by Sid Luft
I was thrilled when we moved to Armour Villa next to the Leos and the other Catholic families. Although there were exceptions, in general they were warmer, not so elitist or intimidating.
Whenever I called for Johnny, Mrs. Leo would more often than not say, “He’s learning his catechism.” I finally got up enough nerve to ask Johnny just what catechism was. He answered, “Prayers.” Once, on a Wednesday night, I went with Johnny to the local church. I sat next to him in the third row, and Father McCann picked me to answer a question: “Why is Catholicism the one true church?” When he pointed to me, I thought, wrong kid. I froze and muttered something. Johnny looked real embarrassed. The father didn’t know who I was, just a new face that evening. I never expected to participate. When I finally spoke up, I said, “I don’t know.” He moved away. I was waiting for some kid to snicker and humiliate me, but it didn’t happen.
Norbert and Father McCann became friends. They’d have long conversations I wouldn’t understand. As threatened as I was during childhood by the WASP boys, I was totally at home on the hill in the Catholic community. These kids were my close friends.
Nevertheless, ignominy seemed to lie in wait for me in Bronxville—it never subsided. A boy in my fourth grade class, Tom Nasworthy, had a habit of calling me “a dirty Jew.” One day at recess when I could take it no longer I hit him. We rolled around in the playground’s mud until one of the teachers stopped us. He asked, “Do you really want to fight?”
I said, “Yeah, I do.”
So we removed ourselves to the cafeteria, blocked off some tables to simulate a ring. The teacher put boxing gloves on both of us. Tom was three inches taller then I, but he couldn’t see without his glasses and he was cross-eyed, so I was able to punch him all over the place.
Jack Dempsey was a hero of mine. One night we were gathered in the Leos’ living room for the heavyweight championship between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. I bet fifty cents on Dempsey, and lost. Tunney got up to win the fight on points. He didn’t actually knock Dempsey out, but Dempsey went to the wrong corner. Years later Dempsey and I were on the same plane from New York to Los Angeles, and we sat together. I was impressed by his enormous, smooth, ungnarled hands.
I had other idols. Tom Mix was one, along with the writer Jack London, aviator Doug Corrigan, and Lindbergh, of course. I went down to New York on my own when Tom Mix made a personal appearance. Parked in front of the theater, roped off by police guards, was Mix’s black Duesenberg convertible. It had wicker trim on the doors, with horns and other decorations. I reached out and touched it; I thought it was the most fabulous automobile in the world. Mix was a major star. He’d come out onstage with his lariat and horse, Tony. Later, when I moved to Hollywood, I discovered he was an egomaniac, insisting his initials, TM, had to be on everything in his house, including toilet seats.
Shortly after we moved into our new home in Armour Villa Park, Johnny insisted, “Come up to Kessler’s pond to skate.” I was still a bumpkin when it came to competitive sports. I wore my sister’s awful brown skates; instead of a blunt toe they had a steel plate. The boys already skating on the pond wore authentic hockey shoes. I looked like a fucking idiot, and I wasn’t prepared for the local jocks.
The Leo kids had skates, and hockey sticks that were properly taped, and genuine hockey gloves. I wore mittens. As I energetically made my way out on the ice, Don Miller greeted me with “No Jews on the ice.”
My response was to thwack Miller with my pathetic hockey stick, whereupon he went nuts. I was no match for Miller. He commenced to kick the shit out of me. I was spitting saliva from the struggle. He cut me up by skating over my leg and my back. My hands, face, and lips were bleeding. One eye was black. When the fight started there was about an eighth of an inch of water, and as the sun began to set I started to chill. I was soaking wet. I was left exhausted at the side of the pond, where I sank into the snowbank trying to gain strength enough to drag my ass home. The gang had skated off. I was humiliated. Miller had been ruthless.
I refused to tell my father who had beaten me to a pulp. I couldn’t stand any further embarrassment of my father going over to the Millers’ house, which he surely would have done. I didn’t want anyone to fight my battles.
