By prior arrangement, Jean came up to Toronto a week later to join me for a short visit. She brought along five-year-old Ian. I had not told her about what had transpired between Liv and me. In a state of numb paralysis, I had done nothing to forestall her trip. The visit was horrific. On the very first night Jean was there, I blurted out to her the news of my latest infidelity. Her first response was incredulous laughter (“You’re kidding!”). This was quickly followed by bewilderment, then rage, and ultimately a kind of deranged despair. I was so choked with my own tears and guilt that I was blind to my unintended cruelty toward her. In retrospect it appalls me. There was plenty wrong with our marriage, but I’d had neither the honesty nor the courage to flatly state that I wanted it to end. Instead I blamed our troubles on some inexorable outside force that had me in its grip. How can we go on, I wailed, when I keep doing this to you? How can you endure it? I’m such a bastard! Why don’t you throw me out? The scene could have been scripted by Eugene O’Neill.
In essence that evening was the beginning of the end of our ten-year marriage. Jean flew home early with Ian, leaving me to grapple with a turbulent new reality of my own devising. The pre-Broadway tour continued for two more months. After Toronto we played Washington and Baltimore. The out-of-town run constituted a de facto separation from Jean and a de facto live-in relationship with Liv. Between Liv and me, passions ran so high that it was almost impossible to sort them out. We loved each other’s company, but from the very outset our relationship was beset with insecurity and strife. Following the age-old pattern of stage romances, the play had released a torrent of need in both of us. She longed for a simple love relationship, a safe haven from the unwanted glare of celebrity and star worship. In me she was looking for a strong and defiant protector. I was completely incapable of assuming that role. I was a tangled mass of conflict, woefully lacking in self-knowledge. On the one hand I was a horny teenager in a thirty-year-old body, grasping insatiably for all the sex I had never allowed myself. On the other, I was an escapee from an unhappy marriage and a defecting father, tortured with guilt and doubt. With such baggage, the affair was unlikely to be good for either of us, but this prevented neither of us from hurling ourselves into it. In the coming months, things only grew more troubled and intense. But by some miracle, despite all the tempestuous offstage drama of our relationship, the two of us managed to put on our costumes every night, walk out onstage, and act.
As the weeks passed, more complications weighed on us. The backstage world of Anna Christie grew claustrophobic. It became the least fun show I’d ever been in. A subtle hierarchy took hold in the company, with Liv at the top. My friendships with three-fourths of the cast evaporated. Although Liv never invoked the privileges of stardom, an entourage gradually formed itself around her, answering to her every whim. It was comprised of our director, our company manager, Liv’s dresser, an older character actress in the cast, and their various traveling companions. Of this inner circle of fawning courtiers, I was the only heterosexual. I wrestled disconsolately with the role of royal consort. After every show the group would merrily carouse in a restaurant, striving mightily to flatter and entertain their queen bee. At the end of such evenings I would squire Liv back to her hotel room and leave the others behind. Everyone tacitly understood my courtly function. My male ego, fragile at the best of times, swung crazily between swaggering pride and cringing humiliation.
In those days, everywhere Liv went she was treated like visiting royalty. In every city, she was invited to glittering A-list events to which I would dutifully escort her. Rudolf Nureyev greeted us in his Toronto dressing room after a performance with Canada’s Royal Ballet. Ethel Kennedy hosted us at a lawn party at Hickory Hill, her rambling family seat. We sat on either side of Henry Kissinger at Sweden’s embassy in Washington. We had chummy lunches with the likes of Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Bergman. With fellow partygoers Katharine Graham and Teddy Kennedy, we witnessed a gleeful frat-boy food fight between George Stevens, Jr., and Bob Woodward at Stevens’ Georgetown home. Our show’s press agent engineered an after-theater soiree in honor of Liv and Elizabeth Taylor. On another night we shared an intimate dinner with Richard Burton, Robert Preston, and their wives. Burton began that evening gracious, charming, and sober. Liv and I watched in fascination and horror, exchanging eye-rolling glances, as too much drink gradually turned that splendid man into a boorish, self-loathing sot.
At such moments I could hardly believe that I was in the presence of such powerful, notorious figures, or that I was witnessing such larger-than-life behavior. It was both exciting and unsettling. On the one hand, I was thrilled to be so close to the white-hot center of the celebrity firmament. On the other, I knew very well where I stood. All eyes were on Liv. I was strangely invisible. I was an awkward, ungainly presence, regarded by all as tolerable, perhaps necessary, but vaguely embarrassing — if, that is, they noticed me at all.
In retrospect, my comparative anonymity strikes me as a blessing. Back then, show business was not yet subject to the frantic 24/7 scandalmongering of our present era. Our affair had all the elements of a sensationally lurid tabloid serial, tracking the undoing of four lives. But in our case, the press was merciful. It turned a respectful blind eye to all of us. This was partly the result of a greater degree of circumspection among entertainment reporters in those days, and partly it was because of their worshipful regard for Liv. Whatever the reasons, only a single brief mention of our relationship ever appeared in the national press. In a Q&A feature for her Sunday gossip column, Liz Smith was asked about Liv Ullmann’s love life. Smith succinctly noted a “heavy affair” with her costar in Anna Christie. The subtext of the sentence was unmistakable: “Let’s leave these people alone.”
The torrid weeks passed by, and we continued to perform our ponderous production of Anna Christie. My role was a monster. I’d never worked so hard onstage, and rarely to such little effect. It slowly dawned on me that, for most of the audience, the show’s main attraction was neither the play nor the production but Liv. As I bellowed my way through my speeches on one side of the stage, I would occasionally glimpse the audience gazing at the other side, where Liv was simply standing and listening, staring straight out into the lights. People were transfixed. Who could blame them? She was beautiful, the show was turgidly undramatic, and I was a lousy Mat Burke. But that adoring, misdirected gaze did little to shore up my faltering self-esteem.
The most torturous period of our affair was during the first months of the Broadway run. When the tour ended, the heady swirl of life on the road smashed up against the reality of home. Back in the city, I was surrounded by all the touchstones of my everyday New York life — my apartment, my friends, and, most of all, my son, who had been pining for my return. I was utterly unprepared to leave any of this behind. Reaching out desperately for some semblance of normality, I moved back in with Jean. Liv was aghast. My feckless decision left her feeling abandoned, humiliated, and deeply injured. For weeks I shuttled between her and Jean, bicycling inanely between my apartment and Liv’s hotel suite on Central Park South, in the mad attempt to meet the needs of two very different women. I was frantically shoveling to fill two bottomless pits, yawning on either side of me. It was Scenes from a Marriage, but with two separate leading ladies. And through it all, the curtain went up eight times a week on Anna Christie at the Imperial Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, like the relentless tolling of a doomsday bell.