The handful of online tributes to Jeremy began to dribble in. I read various novelists, whose names were all unknown to me, thanking him for his support of their work, and a few readers expressing appreciation for what he had taught them. Jeremy Jacobson was gone, and would soon enough be forgotten by the infinitesimal segment of the world who knew of him and would now carry on its business well enough without him. I wish I could be among those who could easily forget him, but I find, damn it, I cannot.
The Bernie Klepner Show
Not easy having a meshugener for a father. Having had one, I don’t recommend it. At what point in life does one notice that one’s father is unlike other fathers, and not necessarily in a beneficial way? In my case, though I can’t date it exactly, it must have been around the age of four or five. Our mother, for whom I thank God, used to warn me, my brother Howard, and my sister Melissa when our father was in a bad mood, which was fairly often. “Leave Daddy by himself for a while,” she’d say. “He’s tired from working all day.” Or: “Don’t bother Daddy just now, sweetie, he didn’t sleep very well last night.” Or: “Daddy’s not feeling very good. Let’s give him some time to feel better.” And, most frequently: “Daddy’s just back from the doctor. You know how he’s sometimes a little on edge when he gets back from the doctor.”
The doctor, I soon learned, was Louis Slotnik, my father’s psychoanalyst, then head of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. I don’t know how long my father was in psychoanalysis, but it must have been at least beyond a decade, probably a lot more; it wasn’t a subject he was eager to talk about. If his analysis was successful, you couldn’t tell by me, since his behavior in all the years I knew him—he died at eighty-three, when I was myself fifty-five—never changed a jot. In all that time he did and said what it pleased him to do or say.
Culture was one of the bees in my father’s bonnet. He wanted me to play violin—the Jewish instrument, he called it, “par excellence.” The problem here was that I hadn’t the least scintilla of musical talent. After six years of lessons and practice, he finally allowed me, at the age of fourteen, to quit. When I told my mother, her eyes teared up. When I asked if my quitting the violin made her sad, she said no, quite the contrary, she was crying with delight at no longer having to listen to me scratching away at my instrument seven days a week.
I am the oldest of my father’s three children. As the oldest, I took the brunt of his nuttiness. Not that he was all that consistent in his demands. He would often change them without notice. “Just because the kid is Jewish,” I heard him tell my mother, “doesn’t mean he has to play the goddamn violin.” Febrile, showing lots of agitated energy, is probably the word that best describes my father. He displayed every emotion in the book except calm.
My father—Bernard Kepner is his name—has for years had a late-night radio interview show on WMAQ in Chicago. Before that he taught political science at Roosevelt University. His father, who was in the furniture business and with whom he didn’t speak for more than a decade before my grandfather’s death, died intestate, and so his not inconsiderable fortune—something just over a million dollars, a lot of money in those days—went to my father, his only surviving relative. (My father had an older brother, Samuel, who died, of cancer, in his fifties.) I never knew my grandfather. When I asked my mother about him, she said that he was a man who seemed to be angry full time.
I never found out the cause of their falling out, but with my father any of a thousand causes was possible. My grandfather would have been outraged to know that his money went to his disputatious son. His money freed my father from teaching, which he never really enjoyed. “Time to set the pearls before swine,” he used to say when he went off to Roosevelt. “Sorry, swine,” he said in a self-toast at a small retirement dinner given him by the three colleagues who still spoke to him, “no more pearls.”
My father had a thousand opinions, all of them strongly held, but even as a kid I never found it easy to make out exactly his point of view. On only two items was this unmistakable: he was certain that we were living in a time of momentous debasement of culture, and he felt the world was out to get the Jews. “The barbarians are no longer outside the gates,” he once told me, “they’ve had the gatekeeper on their payroll for decades.” He also instructed me never to forget that everyone keeps a cold place in his heart for the Jews.
I remember the time I was ten years old and my father took me to buy a parka for the rough Chicago winters. The salesman at Marshall Fields took a hooded, khaki-colored coat off the rack and said, “Here’s a coat that’s been very popular this year.” To which my father answered, “In that case we don’t want to see it. Show us something that isn’t so goddam popular.”
I had a slump my sophomore year in high school. For reasons too boring to go into here, I just stopped turning in homework. My father was called into the office of the guidance counselor, a Mrs. Miriam Ginsberg, to decide on a course of action. I sat there next to my father when Mrs. Ginsberg, after explaining my conduct, said, “Maybe the boy is more role than goal oriented.” I saw my father’s jaw set. “More role than goal oriented?” he said. “In that case, if I continue to let him get away with this outrageous behavior, my role would be that of a schmuck, wouldn’t it?” I wanted to jump out the window behind Mrs. Ginsberg, but the point got across, and I promptly returned to doing homework.
When the time came for me to go to college, my father made plain that he would only allow me to go to one school, the school he had gone to, the University of Chicago.
“Let’s get this straight, kiddo,” he told me, “you apparently have a good brain, and I’m not sending you off to Brown or Tufts or Williams or Amherst, or any other of these dumb designer colleges, and that includes Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.”
“But, Dad,” I remember saying, “I was hoping to get out of town for college.” Naturally I didn’t add that I was also hoping to get away from him, at least for a while.
