Just Kids From the Bronx Read online

  Everybody froze, glass in hand, a living tableau. I turned slowly, martini still half raised, heard myself say, “Well, I sure as hell hope so.” There were a few titters, and somebody decided it was time for dinner.

  Sure enough, justice triumphed, and a couple of years later I was back in London, this time to celebrate with the crowned heads of Europe my appointment as managing editor.

  The morning after my arrival, I picked up a copy of the Times of London outside my hotel room door—Claridge’s—saw “Up from the Slums of the Bronx to the Editor’s Chair, Page 3” on the front page. I knew they were singing my song and turned the page.

  I saw it at once: a long story from the Washington correspondent of the Times, a kind of strange-customs-in-faraway-places piece in which the writer tried to explain to the British public exactly how it had come about that a poor boy from a slum in an exotic part of New York seldom visited by tourists, who attended a free college with the social prestige of a herring, whose parents were born in Russia and who also happened to be, well, Jewish, actually became managing editor of the most important, powerful, and prestigious newspaper in the United States.

  It was written with a sense of kindly wonderment, as if explaining the customs of Ugandan tribesmen to the British audience.

  There was a certain poignancy in the piece, discernible perhaps to only two people: the author and me. The writer was Louis Heren, who had been the correspondent in India of the Times of London during my years there. He had told me often that though he stood high in the regard of the proprietors of the Times of London, he and they knew he could never become its editor. He was born a Roman Catholic and had compounded that initial error by attending the wrong schools.

  I sent Louis Heren a message of thanks, also informing him that the Pirate Queen would have been furious if she knew that Mosholu Parkway1 would ever be described as a slum.

  * * *

  Note: This excerpt from Abe Rosenthal’s unpublished memoir is printed here with permission from Shirley Lord Rosenthal. It is the only contribution in this book, aside from my own, not derived from a live interview.

  CARL REINER

  Award-winning actor, writer, director, producer, and comedian

  (1922– )

  My father wasn’t a joiner, so we were never synagogue members. When I turned thirteen, he persuaded a rabbi to rent him a synagogue in a poor neighborhood for a Thursday morning bar mitzvah for me. My only training for the event had been with another rabbi who, for a few months, was willing to teach me what I needed to know. My father, my mother, my older brother Charlie, and a group of strangers, old Jews with beards and prayer shawls, were the only ones who attended when the time arrived.

  And it wasn’t like today, where kids write their own speeches. My father wrote the speech for me, in both flowery language and beautiful handwriting. “Worthy Assembly. You’ve afforded me a great honor this day, when you have come to this temple of God to take part in and celebrate on the day I have become a bar mitzvah.” It went on in the same manner, ending with “May God be with you in my endeavor to be a good member of society and a good Jew. Amen.” This speech was actually the same one my father had written for my brother Charlie, who had said it at his bar mitzvah a few years earlier.

  Over seventy years go by when a granddaughter of our old neighbors the Fishmans contacts me out of the blue with something she thinks I’ll be interested in. It turns out to be her family’s copy of that same speech in my father’s own handwriting. My father had written it out for the bar mitzvah of Murray Fishman, her father, who was a year younger than I was. So that speech was delivered at three different bar mitzvahs at three different times.

  I was thirteen and officially a Jewish man in the eyes of the elders, but my friends, who were older and maybe more religious than I, had already taken part in a minyan, a group of ten adult male Jews who get together for prayers. There have to be a minimum of ten or the prayers won’t be valid. If I saw men in our neighborhood with prayer shawls, I quickly crossed the street. I always dodged being part of a minyan, especially since I had learned only what I needed to learn for my bar mitzvah by rote. I knew no Hebrew. I couldn’t read the prayers.

  But one day I was with my friends walking down our street when we were all called in for a minyan. Since I was part of the group I couldn’t escape. I had no choice. When everyone else started praying, I didn’t know what to do, so I prayed too—but in Hebrew double-talk. My guilt lasted many years, because at the time I thought that I was preventing the prayers of nine faithful Jews from reaching God because of my gibberish.

