At 100 years old, Alan Shayne’s life has spanned the entirety of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.
Alan got his start acting on Broadway during the Golden Age in the 1940s, then shifted behind the scenes after a famous casting director sat him down and told him that while he was talented, he was never going to be a star. (That casting director was Michael Shurtleff, who went on to write Audition, a book that’s still considered required reading for aspiring actors and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.)
Maybe Alan didn’t have star quality, but one thing is certain: he could spot it in others. He became a casting director and cast Barbra Streisand in her first Broadway role in I Can Get It For You Wholesale, as well as Diane Keaton, Cicely Tyson, and Dustin Hoffman in some of their earliest roles. He also cast the films Catch-22 (1970) and All the President’s Men (1976). He ended his career as president of Warner Bros. Television.
Through it all, Alan and his partner, Norman, have been together for 67 years. It’s impossible to put a simple framework on his life of being in or out of the closet. It wasn’t a secret that he had a longtime partner. They’d go out together and have people over, but at the same time he wasn’t able to bring Norman to work events and almost didn’t get the job at Warner Bros. because of it. His story is one that doesn’t fit neatly into any box.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jeffrey Masters: Your first Broadway show was in the 1940s. What was that audition process like, and how did you end up walking onto that show, as you say?
Alan Shayne: I was desperate. I had no money. I’d been fired from a play I was in, a touring play called Junior Miss. I was really miscast, terribly miscast, for a very tough kid. Finally somebody from the New York office saw me and said, “He’s terrible, fire him.” So they fired me, and I managed to get to New York with no money and lived in a little four-dollar-a-week place.
Terrible, and I was desperate to get work. I would go to all the offices where the actors went, and they would say, “Nothing for you. Nothing for you.” Or they wouldn’t even talk to me. So I didn’t know what to do. I read in the little paper that actors could buy, that they were seeing actors at a certain theater. So I went and stood in line, and two guys came out, looked at the people, and picked me. They said, “Come in.” I went in, and they said, “Yeah, I think he’ll do.” I thought, well, I guess they’re going to give me a reading. They said, “Come back at eight o’clock tonight.” I thought, oh boy, that’s really exciting.
I went back, and I didn’t know what they were doing, and suddenly they said, “Here’s the uniform, see if it fits.” I said, “Well, okay.” They took me to the basement, I tried the uniform, and they said, “Perfect, you look perfect. Okay, you get a dollar a show, just be noisy.” I didn’t know what they were talking about. There were some other guys there also in uniform, and some man came and said, “All right, guys, let’s go.” I followed them, afraid to ask what we were going to do. I figured they were finally going to give me a reading. Suddenly we all walked on stage, and the curtain came down. That was my job.
It was a play where the girl had invited all the soldiers from the nearby base, and her parents caught her, and there was hysteria, and suddenly all the soldiers arrived and the curtain came down. That was my part. I got a dollar a performance, and I did that for some time. John Dall was one of the soldiers, who went on to Hollywood.
JM: So it was not what you were expecting.
AS: No, they didn’t ask me to read. They didn’t ask me to do anything. I happened to fit the uniform, so I got the job. But I didn’t actually get on Broadway for five years after that. I mean, that was on Broadway, but I was an extra, I didn’t really do anything.
JM: And so that show was Antony and Cleopatra, right?
AS: No, no. I think the first real one was Hamlet, with Maurice Evans. That was the first time I actually got on Broadway.
JM: Really?
AS: Yes.
JM: You went on to do other shows on Broadway, in non-background roles. Today the stereotype of Broadway is that it’s very gay. Was that true back then?
AS: What, that Broadway was gay? No. If anything, you didn’t want anyone to know you were gay, or you wouldn’t get work. Agents wouldn’t send you out if they knew you were gay.
JM: Was it more hidden, or just nonexistent?
