Stiller & Meara

At the memorial service for Madeline Gilford a few days ago, I made a resolution: I want to die before Stiller and Meara do. So do you. You want these people to speak at your memorial.

Like approximately 80 percent of people in show business today, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara got an early and important break from Madeline. That was more than 40 years ago, and by now their repartee is so polished that their loving recollections of Madeline had the crowd at Sardi’s in stitches. She dithers, he blusters; she needles, he nags. There’s a great deal of recognizable psychology in their routines, and in their personae you see other couples you know, perhaps even the couple you’re in. They’ve watched and listened to the human dynamic in quadrophonic stereo for many years. They’ve done their homework, although you’re certain they haven’t done it at home: it’s by observing others, and not by portraying themselves, that they’ve found their material.

How do I know this? Well, they’re still together, aren’t they?

It can’t be said that I know Stiller and Meara personally, although as an Upper West Sider I saw them around often enough, as one sees any of one’s neighbors. And that’s telling. They don’t behave like celebrities, even though most of our neighborhood encounters coincided with the period of Jerry Stiller’s greatest fame, the years when he played George’s father on Seinfeld. To run into them on the street, one might think they were schoolteachers, or accountants, or insurance executives, and the fact that they cut loose with the random funny remark seems a function less of their being comedians than of their being New Yorkers.

Take for example the time I ran into them at Filene’s Basement. George Pataki was still Governor of New York, and the Stillers and I were taking advantage of one of his periodic waivings of the state sales tax. None of us really understood the thinking behind this — something about stimulating the economy in the aftermath of 9/11 — and while we waited for a cashier, Anne Meara and I talked for a few minutes about all the other, more urgent problems in the state, that couldn’t be addressed by shopping but might be addressed by taxation.

Our strongly held political opinions didn’t prevent us from buying low-priced socks, but there you have it.

So if you run into them at the corner deli, don’t quote his lines from Seinfeld or rhapsodize over her contributions to Archie Bunker’s Place and Rhoda. Don’t fawn, flatter, or ask for autographs. Just ask whether the pastrami is any good today.

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Notes from Underground

New Yorkers are famous the world over for (no way to put this more politely) refusing to take bullshit from anyone. We are a tough people, hardened by years of living next to, under and on top of one another, and even the most genteel Manhattan society matron can and will cuss like a Brooklyn longshoreman when the advertised item is not in stock, when another New Yorker has the effrontery to seize the taxicab she was hailing, or when she’s cut off while crossing the street (“I’m walkin’ here, asshole!”). We put up with too much in life already, and you, poor outlander, could not survive a single day in our shoes. We will not tolerate any further disrespect, inconvenience, or discomfort.

That, at least, is the reputation. We are proud of it. Not content to let others spread our fame, we are first to brag of it. O, woe! Woe to ye who come to New York with hearts full of guff, attitude, lip, disrespect, malarkey, garbage, baloney, bunkum, sass or crap! We do not take any of it. We will have none of it. And, by the way, we don’t make change.

In my heart, I am still a New Yorker. But I cannot uphold this preposterous fiction any longer. Contrary to our reputation, New Yorkers take plenty of bullshit. We take it slavishly, masochistically, without complaining. We take the worst of it — the most unendurable construct known to the mind of man. We take it without complaining. We take it forth, and we take it back. And we take it every day.

It is our subway.

I forget just how bad the New York City subway system is, until I return to it. I am hard-pressed to understand how I survived it for 21 years. Surely it was not always this bad. And by “bad,” I mean: noisy, dank, murky, malodorous, crowded, sticky, malfunctioning, and dangerous. It is in bad repair at all times, and it is famously prone to inexplicable delays. Even if explanations were offered, you could not understand them, because they would be pronounced by a conductor who speaks no known language, over a public-address system that garbles the voice and cannot be heard over the ambient din.

That the subway remains the best way to get around town is a cruel accident of fate, and a reminder of just how bad things are above ground.

