The Hard Bargain: Music, Medicine, and My Father (Richard Tucker, Opera Legend)

By David Tucker and Burton Spivak

The Hard Bargain describes in vivid detail and elegant prose the clash of wills between a famous father and his hard-driving middle son. Richard Tucker, the American superstar tenor from the golden age of the Metropolitan Opera, demanded that his son become a surgeon. Rejecting his father’s wishes, David wanted to follow his father onto the opera stage. Their struggle over David’s future—by turns hilarious and humiliating, wise and loving—is played out in medical and musical venues around the world. The father and son strike a bargain, the hard bargain of the title, which permitted both dreams to flicker for a decade until one (the right one, it turns out) bursts into sustaining flame. This heartfelt memoir about a son’s struggle against the looming power of a magnetic father is conveyed in a moving narrative that one reviewer has called “the most dramatic exploration of the private life of a legendary singer in the annals of opera literature.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543478532

David Tucker

David Tucker has been a keen user of public transport since the 1960s, while working in various professions as a researcher and writer. A tour guide across Scotland since 2010, David has extensive knowledge of travel in the Highlands. He has lived for many years near Stirling, enjoying the city's cultural life and good public transport connections.

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Copyright © 2018 by David Tucker and Burton Spivak.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 03/12/2018

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Book Summary

About the Authors

Foreword

PART ONE

BEFORE DAVID NELLO

Chapter 1 Brooklyn and Great Neck

Chapter 2 Rubin Ticker and Richard Tucker

Chapter 3 Tufts and the New England Conservatory of Music

Chapter 4 Italy, Israel, and the Fontainebleau

PART TWO

THE SHORT LIFE AND SPECTACULAR DEATH OF DAVID NELLO

Chapter 5 Cornell Medical School

Chapter 6 David Nello and Skitch Henderson

PART THREE

AFTER DAVID NELLO

Chapter 7 Mount Sinai Hospital

Chapter 8 The National Institutes of Health

Chapter 9 On the Shoulders of Giants

Chapter 10 Bogotá

Chapter 11 Europe

Chapter 12 Near Death

Chapter 13 Cincinnati

Chapter 14 The Robin and the Rose

Chapter 15 The Battle Zone

Chapter 16 Kid Scar’s Greatest Fight

Chapter 17 My Father, My Mother, and Israel

Chapter 18 David Nello Redux

To my father—my mentor and greatest teacher.

And to all the teachers who shaped my life and career.

David Tucker

For my darling wife, Marcia, who passed away in 2015.

Always my guiding star, then and now.

Burton Spivak

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W e would like to thank Mervyn Kaufman and Girl Friday Productions for their assistance in the preliminary steps of this project, and Jacques de Spoelberch, who read our manuscript and made several helpful suggestions.

We would also like to thank several computer specialists for their expert and timely assistance through the various drafts of this book. Paul Einarsen, founder of Bluewater Imaging LLC, and Michael Franco were always at the ready to help our efforts in Connecticut. Leo Papp was comparably available to assist in Florida. Finally, Meredith Emond facilitated the design of the book cover, highlighting the commanding photo of my father.

And we owe a special thanks to Jim Drake, my father’s award-winning biographer, who read the entire manuscript to confirm the accuracy of David Tucker’s memory.

