Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  Pranks notwithstanding, Carl considered his stay a productive one, telling a writer at Washingtonian magazine: “I got a tremendous amount done at Bob’s . . .”

  Apparently, “tremendous” in Carl-speak meant “something,” but in publishing terms it meant “not finished by any stretch of the imagination.”

  That was a year before Veil was published, and now Carl was more than a few years late on this book. I had gotten to know their editor, Alice, while I worked on Veil, and let me just say she is not someone whose wrath you want to incur. She terrified me, like she terrified most people. Barely five feet tall, Alice is a towering presence. If you were casting the part of a prison warden in a maximum-security women’s prison, she would fit the bill. Peering out at the world over her spectacles, gimlet-eyed, Alice was anxious for Carl to finish his book.

  I absolutely revered her. The way she talked about books, their conception and execution, her no-bullshit manner, her quiet confidence—she was one of just a handful of women I met early on who demonstrated a steely toughness I knew I needed to acquire.

  Now she and Woodward had cooked up this scheme to get this elusive book out of Carl. They wanted to send me to New York to be the Enforcer. I immediately jumped at the chance. Working on Carl’s book would solve two problems: my impending lack of employment and my desire to get out of Washington, at least temporarily. I was becoming tired of the city’s focus on politics and government, which I found two-dimensional and single-minded. With my literary aspirations as strong as ever, I was excited about living in New York, the publishing center of the world.

  But before this plan was set into motion, Woodward said he wanted to address a few issues. Woodward was going to bankroll my participation, at least for a while, and he’d make sure I was paid for all my time spent on the project.

  And there was one more thing, and Woodward seemed nervous, even flustered as he prepared to address this. Though he could be personally awkward, he wasn’t terribly self-conscious. I waited until he spoke. He said something to the effect of “I’m sure you’ve heard about Carl and women?”

  I nodded.

  “I just want you to know I’ve talked to Carl about this since you’ll be staying in his apartment.”

  Woodward laughed nervously, clearly embarrassed. I was both mortified (picture talking about sex with your father) but also slightly pleased he thought that Carl might behave badly around me. It meant he thought I had game.

  I was flattered until I remembered a line from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, her thinly veiled roman à clef about her disastrous, famously-imploding-on-the-gossip-pages marriage to Carl, who had cheated on her, while she was pregnant, with the British ambassador’s wife, Margaret Jay. Nora described the Carl character as “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”

  Even though this was five years after her novel was published and two years after the movie version of the book premiered, Woodward was not sending his twenty-eight-year-old female assistant to live in this man’s Manhattan apartment without a little chat. I can still feel my face flushing.

  I happened to be a huge Nora Ephron fan. Secretly I hoped that during my time helping Carl I would get to meet Nora. I thought Heartburn was hysterically funny, and I admired her for her boldness and her vulnerability, and, of course, her writing talent.

  Her take on Washington spoke to me: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes . . . there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel. I don’t mean to make it sound as if it’s all about being Jewish, but that’s another thing about Washington. It makes you feel really Jewish if that’s what you are. It’s not just that there are so many Gentiles there, it’s that the Gentiles are so Gentile. Listen, even the Jews there are sort of Gentile.”

  Eager to relocate to a city where I could find a “decent bagel,” I bought a round-trip train ticket with an open-ended return date and headed up to Manhattan. When I arrived, with the same ratty duffel bag I had schlepped around Italy and Greece, I felt out of place in Carl’s world. He lived in a two-story duplex on the Upper East Side. It was a big apartment by New York standards, though cramped by the rest of America’s. It was nice and classy and light filled, but it was also kind of deteriorating in a shabby chic sort of way, with plaster falling, described in a 1989 Washington Post Sunday magazine profile of Carl as “faux decay. It’s supposed to look old and flawed and just accepted. A lot like Carl.”

  It was also a bit crowded, the rooms filled with elegant furniture that didn’t really accommodate the realities of Carl’s life, which included joint custody of his two sons and an ongoing book project that relied heavily on documents such as twenty-five hundred pages of FBI files on his parents. Those files spilled out of filing cabinets and onto any free surface and could even be found stashed between pots and pans in the kitchen cabinets. His bicycle took up space in the hallway outside the bathroom.

  I learned upon arrival that I would be occupying the bedroom where his two sons stayed during their weekend visits. It didn’t strike me as a hangout for young boys, but something more suitable for the Empress Dowager of China. The full-size bed was encased in an ornate wood frame with carved gewgaws and a vase of tulips on the nightstand beside it.

  Taking in my surroundings, I was reminded of how different he and Woodward were. I marveled that the two together had ever accomplished anything. Every magazine profile about them emphasized this contrast and certainly I had witnessed it in small doses when Carl had stayed at Woodward’s, but now I was seeing it up close and all the time. It is impossible to overstate the yin and yanginess of what the late great Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons dubbed “Woodstein.”

