Blue Genes (15 page)

If I did better and better academically, my social life (a euphemism for sex and love) was dismal.

That I could not find even a temporary mate was unpleasant at the least, and often caused me abject self-doubts.

More than doubts, there was emotional and physical pain: psychosomatic stomach cramps. In my senior year, this symptom showed up whenever I had even a casual relationship with a woman. By the winter of that year, I would often have to dash to a nearby bathroom, leaving my date sitting in her seat at the movie theater or at dinner or on the front porch of the main building, alone and disgruntled. Even before this embarrassing and uncomfortable disorder sprang up, I was baffled that I couldn’t find anyone whom I could love, or who would love me.

Despite my disasters when it came to romance, I was able to claim a little piece of glory at Swarthmore. Graduating with high honors and selected for Phi Beta Kappa by the faculty, I could also look back on successes in dramatic productions, a series of musical endeavors that brought me some note, and a bunch of good friends who might think me a little strange but who honored strangeness as a badge of character.

And I could look back on one of the few times I got an encomium from Tony. I had finished my junior year in the Honors Program with high grades, and Tony wrote me a letter that started off, “I’m very proud of you.” This was trebly sweet. Tony had often criticized me for rushing through papers and other school exercises, for not “thinking through” knotty problems, and for being a politically naive lightweight. Few words of praise had come my way from him.

This letter, with its opening line, moved and rewarded me deeply.

At Harvard, Tony had concentrated on studying history and political science and on honing his command of the English language. His two role models were A. J. Liebling of the
New Yorker
and H. L. Mencken, who had been a star reporter and editor in Baltimore. Both men were renowned for their acerbic writing and their gourmand tastes. Mencken made outsize attacks on the establishment, while Liebling wrote exquisitely about the seamier sides of life, both here and abroad. It’s hard to know which of these qualities Tony most admired. Perhaps it was Liebling’s attachment to good eating and Mencken’s years in Baltimore; perhaps it was their willingness to take on sacred cows.

One summer Tony worked for a Long Island newspaper, writing obituaries. I remember discussing with him the fact that the paper didn’t allow anyone to use the word “cancer” as a cause of death.

It soon became clear to the family that Tony’s goal was to be not simply a reporter on the
Times
but a crack foreign correspondent. He had read the work of the best of the travel jockeys who reported from distant lands. He had read James “Scotty” Reston and A. M. Rosenthal’s reportage in the
Times
. He wanted to be like them. Dad scoffed at his dream, suggesting that “wishing won’t make it so” and telling him not to be a creator of impossible fantasies. I don’t know if Dad was egging him on or had a sincere doubt that anyone in our family could ever become that competent, that well-known.

If it was the latter, he was sadly mistaken about Tony, underestimating both the dreamer and his competence.

AFTER GRADUATION
, Tony went to the Free University of Berlin to study political science. It was there that he wrote the first of a collection of about forty-five letters to me. They are remarkable for their length—he made up in pages for the months and months between epistles—and for their lack of detail about the places he was visiting. Most of the time they told about his feelings: his loneliness, anger, jealousy. Occasionally he spoke of advancement or lack of advancement. Every now and then, something of his actual life in the foreign clime came out.

The
Crimson
had trained him well. He edited his typewritten letters as if they were to be published, with carets used to insert careful changes. His handwriting was a little adolescent, but easy to read; even now, I can see it in my mind’s eye, thick blue ink scrolling the letters. In some way, even though I, too, typed all my letters, it was the inked-in words that seemed the most personal to me: here is the real me, they seemed to say, beneath the smart words and the research and analysis. Here is the real Tony Lukas.

I looked forward to all his letters. I was profoundly grateful that he chose to share his experiences and his inner thoughts with me. Dad complained that he never heard from Tony, but I accepted his sporadic writing habits as part of who he was. If I didn’t hear from him for months, I did not interpret this as a signal of something gone wrong, or as a sign that Tony had stopped loving me. In this regard, I let Tony be Tony.

Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the long hiatuses, spelling out—as they did—his emotional lows.

