“I’m sure,” Waverly says. “There were nice Nazis, too, right, who wanted to ship the Jews from Europe to Africa to start their own country. But the Nazi system was still the Nazi system.”
My peevishness with her is so intense that I wonder if I’m on a hypoglycemic downward slide. I keep glucose meters all over the place—bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, right here on the coffee table—so I prick my finger and squeeze out a drop: 117. Good: I’m just angry, not too low, for my meter tells me so.
“You okay?” Waverly asks.
“All good.” In the fifteen seconds it’s taken me to find out how many milligrams of sugar are floating in each deciliter of my blood, my love has dissolved my anger. But not my disapproval. “You know,” I say, “it’s a dangerous slippery slope to start comparing anybody you disagree with to a Nazi.”
“It’s an analogy. I’m not saying everyone who runs the whole, you know, global machine of disaster capitalism is a Nazi, literally. But they’re so sure they know best and so sure people like me are idiots. They’re just so fucking … what’s the word? Dis-ingenue-us. And smug.”
“It’s ‘disingenuous,’ honey.” God, I love her. Last year when she pronounced “epitome” incorrectly—declaring her father’s new enthusiasm for Senegalese drum music “the absolute EP-ih-tome of self-satisfied pseudo-progressive NPR bullshit”—I laughed so hard, I almost cried. ”And yes,” I say, “smugness is a good thing to avoid.”
“Grams,” she says as she types a flurry of characters into two of her text-messaging windows, then shoves the machine away, “I have a question.”
“No, I don’t think it’s a terrible idea for you to think about becoming an actor, and yes, you could live with me here for free after you graduate from college and you’re starting out. If you wanted.”
“Ha. No, do you think I could maybe get a grant from somewhere to expand my Virtual Home project?” Growing up in New York City, Waverly was always fascinated by the tons of stuff that homeless people drag around in shopping bags and supermarket carts. This past summer, she started introducing herself to street people and offering to scan and digitize all their documents for free, then provide a simple, password-protected, visually indexed online archive that they could access from public libraries or anywhere else. So far she’s signed up eight men and five women and digitized a thousand pieces of their ephemera—medical records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, military discharge documents, photos, newspaper and magazine clippings, old bills, bits of Scripture, box tops, addresses, weird drawings, random scraps, anything they want.
“What I’m thinking,” she explains, “is that kids in other cities could do it, too, and maybe even not just kids, and I could make the user interface much better? My digital arts teacher said he thinks it’s ‘scalable.’”
Yes! Which multibillion-dollar pot of money provided by which contemptible global capitalist would you prefer to tap? Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Mellon? Hewlett, Packard, Gates? Steady, Grandma. “What a great idea, Waverly! You know, I’ll bet that is a project somebody might fund.”
“How would I go about doing it?”
I’m wired in to half of them, and we can set up meetings with the correct program officers right after the New Year. And if that doesn’t get you into fucking Harvard or Brown, the world’s gone mad. I’m really no better than her father, with whom I got into a fight a couple of years ago when he was pressuring her to join the fencing team and learn to play Grandpa Jack’s old theremin as college admission ploys. “I know a couple of people who work at foundations,” I say. “Let me check it out for you.”
“Cool.” She grabs her computer with her right hand, props it up on the rug, and stands, moving her torso and left leg perpendicular to the floor and shooting her left arm straight toward the ceiling. She holds the yoga pose—a Half-Moon—and takes four slow, deep breaths before standing up straight, holding the iPad tight to her chest beneath crossed arms, in exactly the nice-girl way I refused to carry my schoolbooks when I was a teenager. She pats it with both hands. “I’m gonna go watch the new Hobbit.”
“My God, there’s a second one already?” I stop myself from asking if she’s stolen the movie off the Internet.
“Uh-huh. It’s supposed to suck. You staying up?”
“Nope,” I say, standing. “It’s bedtime for this Bonzo. Have to get up early and work, work, work!” Meaning: in the morning I’ve got to email Alex Macallister and finally tell him I’m writing this book and that he features in it, um, er, uh, somewhat prominently. “Sweet dreams, baby duck.”
