by Robin Green
At the same time, it was as if a lightbulb appeared above David’s head, a thought balloon next to it that said, And then I can finally get rid of these two clowns. Meaning me and, most likely, Mitch. Which, mid-sixth and last season, is what he did.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
My Little Life, Part 2
In October 2002, Mitch asked me to marry him. We were in Paris, at Taillevent, and we’d just finished lunch. He says that he got down on one knee beside our banquette. I have no such memory. I’d had a lot of wine and I remember only that I kept saying, “You’re kidding,” until he got exasperated and said, “Are you going to say yes or not?”
I don’t know why I was surprised. We’d been living together for years, traveling together, working together. Even with all the tension at Sopranos, he’d stuck by me. Unlike my mother, who, when I told her I’d been fired, said, “Oh no! Why? What did you do?”
Not that Mitch wouldn’t call me on my shit. He wondered why, for instance, when we were onstage taking questions on story process at a WGA symposium in Santa Monica way back when, I’d felt compelled to say that it was Renzulli’s idea to have Tony see the rat on the college trip when I knew it would piss David off.
“Because it was true,” I’d said weakly. Mitch just shook his head.
We had talked about getting married. It was after 9/11, and, in Manhattan anyway, there was a surge in marriage, that hideous calamity reminding us to hold closer what was dear. Mitch and I were in LA when the planes hit. We’d flown out from JFK the night before. The flight had been delayed for hours on the tarmac by heavy rain, the very storm whose passing had left the Manhattan sky so gorgeously blue the morning of 9/11, the city so sparkling clean.
At 5:45 that morning, Mitch and I were driving east to the Santa Anita racetrack on the Ventura Freeway when breaking news on the radio told us that a plane had hit a tower of the World Trade Center. The broadcaster didn’t know much more than that and we imagined, as most people did at that point, that a small plane had gone off course.
We had come west for the Emmys early to research a script in which Tony Soprano bought a racehorse, and our stockbroker, who owned a few at Santa Anita, had offered to give us a tour. He showed us around the stables, the tack rooms, and the grooming stations, and we were watching the horses being exercised on the track when someone came out to tell us that a second plane had hit. There was a small TV in the office on which we watched repeating footage, the planes hitting the towers again and again, no one really able to fathom what was going on. Finally, someone’s son who was in the military called his dad and said that everybody should get the hell home while they still could.
We were in LA for a week before we could fly back to New York. We’d left our two big rescue dogs at home and were lucky that our housekeeper, who was coming to stay with them that awful Tuesday morning, was able to get to our apartment, talking her way through police barriers set up to keep people away from downtown. From our returning plane’s starboard window, we saw Lower Manhattan in the distance, the huge black crater, twisted steel where the World Trade Center had been, the two towers, the sight of which had so often welcomed us home in the wee hours after a long day’s filming in New Jersey, gone.
We lived (and live) in Greenwich Village, about a mile away, but the stench reached us even there, an unholy smell of burning tires and something else less easily defined. It intensified when we went down to the site a few days later to pay our respects with a friend who had lost her best friend there, an odor that seemed to emanate from the thick, oily ash that covered everything. It was the smell of death.
I hadn’t felt it was right to get married until everybody in the country, meaning my gay friends, could, but I went ahead and did it anyway. Mitch found someone on the internet licensed for the task who’d be available on a Sunday. Our only witness was a restaurateur whose place closed that day, and we were married in a room in a small office suite somewhere in the East Forties. There was a white parachute hung from the ceiling for atmosphere and a few lit votive candles around.
I said my vows and meant them—that was another thing I’d been waiting for, a time when I felt I was capable of making that kind of till-death-do-us-part promise. I’d heard or read or dreamed that love could be something that grew, but now I was living it. What had felt in 1976 like a crazy choice—the Lady and the Biker, as we were told the crew of one show we worked on referred to us—had morphed into something else entirely.
