picture abbie in the spring of 1955: bright, good-looking, clean-cut, adventurous, and college bound. A sharp dresser—in his pegged pants, suede shoes, and black leather jacket with the knife cut in it—his hair greased back in a “duck’s ass,” he had danced his way into more teenage hearts than any other Worcesterite I knew or knew of. His act was so smooth that he kept his tweed jacket and tie in his school locker, changed clothes twice a day, and never wore his uniform outside the school walls. He didn’t think twice about the daily costume changes, any more than he did about singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” every morning at assembly.
Abbie drove a black, ’49 Ford two-door, paid for by working summers making deliveries for Dad. The car radio was tuned most of the time to Alan Freed’s WINS 1010 out of New York—rock and roll groups like The Drifters, Ruth Brown, Ivory Joe Turner, the immortal Fats Domino, Sam the Man Taylor, Red Prysock, The Clovers, The Cadillacs. He spent Saturdays at the racetrack: early spring at Lincoln Downs, then moving with the horses to Suffolk Downs, on to Rockingham in late summer, and then back to Suffolk. Abbie didn’t bet large, I guess, but to me it was large: $10 bets with an occasional $50 bet when the spirit moved him. He still shot pool down at the Recreation Bowling Alley—we called it “Recs”—and hustled gin games up on Newton Hill. Saturday nights were reserved for his girl Suzie from Everett, and by then they were doing it in the back seat or at her house when her parents were away. Sex, gambling, and rock and roll occupied him almost entirely.
Around the house none of us paid much attention to how hard Abbie was working to be cool. In the Hoffman family there wasn’t yet any sign of a culture gap or a generation gap. In fact, we all got along just fine. Abbie, Dad, and I spent a lot of time together—at the Y, where Abbie won the pool championship, at Holy Cross football and basketball games, and on trips to New York. Abbie and I both lived within the spread of Big John’s understanding. We were tough, strong, and outgoing. Our values were no different from his.
Abbie applied to three colleges that spring: Columbia, Tufts, and Brandeis. For Columbia and Tufts, he had a medical career in mind, yielding to Dad’s prodding. Ma wanted him to be a psychiatrist, so that he might help with her lobotomized sister Rose. But Tufts and Columbia turned him down—strong test scores, but mixed grades, and weak recommendations. That left only Brandeis. Herbie Gamberg went there and so did Sid Goldfader, another one of our boyhood heroes, an all-city Jewish all-star—basketball, football, and baseball—so we knew it wasn’t a sissy school. But Dad was suspicious of the place from the start.
Brandeis had been formed in 1948 by a group of prominent Jewish professionals that included Albert Einstein. Their aim was to create a university that would serve the Jewish community and also be open to people of all faiths. The group purchased failing Middlesex College, renamed it after the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, and set up shop. Launched with just 14 faculty members and 107 freshmen, Brandeis’s faculty in the early years would include composer Leonard Bernstein and the (non-Jewish) historian Henry Steele Commager, anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Paul Radin, and cultural historians Irving Howe and Ludwig Lewissohn. Eleanor Roosevelt taught international affairs. By the fall of 1951 there were six hundred students. In the spring of 1952, the first class graduated, although the school was not yet accredited. And in 1955, the year Abbie arrived, Brandeis established formal departments according to traditional disciplines, after experimenting with a more open system.
The newness of Brandeis was still palpable when Abbie arrived, and still contagious. This was a school with a mission, one that thrived on its uniqueness despite the inhospitable intellectual climate that pervaded the country. Miraculously, Joe McCarthy had not gone after any part of Brandeis for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, and so it continued as an oasis where many of the best and most controversial minds of the era found refuge.
At Brandeis the world began to open up to Abbie, and it never closed again. He read Dostoyevsky, Camus, Freud, Tolstoy, Rilke. His teachers were among some of the most exciting thinkers of the period. They included Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Frank Manuel, Max Lerner, Paul Radin, Philip Rieff, Kurt Goldstein, and, most importantly, psychologist Abraham Maslow. It is almost incredible that Abbie had the good fortune to find among his professors several of those whose ideas would seed the ’60s counterculture. Nowhere else in the world could Abbie have stumbled upon such an awesome anti-establishment. Brandeis had defined itself as a subversive institution, and that colored everything he read and heard there. The postwar America of the ’40s and ’50s, which until then had seemed unchangeable, began to look like only one among many possibilities.
Abbie had been open to change all his life, but at Brandeis he was able to experience firsthand and way in advance the ferment that a decade later would explode all over the nation. Of course, he didn’t experience his professors as radical extremists in science, psychiatry, and sociology. This was college, as far as he knew, no different from other colleges across the country. He received the new ideas he was hearing not as radical notions but as normal teachings. Many of these ideas became the basis of his personal philosophy.
