Back Then (3 page)

Edward Bernays was different: inspirational, energized, provocative, bold. He revered his uncle and, believing that traits and talents show up in succeeding generations of the same family, felt that he had inherited a good deal of Freud's flair and ingenuity. He deemed himself the father of public relations, although there was a question as to whether he or a man named Ivy Lee had actually provided the sperm. In any case, after a stint as a Broadway press agent, he coined the phrase “Counsel on Public Relations,” and set up a counseling office in the mid-1920s, with my mother as unequal partner, and a staff of more than a dozen. He used his brain the way a superior athlete uses muscle plus timing. He dreamed up improbable things. For instance, with the American Tobacco Company as client, he persuaded “nice” women to start smoking in public during a period when a woman with a cigarette in her mouth or fingers was viewed as a lowlife. He accomplished this by asking several debutantes to walk down Fifth Avenue smoking what he called “torches of freedom.”

Throughout the Depression, when most Americans struggled to feed their kids, when hundreds of thousands went jobless, and despair was the most common emotion, my father continued to make piles of money. His P.R. services, like those of bankruptcy lawyers, were considered by many businessmen and institutions to be not a luxury but a necessity. I was used to being rich in a way only someone who has never been poor is used to it. I almost never thought about money.

Under
several layers of bourgeois camouflage, my mother was a “bohemian.” Among her friends had been the literary moths—Franklin P. Adams, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly—who drank and traded witticisms at the Algonquin Round Table. She had been a
Herald Tribune
reporter when most women her age already had a couple of children, and fancied herself a nascent novelist. But for reasons she kept to herself, she encouraged her husband to make the kind of decisions that are often arrived at by both the man and the woman whose lives will be most affected by them. He loved being the boss; she, apparently, was willing to be bossed. Given the choice, she might very well have chosen the West Side; its informality and energy, its fierce sense of neighborhood, suited her temperament. But my father would rather have lived on the Bowery alongside the bums than among Jews and assorted Old Worlders on the Upper West Side. If you put a drop of ink into a pail of water, it will dilute in a few seconds. This was my father's Jewishness—he trusted that it would disappear in the watery East Side. To be fair to him, he was a thoroughly secular man who very early decided to rely on his own imagination, intelligence, and skill to get him to where he wanted to go. The idea of applying to a divinity was, for him, as unthinkable as sacrificing a live chicken every time he needed to change his luck. Having also decided that Jewishness was a matter of religion rather than heritage, he rationalized his impulse to “pass” in the largely Christian world that was Manhattan's Upper East Side and resisted the Jewish label
by saying, “I don't believe in God. I have no religion.” He expected the same of his children, although he did tell me when I was very little that I was “nothing” and that when I grew up I could choose any religion I wanted. I think he viewed the idea of religion in the same way he chose a street to live on or a pair of shoes—easy to change when the spirit hits you.

For
a few years before the war we lived in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in an apartment that occupied the entire twenty-seventh floor. My sister, Doris, and I shared a bedroom. We had a cook and
a kitchen, but my mother often ordered our dinner from the hotel kitchen; it would arrive under a silver-plated dome wheeled in by a waiter who came up on the back elevator. Although we usually had meat for dinner, whenever my mother went out for the evening she would order a vegetable plate for Doris and me, thinking, no doubt, that this sort of food was healthier for children. We had boiled and naked cauliflower, carrots, mashed potatoes, string beans, and asparagus arranged prettily on a round platter. I looked in vain for the meat.

Anna Freud Bernays, New York, late 1940s.

Letter from Freud to A.B., 1930.

The hotel doorman was suited up like a Russian general, with golden epaulets and something that looked like a coiled miniature fire hose pinned to the front of his uniform. Since this was the favorite New York hotel of visiting movie stars, there was always a crowd clutching autograph albums and waiting under the canopy to pounce on Rita Hayworth or Tyrone Power or Spencer Tracy. One Saturday morning, in the grip of mischief, my sister and I decided we were goodie-goodies and better do something about it. Excited, howling with rapture, and starting out on our floor, we scrambled down twenty-seven flights of back stairs, overturning a large laundry cart on every floor, spilling out used sheets and towels. We were inexperienced vandals, and when we reached the ground floor, instead of retreating back upstairs via the elevator, Doris locked herself in the lobby's men's room while I gave myself up and confessed. The manager, obviously torn between rage and servility, assured our mother, now on the scene, that it was just a childish prank and not to worry. He banged on the door of the men's room, pleading with Doris to come out.

The Central Park duck pond, which froze in winter, lay directly below our living room window. It had a bucolic, ad hoc shape and a graceful, arched stone bridge like something in a fairy tale; I waited for trolls. When we had outgrown our governess, my mother hired a series of Barnard College girls to look after us when we came home from school and before she returned from the office. I fell in love with a couple of them—especially Phyllis, who looked like Hedy Lamarr. I played in Central Park at least three times a week for years, until I was old enough not to need supervision. The park was our front yard.

