SR: Also in this period I learned the drawbacks of marrying into a political family. The benefits were enormous—learning from inside the way political families have to deal with each other, and with their children. They have the same problems everybody else does. Only someone who has sat around those kitchen tables, after the lights go out and the cameras leave, fully understands that. But I did a stupid thing. My father-inlaw was the chairman of the platform committee for the Democratic Convention and I heard from one of his aides there was going to be a negotiating session over the Vietnam plank, which was causing enormous divisiveness in the party. I wrote this modest little story about who was going to be at the meeting—there’s this person and that person and Hale Boggs “representing the Southern point of view.” The next morning Cokie’s mother called us in tears and said, “Why does Steve think Daddy is a racist?”
CR: This was a year when my father had voted for legislation outlawing racial discrimination in housing and came close to losing his own election over it.
SR: Of course, that wasn’t the context at all. I was writing about Vietnam, not domestic policy. And there are few people in this world I admire more than my father-in-law. I always say to my own children, “If you want to understand what made your grandfather great, look at his stands on civil rights.” It was so shocking to me that Lindy would have that reaction, but it was a hard lesson in understanding that words have great power, particularly in dealing with a very public family. I have often said since then that it’s very useful for any young journalist to be the subject of a story, preferably one that’s a little unfair. Then you really understand what it feels like to be on the other side. And marrying into this family gave me that experience, at some pain, but a very important lesson.
CR: My parents were very forgiving, but the times stayed tense. We went to the Chicago convention, with Daddy running the platform committee and Steve covering the protestors outside. I was hugely pregnant and the protestors had thrown these stink bombs into the lobby of the Hilton and the smell was especially hard on a pregnant person. But my “condition” turned out to be a great advantage in the end because I was very thin and from the back you couldn’t tell that I was pregnant. The cops, even in the convention hall, were so nervous that they would never let us stand still to talk. Everyone in the family had different credentials, so we’d meet in the hallways, plotting nefarious schemes like where to have dinner. A cop would invariably come along and prod one of us in the back with a nightstick: “Move on, move on, move on.” I finally learned to swing around in my full pregnant glory and declare, “Do it again and I’m going to have this baby right here, right now.” It worked! A very useful weapon.
SR: Exhausted after the excitement of the convention, we went to New Jersey to see my parents, who had moved from Bayonne to the pleasant town of Lakewood. After dinner on a particularly balmy night, Cokie and I decided to take a walk around their neighborhood. We had been walking for about twenty minutes when I spotted headlights behind us. The car seemed to be trailing us. “That’s my mother,” I told Cokie. “Oh, no, it couldn’t be!” she insisted. “Wanna bet?” I was right. We might think we were grown-ups and able to take care of ourselves. But my mother wasn’t taking any chances with her first grandchild; heaven knew what evil might lurk in the night! Mom’s had to put up with us teasing her about that for thirty years.
When summer ended we started baby classes. We had decided on natural childbirth, which was still pretty unusual in 1968, and it was difficult to find a hospital that would allow me in the delivery room. The only hospital we could find was Beth Israel, which was downtown on the East Side of Manhattan. We lived on the Upper West Side, so it was not exactly a good choice, but it was the only one if we wanted to do this. We were convinced that if Cokie went into labor in the middle of the day and we tried to get a cab and go across town, we might not make it. But the teacher of the childbirth classes insisted it would be a long process. We had an appointment to go see the hospital on Sunday, October 20, just so we could get comfortable with the admissions procedure and see where everything was.