AS: It was laughed at. It was made fun of. If you were gay, they wouldn’t send you out. I was having a relationship with a guy at the time, we lived together, but we used different addresses. If anybody knew we were living together, they wouldn’t send us out. They looked down on gays terribly. If gays were mentioned at a party, it was done in a derogatory way, somebody would say something terrible.
JM: Was there anywhere you could go with the man you were dating to be affectionate with him?
AS: Oh my God, no. It was all done in the privacy of your room, I guess. There were gay bars, but I was a kid, I didn’t know about that, that all happened later. When I was there, I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t have any money.
JM: So how did you meet the boyfriend you were living with?
AS: He was in the play I’d been fired from, and he was very instrumental in helping me get to New York, meeting his family who lived in New Jersey, and so forth. I couldn’t have done it without him. Then he suddenly announced one day that he was in love with me, the last thing I’d ever thought of. But somehow we lived together for a couple of years. On my part, it was never a love relationship.
JM: Yeah.
AS: It finally broke up.
JM: You eventually married a woman in 1947, Jacqueline. I know she was gay too. Would you consider that a marriage of convenience at the time?
AS: It was a marriage of convenience, there’s no question about it. She was a lesbian, I was gay. We were having terrible problems with our families, who said, “Why don’t you get married, why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that.” We were both very fond of each other, we went out a lot together, and she thought I was a wonderful young actor. She really helped me a lot, and was actually responsible for getting me the agent who got me my really big Broadway part. But we finally decided we’d never really love anybody, we didn’t believe in love anymore. We thought, well, at least we’ll live together, we’ll be together, we’ll have relationships, but we’ll have each other. That’s why we got married. We could also put our money together. It was certainly something that wasn’t about love. I thought eventually we might even have a child, but we never did.
JM: You said there were a lot of problems with your family wanting you to get married. Did getting married to Jacqueline solve a lot of issues for you?
AS: Oh, of course, yes. Because I was suddenly married, and they’d leave me alone. Also, she was from a rich family, so they liked that. She wore a lot of jewelry, that impressed my mother. Yeah, it took a lot of weight off both of us.
JM: Sure. Back then, homosexuality was talked about as something that could be cured. Was that ever something you wanted, to be cured, in that way?
AS: What do you mean, talk with people about being—
JM: Oh, no, sorry. At that time, the concept of homosexuality was something people thought could be cured by a therapist, someone you could talk to who could “cure,” quote unquote, you. Was that something you ever desired?
AS: Of course. In the first place, I had a relationship with a woman who was wonderful, I really liked her a lot, this is a bit further down the line. She was a psychologist, and I went to her psychiatrist to be cured. The psychiatrist said, “What is it you want from this?” And I said, “I want to be cured. I want to be straight.” I don’t think we used the word “straight” then. I went to her for a couple of years, and what I got out of it was getting rid of my wife, Jacqueline, who by that point had a relationship with another woman. So there were three of us, two women and me, living in an apartment. It was uncomfortable.
JM: I believe you wrote it was a one-bedroom apartment.
AS: It was kind of a one-bedroom, yes. It was a little storeroom that I lived in. Not ideal. Through the analysis, I remember there was a singer in a club, Mabel Mercer, very famous, and she sang a song like, “If you leave Paris, you’ll take away the sun.” That was my dream in the analysis. Jacqueline was in Paris with her friend, and I said, “Yes, I dreamed that, isn’t that nice? I want her to come home.” The analyst said, “It sounds like you don’t want her to come. If you’re saying, if you leave, you’ll take away the sun, you want her to stay there.” I realized I wanted to get rid of her. So we broke up, and for many years we didn’t speak. But I did try, in analysis, to get rid of being gay, because it just didn’t seem like there was any future in it. Little did I know I was going to be with someone for 67 years. But at that time it was kind of picking up people, though I never went to bars or did things like that. I did have a lot of relationships, quick ones. It wasn’t much of a life.
JM: With Jacqueline being gay too, did you feel back then there was camaraderie between gay men and gay women, in that way?
