Just Kids From the Bronx (18 page)

On the corner in our old neighborhood there was a bank. Manufacturers Trust bank. And right next to it was a New York public library. We played stickball for hours against the wall of that library. You could hit a rubber ball easily three times the distance you could hit a softball. And the speed of it! I once hit a line drive and it went into a city bus. Through a window of a moving city bus! I held my head in my hands. It wasn’t that I worried I might have fractured somebody’s skull with a hard-hit ball. I was worried that I lost the ball because it went into the bus. It all happened in a split second, but the bus kept moving, and then I saw there was the ball on the other side, bouncing in the street. It had gone through the opposite open window of that bus. What are the odds of that happening? The driver didn’t even slow down. It may have happened so fast that nobody in the bus even noticed that this ball flew through the windows.

These are the things that make childhood so remarkable. Something like that stays with you all these years. Let’s see, Jefferson had on his gravestone that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, that he was the writer of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the father of the University of Virginia. Will mine say that I hit a ball through a Number 3 bus and it came out the other side?

There was a particular look to the Bronx. The look of the architecture and the streets. The feel of being under the el and the light coming through. I didn’t know Berenice Abbott had already made the photograph that was in my own memory. The light coming through under the el used to mesmerize me. I would walk with my mother and she’d go into a store and I’d stand in the street and I’d look at the light filtering through. Beautiful sunlight. Through the tracks.

If your childhood was a happy one, that becomes a place that has magic to it. And that was our Bronx in those days. We felt no threat. The war was over. And we were alive and there was a sense of real possibility. Possibility. There was a world opening before me. I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself, but I didn’t dwell on that too much. I knew I was going to draw and read and go to college.

There was another thing. There was a smell. It’s hard to describe. The smell of a thunderstorm. The change in the barometer as the sky would turn a kind of a deep gray-green and the summer thunderstorm would come over and the dust would lift from the street. It was like the rain or the falling barometer actually drew this stuff out of the ground into the air. You’d breathe it in. You could smell the storm. The aftermath of it was clean. The Bronx was an extraordinary and fertile land to grow up in.

My father once explained to me the difference between a Bronx accent and a Brooklyn accent, ’cause I had said, “I don’t get it, what’s the difference?” And he said, “In Brooklyn, they would say ‘I’m gonna moider da bum.’ In the Bronx, they would say, ‘I’m gonna muhdah da bum.’ There’s a lot of ‘duh’ in it.” My father would then say, “Either way, the guy’s dead.”

Before television, men and women went outside at night from spring to fall to sit on beach chairs, or whatever chair they brought out, in front of the building. The women talked, the kids played, and the men smoked cigars and belched. It was after dinner and everybody came out, and that was the sound track of my early days. If a fight or a baseball game was on the radio inside someone’s apartment, that person would open the windows so everybody outside could stand around and listen. Things changed when television came around and families went inside to watch TV. They didn’t go outside anymore. And you had air-conditioning, so you didn’t have to go outside to cool off. Suddenly you didn’t know your neighbors. The world began to evaporate for us. The reason it seems so magical in my memory is that it’s a world that’s gone.

In his acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican Convention, Richard Nixon recalled that when he was a child, he would lay in bed in Yorba Linda, California, hearing the frequent rumble of freight trains as they passed through town during the night. He wondered where those trains were going, and if he got on one, where it would take him in his life.

Nixon and I had similar experiences. Drowsing in my bed half a block from the Westchester Avenue el, I would fall asleep while listening to the passing trains every night. But unlike Nixon, I didn’t wonder about the final destination of those trains. Where they were going was no mystery. On a Saturday afternoon that train would take me two stops east to Parkchester, where the admission to the Circle Theater was 25 cents. And I could buy an insane amount of candy, and watch two movies and ten cartoons.

JOEL ARTHUR ROSENTHAL (JAR)

Artist, jewelry designer

(1943– )

I get so annoyed when people, even people I know, introduce me and say that I’m from Brooklyn.
He’s from Brooklyn!
I’ve been to Brooklyn three times in my life. Actually, I’m going there tonight for pizza, so that will be the fourth time in my life. At openings I’ve had or openings I’ve been to, people will sometimes come up to me and whisper,
I’m from the Bronx
. Whisper?
Why are you whispering?

Bette Midler has a foundation that creates gardens in neglected parks and open spaces all over the city. I went back to the Bronx with her because I wanted to have a garden there to honor my mother. When we got there I saw that the space for the garden was on Fox Street, which was amazing. My mother grew up on Fox Street.

I went to Music and Art High School, where I felt I belonged and fit in because I was surrounded by an entire school full of kids with whom I had many things in common. There were kids who drew, who were really good. There were musicians who were outstanding. I guess by then I was already an arrogant little bastard. There was a wonderful teacher, Julia Winston, who taught our watercolor class. She’d walk around correcting this paper and that. Once she corrected something on my paper, and I said to her, “You’re the teacher. We’re here to learn, but don’t you ever draw on my paper again.” Total silence in the class. But she never did it again, and we became really good friends.

I don’t think I was spoiled except by love, but it was in high school that I started spoiling myself by realizing that I had the capacity to make beautiful things. I did pretty good watercolors and I was a pretty good draftsman so I knew how to get attention. That was not the goal, but when you do a beautiful drawing and someone looks at it, it makes you feel pretty good. I think that artists and musicians do whatever they do to get attention, consciously or not. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s inseparable from what we do.