CR: My last day of work at Channel 5 was that Friday and the baby was due a week or two later. On Saturday, I asked Steven to screw on the little red-and-yellow knobs for the dresser I had painted bright blue, for the gender-neutral nursery of primary colors. Then I took a nap and woke up feeling lousy, but not in labor, according to all of the lessons. I cooked dinner but didn’t eat it, and then, because I was bleeding, we eventually called the doctor. He was, thank God, a very conscientious soul and he said, “You better go to the hospital.” So we grabbed all the stuff they said to grab. I wasn’t ready. The baby wasn’t due. The bag I was supposed to breathe into came from the fish store. Bad choice. At about midnight we finally hailed a cab, and by this time I was very uncomfortable and scared either that this would last another twenty hours or that I’d get to the hospital and they’d send me home. That’s what the classes had led me to believe. I kept saying to the cabdriver, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.” Because he was worrying! And he turned out to be right. When we got to the hospital, we didn’t have a clue what door to go in, or what to do. Thank goodness the doctor found us and took us to a labor room. Then he did a swift exam and said, “Whoa! There’s a baby coming here!” What a relief! No twenty hours, no going home, just labor and delivery to deal with!
SR: I had contracted with Good Housekeeping magazine to write an article about natural childbirth from the father’s viewpoint. The twelve-hundred-dollar fee paid for the whole delivery. So not only was I in the delivery room, I was there with my notebook. And in between gasps she looked up and demanded, “Is that notebook sterile?”
CR: In between gasps. The baby came soon. About two-thirty in the morning. My parents were staying in a hotel in New Orleans, and when I couldn’t reach them I had left a message saying, “Cokie and Steve have left for the hospital to have the baby.” Then I called back a couple of hours later—I still have the messages—and said, “Tell them that Cokie has had the baby, a healthy boy, and they’re both fine.” And the operator answered in that wonderful New Orleans accent, “Who is this?” I said, Cokie. She said, “Dawlin’, you shouldn’t be on the phone. What you doing on the phone?” My mother was my father’s campaign manager, and because he was in the middle of one of the worst campaigns of his life, she couldn’t hang out and wait for the baby. So she flew up that night, made a quick check to see that the baby and I were okay, bought out the infant department of Best and Company the next day, and then turned around and flew home, leaving an exhausted Steven reeling from all of this. Of course for me, it was nothing but a picnic.
SR: After her flying visit, Lindy left behind a shopping bag full of all of her notes and records for the entire campaign. She called me in a panic. I was lying on our bed, dozing, not having been to sleep in forty-eight hours. I heard my mother-in-law say, “Darlin’, I’ve left behind my shopping bag with all of my notes for the campaign.” And I said, “Lindy, I’ve got it right here. I’ll just pack it up and send it right to you.” The reply: “Oh, no, I don’t have time for you to do that. You have to read it to me.” Well, there were dozens and dozens of little pieces of paper. Laundry slips. Envelopes. An interesting way to organize a campaign, but it worked for Lindy. Remember, I hadn’t had any sleep, and there I was reading these slips of paper. “Call Phyllis three o’clock Monday for fund-raiser.” And she says, “Why, darlin’, you know Phyllis, she’s married to Moise, and you know their kids….” Lindy somehow thought it was rude not to give me the full personal history of everyone she mentioned. Finally, I snapped, “I don’t need to know everything! Just let me read it.” But she was incapable. She just had to tell me everything. At that moment I could’ve done with a little less darlin’ and a lot more speed.
The next day I had to bring Cokie and the baby home from the hospital. So I went down to Beth Israel and packed them up in the car. I had put crepe paper and balloons all around the apartment to welco
me them home. I got them settled and then went to work at the city room at The New York Times. Before I even sat down at my desk, the editor called me over. “I have something to tell you. We want to send you somewhere.” And I said, “Where? Washington?” Because all I wanted in the world was to go back to Washington. My great dream was to be a reporter in Washington. “No,” he answered, “Los Angeles.” Now I had been west of the Mississippi for one day in my entire life at that point, covering Ed Muskie’s vice-presidential campaign a few weeks before. That’s how carefully The New York Times picked an expert to cover California. But for the last year or so the youth culture had been exploding on the West Coast, and since all the New York Times reporters in California were in their fifties, they had completely missed the story. My editors looked around the newsroom, picked the youngest reporter they could find, and said, “You, go tell us what the hell is happening out there.” It was a great shock to me, and my first reaction was no. Where was Los Angeles? Fortunately, Cokie has always been a much more adventuresome person than me.
