Heartburn (3 page)

How I got my own show is probably something you’re wondering. I’m not exactly a conventional television personality, although I suppose I’m somewhat conventional when it comes to public television, which is what my show was on, not network. “Too New York” is what the last network that was approached about me responded, which is a cute way of being anti-Semitic, but who cares? I’d rather be too New York than too anything else. Anyway, I don’t belong on a network. I have the kind of odd and interesting features that work out all right in life but not at all on the screen, so I’m far better off on public television, where the producers and cameramen are used to Julia Child and are pathetically grateful that I’m not quite as tall. Also, there’s my blink. I blink. “Hi, I’m Rachel Samstat”—saying that, looking directly at the camera, I blink fifty or sixty times minimum. It’s the looking at the camera that makes me do it; when I’m looking at a person, or a pork roast, my blinks go down to near normal.

After we taped the first show and discovered the blink, Richard, my producer, suggested I go see a professional television coach, who specialized in voices but was willing to undertake a little eyelid work on the side. She kept telling me she’d never had a failure, probably to encourage me, but the effect
was to make me absolutely determined to be her first, which I was.

“I don’t think I can fix the blink,” she told Richard after several sessions, “but I can probably do a little something with the voice.”

“We like the voice,” said Richard, and thank God, because there wasn’t much left of me by then that someone hadn’t taken a swipe at, usually using the definite article. The voice. The blink. The hair. The chin. “She has a quality onscreen not unlike Howard Cosell,” someone high up at the station is supposed to have said, and even though I choose to think he meant it as a compliment—he meant I’m the sort of person you feel strongly about one way or another—Howard Cosell was not exactly what I had in mind. What I had in mind was Imogene Coca or Elaine May. Anyway, the important thing is that I do happen to have a funny voice, and it makes people laugh. It works on television, although there’s no way a voice coach would understand that, since her job is to teach everyone to sound like David Brinkley.

It’s really because of Richard that the television show came up at all. I was on a talk show promoting
My Grandmother’s Cookies
when Richard saw me. Actually, it was Phil Donahue he saw me on. Richard is hooked on Phil Donahue. He says that if Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue he would never have wondered what women want. There I was, fielding questions about piecrust and doing my Jewish prince routine, when Richard got the idea it might make a series—me and my relatives and my friends and a few famous strangers, talking about food, talking about the role food plays in life, doing a little cooking, a middlebrow Julia Child crossed with a highbrow Dinah Shore. How we got away with it I don’t
know, except that we threw Proust and his madeleines into the opening credits, and I managed to get Isaac Bashevis Singer to make noodle kugel on the pilot. Also, the show cost next to nothing to produce, and what little it cost was underwritten by an oil company where someone I used to date is now in charge of parceling out money to public television. I dated him when he was Jewish—now that he works at the oil company you can’t exactly tell. He was so Jewish when I dated him that he taught Hebrew school, and I, who at that point had had no Jewish education whatsoever, learned about Purim and good Queen Esther and the wicked Haman from him one night in a dormitory at Harvard while he stuck one and then two and then three fingers into me. This was before the discovery of the clitoris, when there was far too much sticking of fingers into things and not nearly enough playing around with the outsides; still, it was a nice enough introduction to the origins of Hamantaschen pastries, and I retain a special and absurd affection for Purim in spite of the fact that I have always hated Hamantaschen. That isn’t true. Mark’s Aunt Florence makes good Hamantaschen. Aunt Florence, who raised Mark, is a great cook; her triumph, which she serves on Thanksgiving along with the turkey, is a brisket cooked with sauerkraut and brown sugar, and it sounds perfectly awful, I know, but it’s truly one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten.

I’d been planning to have Mark’s grandmother on the next thirteen-week cycle of my television show to discuss the brisket, as well as her tzimmes and gefilte fish, but I don’t really see how I’m going to be able to now that all this has come about. I don’t like blaming family members for what goes wrong with children, because someday when my kids are arrested for grand larceny I don’t want anyone looking accusingly
at me, but Mark’s behavior was so obviously Florence’s fault that even Florence knew it. “It must be my fault” were in fact her first words on the subject when I called to tell her I had gone to New York because her nephew had fallen in love with Thelma Rice. “Don’t be silly,” I said in reply, but what I was thinking was: You bet your sweet ass it is. Jewish princes are made, not born.

I was not raised as a Jewish princess. Sometimes I’m accused of being one because I’m not exactly the outdoor type, but I
grew up a scrappy little athlete with a scrappy little mother who wanted me to have a flashy career like her own. I wonder what she would have made of my work. My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

My mother was an agent in Hollywood, a lady agent, a classic forties career woman: she had short hair and bangs, she wore suits with shoulder pads, and she talked in a gravelly voice. She handled what were known in the business as specialty acts, which is to say mostly midgets. After they stopped making movies like
The Wizard of Oz
, the midget market dried up and she moved into actors with scars. In the meantime, we had a lot of midgets hanging around the house, and as a result my mother often served food that was a little too bite-sized. My sister Eleanor gets very churlish about my mother’s cooking, and she always points out that my mother’s fling with rumaki lasted considerably longer than it should have; but Eleanor hates to give credit where credit is due, and the fact is that my mother had enormous flair when she was paying attention, and when she didn’t feel like paying attention she threw in a lot of butter. She could also Keep Help, which I was raised to believe was no small thing; indeed, I was raised to believe that almost the worst thing that could be said about you after you grew up was that you couldn’t.

