Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  In 1962, Charles met a moody French American model named Suzanne de Bidart. He was being drunk and noisy on the streets of San Juan, and she told him what a jerk he was. Even in disarray he had a wounded charisma. They were married in New York in 1964, and they traveled and photographed well together, sharing a self-mocking chic. But when Suzanne gave birth to my cousin Andrea, known as Daisy, in 1966, the circumstances were squalid. Charles, who had moved to Mexico City to work for General Foods, had wanted Suzanne to abort the baby, and when Suzanne was nearly eight months pregnant, she caught him having an affair. In a state, she boarded a plane to fly off to Zihuatanejo — but the cabin was unpressurized, and her water broke as the plane made an intermediate stop in the jungle. A local doctor listened for a fetal heartbeat by pressing his ear to a metal egg cup on Suzanne’s stomach and said, “I don’t hear the baby.” Yet that evening Daisy slipped into the world, weighing less than three pounds. When Suzanne’s next pregnancy miscarried, in 1968, she was relieved: Charles was in New York, conducting another affair. Two years later, Suzanne and Daisy abruptly moved to Ghana — “You can’t love for two,” Suzanne says — and Charles stayed in Milan.

  As he took increasingly prominent jobs in advertising with Norman, Craig & Kummel and J. Walter Thompson, he picked up local ways wherever he went. In Mexico City, he sang along with the mariachi bands; in Milan, he pinched his fingers to make a point. When his daughter Lili was married, he flew in from London and gave a toast at the rehearsal dinner, and friends asked her afterward, “Who was that Englishman?”

  Because Charles would lose interest in his wives, we didn’t really get to know his children — and they didn’t really get to know Charles, either. Lili recalls, “I didn’t see him at all from when I was eight to fourteen or fifteen, when my mother had to suggest to him that my brother and I visit him in Milan.” Charles was so nervous when he met the children that his hands were shaking; he wanted to do this right, to make amends. He took them to a bullfight and later introduced Lili to steak tartare, Mongolian hot pot, and dim sum. He made life seem so cosmopolitan and amusing that Lili tried to work out a plan to leave her dreary mother and stepfather and live with glamorous Charles. However, she says, “I don’t know if he ever thought of me if I wasn’t in his plain sight.”

  “I was always sending him soppy cards and saying, ‘I love you, I love you,’ ” Daisy says. “He saved all the letters and drawings I ever sent him in a file — I found it after he died — and on the phone he’d say, ‘I love you, too, Daisy.’ He wouldn’t ever say it first, though. And he had the best for himself — Turnbull & Asser, cashmere — but he was frugal with us. He always thought we were all after his money.”

  I WORRY a lot about money, in a defensive sort of way, but I have nothing of James Wood Friend’s Midas touch. In 1980, Day gave the three of us a Christmas gift of $200 each to invest in stocks, as a way of encouraging an interest in fiscal management. Timmie sold her Eli Lilly position twelve years later for $735. Pier sold his Citibank stock after five years for more than $650, which he used to buy his first car. And I took a plunge on National Mobile Concrete — an oxymoron only Grandpa Ted could have loved.

  In 1986, my parents gave us $60,000 apiece to cover three years of graduate school or to help with the struggles of early adulthood. My father was understandably proud of being able to stake us, proud that he had begun to repair the family fortunes, taking salary put by during the years at Swarthmore and investing it diversely, as he’d learned to do by sitting on the college’s investment committee. He had broken with the Wasp habit of letting children fend for themselves until it no longer matters. (Uncle Wassa, after reneging on his promise to pay for his daughter Anne’s college education, told her, “I’d rather stand on my head and spit wooden nickels than give you a dime.”) Day’s note said that the money had been placed with his adviser at Smith Barney, in our names, and that “even as we try to arrange your further independence, we will be eager to hear your thoughts, and glad to advise you whenever you ask. Love, Day.”