AS: Well, we were together a lot. We were great friends before we married. We went out together a lot. Jacqueline had more money than I did, so she’d pay more than I did. We went to clubs, we had fun. I liked her enormously. Finally she died, and I was very moved by that. But I did care about her. And I think she cared about me. We fought over the years, sometimes we didn’t speak, sometimes we did, but we were very close.
JM: I know during this time you were continuing to act and do Broadway, and then you shifted to casting and behind-the-scenes work. The impetus for this was a man named Michael Shurtleff, who was a famous casting director and also wrote the book Audition, which is considered a bible, I’d say, for aspiring actors. What did Michael Shurtleff say to you about your acting?
AS: He called me in. I had never met him. I’d been playing opposite Lena Horne as an understudy, understudying Ricardo Montalban, and I was feeling very good.
JM: This was in the musical Jamaica.
AS: In Jamaica, yes. Ricardo got sick quite a bit, or whatever, and I would go on, in blackface at that time, because it was about natives on an island in Jamaica. Michael, who was very famous as a casting director, sent for me to come to the David Merrick office to meet him. I was pretty sure it was about a part, obviously he’d seen me in the show and thought I was terrific. So I was all ready to finally get the part of my life. He said, “You are a wonderful actor, but you’re never going to make it.” I went to pieces inside and said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I’ve seen your performances, you’re very good, you’re a very good actor, but you’re never going to be a star.” I said, “Well, I just haven’t had the part yet.” He said, “You won’t make it. You’re very good in Jamaica, everybody likes you, but they’re not lined up at the stage door waiting for you when you come out, are they?” I agreed that they weren’t, because they weren’t. I got a big hand, and all that stuff, but I didn’t get fan mail.
Alan Shayne and Lena Horne in “Jamaica” (1958) on Broadway
There’s something about a star that’s just there. If you saw Robert Redford in a crowd, there’s a light on him. When I cast All the President’s Men, if you walked into a room crowded with people, there was a light on Robert Redford. He was a star, and that’s true. Anyway, Michael said he’d sent for me because he thought I should be a casting director. I was horrified, I thought I’d be taken away from my acting. Then I realized he was probably right, that I would. He kept saying, “You’ll have a long career and everybody will like you, but you’ll never have a big part, and you’ll end up with your cronies in a bar talking about what could have happened. Why do you want to do that when you can make a lot of money and have a career?” So I did. I left and became a casting director.
JM: Him telling you that you’ll never be a star, in hindsight, do you think he was right?
AS: I think he was right. I walked back home after that meeting and thought about my life. I’d been in New York, well, I was then about thirty-two, and I’d been there since I was eighteen, and I’d never made it. I had one wonderful part in a Broadway show and got good reviews, but it didn’t lead to anything. Everybody said, “Oh, you look great,” or “you were this or that,” and I had a bit from Hollywood at one point, but it wasn’t going to mean anything, really. I would’ve been a contract player and it wouldn’t have meant anything. I had chances, but nothing really happened. And I realized that by then I’d met Norman, and Norman was a graphic artist, so he worked in the daytime and I worked at night. There was no future in that, because we wouldn’t see each other. All these things went through my head as I thought, I don’t want to end up as a guy in the unemployment line, an old actor talking about what could have been. I didn’t want to do that. I’ve never regretted it.
JM: With Norman, when you met him, it seemed like you had a lot of false starts. It wasn’t totally clicking right away. What finally changed?
AS: Norman was very smart, and it’s one of the things I think of today for young people. It’s so easy to go to bed with anybody and enjoy it, or not enjoy it, or do it twice or three times, whatever. Norman and I finally did have sex, badly, terrible. It was going to end, it was just not going to work. Norman called me and came over and said, “I really think there’s something between us, but we have to find out who we are, and whether we really care for each other. No sex.”
JM: So he wasn’t scared away by you two having bad sex.
