And for a while it had gone well. Dyanne and I had done our bits registering voters on rural black farms, teaching African-American history to schoolkids in the “colored” part of Sumter and even organizing the first production (albeit truncated) in that part of the South of that seminal drama of black family life, A Raisin in the Sun. On weekends we would motor around neighboring states, once visiting the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee office in Atlanta in search of black history materials. There we ran into two of the more famous young idols of the period—Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond. The exceptionally handsome and charismatic Bond—now president of the NAACP—was then making his first run for a congressional seat. He showed me a leaflet he planned to distribute to voters with the symbol of the Black Panther Party of Lowndes County, Alabama. It was the first time I had seen that famous sign of Black Power—though I had heard about it—and felt hurt when Bond rejected my offer to go precinct walking with him. He apparently didn’t need a white boy in the black districts of Atlanta. I tried to understand. I had other things to do then, other ways I could serve the cause of racial equality.
This, however, was all cut short by my encounter with a redneck cop on my way to integrate Myrtle Beach. But was I actually the victim of a civil rights incident? Or had I just been a clumsy urban graduate student unable to operate a simple automobile jack without bringing the car down on my hand? What would I tell my friends and family when I got home? The whole affair was ambiguous.
My life before then had been more sheltered than I wanted to admit. Dartmouth College, where I had spent my undergraduate years, was a good school, but painfully far from the action at a time when I correctly surmised the world was about to go upside down. Dartmouth in those days wasn’t even coed, a sure-fire prescription for social retardation, though at least I had a girlfriend at Skidmore.
I’d tried my best in high school to be ahead of the curve—wearing sunglasses, black turtleneck, and beret, in the emerging beatnik style—but the results were marginal. I was the youngest member of my Scarsdale High class and even being the first of them (probably) to smoke grass (with a local jazz musician who was teaching me to play the drums and called joints “medicated cigarettes”) didn’t amount to much. Nor did being the only one to witness Jack Kerouac reading live at Hunter College auditorium (circa 1959). My eyewitness tale of the Beat Generation icon slumped over the lectern, waving a bottle of Scotch while holding forth from the pages of The Subterraneans and beckoning the young Allen Ginsberg—then resembling a bespectacled yeshiva bocher from a road show Fiddler on the Roof—to join him on stage was of interest only to a tiny minority of like-minded Scarsdale High School classmates.
We were the ones trying to be superficially cool, listening to Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan on Symphony Sid’s late night radio or, in the case of the folkie set, Joan Baez, but actually dreaming of normal teenage things like losing our virginity or getting into our college of choice.
I failed at the latter, only making the waiting list for Harvard, and just barely achieved the former before arriving at Dartmouth, having lost my cherry over summer vacation to what I thought was a desperately aging hooker (she could have been thirty) in a walk-up off the Place Clichy. “J’ai un étudiant!” she shouted as we climbed the stairs. At least she hadn’t used the more demeaning élève, declaring me a student and not a “pupil.” Perhaps she guessed I was college-bound.
Of course, this was still the very early Sixties—not yet what we’ve come to call “The Sixties.” Dartmouth when I arrived had much the same atmosphere as Scarsdale High, though it was far from New York and its Greenwich Village Mecca, to which I would escape from the suburbs any chance I had in high school. The student body consisted of a lot of innocent jocks, a few nerds-before-their-time—mostly in the math department—and some preppies who didn’t make it into Princeton. But there were exceptions; there always had been. My father had gone to Dartmouth and introduced me to his classmate Budd Schulberg ’36 at a Yale game when I was about twelve. I knew even then this was the kind of Ivy graduate I aspired to be, assuming that I would graduate and not dare to go the full bohemian route like Scott Fitzgerald—to drop out (or be dropped out) in my junior year.
I searched out these eccentric types the moment I was on campus, but they were upperclassman and seemed inaccessible to me. One of them, Stephen Geller, cut a swashbuckling figure not only because he directed a production of Waiting for Godot and made his own student film (unheard of then), a burlesque of Bergman’s Seventh Seal, but also because he came from Los Angeles and his father worked in The Industry (an arranger for Tennessee Ernie Ford, as it turned out). Geller knew people who actually made movies for a living, that weren’t the doctors and lawyers or, worse yet, business people who had until then constituted nearly the entire panoply of adults in my life.
Somewhere in the second half of my freshman year, he and six others—a couple were attractive younger faculty wives, I was interested to note—staged the first ever nuclear disarmament demonstration in the history of the Ivy League in the middle of the Dartmouth Green. This was in the winter of 1960-1961, not long after the far more dramatic demonstrations in Berkeley, California, against the House Un-American Activities Committee (commemorated in the film Operation Abolition), which many consider the beginning of our modern era of protest. But I was more transfixed by the local New Hampshire event and yearned to participate.
Even then I realized on some instinctive level the important bond between progressive politics and artistic success, though I had no idea how intricate it was. But besides wanting to show my colors as an incipient progressive, the subject of the tiny Dartmouth demonstration had a rather large personal component for me. Nuclear weapons provided an eerie background to the childhood of most of my generation. And for me they were more than that. They were the major point of contention between my father and me, the focus of my adolescent rebellion.
My father, Norman Simon, was a radiologist—among the first in private practice in the City of New York—who volunteered his time for the Atomic Energy Commission. Although it was probably something of an exaggeration, I was told as a boy that my father would be de facto Governor of New York in the event of a nuclear attack. He had treated the “Hiroshima Ladies”—the group of victims of the Hiroshima blast who were flown to the U.S. for examination—and was supposed to know as well as anybody how to deal with the effects of radioactive fallout on the human body. When I was very young, he would spend many of his weekends at the Atomic Energy Commission installation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, or at Los Alamos itself. (I have a dim recollection of being introduced to the Manhattan Project scientists Lisa Meitner and J. Robert Oppenheimer as a child. I must have been about three.) He would return from those weekends with a grim expression, having attended lectures on the latest doomsday weapons—by then they must have been thermonuclear—that only those with the highest security clearance were allowed to see.
My father’s obtaining that elevated clearance provided the background for one of my more potent childhood memories. I recall at the age of seven standing in the lobby of our apartment, two blocks from New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, where my father practiced, watching a pair of FBI agents conduct an interview about my dad. The agents were scary enough to me in their gangster-movie wide-brimmed fedoras, but not nearly as disturbing as the man they were questioning. He was the superintendent of our building, an angry drunk who beat his kid with an old-fashioned cat ’o nine tails. I knew this because his son Byron was my after-school playmate; I had seen the super whip him on more than one occasion in the shadows of the dank corridor near their basement apartment. I had also seen the welts on Byron’s back and arms. The idea that a drunken thug like that super held my father’s future in his hands was unnerving to my seven-year-old self. Nothing good could come of that. And my fears were only exacerbated by my pal and confidante Nick, our handsome young elevator man from the Bronx. He informed me that the feds had