Authors: Christopher Lukas
Indeed, some Bombay bylines did show up, but Tony soon returned to home base in Delhi: plowing on, writing a huge piece on right-wing Hindu groups for the
New York Times Magazine
, traveling up and down the country, and proving his worth. In September 1966, he visited with Dad on the island of Menorca, off Spain. It was such an uncharacteristic place for either of them to have gone that the vacation was surreal. I think it was the first time that Tony came face-to-face with Dad’s alcoholism.
The days in sunny Menorca were a little strained. Dad and I sat around the lobby and the bar of the Agamemnon drinking dry martinis and making rather desultory conversation. Nothing very significant was said by either party, but I think Dad got a lift out of it. I thought he looked a little better and more relaxed than when I saw him last, but he did some damn heavy drinking a couple of the days—you know the drill, nipping away at the bourbon bottle all afternoon and then starting on the martinis at night.
His words left me puzzled and a little dizzy. I didn’t know Dad had traveled outside the country, not since a few months he’d spent in Germany in the 1950s. I thought he was sedentary and U.S.-bound. It made me wonder where
else
he had secreted himself off to, without telling me. The idea of Tony and Dad going to tiny Menorca in the Mediterranean, a place known in those days mostly for stoned expatriates, was bewildering. I can imagine the scene—in a bar on some backstreet—and it isn’t pretty.
In those days of blissful ignorance I didn’t put Dad’s drinking together with his moods. For me, and for everyone I knew, liquor was a treat, something you occasionally took to make you feel good. The idea that people were
dependent
on it—in those halcyon days before marijuana, crack, and other drugs of support hit the schoolyard markets—had not occurred to me. So the idea that Dad was an
alcoholic
and needed his drug never crossed my mind. He was someone who
liked
to drink, and he wanted to drink. The negative effects—his anger, his own depression—never hit home.
The worst instances of Dad’s behavior due to drinking, the times I was most aware, were when Susan and I would be walking down the street with him and he would say, in a very loud voice, “Susan, you’re a woman: explain that to me.” “That” was a young woman nearby who had dyed hair or a low-cut blouse or some other fashion statement. Or “that” was an older woman with a fat belly. Or “that” was a young man with a hippy-dippy attitude or attire. Then the scorn that came over Dad was a far cry from the liberal father I had come to know.
At times like these—and they increased in number and amplitude over the last years of his life—I would look the other way, or cringe in embarrassment, or wish I could be somewhere, anywhere, but here. Later, Susan and I would laugh or cry over these episodes. But at the time, we said little. Alcoholism was not talked about among the general population. A man was either a drunk or a stone-cold-sober and upright person. Middle-class Jewish people didn’t accept that their fathers could be drunks, so they must be upright citizens who occasionally took too much.
Like thousands of others, I deceived myself. I was an enabler, but I could not break free from my fears and anger, not nearly enough to help my father.
I wrote to Tony that Dad and Betty’s marriage was now officially ended. Dad had waited until he could make sure that Betty got what was coming to her from her late husband’s estate, while he eked out a living in a hotel room on Fifty-seventh Street. He had left behind all the belongings that he and my mother had acquired—antiques from France and Italy, and wedding gifts. He just wanted to get out of the apartment, he said, but I told Tony that I thought Dad had feelings of guilt over leaving and gave Betty all those beautiful belongings as atonement.
To Tony the divorce was inevitable, but something of a relief now that the angry marriage was over. He was also sad: “What kind of life is it for a man of sixty-five, living in a room and a half apartment in New York? Christ, I hope I don’t end that way.”
That was not a casual thought.
By the end of the year, Tony had decided not to extend his tour of duty for a third year, which the
Times
had offered him, and not to take a Belgrade post, which was an alternative. As for China? Learning the language was too much of a challenge for him. Barring appointment to the plums of Paris or Rome, he’d prefer to return to a place he could call home: New York City. He was in his early thirties.
