book, and so did not go on tour with his next production—saw it only when it began giving previews just before the Broadway opening. It was not the right time to make suggestions—he was as tense as a sprinter on his mark—but I offered some anyway in a dingy little bar after the performance. This time, the sharp line between criticism and remedy seemed to cut too close, and abruptly he arose from the table. “This used to be helpful,” he said crisply, “but I can’t listen to it anymore.”
All communication stopped, and neither of us seemed to know how to start it up again. It was Marge who eventually engineered an accidental meeting. He and I immediately began kidding and pounding each other’s arm. However, we never really talked about his work again.
Suddenly, the three of us were fifty. We met in Malibu, and for the first time, I brought along someone who mattered to me. Everyone liked him immediately, and yet, somehow, it changed the mixture. Gower, slim and silvering now, was gracious, but remote, perhaps preoccupied by preparations for the film he was planning to produce and direct. There was little time for us to catch up on each other, but as if to make up for it, he sat me beside him at the huge birthday bash he threw for Marge. Towards one o’clock, when the candles on the cake had been blown out and the rock combo temporarily silenced, Gower lifted his glass and spoke quietly, ardently, in tribute to Marge. It had been a love affair, he said—was a love affair still.
And yet, within a few years, they were apart. I was out on the West Coast again, doing the screenplay for a book I had written, and heard the details from each. It was familiar stuff. Home and children had taken her in one direction, career had swept him far out in another. Their house was up for sale, and I helped Marge sort and pack, a reverse image of the time we had cleaned out the rectory in the abandoned church.
Gower had already moved into an empty crag-top mansion that had once belonged to Charles Boyer. At the push of a button, the roof of the formal dining room could slide back to reveal the sky; and from the garden wall that precariously encircled the estate, he could look down on his neighbors sunning themselves far below. Lofty, isolated, he seemed to have set himself up in some kind of metaphor.
We still saw each other when he came East, but never very satisfactorily. There wasn’t a whole lot we could talk about now, the past being off-limits, and his current output requiring the utmost in tact. Prettybelle. Sugar. Mack and Mabel. Vacant lots in a posh neighborhood, the critics indicated.
He married again, a handsome young woman, who encouraged us to resume our old companionship; but without the balance Marge had supplied, he and I began to slip back to the petty needling that had marked our adolescence. Temporarily, Gar took over a leading role in a Liza Minelli musical, but I learned of it from a newspaper, rather than from him. Stung at being excepted, I didn’t go to see his performance. In response, he did not come to see a show I had adapted, then at the Booth Theatre. I made up my mind to let the friendship lapse, but the timing was wrong for that. Now that his career was beginning to falter, too many other people were abandoning him. The fashionable seers were even now predicting that one more flop would finish him forever. Heedlessly, he sank everything into an iconoclastic rock version of Hamlet. It was so calamitous as to be magnificent—rawly creative, mammoth, but even at its most imaginative, offensive. I saw it twice, sweating, clenching my muscles in an effort to make it work. It did, magically, in the final duel scene, but the first-nighters shuffled their feet, and were silent only when it came time to applaud.
I went backstage to see him afterwards. He was standing alone, wearing the red jacket he always wore on opening nights. He listened impassively as I told him the things I liked about the show, but then an impossible silence fell between us. After a moment, he took a breath and began backing away. “I have to see some friends,” he said.
Too proud for sympathy, too bruised to roll with the punches, he went back to his mountain-top isolation in California. I too was in process of leaving the city, moving a hundred miles out on Long Island. I saw Marge often, but did not hear from Gower, or even about him, until a few years later, when a mutual acquaintance phoned. Incredibly, he said, Gower was hammering at the gates again—a big new musical was already in rehearsal. “But he’s pretty run-down physically,” he added. “Might perk him up if you dropped by, like you used to.” But by now, “used to” had been used up.
There was another phone call five weeks later, this time from Marge. “Gower’s in the hospital,” she said. “You’d better come.”
I took a train to New York and joined her. In a traffic-locked taxi, she explained Gower’s condition, but the medical terms had neither meaning nor immediacy for me. Vi
siting hours were over by the time we got to the hospital, so I left a note saying I would be back the next day. His new show, Forty-Second Street, was due to open on Broadway that night, but I had not planned to go. Margie found a ticket for me, however, and I managed to borrow a tux.
Being late August, it was still daylight when we entered the theatre. The first-night crowd was dazzling, but with a hard, show-me attitude. Suddenly, before the show had even begun, everyone was jolted into applause. Instead of an overture, a hundred tap shoes and a rehearsal piano began thunderously banging out a basic routine from behind the curtain. The backstage world of the early Thirties that this opened upon presented Gower at his most certain. Never patronizing the grand cliché of this show-biz fable, he blazoned it with wit, tenderness, and imagination. Long before intermission, he had climbed back to the pinnacle of his profession, and at the triumphant final curtain, the cheers and bravos almost made up for the damnation of Hamlet. It was then that the producer came out on the stage to tell the audience, the cast, and especially the media, that Gower was dead.
I kept waiting for regret to hit me, but it didn’t. Not when I read the accounts of his death on the front page the next day, not when I went to the huge memorial for him at the Winter Garden Theatre, not when I saw the lights of Broadway turned off for a moment in his memory. The fact is, I felt nothing at all, but the surprise of feeling nothing.
It was nearly one o’clock when Marge came hurrying up the broad quad-rangle of the Palais Royal garden, clutching the smartly wrapped packages that would furnish her an excuse for being late. Her hair was gleaming and newly short, and her eyes bright with humor—the kind of woman who will frankly tell you her age, but won’t look it. “—couldn’t resist this beaded purse,” she was saying. “And look at these little shirts for my grandson!”
