by Anne Bernays
We had met in the fall of 1953, saw each other almost exclusively during the winter, became engaged in the spring, and married in July; in September we went to Italy and England on our honeymoon. It had all happened much faster than most of the marriages we knew of among our friends. Early on, maybe after our third or fourth date, I had invited Annie to dinner at my apartment on Thirty-seventh Street. I wanted the evening to be just right. Georgia Edwards, the West Indian woman who had brought me up from infancy, agreed to cook the dinner, shrimp creole with rice. The day before I bought six place settings of white Arzberg chinaware along with proper wineglasses and linen napkins. The other guests—Fielder Cook, a television director, and his actress wife, Sally; an art historian, Sam Hunter; and his fiancée, Edys Merrill, a painter—supplied a plausible setting for an evening that might otherwise look like a prelude to attempted seduction. (I had in mind, as suggesting a precedent to be avoided, a cartoon that showed a leering host greeting his date at the door of his apartment: “We’re the party!”) A few nights later Annie came over alone and, as we talked, picked up from the coffee table a little bronze horse figure, supposedly Etruscan, that I had bought a few years earlier from an antiquarian in Rome. She asked me for some metal polish and a cloth, applied herself to the horse and, as I looked on, went about removing perhaps two thousand years of verdigris. What she was doing was so intimate, spontaneous, and innocently abstracted that I couldn’t say “Stop!” I even felt a sort of somber delight as I ran my fingers over my denuded horse.
Annie still lived with her parents. In February we went away for a ski weekend in New Hampshire. Caught in a snowstorm on the way, we spent our first night as a couple in a Manchester commercial hotel after decorously registering for separate rooms. Soon after, we were together almost every evening and often on our lunch hours. On Sunday mornings she would come over with a bag of croissants from a French bakery around the corner from her parents’ house. One evening she announced that her analyst had told her it was all right for her to think of getting married. It had all happened so naturally.
We were caught up with each other, with overcoming our shyness, discovering our capacity for play and humor, and with being young, healthy, and at home in the city. We went to the New York City Ballet, to Ralph Kirkpatrick’s harpsichord recitals at Town Hall, to the movies (rarely to “films”) as often as we could—Shane, From Here to Eternity, Rear Window, On the Waterfront, Stalag 17, Roman Holiday. We didn’t have much time for reading. We didn’t think a great deal about the future or about careers (we both had editorial jobs in publishing), never discussed money or (except jokingly) the old status tussle between German Jews (her people) and Russian Jews (mine). Even after we decided to marry we gave no conscious thought at all to the prospect of children. Children were so remote from my own experience—I had never touched or held an infant much less ministered to one—that for me they weren’t even conceivable.
Annie had a core of sweetness, shrewdness, and merriment. She was my idea of the fully realized 1950s Girl of the City (and of no other): immensely attractive, a proto-feminist, self-assured, easily amused, wary of anything pretentious, street-smart, privileged without ostentation or snobbery, comfortable with luxury but unspoiled by it, and professional minded: she had been Barnard campus correspondent for the New York Times and was now managing editor of discovery, a quarterly of new writing published by Pocket Books. I thought she was near perfect except for her initial reluctance (quickly eroded) to joke about “serious” things; her objection (also transitory) to “bad” language; and her looking askance at my drinking martinis before dinner (her previous boyfriend, a writer for television, had been a lush). My record of promiscuity, if she was at all aware of it, didn’t seem to bother her.
Of more concern to her, although briefly, were my male friends, many of them homosexual or sexually indeterminate, relatively dissolute, or, as was the case with my college friend Bernard Winebaum, all of the foregoing in addition to being preoccupied with giving and going to parties. She and Bernie adored each other at first sight. She minded that I couldn’t dance, was a Yankee fan, did not admire Adlai Stevenson (I thought he was a snob and a born loser), and was mostly silent instead of casually communicative when we looked at pictures in museums and galleries. We had made up our minds to marry with little recognition of the demands of living with another person: patience, humor, and flexibility tempered by resignation and inertia. Maybe it was not love alone that defied normal prudence and caution but the psychic climate we lived in. Our outlook had been formed by a collision of forces: the postwar, almost utopian exuberance that made all good things appear possible, and the nuclear arms race, pursued to the brink, that transformed the city’s subways and basements into one big fallout shelter. We seized the day, hoped for the best, and took short views.
