Strange Bedfellows

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."
- William Shakespeare, "The Tempest"


Tales of roommates gone wrong are legion. Just Google "roommates from hell" for page after page of internet horror stories. We’ve all had the experience and relating even the most horrendous of tales would be superfluous. Still, there are a couple of historical yarns worthy of note.

August Kubizek (above), affectionately nicknamed "Gustl," was the firstborn and only surviving offspring whose three sisters died early in childhood. The Austrian would forever treasure this as a parallel to countryman Adolf Hitler (below), whose own mother lost four children prematurely. In his mind, they both had been spared, "chosen" by fate.

The two young lions first met while competing for standing room at a performance of a Richard Wagner opera in Linz, Austria. Their shared passion for Wagner blossomed into a friendship that led to a decision to room together in Vienna while they both sought admission into college. Kubizek was expected to take over his father’s upholstery business, but he dreamed of conducting an orchestra. Eighteen-year-old Hitler, one year Kubzek’s junior, convinced the senior Kubizek to allow his son to attend the Vienna Conservatory. Kubizek noted that this forever changed the course of his life.

While Kubizek was embraced by the conservatory, Hitler was twice snubbed by Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts (due to his "unfitness for painting"), which he never related to his roommate. Out of money, Hitler abruptly ended the friendship when he moved into a shelter for the homeless in 1909.

Kubizek’s promising music career was interrupted by military service at the beginning of World War I. He reconnected with Hitler in 1933, congratulating the latter on his appointment as Chancellor of Germany. A few months later, Kubizek was surprised when his former roommate responded, "I should be very glad…to revive once more with you those memories of the best years of my life," resulting in what Kubizek recalled as "the happiest hours of my earthly existence." Hitler ultimately bankrolled Kubizek’s sons’ education at the Anton Bruckner Conservatory.

Kubizek saw Hitler for the last time in the summer of 1940. A year before Hitler bit into a life-ending cyanide capsule in 1945, he sent Kubizek’s mother a food basket for her 80th birthday. Hitler said, "It is a tragedy. I did not become Chancellor of the Greater German Reich to fight wars."

In the winter of 1945, Kubizek wily concealed his collection of postcards, sketches and keepsakes from Hitler in his basement. Following his arrest, imprisonment and interrogation by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, his home was searched, but all of Hitler’s correspondences and drawings were not found.

Kubizek was released in the spring of 1947. In 1958, he published Adolf Hitler: My Childhood Friend (also known as The Young Hitler I Knew). In the book’s epilogue, Kubizek wrote, "Even though I, a fundamentally unpolitical individual, had always kept aloof from the political events of the period which ended forever in 1945, nevertheless no power on earth could compel me to deny my friendship with Adolf Hitler."

Billy Capshaw (above), a 17-year-old from a poor family, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1977. Trained as a medic, he was stationed in Germany and assigned a room with another medic, Jeffrey Dahmer. Drunk for most of his one quarter at Ohio State University, Dahmer had been forced to join the Army by his father. Over the next 18 months, Dahmer, initially charismatic and likable, systematically manipulated, tortured and sexually abused his roommate. Capshaw’s repeated requests for a transfer to another room were ignored, even made fun, of by his superiors. He considered going AWOL and flying home. He considered killing Dahmer, who often drank himself into oblivion, and making it look like an accident. Finally, when Capshaw returned from a field assignment, "that sorry son of a bitch was gone." Dahmer had been ingloriously discharged because of his alcoholism.

Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer raped, murdered, raped again, dismembered and cannibalized 17 men and boys. In 1994, while serving 15 life terms, he was beaten to death by a fellow inmate at Wisconsin’s Columbia Correctional Institution. For 24 years, Billy Capshaw suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but thanks to help and therapy he now lives free of anxiety attacks, flashbacks, nightmares and chronic pain.

And you think your roommate is bad news? On a lighter note, roommates have provided more than their fair share of laughs, even chills, in the moviehouse, from cross-dressing Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in "Some Like It Hot" (1959) to Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari in drag on TV’s "Bosom Buddies" (1980), from the thrill-kill college roommates in Hitchcock’s "Rope" (1948) to 1992’s psychotic "Single White Female" (not to mention its 2011 rip-off, "The Roommate") and the slacker roommates who battle flesh-eating zombies in "Shaun of the Dead" (2004).


On television, the dynamics of roommates have been at the center of "The Monkees" in the ‘60s, "Laverne & Shirley" and "Three’s Company" in the ‘70s, "Full House" and "The Young Ones" in the ‘80s, "Friends" and "The Real World" in the ‘90s and "It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia" in the 2000s, to name just a handful.