In his sophomore year at Brandeis, Abbie broke off with Suzie. He met Sheila Karklin, a beatnik painter who danced, wore mostly black, and came from a Conservative Jewish family. Sheila was a year behind Abbie and a good student studying psychology. She was tiny, around five feet one inch or so, and she had beautiful emerald green eyes, like a delicate Elizabeth Taylor to Abbie’s Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. That year, along with his wrestling and other macho sports, Abbie took a modern dance class and went bohemian with Sheila as his guide. Not one to do anything halfway, he even began wearing a beret. Together, Abbie and Sheila went to folk concerts and listened to Pete Seeger records. Within a few months Abbie was head over heels in love.
He brought Sheila home to meet Ma, Dad, Phyllis, and me, and told us that evening that this was the girl he was going to marry. Abbie and Sheila were very affectionate with each other, and they seemed to share political ideas and dreams. She led and he followed—you could see how much he respected her. The only thing out of place was how different their styles were. Sheila was serious, quiet, even somber, and Abbie was exuberant and arrogant. And the funniest part was the quieter she got, the louder he seemed to get. So even early on there was that tragic flaw between them, and if you squinted you could catch a glimmer of how they might “enable” each other in the wrong way. But there didn’t seem to be any doubt that they loved each other.
Partly under Sheila’s influence, Abbie began to take an interest in psychology. He took a class with Abe Maslow, and that may have been the single most important decision of his life. Maslow was asking hard questions in 1956. What is self-fulfillment really about? What values make for a worthwhile life? To whom can we look for models of “self-actualizing” men and women? Even unanswered, those questions presented a forceful threat to the materialism of the ’50s world. But Maslow was also suggesting answers that were as profound as the questions.
Maslow taught that sexual openness was to be encouraged in the form of honest self-disclosure, and at an earlier teaching position at Brooklyn College had even asked his students to keep sexual autobiographies. He believed that masturbation was good and healthy, and advocated early education of children in sexual matters. Maslow also advocated and experimented with communal living, inviting a variety of family members to live in his home with chores and responsibilities for the household and children assigned to each.
In both his writings and in talks, Maslow emphasized that true fulfillment in life comes from satisfying our higher needs, particularly what he called our need for self-actualization. His idea was that self-actualization, self-fulfillment, was a part of human nature, common to all of us, and that those who actually find this self-fulfillment are not superior, just normal, although rare. Rare because in most people human nature is thwarted by events in their lives, usually in childhood. “There seems no intrinsic reason why everyone shouldn’t be this way [self-actualizing],” he said; “I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away.”1 “What a man can be, he must be,” he wrote.2
To Abbie, Maslow represented the perfect bridge between his own past and future. Raised in Brooklyn, Maslow, like Abbie, had grown up Jewish, and like Abbie had shown a distaste for religion early on, substituting for it a serious interest in socialism. Maslow belonged to Dad’s generation, and had been barred from the college of his choice by anti-Semitism. But by temperament Maslow belonged to the new age that was dawning on the horizon. When he had been urged to change his given name from Abraham to something less obviously Jewish—at one point his own wife had threatened to divorce him if he would not do so—he had refused, considering the very idea ridiculous. Unlike our parents, or their parents, Maslow represented a welcome and fruitful break with tradition, one that could be taken by Abbie as a model of intellectual freedom, ambition, and personal happiness. Maslow came from the world of our fathers yet had an utterly contemporary mind—by dint of both its audacity and empathy.
Under Maslow’s influence, Abbie chose psychology as the profession he would pursue upon graduation. Abbie also became one of a relatively large number of students who turned to Maslow and his wife for advice on personal matters, visiting them in the evenings at their residence on campus. Abbie began to see America through Maslow’s eyes, and through other visionaries Maslow assigned in his classes, including Aldous Huxley, Erik Erikson, D. T. Suzuki.
In his autobiography, Abbie wrote:
Most of all, I loved Abe Maslow. I took every class he gave and spent long evenings with him and his family. There was something about his humanistic psychology (considered radical at the time) that I found exhilarating amidst the general pessimism of Western thought. [He] laid a solid foundation for launching the optimism of the sixties. Existential, altruistic, and up-beat, his teachings became my personal code.3
Then there was Herbert Marcuse. If Maslow was inventing a form of psychology to suit the new America, Marcuse, his colleague at Brandeis, was reinventing Marx. Ten or fifteen years later, every leftist on every college campus in America would be reading Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization, and Reason and Revolution. But Abbie’s connection to Marcuse was less profound and less personal than what he felt for Maslow. Mostly, Abbie considered Marcuse a kind of “corrective” to Maslow, completing the psychologist’s thought and modifying it theoretically.
While his thinking matured under the guidance of Maslow, Marcuse, and other professors, Abbie had developed a great entrepreneurial hustle to make money on the side. He’d worked out a deal with a submarine sandwich shop in nearby Waltham, and every night Abbie would drive into town and pick up dozens of deli sandwiches which he would then sell for sixty cents apiece in the Brandeis dorms. Abbie and other students he hired crying out “sandwich-es” became one of the most familiar and welcome sounds on campus, as doors flew open and students gathered for evening study breaks.
