Back Then (33 page)

He started commuting to Athens where, with money from his parents, he bought a nightclub that he decorated with his own murals. He self-published a volume of his poetry, illustrated the work of a Greek novelist, and filled leather-bound notebooks with nervous and witty ink drawings. Driving his little Karmann-Ghia he steered with his elbows as he looked for a cigarette and lighted it, and this was terrifying enough, but he was also nearsighted and only at the last moment did he recognize that it was a person or a dog, and not some wisps of hay, that happened to be moving across the road in front of him. At his best, Bernie was generous, supportive, and tolerant, playful as a kitten, and in Mark Twain's phrase, as “sociable as a house fly.” That he was gay and I was not never came between us. He and Annie adored each other, but before then there had also been women friends of mine he disapproved of, in a protective way, as not being up to the level of intelligence, sensibility, and native good judgment (he used the Yiddish word
sachel
) he thought I deserved.

Bernie knew everybody, especially people with impressive family trees and colorful connections, and he insisted on telling Annie and me about them at exasperating length. He was always meeting someone for drinks, weekending at Fire Island, Sag Harbor, Sneeden's Landing, or Stonington. As much as I loved Bernie there were times when I went out of my way not to see him, especially when his moods swung with alarming speed and unpredictability from high spirits to a rage directed against “liberals,” “Communists,” “faggots,” and at least one family member. He became a vociferous supporter of Greece's right-wing military government. “What's the latest about Bernie,” some of his old party guests would ask me. “Has he gone mad again?” He began to vanish from my life.

After Annie and I married, parties in New York no longer had their old romantic and erotic glow, their promise of adventure. Now they were largely a kind of education, an extension of office life: being a full-time editor was also an evening job. One night, in the crowded Central Park West living room of Tom Bevans, head of production at Simon and Schuster, Annie and I met the humorist James Thurber. Then in his midsixties, he talked nonstop, somewhat drunkenly, about his daughter and her favorite stuffed animal. Several times he had to interrupt his monologues to be led, like blind Oedipus, down a long hallway to the bathroom. Helen Thurber, his second wife, nudged me with her elbow, complaining in a loud whisper, “He's talking about that goddam daughter of his again.” Except for her, the roomful of guests listened in battered silence, even the celebrity of the day, the quiz show champion Charles Van Doren, a Columbia University literature instructor and son of the distinguished literary scholar Mark Van Doren. In front of the television cameras he appeared to know everything, from astronomy to zootomy, along with the batting records of Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. For fourteen dazzling weeks, locked in a glass-walled isolation booth (a trademark feature of
Twenty-One
), sweating and biting his lip as he strained for answers to difficult questions, Van Doren established himself as something unique in American popular culture of the day: the intellectual—or at least, the know-it-all—as hero. In November 1959, responding to a subpoena and open to charges of perjury for lying to a grand jury, he finally confessed to a congressional subcommittee that his spectacular ride to glory and $129,000 in prize money had been a put-up job: the producers of
Twenty-One
primed him with the questions and fed him the answers. We felt sold out, doubly ashamed because we should never have bought into this cheap spectacle in the first place.

Van Doren was like an earlier public figure turned notoriety, Alger Hiss. Annie and I met him and his wife, Priscilla, in 1956, shortly after he had finished serving in a federal penitentiary a five-year term for perjury. He told us he was proud that he had proven himself able to survive life on the inside without injury, especially since, as a convicted spy for the Soviets, he must have been a pariah among felons. “I can take care of myself,” he said. That evening, after dinner at the house of one of Hiss's (and Max Schuster's) lawyers, Ephraim London, we planned to watch the televised newsreels of Grace Kelly's wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. To satisfy an American public that (like us) hungered for celebrity doings hot off the griddle, an RAF fighter had flown the films from Nice to Gander, Newfoundland, where they were loaded onto an American plane that took them to New York. The wedding films, melding studio royalty and casino royalty, were harmless enough entertainment by anyone's standards. But for Priscilla Hiss it was a matter of principle not to watch—and thereby to condone—a show-business spectacle that would “corrupt,” she said, “the shop girls of America.” Up to then I hadn't known even that we had “shop girls” in our country nor had I suspected that Priscilla may have been the driving ideological force in the Hiss family. We left her sitting alone in righteous protest and rushed downstairs to the TV room in the basement.

