When he first met Lucille Ball, his future mother-in-law, Laurence Luckinbill accidentally set his apartment on fire. He had been preparing a meal for her, and left the eggplant sizzling on the pan while he rushed to a store to get some wine.
“What the hell is going on here?” growled the woman who was at the time “the biggest star in the world,” when she entered into the haze of smoke, shortly after the firefighters had left.
Luckinbill had planned this homecooked meal for his girlfriend Lucie Arnaz and her parents in his apartment in order to make a point: He was going to impress on Miss Ball that he was “a clodhopper from the Ozarks who insisted on being himself,” as he writes in his autobiography “Affective Memories: How Chance and the Theater Saved My Life” (Sunbury Press, 482 pages)
It’s hard to understand how Laurence Luckinbill was at this point in any way being himself in this story. It’s not just that, as he tells us in understatement, “I am not a cook.” By the time they met, he was a working New York stage and screen actor in his forties who had made both his Broadway and Hollywood debuts many years earlier – and, most notably, had performed for three years on stage and screen in the cast of “The Boys in the Band,” which “improbably” became a smash hit “and put me on the map.”
But an earlier map of his life locates his origins as a poor boy from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who grew up in a dysfunctional family, with a mother and father who had “a more than five-decade-long murder-suicide pact.” He became an actor, he tells us within the first few pages, for the same reason he claims anybody becomes an actor – to “escape.” That makes his decision, at the age of 89, to revisit so many harrowing scenes many decades earlier in Arkansas feel unintentionally poignant – as if to drive home the belief that no one, not even a good actor, can ever completely escape.
For this memoir, Luckinbill writes at its end, “the task I set upon was to write what I know, to explain myself to myself.” That’s too often how it reads. Too much in this overstuffed book is unlikely to appeal to an audience much beyond his family and friends. There’s just so much the average reader, even an admirer, wants to learn about his long-forgotten roles or details of his courtship and 44-year marriage or how proud he is of his children, or the specifics of projects he planned that were never made, such as a play he wrote entitled ‘My Mind on Trial, or Torture and Execution, the Musical” based on the life of a Czech dissident. “The play is in the trunk reserved for works whose truth has gone no further. It’s a heavy trunk. Heavy with love and aspiration, not with failure. It may all be headed to the shredder after I’m gone. I keep these works around as friends who’ve grown old with me and of whom memories are comforting.”
To many theater lovers, the most readable passages in “Affective Memories” are likely to be the account of his involvement in “The Boys in the Band.”
As Luckinbill explains it, he had met Mart Crowley in the late 1950s when both were working in theater in Washington D.C. A decade later, Crowley, a flat broke drunk whose supply of both food and booze was dwindling, “in real desperation, sat down and wrote a play” about a group of nine gay men. As Crowley explained to Luckinbill, the play had gotten a “feeble” reception: “New York is not ready. ‘Come back in five years,’ an important agent says. Agents don’t want to represent it. Actors won’t risk it, won’t even read it. Producers can’t see beyond the risk-to-value metric….” Even playwright Edward Albee, who had co-founded the Playwright’s Unit company to showcase new work, had reacted with “flinty disapproval.” But Albee’s partner in the company Richard Barr agreed to give it an eight-show tryout with actors who would agree to work for free.
Crowley asked Luckinbill to be one of those actors.
“He looked at me now, his eyes letting me know he was ready to hear my turndown speech. ‘Mart, I’m just so busy right now, I can’t . . .’ or ‘I’m sorry, I don’t see a part that’s right for me,’ or ‘Gosh, it’s funny and all, but it’s just not my cup of tea,’ or even, ‘Sorry, I really don’t like it . . .’ followed by reasons and suggestions for rewrites. Instead I said, ‘It’s a good play, Mart. I’ll do it.’ His eyes filled with tears, which he blinked away….
“I told my agent the next day. ‘All right,’ she snapped “But it may be the end of your career.”
Luckinbill played Hank, a divorcing man who passes as straight but has a live-in boyfriend Larry (portrayed by Keith Prentice), whose promiscuity is threatening their relationship.
The scene outside what is now the Soho Playhouse for the first performance of the eight-show run was so crowded “I wondered if there had been a fire.” The reception was explosive, yet the play was so daring that it took an inordinate amount of time and effort to scrape together enough money to move to a bigger Off Broadway theater – and the only one that would house the play was in what at the time Crowley called a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” (54th Street and Ninth Avenue.)
Luckinbill had already performed on Broadway, and this was an out-of-the-way Off Broadway production, but right before opening night, he lost his voice. His doctor diagnosed his condition as globus hystericus, a swelling of part of the voice box caused by panic. “Why was this opening so scary? It was partly everyone else’s fear that had infected me.”
He recovered in time. Audiences flocked, including celebrities like Groucho Marx and Jackie Kennedy. The show ran for years, first Off-Broadway, then in London, then it was turned into a movie in 1970.
Luckinbill spends much time on the movie, most oddly on the fight he waged along with Prentice against the insistence by the director and Crowley as screenwriter that the two kiss on screen. “Keith and I refused to do it on four grounds: it was emotionally impossible to justify; given the emotional climate of the time it could only be tasteless and sensational; it had not been done in the play in its twenty-eight-month run and had never been missed; and we had been promised we would not have to do it.”
The reception to “The Boys in the Band” was not all positive, nor was it free of repercussions. The fashion photographer Irving Penn did a spread on the cast in Look Magazine which was “a hit job… distorting us all just enough to make us look unreal, sad.” Shortly afterward, the cigarette company for which Luckinbill had made a lucrative commercial, which enabled his theater work, didn’t renew his contract. The gay casting agent reported back that an executive apparently trying to be clever told him: “No fags smoke our fags.”
But Luckinbill was surprised when he brought his mother and father to see the play. Afterwards, after walking in silence, his father told him that he figured out his old friend Jim might have been homosexual when he gave him a book of love poetry.
“Did you see him again afterwards?”
“Yes. He was my friend. My best friend. “
