A June Wedding For Gabriel Kaplan!
19 Temmuz 2024
in Hollywood
by admin
Come June, Gabe Kaplan may be trading in his sparsely decorated, rented hilltop home in Beverly Hills for more permanent digs. The reason? He’s opted to share bed and board with a woman, and as much as he may fight against it, the little lady may have a thing or two to say about setting up housekeeping in Gabe’s old bachelor pad.
It came as a surprise to some, since Gabriel Kaplan is known about town as a “workaholic”—someone so dedicated to his work that he has no time to play the field and date after a hard day at the studio. But the truth is, Gabe and Leigh Walsh had been dating, ever so discreetly, for quite some time. Gabe had always maintained that he preferred women who weren’t in show business, but he made an exception for Leigh, who is an aspiring actress, and a very pretty one at that.
All in all, it’s been a time when Gabe Kaplan has been making quite a lot of exceptions, and he may be trading in some of his old standards to make way for a new life style. Gabe never believed he’d marry at all, but when his thirtieth birthday rolled around, it gave him time to pause and reflect on the upcoming years. “You know. I’m always the permanent bachelor, I tell people I’m not interested in marriage,” he said at the time. “I’m not monogamous. But now that I’m thirty, I think about marriage. I think if I had children now, by the time they were sixteen, I’d be forty-eight. I don’t know whether I can afford to wait to get married.”
That was one year ago, when Gabe decided marriage was a valuable state if you were someone who wanted to have children. So, he determined that he would marry some day, if the right woman came along. And yet, there were some ground rules, some things he would have to get straight with his fiancee if they were going to have a successful marriage.
Gabe wanted an “open marriage,” a relationship that would allow him to date other people if the urge struck. In his fantasy, though, it was only he who would be able to see other people, and that aspect of it made the fantasy seem somewhat chauvinistic. As Gabe saw it, “It would be understood between my wife and myself that if we wanted to go out with someone else, we could. I sometimes picture myself married and going out with other women. But when I think of this fantasy wife going out with other men, I don’t like the idea at all.”
Basically, Gabe’s idea about how his marriage would operate had that air of unreality and contradiction about it that made us stop and wonder why he would even consider such a bizarre and potentially dangerous set-up to jeopardize a fragile relationship like marriage. The only way to explain his fantasy is to see it as an integral part of his introverted personality. As James Komack, executive producer of Welcome Back, Kotter, so candidly puts it, “Gabe is a loner, an emotionally difficult and unusual person, conditioned to being on his guard, unable to trust people totally.”
Given this type of guarded temperament, it is easy to see a pattern in Gabe’s emotional makeup. For instance, it is typical for a person like him to go into comedy, and only when they are performing to be perfectly at ease with an audience. Outside of work, though, Gabe is admittedly very shy around people. And since the prospect of opening yourself up to someone in an intimate setting like marriage is so frightening for even a more extroverted person, it is clear why Gabe would choose an escape mechanism for himself by suggesting that if it doesn’t work out with this person, he can always go on to other women, with the full consent of his wife.
We don’t know too much about 20-year-old Leigh Walsh, but one thing is clear. She has decided to accept Gabe as her husband, and in doing so, has probably accepted his notions on marriage and all the other important things people discuss before deciding to share their lives. And yet, knowing him so well, Leigh no doubt realizes that Gabe’s open marriage concept is probably just a defense mechanism he needs because he feels a little insecure at taking such an important step in his life right now.
Leigh has seen Gabe in every conceivable situation. She even accompanied him last summer to Camp Sussex in New Jersey, a camp for underprivileged children that Gabe attended as a young boy growing up in a bad section of Crown Heights in Brooklyn. In that setting, Leigh was able to see Gabe give to these children as he played baseball with them, went canoeing and helped prepare their lunches. It must have been quite an eye-opener, because it revealed what Gabe has been trying so hard to hide—his need to relate on a deep, emotional level.
Until now, marriage was something Gabriel Kaplan wanted to escape. But all that is changed, and Gabe acknowledged that when he said, “I never wanted a monogamous situation, but I’m thirty-one now and want a family. So I’ve decided to take the step.” Since that hurdle is passed now, it is likely to assume that Gabe will change his mind about that other “escape route” too. After all, there the two of them will be, close and secure in each other’s love. How unlikely that Gabe will want the same kind of affection from someone else.
In any case, once a person has made such a tremendous emotional commitment, it’s no light matter to merely discard the vows of marriage in this changing world as something frivolous to be taken lightly. But once children become part of your life—and let’s not forget that’s why Gabe decided to get married in the first place—the commitment becomes even more permanent, even more binding. Sure, freedom is desirable, and for some couples, the only way for the marriage to work is in the knowledge that each partner is free to do as he pleases. This is fine in theory, but it seldom works out in practice. People are merely human, with the average amounts of jealousy and tolerance. Yet only time will tell whether Gabe and Leigh Kaplan will succumb to those passions or maintain the liberated attitudes they now share.
THE END
—BY JESSE ADAMS
See ABC’s Welcome Back, Kotter.
It is a quote. SCREEN STARS MAGAZINE JULY 1977
