Fear of Fifty (13 page)

When I was growing up in a New York that seemed dominated by Jews whose parents or grandparents had fled from Europe, I never consciously thought about Jewishness. Or about class. And yet invisible barriers ruled my life—barriers that still stand.

Even in childhood I knew that my best friend, Glenda Glascock, who was Episcopalian and went to private school, was considered classier than me. We lived in the same gloomy Gothic apartment house near Central Park West. We both had parents who were artists. But Glenda's name ended with
cock
and mine did not. I knew that names ending in cock were intrinsically classier.

What was my name anyway?

My father was born Weisman and became Mann. My mother was called Yehuda by her Russian Jewish parents when she was born in England, but the intransigent Englishman in the registry office had changed it first to Judith and then to Edith (“good English names”)—leaving the resultant impression that Jews were not even allowed to keep their own names. The dominant culture around our (mental) ghetto required names that did not
sound
Jewish or foreign. That left a strong impression too.

There were categories of Americans in our supposedly egalitarian country, and I did not belong to the better (as in “better dresses”) category. Glenda did. Her last name bespoke this. Even her nickname—Jewish girls did not have nicknames like Glenni then—bespoke this. And yet we were close as twins, best buddies, in and out of each other's apartments—until we took a bath together one day and she accused me of making peepee in the bathwater because that was “what Jews did.” I was outraged, having done no such thing. (Unless my memory censors.)

“Who says they do that?”

“My mother,” said Glenni confidently.

So I reported this conversation to my parents and grandparents, and mysteriously my friendship with Glenni cooled.

She went off to private school. I did not. I was in some “Intellectually Gifted Program” at P.S. 87, at Seventy-seventh Street and Amsterdam Avenue—a great Victorian pile in those days, with girls' and boys' entrances. There I discovered other class stratifications. The closer you lived to Central Park West and the “better” your building, the more classy you were. Now I had status. Below me were poorer Jewish kids whose parents had fled the Holocaust and who lived in lesser buildings further west, Irish kids who lived in tenements on side streets, and the first sprinkling of Puerto Rican kids to arrive in New York. They lived in other tenements, on West Side Storyish side streets. In the forties, New York was far from being racially integrated. I did not meet black kids from Harlem until I went to the High School of Music and Art, where talent, not neighborhood, was the qualification. The only African-Americans we met—catted Negroes then—were servants. In childhood, my world was Jewish, Irish, Hispanic—with Jews lording it over everyone else.

The WASP kids were, by this time, off in private school, meeting their own kind so they could go to Yale, run the CIA, and rule the world (like George and Barbara Bush). Jewish kids did not go to private school in that New York—unless they were superrich, had disciplinary problems, or were Orthodox.

I figured out pretty soon that in my school I was high class, but that in the world I was not. The kids on television shows and in reading primers did not have names like Weisman, Rabinowitz, Plotkin, Ratner, or Kisselgoff. Certainly not Gonzales or O'Shea. There was another America out there in televisionland and we were not part of it. In that other America, girls were named things like Gidget and boys were named things like Beaver Cleaver. Our world was not represented—except when the credits rolled by.

Kept out of this
proper
America, we learned to control it by rein-venting it (or representing it—as in agent). Some of our parents already did this as actors, producers, or writers, so we knew this was a possible path for us. Others were businessmen, or artists turned businessmen—like my father. The point was we were outsiders longing to be insiders. In those days, we knew that Princeton and Yale might not want us—unless we were rich enough to buy the school. We knew our initials were MCA, not CIA. We knew we were not born into the ruling class, so we invented our own ruling class. Mike Ovitz, not George Bush. Swifty Lazar, not Bill Clinton. Mort Janklow, not Al Gore.

