INTRODUCTION
I’m so excited, because not only are my father and I riding down
Riverside Drive on a double-decker bus, but it’s summertime, so there’s no roof
over us, and best of all, we’re sitting in the two front seats on the right
side, where we can wave to the sailors on the decks of the ocean liners docked on
the Hudson River as we pass them. And they’ll see us, some of them anyway, and
wave back. It’s 1945, I’m six years old, and life is good.
We’re on the Fifth Avenue
Bus, now designated the M5, which still makes its way south from the George
Washington Bridge, then cuts across town on Central Park South, and finally turns
downtown again on Fifth Avenue to 31st Street. We’re not on our way anywhere
today; it’s just an excursion, a pleasurable trip on the bridge of a land yacht
cruising south in New York City. There are still double-deckers buses in
Manhattan, all of them conducting sightseeing tours, and the M5 was their
forerunner. Sometimes, we’ve had an actual destination: once, a year earlier,
we had gone down to see the ocean liner Normandie,
which had capsized when a fire broke out, lying on her side in her berth. She
had been converted to a troop ship and painted wartime gray. I had seen this
beautiful ship when she was still afloat in her Cunard colors, and the
spectacle of her capsized, an immense gray island of steel jutting from the
river and dwarfing the pier, made the war real to me.
These
are my earliest memories of that portion of my life, beginning in 1943 and
ending in 1972, that I spent in a particular neighborhood of New York City, that piece of the Upper West Side
which, since the introduction of zip codes in 1961, has been designated by the
Postal Service “10024.” Zip codes were designed to make the delivery of mail
more efficient, but if you look at the map of this one, you may wonder what the
USPS was thinking.
Did someone
gerrymander this zip code into resembling a headsman’s axe poised above the
nape of the Central Park Reservoir? The handle extends north-east from 86th
Street all the way up to Harlem, but encompasses only the sliver of real estate
that is Riverside Park. Since there are no residences in the park, and only a
couple of administrative offices, the volume of mail directed to it must be
slim, and it’s hard to tell why it didn’t fall into the purview of 10025 and
10027. That question, however, falls beyond the scope of my project, so I’m
simply defining the area in which I lived as the rectangle bordered by the
Hudson River on the west, 59th Street on the south, Central Park on the east,
and 96th Street on the north. I’m borrowing four blocks from 10025, because on
both sides of the park, 96th is a demographic and financial boundary, and I’m
ignoring the axe’s handle – though I privately considered all of Central Park
as part of my home turf, down and east to the Zoo.
10024 and the zips
adjacent to it are the heart of the Upper West Side, cartographically and
culturally. Lincoln Center, the Museum of Natural History, the Ethical Culture
Society, Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass, the Beacon and the New Yorker and the
Thalia and the Ansonia and the Apthorp and the three double-tower apartment
buildings on Central Park West – all the iconic landmarks are in or abut it.
I know that I attended nursery school, during that earliest
period of my sojourn there, but I couldn’t tell you the name of the school, and
there’s no one left to ask. Was it the Alan-Stevenson School, the Rudolph
Steiner School, Ethical Culture? All I recall is that we were made to take our
shoes off and put on calfskin slippers so as not to mark up the floors. My
family had originally moved to New York from Chicago when I was an infant for
reasons that varied with the telling and the teller. The official version held
that Dad had been sent to open a New York office of Lord & Thomas, the advertising
agency where he was a star copywriter and account executive. My mother replaced
that story with a darker and sadder version
forty years later: that Dad’s best friend had engineered a coup against him,
and that his boss, Albert Lasker, had fired him. Lasker, an Olympian presence
in the advertising world, was known for firing people impulsively. My father
told me that he had once canned someone for having a sign above his desk that
read “They said it couldn’t be done . . . so I didn’t do it,” because he didn’t
want defeatists (or ironists) working for him. The agency’s biggest account was
Lucky Strike, and one day Lasker spied a pack of Camels on some poor guy’s
desk. The offender looked up and blanched. “They. . . they’re my wife’s, sir,”
he said. “Your wife has an independent income, I presume?” Lasker replied. “You’re
going to need it.” Lasker was a thinly-disguised character in a novel by
Frederick Wakeman titled The Hucksters,
a kind of forerunner to Mad Men. The
two ways in which my father did not conform to that show’s stereotype are that,
though he did work on Madison Avenue, I’m sure he didn’t seduce the secretaries,
and he didn’t drink – at least not in the three-martini-lunch sense of the
word.
