They Call Me Supermensch Read online

  In fairness to them, my mother had a story like that for everybody. I never felt comfortable asking my father about it. It’s something he would never, ever discuss. I’ve never felt comfortable asking Al’s kids about it, either, because why would I at this point? Why would I want them to think badly of their dad? So I never learned the facts, but that’s the cloud I was raised under, made up of my mother’s anger, greed, and envy. Not a pretty picture. My father never showed the slightest anger or envy toward his brother. He just sat there quietly. But the fact that we weren’t rich like Al and his family rankled my mother fiercely.

  I had such a strange childhood that by my mid-fifties I was convinced I had made it all up. A few years ago I reconnected with my cousin Patti. Cousin Patti was one of the few relatives on my father’s side I got to know. She lived not too far from us on Long Island. Patti is the cutest thing you have ever seen, under five feet tall with the happiest face, like a little girl. She surfed and boogie-boarded into her eighties. She’s a pistol. She’s about twenty years older than me. Her daughter and I were born around the same time, and Patti remembers us as infants being wheeled around together in our baby carriages. Once a year all the cousins would get together at a hotel in the Catskills, which is where I got friendly with her. When I was in the eighth or ninth grade Patti had a summer job at a waterskiing school not far from Oceanside. She started coming by the house in the mornings to pick me up and take me there for the day. Not to learn to ski, just to get away from my mother and Skippy. I had lunch with her, sat in the boat, read a book. It was just great to be out of the house for a day.

  When Mike was working on Supermensch, they got in touch with Patti to interview her. She was around ninety and still a dynamo.

  “I think I made my whole childhood up,” I said to her. “Did you ever come to the house?”

  She said, “I couldn’t come to the house. You had that dog. Don’t you remember, I tried to adopt you. Your mother never spoke to me after that.”

  I had never heard that before. She actually spoke to my mother about adopting me, which of course meant my mother banished her from our home.

  So I didn’t make it up. My childhood really was strange enough that Cousin Patti tried to adopt me to rescue me from it. Patti earned a giant coupon from me for doing this, which I keep paying back happily. In the summer of 2015 I lectured at the University of Hawaii School of Law about ethics in the music business (an oxymoron?) to get three VIP passes to a Grateful Dead concert in Chicago for Patti’s granddaughter, a Deadhead. The Dead’s lawyer and manager was on the panel. Patti’s grandson Mikey, whom I love so much, lived with me in Maui for a year and recently got married at my house. Patti still has lots of coupons with me.

  I didn’t brood about my life as a kid. That’s not how I am. It’s only been fairly recently that I’ve looked back and recognized ways that my childhood and family had an impact on the adult I became. For one thing, spending all that time in my room meant that I learned how to be alone, and how to think. I didn’t have a TV in there, or a telephone. We didn’t have computer games in those days. I had my thoughts, my books, and my imagination. I learned solitude. I can get lonely, same as anyone, but my ability to sit alone quietly for hours at a time, thinking, visualizing, would play a huge role in my successes as an adult. I also think that my mother’s attitude toward me as the son who was not destined for success must have in some way driven me to be successful. I think in some ways I tried to prove her wrong, or prove myself to her.

  I think that because my father was so quiet and reserved, and allowed my mother to so dominate our lives, I spent a number of years instinctively seeking out mentors and surrogate father figures to fill some void I must have felt. But as it turned out, my two greatest and most influential mentors would be men who reminded me of him. My father spent his whole life in service to others—first his mother and brother, then his wife and kids. He never had money or power, but he was happy, proud to be a provider. In their own ways, my later mentors did the same. And in my own way, imitating them all, so would I.

  Thank you, thank you.