I search for “LGBTQI” and discover (thank you, Google) the “I” stands for “intersex.” I take my blood one last time (107), load up a syringe with five bedtime units of insulin (thank you, electrical and genetic engineers and Big Pharma), and find a fresh, unbruised spot on my thigh to plunge the needle and shoot. I turn on the little bedroom TV and scan through Movies on Demand—huh; the newest James Bond film, set in India; Judi Dench does look amazing for seventy-seven—and then turn it off.
I get the lighter-sized electronic vaporizer from my bedside drawer, put the merest pinch on the tiny platter, close it, push the button, and deeply inhale once. Yes, a former Justice Department official and former candidate for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States admits she very occasionally smokes legal, physician-prescribed marijuana. So? I’m no longer angling for anything. Besides, what’s the point of a memoir that isn’t candid?
Seven years ago, around the time I moved to L.A., Greta told me about some new research into memory loss. Marijuana, she told me, reduces inflammation in a certain brain receptor in older people that’s associated with Alzheimer’s. It also acts on other brain receptors to generate new memory neurons. Losing my memory terrifies me. Thus, after a forty-year-hiatus, I started smoking pot again.
Also, I find I enjoy getting a little high. One night in Washington when I was working for the government, I was with my friend Sarah at the bar in the Hay-Adams. In the middle of our second martini, she called me “Hillary on the outside and Bill on the inside.”
I knew what she meant—I dressed Ann Taylorishly, and I do have a strong taste for physical pleasure. But I have never been a liar, not in any routine Clintonian sense.
My editor’s suggestion that I write a memoir came the day after I delivered my “be careful what you pretend to be” and “honesty in the defense of liberty” speech at a Harvard commencement. It was in the course of that speech that I announced I was withdrawing myself from consideration for appointment to the Supreme Court. For a year afterward I made a few notes for the book we imagined I was writing.
But I decided to write the present book a little over a month ago, during the … commemoration? celebration? wall-to-wall media opportunity? … surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death. I recall the very moment: I’d just seen the new IMAX documentary, and, shaken by its digitally reconstructed 3-D 360-degree version of the Zapruder assassination film, I’d taken a sip of gin, then sobbed for several minutes in my banquette at a Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood, allowing my date to misunderstand why the ninety-eight-foot-high snuff film had shattered me.
Those weeks last fall of national Kennedy hoo-ha amounted, I think, to the baby boomers’ dress rehearsal for their generational funeral. For me, at any rate, it was a two-minute warning. Time’s running out. After fifty years of elaborate JFK conspiracy theories and conspiracy-theory refutations, the unending re-investigations of the investigations into ballistics and cover-ups and murky connections among Cubans and CIA agents and the FBI and mafiosi, and the endlessly regurgitated disingenuousness about America’s lost innocence, I knew I was obliged to figure out and come clean about my own secret episode of 1960s berserkery and lost innocence.
My lawyer, the one person to whom I’ve described in detail what I’m doing with this book, calls it “suicidal,” says it will “besmirch” my “legacy” and ruin my life, blah blah blah blah blah. Even
though I am doing it to myself, my motives are the very opposite of a suicide’s: instead of chickening out, allowing the shock and scandal to bloom posthumously, I decided I want to be alive when the truth comes out. It’s not masochism. It’s closer to honor. Plus, I suppose, an old litigator’s obsession with having the last word and wanting to see the case all the way through to a verdict.
And by the way? For the record? America didn’t “lose its innocence” all at once on November 22, 1963. That was the midpoint, the end of the beginning, the moment when a wild new strain of crazy could no longer be denied or ignored. I started reading the newspaper every morning when I was eight, in 1957, and my scrapbooks, full of crinkly Elmer’s-glued press clips, seem like the libretto of a dark modern opera, all the darker now for my schoolgirl conscientiousness.
