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RL and Emily McLaughlin:
Early in 1956, aspiring actress Emily McLaughlin went out on the
road for four months with a troup called The Touring Players. They played cities and college towns
in the South and Southwest, and in April, near the end of the tour, she picked up the flu in a coal mining town in West
Virginia. Shortly thereafter, she returned to New York, and before she even had time to unpack, she received a
call asking her to join the cast of "The Lovers", which would leave for Detroit that same night. Despite the
fact that she was still running a high fever, she decided to accept the offer. She took some aspirin, picked
up her suitcase, and headed for Grand Central Station.
The first night in Detroit, she and Bob, whom she had met on
the train, walked to the cafeteria together. The table where the rest of the cast was sitting was already full,
so they sat at another table by themselves. She said she fell in love with him in "about fifteen minutes". Three
days later they were discussing marriage, although he never officially proposed to her. A week after they met, she phoned
home with the news, and her mother promptly hung up on her. Emily said she understood her mother's
attitude, considering she and Bob barely knew each other and they were both struggling actors with no steady income.
Bob and Emily were on the road six weeks with "The Lovers" before
it came to New York to open on Broadway. It lasted one night and she took him home to meet her parents. Her
family liked him immediately, and she said her father took her aside and said, "That boy's a gentleman." Her mother
hastily arranged a wedding for them. It took place on
June 6, 1956, just nine weeks after they had first met. They were married in the same congregational church
in White Plains, New York, where Emily's parents had met while singing in the choir and where she had been
baptized as a child. They spent their honeymoon doing summer
stock together at the Cleveland House in Tarnworth, New Hampshire.
Click Here For RL & EM's Official Wedding Portrait
In December 1956, Emily found out she was pregnant. "I'll
tell you honestly," she said in an interview. "When I first heard, I just sat down and cried. There we were,
in a cold-water flat, with no work and no money. But, after that first reaction, we suddenly felt great.
We wanted children and we began to realize that, if you put off a family, you suddenly wake up fifteen years later without
one, and then it's too late."
While Bob continued to audition for roles, Emily took a job at
Scribner's Publishing House where she copied cards for $37 a week. Meanwhile, the following summer (1957), Bob
got a job doing summer stock in Maine, and sent everything he made back home. "At times," Emily said in an interview,
"I used to wonder how he ate up there in Maine." Emily worked at Scribner's until the eighth month of her pregnancy
and then quit. She spent a week in Maine with Bob, then went home to her parents' house in White Plains to wait
for the baby to be born.
The baby was due August 25, and in the middle of the night of August
26, during a rainstorm, she went into labor. Bob, who had finished his last show in Maine that night, was
notified, and he drove all night back to New York. He arrived about the same time as the baby. Their son,
Robert Frederick Orrin Lansing, was born at 11:26 a.m. on August 26, 1957.
TRIVIAL FACTS THAT MAY INTEREST ONLY ME:
- RL and Emily owned an original Picasso. I
asked Bobby what happened to the painting and he believes that either Emily's adopted daughter or someone in Anne's
family may have it.
- When living in New York in the 1950s, RL owned a motor scooter. He and
Emily used to ride the scooter up East River Drive to the studio when they worked on Young Doctor Malone
together.
- RL paid for his SAG card with borrowed money.
- The two cats RL and Emily had in their cold-water flat in New York to help
keep out the rats were killed at the same time by a car after they moved to Los Angeles.
- RL and Emily had two Airedales in California - Laurie, nicknamed "Miss Brillo"
because of her ability to withstand Bobby's roughhousing, and Laurie's pup, whose name I don't know.
- Emily's father, Frederick McLaughlin, was an attorney and three-time mayor
of White Plains, NY. Her mother at one time had theater aspirations and studied voice.
- Emily graduated with a degree in American Literature from Middlebury College
in Vermont. One of her classmates was Joanne Woodward.
-Other cast members of "The Lovers" included Darren McGavin, Pernell Roberts,
and Joanne Woodward.
- Two odd jobs RL had in New York while trying to break into show business
was working in a plastics factory and checking hats at the Latin Quarter night club.
- RL had Swiss steak and eggplant at the cafeteria in Detroit the night he and
Emily first met.
- Emily was born on December 1, 1928, and died on April 26, 1991 of lung
cancer. She was 62.
Timeline:
June 5, 1928 - born in San Diego, California
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