Chapter 15
OUR HOUSE ALWAYS SEEMS full of people and noise, with the front door continuously opening and closing, the phone ringing, dogs barking, friends running in and out, and my dad and his friend Dick Berg playing gin rummy downstairs on rainy Sundays.
I hear the slapping of their cards against the table, their voices rising, and a sudden eruption of laughter. No one can laugh like my dad. Listening to him tell a joke, any joke, is a story in itself. He acts out voices and mannerisms with an impeccable sense of dialect and timing, usually slapping his knee and losing himself in his own hysteria before ever arriving at the punch line.
The comedian David Brenner remembers that laugh. He told me how one day he boarded the first-class section of a jumbo 747 and saw my dad sitting in the middle, front seat. He said they talked for the entire five-hour flight. “I knew your dad was short and I asked him if I could bounce a joke off of him that had just popped into my head to see if it was too offensive. Your dad said, ‘Sure.’ So I said, ‘I feel sorry for short people. It must be frightening to wake up in the morning and see your feet right here.’ I held my open palms under my chin and continued talking to them. ‘It’s us! It’s us!’ Your dad literally slipped off his seat and was curled up on the floor hysterical with laughter.”
I know my father’s laugh anywhere. I can pick it out of a crowded room and, in fact, have. Years later, as a senior in high school I am in a stage version of The Wizard of Oz. For my great acting debut I am cast as the lead poppy and, as such, am the first out, wearing a green leotard and orange petals around my neck. This role must have been created because the teacher wanted to give everyone a part, no matter how dismal. When I dance out, I immediately hear my father’s laugh in the crowded auditorium. I might have been hurt if I, too, hadn’t thought the whole thing was pretty funny.
In the late sixties, my dad discovers paddle tennis, which doesn’t put as much strain on his war-injured knee as regular tennis. He has a court built in our backyard. This becomes a favorite weekend activity for him and some of his buddies. Among the regulars are Dick Berg and Jerry Paris (a regular on The Dick Van Dyke Show and director of many TV shows, including Happy Days), friend Tom Ryan, actor John Forsythe, and writer Bill Idelson.
Every weekend, they are out there unless it is pouring rain. From my bedroom, early in the morning, I hear the ball being hit back and forth, and I hear them talking, yelling, and swearing. Inevitably, there is some break in the game as an argument ensues about the boundaries and some heated “discussion” about the score takes place.
Years later, after his first heart attack, one of the funniest cards my dad receives in the hospital is from Jerry Paris: “Berg said you were dead . . . but he always calls ’em wrong.”
During the week our days have a routine, a flow, even when my dad is in the middle of a project. He makes time for a quick game of basketball when I get home. In the earlier days if he was a little late, I played school with the dogs, leading them (with biscuits) into a little room off the kitchen I called their classroom. I have it all set up with pencils and papers and a tiny chalkboard I balance on my lap. I “teach” them addition and subtraction and then read to them. When they get restless, I call, “Okay, recess!” and we file back outside. My dad, who sometimes hears me, finds this very amusing.
He and I play basketball on the paddle tennis court, never keeping score; we just shoot the ball, and when I miss, he says, “You were robbed.”
Sometimes, when his knee isn’t hurting, he will do a Russian dance out there on the court, crossing his arms, squatting down, and kicking out his legs. I try it and fall down.
My dad and I continue to sneak in more than the occasional episode of The Flintstones, and he pays me a quarter if I tickle his feet.
One program, though, that we are never allowed to watch is Hogan’s Heroes, about a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. My father has a particular abhorrence of this show and no tolerance for how it perversely twists what happened in Nazi prison camps into something even remotely comical. Years later, in a speech at the Library of Congress in Washington, it is clearly still on his mind:
You take a show like Hogan’s Heroes. Now, here you have a weekly, mirth-filled half hour that shows what a swinging ball it must have been in a Nazi POW camp. Now there’s a slight deviation from the norm in that there are good guys on this show, certainly, but there are no bad guys, at least not in the sense that we’re used to recognizing our enemies as they appeared in old Warner Brothers films. Now the Japanese in a Jack Warner production was very recognizable: big buckteeth, myopic eyes, he lusted after Occidental women and he tortured nuns. And the Nazis, of course, were all walking hymns of hate, totally unregenerative and all looking like Erich von Stroheim.
