I must say that although I was anything but calm when the plane was taxiing down the runway prior to takeoff, once we were in the air I relaxed. The decision to board the plane was far scarier than the trip itself. And I’ve never been afraid to fly since. I’ve not been afraid of most things that are out of my control.
In 1964, my family finally left New York behind and officially made the move to Los Angeles.
Over the next few years, all of our lives were reshaped and redefined, as was the family unit.
My dad became an even more successful TV guy, writing and producing and ultimately directing two-hour television movies, writing the occasional feature film, and even writing two more plays, both of which toured the summer stock theaters, never quite making it to Broadway. He wanted to be Arthur Miller, would have accepted being William Goldman when it became clear he wasn’t writing Death of a Salesman, and wound up being Steven Gethers, which was pretty damn good but also frustrating. His compromises—some necessary, some of his own choosing—tortured him more than a little bit. Providing for his family was important to him; it was a priority. And his lifestyle was important to him. He loved entertaining people and he loved going to restaurants and getting his regular table and having the owners or maître d’s or waiters welcome him with open arms. He also started drinking and learning about good wine, so food and drink, in a pleasantly insidious way, became an even bigger part of our daily lives.
Because my dad loved to entertain, my mom became a better cook and better entertainer. They had people over for dinner on a regular basis, and I spent a lot of time with adults, my parents’ friends, during my early teenage years, probably more time than I spent with kids my own age. I liked the grown-ups’ stories better, I found them more interesting, and some of them took me to baseball and football games, which was pretty much like taking me to heaven.
The producer of The Farmer’s Daughter, one of the TV shows my dad worked on, was a wonderful man named Peter Kortner. Kortner, as my dad and I called him, became a close friend of my parents as well as mine. In my preteen years until I was around fifteen, he was my sports buddy. I went to Dodgers games with him and my dad, but sometimes Kortner would take just me. We were both UCLA nuts so I got to accompany him to some great UCLA football games at the Coliseum. Even though he was in his forties and I was twelve, we became true pals. He talked to me as if I was an adult, which made me feel as if I was an adult. I also envied him because he always seemed to be on a date with one beautiful actress after another. He was often out and about with Inger Stevens, whom I lusted after in a major way, once I began to understand what lusting was.
My brother left for the University of Denver the year we moved to L.A., so for four years he was a bit separate and, except for summer vacations, didn’t really participate in our Los Angeles life. He didn’t become close friends with many of the grown-ups I got to know as a child. He didn’t come to the dinner parties for which my mom cooked (not that I was too often actually at the dinner table; I was usually upstairs doing my homework and wearing my very attractive night brace, which was basically like having a ham radio set attached to your teeth and surrounding your head. But I would meander through the party and participate in conversations whenever it was appropriate and I felt welcome).
My mom, dad, and I were changing as a threesome while Eric began experiencing life on a separate plane. As a result, he and my father began a constant tug-of-war, a battle that dominated much of our family life. I was usually standing off to the side watching, but my mom was inevitably caught in the middle. I don’t know on which side her true sympathies lay, but in those years she was not one to break with wifely tradition. She showed quiet support for her children and absolute love with no strings attached, but there was never any question that her relationship with her children was secondary to her relationship with her husband.
My mom told me many years later that she always felt guilty about her motherly role with Eric. Before he was born, she said that she and my dad made a pact: they would love their children but they would not let their kids come between their own relationship. She, to this day, feels as if a wall was put up that somehow kept Eric separate from their world of two. By the time I popped into the world, I guess they weren’t as concerned about preserving their own love match. Or else I didn’t care all that much about being in a secondary position.
Families are delicate things. Who’s to say why or how we end up the way we do or become who we are? Parents make mistakes. A child’s job is to overcome those mistakes. We can blame our parents—and our own past—for only so long before it becomes an excuse and a crutch. That’s my position on family dynamics and I’m sticking to it. Sometimes you just have to assume responsibility for your own life and grow up.