The move to Hollywood, then, was born of necessity. My father’s
plan was to become a screenwriter, and he succeeded: somehow penetrating the
layers of security surrounding C.B. DeMille, Dad presented him with a letter of
introduction from, of all people, Carl Sandburg. I have no idea how he got it; I
had never heard Sandburg’s name mentioned among family friends and
acquaintances. But DeMille gave him a
job in the writer’s wing of Paramount Studios, churning out dialogue for the
B-movies of the day. The only film I know for a fact that he worked on
was Road to Utopia, starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy
Lamour. Norman Panama and Mel Frank won on Oscar for the screenplay, and all my
father and his cohort of hacks did was polish it up a little. He didn’t get a
screen credit, and soon after it was released, the Writer’s Guild went on
strike and he was once again out of a job. But the Super Chief, on which my
mother and I had traveled west to join my father, was my own road to Utopia. Lamour
was on the same train, and apparently, if my mother is to be believed, Dottie
and I fell in love, and I wouldn’t go to sleep in our compartment until she
came in and kissed me good night. I dimly recollect this, but it’s probably a
false memory, since I picture her in a sarong. But I do remember the train
itself, which became and remains my favorite form of transportation. Freud
would of course say that was because I had my mother all to myself in a tiny
bedroom, but the compartment was my least favorite part of the experience. The
porter would unlock the upper bunk, which swung down out of the ceiling on
hinges, and after I had been put to bed in it, Mom would leave to socialize
with the glamorous people the lounge, and I would lie there alone, fearful that
the bed would somehow snap shut, suffocating me. I also recall the
announcements (“First call for dinner! First call!”), the dining car, with its opulence
of snowy tablecloths and napkins, and the menu on which my mother wrote down
our orders. On the final day, there were the Rockies, seen from the observation
car at the end of the train. Too bad there were no iPhones in 1946; I could
have snapped a selfie of myself and Lamour, with the mountains in the
background; as it is, since neither of my parents was very interested in
recording our family’s doings, the only picture I have of myself in Hollywood
is a snapshot with my first girlfriend, Julie Ann Jones, taken at my seventh
birthday party, shortly after we got engaged.
One lifelong blessing that Hollywood conferred on us came about
through my mother’s inability to navigate Los Angeles. She had been born on a
farm in Saskatchewan, to parents who emigrated from Odessa, and no one could
have been less suited to the agricultural life. She was timid around animals
and machinery, for starters. Her father taught her two sisters to drive, but
the first time my mother got behind the wheel, at age 14, she managed to turn
the car over, and that was the last time she attempted the feat, abandoning the
automobile just as America was adopting it. So life in L.A., where cars were then
even more indispensable then than they are now, was difficult for her. She got very
bored sitting home while my father typed away in the writers’ building at
Paramount, but she was saved when, improbably, they were invited to an A-list
dinner party at the home of René Clair, the French director. After the meal, my
mother wandered back to the kitchen, where M. Clair’s French chef was at work.
They fell into a conversation about food, especially the food upon which my
mother had grown up. My grandparents were not the stereotypical wretched refuse
of Europe’s teeming shore; my grandmother Yetta came from a prosperous, stylish
Odessa family (I think you can see that in the picture below) and had brought a
cook with her -- the famous Anyushka -- when Roy Brounstein persuaded her to move
to Saskatchewan, so in addition to Canadian bacon and Saskatoon berry pie, they
ate stroganoff and shashlik and borscht and pelmeni and pirozhki.
My grandmother, Yetta Brounstein, and her three daughters: counter-clockwise, Rose, Eve and my mother Sally, c. 1911,
And my mother had absorbed the fundamentals of food prep, enough
so that what she put on the table for my father and me was perfectly adequate. But
M. Clair’s maitre de cuisine offered
her a kind of postgraduate internship. He would pick her up every day and she would
act as his sous-chef, mincing parsley, boning fowl, fileting fish, reducing
stock, and in the process, he would teach her how to assemble these ingredients
into the stuff of which dreams are made – French dreams, that is.