  As Ben Bradlee would later write in his autobiography, “Carl loved the midnight glitter. Bob loved the midnight oil.” Carl was fun. Bob was not. Carl cared about fresh, expensive cut flowers in vases carefully placed throughout his living space, and Bob not only failed to stop and smell the roses, I don’t think he even saw them.

  I was anxious to get to work, mainly because I felt like an awkward intruder and wanted to have a purpose. So I began to furiously organize his files, the ones in his kitchen, on his desk, and in random cabinets. We made a list of what I should look for in the documents in his possession, what other documents he might need, and what sections of the book he needed to produce or revise.

  When he described this scene or that anecdote that he intended to include, I was hopeful. But after a few days of catching only glimpses of Carl on his way out the door to the gym or some unspecified “meeting,” I began to despair, admitting to myself that salvaging the great book I knew was buried within Carl’s brain was like hunting for a downed plane’s black box at the bottom of the sea. I knew it had to be there, sometimes I could even hear it pinging, yet, day after day, no box. Of course it was significantly more fun for Carl to hang out with celebrities than it was to stay home and work on a book that had become an albatross.

  I kept myself busy in his absence, poring over stacks of documents like Hearings Regarding Communism in the District of Columbia, fact-checking quotes from FBI files, editing and proofreading the chapters Carl had already drafted. When he was gone, his absence was a reminder to me that I was failing to do my job and I began to panic that Carl would never finish the book. I wondered why I had let myself get into this mess. Of course I thought it would be cool to be able to say down the road that I had worked with both parts of Woodstein. And the Red Scare era fascinated me, particularly Carl’s personal approach: rather than a dry history tome, Carl’s book was a compelling read that explored a family dynamic from within a culture that spoke to me personally.

  But none of that mattered if I couldn’t persuade him to sit at his desk and actually finish the book. I would hear the sound of his key turning in the lock and then his footsteps as he cheerfully bounded up the stairs. He entered the room with all the subtlety of a leaf blow
er. Looking slightly guilty, he would then make excuses about why he had been delayed or regale me with stories about his fabulous life.

  Carl was a masterful storyteller. I just needed to get him to turn these talents to his book. I never knew where he was or when he would appear or with whom. One day he would show up suddenly at home with one of the Baldwin brothers (Alec, I think) in tow, the next, author Kathleen Tynan. I learned more about where he was when he wasn’t at home by reading the gossip columns, which were full of photos and juicy items pairing him with everyone from Bianca Jagger to Martha Stewart to Liz Taylor.

  My desire for him to buckle down and finish the book was no match for the bigness of his life. Though I had come to witness firsthand that even legends in their own time are still just people, with hassles and ex-wives and flaws like everyone else, they are still different. Becoming “larger than life,” as icons do by their very definition, means they often leave little space for others.

  Case in point: Carl is particularly good at filling up a room and I got to see him in action one night when he invited me to dinner, noting I had been working hard and deserved a night out. He took me to the Manhattan restaurant of the moment, Indochine, a place to be seen as much as to get a meal. I was excited to go and felt flattered Carl was taking me. I was also more than a little bit curious to see what a typical night out was like for Carl and where it was he disappeared to for hours on end.

  The maître d’ showed us to a table in a section of prime real estate and people began stopping by to chat, people whose names I’m sure showed up in boldface in the gossip columns but whom I was unfamiliar with. I did manage to recognize the name of artist Julian Schnabel, who came over to say hello. The entire meal Carl fielded people stopping by to be acknowledged, introducing me, trading bits of news with friends and acquaintances.

  Another time he took me out to lunch and I looked forward to talking about our progress on the book and to establish what else remained to be done. But as soon as we sat down, he pulled out that day’s New York Times and started reading it, holding it up as a sort of barricade between us, seated across from each other at a small table. I wished I had had the nerve to ask Carl to put the newspaper away, but I didn’t.

  Looking back, I see that these small moments had defined my future, moments in which I should have staked out my own identity and demanded attention. Instead, I vanished into myself. Now I urge my students, particularly the timid females, to speak up, to assert, This is mine, I am here. Put down the newspaper, please. Time after time, I failed to do that, complicit in my own erasure. Maybe I’m being too hard on my younger self—is it too much to expect a young woman, working for an older, famous man, to speak up in a situation like this?

  Though I had trouble speaking up for myself, I forced myself to lobby for the project. I brought up Alice a lot, that she was waiting for the manuscript and we didn’t want to disappoint her. In the end, he did it. When Alice received the manuscript, she gave me a lot of credit, more than I felt I deserved. I later would tell people that having me around cramped Carl’s famous party-boy style and that he finished the book just to get rid of me.

  I regret having labeled what I was doing as “nagging.” It was a way of devaluing my contribution before anyone else did. The act of nagging has a definite value as far as skill sets go, but unfortunately it is perceived historically as female and is therefore inherently diminishing. I didn’t acknowledge that then and tried to wear the “nag” badge proudly, joking about it, even encouraging other clients to call me a nag. The etymology of the word nag is, unsurprisingly, pretty disheartening. Besides being a slang word for “penis” and “prostitute,” the Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus: “To find fault, complain, scold, or urge, esp. annoyingly or persistently. Also (in extended use): to irritate; to demand attention or make one’s presence felt in a marginal but persistent manner.” Ugh. Marginal but persistent.

