Old Neighborhood (6 page)

S
ARAH WAS BORN, AND
I became a compulsive expert on child care and nutrition. I sterilized bottles and nipples like a lab technician, I memorized symptoms of childhood illnesses and read Dr. Spock, the same sections repeatedly to make sure I did not forget anything. I would have nailed roseola on the spot. We bought a small three-bedroom house in Santa Monica and I hurried home from work each day to play with the baby, to place my face against her belly and make her laugh. Beverly’s parents would invade us periodically from Sacramento bearing lavish gifts. I resented these gestures, in a competition with my father-in-law for the attentions of his daughter and grandchild. On Sarah’s second birthday George announced they were giving the child her own pony. They would keep it for her at the ranch. I was reminded of the Daisy Rifle contests in the comic books I read when I was small, which offered the winner a free pony. The ads missed us as a market, there was not much call on Morris Avenue for Daisy Rifles or for ponies. Now my own daughter would have a pony.

Whenever we visited the ranch, George seemed intent on getting me up on a horse, no doubt playing out some scenario with the tenderfoot dumped to the ground to the delight of the hands. Or perhaps it was that my non-horsemanship exemplified that his daughter had married such a total Easterner.

“You can’t know you don’t like it, boy, unless you try.”

“George, there is death and taxes—and there is me not getting up on a horse. You can count on it.”

“A bit of a
faggalah,
are you?”

Beverly, George and Cindy planned to go riding one morning and George suggested I go out on a bicycle. I declined and he knew the reason.

“Don’t tell me. He can’t ride a bicycle!”

“We were too poor when I was a child. I never owned one.”

“Never met anyone who couldn’t ride a bike. Unbelievable!”

When we returned to Santa Monica I rented a bicycle and became the local entertainment for the local children, skinning my knees and elbows and caroming around the streets, learning to ride—goddammit—but he was still not getting me up on a horse.

My father came to the West Coast with Rose as part of a trip they were taking to Hawaii. He seemed to have straightened his posture, he was tan, trim. Rose looked a little chunkier and her hair a little bluer—but that might have been my prejudice about Rose’s “means” not being superior to my mother’s naive feelings about intellect and
The New York Times.
Rose’s specialty was sitting. She sat in one position for what seemed seventy-two hours.

“If she doesn’t get up to clear a dish,” Beverly said, “she gets fruit salad in her lap.”

“She’s retired,” I said.

“We go out for dinner every night,” Rose told us, confirming the situation. “When my ex died, I said ‘No more cooking.’”

“We don’t even have an egg in the house,” my father said proudly. “We don’t even need one.”

I decided to change jobs. The agency had been taking on industrial accounts rather than consumer products and the work required less imagination. It was also difficult to move out of the industrial category and I did not want to become trapped, the advertising business was becoming pathologically specialized. A trade joke of the day concerned a copywriter who went out for a job.

“What have you worked on, consumer or industrial?”

“Consumer.”

“White goods or package goods?”

“Package goods.”

“What kind of package goods?”

“Cereals and soaps.”

“Hot cereals or cold cereals?”

Porter and Bell was my new agency, they had a diversified consumer list including California wines, children’s toys, a bank, and a radio station, the accounts to which I was assigned. I considered myself a serious advertising man now. I read market-research reports, media appraisals, and in a city where businessmen prided themselves on their casualness of dress, I wore a continuous assortment of Brooks Brothers suits, ranging from gray-gray to gray-green. A very serious type.

Our second child was born, Amy, our second blond baby. I found Amy’s birth a curious measurement of adulthood. I would now have had more experience in dealing with infants than my own parents.

In a logistical error, George and Cindy were visiting us at the same time as my father and Rose, who were returning from another trip, this time they had gone to Mexico. The Hillmans were in their buckskin, Bernard and Rose in haute Miami Beach. At dinner, Rose turned to Cindy, examined the buckskin and said:

“What kind of dress is that?”

“Comfortable. What kind of hair is that?”

