Up Till Now: The Autobiography

dare believe I was paying my dues—I couldn’t have afforded that.
    There was a hotel with an all-you-can-eat buffet for $2.50 (Canadian) a few blocks from my rooming house. To save money I ate there most nights. Early in the evening it was a family restaurant; workingmen could come in with their wives and children and eat well, and then go back in line and eat again. It was a festive family place, ringing with loud voices, chattering mothers and fathers, and yelling children. It was alive with life, and I would sit there by myself, every night, usually reading a book. I sat there for several hours, until they closed the cafeteria. I had no place else to go.
    By eight o’clock the families would leave. And across the lobby in this flea-bitten hotel was a seedy bar that opened when the cafeteria closed. I would move from the cafeteria to the bar and a whole other life began. It was like the second movie on a double bill. The first feature was a family movie, then after the intermission they showed the adult films. Once the families left the prostitutes moved in. It actually took me some time before I realized this was a hot-sheets motel, a brothel; the girls would pick up their johns in the bar and take them upstairs. And I would sit there watching the whole thing just as I’d watched the families.
    After awhile the girls became accustomed to seeing me there and they would sit with me and talk. Then they’d get up and go upstairs and eventually come back. I don’t know what we talked about, but I know I was much too shy to talk about what was going on upstairs. For me, it was conversation; interacting with another person. There was no sex, the concept of paying for sex never occurred to me. That would be the worst of all the traits of a hanger-on; a hanger-on pays for sex.
    Many years later I’d make a movie for television entitled Secrets of a Married Man in which I played a husband so straitlaced I wore a tie and jacket when having dinner with my family. Michelle Phillips played my wife and Cybill Shepherd played a call girl with a heart of cash. In one scene I was sitting at a bar with a cowboy-type who looked at a prostitute and said admiringly, “Whoa. Now, that’s somebody that’ll teach a man how to yodel. For a price.”
    But for me it wasn’t like that at all. I was sitting in a bar and these were my friends. How I could not be curious about their lives I don’t know, but it was something we never discussed. So I sat there with them week after week, month after month, searching for jobs in the day, passing the nights, waiting for the Stratford Festival to reopen so I could regain some prestige.
    One night one of the girls took me home with her. She wasn’t really much older than me, but she seemed so worldly. And she took me into her life and became my teacher. We slept in her bedroom while the other girls with whom she shared that apartment were talking in the living room. That began a relationship that lasted several months. It wasn’t a love affair, we weren’t in love with each other, but it was warm and soothing and nurturing. She cared about me and offered me her being. It was lovely.
    Some months later I’d written a play, Dreams, for the CBC and cast a beautiful young woman to play the female lead opposite me. Her name was Gloria Rosenberg and I fell in love with her. Both figuratively and literally, she was the woman of my Dreams . That wonderful summer I called her every night from Stratford. We were on the phone so often that the operator from the Canadian Exchange felt sorry for me and allowed me to call for free. I didn’t fit into any of the groups that had formed at Stratford and I was very lonely there without Gloria. Finally I told her, “I love you, please come up.” She raced to be with me in Stratford, it was so romantic. It seemed like there was only one thing to do: I asked her to marry me.
    Marry me? I’d known her for only four months. After she’d gone home to make preparations for our wedding I began wondering if this was the right thing to do. One night, I remember so well, I was caught outdoors in a thunderstorm and as the rain fell and the wind raged and the thunder burst above me I thought, I’m living an experience from a Shakespearean play. It was an incredibly dramatic moment and I had no one there to share it with; I was so lonely and I was in love and so we were married.
    At the end of the season we returned to Toronto. I remember onecold fall night