TWENTY-TWO

NEW YORK CITY

1987–1992

Next door to the restaurant, all but unnoticed by hungry theatergoers, is a humble Lutheran church. That’s where B. and I got married, nearly twenty-two years ago. So far, B. remembers that day as well as I do.

I first saw B. the way a lot of actors, directors, singers, and models saw her: holding court in the first bar that bore her name, on the scruffy side of Eighth Avenue at Forty-Seventh Street. I can remember the exact date: February 14, 1987. There was nothing scruffy about B. She lit up that room, a truly ethereal presence. B. Smith’s was a hip bar in a fringe neighborhood, but I could see right away that B. herself wasn’t hip. She was just this pure, gorgeous, gregarious woman who loved entertaining and had figured out a way to do it every night and make a living at it. More than that, she’d made a white-tableclothed restaurant for all New Yorkers, not just white New Yorkers.

On any given evening at B.’s place, you might see Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, John F. Kennedy Jr., Steven Spielberg, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and more. B. Smith’s had become one of the three or four places you went when the theaters let out. It was also a beacon of diversity in a town where black and white rarely mixed apart from the street and subway.

That first night I saw her, B. was wearing a fire-engine red bustier and red hostess gown—and managing to look demure while doing it. Man, I remember thinking, it’s like they poured chocolate into the perfect mold. Unfortunately, I wasn’t available to chat. I’d brought my wife, Jocelyn, to the joint for a Valentine’s Day dinner and was about to bestow a pearl necklace on her. That’s how I know the exact date I first saw B.

For the next three years, I came in as a friend, bringing expense-account groups whenever I could. I loved talking to B., but I never crossed that line. Later, B. would tell me how much she respected that. I was different; I didn’t say corny things or act up like some of the guys.

I was a big, broad-shouldered guy coming up in the world of television ad sales and marketing, but no one had invited me in. I had just kept pushing until the first door opened. When you were a black kid from Bedford-Stuyvesant, that was all you could do. Push hard and talk fast. Or as the old saying had it, fake it till you make it. On my father’s side, my family went back to 1754 in Virginia, the start of a long line of hucksters in the old-style definition of the word: they sold fruits and vegetables on steamboats, working their way up to New York. By the time my father came along, the riverboat life was long gone: he worked as a maintenance man. But he and my mother still had a bit of the huckster in them: they kept a numbers book. For a quarter or a dollar, your customers in the neighborhood bet on different outcomes of the horse races that day: what numbers the winning purses added up to, or what the last three numbers of that total were. The keeper of the numbers book had to pay out when one of his bettors won, but there was always enough left over to make the business worth his while.

A teacher saved me, as teachers often do in a place like Bed-Stuy. I got bused to an all-Jewish public school and nearly dropped out: I could barely read. Mr. Vogelson saw some potential in me, and got me up to speed. For high school, I went to the then all-boys Brooklyn Tech, an engineering school and now one of the top schools in the city, and then Colgate University, where I dreamed of becoming a doctor. After graduating, I found myself rooming with a guy who ran a job placement firm. Just to help him, I’d go on job interviews when he didn’t yet have a qualified candidate. I’d get the job, and hold on to it for four or five days until he could find a candidate who really wanted it. I got offers right and left—I was the ideal African American job prospect! Until I landed a job at Burlington Industries that paid so well I decided to take it myself. So I got into the garment business, selling draperies to stores that no longer exist, like Bamberger’s and Abraham & Straus. That was where I learned to kibitz. “Don’t get mad,” as one of my Jewish friends liked to say. “Make a deal.”

A chance introduction led me to a job selling ads for a television station in Memphis. Eventually I worked my way back to New York, and to television, still as an ad salesman, but now for Oprah, Jeopardy, and Wheel of Fortune.

Soon after taking my first wife to that Valentine’s dinner, I learned that B. had just published a book, B. Smith’s Entertaining and Cooking for Friends. That made her the first-ever black woman to come out with a tabletop entertaining and recipe book. I was awed, and proud for her, and strictly on a professional basis, I called a very influential friend on B.’s behalf. Marketing guy that I was, I could see exactly how to use this book as the basis for a whole new lifestyle brand.

