Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  The moment also marked an important transition in the relationship between the two brothers. They remained close. But now there was a difference. Norman said, “I felt Okay, I’m going to be glad to be your brother—this is in my head, I don’t think I told him this—but this doesn’t seem right to just be micromanaging your life. I think I drew back. And I think he was aware of it. He was pissed.… We stayed close and everything but it felt like now that he was at Andover, my feeling was I needed to step back a little bit.”

  Jack got off to an extraordinary start academically at Andover. An English teacher wrote in a November 1971 report that “Jack is a high-powered lad with considerable verbal gifts. He is a sophisticated writer, though I am trying to rid him of the jargon habit: he uses 35% more words (usually big ones) than are necessary. Very good classwork—often over the head of other boys who sit back and ooh and aah. A very nice boy—but then, what do you expect from Moosup, Connecticut?” In Clement House, where he lived, the housemaster reported that Jack was “also a good citizen, quiet, well-organized and polite” who got along well with his peers and seemed to be enjoying his Andover experience. Jack continued to impress everybody throughout his first year at Andover, and ended up on the honor roll. “He got to Andover and just said, ‘Wow, what a pool, I’m going to swim in it,’” said his Andover friend John Barber, who grew up in Middletown, Connecticut, fifty miles and a stratosphere away from Moosup. “He was quiet and scholarly and measured but he also had this sort of glorious kind of cackle of [a] laugh and at times [a] very wacky sense of humor, so he could surprise you.”

  His second and third years at Andover would not be as easy in the classroom. He seemed to have particular trouble with math and chemistry. By the first semester of his Upper year (eleventh grade), there was near-universal criticism of Jack’s academic performance in letters sent home. “Two years ago Jack was one of my best students in History 10,” Robin Crawford wrote after Thanksgiving 1973. “He was particularly notable for a very solid written expository style. All of that seems to have simply vanished.” Harper Follansbee, Jack’s biology teacher, was equally bewildered. “Somehow Jack gives the impression of being an honor student but then doesn’t live up to that,” he wrote.

  It seems unlikely that Jack’s parents would have sat Jack down in Moosup over Christmas vacation and read him the riot act for squandering a huge opportunity, especially since the fact that he was even at Andover in the first place was beyond their wildest imagination. They remained preoccupied with the egg farm and had developed no better an understanding of the nuances of the English language—and there were plenty of nuances in these academic reports, along with some clear-eyed warnings. Norman was in Boston, working on his law career and pursuing his own life. He had already decided to step back from his role parenting Jack. This was a challenge Jack would have to meet and overcome on his own, if he could. “What he realized was that maybe the sun didn’t rise and set over him,” Norman surmised.

  By spring 1974, there was some improvement in history, and his biology teacher Follansbee also remarked on Jack’s appearance—the era of post-1960s long-haired renegades must have startled some of the old guard—finding him to be “attractive, neat and clean in appearance, polite but very quiet and unobtrusive. I think he sets good standards for himself and tries to reach them. He seems to have the respect of his classmates but I am uncertain as to how wide his circle of friends is. He seems fairly self-sufficient to me.” Math however continued to be a disaster, with Jack flunking the final exam.

  Alan Cantor followed in Jack’s footsteps to Andover, one year later. “To a certain degree, it influenced my going,” he said. On occasion, Alan used to ride back and forth with Jack to their homes in central Connecticut, but he did not spend a lot of time together with him at Andover. Despite his academic troubles, Jack gave off an impression that was serious and not all that much fun. “He wasn’t a hang-around kind of guy,” Alan said. “I think of him as someone who knew where he was going and he didn’t feel a particular need to bring other people along on the ride. He was not unfriendly, but he didn’t really seem to spend time with people on the way. He was working toward something. At that point in my life as an adolescent, I was just hoping a girl would occasionally smile at me. And Jack was figuring where he was going to go to college and grad school and make his career, and he was just sort of humming along on that track. He just sort of seemed to know where he was going.… He was not a backslapper. He also wasn’t anyone you could possibly dislike. But back then he was like a thirty-year-old man. He had a certain quiet intensity to him.”

