Still, as a playwright, he did think big. Sadly, his kind of drama (that whole Waiting for Lefty sort of thing) was dead by the start of the forties. Orson Welles went to Hollywood. So too did Clifford Odets. The Federal Theatre Project was accused of being Communist by a handful of dreadful small-minded congressmen, and was finally closed down in ’39. Which meant that, in 1945, Eric was paying the rent as a radio writer. At first he scripted a couple of episodes of Boston Blackie. But the producer fired him off the show after he wrote an installment where the hero investigated the death of a labor organizer. (He’d been murdered on the orders of some big-deal industrialist—who, as it turned out, bore more than a passing resemblance to the owner of the radio network on which Boston Blackie was broadcast.) I tell you, Eric couldn’t resist mischief . . . even if it did hurt his career. And he did have a terrific sense of humor. Which is how he was able to pick up his newest job: as one of the gag writers on Stop or Go: The Quiz Bang Show, hosted every Sunday night at eight thirty by Joe E. Brown. I’d wager anything that nobody under the age of seventy-five now remembers Joe E. Brown. And with good reason. He made Jerry Lewis appear subtle.
Anyway, the party was in Eric’s place on Sullivan Street: a narrow one-bedroom railroad apartment which, like Eric himself, always struck me as the height of bohemian chic. The bathtub was in the kitchen. There were lamps made from Chianti bottles. Ratty old floor cushions were scattered around the living room. Hundreds of books were stacked everywhere. Remember: this was the forties . . . still way before the beatnik era in the Village. So Eric was something of a man ahead of his time—especially when it came to wearing black turtlenecks, and hanging out with Delmore Schwartz and the Partisan Review crowd, and smoking Gitanes, and dragging his kid sister to hear this newfangled thing called bebop at some club on 52nd Street. In fact, just a couple of weeks before his Thanksgiving party, we were actually present in some Broadway dive when a sax player named Charles Parker took the stage with four other musicians.
When they finished their first set, Eric turned to me and said, “S, you’re going to eventually brag about being at this gig. Because we have just witnessed ourselves a true revolution. After tonight, rhythm is never going to be the same again.”
S. That was his name for me. S for Sara or Sis. From the time Eric turned fourteen, he called me that—and though my parents both hated the nickname, I cherished it. Because my big brother had bestowed it on me. And because, in my eyes, my big brother was the most interesting and original man on the planet . . . not to mention my protector and defender, especially when it came to our deeply traditional parents.
We were born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. As Eric was fond of pointing out, only two interesting people ever spent time in Hartford: Mark Twain (who lost a lot of money in a publishing house that went bust there), and Wallace Stevens, who coped with the tedium of being an insurance executive by writing some of the most experimental poetry imaginable.
“Outside of Twain and Stevens,” Eric told me when I was twelve, “nobody of note ever lived in this city. Until we came along.”
Oh, he was so wonderfully arrogant. He’d say anything outrageous if it upset our father, Robert Biddeford Smythe III. He fit his portentous name perfectly. He was a very proper, very Episcopalian insurance executive; a man who always wore worsted three-piece suits, believed in the virtues of thrift, and abhorred flamboyance or mischief-making of any kind. Our mother, Ida, was cut from the same stern material: the daughter of a Boston Presbyterian minister, ruthlessly practical, a triumph of domestic efficiency. They were a formidable team, our parents. Cut-and-dried, no-nonsense, reluctantly tactile. Public displays of affection were rare events in the Smythe household. Because, at heart, Father and Mother were true New England Puritans, still rooted in the nineteenth century. They always seemed old to us. Old and forbidding. The antithesis of fun.
Of course we still loved them. Because, after all, they were our parents—and unless your parents were savage to you, you had to love them. It was part of the social contract—or at least it was when I was growing up. Just as you had to accept their manifold limitations. I’ve often thought that the only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else . . . and then acknowledge that, within their own boundaries, they did the best they could for you.