In 1950 Dad had quit the Society and became chief legal counsel to the American Jewish Committee (AJC), where he would serve a variety of constituencies, including African-Americans during the upcoming civil rights revolution. Tony and I were startled to hear that Dad was joining a “Jewish organization” because of his strong antipathy to religion. But when he pointed out that the AJC’s primary role was human rights and civil liberties, we could see that the job fit Dad’s experience and persona.

The main exchange of letters between Tony and myself began in October 1956. Tony had come back from Germany and was preparing to go into the army. After his deferment year, the draft had caught up with him.

I
was destined for the University of California at Berkeley, where my Swarthmore mentor thought I belonged. It was the seat of some of the best research work in the country. I had also applied to Boston University’s school of theater. My heart yearned in that direction. Dad, as one might expect, was all for the Ph.D. program and against the idea of his son becoming a theater director. At the time this puzzled me. It was he who had introduced us to the world of theater, he who had married an actress, he whose dramatic flair showed itself in the courtroom. What could he possibly have against theater?

In retrospect, however, the choice made eminent sense—for him. He had been disappointed by the theater: in his view, it had been at least partly responsible for stealing his wife from him. And he already thought I was too dramatic in my everyday behavior for my own good.

Of course, there was that other thing: like many a parent who had come through America’s Depression, he wanted to make sure I had something “to fall back on.”

Sensible, perhaps. It didn’t work out the way either of us expected it to.

One letter I received in Berkeley spelled out that Tony was suffering both from a cold and from the fact that the next day he would have to appear at the army for his physical. He was not upbeat about his next two years, but he did say that he would be more sanguine if he could get into the psychological warfare division of the army or perhaps work on
Stars and Stripes
, the famous army newspaper.

By mid-November, he was at Fort Benning in basic training. He moans about having to get up for KP duty at three-thirty in the morning and explains how he and two law school grads found that by standing in the middle of formation, they didn’t get lopped off for kitchen duty: peeling spuds. The close-order drills, the early formations, the strict adherence to schedule, and the fear of being sent into combat in the Korean War provided him with plenty of worries and complaints.

He talks about my “condition,” his coy word for my intestinal problems. They had continued unabated after college, and endless tests proved they were clearly
not
physiological in origin. I had begun psychotherapy to try to get to the bottom of them, but this proved more difficult than anyone had supposed. I still had to decide where I was going and with whom based solely on the nearby availability of a bathroom.

If it hadn’t been for the miracle of paregoric (an opium derivative prescribed by my doctor) and the companionship of good male friends who understood my dilemma, I might have become more agoraphobic than I did. As it was, I was afraid to venture too far outside the dorm and, for a while, seldom dated.

I don’t think Tony ever really bought into the concept that a psychological problem could turn into a physical one. Psychology was not among the courses he took at Harvard, and he was ignorant of Freudian concepts. Though the idea of psychosomatic ailments had been around for decades, he knew little or nothing about them. In this letter, he suggested I not be “too
clinical
” about my problem. “I try to take these things in stride,” he said.

I don’t know what he meant by “these things,” but his lack of understanding at that time was very upsetting. I felt crippled by both the physical and the psychological characteristics of my intestinal disorder—for that is precisely what it was—and his statement made me angry. How could he know what I was going through if he’d never had a problem like this? Why did people think it was just an upset stomach when I had done all the medical tests and knew that I had something that Maalox and Pepto-Bismol weren’t going to cure? Something alien and disconcerting and frightening had happened to me, and Tony’s lack of understanding disturbed me deeply.

I didn’t hear from him again until March 1957. He was finishing up his basic training at Fort Benning and studying how to write propaganda to be beamed into Korea. He sent mock army forms that “excused” him for forgetting my birthday.

The same week, in my apartment in Berkeley, I received a telegram from Dad saying that he and Betty Field had been married. Betty had some reputation as an actress: her role in the film
Of Mice and Men
, as well as numerous Broadway plays, confirms her talent. The fact that her name was Elizabeth, and that she was an actress, speaks volumes to me about Dad’s inability to let go of Mother.