How much the world has changed since the forties! And how
little!
Except for Henry Kissinger, who has changed these laws of class and caste? Not even Mike Ovitz. What you see your parents do is what you think
you
can do. So are we defined, designed. Since my father was a songwriter-musician turned importer, my grandfather a portrait painter, my mother a housewife and portrait painter, I just
assumed
that I would do something creative. I also just assumed that I would graduate from college, and live in a “good building” forever. I also assumed that I would never turn out to be anything like those American families I saw on TV.

My family was fiercely proud to be Jewish, but not religious—unless our religion was buying new English Mary Janes at Saks and English leather leggings and velvet-collared chesterfield coats at De Pinna. We were dressed like little English princesses, and I understood that this was the class to which we aspired.

Dress tells you everything about aspiration. I hated the damned leather leggings but had to wear them because Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret did. How did
they
get to be princesses of the Jews? Better not ask. It was tacitly understood, just as it was understood that Glascock was a better name than Weisman (or even Mann).

I smile writing all this. I am trying (clumsily, I fear) to reenter that world of 1940s New York with its “air-cooled” movie palaces (complete with towering matrons and wrapper-strewn children's sections), its striped awnings on apartment buildings in summer, its dime bus fares, its telephone exchanges (I was ENdicott 2), its candy stores and soda fountains, its marble lunch counters that sold the most delicious bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches and fresh-dipped ice cream cones.

Gone, gone forever. But just as sunlight on a series of paving stones or the taste of tea-soaked cake returned Proust
⁴
to his halcyon childhood, I sometimes stop on a street corner in New York and am taken back to the forties. The smells do it. The mouths of the subway stations still, on occasion, blow a blast of cotton candy-bubble gum breath, mixed with sweat and popcorn, with piss and (its precursor) beer, and, inhaling deeply, I am taken back to being six years old, standing in the subway, staring at a forest of knees. In childhood, you feel you'll never grow up. And the world will always be incomprehensible. First you are all mouth, then you have a name, then you are a member of a family, then you begin to ask the hard questions about better/worse that are the beginning of class consciousness. Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion.

It was in junior high that my world opened up beyond Seventy-seventh Street and the West Side. Because my parents and I were both terrified of the violence of the local junior high, I went to private school—a deliciously comic place where the paying students were mostly Park Avenue Jews and the scholarship students mostly WASPs from Washington Heights whose parents were professors, clergy, missionaries.

The teachers were genteel and WASPy, like the scholarship students, and they had proper American-sounding names like the TV people. The school had been started by two redoubtable New England ladies named Miss Birch and Miss Wathen, who were probably lovers—but in those days we called them spinsters. One of them looked like Gertrude Stein, the other like Alice B. Toklas. They pronounced “shirt” as if it had three i's in the middle, and they pronounced “poetry” as if it were poy-et-try (poy rhyming with goy). I knew this was classy. I knew this was WASP.

At Birch-Wathen, most of the Jewish kids were wealthier than I. They lived on the East Side in apartments hung with expensive art and some of them had German names. They went to Temple Emanu-El—my nephews now call it Temple Episco-Pal—and took dancing and deportment (what an old-fashioned word!) at Viola Wolf's. Again my sense of class was up for grabs. With my Russian grandparents and my West Side bohemian home, I didn't fit in with these kids either. And the scholarship kids all stuck together. I thought them snotty—though now I realize they must have been scared to death. The paying students got bigger allowances—and some of them came to school in chauffeured Cadillacs, Lincolns, or Rollses. That must have seemed daunting to kids who rode the subway. It seemed daunting to me.

Cliques splintered us. The Park Avenue kids stuck with their own kind. The scholarship kids did the same.

I floated between the two groups, never knowing where I belonged, now shoplifting at Saks with the rich kids (the richer the kids, I learned, the more they shoplifted), now wandering up to Columbia with the scholarship kids (whose parents were professors). I felt I belonged nowhere. Ashamed that my father was a businessman, I used to wish he were a professor. If you couldn't have a name that ended with
cock,
or an apartment on Fifth or Park, you ought to have a Ph.D. at least.