My mother’s dynamic with the siblings she left behind changed quite a bit during this period. Being in L.A. gave her some perspective on them and she began to see them for what they were, the good, the bad, and, in some cases, the ugly.
My mother’s sister, Belle, the sibling who was closest to my mom, came to visit regularly and always stayed with us. When I was eleven or twelve, Belle was scary. She was a no-nonsense and zero-tolerance person when it came to behavior she disapproved of, and she was certain she was right when it came to just about everything. By the time I grew to adulthood, I came to realize what a remarkable person she really was—devastatingly funny, deeply kind, and rather sad. She was born at exactly the wrong time in the family chronology: because she was a Depression Baby, she was the one sister who didn’t get to go to summer camp and who couldn’t go to college because it wasn’t affordable. When Belle was around eighty, she had dinner with me and a bunch of my friends (all of whom adored my aunt). We were telling college stories and someone asked Belle where she went to school. Without missing a beat, she said, “NYU.” Later that night, after dinner, she came up to me and told me that she’d lied, that she not only hadn’t gone to NYU, she hadn’t gone to college at all. I asked her why she would bother to lie to my schmucky friends and she said, “Your friends are accomplished and smart and I’ve always been ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have a good education.” I told her that she was smarter than almost everyone I knew and that was what counted. But it didn’t count with her. She asked me not to reveal her secret, which I haven’t, until now. And I’m only doing so because I find it so telling and touching.
Belle was the one regular family visitor during that period in L.A. She came out two or three times a year and while she was there she taught me how to play poker, honeymoon bridge, and gin rummy (she also took my money on a regular basis; she didn’t care that I wasn’t even a teenager yet). She was a different person when she was in L.A. She shed the hassled Ratner’s persona, stopped feeling like the family martyr, and just enjoyed herself.
When she was young, Belle was tough: tough on her husband, tough on her kids, tough on the world, but she is one of the few people I’ve ever met who got better as she got older. She softened a bit—or let herself reveal that softer side, which was probably always there under the protective layers of cynicism and sarcasm—and opened herself up more to the world around her. For my fortieth birthday, I went down to New Orleans with about twelve people to eat, drink, and be merry. That began a tradition that lasted for over a decade. It became known as the Spring Trip and it was the same group of pals, more or less, who went to some interesting spot every April. We did Annapolis and the eastern shore of Maryland; Washington, D.C.; the Napa Valley wine country; a farm in eastern Pennsylvania; Charlottesville, Virginia; Providence, Rhode Island; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Key West; and Havana. Belle and my mom were invited to that first weekend in New Orleans because it was specifically to celebrate my birthday, but they wound up coming to almost all the others. My friends all knew my mom. As I had befriended my parents’ friends when I was young, my mom and dad were pals with my pals when I got older. But Belle was a revelation and the hit of the weekend: she refused to drink an ac
tual Hurricane, the official get-shitfaced drink of NOLA, but she convinced several bartenders to make her scotch hurricanes—scotch was her drink of choice—and she proceeded to guzzle everyone under the table. She also made one of the greatest toasts ever. After three days of serious eating and imbibing—we went to Emeril Lagasse’s first restaurant, not long after it had opened (I can still taste the salmon cheesecake—a savory, not a sweet); Brigtsen’s (best chocolate pecan pie anywhere, ever!); the Acme Oyster House and its main rival, Felix’s (nothing complicated here: raw oysters by the dozens and beer); Café du Monde for beignets and coffee with chicory; and lots of dives for po’boys and fried shrimp and oysters—we were at our final dinner of the weekend. A large white napkin was passed around, on which everyone was supposed to write a toast. Some were funny, some artistic, some sarcastic, some touching. All were good; Belle’s was by far the best. She wrote: “Happy to be here. At my age, happy to be anywhere.” The phrase immediately went into the group’s lexicon. We even had buttons made with Belle’s picture on them, to commemorate her wisdom on her eightieth birthday.
