Stars of David (11 page)

“When my mother saw that sketch, she thought it was Elaine's mother we were doing and Elaine's mother thought it was my mother we were doing, but we were free at last. It was really a very big deal for us. Because if you can get a whole audience laughing their ass off at what has made you miserable, you have freed yourself to some extent. And all of that process was being Jewish.”

I read Nichols a quote of his from an old
New Yorker
interview:
“The
refugee ear is sort of a seismograph for how one is doing . . . A thousand tiny victories and defeats in an ordinary conversation.”
“I remember saying it,” he says with a nod. “You come to this country and you're seven. You don't speak English. In two weeks, you do speak English, because you're a kid. And from that point on, your ear is tuned forever to ‘How are they doing it? What's the way to do it?' And you can't turn it off; that's your central point of concentration—‘How do I get to be
one of them
as fast as possible, as convincingly as possible?'”

The only American anti-Semitism he recalls was when he went to the Cherry Lane boarding school in Connecticut. “What I remember was Mrs. MacDonald, the mother of one of my friends with whom I rode horses, saying, ‘Now, we'd love
you
at the hunt club—there would be nothing wrong with that—because you're the
right kind of Jew
; it's those others that we really don't want.' And that confused me enormously. Even without that, there was no way
not
to know what anti-Semitism was, because Darien, Connecticut—at that time anyway—was sort of
based
on anti-Semitism.”

He says his college friendships made him feel more Jewish. “Because we made immigrant jokes and because what interested the bunch of us was music, which leads you back to Germany, God knows. And through all of that was the sense that we were all Jewish and I guess, to put it briefly, lucky to be at the University of Chicago and alive.”

I wonder if Nichols thinks any generalization can be made about why so many comedians and comedy writers are Jewish. “Jewish introspection and Jewish humor is a way of surviving,” he says. “Not only as a group, but as individuals. If you're not handsome and you're not athletic and you're not rich, there's still one last hope with girls, which is being funny. Girls like funny guys.

“When I was in this group in Chicago, we all improvised, and this beautiful TV star/jazz singer came to see us all; and out of all the guys, she picked me. That was my first wife, in fact. And I said to her after some time, ‘Why did you pick me out of all those guys?' And she said, ‘Funny is sexy.' So just when things look bleakest, there's an advantage. Humor is a way of helping you to survive if something awful happens. And all these things Jews are practiced in; all these things Jews have had to pull out of their hats when things got tough. And I guess that's the best explanation I can find. It's not the only kind of humor: Steve Martin is hilarious, and it's not possible to be less Jewish than Steve.”

What does he think about the fact that Jews—however funny—are never the all-American ideal in movies? “But in any representative group of Americans, the Jews are there. Jewish characters are very often the people the audience can identify with, can enjoy. In army pictures, the Jew is the funny one, the schlemiel—you
do
identify.”

When I ask him whether the unexpected blockbuster
My Big Fat Greek
Wedding
could have been made about a Jewish family, his answer differs from the other Hollywood pros I've asked. He doesn't say it wouldn't work with a Jewish family because Jews aren't commercial; he says it wouldn't work because it wouldn't be accurate to a Jewish family. “
My Big Fat Greek
Wedding
is about what Greeks have, really more than anyone else, which is a kind of overwhelming sense of vitality, an utterly sustaining love of family. I have a very dear friend who's my line producer and she's Greek, and most weeks there are new cousins visiting her—maybe I've met fifteen cousins. And they're all sexy like she is and they're all full of life. So we don't associate that with being Jewish; we don't associate
joy
and family. If there is an exception, where there is a Jewish family for whom family supersedes everything, then there's a lot of pain in it; there's a lot of guilt; there's a difficult mother, there's a father who's not so easy either, who's also easily hurt.”

So what kind of Jewish identity results from being raised with Jewish guilt but no Jewish customs? Does Nichols connect in any spiritual way to being Jewish or is it heritage that moves him? “Certainly heritage,” he answers. “Religion? I would have to say, no. In an intellectual way, I'm glad that the Jewish religion doesn't contain things that I find really difficult, like
eating
God. That's not one of the things that I would want to do with God. I've tried and tried to understand it, but I can't. And when Catholic friends explained to me that transubstantiation is
literal
, that it is
not
a metaphor, I gave up. I said, ‘Well, I respect it, but I will never understand it.'”