But loving your parents is far different from embracing their worldview. From the time Eric was in his teens he worked hard at infuriating Father (yes, he insisted we address him in that Victorian manner. Never Dad. Or Pop. Or anything hinting at easy conviviality. Always Father). Sometimes I think Eric’s radical politics were less rooted in ideological conviction, and more to do with raising Father’s blood pressure. The fights they used to have were legendary. Especially after Father discovered the copy of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World under his son’s bed. Or when Eric presented him with a Paul Robeson record on Father’s Day.
My mother stayed out of all father/son arguments. To her, a woman had no business debating politics (one of the many reasons why she so hated Mrs. Roosevelt, calling her “a female Lenin”). She was always lecturing Eric about respecting Father. But, by the time he was ready to enter college, she realized that her stern words no longer carried any import; that she had lost him. Which saddened her greatly. And I sensed that she was always a bit baffled as to why her only son—whom she had raised so correctly—had turned into such a Jacobin. Especially as he was so astonishingly bright.
That was the only thing about Eric which pleased my parents—his exceptional intelligence. He devoured books. He was reading French by the age of fourteen, and had a working command of Italian by the time he entered Columbia. He could talk knowledgeably about such abstract, abstruse subjects as Cartesian philosophy or quantum mechanics. And he played a mean boogie-woogie piano. He was also one of those maddening whiz kids who got straight As in school with minimal work. Harvard wanted him. Princeton wanted him. Brown wanted him. But he wanted Columbia. Because he wanted New York, and all its ancillary freedoms.
“I tell you, S, once I get to Manhattan, Hartford won’t see me ever again.”
That wasn’t exactly true—because, despite his rebelliousness, he still remained a reasonably dutiful son. He wrote home once a week, he made brief visits to Hartford at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, he never shoved Mother and Father out of his life. He simply reinvented himself completely in New York. To begin with, he changed his name—from Theobold Ericson Smythe to plain old Eric Smythe. He got rid of all those Ivy League Rogers Peet clothes that my parents bought him, and started shopping at the local Army/Navy store. His skinny frame got skinnier. His black hair grew thick, bushy. He bought himself a pair of narrow rimless spectacles. He looked like Trotsky—especially as he took to wearing an Army greatcoat and a battered tweed jacket. On the rare times my parents saw him, they were horrified by his transformed appearance. But, once again, his grades silenced them. Straight As. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of his junior year. High honors in English. Had he wanted to go to law school, or get a doctorate, he could have waltzed into any graduate program in the country. But instead, he moved downtown to Sullivan Street, swept floors for Orson Welles for $20 a week, and dreamed big dreams about writing plays that mattered.
By 1945, those dreams were dying. No one would even look at his plays anymore—because they belonged to another era. But Eric was still determined to break through as a playwright . . . even if it meant writing hack jokes for Joe E. Brown to keep a roof over his head. Once or twice, I dropped hints about maybe finding a teaching job in a college—which struck me as more worthy of Eric’s talents than churning out one-liners for a game show. But Eric refused to entertain such notions, saying things like, “The moment a writer starts teaching his trade, he’s finished. And the moment he enters academia, he slams the door on the real world . . . the place about which he’s supposed to be writing.”
“But the Quiz Bang Show isn’t
the real world,” I countered.
“It’s more rooted in reality than teaching English composition to a bunch of prim little women at Bryn Mawr.”
“Ouch!” I said, having graduated from Bryn Mawr two years earlier.
“You know what I’m saying here, S.”
“Yes—that I am a prim little woman who probably should be married to some dreary banker, and living in some prim little town on the Philadelphia Main Line . . .”