Belle’s eightieth birthday button
Belle had a soul, which none of my mother’s other siblings did. She was protective of my mother, always thought of Judy as her baby sister, worried somehow that she was frail and delicate. But Belle was also the only one who was respectful of my mom. She understood that my mother had made a conscious break from the family, something I think Belle would have also liked to have done but never could, and she respected my mother’s strength. She also admired my father’s strength; she understood that he wanted my mom to attain her full potential, even if that meant he had to buck my mom’s family and Belle herself.
Belle didn’t have an ounce of bullshit in her. She didn’t allow it in others and she didn’t partake herself. Her honesty and sense of humor won over a lot of people. But so did her compassion and her unselfishness (she was not a saint, don’t get me wrong; she was selfish in many ways, especially when it came to her son and daughter—she held on to them with a firm grasp—but she was selfless when it came to my mom).
In Los Angeles, in the mid-’90s, my mother got breast cancer. It was her third dangerous cancer (I skipped over the thyroid cancer: for my mom, that was just an ordinary procedure, which she got over quickly, seemingly with a wave of her hand). Belle went out to stay with her during the operation and recuperation period. I couldn’t get to L.A. for those first few days—I was on a book tour but said I would come as soon as I could. Belle decided that Eric, who was living in Dallas, should come. She called him up, told him she thought he should be there for the operation, and, because he was having some financial difficulty, said that she would pay for his flights.
By the time I got to L.A. to see my mother, a week or so after the breast cancer operation, Eric had returned to Dallas. When I saw my mom she said that he had been an enormous help and she was thrilled that he’d come. I nodded at Belle, a silent “job well done” acknowledgment. My mom then said to us that she’d felt guilty that my brother had to spend money to come to L.A., so she’d given him a check to cover the expense of the flight there and back. I saw Belle turn red; I thought her head was about to burst into flames. I signaled her to keep quiet; then she and I quickly went downstairs. She immediately turned ballistic, enraged that my brother had “double dipped,” as she put it. I told her to forget it, that yes, it was kind of horrible, but it was also sad and understandable, and there was no sense upsetting my mother.
“What’s the point?” I asked.
“The point is it’s the truth,” she said.
My mother’s journey to becoming the ultimate realist, someone with few illusions and able to confront life exactly as it is, was in its infancy. At this point, she still, to a degree, preferred denial to the truth. I didn’t think she would fully absorb this news; it was a difficult thing to absorb. I argued with Belle. My side was: we knew what had happened and, going forward, Belle could deal with it accordingly if she wanted to but that nothing was to be gained by sharing this with my mom. Belle’s side was: people should always know the truth. I realized that Belle’s core belief, her brutal honesty, was why I’d been somewhat frightened of her as a child and why I’d become so close to her and adored her as an adult.
After half an hour or so, I thought she’d calmed down and that I’d convinced her to keep things between us. She went upstairs to check on my mother, came back down a few minutes later to join me at the small round table in my mom’s kitchen, and said, “I told her.”
I was annoyed, more than annoyed, angry, but also curious. “How did she react?”
“She defended him.”
“That’s what she does. And in a few weeks, she won’t remember what you told her. She’ll block it out.”
“That’s her choice,” Belle said. “My choice was to tell her the truth.”
From that point on, Belle and I grew even closer. She was great fun, with a sharp, biting sense of humor and an appealingly cynical view of the world, but there was also something that touched me about my mother’s sister. Her honesty was directed not only to others but also inward. She was smart enough to have wanted something more from life than what she wound up with. But she understood that she’d made choices and had to live with them. And that choices had been made for her, leaving certain things beyond her control. I think this is one of the things that connected her and my father—they were both very aware of their own compromises and what they considered to be failures. Belle also appreciated the fact that my mother had made very different choices than she had. Belle thought of herself as the strong one, yet she realized that many of my mom’s choices had come from an inner, invisible strength while some of Belle’s had been made out of fear. There was no jealousy on Belle’s part, none at all, only support. She reveled in my mother’s rise and my mother reveled in Belle’s ability to share and enjoy her and my dad’s new life. Everyone else in the family was suspicious of that new life. I think their suspicion came from the fact that my parents were happy. More than that, they were suspicious of happiness as a concept. Belle wasn’t happy—not with the life she’d chosen or the way her life had turned out—but she enjoyed coming upon happiness in others, as well as sharing it when she dipped in and out of my parents’ lives in L.A.
