Back Then

by Anne Bernays

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part III

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part IV

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part V

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Authors

  Also by Anne Bernays

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This book is for our grandchildren—

  David

  Benjamin

  Tobias

  Alexander

  Samuel

  Rachel

  —and our friend George Cronemiller

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We thank Larry Tye, Doris B. Held, Sterling Lord, Shelly Perron, Jennifer Pooley, and Claire Wachtel, our inspiring and merciless editor.

  INTRODUCTION

  We were lucky. We met, began our careers and adult lives, and opened our eyes to the world of possibilities in New York, in the 1950s, when the pent-up energies of the Depression years and World War II were at flood tide. You could see this in the rush of crowds, in big fish-finned cars on the streets and in showrooms, in store windows crammed with things that had been scarce for years—high-fashion shoes, kitchen and laundry appliances, generously cut dresses and suits, Scotch whiskey, prime cuts of beef, caviar, imported cheeses, sugar-saturated cakes—and now in the first affordable, invariably temperamental television sets. (To own one, too large to move or disguise, was something of a guilty secret, a cultural sellout according to our sniffier friends.) We discovered the luxury of the inessential—two-tone refrigerators, electric can openers, the conversation pit.

  Postwar meant abundance, rapid change, physical and social mobility, a farewell to the lingering effects of the years 1941 to 1945: austerity, scarcities, postponements for “the duration.” It also meant urban sprawl, intimations of conflict with a new enemy, the Soviet Union, fallout shelters marked by black and yellow signs, organic anxiety. “Iron Curtain,” “cold war,” “neutron bomb,” and “loyalty oath” entered our vocabulary (along with “junk mail” and “Bermuda shorts”). Prewar, meanwhile, had begun to imply a backward glancing recognition of what had been lost: in buildings and material objects—solidity, amplitude, workmanship, humane scale; in mind-set—stability, restraint, generosity, a feeling of community and social connectedness fostered by the presence of a common enemy. The moral certainty driving “the good war” that had just been fought and won gave way not only to guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also to dread that the Bomb might be used again, this time against us. During this period of nominal peace we built fallout shelters, conducted a “police action” in Korea to contain communism, found Julius and Ethel Rosenberg guilty of espionage and sent them to the electric chair. Meanwhile Edward Steichen’s monumental photography show (and the book derived from it), The Family of Man, depicting the daily lives of people all over the world, gave hundreds of thousands of Americans an almost sacramental experience of universal oneness. Tranquilizers, developed in France as a treatment for violent psychotics, became the medication of choice for what W. H. Auden named the Age of Anxiety.

  Journalists had labeled us—men and women born between 1925 and 1935—“the silent generation,” because we didn’t make a lot of noise, accepted things as they were, however skewed, were too busy having fun and (in our case) learning what New York had to offer. We had a few insurgent heroes: James Dean, Elvis Presley, Fidel Castro. Some intrepid unmarried couples lived together, but most middle-class young people remained under their parents’ roof until the wedding night. Girls drank and smoked in public without hesitation, not realizing their mothers would have been shamed for doing the same. Margaret Sanger’s birth-control clinics still refused to fit unmarried women with diaphragms, but there were doctors who would. In the movies, according to an industry moral code adopted in 1934, married couples retired chastely to twin beds. When they embraced they kept one foot on the floor. In real life sex—straight and otherwise—was all around us, just beneath the surface, germinating.

