How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am

by Charles Grodin

  Just after we were married, Julie found a stray dog wandering the streets. She seemed way more comfortable with the dog, which she named Buddy, than with me. (I have a feeling that’s not unusual among married couples.) Buddy was a mix of some kind, a nice-looking medium-size dog who Julie brought back to full health. She later worked in an animal shelter.

  Julie and Buddy bonded. Buddy seemed to like me considerably less than he liked Julie. When I’d come home he might or might not come over for a pat on the head. When Julie came home he jumped all over her with excitement. As time went on, this behavior continued, except I would describe Buddy’s attitude toward me as decreasing to tolerant.

  One day as I was walking down the street in Forest Hills, the neighborhood where we lived in the borough of Queens, a pack of dogs approached me menacingly. Not leading the pack but right in the middle was Buddy. I managed to shout them off. After that, Buddy’s and my relationship, needless to say, just about disappeared.

  Although I never had one, I’ve always loved dogs. I find it ironic after my experience with Buddy that far and away my two most commercially successful movies were with a dog.

  Julie and I never argued. There was just an ongoing withdrawal on her part. Nevertheless, we had a baby, Marion, who is now a wonderful woman. Julie and I persevered. I should say Julie persevered. I had no problem with Julie other than her determination to almost never speak. I once stopped speaking to her to see if she’d notice. It took a few days before she did. Then one day, after about four years without any arguments, Julie took our baby and moved out.

  I think a lot of the problem came from Julie’s relationship with her mother, who was a fine woman but on the authoritarian side. Julie wanted to be on her own to such a degree that if I took her arm while crossing a busy street she would take it away.

  After we separated, we resumed the great friendship we had before getting married. Eventually, she filed for divorce, but we remained close friends—partially, of course, because we had a daughter, but also because we always were great friends.

  One day long after our divorce she called to tell me that in the middle of the night something caused her to bolt straight up in bed from a sound sleep. After that happened a few more times she saw a doctor and was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor that the doctor felt should come out. When they operated they found that it was the worst kind of malignant brain tumor, for which there was no treatment. Of course, my daughter and I were devastated.

  Marion dropped out of her successful show business career and moved into a house with her mother to be with her during the last three years of her life. I had married again sixteen years after Julie and I were divorced. I had a baby son whom Julie came to see in the hospital when he was born. She was next door receiving chemotherapy. I never heard Julie express any sorrow for herself.

  I would sometimes join Marion on Julie’s medical appointments. One particularly stands out in my mind. A renowned doctor at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering was asking her some questions, which Julie had trouble comprehending due to her gradual loss of faculties. She would look to me for help, and the doctor snapped at her, “Don’t look at him! Look at me!”

  After the examination I complained to officials at the hospital, and that brilliant cancer researcher was then limited only to research—no longer seeing patients. Evidently, I wasn’t the first to complain.

  Before all this happened and while we were still married, Julie received great acclaim starring in an off- Broadway play. A major agency invited her to meet their agents. At the end of all the meetings, the agent who had brought her in said the feeling was that she wasn’t a “commercial” type. This was before actors like Dustin Hoffman and Gene Wilder redefined what a commercial type looked like. Julie looked more like a tomboy, but she had a unique quality that was so special, many of us felt she would become very successful, but that one rejection caused her to stop her pursuit of an acting career. This has been the case for many gifted young actresses and actors who temperamentally could not handle what feels like constant rejection.

  After our divorce, Julie became an outstanding woodworker. She made desks and chairs but never charged enough to make a profit, so she also taught woodworking at a Y in New York. She continued this even after her fatal diagnosis. She would be teaching, feel a seizure coming on, excuse herself, walk into the hall, have a seizure, and return to teach.

  When she died, she was fifty-two. She was one of a kind and an inspiration for courage.

  My daughter later told me she would go home after her visits with me and tell her mother, “Dad’s great.” Julie would always say, “Yeah, but y’know.” Eventually, Marion asked, “Y’know what?”

  Since it’s hard to imagine the mother of a four-year-old child would leave and deprive the little girl of a father, just about everyone thought I left Julie. Even people in my family felt I left my wife and baby. Later a relative of mine who learned the truth said, “I thought that seemed so out of character for you.” I once visited Julie and Marion in Pittsburgh. Her father, a distinguished gray-haired man who was the head accountant for Pittsburgh Plate Glass, chose to not even speak to me as he sat in another room reading a paper.

  I wonder what he would have thought had he known what actually happened.

  In doing research for this book I read a quote from Julie in an interview I came across from 1972, five years after we were divorced. She said of me, “The thing about you is that everything bad about you is right there up front. As you get to know you, you get better and better all the time.”

  Naturally, I was pleased to read the last part of the quote and honestly baffled by the first part. I hope that’s not how everyone perceived me.

  Since I’ve written the above, I’ve come across an outline for a play I wrote in the early sixties. It’s about Julie and me. According to the female character, the male character never stops talking, and a lot of the talking is about sports. The female character has no interest in anything the male character has to say.