Every New Year’s Day, my parents had a big party, and their friends came over and bet on the Rose Bowl and argued about which of the players on either team were Jewish, and my mother served her famous lox and onions and eggs, which took her the entire first half to make. It took her so long, in fact, that I really don’t have time to give you the recipe,
because it takes up a lot of space to explain how slowly and painstakingly she did everything, sautéing the onions over a tiny flame so none of them would burn, throwing more and more butter into the pan, cooking the eggs so slowly that my father was always sure they wouldn’t be ready until the game was completely over and everyone had gone home. We should have known my mother was crazy years before we did just because of the maniacal passion she brought to her lox and onions and eggs, but we didn’t. Another thing my mother was famous for serving was a big ham along with her casserole of lima beans and pears. A couple of years ago, I was in Los Angeles promoting
Uncle Seymour’s Beef Borscht
and a woman said to me at a party, “Wasn’t your mother Bebe Samstat?” and when I said yes, she said, “I have her recipe for lima beans and pears.” I like to think it would have amused my mother to know that there is someone in Hollywood who remembers her only for her lima beans and pears, but it probably wouldn’t have. Anyway, here’s how you make it: Take 6 cups defrosted lima beans, 6 pears peeled and cut into slices, ½ cup molasses, ½ cup chicken stock, ½ onion chopped, put into a heavy casserole, cover and bake 12 hours at 200°. That’s the sort of food she loved to serve, something that looked like plain old baked beans and then turned out to have pears up its sleeve. She also made a bouillabaisse with Swiss chard in it. Later on, she got too serious about food—started making egg rolls from scratch, things like that—and one night she resigned from the kitchen permanently over a lobster Cantonese that didn’t work out, and that was the beginning of the end.

Shortly after that, she went into her blue-chip stamp phase. She wasn’t alone, of course. It was 1963, and there were a lot of American women who were saving blue-chip stamps and
green stamps and plaid stamps and whatever stamps their supermarkets were giving out; still, ladies in suits with shoulder pads were supposed to have more sense. My mother, who had spent years avoiding supermarkets, made at least one trip a day to the local Thriftimart. (The scar-face market had gone pretty dry on her at this point, and she had very little else to do.) She would get into her 1947 Studebaker and set off for a day in the aisles. She developed passionate and brief attachments to new products. One month she fell in love with instant minced onions. Another month it was Pepperidge Farm raspberry turnovers. The next it was frozen chopped chives. She would return home with her bags of groceries, leave them in the kitchen for the housekeeper to empty, and go up to her bedroom, where the card table was equipped with one of those little sponge-and-jar contraptions you use when you have a lot of stamps to stick.

I was living in New York at the time, and I heard about most of this from my sister Eleanor, who was perfecting her sanctimoniousness under the aegis of my mother’s progressive insanity, but I saw a little of it firsthand when my mother arrived in Manhattan one day with a ten-speed blender she had purchased for me with twenty-six books of blue-chip stamps. She had carried it onto the plane and held it on her lap all the way to New York. The next day my apartment was burglarized, and they took the blender, complete with warranty. They also took my typewriter, the television set, and my gold bracelet. My mother surveyed the wreckage and then, instead of just going out to buy a new blender for sixteen dollars, went off to the nearby A & P and spent six hundred dollars on groceries, just for the plaid stamps. Then she returned to my apartment and began pasting them into stamp books. That’s
what she was doing when the police finally arrived—sitting there at the table, laughing her gravelly laugh and licking every so often as the two policemen told us what they thought were a lot of rollicking stories about New Yorkers who’d been burglarized of all the presents under their Christmas trees. We all had a drink, and then we all had another, and four hours later my mother was singing “When that midnight choochoo leaves for Alabam’ ” and the policeman whose lap she was sitting on was taking little nips at her shoulder. Then she got up and did a tap dance to “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and passed out in the middle of it. It was a fabulous pass-out as those things go. She was in midair when it happened—she had both her legs up to one side, and she’d just managed to click her heels together when her eyes clanged shut and she slid on one side of her leg to the floor. I put her to bed.

“Was I very bad?” she said on the way to the airport the next day.

“Not really,” I said.

“Please say I was,” she said.

My father was a specialty act himself, though not in any formal sense. He was a character actor—he worked under the name of Harry Stratton, the name he still uses—but he played the kind of characters who have no character: he played kindly lawyers and kindly doctors and kindly teachers, and he said kindly things to whatever leading actor was about to lose heart in his fight to discover penicillin or defeat the outlaws or rout the Nazis. He made a lot of money—so did my mother—and they invested it in Tampax stock, and one day they were rich, and a good thing they were, because my mother’s medical bills were enormous. She drank and drank and drank and finally one day her stomach swelled up like a Cranshaw melon and
they took her to a very fashionable hospital for rich people with cirrhosis and the doctors clucked and said there was nothing that could be done. My parents had moved to New York by this time, and my mother’s hospital room had a view of the East River. She lay there slowly dying, with my father impatiently standing by. “Pull the plug,” he would say to the doctors, and the doctors would calmly explain that there was no plug, there was just the wasting away of life. A few of her former clients came to see her—the scar faces frightened the nurses and the midgets made whoopee on the electric wheelchairs—and now and then she came into focus and made deals. “I think we can get you a hundred thou on the next one,” she would say; she hadn’t handled a client in years, but she went rattling on about points and box office and below the line and above the line. The nurse would bring lunch. “I think I’ll take it in the commissary,” she’d say. One day my father called and said, “You’d better come. I think this is it.” Of course, he telephoned every day and said that, but it always sounded like wishful thinking; now, finally, I knew he must be right. I went straight to the hospital, and when I went into her room she was sleeping. Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked at me. “I just screwed Darryl Zanuck on the remake,” she said, and gave a little croak, which I didn’t know at the moment was a significant thing, the actual croak—I thought it was just her gravelly laugh—and died.