New York in the '50s (8 page)

When I lived in the Village, I saw Bodenheim again on other nights in the San Remo, a favorite hangout of his and a source of sales. He always made me uncomfortable, not only out of guilt because I had thought him a wino pretending to be a real poet, but also because he
was
a real poet, one whose work had been recognized and acclaimed, and this was the end to which he had come. I liked to think justice triumphed, especially in literature—that serious artists who didn't sell out would somehow be rewarded or saved. I knew all the tragic stories of poets' lifelong struggles and early deaths, but I never had seen a poet whose presence proved that not all literary stories had a good ending, that refusing to sell out could lead in old age to selling one's work in a bar for spare change.

I ran into Malcolm Barbour in Los Angeles in 1976, when I was working on the television series I created, “James at 15,” and he was working for a production company. In 1989 I saw his name listed as coproducer of “Cops,” a docudrama series. I still remember a story he wrote in college about a penniless young artist in love with a beautiful dancer in Paris. I can picture the girl, with her long blond hair, walking in her black ballet shoes over the fallen wet leaves of the streets along the Left Bank.

Abruptly and with no fanfare, my college life ended in February 1955, an anticlimactic finish that came out of season because I lost a semester—and almost my life—after the car crash the summer
before my senior year began. When I passed my last exam—in, of all things, geology (still using New York as our laboratory, we studied rock layers of the Palisades on the Hudson)—my college career was over. Of course, I could attend the graduation of the class of '55 in June; otherwise, I'd get my diploma in the mail, which seemed even more unreal, as if I'd simply sent away for it from a catalogue.

No longer in college and not yet launched on a job, I felt in limbo, like a man without a country. I rationalized that I still had business at Columbia, or at least the excuse of one last semi-official tie: I'd submitted a short story to that year's fiction contest of
The Columbia Review
, giving it to Sam Astrachan, who was now one of the editors. I nurtured hopes of a prize, or at least publication, which I thought might seem like my own graduation from Columbia.

Sam called me a week or so after the semester break to tell me my story had come in second, but the winning story was so long it would take up the whole issue, so no others would be published. He invited me to the West End for a beer, my consolation prize. He understood how I felt and was sympathetic without being condescending, as if we were both grown literary men who could take such blows in our stride as we moved ahead to create the next work. He led me on one of his long walks down Broadway, and I clasped my hands behind my back as he did, feeling like an accepted member of the writing fraternity. It was in that time of my defeat and his compassion that we really became friends.

Now that I was leaving, I began to think with nostalgia of the friends I had made at Columbia, guys I had gotten to know from
Spec
and the dorms and classes, and then from the literary life of the college. I realized most of them were Jews. In fact, the only exceptions were the Englishman Barbour and Mike Naver, who I thought at first was Jewish because he came from New York and most of the other guys from the city were Jews. It was not until I knew him more than a year that I learned Nave's roots were Italian Catholic.

At the high school I went to in Indianapolis, Jews were a definite minority and stayed within their own social structure, except for several Jewish boys and girls who each year, by some unspoken and unconscious social mechanism, became part of the In group of
thirty or so kids who were the athletes and leaders of the class. I was good friends with Ferdie and Ads in high school, the Jewish boy and girl who were part of the In gang of my own class of '50 (in fact, I'd been madly in love with Ads), but I knew next to nothing about their religious or cultural heritage.

At Columbia
I
felt like the minority kid as a
WASP
from the Midwest, something of an oddity who was anyway accepted and befriended by these Jewish students from New York. I was flattered when Joe Berger took me home for a
Shabat
dinner with his Orthodox parents in the Bronx, and for the first time in my life I perched a yarmulke on the back of my head (terrified that it might fall off and be regarded as a sign of disrespect), listened to prayers in Hebrew, and ate chicken soup with matzoh balls. Riding back on the rocking subway, Joe and I spoke not of our cultural differences but the common problem we shared that cut deeper than the rituals of religion and ethnic roots: being the only child of doting parents.

