Fear of Fifty (6 page)

“Your mother doesn't remember anything,” my father says, “but I do.”

Now, you have to know that my father is the kind of guy who never has lunch with me alone because he thinks my mother might be jealous. If we meet during the week—which may happen every seventeen years or so—we snatch lunch at a greasy spoon like rushed adulterers. But this time history is at stake. My father takes a proprietary interest in my literary career—everything from moving books around in bookstores (so that Fear of Flying or Fanny covers the latest from Stephen King, Danielle Steel, or John Grisham), to subscribing to
Publishers Weekly
(and worriedly reporting on the latest deep-discounting trends), to wringing his hands over my nasty reviews.

“Why do they call you a pornographer, darling?” he'll ask, actually, at times, informing me of a shafting I've missed. I try to avoid reading reviews—good or bad—and my father, in his solicitude, has actually brought some of the more apoplectic ones to my attention.

Why, why, why? he questions like Job. His purgatory is to have a daughter who is castigated in the press every few years. At this point, I think it hurts him even more than it hurts me. I want to call up all the reviewers and say: “Look, my dad is eighty-one and a nice guy—give him a break.” (My students at City College in the sixties and early seventies used to do that to me: “If you give me an F, my mother will have a heart attack. And besides, I'll end up in 'Nam.” Special pleading. And often, it worked.)

So we are to meet in my father's showroom at 12:30. But it's pouring in New York, so the cab ride, from Sixty-ninth to Twenty-fifth Street, takes nearly forty minutes and I am, as usual, late.

My father is dancing around his showroom with great excitement and impatience, wanting all his staff to meet the famous daughter. He takes me on a tour of the “new line”: “antique” dolls, ceramic tureens and teapots shaped like pumpkins and aubergines, decorative plates in the shapes of sunflowers and asparagi, roses, and onions. Years pass between visits to this showroom, and I am always astonished by what my father and brother-in-law have wrought—as curious in its way as making books out of a blank piece of paper and a pen. The way people make money in America! A Depression-era
barabanchik
can become a millionaire making “antique” dolls and selling them via the home shopping channel. What other country boasts such absurdities? In America you can change classes as fast as you can say
barabanchik,
because in America there really are no classes—but that is for a future chapter.

I admire my father's stuff and greet his staff; then we are off to lunch in the luncheonette in his building—a lunch of turkey sandwiches and Diet Cokes.

My father is blue-eyed, thin, wiry, still handsome. He looks about sixty-five. Okay, he looks seventy-five. But not eighty-one. (What does eighty-one look like?) Vitamins and exercise are his religion. He discovered vitamin C before Linus Pauling, beta carotene before Harry Demopoulos, and he tells me the secret is “to enjoy being hungry.”

He has produced a document for me, aware of the gravity of my writing an autobiography, but secretly he has called my husband to say: “I'm giving Erica all this information. I hope she doesn't plan to use it.” This is typical of the mixed messages that abound in my family.

I reproduce it here, verbatim.

 

HOSPITAL NURSERY HAD MANY FATALITIES DUE TO INFECTIONS AND DIARRHEA. AT BIRTH YOU HAD LARGE BALLOON FILLED WITH FLUID—HYGROMA, I BELIEVE. DR. AUBREY MACLEAN SAID IT WOULD BE ABSORBED AND DISAPPEAR. HOWEVER YOU COULD NOT HOLD FOOD-MOTHER FED YOU 24 HRS A DAY—KIND OF STRAINED MUSH WAS FORCED DOWN YOUR THROAT. CHOPPED RAW MEAT WAS ALSO FORCE FED. YOUR SURVIVAL WAS TOUCH & GO. DR. AUBREY MACLEAN WHO WAS FIRED FROM BABY'S HOSPITAL AT PRESBYTERIAN BECAUSE OF HIS UNORTHODOX TREATMENT OF SICK BABIES CAME EVERYDAY TO EXAMINE YOU. MILK WAS FORBIDDEN. HOWEVER, A NEW WALKER GORDON MILK PRODUCT WAS OBTAINED AT THE BORDEN PLANT. (I PICKED UP A COUPLE OF BOTTLES EVERY OTHER DAY.) YOU GREW STRONGER BECAUSE FOOD INPUT WAS GREATER THAN RUNNING STOOL. APPROX. AFTER 6 MONTHS YOUR METABOLISM WAS STABILIZED AND WEIGHT INCREASED. THE FLUID IN YOUR BALLOON WAS ASSIMILATED AND VANISHED.

