He had an anger in him that was unbelievable. Leedom said, before adding, after a few questions: “He was a difficult man, to say the least. Cott, he answered a newspaper ad for a personal assistant, and wound up spending the next five years as the traveling companion to the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and becoming his lover, though Mr. Leedom was the executive director of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.īefore meeting Mr. Cott worked as an actor, a publicist, a theater manager and the executive director of Westbeth, the artists’ residence in the West Village. ‘I’ll do it right away.’ But he doesn’t.” And I’ve reminded him five times to eat the apple.
Four hours later, it’s not been eaten yet. Leedom continued: “This morning I said, eat that apple on the table. I can take care of him, but it’s a burden, and it’s getting worse of a burden. If it became serious, then that’s a nursing home, I guess. His partner’s health, he said, worried him. On that recent day, the doctor had called about rescheduling the procedure. Cott’s doctor found a cancerous tumor on his bladder and called for surgery. We remember the stories we tell about our lives we invent our lives in the remembering. Some linguists believe that preliterate societies used myths to preserve their collective memories, and it seems possible, or at least poetic, that the style of memory is toward constructive storymaking, not simple retention. Memory is a tricky thing: subjective, malleable to the needs of narrative or the fog of time. “I’m going to bed him,” he remembered, smiling wickedly. “He turned around and I said, yes, very cute. “Across the crowded room I saw the back of his head, and I thought, that looks kind of cute,” Mr. Leedom was raising money to build the theater, and Mr. They can recall the first time they saw each other, at a 1955 fund-raiser for the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Conn., where they both worked. In 2000, they were joined in a civil union ceremony in Vermont and, shortly after moving to their current home, wed in a ceremony in their apartment with no neighbors present because they did not yet know anybody. “It’s a lovely house.”Īs for their personal histories: first kisses, petting sessions with girls, engagements to marry, an affair with one of the last century’s greatest musicians, friends lost to AIDS. Leedom said, evoking another river of New York history. “We paid $150,000 for it, and we sold it for four million,” Mr. Together and separately, they have lived a broad swath of gay history: romantic encounters in the military during World War II nights at the Stonewall Inn, birthplace of the gay rights movement the anything-goes bathhouses of the 1970s living in a town house in Chelsea as the neighborhood was becoming the center of gay New York. And we’ve always been very close and compatible - shared everything.” “We’ve argued or had differences of opinion, but it’s never been dramatic of any kind. “Our relationship has been - we’ve never fought,” Mr. Among their peers and neighbors, theirs is one of the few love stories that is still going on. Photographs of the two men in younger and younger-old days - in tuxedos or white pants, at the beach or in the city - tell part of their story. Eventually the story ties itself up in a neat ending, often precipitating the survivor’s move to this age-segregated home, where meals and daily activities are part of a program, and whole lives are shaped by the imperious processes of memory. In such a building, everybody has a story - of love won or lost, love tested by time, love sour or sweet. I would see them periodically in the building’s dining room: a couple in a residence populated mainly by widows, always sitting just the two of them, well dressed, slightly formal in speech, given to remarks like, “ ‘60 Minutes’ is starting shall we forgo dessert?” Three years ago, the two men moved into a senior building in Lower Manhattan where my mother lives. They worry about how much longer they will be able to care for each other. Cott wears two hearing aids and has been given a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s.
Leedom walks with an aluminum cane since he broke his hip a couple years ago in a fall in their bedroom. Cott have been together for 58 years, during which time, both say, they have never had a serious argument. And I think it cost a nickel to get in in those days.” “And there was always gay activity going on in the toilets.