Not only did this apprenticeship solve my mother’s problem of
what to do with her days, but it made her a wonderful cook. She had the nose
and the palate, and an innate sense of what went with what. She could identify
any food by smell or taste; she had only to glance at a recipe once, and she
knew just how to make it simpler and better. This was an era in which French
cooking was still very grand and complex – the Larousse Gastronomique cuisine of Escoffier and Fernand Point,
dripping with butter and fat and cream. But Mom’s take on what she learned
produced food that wasn’t rich – it just tasted rich, a precursor to the
Nouvelle Cuisine decades later. And as soon as I was old enough to be trusted in
the kitchen, she began to teach me some of the simpler items in her repertoire,
along with how to manipulate knives and whisks and skillets; I could fry myself
an egg when I was ten, and assemble a creditable meat loaf by eleven. Years
later, she would show my wife how to lard a leg of lamb with slivered garlic
for roasting, how to add liquid to a stew gradually as it cooked, so that it
married with the other ingredients instead of drowning them. She was noodle
kugel’s Fairy Godmother: using fine noodles, sour cream and cottage cheese, and
no sugar or raisins, she turned it from a humble Ashkenazi pudding into the
most elegant of side dishes.
But after two years in
Beverly Hills (the street we lived, on Cory Avenue, formed one of its boundaries)
back we moved to postwar Manhattan. I still recognized the neighborhood. The
green blur that was Riverside Park in the summertime and the white quilt that
it became in winter hadn’t changed in the interim – indeed, it still hasn’t.
When I think of the trees and the streets and the buildings, I’ve no idea
whether I’m pulling up pictures from the memory of a toddler or a sixth-grader
or a Columbia graduate student. Today, all but a few storefronts have changed
identities, some of them multiple times, but the facades of the residential
structures very little. The brownstones that define the area now have air
conditioners in their windows, but their exteriors are otherwise unchanged, some
of them a little more dilapidated than they were when they were built, at the
turn of the last century, as private family residences, and some repointed and
otherwise beautified as the new wealth restored them to their original purpose.
My father – like my mother, the child of immigrants -- was born
and raised in Chicago, and I always felt he would have been better off if he’d
stayed there; the memories he shared of his boyhood there all seemed happy ones.
New York was his Second City, his alternative workplace after he’d left Lord
& Thomas. Chicago was where he’d met my mother, where he’d had his greatest
and most lucrative success, and where I was born. My mother’s route to New York
was far more serpentine -- the culmination of her plan, hatched in childhood,
to escape Kamsack, Saskatchewan. It’s unclear why her parents had chosen to
move there, or whether they were aware that Western Canada is nothing like the
Ukraine. Odessa is a temperate city on the Black Sea where people go to the
beach on warm summer days. Saskatchewan is Siberia without gulags. But it may
have suited my grandfather’s entrepreneurial ambitions and his adventurous
nature, a wide-open, almost uninhabited frontier – the gateway to Canada’s Wild
West -- where he eventually owned three farms and a ranch on which he bred horses
for the British cavalry in World War I. But anyone who has ever been there might
sympathize with the plight of an attractive, ambitious girl stuck in the middle
of an enormous, monotonous prairie, so flat that the local saying was, if your
dog runs away you can still see him two weeks later, and so cold that when
people traveled by sled in the winter, they had to slap each other’s faces to
get the blood circulating again if signs of frostbite appeared.
Granddad, at home on the range
As soon as she was old
enough to travel on her own, Mom homed in on brighter lights and bigger cities,
first Winnipeg and then Montreal. No one in the family stayed in Saskatchewan;
eventually, her parents retired to Vancouver, and three of her four brothers
and sisters all made Montreal their home for the rest of their lives (and
obligingly lived in the same building, which made visiting them easy). But
Mom’s sights were set higher. She got a nursing degree at the University of
Michigan, moved to Chicago, and became an operating-room nurse in a hospital
there. She was on duty when an eminent surgeon named Yale Levinson reached
toward a sterile tray of instruments during a procedure, and she boldly rapped
him across the knuckles with a forceps. He congratulated
My parents, Sally and David, on their honeymoon
My mother kept in touch with her family; often, she and I
visited Montreal, and a couple of times, Saskatchewan while her parents still
lived there. It was a three-night trip by Pullman from New York to the farm in
Kamsack, and though not quite as super as the Super Chief, I was very happy to
stare out the window all day at the scenery, dull and flat though it mostly
was.