  I remember brooding about the idea of arranged independence, and being pleased that after borrowing $2,000 from Mom and Day, to help me survive in Manhattan on my reporter’s salary at a magazine called The American Lawyer — $15,500 — I had paid the loan off before this gift arrived. While I was grateful for my parents’ offers to “pave the way” with their friends in publishing, to help me “get a foot in the door,” I was also glad that I had gotten this first job on my own. One of the reasons I loved New York was that unlike Boston or Philadelphia, the city was run less by the old-boy network than by the noisy claims of talent. Still, when I heard of a new satirical monthly, Spy, I introduced myself by letter to one of its founders and mentioned that I’d been on the Harvard Lampoon, as he had (no reason to renounce the old-boy network entirely).

  I was crazy about working at Spy as a writer and then a senior editor; it was thrilling being part of a young, underpaid underclass and blowing spitballs at the city’s old, overpaid overclass. We spent our days together in laughter, competing to think of more shivlike headlines, and our nights discussing stories and headlines we could never do — “The Yellow Peril,” say, about moguls and their Asian wives — over rounds of stingers ordered up by the coeditors, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen, old friends from Time. “More hooker drinks!” Kurt would call, and Graydon would cry, “Drink up, Taderino!” One evening, a few stingers in, Graydon challenged me to arm wrestle, beat me soundly, and gave me a sweet, confiding little speech about how I needed to make a six-year plan to rise to the top, needed to understand how the city truly ran, the false heat — the relentless, unembarrassed self-promotion — that fueled it. He ordered another round and pinned my arm again. Then he told me how to prevent hangovers: first, coat your stomach before going out with four aspirins dissolved in milk; second, upon awakening in the morning, drink a raw egg in whipped Worcestershire sauce. Third, squeeze a little Visine into your eyes, shave twice, and wear a bow tie, because you feel better when you look natty, and people will notice your tie instead of your wan expression.

  I soaked it all in: the hurly-burly of adult life was not nearly as bad as I’d feared. I even copied the bookish way Kurt nudged the bridge of his glasses up with his forefinger as he cracked wise. My mother was pleased that I was enjoying myself at a publication that swiftly became remarkably popular and influential (and, nearly as swiftly, fell apart). But she suggested, a few months in, that constant attack would ruin me: “Walter Kerr was a famous theater critic for the New York Times, and one reason everyone read him and loved him was that he always looked for something to praise.” I didn’t agree — it hadn’t occurred to me yet that my ambivalence about money informed my appreciation for this line of work, where we reflexively attacked the visibly rich, people like the Viscontis.

  But I was beginning to wonder about our targets. The first three people I profiled at the editors’ suggestion, an intellectual, a judge, and a tycoon, were all Jewish. We weren’t pillorying them for their religion, but for their hypocrisy, megalomania, stupidity, cupidity, vulgarity, pretension, sexual peccadilloes, and self-glorifying excess: all satire’s usual piñatas. But we didn’t know what we didn’t know. Thirty years earlier, Edmund Wilson had made a criticism of Time, then run by upper-crust Wasps, that also applied to Spy’s middle-crust Wasps:

  Time’s picture of the world gives us sometimes simply the effect of schoolboy mentalities in a position to avail themselves of a gigantic research equipment; but it is almost always tinged with a peculiar kind of jeering rancor … a general impression that the pursuits, past and present, of the human race are rather an absurd little scandal about which you might find out some even nastier details if you met the editors of Time over cocktails.

  At one of Spy’s many parties, a friend who wrote for the magazine, Melik Kaylan, issued a challenge: “Tad, for God’s sake say something controversial about someone powerful.” “Graydon Carter can blow me,” I replied. Melik laughed, then sai
d, “That’s the best you can do?”

  I sometimes felt that I was cheating at Spy, using humor not as an expression of feeling but as a crafty shortcut, a way of winning the writing game by lowering the stakes. Yet I felt no urge to ennoble the magazine’s mission — which, occasional excesses of meanness aside, I approved of — or to right larger wrongs. I had become a writer because the life came fairly easily to me, because everyone in the family from Grandpa John on down was overly encouraging about my early work, and, mainly, to seem mysterious and desirable. I hoped my byline would attract women for me, serving as a highway teaser like the Wall Drug billboards: ONLY TWO THOUSAND MILES TO TAD FRIEND. FREE ICE WATER.