  When I got to be fourteen or fifteen, Long Beach became my main escape. My parents gave me permission to hitchhike. In those days you could still hitchhike fairly safely. Our street, Henrietta Avenue, ran right to Long Beach Road, which ran straight to the boardwalk, about fifteen minutes away. It was a very easy hitch, because it was a very high-traffic road. It usually took two rides. The first ride was generally up to this big intersection with a stoplight. They’d turn off there, and I’d thumb a second ride the rest of the way to the beach. The drivers were almost always strangers, which made it my first time out alone in the world, meeting strangers, without a safety net, without my dad by my side. It was a little scary. A car would stop, there’d be some stranger behind the wheel. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I’d get in. Every once in a while I’d get a weird vibe and say, “Oh sorry, I left something at home,” and not get in. The road to Long Beach ran straight through the neighborhood of Island Park, which was very Italian and full of mobsters and gangsters. Every now and again there’d be a mafia killing or a big arrest in Island Park, and my mom wouldn’t let me hitchhike for a couple of weeks.

  Long Beach is a narrow barrier island, reached by a couple of bridges across a channel just off the south shore of Long Island. It was a mix of residential and resorts. I started getting summer jobs at the beach clubs there. One was Malibu Beach Club, another the Colony Beach Club, another El Patio, but they were all very much the same, all strung along a road running down the center of the island called Lido Boulevard. They all had the same basic footprint. An impressive driveway and entrance, where young, good-looking guys took your car and put it in the large parking lot. You’d go into a lobby that was fairly fancy, with gin games going on everywhere, old Jewish guys with pinkie rings, and elderly blondes in high heels. Lots of young, beautiful girls, too. There’d always be a snack bar or a restaurant, always a pool with a lot of cabanas around it, and then a beach with beach chairs and striped umbrellas.

  If you’ve seen the Matt Dillon movie The Flamingo Kid, you know exactly what my life was like then. It was even shot at Long Beach. When I got to whichever club I was working at I went straight to a locker room and changed into whatever outfit the job required. In one job I worked as a beach boy. I ran out to set up chairs, fetched people drinks, took the chairs back inside when they left. I worked at a snack bar, which was interesting because it was my first experience with peer pressure to do something I didn’t agree with. Some of the guys working there were older, heavily tattooed, dangerous characters. When we made hamburger patties, they’d laugh and press them in their armpits, or do other disgusting things. Just to be cool. I couldn’t rat on them, because they’d beat the hell out of me. I knew I should give them up, but I didn’t. I think it was the first real moral dilemma I ever confronted. Wow, how am I going to conduct my life? Am I really going to stand by and watch this happen? Which I did. I cooked those hamburgers and served them to people. It wasn’t so much that what these guys did was unsanitary, because these snack bars were so dirty anyway. What confused and upset me was that one human being would want to do this to another, just for a laugh. It still gets me to this day. When I see a TV show where they’re laughing because someone fell down the steps, I still can’t figure what it is in human nature that can make that funny.

  The most interesting job of all was as a cabana boy. The cabana boy opens up the cabana for the customers, sets them up with towels, brings them their food and drink orders, and cleans up afterward. You’re basically their house servant for the afternoon, only it’s a cabana. Observing those people was a real education for me. There was always one hot gin or poker game going on in one of the cabanas, and there was always an alpha male who was the leader, and everyone knew he was the guy. He had the biggest pinkie ring, and the darkest tan, and the hottest wife, and won the most hands. I’d never been exposed to that sort of social behavior before
, how hierarchies work, how society chooses its leaders.

  It was a very good time for me. I had all the things I couldn’t get at home. I finally had my own individual, independent life, away from all the neighbors who knew everything about me, away from my mother and always being compared unfavorably to my brother. I was free to come and go, and I had a social life at the clubs. I could be whoever I wanted to be. I didn’t have to be Shep Gordon from Oceanside living in a house where I couldn’t leave my room. I started experimenting. There was a doo-wop group called Shep and the Limelites at the time, who had a big hit with the song “Daddy’s Home.” For a while, to the girls at the clubs I was Shep of the Limelites. I never actually said I was. I’d just go around humming the song, and my name was Shep, so they leaped to that conclusion. I didn’t dissuade them. I even signed autographs. Until they found out the Limelites were black.