Belle understood food. In New York, she had a few restaurants she’d escape to where she was treated royally. Belle was a restaurant person; she knew what a difficult business it was and how hard everyone involved had to work. As a result, she tipped well, encouraged everyone, and didn’t make unreasonable demands. In return, she expected everyone to do his or her job as well as possible. Good service was not a bonus; it had to be the norm.
When her brother Hy and his sons ran Ratner’s into the ground, she never said a bad word about them. But deep down, she must have been devastated. Not only did they dismantle a legendary restaurant, they shattered a way of life that she cared for deeply.
Belle smoked constantly and loved to drink. When she’d make her twice- or thrice-a-year trip to L.A., every day around five or five thirty, she’d call up from the entryway to my dad, who was usually upstairs in his office, sitting at his snazzy electric typewriter working. Her raspy voice carried throughout the house: “It’s cocktail hour.” Within moments, Belle would have a glass of scotch in her hand. My dad’s drink of choice varied. He was definitely bourbon and rye rather than scotch. But he also liked Manhattans and stingers and old-fashioneds. With dinner he was a serious wine guy, mostly reds. My mother rarely drank hard liquor in those days—two sips and her legs were as rubbery as Reed Richards’s—so she usually stuck to white wine.
So, during this period in Los Angeles, my dad flourished professionally, my brother drifted in and out of the city, and my mother began to appreciate being three thousand miles away from her family and slowly was discovering her independent streak, with a tinge of guilt mixed in.
Me? I went through a fairly normal and exceedingly gawky early teenag
e period that turned into a reasonably gawky and dorky late teenage period. I developed what was to become a lifelong friendship with my aforementioned buddy Paul. My shnozz seemed to me to be the size of a 1955 Buick and unfortunately the only part of my body bigger than that was my Adam’s apple, at least the only part that was getting any use. I discovered girls, most of whom rejected me. Got solid grades in school, although was already beginning to resist the idea of anyone forcing me to learn anything I didn’t want to learn. Got my driver’s license. Discovered drugs (Hallelujah!) and went off to college, to the University of California at Berkeley, where I found more girls who rejected me, friends who would last a lifetime, lots of interesting classes and professors, and way more drugs. After two fun-packed years at Berkeley, I spent a year at University College at the University of London (serious scholars, brilliant tutors, total absorption in learning, plenty of drugs, and non-American girls who thought I was exotic and thus attractive). Leaving for London was a big step in my growing-up process: it was a big geographical separation from my family, a completely new environment where I knew few people and had no real concept of the world I was entering.
As adventurous as I felt—or as least as I was pretending to feel—my mom, under the guise of wanting a vacation, accompanied me to London. I insisted I didn’t need any help in adjusting or finding a place to live and then gratefully (if silently) allowed her to help me adjust and find a place to live. We went to good restaurants and, once I was settled, even spent a few days in the English countryside. In London, we went to Rules, where I had my first pheasant and my first Stilton soup and my first trifle, and to Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, where I had roast beef and my first-ever Yorkshire pudding. In the countryside, we had game pie and, one night, at a lovely country inn, I stayed up late into the night, shot a few games of snookers with an Irish priest, and sipped quite a lot of my first bottle of single malt scotch. My mom brought along Belle’s daughter Beth on this trip. Although she and Beth were very close, I think this was my mother’s way of showing me that she wasn’t really there to take care of me, she was there to have fun with her niece—and if she happened to make sure I was well fed and had a nice flat to stay in for the year, that was just the luck of the draw.
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