“It’s the University of Chicago, or I don’t pay,” he said. “The school may have lots of flaws, and it’s probably not as good as when I went there, but it’s still the only serious joint the country. The place was the making of me, and if it was good enough for me it’ll be good enough for my son. Case closed.”
Thank God I was able to get into Chicago, so I never had to test him on the firmness of his promise never to pay for my education anywhere else. The University of Chicago turned out to be far from my idea of a good time. My father was right about its seriousness, and maybe the problem is that I wasn’t myself serious enough, at least not at age eighteen, for it. I also fairly quickly sensed that there was a not-so-hidden agenda at the University of Chicago, and it was that there were four things, and four things only, worth being in life: an artist of some kind, a scientist, a statesman, and (the loophole) a teacher of artists, scientists, or statesmen. I had neither the talent nor temperament nor even mild interest in becoming any of those things, which meant that, by the standard of the University of Chicago, I would be just another peasant, no matter how much wealth I might acquire, raking gravel under the sun. That I didn’t take to the University of Chicago, though I managed to graduate from the place, was, I suppose, another reason for my father’s disappointment in me.
On my father’s interview show he sometimes spoke with local politicians, or mildly famous actors passing through Chicago, but chiefly his guests were authors flogging their books. “An interesting word, ‘flogging,’” I remember him saying, “suggesting as it does a dead horse.” He was on radio five nights a week, from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m., with the second hour devoted to calls from listeners. On a given week he might interview an athlete, a nuclear scientist, a stand-up comedian, a civil-rights leader, and a ballerina. Some of these people, innocently hoping for a little publicity, didn’t know what they were in for when they encountered Bernie Klepner.
A sports fan as a kid, I stayed up one night to hear him interview
Kareem Abdul Jabbar, recently retired from the Los Angeles Lakers. “Mr. Jabbar,” my father said, “what does it say about our country that a man like you can become famous and a multi-millionaire because he is inordinately tall and has acquired the knack of throwing a rubbery ball through a metal hoop?” I remember a long silence followed, then a sudden break for a commercial; and when my father returned he announced that Mr. Jabbar was called away by an emergency, and he would now replay an old interview he had done with Nelson Algren, who had died three weeks before.
On the air my father once asked Mayor Daley—the son not the father—if corruption was absolutely necessary to run a big city, or, as in the case of Chicago, was the rampant corruption instead only an Irish thing? In later years, I heard him begin an interview with Bill Clinton, then promoting his memoir, by asking if he had any interests in life apart from sex, money, and power. He had the editor of Poetry Magazine on and asked him how he felt about his job now that poetry had become a mere intramural sport, read only by the people who were writing it. He asked Jesse Jackson how he had the gall to mount his own pulpit after it was revealed that he had a child out of wedlock. Why people put themselves through my father’s buzz-saw by appearing on his show I never understood, but they did, five nights a week, for decades.
On air or off, my father said whatever it occurred to him to say. What was on his lung, as the old Yiddish expression had it, was on his tongue. Was he candid, or fearless, or merely nuts? My mother once told me that it was through his years of psychoanalysis that my father had learned never to hold back. Circumspection, like repression, was, he held, for idiots. His listener ratings in Chicago were high. As many, maybe more, people listened to “The Bernie Klepner Show,” I’m told, because they hated him as because they liked him. But either way he had a steady following.
I once asked my mother what drove my father into psychoanalysis.
“Your father’s mother favored his older brother,” she said, “and made no bones about it. The unfairness made it very hard for your father as he was growing up. This was made worse by the fact that he could never get along with his father. Talking about it with Dr. Slotnik relieves some of the pressure he still feels from being unwanted as a child.”
My father was short, muscular, with heavy forearms, and dark wavy hair that he brushed straight back. He had to shave twice a day: once in the morning, and then again before going off to do his show downtown. There was something of the scrapper about him, not just mentally but also physically. Once, when I was nine years old, he took me to a White-Sox–Cleveland Indians game. At the game, two rows behind us, two drunks began taunting Al Rosen, the Indians’ third baseman, yelling anti-Semitic remarks at him.
“Excuse me a moment, kiddo,” my father said. I watched him make his way to the drunks, bulky working-class guys, and, moving in close to the one sitting on the aisle, I heard my father say: “Shut the fuck up, or I’ll see you jagoffs are thrown out of the park.” I thought sure they would punch him out there and then. Something in the intensity of the way he said it must have cowed them, and they stayed quiet for the rest of the game. My father had made himself into a man not to be trifled, or otherwise fooled, with, not even by brutes.
I was at the end of my first year at the University of Chicago when my mother died. Ovarian cancer took her in just less than a year after she was diagnosed with it. My father was solicitous through his wife’s illness, but he didn’t seem thrown by her death. “Life goes on,” he said more than once. He gave the main eulogy at my mother’s funeral, and it was quite as much about him as about her, about his not being able to have attained what he had in life without her, about how extraordinarily generous she was to him, about how sorely he and his children would miss her.