What about Orthodox Judaism? “I have an emotional reaction against some aspects of Hasidic scholars and their absolute concentration and disinterest in anything but their studies . . . it looks like arrogance.”

His family—namely his three grown children—were not raised in any faith. “But there was a time when there were various tensions in my family and we were all under pressure and my son said, ‘Dad, could we celebrate the Jewish holidays next year?' I said, ‘Yes, sure. Let's get a book; let's educate ourselves. God knows it's late for me.' And we have a friend, Lorne Michaels [creator of
Saturday Night Live
], who often invited us to his seder. I said, ‘We can study with Lorne and learn how to do it.' And somehow, by the time it came up again, my son said, ‘No, I don't want to anymore.' I said, ‘Are you sure? It would be interesting, it would be fun.' But he said, ‘No.' And I had the feeling that it had to do with the inner workings in the family and the difficult time that we had entered. But he never asked again. Although all three children did go through the stages: first, ‘I'm not Jewish because my mother isn't Jewish' and then ‘I
am
Jewish.'

“My youngest daughter, Jennifer, once said to me, ‘In the end you pick Jewish because it's harder.'” How did he feel when he heard that? “Proud. And impressed. I think it was also accurate. If you get a choice, you do pick it because it's harder. You don't like yourself if you pick the other one and always feel that you're full of shit.”

I find myself looking at this famous director, who dines regularly with Spielberg and “Harrison” [Ford], who has a staff at home, and a pool outside, and an equally accomplished wife upstairs on a conference call, and I find myself asking the old chestnut: Does he ever think about how far he's come from that seven-year-old on a boat from Berlin? Nichols pauses. “I do think about that. What I think mainly is that I'm ridiculously lucky. I mean, indescribably lucky. Frighteningly lucky. Sometimes I think, ‘Oh please, don't let some spiritual bill be piling up somewhere.' And I'm relieved to remember that the first part of my life was not wonderful by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe, maybe,
maybe
I've paid my dues in that tough, painful first part, which was, after all, very long. We'll see. If not, then I'll be sorry. Of course the gag is that the luck was there to begin with. As I'm always telling my children and they're now always telling it back to me: ‘You can never tell the good thing from the bad thing. Sometimes not for years, and sometimes never, because they become each other.'”

Ronald O. Perelman

WHEN I MENTION to Revlon Chairman Ronald O. Perelman that in 2003 an article cited that nineteen of the Forbes 400's twenty-five New York City billionaires were Jewish (including him), he doesn't look surprised. “Look, I think Jews are very aggressive,” he says, leaning back in a loden green armchair in his spacious office off Madison Avenue. “I think that by nature we're high achievers. And I think by nature we're smart. I don't think we're
smarter
than anybody else. I think we have to try harder than anybody else.”

Why harder?

“Because I think people expect more from us than from anybody else. And I think that we've got to deliver that or else we're viewed negatively.”

This compact sixty-one-year-old, who appears thick in photographs but is actually trim in person, has over the years been portrayed negatively, and doggedly, by the New York tabloids; it seems they can't get enough of his marriages, divorces, remarriages, and dustups in the courts—be it the 1997 custody battle with his ex-wife Patricia Duff over their four-year-old, Caleigh, or a 2004 noise dispute with a café across from his East Side town-house. I ask him whether his religion helps him keep things in perspective. “A lot,” he says with a nod. “I believe that a large part of how we all get to where we are is not entirely our own doing. I am a great believer in that.” In other words, moments of adversity are meant to be? “I think you've got to learn from them, deal with them, grow from them.” He nods. “That's easy to say; it's more problematic when you're going through them.”

I tell him that many of the people I interviewed don't feel that Judaism offers the tools for coping with crisis. “Oh I think it does,” he says. “At least for me.”