CR: Even though he wrote me that first note at the student convention saying never get comfortable, I was always the one saying, “Come on!”
SR: She immediately thought it was a good idea. That night I walked home up Broadway to our apartment and stopped at a bookstore and bought two books which symbolized our new life. One was Dr. Spock’s Child Care. The other was The Pump House Gang by Tom Wolfe, an account of the youth culture of Southern California.
CR: All of New York was on strike that week, which made the idea of leaving sound good to me. And the truth was, the minute a baby arrives in New York, it becomes a completely unlivable city. It was one thing to be young and newly married and have jobs and enough money to go to the theater and out to dinner. The baby changed everything. Just going to the grocery store meant bringing the baby and trying to figure out a way to carry both him and the food home. When I tried to take the baby to the pediatrician for his first visit, I stood at Broadway and Seventy-fifth for half an hour trying to hail a cab and couldn’t get one. Finally, in tears, I went back to the apartment, called the pediatrician, and canceled the appointment. I felt like a total failure as a mother who couldn’t take care of my baby because I couldn’t get to the doctor’s office. I was plenty happy to leave New York.
SR: Before we left, we had to decide how we were going to celebrate the birth of this baby. In Jewish tradition there’s a ritual circumcision, called a Bris, when a baby boy is eight days old. We didn’t want to do that; among other things, there was no way Cokie’s parents could come to New York then. But we did want to have some event marking Lee’s arrival.
CR: The baby was circumcised in the hospital, which, in 1968, was an extra twenty-five dollars. Steve’s Grandpa Abe called me shortly after I got home from the hospital and barked into the phone, “I want to tell you something. Whatever you do, don’t circumcise that baby.” Astonished, I asked, “Why?” And he said, “Because I’ve read all about it. Your sex life is never as good.” This was my grandfather-in-law! I said, “Too late, Pop.” Then I told him we were having a party to celebrate the birth of his first great-grandchild. And, despite what he saw as my precipitous action on the circumcision front, he accepted the invitation.
SR: He called me up the morning of the party and said he couldn’t come. “Why?” I said. “Because I won’t have a place to park.” So I said to him, “Pop, if you leave now, I will go outside and lie down in a parking spot in front of the apartment and make sure it’s there for you.” He did come, and we have a picture of him holding his great-grandson. It was great to have family and friends around; most of my family was in New Jersey. So was Cokie’s sister, Barbara, who had stayed with us after the baby was born to help take care of him. But then we announced we were moving. It was hard on my parents when I said to them, “The good news is you have a healthy baby grandson. The bad news is we’re about to take him three thousand miles away.”
CR: Which, now that I think about it, was really vicious of us. At the time it didn’t even occur to me, but it was mean.
SR: I think that on reflection, the timing was good. There’s always a balance in a young marriage. We were still working out a lot of things for ourselves, as any couple does. Exactly how to be parents. Exactly what role religion would play. Exactly how we would balance work and family. Just learning more about each other. Professionally, of course, it was a great opportunity for me to become the bureau chief in Los Angeles. But personally it gave us some space at a key time in our marriage to figure things out without either set of parents looking over our shoulders. I don’t think it’s a total accident that when both of our children got married they moved far away from us—our daughter to California and our son to London. At least in part they were reflecting what we had always said, that it’s a healthy thing at this stage of marriage to have some time on your own.
CR: A stupid thing for us to have said!
SR: California was like another country to us. We knew nothing about it. A college friend of Cokie’s who was from L.A. came over for dinner, and I remember her drawing on a napkin a sketch plan of the city, suggesting places we might live. The Times flew us out there to house-hunt and we couldn’t find anything we liked.
CR: The houses were perfectly normal houses, houses we could have found in Cleveland or Bethesda. I was mightily unimpressed. We were in California. We were supposed to have a California house. One of them did have an avocado tree in the backyard, but that was about it. Finally, we saw an ad in the paper: “Not for everyone. Great view, Malibu, overlooking the ocean,” or something like that. So, we decided, shoot, we’d go take a look at it.
