People are surprised when I tell them Peter Falk was my roommate in New York 65 years ago. They are even more surprised when I say that Falk was not the only one in our circle of friends to attain stardom; so did George Segal, Roy Scheider, and Wayne Rogers. What still surprises me, though, is that those four weren’t necessarily the ones I assumed might become Hollywood giants. Looking back, I realize what a watershed moment in the American theater I was able to witness, surrounded by hugely talented, wildly ambitious, and often tragically flawed individuals. Watching their old films today, I can clearly remember them in their 20s and early 30s, when they were just ordinary people, and we were all young nobodies.

In the fall of 1959, I started on a PhD in English at Princeton, but after just a few weeks I was miserable. At 27, with an MFA and two years of study in Paris, I had reached the point where I was sick of being a student. When I confessed this to Philip Minor, a Princeton graduate who had already directed a play off-Broadway in New York, he said, “So quit. You should be writing, not taking a bunch of courses you hate.”

He was alluding to the one-act play contest at Princeton, which I had won three years in a row. The last play, Reflexions, had been published in The Hudson Review, and Ben Piazza, who as a junior had played the role of Narcissus in it, had since become a member of the Actors Studio—the high temple of Method acting—and starred in two Broadway plays, Winesburg, Ohio, opposite the movie star Dorothy McGuire, and Kataki, with the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa. When I went to see him in the latter, his first Hollywood movie, The Hanging Tree, with Gary Cooper, had just been released, and he told me Lee Strasberg, the revered guru of the Actors Studio, had predicted that he could be the next John Garfield.

“Quit,” Minor continued, “and come to New York. You can stay at the Mission until you get a job.” That was the joke name for the top-floor walk-up apartment he shared with three other actors on 14th Street between Second and Third Avenues.

That was all it took, plus the fact that two Princeton classmates were also in New York: Chiz Schultz, who was a producer at CBS, and Ron Harper, who was on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, understudying Paul Newman. A week later I informed the stunned dean’s office that I wished to withdraw, and a week after that I moved to 212 East 14th Street, where my roommates were Minor, Rogers, Falk, and James Carruthers.

I already knew Rogers; a Princeton classmate, he had been in the Triangle Club, to which I contributed a brief skit our senior year. After serving in the Navy, he had studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and got some bit parts on TV. Up to then he was Bill Rogers, but since there was already a William Rogers in Actors Equity, he had to change his name. A group of our friends decided that my name went best with Rogers. In 1959 he was enjoying his biggest success up to then: a brief appearance in a bar scene in Odds Against Tomorrow, a film noir starring Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan.

Through friends, I also knew Carruthers slightly. He was 28 and studied with Uta Hagen and her husband at the Herbert Berghof Studio. He had recently replaced the juvenile lead in the off-Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, directed by the hot young director José Quintero.

Falk, who was 32, had been a cook in the merchant marine and earned an MA in public administration at Syracuse University before studying acting with Eva Le Gallienne. In 1956 he had arrived at a casting call for a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Quintero, in his memoir, If You Don’t Dance They Beat You, describes the moment:

“What have you done recently, in the theatre, I mean?”

“I was in a play with Miss Eva Le Gallienne in Westport.” He raised his arms, placing his elbows on my desk, and opened his hands. “And that is all,” he said…. I thought, “This guy is the greatest con man ever.” I liked him, and I knew I had found the bartender who is named Rocky in the play.

Falk and Minor, who had replaced an actor in The Iceman Cometh after it opened, got to know each other—they were nearly the same age—and in 1958 Minor cast Falk in a production of The Bonds of Interest, by Spanish Nobel winner Jacinto Benavente. It ran for 32 performances.

Falk was very bright. When he and I talked, it was mostly about contemporary French theater, with him wanting to know which plays might be right for American actors. When I moved into the Mission, he was working on scenes with Albert Salmi, who had won early recognition when he played opposite Kim Stanley, a major star of the Actors Studio, in William Inge’s Bus Stop on Broadway. One day Falk came back to the apartment raging. “Can you believe it?” he stormed. “That fucking Neanderthal is telling me how to read a line!”

I never saw Falk without his prosthetic eye, which he had received after surgery when he was three. Before he lay down to sleep, he put it in a glass of water on the night table beside his bed.