Perelman doesn't just turn to Judaism in the rough patches; he's incorporated it deeply into his daily life. He davens every morning with tefillin (the leather cubes containing scripture that are worn on the head and arm during morning prayers), keeps kosher, goes to synagogue every Shabbat morning, and imports a minyan when he's in the Caribbean. I ask if he finds that it takes work to make time for observance. “No, it's just the opposite, I think,” he says. “Take shabbos, for instance: It becomes this great island that transforms the whole family for that period of time.” (In addition to Caleigh, Perelman has five other children—four grown kids by first wife Faith Golding and a daughter, Samantha, twelve when we meet, by ex-wife Claudia Cohen. He is currently married to actress Ellen Barkin, fifty, who is also Jewish and has two children by her marriage to actor Gabriel Byrne.)

“On Friday nights, whenever the kids are around, we'll have dinner together,” Perelman explains. “The girls will light the candles. We'll say the blessings over the wine and the bread. And then we'll have dinner and just hang around. And then Saturday, I let them do a lot of stuff, but there's a whole bunch of stuff that they
can't
do and they know that. For me, I go to synagogue every Saturday morning, I finish up around noontime, and then we'll just hang around; read, watch a movie. It's this great block of time that's so peaceful and so spiritual for me and so different that I just love it.”

I wonder if he understands why many Jews I spoke to say that they don't feel moved in synagogue. “Really?” he asks. “I feel moved every time I go.” Is he stirred by the prayer text itself, which I've heard some describe as fairly lifeless? “I think if you've got a great
chazzan
[cantor], it can make it alive,” he says. “Like Joseph Malovany, who we have at Fifth Avenue Synagogue—he's unbelievable. But it could be just a kid who is energetic. You go to a Hasidic Saturday morning service: It is fabulous. It's so full of energy and spirit and joy.”

So he wouldn't call it somber? “No, that's a Reform service,” he says with a smile.

He keeps kosher at home, and his children have followed. “They're very aware of what they're eating. They'll ask a waiter what's in it. If they're having pasta at a restaurant, they'll ask, ‘Is there any fish stock?' Even my nine-year-old [Caleigh] will ask questions as to what's in it. After school, I'll say, ‘What did you have for lunch?' She'll say, ‘Well they served meatloaf, but I wasn't sure what was in it, so I didn't eat it.' Same with my twelve-year-old. Very aware. And aware of being respectful on shabbos.”

When the family travels, Perelman always finds the nearest Chabad House (a Lubavitch shul) within walking distance; or rather, his office finds it for him. “I was in South Beach with my kids this past weekend,” he says. “Ellen, my wife, wanted to go to Canyon Ranch for two days. So rather than stay home with the kids, I said, ‘Let's go away someplace.' I asked my kids, ‘Where do you want to stay?' And my eldest daughter wanted to go to South Beach. She said, ‘I hear the Shore Club is the hippest place to stay.' There was this Chabad House like a mile and a half away from the hotel. So on Saturday, I walked over there.”

Perelman hasn't always been this devout. “My turning point came when I was eighteen years old; we took a family trip to Israel. It was the first and only time I've been there. It just had this strong impact on me. I felt not only this enormous pride at being a Jew; I felt this enormous void at not being a
better
Jew. So I decided then to begin being a better Jew. As soon as I got married, we kept a kosher house, we became much more observant. We moved to New York shortly thereafter and joined an Orthodox synagogue and the kids grew up with much more Judaism surrounding them than I ever did.”

I ask why the Israel trip was so pivotal. “It was seeing a country where everybody was proud of being a Jew, where everybody had the Jewish traditions and religious aspects of their life blended into the social and environmental aspects of their lives. Even when they were not terribly observant they were observant. And they were the happiest, most content, focused, proudest people I'd ever met.

“I went from there—I'll never forget this—to Austria, which I just hated. I wanted to leave after the cab drive to the hotel and go right back to Israel.” Why was he so turned off? “Too Germanic. Going from this proud, energetic young country to this very staid, institutionalized, pompous, strict, harsh environment.”

He says he hasn't returned to Israel in forty-eight years, mostly out of “laziness” and security concerns. “I always think it's two hours too far,” he says. “I'm not a great traveler. I've never been to most parts of the world.”