SR: We were staying in downtown L.A. at the Ambassador Hotel, the place Bobby Kennedy had been shot six months before, because it was literally the only hotel name I knew in the whole city. We got on the freeway for the first time, an adventure in itself, and drove west to Santa Monica and into a tunnel. When we came out of it there was the Pacific Ocean! I had never seen it before. It was truly dramatic. We followed the directions and drove about seven miles up the Pacific Coast Highway, then turned up into the hills. We kept going up, and up, and up, thinking there must be some mistake. I remember as we were driving up, I turned to Cokie and said, “Are we out of our blooming minds?” Finally, we found the house. It was the last one on the top of the hill, nothing but open country behind it.
CR: All we could see from the driveway was this little rambler, this L-shaped California house. We walked in the door and looked directly in front of us and there, through a glassed-in living room, was a magnificent unimpeded view of the Pacific Ocean. And we said, “That’s fine, we’ll take it.” We had not looked at a bedroom or asked the price. The landlady kept saying, “No, no, no you won’t, you don’t know how inconvenient it is.” And we said, “In fact, we will. We’ll take this house.” We didn’t even ask each other. We knew this was the house. This was California.
SR: We lived in that house for five years. After we signed the lease, we went back to New York, and a few weeks later, with friends lining up to take over our rent-controlled apartment, we packed up to drive across the country in Cokie’s rattletrap Ford Falcon. The baby was about three months old and he traveled in a bassinet in the backseat. Our enduring memory of our trip west to our new life was seeing this fuzzy blond head poking up at us.
CR: We had many adventures on the trip. First, just to prove our anxious parents right, the car broke down as soon as we got to Washington. We visited lots of family members along the way, and I got a speeding ticket in Seguin, Texas, a town with an enormous statue of a pecan on the courthouse lawn. In Arizona we started up a mountain for a picnic lunch and suddenly encountered snow. We had to turn around and come back down to a coffee shop next to a gas station, where we asked the guys there to check the car while we ate.
SR: We came out and they had the car up on a rack and they had taken gouges out of our tires and said you need three new tires. They had circled the gouges in
chalk. I figured that they vandalized it, but what was I going to do? We were about to drive across the desert. I said, “What if I don’t get new tires?” The guy in the gas station said, “Fine, go drive across the desert with these holes in your tires and your new baby.” So this bandit held us up, and I was helpless to do anything about it because I had to protect my little family.
CR: Also, all the way across the country we were hearing on the radio about mud slides in Malibu. We were convinced that we would get there and our dream house would be at the bottom of the hill. We finally got to California. We drove through the tunnel, out to the Pacific Ocean. We drove up and up and up the mountain, and when we got to the top, the house was still standing right where it belonged. We went in and found waiting for us a notice from the draft board that Steve was no longer eligible to be called. My other big concern—hardly of the same magnitude—was whether Pampers would flush. I put one in the toilet and it flushed right down. I was literally jumping up and down, I was so happy. Everything was right, our house was there, we were going to start a new life, everything was perfect, and then the baby just burst out laughing in this wonderful giggle. His first real belly laugh. It was a great moment.
SR: Welcome to California!
NEW PARENTS IN CALIFORNIA
So there we were, on our mountaintop in Malibu, with lots of space and sun, a new baby, and a new life. Some mornings, when the early fog clung to the coastline, we were literally above the clouds. What we didn’t have was a community—no family, no friends, not even the people we passed on the street and greeted daily in New York. In fact, we had to get in the car and drive several miles just to buy a bottle of milk or loaf of bread, let alone find a conversation. Most young marriages face the same sorts of tensions we were encountering. Like newly planted tomatoes they need plenty of room to grow and thrive, but they also need stakes to keep them from sprawling on the ground. And no stakes are more important to the sturdiness of a marriage than friendships.
From This Day Forward Page 11