  Alan and Jack did, however, team up to start Andover’s first Jewish student organization. The group sponsored bagel breakfasts on Sunday mornings and held Sabbath services on Friday nights in the basement of the imperious Cochran Chapel towering above. At that time, the faculty adviser to the Jewish Student Union, as it was known, was the school’s protestant minister. (Andover’s sole Jewish teacher, Jack Zucker, known around campus as “Fat Jack,” was a poet from the Bronx. He had no interest in being the faculty adviser to the Jewish Student Union.)

  Even though there were probably only around sixty Jewish students—out of a population of twelve hundred—there was rarely a feeling of anti-Semitism, or overt racism of any kind, at Andover. Indeed, Andover was then one of the more ecumenical school settings on the planet. Maybe it was the times or maybe it was, as Al Cantor postulated, that Andover’s very few Jews, African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics were more like exotic species encased in dioramas—more like a source of wonderment for the WASP establishment—than anything else. I share Alan’s observation about the school. I never felt the least bit of anti-Semitism or prejudice at Andover. Everyone seemed to feel kind of lucky to be there in the first place, and my classmates were an endless source of wonderment, especially their intelligence, their creativity, their senses of humor (and in some cases, their seemingly bottomless capacity for drugs and alcohol).

  Besides the Jewish Student Union, Jack’s activities outside the classroom included the school newspaper and rowing crew, the latter about as unlikely an avocation as there could be for someone once a tick or two away from becoming an Orthodox rabbi. A teammate, his friend John Barber, remembered that Jack was “not overly athletic and graceful, but highly committed” to the sport and to the team. Jack handled the so-called seven position in the boat of eight rowers with some aplomb. “Number seven is actually the toughest spot of all because you have to follow stroke and you have to lead the starboard side,” according to Barber.

  Barber said Jack was “clearly a scholarship kid but he had [none of] what the British would call chippiness. He was just thrilled to have the opportunity.… I can still remember him saying, ‘I never want to see another chicken in my life. I never want to smell chicken shit in my nostrils again.’ … You might think of him as sort of scholarly and extremely hardworking and then out of the blue he would [let out] just this enormously joyous outbreak of laughter.”

  Sometimes the jokes were at Jack’s expense. For his senior year, Jack had decided to move to Sunset House, a small outpost of seven students in a remote corner of the campus. His dorm mate Brooks Klimley, captain of the Andover basketball team, used to refer to Jack as “Spermy Berman,” although other than the near rhyme there was no discernible reason why. Even though they could not have been more different—according to yearbook rankings, Klimley was not only the “best dressed” senior but also the third biggest “alkie” on campus—they were pretty good friends. Jack told Brooks that chickens flirt through their eyeballs. “Of course that led to a raucous amount of entertainment,” Brooks said. Another time, Brooks and Jack, who seemed to have developed an enviable level of skill on an IBM Selectric typewriter, set out to type a pornographic essay. Jack was convinced they could not pull it off; Brooks felt otherwise. He urged Jack to just start typing. “We had one of these rollicking conversations, which is totally out of character for him,” he said. In the end, af
ter about fifteen minutes, the pair erupted into hysterical laughter and the essay ended up in the wastebasket, lost forever. “Shit, I’d never seen a yarmulke before,” Klimley said. “We just got to be friendly and I kind of liked him. He was very kind of dorky in many ways but he was fun.”

  * * *

  ONE THING EVERYONE WHO LIVED with him noticed about Jack was how focused he was on the college admissions process during his senior year. Jack wanted to go to Harvard. Even though he had performed poorly in math and science at Andover, he believed he had the intellectual gifts to deserve admission to the most selective and prestigious school in the country.