AS: No, he wasn’t. I don’t know why he wasn’t. I had encouraged it, it was my thing, I was, “What are we doing? We had dinner, what do you do after dinner?” It was a time when if you lived on the east side of New York, you had only to open the door and people came rushing by, it was a very gay area at that time. He was smart, and we spent, I don’t know how many months, seeing each other every night, having dinner, going to the theater. We were together, but we never had sex, until finally we did. By then we knew we had so much in common. We had the same backgrounds, though he’s five years younger than me, we came from similar families, we knew the same movies. Little by little we got to know each other and realized how much we really cared for each other. That was the basis of the sixty-seven years, and also that we decided to be monogamous.
JM: Can I ask, so you spend these months getting together, not having sex, getting to know each other. When you finally did have sex, how was it?
AS: Wonderful. It was loving and wonderful. That was it.
JM: What year did you meet him?
AS: Fifty-eight.
JM: Fifty-eight. As you write, a big shift happened in your relationship in 1976, when he won an Emmy, for title design. This shift happened because you weren’t present at the ceremony, it sounds like.
AS: There was still homophobia. We were in Hollywood, I had a good job, I had produced the shows that Norman did the graphic work for, and I’d nominated him, you had to nominate in those days, and he was chosen as one of the contestants. When he was chosen, I was advised not to go to the Emmys, although we lived very openly in Hollywood and entertained the networks together. I didn’t go with him to business dinners. Everyone knew we lived together, and we lived openly, I’ll go into that in a minute. But I was advised not to go to the show, to the Emmy Award evening, although it was actually a luncheon.
JM: Is that because when you’re hosting people at home for dinner, that’s private in a way, but the Emmys are public?
AS: Yes, it was public. If it was a business dinner, a big dinner, a benefit or something, I would go with a woman. I think I was the only executive who was gay and known to be gay. Everybody knew about Barry Diller, everybody knew about David Geffen, all the ones who were quiet, but we lived openly, we lived together, we always went to restaurants together, we were known to be together, everybody knew Norman and liked him. But they didn’t want it rubbed in their faces in a business meeting, if that makes any sense.
JM: You were the president of Warner Brothers Television at the time.
AS: Yes.
JM: So there were these unspoken rules where it’s more or less, don’t ask, don’t tell. Well, actually no, you were telling, but it was more or less, it’s fine, but don’t make a big deal about it.
AS: I was in the film division at Warner’s and I was casting as well, and then finally they hired me to just be in the film division. One day they came to me and said, “We’re going out of the television business, and you’re the only one who has any knowledge of television.” I had already produced television for years, worked with David Susskind on all sorts of plays on television. Anyway, they said, “You’re the only one, and we’re firing the guy who was head of television. Would you just take over till we can get out of the business? It’s costing us a fortune, it’s only for a couple of months, just take it over.” So I did, and I decided to do it as well as I could, and it became a success. I got series, I got miniseries, and so forth. One day they came to me and said, “It’s a success,” and I said, “I know it’s a success, everybody’s talking about it, and we’re going to stay in the business.” I said, “Wonderful.” They said, “Let’s find somebody to take it over.” I said, “Okay.” So we began making lists of people to take over the television division. Nobody wanted it, they all had their good jobs.
The head of Warners had gone to something very popular at that time, EST, where you went and heard about yourself, thought about yourself, and so forth. One of the things in EST was you could say to somebody, “I want to share with you, I really don’t like you, but I want to share that with you.” So I suddenly thought, what the hell are we doing here? I’d made this thing successful, they were going out of business. So I went to Ted Ashley, who was the head of Warners, and also a friend, and I said, “Ted, I just want to share with you, I should be the head of Warners Television, I should be the president.” He looked at me in great amazement and said, “Oh, we never thought of that.” I said, “Well, I didn’t either, but I just thought of it.” Then began the homophobia, not really strong homophobia, but the feeling, oh, he’s gay, he can’t really work with the old boy network that is television, always at the soccer game or the ice-skating rink or whatever. Alan won’t do that, he’s a gay person. Weeks and weeks went by as they argued about this. People would tell me things that were going on, and finally they called and said I was president. But that’s the homophobic climate we were living in at that time. It’s not that they hated gays, they just didn’t think we could make money and sell. But I’d already proved I could.