“What do you mean, ‘What kind of hair’? Bernard, what does she mean?”

“It’s a rinse,” my father said informatively.

We had brought in Chinese food for dinner. Rose peered at one of the serving dishes.

“Is that black thing pork? I don’t eat pork.”

“Are you
korsher?
” George asked.

“Sometimes.”

“The black thing is a mushroom,” Beverly announced.

“I wish I was
korsher,
but I haven’t got the time,” George said.

“
Korsher?
You’ve got a peculiar accent,” Rose told him. “Where are your people from?”

“Sacramento.”

“That’s Rumania?” she asked.

We had a definite cultural gap there.

“To the
mishburger
,” George said after a few drinks, later in the evening.

“To the what?” Rose asked.

“
Mishpocheh
,” my father said.

“Such an accent.”

“Rose is very direct,” my father said apologetically.

George then made his announcement, that when Amy was two, she also would have a pony. He was prepared to come up with as many ponies as we were able to produce children.

“A pony? Did he say a pony?” Rose asked.

“If we have any more kids, we’ll end up with a riding academy,” I said ungraciously, but who needed his ponies?

“To give a pony to a child! I never heard of such a thing.”

“Do you ride?” Cindy asked Rose sarcastically. “I mean—horses.”

“I go by taxi,” Rose replied grandly.

In 1964 I was thirty years old. I was finding less and less the need to be a wise guy, to make a smart remark so people would notice me. Other things were important to me. I had deep emotional commitments to my wife and our children. On a Sunday morning, Sarah was playing in the driveway on a tricycle. A driver, using the driveway to make a U-turn, failed to see her come out from behind the house, knocked her off the tricycle and against the side of the house. When I reached her she was unconscious and in those first few seconds I did not know if she would live or die. I slapped her cheeks and she regained consciousness—as it turned out she had several broken ribs—but when I thought she might be dead, at that moment I realized I would have given myself for her—they could have taken me if in some way it would have saved my little girl. When something like that happens, you can never again be a wise guy.

On vacations we traveled with the children, mostly to the national parks. I can trace those years by the parks visited. One night at a campfire in the Grand Canyon, the ranger asked how many people were from “back East.” “Let’s see the hands now, anybody from Chicago?” I was a Californian. I even consented to go skiing. I was on the slopes, struggling with my snowplow turns, as my California blondes in ascending sizes whizzed past me. We joined organizations, liberal causes of the 1960s, including a civil rights group for which I wrote ads and fund-raising letters.

“I’ve got to keep my mind from turning to peanut butter,” Beverly said, and we kept busy with cultural events and a film series at UCLA. I was amused to learn that I was really watching “Neo-realism in European Cinema” back in the days of the Ascot Theater when I went hoping to see Anna Magnani’s bare breast on the screen.

Beverly maintained her interest in art, collecting inexpensive graphics by new artists. My collecting interest was in old items like vintage movie posters and old advertising signs.

Beverly chauffeured Sarah and Amy, stayed on top of their school events, took care of car repairs and domestic flotsam and jetsam, which she managed with efficiency. “Neatness counts,” she would say, self-deprecatingly. She was another overeducated housewife. “What good is it,” she said, “if you know Giotto is not a children’s game?” We had married and started a family before she could establish a career and now she was virtually unemployable. Squadrons of art history majors had been graduating from colleges, competing for the small number of jobs in the field. She decided to take education courses so she could teach art to children. On weekends when Beverly was busy studying and on those nights when she attended evening classes, I stayed with the girls. Two little angels in long nightgowns, smelling of their baths, curling into my lap at bedtime. It is as though that time when they were young lasted for about three minutes.

