Fritz

by Martin Shepard

  “What was so unique and phenomenal about that was that I was fantasizing that I was the burning bush. It was in relation to a whole biblical allegory about the burning bush, Moses, and the Guardian Angel. And he, somehow or other, was able to pick up these messages. He knew my fantasy. When he said ‘And I am your Guardian Angel,’ something in me just snapped, and my whole relationship was established at one moment—my feeling of being able to believe in him, to trust him, to marvel at his creativity. For it was not that I was a mystic and felt that he had mystical ways. I just knew that he was such a master that he knew me. He plugged into my Jewishness, he knew my background.

  “He could see subtle, subtle messages in your body. He could read expressions in your eyes, in your mouth, and all around your cheeks that were uncanny, they were so perceptive. He had a way of going right to the center of your soul and just splitting you open in a fraction of a second. Because he could see you so clearly.

  “We developed a tremendous love for each other. He was never cruel to me. I didn’t understand that, because he could be so cruel to people. I’ve never seen a man who could be so sarcastic, so belligerent, so nasty, and get people so frustrated that they would be ready to assault this poor old man. I saw somebody, in one group, pick up a heavy ashtray and throw it at him. And he’d say, ‘Hit me. Come on, hit me.’ I know that was one of his techniques. I could see he was doing this and it was very courageous. He had some woman choking him at one time. ‘Go ahead and choke me,’ he taunted. And I’d sit there petrified.”

  These new opportunities for creative work reinstilled, in Fritz, both energy and passion. Esalen, he wrote, had “become a symbol very similar to the German Bauhaus, in which a number of dissident artists came together, and out of this Bauhaus came a re-catalyzation of art all over the world.” The Institute, he felt, would, through its diversity of programs, similarly recatalyze psychotherapy. It was “a symbol of the humanistic revolution that’s going on.”

  By 1966, the old revolutionary was feeling his oats once more. It was Berlin after the First World War, New York in the early fifties, and then some. For he himself could now enjoy the role of one of the leading formulators of this new way of thinking. He was no longer simply one of the crowd.

  9. Missed Connections

  What prevented Fritz from finding a sense of family with his own children? Why would a man who resented his own father’s aloofness be remote from his own son? Was Fritz not guilty of the same stück scheisse feedback toward his daughter that he suffered at Nathan’s hands?

  It does not suffice to attribute these paternal shortcomings to his marital discord with Laura, to his greater interest in his work, or to his advanced age on becoming a father. My quest for greater understanding of the disconnectedness that existed between Fritz and his offspring led me, of necessity, to Ren’s and Steve’s doorsteps. I discovered, in the process, people of sensitivity and warmth, came to empathize with Fritz’s longing for greater closeness with Steve, and felt saddened by tales of their missed connections during Fritz’s Esalen years.

  I was unprepared for my meeting with Ren (Perls) Gold at her suburban New Jersey home. Laura, ever protective, had told me that she preferred I didn’t contact Ren, that her daughter was “precarious,” and intimated that talking to her about her father might be an unsettling experience for her. Ren’s brother and sister-in-law, while good enough to direct me to Renate (“she would be even more upset if a book came out about Fritz and she wasn’t asked to comment”), also hinted at serious personal problems. It was both a great surprise and a great delight to meet Ren, for she failed to live up to any of these catastrophic billings.

  Ren Gold reminds me of Ethel Merman. A big, brassy, attractive forty-one-year-old, with a rich laugh that erupts from her belly, she exudes warmth and theatricality. On both our first and subsequent meetings she was artfully, dramatically, and colorfully dressed in long flowing robes, wearing large summer earrings, noticeable pendants, and chunky jewelry.

  There is a cozy and intimate quality in her home. She is a child/queen who obviously gets from her immediate family what she stopped getting from Fritz and Laura when she turned four. Art, her husband, is a soft and gentle man who seems to defer to her. Her younger daughter, Leslie, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old, fetches cigarettes for Ren and serves hors d’oeuvres that her mother had previously prepared. The three of them speak frankly about the most intimate details of their personal lives—like three adolescents, sharing stories and giggles. But Ren is clearly the leader of the gang.

