They wed nine months and 19 days before their son's birth - Florence said, "Thank goodness for the 19 days!".
His father, Irv, was a Protestant, and in that era his decision to marry a Catholic, Florence, after a five-year engagement, was rather bold. Of Irish, French, German, Dutch and Russian ancestry, Gibson was born and grew up in the Bronx, the teeming, dramatic New York neighbourhood later brilliantly evoked in his substantial, unusual memoir A Mass for the Dead (1968). As Seesaw, in 1973, it was the great lyricist Dorothy Fields's last musical, and included "It's Not Where You Start (It's Where you Finish)". The same year Robert Wise less effectively made Two for the Seesaw, with Shirley MacLaine and Robert Mitchum. The Miracle Worker was successfully filmed by Arthur Penn, again with Anne Bancroft, in 1962. "Will it lead to anything?" asked his mother when half-a-million dollars arrived from Hollywood. Audiences for the smash hit relished such lines as Gittel's semi-confessing to another dalliance: "Well, he may have slept with me, but I didn't sleep with him." Gittel's crackling wit put off many candidates for Jerry's role, until Henry Fonda signed up.
Two for the Seesaw has only two characters: a young Jewish gamine, Gittel, who lives in one small apartment while another contains her new lover, an older, out-of-town lawyer, Jerry, often rung by the wife whom he is divorcing. Her first great success, however, was in Gibson's Two for the Seesaw (1958), which reached the stage before The Miracle Worker. Gibson expanded the play for the stage, and enlisted the then unknown actress Anne Bancroft for the 1959 Broadway production.
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