Annie’s parents had no patience with short views: for them a life not planned ahead in at least five- or ten-year units was a life abandoned to chaos and irresponsibility. As a prospective son-in-law, when Annie first told them about me, her parents probably would have preferred a (high-caste) Hindu to a Russian Jew, Harvard apart, from the other side of Central Park. Their first response to a potential wrenching of their social order was plain disbelief. “You must be joking!” Annie’s mother told her. Over a few weeks their incredulity declined into wariness, cautious acceptance, and even a degree of warmth. But they were formidable and exacting, and I broke into a sweat whenever I entered the Gothic mahogany-paneled foyer of their double house on East Sixty-third Street. At dinner with them one night, placed with my back to an active fireplace, I could as well have been a planked shad ready to be deboned. Whether placing me close to a pile of burning logs, to roast there like a heretic, was mischief or accident I couldn’t tell.
Although polite, Edward and Doris Bernays voiced powerful opinions that combined moralism and hair-trigger disapproval with a fiercely practical view of how the world should work. According to Annie they had recently expunged from their guest list a lawyer who had got tipsy at one of their dinner parties as well as a doctor and a Newsweek editor suspected of carrying on an adulterous relationship. Edward and Doris exerted force in tandem, like a span of matched horses, and were used to being in command and equally unused to being challenged. Eventually I devised sly and oblique strategies for putting them off balance—by answering their questions with questions, for example, or dealing in deliberate non sequiturs. In Doris, but not her husband, I found a congenial element of irony. When apart from him she eased up on their collective rectitude and allowed herself cigarettes and more than one cocktail. She took Annie and me out to a festive lunch at Carlton House on Madison Avenue and congratulated me on winning the hand of “the last remaining virgin in New York City.” We all drank to that.
A.B., New Hampshire skiing weekend, winter 1954.
When Annie and I first met I knew nothing about her father, Edward L. Bernays, except his name, which I had often noticed in the credit line—“Courtesy of Edward L. Bernays”—whenever the New York Times Book Review ran a picture of Sigmund Freud holding a cigar. I learned right away that Edward was not simply the proprietor of rights to the official portrait that scowled down at patients from the walls of nearly every orthodox psychoanalyst’s office. He was also Freud’s double nephew, a genealogical knot that took a deep breath and slow-motion untying whenever it was explained to me: brother and sister from one Viennese family had married sister and brother of another, an arrangement that sounded unholy but was 100 percent kosher once you understood it. Sometimes mocked as “a professional nephew,” Edward was justifiably proprietary about his uncle: as a young man he had arranged for the first translations of Freud’s work to be published in America. He regarded Freudian theory as a historically important intellectual commodity that offered valuable insights into mass behavior, but he had no use at all for it in his own life and could barely tolerate the fact that he had permitted his daughter to see a psychoanalyst. He himself would as soon consult a gy
psy palm reader to find out which way the wind blew. His unconscious was nobody’s business, not even his own.
In Edward’s view, and that of his disciples, he was the Father of Public Relations, a profession I knew nothing about. When I did learn something about it from Edward it was a little like being told there was a secret government. Edward believed that the counsel on public relations (a job title he invented) acted as the guardian of capitalist democracy, a behind-the-scenes philosopher-king and wizard who, supported by opinion and policy experts, told governments, corporations, and societies in general what was good for them. Public relations introduced corporate giants to benevolent, enlightened, and endearing policies, thus maintaining their interests, and the public’s as well, in gainful equilibrium as they walked together along a two-way street of “information, persuasion, and adjustment.” Edward was a passionately sincere believer in the social value of public relations, possessed brilliance, flair, and imagination in practicing it, and was extravagantly rewarded for what he did. He insisted that nothing had value unless it was visible and publicly acknowledged. The title alone of one of his books, The Engineering of Consent, chilled me to the bone because it treated democratic society like a big child. He refused to consider himself Jewish in any binding or meaningful way, dismissing as “the higher hokum” all religion, however disorganized. We argued about these things, sometimes heatedly, and kept our juices at a healthy boil.
