Just Kids From the Bronx (5 page)

While I was terrified of getting on a subway going to a theater in Manhattan, somehow or other the Bronx seemed safer. So I saw
Death of a Salesman
at the Windsor Theater near Fordham Road and fell in love with plays. I saw theater for the first time at the Windsor and would take two trolleys to get there, as I recall. And I loved that. I saw Ethel Barrymore at the Windsor. I still remember the actor who played Willy Loman. Duncan Baldwin.

At school, I essentially wasn’t good at anything except bullshitting. I was the Jewish wiseguy. I was funny! As a “closet Jules,” I understood what I could get away with and what I couldn’t. And what I couldn’t get away with was talking seriously about any serious ideas because that was always suspect. But being funny was great and I was a funny guy. I made people laugh. I amused them. So I knew how to do that. And I knew how to draw cartoons and people liked that. I loved that because it was really where I wanted to be. Al Capp who did
Li’l Abner
and Milton Caniff who did
Terry and the Pirates
, I mean, I had real heroes. And I learned my craft by studying the work of these guys in the daily newspapers.

But I did have one friend in the Bronx, Irwin, who read books, who liked to talk, who liked opera. He was on his way to being an intellectual and because we were teenagers, you know, we had hard-ons all the time. And his luck went amok because he came from an Orthodox Jewish family and he happened to fall in love with an Italian Catholic girl. It broke the whole family up. It wasn’t because of her but because of the upset in the family. When he got out of college, he married a Jewish girl but changed his name. He never had contact with his parents again. All because he was so angry and so upset that they tried to sit on him, which they did.

Years later, after I had become known, I was on a radio show being interviewed on one of those call-in shows. A woman got on the phone and said, “Jules, this is Irwin’s mother. Do you know where he is?” Just like that. On the air! Well, I said, “If you give the person who takes the phone calls your number, I will call you as soon as I get off the air and we’ll talk.”

So then I called her and we had a painful talk. I told her what little I knew. I’d seen Irwin a few times after school but had lost touch. Then later I heard that he had died of a heart attack because his daughter, who worked for Tom Brokaw when he had the evening news, contacted me. But she had no contact with her grandparents. She didn’t know anyone in her father’s family. That’s why I’m so fond of religion. The day after my bar mitzvah was the last day I went to synagogue.

My father was a Polish Jew. My mother was also a Polish Jew, but after first settling in New York her family moved to Richmond, Virginia. She grew up as a southern girl. She didn’t have a southern accent and didn’t have a Jewish accent. She sounded, as I used to say, like Walter Cronkite, quintessentially American. And because in our Jewish neighborhood you had either a New York accent or an Eastern European accent, she was Eleanor Roosevelt. She was treated as the lady on the hill because she sounded superior to everybody and also felt that she was superior.

She had always wanted to be, and was, a fashion designer. She kept the family afloat during the Depression while my father got occasional jobs. Essentially she would go door to door to those in the rag trade on Seventh Avenue and sell sketches for three dollars a sketch. She was very adept at that and kept us going somehow. Over the years, in criticism of my father, she would say, “He’s a good man, but…”

My mother was very seductive with other people and with her own children in terms of being charming—and then Hitler. All my friends and all my sister’s friends would fall in love with my mother. She would seduce them socially.

I don’t know the following for sure, but she didn’t believe in sex. I think she got married because her family made her. It’s what I’ve surmised. If my mother had her druthers, she would have been a single woman with a career as an artist or an illustrator and wouldn’t have had sex at all, although if she did it might have been with a woman. I don’t think she was attracted to men. And I don’t think for a second that she was attracted to my father. But my mother came from a poor Jewish family and she wasn’t going to defy anybody. One of the things that terrified her was when her Communist daughter and her radical son defied—no, went into the business of defiance. That scared the hell out of her.

Because of her art background, the fact that I wanted to be a cartoonist was fine with her. When she was growing up, some of the cartoonists, like those in
The New Yorker
, had great reputations. The newspaper strip cartoonists had great reputations too. Some of them went on the vaudeville circuit and she loved show business. She used to quote me stories about Moss Hart and what a down-and-out kid he was in the Bronx but how he promised his mother that when he got to be rich and famous he would buy her a mink coat. My mother expected that of me. And I promised that I would buy her a mink coat.

Mike Nichols was telling me that when he was casting
The Graduate
he had Redford in to interview, because Redford was so brilliant in
Barefoot in the Park
. Mike was talking to him about the role of Benjamin in the movie, saying, “You know what it is when you’re that age and you want to get the girl and you’re not sure you can get the girl and you’re not sure of anything.” Redford had no idea what he was talking about. Because he was Robert Redford. There are those kids who grow up to have the good fortune of being Robert Redford, knowing that they’ll always be Robert Redford, or O. J. Simpson before he became an accused killer. I think the reason he found himself in that position is that from the time he’s a kid, he’s a star. No one ever says no to him. He was handsome. He was the best athlete in the world and he was charming. There was nothing he couldn’t have.