  * * *

  MY INTEREST IN performing was sparked early on by my mother’s family. Her brother had been in Irving Berlin’s show Yip Yip Yaphank. He played the spoons and he sang. And my mother’s sister, Adele, was just a funny woman who made us laugh. We also went to movies and listened to comedy shows on the radio. I guess that people are born with a talent for comedy, but if you’re in a household that accepts humor as a potent force then you also develop it.

  I could make kids laugh when I was very young and I liked doing it. When I was in first grade at P.S. 57 I was the teacher’s pet. At Christmas they asked, “Can anyone do anything entertaining?” One kid got up and tap danced, and I could stand, put one leg behind my head, and hop around on the other. It was one of those things I found out I could do, because I had a short torso and long legs. I did that in our classroom, and then the teacher took me to two other classrooms to do it. That was my first touring in show business right there.

  In third grade, I played the Headsman in the play Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil. I was the guy who chopped people’s heads off. We performed the play for an audience and all I remember is that my mother sat next to the principal, who said to her, “That boy is the best one.” He said that because I was loud. I was the loudest one and he could hear me.

  At Evander Childs High School, Mr. Raskin, who was the music teacher there, needed singers. So my friend Milton points to me and says, “He sings.” I could sing loud and I had a big operatic voice but no ear and no timing. However, I could sing like Caruso if somebody conducted me. Raskin says, “Let me hear you sing.” And he gives me a few notes to sing. I hit one note. “You’re in!” “In what?” “In the chorus.”

  Then I was paired with a wonderful girl coloratura, Ruth, and we rehearsed a duet, “Yo Soy el Pato,” which is “I Am the Duck” in English. In rehearsals I sang it really well. This was for our big outing—to be onstage at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan for a Spanish festival.

  So we’re there and Ruth starts to sing, and I’m supposed to walk behind her onstage. While I’m doing that, I can’t help myself. I’m doing it duck style. I’m flopping after her and the audience is roaring with laughter. The more they roared, the more I’d both walk like a duck and jump like a duck. That was my first and only theatrical performance in high school, but by then I was bitten.

  A few years ago The New Yorker magazine was going to do a piece on my old neighborhood, and I wanted to show them where I lived. Our apartment building was on Belmont Avenue, with a second building backed up to it, on the corner of 179th Street. But when we arrived, I was shocked to see that there was nothing there. Both buildings had been razed. So I went to the open lot, picked out two bricks, and sent one to my brother in Atlanta with a note that said, “Memories of our old homestead.” Across the way were two short apartment buildings, two stories, like for three families each. They hadn’t been torn down because they were historic, even though they were older and much more decrepit. One of those buildings was where I prayed in Hebrew double-talk for the minyan.

  MARTIN BREGMAN

  Film producer, including the Academy Award–winning Dog Day Afternoon

  (1926– )

  In the basement of our apartment building there was what we called the club room. Maybe the room was ten by ten, with an old couch, a chair, and a bench. After school, when we were about fifteen or sixteen, we’d go
down to the basement. What did we do there? Smoke. We crowded into this room and lit our cigarettes. We smoked until you couldn’t see. You could not see. You couldn’t breathe. Hey Solly, how’re you doin’ over there? I can’t see you.

  At about that same age I had my first serious date. She was Italian and I was Jewish. In those days it wasn’t so easy for an Italian girl to bring a Jewish boy to meet her parents, so she wasn’t so sure about bringing me home. But finally she brought me home for dinner. We were supposed to go to the movies afterward. Her mother and father were pure Italian. You know, very, very strict and domineering. The father looked like he was connected.

