Gary’s mother, Edith Wilensky, could be the daughter of a Connecticut socialite. She could be the sister of a war hero who died in combat in 1948. She might be the daughter of a Russian Jew or a Polish Jew. Or not a Jew at all, but likely a Jew. She could be Edith Fox, or Edith Parks, or Edith Wolfe. Or Woolf. Or Wolf. Or Wulf. I’ve gathered leads to all these surnames, though I’m uncertain which one, if any, would have led me to her.
In Edith’s day, a man was given a name. A woman was given a temporary tag to be traded in for the prize of a romantic commitment. Any vestige of her old self was bumped to the middle slot, and any middle name that once filled the slot vanished, as was expected of women’s middle names. Maiden names are only slightly less obsolete—they’re for password verifications and deep genealogy dives. Maiden names are designed like disappearing ink, dissolving a former identity as easily as a felt brush wipes a blackboard clean of a lesson plan.
What happened in Edith Wilensky’s life before she took the name Wilensky and then after she removed it? The original surname given with the hope that it would one day be replaced, the married surname taken with the hope that it wouldn’t. But when a marriage fails, the assumed last name isn’t really hers anymore either. Maybe this is why Edith Wilensky changed her name after her divorce, or maybe she remarried. Either condition, combined with the years that have passed, has made her a challenge to locate.
What I know for certain is that Edith was born in 1918 in Hartford, and took the last name Wilensky by the age of twenty-one. Her husband was a Jewish salesman eight years her senior, named Irving Wilensky. They lived on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, home to a cross section of working-class Italian and Jewish immigrants. Irving pulled in around $130 a week hawking textiles for dresses, while his wife stayed at home and cared for their only son, Gary, born September 1, 1939.
In that same year, in Queens, the 1939 World’s Fair was erected. The fair, with the theme World of Tomorrow, offered 44 million visitors a glimpse into the future—a promise of a bright new post-Depression era—never mind the barrel of a second world war. What mattered within the parameters of Flushing Meadows, which would later become home of the US Open, was the prospect of an automated highway system, dishwashing machines, mechanical pets, cigarette-smoking robots, and a historic dedication by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, marking the first televised broadcast of an American presidential speech.
That same year, Irving announced the launch of Gary Junior, a firm manufacturing junior dresses for wholesale buyers, in the March 31 issue of Women’s Wear Daily. Quilted taffeta, nylon cord, gold leaves embossed on cotton swing skirts. Sketches of slender women with cinched waists and skirts that belled out over Barbie-slim legs, daintily shod in ink-drawn pumps, all accompanied ads for Gary Junior in the trade paper throughout the early 1950s. Irving, who was first and foremost a salesman, recognized early on that messaging mattered. He gave each pattern a name—“Thunder and Lightning,” for a rayon taffeta print. A striped chambray skirt and rope belt, he called “The Skirt That Sells on Sight.”
In 1949, he placed a full-page ad that was prescient of a Mad Men era. The image was simply a giant hollow exclamation point. The large display text read “HEY.” In smaller print, potential buyers were invited to visit their showroom.
Two weeks later, another full-page ad featured a giant question mark, with the words “AND WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”
The ads were aggressive and hard to ignore. It didn’t matter if buying dresses wasn’t your business, the message was for everyone reading the paper: Pay attention, remember the name, Gary Junior.
It worked. The company, which had its offices on West Thirty-Fifth Street in Manhattan, continued to expand and won two major contracts totaling 30,000 dress orders less than two years later. There was enough brand recognition (and money spent to develop it) that by the early fifties, when a fourteen-year-old Gary suffered from appendicitis, Women’s Wear Daily wished him a speedy recovery in their pages.
By 1950, Irving, Edith, and Gary had moved to Hewlett Harbor, Long Island, a South Shore alcove encircled by placid shorelines. Developers at the turn of the century erected Gold Coast–style mansions for local magnates, and returned in the forties and fifties to build sleek single-family units for the upwardly mobile middle class. Advertised as the area’s most exclusive community, Hewlett Harbor became an instant suburban oasis for commuters to the city, with brand-new homes—sold prebuilt—averaging $35,000 complete with dropped living rooms, General Electric appliances, thermopile insulation, infrared and ultraviolet lamps, and built-in liquor cabinets.
Irving’s wages also went toward a first-class cabin cruise to the West Indies for husband and wife aboard the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, a luxury ocean liner.