  Others had noticed a change in focus in Jack, too. His house counselor, Gil Sewall, wrote the Bermans in December 1974 that he had known Jack “casually” since his first year at Andover when he did “a great village history for me on Moosup” and added, “Jack is an introspective and self-contained boy who goes his own way, drinks deeply of those things which interest him, and always seems restrained and solidly grounded.”

  Once upon a time, in the decades before the personal computer, the internet, or the “common app,” the denouement of the rigorous senior-year college admissions process arrived the old-fashioned way, in the form of either large envelopes or small envelopes, delivered courtesy of the US Postal Service. At Andover, no surprise, this annual spring ritual was a serious event. And it all came down to one day in mid-April when the seniors gathered in the basement of George Washington Hall where row after row of mundane-looking metal mailboxes took on an immense importance. Would the envelope be thick or thin? For reasons unknown, the day was known as Black Monday.

  On the fateful April day, Jack did not get into Harvard. But he did get into Brown. John Barber remembered Jack being disappointed. “He was hoping for more,” he said, “and was temporarily frustrated … and disappointed” that Harvard rejected him. Jim Horowitz, Jack’s senior year roommate who had been accepted by Yale, thought part of the problem for Jack with Brown might have been that, at a forty-five-minute drive, Providence, Rhode Island, was too close to Moosup—and the past he was trying to escape—for his comfort. Part of it might have been that back in those days, Brown was not quite the revered and desirable school that many know it to be today, at least if you had been indoctrinated in the perverse logic of Phillips Academy’s college counseling office, as we all were.

  Jack’s family attended his Andover graduation in June 1975. They could not have been happier to celebrate Jack’s successful navigation through the halls of one of the nation’s premier secondary schools. In the end, he had graduated with honors. “Everyone was in awe of how he looked,” Norman remembered. “Just how tall he had gotten and confident. This was not the little kid that we had dropped off four years earlier. There was a huge pride.”

  * * *

  IN HIS FIRST SEMESTER AT BROWN, Jack took four English classes. His brother, Norman, was incredulous. They had long arguments about Jack’s approach to his studies. “What are you doing?” he asked Jack. “But he was hell-bent, he said, ‘No, this is what I want to do, this is one of the strengths of this school.’” Slowly, Jack mentally unpacked his bags at Brown. He joined the school’s radio station, WBRU Radio, and was a disc jockey for a while before he took to journalism. He reported news, did interviews, and covered the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City as a stringer for National Public Radio. A few months after it began publication in August 1978, while still an undergraduate at Brown, Jack served as the production director for a fledgling Providence newspaper, East Side/West Side. It was clear he wasn’t going to go the same route, professionally, as his fellow Brown students, at least not initially.

  In 1979, Ray Rickman, a thirty-one-year-old African American man from Detroit, landed a new job in Providence as the executive director of the Providence Human Relations Commission. He had eleven employees. “They came late, they took two-hour lunches, they had part-time jobs in the post office that started early afternoon,” he said. “It was hilarious, I’ve never seen anything like it.” He would fire them and they would return a week later. “I was very isolated,” he said. He needed to find a fellow traveler to work with him. He started interviewing candidates for a job that paid only the small amount of money he had cobbled together from what he was supposed to be paying interns. The fifty-year-olds he interviewed said it wasn’t enough money; the twenty-two-year-olds didn’t have enough experience.

  Then he met Jack Berman. “I sat there and in five minutes I realized he was brilliant and in ten minutes he showed me his writing samples and I fell off the chair,” Rickman said. “It was the kind of writing you’d expect from a forty-year-old with twenty years under their belt.” He knew he wanted to hire Jack right away but kept up the fiction of interviewing a few others, just to make the process seem competitive. He soon hired Jack, who started at the commission soon after he graduated from Brown, in June, with a degree in sociology. For his first few months at the commission, Jack was the “civil rights director,” investigating charges of employment and housing discrimination.