I enjoy telling people that I fell in love with Mitch again at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, on the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday in 1997. Of the two of us, I’m the driver, and I told him I’d take him anywhere he wanted to go and that was the place he picked. We made the harrowing drive down the 405 from LA, bumper-to-bumper at sixty-five miles an hour, to Orange County, a scant forty miles away, but another planet. A Republican one.
We had lunch at a Chili’s—salads as big as hubcaps and oily fajitas—and went to confront Nixon’s legacy. Mitch had been a history major in college, an insatiable reader of newspapers, magazines, biographies, tomes about World War II. He’d been to the Herbert Hoover Library in Iowa, Truman’s in Missouri, Coolidge’s place in Vermont, and now this.
Nixon’s childhood home sat entire on the library grounds, a small, white two-story clapboard house with living room, kitchen, and parents’ bedroom downstairs, upstairs a children’s dorm. They were Quakers and the place looked it—no cushy couches for them, just a wood bench facing a wood rocking chair before a fireplace. And on the white walls, nothing decorative, with one exception: a blue-and-white plate depicting the Great Wall that his aunt had brought home from a trip to China when Nixon was a child.
The sight of it led me to a recollection of Nixon’s trip to the People’s Republic of China in 1972. He’d been the first U.S. president to visit in twenty-five years and had been a proponent of warmer relations with China before that, and I’d written an article on it for Rolling Stone under the byline White House Staff. I was rocked when I saw that plate. Was that the reason behind his whole China thing? That one fanciful piece of art on the walls of his childhood home had spoken to his soul?
I began to think of him as human as we continued on to the main building, where we saw displays of gifts from foreign dignitaries, photos of Elvis shaking Nixon’s hand, and an Elvis statue dressed in a replica of the clothes he’d worn for the visit. Finally, we came to a re-creation of the room so recently depicted in the Oliver Stone movie Nixon, where he’d crank up the air conditioner to freezing so even in warm weather he could sit by a fire and stew and curse on the phone and drink his bottomless glass of scotch.
No doubt it was because Stone’s film had cast such a bad light on certain Nixonian items at the gift shop that, to be rid of them, those wares had been drastically reduced and set on a bargain table outside. For a dollar each, we bought two scotch glasses with RN etched into the crystal and two pewter coasters similarly engraved, each surrounded with federal stars. Our scotch glasses have disappeared with time, but the coasters still sit on our bedside tables, for cups of the coffee Mitch makes in the morning and water glasses at night.
I realized that day that with Mitch I would do things I wouldn’t ordinarily do and go places I didn’t even know I wanted to go. Since then, we have been to the libraries and birthplaces of Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Monroe. We have also visited several Civil War battlegrounds, the Crater in Virginia the most vivid and horrible and interesting. And, of course, Gettysburg, where we spent the weekend after we’d been fired from The Sopranos, Mitch’s thought being that it would be good for us to consider grief so much greater than our own.
And then there was the sex. Toe-curling, lubricious, ecstatic sex, the kind Germaine Greer had written about all those many years ago and that I’d wanted so much for myself, if inchoately, and now had—without being bound by the ankles and dragged thr
ough the woods, as I had been in Texas—and with the man I married, of all people.
I’d started talking about sex in therapy, more specifically about sex with Mitch, how we’d started in such heat when we’d met in 1976 but that, even then, there had always been some part of me that held back from the kind of cataclysm I imagined existed and that after a while, I’d become discouraged and began avoiding sex with him, though I’m sure the abortion and miscarriage played a part in my aversion. Now, so many years later, I’d started loving Mitch again—working with him, traveling; we were great companions—but I couldn’t feel right about getting back together with him, not honorably, not unless I could feel right about sex with him.
My therapist asked if I’d ever had the type of sex I was after and I admitted I had—kind of, with the bald and emotionally withholding single father at times and unmistakably once with a cute guy from the art department at California who was in love with someone else but came by my apartment in Beachwood Canyon on some pretext one night anyway. Christine asked me to tell her about it and I did, and she pointed out that it was interesting that in both cases, we’d smoked a joint before we went to bed.