After the Miller episode I worked out once a week in the ring at the Eastchester Police Department, and sometimes we’d go over to Westchester. There was always an assortment of boys around the Eastchester area. I began to develop. I responded to the policemen’s instruction. I had the rhythm and I kept going and going until I became local boxing and wrestling champion in Westchester County. There was no stopping my aggression. I ran at least two or three miles daily. This was part of the bodybuilding program, motivated by the idea of revenge: I had to get back at Miller.
Three years later I had my chance. Hank Richards, the principal of Roosevelt High, called my father from his office and put me on the phone. I said, “I just killed Don Miller.”
Richards told my father that Miller was seriously injured and that he’d better come to school immediately. I reminded Norbert of the time I came home half dead, cut up, bleeding, black and blue. “Now we’re even.” That was my mentality. For the first time Norbert said, “Mr. Richards, I must tell you I’ll support Sidney in this incident.”
I was expelled from school. To be reinstated I needed to go before the Yonkers Board of Regents. I was to tell the board the origin of my contempt for Miller, how it began on the ice pond three years earlier. True to his word, my father supported me, and eventually, I was readmitted.
5
WITH SO MANY FANTASIES in mind, the first thing I built in shop class was a sailboat that I named the Get Away. Mother’s chief seamstress, Vera, made the sails and did the stitching. I polished and painted the hull, rubbed down the paint until it was slick. The following year I built a motorboat with a proper motor. Every year I won medals for the airplane models, the boats. I suppose I inherited some of father’s manual dexterity.
My parents were very busy with their respective businesses, and my little victories went by like water off a duck’s back. Westchester Interscholastic Athletic Association awarded me over and over again for things boys can do. If it wasn’t for the model airplanes, it was for painting or boxing. Neither parent paid attention to these small honors. But there I was winning one medal after another.
My sister and I both painted. My work was stiff, very flat, illustrative. Peri was more inventive. I worked on a twelve-foot mural, a backdrop for a high school Shakespeare production. Later I stashed it in a secret hiding place beneath our sunporch along with a gun and an airplane propeller.
Peri suffered more from our parents’ lack of attention. She was an overachiever who tried to please through her intellect, and she felt totally shut off. Leonora’s fastidiousness, her insistence on plumping a pillow rather than noticing Peri’s good marks, was perceived as rejection. Peri’s silent fury went into her books, while I was still possessed by unleashed energy. As much as I enjoyed my friendship with the kids from Catholic backgrounds, I was an outsider in that environment too. I was looking for something to distinguish myself, to be noticed.
I tried showing off my strength. By the time I was a teenager I’d perform eye-catching acts such as “watch me” walks on my hands from the cellar up the stairs to the kitchen. I drove my mild-mannered, opera-loving father nuts. I’d plead, “I can walk up to the second floor on my hands.”
“No, Sidney, I think this is good enough.”
As devilish as I may have been, father was proud of how I looked. He’d comment at dinner to mother, in German, “Look at him, how handsome he is.” And I began to think I was something. I wore corduroys and lace-up boots. Most kids had a corduroy coat with fake fur on the collar. I wore leather and possum.
Peri didn’t look like the all-American Sarah Lawrence girl either. She had curly hair, a good figure, and a warm smile. In Bronxville, a girl had to have a turned-up nose to be popular. Everyone in those years was nose conscious.
Mother had a rounded nose, Father a straight one. I had a widow’s peak, and lots of hair. No glasses, thank God. They’d have called me four eyes. More fights.
In Peri’s case, she was not chosen to go to school proms. She was rejected by those boys in Bronxville. She had a crush on Dick Rossiter. Dick had a brother who went to Cornell, a dumpy little guy, but brilliant. Dick was tall and handsome, like a movie actor, and not so brilliant. He was nice to her, but competition was too rough, and he didn’t ask her out. Peri’s revenge was that she was super smart and would graduate high school early. From there she’d go on to Skidmore College and graduate in three years.
I admired the style of the men who lived in Bronxville, the commuters who were the advertising agents, big brokers, corporate lawyers. Very social. Their daughters would make their debut at the Waldorf, the Plaza, in the coming-out cotillions. A few of them went to Bronxville High School, but the majority of the Bronxville children went to Lawrenceville, or to Hanover, and to prep schools. We didn’t have “good schools” nearby. Though the Mudds, the Rickenbackers, were mother’s customers, and they adored “Madame Leonora” because they didn’t have to get on a train and go into Lord & Taylor or to the Tailored Woman, it was an era when their kids were not interested in democratic social behavior. They saw us, of course, as “tradespeople,” and I was determined to live down the “townie” designation.