  But it was great while it lasted, and maybe it was necessary. Because I was very, very interested in all those pretty girls, but at fourteen and fifteen I was also very, very shy and totally inexperienced. It wasn’t the last time I’d use a ruse or a pretext to be with girls. Because I’ve been with many gorgeous women as an adult, with movie stars and fashion models, I have this reputation as a world-class ladies’ man. You can see it in the documentary, my male friends talking about me and all my beautiful women. The truth is I don’t think of myself that way at all. I have never felt that I was good-looking. I have always felt shy and self-conscious around pretty women. Their beauty overwhelms me. Certainly this was true when I was young. I was still a virgin when I went to college.

  But I always had eyes for pretty girls. There was this one cute little blonde at one of the clubs where I worked, Leslie Feldstein. Her dad was the alpha male at that club. I really wanted to be with her, and the other guys all said, “Ask her out on a date.” I didn’t have a car and had never been on a date before. But I asked if her she wanted to go on one, and she said yes.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked, hoping she’d have some idea, because I didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “my high school is playing a basketball game I want to go to.”

  “Okay,” she said. “How are we going to get there?”

  “Um, do you hitchhike?”

  “No. Let me ask my dad if he’ll take us.”

  He agreed. So now the big alpha male is going to chauffeur me on my first date. I gave her my address. On the night of the game, this enormous, shiny car with big tail fins, a DeSoto or Chrysler, one of those types, pulled up outside my house on Henrietta Avenue. I got in the back with Leslie; her dad sat up front, chauffeuring. The seats of the car were covered in clear plastic, just like the furniture in my living room, only under the plastic was all covers of MAD magazine. I loved MAD. I think I said something stupid like, “Wow, do you collect MAD magazines? So do I!”

  Leslie said, “My dad is the editor.”

  And he was. Al Feldstein, editor of MAD for nearly thirty years, drove me on my first date. He was really nice about it, too. After the game he took us to a Jahn’s ice cream parlor. Jahn’s was a local chain famous for its huge Kitchen Sink Sundae, an actual tub of dozens of scoops of ice cream in all the flavors, which served eight. He ordered one of those for the three of us. That was the only time I ever had one.

  That was also the only time I ever went on a date with Leslie. Guess I didn’t do so well.

  I loved those summers at Long Beach. I played a lot of Fascination on the boardwalk, where you rolled a rubber ball into holes and tried to set off a pattern of lights, sort of like in bingo, to win a prize. I got very good at it. I ate a lot of Izzy’s knishes. I got high for the first time at Long Beach, too, sniffing glue out of a paper bag under the boardwalk. I can still smell and taste it. Disgusting. But that’s what we did then. We thought it was cool. We observed those high-rolling gamblers with their gold watches and dark, dark tans and wanted to be like them. During senior year my friend Dennis Greenstein and I used to sneak off to the racetrack at night. I used pillows and blankets to make it look like I was in bed, then slipped out of the house around nine o’clock and walked thirty minutes to his house, which was in an area identical to mine. He met me outside. We would roll his mother’s black Valiant down their driveway and then down the quiet street until we felt we were far enough away, then he’d start it up and drive us to Roosevelt or Yonkers Raceway. They’d let you in free for the last race, around ten thirty. We rarely had any money to bet. We just watched and felt like big shots.

  Thirty years later I went to Dennis’s parents’ house for the holidays. I said to his mother, “Mrs. Greenstein, I have to make a confession.”

  She said, “Really? What about?”

  I said, “Well, there were nights when you thought Dennis was sleeping—”

  And she said, “Oh, you mean the nights you rolled the car out of the driveway?”

  Jewish moms. You had to be awfully slick to put one over on them.