With Abbie gone, I felt some amount of pressure to fill his blue suede shoes around the old neighborhood. I got myself thrown out of Classical High and enrolled at Worcester Academy, just as Abbie had done three years earlier. I found an old drum set at the Salvation Army and bought it for twenty-five dollars, thinking that drummers made the most noise and got the most girls. I didn’t really miss my brother. Mostly I enjoyed being the center of attention for a change. Dad and I got closer, Ma took more interest in my schoolwork. I enjoyed my classes. My girlfriend and I were having sex in the back of the Pontiac convertible that my uncle Schmule had helped me buy a week after my sixteenth birthday.
Then, after a few months, the novelty of my new freedom began to grow old, and the hole Abbie had left in my life seemed to expand. The new, bohemian, intellectual stuff he talked about on visits home didn’t make any sense to me at all. During this period of enormous growth for Abbie, each new idea he learned was a new source of estrangement to me. And, sensing that I didn’t understand his new interests any better than our parents did, Abbie kept his distance from his kid brother.
In the summer of 1958, after Abbie’s junior year at Brandeis, he decided to embark alone on a European tour—London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid. He ran with the bulls in Pamplona and would claim ever after that he’d been gored and had the scar to prove it. In Paris, he stumbled upon his first political demonstration. It was the summer when, with France losing the French-Algerian War, the government had collapsed and de Gaulle had been summoned from retirement to put the pieces back together. Just hours after getting off the plane from London, Abbie saw a mass of French students marching along the Champs Elysées singing, and joined them without a second thought. The next thing he knew, the world around him was a churning mass of soft bodies and swinging clubs:
this wave of club-swinging gendarmes swooped down on us, trapping students beneath their capes and pounding them to the ground. The whole area came alive with swarming, shoving students. I got clubbed to the ground, staggered up and ran, following racing bodies. . . . It was my first political demonstration. My first beating by police. To this day I have no idea what the marching and clubbing was about. . . . Paris spotted the troublemaker in me even before I did.4
Abbie in the Paris of 1958 turned out to be like Candide in the Eldorado of gold and emeralds. His encounter didn’t yet make sense to him, but he gloried in it anyway out of his pure love of experience.
Back at Brandeis for his senior year, Abbie didn’t miss a single political or psychological heavyweight who came to visit. He heard lectures by Erik Erikson, the world-famous figure in the field of psychoanalysis and human development; political activist Dorothy Day, the founding editor of the Catholic Worker, who talked about the soup lines outside her Bowery mission; and Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking on the recent successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; among many others. But Abbie was still the political ingenue whose primary interests, other than the usual Saturday-night escapades, were still perfectly conventional: He was chairman of the campus Film Society, president of the Psychology Club and, captain of the Tennis Team. Bud Collins, who was the tennis coach that year, describes Abbie on the court as an “ultraconservative,” who stayed at the baseline but rarely missed a shot and always won. That year the team was unbeaten, probably the only time Brandeis has fielded a winning team in any sport.
Meanwhile, I was a University of Illinois freshman, with plans to become a business major. But lost among the more than 35,000 students, I spent the fall reeling from the sudden change of environment, recognizing for the first time how my family and friends had shielded me all my life, and how unprepared I felt without them.
On January 1, 1959, as Abbie prepared for his last semester at Brandeis, Fidel Castro entered Havana, placing a Communist regime within eighty miles of the United States. Castro’s ascendance signaled, if not an end to ’50s isolationism, then at least a very large crack in its surface. And in March or April, Abbie drove to Harvard Stadium in Cambridge to hear the young Castro speak to his North American comrades. Abbie remembered Fidel as “young and flashing in his green army fatigues. Tall and bearded, at thirty he could have been one of our younger professors, and here he was International Champ of Liberty; Guerrilla Fighter Extraordinaire. A real hero.”5 Abbie had heard that Castro liked to have U.S. newspapers flown in daily, and when they arrived he “quickly turned to the baseball scores and then threw the [rest of the] paper into the trash barrel.”6 Abbie loved that. The appeal to Abbie of a revolutionary hero with a passion for sports (and women and good cigars) was enormous. Why not live the macho myth and the ideals of justice and revolution at the same time? Castro’s successful revolution was living proof that you could challenge the power structure, give it your all, and win. As the ’60s approached, Castro was Abbie’s money-back guarantee that the system was beatable.
Sometime in March 1959 I was sitting in my dorm room at the University of Illinois listening to Dave Brubeck when my roommate, an agriculture student, came in smelling of cow shit. He looked at me and asked me what kind of music I was listening to. He asked earnestly, and I have nothing against cow dung on a guy’s boots, but something inside me snapped and I decided right then that I was going home without waiting for the semester to end—without waiting for the week to end. The University of Illinois wasn’t a bad place, but it was a mistake for me to be there, too far from my brother and my parents. It was too large, and too dominated by ROTC and fraternities. The truth was I was as unhappy as I could be. And besides, Dad was sick; his business was suffering. I could be of use if I went home; I wasn’t being of use to anybody if I didn’t.