I admired the savvy and intelligence of New York Jews, and envied their early, ingrained love of learning and unashamed respect for literature, music, and the arts. I also appreciated the kind of compassion I got from these friends, as demonstrated by Sam Astrachan in my time of disappointment. I identified with Jews as outsiders, since part of me always felt that way myself, despite all my efforts to be In. The kid born with an urge to write, which means a tendency and talent to observe, almost by definition is outside the society he sees and describes. I felt more kin than alien to my new Jewish friends. Perhaps most important of all, I was grateful to them for accepting and befriending me, the
WASP
outsider from the sticks.

Harold Kushner, in his reunion address to the class of '55, observed that “half of us were bright Jewish kids from Brooklyn and Queens who wanted Columbia to help us transcend our parochial origins and gain admission to the greater American scene … and the other half of us were high school hotshots from the Midwest who hoped that Columbia would teach us to pass for New York Jewish intellectuals.”

Marion Magid, who came to Barnard from the Bronx and whose parents were immigrant Russian Jews, believes that “the cultural
encounter of Jews and
goyim
, New York and Midwest, was the great experience of the fifties in New York.”

On her first day at Barnard, at a tea for incoming freshmen, Marion met a student who came from the Midwest and had gone to an Episcopal boarding school. “She'd never seen a Jew before,” Marion recalls. “There was a mutual fascination between us. She'd recite the names of her relatives—American names—and I'd give her back names of my relatives from Russian Jewry. It was a fructifying encounter, a much more crucial kind than the European-American encounter. Now it's become a syndrome, a reigning cliché, like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. You can't live it now without knowing you're some kind of social phenomenon, but then it was unmapped terrain. It was like embarking on a voyage of discovery.”

This cultural voyage of discovery led me to a real voyage to Israel shortly after college, where I sent dispatches to
The Nation
and traveled the country from Eilat to Haifa, working on
kibbutzim
as a shepherd, a hay pitcher, and a fruit picker. I talked late into the night with a couple my own age who lived on a
kibbutz
near the Dead Sea, hearing the husband's explanation of coming to Israel as a reaction to his sense of isolation as a Jew when he walked through the Christmas-lit streets of Manhattan, knowing he was outside all that. Yes, I said, for I too had felt outside, and I felt a kinship with this young guy, and his country.

On one of my walks down Broadway with Sam Astrachan after he had told me my story failed to get
The Columbia Review
prize, I said something rueful and self-deprecating that he especially appreciated. It made him laugh, and he stopped walking and put his arm around my shoulder with brotherly affection.

“Wakefield,” he said, “you're a Jew.”

I smiled, feeling proud and elated. The illumination from a streetlight on one side and the glow from the plate glass window of a Rikers late-night restaurant on the other made a pool of light where we stood in the middle of the sidewalk. There was a warmth about the moment, a festive aura. I felt, at last, I had graduated.

THREE

Getting Started

FIRST JOBS

I couldn't get past the receptionists. When I went on my job search after college, the receptionists who barred my way from interviews at New York's great newspapers blended together into one gorgon-like image: a grim woman with a beehive hairdo wearing cat's-eye glasses studded with rhinestones, her red lips pursed in disapproval and rejection. Clutching the manila envelope of clippings I had published in my summer jobs at the
Indianapolis Star
and the
Grand Rapids Press
, I slunk away in dejection. I'd thought this would be a snap.

After all, one of my stories in the
Press
had drawn the managing editor himself out of his office to make a rare appearance in the city room. The legendary M. M. “Crow” Kesterson (it was whispered that his initials stood for Montmorency Maximilian, but one did not address him as such), who wore a neatly pointed gray mustache and sleeve garters, à la the editors from the golden age of journalism, shook my hand as he praised the lead of my feature on a woman who planted rosebushes in her garden that multiplied into more rosebushes. My opening sentence was “A rosebush is a rosebush is a rosebush in the garden of Mrs. Henry Frampton of 2245 Euclid Avenue.” As he grasped my hand firmly in his own, Kesterson said,
“Congratulations. You are the first person to ever get Gertrude Stein into the pages of the
Grand Rapids Press
.”

