Douglas McGrath: Funny, Fulsome Friend and Empath

“God, it’s so fun all the time, isn’t it?”

Less than two weeks ago, Douglas McGrath, aware of certain events in my life, reached out to let me know why I was needed, and why life remained challenging but terrific. Douglas was preparing to open in his one-man show Everything’s Fine, so I know he had a full plate, but he took the time, as he always did, to be a funny and fulsome empath.

And now Douglas McGrath is dead, a sudden death in his office this past Thursday, yanked from us while he was in what he told me was a “deliriously happy place,” performing an autobiographical piece in an intimate setting, where he could “feel the people and tell a tale.”

If Douglas were able to communicate with me right now (and I wouldn’t put it past his gifts, supernal and otherwise), he would probably say, “Well, didn’t I get lucky? I died at my happiest moment. No sad songs for me.”

If there were ever sad songs for Douglas McGrath, I never heard him singing them. When I asked him once how it was that he remained positive no matter what happened in his life or the lives of his friends, he told me he thinks it had to do with the fact that his childhood newspaper The Midland Reporter Telegram, in Texas, carried the syndicated column of Norman Vincent Peale. “On the front page!” he would add, and before he read of Vietnam or inflation or the death of a loved personage, he was reminded that life was worth living and the power of positive thinking would pull him through anything. “I think it stuck,” he told me.

Doug McGrath introduced me to so many books and films and people, and my life is better. Doug had the sweetest judgment about all things: He could notice a flaw somewhere, but also find the redeeming nature of that flaw. If anyone complained about how their film or their book or their play was received, Doug was likely to say, “But it was done! It lives. It will continue to live. You were heard. We don’t know where this will all end up.”

Doug and I had a game, and it was one he invented because he didn’t care for my game, which was called DEAD BY CHRISTMAS, where I listed everyone I hoped would die before all the gifts were unwrapped. Doug’s game was called THINGS TO LIVE FOR, and in time he would call or write and tell me stories about Boaty Boatwright, Woody Allen, Terry Kinney, Lili Anolik, Fred Astaire, Truman Capote, Kathryn Erbe, Juliet Stevenson, and life was colorful again. Doug did join me in my aerobic game in our shared Upper West Side neighborhood, which was to successfully evade contact with a particularly obnoxious actress and an actor of no discernible talent with the visage of an angel who has been left out in the rain too long. “We have never been caught!” he bragged once, although, on one occasion, the actress could be heard yelling out his name and mentioning an upcoming appearance she would be making on “Blue Bloods.”

What is there to say, really? Doug’s credits can be found online. Rent the films. Read the plays. Look up the pieces he wrote for Air Mail. So many people are dying lately, and all of them the wrong people. Doug would tell me that our responsibility is to replicate what they gave to the world, to provide the inspiration they gave us, so I’ll do that, because I always did what he advised, and the result was always positive.

I met Doug McGrath because he reached out to me via Facebook to let me know how much he loved my “Follies of God” page. “Tell me, please,” he said, “that this is going to be a book.” It became a book, and Doug made sure that people read it, and those people have written to me or approached me at parties (I used to go to parties) to tell me how grateful they were to Doug for bringing my book to their attention. He did this for others, and I now know Lili Anolik because Doug told me she was as important as the Vitamin D supplement I took daily. My Vitamin D is still too low, but I have Lili Anolik in my life. “So there!” Doug said. “You win!”

“It’s not just that you matter,” Doug told me once in the bar of the Beacon Hotel, “but so many things matter. All people matter, even the ones we run from, because they keep us in shape. Whenever you’ve been most negative, I’ve looked for the sweet person underneath, and I always found him. Do that for everyone.”

Doug loved a talk-show clip on YouTube with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. At one point Hope castigates the box-office returns and reviews of one of the films they made together, and Ball slaps at his hand and exhorts him to stop it. “She was the epitome of positivity, and she knew to never dump on your work or the people who made it with you,” Doug told me. “Be like Lucille Ball.”

We were in the Beacon bar one evening when a gentleman returned from the bathroom with a disconcerting and bizarrely shaped bulge in his pants. “Doug?” I asked. “See it,” he whispered, and at that moment, the man bumped into the back of a chair and a bottle of Pinaud Clubman After Shave, which had been liberated from the bathroom, and placed in his pants, exploded, drenching the front of his khakis and sending a burning wave of the scent into the bar. Our eyes watering from the onslaught and our laughter, Doug wiped his eyes and said, “God, it’s so fun all the time, isn’t it?”

You’re with me always, Doug. I’ll be dodging the actress and the spoiled angel, but I’ll be thinking of you.

Photo Credits, from top to bottom: Jeremy Daniel; J. Vespa via Getty Images; Sara Krulwich for the New York Times.