On the scrapbook page opposite my pale green report card from the first semester of third grade is a Chicago Sun-Times article about Charles Starkweather’s murder spree across Nebraska with his fourteen-year-old girlfriend. The Starkweather story is followed immediately by a tiny article from New World, the local Catholic weekly, about St. Clare of Assisi being named the patron saint of television. At the end of fourth grade, the Action Comics cover introducing Kara Zor-El (“Look again, Superman—it’s me, Supergirl! And I have all your powers!”) is pasted next to a photo of the actor George Reeves in his Superman costume, illustrating the news story about his suicide, and then a motif emerges, Grown-ups on TV Misbehaving—articles about Charles Van Doren admitting his quiz show championship was fixed, Jack Paar walking off The Tonight Show in a huff, the divorce of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
From sixth grade is my census of the ravages of Dutch elm disease in our neighborhood, with my color snapshots of eleven dead trees, as well as articles about the Bay of Pigs invasion, Ernest Hemingway’s suicide by shotgun and a protest (3,000 BEATNIKS RIOT IN NEW YORK’S GREENWICH VILLAGE) that I fantasized about having attended. Starting in seventh grade are some James Bond bits and pieces (“BOND” AUTHOR FLEMING SPIES ON CHICAGO), and a Sun-Times article about the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing prayer in public schools, but I was still archiving the terrors of the day: a government pamphlet about the new community fallout shelter program, a wordless Newsweek cover illustration of a skull and mushroom cloud hovering above the earth, Marilyn Monroe’s suicide by Nembutal, a plane crash near O’Hare that had been watched by a man whose wife and four children were on board, Sylvia Plath’s suicide by coal gas, a U.S. Air Force pilot parachuting live pigs in wicker baskets into besieged South Vietnamese army outposts so they could be slaughtered and eaten.
My last scrapbook, only half filled, is from ninth grade. Slipped into it is the entire Tribune front page about Kennedy’s assassination. We got only the Sunday Tribune, so my father must have bought it in Chicago for me as a souvenir. The news had shocked me, of course, but so did the size and baldness of the headline—KENNEDY SHOT—DIES—and the fact that the page-one photos of JFK and Lyndon Johnson were printed in color.
“So back then were you, like, more emo or more nerdy Goth or more punk?” Waverly asked a few years ago when she was looking through my scrapbooked chronicle of America Spinning Out of Control. I explained to her that, mainly, I’d been a cheerful, ambitious, good-humored child and young adult—self-obsessed, sure, and slightly morbid, but not sullen. “Your scrapbooks are death death death, Grams.”
Because I was very young, I told her, and living in peaceful, prosperous America, death was totally theoretical to me. Plus, because my father had survived the Nazis and contributed in his small way to the Allied victory, I grew up believing in happy endings. And even though things were beginning to fall apart in the early ‘60s, I said, thinking out loud, the world—my comfortable bit of the world—was also becoming fizzier and shinier and more fun than ever.
In other words, those old scrapbooks provide a skewed history of my tween years, because I neglected to document our nonstop and virtually sexual excitement over all the newness. The sudden arrival, all at once, of stereo records and the Beatles, Bic pens and Instamatic cameras and live transatlantic TV broadcasts and in-flight movies and printed circuit boards and TouchTone phones, area codes and zip codes, Frisbees and Slip ‘N Slide and Silly Putty, instant tanning lotion and stretch fabrics and bikinis, McDonald’s and Tang and SweeTarts and Sweet’N Low and zip-top cans of Tab. There’s no mention of my dad’s business trip to Rio de Janeiro in 1961 on the same 707 as Rock Hudson or the new supersonic jets announced in 1963, or of Alex’s brother Flip driving his brand-new green Mustang to New York City for the World’s Fair. All in all, back then, I told Waverly, I was a lot more manic than depressed.
Take our James Bond shenanigans, for instance: total mania.
4
From the summer after seventh through the winter of eighth grade, from just before the publication of The Spy Who Loved Me until the release of the Dr. No film, we went whole-hog. My home-movie fan-fiction idea turned into Alex’s real-world-theater idea, and our little Bond discussion group had become something vastly more elaborate.
In the profile of Alex published in Vanity Fair last year after he announced he was donating his entire art collection to L.A.’s contemporary museum, he claimed that during “one weekend the winter of 1963,” right after he turned fourteen, he experienced his “seminal aha moment as an art person” when he attended a Happening put on by the artist Claes Oldenburg at the University of Chicago. Alex told the Vanity Fair writer that he remembered watching “a man in a scuba suit reciting poetry, a woman kneading dough and telling the scuba guy to put a sock in it, and someone else playing ‘America the Beautiful’ on a trombone.”
