Ossie & Ruby: Is This The Love Affair Of The Century?

Ebony, Feb, 1999 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

Couple sets new standards for art, protest and togetherness

Ossie and Ruby. The two names go together, like "Purlie" and "Victorious," and should be added to the short list of great collaborators in love, art and struggle.

Actors, activists and partners for 50 years, Ossie Davis, 81, and Ruby Dee, 74, have played their private love on a very public stage, set against the backdrop of the major human rights struggles of the late 20th century.

In the process they have produced not only groundbreaking work on Broadway and in Hollywood, but three children and seven grandchildren, as well as millions of fans who have been changed by their love and art.

Not content to profoundly reshape the landscape for artists and audiences over the past five decades, they also have worked doggedly and tirelessly on that most delicate and demanding of all arts--marriage.

Working, marching, and acting through decades of civil and social unrest, through several world wars, political and character assassinations, the divorces of many of their close friends and colleagues and the deaths of family members, Ossie and Ruby have returned again and again to the well that feeds their love and have been renewed.

In honor of their triumph, and ours, most of Black America stopped in 1998 and celebrated one of the great love stories of this century.

In an age of quick couplings and even faster partings, this couple has achieved a remarkable marriage forged as much in independence as togetherness, as much in heartbreak as in wind-swept passion. In their new book, With Ossie & Ruby: In This Life Together, they not only entertain with their consummate story-telling skills, but also enlighten and educate as they write together and separately on their lives, and on keeping a family together in a world where families are ripped apart by scandal and divorce.

Writing the book, digging, sifting and wading through 50 years of marriage was not an easy process. But in the end it was a clarifying one. "One of the things I appreciate more was how important struggle was as the instrument that helped to keep us knit together," Ossie Davis says.

Ruby Dee describes the process as similar to "getting an alcohol rub light after a skin peel." Although it can hurt she says, "when it's all over you feel some exhilaration and a lot cleaner."

What keeps a couple together and still liking each other, not to mention loving each other, after 50 years? The couple say that, while there are no pat answers, a sense of humor and good communication skills are high on the list. "Learn how to have a good argument and make it productive," Dee says. Also share the household duties.

Long before Women's Liberation, the two actors wont through a tough time deciding to share the household chores so that each could continue to perform and write.

"Why does it take my life and your life to make your life?" Dee says she would ask Ossie in numerous discussions on chores. "When a man marries he can drop half of his cursory responsibilities, the minutia of life on his wife, while a woman has to double hers and maybe triple it when she has a family." After Ossie began to pitch in with their dinners and the diapers, things improved in their marriage says.

While the couple regales the reader with numerous humorous stories of their lives, they also write quite candidly on the underside of married life. So candidly, in fact, that controversial chapters will raise eyebrow's among those who think they know the pair well. The couple writes with empathy and honesty on their experiences with sexual temptations, abortion, miscarriage and a short-lived experiment with open marriage which they would not recommend to anyone today.

"Sometimes as the old adage says, you shall know the truth and the troth shall make you free," Davis says. "Not comfortable, not fat, not rich, but make you free." They agreed to write honestly about sensitive subjects, because, "I think we owe it, if we're going to tell our story at all, we owe it to put the subject out there as honestly as we can and for our own children to say this is what life is like, rather than for them to find it some other place by say, pecking and guessing."

The bottom line was their personal commitment to each other. "You see, what I always knew both intuitively and from a fact, was that I had come to the end of the search for the woman I wanted to be my wife, to be in love with and to conduct marriage with for the rest of my life," Davis says. "Ossie used to tell me," Dee says, "well, if you want to quit me just make sure the guy knows that I'm coming too!"

America's puritanical foundation leads to "spiritual brutality in the lies we have to tell each other," she says. "A trustworthy marriage has weathered temptation and anger and jealousy, resentment, self-righteousness and a little bit of selfishness," Dee adds. "When you get over and get through that, then maybe you can sec the light to love."

Their walk toward the light of mature love began in post-World War II America. The couple met in New York, December 1945 at the New Amsterdam Theater while appearing in the play Jeb. When Dee and Davis took the stage that year, Black soldiers were coming back from war and being shot and killed for being in uniform. The couple married three years later, Dec. 9, 1948, in an intimate ceremony that included only the bride and groom, Davis' brother and Dee's sister. The couple was then in rehearsal for the play, The Smile of the World. They only had Thursdays off, so they went to New Jersey, where you could get married in one day. The bride wore a brown suit and after the "I Do's" it was back to New York City. Their theater circle was a vibrant one and included Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. "We were in a constant state of social and creative agitation," Davis says now. "And the struggle is demanding and requires dedication, and it really hasn't got time to be frivolous," Davis says. There was no time to sit and ponder the state of their marriage. "Ruby and I were busy marching, demonstrating, writing, acting, singing, dancing, involved in the cause," he says. "And so we had very little time to sit down and ask if we were happy."