Because of Edward’s horror of clergy and of any taint of religious ritual Annie and I were married in the living room of 163 East Sixty-third Street by a New York State judge recruited for the task. My brother was my best man. A hundred people wilted in the late July heat and waited for the bar to open while the judge carried on, inexplicably and at exasperating length, about William Shakespeare. As arranged by Edward and Doris without consultation with either of the principals, this was a full fig wedding, from the policeman stationed on the street outside to the tailcoat that encased the bridegroom and the tossing of the bridal bouquet.
CHAPTER 10
Every week or so I left our discovery office and walked up three blocks to where our parent, Pocket Books, Inc., occupied the entire twenty-seventh floor of 630 Fifth Avenue, posh premises. I was there, in Bob Kotlowitz’s office one late fall day in 1953, when I noticed a young man standing in the doorway of Bob’s office, peering in at us. The man was wearing a Harris Tweed overcoat and a long green cashmere scarf he had wound once around his neck, leaving most of it hanging gracefully down his back. I was transfixed by the arrangement of scarf and body and wondered, for the briefest moment, whether this display said something I might not want to hear, for instance, that he liked boys better than girls, or that he was hopelessly in love with himself. I hardly bothered to look at the face above the scarf.
“It’s cousin Joe,” Bob said. “What are you doing here?”
This Joe said, “You haven’t heard?” and went on to explain that Pocket Books and Abrams were collaborating on a series of art books. Cousin Joe, it seemed, was its general editor.
Bob introduced us. “This is Justin Kaplan,” he said. “His friends and relatives call him Joe.” Justin—or Joe—said hello in a surprisingly light and gentle voice. I asked him how he was related to Bob. Bob answered for him: Bob’s wife, Billy, was a first cousin of Joe’s cousin Jerry’s wife, Eleanor. Did that make Bob and Joe cousins? I didn’t think so. This answer reminded me of the way my father insisted I was related to James Joyce: “Your mother’s brother’s first wife’s second husband was the son of James Joyce.” The beads were not on the same string, and yet if you were proud of any connection at all, you could, for the sake of the pride, pretend that they were. I had recently met Justin’s first cousin Leon; the two men looked so much alike, they could easily have been taken for brothers: both had assertive jaws and noses, dark hair, and emphatically intelligent expressions. The Kaplan genes were evidently powerful.
I stared at the scarf, amazed at its pulsating green-ness, its softness. Its owner seemed shy and not especially forthcoming, but there was something about him that adhered, like the smell of strong perfume on a woman who has left the room.
My current boyfriend, Paul, and I had, without consciously admitting it, come to a fork in the road of life from where he was about to take off one way and I another. The main problem was that I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t more attached to the bottle than he was to me. We endured a prolonged and painful severing, like pulling a Band-Aid off slowly so it won’t hurt so much, and of course it should be done in one swift yank, but we really loved each other and couldn’t bear the idea that we might never see each other again. As all this was going on I felt, buried in my brain, a fragment, a pun based on Mr. Kaplan’s name, that would not be dislodged: Just-in case—just in case I’m cast on the shore alone again.
It took me and Paul several months to pull the Band-Aid all the way off, and when it was done, a stinging raw spot was left underneath. Melancholy, I asked Bob if he could arrange a lunch date for him, me, and cousin Joe. I couldn’t figure out any other way of seeing him again without looking desperate and aggressive; a girl could wait until she turned into Miss Havisham.
