Just Kids From the Bronx (3 page)

I could make kids laugh when I was very young and I liked doing it. When I was in first grade at P.S. 57 I was the teacher’s pet. At Christmas they asked, “Can anyone do anything entertaining?” One kid got up and tap danced, and I could stand, put one leg behind my head, and hop around on the other. It was one of those things I found out I could do, because I had a short torso and long legs. I did that in our classroom, and then the teacher took me to two other classrooms to do it. That was my first touring in show business right there.

In third grade, I played the Headsman in the play
Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil
. I was the guy who chopped people’s heads off. We performed the play for an audience and all I remember is that my mother sat next to the principal, who said to her, “That boy is the best one.” He said that because I was loud. I was the loudest one and he could hear me.

At Evander Childs High School, Mr. Raskin, who was the music teacher there, needed singers. So my friend Milton points to me and says, “He sings.” I could sing loud and I had a big operatic voice but no ear and no timing. However, I could sing like Caruso if somebody conducted me. Raskin says, “Let me hear you sing.” And he gives me a few notes to sing. I hit one note. “You’re in!” “In what?” “In the chorus.”

Then I was paired with a wonderful girl coloratura, Ruth, and we rehearsed a duet, “Yo Soy el Pato,” which is “I Am the Duck” in English. In rehearsals I sang it really well. This was for our big outing—to be onstage at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan for a Spanish festival.

So we’re there and Ruth starts to sing, and I’m supposed to walk behind her onstage. While I’m doing that, I can’t help myself. I’m doing it duck style. I’m flopping after her and the audience is roaring with laughter. The more they roared, the more I’d both walk like a duck and jump like a duck. That was my first and only theatrical performance in high school, but by then I was bitten.

A few years ago
The New Yorker
magazine was going to do a piece on my old neighborhood, and I wanted to show them where I lived. Our apartment building was on Belmont Avenue, with a second building backed up to it, on the corner of 179th Street. But when we arrived, I was shocked to see that there was nothing there. Both buildings had been razed. So I went to the open lot, picked out two bricks, and sent one to my brother in Atlanta with a note that said, “Memories of our old homestead.” Across the way were two short apartment buildings, two stories, like for three families each. They hadn’t been torn down because they were historic, even though they were older and much more decrepit. One of those buildings was where I prayed in Hebrew double-talk for the minyan.

MARTIN BREGMAN

Film producer, including the Academy Award–winning
Dog Day Afternoon

(1926– )

In the basement of our apartment building there was what we called the club room. Maybe the room was ten by ten, with an old couch, a chair, and a bench. After school, when we were about fifteen or sixteen, we’d go down to the basement. What did we do there? Smoke. We crowded into this room and lit our cigarettes. We smoked until you couldn’t see. You could not see. You couldn’t breathe.
Hey Solly, how’re you doin’ over there? I can’t see you.

At about that same age I had my first serious date. She was Italian and I was Jewish. In those days it wasn’t so easy for an Italian girl to bring a Jewish boy to meet her parents, so she wasn’t so sure about bringing me home. But finally she brought me home for dinner. We were supposed to go to the movies afterward. Her mother and father were pure Italian. You know, very, very strict and domineering. The father looked like he was connected.

I was dressed magnificently. A tie. A shirt. A jacket. I was fine. And during dinner I was trying to be charming. The mother took out a cigarette. She was looking for a match or something, and I, charmingly, reached into my front pocket and pulled out a pack. I was pure sophistication. I’m talking. I’m fumbling with opening it, without ever looking at the pack, while the father looks at me. This is his daughter. Italian.
Pure.
This is a mob guy too, or at least he looked like one to me. And as I’m talking I’m opening this packet of condoms. In those days, everybody my age carried them—just in case. You never knew when lightning would come down and strike you and you’d get lucky. And I feel the stare as he’s looking at me. The mother’s looking at me. The girlfriend-to-be is looking at me and I’m pulling out this condom. I wasn’t looking, but I felt it. I was mortified.

We didn’t go to the movies that night. The girl got sick and I got sicker. I never saw her again.

During those years, I was also looking for extra money and fun, so I hooked up with a kid I went to school with who said, “You wanna go into business? Let’s buy a car and then we can deliver some liquor.” So we bought a car, an early 1930-something Ford. The liquor we delivered was homemade, made in a still in the Bronx. We’d load the whole back of the car up with booze and then drive it like we were delivering bottles of milk. We worked for a “man.” We had no idea that we were doing something illegal.

