Queer eye for the straight old guy

LOVE GURU Morris helped guide his father through the world of dating.

For eight years, Bob Morris chronicled the rituals of New Yorkers of a certain neurotic and aspirational bent in his New York Times “Age of Dissonance” column. Morris may have looked at the human comedy through his own middle-aged gay man’s arch and dystopic lens, but he always fell on the side of fabulous. Through some karmic irony, Morris was blessed with a demonstrably unfabulous, Republican father, who, as a new widower at 80, asked the author for help navigating the ways of finding female companionship in Long Island and Florida. Morris writes about his year of dad-pimping in his funny, brash and often tender new memoir, Assisted Loving, in which both father and son find true love: the author with his partner, literary agent Ira Silverberg, and Morris père (who died in 2006) with sweet, albeit wigged, Doreen. TONY recently met Morris at his beloved Soho House to talk about his adventures in romance.

Did playing 45-year-old gay wingman to your straight 80-year-old father teach you anything about your taste in women?
It taught me nothing about my taste in women, but it did teach me about how crippling tastes can be in general. For a while, I wrongly thought that if my father dated somebody well-to-do, it would upgrade our family.

You’re talking about people like “Fifth Avenue Florence,” whom you thrust upon your father?
Right. If somebody had an apartment on Fifth Avenue or a place in Aspen, then I was all ears. But the beauty of my father is that he didn’t care about those things very much. He also didn’t care that much about somebody’s age. When my dad handed me the personals pages, he had circled ads of people who were in their seventies or eighties—it was age-appropriate! You don’t know how many senior men think they should go with someone 50 years old. I mean, look at Billy Joel’s wife—how old is she?

Did you ever come close to going crazy, like in that scene in The Sopranos where Paulie Walnuts smothers one of the women in the retirement home where his mother lives?
The closest I got was when we were going to see the musical Nine. My dad brought this date who was so unfriendly. I couldn’t believe that this woman couldn’t see my father’s charms, even though for most of my life I couldn’t see them myself.

You’re working with diva-entertainer Diahann Carroll now on her second memoir, The Legs Are the Last to Go.
After working on my own story, it’s been a great opportunity to get inside someone else’s head. What she has in common with my father and the world of Assisted Loving is that she is a lady of a certain age. I’m really interested in most older people; I’m convinced that life experience deepens everything they say. She could have dated my father.

Would that have worked?
It would have been fabulous, but I don’t know that she could put up with him. She is a fastidious person. My father was the type of person who left a trail of Rice Krispies wherever he went.

Your memoir also describes your courtship with Ira Silverberg. Did he mind being mentioned by name in the book?
Besides my father, he’s the only real name in the book. Ira is getting a kick out of it. He’s getting a bigger kick out of it because the book is doing well. The last thing he needs in his line of work is going home to a mopey writer. My agent and I both know that my pages are better because my Ira stuck his nose in the manuscript.

He calls you “the most untherapized Jew in New York City.” Have you ever been in therapy?
Untherapized Jews are rare in this town—like twentysomethings without iPods. But no, I’ve never been in therapy. I channeled all my neuroses and insecurities into my Times column, which was about manners in the most ambitious, aspirational city in the world.

Most memoirs are about how awful parents are. Yours is almost rebellious in its optimism about parent-children relationships.
I want people to enjoy my book, but yes, it’s also about how to get over your issues with your parents. I want you to move on, and to have as good a time as possible with them.

Assisted Loving (Harper, $24.95)is out now.