“People are wired differently,” she said. “It may be something you need to know about yourself, that you might need this in order to free yourself.”
I remembered what a friend had told me (this was when Mitch and I were living on West Knoll and I’d confided in her about my sex problem with Mitch). She’d told me to smoke pot; it’s what she and her husband did and it made all the difference. (They’re still married today, three grown kids and a hundred years later.)
I’d smoked plenty of grass with David Leach and it hadn’t come close to doing any good, but I was a different person now in the mid-1990s, no longer the mute, frightened girl I’d been, staring out harmlessly from under my bangs. I’d found work that I loved; I’d become a woman of means. Wait—did I say woman? Was I? My mother had told me I wouldn’t know what it was to be a woman unless I had children, and I was childless. And when I’d asked a friend why she was going through so much trouble to adopt, she had said, “Because I don’t want to be one of those women without children.”
Well, that’s what I was and, at fifty years old, showed every sign of remaining: a woman without children. It was something that, at a time when bearing children was more a possibility, my therapist had wanted me to confront: did I want children or not? I hadn’t wanted to think or talk about it, but if I had, I might have figured out that, as with marriage, I wanted to feel self-reliant, more solidly myself, to achieve some sort of personhood before I dragged a child into it. And when I did achieve personhood, the time for motherhood had passed.
But sex? That was a subject I would address. I felt my life depended on it. I asked Mitch if he’d smoke some pot with me, and he was game, though he hadn’t done it much since he was a kid. So we did, we smoked pot—and holy shit, the pot today!
It wasn’t just the sex that was great, it was getting high together and being high before and after. And it would become a ritual for us, a time we’d set aside just for each other, a non-work, non-buddy time. We’d sit on the couch drinking good champagne and he’d fill a pipe and light it and I’d inhale and cough my lungs out. Then he’d smoke. He’d become more voluble, hilarious, in fact—I’d see the person he must have been getting high as a teenager, rapping with his cronies in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He’d be smarter than ever. And even handsomer. We both grew younger by the minute.
When we decided we were high enough, we’d head for the bedroom. I’d feel something like a combination of fear of disappointment and happy anticipation as I lit candles—at a certain age, candles are key. He’d come in from another room and we’d see each other naked and I’d walk to him and we’d feel our undressed bodies against each other. In time, we’d go to the bed and I’d cry out as he entered me—it was such a rude shock and yet something I’d want desperately at that moment. And we’d fuck—a lustful, corporeal, carnal, and vociferous act.
His mouth at my ear, saying, “Is this what you want, baby? Is this what you want?” he’d say.
I’d be thrilled by the crude sexiness of it, out of my head with pleasure, actually, though sometimes I’d have a vague hallucination that I was in Montana or Wyoming, places I’d never been but where I imagined a person could be free to play the music loud and scream as loud as she wanted, and meantime we’d be fucking as if we were one thing until we’d both be crying out, until we were done and found ourselves landed on the bed on our backs, catching our breath, each of us with a shit-eating grin, or sometimes I’d feel emotional, both of us definitely feeling that we’d left it all on the field, as Mitch once put it. I’d feel beautiful then and strangely young, as young, in fact, and pleased with myself as the girl on the beach in the old photograph.
I wondered how such an animal, carnal act could be called making love. And then answered myself: because that’s what you feel then, that you’d made, created love. And I’d congratulate myself for having had the good sense, or luck, to have found the right person to love and be loved by. And for finding what I’d been looking for my whole life.
Afterward I’d tie on a short gray satin robe I’d bought for such occasions and he’d slip into the cashmere set of loungers I’d gotten him for winter (James Perse cotton in summer), and, me still high, him taking a few more tokes, he’d put the music on—loud—Dylan or the Stones mostly. Sometimes we’d just sit and listen, Dylan’s words striking us as especially profound, and sometimes we’d dance around the living room like kids and then it would just be me grooving while he went into the kitchen and fixed us something to eat. No food ever tasted as delicious as what he calls his fuck-night pasta (actually premium penne with basic homemade red sauce and hot and sweet sausage meat and good Parmigiano-Reggiano).
