Back Then (18 page)

Over the four years I spent in analysis there were no Hollywood-ish breakthroughs, no long buried traumas brought to light. Neither was there a “primal scene” to be revisited, although there was always the unspoken assumption hovering in the Freudian air that the patient must have seen his mother and father making love but blocked the memory of it. Sometimes, recalling a famous scene in Arthur Koestler's anti-Stalinist novel,
Darkness at Noon
, I was tempted, like Koestler's hero-victim, to make a false confession to his inquisitor—Yes, you're right, I remember!—just to get the primal scene out of our system and move on to something more productive.

Rather than any dramatic change, analysis—the goal of my generation—slowly eroded whatever it was that had been bothering me: unresolved issues with my parents, fear of abandonment and competition, guilt about money. Time and growing up might have done this by themselves, but there was no way of telling—this would-be scientific experiment in gradual change had no “controls.” But for all its lack of drama and its extravagant expense of time and money, Freudian psychoanalysis had been a great education, especially if one could shed its doctrinal baggage and implicit determinism and embrace the more dynamic and liberating view of human development that I was to find in Erik Erikson's
Childhood and Society
, when I read it in the mid 1950s. What psychoanalysis left me with in the end was a mode of forgiving along with recognition of the role internal conflict, symbols, fantasies, ambivalence, and unconscious motivation play in daily life: a run-up to biography.

A little while after Dr. Hughes and I “terminated” the analysis by mutual consent, I paid him a courtesy visit to thank him for his help and to tell him I was doing just fine in my work and would soon be married. “I think you might be especially interested to know,” I added somewhat teasingly (Put that in your pipe!), “My fiancée, Anne Bernays, is Sigmund Freud's grandniece.” This time Dr. Hughes abandoned his chronic composure and professional vow of silence. “Tell me,” he said, “is she native American-born?” I stopped myself from replying, Why do you ask?

PART II

CHAPTER 7

The last office
my father occupied was a three-storey, cinnamon-colored brownstone, once owned by the Auchincloss family, on Sixty-fourth Street between Fifth and Madison. Around the corner was the Chase Bank, its white-glove East Side branch. The Wildenstein Gallery, which had been a client of my father's years earlier, was directly across the street.

My father's desk occupied what once had been the front parlor. From this perch he could look out over the street and watch the quality passing by. He didn't do this very often; he was a man focused on his work the way a pathologist concentrates on the
item on the slide. No time for daydreaming. Directly above my father's office was my mother's. Nominally his partner, she was kept in the background, like a new puppy whose bathroom habits are not quite jelled. She did not even appear in the firm's name—Edward L. Bernays, Inc.: followed, in smaller type, by “A Partnership of Edward L. Bernays and Doris E. Fleischman.” Apparently, it did not trouble either of them that she was an unequal partner, the same paradox at work and at home.

While my father's office was furnished with heavy pieces, choice wood polished daily before he arrived, two enormous crystal inkwells with round brass covers, a leather armchair, masculine stuff, the woman's featured a pink faux-marble—but really wooden—table without drawers, flowered curtains, a light-colored rug, nonchallenging pictures, a fanciful chair, more like one you'd find in a drawing room than an office. She wore a hat to work and was hardly alone in this; ladies wore hats indoors except at home and sometimes even then. My mother wrote most of the firm's first drafts, speeches, articles, notices, triple spacing as she went. My father had persuaded his wife to stay in the background so as not to risk, he explained, being seen as a pushy female with ideas—a threatening and sometimes deadly combination, toxic to the male. She was not invited to conferences with clients nor was she invited along on his numerous business trips all over the country, places like Cincinnati or Chicago or Washington, to meet with presidents and sometimes lesser management of the companies who had paid for his public relations services. Once in a while he would take me with him, and while he was doing business, a woman, probably an executive secretary, would spend the day with me and show me the sights of the city we were visiting.

