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Love is a Lifetime Commitment
In And It Only Took 100 Years…, you share the trials of your youth, your career in show business, and your enduring love story that has defied all odds. What made you decide to share your story with readers?
Seventeen years ago, our friend Joan Rivers gave a dinner party at her house near ours in Connecticut to celebrate New Year’s. She insisted that we go around the table and each person had to say what they were thankful for. She began by saying she was thankful that her daughter and grandchild were well and happy; a guest from England, who owned a huge farm, was thankful for a splendid harvest; a young man said he was thankful for a puppy he had been given for Christmas. Then it came to me, and I said, “I am thankful that Norman and I have been together for 50 years.” Although we lived openly together, I had never alluded to how long our relationship had lasted in such a public way, and there was a moment of shock and then congratulations. Afterward, the boy who’d talked about the dog came over to me. “I’ve been with the man who is my husband for fifteen years, but you two are an amazing example of what I hope we can become. You really have changed my life.” On the way home, I reminded Norman of the articles we had been reading about young gays committing suicide because they felt there was no future in being gay. “If we are an example, maybe we have the responsibility to tell people how wonderful our life can be….” We wrote a book called “Double Life” about our relationship that is still read today. And recently, I decided to tell my story from age 15 to 100 to show how life has changed for me, from World War II to the present day, as well as for the world I lived in. I hope people suffering from doubts about long-lasting love can take heart from my story and know that it is possible.
You write about figures like Bette Davis, Helen Hayes, and Barbra Streisand without losing your own narrative center. How did you balance telling your story without being overshadowed by theirs?
From the time I was a young actor, I was involved with celebrities in some way. I acted with Maurice Evans, who was a huge star in his time. So was Katherine Cornell when I was in her company of “Antony and Cleopatra”. They were part of my life as I worked with them eight times a week. Of course, they were stars and not my buddies, and they were my bosses, but still, they were part of my everyday life. Helen Hayes became a friend when I wrote “The Snoop Sisters” for television. She and Katharine Hepburn were down-to-earth people with decided tastes and enormous talent. Streisand, I watched grow from a plain young girl to a huge screen star. I worked with young actors like Charleston Heston and Tony Randall before they became stars, and when I turned to casting, actors like Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, I came into contact with them before they were stars. My book is not about their lives unless they affect mine in some way. I was in on the beginning of Streisand’s life, but it was part of my development, not only hers. Helen Hayes sent for me from Hollywood, and it affected my life more than hers. My book is my story, and certainly Marlon Brando played a role, but as a supporting player in my story of leaving the New School and taking a small part in the War. But finally, I wrote about what I know – my own life, not the star’s, unless it affected me in some important way.
Your relationship with Norman feels like the emotional anchor of the book. What did you learn about love that you couldn’t have understood earlier in life?
I learned that love is a lifetime commitment. It becomes your family, your friends, your mornings, your evenings, your health, and your sickness. Norman and I married when the law allowed us to, but many years after we had been together. We didn’t need the emotional security, but we did it mainly to join the gay movement into the mainstream. But as I heard the word “commitment” from the woman who married us, I began to cry. I think the realization was dawning on me that she was talking about LIFE, not just being together for passion, attractiveness, fun, and games. This was for life, swearing under the stars and the heavens, but also forever, eternity. That had not been part of the thoughts in my head when I first saw Norman, but they were now what I knew was the truth.
If you could speak to that young boy looking through shop windows, what would you tell him?
I would tell my young self to have courage, be brave, and not be with people who put you down, even if they are your own family. Follow your dream, but remember that sometimes fate will help you along the way. You have to work your ass off all the time – it is never easy. And if you ever get to the point where what you have worked so hard for is not going to work out for you, don’t be afraid to stop and try something else. It’s better than being always disappointed or chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Never forget that life is love as well as work. Most importantly, God, whoever that is, is there to help you. You are not alone.
Author Links: Instagram | Facebook | X | Website
Yet the real story unfolds far from the lights of Broadway or Hollywood. It’s found in his six-decades-long partnership with artist Norman Sunshine, a love story that endured secrecy, prejudice, and time itself. Together they created a shared life filled with beauty, humor, and devotion, proving that the most extraordinary thing of all is the quiet miracle of lasting love.
Only about 0.03% of Americans ever reach 100, and fewer still arrive there with such grace, insight, and gratitude. Reflective, wise, and deeply human, AND IT ONLY TOOK 100 YEARS… is a celebration of work, love, and the mysterious force that binds them-the hard-won truth that, in the end, a full life is its own masterpiece.
And It Only Took 100 Years…
And It Only Took 100 Years… is, on its face, a show business memoir, but it’s really the story of a life slowly claimed from fear, class anxiety, secrecy, ambition, and time itself. Alan Shayne begins with a lonely, yearning boy in Falmouth, watching the world through shop windows and trying to understand his own desire, then carries us through acting, television, Broadway, casting, production, Hollywood power corridors, and finally into the long, durable companionship of his life with Norman. The book moves from furtive early encounters and humiliations to rooms full of stars, from the sting of his grandmother telling him his nose is too big to the strange dignity of growing old enough to look back and say, with some hard-earned calm, that work and love were the real architecture of his life.
What I admired most is how unvarnished Shayne is about loneliness. That early material has a bruised, searching quality I found very affecting. The scenes with Dudley, Lenny, Roger, and the antique dealer Dave Garland aren’t presented as neat awakenings or tidy milestones. They’re confusing, charged, half-understood, and often sad. That felt true. So did the social texture around them, the bad meals, the grandmother’s cluttered shop, the humiliating hunger to be seen, the way a beautiful room or a handsome stranger can seem to promise an entire future.
Later, when the memoir opens into theater and Hollywood, the book never loses that earlier ache, and I think that’s why the celebrity material lands. The stars are there, yes, but they don’t swallow the man telling the story. Even when he’s writing about Bette Davis, Helen Hayes, Barbra Streisand, or the mechanics of Warner Brothers, the deeper subject remains the same: what it costs to make a self, and what it costs even more to keep one.
I also found myself responding to the book’s ideas, which are wiser and less glib than the title might lead you to expect. Shayne is not peddling a “life lessons at 100” pose. In fact, one of the book’s strengths is its resistance to easy wisdom. He keeps circling back to effort, luck, erotic secrecy, professional endurance, and the odd mystery of survival. I liked that he can describe casting Cicely Tyson, watching blacklisted actors slip back into work almost by accident, or helping shape television careers, and still end up talking not about triumph in some grandiose sense, but about responsibility, taste, loyalty, and stamina. His prose isn’t always polished in a high literary way, but it is vivid, direct, and alive with remembered detail. When it works best, it has the crispness of someone who spent a lifetime noticing entrances, voices, rooms, and timing. There are stretches where the pace becomes brisk and episodic, especially once career anecdotes begin to stack up, but even then I felt the pulse of a real consciousness behind it, amused, wounded, vain, observant, generous, and finally very tender.
What stayed with me wasn’t any single famous name, though there are plenty, but the through-line from the frightened boy who sensed “some mystery” in the world to the old man who can finally name the cornerstones as work, love, and the mystery that carries them. I found that moving and unexpectedly grounding. I’d recommend And It Only Took 100 Years to readers who like memoirs with both cultural history and emotional candor, especially anyone interested in queer lives across the twentieth century, old Hollywood, television, and the slow making of a shared life.
Pages: 328 | ASIN : B0GCVCMSWC