We who weren’t the best looking, we who weren’t the biggest, we who wouldn’t automatically have women fall all over us had to find our own way of figuring out how to deal with rejection, failure, high-level schmuckery. How to deal with the casual insults of others and the not so casual. I used to say in my twenties, and I felt it was true, I’m gonna have to get famous in order to get girls. Because I’m essentially shy, I don’t know how to start a conversation. If I sit on a plane, and this is still true, if I sit on a plane next to a stranger, unless he or she talks we can ride around the world and not a word will be said.

Fame really meant a lot. When people talk about the downside of fame, I don’t know what they’re talking about because it’s only been good for me.

The reason I’m a cartoonist is because I was good at it. If I could throw and catch a ball, maybe I would’ve been an athlete. But I couldn’t throw or catch a ball easily. I gravitated to the thing that I felt I had a chance to be successful at. You want to break into some circle of acceptance with people who’ll buy your story and pay attention to you. It was about being paid attention to. I wanted to go out in the street and get attention when I was a kid so I would draw cartoons on the sidewalk. I got some attention because I could do that and the others couldn’t. I could draw Dick Tracy and Popeye. They couldn’t. That’s how I survived. That’s how I didn’t get beat up. I was little. I was underweight. I wasn’t the masculine macho kid. I would’ve been thought of as sissy or a pansy. But no, I was an artist. I was an artist and they let me live. That was a lesson I learned at a very early age. If you draw a lot they’ll let you live.

DAVID YARNELL

Independent producer of television programs and documentaries

(1929– )

“The Bronx? No Thonx!” a poem by Ogden Nash, is one I cynically recited for a good part of my life, but I’ve changed my mind. I have great memories, in spite of the awful rush-hour rides on the loud and squeaky 241st Street IRT subway line.

There were the fragrant, sweet smells from the Saperstein and Snowflake bakeries. No Parisian patisserie produced a more luscious éclair than those two Jewish corners of heaven, especially when you bit into the outer shell and the inside custard released in all its glory. There were the delicatessens with their pickle barrels, the Italian grocery stores, lilacs growing wild in empty lots—yes, lilacs! And in my restless teens I found the tiny Ascot Theater showing foreign films, a trip into an exotic world of other places, other languages, with subtitles in English. These experiences gave me a heady feeling of sophistication since I was the self-proclaimed number one expert in the Bronx on the work of the French actor Louis Jouvet.

However, I knew that I wanted to get out of the Bronx when I actually lived there. In my mind there were definitely better places, like Greenwich Village in Manhattan. When I was a teenager, I would take the subway to Manhattan and go to jazz clubs. I wanted some action. The Bronx didn’t do it for me, except for the summer that I was sixteen, when I led a double life, kind of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

There was the Pelham Parkway gang near where I lived. These were the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School overachievers. They were the smart Jewish kids, studying to be professionals. Then there was the Tremont Avenue gang. Tough street kids. Knew how to hustle. They lived farther south on the White Plains Road line of the subway. I went back and forth between them.

That summer I was looking for something exciting and maybe even a bit dangerous. I had a cousin. He was a real daring, wild, great-looking guy. He was into jazz, dressing sharp—and smoking pot. Prompted by him and our friends in the Tremont Avenue gang, my friend Eugene and I decided that we would make some money by growing marijuana and then selling it.

We staked out a plot of land fifteen feet by ten feet about three hundred feet inside Bronx Park, surrounded and isolated by bushes and trees. We planted the seeds in early spring, and they were watered by nature and a nearby drinking fountain. We would dash to our crop as soon as we got home from school, thrilled to see that the plants were really growing. We weren’t totally successful as farmers. One of three plants survived. But we harvested and started the curing process. The buds of the plants were placed in quart pickle jars, then placed under my bed, carefully relocated on Fridays, cleaning day, to avoid discovery by my mother.

The courier for the pot was Max, a Brooklyn College student, who drove a hack in the summer—a taxi service carrying New York City residents to the various Catskill Mountain hotels. I had met Max the previous year when he provided this service to my family on our annual trek to the mountains. His brother, a jazz trumpeter, opened the door to our customer base. These were the jazz musicians who were ready to improve their performance by smoking pot-weed-maryjane. All of this was a heady adventure that thrilled and scared the hell out of us.

With the drop-off of our product to the Nevele country club and Klein’s Hillside, we had a profit of $270 for the both of us to split. That was a lot in those days. Not bad for a summer’s work, but our adventure came with much more fear than I wanted. And when it was all over I was much relieved. I went back to Christopher Columbus High School and hit the books.

MILTON GLASER

Artist and graphic designer, creator of the I
♥
NY logo

(1929– )

My mother never ate with the rest of the family. My father, who had this dry-cleaning store, would come home from work at about a quarter after eight at night. My sister, who at that point was still in grade school, would come home early and have something to eat. Everybody ate by themselves. Every once in a while two would eat at the same time, but my mother was never seen eating. During the day, she was taking food from somewhere. It was very strange. My mother also cooked spaghetti in a very specific way. She would boil it for an hour until it had gotten gelatinous and lost its identity. She’d toss Velveeta cheese in before the water had boiled off. Then she would demold it from the pot because it had been reduced to a kind of pudding. It was like the Dome of St. Peter’s. And after that she’d slice it and fry it in chicken fat. In my teenage years, I went to an Italian restaurant for the first time. I asked for spaghetti and when they brought me a plate of spaghetti, I said, “No, no. I want spaghetti.
Spaghetti
!”