Street Gang by Michael Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

raise in pay—to promote the show.
    It was a dream job, she said later, and one that in time provided ample free time to pursue political causes. “I had done some volunteer work for the Democratic reform movement in New York that was led by Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and Herbert Lehman, and I would go to this political club, the Lexington Club, to write releases for them. But time still hung heavy on my hands. So I called a friend at the Theater Guild, a producer of United States Steel Hour . I said, ‘There has to be someone in New York who could use a volunteer doing something interesting.’ And he said, ‘William Phillips of the Partisan Review could use some help.’ ”
    In its history, the political and literary quarterly had provided a forum for T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, and other notable minds.“I was pulled—in my late twenties—into this incredible world. I helped William put on a fund-raising event at Columbia that included Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Lionel Trilling.
    “This was incredibly heady stuff for me, far headier than the crowd at Sands Point. It was the New York intellectuals arguing, and I was a fly on the wall listening. It provided me with an education that was richer than anything I could have had at the best graduate school.”
    Not everyone from the Partisan Review crowd immediately embraced Cooney. “Television was a no-no among intellectuals,” she said, “and Jason Epstein, a great editor at Random House of that time, had total contempt for me. Not only was I in television, but I was doing publicity for television. I mean, what could be lower?”
    As the years passed though, Epstein and Cooney would forge a deep friendship, marked by wide avenues of mutual respect and a shared interest in the characters inhabiting Sesame Street .
     
    At around 9:00 a.m on Monday, June 18, 1956, Sylvan Ganz reluctantly picked up the telephone receiver after repeated rings. It was just four days after he had returned home from a ten-day stay at Camelback Sanatorium in Phoenix. He had checked himself in, burdened by another bout of depression.
    Joan’s married sister, Sylvia Houle, was on the line, concern in her voice. Sylvia lived only streets away from her parents and was checking on her father’s readjustment to being home. Sylvan kept the conversation short. “I’ll see you later,” he said. 13
    At a seemingly robust seventy-one, Sylvan had become an agent for Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company and a director for the Butane Corporation, following his retirement from the First National Bank of Arizona. Associates hailed him as a shrewd and judicious banker whose leadership guided the institution during years of steady growth. Ever civic-minded, he had also served as president of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and of the Arizona Bankers Association.
    Pauline had left the house that morning to swim at the Phoenix Country Club, the place her husband endured more than accepted.
    When she returned home just before 9:30, she discovered an empty shotgun scabbard on Sylvan’s bed. Near panic, she set off to find her difficult, fragile, tormented husband.
    Pauline discovered him in the backyard, dead by his own hand.
    Across the continent in New York, her father’s violent choice cut deeply into Joan Ganz. “I really had a terrible time for the next eight or ten months of being able to face what had happened,” she recalled.“I just kept pushing it down. I was having dizzy spells and claustrophobia, headaches and neurological problems. I couldn’t go to the theater. I couldn’t get on a subway. I was able to go to work and go home, but I went out very little because of this kind of physical illness that overcame me. I felt like a marionette whose strings had been severed.
    “I stayed in therapy and finally it got through,” she said. Over long months, her strength and equilibrium were restored, and she emerged “a much strengthened person. My father’s death was the event