  A city that Henry James remembered from his boyhood as a dusky little village was now on its way to being the cultural and economic capital of the twentieth century. Like the famed Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, Frances Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart at 41 West Forty-seventh Street—its hanging cast-iron sign read WISE MEN FISH HERE—was headquarters for an American literary avant-garde alert to both European modernism and native materials. For us, one of the defining images of the era to come is a 1948 group photograph of writers compressed in varying degrees of discomfort in the bookstore’s back room: Auden perches on a ladder and towers over Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz crouches in the foreground, Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams huddle in the rear, the Sitwells—Edith and Osbert—are enthroned like royalty. A postwar generation of bold and original writers came into their own: Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Carson McCullers, J. D. Salinger, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac. Under an imported genius, the choreographer George Balanchine, American ballet produced a classic repertory along with goddesses of Mozartian radiance and grace like the dancer Tanaquil LeClerq. A distinctively New York school of painting was already a force and influence nationally and abroad. The Museum of Modern Art championed the New and dictated taste in painting, sculpture, and design. Sometimes it took its proselytizing mission too seriously, canonized coffeepots, can openers, and martini shakers, and exhibited automobiles on oil-stained white marble slabs as “pieces of hollow rolling sculpture.” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) inaugurated a decade and a half of exuberant musical comedies like My Fair Lady (1956). There was nothing tentative or sparing about the “big” movies of the 1950s—Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The African Queen (1951), at the beginning of the decade, Giant (1956) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) near midpoint.

  Still relatively restrained in style, and with as yet only a subdominant glitter, chic, and Babylonian arrogance, New York was hospitable to the young. Subway tokens were ten cents. Newcomers in entry-level jobs, like us in their twenties, could find affordable places to live in the Village, Chelsea, along Third Avenue in the shadow and clatter of the El, on the Upper West Side, and, before it became the East Village, on the Lower East Side. There, in 1950 and 1951 one of us ( J.K.) lived in a five-room walk-up in a dumbbell tenement on Pitt Street, with the bathtub in the kitchen, and paid twenty-nine dollars a month for it. At night rats scratched and squeaked inside the walls.

  Most of us smoked cigarettes, drank blended whiskey, gin (especially in martinis), and jug wine. Vodka was something Russian and Polish we had only heard about. Occasionally we went to eat at pricey smorgasbord places—Stockholm, the Three Crowns—and piled our plates at assembly-line tables loaded with pickled and smoked fish, iced shrimp, cold cuts, meatballs, and unfamiliar cheeses. The city abounded in sociable cafeterias, aromatic delicatessens, hot dog carts, drugstore and Woolworth counters serving up grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna on white, cherry Cokes, and milk shakes. The standard, minimally worded restaurant menu offered a choice of tomato juice or shrimp cocktail, daily specials like half a spring chicken and Salisbury steak, and apple pie either à la mode or topped by a wedge of orange cheese. Automats dispensed coffee and milk from nickel-plated spouts in the shape of a lion’s head, a
nd sandwiches, baked beans, and pies from little glass cells; we favored Nedick’s for hot dogs and a pulpy, vaguely orange-flavored drink; Chock full o’ Nuts, begun as a nut shop near Macy’s, had become a chain of lunch counters, efficiency engineered down to barely tolerable spaces between stools and calibrated dollops of mustard in tiny paper cups.

  The owner of Chock full o’ Nuts, a white man named William Black, advertised in the tabloids for “light colored counter help,” an example of nth-degree job discrimination. The separation of whites and blacks was an embedded fact of American life, “civil rights” an unfamiliar phrase, Harlem another world. In 1956 the city’s nearly eight million population was 83 percent white, only 11 percent black. Except downtown in the Village and in other artistic and intellectual enclaves, white people and black people did not mingle. We were accustomed to seeing only white faces as patrons in theaters, restaurants, hotels, and sports arenas. It was only in 1947, when Jackie Robinson, wearing a Brooklyn Dodger uniform, trotted out to second base at Ebbets Field, that the color line in major league baseball was finally breached.

  We—the authors of this book—were born and brought up in New York, on opposite sides of Manhattan Island separated by the Everyman’s land of Central Park. As much as your address, your telephone exchange was a caste mark: classy names like Butter-field, Regent, and Rhinelander for the Upper East Side, plainer ones for the Upper West Side—Riverside, Monument, Academy. The West Side was exuberant in the architecture and names of its monumental apartment houses—Eldorado, San Remo, Beresford, Majestic, Dakota, Ansonia, Henrik Hudson, Century, Hotel des Artistes, White House. The East Side tended to stick to numbers and to stretches of uninflected and somber blocks of residential masonry. What the Upper East Side lacked in street life along the cheerless canyons of Park Avenue it made up for in elegance, discretion, and exclusiveness. Madison Avenue was New York’s Rue de Rivoli Saint-Honoré; upper Broadway, a marketplace promenade in Warsaw or Vilna, an upscale Hester Street with plate-glass display windows instead of pushcarts.