Take as an example the case of the station at Columbus Circle. When I moved to France, nearly four years ago, a major reconstruction was underway. It has not been completed. To describe the process is to exhaust one’s supply of literary references: the circles of Dante’s Hell, the diabolic ritual of Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht, the tortures of Torquemada cannot do justice to the Columbus Circle station. The platforms were torn up, in an exercise requiring that almost every light bulb be removed; welding machines went into operation that smelled even worse than the pervasive aroma of human excrement. You could not breathe there. You did not want to. Passengers awaiting trains were shoved and squeezed onto narrow shelves, and then channeled into even narrower corridors toward exits that are, for the most part, blocked off. You told yourself to be patient, that eventually the work would be finished — hell, even the remodeling of the 72nd Street station was finished, eventually.

And yet, to my astonishment, the Columbus Circle station is still under construction. I could find no indication that the project was any nearer to completion, although its scope has expanded, and now the platforms for the 1 train are as badly torn up as those for the A, B, C, and D trains.

I’d have taken a picture to show you, but these days anyone taking a photograph in the subway is automatically presumed to be a terrorist.

And let us not talk about the “service changes” that used to be justified as urgent and temporary (often in response to the damages incurred during the 9/11 attack), but are now a regular fact of life. They mean that the train you want will not be running on the track where you expect it, will not stop at the station where you need it, and will be running at intervals much longer than you can afford. In short, on weekends it is impossible to get from one place to another.

New Yorkers may grouse from time to time about the subway, yet they do not ever take action, the way people would do in any other city on earth. In France, entire governments have been toppled with less provocation, and yet New Yorkers do not march on the offices of the Metropolitan Transit Authority to demand better service and improved conditions.

Of course, one reason the Paris Métro is nicer than the New York subway is that the Parisians close down the Métro between 1:00 and 5:00 in the morning, the better to clean, repair, and maintain cars, tracks, and stations. No such option is possible in New York, because New Yorkers work and play at all hours and require 24-hour service. Paris is not “the city that never sleeps,” and it does not pretend to be. But Parisian Métro cars run quietly, and Métro stations are brighter, more spacious, and better designed, with separate corridors for passengers going toward the platform and passengers going toward the exit. (In New York, passengers must constantly waltz or fight, rumba or rumble, with passengers going another direction.)

Even in the United States, it’s easy to find better subway service. Andy Weems used to act out the differences between the New York subway (in which the dialogue was unprintable) and the gorgeous Washington Metro (“Is this seat taken?” “Are you through with the sports section?”) — even Boston’s “T” is more efficient and attractive.

And yet New Yorkers slog on, taking the worst kind of bullshit, without any demand, nor even any hope of change.

UPDATE: The intrepid Feldstein sends the above photo of a New York subway station. Of course no trip to the subway could be complete without spotting a few dozen rats, and Feldstein found the ones scurrying there along the wall to be a particularly worthwhile subject for his camera.

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Digested Contents

Reflections upon discovering back issues of Reader’s Digest in my parents’ home in Texas.

The ‘Hang In There!’ Kitten:

The True Story behind One of America’s Most Beloved Inspirational Posters …………………43

Special Diet Report:
Are You Eating Enough Rutabaga? …………………55

Predestined Pleasure: Sex Tips from Presbyterians
Now You Can Have Multiple Catechisms …………………69

Save Money by Recycling This Magazine! …………………76

What Is Rock and Roll, Actually, and What Can Be Done About It? …………………83

Humor in Cuneiform: Our Best Archaeology Jokes Ever! …………………87

‘I Still Love That Bob’:
A Heartwarming Personal Memoir by Ann B. Davis, TV’s ‘Schultzie’ ……………89

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Laughter?
‘My Husband Died Laughing,’ Warns One Harvard Medical Professor, ‘And So Could You!’…………………………124

The Timeless Wit and Eternal Wisdom of John Foster Dulles…………141

McLean Stevenson: Hollywood’s Favorite Family Man…………………143

Could Excess Dryer Lint Be Shortening Your Love Life?…………………151

Reese Witherspoon Is Much Younger Than Anyone You Will Ever Know Personally!…………………158

America’s Top 100 Baked Goods…………………160

Bonnie Franklin’s Unforgettable Night of Torment …………………170

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Korman/Weber

Separated at birth, reunited in death: the comic actor Harvey Korman and the distinguished historian Eugen Weber. And yet which is which?