Now through the good offices of Hogan’s Heroes, we meet the new post-war version of the wartime Nazi: a thick, bumbling fathead whose crime, singularly, is stupidity—nothing more. He’s kind of a lovable, affable, benign Herman Goering. Now this may appeal to some students of comedy who refuse to let history get in the way of their laughter. But what it does to history is to distort, and what it does to a recollection of horror that is an ugly matter of record is absolutely inexcusable. Satire is one thing, because it bleeds, and it comments as it evokes laughter. But a rank diminishment of what was once an era of appalling human suffering, I don’t believe is proper material for comedy.
He goes on to suggest that the success of Hogan’s Heroes could lead to “The Merry Men of Auschwitz, or Milton Berle in a new musical version of the Death March on Bataan, or a single shot spectacular, The Wit and Wisdom of Adolf Hitler.”
I don’t recall any other television show about which he feels such a singular repugnance or any other program being banned in our house. On the topics of Nazis or the persecution of Jews, or prejudice of any kind, he is fierce and unequivocal. Never is this clearer or the message conveyed more powerfully than in The Twilight Zone episode “Deaths-Head Revisited,” in which a former S.S. officer makes a nostalgic post-war visit back to the Dachau concentration camp. Perhaps if it hadn’t been broadcast four years earlier, “Deaths-Head” would have been my father’s response to Hogan’s Heroes.
The opening narration captures my father’s disdain:
Mr. Schmidt recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies eight miles northeast of Munich, a picturesque, delightful little spot onetime known for its scenery but more recently related to other events having to do with the less positive pursuits of man: human slaughter, torture, misery and anguish. Mr. Schmidt, as we will soon perceive, has a vested interest in the ruins of a concentration camp—for once, some seventeen years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the S.S. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis: he walked the Earth without a heart. And now former S.S. Captain Lutze will revisit his old haunts, satisfied perhaps that all that is awaiting him in the ruins on the hill is an element of nostalgia. What he does not know, of course, is that a place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas of The Twilight Zone.
In this episode, as in many Twilight Zone episodes, my dad renders the justice that failed to occur in real life. He tells it the way it should have been, where the evil get their comeuppance, their due. When former Captain Lutze returns to the camp where he once held the power of life and death, he has only a little time to reminisce before he is confronted by one of his victims, Alfred Becker (played by Joseph Schildkraut, the Viennese-born actor who two years before had portrayed Anne Frank’s father on film). Becker says that he is now the camp’s “caretaker.” Lutze soon realizes that Becker is dead at the captain’s own hand and intends to put him on trial with the help of other ghosts from the camp. After the guilty verdict has been delivered, Lutze stumbles around the camp, experiencing the agonies he once inflicted on others.
When the taxi driver comes to fetch him, he calls the police and a doctor, reporting, “I heard him screaming. Such screams. Like a . . . like a . . . wounded animal.” He then asks the doctor, “What happened to him? I drove him up here myself not two hours ago. He was all right then. But his screams . . . oh . . . his screams . . .”
To which the doctor replies, “I have no idea. All I know is that he screams from pain. More than pain—agony. But there’s not a mark on him. He’s insane. A raving maniac. What could happen to a man in two hours to make him a raving maniac? Someone must tell me.”
Almost all of my father’s closing narrations end with the phrase, “The Twilight Zone.” The message of this episode, however, was clearly so important to him, so central to his passion, that he felt the need to go beyond the fantasy.
The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and remember, not only in The Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s earth.
There are shows my father likes or shows we watch regularly when I am young—Disney, and all of the popular family shows. We also watch many cartoons besides The Flintstones. We love Huckleberry Hound. My dad can do Augie Doggie’s voice to a tee, repeating Augie’s catchphrase “Dear old Dad.” Sometimes I grab his arm on his way out to his office or on his way down the stairs and beg him, “Come on. Do it. Be Augie one more time.”
Our house is also never without a myriad of pets. We have dogs, cats, birds, fish, and turtles, and Jodi has a horse stabled in a canyon nearby. She names him “Highbeam” and writes his name on her wall by her bed. Years later, we find her writing again, laughing when we read: “Highbeam, Highbeam, Highbeam” all over her wall in tiny letters and then an occasional “Highbeam rules.”