JM: Do you have any feelings about Warner Brothers now, having been sold to Paramount, and the Ellisons?
AS: I have no feelings about it. I left Warner Brothers, and that’s enough feelings about it.
JM: I want to go back a little in time to the sixties, when you were casting for Broadway, because one of the shows you were casting director for, in 1962, was I Can Get It for You Wholesale, which is famously Barbra Streisand’s Broadway debut. How did she get on your radar?
AS: I’d gone to work for Michael, and one of the first shows we worked on was I Can Get It for You Wholesale. We saw everybody, and at one point he said, “I want you to see this girl. There’s nothing for her in this show, but her voice is incredible.” He brought her in for an audition, and she was the ugliest thing you could imagine, she looked like she just wasn’t a very attractive person. She wore old, grungy clothes, took chewing gum out of her mouth, stuck it on the piano, and then sang, and the voice was so incredible. She sang “A Sleepin’ Bee.” Michael just went berserk. He said to me, “There’s nothing for her in the show, but I wanted you to hear her, because she’s incredible.” And she was, when she sang she was gorgeous, but otherwise she was a mess.
Merrick, the producer at that time, only used beautiful women, he only cared for good-looking women. She was really ugly, huge nose, dirty hair, looked awful. Then we went through the process, I’d worked on a show for them, I started getting jobs from the Merrick office, one of them was with a French guard, the French Foreign, I’m not so great at remembering everything. I was working on that as an assistant stage manager, and I took photographs to make money, and I photographed a guy named Elliott Gould, who was in the chorus, aggressive and impossible and wonderful, kind of great-looking, someone who really filled a room, he was terrific. I brought him in to be the lead, everybody thought I was crazy, but he was wonderful and he got it.
When we started talking, we brought Streisand in for Arthur Laurents, the director, and said, “There’s nothing we can do with her, but you’ve got to hear this voice.” He went berserk about her voice too. We all thought, what could we do? I don’t know to this day who thought of it, but somebody said, “Let’s make her the telephone operator.” It was meant to be a woman in her fifties. Anyway, that’s the story.
JM: Miss Marmelstein.
AS: Miss Marmelstein, yes.
JM: It’s funny you talk about her looks, because when I grew up, Barbra Streisand was already Barbra Streisand, and from my young brain she was impossibly glamorous.
AS: The shock was what happened to her in that show. Suddenly she had gorgeous nails, was beautifully done, I don’t know who did it, but she changed amazingly. And yet in Hollywood, when we’d run into her, she didn’t look so glamorous anymore. But in movies she did, she looked fantastic.
JM: When you moved to Hollywood, you cast Cicely Tyson in an early role, Diane Keaton in her first film role, Catch-22, All the President’s Men with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. These are some of the biggest stars we’ve had. Going back to what Michael Shurtleff told you, that you didn’t have star quality, that spark, it’s clear you were able to identify that in other people. How do you define what that is, what you’re seeing?
AS: Well, most of what I learned as a casting director was to see the performance. I couldn’t tell by meeting somebody that they were gorgeous or wonderful, it didn’t matter what they looked like. I was helping cast a little off-Broadway production, and they put an actor in that I didn’t know, and I went to see it, and I saw Dustin Hoffman. God knows, not a beauty, but the performance was so spectacular. He played a kind of transvestite in Berlin, I think it was Harry, Noon and Night, but I can’t remember. You knew from that performance he was going to be a star. He didn’t have “the light,” I mean, Redford was different, he had that blond hair, he was so incredible-looking, you knew he’d be a movie star. You didn’t know how good an actor he’d be, but there was something about the performance. I knew Faye Dunaway was going to make it, there wasn’t anybody around like that, she was a leading lady. When I put her into a part, she made a success. Most of what I learned as a casting director was to see the performance. That told you, when you saw Richard Gere, you knew he was going to make it, you saw the performance.