When high school began, I joined still another new world—a world that was racially mixed and full of kids from the ghetto. (We called it Harlem then.) Chosen for their talent to draw or sing or play an instrument, these kids were the most diverse group I'd ever met. Their class was talent. And like all insecure people, they shoved it in your face.

It was in high school that I began to find my true class. Here the competition was not about money or color or neighborhood but about how well you drew or played. At Music and Art, new hierarchies were created, hierarchies of virtuosity. Was your painting in the semiannual exhibition? Were you tapped to perform in the orchestra or on WQXR? By now, we all knew we did not belong in televisionland America—and we were
proud
of it. Being outsiders was a badge of merit. We had no teams, no cheerleaders, and the cool class uniform was early beatnik: black stockings, handmade sandals, and black lipstick for the girls; black turtlenecks, black jeans, black leather jackets for the boys. Stringy hair was requisite for both sexes. We experimented with dope. We cruised the Village hoping to be mistaken for hipsters. We carried books by Kafka, Genet, Sartre, Allen Ginsberg. We stared existentially into our cappuccino at Rienzi's or the Peacock. We wanted to seduce black jazz musicians, but were afraid to. We had found our class at last.

Many of us rose to the top of it. I count among my high school classmates pop singers, television producers, directors, actors, painters, novelists. Many are household names. A few earn tens of millions of dollars a year. Most of us went to college—but it was not finally a B.A. or a Ph.D. that defined our status. It was whether or not we stayed hot, were racing up the charts with a bullet, were going into syndication, on the bestseller list, into twenty-five foreign languages. Even the professors envied
this
status: Money and name recognition level all classes in America. Hence the obsession with celebrity. Even in Europe you can pass into the “best” circles, though the rules of class are quite different there.

Having done my time with the Eurotrash set, I'm always amazed at how an aristocratic name still covers a multitude of sins in Europe. In England, in Germany, a lord or ladyship, a
Graf or Cräfin,
a
von
or
zu
, still carries weight. Italians are more cynical about titles. The classiest friends I have in Italy may be
contesse, marchesi,
or
principi,
but they're too cool to advertise it. They'd rather be famous for a hit record, or a big book. But go to the chic watering spots—St. Moritz, for example—and membership in the best clubs still goes by family, not by individual achievement. Walk into the Corviglia Club and say you're Ice-T or Madonna. Honey—you won't get in, while any old Niarchos or von Ribbentrop will.

Many of my European friends still inhabit a world where a name and old money can become a positive
bar
to achievement. There is so much
more
to do than merely work. If you have to be in Florence in June, in Paris in July, in Tuscany in August, in Venice in September, in Sologne in October, in New York in November, in St. Bart's in December and January, in St. Moritz in February, in New York in March, in Greece in April, in Prague in May—how on earth can you take (let alone hold) a job? And the fittings. And the balls. And the spas. And the dryings out! As a husband of Barbara Hutton's once asked: “When would I have time to work?” True class means never even having to
talk
about it. (Work, I mean.)

Americans are intrinsically unclassy—so the Jews
almost
fit in. All we talk about is our work. All we want to do is make our first names so recognized we don't even
need
a last (Ms. Ciccone is the ultimate American here). We believe in change as fervently as Europeans believe in the status quo. We believe that money will buy us into heaven (with heaven defined as toned muscles, no flab at the chin, interest on interest, and a name that cows maître d's). Once that's accomplished, we can start to save the world: plow some money into AIDS research, the rain forest, political candidates. Maybe we can even run for office ourselves! (Witness Mr. Perot.) In a society where pop name recognition means everything, celebrities are more equal than everyone else. But celebrity status is hell to keep in shape (just like an aging body). It needs a host of trainers, PR experts, publishers, media consultants. Plus you have to keep turning out new product—and possibly even new scandal. (Witness Woody Allen.) Maybe the reason celebrities marry so often is simply to keep their names in the news. And maybe—whether they intend it or not—they create scandal to hype their movies. (Again, witness Woody Allen, né Allen Konigsberg. )