Abbie tried to persuade me on the phone to switch to Berkeley, where he was hoping to do an advanced degree in psychology after he graduated. He said I’d like the weather. But nothing could tempt me more than the thought of going home right then. I rented a U-Haul, packed my drum set, pulled my ’54 green Ford convertible around to the front of the dorm and said goodbye to the cow shit in time to get a partial refund on Dad’s tuition payment. Two days after reaching Ruth Street, I was back at work in the family business, and looking up old friends.
I had become friendly with a neighbor of my friend Richie Lenett named Yvette Leventhal. She and her husband Teddy lived just a few blocks away from us and they were both therapists, he a psychologist, she a psychiatric social worker. Both had been trained at the famed Menninger Institute at the University of Kansas. The Leventhals were the only headshrinkers I knew personally, and they were a couple of true-blue originals. They became my unofficial therapists.
Lost in the ’50s like all the rest of us, Yvette had no trouble expressing herself. Born and raised a nice Jewish girl from Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, she never tried to cover her origins. We’d see her walking down Pleasant Street in Worcester wearing her gold leotard and tights, gold lamé slippers, with her big hair, white plastic sunglasses, globs of makeup, and two mini poodles by her side, and I loved her for that craziness. It was nice to see a grown-up act like that. And then she was so smart underneath, with all her Freudianisms and her Behavioralisms.
On one of Abbie’s frequent weekend visits home from Brandeis, I took him over to meet Yvette and they hit it off. Yvette soon became one of Abbie’s most trusted advisers too. Soon, to Dad’s horror—Dad liked to keep family business private—Abbie was quoting Yvette in family squabbles.
In September 1959, Abbie joined the graduate program in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. His academic interests tended toward the offbeat: hypnosis, extrasensory perception, even witchcraft, which had been the subject of his senior dissertation. Almost immediately he realized that his real education was going to happen outside of school. Berkeley was first among the centers of discontent in America. Once again, Abbie just happened to be there.
Across the bay in North Beach, he started dropping in on the poetry readings that were already raging against official American culture—by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Rexroth, et al. In Abbie’s autobiography, he remembers poets “shouting angry poems.”
It was the year of Ginsberg’s “Howl”: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix . . .”; and “America”: “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. . . .”
These poems, railing against “freeways fifty lanes wide/on a concrete continent/spaced with bland billboards/illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness,”7 were filled not only with anger but also with alternative ways of seeing. Every one of them suggested implicitly that one didn’t automatically have to be a part of the America they described with so much love mixed with so much scorn. Abbie was curious, and delighted by the energy of the readings but still about five years away from being able to apply any of what he was hearing to his own life. For now he still had both feet in the straight world. His main fascination was still sports, and when a school chum tried to tell him about the covert activities of a government organization called the CIA, Abbie exclaimed, “The CIA, what the hell is that?”8
In November, he formed a travel club, hiring a charter plane to ferry all the East Coast natives at “Cal” home for the holidays at a discount rate. He called it the BO-RAH Travel Club, an amalgam of bohemians and college rah-rahs. And he actually managed to make the thing work, getting a free ride home in the process. It would be the last Christmas Abbie would have nothing better to do than come home. Almost the day the 1950s ended, the world around him started changing very fast.
January and February 1960 saw the first stirrings of student activism making waves across the upper South. In February 1960, students at all-black Southern colleges were organizing sit-ins at lunch counters, providing a nonviolent model and a training ground for many of the black activists who would lead the civil rights movement during the next few years, and the mostly white student activists who would come after. It all began at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in the town of Greensboro, North Carolina. Many from this first wave of black student activists would come to organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Their goal was desegregation. Their history-making civil rights successes would grow into a large part of Act One of the two-act play that was the ’60s. And Abbie still wasn’t even thinking about becoming a part of it.
In the spring of 1960, during his second semester at Berkeley, Abbie was feeling lonely. He wrote to Ma and Dad to tell them how much he loved Sheila and missed her; he asked them to help pay for airfare for Sheila to come visit during the spring break in late March. To Dad the thought of Abbie in Berkeley, California, studying psychology and driving around in his yellow Volkswagen convertible was already a nightmare. Adding Sheila to the picture was more bohemianism than Dad could bear. But Ma took charge this time and sent Abbie the money anyway. Sheila arrived and they spent a wonderful week camping in some of the most picturesque countryside within driving distance of the Bay Area. The trip began with redwood forests and the hills of Sausalito and ended in a cabin by the sea in Big Sur, where Abbie and Sheila made love for the first time.
After Sheila left at the end of March, Abbie began to connect more with the political atmosphere of Berkeley; he began to feel for the first time that things concerned him personally. It wasn’t a conscious choice. The ferment around him had finally reached him. His first political action came soon after.