 

AT AGE TWO ON OUR WEEKLY FAMILY DRIVE TO A RESTAURANT THERE WAS A GREAT DEAL OF TALKING. YOU SHOUTED “THIS IS NOT A TALKING CAR, PEOPLES” AND THEN CARRIED ON A MONOLOGUE ABOUT THE SCENERY. WHEN WE PASSED A MONASTERY ON CROSS-COUNTY DRIVE, YOU CALLED IT A MONKEY.

 

YOUR FAVORITE GAME IN RESTAURANT WAS POURING A MOUND OF SALT ON THE TABLE, THEN VERY CAREFULLY YOU RAN YOUR FINGER IN CIRCLES AND CREATED A NEW WORK OF ART WHICH WAS CALLED AN
INBUT.
THIS CREATIVITY OCCURRED IN RESTAURANT WHEN YOU SPOTTED A FULL SALT SHAKER.

 

WHEN YOUR SISTER CLAUDIA WAS ABOUT TWO YEARS OLD YOU AND NANA HID HER IN A CLOSET SCREAMING MYSTERIOUSLY, “THE GERMANS ARE COMING!”

 

AT AGE SIX OR SEVEN YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS WERE PLAYING IN CENTRAL PARK AN AMBITIOUS PRODUCER FROM NBC SELECTED YOU AS A CHILD BALLET DANCER, YOU APPEARED ON NBC IN A BLACK TUTU AS PREMIER CHILD BALLERINA.

 

FIRST OVERSEAS TRIP ON LIBERTÉ YOU PACKED A KING SIZED VALISE WITH EVERY COLOR LIPSTICK, POWDER, SPRAYS, OINTMENTS, HAIR CURLERS, BULGING LIKE A HELENA RUBINSTEIN SAMPLE CASE.

 

I REMEMBER THE PIG'S FETUS YOU BROUGHT HOME FROM BARNARD-SCALPEL AND ALL. THESE WERE PROMPTLY TRADED IN FOR PENCIL AND PAPER. IN ONE FELL SWOOP WE LOST A DOCTOR AND GAINED A WRITER.

 

My reaction to this? Relief that I didn't get the details too wrong. And wonderment at why my father wrote all this if he didn't want it used.

But I am also struck by the fact that it is all about me and not at all about him. He made the assumption that his life was of no importance and that all I wanted to hear about was how I rose from neonatal jeopardy to the fetal pig that ended my dreams of a medical career. I had wanted to interview him about his life. That never entered his mind.

So I begin to interview him as if he is a stranger about whom I am assigned to write an article. My father takes easily to the game. He likes it. He is setting the record straight.

 

Full of gardens and yards. People moved from the Lower East Side as if they were moving to the country. The subways were new and Brownsville was considered a step up.

 

I'd say, 90 percent Jews, 10 percent Italians.

 

How about your parents, Max and Annie
—
what do you remember?

My father bringing tailoring home and standing over a pair of pants. He worked two jobs, moonlighted. Everybody worked two jobs or three. There were six kids! He'd do alterations to make extra money. And my mother always stood over the soup pot and she swatted us as we ran by. I remember that and her advice when I was older: “Never spend your life in worriment.” Worriment! What a word. Every day she would threaten to jump out the window. Every day I would talk her out of it. That was my job as number-one son. Once a week, a letter arrived from Germany or Poland or wherever the border happened to be. My father read it aloud to my mother in Yiddish. It came from the shtetl. A place called Czkower, I think. My parents lived in two worlds—Brownsville and Czkower. I think Czkower was more real to them.

 

It was Sammy Levinson who showed me a whole other kind of life. He had music lessons, an Amati violin. He played MF—mit feeling. His family paid for him to study. My father expected me to bring money home. I had one lesson at the New York Music School—a fly-by-night place that later went out of business. One lesson! After that, we got gigs—weddings, bar mitzvahs, golden weddings. My father said: “You're already making a leeving, why waste money on lessons?” (He also hid my letter of admission to City College. Years later, I learned this and was furious.) He needed me to help support the family. He didn't see the point of college. At the golden weddings, we played all the old chestnuts: “Just a Garden in the Rain” and “Oh How We Danced on the Night We Were Wed.” I decided I never wanted a golden wedding. I'd rather be dead. And Russian dances—always Russian dances—especially at the weddings. They danced the kazatska till they fell down.