  I was dressed magnificently. A tie. A shirt. A jacket. I was fine. And during dinner I was trying to be charming. The mother took out a cigarette. She was looking for a match or something, and I, charmingly, reached into my front pocket and pulled out a pack. I was pure sophistication. I’m talking. I’m fumbling with opening it, without ever looking at the pack, while the father looks at me. This is his daughter. Italian. Pure. This is a mob guy too, or at least he looked like one to me. And as I’m talking I’m opening this packet of condoms. In those days, everybody my age carried them—just in case. You never knew when lightning would come down and strike you and you’d get lucky. And I feel the stare as he’s looking at me. The mother’s looking at me. The girlfriend-to-be is looking at me and I’m pulling out this condom. I wasn’t looking, but I felt it. I was mortified.

  We didn’t go to the movies that night. The girl got sick and I got sicker. I never saw her again.

  During those years, I was also looking for extra money and fun, so I hooked up with a kid I went to school with who said, “You wanna go into business? Let’s buy a car and then we can deliver some liquor.” So we bought a car, an early 1930-something Ford. The liquor we delivered was homemade, made in a still in the Bronx. We’d load the whole back of the car up with booze and then drive it like we were delivering bottles of milk. We worked for a “man.” We had no idea that we were doing something illegal.

  We delivered the booze to the clubs on Fifty-Second Street and in Greenwich Village. There was one guy in the Village who looked like he was straight out of central casting. He was a huge man who liked me. After about two years, he said, “Whad’ya doin’ this for? You gonna deliver this shit for the rest of your life?” Then he says, “What would ya like to do? What would ya like to be?” And I said, “I’d like to get into the entertainment business.” He picked up the phone and in a week—I couldn’t believe it—I started working for a booking agent in the Borscht Belt. My job was to drive people up to the mountains, and that’s how I got my start in the entertainment business.

  LEON FLEISHER

  Pianist, conductor, recipient of the 2007 Kennedy Center Honors award

  (1928– )

  For some reason music had a certain importance to my mother. She saw that music seemed to be not only a path to a better life but also that it was part of the human soul to which one should aspire. I can’t remember a time in our apartment when there wasn’t this little upright piano.

  My older brother, Raymond, was given piano lessons but was not particularly interested. In those days, music teachers and doctors both made house visits. Whenever the teacher came to give Ray a lesson I was absolutely fascinated. I would curl up on the couch in the corner and just watch and listen. When the lesson was over, Ray would go out to the school yard and play with his friends. I would go over to the piano and repeat everything that had been done in the lesson; and apparently did it with much greater enthusiasm and alacrity than he did. I must’ve been four or four and a half. It turned out that Ray was very happy to let me take over his lessons so that he could spend more time in the school yard.

  I enjoyed it. It was great fun. I think that it was one of those extraordinarily lucid moments when a mother’s vision for a child actually coincided with the talent of the child. I had two choices. First choice was to become the first Jewish president of the United States. Second choice, become a famous musician. As I said, it was one of those rare serendipitous occasions where the dream and the reality seemed to coincide.

  There came periods of time when I became bored with practicing because you have to develop certain neuromuscular responses which come about only as a result of a certain amount of repetition. I became master of being able to practice something and read a book at the same time. The only problem was hiding the book when my mother came by. I learned how to do that by slipping the book under one leg when I heard her footsteps.

  I had just turned ten in 1938 when my mother and I, in effect, abandoned my father and brother in San Francisco, where my brother and I were born. My mother and I left for Lake Como, Italy, where Artur Schnabel, this world-famous, incredible teacher, taught. Schnabel had accepted me as a student. He had also discovered Lake Como long before George Clooney. It’s a paradise on earth. Beautiful lakes surrounded by mountains.

  I went some four months in the summer to work with him. War clouds were gathering, and Schnabel was making plans to leave Lake Como. He was going to move to New York, and if I wanted to continue working with him it made sense that my family move to New York too. So we came back from Lake Como in September. We lived on West Seventy-Ninth Street in a brownstone while looking for another, larger apartment. My father and brother joined us in New York, and I think it was toward the end of 1938 that we found an apartment at 1325 Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Our apartment faced south, the side street, which had two sides lined with cars but certainly enough room to have a rather constricted game of stickball, which was a kind of nonstop affair.