Now in Hollywood, it’s all different. Stars, it’s not the casting director, it’s the star that they want. When I went to Hollywood and made suggestions of New York actors, they’d all look at me as if I were crazy. They’d say, “What about Robert Redford? What about Paul Newman?” It’s always stars.
JM: They just wanted a big name.
AS: I think that’s what they want, because it makes money.
JM: Did you miss casting for specificity in theater, versus talent, when you moved to Hollywood, when you became an executive?
AS: I don’t know. I’d done an awful lot of casting before I got to Hollywood, and New York had changed, it was very tough at that time, and I was glad to be in Hollywood, where they’d park my car and do all that stuff at the studio. You’d go to the dentist, and they’d park your car at the dentist. It was such a nice time.
JM: You grew up with very little money, and then you were living in New York City in, I’ll just call them, shitty apartments. It must have been an extraordinary lifestyle change to suddenly be a Warner Brothers executive.
AS: Well, remember, I’d already been very successful as a casting director, so we’d bought a house in Bucks County, and then bought a house in Connecticut with a swimming pool. We were living very well. The difference in Hollywood, we lived opposite Rock Hudson, we didn’t do that in Connecticut. They had a special table at the good restaurants. If you had a good job in Hollywood, they treated you very well.
JM: You mentioned Rock Hudson. This is the seventies in Hollywood, I think, right? I know you weren’t able to be out as a gay person, but was there camaraderie with other gay people in Hollywood?
AS: No, not really. We never really lived that life. David Geffen and those people, I knew them, but we might have gone to one or two gay parties in all the years we were in Hollywood. We didn’t really fit in too well. We were a married couple, not married until, you know, we could get married, but we lived a very married life. We were together every evening, we had a cook, we lived very well, we had a screening room to watch movies, it was a big deal.
JM: I know you were never an activist in your life, but were you paying attention to the larger gay rights movement that was unfolding?
AS: It wasn’t really there. Maybe if we’d gone to gay parties we would’ve been more knowledgeable, but we didn’t. We went to one or two and felt very uncomfortable. In the first place, we were the wrong age by then, I forget what age we were, but we weren’t kids, so nobody really wanted to be with us, or find us attractive. For example, when AIDS started to come along, we didn’t know anything about it. Our friends were getting sick, and we didn’t understand what was going on. None of us did.
JM: I guess because you were in a monogamous relationship, you didn’t need to learn those things, because it didn’t affect you.
AS: We had gay friends, and we knew they were getting sick, and we saw them, they came to the house looking terrible. But nobody knew what was going on at that time. Rock didn’t know what was going on either, he came to the house for dinner one night and he was very thin, we didn’t know what it was. It was all a mystery.
JM: Yeah.
AS: We weren’t part of a gay movement. We weren’t, I’m sorry to say.
JM: Well, it sounds like you might not have been able to have your career too, if you had been part of one, is what I think the assumption would’ve been. I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
AS: What do you mean?
JM: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you wouldn’t have been able to have the career you had, had you been out and an activist and loud about being gay.
AS: Well, no one was loud about being gay. It was all done secretly. No one said they were gay, the gay parties were secret. It wasn’t spoken of, it just wasn’t spoken of. We went everywhere, but no one ever said it out loud. I didn’t say out loud that I was gay until I was fifty. We’d been together fifty years and it wasn’t mentioned. It was obvious, but it wasn’t mentioned. What can I say?
JM: You’re a hundred years old now, which sounds crazy to say, but you’ve seen the full span of the modern LGBTQ rights movement in your lifetime. What are the moments from your life that stand out, where there was a change, be it being able to hold Norman’s hand in public, or small things like that. Do you have things that stand out?
AS: I’ve never held Norman’s hand in public. We just weren’t brought up that way. We’re always together, everybody knows we’re together, all our friends know, our maid knows. We live very openly, but I don’t kiss him in public, I wouldn’t do that. That’s not the way we were brought up. We were brought up in secrecy, and we were afraid of some question. We lived secretly for a long time. In Hollywood we lived openly, but I didn’t do anything in public that would embarrass anyone.