  I cannot believe she has had any emotional problems and tell her so.

  Oh no, she insists. She has. For over a decade she never left her house.

  Never?

  Well, hardly ever. She had unnamable fears of something awful happening to her if she ventured beyond her doors. Only recently, after therapy, has this begun to dissipate.

  But aside from that, was she as rational, as available to her two daughters, and as capable a homemaker and raconteur as she is now?

  Yes, came the affirmation of all three. She entertained, ran the home, laughed, cried, loved as she does now.

  So, what was so dreadful? How was she so “ill”?

  Well, she couldn’t go outside and felt limited and panicked by this symptom. Laura came over frequently to comfort her and, for years, supplied money to meet the expenses of the Gold’s household, which were, in the past, invariably beyond their means. Fritz had shelled out money, at first, too, but eventually got fed up and stopped because he felt it was going into an empty well.

  “With my father I always had to grovel. If I was a good girl, he gave me money. The money came in handy, but I think a little affection and a little interest would have been much more helpful.”

  Fritz was also contemptuous of Arthur Gold, Renate’s husband.

  “Why didn’t he like you?” I asked.

  “I married his daughter. That was the first thing. And then there wasn’t any hero worship coming from me. When we first got married, he would ask me for advice—for criticisms of his paintings. It was the one common ground we had. He took my criticisms very carefully. But beyond that, he was very disdainful of me, looked down on me, and would shit on me every chance that he had. He tried to throw both Ren and me out, he called us leeches, parasites. He called us parasites while I was going to art school and had no income. He knew I had no means of support. We were living with him in a brownstone in Manhattan, and he picked on us at our most vulnerable point. Well, maybe we were parasites. But he invited us to live with them when he knew I had no income and Ren was pregnant.”

  One wonders, of course, who did the actual inviting. Knowing of Laura’s solicitousness toward Ren, I can only assume that she extended the invitation, with Fritz begrudgingly going along.

  Ren complains that Fritz never took note of her desires: “We were up in Greenwood Lake once and Fritz came up to spend the night with me there. He was a disaster. The only good thing about it was that I made a good dinner. After I put the kids to bed I turned the television set on, and trouble began. Every time you’d begin to understand something, he’d switch channels.

  “At 7:30 he went to bed. But I wanted to watch television. The cottage had no curtains and no doors. So I’m sitting there with my ear to the television set; I can’t see the picture, and he’s yelling at me, ‘Turn the damn thing off!’ So I turned the damn thing off. Now who the hell goes to bed at eight o’clock? I had a little radio and took it under the blanket. I, the mother of two children, had to go hide under a blanket to listen to a fucking radio because he didn’t want any noise. Or running out in the rain to shut the windows of his car. I did it because I was scared.”

  She complains that he never took note of her children: “The last time Allison, my eldest daughter, saw Fritz, she was there with a girlfriend. He went over to the friend and said ‘Hello, Allison.’ He couldn’t even recognize his grandchild.
”

  She complains that he never took note of her home: “Our final meeting was an absolute utter and complete disaster. We had just moved into our house and he had just been to Esalen. We decided to have people in—my mother, my aunt Grete, and Fritz. When Fritz came in, I said, ‘Would you like to sit down first or see the house?’ He said, ‘I don’t care.’ I said, ‘In that case, see the house.’ But he never did make the effort to walk through the house.”

  And she complains that he never took note of her: “My mother always said that he thought that I was beautiful. Why didn’t he ever tell me? To me, I was always shit. He gave me two compliments in my life. One when I was thirteen going on fourteen and we had a big Russian to-do at the City Hall in Johannesburg—before Russia was the enemy. I was taking ballet. And there were all these Russian and South African dignitaries. I was the best jumper of the group and got a lot of compliments for two jumps. And he was bragging about me.