On stage, screen and TV, the benchmark against which all roommate sagas are measured remains "The Odd Couple," in its origin playwright Neil Simon’s Broadway hit about mismatched divorced roommates Felix Ungar, an uptight neat-freak, and Oscar Madison, a laid-back slob, which opened in 1965 with Art Carney as Felix and Walter Matthau as Oscar, directed by Neil Simon.

Most sources have it that the play was inspired by the experiences of Danny Simon, Neil’s older brother, himself a comedy writer, who, in the aftermath of a divorce, moved in with newly single theatrical agent Roy Gerber in Hollywood. Together, the Simon brothers wrote for Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers and Red Buttons. On his own, Danny Simon was a head writer on "The Danny Thomas Show," contributed to "The Carol Burnett Show" and was a gag writer for Alan King and Joan Rivers. Woody Allen once said of Danny Simon, "Everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from him." It was Danny who apparently entertained the notion of writing a play based on his banter with Gerber, but he disliked the solitude of play-writing, as opposed to the collaborative nature of writing for television, and handed the project to kid brother Neil.

On the other hand, James Robert Parish, author of the 2008 biography of Mel Brooks, It’s Good to Be the King, states that the play was inspired by Neil Simon’s observation of Brooks, his friend and television co-writer, who was separated from his first wife and lived with writer Speed Vogel for three months in New York City. Vogel, a popular raconteur and a walking encyclopedia of jokes and their origins, was, according to his 2008 obituary in The New York Times, "a charter member of a loose assemblage of writers, artists and show business types…who gathered weekly…to eat and shmooze at ethnic restaurants…in New York," devoting their meetings to "philosophy, Jewish humor and gluttony." Known as the Gourmet Club, the conclave included The Godfather author Mario Puzo, Zero Mostel, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Catch-22 author Joseph Heller.

(In the early 1980s, when Heller suffered from Guilliam-Barré syndrome, a neurological disorder that resulted in severe muscle weakness and partial paralysis, Vogel moved in to help care for him during his recovery. The two collaborated on a book titled No Laughing Matter, chronicling Heller’s ordeal. Heller wrote the serious chapters, alternating with Vogel’s humorous input. The New York Times’ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the darkly comic best seller "positively cheering…richly amusing…a curiously uplifting story of suffering.")

Born Irving Vogel, he got the boyhood nickname "Speed" from a summer camp counselor who thought he spent too much time tying his shoelaces. He had worked in the textile business, worked with found metal as a sculptor, even worked as a professional herring taster at a delicatessen. Mel Brooks once called Vogel "Huck Finn on his raft in Manhattan.." Of their three months as roommates, Vogel recalled that Brooks had insomnia, "a brushstroke of paranoia" and "a blood-sugar problem that kept us a scintilla away from insanity."

Given the choice between Danny Simon and Roy Gerber rooming together or Mel Brooks and Speed Vogel as roommates, we honestly prefer, true or otherwise, the comedic opportunities of the latter as the inspiration for "The Odd Couple." Which got us to thinking about the dynamics of other celebrity roommates, storied or little-known.

Cary Grant, in his 34-year career, was the quintessence of class on the silver screen. He could be debonair and charming in both dark dramas and screwball comedies. In contrast to Grant’s urbane sophistication, Randolph Scott exhibited silent stoicism as the leathery leading man in several westerns. The two actors first met as costars in the 1932 melodrama "Hot Saturday," Grant’s first film as a leading man. They decided to room together in a Malibu beach house, which became known as "Bachelor Hall." They lived together on and off during a ten-year period. According to Robert Nott, author of The Films of Randolph Scott, "They were friends and wanted to save on living expenses (they were both considered to be notorious tightwads)."

They often accompanied each other to Hollywood parties and movie premieres and were utterly unconcerned when photographs of them cozily enjoying dinner together or sharing a dip in a swimming pool were published in fan magazines. In 1944, the rooming arrangement ended, but Grant and Scott remained close friends for the rest of their lives.

Rumors persisted that the two had a homosexual relationship. Randolph Scott once said that he had "nothing against gays, I’m just not one myself." After his death, his son, Christopher, rebuffed the rumors in his book Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?, while director Budd Boetticher, who worked with Scott on seven westerns, called the small talk "bullshit."

Chevy Chase once made a joke about Cary Grant being gay in a television interview and was sued by the actor for slander. They settled out of court. The last word goes to actress Betty Drake, the third Mrs. Grant (from 1949 to 1962), who said, "Why would I believe that Cary was homosexual when we were busy fucking?"

Shelley Winters, who won Best Supporting Actress Oscars for "The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959) and "A Patch of Blue" (1965) and was nominated for her performance in "A Place in the Sun" (1951), came to California in the early 1940s and first signed with Columbia Pictures but was stuck with bit parts. As an acting student at the Hollywood Studio Club, she shared a bedroom with classmate Marilyn Monroe, who would sign her first film contract in 1946.