By 1969 I was earning $25,000 a year, considered a top salary for an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles. Beverly completed her education courses and walked right into a state budget cutback and a teacher surplus. She created work for herself and organized an art play group in our basement for preschool children. She was a gifted teacher, imaginative, patient, and after about six months her play group was beginning to show a profit. We became the subject of a feature in the Los Angeles
Times.
The woman who wrote the article was a mother of one of the play-group children, but there we were, shown on bicycles—“Steven Robbins, 35, top adman, Beverly Robbins, 32, nursery play-group teacher, Sarah Robbins, 10, and Amy Robbins, 8.” The article was called “The True Californians.”

“The Robbinses eschew yoga, health food fads, the new therapies. They are a conscientious working couple, professionals in every sense. Their vigor and no-nonsense approach to life is truly Californian. Their industriousness contradicts the myth of a society of vain body worshippers. …”

I had come to be the embodiment of a California lifestyle.

Within the week I received a phone call from someone at the Sloan and Vespers Advertising Agency in New York. He was coming into town and wanted to talk to me about “a job opportunity,” he said. “Something important.” This was an agency that had not even granted me an interview when I was first out of college. We met in his hotel room, I brought samples of my work, including a campaign that had won an advertising award and was reprinted in
Advertising Age.
He had a Xerox of that ad on his desk, along with a copy of the article from the Los Angeles
Times.
His name was Wilton Parker, a formidably handsome man in his late forties.

“Very frankly, we need new blood at our agency.”

“I see.”

“There’s a freshness of approach out here that we like. A California style.”

“Good advertising is good advertising,” I said.

“Yes, but we’re all talking the same way back in New York, very frankly.”

He looked at my samples, which covered a wide range of ads and commercials.

“Very frankly, it’s as fine as I’ve seen in a long time.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Robbins, we’re looking for a California type, such as yourself. If we were to hire you, we’re talking about copy chief and senior writer at thirty-two thousand on a two-year contract.”

“That would be a big decision for me.”

“We’d pay relocation costs, of course. I don’t know how well you know New York, but I live out on Long Island in a lovely area. We could help you find something with good schools, etcetera.”

It was the ultimate get-even fantasy, to return in triumph to the place where I had once been rejected. As successful as I had been in Los Angeles, New York was the center of the advertising field.

Apart from the wisdom of uprooting everybody, I had a serious moral question. I had insisted upon, and was given the luxury of working on, the kinds of accounts acceptable to me. We were, after all, very typical 1960s liberals in our home. I would not work on cigarettes because they were harmful, or on Dow Chemical products because of the napalm. I could make these demands in Los Angeles where the agencies were smaller and the agency politics not as intense as in New York. I expressed these concerns to Parker, he thought about this, then he said:

“Robbins, I’m glad you told me. Very frankly, I respect you for it. That’s just the kind of directness I came out to California to find.”

Beverly and I discussed the job over a several-day period, she did not know if she wanted to leave California—and her play group was becoming established.

“When is it going to be my time?” she said.

“Maybe you could do it there.”

Parker asked if he could see us at the house, a suggestion so blatant, Beverly and I were amused. Obviously, he wanted to check out the corporate wife on home ground. We overpowered him, of course, my beautiful wife and children. We were the family straight out of the Los Angeles
Times.

“We’d like to offer you the job, Steve,” he said. “We’d be willing to pay thirty-five thousand.”

“Well, we’re still thinking about it here.”

“I know it’s a big decision. But it’s an important position we’re offering you, very frankly.”

When Parker was in the next room, Beverly said to me:

“Oh, take the job, Steve. You want it more than anything.”

“I do, Bev. To go back there—”

“Take the job.”

A contract was sent to me within days. I loved the irony. I had been hired to come out to California because I was a New York type. Now I was being hired to come to New York because I was a California type.

The news that we were relocating, that for career reasons I was going with Beverly and the grandchildren to New York, was met with unadorned rage at the Hillman Ranch. “What? Say that again?” George told us and we explained it carefully again. “No. I didn’t hear that. Tell me again.” We tried to round out the argument, that something was in this for Beverly, too. She would have a chance to create a nursery school in a new locale, her business had been only marginally profitable here.

“Are you hearing all this, Cindy?”

“I’m hearing it.”