My mother—whom I never called anything but “Mother”—had plenty of ideas but was temperamentally a shy person; the arrangement was okay with her. On the way back from Barnard I would often stop in and pay her a visit before I walked home to the house on Sixty-third Street where we all lived together, they on the second floor, I on the third. There she was, in her custom-made hat, a small thing with tiny flowers and a veil, typing away at her IBM Model C typewriter. “Hello, ducky,” she'd say, looking up. She was cheerfully energetic at work, docile at home. One afternoon in the spring of my junior year—1951—she told me that “Eddie would like you to work with us over the summer. We'll pay you.” What would I do? “You're such a good writer,” she said. “You'd be doing some obituaries and some press releases.”

“Who died?”

“Nobody. But when, for example, Mr. Zemurray dies, we'll have his obit ready to send to the papers. Most of them will use it verbatim. Not the
Times,
though. They have their own obituary man.”

“I don't know. . . .”

“Well, think about it. It would be a good experience for you.”

So I did it—about six weeks that summer when I wasn't being a footloose New York girl. I went to my father's office every day and learned how to write a news release and an obituary. For Mr. Zemurray's I went to the New York Public Library and dug out the published facts of the life of the president—more like tsar—of the United Fruit Company. When I found statements somewhat less than flattering to Zemurray—the United Fruit Company, it seemed, had swallowed two Central American countries—my mother instructed me to soften them or leave them out. Obituaries—at least those that originate in a public relations firm—do not mention the unsunny hours. I learned that.

I also learned that you can't fudge details or guess in place of know; you can't make a mistake. My father was celebrated for firing people who got one thing wrong in a press release, one letter wrong in a word, a name misspelled, a date off by one day. No one who ever worked for Edward L. Bernays got a second chance. One of his former staffers told me a bunch of these men, all of whom had been canned for minor goofs, got together every so often to trade Eddie stories. They called themselves the “Bernays B'rith.” My father's office manager, Howard Cutler, a laconic, unsmiling administrator of impeccable New England stock, did all the fir-ing—and there was a lot of it—as my father could not face doing it himself.

And so I picked up some basic writing skills and at the same time advanced my knowledge of what sort of people my parents were, something I wasn't especially eager to do, suspecting that I would find holes and wrinkles—in other words (one of my father's cherished phrases) there was no guarantee that everyone was going to love them, especially my father. Children are supposed to recognize and absorb the grimmest truths about their parents—and then get over it—sometime before the age of puberty. Not me. It was as if I lived in a house whose cellar stairs I had never gone down, nursing a suspicion that there was something down there I would rather not see or smell.

A
year or so after this my mother, settling into a voice range she used when serious and private, told me that she and my father had been talking things over, my father being at an age—sixty-two—when most men want only to retire so they can play golf in a world of perpetual sunshine. Well, of course Eddie wasn't about to retire—he had the look and the energy of a man in his early for-ties—but they had been talking things over, as she said, and since there didn't seem to be anyone within his circle of friends and acquaintances to whom he felt he could entrust “the business,” they had decided to turn it over to me. I was a good, clear writer and I seemed to know what was involved in relating to the public. She beamed a smile at me, bestowing first prize on a contestant who doesn't even know she's in a contest.

I was stunned, surprised not only by what she was proposing, but that she also seemed unaware of how many hours she had missed the boat by. I had, apparently, hidden my distaste for my father's occupation as thoroughly as an alcoholic hides the bottles in the house. We were in my mother's office, a place that reflected someone else's taste, someone who liked frills and flowers—a postwar stereotypical version of a lady's working place, so distinct from a man's manly one. Manhattan's poshest neighborhood surrounded us quietly, without grime, with muted noise, with a sky that seemed brighter than that which hung over the Third Avenue El and those murky streets below Houston. Stirred by somewhat more primitive motives than my mother's and secretly mutinous against my father's equation, which placed perception and reality on opposite sides of the equals sign, I was horrified by her offer and just as horrified by having to decline it. I didn't want to have to hurt her feelings.

“I'll have to think about it,” I said, honoring the way of the coward. “I'm not sure that it's exactly what I want to do.”