Caryl Chessman had been convicted of rape and sentenced to die in the gas chamber in 1948 on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Chessman had managed to obtain repeated stays of execution and had even written several books in prison. He had convinced many people that he was innocent, and regardless of guilt or innocence had become the human face of the anti– capital punishment movement.
For twelve years, support for Chessman had grown steadily. His current execution date was May 1, 1960. As the date approached, petitions circulated across the country and silent vigils were organized at U.S. embassies all over the world. In California, there was a last-minute flurry of newspaper editorials and radio announcements pleading for Chessman’s life to be spared.
On the night of April 30, Abbie joined a few hundred silent witnesses, including the actors Shirley MacLaine and Marlon Brando, who stood and waited in the light rain outside the walls of the San Quentin Federal Penitentiary in nearby San Rafael. Coffee and doughnuts were served to the demonstrators by prison staff. The warden himself addressed the protesters and announced that he was personally opposed to capital punishment. California Governor Pat Brown issued a statement from the governor’s mansion that he too was against capital punishment—but that the laws of the state must be obeyed.
The next morning, May 1, it was still raining when the warden reappeared and announced to the crowd that Caryl Chessman had succumbed peacefully at 10:10 a.m.—according to the laws of the state of California. “Around me people were in tears,” Abbie would write. “Someone moaned, ‘No! No!’ as if he had been wounded. No one shouted. No one threw a rock.”9
On the way back to Berkeley, one of the people sharing a ride in the same car as Abbie asked, “How does that work? In a democracy, I mean. No one wants to see him die and the state kills him?!”
Less than two weeks later, Abbie witnessed firsthand another shattering local event. On the afternoon of May 13, 1960, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) field hearings being held in San Francisco turned violent. One of the subpoenaed witnesses was a Berkeley professor; another was a sophomore who had allegedly been active in leftist causes. Indignant at what seemed to be clear violations of political freedom, busloads of Berkeley students, including Abbie, were among those who came to protest.
No violence had been intended, but after the students were denied entrance to the crowded hearing room, they tried to push their way in and a policeman was knocked down. Suddenly all the police in the vicinity were wielding billy clubs and hoses. By the end of the half-hour battle, twelve people had been injured and fifty-two demonstrators had been arrested. If the Chessman vigil had been Abbie’s first protest, the HUAC hearings gave Abbie an idea of some of the responses protests could elicit other than coffee and doughnuts.
Around the middle of May, Sheila called Abbie at school to say the rabbit had died: She was pregnant. For a few weeks, Abbie was on the phone almost daily to Yvette to help him decide between abortion and marriage. He told Yvette he thought Sheila was beautiful, exciting, and intelligent. He said he would not live with any other woman. He said Sheila was the one. But at the same time he was obviously scared. Yvette sensed his predicament and tried to persuade him against the marriage. But he wouldn’t listen, he couldn’t listen.
To Sheila, he was full of certainties: “I’ll be there in a week. We can get married,” he told her. Sheila hadn’t planned on that. But neither did she want an abortion.
Abbie came home in his yellow Volkswagen special, moved back into our parents’ house on Ruth Street, and began to make preparations for his wedding. With help from Dick Lazarus, one of his Berkeley professors, Abbie landed a job at Worcester State Hospital that started right away. That year the state of Massachusetts had more federally funded psychologist positions than it had applicants. So the state loosened its academic requirements and allowed some candidates who had not finished their studies to be licensed. Dad was unimpressed. He considered psychology voodoo science. But to Ma, Abbie’s new job was the next best thing to having the doctor-son she’d dreamed of, and she was happy. And Abbie himself felt that he was at the beginning of a brilliant career. His first assignment, which lasted through the summer and into the fall, was to interview some of the forty couples gathered by the local Lutheran church for a study on “Normalcy in the Community.”
So Abbie was a psychologist, about to be married, well on his way up the ladder of success, just like we had all expected he would be by now. Abbie didn’t consider himself to be choosing a lifestyle. Like a lot of people, he did not see any alternative to the one lifestyle that was grabbing him by the balls. He wasn’t choosing to conform. He didn’t think about it in those terms. It would never have occurred to him that there might be a conflict between his personality and his current aspirations. Getting a job and getting married were things you did. There wasn’t really any alternative, wasn’t any other place you could go, in 1960.
Almost from the hour of his return, Abbie and Dad fought. The skirmishes centered on the insurance on the Volkswagen. Abbie had it registered in California, where auto insurance was not compulsory. Dad insisted that he register it in Massachusetts and get insurance as required by state law. But Abbie didn’t see it that way. He wasn’t planning on getting into any accidents, so why waste the money on insurance? Dad was apoplectic. To Dad, Abbie’s forthcoming wedding was a mistake, his job was unimportant, and being uninsured was the icing on the cake.
