by Julie Klam
I’m sure we all know people who have dazzling (or at least interesting) stories about their lineage. Your grandfather’s cousin who was the captain of the Mauretania. Your mother’s best friend who was Theda Bara’s makeup artist, Persian royalty, or Irving Berlin. It was always lovely to hear these stories, and the only necessary reaction is to just say, “Wow.”
Why are these stories from our families so flawed? Many reasons. Oral history is not unlike a game of telephone: Even when people are trying to get the story right, it gets twisted in unexpected ways—and not necessarily in the ways we think. One detail you hear a lot when someone is investigating their family is that their family’s name was changed when they immigrated—at Ellis Island, for example—because the clerks didn’t speak the language of the immigrant and wrote down whatever name they felt like. My grandfather told me his grandfather had been named Kuperschmidt, but the Ellis Island officials (he had a less polite term for them) changed it to Smith.
But this is not actually true. When people came through Ellis Island during the sixty-two years that it was open as an immigration station, the only information the immigration clerks had was the steamship’s manifest with the names of the incoming immigrants. These had been filled in by the ship’s officials in the originating country, who spoke the language. The Ellis Island clerks, with the aid of an interpreter, asked each entrant questions to verify they were the people on the manifest. It is true that some names were changed, but often it was done by the immigrants themselves before they left their country. Some of them may have wanted to sound more American when they got here. Or they felt a certain spelling made it easier for people. Whatever the reason, a changed name wasn’t because of a lazy admission clerk at Ellis Island. Yet you hear people repeating this story all the time.
My other grandfather had been born Louis Klam and changed his name to William Klam because he had been arrested for bootlegging on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (To be honest, there were times in my life when I might have changed Klam, but now I’m glad he didn’t.) His wife, Ida, changed her name to Billie because she thought it sounded more glamorous. Ida/Billie’s sister Rebecca became Blanche because it was modern; her brother Israel became Stanley, and then finally settled on Edward. People often reinvented themselves with names the same way they’d change their hairstyle or wear a new hat. I think of it as the old-fashioned version of changing your avatar.
But the Morris sisters, my father’s mother’s cousins, were real people. Ever since I was young, they were legendary members of my family. I was told they were completely crazy, obscenely wealthy, never married, had no children, and all lived together in a house in New York City. Selma, Malvina, Marcella, and Ruth Morris. I grew up listening to my grandmother’s fascinating, somewhat questionable, and often inconsistent stories of these women, who were her first cousins. The common thread in the stories was that every one of my father’s family had a story to tell about them, most involving how much money they gave to Brandeis University and how little they gave to [fill in relative’s name who is telling the story].
I actually met Malvina and Marcella Morris in the summer of 1980 when I was thirteen, at my grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary party. My grandma Billie, who was a little on the vain side, told Marcella and me how she modeled for her father, a dress designer in the 1920s, because she was a perfect size 5 and remained a size 5 all of her life.
Marcella, taller than my four-foot-eleven-inch grandmother, but not by much, with short gray hair and no makeup, and stinking of cigarette smoke, dressed in polyester pants with a matching vest and long-sleeve shirt, said, “That’s ’cause they make that stretchy fabric now!” And then she took a long drag on her Pall Mall.
My family did just fine. We had everything we wanted, but I never thought of us as rich. We didn’t have servants and our dinner didn’t come on silver platters with lids that were lifted by a butler. The Morris sisters were that kind of rich, or so I was led to believe. I imagined that if I’d had a chance to meet all of them they’d be charmed by my brilliance and my sense of humor, and one of them would pull out a ribbon-tied scroll of parchment and unroll it to reveal the word “will” at the top of the page, and with a feather quill she would scratch out whoever’s name was written on it and put in “our dear cousin Julie Klam,” leaving everything the sisters had to me.
I had wanted to meet Marcella even before the party. She was, the story went, the sister who had made all the money. I had heard the Morris sisters only liked girls. (I didn’t know at the time what a lesbian was, so I assumed it was more misandry.) When I finally did meet her, I attempted to dazzle her with my intellect and wit. But apparently she wasn’t impressed, because she walked away without saying a word to me or giving me a dime. And her purse wasn’t big enough for a scroll.
I didn’t think much about the Morris sisters until a couple of years later when I visited my father’s cousin Claire in the Florida Keys.
My dad’s family had a cousins’ club: Almost every year most of his first cousins and their families would congregate at someone’s house for a visit. It was a way for us all to stay in contact. We had many of them at our house in Westchester County, New York, north of New York City, and at these get-togethers Claire always sought me out. I was the youngest child in my family, and at the time my brothers didn’t have a lot of use for me except if I wanted to be the backboard and hoop of their basketball game. (They were pretty horrible, but the good news is I’ve spent most of my adult life making them pay.) Claire related to this and she was always on my side for the time we were together. She didn’t ask me the typical questions that adults do about how old I was or what was my favorite subject in school. Instead she’d tell me stories about how she’d had an annoying cousin when she was younger, and spent a lot of time plotting her death. She was my kind of relative.