The Mission served mainly as a dormitory. During the day we were frequently all out, looking for jobs, attending rehearsals, going to tryouts, seeing matinees, or, in the case of Falk and Rogers, shooting pool at the local billiard parlor. Leaving the building, on the first floor we passed the photo studio of Irving Klaw, who would later become known for his top model, Bettie Page, and his bondage films. When you came home at night, it was not unusual to find a drunk asleep in the stairwell. Only once did we have a party there, for about 20 friends, on New Year’s Eve.

The five of us rarely ate together, but almost every Saturday Minor and I would shop for food for everybody in the ethnic stores on First Avenue—olives scooped out of barrels of brine, chunks of cheese cut off giant wheels, big round loaves of Italian bread, quarters of freshly killed chicken.

My favorite story of Mission life—best told by Carruthers—took place before I got there. The previous summer most of them were working in regional theaters, and those who could had rented their rooms to people recommended by friends. When Minor returned one evening in late August, the apartment was empty. He showered, turned on a floor fan, put clean sheets on his bed, and stretched out to read. He soon became aware of little black dots moving around on the top sheet, so he slept in another bed, and the next day he doused the mattress with two cans of insect spray and hauled it up to the roof to air out. Shortly after that, Carruthers returned to find that the avocado plant he had started from a seed was almost dead, so he took it up to the roof to get some sun. The mattress was gone! A few days later he went up to see how the plant was doing, and—here Carruthers would pause—the mattress was back.

II

More than ever before, New York then was mecca for theater hopefuls. In 1959, 56 plays opened on Broadway, among them The Sound of Music, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Miracle Worker. Off-Broadway was also booming. In 1954 Joseph Papp had inaugurated Shakespeare in the Park, which provided hundreds of roles for actors and technicians, and in 1967 he would open the Public Theater in the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street, where he put on a dozen shows annually, including such superhits as Hair that year and A Chorus Line eight years later. In 1965 the Vivian Beaumont Theater—part of the newly created Lincoln Center—started up.

It was an amazing period in New York’s history, the time of the Kennedys, the Beats, the Beatles, Robert Moses, Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), and Petula Clark (“Downtown”); of Vietnam War demonstrations, human rights marches, and women’s lib. Pennsylvania Station was being torn down, and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge was going up. Everything seemed affordable in those days, even the occasional dinner at Lüchow’s, the German restaurant a block from the Mission on 14th Street, with its small string orchestra, its gorgeous Christmas tree, and its banks of lilies at Easter time. For lunch, if you were broke, you could have the hot dog and orange drink at Nedick’s or insert three or four nickels to open a little glass door for a sandwich at the Automat. Three actors I knew lived in cold-water flats with monthly rents of $20—roughly $220 today—or less. Almost everyone smoked, heavily; cigarettes cost 26 cents a pack. A subway token was 15 cents. The most expensive ticket for Gypsy, the musical starring Ethel Merman, was $9.20; and if you paid $1.25 for a seat up in the Family Circle at the old Metropolitan Opera on 39th Street, you could hear some of the greatest voices of the century—Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, Renata Tebaldi, Richard Tucker, and Franco Corelli, to name a few.

In much of the United States back then, homosexuality was still culturally taboo if not outright illegal. But New York City was different. Though the Stonewall riots and the resulting gay-pride movement would not happen until 1969, the humor known as camp was very much in the air. Expressions such as “he’s a camp” and “camping it up” were common parlance, and many actors, both straight and gay, had a repertoire of jokes they told in a swishy, effeminate voice. Rogers and Minor were exceptionally good at it. Everyone seemed to have the same stack of LP records that went well with cocktails—Broadway cast albums, Lenny Bruce, Ruth Draper, Elaine May and Mike Nichols. Campy recording artists such as Bea Lillie and Frances Faye were also extremely popular, and if you wanted to play really hilarious stuff for friends, you put on Florence Foster Jenkins murdering opera arias, or Jo Stafford (a.k.a. Darlene Edwards) singing love songs off-key, or the super-saccharine Manhattan Tower by Gordon Jenkins. In 1968 the general acceptance of camp and the gay life would be borne out by the two-and-a-half-year off-Broadway run (and the subsequent film) of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band.

