Elizabeth And Doris

The recent death of Elizabeth Taylor brought back memories of Sid who was one of my best friends from my adolescence. We met when we were going to Pershing Junior High School in Boro Park in 1958 and remained close through 1963 when we had a falling out over Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day. Let me explain. Sid loved with a passion Elizabeth and I loved with a passion Doris. We would argue constantly over who was better, and we both had scrapbooks on them. Mine was huge, a former sample book for greeting cards that someone gave my mother. I ripped the cards out and started to paste ads, articles and pictures from fan magazines of Doris beginning in 1955 so by the time I met up with Sid this was one big fat scrapbook. In fact I was working on my second book when I met him. Sid started his own on Elizabeth but it was just a cheap binder with lined paper. We were two little gay boys from Brooklyn in training to become in a few years two big gay boys. What were we thinking? Actually what were our families and friends thinking as we both cut and pasted our way through junior high with nothing on our minds accept these two movie stars. Our competition got fierce in 1959 when both of them were nominated for Oscars, thankfully both lost to Simone Signoret because there would have been no living with Sid if Liz had won, and of course I would have been impossible if Doris had snatched the prize for Pillow Talk which I knew was a big long shot. However in 1960 Liz had her near death experience and the papers and fan magazines were flooded with Liz this and Liz that, and Sid couldn’t cut and paste fast enough.We both went to see her in Butterfield 8 on a sat afternoon at our neighborhood Loew’s and the din of the kids carrying on was so loud and awful that we could hardly hear the or follow the film. That winter when the nominations were announced there was Liz with her 4^th in a row best actress nomination for Butterfield 8, but no nod for Doris for her femme jep movie Midnight Lace. I was off the hook at least, and could relish Sid’s happiness, because I didn’t think she would win for this performance in a film that got universally bombed. However I wasn’t counting on the sympathy vote, and I even agreed to stay over at Sid’s and watch the Oscars with him. Sid went nuts when they announced Liz’s name as best actress, and I just sat there in silence. In 1961 we went off to different high schools, but we remained close friends. By that time my scrap booking had come to an end, but I still loved Doris and Sid still loved Elizabeth. Our friendship came to an end however in the early fall of 1963 when I refused to go with Sid to Radio City Music Hall to see the V.I.P.S. “But I went with you to the Hall during the summer to see “The Thrill of It All.” “So” I replied “I don’t want to see that movie”, and with that Sid stopped talking to me. He dropped me cold, and took our mutual friends with him. We went through the Kennedy assassination without each other and I didn’t expect to ever see or hear from him again. Then in 1966 I did heard from him, I forget how this happened, but we made a date to go see the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Starring you know who and which had just opened. Afterwards we would occasionally go to a movie together or have dinner. We were both older now and the silly things of our early teens had passed. In 1967 I moved to Manhattan and threw away my Doris Day scrapbooks which sadly I regret now doing, and once again I lost touch with Sid. I had heard that he had been drafted into the army, and that was that. Then one day in late 1967 he called me up out of the blue, he had gotten my phone number from my mother, and we made a date for him to visit me in my apartment in Chelsea that I was sharing with a roommate and several cats. He had left the army, discharged for some reason that he wouldn’t go into. He seemed sad and lonely that day as we played Joan Baez records and smoked pot, and this was the last time I saw him. Years later I ran into a mutual friend of ours who told me, that he had become a drug addict and he didn’t know if Sid was alive or dead. 

The top photo is of me and Sid with 3 other friends. Sid is second from the left, and I'm second from the right.