The friend was Dick Robertson, head of Warner Bros. television distribution. His thing was syndication: coming up with new TV shows and selling them to stations around the country. I put a copy of B.’s book on his desk.

“There’s a TV show here, Dick,” I said. “I see it as one part cooking, but not a cooking show. One part lifestyle, but not a fashion and beauty show.”

“So what the hell is it?”

“It’s food, fashion, and fun, for a white and black audience.”

“I still don’t get it,” Dick said. “What is it?” This is the way TV syndicators talk. At least, it’s the way Dick talked. They hear pitches all day and they get pretty impatient with them. I could see I had one more play. “It’s like Martha Stewart with rhythm,” I tried.

Dick’s eyes lit up.

“The black Martha Stewart,” he exclaimed.

That was kind of crass but…yeah, I could roll with that.

The real Martha Stewart, as it happened, had just left Warner Bros. Dick wanted her back. First he spent $150,000 filming a pilot for B. Smith’s show. Then he pitched it to Martha as a half-hour show to run before or after a half-hour show of her own. Yin and yang, sort of.

Martha hated it.

That was the end of our romance with Warner Bros.

Finally I worked my way in to see Irwin Gotlieb, president and CEO of a hugely successful product marketing company called MediaVest. Gotlieb, unlike Robertson, was silent as I spoke, his hands clasped, very Zen-like. “Dan,” he said when I’d finished, “we may have two clients for this.” The clients were Procter & Gamble and General Foods. Success! They would underwrite the show, which was to say it would carry their commercials. It would be syndicated through Hearst Entertainment: sold to different local stations around the country.

The show made money—and history. Here was a black woman not talking about being black, just being black. A beautiful black woman with a stylish lifestyle that everyone, white and black, wanted to emulate. The show lasted for eight years. It led to two more entertaining books. It even hatched a magazine: B.’s own magazine, the first truly transcultural lifestyle magazine, with interracial couples, old-and-young partners, an Asian-themed Thanksgiving—you name it, we did it. By then, B. and I weren’t just an item: we were married.

The romance began about three years after that first night I saw B. My marriage had ended when my wife walked out, leaving our young daughter, Dana, with me. I was struggling professionally, too. After a first successful year, a variety show I’d cooked up featuring singer Natalie Cole had been dropped. In retrospect, the show was a precursor of American Idol. But my sponsors had lost faith. Two weeks after that dopey decision, Natalie’s new album, Unforgettable, came out and made her an international star.

I was drowning my sorrows in mimosas at another Eighth Avenue bar—not B.’s—when in she walked with a girlfriend, the two of them in natty double-breasted blazers. B. was wearing tight white pants with hers. “I need a hug,” I said glumly. Playing along, B. gave me one. “How do I get another of those?” I asked.

B. laughed. “Try using the phone.”

A call led to a lunch date, at Caffe Cielo on what felt like our turf already: Eighth Avenue. We’d often chatted at B.’s bar, but a lunch date—that was a first. B. told me that her own first marriage, to an HBO executive named Don Anderson, had recently ended after three years. I fell in love with her right then and there. There’s a light inside B., an honesty and kindness. You can see people who are beautiful but ugly inside, and then those who are not necessarily beautiful outside but beautiful inside. She had, still does, both types of beauty, inside and out.

I remember what she was wearing that day, too: a houndstooth jacket and an Annie Hall hat with a big brim pulled low so all you could see was her eyes and her smile. She kissed me on the cheek when I left her at the corner. I strode away, happy, hopeful, and then, after about ten steps, I thought to turn around. There, back at the corner, was B., still looking at me. I was special, she told me later; she was special, too. Soon we were inseparable, two sides of a coin. I called her Sweetie. She called me Big.