But the following year, Gary Junior’s reputation took a hit when the Federal Trade Commission charged the company with mislabeling the wool count in their dresses. The complaint against Wilensky and his partner, Oscar Zinn, was eventually dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence, but a year of negative press took its toll. Irving sold his Hewlett Harbor home in 1952, and by 1954, Gary Junior had become Galy Junior, still a dress manufacturer but with a new, nonfamilial name. Soon Irving’s partner, Oscar, sold his stake in the company and joined a competing label.
Edith and Irving were through as well. A teenage Gary Wilensky moved with his father to Roslyn’s newly built Silver Hill apartment complex, a multiunit efficiency that looked like a redbrick high-rise chopped down to the trunk.
Roslyn was an idyllic hamlet trimmed by leafy tree branches, lined with a grassy park overlooking a pond, and cinched at the waist by a street-long village with a soda shop and a post office. The local news in 1955 centered around parking disputes and a protest by a group of students against what was described as “horror” content, prompted after a reading of The Blackboard Jungle in class. When they weren’t promoting “self-censorship” of books, students at Roslyn High waged a war, via pamphlet, against girls wearing too much makeup.
Still, there was no censoring one of the most prominent and tragic headline news stories of the year. A recent graduate of Roslyn High was brutally raped and murdered in Greenwich Village by a convicted sex offender who spotted her on the street and followed her home. Much coverage was devoted to the search for the suspect and his drawn-out trial, in which his lawyer claimed his sexual urges were “so overpowering that he became a wild man.”
Meanwhile, Irving’s Galey Junior had sold $1 million worth of merchandise in a single season. Running a small company in high demand might have meant long days in Manhattan and nights commuting home to Roslyn, but Irving spent as much free time as he could with Gary, often on the tennis courts. He’d taught his son to play at age five and continued to practice with him regularly.
There are questions that might be asked: Why didn’t Gary live primarily with his mother? How often did he see her? Where did she go?
According to New York magazine, she moved to a home nearby, but that is the extent of what I know. A few of Gary’s high school acquaintances told the magazine that he reeled over his parents’ split and blamed his mother for leaving him. He told two classmates she was dead after suffering a long illness.
Gary’s high school friend Neal Pilson can’t recall ever meeting Gary’s mother, which was odd, considering their tight-knit community. “I knew everyone else’s mother,” he says. “Come to think of it, I don’t even know where Gary lived.”
It’s tempting to assume Gary’s relationship with his mother was fractured by his parent’s divorce. In one small scientific analysis, adult stalking behavior was linked to separation from a primary caretaker in early life. This perceived rejection, when coupled with other mental disturbances, might resonate in later life when the person is rejected again. Their obsessive and, in Gary’s case, violent behavior might be rooted in a unresolved desire to change the past, to recapture what was lost so long ago. But even if this was true of Gary, there isn’t enough background on his childhood to fully substantiate it.
In 1957, a year after Gary graduated from high school, Irving Wilensky, then forty-nine, remarried; his new wife was a thirty-five-year-old woman with a daughter from her first marriage. They eventually moved to Port Washington, the next town over from Roslyn, while Gary moved south to attend the University of Alabama. Though the South was still entrenched in Jim Crow racism—only two years earlier the university accepted the first black student, while still barring her from dormitories and dining halls—the school had made a surprising push for more Jewish East Coasters, reportedly trying to attract a competitive applicant pool. The school was cheap and easy to get into by East Coast standards. He joined Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity with a reputation for parties, alongside fellow New York–born pledge Bernie Madoff.
But Gary didn’t stay in Alabama long enough to leave an impression on his frat brothers. (Nobody I spoke with remembered him.) After his freshman year, he transferred to Rider University in New Jersey before dropping out.
The year was 1958, when Sophia Loren and Tab Hunter landed twenty miles from Roslyn in Long Beach to shoot That Kind of Woman, Sidney Lumet’s film about a sophisticated Manhattan mistress who falls for a young paratrooper. After a locally publicized call for young extras, over five thousand teenagers stampeded the seaside town. One of the six chosen for an extra role in the film was a seventeen-year-old boutique model from Roslyn named Judy. She left such an impression on casting directors, she was recruited to screen-test for Paramount. That was the girl Gary Wilensky would marry. (Judy did not respond to my request for an interview, so my research is largely limited to public records and reporting.)
By the time they wed in 1969, Judy had put aside any Hollywood aspirations and was pursuing a law degree, while Gary taught tennis in midtown Manhattan.
Their marriage lasted only six months. After their divorce, Judy got married again, this time to her law professor, and together they started a private practice representing musicians—Frank Sinatra, Luther Vandross, Don Henley, the Beach Boys, Michael Jackson. Their firm went on to win precedent-setting judgments on behalf of artists in binding record contracts.