If you ever watched Weber’s engrossing TV series, The Western Tradition, you will know that he not only looked like, he sounded like Harvey Korman, too. You have observed that, if only Tim Conway were around during tapings of Tradition, the sober analyses of history and culture would be interrupted frequently by hysterical fits of giggling. Indeed, that is about the only thing that Weber’s program lacked.

Let it be known that I admired both men (if indeed they were not the same person), and I shall miss them profoundly and equally, but for different reasons.

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Memorial Days

My corner of my freshman dorm room, in Poland Hall,
As it looked on May 26, 2008.

“The past is another country; they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley, and since landing in New York a few days ago, I have been traveling without a Baedeker guide. (Or Rick Steves, or whatever.)

I began to write this note on the train as I returned from Providence, Rhode Island, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of my graduation from college. I have hardly set foot on the campus in all that time. Despite the presence of so many faces familiar to me from my youth, I didn’t recognize myself among the middle-aged. No, I was a student again, and because this was not my graduation ceremony, it must be assumed that I was at most a junior, like so many other undergraduates who linger for days after the final class has been dismissed. But then, from time to time and all too often, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a windowpane as I passed. My hair is almost white now — by far the greyest of anybody in the Class of 1983. I am not the person I think I am.

The whole city seemed to be celebrating this weekend. The air in Providence was filled with the scent of flowers, and every garden on Prospect Street was in radiant bloom. I wonder whether I’d have been a better student — or a poet, instead — if Providence were always like this, if “youth’s fleeting golden hours” were always springtime.

Scooting along the Northeast Corridor on Amtrak, I look out at the Connecticut woodlands, and I remember the days when Alan Organschi introduced me to his homeland, around Litchfield, pulling back one curtain of green to reveal another and yet another curtain, always greener and more distant. For a long time, Litchfield seemed to me the most beautiful place on earth, and though the Amtrak line runs nowhere near the town, I’m closer now than I’ve been since the last time Madeline Gilford took me to Freedonia, her house in the country.

Soon I will be in New York City again, walking the hallways of the Gilfords’ apartment. The place will brim and burst with activity, and our voices will resound against the walls that are dense with memories and monuments. But Madeline won’t be with us — not physically, anyway — because the project that consumes us is not a play or a protest but her memorial service.

The hallway of the Gilford apartment, May 26, 2008.
Jack Gilford’s Oscar nomination can be seen at top left.

Since before the day I met her, my role in the Madeline Universe has been that of production assistant. If there is some small task to do, I do it. And this week I will be production assistant again, perhaps for the last time. It is my way of keeping my emotions in check. Madeline wouldn’t approve, but that is the way of my ancestors. I will be a shabbos goy — or a shiva goy — until my chores are done and it is time for me to grieve again.

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The Meme Generation

You know that awkward moment in school, when the coolest girl in the senior class asked you to dance, and you realized that you had nothing to wear, no moves to bust, and only the minimum requisites for the task (namely, two feet)? But you went ahead and tried to dance anyway, because she was so cool?

I’m having that moment. Joyce DiDonato, the mezzo-soprano and authoress of Yankeediva, has tagged me in “Meme,” a kind of game among bloggers: as she explains it, one blogger asks another to answer a few questions about herself on her blog, and then she asks other bloggers to do the same. That last part will be tricky for me, since I know only four people who blog — and Joyce is one of them. I do read other blogs, but the authors don’t know me at all: I can’t very well tag Dan Froomkin, the political blogger of the Washington Post. (Can I?) On the other hand, my brother has multiple blogs, so perhaps he can write multiple responses. Much the way Sally Field might have done, in the movie Sybil.


Rules
The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about himself or herself. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Ten Years Ago
I was a producer at CBS News, attending the Affiliates Meeting in Los Angeles. (I had to look this up in the journal that, in those days, I kept faithfully — though soon I would become so depressed by my job that the journal fell by the wayside forevermore.) On our way to Los Angeles, my supervisor, who shall go nameless, threw a temper tantrum so colossal that I was still upset and writing about it on June 3, several days later. At the next Affiliates Meeting, one year later, he threw another, even bigger tantrum that resulted in the loss of my job. One wonders why I didn’t see the warning signs.