  In fairness to Julie, that rings true. So when Marion said to Julie, “Dad’s a great guy,” and Julie said, “Yeah, but y’know,” and Marion said, “Y’know what?” Julie meant I was always “on” all the time, and Julie was never “on.”

  Marion, a headlining and brilliant stand-up comedian, makes me look like the semistrong silent type. That’s why Marion’s experience with me was so different from her mom’s. My nickname for Marion as a kid was “Mouth.” Julie would say to her, “You’re just like your father.”

  People who prefer silence really shouldn’t marry talkative types, and vice versa. Everyone can be a great person, but no relationship is reasonably happy with one person talking most of the time. In defense of us talkers, at least Marion and me, if you want to talk, you’ll never get better listeners. If we’re with someone in a room, we’re comfortable as long as someone is talking, and it doesn’t have to be us.

  Just before our divorce became final, Julie told Marion, “I think I made a mistake,” but by that point we had both moved on. I think she meant yes, I was a talker, but time had taught her she could always count on me. On one hand it was heartbreaking to hear, because my daughter was raised without a dad at home. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be married to Elissa for twenty-five years and have my son, Nick, if Julie hadn’t left, because I never would have.

  Doctors

  The doctor who was insensitive to Julie was my first bad experience with a physician but, unfortunately, not the last.

  Several years ago, there was a play on Broadway called The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife. I’ll tell you a tale of an allergist. I don’t know if this allergist has a wife, but if he does I’ll bet she could tell a heck of a tale.

  A few years ago I was having an unusually aggressive attack of allergies. I’m fortunate enough to live around a lot of trees. At certain times of the year, and it feels like a lot of times, those trees, with all due respect, throw off a lot of pollen, not to mention the pollen th
rown off by the bushes and grass. Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely hold the trees, the bushes, and the grass in the highest esteem, but sometimes they do throw off a lot of pollen, and this time I was sneezing my head off. Hey! Nothing’s perfect.

  So I asked my local medical office if they could recommend an allergist. I’d never been to an allergist, but the sneezing had gotten to a point that I felt the time had come. My intention was to ask the doctor to suggest something perhaps stronger than the over-the-counter medications I’d been taking for the sneezing.

  I sat alone in the waiting room for a while, and then this tall young guy who had shaved his head walked by. He was wearing the white jacket, so I assumed he was the allergist. He was. He didn’t even glance at me.

  Soon, a nurse appeared, took me into a small room, and asked me to blow into a tube. She made some notes and then disappeared. She came back a few minutes later and said, “The doctor feels you should be able to do better than that.” So I gave it all I had. She made some more notes, disappeared again, came back after a few minutes, and said words to the effect that the doctor somehow thought I was cheating.

  I assured her I wasn’t, and pretty soon the allergist appeared. He probably said hello, but that was it. Clearly, he had little use for small talk or any talk about exactly why I was there.

  He began looking in my ears, then up my nose, and then down my throat. He still did not say a word. Then he asked me to lie down, took out a stethoscope, and began listening to my heart. Still not a word.

  At that point, I considered getting up and walking out, which I’d never done in my life—in a doctor’s office, anyway. He looked at me very solemnly and said, “I hear a murmur.” I looked at him and said, “I’ve been examined regularly since I was born, and no one has ever said that.” He said, “I’m a musician, and I have a very keen sense of hearing. Some murmurs are meaningless, and some aren’t.” He suggested I see a cardiologist.

  Still not one word about my sneezing. I said some things to him I’ve blocked out—no profanity, but I walked out and drove over to my internist, who briefly examined me and said, “You have a negligible murmur which isn’t even worth mentioning.”

  I did go to a cardiologist, who said, “You have a negligible murmur which isn’t even worth mentioning.”

  Rather than go to another allergist about the sneezing, which was worth mentioning, I decided to continue to sneeze. I figured there were a lot worse things than sneezing, and I’d just experienced one. Oh, yeah, the allergist wrote me a letter about six months later that I tore up without opening. What goes around really does come around.

  In fairness to the allergist, I’ve since been told by a very good source that he has an excellent reputation, which just proves again there’s always at least two sides to everything.

  I can’t end this story without saying a few hundred words about the cardiologist, who also concluded, “You have a negligible murmur which isn’t even worth mentioning.” (That’s probably why my regular doctors chose not to mention it.)

  First, I met with the guy. He didn’t examine me. We had a pleasant chat, and he scheduled me for an echocardiogram, which reveals if a murmur is worth mentioning or not. His was a big cardiac practice, and I assume he just didn’t get my message that I needed to change the appointment because that was the day my eighteen-year-old son was to have his first scene in a movie. I wouldn’t be on the set, but I’d definitely be somewhere in the building.

  Evidently, the cardiologist only heard I had changed the appointment, not the explanation. Although it’s a busy office, he shouldn’t have sent a letter, which I received on a Saturday, citing several reasons why I might not survive the weekend! It was such a frighteningly provocative letter, I chose to share it with no one, not even my wife—especiallynot my wife.