When Claire invited me to the Keys, I jumped at it. She was maybe fifty, a little older than my parents, but she was fun with a capital F. She took me deep-sea fishing and then, with a guide, into the backcountry of the Everglades, where we fed marshmallows to a one-eyed alligator named Andy.
Claire was married to Jerry, but he was often in New Jersey working, and her two daughters were adults with children of their own. She had lived a pretty traditional life, getting married and staying at home with her children. When I knew her, she was at a point in her life where she was figuring out what she wanted to do next.
During my visit, Claire also invited her adult friends to the Keys. One was a single man with two sons. At every chance she got, Claire would challenge them to contests against us—boys against girls. Fishing (the biggest fish, the most fish caught, the first catch), tennis, swimming. Whatever the challenge was, somehow, Claire and I always won. And Claire rubbed it in with a delicious vigor.
Selma Morris
In the evenings at sunset she and I would sit on the docks and watch the seabirds dovening, she with a glass of wine and I with a Tab, and she’d tell me about the Morrises. Selma was the oldest. When she was young, she was very beautiful and had a glorious singing voice, but when she was older, when Claire knew her, she just drove everyone crazy. She never stopped talking. “I remember very clearly when my father and his brother took Selma to Montreal to visit the family,” Claire said. (The third sister of my great-grandmother Martha and the Morris sisters’ mother, Clara, was Rebecca, who had settled in Montreal.) “I remember my mother was with us. The only reason they took Selma was to pay for the gas. Halfway there they could not stand her talking and complaining, so they threw her out of the car!” She laughed. “It was in Watertown, New York. She really was impossible to be with for any length of time. She only wanted to stop at a restaurant for a nice barbecued hamburger with lettuce and tomatoes, and don’t forget the onions! And the french fries—very well done!”
Malvina was the second sister; she had a childhood illness that left her with one leg shorter than the other
and a pretty significant limp. She was known to be the sweetest and kindest, and was adored by everyone. She worked in administrative jobs and stuck closely to her sisters. She was also a very gifted painter.
Marcella, the third, was the financier. She was fiercely independent and a genius with numbers. It was her intense determination that got the girls to New York, where she then had an incredibly successful financial career. She had short hair and wore pants the minute it became acceptable. She had a deep dislike of men.
Ruth was the baby. Claire said, “Ruth was really very pretty and totally bohemian. She wrote beautiful stories and was a painter. She was the only person I know who wore high button shoes, bloomers, and very flared skirts with a stiff crinoline to hold the skirt—and this was in the 1950s and ’60s! All the sisters swore that Ruth wrote the musical High Button Shoes, but she told me that a Broadway producer who came on to her stole the script. Julie, I believe it. She showed me the script she wrote. She certainly dressed the part. I wish I had saved some of Ruth’s stories. You would have loved them. I remember when she came to my house for Thanksgiving one year, with her high button shoes and her crazy outfit. She asked my kids if they could stand on their heads, and with that she stood on her head, and that’s how we knew she wore bloomers. She was in her sixties then!”
I’d heard from my father that Ruth wore a lot of brightly colored silk scarves and noisy jewelry and that she had painted her fingernails a dark purple and that in her bag she carried a perfume atomizer with a bulb sprayer and that the scent was called something exotic like 1001 Arabian Nights. “Oh,” Claire said, “they all smoked like chimneys! I mean a lot of people smoked then, but they smoked.”
Claire spoke of them as funny and unusual and brave. She envied their independence from men. We sat quietly for a time, both reflecting on these amazing women as the sun dipped into the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1993, my brother Matthew had his first short story published in The New Yorker, followed by several others. With his tremendous acclaim, he officially became the writer in the family. One day, Matt received a cassette tape in the mail. It was from Claire.
He put it in his tape deck and we heard her voice with its inimitable New Jersey accent declare: “The Morris Sisters: An Impossible Dream.”
There was Claire, on Memorex, telling the whole story of the Morris sisters as she knew it, and more important, her own stories of her experiences with the Morrises. Claire may not have been a writer, but she was one of the best storytellers I ever knew. She would sit at a table and every head would be facing her, mouth open, ready to gasp or laugh.
With each story the sisters became clearer in our minds—more vivid, more three-dimensional. The stories Claire told about them made them into real people. When people find out you’re a writer, they tell you what they think is a great idea for a book, a magazine article, a TV show, a movie, or a miniseries. It doesn’t matter what you write or where your interest lies, it’s not about you: It’s their great idea, and they are giving it to you. Every time my grandpa Willie saw Matt, he would tell him he should write a book about how his son (our father) retired at age fifty-five. (Matt’s stories are about sexuality and infidelity, and they use a lot of F words. They don’t tend to be about retirement.) I was writing then, too, but short reported pieces for Rolling Stone and Us magazines. (I was also writing screenplays for no one.) While I was still employed at the insurance company, I had no idea what I was going to do professionally. My ambition was to be not working at the insurance company forever, but at that point that was the extent of my career planning. I thought I was a writer, but I never imagined I would be able to make a living as a writer (which was actually pretty prescient of me). Still, I loved Claire so much that when I heard her stories about the Morris sisters, I wanted that tape for myself. Not to do anything with it, just to have it.