The dude syndrome set in early. I enjoyed good clothes, and Mother allowed me to have charge accounts at A. G. Spalding and Comstock men’s haberdashery in Bronxville. I didn’t violate that trust. I’d tell her, “I’m going down to Comstock’s to buy trousers” or “I’m going to Spalding’s to buy football pads or hockey skates.” And it was perfectly fine.
It was Mother, not Dad, who taught me how to dress. “Keep it simple” was her motto. Her taste could be described as classic elegance, never flamboyant. Perhaps a handsome, colorful scarf or maybe a pin, not a lot of jewelry.
One afternoon, mother was giving a fashion show at the Bronxville Women’s Club. I knew she was going to come home with her number-one customer: Mrs. Erskin, tall, slender, well groomed, and socially correct. She was the quintessential WASP: she and her Aryan daughters appeared to me to be from another world with white ice fjords where anything brown or amber or gray couldn’t live. I was warned I must make a good impression on the woman. I was in the bathroom trying to open up a can of black shoe polish to shine my shoes. Somehow, I slammed it onto the floor, where it blew up like a goddamned black fire bomb, spattering all over the wall, on the rugs, on a piece of priceless tapestry. I was grabbing towels, running water in the bathtub, when my sister announced, “I’m gonna tell Ma.” I said, “You’ve gotta help me clean up this mess.” Peri said, “No, I’m gonna call her and tell her what you did.” I ripped the phone away from her, shoving my sister aside. Under certain circumstances, I had a vicious temper, with no intention of controlling it.
For two summers Peri and I were sent away to a camp we hated. We ran away when they fired the only counselors we liked, a young married couple. We knew they were staying in the village, and we went to their house. They called our parents and Mother and Father came up and got us.
The second camp we were sent to was in Rutland, Vermont. I was captain of the “blues,” and a kid named Bobby Williams was captain of the “grays.” Bobby was to become a successful businessman in California. We were intense about sports. I was either running, pole vaulting, broad jumping, or boxing. Accidents were always happening, endless situations that no doubt drove the staff nuts. I once dug shoe spikes into the inside of my ankle and tore a big hole. I had to be taken to the hospital for a tetanus shot.
Years later I ran into Bobby in Hollywood. He first worked for Warner Bros. as a publicist before marrying and starting a pasta company. He became a big golfer, and we’d run into one another on various fairways. He went on to walk with Palmer and Nicklaus on the green.
The next summer, our parents didn’t know where to send us. They were concerned that we be safe. So we wound up at kosher Camp Jened in the Catskills for the months of July and August. Jenny and Ed Fine owned the camp. We had to shop for the right clothes, to get the blue and gold shorts with the blue and gold CJ initials. We each had our own trunk, but there was an error on my blue trunk: it read SID LUST, in large gold lettering.
I resisted the camp’s regimentation. Among other rules, on Friday nights the kids put on their yarmulkes and a white shirt, a blue tie, and a blue jacket with the CJ initials on it, and white knickers to go to shul. It was mandatory. However, I refused to go, and my Bronxville friend Freddy Steinman, whom I could always count on to be more outrageous than me, was a partner in crime. Freddy had a bad mouth.
We’d sneak off to a stream that fed the lake where we swam. We’d go way the hell up in the woods and dam up the stream and catch trout, and cook them up instead of attending shul.
Certain activities were prohibited on Saturday, because a lot of these kids were Orthodox Jews. Most of them could speak Yiddish, and the prayers were all in Hebrew. Freddy and I, having grown up in Bronxville, knew nothing about Jewish culture. On top of that, unfortunately, we were ashamed of anything Jewish.
I despised discipline of any kind in those years. The Leo kids were Eagle Scouts. I was never a Boy Scout. They said, “Why don’t you join the Scouts?” Not me. Those innocent organizations represented repression to me. I couldn’t see their value.