This was years before Winters’ plus-size performance in "The Poseidon Adventure" earned her a fourth Academy Award nomination. At the time (above), she was sensationalized as "The Blonde Bombshell." Her pinup measurements were 37-26 1/2-36, compared to Monroe’s 37-23-36. They shared the same bathing suit for cheesecake photographs and the same mink coat for dinner dates.

Winters became a role model for Monroe. Legend has it that Winters taught Monroe how to "act pretty" by tilting her chin up, lowering her eyelids and ever so slightly parting her lips, a look that Monroe made her own, a look that made Monroe famous.

In the late 1940s, Wally Cox was a jeweler in New York City with a reputation at parties for his intellect and amusing anecdotes. Encouraged by his theatrical friends, he made his show business debut in 1948 at the Village Vanguard, a jazz club in Greenwich Village, to rave reviews. Guest appearances on television variety shows and dramas followed, and in 1952, he was cast as the star of a live summer replacement situation comedy, "Mr. Peepers," as a shy, bespectacled science teacher (below). The mild-mannered, almost twerpy, stereotype stuck with Cox for the rest of his life.

In his 1994 autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, Marlon Brando commented, "In a lifetime of making friends, none was ever closer or more important to me than Wally Cox." Marlon Brando and Wally Cox, the latter wearing the same horn-rimmed glasses that would become his trademark on TV, were boyhood pals in elementary school in Evanston, Illinois, outside of Chicago. Years later, they reconnected by happenstance in New York City and in the 1950s shared an apartment. Brando encouraged Cox to study acting under Stella Adler, whose alumni later included Robert DeNiro. Cox eventually moved out when he could no longer tolerate Brando’s pet raccoon, Russell.

"Of all Marlon’s friends," author Peter Manso noted in 1994’s Brando, "the most independent - and mysterious - was Wally. It was a kinship that many found strange." Brando said it was not "an unlikely friendship," insisting that "Wally didn’t resemble in the remotest his Mr. Peepers character" but had "the mentality of an ax murderer."

According to his brother-in-law, Richard Loving, Brando "in some way embodied an accepted, conventional sexuality, while with Wally it was a kind of mental strength, a humor and wit, an intellectual fencing." After Cox’s death, in 1973 of a coronary occlusion, age 48, Brando declared, "I was his only friend," although he had often treated Cox with what Manso called a "patronizing irony, like a naïve little brother who didn’t know the ropes."

Manso related that, according to a mutual acquaintance, Brando once asked Cox, "With your kind of perception, awareness, being who you are in this world, how are you able to hack it? How do you manage?" Cox replied, "It’s easy. I just look at them all as though they’re Martians. They’re the interlopers on my planet. I’m not the interloper."

When Cox’s comedy career listed in the doldrums, he was, in Manso’s words, "forced to become a regular, along with Paul Lynde…on the game show ‘The Hollywood Squares,’" displaying a markedly dark sarcasm. (He also provided the voice of "Underdog" on the popular Saturday morning cartoon.) Jim Backus, who played millionaire Thurston Howell III on "Gilligan’s Island" and was himself a frequent celebrity "Square," recalled that Cox and Lynde "would go across the street from the studio to a bar, and both would come back loaded. I don’t think viewers ever realized that they were blind drunk, but they’d do the show absolutely loaded."

Brando attended, unannounced, Cox’s wake and in memory, placed a photograph of Cox next to one of his mother. He told Time magazine, "He was my brother. I can’t tell you how much I miss and love that man. I have Wally’s ashes in my house. I talk to him all the time."

Another close friend of Brando’s, Philip Rhodes, recalled Brando "always reminiscing about their walks together through the woods below his house on Mulholland. He loved Wally, but he talked about his feelings for him in the same way he sometimes talked about old girlfriends, even his ex-whores."

"I’m not sure I will ever forgive Wally for dying," Brando noted in his memoir. "He was more than a friend…closer to me than any human being in my life except for my sisters…Wally probably came closer than anyone I’ve ever known to being a genius…He was as absorbed as I was by human foibles, and was one of my greatest teachers…I curse him - ‘You son of a bitch’ - and chastise him for dying. I also laugh at things when I’m alone because I imagine that he is there, laughing with me."

According to Brando’s son, Miko, after his father’s death, Marlon’s and Wally’s ashes were scattered together in Death Valley, forever reuniting the lifelong friends.