I once said to my parents, “How did you know how to bring up a kid?” “Just instinct, that’s all.” I was an only child and I didn’t play baseball in the lots. I didn’t play stickball. I had no apologies to make, and my parents made me understand that I had no apologies to give. They encouraged me to express my opinions and not the opinions of others. They raised me to respect what I thought and not to waver from that. Taste and opinions. I got into many fights about those, and I still do.

I think I was the head of the yearbook in high school and somebody wanted to do a cover that I thought was too modern. Too ugly.
If I’ve been given the power to decide what this yearbook looks like, I’m gonna fight for the cover.
I prevailed. They were all annoyed with me, including Julia Winston, the watercolor teacher. And yet, and I know this sounds odd, I’m very shy. I was head of Arista, the honor society. There was a general meeting of the heads of Aristas from all the different schools. We were each supposed to make a speech and I said no. And I didn’t do it.

Recently, the head of Christie’s in Paris came to our office in Paris bringing all these guys I’ve known for years. Five of them along with François, who’s been a friend for five hundred years. He wanted me to explain something. I couldn’t. I couldn’t talk to them. I can talk to you alone. Maybe two of you. But I can’t expound in front of people. I wish I were Barbra Streisand, and then maybe? I just cannot do these things.

Eleven years ago we did an exhibition of my jewelry in London. Then friends gave us a ball for about four hundred people. At the last minute they told me I had to make a speech. The logistics were that two other people would make their speeches first and then I would be tapped on the shoulder and they would give me the microphone. I was sick. Absolutely sick at the idea. After agonizing over it, I decided that I would say,
Thank you, Eugenie. Thank you, Nicola. Thank you all for coming
. Period. I was numb even thinking about it.

When the time came, they gave me the microphone. I said the first thank you and then burst into tears. Lily Safra was at the table, and she said, “You’re always such a pain in the ass. Come outside with me.” She knew what she was doing. She saved me. I went outside with her and I sobbed for five minutes. It was then that I decided that I would never,
never
under any circumstances try to do that again. I never will.

Maybe this is my way of dealing with the public and my shyness, but when they asked us to do this current show at the Metropolitan Museum, and when I conceived of the exhibition, I didn’t think of myself as the person having the show. Instead, I thought of this little kid walking up the steps of the Met, being taken there by his parents. He was the one having the exhibition. That little kid, who was always very happy to go to the museum every time his parents took him. Who did drawings there when he was ten. Seeing the little kid there instead of me, the grown-up, keeps the experience away from me, even now.

MILLARD (“MICKEY”) S. DREXLER

Businessman, CEO of J.Crew

(1944– )

In third grade, I was given a punishment that involved math calculations. Five digits multiplied by four digits. And the punishment was to do thirty or forty of these different multiplications. It’s hard, right? But I did them. The next time I figured out that the teacher didn’t check out the answers, so I just made up the numbers and handed them in. She never checked, but after that I didn’t misbehave. I didn’t like being punished. In the fifth or sixth grade, after the regular public-school day, I also went to Yiddish school. I went for a few years, but then was kicked out for misbehaving. I misbehaved because I always had trouble with authority to a degree. Especially with people who weren’t nice to me. Even to this day, I’m very sensitive to people being rude.

When I was punished in Yiddish school, my teacher, Mr. Schneid, said, “Mordecai”—my Yiddish or maybe my Hebrew name—“you will go home and write, ‘I will be good in shul. Ikh vel zayn gut in shul.’” Maybe it started with my writing this twenty-five times. I misbehaved the next time. “Ikh vel zayn gut in shul.” Fifty times. I got more angry. I couldn’t stand these stupid punishments. I was sitting in the apartment of my aunt Frances, who was a bit of a renegade. With her encouragement I wrote, “Ikh vel zayn gut in shul x 1000.” I handed it in, and that was it. I was out. I was bored out of my mind when I was there. And I think also, somewhere in my eleven- or twelve-year-old head, was the fact that I couldn’t stand the guy.

You know what’s interesting? I didn’t grow up in a home environment that said, Do your work. Be successful. Work hard. That was the usual Jewish DNA message in those days, but not in my family. I was the only one of eight cousins who made it to college. Somehow or other I was lucky. I realized that I needed others as role models. My seventh-grade math teacher was someone I loved. I was always good in math. I excelled in it. Mr. Barrett gave me the confidence to feel good about myself. At home, my mother was either ill or depressed, and my father didn’t pay any attention to me. Ambition and education were not values in my family. I never heard, for instance, Be a doctor. Be a lawyer. Be a dentist or a businessman, for that matter.

There were two things that introduced another world to me, other than the one I knew at home and in the neighborhood. The first one was going to sleepaway camp. For the first time in my life, I met kids who lived on Long Island, Westchester, and even Manhattan. And I’m thinking on visiting day fancy cars are here. I’m looking, and even a kid knows that if you had a Cadillac you were automatically rich. Wow! And then I met this girl who went to a private school in Manhattan. Dalton. I couldn’t imagine going to Dalton, a private school on the Upper East Side. I had never met anyone like that before. I got a tour of the school. I’m looking around and saying, This is another world. Private school. You pay. And it’s in Manhattan. Mecca to a kid from the Bronx.