III

I soon got to know another actor who had worked with Quintero in Iceman: George Segal, who at 26 was by far the most driven of all the aspiring individuals in our circle of friends. He had worked as a janitor at Circle in the Square just to be able to understudy the role of the young anarchist in the play, which he eventually played. He and I bonded when it came out that we had rented the same room on rue de la Harpe in Paris; he was the “Monsieur Georges” the landlady was still raving about when I moved in. He and Marion, his sharp, attractive wife, were soon regulars in my social life. Segal played the banjo, and twice I went to hear him and his friend Patricia Scott, the ex-wife of George C. Scott, perform folk songs in a small club in the Village.

The Segals once invited a group of us to a cocktail party in an apartment they had borrowed from a relative. We arrived to find two chairs blocking the doorway to the dining room, where the inevitable spread of cold cuts, cheese, and crackers was carefully laid out. When we remarked on it, George explained that they wanted to keep everything nice until José arrived. He then got neckties from the lender’s closet and hastily distributed them to all of us who weren’t wearing one.

That brings me back to José Quintero, whom it is impossible to overestimate as a changing force in American theater. I met him personally through Isabel Halliburton, his beautiful, witty secretary-assistant, who would become one of my closest friends. Born in Panama, Quintero, with his penetrating dark eyes and soft, seductive voice, was an irresistible presence. At 35 he was already established as the most sought-after director in the city. Only eight years earlier, with the producer Theodore “Ted” Mann, he had turned an abandoned nightclub at Sheridan Square into a small theater-in-the-round, which they named Circle in the Square. Quintero’s core idea was to revive plays by important playwrights that had flopped on Broadway, and he had an uncanny instinct for recognizing untapped talent. In 1952 he staged Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke and introduced Geraldine Page, a former fellow student at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, whose ongoing bad luck in New York had reduced her to working in a sewing factory. It was an unheard-of success for off-Broadway. In 1956 he resurrected The Iceman Cometh and cast another unknown, Jason Robards Jr., in the lead role. Two years later he directed Children of Darkness by Edwin Justus Mayer, pairing Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott (who soon married and divorced, twice).

With Iceman he struck gold. Though Eugene O’Neill had won the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzers, Iceman bombed so definitively on Broadway in 1946 that no work of his had been produced in New York since. After Quintero’s triumphant revival of the play, O’Neill’s widow offered him Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a late work the playwright considered so agonizingly personal that he said it should not be performed in New York until 25 years after his death, which occurred in 1953. Just three years later Carlotta O’Neill gave it to Quintero; so the first work he directed on Broadway happened to be the greatest play ever written by an American. He cast Fredric March, Florence Eldridge (March’s wife), Robards, and Bradford Dillman, and the critics outdid one another in their raves. By the time I got to know him, he was a celebrity, living in a penthouse on Lower Fifth Avenue.

Relaxed over cocktails with friends, Quintero was a riveting storyteller. One night he related, for instance, how in 1958 he had attempted to deal with the great Croatian soprano Zinka Milanov in Cavalleria Rusticana at the Metropolitan Opera. A large lady in her 50s, Milanov was accustomed to simply taking center stage and producing glorious sound. Hoping to enliven her performance, Quintero said, he suggested that she should almost sneak onstage, not wanting to be noticed, because Santuzza has been abandoned by her lover and is ashamed. Instead, he said, when the rehearsal resumed, the diva walked straight to center stage and announced, “I am Zinka Milanov. I am not ashamed.”

Minor had a funny, revealing story about Quintero—the time he developed a crush on a young man he had cast. He asked Minor to find out if the actor was gay, and Minor asked why. “Because if he is, I’ll kill him,” Quintero responded, “and if he’s not, I’ll die.”

IV

The ’60s brought significant changes for all of us, starting with the demise of the Mission. In 1960 Falk married his college sweetheart, Alyce Mayo; Rogers married the actor Mitzi McWhorter; and both couples moved to Los Angeles. Falk, for his performance in Murder, Inc., released that year, was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor, as he was the following year for Pocketful of Miracles, starring Bette Davis. Rogers worked often in TV after moving to the coast, but it would not be until 1967 that he got serious attention, for his part in Cool Hand Luke, with Paul Newman.

