The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
THE forever formula
Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue ask 40 famous couples for the secret to a successful marriage — and find there isn’t one
When Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue learned a close friend was getting divorced after nearly 30 years of marriage, the actress and the talk show host — who themselves are celebrating 40 years of marriage this month — were shaken. Thomas, who can remember hiding in the bushes when she was a child to watch 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor leave for the church for the first of eight ill-fated marriages, thought that a relationship that had weathered three or four decades ought to be able to go the distance.
As they took stock of their own marriage, Thomas and Donahue considered the secrets of its success and wondered how others made their unions work. An idea surfaced: They would talk to other well-known, long married couples and see what lessons they might learn. The book that became “What Makes a Marriage Last” arrived last month.
“We really did this book, not like reporters would do it — we did it as a double date,” Thomas says by phone from the couple's Manhattan apartment recently. “We went as husband and wife and called upon other husbands and wives and sat down with them, ate cheese and crackers or drank wine or whatever.”
Adds Donahue: “And the conversation just started to roll. And roll. It was amazing.”
They flew back and forth across North America to conduct their interviews in person — that was Rule No. 1 for the project — and they learned from couples that included President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Billy and Janice Crystal, rapper LL Cool J and Simone I. Smith, pop star Elton John and David Furnish. And as they did they found that there is no singular method to wedded bliss or the obstacles that arise along the way.
“There really is not a challenge you can think of that a marriage would have to face that it didn't turn out was in this book,” Thomas says. “I mean, we didn't know that when we chose the couples, but for instance Jamie Lee Curtis was facing a cocaine habit and Jesse Jackson and his wife faced a betrayal.
“Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, three years into their marriage they got Michael's diagnosis of a lifelong illness,” she says. “Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon lost 30 years of their savings to Bernie Madoff.”
So what did they learn from their double dates with other long-married couples — nearly all of them together for more than 20 years?
“Well, you could see that, yeah, they wanted to be married,” says Donahue, whose first marriage lasted 17 years. (Thomas, whose actor father, Danny Thomas, and mother, Rose Marie, were married about 55 years, had not been married before she wed Donahue on May 21, 1980.) “And if there were problems, and there always are, they toughed it out.
“Who was it who said it's a lot more complicated?” he asks.
“Elsa Walsh, Bob Woodward's wife,” Thomas replies. “She said, ‘I don't understand this impulse for disruption, all this energy it takes to get out of marriage, where you could take all that energy and put it back into the marriage. These people face challenges and they didn't run from them.”
Some talked about hardwon maturity after the failure of previous marriages, such as actor Ted Danson, now married 25 years to actress Mary Steenburgen. She's his third wife, he's her second husband.
“I said to him, ‘Three times. Wow, that's optimistic. What makes you think it would be good the third time?' ” Thomas says. “He said, ‘Well, I learned a lot about myself. One of the things is that I stopped lying.' ”
Some, including director Ron and Cheryl Howard and actor Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, credited couples counseling for helping them navigate the sometimes rocky paths of marriage. Thomas cites what “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston said about going to couples counseling with wife, Robin Dearden.
“Bryan Cranston said, ‘We're not looking for a referee; we're looking for an interpreter,' which is smart,” says Thomas. “Because sometimes you can have a fight with your spouse and it takes a couple of rounds to figure out, ‘Oh, that's what you meant.' ”
Rather than being a sign of failure, counseling is a sign of how much you care, Donahue adds.
“I think that is an act of love right there,” he says. “If you engage a marriage counselor, you really want to save the marriage. That's a good sign.”
Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter said that in their nearly 74 years of marriage they've made sure never to go to sleep mad at each other. But director Ben Falcone, married to actress Melissa McCarthy since 2005, told Thomas and Donahue he did the exact opposite.
“He said, ‘I purposely go to bed —,'” Thomas begins.
“‘— because then when I wake up it will be gone and I know I'll feel better,' ” Donahue continues.
Some couples cited the importance of humor, others the need to work on issues that arise when one partner's professional standing is eclipsed by the other. Singer Patty Smyth, married to tennis legend John McEnroe since 1997, told them she believes one should never marry with plans to change the person they wed.
“She said, ‘Women make the mistake of marrying potential — marry what you see; it's not going to change,' ” Thomas says.
Similarly, Thomas recalls that Judith Viorst stressed accepting your partner for who he or she is.
“She said, ‘You know there are things in your marriage' — and she's been married 50 years — ‘that will never be resolved,' ” Thomas says. “‘No matter how hard you work on it, he's never going to be you and you're never going to be him. So step over it, step around it, let it go.'” Thomas and Donahue say they broke one long-standing rule in their relationship — never to work on a project together — to write the book. But writing it taught them things about each other they'd not known before.
“I didn't want to work with him because I thought, ‘Oh, you know, we'll be fighting because he's a Type A and I'm a Type A. He ran his own show; I run my own show,' ” Thomas says. “But it didn't turn out that way because our styles are so different. He's very cool, very laid back. I'm not, I'm on top of it, jumping over fences to get it.
“It's just a different style — what would you say, honey?”
“I'd say talking to all these couples about marriage has inevitably strengthened ours,” Donahue says. “It made us think about things that I don't think — I'll speak for myself — I would have.
“You know, you get married and the rice and all the relatives and people, it's just so happy,” he says. “And you're filled with love. And I'm not sure we let people know that inevitably there's going to be difficulty.”
So embrace the differences and find strength in those as well as your similarities, Thomas says.
“With the love and the lust and all the excitement of everything else you get through the first few years,” she says. “It's kind of like Mother Nature gave you all that so that you could get through the rough and tumble of trying to live with somebody who's different than you.
“That's hard, and it takes a while to start appreciating.”