But I didn’t like the farm itself any more than my mother had;
in fact, it became synonymous for me with death. I was in the car when my
grandfather drove over one of the family dogs, which for him was merely an
annoyance, but I still remember feeling the lurch and hearing the yelp. And he
thought it would be a good idea for his five-year-old grandson to watch him
slaughter a turkey. The bird was bigger than I was, and violently resisted
being grabbed by the neck, but my grandfather was too strong for him; slamming
him down on the chopping block, he struck off his head with an axe. Gouts of
blood erupted from the severed neck, drenching me. I stood, horrified, for a
moment, and then ran away screaming. Rapport with the tender feelings of young
children was apparently not in Granddad’s repertoire. My mother once told me that
he never hugged or kissed her or her siblings, or even sit on his lap, because he
didn’t want them spoiling the creases in his trousers. My mother’s own lifelong
tendency to repress, ignore or deny anything that smacked of emotion must have
had something to do with that early training. When my father died, she never
told her parents, who then lived in Vancouver. They never traveled East, so why
did they need to know?
Nor did my father travel, except for his excursions to
California. He never accompanied us to Canada, and we never took any family
vacations. Other fathers had hobbies and recreations – they played golf, they fished,
they did carpentry projects. But not Dad, reading and writing were his only
activities, apart from our excursions. Our friends would go to the Catskills in
the summertime, to Vermont in the winter if they skied, but Dad never even
visited his brothers and sisters in Chicago. I don’t think there was any
tension or discord between them; when my uncle Lou came to New York on business
a couple of times a year, we’d go with him to a restaurant for lunch and Dad
always seemed glad to see him. Perhaps there was no reason for his staying home
except that he simply didn’t like to go places.
About
my father’s boyhood I know relatively little, since I don’t have any mental
pictures of the place where he grew up, and despite the fact that his uncle
Bernard wrote an autobiography optimistically titled My First Eighty Years, a book crammed with financial and civic
information but not so much with colorful details. But my father was a writer,
and he could produce vivid images for me. He told me that on hot summer days, a vendor
would roam the streets selling watermelon to kids – a kind of precursor to Mr. Softee, complete with the music: Dad would
sing out, as best he could, his melodious spiel, which had to shift the
emphasis on four syllables to make it scan: “WatermelON, melON, melON, sweet fresh watermelON today!” And Dad also taught me the fight
song of his alma mater, Crane
Technical High School:
Hare ‘em, scare ‘em, rip ‘em, tear ‘em,
eat ‘em, beat ‘em, all the hell
Knock ‘em, bang ‘em, kill ‘em, hang ‘em,
we’re the boys of Technical.
Then
he went on to the University of Illinois in Champaign, studying architectural
engineering, which he never practiced except for one summer, still in school,
when he worked for a company retrofitting a bridge over the Chicago River, and Dad
recognized a flaw in the specs and got the firm to re-position the new bolt
holes before they were drilled. I think his life would have been happier if he’d
stayed an engineer, but the siren song of Hollywood and later Broadway drowned
out all the other possible lives he could have led.
But I didn’t like the farm itself any more than my mother had;
in fact, it became synonymous for me with death. I was in the car when my
grandfather drove over one of the family dogs, which for him was merely an
annoyance, but I still remember feeling the lurch and hearing the yelp. And one
day, he thought it would be a good idea for his five-year-old grandson to watch
him slaughter a turkey. The bird was bigger than I was, and violently resisted
being grabbed by the neck, but my grandfather was too strong for him; slamming
him down on the chopping block, he struck off his head with an axe. Gouts of
blood erupted from the severed neck, drenching me. I stood, horrified, for a
moment, and then ran away screaming. Rapport with the tender feelings of young
children was apparently not in Granddad’s repertoire. My mother once told me that
he never hugged or kissed her or her siblings, or even allowed them to sit on
his lap, because he didn’t want them spoiling the creases in his trousers. My
mother’s own lifelong tendency to repress, ignore or deny anything that smacked
of emotion must have had something to do with that early training. When my
father died, she never told her parents, who then lived in Vancouver. Her
mother would have been saddened by the news, would have wept and worried. And
since they never traveled East, why did they need to know?