About eighteen months later—December 23, 1992, to be exact—we were married at the Lutheran church on Forty-Sixth Street: St. Luke’s. We didn’t yet have the restaurant space next to the church: we wouldn’t open that B. Smith’s until 2000. So after the church ceremony, B. and I led our guests in a parade up Eighth Avenue to the original B. Smith’s on Forty-Seventh Street and packed the place until long after midnight.

Our wedding was written up in all its happy details in the “Vows” section of the New York Times. The article noted that B. wore a ball gown the color of champagne roses and sparkly sequin-covered gloves. It went on to tell her story.

“Seven years ago, Barbara Smith, a model and an actress, opened B. Smith’s Restaurant at West 47th Street and Eighth Avenue, next to a closed-down movie theater and across the street from a row of dilapidated tenements,” the Times’ Lois Smith Brady wrote. “Until Ms. Smith arrived the block was one of New York’s bleakest.

“Some people now consider her corner a landmark,” Brady went on. “As Edward J. Robinson, an interior designer and a regular customer at the restaurant, said, ‘Anyone who comes in from out of town, I must take them to B. Smith’s, then to the Statue of Liberty. There’s always the possibility of seeing someone famous or in the news or in the know.’ ”

The article explained that we’d met at B.’s restaurant two years before—a slight chronological gloss. It noted that despite my day job in television marketing, I often spent evenings there now, doing everything from busing tables to coordinating the music. “I’m Barbara’s cut man, and she’s my cut man,” I told the Times. “A cut man is the guy in the corner of the boxing ring who cleans up fighters and sends them back to battle. We’ll always be in each other’s corner.”

Twenty-two years later, we still are.

LESSONS LEARNED

PICTURING THE PAST

I’m looking right now at a gorgeous picture of B. and me on our wedding day, B. in her cream-white dress with its lace-embroidered front, me in morning coat with my rose boutonniere, the two of us looking at B.’s ring under her sequined gloves. We look as happy as we felt that day, and every time B. sees that picture again, it cheers us both up. For all families struggling with Alzheimer’s, there’s a really helpful lesson in that.

The official therapeutic word for where I’m going here is scrapbooking. Family pictures are memory enhancers; an album of them is all the better. There’s more than common sense in all this: not long ago I Googled my way to a list of twenty scientific papers on the subject, with catchy titles like “Therapeutic Implications of Portrait Photography in a Nursing Home,” and “Photographs as a Tool in Memory Preservation for Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Once you get through their jargon, the studies make some sensible points. For the process of pulling a scrapbook together, they suggest enlisting the family member who has Alzheimer’s. You know those piles of family pictures you always vowed to go through and put in albums? That time has come, with your loved one beside you. It’s a great way to connect, to pass the time—and to create an enduring record of your loved one’s life.

One bit of guidance is mostly to use larger pictures: easier to focus on. Start with a good-sized picture of your loved one smiling—the simple power of a smile to inspire a smile in return can never be overestimated. It puts your loved one in a good mood to thumb through the pages, and that’s good, too.

Let your loved one’s developing scrapbook become, as much as it can, a multigenerational story that works its way up through his or her life. Basically, a scrapbook is taking the place of your loved one’s own repository of pictures—like a backup hard drive. You want to identify the faces in all the pictures; you also want to add recollections and key facts, writing them in beside those pictures. As with any scrapbook, other mementoes can be mixed in, too: diplomas, wedding certificates, a child’s lock of hair, a military service medal.

Scrapbooking keeps the past fresh for the whole family, and helps children appreciate a grandparent who may have become sick before they knew him as he was. As the Alzheimer’s progresses, it also becomes a means for a home-care worker to understand the soul inside the illness, creating more empathy and making for better care. When a severe-stage patient enters a nursing home or hospital, a scrapbook becomes that much more precious, giving doctors, nurses, and other patients some sense of your loved one’s pre-Alzheimer’s life.