  “The other time was when he came back from Israel and brought back all these paintings, which I thought was the biggest shit I had ever seen. I had been painting at the time myself. I didn’t like my paintings. I’m not a good painter, but a ‘cute’ one. But he said, ‘There’s one thing that you can do that I don’t have the guts to do. You dare to use color.’

  “During most of my life there was simply almost no communication between us at all. I certainly tried. I wanted closeness with him. I heard that a patient of his brought along his girlfriend to either Cowichan or Esalen, and that he threw her out—she reminded him of me. What can I say about him? I loved him very much and tried to get his attention. I never could and it turned into hatred.

  “In the last six years that Fritz was alive we didn’t even talk. I hadn’t read In and Out the Garbage Pail before he died. And after I read it, I thought that if he weren’t dead, I’d kill him. His few remarks about me were a total wipeout.”

  And what were Fritz’s complaints about Ren? Basically, they boil down to her failure to take note of him except to ask him for things. Two proud and stubborn people—each unable to give the other the adulation that they wished.

  Having had warmth and closeness until she was four, Renate, I imagine, found it hard to give it up. She reacted, instead, as any child might, with hurt, anger, and displays of sassiness. Her later adaptation to life, including her “illness,” enabled her, apparently, to get the concern, attention, and financial support ordinarily reserved for loved children or handicapped adults.

  Fritz was never sympathetic to her underlying desire to be pampered and cared for. He responded, instead, to her surface behavior with irritability and, later, contempt. This, of course, only perpetuated a vicious cycle of more demandingness and more contempt until an unbridgeable gap was erected between the two of them. Once, upon seeing his daughter twelve years after her “illness” began, he said, quite scornfully: “What’s the matter, Ren? You still can’t go to the movies?”

  “That was the only sentence he ever issued about it,” Ren indignantly said.

  Fritz never recognized the positive elements in his daughter. He saw only one aspect—her desire to suckle—and failed to realize that she could also suckle others, that she provided (and shared) a cozy nest for her family, that she had charm, humor, warmth, generosity, and a stage presence every bit as impressive as his.

  Part of Fritz’s failure to understand Ren and Steve related to his high expectations of them. Fritz treated his progeny not as children but as adults. He expected them to exercise the restraint, maturity, and self-sufficiency of twenty-year-olds while they were still in their preteen years. And he was intolerant of their inability to do so.

  He failed to satisfy a child’s normal greediness for favors, affirmation, and affection and, instead, dealt with this with the same “Why expect anything of me?” attitude that any reasonable adult might adopt toward another grown-up. When one adult doesn’t get decent stroking from another, he or she can always move on and find more affirmative companions. Children, unfortunately, can’t find new parents.

  Even more damaging than his unrealistic expectations were the convoluted and painful attitudes he had toward himself. On the one hand, Fritz had no sympathy for his own need to be cherished and couldn’t, therefore, be sympathetic to that need in others. And on the other hand, Fritz’s wanting center stage was so powerful—he was such a big kid, in this regard, himself—that these rival needs of his children for center stage were simply pushed aside.

  Thus did Fritz, who felt so resentful toward Nathan’s neglect of him, become so self-absorbed that he acted as an unwitting conduit in visiting the sins of his father upon his children.

  He saw in Ren the “bottomless well” that he himself shared, and he hated her for it. He saw her as a parasite, who took from Laura. Yet, he himself would perpetually freeload off Laura: use her apartment, get her to drive him places and pick him up, to cook, clean, and wait upon him, and to provide hospitality in return for the pleasure of his company. As he later wrote:

  “If you have hate for something there,

  This is yourself, though hard to bear.

  For you are I and I am thou.

  You hate in you what you despise.

  You hate yourself and think it’s me.

  Projections are the damnedest thing.”

  Fritz would not be direct in asking for affirmation, love, or adulation because it offended his sense of dignity. Yet, as he received this recognition in later life, he softened considerably, in terms of responding to this need in others. He became increasingly comfortable with his own neediness as the degree of his “want” lessened with his fame. At the end of his life, he was more capable of acting fatherly than he had been in his younger days.

  Fritz knew that he was a terrible father and tried, at least with Steve, to lessen the gap between father and son and to show that he cared. With age, he found he was missing “what might have been.”