Tony had attended the wedding, and I was upset. No one had alerted me, or given me the chance to say I wanted to be there. I had met Betty a number of times but had no feeling one way or the other about her. By this time, another mother was not something I sought. Betty had three teenage children from a previous marriage. Given the difficulty Dad had with raising us, Tony and I wondered how he would deal with them.

In April, on his way to Japan for active duty as a psywar specialist, Tony visited me in California. I showed him around the campus and told him that I was not happy with the psychology department at Berkeley and didn’t think I’d continue graduate studies beyond May. At Berkeley everyone seemed interested only in passing Ph.D. exams, not in the subject matter itself. What had impressed me at Swarthmore was the passion for the subject, but that was completely missing from my experience at Berkeley. I found myself more and more drawn back to the theater—to stagecraft and acting. I joined the Mask and Dagger Society, a student performance group. I began performing in their musical revues. Once again, I had found a substitute family.

Tony and I took a grand tour of the area, driving north, then stopped in the elite little bayside town of Sausalito to take lunch at Sally Rand’s, a waterside bistro run by the former fan dancer. I remember a delicious chilled Beaulieu Vineyard Pinot Blanc, oysters, and shrimp.

Conversation at the restaurant roamed from my studies in psychology to Tony’s dread of going to Tokyo for the army. As the wine streamed through our veins, we shared memories of past meals and warmed to each other in a way that had seldom been true during our adolescence. Perhaps, I thought, we are going to be comrades after all.

A little later, Tony let me know that my recent change of heart about my career worried him. “Don’t jump. You may come to regret it,” he cautioned. I wrote my father:

“Working on that” refers, I suppose, to my ongoing psychotherapy.

What startles me at fifty years’ remove from this letter is how calm I was. Timid to the extreme with my father, I can
feel
myself growing emotionally in the correspondence at this time. I am willing to share my personal feelings with him. I am willing to risk his reactions. In some ways, this was similar to what Tony did with me: using letters to expose energies and emotions we could not share in person.

Soon, Tony was in the business of disinformation—broadcasting to the Chinese and the North Koreans what the Americans
wanted
them to believe. In short, after only a week in Tokyo as a psychological warfare specialist, he had decided it was okay to write propaganda, to do what his normally liberal views would never have allowed him to contemplate previously. We were both brought up to tell the truth, and in later years Tony would be horrified at anyone who justified lying, even in times of war.

Still:

Five of the writers and performers from Mask and Dagger and I decided to move to Los Angeles, setting up house way out in the San Fernando Valley. I was the only one who had a job: Bob Maxwell, Dad’s old radio producer, had put me on the
Lassie
television program staff, as dialogue coach.

It was a new world for me—television, film, Hollywood, palm trees, celebrities, long hours on location, technical stuff I’d never studied—and I was thrilled.

By August 1957, Tony was anything
but
thrilled. He was sick of barracks life. He moved into a private room in someone’s house in Tokyo; it was small but pleasant. He removed his shoes before entering and spoke of how wonderful the light and silence were. The “only problem,” he reported, was that he couldn’t get to early morning rounds of cleanup at the barracks. Was this a coy way of saying he actually was AWOL during this mandatory work, or did he rush to the barracks at 5:30 a.m., then return to his apartment?

I do know that he got up one morning at 5:30 to climb Mount Fuji for the joy and awe of sunrise. In a footnote to that letter, Tony vowed not to “get bitter” at the army for taking two years out of his life.

But by January 1958, he had become desperate to get out of the army early—“at any price.” He began to look for positions on gubernatorial campaigns around the United States, thinking he might be valuable as a press aide.

He remarked on the loneliness of a writer’s life and how
I
was lucky because I was “good with people.” I reflect now on this statement and feel the surprise I must have felt then. How different one’s self-image is from the perception of others. “Good with people.” I didn’t think so. I felt frightened at approaching strangers. As a newcomer to a room full of people, I crept along the edges. Everyone seemed, if not hostile, then supremely blah about my presence. I couldn’t even get up the nerve to suggest a game of tennis to a colleague, for fear of being rejected.