Smoking with Barry Sullivan

So one evening in the 1970s, Barry Sullivan's
daughter, Jenny Sullivan, was appearing in or
directing a Peter Weiss play called Marat/Sade
or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul
Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum
of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis
de Sade, which is supposed to be the longest play
name in history, at a tiny theater in Santa
Barbara, California. She was married to Jim
Messina of the band Loggins and Messina at
the time. Your parents might have listened
to their songs Your Mama Don't Dance or Angry
Eyes back in the day. Uh-huh. I digress. So
anyway, Messina was probably there, too, but
I didn't see him. It was a really strange play,
performed in-the-round, with characters popping
up out of the audience and weird things like
that. I probably enjoyed it. I don't really
remember. What I do remember is going out on
the sidewalk at the intermission for a smoke.
And Barry Sullivan was there. And we stood and
smoked cigarettes together. I said something
about the play being interesting, and Barry
looked grim and said "Yes" and seemed pretty
tense. He was probably tense that his daughter's
play would come off okay. Since then, I've been
a father, so I understand such fatherly tensions.
So the evening sun was setting, and Barry and I
finished our cigarettes. And the intermission
ended. And the play began again. And Barry died
of a "lung ailment" in 1994 at the age of 82,
so he didn't do too badly for a heavy smoker.
He wasn't a starlet, but he was in, like, 183
movies and television shows with stars like
Barbara Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert, bitchy
people like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, and
starlets like Frances Dee, Senta Berger, Angie
Dickinson, Martha Hyer, Joey Heatherton, Jane
Wyman, Phyllis Kirk, Arlene Dahl, Jane Powell,
Claire Trevor, and a bunch of others. Barry
didn't live long enough to see blogs. Ah well.