As fellow students at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were allegedly deemed "least likely to succeed." That was, jointly, four Oscar wins and 11 nominations ago. After Hackman migrated to New York for the theater and moved into an apartment in Murray Hill in midtown Manhattan, Hoffman soon followed and ended up spending nights on the kitchen floor. The situation was supposed to last a few nights, but Hoffman supposedly refused to leave. Hackman eventually palmed Hoffman off on Robert Duvall. Both Hoffman and Duvall once said that the main reason they attended acting classes was to pick up ladies. Reminiscing about their nights as roommates, Hackman and Hoffman recalled the fun they had playing bongos on the building roof. In 2003, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman finally worked together in a film, "Runaway Jury" (below) based on the best-selling novel by John Grisham.

In the late 1960s, Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito shared an apartment on West 89th Street in Upper Manhattan. "I first got out of college and came to New York as a young actor in ’69," Douglas remembered. "And I had met Danny in summer theater before that, and we were roommates together in New York."

"Michael did the laundry," Danny DeVito recalled in an interview. "Did he tell you I was a slob?" Douglas mentioned in the same interview. "Danny was sloppy. No, really, he was a great roommate. It was a magical time. We were getting paid to act!" In truth, Douglas admitted that DeVito was the tidy one of the two. "That’s not very good for his image! But he was neat, and he was in love with (future wife) Rhea (Perlman). So actually, he was a great roommate because I didn’t see him a whole lot." As for himself, Douglas said, "Well, it was a magical time. You put a sock on the door," roommate shorthand for "Do Not Disturb."

When Michael Douglas produced "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" in 1975, he cast his old roommate Danny DeVito as Martini, a role the actor had played in the 1971 off-Broadway revival of the play based on Ken Kesey’s novel. DeVito subsequently costarred with Douglas in "Romancing the Stone" (1983), "The Jewel of the Nile" (1985) and "The War of the Roses" (1989), which DeVito also directed. DeVito appeared in director Francis Ford Coppola’s "The Rainmaker" (1997), produced by Douglas, and again costarred with Douglas in "Solitary Man" (2009).


Commenting on reuniting with DeVito for "Solitary Man" (above), Douglas said, "It’s comfortable…I know why actors work with each other over and over again. You don’t have to go through all the introductions and feeling each other out. You just do it."

As roommates at New York City’s prestigious Juilliard School, Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve vowed that whoever made it in show business first would help the other make it as well. At the time, they were the only two students selected for Juilliard’s Advanced Program. They had several classes together in which they found themselves the sole students. John Houseman (a recent Oscar winner for his performance as the imperious Professor Kingsfield in "The Paper Chase"), then a faculty member at Juilliard, told Reeve, "It is terribly important that you become a serious classical actor. Unless, of course, they offer you a shitload of money to do something else."
After Reeve’s spinal injury from a horseback-riding accident in 1995, Williams volunteered to pay medical costs beyond Reeve’s insurance. Williams masqueraded as an eccentric Russian doctor who called on Reeve to perform a colonoscopy. In his 1998 memoir, Still Me, Reeve said he laughed for the first time since the accident and knew that life was going to be all right.

In October 2004, Reeve died of a cardiac arrest. Williams became avidly involved with the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation to fund research in spinal cord injuries and paralysis. He vowed to watch over Reeve’s son, William, after Reeve’s widow, Dana, passed away from lung cancer in 2006.

Al Gore, Tommy Lee Jones and Harvard are names not immediately associated with each other, but Gore and Jones were, in fact, roommates, randomly paired, during their freshman year at the Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their friendship endured, and when Gore scored the Democratic nomination for President in 2000, Jones was honored to give the nominating speech at the convention.

The living arrangement between distinguished actors Ving Rhames and Stanley Tucci as roommates at Purchase College, State University of New York, is noteworthy in that it was Tucci who advised Irving Rhames to drop the "Ir" from his first name because "Ving" was a catchy, more marketable moniker. In 1995, Tucci and Rhames costarred with David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage and Helen Hunt in the crime thriller "Kiss of Death."

It’s probably urban mythology that Liberace and Rock Hudson were once roommates. Likewise, tales of ’N Sync singer Lance Bass and CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper rooming together smack of internet fantasy.

Still, there’s reassurance in the knowledge that, in the words of web wag Gwendoen Fairfax, "most famous folks started out as regular schlubs just like us. When they were young and in college, they lived in squalid dorms or apartments with roommates, eating ramen noodles and building their furniture out of empty kegs and pizza boxes." John Cusack and Jeremy Piven, Conan O’Brien and Jaff Garlin, Holly Hunter and Frances McDormand, Mel Gibson and Geoffrey Rush, Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Downey Jr., and Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow all were, at one time, roommates.

"The next time you’re tempted to lecture your roommate about cleaning the bathroom or to argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes," Fairfax advised, "imagine that person holding an Academy Award."