Nor did my father travel, except for his excursions to
California. He never accompanied us to Canada, and we never took any family
vacations. Other fathers had hobbies and recreations – they played golf, they
fished, they collected coins or played music. But not Dad. Reading and writing
were his only activities, apart from our excursions. Our friends would go to
the Catskills in the summertime, to Vermont in the winter if they skied, but
Dad never even visited his brothers and sisters in Chicago. I don’t think there
was any tension or discord between them; when my uncle Lou came to New York on
business a couple of times a year, we’d go with him to a restaurant for lunch
and Dad always seemed glad to see him. Perhaps there was no reason for his
staying home except that he simply didn’t like to go places. And of course,
writing dozens of plays was a time-consuming extracurricular diversion.
What
I know about my father’s boyhood was what he told me, and as a writer, he could
select and describe vivid details. He told me that on hot summer days, a vendor
would roam the streets selling watermelon to kids – a kind of precursor to Mr. Softee, complete with the music: Dad would
imitate, as best he could, his melodious spiel, which had to shift the emphasis
on four syllables to make it scan: “WatermelON,
melON, melON, sweet fresh watermelON
today!” And Dad also taught me the fight song of his alma mater, Crane Technical High School:
Hare ‘em, scare ‘em, rip ‘em, tear ‘em,
eat ‘em, beat ‘em, all the hell
Knock ‘em, bang ‘em, kill ‘em, hang ‘em,
we’re the boys of Technical.
Then
he went on to the University of Illinois in Champaign, studying architectural
engineering, which he never practiced except for one summer, still in school,
when he worked for a company retrofitting a bridge over the Chicago River, and
Dad recognized a flaw in the specs and got the firm to re-position the new bolt
holes before they were drilled. I think his life would have been happier if
he’d stayed an engineer, but the siren song of Hollywood and later Broadway foreclosed
all the other possible lives he could have led. He made a lifelong friend at
college, Hi Carr, and our two families have been joined at the hip ever since;
since we had no extended family in New York, it was they who invited us to
Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. Twice, for extended periods, we lived in the
same buildings, and Hi’s and Dorothy’s children, Peter and Toby, were virtually
older brother and sister to me. Toby and I are the only members of either
generation still alive, and though she lives in California and I in New York,
we’re still close.
Hi and Dave in college
Dad
was drawn to Hollywood the summer after he turned twenty, when anyone
good-looking could get a job as an extra just by hanging around the movie lots.
He appeared as a spear-carrier (literally) in two or three epics being filmed
then, and – another piece of family mythology, of which my mother was oddly
proud – he claimed to have had an affair with Pola Negri, the reigning vamp of
the era. (It can’t be true, however, as my mother claimed, that he’s somewhere
in a crowd scene in Birth of A Nation; he
was only 18 when it was filmed.) Then he went back to Champaign, graduated,
spurned the engineering firm and drifted into advertising, where he came up
with one of the all-time great slogans for Lucky Strike cigarettes: “Reach for
a Lucky Instead of a Sweet.” Sales of candy actually declined, and the
manufacturers of sweets got an injunction forcing the agency to amend the line
to “Reach for a Lucky Instead.” But everyone knew what it meant: take care of
your health, watch your weight, and do what my father did: smoke 60 cigarettes
a day.
We
were like orphans when we returned to post-war New York. Apartments were
incredibly scarce, and we had apparently burned through our savings. Dad landed
a middle-range job in an ad agency – by that time, he hated that business, but
it was all he knew – and for the first eighteen months, we were gypsies. We
lived in a sublet on 54th and 7th Avenue for six months, during which I
attended P.S. 69 a few blocks away (it isn’t there any more), and when that
lease was up, we moved into quite a fancy flat on Fifth Avenue in the 60s,
which belonged to my mother’s friend the actress Stella Adler, who was in
Europe telling Stanislavski why he was wrong about acting. Then, as I was about
to enter the third grade, we found an apartment we could afford and that was
marginally big enough to accommodate us – a floor-through four-story walkup at
320 West 77th Street. Its zip code was 10024.