David Tucker

and

Burton Spivak

BOOK SUMMARY

The Hard Bargain describes in vivid detail and elegant prose the clash of wills between a famous father and his hard-driving middle son. Richard Tucker, the American superstar tenor from the golden age of the Metropolitan Opera, demanded that his son become a surgeon. Rejecting his father’s wishes, David wanted to follow his father onto the opera stage. Their struggle over David’s future—by turns hilarious and humiliating, wise and loving—is played out in medical and musical venues around the world. The father and son strike a bargain, the hard bargain of the title, which permitted both dreams to flicker for a decade until one (the right one, it turns out) bursts into sustaining flame. This heartfelt memoir about a son’s struggle against the looming power of a magnetic father is conveyed in a moving narrative that one reviewer has called the most dramatic exploration of the private life of a legendary singer in the annals of opera literature.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr. David N. Tucker is a retired ophthalmologist with degrees from Tufts University and the Cornell University Medical College. After an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, he was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health, doing research in infectious diseases during the Vietnam War. As chief resident under Dr. Edward Norton at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami, he accepted a one-year fellowship with the eminent Colombian microsurgeon Dr. José Barraquer and with other prestigious ophthalmic surgeons in Europe. For over thirty years, Dr. Tucker was in private practice in Cincinnati and was the director of the Department of Ophthalmology at Cincinnati Jewish Hospital for twenty-seven years. After retiring in 2004, he taught part time as a clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at the NYU School of Medicine. He and his wife Lynda celebrated their golden anniversary in 2013 and have four children and nine grandchildren.

Burton Spivak received his PhD in American History at the University of Virginia where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Virginia- Danforth Fellow, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Brown University, Bates College, and the University of Virginia. He is a former recipient of the Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize for outstanding achievement in teaching and scholarship, awarded annually by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His book Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo, and the Republican Revolution (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1979) was included in C-SPAN’s American Presidents: Life Portraits list of twenty-five recommended books on Thomas Jefferson. Spivak also received his JD degree from the University of Virginia where he was on the Law Review and Order of the Coif, and practiced tax law in New York City for many years. He currently is an Adjunct Professor of History at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.

FOREWORD

R ichard Tucker was the greatest tenor America has ever produced, Luciano Pavarotti told me in 1983 when he was writing the foreword to my book Richard Tucker: A Biography . On the stage, Pavarotti continued, Tucker was an authentic Italian tenor—but he was much more than that. As I said to him many times, ‘Richard, you are the master of us all.’

For thirty consecutive seasons, Richard Tucker held the elite status of primo tenore at the Metropolitan Opera. When he made his Met debut in January 1945, he was hailed by the veteran critic Irving Kolodin as having the most beautiful tenor voice since Beniamino Gigli’s a quarter century earlier. In 1950, (Sir) Rudolf Bing, who had just become the Met’s general manager, went even further. Caruso, Caruso, that’s all you hear, said Bing. I have a feeling that one day, we are going to be proud to say we heard Tucker! By 1975, when the great tenor died suddenly during a concert tour, Bing’s prediction had come true: Richard Tucker was universally lauded as one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century.

When Sara Tucker, his widow, chose me to be his biographer, I conducted nearly two hundred hours of interviews with Richard Tucker’s family, friends, artistic colleagues, agents, managers, and publicists. No one ever declined my request for an interview—and without exception, thanks to Sara Tucker’s endorsement of my work, no one ever withheld anything they knew from their association with him, whether onstage or offstage. Everyone I interviewed spoke of Richard Tucker in the most respectful, affectionate, and endearing terms.

I was especially pleased to be able to conduct multiple interviews with the man who, according to Sara Tucker, was her husband’s closest friend and confidant: Ben Herschaft. My husband and I were together forty years, Sara had told me, but not even I knew Richard like Ben knew him.

I met Richard through his father, Ben Herschaft told me during my first interview with him. "Sam Tucker was a client of mine in the fur business. Sam sold silk for the linings of fur coats, and when his youngest son, Rubin—or Ruby, as we always called him—was just a teenager, Sam put him to work as one of his salesmen. That’s how I met Ruby. He tagged along with his father when Sam called on me with his newest brands of silk.

At that time, Mr. Herschaft continued, "I didn’t know that Ruby was studying for the cantorate. But from the moment he told me about his ambition to become a chazzan, I was so proud of him! I had made it a point to hear every cantor of that period—I heard almost all of them, and I owned copies of their recordings. When Ruby told me about his studies, I gave him those recordings. I also took him to hear Mordechai Hershman, who became Ruby’s model as a cantor."