We delivered the booze to the clubs on Fifty-Second Street and in Greenwich Village. There was one guy in the Village who looked like he was straight out of central casting. He was a huge man who liked me. After about two years, he said, “Whad’ya doin’ this for? You gonna deliver this shit for the rest of your life?” Then he says, “What would ya like to do? What would ya like to be?” And I said, “I’d like to get into the entertainment business.” He picked up the phone and in a week—I couldn’t believe it—I started working for a booking agent in the Borscht Belt. My job was to drive people up to the mountains, and that’s how I got my start in the entertainment business.

LEON FLEISHER

Pianist, conductor, recipient of the 2007 Kennedy Center Honors award

(1928– )

For some reason music had a certain importance to my mother. She saw that music seemed to be not only a path to a better life but also that it was part of the human soul to which one should aspire. I can’t remember a time in our apartment when there wasn’t this little upright piano.

My older brother, Raymond, was given piano lessons but was not particularly interested. In those days, music teachers and doctors both made house visits. Whenever the teacher came to give Ray a lesson I was absolutely fascinated. I would curl up on the couch in the corner and just watch and listen. When the lesson was over, Ray would go out to the school yard and play with his friends. I would go over to the piano and repeat everything that had been done in the lesson; and apparently did it with much greater enthusiasm and alacrity than he did. I must’ve been four or four and a half. It turned out that Ray was very happy to let me take over his lessons so that he could spend more time in the school yard.

I enjoyed it. It was great fun. I think that it was one of those extraordinarily lucid moments when a mother’s vision for a child actually coincided with the talent of the child. I had two choices. First choice was to become the first Jewish president of the United States. Second choice, become a famous musician. As I said, it was one of those rare serendipitous occasions where the dream and the reality seemed to coincide.

There came periods of time when I became bored with practicing because you have to develop certain neuromuscular responses which come about only as a result of a certain amount of repetition. I became master of being able to practice something and read a book at the same time. The only problem was hiding the book when my mother came by. I learned how to do that by slipping the book under one leg when I heard her footsteps.

I had just turned ten in 1938 when my mother and I, in effect, abandoned my father and brother in San Francisco, where my brother and I were born. My mother and I left for Lake Como, Italy, where Artur Schnabel, this world-famous, incredible teacher, taught. Schnabel had accepted me as a student. He had also discovered Lake Como long before George Clooney. It’s a paradise on earth. Beautiful lakes surrounded by mountains.

I went some four months in the summer to work with him. War clouds were gathering, and Schnabel was making plans to leave Lake Como. He was going to move to New York, and if I wanted to continue working with him it made sense that my family move to New York too. So we came back from Lake Como in September. We lived on West Seventy-Ninth Street in a brownstone while looking for another, larger apartment. My father and brother joined us in New York, and I think it was toward the end of 1938 that we found an apartment at 1325 Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Our apartment faced south, the side street, which had two sides lined with cars but certainly enough room to have a rather constricted game of stickball, which was a kind of nonstop affair.

When I wasn’t practicing, or doing my homework, I might be down there playing stickball. It’s a great game. One of our great players was called Sluggo. The pink Spaldeen was hit onto the Grand Concourse itself by him. I forget the name of the street to the west of us, but Sluggo could hit that ball a country mile in the heart of the Bronx.

Around 1939 or ’40 there was this lovely, ample-bosomed blonde girl who was my older brother’s girlfriend. Her name was Natalie. She lived across the little side street on which we played stickball. The room that held my piano, my studio, if you will, faced her windows. We were up on the fifth floor, and Natalie was across the street on the second floor. There were a number of times in the summer when Ray, my brother, threw open the window, sat on the sill with his leg up, and Natalie would be like Juliet, except she was below, not above, at her window. The two would gaze and gesture to one another. It was quite a distance from the fifth floor to the second floor across the street, and, you know, with kids in between playing stickball, it wasn’t quite the situation where they could converse. So they developed a kind of sign language.

One afternoon, Ray must’ve been in the throes of some great wave of passion. He sat me down, literally grabbed me by the arm, and put me on the piano bench. He knew that I could play the piano version of Tchaikovsky’s
Romeo and Juliet.
He pointed to the music and said, “Play!” Then he went and sat on the sill while I played as loudly as I could, with the appropriate feeling. I played this love music while my brother sat on the sill making these great swooping gestures as if he were sending the music out the window down across the street to Natalie’s window. I was twelve or thirteen and Ray was close to eighteen at the time. I felt like Cyrano de Bergerac. A musical Cyrano de Bergerac.

LAWRENCE SAPER

Entrepreneur, inventor of patient-monitoring equipment and cardiac-assist devices

(1928– )

The candy store, as was usual in the neighborhoods, was on the corner. It was a simple business, one that was easy for someone with very little money to start. Our neighborhood candy store, Nathan’s, along with its candy, newspapers, comic books, and soda fountain, had a public phone in a booth, on the right near the doorway. Most people before the war didn’t have phones, so the public phone was an important one.