Certainly that was the life my parents envisaged for me. But I was having none of it. After I graduated from Bryn Mawr in ’43, Mother and Father hoped that I would marry my steady back then—a Haverford graduate named Horace Cowett. He’d just been accepted into U. Penn law school, and had proposed to me. But though Horace wasn’t as prim and humorless as his name (he actually was a rather bookish fellow who wrote some halfway decent poetry for the Haverford literary magazine), I still wasn’t ready to impound myself in marriage at a premature age—especially to a man I liked, but about whom I felt no overwhelming passion. Anyway, I wasn’t going to squander my twenties by sequestering myself in dull old Philadelphia, as I had my sights set on the city ninety miles north of there. And nobody was going to stop me from going to New York.
Predictably, my parents tried to block my move there. When I announced—around three weeks before my graduation—that I had been offered a trainee job at Life, they were horrified. I was home for the weekend in Hartford (a trip I made deliberately to break the job news to them, and also to inform them that I wouldn’t be accepting Horace’s marriage proposal). Ten minutes into the conversation, the emotional temperature within our household quickly hit boiling point.
“I am not having any daughter of mine living by herself in that venal, indecent city,” my father pronounced.
“New York is hardly indecent—and Life isn’t exactly Confidential,” I said, mentioning a well-known scandal sheet of the time. “Anyway I thought you’d be thrilled with my news. Life only accepts ten trainees a year. It’s an incredibly prestigious offer.”
“Father’s still right,” my mother said. “New York is no place for a young woman without family.”
“Eric’s not family?”
“Your brother is not the most moral of men,” my father said.
“And what does that mean?” I said angrily.
My father was suddenly flustered, but he covered up his embarrassment by saying, “It doesn’t matter what it means. What matters is the simple fact that I will not permit you to live in Manhattan.”
“I am twenty-two years old, Father.”
“That’s not the issue.”
“You have no legal right to tell me what I can or cannot do.”
“Don’t hector your father,” my mother said. “And I must tell you that you are making a dreadful mistake by not marrying Horace.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“Horace is a splendid young man,” my father said.
“Horace is a very nice young man—with a very nice, dull future ahead of him.”
“You are being arrogant,” he said.
“No—just accurate. Because I will not be pushed into a life I don’t want.”
“I am not pushing you into any life . . . ,” my father said.
“By forbidding me from going to New York, you are stopping me from taking control of my own destiny.”
“Your destiny!” my father said, with cruel irony. “You actually think you have a destiny! What bad novels have you been reading at Bryn Mawr?”
I stormed out of the room. I ran upstairs and fell on the bed, sobbing. Neither of my parents came up to comfort me. Nor did I expect them to. That wasn’t their style. They both had a very Old Testament view of parenthood. Father was our household’s version of The Almighty—and once He had spoken, all argument was silenced. So, for the rest of the weekend, the subject wasn’t raised again. Instead, we made strained conversation about the recent Japanese activity in the Pacific—and I stayed button-lipped when Father went into one of his jeremiads about FDR. On Sunday he drove me to the train station. When we arrived there he patted my arm.
“Sara, dear—I really don’t like fighting with you. Though we are disappointed that you won’t be marrying Horace, we do respect your decision. And if you really are that keen on journalism, I do have several contacts on the Hartford Courant. I don’t think it would be too difficult to find you something there . . .”
“I am accepting the job offer at Life, Father.”
He actually turned white—something Father never did.
“If you do accept that job, I will have no choice but to cut you off.”
“That will be your loss.”
And I left the car.
I felt shaky all the way to New York—and more than a little scared. After all, I had directly defied my father—something I had never attempted before. Though I was trying to be dauntless and self-confident, I was suddenly terrified of the thought that I might just lose my parents. Just as I was also terrified by the thought that—if I heeded Father’s wish—I would end up writing the “Church Notes” column in the Hartford Courant, and ruing the fact that I had allowed my parents to force me into a small life.