  Well into my thirties, though, I dreaded the actual process of writing. It felt like a chore. My work bore the traces of having been labored over like a dry garden in Japan, the sand raked into formal patterns by workmen in conical hats. When I met with editors from Esquire to discuss a potential freelance profile and they began anatomizing my prose — “He’s got the perfect style for it, that dry, acerbic thing” — I tried, while looking attentive, to stop my ears. I didn’t want to have a defining style, even a situationally perfect one. A defining style would express a personality, and a personality would have to be expressed by a person, and then I would be stuck, accountable.

  I also felt uncomfortable thinking of myself as a writer or an artist, rather than a journalist; serious art, rife with feeling and conflict, is not encouraged among Wasps. Christina’s World is as near as we care to get to the abyss. When Mary Cassatt returned home for a visit, the Philadelphia Public Ledger revealed the culture’s hierarchy of values by reporting the arrival of “Miss Mary Cassatt, the daughter of Mr. Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who has been studying art in Paris, and who owns one of the smallest Pekinese dogs in the world.” After the documentarian Dickie Rogers learned that a growth on his foot was a melanoma, he told me, “I was relieved. My first thought was, I’m going to die — I don’t have to make a great film.” Part of his relief, I think, came from the knowledge that his people never wanted him to make a great film, and now he wouldn’t have to vex them by doing it. Two years later, he was dead, the documentary about Georgica he’d been working on for a quarter century still unfinished.

  Because Spy was such a success, I realized I might soon be offered jobs at other magazines and find myself on track to become an editor in chief somewhere by age thirty-five. I didn’t want to be an editor in chief somewhere by age thirty-five; I wasn’t yet ready, even in anticipation, to be another attendant lord. So I quit to travel and regroup.

  A few years later, in the early nineties, my literary agent called me to give me a pep talk, afterward referred to between us as “the contender speech.” Her point was that I was treading water with the array of pieces I was writing for Esquire and Vogue: “The reputation you have, among your friends and enemies, is that no one knows what you care about, d’you know what I mean? You have to decide if you’re going to be a contender, channeling your talent in a straitjacket, or just do your pieces one by one on the sidelines. I keep wanting to bump you up to the A level, but honest to God, Tad, if you don’t want to be focused, if not committing to any one thing makes you happy, then I’d be the last person in the world to not keep a happy client.” Enemies? But she was right. I did want to dumbfound the world with my abilities yet leave no trace. I’d thought of myself as the consummate freelancer, beholden to no one, but ambition expressed in the serial execution of others’ ideas is the hallmark of a corporate man.

  AFTER CHARLES Friend’s first wife remarried and became Joan Turnure, she moved with her children and her husband and his children to Caracas. When Joan and Charles’s son, by then known as Juan, was in first grade there, he began throwing up during roll call. The school psychologist suggested he might be expressing his desire to be part of the same family as his stepsiblings. “So we changed his name from Friend to Turnure, but not legally,” Joan says, “and I wrote to Charles to explain the circumstances, that he was getting ill in class. But Charles was very bitter about it. At Lili’s wedding he told me, ‘He’s not my son — he changed his name.’ ”

  “I remember mostly negatives,” says Juan, who a few years ago legally changed his name to John Christopher Friend Turnure, completing his trek of identity. “When I was twenty, Charles visited me at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where I’d just had spinal fusion surgery for a crushed lumbar disk. I’m lying there on morphine in a room without air-conditioning, and he comes in and says, ‘I don’t know why you had this surgery — it’s a big mistake. I wouldn’t have done it.’ We had a whole blowup over it. Then, at Lili’s wedding, when I hadn’t seen him in years, he said, ‘Boy, you got fat!’ ”

  Juan observes that among the values he learned from his father’s side of the family, and has tried not to pass on to his daughters, are the following:

  --Kick your kids out of the nest early…. It’s good for them.

  --Drinking at a young age is acceptable.

  --You’re marrying a girl from where? But your backgrounds are so different (read: not our class, dear).