Also in May 1998, I was at work on my second novel, The Dark Is My Delight, which, in May 2000, I would accidentally erase with a single keystroke. Basically, the historical record shows that this is not a good time of year for me.

Hooray?

Five Things on Today’s “To Do” List
1. Attend a memorial service for Madeline Lee Gilford;
2. Commemorate the births of my household goddesses Beverly Sills (May 25), Teresa Stratas (May 26), my maternal grandmother (May 27), and Madeline Gilford (May 30);
3. Contact friends I encountered at the 25th reunion of my graduating class in Providence this weekend (and more about that subject will be written in this space soon);
4. Contact friends in New York to let them know that I’m in town this week;
5. If there’s time, try to work on an article for Opera News that was assigned two years ago and is due five minutes ago.

Things I’d Do If I Were a Billionaire
1. Buy a château — not too big, just something homey — Azay-le-Rideau, say, and not Chambord;
2. Produce all the movies that my friends want to make;
3. Publish all the books that my friends write (oh, and the books that I write, too);
4. Launch and/or bankroll an opera company;
5. Pay the college tuition of all my godchildren.

Three Bad Habits
Only three? I’ve got hundreds. Unfortunately, none of these are printable. But I’ll share this with you: I seize upon any opportunity to talk about myself.

Five Places I’ve Lived
The list in toto: San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Providence, New York, Boston (for almost two months, while Rags was in tryouts), Paris and Beynes.

John B. Anderson, a boss I never met.

Five Jobs I’ve Had
Most of my jobs are listed in my profile, but I’ll try to make this more interesting.

1. While I was in college, I got the first and only paying acting gigs of my career thus far. As part of a training program for medical students, I pretended to be a patient. My portrayal of “Man with Hypertension” received rave reviews from all the doctors, but when I played “Man with Venereal Infection,” the critics were less than kind.

2. I was North Texas Area Campaign Manager for presidential candidate John B. Anderson, in 1980. I had no idea what I was doing, and I take full responsibility for his defeat at the polls.

3. I worked as an assistant to the production accountant for the TV show Dallas, on location, for three days in the summer of 1981. One of my duties was the shredding of scripts, so that secrets of the plot would not be divulged to the public. I wasn’t a fan of the show, and those scripts were unbelievably badly written: it’s a mark of Larry Hagman’s talent that people even watched the show. Seriously. Could Olivier have made that prose sing? I doubt it.

4. I was a go-go boy for one night, only a few years ago. I know that I’ve mentioned this already, but I just like saying it. I was a go-go boy. I was a go-go boy.

5. I taught freshman comp at Columbia University. I’ve mentioned this, too, but it’s on my mind, since this week I’m sleeping on the couch of Kara Lack, who was one of my students. In a perfect world, this would constitute extra credit, and I’d be obliged to raise her grade by two or three points for the semester.

And did I ever tell you about the time I was a go-go boy?
(Sadly, this is Matt Cavenaugh, co-star of the musical Grey Gardens, and not yours truly.)

Five People I’m Tagging
1. The Girl from Texas
2. Chronic Pain Woman
3. My brother
4. My brother
5. My brother

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On the Legality of Marriage

After all these years, she still warms to his bacon.

A friend’s marriage was breaking up a few years ago, when she observed that I was more upset about it than she was (to a point, anyway). “You romanticize marriage more than anyone I know,” she said. “Is it because you’ve never been married?”

Maybe. And I had the dubious advantage of growing up in a home that was not only unbroken but formed around a couple whose union has been a cosmic necessity: if my parents hadn’t found each other, married and stuck together, they’d probably have wound up as mad scientists, serial killers, Heaven knows what. We’d all have paid a price. They are not fit for anyone else but each other. Knowing them has no doubt colored my view of the institution.

On the subject of gay marriage, however, I’m considerably more ambivalent — primarily because it’s always struck me that the great advantage of — indeed, the definition of — homosexuality is not doing what heterosexuals do. Nevertheless, on a purely legal basis, it’s an open-and-shut question of civil rights, and I’m mystified as to why so few people in America (or, indeed, most countries) understand that. An editorial in today’s Washington Post, mulling over the recent California Supreme Court decision, so thoroughly misses that point, and so blindly accepts reactionary arguments, that I’m compelled to write now.