JM: So when did you become comfortable publicly labeling yourself as gay?
AS: I think, well, we got married in 2004, that was the first time you could get married, and we got married because we felt that if we believed in being gay, we ought to stand up for it. So we got married as soon as we could, that was very early. We got married in Nantucket, when you could get married in Massachusetts.
JM: You’re a hundred years old, Norman’s ninety-five, right? You write in the book about how many of your friends have died. It’s kind of remarkable that as many people as you’ve known who’ve died, you’re both still alive, together.
AS: Well, part of it was that we lived a monogamous life, so we weren’t tempted. I think there have been one or two episodes, I write about that in the book, but for the most part I’d say 99.9 percent of the sixty-seven years has been monogamous. When we have had a moment of thinking otherwise, we’ve been smart enough not to go through with it. I think that’s kept us together. Norman has now had a broken leg, and he’s not been well. We’re married.
JM: You’re together, but you’re also just, you’re alive too, at these ages. It’s against the odds, if I can say that.
AS: We stopped smoking. I was thirty-two, he was, what, twenty-eight. We stopped smoking because we were paying an analyst, and spending so much money puffing cigarettes, that we gave it up. Luckily we did, I think that’s very good. We don’t drink heavily. As a matter of fact, right now we don’t drink at all. We did drink a lot of wine in our life, but we were never drunks. We’ve never done drugs, we just couldn’t do it. We tried, in Hollywood somebody always tries at a party to give you something, and I hated it, so we never would. There were things we would’ve gotten involved in, I think, if we hadn’t been monogamous in Hollywood. We’d be dead, so many of our friends were.
JM: You’re saying because of AIDS?
AS: Because of AIDS.
JM: How much do you think about your own death now? How present is it?
AS: I think about it. It doesn’t frighten me. I would like to face it in a strong, bright, brave way, and I would like it to be pleasant, if possible. We go to doctors all the time, living in Palm Beach is doctors’ heaven, and of course we’re old, we’re getting problems. We have problems, ear trouble, all that stuff you get when you get older that you don’t expect to have. So even if I’m a hundred—
JM: No, no, I don’t want to cut you off.
AS: It’s not all bad, being a hundred years old rather than ninety-nine, ninety-five. Norman’s had a lot of trouble with his back, because he’s an artist, he spent his whole life raising his arm up to a canvas, and now his whole back has gone. I don’t know, we are what we are. I figure it happens any day, any moment, when it happens.
JM: Is that how you’re living nowadays, that it might happen at any moment?
AS: Oh no, I never think of it that way. Basically, I don’t think I’m a hundred.
JM: How old are you mentally?
AS: I don’t know. I just, when you hit eighty, you’re starting to go, because really up until eighty we could do anything we wanted to do. Now I don’t drive, because I see quite well but I’m not sure I see perfectly, and I don’t think I should drive. There are things you can’t do, you can’t travel the way you used to travel. We went around the world, we had a wonderful time, we can’t do it now. So I don’t think about that.
JM: Are there things still on your bucket list that you want to do?
AS: Well, you can’t anymore, that’s the trouble. I’d love to go to Europe again, but it’s so difficult to travel, and you have to think about hospitals and doctors in Tuscany, it’s difficult. I’d love to go. We sit and think, “Let’s do something for the summer,” but what? We can’t go to the beach because you can’t be in the sun all the time. All these things happen when you get older. But you don’t sit around and think, oh, any minute they’re going to take me.
JM: There are all these things you can’t do, but you seem in good spirits. Are you still enjoying life, I guess?
AS: I love it. We had a party recently for the beginning of my book, just to have friends in, not to sell books. It was wonderful to see them all, the ones who are still alive. Most of our friends are gone, and that’s something else you have to taste, that they’re gone. Anyway, you have to have younger friends.
Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.
LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1
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