  --You should uphold the family name, despite all the deadbeats who preceded you.

  --Family conflict should be avoided, not confronted.

  --When the going gets tough in a marriage, the Wasps get out.

  In the early 1970s, Charles met Karin Kretschmer, a generous, smiling German who worked in advertising in Milan and had come to see him about a job; he drew her in by talking enthusiastically about his travels to Yemen and Iran, and by admitting — his brow drolly furrowed — that he was lonely. When he introduced her to us later, she proved candid and inquisitive, curious about our interests in a way that seemed to puzzle Charles (They’re just my brother’s children…. ). Karin teased him, calling him Carletto and refusing to countenance his sulks, and he began to open up at last. But only after Karin stopped seeing him, early on, when she learned that he was not yet divorced from Suzanne, as he’d let her believe. It was Grandpa Ted who reunited them, by dying. Charles called Karin in tears to say that he was leaving for the funeral in Pittsburgh the following day, and asking her to meet with him and to forgive him. When they married, he neglected to tell his children; Daisy, seeing the photos in Charles’s Milan apartment, was shocked not to have been invited.

  At fifty-five, Charles discovered that he had cancer of the thymus, news he would relay offhandedly: “It’s such a bore.” When he returned to America after this blow, he and Karin settled in Sarasota — Charles having dismissed her suggestion of Delray Beach as “Too close to Mother” — where he began to employ a pain-reduction technique called Dynamic Meditation. After “constructing” an imaginary room inside himself where he could invite people in to advise him, he invited in Ronald Reagan. Always a conservative Republican, he now began listening to Rush Limbaugh, which can’t have helped much.

  After decades of infrequent contact, my father sent Charles a $12,000 check for six months’ worth of cancer treatments with Taxol, together with an apology for having borrowed his comic books a half century earlier. “My additional and deeper purpose,” Day later wrote, “was to enjoin correspondence on our brotherhood and its meaning — a difficult project, given the intense aversion of the Friend family compound to talk realistically of human emotions and relationships.” He added that Charles “thanked me warmly for the gift … and returned the check, saying I should use it as a down payment toward the renovation of our garage workshop into my study.” My father believed that the gift, although returned, had achieved its purpose, but Karin suggests that it left Charles nonplussed.

  He could be hard to read. When Karin broached the topic of cancer or mortality, he would say, “There’s nothing to talk about.” Nothing to report. When Karin and Charles went to Jess’s for the holidays, Karin got mad at them both: “I said, ‘Do we have to talk about the stock market on Christmas Day?’ ” My father flew to Sarasota in late February of 1994, when Ch
arles was in extremis, and found his brother still very much in character. When the nurse said, “You just lay there quietly,” he replied, “No, I’ll just lie here.” When she looked at him, he said, “I’m still the house grammatician.” (My father later told the nurse, “That’s okay; the word is ‘grammarian.’ ”) Day sat by his brother’s bed and read him the Twenty-third Psalm from a Bible Mom had sent him at Christmas; he had been asking for a Bible, but everyone else had resisted such a fateful gift. When Charles said that the Twenty-third was the only psalm worth reading, Day told the story of declaiming the First Psalm in the woods after he’d failed his orals. “Did you tame Bambi?” Charles inquired bitingly.

  The final night, Karin woke my father to listen to Charles’s increasingly ragged breathing. He took his brother’s pulse and whispered, “It’s over 130!” and Karin whispered, “It’s been high ever since his thymectomy” — the removal of his thymus gland two years earlier. Day had the disturbing sense that Charles had spent the last years of his life sprinting. As the dying man’s breathing slowed to three gasps a minute, Day and Karin began to sob. Finally, at 7:30 a.m., a becoming flush spread across Charles’s face.

  My father wrote up an obituary, listing, at his brother’s insistence, Lili and Daisy as his only children. Juan was not only stricken from the record, but advised not to come to the funeral. Nonetheless, he wrote a generous condolence letter to Grandma Jess, who was in the hospital recovering from her fourth heart attack when Day called to tell her that her younger son was dead.