He prefers to stay closer to home—or homes; he has mansions in New York, East Hampton, and Palm Beach. Despite his wealth and stature, Perelman belongs to none of the tony private clubs that he characterizes as anti-Semitic. “New York, which is probably the most open society in America because it's so big and achievement oriented, is probably still one of the most restricted,” he says. “You go to the Hamptons or Palm Beach, which are probably sixty percent Jewish now, and you'll see private clubs that are restricted. But none of them will acknowledge that. They'll say, ‘We have Jews here.'”

He seems genuinely blasé about this vestige of prejudice—almost proud to be excluded. “There was never a time that I wanted to be where I wasn't wanted,” he insists. “And I was never bothered. If someone doesn't want you around, why be around them?”

He doesn't feel the same gentile exclusivity in the country as a whole. “I think this is the greatest place for Jews ever in the history of the world,” he enthuses. We happen to be talking just a few weeks after the 2004 election, and many Jews I know feel wary about an Evangelical groundswell. Perelman is unperturbed: “I think George Bush has been a fabulous president for Jews—far better than any president in my lifetime. As long as you don't get the nuts—the Jerry Falwells—driving the truck, then the world is a fine place. You start getting them with too much power and you could be in a little bit of danger, but I think the country is too centrist to give too much power to those kinds of people.

“I think Bush has been the best president for Israel in history. He's allowed us to defend ourselves! He hasn't held us back. No other president would have let us do this. Every other president said ‘no retaliation for terrorism.' He's the first one that said, ‘Okay, you do what you have to do to protect yourselves.'”

Obviously Perelman embodies not only the unapologetic Jew, but the visible, prosperous one. When I ask him if he bristles at the persistent stereotype that rich Jews control the media and Wall Street, he scoffs. “The truth is that we rely on the gentile establishment for our lifeblood: both the banking and advisory world, and to a large extent, the media, which everybody says is Jewish controlled, but that's nonsense. Jews still today are heavily reliant on the gentile establishment. Who are the big banks in the world? Barclays, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley. They're all predominantly gentile institutions.”

So when he still hears the “Jews-run-the-world” adage, it doesn't ruffle his feathers? “No. I mean, if someone called me a ‘Jew bastard,' that would ruffle my feathers. I was at a restaurant two years ago and at the table next to us were these Germans; I think they had just come from seeing
The
Producers
on Broadway and they were talking derisively about Jews—‘Jews this and Jews that, Jews this and Jews that.' Finally I got up and said, ‘I have never seen such a bunch of fucking assholes as you people.' And I very rarely do that. I said, ‘You guys don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and if you don't like it, you should get the fuck out of here.'”

Perelman is bullish not only about his personal Judaism but about the religion's long-range survival. “Jews have a certain value system that has been the platform for a big part of the world for four thousand years,” he asserts. “I think it is important for an individual to have the stability that comes from the belief there is a God and that that God has a great impact on his destiny. I happen to be a big supporter of Lubavitch [a Hasidic sect] primarily because of the continuity issue. I think Lubavitch has been probably the best organization in supporting pure traditional Judaism around the world and getting more young people oriented to that. More young people are realizing the importance of their Jewish heritage and they're leaning more toward the purer aspects of it in Orthodoxy than the Reform aspects of it. If you look at the strength of the two movements, you'll see that Reform strength has declined and Orthodoxy is increasing. I think it's in large part because Reform doesn't give you much to believe in. I mean, you may as well not be Jewish because they rationalize away everything that is the essence of Judaism.”

For instance?

“Well, you don't have to be kosher because of refrigeration. You don't have to celebrate Yom Kippur all day because they can start eating in another time zone fifteen minutes earlier. When you get all done, there's nothing there. And I think that kids today—what is it, the fourth or fifth generation here?—are looking for something that is more real, more established, and more substantial. I think that's what is orienting them back.”

He also prefers his Judaism the old-fashioned way: adhering to strictures of Orthodoxy. I ask how he reconciles the division between men and women; for example the requirement to sit separately in shul, or with women upstairs. “I think it's great,” he says. “For me, it allows for more concentration, more focus on what we're there for. There's less socializing and social requirements than would exist if both sexes were together. And it's not like we put the women in the basement; we put them above us. That's significant, I think, in terms of how Jewish women are thought of; they are really the head of the household.”