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SOWING MY WILD CHEERIOS
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Tales of marriage, affairs,
trysts and a 'scarlet' lady
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
While all of this
fevered careering was going on in New York, I was leading a parallel
domestic life as a married man. After I got settled in the city
and began freelancing for The New York Daily News, my
wife, Mary, came east and joined me at the Prince George Hotel,
where we lived for six months one winter while she looked for
work.
The Prince George was a quaint old hotel on 28th Street, a place nobody had ever heard of just off Fifth Avenue, filled with grandfather clocks in the lobby. It later became a welfare hotel. The management pretended to look the other way after I sneaked Mary up the back stairs, thinking it pretty shrewd of us--the first couple ever to devise such a ruse, of course. Lugging her stuff up the stairs resulted in a hernia, but it was worth it. We were young, resilient (my groin aside), eager and happy. We ate our dinners in the hotel coffee shop--grilled cheese sandwiches and malteds, gaining nary a pound.
I finally got hired at The Daily News and Mary found a job working at “The David Frost Show” as his assistant. Frost still lived in London but flew in every week to do the show. Mary loved the job (though not always Frost), for it plunked her down in the very midst of the show biz-media action. Later, she moved to a job as a booker on “AM New York,” then became a movie reviewer for NBC’s radio syndicate; I edited her pieces that she then delivered in a bright, breezy style.
Our friends were all fellow media couples: David Rubin, a stern journalism teacher at NYU and his crisp little dynamo of a wife, Tina Press, an assignment editor at New York City’s CBS radio station; Ron Fimrite, formerly of The San Francisco Chronicle, who became a colorful writer at Sports Illustrated, and the lovely Blake Green, another Chronicle refugee, a Newsday feature writer; the then-unknown Charlie Rose and his wife, Mary; and Randy and Cathy Poe. Randy worked as a publicist at The Conference Board, an economic think tank, but freelanced everywhere, and she, a rabid feminist at NOW, taught English on Long Island.
Of the four couples, alas, only the Rubins are still together. New York takes its toll, but then so does Duluth. If there was a core marital problem for the Nachmans it was that I was never a dedicated enough husband, but my memories of our 13-year marriage are almost all pleasant, or better. Mary, ever the prankster, once secretly taped a typical breakfast morning with the Nachmans and a Thanksgiving dinner with the Poes, all of it full of cheery banter and laughs.
Mary always found us great places to live, chatting up and charming door men. We started out in grand style, subletting an apartment at 2 Beekman Place, followed by a move to 20 Beekman. I had no idea they were such swanky addresses, within walking distance of The Daily News. We paid the exorbitant rent of $500 a month. Irving Berlin lived across the street and Greta Garbo was often spotted strolling. Later, we wound up on E. 53rd Street and First Avenue in a big place with a mirrored living room where Nina Foch had lived. It’s almost impossible not to brush elbows with someone famous in New York, especially in that swanky area.
Whatever it was that came apart I’ve forgotten, or blocked, or something, but in 1977 we decided to separate for a time and I moved into a drab little one-room place on E. 38th Street, off Park Avenue, in the Murray Hill section; it sounds chic, but my room was a glum match box. Liz Smith lived across the street (still does), just beginning to write her gossip column at The Daily News. I ate at delis and diners and spent longer hours killing time at the newspaper.
I didn’t date, exactly, but did stumble into a romance or two, or three, all of which fell into my lap, so to speak. Inevitably, the first was an office affair with a writer in my department, Laura Weiss--a pretty, proper “Smithy” stuck in a dull marriage to a scientist. We sat next to each other, ate lunch together at Schrafft’s a lot and, well, one egg salad sandwich led to another. Which led to strolls in United Nations Park and, finally, a bench near a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, who stared at us disapprovingly.
Laura was one of the writers that News editor Mike O’Neill had brought over from Newsweek. She wasn’t my type--too formal, programmed and buttoned-up (or so I thought). We stole away for a few obligatory liaisons in tacky midtown hotels I’d seen in TV commercials that rented by the hour. Much too ashamed for that, I’d book a $40 room for the night, feeling like Dustin Hoffman meeting Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate.” Half an hour after I checked in, Laura would arrive and rap softly on the door.