I owe it to myself to give my Personal Life some attention after many years in which I have thought only about my career. It’s high time I get married. Sooo—I’ve told the Times that I’d like to come home to New York for a year and work on the metropolitan staff. It will be just one year . . . but if I can’t find a wife in one year’s hunting in New York then something is radically wrong. Naturally, I expect you and Susan to keep your eyes open for lissome young things these next seven months so that when I get back you can start parading them into my office for inspection.
Later. New Delhi. Tony is miserable:
I’m afraid things have not been going very well at this end for the past few months. I was bitterly unhappy at the Times’ decision to put Joe Lelyveld in here eight months before my departure. Even though he is technically the second man in the bureau . . . this seemed to me to be an unfortunate move.
This reflects a perpetual issue for Tony, his “Halberstam dilemma.”
The fact that my brother never made managing editor at the
Crimson
, and David did, bedeviled Tony for years. It began a lifelong rivalry with David, of which Halberstam himself was perhaps never aware. In Tony’s view David was richer, more famous, and more blessed than he. Halberstam got a job with the
New York Times
before Tony. Halberstam got his first Pulitzer before Tony. My brother’s need to be “the best there is” never let him believe he was successful
enough
. The disparity—or perceived disparity—between David and himself rankled.
This lack of self-worth, the jealousy, the sourness of spirit, could spur him on at times—make him push for greater goals, more perfect stories—but it could also send him into the depths of depression.
So with Lelyveld, the dilemma raises its head again. In fact, I cannot remember a year going by when some real—or potential or
imagined
—rivalry did
not
raise its head to bite him. He was—and would remain—sensitive to the juggling of hierarchies and positions.
In his final letter from India, he restates this dilemma:
I confess I am returning to New York with great trepidations about my future on the Times. In the last eight months almost everything in my relations with the paper has turned sour. However, things may look brighter on 42nd street than they do here.
In fact, things
did
look brighter, and Tony never returned to the foreign field, except for special assignments. He found the work on the metropolitan desk, under Arthur Gelb, rewarding. Here, he could write about Harlem or City Hall or Newburgh with the same kind of attention to detail and color, and with the same insights, he had brought to his work in India and the Congo,
and
enjoy the friends and family he had missed abroad.
MY LIFE HAD ALSO TAKEN A SERIES OF TURNS.
Due to a variety of conflicts with Bob Maxwell, I found myself, just before my wedding, with no job. I despaired that I’d ever be in a position to support Susan, who was starting her first year of graduate studies at UCLA.
But in January, in one two-week period, I received two offers. One was for a TV series just starting up at MGM. The other was to join New York’s public television station, Channel 13, WNDT (later to be WNET).
We leaped at the opportunity to move to New York, to be closer to Tony when he came home on leave, my father, and the exciting theater there. Susan abandoned grad school.
Tony wrote from the Congo that he was delighted to hear that I’d moved from the “fleshpots of L.A.” to the serious world of New York.
As I look back at the correspondence from Tony, the fact that there were fewer rather than more letters makes each one have a weight that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. The same is true of my mother’s letters to Dad. Sometimes—as Freud said in another context—a letter is just a letter, not a cry for help or a metaphor.
Nevertheless, because there were few, I awaited them eagerly and opened them quickly. These were the times that Tony let himself express positive and negative feelings openly, where he said what was on his mind. In person, he came across as a serious, guarded, often depressed, or angry character—deep, sad eyes with dark circles under them; low, lugubrious voice—but on paper he could allow his wishes and desires and disappointments to emanate.
As the years went on, it was also the only place that Tony now allowed himself to embrace me as a friend and brother. For instance, from the Congo came this, reacting to an Emmy I won:
A long overdue congratulations on your Emmy. You are becoming emmynenter and emmynenter by the day. I want you to know that I’m damned proud of you.
As I turned thirty, I was made director of cultural programming.