  He made small, unasked-for monetary gifts whenever he visited Steve and his family, a clear symbol of love when one is so patently frugal. Steve Perls, for instance, rarely asked his father for anything and fully recognized Fritz’s difficulty in giving. Once, twelve years into his marriage, Steve turned to Fritz for a loan. He had just finished school and needed a car to get to work, but he was hurting financially.

  “Fine. What do you want?” asked Fritz.

  “Just over a thousand dollars,” Steve answered, “and I’ll pay you back over a few years.

  “And he said ‘Fine.’ He took his checkbook out and wrote a check. I was shocked but accepted it. Later, I started to make a payment back to him and sent him a first check. But he said, ‘Forget it. You don’t have to pay it back to me.’ Which surprised me.”

  His daughter-in-law remembers his second and last visit to Albuquerque.

  “We were sitting in the dining room. Some mutual friends were with us that night. I made the comment that it would be fun to just earn $50 that I could go and blow—do whatever I wanted with it. And that took his fancy. He asked questions like, ‘What would you do with it if you had $50 absolutely unattached to anything?’ I told him what I’d do with it, and he thought that was neat, I guess, for he took out his checkbook and he wrote a check to me, Rae Perls, for $150—a hundred more than I had even dreamed of. And he said, ‘This is yours. This is for you. It’s not for anybody else. You just do what you want to do with it.’

  “One friend, Larry Bloomberg, said, ‘I’m going to check up on you in a couple of months to be sure that you didn’t buy groceries.’ And he did. But Fritz never asked. And I had fun with it. I bought books. I bought lingerie. I nickeled-and-dimed it away and had an absolutely marvelous time.”

  Unfortunately for Fritz, these financial gifts were usually interpreted by Steve as conscience-clearing money. Neither Fritz nor Steve could openly ask for the other’s appreciation. Nor could they express their own. Fritz would keep a photograph of Steve a
nd his family on display at his home, but he would never display open affection.

  Steve is a thirty-seven-year-old man of average size and shape. Stoop-shouldered, shy, polite, gentle, and friendly, he looks, behind his glasses, a lot like Fritz did in his early years. The heads are shaped the same, with ample noses, sparse hair, and deeply set large eyes. The difference between the two men is that whereas Fritz would stare at you intently, Steve frequently—almost uncomfortably—looks away. There is a note of apology in both his tone and manner. One would never suspect that he is the president of The New Mexico Psychological Association, nor that he heads a manpower training program at the University of New Mexico’s Medical School, teaching seventy “dropouts” skills as mental-health workers.

  I spent two days with Steve and his family in Albuquerque in December 1972 and was most impressed with his thoughtful and disciplined decency. Driving his blue-and-white Pinto with red trim, relating stories of managing his son’s Little League baseball team, picking up his kids after school and dutifully inquiring about their day’s activities, he seemed to be the stereotype of the All-American Father and Husband—so different, in that respect, from Fritz.

  Steve appears detached and reluctant to need others. He is a man, I suspect, who would have to know you for a long time before he would allow himself to count upon you as a trusted friend. This impression was reinforced as he talked about his life, for “once burnt, twice careful.”

  Steve, never having had Ren’s early “good years,” was, perhaps, somewhat less disappointed in his father’s unavailability. Instead of Ren’s demandingness, he denied his desire for parental closeness, went his own way, became his own “parent,” and adopted a cool, aloof, live-and-let-live attitude toward Fritz and Laura. His quality of “I do my thing and you do yours” was more acceptable to Fritz and accounts for why he never treated his son with the scorn he reserved for his daughter.

  Steve left home for college when he was eighteen, two years before Fritz left for Miami, and aside from vacations has seen little of either parent since. He met his wife, Rae, at Antioch, when both were attending that small progressive school in Ohio, and married her in his third year. Moving on to the University of Chicago, he received a master’s degree in educational psychology and a doctorate in counseling psychology. From there, he went to Oregon and, some years later, to New Mexico.