After the seediness got to us, we switched to the Tudor Hotel near The Daily News, a bit close for comfort but half the paper’s staff was too busy with their own hanky-panky there to notice. However, when we returned from lunch 10 minutes apart, it was a dead giveaway to the entire department. Nobody was fooled--just us.
I must have been romance-crazed when I met Joan Seiler, the stunningly beautiful wife of a nerdy press agent, Bernie Seiler. Joan turned up two or three times a week at The Daily News to drop off his releases. The first time I saw Joan, demurely delivering envelopes to this desk or that, I decided I had to meet her. I couldn’t fathom how she wound up married to a nice but nebbishy Broadway flack.
So, puppy-like, I followed Joan down in the elevator and “bumped” into her in the lobby, introduced myself and oh-so-casually suggested we have a cup of coffee. She said she hadn’t time but perhaps another day and hurried out a revolving door, fleeing what must have seemed a crazed stalker. A week later, I cornered her again and got rebuffed again, but I was stupidly determined.
I learned where she lived, up near the Frick Museum, and began hanging out in the area, desperately hoping to run into her on the street. I mooned about the Frick, savoring the sensual Fragonard paintings. Once, I sent her a letter from there, written near the little indoor pond, expressing my undying devotion. Finally, I wangled a lunch date with her near her husband’s office at a little place on W. 46th Street, the intensely romantic Barbera, with its indoor patio, trees and skylight.
Deciding this would be my only chance, I took her hand. She took it back, smiling gently but firmly, and then made a sensible speech about her domestic responsibilities that I can recall almost verbatim: “It isn’t that I’m not very flattered by all your attentions, and not even that I wouldn’t enjoy the kind of thing you have in mind, but it would destroy the life I have, which isn’t perfect but it’s pretty good. Bernie is a nice man who’s devoted to me and our kids and takes care of us and I’m not about to throw it all away for a romantic fling. I did that once. I can’t risk it again. I’m sorry. Too much is at stake. I have a real life and those Fragonard paintings you like so much, they’re beautiful but they’re not real.”
I nodded, unable to come up with a counter-argument, and walked her back to her office, crushed but resigned. Not only was the woman enchanting, she was honest, wise and, of course, right.
If Laura was a workplace liaison, and Joan a major miscalculation, Sarah Hertz was serious business. Sarah was yet another Newsweeker, an editor in the arts department I met at a party and asked to lunch at Japonnaise, a little French-Japanese place near my office. Sarah was slender, with short dark hair and a lightning wit; she was incredibly, almost intimidatingly bright, with a Radcliffe pedigree and an MA from the Sorbonne in philosophy. She read Wittgenstein for kicks (I tried reading him at her place and almost made it to the third sentence.)
Sarah was the smartest woman, maybe even the smartest person, I’d ever met, not just book smart but chock full of incisive comments and original ideas and theories. Never had my San Jose State College education been so challenged and found wanting. She was funny, quick, lively, competent and very cute.
I was drawn to her sharp New York wit and Eastern sophistication, a different kind of preppy Jewish girl than I’d known in Oakland, though I winced at some of her Ivy League-isms (“It’s just too ridic”). She was like a member of Salinger’s neurotic, finely-tuned Glass family. When I told a Newsweek editor who knew Sarah that we were dating, he mimed playing a violin and said “high-strung.”
Despite her brains and polish, she had no self-confidence, was terminally tardy and a major procrastinator, taking years to hang a picture and 20 minutes to pick out a potato. She was cynical, with a deep disdain for journalism, my holy grail. She thought journalists were jerks who took themselves too seriously (this was during the Watergate era). She also drank and smoked cigarettes and pot, while I was Mr. Clean. Sarah once told me, a little accusingly, “You’re a damned rabbi!”
When she drank--straight Scotch in snifters, until 2 or 3 in the morning--she got sad and bitter. Her family hadn’t appreciated her, nor did her employer, nor did she. She once threw out a line that I still quote: “The over-examined life is also not worth living.” Sarah was blocked, unable to write, while editing writers she didn’t respect. She was, in short, a bit of a mess, however adorable.
Because I was married, but separated, and because she had broken up with her longtime boyfriend, we had to skulk about Greenwich Village looking for little hideaways to have dinner. She was terrified someone who knew us (i.e., her editor who lived in the Village), would see us, so we’d peek through restaurant windows to make sure the coast was clear.