Early in 1960 I got a job as an encyclopedia editor at Grolier and moved into a five-room, fourth-floor apartment at 229 East 21st Street (rent: $65). In short order, Minor and Carruthers got apartments at the same address, but by then I had moved two blocks away, to 19th Street. Carruthers soon had a hugely talented partner, Jennifer Scanlon, a principal dancer in José Limón’s company, and they had three miniature poodles—Fanny, Felix, and Emma. Meanwhile, friends had given me two Siamese cats—F. Jasmine and Stephen—so for years I would feed and walk their dogs when they were away, and they would feed my cats when I was.

In 1961 Minor directed an off-Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance, which got glowing reviews, played 156 performances, and allowed me to meet three actors he cast in it who were soon dear friends: Frances Sternhagen, Donald Moffat, and Wayne Tippit, who had the great good fortune, in those days, to be comfortably ensconced in a running role on a CBS soap opera, The Secret Storm.

That year Quintero directed a feature film, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, based on a novel by Tennessee Williams, with Vivien Leigh, Warren Beatty, and Lotte Lenya.

That year, too, Ben Piazza opened off-Broadway in The American Dream, a one-act play written for him by Edward Albee, America’s major exponent of the theater of the absurd, which explored man’s meaningless existence, and which had begun in Europe after World War II with the plays of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. He and I stayed in touch, and when we got together, he would regale me with the latest happenings at the Actors Studio. One day he recounted Helen Hayes’s recent visit. Lee Strasberg told the first lady of the American theater that unfortunately they were not doing scenes that day, just sense-memory exercises. She said fine. Then Shelley Winters got up and “remembered” giving a blow job. When she finished, she threw back her head and cried, “I’m not sucking any more fucking cocks!” Strasberg, taking the situation in hand, Piazza said, first asked Winters to leave and not come back until she could be a lady and then apologized to Hayes for the embarrassment.

Piazza never discussed his relationship with Albee, but I assumed it was intimate, because the following year he played Nick in Albee’s first full-length play, the very controversial Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and in 1964 he dedicated his only novel, The Exact and Very Strange Truth, to the playwright.

Almost single-handedly Albee took the American theater in a startling new direction, far from realism and Method acting. By 1963 Quintero and Geraldine Page had become prominent members of the Actors Studio, and Quintero directed O’Neill’s nine-act Strange Interlude with a full Studio cast, including Page in the lead, Jane Fonda, Betty Field, Ben Gazzara, and Franchot Tone. Though the play had won O’Neill a Pulitzer Prize in 1928, it no longer seemed daring, much less shocking, the way Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? did. In 1962 a cloud had fallen over the Studio when its most famous member, Marilyn Monroe, died of an overdose at 36. To make matters worse, in 1964 Strasberg announced that he would direct his first Studio production on Broadway, Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, with Page, Kim Stanley, and Shirley Knight as the sisters. Anticipation ran high at the thought of the god of Method acting in America directing a work written for Stanislavsky, the inventor of the Method. Though it ran for 119 performances and the critics were polite, the general consensus held that it was a bore. Everyone was soon quoting what Elia Kazan, the Studio’s star director, had to say. When someone asked him, “What went wrong? It’s Lee’s favorite play,” he reportedly responded, “Lee can get it up, but he can’t come.”

If Albee, who was 34 in 1962, changed Broadway for the foreseeable future with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Stephen Sondheim, who was 32, caused a comparable seismic shift in the American musical that year with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Though Sondheim was known as the lyricist of West Side Story and Gypsy, this was the first Broadway show for which he also wrote the music. In spite of some early skepticism on the part of the critics and audiences, and occasional dry periods, these two men would come to dominate their spheres of the American theater for the next 60 years.

The books for two of Sondheim’s musicals, Company (1970) and Merrily We Roll Along (1981), were written by George Furth, a friend of mine known most of his life as a character actor in films and on TV. He was also a master manipulator. Once, when I was on vacation in Los Angeles in the early ’60s, he called me at my hotel to say he’d pick me up the next day and we’d go to the beach. Soon after I got in Furth’s car, we picked up another friend of his, who happened to be the wife of one of Jennifer Jones’s sons from her first marriage, to Robert Walker. Before you could catch your breath, Furth had talked us into skipping the beach and going instead to the grand home of Jones and David Selznick to play croquet. Once there, he promptly asked Jones if she wouldn’t please show me the famous portrait of Jennie featured in her film of that name, which she dutifully did. And so it went all that day, with Furth demonstrating once again his extraordinary knack for getting everyone around him to do what he wanted.