Ben Herschaft was fifteen years Tucker’s senior, and their age difference was a factor in their unusually close friendship. I guess you could say that I was somewhere between an older brother and a second father to Ruby, he said. And when Ruby met and married Sara, whose family I knew quite well, I dedicated myself to help him pursue a career in Jewish liturgical music.

The mention of Sara Tucker’s family (her parents, Levi and Anna Perelmuth, owned and operated one of the largest banquet halls in Manhattan’s Lower East Side) prompted me to ask Ben about the truth of a rumor that had surrounded Tucker during his early years at the Met: namely, that his wife’s brother, the star tenor Jan Peerce, had persistently lobbied Edward Johnson, the Met’s general manager at that time, to give the young Tucker an audition. I asked that question because in opera circles, it was common knowledge that Peerce intensely disliked Tucker and that their respective families were not on speaking terms.

Ben confirmed their deep rift, and also confirmed that Peerce had not lifted a finger to help the husband of his sister to gain entry to the Met. Have you spoken to Jan Peerce? Ben asked. If you do, and if he’s direct with you, he’ll admit that he never did anything to help Ruby as a singer.

In 1973, a decade before I would be chosen as Tucker’s authorized biographer, I had the opportunity to interview Jan Peerce for an oral history project that I was codirecting at Ithaca College, where I was a professor and an administrator at the time. The project involved American popular culture, and it had been funded through Gustave Haenschen, a longtime member of the college’s board of trustees who was once one of the best known conductors in radio broadcasting and, coincidentally, had hired Peerce as a tenor for network radio programs.

When I interviewed the affable Peerce in his apartment in midtown Manhattan (his main home was an estate in New Rochelle), he prefaced our discussion by saying, I know that Gus has already told you that there’s one subject I will not discuss in this or any other interview. You know what that subject is, so I’m sure you will respect my wishes.

I nodded my agreement, as Haenschen and others cautioned me not to mention Richard Tucker’s name in Peerce’s presence. But when I turned off my tape recorder two hours later, Peerce was in such an ebullient mood that I decided to take a risk by referring indirectly to his brother-in-law. Regarding the one subject that we agreed not to talk about, I asked hesitantly, when you first heard him sing, did you think he would ever have a career?

I had expected Peerce to bristle at my comment, but to my surprise, he reacted calmly and was unusually forthcoming. That’s a fair question, he said, and I’ll answer it, provided that you don’t ask me any follow-up questions.

Honestly, Peerce began, I didn’t think he had any chance at all. When he married my sister, his voice was not refined, to put it kindly. As one of my brothers said, ‘His voice was so small that you couldn’t hear him in the other room of a two-room apartment.’ He had a little voice, a breathy-sounding voice, and he couldn’t even read a note of music. He used to ask me for advice, but I never gave him any.

Peerce grudgingly acknowledged that Tucker’s voice grew stronger and better with each passing opera season. But what surprised me about the tone of Peerce’s comments was that his voice and mood brightened when he began to speak about Richard Tucker, the family man (a very good father, Peerce told me), and about David Tucker, his middle son.

Perhaps you know, he said to me, "that David is a doctor. Not just a doctor but an ophthalmologist—a surgeon."

I knew that Peerce had been plagued all his life with terrible eyesight, so I felt that his admiration for David’s career choice was understandable. But much more was going on here: I was struck that Jan Peerce, Richard Tucker’s mortal enemy, had joined hands with David’s father in a profoundly Jewish spirit of awe and gratitude for a life spent in healing.

To be a doctor, to be a surgeon, is the pinnacle of a Jewish family, Peerce said reverentially. "He’s not just David Tucker—he is Dr. David Tucker."

Maybe you know this, he added, but David wanted to be a singer. As my wife, Alice, will tell you, David asked us to listen to his voice. (As will be seen in the coming chapters, some of the funniest and heart-wringing episodes involve Richard Tucker’s repeated refusals to give his son voice lessons.) Peerce went on to say, We invited David to come to our home, and I had him sing some scales to warm up. Alice took the words right out of my mouth when she said to me, in front of David, ‘He sounds just like a young Ruby!’ She was right. David sounded a lot like his father did when he was young.

