Back Then

by Anne Bernays

  He was addicted to quoting from a four-page dittoed collection of epigrams—The Wisdom of the S(ages), or, Short Sentences Based on Long Experience (in other words, Max-ims)—that he compiled, updated from time to time, and distributed to friends. Among his favorites were “God is subtle but not malicious” (Albert Einstein); “There is no cure for birth or death except to enjoy the interval” (George Santayana); “Always do right; you will gratify some people, and astonish the rest” (Mark Twain); and “Great thoughts come from the heart” (Vauvenargues). Another referred to the denizens of Boca Raton, Palm Beach, and Juan-les-Pins, places Max and his wife often visited in the winter: “Shady people in sunny places.” My own favorite during these recitations of gnomic wisdom was: “This too shall pass.”

  Max had a stock of inescapable routines and fetishes, like sending a messenger for an advance copy of Publishers Weekly—he had to be first with the news. Every morning at eight-forty-five he phoned whoever was in charge of publicity and asked, “What’s new on the city desk?” Another routine: “This bulletin just in. Someone was seen attempting to buy a book at Brentano’s [or Doubleday, or Scribner’s]. The manager called the police, and the man is now at Bellevue being held for observation.” I attended these daily performances with an aplomb verging on catatonia.

  As part of my training I had to learn Max’s system of abbreviations and verbal algorithms, great time-savers when bucking letters down the line. His scribbled PAAIMA UYOJ DTN MLS at the top of a letter he had received meant, when decoded, “Please answer as in my absence. Use your own judgment. Do the necessary. M. Lincoln Schuster.” The tiresome but officially approved formula for my replies: “In Mr. Schuster’s absence from the office, I am taking the liberty of responding to your letter of such-and-such a date.” (It was amazing how often he was supposed to be absent from the office.) His alphabet code was as much a Schuster trademark as the straight pins, a menace to beginners, that he used instead of paper clips (he abhorred them) to fasten papers together. Another trademark: the pink, blue, and green three-byfive slips, each color with a particular significance, he kept in his left-hand coat pocket. He used them for recording instructions, ideas, and, of course, maxims and then moved them to his right-hand or “out” pocket from which they would go to his secretaries for action or filing.

  Drafting Max’s own letters in triple space for his revisions and eventual signature, I became, in effect, a ghostly presence in his publishing affairs. Over his name I carried on phantom correspondences with all sorts of people, including Henry Ford II, whose equivalent phantom, impressively named Forrest D. Murden Jr., I once had lunch with. Each of us knew but neither acknowledged the other’s role in the exchanges between our masters. In time I achieved a modest command of Schuster boilerplate, hyperbole, and formulaic closings and learned from him not to raise more than one question per letter if you wanted results, and always to close with a request for action (the “what to do next” paragraph). On my own I also learned that if you wanted to confuse and exasperate a letter writer who made the mistake of raising several questions, you had only to answer just one.

  Working for Max Schuster, I thought, was like playing for the New York Yankees. I was proud that I had been recruited in the first place, lasted as long as I did (about five years), and worked with authors I admired and brought into the house—the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the memoirist Niccolò Tucci, the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Tucci’s Before My Time, an account of his early years in Mussolini’s Italy, was a work of genuine literary distinction, comparable to Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Tucci had seen the rise and demise of fascism only to find himself living in the America of do-nothing President Dwight Eisenhower and Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, the first, “crazy and cancer-ridden,” Tucci raged in one of his operatic appearances in my office (making significant moves toward the open window), and the second, equally “crazy,” bent on plunging the world into another hot war.

  Muriel Rukeyser’s One Life combined poetry, biography, reportage, meditation, and history in a boldly original way that was bound to baffle and repel some readers. It told the story of Wendell Willkie, a lawyer and corporate leader (president of Commonwealth and Southern, a giant utility holding company), a Democrat turned liberal Republican, who had entered the political arena, his critics joked, as a “barefoot boy from Wall Street.” He ran for president against F.D.R. in 1940; he toured wartime England, Russia, and China as F.D.R.’s personal emissary; and in 1943 he published One World, a book (written with Joe Barnes’s help) that described his travels, preached globalism, and sold about four and a half million copies by the time he died in 1944. A foe of Amerian isolationism, Willkie had been one of my heroes. I would have voted for him in 1940 if I had been of voting age. But by 1957, when Muriel’s book came out, he was pretty well forgotten or, if remembered at all, counted among the freaks of recent political history. The first book I sponsored when I came to Simon and Schuster, One Life, described by its author as “a story and a song,” earned me as its editor a plea from Post columnist Murray Kempton, in his review in the New York Post, to get down on my knees and pray for forgiveness.

  CHAPTER 14

  During the early and mid-1950s there seemed always to be a party, small or large, at Bernie Winebaum’s walk-up apartment at 950 First Avenue: a mix of writers (William Gaddis, Jimmy Merrill, and David Jackson, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler), museum and gallery curators (William S. Lieberman, Jacob Bean), and occasional society night creatures. Bernie’s impromptu, ad hoc parties simply happened, like flurries of snow.

  I had known Bernie only from a distance when we were students togther in a freshman German course at Harvard. The instructor, Heinrich Kruse, said to have been an officer in the Kaiser’s army in World War I, recognized a natural victim in me, and after three weeks of systematic humiliation I dropped his course. Bernie, as I was to learn, soldiered on, and seven years later, when we ran into each other at a wine cellar in Paris, he recalled my ordeal in detail. It was impossible not to love him for such concern. In the intervening years he had acquired the confident manners and style of the WASP upper class along with a certain stylish fastidiousness, but he managed to do this without selling out his loyalty to middle-class Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where his father, prominent in the Jewish community, ran the Hearst news agency for northern New England, acquired valuable real estate, and prospered. When we met in Paris Bernie was on leave from a liaison job in Germany with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of several organizations trying to deal with the vast tide of displaced persons the war had left in the hands of the victors. “Guilt and officialdom, dirt and depravity,” he wrote to me from Schweinfurt. “You can picture, if you care to, sniveling Germans, black marketing DP’s, bribe-taking petty officials, the habitual smut of occupation army people, und so weiter.” He managed to do his job with the little German he had learned in Herr Kruse’s class supplemented by a smattering of Yiddish picked up from his grandparents.

  A year later he made a binary shift, from inferno to paradiso, from Schweinfurt in the Allied Zone of occupied Germany to the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. He rented an apartment there that he said looked a little like the Museum of Modern Art, took his meals with Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman, and joined a “small but ferocious American colony” that had touched down like a flock of migrating birds: Truman Capote, the poet James Schuyler (then Auden’s secretary), Tennessee Williams, and an assortment of “literary chasers” and remittance people from New York.

  When his money ran out Bernie left Ischia for New York. Endowed with considerable charm and worldly experience, a fluent writer and an accomplished artist, over the next few years he worked at a succession of prize jobs: at Time; at Flair, Fleur Cowles’s glossy magazine of fashion and the arts; at a top advertising agency, Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather. He was never able to stay put, after a brief euphoria sinking into a state of chronic disgruntlement, picking fights with his employers, unable to satisfy
whatever it was that he expected of himself. I hadn’t begun to realize how constantly he drank—our favorite was a medium-price blended whiskey called Bellows Partner’s Reserve—until one weekend when we flew to Miami to stay with an aunt of his and he vomited on the tarmac.

  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—

  At five in the afternoon.

  Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!

  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.