Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (39 page)

The exception was Derek, who was a middle-aged, crew-cut businessman who fancied that as the oldest he should be the team’s leader. Initially he tried to take charge. Instinctively, the other Brits deferred to him. But his authority fell apart on the very first challenge when it became apparent that he couldn’t read a simple map. I took the map from him and just kept pushing forward. Although we barked at each other continuously, the tension never quite reached the point where any punches were thrown.

I give Derek most of the credit for the fact that we never came to
blows. He was a well-meaning bloke and he did appreciate the successes we had. I actually tried hard to be good-natured, even after we had climbed a rope ladder to get into the castle only to discover that we could have strolled through an open door just around a corner. Fortunately, we still got to the Beast first, seized it, and raced toward our final task.

The finish called for us to use a metal frame, wood, and some inflatable tubes to construct rafts that we would paddle across the lake and then, after capturing the Beast, to get to the floating raft. We fired the flare gun and a Royal Air Force helicopter appeared overhead. A sling was dropped down and, one by one, we were winched into the hovering aircraft. It was one of the most exciting things I had ever done. Intensely competitive, I was thrilled when we were informed that we had beaten Cambridge.

After the contest was over, the film was edited and the host, Bernard Falk, added his witty narration. The four hours were aired over the course of four nights during the last week of August 1981 and drew a big audience. And though Derek and the others got plenty of “face time,” the voice that echoed constantly throughout the four episodes was not the one speaking the Queen’s English.

From the very first scene I was presented as a caricature of the kind of rude, pushy American whom the British love to hate. Overnight, the media decided that I was worthy of scorn and had a field day making fun of me. Russell Davies of
The Sunday Times
of London called me “the excitable Zeke Emanuel” and described my “star turn” this way:

As I recall, Davies was the kindest of the commentators. Summing up at the end of the show, Bernard Falk said, “Zeke is pushy, but where
would Oxford be without him?” Andy Oram insists that people excoriated me in letters to the editors published in papers all across Great Britain and that one of the tabloids elected me the most disliked person in the land. (Ironically, before the show was aired, I had left Britain to start medical school in the United States. I would not see the show for another three decades, when my daughters gave me a copy for Hanukkah in 2011.) The British especially hated that I led Oxford to victory.

But not everyone viewed me with disdain. A few weeks after the series aired, some of Linda’s friends went walking in the Scottish Highlands and discovered, inside a hut built as a resting place for hikers, a note advising visitors who faced hardships to “be like Zeke.”

In time the experience would help me see, with a bit more clarity, who I was in comparison with others. I
was
loud, fast, pushy, and incredibly competitive. But I was also the only member of the cast who would be both indispensable and memorable. I was willing to accept both the good and the bad, including the bit about how I resembled a movie character “lecturing its parents,” because it was pretty close to the truth. And I wasn’t embarrassed by who I was.

As my brothers made their way into adulthood, they also ran into critics and opponents. In France, where Ari was spending a semester abroad, he encountered lots of people who challenged his views on life and how it should be lived. He adapted well enough, learning to speak passable French and accepting local customs. But he was still the same old Ari, ever willing to take risks and push things to the limit. When the Glass brothers stopped to see him during their own trip to Europe, they found him to be more worldly, but no less ornery. He was starting to resent the put-downs and dirty looks he got from natives who recognized him as an American and he was veering dangerously close to the kind of attitude that had meant trouble for him over the years.

When Michael Glass came home he told a story about going with Ari to a little café for some food. Short on money, they declined the expensive bottled water that servers tend to push on diners and asked
for tap water instead. The waiter sniffed and walked away. Ari waited for the waiter to pass him three or four times before he called out loudly to remind him to bring the water. Under his breath the man muttered in French, “I’m not your dog.” Ari heard him and jumped up, puffed out his chest, and growled, “Tu es mon chien.” Thus informed that he was indeed Ari’s dog, the waiter hustled off and returned with the water on a tray. All the while, Michael Glass studied the sharp corkscrew tucked into the waistband of the waiter’s pants, wondering if he was going to attack. The
chien
turned out to be all bark and no bite and Ari chalked up another victory in his never-ending confrontation with the world.

After college, Ari knocked around in New York for a while, trying various businesses. My father, who considered advanced degrees to be insurance against unemployment and the tyranny of bosses, urged him to get an MBA. Ari could have gone into the MBA program at Northwestern. However, just as I had deviated from my father’s advice in order to study bioethics, Ari decided to search for something more exciting and fulfilling than the classroom. Through a friend he was hired by a legendary New York talent agent named Robert Lantz. Already in his seventies when Ari met him, “Robbie” Lantz was the son of a German screenwriter who had escaped the Nazis by fleeing to London. There Robbie had worked for years as a story editor and consultant for American film companies. He finally came to the United States in the late 1940s to work as an agent. He wound up representing a roster of writers, actors, and directors that was the envy of the industry. Among them were Milos Forman, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Bette Davis, Montgomery Clift, and James Baldwin. He also represented the estate of Damon Runyon.