The wedding, in Warwick, Rhode Island, on July 10, was a traditional affair. Abbie wore white—a showy rented tux—and a black bow tie. His Brandeis roommate Manny Schreiber was his best man. There was a lot of backslapping and an enormous buffet built around a mountain of oleomargarine carved in the shape of a swan. Dad got drunk on the punch and cursed Brandeis to anyone who would listen. Uncle Al, Dad’s brother, walked around with his right sleeve rolled up, swinging his forearm up and down, and saying loudly, “The kid’s got a schlong the size of an elephant.”
Abbie and Sheila got lost on their way to their honeymoon and ended up in a half-deserted hotel. While Sheila vomited in the bathroom, Abbie read a book titled Love without Fear and listened to his own terror-stricken interior monologue: “She doesn’t close the bathroom door. What am I doing here? We’re strangers. No we’re not. She’s my wife. Shouldn’t she close the door? What should I do when it’s my turn to go?”10
A few weeks after the wedding, Abbie was driving down Shrewsbury Street one afternoon when he rammed another car at a traffic light. He was arrested for being uninsured. From the police station, he had to call Dad at the office and ask him to put up a substantial bond for the damage done to the other car. It was Abbie’s first arrest, and perhaps his last concession to Dad while Dad was alive, the last time he would say, “Dad, you were right.”
Abbie and Sheila rented one floor of a two-family house on Trowbridge Road in Worcester, in a neighborhood of young married professionals in the shadow of Worcester Tech, and began their young married life with all the usual appurtenances and the conviction that nothing at all was wrong. Abbie went to work every morning wearing a thin tie and sports jacket, and with his hair neatly cropped. He looked like a psychologist, with just a tasteful touch of bohemia—basketball sneakers instead of dress shoes. And he looked forward happily to performing his own personal experiment on the subject of normalcy. Sheila stayed home, painting her paintings, large, colorful abstractions, and playing the part of Abbie’s young, pretty, and interesting young wife. And that summer she started the Trowbridge Candle Company, making candles in their kitchen to bring in extra money.
From almost the first day, with Sheila now visibly pregnant, the marriage was fouled by daily disagreements. Abbie had entered the marriage with the best of intentions. He genuinely wanted and expected his marriage to work. But husband and wife were both extremely stubborn. Years later, Abbie would write, “I didn’t know how to be married. As it turned out, she didn’t know how to be married either. She would say she did. And I would say she didn’t. Silence. ‘I do.’ ‘You don’t.’ ‘I do.’”11
Both Sheila and Abbie were serious about their political activities. But other than that, they had little in common. And in many ways, Sheila’s dissatisfaction with their marriage may have been more forceful than Abbie’s, since he at least was living a full life outside the home, whereas her outside life had abruptly terminated when her pregnancy and marriage had begun.
At a few minutes before midnight on December 31, 1960, as the apple began its descent in Times Square, their first child, Andrew, was born, raising the stakes further on Abbie and Sheila’s life together. Sheila continued to paint, now having their infant son to look after as well.
In the two years Abbie stayed at Worcester State, he made a life for himself—replacing the wrecked Volks with a used Volvo because it seemed just the thing for a young psychologist, and trying to enjoy going home in the evenings to Sheila and Andrew. He went bowling a couple of nights a week with his old friends from high school. At work, the staff found him likeable and loved the stories he told them of the exploits of his reckless youth. His exuberance was infectious: Whether the subject was sex, sports, or patient care, he made things exciting.
Abbie had organized a softball game for the patients a couple of times a week. He pitched at these games, and marveled at the patients’ ability to enjoy the fun without paying any attention to the rules. His centerfielder was a heavily medicated schizophrenic who always dropped the ball. Abbie called him Jethro, after the Boston Braves’ centerfielder, Sam Jethro. A batter would hit the ball and then run straight to third, or the pitcher’s mound, where Abbie would give him a big hug before walking him to first. Abbie sometimes called me in the evening to give me the play-by-play on the day’s game. We laughed at the patients, but for Abbie, laughing at them was a way of relating to them, not a way of shutting them out. He laughed at me and at himself in the same way.
And the more intractable his problems at home became, the more he poured his boundless energy into his work and outside activities. At Worcester State, Abbie felt that he was helping people whom others tended to scorn, and that satisfied some very deep need in him. But it reached the point where each hour of fulfillment on the job seemed to be matched by one of trouble at home.
Abbie and I used to have lunch at a Greek social club near Worcester Medical, where I was working with Dad. Abbie would double-park out back and honk twice. I’d drop whatever I was doing and rush out to meet him in thirty seconds flat, by which time Abbie was already talking with the bookmakers who hung around the parking lot, waiting for the limousine to take them to the Suffolk, Rockingham, Lincoln, or Narragansett horse-racing tracks. We’d head off on foot to “the club,” as we called it, to stuff ourselves on stuffed cabbage, potatoes, moussaka, and baklava.
Over lunch, Abbie talked and I listened. He usually had a lot more answers than questions. And he wanted me to know everything that was happening to him. He’d describe how he administered Rorschach tests on patients prior to their being started on medication. He’d tell me about the most recent softball game. And he talked about the fierce rivalry between the psychiatrists who vaunted the healing power of drugs, and the psychologists who wanted to rely more on testing and therapy. Abbie sided with the psychologists, of course, and used all his hustling experience to delay having his patients put on drugs.