Gary never remarried. Irving Wilensky would tell reporters Gary’s marriage failed because he put tennis first. He wasn’t ready to start a family and wanted to focus on growing his career instead. But this could have been a father’s perspective on a son he only partially understood. In fact, another source had heard that it was Gary who wanted children. (His ex-wife never returned my repeated requests to speak with her.)
In 1973, Gary looked like a seagull, with matchstick legs and his white Adidas parted in a V. As the cameras flashed, he dug a silver shovel in the Catskills dirt to cement the opening of the Concord Resort Hotel’s new indoor courts. Gary’s smooth dolphin sonar could simultaneously signal the most important person in the room and the cameraman to converge wherever he might be standing. Shoulder to chest with Pancho Gonzales at a charity tournament. Knocking an elbow against Bobby Riggs after an exhibition match. Edging into a semicircle with John Dockery, Marty Glickman, and Red Holzman while wearing a sweater covered with finger-sized tennis rackets. He could talk his way into any inner circle, and he would, if it meant a photo op.
“Gary wasn’t a world-class player, but he had the ability to talk to people, which is sometimes more important than playing,” says Fredo Weiland, a tennis pro who worked at Midtown Tennis alongside Gary in the 1980s.
He used the press to gain traction, just as Irving had done so many years before. In 1974, Gary posted a quarter-page ad in Women’s Wear Daily— the fashion trade paper where Irving’s business ventures played out in print—advertising his very own tennis gift shop. “Gary Wilensky Tennis Lover,” the ad read in three-dimensional Yellow Submarine font. Crouched above the headline, as if resting on a cloud of letters, was a photo of Gary in a butterfly color, his smile parenthesized by a long trail of mustache hair.
“If You’re a Lover, Don’t Be a Stranger,” read the text beside his head.
Dad must have been proud then. Gary’s Tennis Shop did little more than spread his name around the city before it closed, but he was never short on new ideas.
“He was good with the gimmicks,” says Fredo. “He thought outside the box.”
Gary was a champion performer, if not at tennis, then at public entertainment. He zigged and Zelig-ed his way through pop culture, modulating his act to suit each era.
In the seventies, the age of mimes and stuntmen, he donned his roller skates and challenged a unicyclist to a well-advertised tennis tournament. In the eighties, he appeared on an episode of To Tell the Truth, a remake of the fifties game show that challenged B-list stars to pluck the actual roller-skating tennis pro from a series of imposters. And in the nineties he kicked off the decade’s obsession with televised true crime.
“He was a showman,” says Erica Goodstone, his former student and friend. “Even his death was a show.”
At his core, he was a salesman like his father. Always staying on trend, always modifying the merchandise to suit demand—and as was true of his father, who manufactured textiles for juniors, Gary’s niche was also the junior circuit.
“He had hundreds of students over his career and was a pro at many camps, at Central Park, and at numerous clubs,” Irving Wilensky told the New York Post in 1993, after his son had died. “He taught a lot of students who were five, six, and seven years old and followed them through their graduate years. He was one a father could be proud of. He did not seem like the kind of guy who would do something like this.”
After Gary’s death, eighty-five-year-old Irving was interviewed by the Associated Press, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the Post. In a photo in Newsday, he is slouched in an armchair. His arms sag from the short sleeves of a thin button-down shirt. He has scruff on his chin and his mouth curdles as if he has tasted something rotten and is searching for the language to describe it. His eyes rest on a point below the camera’s lens.
In his son’s final days, Irving claimed Gary called every day, sounding frustrated. He could tell something was wrong by the sound of Gary’s voice, but he didn’t know the extent of his son’s issues.
“I am shocked,” he told the Post. “[He] never confided in me that anything was troubling him. I wish he had.”
The only trace of Edith Wilensky in reports came from Irving himself. He’d broken the news of Gary’s death to her by telephone. “She took the news the way you’d expect a mother to,” said Irving.
Edith, who by then had changed her last name to Wolf (or Wulf or Woolfe or Wolfe), attended Gary’s private funeral, a gathering of about thirty friends and family in Long Island.
When contacted, one of Gary’s closest living relatives turned down my request for an interview, citing a wound still too damaging to revisit. “Gary’s final days caused a great deal of pain to [his father],” the relative wrote in a follow-up email, adding, “Gary was adored by his mother and father, and remained close to them all his life.”
Irving Wilensky died in 1994, less than a year after his son. If she is alive today, Edith would be nearing a hundred, but the last time Gary’s relative saw or heard from her was in 1993 at Gary’s funeral.