Librettist ("The Rothschilds"), playwright, and Emmy-award winning screenwriter Sherman Yellen celebrates the jubilee of his marriage in this post via Huffington:
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When we married on a sweltering June day in 1953, the chance of our marriage lasting was remote -- even when divorce was something of a rarity in our world. Born in the early Depression years we came of age in post WWII America. I'd just turned 21, a recent college graduate with a determination to make my living as a writer, and Joan was 19, and an amazingly beautiful girl at a time when Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman set the standard. We met at college, as many people did who married early. We were far too young to have settled feelings, and we had no jobs or money: a recipe for a marital disaster.
Neither of our parents had been divorced. Mine had soldiered through some difficult years, while hers had enjoyed a good marriage, so divorce was not in our DNA.
We were outspoken, opinionated, stubborn -- oh, so stubborn -- and not afraid of snapping a judgment or having a good fight. No smart bookmaker would have given odds on our marriage enduring for six years, let alone 60. Young people in love in those Eisenhower/Kennedy years didn't live together first as 80 percent of the couples do today; they got married amidst a family celebration and a lot of ugly wedding presents: silver-plated table top cigarette lighters, crystal ashtrays, and enough wooden salad bowls to launch a life devoted to nothing more than smoking and eating iceberg lettuce and pale pink hot-house tomatoes.
We were Depression era babies who married in "The Age of Anxiety" when fear of the bomb, the Russians, juvenile delinquents, and flying saucers lived side by side with Father Knows Best, comedian Milton Berle, the poems of W.H. Auden, and the dreaded, indefinable "existentialism." Although TV had made its steady incursions into movie-going, it was still a time of superb filmmaking. Storytelling was an art that then depended on good writing and performances, not special effects. Brilliant film stars acted in literate movies such as Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve and On The Waterfront and superbly crafted comedies such as Some Like it Hot filled the big theater screen with laughter and glory. And so we have lived from that Age of Anxiety to the Age of Kardashian where a glut of celebrities whose work nobody has ever heard of go in and out of rehab as the cameras roll and turn their sad, soft disorders into hard cash. Life may be far more expensive than it was in the '50s and '60s, but fame and fortune are so much cheaper.
Okay, enough from the grouchy old man -- on with the story.
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