So the old “duck and cover” game we used to play at PS 6 back in the early Fifties, hiding from atomic bombs with our heads in our hands while contorted under those cramped nineteenth-century folding school desks—that was a family matter to me. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Feig, whose husband was also a doctor, knew this. She’d announce to my classmates that “Roger’s father” would come in to check up on them if they didn’t behave in the proper manner during their proxy nuclear holocaust exercises.
I was proud of this parental recognition then, but by the time I was in junior high, adolescent hormones were kicking in and I was starting to separate from my father. I didn’t like that he worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and especially disliked that he often represented the AEC in debates with the newly formed Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Never mind that my father told me not only that he actually sympathized with SANE but also that by the end of their debates everyone was really listening to him, because, after all, he knew the facts and they knew only their idealistic pronouncements. I wasn’t buying. More than that—I was embarrassed. My father was on the wrong side.
Not long into high school, I was attending my first meetings—found in ads on the back of The Village Voice—of a short-lived group called the Student Peace Union. They advertised that they were a “Third Camp” in opposition to the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union. I didn’t realize then that the “Third Camp” consisted mostly of Trotskyists trying to find a way to rope in a few naive Quakers and other pacifists and put them on the straight and narrow to world socialism. In fact, at that point, I had no idea how to recognize any of the socialist sects or their methodologies or internecine rivalries. I wasn’t even fifteen.
I came in from Scarsdale for the SPU lectures at the Judson Church with a high school friend whose parents were Quakers and members of the American Friends Service Committee. In reality my friend and I weren’t very interested in the lectures. We wanted to meet the Village beatnik girls of our dreams. That meant we would skip out of the political speechifying after about ten minutes and head over to Rick’s Café Bizarre or Rienzi’s Coffee Shop on Bleecker in the hope of running into one, or preferably two, of those mysterious creatures in leotards. Of course, when we did, we suburban kids couldn’t have been of less interest to them. So my friend and I ended up spending most of our time drinking hot cider (why was that hip?) and playing chess. Later, too young to go inside, we would “free beat” in front of Birdland, listening to Coltrane or Cannonball Adderley before taking the last train back to Westchester. A couple of times we even puffed on a joint late at night at the Scarsdale station. It seemed the safest place for such reckless abandon.
In true teenage fashion I resisted sharing these experiences with my parents, especially the furtive pot smoking. This was still the Fifties, remember. But I suspect that my mother romanticized my adventures anyway, thinking they were more than they were. (That would have been easy at that point.) She’d had literary dreams and I got some of my aspirations from her. Like seemingly half of my family, my mother had wanted to be a writer.
Ruth Simon—daughter of the Polish-born Ben Lichtenberg and the Bronx-born Minerva Kahn—dropped out of college in her junior year to take an assistant’s job with the Paris branch of the Chicago Tribune. There she hung around Left Bank cafes and met journalistic lights like Walter Lippman. It was a time in her life she told me about repeatedly when I was a boy—her trips to Spain after the Civil War and to Germany with the Nazis already in control. But as the Second World War loomed, she returned to America and, bourgeois impulses at work, agreed to marry my father after only a couple of dates. It helped that he was smart and good-looking (both my parents were attractive), but all the same he came from a seemingly lower-class Jewish family of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants from the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts and had to pass muster with my mother’s more “aristocratic” father. Ben Lichtenberg was a foppish public relations man who admired Napoleon, dined frequently at the Pavillion, allegedly changed his Sulka’s silk shirts five times a day and claimed to be related to the Baron von Lichtenberg—supposedly, or so my grandmother told me, one of the rare Jewish royals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Google has nothing on this.)
After marrying, to keep her hopes of an independent career alive, my mother spent another couple of years as a publicist for classical musicians, during which time she walked around Manhattan wearing a hat fashioned from a long-playing record of Metropolitan Opera star Lili Pons. But after that, she never worked again. Later, I would live out those Paris literary dreams for her, but then, when I was in high school, hers were at their most thwarted. She was beginning to realize that she was staring down the barrel of forty years of stultifying suburban life out of a Cheever novel.
So my mother ameliorated her pain with a haze of prescription drugs. She was more or less addicted to tranquilizers and barbiturates throughout my high school years. My father the doctor kept the medicine cabinet well stocked, making it easy for her. I don’t know if he was consciously medicating her, but it was certainly conventional for that generation to do this to themselves and sometimes to their children. The humorist S. J. Perelman was my father’s patient, but it wasn’t for that reason alone my father kept an autographed copy of The Road to Miltown on the living room coffee table. My generation’s (and my) later much more public experiments with drugs don’t seem so astonishing when juxtaposed with this secret reality of the Fifties, which sometimes bubbled to the surface in New Yorker cartoons. Maybe we were only making explicit what our parents had kept hidden.
Although my father came from that Orthodox immigrant home back in Lawrence, my parents’ lifestyle, particularly in Scarsdale, was Jewish-WASP. They rarely went to synagogue or discussed religion at home; they liked to entertain formally and were members of a country club. Surfaces were of paramount importance. Even in the social sphere, things had to be dealt with in a decorous manner. My parents were Stevenson Democrats but I can’t remember them actively lobbying for any political cause or even going to a meeting. Their involvement in the growing civil rights struggle was only peripheral. They sent me to visit family friends in Louisiana when I was thirteen, but when I returned, aghast, with my stories of “colored” water fountains and other Jim Crow horrors, they merely clucked their disapproval. They never did anything about it. The two exceptions came from my father’s aforementioned professional interest in nuclear energy and his usually unspoken fascination with the Holocaust.
This kind of repressed behavior and hypocrisy is of course popularly associated with the Fifties. When, shortly after college, I read Yale psychologist Kenneth Kenniston’s The Young Radicals—which defined the left-wing youth of my generation as being in rebellion against liberal parents who rarely acted on their values—I thought I’d found the academic version of my own autobiography. And for those days, I had. But the dialectic moves on and I had no idea how my view of my parents, particularly of my father, would circle back on itself. I am far more sympathetic to him now and recognize that his activities with the Atomic Energy Commission were in many ways heroic. He was a committed man in the sense that he believed that, on balance, the values of this country are positive and its role in the world necessary. He wanted to defend and protect it through his scientific work.
At that time, however, I was in Kenniston-style rebellion. By my sophomore year at Dartmouth I had become roommates with Alan Coggeshall, a tow-headed, angular character who resembled a latter-day Ichabod Crane and even came from Peekskill, New York, not far from Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow. These were the days (1962) when we were first getting an inkling of the existence of psychedelic drugs and Alan, less risk-averse than I, would head off to Cambridge on weekends to participate in the early LSD experiments of Harvard psych professors Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. When I listened to his tales of rainbows exploding to Bach cantatas, I never dreamed that Leary himself would be one of my closer friends in Hollywood in the Eighties, or that Alan would be dead the year after we graduated. He was in the back of a car that went flying off the road on its way to Bennington. I always assumed