Paula Prentiss & Richard Benjamin: 62 Years and Counting

Happy Anniversary to Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin!

They were married on this day in 1961 and they’re still going strong 62 years later. And today, we’re looking at this couple through the lens of a September 1962 Photoplay article Benjamin wrote (read: gave an ‘as told to’ interview to Jane Ardmore) about his wife of one year.

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Over a handful of pages, Benjamin waxes romantic about his paper-anniversary bride in an oddly-titled article called “I Married a Ten-Year-Old” with the sub-head: “All I know is that when I kiss Paula, I know I’m married to a woman. It’s those other times that I feel sure…I married a ten-year-old.”

Paula and Richard met at Northwestern University in 1958 where they both studied drama. According to sources, Paula was impressed by his height—she stood 5’10” and he was taller than her—in addition to other qualities. Benjamin writes that he never imagined getting married because he never wanted to settle down; but that changed on October 26, 1961.

“So now I’m married and loving it — and not to just one woman, but two! It’s great, it’s real, it’s a full life. We meet everything head-on together, solve our problems together. We reinforce each other and we’re gradually growing up. Me and my two wives: Tall Paula Prentiss (who gets confused about everything except the basic values), and little Paula Ragusa (who can and sometimes does act like a ten-year-old).”

At the beginning of their professional careers, Paula was the bigger star. She broke out in Hollywood with a memorable part in Where the Boys Are in 1960, co-starring with Dolores Hart and Yvette Mimieux in one of the better ‘spring break’/’college co-ed’ flicks of the decade.

And it was upward from there.

A screen partnership with Jim Hutton—one of the only actors taller than her in the MGM stable, so her go-to love interest—saw her in films like The Honeymoon Machine, The Horizontal Lieutenant, and Bachelor in Paradise.

The second-coming of the screwball heroine in Man’s Favorite Sport? opposite Rock Hudson in a spiritual successor to Bringing Up Baby in 1964.

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He answers the question of Paula being the moneymaker thusly: “I certainly thought her making it would bother me. After all. the American plan is for the man of the family to make the money and support his wife. It worried me. We discussed it. Paula just simply said that it couldn’t make any difference, and it doesn’t. She doesn’t think of this money as hers. It’s sort of a gift for doing something she enjoys—and something she does so well.”

Benjamin’s success would come slower, but he was steadily employed from the jump. He worked in theatre and did touring productions of shows like Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple; and as the ‘70s dawned, he continued working in theatre, on screen, behind the camera…

In 1967, the couple would star in the CBS sitcom He & She, in which they played a married couple living and working in New York. It didn’t get picked up for a second season, but later reviews would put it in the category of The Mary Tyler Moore Show for its willingness to embrace forward storylines and ideas.

Back to Photoplay! Benjamin, still the smaller star here, writes that he did have fear that Hollywood would change his wife, “But nothing has changed, not one thing.”

Later, he writes this about being married to a movie star: “Well, movie stardom is really beyond both of our comprehensions—and so is the money that goes with it. In fact, we still save pennies. Paula’s very high right now on savings stamps. She shops at stores where she can get them, brings them home and pastes them in little books. So far she’s translated those books into a bathroom scale, a toaster and assorted pillows.”

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And she’s a housekeeper, he writes. She loves to keep house and she loves to decorate, and it was Paula that found the house they were living in when they came out to California, driving around “Beverly Hills, Westwood and Brentwood…our little compact car stuffed to the gills with wedding presents: pictures, clothing, china, books and bric-a-brac. We couldn’t even see out the car’s back window, and on the freeways my bride would stick her head out the open door to tell me what was coming.”

They eventually settled in a “10^th century” home decorated by a “shipbuilder from Denmark” and “reminiscent of the old pubs we’d seen in England. We had a big scene, and then we took it—on a temporary basis.”

Benjamin said not to bother unpacking because they might have to go back to New York quickly, but that Paula was adamant and when he saw it furnished, “it looked as if we’d lived there a long, long time. It was ours! There were plants around everywhere and little artificial birds and flowers—she loves flowers but she won’t throw them out. I just got her some new ones to take the place of some little ratty violets she was carefully preserving!”

Benjamin also shares these down to Earth hobbies and habits of his wife: she loves to cook (“Denver omelets when we have guests for Sunday brunch, and imaginative desserts like blueberry pie and pistachio ice cream.”) and she loves to clean (when she’s not shooting, she’s up at 6 am tiptoeing around the house cleaning).

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Here’s a very sweet summation of their relationship, according to Benjamin: “I’ve shared several golden moments in the theater with Paula and they are a counterpoint to the golden moments we share as husband and wife… It’s as if there were no such thing as two human beings at moments like this. We’re in each other’s minds. Paula has told me many times that with me she is most herself, and with her I am most me.”

“Of course we fight,” he writes. Typical husband and wife fights about houseguests and chores. And income tax forms… “We’d gone to the tax man, hut he needed all sorts of information, facts and figures. So we returned home and were beating our brains out trying to get all the material together.”

There, they began yelling at each other and he said to consider the neighbours (more succinctly, that she was acting childish and he told her to stop it, so she did). “But she’s not always a ten-year-old. She’s also an exciting, warm and talented woman, and I love being married to her—both of her.”

Paul and Richard have two children, Ross and Prentiss, who were born in 1974 and 1978 respectively.