  In January 1980, Rickman promoted Jack to be his deputy. He supervised investigations into alleged civil rights violations, organized public education programs on topics such as sexual harassment, affirmative action, and police use of deadly force. He also got it in his head that all the cases that the commission had previously received should be reviewed to make sure they were handled properly. Of course, the commission did not have staff qualified to take on that huge task, so Jack recruited a group of young, idealistic students from Brown and had them work for free. Suddenly, the commission was a hotbed of activity.

  Rickman would arrange for Jack to visit every few weeks with the city solicitor so they could work on cases together. “He was educating himself,” Rickman said. “He used to come a half hour early every day.… And he would stay an hour and a half or so extra every day. He was wonderfully zealous.… I’ve had a couple of hundred employees in my life and I’m liable to blurt out that Jack Berman was the best employee I ever had, and it’s true. What he didn’t know he would find out in twenty minutes.” Jack seemed to have infinite intellectual curiosity. “He was brilliant and he was always at the top of his game,” Rickman continued. “He would tell me, ‘I don’t know anything about that but I’ll find out.’” Improbably, a white Jew from rural Connecticut and a black man from Detroit became very close friends. “Jack Berman was my best friend in the entire world,” Rickman said. “This sounds so over-the-top but I have to say it. Have you ever met anybody and you said, This is my friend and this is my friend for life, and they feel the same about you? And it doesn’t happen often. I believe Jack is the only time in my life that’s happened.”

  In a testament to how close Jack was to his parents despite his years of independence, he would return to Moosup on most weekends. On Friday afternoons, Misha would drive to Providence and pick him up. Misha and Rickman would talk on the sidewalk for ten minutes or so while waiting for Jack to collect his files and belongings. “[Misha] just wanted the best for his children,” Rickman recalled. “He wanted to know what he’d been doing during the week. He needed an update. He said he didn’t always get it from Jack. ‘Give me the details, what has he done good this week?’ That’s what he used to say, ‘What has he done good this week?’” He marveled at how different Jack was from Misha. “Jack was this fabulous kind of upper-class person with no snobbery,” Rickman said. “His diction is intelligent, his bearing, everything about him, you would think he was third generation or fourth generation. You would think his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all went to Harvard or Yale, and of course they didn’t.”

  After eighteen months working with Rickman, Jack decided to apply to law school. Again, he wanted to go to Harvard. Again he did not get in. He ended up at the Boston University School of Law, and he excelled there. His GPA put him in the top 25 students in his class of 449. When he graduated in May 1984, he had an offer to be an associate at the pre
stigious Providence firm where he had worked the previous summer. But that seemed a little parochial and way too close to Moosup for Jack’s long-term comfort. “We talked a lot during that time of career stuff,” Norman said. “I was already a lawyer. He was becoming a lawyer.” To try to spread his wings, he interviewed for firms all over the country. In the end he accepted an offer from Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon, in San Francisco.

  Before heading to California, Jack returned home to Moosup and wound up giving a brief talk at the synagogue in Danielson. He said it was an occasion for “rejoicing” because “tonight I stop spending my parents’ money and start earning an honest living. For that, my parents are grateful. And I am also grateful, because it means I can come here and face my parents and their friends without shame or embarrassment.” He said that if asked “thirty years from now” when he left Danielson, he would have to say he never left Danielson. “It is because this is where my life began,” he continued. “It is because for many of you, this is where freedom was born, where dignity was restored. It is because this is where you relearned the joys of life and where I learned them for the first time. This is the place where many of you raised the children who used to run around in this temple. Maybe some still do. I know that after this service, I am going to go downstairs and run around a little bit for nostalgia’s sake.”

  Ever the loyal son, though, in his first years at Bronson he would find clients of the firm who were in New York and ask to be put on their projects. He would come to New York around once a month and make sure he also saw his parents. “He needed to see them,” Rickman said. “He’d come seven or eight times a year the first year and pay half the time himself and the other half the law firm would pay.” He used his first paycheck from Bronson to buy Misha and Bluma a two-year-long airplane pass. He used his vacation time to take his parents on trips. “He often made me look bad,” Norman said.