Affairs of the Heart : Unexpected Second Chance at Love

Ah, the golden years--when a lonely widow and a lonely widower find companionship together, if they’re lucky. Companionship is lovely, but let us tell you about when Harry met Leah . . .

They were married the last day of April: Harry Seiden, Room 314, Encino Hills Retirement Hotel, and Leah Fonstein, Room 214.

We’re not talking about companionship. This is love.

Leah, 83, knew there was a spark soon after Harry moved into the hotel, when “he started bringing my salads to the table” in the dining hall. But, she says, “he was a little bashful.”

Seeing that he spent his evenings alone in his room, she kept asking him to her room after dinner, to watch television. He kept turning her down. “Playing hard to get,” she teases.

Harry, 87, knew he was hooked the second time he accepted her invitation. He slipped one arm across the back of the flowered chintz sofa and around her shoulders and. . .

“I kissed her. That was it. It was spontaneous combustion.” They were engaged. “We started to count the days.”

Leah remembers: “He put his arm around me. I thought to myself, ‘Boy, that’s an invitation. I’ll just move over.’ Two weeks later we were engaged.”

He laughs and says, “The reason it took so fast was she told me she didn’t want to be my mistress.”

She smiles, sweetly, and mentions that she had given him a little after-dinner drink before he proposed. Kahlua, as she recalls.

It is a first for the retirement hotel, a courtship and marriage. Oh, there have been other residents who’ve “been together,” as assistant administrator Dorothy Friedman rather delicately puts it.

The wedding was celebrated with strawberry shortcake, a surprise prepared by the chef. And Friedman, announcing the marriage in the dining hall, said, “We are thrilled.”

Her advice to the newlyweds: “You don’t have to account to anybody. Just be happy.”

There were a few residents, Friedman says, who tsk-tsked the news. “It gives them something to talk about. I think a lot of them wish it were them.”

But, given the odds, there isn’t apt to be another wedding soon. There are only a dozen men among the hotel’s 78 elderly guests. And Harry and Leah defy the data: According to the National Center for Health Statistics, only 1,300 women and 4,400 men over 80 were married during 1991.

“I’m lucky,” Leah says. “I’ve had three wonderful men who loved me.” There was her husband, Albert, who died almost four years ago. Then there was Maurice, a resident of the hotel who was her constant companion for two years. He died of cancer in October, 1990.

“Imagine having two men,” she says, “the loveliest of all the men here.” Looking back, she thinks maybe Harry “had eyes for me even then. Maurice was very jealous.”

Leah takes one of Harry’s hands in her own.

The paths that led Harry and Leah to a retirement hotel in Encino were long, and very different.

He was born in Poland but was only a boy when his family, escaping the Russian invasion, fled to Vienna. In the manner of hundreds of Eastern Europeans early in the 20th Century, the Seidens would immigrate to the United States, one by one, each new arrival sending money home for another passage.

In 1922, young Harry sailed for New York, with $22 in his pocket, to join his father and an older sister. He spoke no English, only German and Yiddish, but was able to find work in the “needle trades.”

On Labor Day, 1926, he had his first date with a pretty dark-haired young woman named Bella who lived in the same apartment house in the Bronx. He took her to Coney Island. That Christmas, they were married.

A son, Robert, came along on April 30, 1928, weighing only 3 1/2 pounds. Concerned about the boy’s health, they decided to move to Los Angeles, where her brother lived.

Harry was hired as a sewing machine operator by Roth LeCover, a garment maker at 9th and Los Angeles streets. “We made the coats and suits for the princesses of the Rose Parade,” as well as lines for Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, he recalls. He kept the same job for 22 years, retiring in his early 60s.

His marriage lasted for almost 65 years but, during the last 15, his wife suffered a series of devastating illnesses and was eventually confined to a wheelchair. She was 90 when she died in January, 1990.