Robbie was the quintessential New York character. A regular at the Russian Tea Room, he attended all the important theater openings and frequently wrote letters to the editor of the
Times
to complain about the rude service delivered by ushers and ticket-takers at the theater or about crime rates that kept law-abiding citizens out of Central Park at night.

When Ari met him, Lantz represented the producer of the hugely successful play
Amadeus
and he was trying to help Philip Roth develop a film about the Soviet gulags. The press often turned to him for comments about the state of the entertainment industry or the secrets of successful agenting. He invariably stressed loyalty and constant concern for clients. It was important to accept, he said, that for some actors “a bad haircut can be a catastrophe of biblical proportions.”

As an Emanuel brother, Ari understood, instinctively, how to deal with people who were demanding, mercurial, emotional, and dramatic. Because reading remained a chore, he knew he would always struggle to evaluate book proposals or scripts for plays and movies. However, no one would work longer hours on behalf of a client than Ari, who still had trouble sleeping past sunrise, or pour more energy and activity into a single day. Also, the skills and techniques of nagging, defiance, and charm that worked so well for him in the family and allowed him to go up to the line but rarely cross it were perfectly suited to a business where relationships matter more than anything else. He liked nothing more than to be a champion for something or someone he believed in. He was a tireless advocate.

Seeing Ari’s potential, and noting the big trends in the entertainment business, Robbie Lantz gave him some serious counsel. New York would remain a big theater town and the center of the publishing universe, but the real action for actors, screenwriters, directors, and producers was in Los Angeles. If Ari wanted to make full use of his talents, earn real money, and represent important artists, he should go west. In 1987, my brother packed and moved to Los Angeles, where, with my father’s financial backing, he bought a house in Hollywood and began working on the lowest rung of the ladder: in the mailroom/training program at Creative Artists Agency.

Ari loved the work from the very first day and managed to perform even the most menial tasks—like washing a superior’s car—without grumbling. He was so determined to do well that despite his dyslexia, which made reading almost physically painful, he committed himself to reading as many scripts as he could get his hands on. During one
family vacation in Costa Rica he actually spent part of each day plowing through a stack of bound manuscripts while the rest of us went swimming and explored the countryside.

In the mid to late 1980s, we three brothers were all pursuing very distinct careers, as far apart as was possible. From the moment he moved west, Ari would never live anywhere else but Los Angeles. I was in the midst of my medical and bioethics training—and raising two daughters—in Boston, more than 2,600 miles away. And Rahm lived in Chicago while taking temporary assignments in Washington, D.C. We would keep in touch by phone but in the coming few years we would spend very little actual time together.

But just as I think it was no accident that we chose three radically different career paths—academics, politics, and business—I think that there were good reasons for us to put so many miles between us. Although Rahm and Ari might disagree, I am certain we needed time and space to develop and succeed as independent adults. Each of us needed to find our own careers and not compete with the others. Rahm needed to get out of my shadow, and Ari needed to prove, to himself as much as anybody, that he could succeed despite his disability. Besides, I don’t think there’s a city big enough to accommodate more than one Emanuel at a time. Our force fields would have collided and God only knows how many casualties such an event might produce. Once we all began getting recognition in our individual spheres, we could then begin to reapproach one another as equals.

Ever the family negotiator, Rahm possessed the skills required to succeed in politics long before he decided to make it his career. He first joined a campaign in 1980, when he volunteered in Democrat David Robinson’s campaign to oust Republican congressman Paul Findley. The district, which was in and around Springfield, Illinois, had been held by the GOP since 1959 and Findley was a powerful incumbent. He was the third-ranking Republican congressman at the time and was also a vociferous critic of Israel. Findley was known as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s man in Washington. He spoke in ominous
and conspiratorial tones about Israel’s supporters in America. This posturing gave Rahm and Robinson, who was also Jewish, plenty of motivation to try to beat Findley. They came very close but lost the year Reagan beat Carter for the White House. Two years later, Rahm helped Richard Durbin finally dislodge Findley. Durbin would go on to a very successful career in the United States House of Representatives, and then the U.S. Senate, where he rose to majority whip.

As Rahm knew, Illinois was a great place to learn politics from the ground up. His first full-time job was at the Illinois Public Action Council, which was conducting a ferocious campaign against utility rate hikes. Focused on working families in both rural and urban communities, the council had volunteers knocking on thousands of doors every day and was raising a war chest worth millions on the basis of ten- and twenty-dollar donations. Already credited with helping to elect several members of Congress in 1982, the council’s leaders, including field director Michael McGann, intended to fight the rate hikes and energize the party around issues related to the economy and the environment.