Right on cue

Do you also attend New York City Ballet?
Yeah. Sometimes I don’t like the music. I have to like the music, and I don’t like Ives. I don’t like Schoenberg that much. My favorite there is a ballet called [Tchaikovsky] Suite No. 3 that ends with Theme and Variations, but actually what I like best are the first three movements. Mainly the first one: The girls are barefoot with their hair down. Balanchine always made the women look so beautiful, always, starting with the little earrings that they wear. I always try to see Serenade and Symphony in C and Firebird and The Cage. I mostly like the story ballets. There are good dancers there, but the men are much better at ABT. They didn’t used to be. At NYCB, a lot of them would land really hard to show it was a man dancing, and Jacques d’Amboise wouldn’t point his feet when he was doing pirouettes. And maybe they got three out. And now these guys do eight with perfect passés and split grand jetés. They never used to do split grand jetés! It’s always so amazing when David Hallberg does them, because he’s so big and his legs are so long. He’s amazing; when he’s alone on the stage he fills it like nobody else does. When he was in the corps de ballet, and they were giving him little things I always felt sorry for any other guys who were dancing next to him because he stuck out like a sore thumb. Not only his height, but his feet and that profile? Like Erik Bruhn.

What other men do you like at ABT?
I like Jose Manuel Carreno a lot. The Cuban dancers have such a different deportment when they walk onstage. They look different from all the other dancers. Their training has a little bit of Russian in it. Jose Manuel, of course, is so beautiful in person: You can tell he’s a star. You don’t know if he’s a dancer or a model or something, but you know he’s somebody special. I like Angel Corella. You know when he first started dancing, he was very young and he had the technique already, so he was dancing over the top with this crazy look in his eye. Then he tapered off and now he’s getting a little happy again. He was really good in Giselle. He was really restrained; he’s such a good actor. But if you get him in Don Quixote, he’s just like crazed. And Marcelo Gomes has turned so handsome! He’s such a good partner.

Did you get to see Hallberg and Wiles in Don Quixote?
I did. I thought it was the wrong cast for that ballet. They could do it well, but they just didn’t look the part.

How would you rate the season so well?
I’m very satisfied. You know, the only time I was a little disappointed was at that Don Q. I didn’t think they had the Spanish flair. He could have been a little nervous, and she just didn’t do the Spanish coquettish thing. Maybe next year. She’s great as Myrta in Giselle and as the princess in Bayadère and I loved her in Sylvia. Sylvia, I thought, was perfect for Gillian and Michele.

Why did you stop performing?
My partner was HIV-positive. He got AIDS and I just couldn’t travel. I was already 36. I was getting older. After Dancin’, I worked for a company that did TV commercials and I was going crazy; I was shaving and wearing a suit and it wasn’t for me, so I went back and did Peter Pan on Broadway with Sandy Dennis. That was amazing. I used to love and stand in the wings. The set would break and it would be all stars and they would be flying, and I’d stand in the wings and Sandy would come up on top of me. I’d say, “Hi, Sandy!,” and she’d fly back out again.

Did you stop after Peter Pan?
Yes, and I didn’t know what to do. My mom got me the job doing cue cards originally. She was teaching at UCLA and she talked to the theater-arts department and the chairman knew Barney McNulty, who invented cue cards. He was an NBC page and Ed Wynn—he couldn’t remember his lines, so he asked Barney to write some stuff on a card and all of a sudden he had an incredible business. We worked everywhere. The soaps. We went from show to show. The only one I did regularly was The Hollywood Palace, which I loved. Dean Martin was a really great guy. His fingers were tan and short and chubby just like my grandmother’s. Carol Burnett was amazing. One time in rehearsal, they had to pour water over this actress Jackie Joseph, and I heard Carol say, “Make sure the water is warm.” What a nice lady. The bigger the stars, the nicer they were. The ones on their way up were a little more…nervous. I did cue cards for Laugh-In.

So you rediscovered cue cards?
Yes. It turned out that the hairdresser from Dancin’ did hair at Saturday Night Live, so I went for an interview and the next day I was working. I did that for nine years. The cast was good—Jan Hooks and Kevin Nealon, Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey and Nora Dunn. They were older, and they would write a lot of the stuff; it was before Adam Sandler came. It was a solid cast, and they were so versatile. I can’t believe Dana doesn’t have a movie career. He’s so talented; he can do anything. That show used so many cue cards. There were six of us and I was in charge. I took care of the host. The most amazing one I worked with was Angie Dickinson. God, she was so beautiful. Even though I’m gay, I get these crushes on women.

How did you end up working with Letterman?
Marty got AIDS; we had been together 16 years when he died. It was 1985 and nobody knew anything about AZT. And they were giving him so much AZT, and he was nauseated all the time; nobody knew anything about hospitals, and they wouldn’t listen to me because I wasn’t married to him. I finally learned to get a power of attorney and wave it at people. And then all my friends died. But I mean all of them. The ones that I talked to everyday on the phone, all of them died within four years and Marty was the first. And then, most of the friends I toured with on shows, they all died too. Broadway and ballet was hit so hard. That changed me again; the AIDS crisis was a life-changing trauma for me . The new generation doesn’t know about that. I never thought I’d survive all that loss. I hadn’t reached 50 yet, and I had seen so much death, more than my parents probably. I didn’t think I’d survive. You either commit suicide or you go on. And if you go on, you don’t let bitterness eat you and then it makes you a better person. I feel now that nothing is important. Like when they go crazy on the show because of Dave and this and that—it’s like, please, it’s a TV show.

Are you and Letterman are friends?
I’m such good friends with him. I’m two years older, and we’re very much alike because we’re kids at heart. He’s very impish. Of course, he’s much more intelligent than I am, but the two of us like pranks and I talk to him like he’s my cousin. Nobody at work talks to him the way I do, and he welcomes it because everybody is so afraid of him. And he knows that he’ll get the truth from me. He gave me a lot of money to help Marty pay his bills; Marty was his cue-card guy before me.

Is that how you started working for him?
SNL is like six people and I was in charge. And Letterman is only two people. I had gotten Marty working for SNL. He was an actor and he didn’t have that much work, so he started doing the second person on Letterman and then he moved up, and whenever I wasn’t doing SNL I would do the second guy on Letterman. When Marty started getting sick, I took over for him and started working for Dave [at NBC]. Then, the season ended and Dave decided to move to CBS. I went to work with Letterman two days after Marty died. It actually saved my life because I had a reason to get out of bed. The last six months, Marty was paralyzed on his right side, and it was so intense. Then, all of a sudden, I had no one to take care of. It happens to everybody. I would cry all the way to work. I would cry as I was writing the cue cards, but then I would have to focus on the show, and I would be okay. Then, the show would end and I would cry on the way home and cry myself to sleep. For a long time. But the show saved my life. I had to get up and do something. And New York is great; when you’re crying on the subway, no one says, “Are you all right?”

I’m so sorry.
You know, I think everybody has his destiny. I don’t really believe in God. I think you should be good to human beings, animals and the planet. Somebody is supposed to get hit by a bus when they’re 35. Theirs was to get infected and die. And mine was to survive.