Usually by the end of our lunches at “the club,” Abbie finally got around to what he most wanted to talk about: his problems at home. He would tell me that he wasn’t getting enough sex, that Sheila was rejecting him sexually. And I got the impression that Abbie’s sexual energy may have frightened her. I was having trouble with my girlfriend, a Boston University student from New York named Bobbi, so Abbie and I commiserated and got to laugh together at our various romantic trials.
In a way my life echoed Abbie’s. Sharing an apartment in Boston, commuting back to Worcester Medical to work part time selling amphetamines to doctors for five dollars a thousand (which they then sold to their patients for ten dollars a hundred), and attending business classes in the evening, I felt that my career was back on track. But my inner life was a shambles. Bobbi, a tall liberal arts student with a quick wit, was the first girl I had ever fallen in love with. I was drowning in new emotions, feeling intensely unhappy, and had no idea who I was.
Sitting around his living room one evening, with Sheila painting in the next room, Abbie got me talking and analyzed me with his latest, mostly Freudian, theories. His professional opinion was that my problem went deeper than my difficulties with my girlfriend. Abbie knew I talked informally with Teddy and Yvette about my problems, but he decided I needed something “more intense,” and suggested I see a therapist he knew at Worcester State. With no other options, I went along. What Abbie hadn’t told me was that the doctor’s work involved studying responses to LSD in humans, mostly schizophrenics. Without knowing what I was getting into, I became a paid volunteer.
The next thing I remember I was sitting in the waiting room watching a parade of fellow volunteers pass by, all institutionalized patients at Worcester State, many of them obviously under heavy sedation. It was like a scene from Night of the Living Dead. I wondered, How crazy am I?
The good doctor greeted me at his office door, showed me to a chair, and spoke not another word for the next hour as I talked on and on about Bobbi, my brother, and our parents. At the end of the session, he offered me what turned out to be a low-dosage LSD sample in a cup, which I dutifully ingested.
Immediately I was ushered into a room with a couch, mood music coming through a loudspeaker, and a wall made of dark glass through which, I assume, they monitored me. After a few minutes, the drug hit me. Mostly, the effect was perceptual: straight lines curved, objects warped, colors took on a magical phosphorescence. The gravitational pull seemed to ease, leaving me with the impression that I was floating. Subtly, the hallucinations suggested a whole other reality, and made me feel that the everyday reality we normally accept as concrete, objective fact was actually just one perceptual twist among an infinite number of possibilities. That was what boggled the mind, like I had walked into a fourth dimension.
As I was leaving the hospital afterward, I saw Abbie out on the grounds, leading a group of patients in a game of softball. I started to move toward them, to join the game. Then I had a horrible intuition, like a daydream, in which I saw myself on the field playing softball the way Abbie had described the patients playing, completely without rules, without purpose, hitting the ball in any direction, running in any direction. Suddenly nauseous, I found a seat on a bench, then left the hospital without saying a word to my brother.
I participated in the low-dosage LSD experiment twice, and each time the experience was mildly mind-stretching. But I was in no condition to enjoy what I felt while on the drug. There was not yet any context, as there would be in the late ’60s, of openness, of exploration into alternative realities. Not in the culture and not in our minds. I felt totally unprepared for the experience I’d had, and it left me shaken. I blamed Abbie for bad advice carelessly given and promised myself I wouldn’t turn to him again anytime soon. My confusion and unhappiness only increased in the next few weeks. Then came the serious accident that you could say was my final SOS.
When you need help, the people who care about you notice and want to help, but mostly they don’t know how; they just can’t touch the part of you that’s hurting. And, in a way, that’s what hurts the most, the feeling that your pain is a world all its own that no one can enter. I was sitting with my friend Richie Lenett on the porch of another friend’s house one afternoon in August 1960, when Richie suggested that I lighten up a little on Bobbi and try to date other people. He wanted to call an old girlfriend of mine who was a friend of his and set us up. I told him to forget it. But he wasn’t listening. He got up, went into the adjoining kitchen, and started to make the call. Before I even knew what I was doing, I stood up and lunged through the plate-glass door that separated us to stop him. There was blood everywhere. My right arm, hanging heavily like a wet rag, was nearly severed. The last thing I remembered was the look of helplessness on Richie’s face as he stood there, still holding the phone. Then I passed out and when I came around I was in the hospital emergency room. Today my right arm is still partly paralyzed and held together with plastic. It is like a shy acquaintance I can’t get rid of, who goes wherever I go.
While in the hospital after injuring my arm, I was treated with Percodan, a powerful narcotic painkiller. In August 1961, about a year after the injury, I was still taking Percodan for the pain. A year of Percodan three or four times a day can add up to a pretty serious addiction. Abbie knew exactly what was going on. He was sensitive enough not to nag me about it but he was watching closely. And at some point he decided on his own that my ongoing depression had a lot to do with the Percodan.