Merrily We Roll Along was panned by the critics and closed after 16 performances. In its most recent, sold-out revival, directed by Maria Friedman, it had a top ticket price of $750 and won four Tonys.

V

I went multiple times, in 1964, to a wonderful off-Broadway production of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, because by then I knew most of the actors in it, including Minor, Tippit, Madison Mason (the brother-in-law of a friend of mine), and Carol Macho (Tippit’s wife), and I soon got to know two others: John “Ed” Heffernan and Roy Scheider, whose petite wife, Cynthia Bebout, was also in the cast.

Scheider, a late starter at 32—he had been in one horror film earlier that year—was slender and very good-looking. An amateur boxing champion in high school, he had served three years in the Air Force before seriously taking up acting. Like everyone else in the cast, he paid great deference to Heffernan, who played the lead.

Heffernan was the most gifted actor I have ever known. At Boston University his classmates had included Olympia Dukakis and John Cazale. In 1960, when he was 26, he won an Obie for his Justice Shallow in an off-Broadway production of Henry IV Part 2. Earlier in the year I met him, he had replaced Albert Finney in the title role in John Osborne’s Luther on Broadway, and later that year he would join John Gielgud and Irene Worth in Albee’s second Broadway play, Tiny Alice. He never stopped working, and his apartment was a gathering place for his friends and acolytes, including James Rado, one of the cowriters of Hair. Heffernan spent much of his free time watching old movies on TV, and he could enunciate precisely why a performance was good or bad. He once observed, for example, that Judy Garland was the only totally intuitive performer he could think of, incapable of making the slightest false gesture.

I was hardly the judge of talent Heffernan was, so it never occurred to me that four of the actors I was now on very friendly terms with would become household names. I was surprised when Peter Falk was nominated so soon for two Oscars, and happy for him when he won an Emmy in 1962 for a guest appearance on The Dick Powell Show, but I never would have dreamed that as Columbo—a role first imagined by the producers for Thomas Mitchell (Scarlett’s father in Gone With the Wind) or Bing Crosby—he would become a TV immortal, performing the part 69 times between 1968 and 2003. After starring in movies for the next two decades, directed by such big names as John Cassavetes and Elaine May, he became so famous that in 1987 the German director Wim Wenders cast him in every actor’s ultimate dream role—playing himself, Peter Falk, the creator of Columbo—in Wings of Desire.

In 1965 George Segal burst into stardom with Ship of Fools and King Rat. A year later he achieved superstardom in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (playing the role Piazza had played on the stage), with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Sandy Dennis, directed by Mike Nichols—all of whom, including Segal, were nominated for Academy Awards (Taylor and Dennis won). In 1967 he got great reviews playing Biff in a TV version of the American classic Death of a Salesman, with Lee J. Cobb, the original Willy Loman. After starring in 1970 with Ruth Gordon in the outrageous comedy Where’s Poppa?, he became a favorite romantic leading man, acting opposite some of Hollywood’s biggest names: Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Jacqueline Bisset, Natalie Wood, and Glenda Jackson. In the ’80s his career went south, owing to, among other things, drugs. But he came back with a bang in the ’90s, playing serious leads in movies and on television. His last triumph was an eight-year run on The Goldbergs (2013–2021). Marion Segal, meanwhile, became a film editor, working most notably on Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978).

Roy Scheider, after winning an Obie in New York for the play Stephen D. in 1968, became world-famous just three years later for Klute and The French Connection. He subsequently appeared on TV and in films roughly 100 times, and he achieved international regard for two blockbuster successes: Jaws (1975) and All That Jazz (1979).

Wayne Rogers was the last to hit the big time, but once he played three seasons of M*A*S*H, from 1972 to 1975, his red hair and big grin were engraved forever on the public’s consciousness. He left the show because he felt the producers were favoring Alan Alda over him. But he soon starred in another comedy series, House Calls, from 1979 to 1982. Besides acting, he made frequent TV appearances as an expert on the stock market, and he was a brilliant money manager, particularly for Falk and himself. At his death Rogers was reportedly worth $75 million.