For those who feel creatively challenged by the task of assembling a scrapbook—or for those just too tired to do it—a former nurse from upstate New York stands ready to do your family’s scrapbook for you. Back in 2007, when her father-in-law got Alzheimer’s, Brenda Siegfried made him a scrapbook in her own artistic style, with multicolored backgrounds and small objects like faux pearls attached to the pages. Family members would pick it up every time they visited, and turn its pages with him. “He could access it whenever he wanted,” Brenda told me, “and it definitely helped his memory. He would talk about the people in the album, with a different story every time.” Brenda did some online research on the subject that suggested scrapbooks might strengthen neural pathways and even create new ones. After her father-in-law’s death, she started making scrapbooks for others, at minimal cost. That led to Scrapbooking Pathways, the business she basically started on her kitchen table.

“What I do is include just enough decoration to make it interesting but not so much as to overwhelm the person with Alzheimer’s,” Brenda explained. “Another scrapbooker may want to make it as beautiful as possible. Too much detail will distract the Alzheimer’s client and it won’t stimulate conversation.” Brenda also does “reminiscence journals,” in which she records family stories that can be told again and again.

When Brenda gets a new client, she conducts interviews like a reporter; gathers photographs, memories, and trinkets; and then assembles the book with that balance in mind. She offers two sizes of scrapbooks: 12 by 12 inches and 8½ by 11. Both contain twenty pages. Brenda says that each scrapbook takes her about twelve hours to complete. “I want to make it affordable,” Brenda says. “My goal is to get an album into the hands of everyone who needs it, not to become a millionaire.” (Her website is http://scrapbookingpathways.weebly.com.)

EMBRACING SOCIAL MEDIA

In our iPhone lives, I hardly need mention that taking pictures in an ongoing way can be both entertaining and helpful. B. and I take pictures of each other all the time, or put the iPhone camera on a timer and race back to pose for it. We have pictures of us with Bishop on the beach, walking along Main Street in Sag Harbor, eating lunch on the porch of the American Hotel. Add those to the rooms full of photographs we have from B.’s earliest modeling days on through her entertaining books, the television show, and social meet-and-greet shots with everyone you can imagine, and we could assemble enough scrapbooks to create our own city-sized public library. Instead, we’ve made the sensible leap from scrapbook to Facebook.

Other social media would probably do just as well: Pinterest, for one, Instagram for another. But come on! We’re in our sixties! It’s all we’ve been able to do to manage one of these new Internet tools. Facebook gives us everything we need. As with scrapbooking, we post pictures of B. from earlier stages in her life, from our life together, and of us as a family with Dana. We’ll add comments that come as often from B. as from me. I may have to tease them out of her, but I get them, and we post them. And then—my Lord, the responses! For better or worse, we don’t just pussyfoot around in our postings. We tell it like it is. We talk about B.’s condition, the day’s small victories or setbacks, and how we feel. I don’t have the science to prove it, but I know that B. feels better for seeing new pictures on our Facebook page, and hearing the messages that come in. Old pictures may be even better. The other day I posted a poster of her from one of her early singing gigs. There she was, looking so young and glamorous, singing with Freddie “Rock Me Tonight (For Old Times Sake)” Jackson.

Like a lot of other Facebookers, I often post a picture of an especially tasty meal we’ve just whipped up. Once again, it gives Barbara a little lift—sometimes pulling her out of a funk. For a caregiver, that’s no small thing.

Our favorite subject, though, is Bishop. “It’s blowing 30 knots here,” I posted in the midst of a real blizzard this winter, “a day not fit for man nor beast! But Bishop and I are beach bound!” B. never tires of the pictures of Bishop that we post on an almost daily basis. I can’t quite describe what it is about his big, heavy head and those bulbous eyes, but that dog is funny. And B. laughs as much as I do just looking at him.

For me, Facebook has become a journal as much as a scrapbook—a place to vent frustration and, on a good day, to share some delight. “Just took the Bishop to the vet to get his nails clipped,” I posted not long ago. “Walked home through Main Street, Sag Harbor, said good morning to at least 12–15 people. Walked home across the beach, no one was there, I just thanked God for the moment.”

Post your own moments, your concerns, your dark and your light…it’s one way to reach out to friends and share in the joy and the pain of this journey.