Another evening, writer and photographer Peter H. Buckley, the author of
Bullfight,
a book I was editing at Simon and Schuster, gave a champagne, brandy, and tapas party in honor of the star matador Antonio Ordóñez. With Ordóñez was his beautiful wife, sister of his arch-rival, another numero uno of the bullring, Luis Miguel Dominguín. Ordóñez managed somehow to present himself always in profile as he shook hands or conversed through clouds of cigarette smoke with the
New Yorker
theater critic and bullfight enthusiast Kenneth Tynan.

Buckley's party reflected the vogue for La Fiesta Brava during the 1950s. My own interest in the sport, as it was called, had barely survived seeing bulls butchered in the ring at Nogales, Mexico, years earlier: after some colossally inept swordplay the torero finished off the animal by driving a sort of screwdriver into its brain. Many of my friends who had never been closer to a bullfight than a second-balcony seat at
Carmen
fancied themselves aficionados of a sort. They read books about bullfighting by Hemingway, Tom Lea, and Barnaby Conrad, sat through the 1957 film of
The Sun Also Rises
, owned copies of Picasso's corrida graphics, and in solemn moments, with a little harsh
vino tinto
in their bellies, recited Federico García Lorca's lines for a dead bullfighter—

Idioms of the bullring—“working within the danger of the horns,” “the moment of truth”—became part of the lit-crit vocabulary: for serious writers struggling to go one-on-one with language it was always five o'clock in the afternoon, with blood already staining the sand. The bullfight's ritualized, balletic assassinations were supposed to reveal something profound about the Spanish character and our own craving for expiation. Despite Buckley's attempts to instruct me in
afición,
despite this evening in proximity to the great Ordóñez, what that something was I never found out.

Among the partying people I knew at all well alcohol was the thing and drugs did not play much of a role, except conversationally: the words
psychedelic, hallucinogen, acid,
and
trip
had entered our lexicon. In 1958 the young journalist Dan Wakefield, a transplant from Indianapolis to New York (he still said “Golly!” when impressed), tried to recruit me for a weekend-long experiment in LSD, a laboratory product reported to be many times, weight for weight, more potent than peyote. The gain for me, according to Wakefield, was to be the adventure itself along with a dramatic expansion in consciousness that would enrich my store of experience and make me a better editor. The gain for him was to be my moment-by-moment reactions and behavior, raw material for an
Esquire
article. In controlled circumstances (a private house up the Hudson near Croton), with Wakefield and his
Esquire
editor as observers (along with a doctor in attendance, just in case things got out of hand), I was to travel to a new plane of being with only Wakefield's casual assurance I would return to sea level with my mind in one piece. Enthusiastically, even passionately, urged on me over two long lunches, the project had undeniable allure as my introduction to an emerging spirit of the decade. Wakefield was the apostle Paul, but I remained the reluctant unbeliever Agrippa—“Almost thou persuadest me.” “Almost” was not enough.

In
1958, when Susanna, our first child, was old enough to sit up at her table and eat baby food, Annie and I diverted her with propeller noises and daredevil swerves and swoops as we piloted the spoon from a hot plate of mashed carrots and applesauce to her mouth. “It's from Fidel, in the Sierra Maestra,” we said, bringing the spoon in for a landing, “and it's for you!”