  When I wasn’t practicing, or doing my homework, I might be down there playing stickball. It’s a great game. One of our great players was called Sluggo. The pink Spaldeen was hit onto the Grand Concourse itself by him. I forget the name of the street to the west of us, but Sluggo could hit that ball a country mile in the heart of the Bronx.

  Around 1939 or ’40 there was this lovely, ample-bosomed blonde girl who was my older brother’s girlfriend. Her name was Natalie. She lived across the little side street on which we played stickball. The room that held my piano, my studio, if you will, faced her windows. We were up on the fifth floor, and Natalie was across the street on the second floor. There were a number of times in the summer when Ray, my brother, threw open the window, sat on the sill with his leg up, and Natalie would be like Juliet, except she was below, not above, at her window. The two would gaze and gesture to one another. It was quite a distance from the fifth floor to the second floor across the street, and, you know, with kids in between playing stickball, it wasn’t quite the situation where they could converse. So they developed a kind of sign language.

  One afternoon, Ray must’ve been in the throes of some great wave of passion. He sat me down, literally grabbed me by the arm, and put me on the piano bench. He knew that I could play the piano version of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. He pointed to the music and said, “Play!” Then he went and sat on the sill while I played as loudly as I could, with the appropriate feeling. I played this love music while my brother sat on the sill making these great swooping gestures as if he were sending the music out the window down across the street to Natalie’s window. I was twelve or thirteen and Ray was close to eighteen at the time. I felt like Cyrano de Bergerac. A musical Cyrano de Bergerac.

  LAWRENCE SAPER

  Entrepreneur, inventor of patient-monitoring equipment and cardiac-assist devices

  (1928– )

  The candy store, as was usual in the neighborhoods, was on the corner. It was a simple business, one that was easy for someone with very little money to start. Our neighborhood candy store, Nathan’s, along with its candy, newspapers, comic books, and soda fountain, had a public phone in a booth, on the right near the doorway. Most people before the war didn’t have phones, so the public phone was an important one.

  When the phone rang, whichever kid was there first took priority. And I was usually there first. You c
ould only take part if you were tall enough to reach the phone. I’d pick up the phone and say, “Who do you want to talk to?”

  “Well, Mr. So-and-so.”

  “What’s the address? What apartment?”

  Another kid waiting to answer the phone would have to say, “The next one’s mine.” So the phone would ring, and let’s say it was for Mr. Schwartz on Franklin Avenue. You’d put the phone down—and it was common knowledge that if the phone was down it was in use and you didn’t hang up—and run up the street to get Mr. Schwartz. If you were lucky, he would be reasonably close by, or if you weren’t so lucky, he’d be a long block away. Invariably, for some reason, and I have no explanation why this was, the person you went to was always if not on the top floor, then close enough to that to make it exhausting. Usually there weren’t apartment buzzers in the downstairs entryways so you had to run up to the floor where the person lived. I knew that if the apartment number was a 6 I had a five-story run, or if it was a 5 a four-story run, and so on. Once in a while, I got lucky and I only had to run up two flights of stairs.

  When you rang their doorbell, the person would say, “Who’s there?”

  “Telephone.”

  “For who?”

  I don’t remember a woman actually ever being called, and I don’t remember ever getting a tip from a woman. The call was usually for what we called “the man of the house.” Sometimes I’d be lucky and could yell up the stairwell, “Phone call!” I’d then wait and follow that person back to the candy store, so nobody would misinterpret that it was somebody else’s call. It was mine.

  It wasn’t mandatory, but there was a certain amount of moral pressure for the person to give you a tip for getting them. It was very rare that anybody stiffed you, you know, didn’t give you a tip. Two pennies was a weak tip. A nickel was a good tip. And a dime? I mean, you had struck gold. A dime was rare but it was still possible.