Though I saw Rogers occasionally in the ’70s, when he was acting on the East Coast, I never had any contact with the other three once they became stars. After they moved to LA, their long marriages all ended in divorce. Peter and Alyce Falk split up in 1976, after 16 years together, and he remarried one year later. Wayne and Mitzi Rogers divorced in 1983, and he married again in 1988. George and Marion Segal ended their 27-year marriage in 1983, and he married twice more. Roy and Cynthia Scheider split in 1986, after 24 years together, and he took a second wife in 1989. Cynthia, like Marion Segal, had become a film editor.

All four men had long careers. Scheider died in 2008, at 76, of multiple myeloma. Falk passed in 2011, at 83, a victim of Alzheimer’s disease. Rogers died in 2015, at 82, of pneumonia, and Segal in 2021, at 87, after bypass surgery.

VI

Back in the ’60s, I would have bet the ranch that Ed Heffernan would be the biggest success of them all. He seemed terrific in everything he did, from multiple roles in Shakespeare in the Park to The Fantasticks off-Broadway to Purlie on Broadway, and everyone loved and admired him. But fame can be very fickle. Heffernan was born with the face of a character actor—rubbery and wonderfully expressive but not at all conventionally good-looking. As a gay man he struggled to accept himself. Before he died, in 2018, at the age of 84, he had been in 42 plays and performed 24 roles in movies or on TV; but the roles got smaller and smaller, because he couldn’t control his drinking. He was last on the stage in 1987, and he played occasional small parts on TV until 2014. Today, as Google will tell you, he is best remembered as the gang’s bank teller in The Sting (1973). I recently discovered a weird, little-known film he’s in, Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), starring Faye Dunaway, where his acting, in a few short scenes, stands out. Scheider is also in the cast. Heffernan was in the original productions of two plays by Albee on Broadway—the second was Malcolm—and he once took me with him to Albee’s house in Montauk. The invitation was for tea, which was served by a white-coated butler, but when Albee, who was a recovering alcoholic, asked us if we’d rather have a drink, Heffernan and I both asked for a martini. When the butler came in again with a silver tray, Albee asked, “Does cinnamon toast go with a martini?” Almost in unison Heffernan and I replied, “Not with this one.”

I always assumed that Ben Piazza would also rise to the top and stay there, given that he had been in nine Broadway plays and three works by Albee, including The Zoo Story, before he was 40. He called me in 1969 to invite me off-Broadway to see two short plays he had written, one of them featuring his wife of two years, Dolores Dorn-Heft (who had previously been married to Franchot Tone). During their 12-year marriage, they would appear together in one film, The Candy Snatchers (1973). Piazza was in a dozen more films, but mainly in character parts. The best known are Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), starring Liza Minnelli (Wayne Tippit is also in it); The Blues Brothers (1980), where he is the uptight gentleman who asks the headwaiter to change his table in order to move away from the scruffy title characters; and Guilty by Suspicion (1991), about blacklisting in Hollywood, in which he plays the producer Darryl Zanuck. Piazza died of AIDS in 1991, at the age of 58.

Minor and Carruthers kept their apartments on 21st Street until they died, Minor of prostate cancer in 1991, at the age of 63; Carruthers of a heart attack four years later, when he was 64.

Minor was the wittiest and probably the most intelligent of the actors I knew. For example, in preparing to play Uncle Vanya for a very brief run in a regional theater, he looked up every word of the text in an English-Russian dictionary, and for several years he taught drama at Bennington College. After Jason Robards, a friend from their Circle in the Square days, married Lauren Bacall, he invited Minor to their apartment in the Dakota for drinks. In response, Minor invited the couple to dinner on 21st Street. It happened to be a sweltering evening, Minor recalled, and Jason and “Betty” had to pass the super and his wife, who were cooling off on the stoop, and climb five flights of stairs before they got to the hot meal he had spent two days making. As Minor grew older, he directed mainly in regional theaters, where, over the years, he worked with some major stars, including Geraldine Page, Rip Torn, Sandy Dennis, Jean Marsh, and Wayne Rogers. In 1982 Rogers arranged for him to direct an episode of House Calls, Minor’s only job in TV.