  Old New York society, the subject of Edith Wharton’s novels, had lost almost all of its clout and coherence during the leveling years of two world wars and disappeared into its clubs, mansions, and Newport cottages. What took over was café society—the Stork Club, the debutante Brenda Frazier on the cover of Life magazine, movie stars, the celebrities Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons featured in their columns. Celebrity began to self-generate—you were known for being known. Style, glitz, and status symbols—handbags from Gucci or Vuitton, a shirt with the Lacoste alligator, shoes from Ferragamo, neckties from Countess Mara—began their gradual and irreversible ascendancy over substance. Still, we could see that life in New York was far more fluid than ever before, and that if you were white and had talent and energy you could start your climb.

  A.B., late 1950s.

  During the 1950s we saw the city as if finding something unmatchable anywhere in the world. We took visitors from the South and Midwest to the Fulton Fish market, the meat, cheese, and flower districts, Eighth Street, the Bowery, the South Bronx’s Hunts Point Market; Tottenville and the deserted outer beaches of Staten Island; Brooklyn Heights with its dazzling view of Manhattan and mingled odors of waterfront rot and roasting coffee beans; Times Square, advertising itself as “Crossroads of the World,” offering, in addition to first-run theaters like the Paramount and Roxy, cheap hotels, and Hubert’s Flea Circus and Museum of Freaks.

  Together—our first experiment in collaboration—we wrote an article (for Barnard Alumnae Magazine) about walks in New York. The piece’s breathless tone conveyed our excitement as well as too much immersion in fashion magazine prose. Virgil-like, we guided our readers to Wall Street, silent and ghost-ridden on Sundays; the Baghdad of the Lower East Side with its compaction of bridal shops, tombstone makers, underwear peddlers, and Katz’s delicatessen (order “corned beef on club”); the “pastoral quiet” of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. “For the West Bronx Walk,” we wrote, “take the 8th Avenue subway marked ‘Grand Concourse’ but follow your whim to wander west toward Hunter College, south along Creston and Morris Avenues. Here you are in suburbia: the tiny lawn, the well-tended hedge, the detached but neighborly villa. A little below Kingsbridge Road the city signs begin to thicken: delicatessens, bakeries, dressmakers, caterers. As you quicken toward Fordham Road, you’re on your way to a supreme glory: Alexander’s department store. There you will find more people per square foot finding better bargains per stretchable dollar than anywhere else on earth. It’s likely that, overburdened with your own buys, you may have to call it a day.”

  These wonders were new to us, natives who were beginning to respond to the city like recent settlers. But we were proud of skills that set us apart from these newcomers. We knew how to fold and read the broadsheet New York Times or Herald Tribune while standing in a crowded subway car; we found our bearings immediately, on automatic pilot, when we came up the station steps. We knew how to cross streets—against the lights, cutting corners, in mid-block, on the run, facing down drivers, waiting behind El pillars—always counting on the rabbit reflexes, peripheral acuity, and acquired immunity to danger that those who survived had possessed for years. We stood “on line” for buses and the movies, not “in line,” and said “Sixth Avenue,” never “Avenue of the Americas.” We weren’t solicited by tour agents stationed along Fifth Avenue or horse carriage drivers by the Plaza. Maybe it was the way we walked—purposefully, hard-faced, looking straight ahead, and avoiding eye contact with strangers. If we carried cameras we hid them, so as not to be taken for out-of-towners. We could thread our way through crowds like the Artful Dodger.

  J.k., 1950.

