did get smoothed out. I wrote a letter to Bernice apologizing for the seeming insensitivity and tawdriness of the in flagrante moment and vowing the honor of my intentions. She seemed to accept the apology.
I liked Diana’s parents, and her sister, Heidi. Diana’s father, John, an architect by profession, was also an amazing classical pianist. He wrote music, painted, drew cartoons, wrote poetry, and designed Christmas cards. He was very whimsical on occasion, too, a trait not usually associated with folks of German origin. He was one of ten children of a Lutheran minister from Minneapolis, but he wasn’t at all hidebound by religion or by convention. He remained to the end of his tenure on earth a New Deal Democrat, and there was no saying anything against FDR.
Bernice, his wife, was of Swedish origins and working-class background. Her family name was Engstrom. She had studied art, interior design, and architecture, but, as a woman, she encountered restrictions in entering that last profession, and became an interior designer. Still, not bad for the children of Swedish and German immigrants.
After those initial, bumpy, encounters, we all got on fine. I never told or countenanced any mother-in-law jokes, either.
The situiation in French Indochina, or Vietnam, as it properly came to be called, was looming ever larger on the horizon. Lyndon Johnson decided that an errant floating log was a torpedo that had been fired at a U.S. destroyer, and persuaded Congress to grant him power to carry out any military action he wished under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
I’d read a bit about Ho Chi Minh and his struggle against the savagery of the French colonials, and I knew he’d assisted in the war against Japan, so I was shocked to learn the U.S.A. was now attacking this patriot. Charles E. Martin, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and his wife got me involved in my first antiwar demonstration in 1964. People on the sidewalks screamed at us and threw things, calling us scum, traitors, commies, and perverts, and letting us know that if we didn’t like it here we were strongly urged to go to Russia.
I didn’t know enough about the issues to really debate them, but I did know that the Vietnamese people had a right to live in their own country, and the French had that same right, only in France. Looking at those faces, twisted with hate, I wanted to tell them that it was their sons who were the likely dead and wounded victims of this war, and that they should join us to help stop the inevitable mass murder.
Little did any of us know that it would be more than a decade and three presidents later before it was all over. There would be fifty-eight thousand U.S. dead and a quarter million wounded, and several million Vietnamese dead and maimed before a semblance of peace would be restored.
My friend Hugh Magill and his wife had arranged for a justice of the peace to marry Diana and me, on Monday, March 1, 1965. Louise Arnold, who had introduced us, now married to John Westergaard, a lovable, eccentric bear of a man, joined us for the mini-ceremony, as did Diana’s mother and father.
We have only one picture of the wedding, taken before we left for the house of the justice of the peace, a man who bore the unforgettable name of Euclid Shook. I think he and his missus must probably have had a martini or two that evening, as they were an unusually jolly couple, offering around the beverages, as we were in their home.
After the I dos, Diana, now McCourt, and self sped off to some old inn in Hartford, the Old Forge, I believe it was called. For two people who had both been married before, we were a shy couple that night. We turned on the television for comfort and diversion, and there was a movie playing which I fervently hoped would not portend our future. It was I’ll Cry Tomorrow, with Susan Hayward, as dreary a film as you’d ever see and hope to miss.
In the morning I managed to get the car stuck in a snow bank, from which we were rescued by a French Canadian couple. Another stop, just a little later, to get in the backseat and steam up the windows, and then back we went to reality and life in New York.
At that time there was no housing crunch in New York. Newly built apartments were plentiful on the East Side, and the older and bigger apartments were available quite reasonably on the West Side. We opted for one on the West Side, with the several bedrooms and, as they say, two and a half baths, and they were just as glad to get us as tenants then as they would be glad to get rid of us today, as we are still there, and they could double or triple the rent as soon as we left.
We were both moving from relatively small places, and this new habitation seemed huge and full of echoes. We thought we would never be able to afford to furnish it. But Diana had some furniture, and I had access to a knife and spoon and a few things like that, so we set up housekeeping with what we could.
Merv Griffin had started his syndicated television show, with Arthur Treacher sniffing superciliously at all the vulgar goings-on while offering the occasional witticism (he told me that, secretly, he was having a jolly good time). My friend Tom O’Malley, possibly the best talent booker in the business, was involved from the start, and so I had a reasonably good run as an irregular regular with the show.
There is the illusion that all these chat shows consist of spontaneous and impromptu conversations between celebrities who know each other very well. Not so, old sport! All guests, no matter how well known, are prepped, as they say, by a talent booker. Particularly young actors and actresses ill read and lacking in wit, which is more often the case than you’d want to know. Vaguely humorous anecdotes have to be drawn out of them and inflated into stories, and then polished by the show’s writers until they are actually funny, or else the whole interview is apt to reveal how boring the guests really are.
I, of course, was the ideal guest, replete with the story, the jest, the bon mot, or so it seemed to me. Griffin liked to come to Himself after the show, and there were nights there with Dom DeLuise, Jonathan Winters, Pat McCormick, and Jack Burns that can neither be remembered nor forgotten.
In the kitchen, the cook, the big-bodied, laughing Sudia Masoud, my favorite Black Muslim, eavesdropped all night and added her shrieks of merriment to the general uproar. She had been present when Malcolm X was shot down, and told me, “That was the cleanest assassination I ever did see.” I forbore asking her how many others she had witnessed.
Diana developed a vague suspicion that she was pregnant, and a visit to the physician made it a certainty. We were told that a new child would make its way into this world sometime around the middle of October 1965. I informed my mother, Angela, that she was about to become a grandma again, and she launched immediately into the keening mode.
Now, for those who don’t know, keening is an ancient Celtic expression of grief or sorrow, usually heard at a time of death. It is expressed by a high-pitched wailing sound with mourners beating breasts and giving vent to the odd shriek in the middle of the wail. While it was not quite the full frontal keen, the mother did a fairly good job moaning about what would happen to the other children, Siobhan and Malachy. If I couldn’t look after them, how was I going to look after the new one?
There is nothing more aggravating than someone giving voice to your own unspoken fears.
We weren’t doing well financially, and we were trying to cope with raising a handicapped child. Plus, I’d made a haimes of my role as father to Siobhan and Malachy, so I had my own doubts. I contributed what I could, but Linda took care of our children largely with money she got from her parents, who had quite a bit of it. Having settled in with Diana, I saw Siobhan and Malachy, now six and five, most weekends, but I was as apt to bring them home and then go out, leaving their care to Diana, as I was to stay and give them any of what they needed from their father. During their earliest years, I had been completely absent a good amount of the time, sometimes just too drunk to show up.
But the mother Angela was never comfortable with the women any of the sons married anyway, and announcements of pregnancies only served to deepen her gloom that liaisons were going to be on the permanent side. Yet when babies shouldered their way into the world, the mother became most maternal and loving, at least until the little ones reached the age of two or thereabouts. At that point, they got a bit of independence and she’d shift her attention onto the next infant.
On the evening of the thirteenth of October 1965, Diana announced that there were certain