My mother looked as if someone had poured ice water down her back. “You don't want to do it? Why not? Eddie thinks the world of you.”

Yet another surprise; he had never told me this. He had, in fact, indicated from time to time that he thought women had not been endowed with a brain like a man's, ours being softer and less organized. But that wasn't the point. The point was I would rather have become a foot doctor than a public relations practitioner. I didn't want to have to mess around with the truth or tell people that Mr. Zemurray had done more for the people of Guatemala than God had or sell someone the idea that they should buy something they didn't need. I loved my mother and father in a strange, powerful, and not especially happy way but I couldn't dream of placing my feet into the prints they had left in their stretch of the beach.

I
didn't think it strange that Henry Sell, editor in chief of
Town and Country
, would invite a twenty-one-year-old girl with almost no work experience or proven talent to have lunch with him at Le Pavillon, New York's glitziest dining establishment. Moreover, I was too callow to imagine that he might want to have his way with me. The restaurant looked as if it had been decorated by the parents of a long awaited girl child. Everything but the flatware was pink—tablecloths, flowers, napkins, plates, carpet, curtains, waiters.

I was on time, but Sell was there before me, sitting at a choice table, a half-finished drink within reach. He stood to greet me. I was wearing a new gabardine suit—the jacket had a peplum, a kind of flounce just above the waistline—kid pumps, white gloves: a generic young lady of New York.

A transplanted westerner, Sell was remarkably good-looking for a man in his fifties. He had lots of thick silver hair, an open face, and the kind of extreme polish you acquire only by design and prolonged focus. While he mostly talked, I mostly listened.

“Your father says you might like to work for our little magazine.” He speared a pink shrimp glistening with sauce and brought it to his lips, which opened and shut over it, leaving not a trace around the mouth hole.

“He does?”

“Well,” Sell said. “How about it, would you like to come to work for us? I can pay you twenty-five dollars a week—before taxes.”

I asked what sort of job I would be doing.

“Marian, our beauty editor, could use some help,” he said. “How does that sound?”

It didn't sound at all like what I had in mind. But it was a job in
publishing
. Dazzled by words but lacking the
sitzfleisch
for graduate work, I had been looking for a job for several months, had visited the headquarters of at least a dozen publishing houses, had stupidly turned down one job at
Newsweek
answering reader mail and another at the
New York Times
in their information department. When I wasn't looking for a real job I was at the Marguery Hotel, a huge place that occupied most of the block between Park and Lexington Avenues, Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth Streets, where Adlai Stevenson, running for president the first time, had his New York headquarters. Along with a lot of like-minded young people—most of them female—who could afford to volunteer their services, I stuffed envelopes and folded pieces of paper for hours on end. Once, the candidate shook my hand, sending me into a swoon.

I had just about given up landing anything but a job plying the telephone for a dentist when I broke down and asked my father for help. My main problem was that I had no useful skills, my feminist mother having persuaded me that I shouldn't learn how to touch-type. “If they find out you can type you'll get stuck there forever.” She also persuaded me not to learn how to cook. Doubting, I nevertheless accepted Sell's offer and the following week started work at this swankest of Hearst monthlies. After a while it dawned on me that Mr. Sell must owe my father a hefty favor, for the so-called job for which he was paying me twenty-five a week did not exist; he had invented it. There was nothing for me to do. The office of the beauty editor, overlooking Madison Avenue, was a small room off the large bull pen where most of the other editors worked and chattered like birds in an aviary. On the shelves were dozens of empty perfume bottles: Joy—“the world's most expensive perfume”—Chanel No. 5, Femme, Shalimar. The beauty editor seemed surprised to find me in her office. “I don't know why Henry hired you,” she said. “I don't need an assistant.” She was perfectly nice about it. “Please call me Marian.” Marian came in every morning around eleven, bringing with her clouds not of Chanel but of Johnnie Walker. She left before three, having gone out for a leisurely lunch in the meantime. There was nothing for her to do either.