Less than a year later, he remarried. I met his second wife two weeks before he married her. He knew her from the Chicago Symphony, where they both had Friday afternoon tickets. Clarisse Froehlich was her name. She was a German-Jew, more German than Jewish, from Alsace-Lorraine. She was also roughly six inches taller than my father. Her pretensions were extreme. The first time I met her, when she discovered that I was a university student, she said that she hadn’t herself gone to university, adding there was really no need to, for her gymnasium education was quite complete.
“We studied Goethe, Schiller, Rilke in gymnasium,” she said. “Very serious. Not like here.”
What my father saw in her, I cannot say. Her influence on him, though, was immediate, and first showed up in his wardrobe. Married to my mother, he showed no special interest in clothes, went around in slightly rumpled sport-jackets, baggy gray trousers, and loafers. Now he began wearing Armani suits and Charvet bowties and Ferragamo shoes. When I asked him what was going on, he replied, with a smile: “I’m under new management.”
During this, my father’s Armani phase, he attempted a late-night television talk show on Saturday nights on the local PBS channel. His producers brought him such guests as Carol Channing, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Rodney Dangerfield. All wrong. He had nothing to say to them. On television his boredom was visible. He was too highbrow, too polemical, too (his word) rebarative for the medium. Television of that day called for an agreeable placidity. Two things my father wasn’t, nor could ever hope to fake being, was agreeable or placid. His television show lasted less than three months.
At twenty-one I was pretty much out of the house, and so suffered my father’s second wife’s regime only glancingly. Things were tougher for my brother and my sister. Howard called her—behind her and my father’s back, of course—the Krautessa.
One sometimes comes across a couple and wonders what one saw in the other that caused him or her to marry the other. In the case of my father and the Krautessa, it worked both ways: what he saw in her, or she in him, was a mystery. She didn’t need his money; she was a widow, and her first husband had had a contract with Nike, for whom he made athletic socks, and left her well off. Maybe her Europeanness attracted him. My father, for all his brusqueness, not to say neurosis, seemed to attract women who wished to look after him. My mother did so in a quiet, the Krautessa in a more aggressive, way. Neither could finally change him.
My father sold our house in Highland Park after his second marriage, and moved into the Krautessa’s large apartment, on East Lake Shore Drive, two buildings down from the Drake Hotel. Howard, two years younger than I, was about to go off to Northern Illinois University (an uninterested student, he couldn’t get into Chicago) and Melissa, with two years to go in high school, was transferred to the Latin School. Howard and I shared a room at the Krautessa’s, and Melissa had her own room. But I continued to live mostly in Hyde Park and was already making plans to get out of my father’s life soon after graduation.
As it turned out, my father’s marriage to the Krautessa lasted a little less than two years. An old story: an unmovable force met an irresistible object, and the marriage caved in. The Klepners moved out of the East Lake Shore Drive apartment, and into a two-bedroom apartment in a much, less grand building on Pearson Street. My father dropped the Armani, Charvet, and Ferragamo and returned to his sport-jackets, gray trousers, and loafers.
I never moved into the Pearson Street apartment, for my father and I had a falling out that blasted our relationship. At twenty-one, my last year in college, I found I needed to marry. (I’ll explain that “needed” in a moment.) I told my father in the hope that he would offer to help me financially to bring it off.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You don’t have any money, your education isn’t finished, you don’t have a job or any prospects for one. And now you want to marry some lucky girl. Sounds to me like a splendidly well-thought-out move.”
“I was hoping you might help me out,” I said.
“Forget about it,” he said, “I would only be helping you to destroy your life. Your marrying at twenty-one is preposterous.”
This didn’t seem like the best time to tell h
im that I myself didn’t think my marrying was such a hot idea either, but that I had no choice, having made pregnant Jessica McNeil, the girl in question, a serious Catholic and hence implacably opposed to abortion.
“You were only five years older than I when you married Mom. You were twenty-six, right?”
“But I’d finished school. I was employed. I knew what I was doing.”
“Dad,” I said, “it’s complicated.”
“Not as far as I’m concerned it isn’t. Marry this girl and we’re finished. Done. Kaput. Expect no help of any kind. Not now, not ever.”
“I see,” I said, and walked out of the room.
Two weeks later, Jessica miscarried; a blessing, I realized even then. But I had already made my decision to cut things off with my father. I felt I couldn’t put up with any more of his bullying. My tuition was paid through the end of the term, my final quarter at the university. I had friends I could move in with, at least temporarily. I could go it on my own, and decided to do so.
I rousted about for a year or two, working at various jobs, then I found real estate, for which it turned out I had a knack. I began by selling homes on the Northshore, then went into commercial real estate in the Loop. With two partners, I bought an eight-story apartment building on Sheridan Road. That led to my acquiring, this time on my own, three greystones on the Gold Coast, which I was able to renovate and flip fairly quickly. I could tell you more about my adventures in Chicago real estate, but suffice to say that, against all I was taught at the University of Chicago, I’ve made a lot of money, and, peasant raking gravel in the sun though my old professors and classmates might think me, I don’t have any regrets. I may not be able to create either a poem or make a scientific discovery, but I enjoy putting together and making a deal, and I hope to continue doing so for years to come.
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