Suddenly alone, he realized the time had come to move. During his first weeks at the retirement hotel, he kept to himself. Until he met Leah, he says, “I never thought of going through the agony of being in love again. It never entered my mind.”

Leah, a native of Los Angeles, was only 18 when she married Albert. She remembers clearly their first date: They’d seen a Norma Shearer movie. He worked as a menswear buyer and store manager and there would be good economic times, and bad. She helped out by taking a job in a dress shop. The marriage lasted 64 years and produced a son, Harold, and a daughter, Diane.

As her husband’s health failed, she took care of him until being convinced that he belonged in a convalescent hospital.

After she had a bad fall in her apartment, her son insisted she find another living arrangement. And so, in August, 1988, she moved to the Encino Retirement Hotel. Two months later, Albert died.

Meeting Maurice, and caring for him during the terminal stages of his cancer, helped to ease her own pain.

But with him gone, “I was very lonely,” she says. “I was about to give this place up. The only thing that kept me from going crazy was my needlepoint.

“I was just going out of my mind. This is no living--go from meal to meal, come back, close the door. It’s awful.”

And then she found love, with Harry. With her upswept silver hair, and her coquettish smile, it is not hard to see how Leah attracted “the loveliest of all the men here.”

The bride wore a red and white polka dot blouse, red Capri pants and red shoes. It’s not what she’d planned, but the riots had precluded her shopping for a wedding dress and had forced them to move the ceremony from a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard to a sitting room at their hotel.

They considered a postponement but Harry’s nephew, Manuel Kugler, a judge living in San Diego County, had arranged to be in Los Angeles to perform the ceremony. Besides, Harry says, “At our ages we don’t have much time. What little time we have left, we want to spend together.”

She smiles and says, “It’s not because I was pregnant.”

He picks up on that, grins and says the truth is “we had to.”

Leah says, “I really am in love with him, you know. I never thought I’d find love again. It’s so seldom people of our ages get married. And most of them get married for companionship. We fell in love.”

They kiss.

At their age, people are pretty set in their ways. But Harry and Leah don’t think that’s going to be a problem. She doesn’t want to change him, she says, except to make him eat more. “He’s very thin.” He won’t be giving up his twice-weekly pinochle games at the Balboa Club, nor does she want him to.

He does complain about one thing: “She won’t let me go to sleep.” Certainly not, Leah replies. “He used to go to bed at 6 or 7. I couldn’t believe it. I go to bed at 11 or 12. Now, he’s up till 11, and he likes it.”

Harry smiles. “I like it.”

They were to be photographed in a few days for the newspaper story. “Is the corsage still alive?” he asks her, looking for the single red rose with baby’s breath that he’d bought her for their wedding.

“No, “ Leah says. “But you’ll get me another one.”

“Now,” Harry says,” her troubles are my troubles, and vice versa.”

Chronologically, they’re up there, but they mention minor health problems only when asked. More important, Leah says, “I haven’t retired my mind. The same thing with him. That’s what we’ve got in common.” He concurs, “Mentally, we’re up in the top grade.”

Almost in the same sentence, she adds, “He’s a wonderful lover, too.”

Harry spins around, grins, and asks, “Who?”

“Stop blushing,” says Leah.

The years have flown by for Harry and Leah.

“It comes around so fast,” he says, “and then we can’t do a lot of the things we put off.”

Early on, Harry gave up his boyhood dream of becoming a doctor. Life interfered. Leah would have liked to travel abroad, but she never did.

“We have some ideas,” Harry says. Maybe, they’ve been thinking, they could take a cruise. . . .

Life in a retirement hotel is not exciting--breakfast at 7:30, lunch at noon, dinner at 5. But they take advantage of what is offered--little parties, dances. Neither drives, but they have someone they can call on.

Her room--which they now use as their daytime quarters--is a cheerful place, filled with cherished personal furnishings and family photos. They sleep upstairs, in “his” room.

But Harry is wait-listed for a room next to Leah’s. It’s tiresome, going up and down those stairs.