Freddy and I were the curse of Camp Jened. We were bad, bad. The counselors made a plan: one afternoon we were led about three hundred yards from the camp to a vacant field usually reserved for campfires. Waiting for us were two or three counselors and the camp doctor, a young man in his last year of medical school. We were going to be hypnotized in the hope it might help change our outlaw actions.
The doctor-to-be said, “Freddy, I want you to concentrate on this pen.” He kept bringing the pen closer to Freddy’s nose. Freddy concentrated until he actually went under. I couldn’t believe it! Two counselors lifted him on the chair: “Freddy, be rigid.” Freddy was rigid. They placed his neck on the back of the chair and the medical student said, “Now Freddy, you’re going to be a different camper. You’re going to stop swearing, and you’re going to pay attention. You’re not going to run off when you should come to shul.” And he added, “When I snap my fingers, you’ll wake up.”
Freddy woke up, shook his head. He looked pretty groggy, and I knew he wasn’t faking.
Now they turned their attention on me. They gave me the same line as they gave Freddy. “Put out your hand, Sid.” I raised my hand, someone took a nail file and stuck my hand. I didn’t flinch. Afterward, the experiment completed, we walked up to the tents (four bunks to a tent). The path was obstructed by an exposed tree root, and Freddy tripped over it. “Fuckin’ root!” he yelled out. I had to control my laughter. Freddy’s going under hadn’t done a bit of good.
I had a grudge fight with another camper: Red Lerner, a kid I couldn’t beat. He was a sturdy boy. Red was from Upstate New York, and he had looked like a skinny punk to me. I didn’t like him. The counselors took us up the hill in back of the bunks and we fought ten rounds. I couldn’t knock the turkey down. We could hardly hold our hands up, and wound up hitting each other with our arms and butting our heads. I still couldn’t knock him down. I began to have a lot of respect for Red. Our instructor, a man named Mike, was a Hungarian from the University of Alabama. I’d watch him skip rope and work out. He’d match me with Red and we’d go three rounds for an exhibition at camp. I fancied myself “big gloves,” and then when I returned home I’d always get the shit kicked out of me by the bigger guys. Mike’s brother also wanted to be a boxer, but he didn’t have the speed and he incurred serious brain damage in a match at college. Tragically, Mike was in a fatal auto accident not long afterward.
It was at Camp Jened that I experienced my first thrill at being high up. The flag rope got stuck and we couldn’t lower it for taps in the evening, so I volunteer
ed to shinny up the flagpole. I was in shorts and got chafed on the inside of my legs. I was proud of those burns. I looked down at the camp staff and the campers and realized I loved it up there. The counselors rewarded me with a large bowl of chocolate ice cream, but I would have gladly gone up for nothing.
In high school my energy got channeled into sports. I ran in the early morning light. I loved the speed, the feel of my track shoes on concrete. I was developing muscles. I was the best quarter miler in the school. I pole vaulted and broad jumped; you couldn’t keep me down. My wrestling coach, Andy Thomas, saw I was fast and well-built for a kid. I was developing into an amateur athlete. I ran the hundred, 220, and 440 in high school, and later in college. Andy took a personal interest in me, we got along, and he inspired me. Every year I attended the ten relays. I began to excel.
Andy was able to get a lot out of an individual. He also coached basketball, track, and football, and my freshman year I nearly made the varsity football team. (I wasn’t interested in basketball—or baseball or tennis, for that matter. Bats, caps, and white shorts didn’t appeal to me.) That year I got hurt in the opening game, and Andy screamed at me. I broke my thumb. It was a very fast play. I was in the backfield, an off-tackle play. Andy shouted, “Dig in.” I ended up playing the backfield in high school, prep school, and college. I was all-county in the Westchester Interscholastic Athletic Association.
In those days, being a professional athlete didn’t carry weight, as there was no real money in athletics. It was more of a gentleman’s pursuit, for the honor. But I did make some money with my boxing skills. By the time I was fifteen I could spar well enough that parents would hire me to teach their kids how to work out in the ring in the hope they would exercise, lose weight. I got two dollars per lesson.