In the early 70s, not long in New York (from the UK) but high in ambition and endeavor, I
fancied myself as a television producer. I wrote a pilot for a series that had as its focus different kinds of
love.
With the help of an eminent force in the field, Steve Elliot, creator of a leading advertising agency, specializing in TV commercials I interviewed on camera subjects to illustrate my theme: Maureen O'Sullivan (mother of Mia Farrow) whose love for her late husband John Farrow was so encompassing she said she didn't know what to think anymore when he died; Tonia Campbell, in love and married to the then fastest man in the world on sea and land, Donald Campbell, and a womanizer extraordinaire -- and finally producer Arthur Whitney and agent Dudley (Shim) Malone who before arriving in the studio had told me they were willing to talk about their love for each other. The first two segments went smoothly. The third was a disaster as neither man would mention the word "love," let alone allow it was the reason they were living together.("The price of finding a reasonable rental or buying an apartment in New York makes sharing the only option.")
I felt let down and trying to sell the idea to David Susskind, then a huge name in TV, didn't totally grasp what he meant when he said I was "way ahead of my time." Looking back I can hardly believe how naïve I was and how wrong to assume that love between two men could be publicly discussed on air; after all it was love I was talking about, not sex.
In Double Life, A Love Story from Broadway to Hollywood by Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine, love is what is expressed in the most revealing, extraordinary way, chronicling their fifty year relationship, and the "double life" they each had to lead for so many years, not only to build their exceptional careers, but literally to stay in their jobs. Alan Shayne became president of Warner Brothers Television after casting on Broadway for David Merrick and at the beginning of his career acting on Broadway and in television himself. Norman Sunshine was an illustrator and creative director of the Jane Trahey advertising agency, where among other celebrated ads he created the What Becomes a Legend Most campaign for Blackglama Minks before devoting his time to painting and sculpture (his work today is in museums and permanent collections around the globe.)
In the early 70s, when I was so carelessly attempting to showcase one man's love for another, Alan writes in Double Life:
"At the time heterosexuals usually referred to homosexuals in a derogatory way, unless it was ignored completely. I went to so many parties in those years when people said things about gays that made me cringe. Norman occasionally had to take his clients to lunch and he told me that one of them said after three martinis how glad he was that Norman wasn't a fag because there were so many of them in his field. Norman couldn't take a chance on losing the account, so he said nothing. This was not a time when we had the courage to speak up nor did we think it would do any good."
Because of the stigma attached to the gay identity, when Norman and Alan first met in 1958 they were both struggling with their feelings. Norman had left his luxurious comfortable home in California, against his parents' wishes to come to New York to become an artist:
"...and to explore my feelings about men. I'd slept with women, had lengthy relationships with them and I'd also been with men. There was a growing conflict within me that was surfacing more and more. I was beginning to accept that there was something in me that responded sexually more to men than to women. It had taken the distance of moving away from home for the truth to finally come into focus...to accept the fact that I was gay."
By then Alan had already spent a few years struggling to be an actor in New York -- "lived in cheap furnished rooms, never had enough food, lost a tooth because I couldn't afford a dentist...ushered in theaters..." and on landing "an ignominious job as an assistant stage manager and understudy" in the hit Broadway musical Jamaica starring Lena Horne and Ricardo Montalban:
"Had gone into psychoanalysis to try and figure out what was holding me back in my career and I hoped, at the same time, that I could shed my homosexuality which was at that time considered a curable disease...Being homosexual, as it was called in those days, was anathema to many, especially to agents and producers who would not cast homosexuals in anything but eccentric or character roles -- never in romantic leads...I played my role as a confirmed heterosexual and never let my guard down unless I was alone with my few gay friends."
The two voices of Alan and Norman alternate in telling the story in Double Life, both with such painful, amusing, gutsy, gossipy, sad and joyful honesty, one chapter flows into another without losing the character of either one. They both write so well it would be a page-turner just because of the magnetic worlds they inhabited, full of bold face names they worked with or befriended in the giant world of entertainment on both coasts and the post-Warhol art world. But as Mike Nichols points out in the tender foreword he has written for the book, "We know that the greatest luck is to find the person that is your other half. Their adventure and the everyday detail of love and building a dual life will remind you of your experiences in the melding of two people, forever separate, forever together."
In the end the title, Double Life, takes on new meaning as with the cultural and legal shift in American states, Alan and Norman -- after 50 years -- are able to marry and do so by the sea in Massachusetts.