Maybe that’s true. It certainly makes for a good Alex Macallister backstory. However, I have no memory of the event or its allegedly transformative effect on Alex, and thanks to Google, I know that Oldenburg’s 1963 Happening happened at the U of C on Saturday, February 8, the same date my journals tell me that Alex and Chuck and I performed a Bond mission all day in Wilmette.
Alex also told Vanity Fair the following: “The funny bit is, before I’d even heard of Happenings, I’d sort of invented Happenings on my own. I’d staged a whole series of them—these absurdist, surreal, Living Theatre–type pieces, at the age of thirteen, if you can imagine! I was a little Outsider Performance Artist! They were all done around a theme, sort of the dark side of JFK and Camelot and globe-trotty glamour. With props and costumes, all performed in public spaces, unannounced, site-specific. And intertextual. It was bonkers. It was fabulous. So when I saw the Oldenburg, I thought, Crikey, maybe I’m an artist!”
Alex insists he told the writer that Chuck and I were his coequal collaborators but that she’d left it all out. “You know journalists,” he emailed me. Yes, I do: would a Vanity Fair journalist in the fall of 2012 really omit best-selling author and former Supreme Court candidate Karen Hollander from such a cute backstory? Also, for the record, our Bond theatricals weren’t a bit “absurdist” or “surreal,” except for the fact that we were children playing the parts of spies and saboteurs and assassins and criminal masterminds.
For our first mission, I wore my sleeveless purple knit (Orlon? Dacron? rayon?) party dress covered in big black dots. I’d told my parents the boys were taking me out for a belated birthday celebration—a movie, maybe ice cream at Peacock’s, maybe a game of pool at the Macallisters’ country club. Spies give cover stories. It was more exciting to lie a little, more real.
“Oh, ‘at the club,’ huh?” my mother said. “Lah-de-dah!”
“I disapprove,” said my father, smiling.
“The eye shadow looks pretty, honey. You used my good perfume?”
“Just a tiny bit.” Balmain’s Vent Vert, which the Bond girl Solitaire wears.
As Dad kissed my forehead, he said, “You smell fantastic.”
My father often used the phrase “in the cold light of day,” which he said was the first cliché he’d learned in English, “before it became a clich
é,” from reading Orwell as a boy. He told us he never got drunk because “afterward, in the cold light of day, I always feel like a fool and a weakling.” He hadn’t stayed in Denmark to start a jazz radio station with his brother because “after the war, in the cold light of day, it seemed preposterous.” He moved to the Midwest because it seemed the most Danish part of America, “a place where it’s always the cold light of day.”
As I stepped out into the soft, buttery summer Saturday dusk in June 1962, I wondered how if I’d feel about our adventure tomorrow in the cold light of day.
During the two-mile ride to the lake, we coasted as much as possible, because that allowed us to imagine that our Schwinns were actually motorcycles, that we were riding from, say, NATO central command in Versailles into Paris. My dress also made pedaling tricky. The boys wore neckties and sport jackets, and Alex and I had on sunglasses. The mission equipment was in Chuck’s bike basket.
“People must think we’re weird,” I said after exchanging a glance with a fascinated little boy in the back of a passing car.
“Maybe they think we’re going to Shabbat services,” Chuck said, “or Mass, or whatever.”
A Corvair packed with laughing, shouting high schoolers zoomed past, and a kid in the backseat aimed an “L for losers” hand sign at us.
When we’d plotted that inaugural mission, choosing which characters to play had been easy, except when Alex said that Chuck should be Sol Horowitz, one of the hoods who tries to rape Vivienne in The Spy Who Loved Me. Since we were inventing our own narratives, we were free to pick characters from different novels and stories who never appeared together. But choosing the venue had required a long debate.
No Man’s Land, a few blocks at the north tip of town along Lake Michigan, seemed to me the perfectly obvious place. When my mom was young, No Man’s Land actually had been a lawless no man’s land, part of neither Wilmette to the south nor Kenilworth to the north.
True Believers Page 3