Fidel Castro was our hero, a middle-class professional (lawyer) who was also a revolutionist, a man of daring and action like Judas Maccabeus and the Lone Ranger. From his outlaw's hideout in the mountains, Fidel, Raoul Castro, and Che Guevara led a guerrilla band sworn to topple dictator Fulgencio Batista, banish the corruptive Yankee dollars, and, so we understood, bring democracy to Cuba together with literacy. What a David and Goliath conflict, what a good war Fidel was fighting! What a contrast to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's indifference to civil injustices and to the policies of his maniacal secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who preached massive retaliation and practiced brinkmanship! Before Castro became our official enemy, a Communist dictator in our own backyard, there were even elements of comedy to entertain us: Fidel on the pitcher's mound; Fidel's numbing public speeches that went on for hours; Fidel's cigars, signature beard, drab uniform; Fidel's survival, even diplomatic triumph in the face of American attempts to humiliate him. A day after he arrived in New York to attend a meeting of world leaders at the United Nations, the Waldorf-Astoria management booted him from the hotel, allegedly because his aides had been plucking chickens for
arroz con pollo
in the corridors. Fidel and his entourage moved to Harlem, to the Hotel Theresa on 125th Street. There Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev paid him a fraternal visit, a diplomatic and public relations disaster for the United States.

J.K. and infant Susanna, 1957.

Through a wrench in perception, an exercise in cognitive assonance, we managed to live with the prospect of nuclear warfare while enjoying a time of economic growth and rampant consumerism. We had become “Utopia Limited in the Fat 1950s.”
The Affluent Society
, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called it in his classic 1958 book. In line with its growing control over our behavior and its demonic power to create desire, advertising—“Madison Avenue,” familiarly—was the hot profession of the decade: glamorous, well paid, extravagantly self-marketed, and intrinsically fascinating. The daily capitalist soap opera had its distinctive cast of characters, “account executives” and “creative” people who carried attaché cases and bowed before “clients.” At the end of their working day, they drank martinis and played gin rummy in the New Haven Railroad club car on their way home to Westport, archetypal exurb for people in the “advertising game.” One of my authors at Simon and Schuster referred to me as his “account executive”—I set him straight with a few coarse words.

In the 1950s Annie and I were reading best-sellers like Frederic Wakeman's
The Hucksters
(its hero chooses “a sincere tie” to wear at a crucial interview), Vance Packard's
The Hidden Persuaders
, Martin Mayer's
Madison Avenue
, and Sloan Wilson's
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
, one of Dick Simon's most notable successes (Simon's protegé, Richard L. Grossman, posed for the jacket picture of the iconic Man). Writers we knew worked in advertising: William Gaddis, Anatole Broyard, James Dickey, L. E. Sissman, Joseph Heller, Richard Yates. Like movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn's malapropisms, advertising maxims, genuine or apocryphal, became part of our jokey language. “Run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes,” “Smear it on the cat and see if she licks it off,” “Put it on the 6:28 and see if it gets off at Westport,” “Throw it in the pool and see if it comes up for air”: the “it” being whatever slogan, headline, or campaign idea that might go over with agency bosses, clients, and eventually, us, the target public.

Advertising entertained us, but at the same time we knew we were surrendering some degree of control over our lives to enticing headlines and talking animals, to beer, razor blade, and laundry detergent jingles we couldn't get out of our heads. We were becoming part of a great homogenized American public with no will of its own, only a set of conditioned reflexes profitably studied by motivational researchers. (One expert, possibly fictional, is supposed to have predicted the quick demise of the Ford Edsel because of the vaginal shape of its front grille—“You can't sell a thing like that without hair around it.”) There was plenty of informed support for this feeling of helplessness. According to the reasoned conclusions of David Riesman's
The Lonely Crowd
we had become “outerdirected” rather than “inner-directed,” consumers rather than producers, on the edge of alienation. William H. Whyte Jr.'s
The Organization Man
, an important book acquired and skillfully published for Simon and Schuster by Joe Barnes, narrowed the focus to corporate culture. As a way of subverting conformity, a thumb in the eye for personnel managers, Whyte provided a valuable appendix titled “How to Cheat on Personality Tests.”