Almost as if it were a little game he was teaching me, Abbie showed me all he knew about self-hypnosis, something he’d been playing around with since high school. He insisted that I could learn to live with the pain without the pills through hypnosis. I went along. Over a period of weeks, Abbie hypnotized me a dozen times. And the funny thing was, it worked. He got me off the Percodan. And that’s how it was sometimes with Abbie: When you came to him with high expectations, he’d sometimes let you down, almost like he needed to be free of them; then the minute you gave up on him, he’d surprise you; he’d show up just when you needed him, with a smile on his face, solid as a rock.
At Worcester State, Abbie became particularly close to one of the staff psychologists, Eli Strum, a three-hundred-pound, blond-haired, blue-eyed bon vivant. Eli liked Abbie’s stories and Abbie liked Eli’s openmindedness. They both favored talk therapy and were critical of the staff doctors who relied too heavily on medication. But the main enthusiasm they shared was an interest in film.
Abbie had always wanted to be on The $64,000 Question, and if he’d ever gotten on, the subject he would have chosen first was movies. His bookshelves were filled with books on film; he dreamed that someday he’d be a director. But it was Eli who introduced the art films of the European directors to Abbie. Bergman became Abbie’s favorite for a while, then Fellini. Abbie was easily drawn to these self-aware and unembarrassed artists who seemed able to speak with authority on the meaning of life, and the hunger in the soul. In Fellini and Chaplin, Abbie saw great artists who were able to be serious and funny at the same time, something unthinkable of his college idols like Camus.
In September 1961, Abbie talked a Lebanese friend of our father’s, a used car salesman named Duddy Massad, into letting Abbie open an art cinema house in an empty movie theater building he owned. Abbie convinced him that art films were going to be the wave of the future. And Duddy, who probably hadn’t ever seen an art film, went along. The Park Arts became Abbie’s newest passion. He selected the films and wrote the program notes. For music, Abbie brought over his own phonograph and record collection. He used to work at the theater from 5:30 p.m. until midnight, going there directly from Worcester State. The wife of the projectionist used to bring him meatball and sausage sandwiches out of pity.
Within weeks it became clear that the Park Arts wasn’t going to be a profitable venture. And I remember Duddy trying to pressure Abbie into having a popcorn stand on the premises so that he might at least have a chance to recoup some of his lost investment. And Abbie refused, saying that people had to be able to think while they watched these films and that people eating popcorn in the theater would make too much noise.
My favorite memory of the Park Arts Theatre was that about a month after it opened Abbie was playing a documentary about the Newport Jazz festival, and from the projection room he noticed me dancing in the aisles to the blues singer Big Mae Bell. Seeing how much I enjoyed the show, Abbie scheduled a repeat performance for the following Saturday night at midnight, and let me invite all my friends to come free.
At the Park Arts, Abbie was searching for a new way to be himself, testing a new persona as if he didn’t have a moment to lose. Listen to him being interviewed by the Worcester Telegram in an article that appeared in October 1961, soon after the Park Arts opened, sounding off with all the unblemished intellectual enthusiasm of a young Truffaut:
In a way I may be idealistic, but I believe there’s entertainment in a thought-provoking adult theme. . . . To me, a Hollywood production which is geared to the emotions of a mass audience and which inevitably ends happily is obscene. Such a production is obscene because it isn’t real . . .12
Abbie was looking for new ideas and a new way of being in the world. In a way, in his job and marriage he was living out the kind of happy ending he now found despicable in Hollywood movies. And his alienation from the “obscene” Hollywood values of the day was also an expression of the nausea his own life inspired in him:
Looking back, I could scarcely say I was in love with Sheila or she with me. . . . We respected each other as worthy opponents in some eternal struggle of the sexes.13
I don’t think he ever came to understand his marriage to Sheila, because I don’t think he ever acknowledged, even to himself, how confused and unready he was. I don’t doubt that he had loved her. Abbie didn’t fight harder to save his marriage only because he didn’t know how. A truly conventional marriage would have been impossible for Abbie. And an unconventional marriage wasn’t yet something any of us could have considered or even imagined.
If Abbie had been able to make his relationship with his wife work, then his idyll would have been complete, and he might have remained in Worcester, his father’s son—and his son’s father—to the end. Instead, his contentious marriage became the catalyst with which to probe his own deep inner dissatisfaction and push beyond his nice little life. In the end, Abbie would forgo the stability and fulfillment of work he valued, and the satisfaction he might have found in fatherhood, in order to get away from Sheila, establishing what would become a pattern in his life. Abbie always had reasons for leaving, good reasons usually, perhaps never quite admitting to himself that his guiding light, the North Star he followed faithfully, was his own need for change, what he called “action,” what others have called his egotism. Whatever the reason, by 1962, after a couple of years in which Abbie had built a life around his faith in psychotherapy, marriage, and foreign films, he found them to be false gods and moved on to other things.