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.