My brother, being a generous sort, gave it to me. I listened to it a few times, absorbing Claire’s stories. I kept the tape with my other cassettes until tapes were no more, and then I threw all of them away, and now they’re gone forever.
In 2008, I published my first book, Please Excuse My Daughter, a memoir about my mother and me and how I grew up, and it dipped a little into my mother’s family’s history, which was rich and interesting. Her mother’s uncle, Sam Golding, developed the neighborhood of Rego Park in Queens during the 1920s. In fact, I had always been told that the name Rego Park was for my mother’s grandmother RosE GOlding, but in every documented story about the history of the name, it’s said to come from Real Good Construction Company. When I told that to my mom and Aunt Mattie, they said everyone was wrong, they were certain the family story is true. End of story.
There are buildings and hospitals around New York City that still bear his name. Once at my parents’ house, I found a bag of yarmulkes from various weddings and bar mitzvahs. One was from Sam’s daughter Faith’s wedding to Ronald O. Perelman, the Revlon tycoon who went on to marry Claudia Cohen, Patricia Duff, Ellen Barkin, and Anna Chapman. But his first wedding in 1965 was to my relative. (All of this information was in my book. While I used the internet to research it, it was different then: Google wasn’t a verb yet, and a lot fewer documents were available online.) I looked through old New York City phone books—actual physical phone books—found people’s addresses, and interviewed the people who were still alive at that time, and though I couldn’t always verify their stories, it was fine. It was a memoir, not a history book, after all. I loved the quest for information about my family, though: It was like searching for buried treasure and actually thinking there was a decent chance I would find it. The feeling I had poring over the names of the 1943 Manhattan phone book and finding my grandfather’s office address and telephone number was like I had time traveled. In 1943, he was alive, and people who wanted to talk to him looked up his telephone number in that phone book and called him at his office. A secretary answered, and eventually they got to my grandpa.
When I finished my memoir, I thought the next logical project would be a book about the Morris sisters. I had written about my mother and her family, and now I had this fascinating piece of my father’s family to investigate. I’d heard about these “manless,” independent, rich sisters who existed in a time when the world did not support any of that. Who were they? How did they do what they did? They were kind of radicals. Did any of what made them tick exist in me? I was trying to be more independent in my marriage, and maybe knowing how they did it would help me. They were celebrities in our family instead of being “famous” in the world like Irving Berlin. I needed to know who these women in my family were.
I started researching them, but it didn’t take me long to realize that for women who were so famous within my family, there didn’t seem to be much written about them in the world. Not to mention the fact that their last name, Morris, was extremely common, and they had lived in New York City, which isn’t exactly Bedford Falls. (This was around the time Ruth Etting’s “A Needle in a Haystack” became my theme song. It stayed in my head for three years.)
I started my research by interviewing first Claire and then her older brother, Bobby. While their stories were helpful, they were only a start. I needed more. To really find, understand, and tell the story of the Morris sisters, I would need to dig deeper than anecdotes, to go beyond the family lore to the places where they had lived and where their family had come from and generally look for things (to use a technical genealogy term). My agent, publisher, and editor were all on board.
There were problems, though. My then husband and I didn’t have much money, and we had a child in kindergarten who needed a lot of attention (as opposed to the self-cleaning, autonomous models). My husband was freelancing, and his jobs required very long days and frequent travel. We couldn’t both be working full days and traveling a lot, so I put aside the idea for a book about the Morris sisters and wrote a book about dog rescue instead, an activity I was doing anyway. (The dogs were on
a different side of my family.) As I began to write my second book about dogs, it was evident that my marriage was not going to make it. I went on to write a book about friendship, and while I was writing that book, my husband and I began the lengthy, exhausting process of getting divorced. So it was one step forward (the child got older) and two steps back (I was now a single parent with even less money than before).
During these years, I had been writing a book a year as well as other pieces for magazines. With all that was happening in my life, it was now taking almost three years to write what became my fifth book. It was about the nature of celebrity, which sounded like a good idea because it wasn’t about me: I was at a point in my life where the last subject I wanted to write about was myself. Except I had a really hard time doing it: I became a kind of champion at not writing my book. I would fantasize about having the kind of job you left the house for and sat at a desk and people gave you tasks to complete—much as I did when I worked at the life insurance company. I envied anyone who knew what they were supposed to be doing, and I would grill people about the stresses of their jobs. (It turns out the only jobs with no stress are the ones you aren’t doing.)
Somehow the book got written and published, my divorce was finalized, and I found myself in the magical place of deciding what to write next. It’s such an amazing place to be because you can choose where you want to go for the next two or three years. It’s all possible and every idea in your mind is an instant classic/billion seller. Do I want to write about real-life wizards or haunted houses or spelunking? Well, no. I had several conversations with friends and one with my good friend Ann Leary, who told me about the research she’d been doing on Ancestry and the amazing information she’d learned about her family. Ann is someone who doesn’t do anything halfway, so by the time we talked, she was already an expert in family searches. I told her about my long-abandoned task to write about the Morris sisters. She pointed out that the internet had changed since I first thought about this book and that more and more information was becoming public and available. So she said, “Do it!”