Our cats were a Christmas present from my parents, a well-kept secret until Christmas morning. But early one foggy morning, two years after we get them, my cat, Harry, is hit by a car.
My sister runs home to tell me. She stands on the threshold of my bedroom, wiping away tears, yelling, motioning, waving her arms. It takes a while for me to comprehend what she is saying. “Harry’s dead,” she finally manages. “A truck hit him in the driveway where they’re building that new house.”
She stands there for a moment—the older sister passing on the terrible news, the ill-equipped courier—waiting, as if she is thinking of something more to say. But, at only eleven, she is no more prepared to deliver the news than I am to receive it and silent for a moment more, she then backs out of my room and runs down the stairs.
My father helps me gently place Harry in a box with a blanket and flowers and a note. We carry him to the end of the driveway and say a few words about what a fine cat he was and what a good, albeit short, life he had. My father tells me a special truck will pick him up and he will go to cat heaven.
I stay on the front stoop throughout much of the morning, waiting for the truck, assured that my cat is going to a safe place. My dad finally coaxes me inside, and by late afternoon, the cat is gone.
Perhaps today that kind of parental dissembling would be discouraged, but it certainly made this loss more bearable at the time.
Eventually our menagerie grows to include another cat and even black and white pet rats. Throughout the years, I will name all of mine, “Mary” or “Junior.” I think we got the rats because my mother had heard they were very social and great pets. We dress the rats in Barbie doll clothes. They crawl over the cats in little skirts left open so they’ll fit and the cats just lie there, oblivious, purring, unfazed.
Flying with all the animals between California and upstate New York, is, at best, a complicated endeavor, although we are able to take the rats to our seats in their cages with the little fabric covers my mother sewed for them.
One summer my sister’s rat Berta gets loose and runs under the cottage. Jodi gets a flashlight and, lying on the ground, shines it under the porch in a futile attempt to point Berta home. She finally gives up and stands, her face tear-streaked and dirty. My dad has to return to L.A. for some unexpected business and promises to bring her a new rat. (In those days, pet stores in upstate New York did not sell rats.) On the flight back, he leaves the little cage on his seat when he gets up to go to the bathroom. Upon returning, he discovers the cage is open and the rat has gotten loose. Not wanting to alarm his fellow passengers, he quietly makes his way down the aisle, looking for her. Unsuccessful and beginning to panic, he gets on his hands and knees, literally crawling down the aisle until coming to the feet of the flight attendant.
“May I help you?” she asks him.
My dad stammers some response and goes back to his seat where, sitting on the armrest, is the rat. He grabs her and gets her safely back into her cage. Or so his story goes.
Twice my dad uses my nickname, “Nan,” in his Twilight Zone show. In the first season episode “The Hitch-Hiker,” the main character, Nan Adams, played by Inger Stevens, is driving across country and repeatedly sees a man hitchhiking. She becomes terrified as she keeps passing him on the side of the road; no matter how fast she drives the man is always ahead of her. He turns out to be Mr. Death. When I eventually see this episode, I am not thrilled that my dad used my name in one of the creepier stories. In another episode later that season, “A Passage for Trumpet,” one of my dad’s personal favorites, he again uses my nickname, Nan, but in a much gentler, nostalgic story. It stars Jack Klugman as a depressed, alcoholic jazz musician who commits suicide but is then given a second chance at life:
Joey Crown, who makes music and who discovered something about life; that it can be rich and rewarding and full of beauty, just like the music he played, if a person would only pause to look and to listen.
Two years later, my dad brings home one of the props, “Willy,” the ventriloquist’s dummy from the episode called “The Dummy,” starring Cliff Robertson as an alcoholic, paranoid ventriloquist. Throughout the weekend Willy sits on my father’s knee, and my dad, acting the part of the ventriloquist, animates him, making him move and talk and gesture, bringing him to life for Jodi and me. I remember Willy propped up, sitting at the dinner table with us, and later covering him up for bed. We are only able to keep him for a couple of days and are sad when he has to return to the studio.
When I finally see this episode, my view of Willy completely changes. He is controlling and malevolent, keeping the increasingly crazed Jerry in his thrall. The show ends with the two of them once again on stage, but this time it is Jerry sitting on a human-sized Willy’s knee. I think about this weird and chilling story and the darker, sinister side of the human beings my dad often explores.