The Post takes the position that the California court should have left the matter in the hands of the legislature and the voters, instead of forging ahead. This is the same complaint of “activist judges” who “legislate from the bench” that we hear any time the privileges of white, heterosexual males are questioned in the United States. Granted, the Post editorial page is more conservative than that of, say, The New York Times, but the difference between the Post and The Wall Street Journal is that the Post doesn’t intend to be — doesn’t seem to know that it is — conservative. So it joins the chorus of Americans insisting that there’s plenty of time for homosexuals to get equal rights, that some things need to be done by “baby steps” and forgetting the answer to Langston Hughes’ question, “What happens to a dream deferred?”

What no one seems willing to admit is that the case against gay marriage is unconstitutional on its face, because the only arguments against homosexuality that haven’t been thoroughly debunked at this point are religious. And yet gays are still second-class citizens at best, because Americans believe homosexuality is “wrong,” because God told them so. Never mind that the Constitution requires the separation of church and state, never mind that I am not legally obliged to adhere to your faith, nor you to mine. (Never mind, for that matter, that most of the condemnations of homosexuality in the Bible are mistranslations; the rest are concerned with increasing the population of a small, vulnerable sect, whether the Jews or the early Christians.)


The Bible prohibits a lot of things (shaving one’s beard, touching pigskin, masturbation) that Americans endorse, and it endorses a lot of things (slavery, stoning) that Americans now prohibit. Is a Bible verse any reason to prohibit one partner from visiting another in the hospital (as happened with heartbreaking regularity during the height of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and as is still legal in some places today), or from bequeathing property to a loved one, or from building a stable home life for a child, or from enjoying the protections of the law? A staggering number of so-called compassionate Christians will answer with a hearty “Amen.”

You can’t run a country this way, unless you’re the Taliban. It’s precisely because of such religious prejudices that the Constitution was written to uphold reason over faith in matters of the law.

Gay marriage would weaken the institution of heterosexual marriage and the American family, say some people. Clearly, they have no faith in the strength of their own values. If they’re so worried about their own marriages, why are they meddling in other people’s?

Left to their own devices, American voters usually can be depended upon to do the right thing, give or take 75 to 150 years. If we’d relied on voter initiatives, not only would Jim Crow laws still be on the books in most states, African Americans might still be in chains. It wasn’t voters but activists, from William Lloyd Garrison to Martin Luther King, who forced society to change — and it was the court system, not the legislatures, that recognized the change. If we wait on voters to legalize gay marriage, they most certainly will, but that’s cold comfort to anybody who’s alive today.

The California court recognized, rightly, that civil unions are a form of Jim Crow law, a label of “separate but equal” pasted over something that is inherently unequal. That’s unconstitutional, period. The court may have gotten more provocative than it needed to in parsing the definition of marriage, essentially throwing in the face of heterosexuals the whole question of the government’s role in such private matters. (Though it’s a legitimate question. In France, religious and civil marriages are entirely separate.) But as an application of reason, the decision strikes me as sound.

The Post worries of a backlash. This thinking is typical — timid, even defeatist, and ultimately very harmful. One of my dearest friends speaks of “baby steps” all the time, with regard to gay rights; she worries that if her children were better enlightened, or spoke up in favor of gay rights, they’d get beat up at school. She knows her community better than I do. Maybe she’s right to protect her kids from certain truths. But I have to cringe when I hear them saying things like, “That is so gay.” Their mother would wash out their mouths with soap if ever they dared use the N-word, by the way.

It took more than Brown vs. The Board of Education to guarantee the equal rights of black Americans. Gays must remember that the legalization of marriage is only one part of a larger struggle. And just as blacks encounter prejudice every day, 40 years after the assassination of Dr. King, gays won’t find themselves loved, or even accepted, by American society overnight. It’s a long, slow process — and it’s a shame that well-meaning people like the Washington Post editorialists and my dear friend want to make that process even slower.

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