  While I was developing a life of my own, Edward was living his, and we barely interacted at all. Our bedrooms were right next to each other, but my door was always shut. He had his friends over all the time, usually in his room, and I was not allowed to go in there. We had no real interests in common. I liked sports, and he couldn’t have cared less about that. He loved animals, and because of Skippy I hated animals. I was growing into a big kid, and he was always slight and skinny.

  Edward was very, very close to my mother and my mother’s mother. Very close. It was probably my grandmother who influenced him to be so thrifty. She’d grown up poor in the old country, and she never got over squeezing every penny. Edward became obsessed with thrift, saving every penny, never wasting an opportunity to make another penny. He had us all cutting out coupons every weekend. When I was out playing basketball, he was out collecting bottles for the deposit. It’s the way he is to this day. He has never veered an inch from who he is. It took me a long time, but I have come to respect that about him. There’s certainly nothing phony about him. He makes no excuses. He is who he is.

  When we were kids Edward was on his path, laser-focused on becoming a veterinarian, which he did. After we left our parents’ home, he went off in his direction and I went in mine. We barely saw each other for the next twenty, thirty, forty years. Our lives were just so different. He was very successful, made a lot of money, and raised a loving family. And he still collects bottles and clips coupons.

  I haven’t clipped a coupon since I left home. I have completely the opposite relationship to money. But I must have absorbed something from Edward, because the idea of the coupon is very important to the way I live and do business.

  2

  I GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL IN 1963. One night toward the end of that summer, my mother drove my dad and me into Manhattan, to the big, gloomy Port Authority bus terminal on Forty-Second Street just off Times Square. I was going to catch a midnight Greyhound bus to Buffalo.

  The University of Buffalo had just switched from a private school to being incorporated into the State University of New York (SUNY) system, which meant you could take the exam for what was called a state Regents scholarship. The test wasn’t hard. If you were a middle-class Jewish kid who had paid any attention in high school, you could get one of these scholarships, which easily paid for tuition at Buffalo. So that year there was a huge exodus from New York to Buffalo of Jewish kids on Regents scholarships, Buffalo being the farthest away you could get from your parents and still be in the state.

  The Port Authority ran 24/7 and was never empty, but it was fairly quiet at that time of night, just some knots of travelers waiting around on hard benches under fluorescent lights. It has since been fixed up, but in 1963 it was just a huge bus terminal, pretty grim, no amenities. If there was a coffee machine it probably didn’t work. I didn’t care. I was thrilled to be there. I was getting away from home, getting out on my own.

  I didn’t want to be seen there with my pare
nts. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was making believe I wasn’t with them when I saw a guy my age sitting on the floor in a corner of the waiting area. Something about him intrigued me right away. He was a handsome guy, with thick, straight brown hair, which I didn’t have. He looked cool, which I didn’t think I was. I went and sat on the floor near him, and we discovered we were both trying to get away from our parents, and both taking that midnight bus to Buffalo. His name was Joe Greenberg. We sat on the bus together, an eight-hour ride, and by the time we got to Buffalo we were good friends.

  When we got to Buffalo that morning we weren’t housed in dormitories but in off-campus apartments, a complex called the Allenhurst Apartments. It was about three-quarters of a mile from campus, in a neighborhood that was similar to Oceanside, in that it was all symmetrical and identical, but instead of single-family homes it was a garden apartment complex, all built around central courtyards, with maybe a dozen two-bedroom duplex garden apartments on each courtyard. It was all relatively new and very nice. My assigned roommate was a Jewish kid from Troy, New York, with whom I became very friendly.

  It felt like it was the first day of my life. The journey was about to begin. I had no idea where I was going, no real aspirations. I thought I might become a lawyer, because it seemed that every Jewish kid did that. But I wasn’t committed to it. Eventually I settled on sociology, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with that. The truth is, if I had any aspirations it was to become a millionaire beachcomber, as quickly as I could. I knew that working in a windowless office like my dad’s was not what I wanted. I was willing to work my ass off, but I wanted it to be fun and rewarding work.