He’d have brought a good bottle of wine up from the cellar; the Iowa boy had discovered in himself a discerning palate with which, coupled with an ability to memorize that had once been trained on baseball stats, he’d become a collector of wine, I the beneficiary. One of our tasks in life now is to drink all of our excellent aged wine before we’re dead.
We returned home to New York from Gettysburg to begin life without The Sopranos. Gandolfini reached out, wanting to know if we were all right, buying us lunch, offering us work opportunities; Lorraine Bracco called with sweet, reassuring words. We consoled ourselves for a while with a review in the (admittedly short-lived) New York Sun panning the new season, the reviewer saying he squirmed when he saw Chase’s name as writer, that it was the team of Burgess and Green who knew how to bring The Sopranos to life.
I turned sixty the year we were fired—you’d think I’d have thought it was time for me to stop. We had two homes, money saved, I’d have my Writers Guild pension and Social Security too in a few years, and HBO had paid us the money that remained on our contract for the end of the sixth and final season. But I wasn’t ready to stop—I had things I wanted to do and something I felt I had to prove—and Mitch, fifty-three now, didn’t want to stop either.
Our agent secured a two-year development deal at CBS for us to write, and hopefully produce, two TV pilots. After the Stephen Frears/Skip Tracer pilot failed, we wrote Greenwich Village PD, a quirky hour about a precinct run by a transgender (male-to-female) captain, which might have been a few years ahead of its time, especially for network.
Not that it mattered. The Writers Guild called a strike and we were back to the picket line. When the strike ended (with little gain to writers), CBS force-majeured us, meaning they ended our development deal, meaning also that we were back on the street again and had to do then what we’d never done before—go out and pitch ideas to studios and networks—at the same time considering projects that came to us.
We pitched, and we traveled too. On a European trip, we stopped in Copenhagen to meet the writer and producer of a show we agreed to adapt for E One Entertainment. We pitched it around Hollywood, finally experiencing the supreme joy of
selling it in the room, meaning that the creative executive (in this case, someone at Universal in the very same office building where I’d first met with Josh and John) said right then and there in the middle of the pitch that she loved it, wanted to make it, sold!
Sold, maybe, but never made. There were other deals, projects offered and rejected, consulting jobs on other shows, along with time spent in our glass house in the LA hills while our New York apartment was being remodeled. (I’d used professional designers there and in my LA house, just like my parents’ rich friends’ wives in Providence. But did it make me happy? Yes, it did. I experienced enormous pleasure and satisfaction whenever I came home to both places.) We were home in the apartment in Manhattan getting ready for dinner one night when the phone rang. It was our agent in LA with a favor to ask.
“This thing probably isn’t for you,” he said. “It’s from an old-time producer, did Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch with Aaron Spelling. But his sister works here at the agency and he has an idea for a show, so just listen to the pitch, okay?”
The old-timer called and halfway through his two-minute spiel we were looking at each other with our eyebrows raised: yeah, we could do this. And we did. We flew to LA to meet him and were seated in a booth at the Grill on the Alley, a power-lunch spot in Beverly Hills, when Leonard Goldberg came in—tall, ghost pale, white-haired, and, for such a square-looking gent, incongruously clothed in a little black leather racer-style jacket and slim black jeans.
Heads turned, and as we ate, a procession of men in suits stopped by our table to pay their respects and shake his delicate hand. Who was this guy? With any sense, we would have Googled him before the meeting, for he turned out to be a genuine Hollywood éminence grise, a film and TV producer, former president of 20th Century Fox, now on the board of CBS, which was how Les Moonves, who ran the network, came to ask him if he had any ideas for a show.