There was a pony pitch where, for twenty-five cents, you were hoisted aboard the animal and led several times around an oval of soil, while the poor old beast beneath you creaked and rocked like a boat. I considered a pony ride perfect bliss, but it was a pleasure withheld from me—not because we couldn't afford it but because it was deemed bad for me to have what I wanted simply because I wanted it. There was a birdhouse, and llamas, and a tiglon, the only offspring of a tiger and lion in the whole world. Cages were spartan—a concrete floor, a tree stump, and bars. The animals sat there glumly or walked back and forth, over and over again, side-stepping their poop, in a fever of boredom. The polar bears had a cave and a waterfall, the sea lions a small lake with a concrete structure in its center, where the seals sunned themselves and occasionally squawked like donkeys. Zoos were no more than jails for animals, but no one ever said this. All you had to do was look into their eyes.

Living
on the Upper East Side meant making a contract with an orderly and predictable style. Mr. Bernays rang for the elevator every morning at eight o'clock to be taken down to the ground floor where he wished the doorman an impersonal good morning and entered his chauffeur-driven Cadillac, which whisked him downtown to the Graybar Building next to Grand Central Terminal and some years later, to Rockefeller Center, where he rented office space in the Time-Life Building. His wife and business partner—“Miss Fleischman”—repeated this maneuver exactly an hour and a half later, having done the day's grocery shopping over the phone and taken a long, scented bath.

Sunday evening party chez Bernays. A.B. sitting on floor
(right)
next to sister, Doris, 1947.

Around 1939 we moved to 817 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Sixty-third Street, one of the few luxury buildings whose management was willing to rent to Jews. Our apartment had separate bedrooms for me and Doris, a kitchen and a pantry with shelves enough to hold plates and assorted tableware for fifty people, and a dining room my mother had custom-painted by an artist who specialized in interior murals to look like a tropical rain forest full of brightly colored birds and exotic flora. Milk made me gag; I told my mother about it, but she insisted that I drink a glass of it each day. Every morning I emptied my milk glass behind the radiator in the dining room. The spilled milk had been cleaned away by the next morning when I repeated again this small gesture of defiance, the maid, silent as always, apparently unwilling to snitch on me.

The living room, furnished with good contemporary pieces—and equally good antiques—was at least twenty-five feet long. Sometimes we rode in the elevator with a beautiful woman with blue-black hair and severely chic hats with a full-face veil. She was often accompanied by her daughter, a girl about my age, who looked at me with disdain. We never spoke, but I stuck my tongue out at her behind her back. My mother said the woman was Gloria Swanson, a silent movie star put out to pasture.

Except for the dining room our apartment was as neutral as a model room on Bloomingdale's furniture floor. There was no way to tell what sort of people lived there except that they had oodles of money and liked original artwork. My parents, guided by my father, who knew precisely what he liked and rarely questioned his own taste, had bought several paintings while on their honeymoon in Europe: two by Raoul Dufy, one of them an oil of a French harbor. There was a Jules Pascin that embarrassed me: two girls sitting on an armchair. You could see the underpants of the older girl; I always looked away from it. On the piano stood a two-foot woman made of polished wood, all curves. This was the work of the sculptor Elie Nadelman, who, when an impoverished immigrant artist, had asked for the hand of one of my father's sisters, Judith, and was turned away on the grounds that his poverty and prospects made him an unsuitable suitor.

No one left shoes or socks, apple cores, magazines, or cigarette butts around; if they did, the maid was instructed to pick up and do the necessary with these gritty reminders of daily life. If she failed to do this there was no second chance. Likewise, Sixty-third Street was always swept clear of detritus—no scraps of paper flew up and around, no garbage cans overflowed with grapefruit rinds and dog food cans. No old chairs were left in the gutter, empty boxes, or dead cigar butts. Outdoors was just like indoors. It was an area rather than a neighborhood, just one gray, severe apartment building after another, most of them erected in the 1910s and 1920s; and home to thousands of people who dressed up to go outside, rarely spoke to strangers, and threw away or mended things as soon as they showed signs of wear. Every apartment building in the area had a freight elevator used by boys delivering food from local shops, drugs from Larrimore's, and spirits of various kinds from Sherry Wine and Spirits. All the gears in this machine worked smoothly and silently, oiled with money. You rarely heard of a robbery or other violent crime. We felt as secure as a safe in the vault in the bank at the corner of Madison and Sixty-fourth Street.

Early one morning, still in my pajamas, I went, as usual, into my parents' bedroom and saw my mother sitting up in bed, crying into a linen handkerchief. I had seen her cry only once before, when I was very young and had wandered out to the porch of a rented summer house and found her alone, sobbing quietly. Now, crying with more vigor and blowing her nose, she paid no attention to me. I'd never seen her distraught, and it sent prickles along the skin of my arms and legs. My father told me that Germany had just invaded the Sudetenland and there was probably going to be a war. My mother said it was the end of the world. My father had steely blue eyes that refused to transmit messages—except those that said “off limits.” Eight years old, I wasn't sure what a war involved, but it didn't sound promising. I looked at my mother's face, streaked with tears, and began to worry; to ask her about it seemed out of the question—she had retreated somewhere she did not want me to enter.