The lunch date was swiftly accomplished. On the day and time agreed upon, Bob and I walked over to the Golden Horn, on the northern border of Rockefeller Center, where Joe was waiting inside the door. This was one of the first upscale Middle Eastern restaurants in New York, a cavernous room entirely fitted in white: white curtains, tablecloths, napkins. The waiters wore knee-length white aprons. It seemed as if the air was white with a kind of dry mist. There were only a few other customers in the place, one a man by himself, reading a book. We had plenty to talk about. A week or so earlier two young men, Dennis Wepman and Harlow Fraden, had dispatched Fraden’s parents by forcing them to drink an arsenic-laced daiquiri. The two boys had taken what money there was lying around, booked a room in the Essex House, and holed up there until serious bickering began and Wepman tried to stave in Fraden’s head with a telephone he’d ripped from the wall. Wepman had worked briefly in Pocket Books’ mail room and Bob knew him—Bob had actually talked to a cold-blooded murderer. Their story kept the three of us afloat through my sudden and Joe’s seemingly permanent reticence.
Halfway through the meal, the ambient sense of drama abruptly escalated when a waiter, serving the book-reading diner, upturned a large platter of gummy white soup into the man’s lap. It was like a silent movie: Man rises to his feet, looks down in disbelief as the stuff dribbles over his front while waiter tries to brush soup from man’s pants with napkin. Man angrily pushes waiter’s arm away. Headwaiter rushes over, points to kitchen door, banishing waiter. Soup victim stalks out of restaurant without paying. It seemed as if the episode had been performed solely for the three of us, although its message was unclear.
There was no way to top this incident; we finished our exotic meal, somewhat unnerved but sated, not so much on the food—baba ghanoush, salad with chopped mint, spiced lamb—as on the tableau of the overturned soup plate.
“What kind of soup was that?” I said to Bob as we walked back to our office. “It looked like library paste.”
“It must have been tapioca soup,” he said. “Good thing it was cold.”
“Do you think he’s going to call me?”
“Who, Joe? You must be kidding,” he said. “Cousin Joe is smitten.”
“What makes you think so?” I said.
“Enough,” Bob said. “Just wait and see.”
Cousin Joe called me less than a week after the Soup Lunch and asked me to meet him the following day. I usually ate lunch with one of my friends, Francine or Marian, or alone at a hamburger place or, if he was free, with my boss, Vance Bourjaily, at a cafeteria on Forty-seventh Street west of Fifth that Vance called the Tel Aviv Café for its almost exclusively Hasidic clientele. Once a week or so, Bob Kotlowitz and I walked around the corner to the American Bar and Grill on Sixth Avenue, where I had convinced our favorite waitress that Bob
was Glenn Ford, the movie star, whom he eerily resembled. But a lunch date with a prospective boyfriend put things at a different depth. It meant dressing up. It meant being careful of what you said and what you revealed about yourself. Joe asked me to meet him at Maison A. deWinter, a French place, on the southern border of Rockefeller Center, our hub. The restaurant was on the second floor, in what had once been the front parlor of a milk-chocolate-colored brownstone house, very subdued. I was nervous; cousin Joe was perspiring and ashen. He focused on the menu. “The calf’s brains are very good here; they’re cooked in black butter and served with capers,” Joe said. “Would you like to try them?”
Unaware until that moment that I was weighing him in as a possible mate, I decided right then that I could never marry a man who ate brains for lunch—or, as far as that went, for any other meal.
“I think I’ll have the salade niçoise,” I said.
Like a car with transmission problems, we had trouble keeping a conversation moving forward. Question, followed by answer, followed by silence. I did manage to learn that Joe’s mother had died when he was six, his father when he was thirteen, both of cancer, and that he had been raised by his aunt Frances, his older brother, Howard, and Georgia Edwards, a woman from St. Kitts who had come to work for the family Kaplan when Joe was an infant and was still working for Howard.