Carruthers, too, acted mainly in regional theaters, but he also had small parts in films, including Tootsie (1982); he’s the white-haired man who late in the film dances past Dustin Hoffman in drag in a restaurant and tells “her” she’s even better looking in person than on TV. For a number of years, he supplemented his earnings by working at the Virginia Zabriskie Gallery. One of Zabriskie’s artists, Robert De Niro Sr., the actor’s father, fell for Carruthers and asked him to move to Europe with him. Carruthers had two large portraits of himself by the artist hanging in his apartment, and he often said jokingly, “If I had played my cards right, today I would be Robert De Niro’s stepmother.”

Quintero directed almost 100 productions before he died, in 1999, of throat cancer. Of those, 19 were plays by O’Neill, including More Stately Mansions (1967), with Ingrid Bergman and Colleen Dewhurst, and revivals of A Moon for the Misbegotten (1973) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1988), both with Dewhurst and Jason Robards. His early success was increasingly threatened by his alcoholism. In 1968, during rehearsals for a production in Mexico City, the star, Dolores del Rio, had him fired for drunkenness. After conquering his addiction he won a Tony for A Moon for the Misbegotten and continued to direct, teach, and lecture for 25 years.

Isabel Halliburton, after leaving Quintero, became a casting director, first for Alan Pakula and then for Robert Redford, on films including To Kill a Mockingbird and All the President’s Men. Through her I met scores of actors and writers—had cocktails in the Redfords’ apartment, had drinks with Pakula the night after he proposed to Hope Lange, shared a house one summer in the Hamptons, where Halliburton, who looked like Garbo, knew everyone, from the agent Boaty Boatwright to the actor David Doyle (the assigner of assignments for Charlie’s Angels on TV). Halliburton spent her last decade in a nursing facility, like Falk a victim of Alzheimer’s.

VII

I never wrote the plays I left Princeton to write. I obviously didn’t have the talent or the drive, and I soon became totally involved in publishing, where I continued to meet celebrities, but not fledgling ones. Working with me on an encyclopedia at Grolier, for instance, was a young man named J.J. Mitchell, who turned out to be the last lover of the poet Frank O’Hara. Together, I soon learned, they knew almost every painter and musician in New York. I remember one night J.J. invited me to go with him to a cocktail party he said would be fun. Within an hour there, I met Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, Thomas Schippers, and the great ballet critic Edwin Denby. Later, in my three decades at Vanity Fair, I would edit many famous individuals—from Mikhail Baryshnikov to Gloria Vanderbilt, from Hunter S. Thompson to Barbara Walters—and meet many more, particularly at our Oscar parties. But I never again knew celebrities as friends before they became celebrities, and those are the ones I remember with special fondness. I even collect DVDs of films they are in, just to keep them fixed in my memory.

One of my favorite recollections from that time is a story Marion Segal told about fame and the changes it can bring.

When I met George and Marion, they lived in a low-rent apartment on Barrow Street in the Village. Ted Mann, Quintero’s partner at Circle in the Square, and his wife, Patricia Brooks, a lyric soprano at the New York City Opera, lived in the same building. Shortly after their first son was born, Mann asked the Segals if they would babysit some evening so that he and Brooks could have a peaceful night out alone together. The Segals seized the opportunity. The holidays were around the corner, so they got a little fur pelt, posed the child on it, and snapped pictures of him. They put the best one in a modest oval frame and gave it to Brooks and Mann for Christmas.

Several weeks later Quintero gave a large party in his penthouse. George and Marion, who were still pretty low in the pecking order, were among the guests, and when they arrived Quintero made a big fuss over them. Before they could even get a drink, he said he wanted to show them something. Leading them to a room in the back of the apartment, he pointed to what he said was his favorite Christmas present that year: the picture of the Manns’ baby in the oval frame.

Roughly eight years passed. Then Mann was in Los Angeles with one of the 250 shows he would produce and/or direct at the new, uptown Circle in the Square in New York, with which Quintero was no longer affiliated. He happened to run into George, who by then was a big star. Mann said how often he thought of the good times they had had when they were all starting out, and how much he missed the old gang. George said he and Marion were having a party at their house that night and gave him the address.

When Mann arrived the house was wall-to-wall with movie stars. As he wandered around looking the place over, he suddenly came across his hostess. “It’s so great to see you, Marion!” he exclaimed. “I was saying to George this morning how much I missed those old days in the Village. We used to have so much fun, remember? Tell me, why haven’t we stayed in touch?”

Marion took him right back to Barrow Street with her immediate response. “You kissed the wrong ass, Ted,” she told him.