Entertainment lawyer, literary agent
(1940– )
As a kid I was fat and I was smart, and my mother supported me unconditionally. When she took me to the family doctor who told her, “You know your son is too fat and you should do something about that,” her response was, “My son is too fat? Look at your wife.”
I was always at the top of my class in public school. I was smart enough to manipulate my world to avoid activities in which I couldn’t be the best. Even now, I find myself gravitating toward things that I’m good at rather than changing myself. For instance, I don’t want to ski. I’m not interested. It comes from a combination of built-in fear and wanting to excel. I figured out how to manipulate my world so it worked for me. I avoided sports because I wasn’t good at them. I hated phys ed because I wasn’t good at it. I found climbing ropes really hard. I wasn’t good at it. Instead of building my body and learning how to climb the damn ropes, I figured out how to avoid the class.
In retrospect, it limited my life. And not being good at sports was a source of some humiliation for me. I was good enough at other things so it wasn’t held against me, but it bothered me. When you’re used to being the smartest in the class and then you’re the last one picked for the team, it feels like shit.
When I went to Bronx High School of Science, my views expanded because it was a window onto the world. When you grow up as a working-class, lower-middle-class Jewish person in a Jewish neighborhood, the world is very small. The world is your neighborhood. The world is your building. You know everybody in the building. The kids in the building play together. You know all the people in the neighborhood because they all play together. When I went to Bronx High School of Science, all of a sudden the world got bigger. Really much bigger. One weekend you’d go to a party in a Bronx tenement. The next weekend you’d be at a party on Park Avenue. The high school had kids from all over, which is why it worked. There was this mix. Upper-middle-class kids from Manhattan professional families went to school with kids like me who were from these very limited Jewish neighborhood places. Seeing how other people lived made me want to get away. To get out of my small world, my parents’ world.
My mother grew up during the Depression and that defined everything. The people who grew up that way had a level of fear about the world that was scary. My mother was one of the most frightened of people. She was terrified. Terrified of risk. Everything needed to be secure. The intention of life was to be safe, so I grew up with a fear of taking risks, of being out on a limb. You have to have a safe job. You have to be a professional. I bought into it, I guess.
I was very young in high school. This was a period when kids were skipped in school, meaning you skipped grades if the teachers thought you were very smart. They would keep pushing you forward without any sense of where you were socially. So I graduated high school just before I was sixteen and I managed to get myself out of the Bronx. I have to get out. Go to school out of town. My parents said, “Why can’t you go to City College or Queens College?” I knew that if I stayed my world would stay small. I gotta get out!
I was able to get into Cornell. I went to the Industrial and Labor Relations School, which was what I was actually interested in. I did this all by myself, even though I was only sixteen. The school gave me scholarships, and my parents helped out a bit with some money. My first dorm room at Cornell was shared with this six-foot-four farmer from the Midwest who had gone to one of the fancy prep schools. There I was, this sort of fat Jewish kid. I didn’t even know what clothes to wear. I was two years younger than everybody, which made it hard for me socially. So I graduated in three and a half years, not four. At that time, I was nineteen and a half and still on a fast track.
After college I went into the Air Force Reserve so I could get that over with. That was the era where there were lotteries and a draft, and all eligible guys had to serve. Can you imagine what basic training was for someone like me? I don’t know how I survived. After that I went straight to Harvard Law School. I moved forward without taking a breath. Without looking back for a moment.
When I was at Harvard, I had the good fortune to work with Derek Bok, who at that point was a professor of labor law at Harvard Law School. He went on to become dean of the law school and president of Harvard University. He and I used to have lunch on a regular basis. When he heard about my life and the way I had steamrolled myself through all of these activities, he said, “You have to stop for a minute.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you should spend a year in Europe to start living a little bit.”
I still didn’t know what he was talking about. But he prepared me for applying for a Knox Fellowship, which was given to promising students to study at universities in the United Kingdom. I got the fellowship and went to England, to the London School of Economics. Cornell was another planet, but this was another universe. I took a course in industrial labor relations and for the first time in my life I didn’t do the work. I carried this one textbook around for months. I remember it so clearly. It was called Industrial Democracy in Great Britain. It couldn’t have been more than two hundred pages and it took me months to read. I really didn’t need another degree, so during that one year I traveled all over the world. A condition of the Knox Fellowship was that twice a year you had to write to the dean of the law school and tell him what you were doing. I did that, but for the first time in my life I shirked my other responsibilities. It felt great and it changed my life. Somehow I realized that I didn’t have to be on a constantly moving fast train through my life. I could take some deep breaths and make some decisions that were not simply based on a forward trajectory.
It’s very interesting. When I look to formative processes, like in therapy, look at leaving my family, it wasn’t an unpleasant separation. It wasn’t that I had a family I had to get rid of because I was being abused. It was a separation toward self-creation. That’s what I think about when I think about the process. It’s the process of coming from a place—your family, your neighborhood—and then creating something new. I knew that change was not about money, but an interior process about understanding who you are. What you see the world as being. There’s a kind of self-confidence that comes with that.