  We were both children of privilege. We had gone to progressive schools in the city, then on to high schools grounded in a classical approach to education—a lot of memorizing and Shakespeare, an exhaustive application to history, literature, and the sciences. Both of us went away to college, majored in English, and, back in New York, found jobs in book publishing—a business (or profession) many young people with similar backgrounds and similar educational equipment hoped to enter. At night we headed downtown and to the Village to enter what, in the 1920s, would have been called “bohemia.” It was now inhabited by a new generation, turned on to grass and psychedelics, that called itself “hip” and “beat” and introduced “beatnik” into common speech. Both of us went into psychoanalysis.

  Here, then, are some personal, occasionally parallel or overlapping, narratives of life in a particular time and place: New York City between the mid- and late 1940s, when we came of age, and 1959, when, parents of two, we moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and followed new careers: novelist and biographer. In writing Back Then we wanted to let people and events speak for themselves, within the framework of the period, and without benefit (or distortion) of hindsight, regret, and reconsideration. You won’t, we hope, find us introducing a point of view that has been allowed to ripen and change in the intervening years. We’ve changed the names of a few of the people in our story.

  Our habits, manners, language, attitudes in the 1950s were so different from what they are now that in some respects we could almost as well be writing about the era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Gibson Girl. The events of September 11, 2001, widened the chasm between back then and right now. Still, we’ve tried to convey some of the density and texture of private, social, and working life in the 1950s as the two of us, not altogether untypically, experienced it.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Where we lived in Manhattan had a lot to do with how my father, the person who made the hefty decisions in our family, chose to be perceived by the world beyond his front door. And this, in turn, had a lot to do with his profound and nervous reluctance to be identified as a Jew. His reluctance was the chain on which many of the beads of daily life chez Bernays were strung. Being Jewish was something we almost never talked about, just as we avoided the contagion of cancer, poor people, and sex
. Naturally then, cancer, poor people, and sex took a tenacious hold on my imagination, hung there like a cat halfway up a tree. Oma Hattie, my mother’s mother, was one notch less inhibited than my parents about the subject of Jewishness; whenever she wanted to indicate that someone was Jewish she said, sotto voce, “M-O-T”—Member of the Tribe. It made my father wince whenever she said it. If I read his thoughts correctly, they were saying, “Why do I have to hear this? What does it have to do with me?” Oma Hattie was just as circumspect about malignancy—she wouldn’t say the whole word but whispered its initial: “My friend Bessie was just operated on for C, poor thing.” People with C almost invariably died of it.

  Each era earns its particular codes and proscriptions, some more demanding and painful than others, depending on the temperament of the times and the moral force of what has preceded it. As I grew up the language I spoke was heavily encoded, a condition due in part to my hothouse upbringing and in part to the period itself. Because my parents were born before the turn of the century (my father in 1891 and my mother in 1892), many of their regulations hung in suspension around us like the smell of something nasty. Not once did I hear my father or my mother say anything more freighted than damn and hell—and then only when, like Rhett Butler, they found themselves pushed to the limit.

  I found it a constant challenge to decipher what someone really meant when they used this coded language, and since I wanted to believe what I heard, I wasn’t all that adept at instant understanding. It took me a long time, for example, to understand that “Will you go out to dinner with me?” more often meant “I want to fuck you” than it did “Let’s share a meal.” When I accepted a dinner invitation I didn’t think I owed the man who had extended it any favors; often, he did. “Good friend” or “Great and good friend,” a staple of Time magazine euphemism, meant lover or mistress. A “long illness” might have been lengthy but it was also specific: it meant cancer. “Died suddenly” meant a suicide and “he was a confirmed bachelor,” homosexuality. “New Yorker” was the equivalent of Jew. When a woman said, “I have to go wash my hands,” you knew she was headed for “the little girls’ room,” another euphemism. As for a girl’s periods, they were known by many names: “the curse,” “the monthlies,” “falling off the roof,” and, inexplicably, “grandma’s come to visit.” Your periods put you in a condition about which boys and men pretended to know nothing. The term “social disease” was code for syphilis or gonorrhea; they were both potential killers and, before antibiotics, often were. On the other hand, it didn’t strike us as inconsistent that words like retarded, crippled, foreigner, spinster, and old lady were never disguised but were allowed to emerge starkly, like naked children at a picnic.