How could I fail to make it in New York?

Now I had another question. How could I hope to land a job if I couldn't even get past the receptionists? In desperation, I called home—not my parents but my favorite high school teachers. Jean Grubb, the journalism teacher who got me my first professional job, as our high school sports correspondent for the
Indianapolis Star
, had no contacts in New York. Nor did my first boss at the
Star
, the talented Corky Lamm, who had tried to crash the gates of New York journalism fresh out of college but ended up with a dull job at an insurance company and retreated back home to Indiana. I tried Dorothy Peterson, the history teacher whom so many in my class had looked to for guidance beyond the classroom. Miss Peterson had a friend from her own college days at DePauw who, she said, was in the newspaper business in New York. She would call him and suggest that he see me, at least to give me advice, if not a job.

For the first time, I got beyond a receptionist. In fact, I landed in the inner sanctum itself. The man behind the enormous desk was absorbed in reading my story of the multiplying rosebushes. The only sound in the plushly carpeted room was the muted stutter of a Dow Jones stock ticker, which looked like a small telegraph key inside an elegant bell jar with a gold base, set on a corner of the long desk. Miss Peterson's friend had not only agreed to see me but was actually interested in reading the clippings in the now dog-eared manila envelope I clutched to my chest like a life preserver. The man was Barney Kilgore, publisher of the
Wall Street Journal
.

Kilgore swiveled in his chair toward me, looked up from the clipping, and said, “Did you write this?”

I said I had.

“And the others too?”

He held up the manila envelope.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Kilgore's head jerked sideways in a twitching motion, a nervous tic that was one of the idiosyncrasies for which, I learned, he was famous. He was more justly famous as the brilliant journalist who became publisher of the
Wall Street Journal
at age thirty-nine and, with the acquisition of regional printing plants, was credited by
Time
with transforming a “dull financial sheet” into “one of the best U.S. newspapers.”

I had heard that Kilgore was also renowned for making conscious use of his Hoosier background. He tried to pass himself off as a hick, wearing loud, hand-painted ties with unmatching shirts, and suit jackets that didn't go with the pants. It was said that Kilgore believed this approach disarmed his sophisticated New York competitors and gave him an edge in whatever he was doing, which was usually successful.

A friend on the
Journal
told me Kilgore once showed up in the city room without warning, and a new cub reporter handed him a story to take down to the printer, thinking Kilgore was a copy boy, one of those aging fellows in cast-off clothes who was lucky to get a job, roughly equivalent to a messenger. As well as dressing the part of a bumpkin, Kilgore spoke in a country-boy lingo, with a twang that made Will Rogers sound almost British by comparison.

“You're from Indiana,” Kilgore said to me with approval. “You'll do all right in New York.” His head yanked into a tic and he added, “Some of these New York fellas, they don't do so good here.”

Kilgore explained that as publisher of the
Journal
he no longer got to do any “real” newspaper work, and that was what he loved most of all—getting his hands smeared with printer's ink and putting out a paper, in the old-time tradition of William Allen White and the great country editors. To remedy this, he had just bought his hometown weekly in Princeton, New Jersey, where he could do all the tinkering and puttering in the pressroom, or anyplace he wanted, without union restrictions. He offered me a job as reporter on the
Princeton Packet
, “New Jersey's Oldest Weekly,” at the princely salary of $70 a week.

I was thrilled at the offer—my first full-time job in the postcollegiate, real world. The drawback was I'd have to live in suburban Princeton, a college and commuting town, rather than the one place in the world I wanted to be, New York City. But at least I was less than an hour away by train, and I could come up every weekend to be in the city and breathe the air that would keep my spirit alive. I accepted Kilgore's offer with thanks and gratitude. It was, after all, the only one I had, and I felt Barney Kilgore was a good guy even with his idiosyncrasies, which included (in my current view) not only
his twitch and his Hoosier mannerisms but also his Indiana Republican politics. Whatever our differences, I knew he would treat me fairly and well, and he did.