 

When Sammy and I were in high school, it was still burlesque. 8 snows 8 [he writes it on a napkin]. When Hershey's with the nuts inside was launched they had a gimmick. There was supposed to be a dollar in every ten bars—so we sold candy like it was going out of style. It wasn't true—of course. You never actually saw a dollar, but people are gullible for giveaways. They believed it. So we hung out at the burlesque and got fifty cents for every dollar we sold. Nice margins.

 

Because in vaudeville you can't compete with dogs and little kids. Also, it's a lousy spot on the bill—in the middle. You want the last spot—or the first. Never the middle. Burlesque kept going through the twenties. The skits were unbelievably stupid by even today's television standards. But the rule held: You had skits, dogs, a magician, the strip show, the headliner. You'd never follow a dog act. Anyway, I was always in the band.

 

When I was twenty, I joined the union—local 802. Seymour Mann and his orchestra sounded good—but also there was another reason. There was a crook named Izzy Weisman in the union, who'd been involved in some scandal. So Weisman was not a good name to have in local 802. I liked the ring of Seymour Mann and his band. You couldn't sound Jewish in show business then. Cohen became King. Moskowitz became Moss. Rabinowitz became Ross. Goldfish became Goldwyn. Ethnic wasn't in yet.

 

At a place called Utopia in the Catskill Mountains. It really was called Utopia. It was a family resort near Ellenville in “The Mountains.” Your mother wore a black velvet cape (in the middle of summer) and dragged it through fields of daisies and cowflop. She was an artist—very bohemian.

“What's a beautiful girl like you doing in a dump like this?” I asked, using the corniest line I knew. It worked. I thought she was easy because she was sleeping in the same room as the owner of the place. But it turned out later, he never laid a finger on her—couldn‘t, in fact. She was his beard. Anyway, she was painting murals, so I got her to paint my drum. We fell madly in love. After the summer, I visited her once a week, taking the subway from Brooklyn to Upper Riverside Drive. Papa and Mama always left us alone. We took chances that were unbelievable. I think I first said I loved her on the top of an open Fifth Avenue bus. Do you know that they had open Fifth Avenue buses? I was working at Paul's Rendezvous with a five-piece band and also trying somehow to go to NYU at night. At seven dollars a point, I couldn't afford it. (As I said, I never knew I got into City College.) Maxwell Bodenheim used to come into Paul's Rendezvous to recite poetry in exchange for a drink: “Death comes like jewels dropped in a velvet bag ...” I seem to remember. We got married in 1933 because the Volstead Act was being repealed and we thought there'd be work in the clubs. Roosevelt was inaugurated in March. People were starving: apple sellers on the streets, Hooverville on the river. Our first apartment was on Twenty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth. It was a rooming house with the bathtub in the middle of the kitchen. We'd get two months concession on the rent and move out when the concession was up. We lived in a lot of places that way. At one time we were at 118th and Riverside Drive—thrilled to be on the same avenue as George Gershwin. Musicians worked from eight o'clock until unconscious. Eda would meet me and we'd walk home at night up Broadway and have breakfast at Nedick's. Romantic. She worked all day demonstrating art supplies at Bloomingdale's. She got to take home the paints, so it seemed like a good deal. We never slept. Then, when I was twenty-four, in 1935, I got my first big break. Mickey Green the agent—don't use his name, he's still alive—got me an audition with Cole Porter for
Jubilee
—and I got the job. From then on I was working.

 

Your mother hated show business. The hours, the insecurity. She'd been the best artist in art school but didn't get the Prix de Rome because they never gave it to girls. Also, there was this fierce competition with your grandfather. And she hated the musicians' union—which was crooked then and demanded kickbacks. Also, when your sister Nana was born we moved back in with Mama and Papa to have some help with your sister.

 

I would have missed her more. We were really in love. I couldn't have done any of this without her. And your mother had a tough life. She didn't know her father till she was eight, you know, because he left the family in England when she was two and her sister Kitty was barely three. Escaping the draft in England. Jews were always escaping the draft. Why should they die for an anti-Semitic czar?

 

Oh, there was a girl in high school—but nothing serious. I was nineteen when I met your mother. Marriage was serious, a commitment. You just didn't get divorced. Don't think we didn't have tsuris. We did. But divorce was out of the question.

 

Mama came up to Utopia to check her out. “Watch out—that girl is using you,” she said. [He laughs.]