Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online Page B

moved from the Lower East Side as if they were moving to the country. The subways were new and Brownsville was considered a step up.
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    Was everybody Jewish?
    I’d say, 90 percent Jews, 10 percent Italians.
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    How about your parents, Max and Annie — what do you remember?
    My father bringing tailoring home and standing over a pair of pants. He worked two jobs, moonlighted. Everybody worked two jobs or three. There were six kids! He’d do alterations to make extra money. And my mother always stood over the soup pot and she swatted us as we ran by. I remember that and her advice when I was older: “Never spend your life in worriment.” Worriment! What a word. Every day she would threaten to jump out the window. Every day I would talk her out of it. That was my job as number-one son. Once a week, a letter arrived from Germany or Poland or wherever the border happened to be. My father read it aloud to my mother in Yiddish. It came from the shtetl. A place called Czkower, I think. My parents lived in two worlds—Brownsville and Czkower. I think Czkower was more real to them.
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    When did you get interested in music?
    It was Sammy Levinson who showed me a whole other kind of life. He had music lessons, an Amati violin. He played MF—mit feeling. His family paid for him to study. My father expected me to bring money home. I had one lesson at the New York Music School—a fly-by-night place that later went out of business. One lesson! After that, we got gigs—weddings, bar mitzvahs, golden weddings. My father said: “You’re already making a leeving, why waste money on lessons?” (He also hid my letter of admission to City College. Years later, I learned this and was furious.) He needed me to help support the family. He didn’t see the point of college. At the golden weddings, we played all the old chestnuts: “Just a Garden in the Rain” and “Oh How We Danced on the Night We Were Wed.” I decided I never wanted a golden wedding. I’d rather be dead. And Russian dances—always Russian dances—especially at the weddings. They danced the kazatska till they fell down.
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    How did you fall in love with show business?
    When Sammy and I were in high school, it was still burlesque. 8 snows 8 [he writes it on a napkin]. When Hershey’s with the nuts inside was launched they had a gimmick. There was supposed to be a dollar in every ten bars—so we sold candy like it was going out of style. It wasn’t true—of course. You never actually saw a dollar, but people are gullible for giveaways. They believed it. So we hung out at the burlesque and got fifty cents for every dollar we sold. Nice margins.
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    Why did you tell me never to follow a dog act?
    Because in vaudeville you can’t compete with dogs and little kids. Also, it’s a lousy spot on the bill—in the middle. You want the last spot—or the first. Never the middle. Burlesque kept going through the twenties. The skits were unbelievably stupid by even today’s television standards. But the rule held: You had skits, dogs, a magician, the strip show, the headliner. You’d never follow a dog act. Anyway, I was always in the band.
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    Why did you change your name?
    When I was twenty, I joined the union—local 802. Seymour Mann and his orchestra sounded good—but also there was another reason. There was a crook named Izzy Weisman in the union, who’d been involved in some scandal. So Weisman was not a good name to have in local 802. I liked the ring of Seymour Mann and his band. You couldn’t sound Jewish in show business then. Cohen became King. Moskowitz became Moss. Rabinowitz became Ross. Goldfish became Goldwyn. Ethnic wasn’t in yet.
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    Where did you meet Eda?
    At a place called Utopia in the Catskill Mountains. It really was called Utopia. It was a family resort near Ellenville in “The Mountains.” Your mother wore a