The Peace Process
Page 21
“What took you so long?”
“There was more to it than I thought.”
“Did you get dizzy?”
“No.”
“Seeee,” she said, patting his knee. “Now, let’s be quiet.”
Moments later, Becky made her appearance. On her toes, high and delighted, she smiled through braces and danced on skinny, shivering legs, reminiscent of the lost pink flamingo. Far from Jerusalem, Kleiner leaned forward on a rented director’s chair and entered the Promised Land.
A Biography of Bruce Jay Friedman
Bruce Jay Friedman is a bestselling author, playwright, memoirist, and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter. In a career spanning over five decades, he has achieved both critical and commercial success for his work, which is characterized by dark humor, absurdity, and incisive observations of contemporary life.
Friedman was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx on April 26, 1930. Growing up, he aspired to become a doctor, but his application to the premed program at Columbia University—the only one he sent out—was rejected. He instead attended the University of Missouri where he studied journalism. Friedman enlisted in the United States Air Force after graduating from college, serving as a first lieutenant from 1951 to 1953. Friedman’s commanding officer, George B. Leonard, who later became a leading figure in the California counterculture movement of the 1960s, encouraged him to study literature, which sparked Friedman’s desire to become a writer. His time in the military inspired his first short story, “The Man They Threw Out of Jets,” which was published in the Antioch Review. His second story, “Wonderful Golden Rules Days,” was published in the New Yorker.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Friedman edited men’s adventure magazines including Male, Man’s World, and True Action. He wrote his first novel, Stern (1962), during this time, working late at night and during his daily commutes from Long Island to Manhattan. The tale of a Jewish man who moves his family to suburbia only to feel alienated from his gentile neighbors and increasingly paranoid about their anti-Semitism, Stern is a hilarious and penetrating social satire with themes that recur and evolve in much of Friedman’s work.
While employed as a magazine editor, Friedman met another moonlighting author, Mario Puzo, whom Friedman had hired as an assistant editor. Puzo was working on his novel The Godfather and the two became lifelong friends. The success of Friedman’s second novel, the bestselling A Mother’s Kisses (1964), in which an overbearing matriarch—described by the New York Times as “the most unforgettable mother since Medea”—goes to incredible lengths to help her only son get into college, allowed the author to leave his magazine job and pursue writing full time.
Friedman next turned his attention to the theater, writing two highly successful off-Broadway shows: Scuba Duba (1967), starring Jerry Orbach and Judd Hirsch, and Steambath (1970), in which the afterlife is portrayed as a steam bath filled with the recently deceased and God is a Puerto Rican towel attendant. Around this time, Friedman made his first visit to Hollywood at the invitation of a producer who wanted him to work on a film about comedian Lenny Bruce. Not wanting to “be the one to fuck up the Lenny Bruce story,” Friedman declined the offer, but he would go on to write several acclaimed screenplays, including Stir Crazy (1980), starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, and Splash (1984), for which he received an Oscar nomination. In 1972, Neil Simon adapted Friedman’s short story “A Change of Plan” into the film The Heartbreak Kid, which was directed by Elaine May and starred Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd. The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life (1978), Friedman’s witty portrait of bachelorhood in America, inspired the cult comedy The Lonely Guy (1984) starring Steve Martin.
A popular and gregarious figure on both coasts, Friedman packed his autobiography, Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (2011), with details of his adventures with celebrities of the cinematic and literary worlds: Norman Mailer bit him during a fight, Warren Beatty enlisted his help in arranging an affair, and Kurt Vonnegut once asked him, “Can you teach me how to hang out?” Friedman had a regular table at the iconic New York City restaurant Elaine’s, where he hung out with friends including Puzo, Joseph Heller, and James Salter.
Friedman’s other work includes the novels The Dick (1970), About Harry Towns (1974), Tokyo Woes (1985), and A Father’s Kisses (1996), as well as the short story collections Far From the City of Class (1963), Black Angels (1966), and Three Balconies (2008). As editor of the influential anthology Black Humor (1965), which featured stories by Thomas Pynchon, Edward Albee, Terry Southern, and Joseph Heller, he is credited with introducing the eponymous genre and its self-reflexive anxieties and gallows humor to American readers. Friedman lives in New York City with his wife, educator Patricia J. O’Donohue.
Friedman in 1940 at the Laurels Country Club in the Catskills with his favorite comedian, Jackie Miles. An early influence on Friedman, Miles was one of many Jewish comedians including Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers, who performed at resorts in upstate New York’s Borscht Belt from the 1940s to the 1960s.
Friedman with his mother, Mollie, in 1943. Raised by Mollie and his father, Irving, Friedman graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.
Friedman in uniform as a lieutenant in the air force, where he served from 1951 to 1953. During this time, his commanding officer, George B. Leonard, recommended three books that influenced Friedman’s decision to become a writer: Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe, From Here to Eternity by James Jones, and The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Friedman’s military experience informed his first published short story, “The Man They Threw Out of Jets.”
Friedman at his typewriter in 1954. The author worked as a men’s adventure magazine editor while writing fiction late at night or on his long commute from Glen Cove, Long Island, to Manhattan.
Published in 1962, Friedman’s first novel, Stern, set the tone for much of his future work with its nebbish narrator, who is driven mad by his suburban neighbors’ anti-Semitism. The New York Times Book Review called the book, “an iridescent tour de force.”
The book that launched Friedman into literary fame and allowed him to quit his day job upon its publication in 1964, A Mother’s Kisses was a New York Times bestseller praised for its comedic portrayal of a young man’s domineering mother as well as its emotional depth.
Friedman (at right) with Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, in 1966. The two met when Friedman hired Puzo as his assistant editor for both Male and Men magazines. Puzo churned out dozens of stories for the publications while working on his seminal novel on the side. Friedman and Puzo remained close friends until Puzo’s death in 1999.
After leaving his job as a magazine editor, Friedman began writing plays. He’s pictured here (left) on the set of his off-Broadway show Steambath in 1970. In Steambath, purgatory is a steam bath and God is a Puerto Rican towel attendant. The play was also adapted for a TV movie on PBS (right) in 1973.
Friedman at home in his office in Great Neck in 1971. When not writing at home on Long Island, he spent time in Hollywood during the seventies and eighties working on screenplays—and even had cameos in three Woody Allen films.
(From left) Friedman with his friends Joseph Heller, Mel Brooks, and Mario Puzo in Southampton in the 1980s. He has maintained close friendships with other writers over the course of his career and, as described in his memoir Lucky Bruce, had a standing lunch date with his inner circle, the members of which chose to exclude James Salter because he was “too good a writer.”
Friedman in a recent photo taken by his daughter, Molly.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either a
re the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“The Storyteller” (previously “The Story-Teller”) first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; “And Where She Stops. …” in Commentary; “Any Number of Old Ladies” in TSR: The Southampton Review; “A Fan Is a Fan,” “The Choice,” and “The Savior” in The Antioch Review; and “Nightgown” in Psychotherapy Networker.
Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Jay Friedman
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-5040-1172-3
Published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN
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