When we shared a taxi to work, I had to slide out two blocks from my office, lest someone see us together at 9 a.m. In visits to New York now, every other corner is a landmark of that frantic romantic period--out of the way tea-rooms like Mary Elizabeth’s, The Woman’s Collective, the Elephant & Castle, Ye Olde Waverly Inn.
We managed two vacations during that time, once to romantic Charleston, S.C., and once to unromantic Las Vegas (her choice), where we sipped pina coladas in the pool, strolled the garish jewelry stores and took in a tame girlie show. She reveled in the wretched bad taste of it all; I couldn’t wait to get back to Manhattan.
My only other alliance then, much less intense, was with an assistant to the guy who wrote the popular “Adam Smith” column in New York magazine, the equally well-bred Gretchen Lundquist who wore her salt-and-pepper hair in an upswept bun and lived in an airy East Side two-story townhouse. When she left early for work, I’d loll in bed feeling like a kept man. I’d never been in a townhouse with a little courtyard in back, let alone known anybody who owned one.
My other wealthy, would-be benefactor, Barbaralee Diamonstein, was an art maven and critic I met at an artsy party at Senator Jacob Javits’ home, studded with celebrities--the pianist Byron Janis, the sculptor Louise Nevelson. What I was doing there I have no idea, but columnists get invited to all sorts of strange events they normally would have no business being at.
Diamonstein was rich and older than I, at ease at such chic soirees and salons, but she seemed interested in becoming my friend, maybe more. She was attractive in a dowager sort of way--clanking bracelets, elegant streaked coif, over made-up, gushy hellos. So I thought, well, this might be different, and it was.
Barbarlee, a Southern Jew (highly exotic to a staid Northern California Jew boy) took me to a few parties--the ones where I met Tennessee Williams and listened to Eugene McCarthy woo the guests--and I took her to dinner at intimate Upper Eastside bistros I couldn’t afford. Over one such meal I mentioned a couple I knew who had an open marriage, much in vogue in the 1970s, or at least much discussed. When I said, “Steve and his wife have an agreement,” Barbaralee asked, “Does she know about it?”
Finally, let us not forget “Maxine,” or whatever her real name was--an actual hooker, the only one I’d ever, um, known, before or since. Maxine was an impulse buy. One day, slogging home from work, a cute trick caught my eye and didn’t give it back. I’d noticed her before on that block, then it dawned on me that it was her place of business. I’d never seen a hooker up so early in the day, about 5:30 in the afternoon. Maxine was offering Early Bird Specials, or a kind of happy hour for suburban men before they caught the 7:05 for Scarsdale at Grand Central.
I mumblingly asked her for some job specs--how much? Where?--unsure if that was the traditional procedure; I was nearing 40 but forced to rely on movies. Maxine lived only half a block away, so it seemed safe enough, with the bright June sunshine streaming down. She seemed a bit pricey ($100) and didn’t take checks, so I first had to duck into a Citibank to get enough cash to cover the tab.
More out of lifelong curiosity than desire, I followed her into a dark, gloomy apartment, a sparsely furnished one-bedroom place; in fact, the whole apartment functioned as one bedroom. After riffling my roll of bills on the bureau, Maxine rapidly and efficiently disrobed, the most exciting part of the entire transaction.
Nothing happened, I am required to report. I was too nervous, ashamed and addled for anything like passion. It was all over in about 30 minutes, quick and clinical, like a visit to the doctor for a flu shot.
When Maxine had asked what I “wanted”--I was stymied, muttering something like, “The usual,” hoping to sound cool and matter-of-fact. She ran through the house rules: no kissing, no S&M, no this, absolutely no that. I felt more like an observer than an active participant, frazzled by (1) just being there and (2) being unable to carry out my end of the bargain. “Not to worry,” she said, “happens all the time,” and within minutes was wrapped snugly back inside her miniskirt.
I felt a little better after she told me that, but on the way home, back on the sidewalk in the rush-hour crush with hundreds of other guys bustling along, like me, swinging their briefcases, I was depressed that such a major life experience was over and I had nothing to show for it: no receipt, no cozy snapshot of Maxine and me for my scrapbook, no souvenir of any kind--just a fading, badly frayed $100 memory.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman
caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from
IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San
Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This special extract from a work
in progress is published by special arrangement with the author.
All inquiries about this work should be directed to the author
by use of the Talkback feature below. This excerpt first posted
here May 14, 2007.
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