Back Then
Authors: Anne Bernays
CONTENTS
This book is for our grandchildrenâ
        David
        Benjamin
        Tobias
        Alexander
        Samuel
        Rachel
âand our friend George Cronemiller
We thank
Larry Tye, Doris B. Held, Sterling Lord, Shelly Perron, Jennifer Pooley, and Claire Wachtel, our inspiring and merciless editor.
We were lucky.
We met, began our careers and adult lives, and opened our eyes to the world of possibilities in New York, in the 1950s, when the pent-up energies of the Depression years and World War II were at flood tide. You could see this in the rush of crowds, in big fish-finned cars on the streets and in showrooms, in store windows crammed with things that had been scarce for yearsâhigh-fashion shoes, kitchen and laundry appliances, generously cut dresses and suits, Scotch whiskey, prime cuts of beef, caviar, imported cheeses, sugar-saturated cakesâand now in the first affordable, invariably temperamental television sets. (To own
one, too large to move or disguise, was something of a guilty secret, a cultural sellout according to our sniffier friends.) We discovered the luxury of the inessentialâtwo-tone refrigerators, electric can openers, the conversation pit.
Postwar
meant abundance, rapid change, physical and social mobility, a farewell to the lingering effects of the years 1941 to 1945: austerity, scarcities, postponements for “the duration.” It also meant urban sprawl, intimations of conflict with a new enemy, the Soviet Union, fallout shelters marked by black and yellow signs, organic anxiety. “Iron Curtain,” “cold war,” “neutron bomb,” and “loyalty oath” entered our vocabulary (along with “junk mail” and “Bermuda shorts”).
Prewar,
meanwhile, had begun to imply a backward glancing recognition of what had been lost: in buildings and material objectsâsolidity, amplitude, workmanship, humane scale; in mind-setâstability, restraint, generosity, a feeling of community and social connectedness fostered by the presence of a common enemy. The moral certainty driving “the good war” that had just been fought and won gave way not only to guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also to dread that the Bomb might be used again, this time against us. During this period of nominal peace we built fallout shelters, conducted a “police action” in Korea to contain communism, found Julius and Ethel Rosenberg guilty of espionage and sent them to the electric chair. Meanwhile Edward Steichen's monumental photography show (and the book derived from it),
The Family of Man,
depicting the daily lives of people all over the world, gave hundreds of thousands of Americans an almost sacramental experience of universal oneness. Tranquilizers, developed in France as a treatment for violent psychotics, became the medication of choice for what W. H. Auden named the Age of Anxiety.
Journalists had labeled usâmen and women born between 1925 and 1935â“the silent generation,” because we didn't make a lot of noise, accepted things as they were, however skewed, were too busy having fun and (in our case) learning what New York had to offer. We had a few insurgent heroes: James Dean, Elvis Presley, Fidel Castro. Some intrepid unmarried couples lived together, but most middle-class young people remained under their parents' roof until the wedding night. Girls drank and smoked in public without hesitation, not realizing their mothers would have been shamed for doing the same. Margaret Sanger's birth-control clinics still refused to fit unmarried women with diaphragms, but there were doctors who would. In the movies, according to an industry moral code adopted in 1934, married couples retired chastely to twin beds. When they embraced they kept one foot on the floor. In real life sexâstraight and otherwiseâwas all around us, just beneath the surface, germinating.
A
city that Henry James remembered from his boyhood as a dusky little village was now on its way to being the cultural and economic capital of the twentieth century. Like the famed Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, Frances Steloff's Gotham Book Mart at 41 West Forty-seventh Streetâits hanging cast-iron sign read WISE MEN FISH HEREâwas headquarters for an American literary avant-garde alert to both European modernism and native materials. For us, one of the defining images of the era to come is a 1948 group photograph of writers compressed in varying degrees of discomfort in the bookstore's back room: Auden perches on a ladder and towers over Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz crouches in the foreground, Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams huddle in the rear, the SitwellsâEdith and Osbertâare enthroned like royalty. A postwar generation of bold and original writers came into their own: Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Carson McCullers, J. D. Salinger, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac. Under an imported genius, the choreographer George Balanchine, American ballet produced a classic repertory along with goddesses of Mozartian radiance and grace like the dancer Tanaquil LeClerq. A distinctively New York school of painting was already a force and influence nationally and abroad. The Museum of Modern Art championed the New and dictated taste in painting, sculpture, and design. Sometimes it took its proselytizing mission too seriously, canonized coffeepots, can openers, and martini shakers, and exhibited automobiles on oil-stained white marble slabs as “pieces of hollow rolling sculpture.” Rodgers and Hammerstein's
Oklahoma!