  I called the physician on Monday and made an attempt to put a little lighter spin on his letter, but he interrupted me by asking, “What’s the first part of the paper you read every day?” I said, “The front page.” He said, “I read the obituaries.” We scheduled an appointment for the next day. It turns out, as I’ve said, that I have a negligible heart murmur that isn’t worth mentioning. I hope he reads this and takes a good look at himself. I think that’s good advice for all of us.

  He called me about four months later, but I told his secretary I wouldn’t take his call and explained why.

  I don’t ever recall not taking someone’s call to that point, but I was provoked to do it again within the past year. The son of a girl I went to high school with reached out to me. He’s a journalist and wanted me to see some things he’d written. He sent them to me, but I found them so hateful toward women that I had my assistant e-mail him that my experience with women was so different from his that I was really not his audience. Obviously insulted, he e-mailed back that he didn’t need me to be part of his audience, because he already had a huge audience. Then he e-mailed and asked if I would call a big speaker’s bureau head on his behalf. My assistant e-mailed him that to me that call would indicate support.

  He then called me, and I didn’t take the call. Even for someone who likes to say yes to people, enough is enough.

  The only other weird experience I’d ever had with a doctor occurred a few decades ago when I went in for a checkup and the doctor asked me how many women I’d been with. I asked him the relevance of the question, and he absolutely couldn’t answer.

  He just stared at me and said, “There are a lot of weird people in your profession.” I looked at him and said, “There are a lot of weird people in your profession.”

  Most recently, I went to a doctor to treat an ear infection and he wanted to operate on me for a brain tumor that an MRI at Yale revealed I didn’t have. Actually, I had no tumor anywhere and easily got rid of the ear infection with antibiotics, needless to say prescribed by another doctor.

  Several years ago I was seated next to a Harvard scholar at a dinner party. The reason the host chose to sit me next to him was that the man had been told by a prominent doctor that he had six months to live because of a malignant brain tumor.

  The host, knowing my experience with Julie and her brain tumor, sat me next to him. The man told me what had happened to him, and all I said was, “If you walk across the street to another hospital you may hear something entirely different.” Amazingly, he seemed completely taken aback by what I said. Well, he walked across the street and many more streets, and twenty years later, he’s alive and well.

  When it comes to a serious medical diagnosis, never assume that what someone tells you, no matter who it is, is the final answer.

  One last thought on doctors. Some but not all let their patients know they’re due for something. Every conscientious doctor should do that. Then, if something happens, it won’t be because the doctor didn’t do his full job.

  The Woman in the Hotel

  When I was around twenty and studying acting in New York, I lived in the building I described earlier that is now a homeless shelter.

  I had a job working as a night watchman on the Brooklyn waterfront for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. I worked from midnight to eight at Todd’s Shipyards. My job was to patrol, in full uniform, empty warehouses and call in if I saw a fire or anything. I wasn’t armed, and somehow I happily never considered what “anything” might be. I was paid $1.62 an hour. I was paid a dollar an hour for guard work in Manhattan.

  One day, before I got together with Julie and was living in my room with no window, I was walking through the lobby of the building (I wasn’t in uniform) and was approached by a woman who seemed about fifteen years older than I was who also had a room in the building. I had never seen her before, but she walked up to me, said hello, and told me her therapist thought it would be good for her if she had sexual relations, and I seemed like a clean-cut young man. Nothing even remotely like that ever happened to me before or since. I told her it was true. I was clean-cut, and I agreed to come to her room later.

  I went back to my room, thought
about it, and something told me maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, but it all felt too strange, so I knocked on her door about a half hour before the appointed time. She answered it wearing a dressing gown. I explained I had to go to work. She nodded, and that was that.

  Years later, I ran into her on the street, chatted a moment, and made a date. This was in a period when Julie and I were separated, but I still had some hope we’d get back together. She came to where I was living, and…

  About a month later she called to tell me she was pregnant. I had taken precautions, but nevertheless there it was.

  I have seldom been so distraught. In my brief encounter with this woman it was clear she might have had more than a few emotional issues and had even been institutionalized, but even now, growing up in the era that I did, I believe if you get a woman pregnant, you should marry her. I was unable to dissuade myself from that belief, even under those strange circumstances. It also meant the definitive end of my marriage, which had already ended, but I hadn’t fully accepted it.

  I walked the streets of Manhattan for weeks in a terrible state. Then, one day I got a call from her saying she wasn’t pregnant after all, just “late.”

  I actually went to see her to look at her face-to-face to confirm that it was true. I completely believed her and moved on with my life, although for a long time when the phone rang, which it hardly ever did, I feared for a moment it was her saying there was a baby. Thankfully, that call never came.

  Many years later I found myself in bed with a beautiful actress. When I brought up the subject of birth control, neither of us had any. I got dressed and, I hope politely, took my leave. To this day, that woman resents me. I understand, but since, as I’ve said, I believe marriage must follow a pregnancy, I had no choice. I also believe in a woman’s right to choose simply because, as many have said, if a woman wants an abortion somehow she will get one, and if Roe v. Wade is ever repealed, abortions obviously would be done under less than safe circumstances.