Well done, chappie, as they say “out here.” [By now, he’s in India.] I know how hard you’ve worked for this promotion and—although I’ve seen very little of what you’ve done—I’m told by Jack Gould that you’re the hottest thing since Milton Berle. The title is very impressive indeed. Do you get a rug on the floor too? And a beautiful secretary? And six TV sets in different colors on which you can watch the major channels simultaneously? And a cringing yes man who shuffles into the office and says “great idea, CW,” and “You’re the hottest thing since Milton Berle, CW?” Seriously though, CW, heartiest congratulations and long may you wave.
When Tony decided to come in out of the cold, to decline that third year as correspondent in India, Susan and I offered him a bedroom in our apartment. We were planning to have children, but because none had yet arrived, we thought that having him with us would be good for all of us. He was touched by this, but opted instead for the Harvard Club until he could find an apartment for himself. I think he was genuinely embarrassed at the thought of “having” to share with us, but there were probably other motivations, including his desire to look for a long-term relationship with a woman.
IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED
, Tony pursued his bliss at the
Times
, moving ever upward, gaining the accolades he deserved, writing stories that advanced daily journalism. He didn’t always please his co-workers or his editors. Sometimes he was moody, sometimes combative, sometimes just a loner.
Occasionally, he would telephone or ask me over to his apartment to read a paragraph or even a page of a new piece. In all the time this practice went on—both with me and with colleagues—Tony always read aloud. He didn’t permit us to take the pages into our own hands. I don’t know whether he didn’t trust us to use our eyes or whether this was more a way of hearing it for himself. Or perhaps just some of the Lukas zest for theatricality.
He did that with me when he wrote a famous piece on the Greenwich, Connecticut, teenager Linda Fitzpatrick, a front-page story that won him his first Pulitzer Prize. It was the late 1960s, the height of the hippy generation’s hold on America. In San Francisco, the Haight was thriving. In New York, it was Greenwich Village that held sway. Fitzpatrick was living a double life: being a “normal” adolescent at her parents’ home in Connecticut during the week, but using drugs and sleeping with addicts and down-and-outers in Greenwich Village on weekends. She was murdered, and Tony was put on the story.
When I arrived at Tony’s apartment one night, he was in the throes of wrapping up the piece for the
Times
. He had kept his work on the project very quiet, since many people at the paper, as well as Fitzpatrick’s parents, had it in their heads that Tony was going to paint Linda as “clean,” anything but the drug user that she had been portrayed as previously. It was not to be, and few people, outside of his editor, knew what he had uncovered, how big a story it would be. None knew the style in which it was written—filmically cutting back and forth between the two Green-wiches—or that it would be a journalistic triumph.
Tony asked me not to tell anyone anything about the revelations, but he wanted to read me some of it. With a totally straight face, he said, “This is going to win me the Pulitzer.” I took his statement with a pinch of salt; it seemed egregiously optimistic and grandiose. Besides, I thought, who thinks of prizes when the work isn’t even finished? Apparently, Tony did, and when the full investigative story ran on the front page two days later, I understood the power of what he had been doing, and how important it was to him that he kept his eyes on the prize.
Daily journalism never quite got that exciting again for him, but the work was always interesting, and his reputation grew.
AT CHANNEL 13
, I was able to win Emmys, rise to become director of programming, and produce hundreds of programs. Despite a psychological distance between us, Tony and I were equally proud of each other. Nonetheless, his great successes were always tempered by his interior sense of failure, of fraudulence. So, too, Tony was constantly afraid that he would be “found out,” that an editor was going to “kill” his piece, that it wasn’t good enough. He would often doubt his own craft and experience. He would tell me that things were going badly, when in fact they were just coasting, or actually progressing.
I could see what Tony could not, that he was always a step ahead of everyone else in our crowd. He was intellectually advanced, well-read, and a superior writer and researcher. And he always believed that he could keep escalating his abilities, keep winning prizes, keep doing more—and better. He told one date that he hoped to win the Nobel Prize someday.