And yes, I did believe I had a destiny. I know that probably sounds vainglorious and absurdly romantic . . . but at this early juncture in so-called adult life, I had reached one simple conclusion about the future: it had possibilities . . . but only if you allowed yourself the chance to explore those possibilities. However, most of my contemporaries were falling into line, doing what was expected of them. At least fifty per cent of my class at Bryn Mawr had weddings planned for the summer after they graduated. All those boys trickling home from the war were, by and large, just thinking about getting jobs, settling down. Here we were—the generation who was about to inherit all that postwar plenty, who (compared to our parents) had infinite opportunities. But instead of running with those opportunities, what did most of us do? We became good company men, good housewives, good consumers. We narrowed our horizons, and trapped ourselves into small lives.
Of course, I only realized all these years later (hindsight always gives you perfect vision, doesn’t it?). Back in the spring of ’45, however, all that concerned me was doing something interesting with my life—which essentially meant not marrying Horace Cowett, and definitely taking that job at Life. But by the time I reached Penn Station after that horrible weekend with my parents, I had lost my nerve. Despite four years away at college, Father still loomed large in my life. I still desperately sought his approval, even though I knew it was impossible to receive it. And I did think he really would carry out his threat to disinherit me if I went to New York. How could I live without my parents?
“Oh, please,” Eric said when I related this fear to him. “Father wouldn’t dare cut you off. He dotes on you.”
“No, he doesn’t . . .”
“Believe me, the old fool feels he must play the stern Victorian paterfamilias—but, at heart, he’s a scared sixty-four-year-old who’s about to be put out to pasture by his company next year, and is terrified of the horrors of retirement. So do you really think he’s going to slam the door on his only beloved daughter?”
We were sitting in the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Pennsylvania, opposite Penn Station. Eric had arranged to meet me off the train from Hartford that Sunday afternoon (I had a two-hour wait for my connection back to Bryn Mawr, via Philadelphia). As soon as I saw him on the platform, I threw myself against his shoulder and started to weep, simultaneously hating myself for behaving so weakly. Eric held me until I calmed down, then said, “So, did you have fun at home?”
I had to laugh. “It was wonderful,” I said.
“I can tell. The Pennsylvania’s nearby. And the bartender there makes a mean Manhattan.”
That was the understatement of the decade. After two of those Manhattans, I felt like I was under anaesthetic—which, I must admit, isn’t a bad thing to feel on occasion. Eric tried to get a third dri
nk into me—but I dug in my heels and insisted on a ginger ale. I didn’t want to say anything, but I was a little concerned when my brother downed his third Manhattan in four fast gulps, then called for another. Though we’d been in regular contact by letter (long-distance calls—even from New York to Pennsylvania—were expensive back then), I hadn’t seen him since Christmas. And I was genuinely taken aback by his physical state. His lanky frame had thickened. His complexion was pasty. A small, but noticeable roll of fat hung beneath his chin. He was chain-smoking Chesterfields and coughing loudly. He was only twenty-eight, but he was beginning to have that puffy look of a man who had been prematurely aged by disappointment. Of course his conversation was as fizzy and funny as ever, but I could tell that he was worried about work. I knew from his letters that his new play (something about a migrant worker revolt in southwest Texas) had just been rejected by every possible theater company in New York, and he was paying the rent by reading unsolicited scripts for the Theatre Guild (“It’s pretty depressing work,” he wrote me in March, “because it’s all about saying no to other writers. But it’s $30 a week—which just about pays my bills”). And when he threw back his fourth Manhattan in five gulps, I decided to stop being silent about his chain-drinking.
“One more of those Manhattans, and you’ll stand up on the table to sing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’.”
“Now you’re being a puritan, S. After I see you off to beautiful Philadelphia, I shall take the subway back to my Sullivan Street atelier and write until sunrise. Believe me, five Manhattans is nothing more than creative lubrication.”
“Okay—but you should also think about switching to filtered cigarettes. They’re much kinder to your throat.”
“Oh God! Listen to the Bryn Mawr ascetic! Ginger ale, filtered cigarettes. Next thing you’ll tell me is that, if he gets the nomination, you’re going to vote for Dewey against Roosevelt in the next election.”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 9