In her 2014 memoir "I Said Yes to Everything", Lee Grant wrote that Manoff was known as "the silver fox" when she first met him in 1950 during rehearsals for "All You Need is One Good Break", because of his white hair that made him look older than his 36 years. He'd already been married three times and had a nine-year-old daughter with his second wife, Ruth. He was married at the time to Marjorie MacGregor, the mother of his two sons, Tom and Michael. Grant recounted that she and Manoff were "an item" during production of the play.