  The truth is there is an art to collaborating with people, particularly with those in the limelight who are used to being surrounded by yes men. A good collaborator not only gathers, organizes, and shapes the material but also convinces the subject, through gentle persuasion or not-so-gentle cajoling, to confront the stuff that doesn’t make it into the campaign speeches, photo ops, or television appearances—those private thoughts, marked by self-doubt, fear, and regret that render something authentic.

  On Friday April 1, 1988, with the completed manuscript out of our hands, Carl invited me to join his parents for Seder on the first night of Passover back in D.C. where his family lived. I was touched by the invitation, and I looked forward to meeting his parents who existed for me only as characters on the pages of Carl’s manuscript.

  I immediately felt comfortable with the Bernsteins because they easily could have been my parents or grandparents. Vintage Old Left, New Dealer sensibility, educated, Jewish, Yiddish-speaking: this was a demographic I shared. I could read in the lines of their furrowed brows a high level of anxiety, and I felt a wave of empathy for them. This book was going to stir up a painful past, one they had worked hard to leave behind, building a different, unpolitical, and quiet life from the one chronicled in Loyalties. I also had empathy for Carl. It struck me in that moment that the gulf created by celebrity between Carl and me was not as wide as I had perceived, because no matter how successful or famous you become, you still are forced to see yourself through the lens of parental disappointments, frustrations, tensions, misunderstandings, and bitter and bittersweet memories.

  It didn’t take long for his parents to start asking Carl about the book, and as he dodged the questions, they redirected them to me—When would the book come out?, How long was it?, What did I think of it? I fumbled through my answers, trying to be neutral or at least diplomatic. I spent most of my time trying to make small talk as it slowly dawned on me that Carl had brought me less for breaking bread (or matzo) with his loved ones and more because I could serve as an unwitting human shield on the battlefield of Bernstein family unresolved issues.

  I was confused because I knew Carl had interviewed his parents for the book and also had access to his father’s personal papers. And in the book’s postscript Carl noted that his father had refused to read the final version of the book, that he was resigned to the book’s publication and “to the certainty that the book would say my mother and he had been members of the Communist Party; nevertheless, he wanted to register his disapproval in the strongest terms.”

  If Mr. Bernstein had rejected an opportunity to read the manuscript, why all the questions now? The New York Times review later clearly articulated what I intuited that night: “While the very form of the book is a running argument between parents and son over the importance of the parents’ membership in the Communist Party, their real quarrel appears to be something else. There is a hostility permeating the relationship that even Mr. Bernstein’s eventual comprehension of his parents’ political position does not dispel.”

  In the postscript, Carl recounted how his father had pulled from his bookshelf a copy of author, activist, and Communist Party member Jessica Mitford’s memoir A Fine Old Conflict and read aloud: “My policy has been to use the real names of Communist [Party members] only with express permission of the individuals so identified in my book.”

  “‘That is the decent thing to do,’ he said. ‘You didn’t afford your mother and me that decency.’”

  This gets at the heart of an ethical issue that fascinates and dogs me: Whose story is it to tell? If you are compelled to tell your own story, are you obliged to let others’ feelings dictate what you do or don’t document? What if changing names isn’t an option because most any description of a person in the public eye is easily identifiable? After all, Carl had only one set of parents. He didn’t have the option to do what Jessica Mitford suggested and change their names. Is it reasonable to expect a writer not to tell the one story he or she is most compelled to share? What if protecting other people’s privacy is at the expense of being able to te
ll your own story?

  I don’t know if Carl wrote the book to heal or perhaps just to acknowledge old wounds or because it’s the truth and sometimes that’s enough of a reason. Or maybe it was just that he had a good story to tell and that’s what writers do: tell stories. I was annoyed when reviewers and profilers focused on the backstory of the book’s circuitous path to publication rather than how well it turned out. I thought the book was heartbreaking on a personal level—the toll the Red Scare took on Carl’s family, his childhood, and an entire generation.

  Whatever the critics and gossip columnists said back then, I do think it took guts, something I doubt I fully appreciated at age twenty-eight. Now, at twice that age, I have a better sense of how painful it must have been to write that book. Investigating a corrupt president and his administration is tough, but if you really want a challenge, try investigating your own parents.

  Competing loyalties inevitably arise in the process of autobiographical narration. Later, when I would actually write books for public figures, I frequently met resistance from the “author” about what I could include in the narrative; they were understandably worried about hurt feelings or, more often, about political expediency. Ironically, Nora Ephron, who wrote about her marriage to Carl in ways he objected to legally and publicly, makes a compelling argument for Carl’s right to write about his parents, though she was talking about herself at the time. She suggested you have the right to take control of your own story, if you have the guts to do so.