(1943) inaugurated a decade and a half of exuberant musical comedies like
My Fair Lady
(1956). There was nothing tentative or sparing about the “big” movies of the 1950sâ
Sunset Boulevard
(1950) and
The African Queen
(1951), at the beginning of the decade,
Giant
(1956) and
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957) near midpoint.
Still relatively restrained in style, and with as yet only a subdominant glitter, chic, and Babylonian arrogance, New York was hospitable to the young. Subway tokens were ten cents. Newcomers in entry-level jobs, like us in their twenties, could find affordable places to live in the Village, Chelsea, along Third Avenue in the shadow and clatter of the El, on the Upper West Side, and, before it became the East Village, on the Lower East Side. There, in 1950 and 1951 one of us ( J.K.) lived in a five-room walk-up in a dumbbell tenement on Pitt Street, with the bathtub in the kitchen, and paid twenty-nine dollars a month for it. At night rats scratched and squeaked inside the walls.
Most of us smoked cigarettes, drank blended whiskey, gin (especially in martinis), and jug wine. Vodka was something Russian and Polish we had only heard about. Occasionally we went to eat at pricey smorgasbord placesâStockholm, the Three Crownsâand piled our plates at assembly-line tables loaded with pickled and smoked fish, iced shrimp, cold cuts, meatballs, and unfamiliar cheeses. The city abounded in sociable cafeterias, aromatic delicatessens, hot dog carts, drugstore and Woolworth counters serving up grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna on white, cherry Cokes, and milk shakes. The standard, minimally worded restaurant menu offered a choice of tomato juice or shrimp cocktail, daily specials like half a spring chicken and Salisbury steak, and apple pie either à la mode or topped by a wedge of orange cheese. Automats dispensed coffee and milk from nickel-plated spouts in the shape of a lion's head, and sandwiches, baked beans, and pies from little glass cells; we favored Nedick's for hot dogs and a pulpy, vaguely orange-flavored drink; Chock full o' Nuts, begun as a nut shop near Macy's, had become a chain of lunch counters, efficiency engineered down to barely tolerable spaces between stools and calibrated dollops of mustard in tiny paper cups.
The owner of Chock full o' Nuts, a white man named William Black, advertised in the tabloids for “light colored counter help,” an example of
n
th-degree job discrimination. The separation of whites and blacks was an embedded fact of American life, “civil rights” an unfamiliar phrase, Harlem another world. In 1956 the city's nearly eight million population was 83 percent white, only 11 percent black. Except downtown in the Village and in other artistic and intellectual enclaves, white people and black people did not mingle. We were accustomed to seeing only white faces as patrons in theaters, restaurants, hotels, and sports arenas. It was only in 1947, when Jackie Robinson, wearing a Brooklyn Dodger uniform, trotted out to second base at Ebbets Field, that the color line in major league baseball was finally breached.
Weâthe authors of this bookâwere born and brought up in New York, on opposite sides of Manhattan Island separated by the Everyman's land of Central Park. As much as your address, your telephone exchange was a caste mark: classy names like Butter-field, Regent, and Rhinelander for the Upper East Side, plainer ones for the Upper West SideâRiverside, Monument, Academy. The West Side was exuberant in the architecture and names of its monumental apartment housesâEldorado, San Remo, Beresford, Majestic, Dakota, Ansonia, Henrik Hudson, Century, Hotel des Artistes, White House. The East Side tended to stick to numbers and to stretches of uninflected and somber blocks of residential masonry. What the Upper East Side lacked in street life along the cheerless canyons of Park Avenue it made up for in elegance, discretion, and exclusiveness. Madison Avenue was New York's Rue de Rivoli Saint-Honoré; upper Broadway, a marketplace promenade in Warsaw or Vilna, an upscale Hester Street with plate-glass display windows instead of pushcarts.
Old New York society, the subject of Edith Wharton's novels, had lost almost all of its clout and coherence during the leveling years of two world wars and disappeared into its clubs, mansions, and Newport cottages. What took over was café societyâthe Stork Club, the debutante Brenda Frazier on the cover of
Life
magazine, movie stars, the celebrities Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons featured in their columns. Celebrity began to self-generateâyou were known for being known. Style, glitz, and status symbolsâhandbags from Gucci or Vuitton, a shirt with the Lacoste alligator, shoes from Ferragamo, neckties from Countess Maraâbegan their gradual and irreversible ascendancy over substance. Still, we could see that life in New York was far more fluid than ever before, and that if you were white and had talent and energy you could start your climb.