When I asked Peerce whether he believed that David could have become a professional singer, and whether his voice might have developed like his father’s had, he gave me a straightforward answer. I didn’t think his father could get anywhere, and obviously, I was wrong about that because he succeeded at the Met. As for David’s prospects, who knows if he could have had a singing career? Maybe yes, maybe no.

Ben Herschaft confirmed what Peerce had said. It’s true that David had wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. Ben proceeded to describe the monumental clash between the strong-willed father and the equally strong-willed son. David wanted to sing. Ruby insisted that he become a doctor. Ruby paid for David to go to the New England Conservatory of Music so long as he kept up his grades in premed at Tufts University. Ruby paid for voice teachers and lessons in New York, so long as it didn’t interfere with Cornell Medical School. Beyond that, he gave David no help. He discouraged him. Ruby even asked me to discourage him.

Many others confirmed Richard Tucker’s stony refusal to help his son in an arena in which the father was a colossus. Alix Williamson, the publicist who had helped make Tucker an international celebrity, had also been drawn into the strategy to keep David away from the music world. He has always been my particular favorite of the three Tucker boys, Ms. Williamson told me, and it was no secret to Ruby that I favored David. Both Ruby and Sara had mentioned that David had theatrical aspirations. But Ruby made it clear that if I ever gave David any help, it would be the end of my professional relationship with Ruby. In very plain language, and not angrily but factually, he said he would fire me.

Yet the strong-willed son refused to yield. Like Ruby, Ben Herschaft told me, David was relentless when he set his sights on a goal. As a young man with an even younger wife and three children (eventually there would be four), and a crushing academic load in medical school, David sang and sang. He sang at weddings and bar mitzvahs, in restaurants and synagogues, he sang wherever he could find an audience and a spotlight—and he sang despite his father’s stone-cold indifference. Witnesses who had heard David sing told me that he had the glimmer of a fine lyric-tenor voice. His mother admitted to me (and later repeated in a televised interview) that David’s voice was pretty good, but we wanted him to be a doctor. And Jan Peerce told me the same thing.

In one of many telling episodes in this memoir, David sang for the legendary tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi at his villa in Italy, where David and his parents were visiting. To the Tuckers’ complete surprise, Lauri-Volpi urged Richard to leave his son with him for a year. I will give him the technique to be a tenor, the maestro promised. But Richard Tucker immediately and icily refused, and the son silently accepted his father’s decree.

In the chapters that follow, the clash between father and son plays out around the world. Seeking singing lessons and paternal love, David follows Richard Tucker on a musical odyssey to the Concord, the Fontainebleau, and Las Vegas, and to Israel, Rome, and Florence. Seeking glimpses of his chosen career for his son, Richard Tucker follows David on a medical odyssey to Tufts, Cornell, Mount Sinai Hospital, the National Institutes of Health, and Miami and Bogotá. These colliding journeys are conveyed in a narrative that represents, in my judgment, the most dramatic exploration of the private life of a legendary singer in the annals of opera literature.

This book’s title is drawn from a bargain that Richard Tucker imposed upon his son in order for David to pursue his musical dreams. The three parts to this deeply affecting memoir—Before David Nello, The Short Life of David Nello, and After David Nello—derive from the stage name that David Tucker coined to escape his lineage at auditions for musical and theatrical roles, although his startling resemblance to his internationally known father made it next to impossible for him to pass as his alter ego. The book’s intriguing question—who killed David Nello?—unfolds in the narration of these conjoined and conflicting journeys. Was it Richard? Was it David himself? Or were the father and son partners in David Nello’s demise?

Without giving too much away, I can say that in 1983, I had the good fortune of interviewing David for two days at his home, at his office, and at a hospital in Cincinnati. At that time, he was at the height of his medical career as chief of the Department of Ophthalmology at the Jewish Hospital. I saw up close his passion to help and to heal. I witnessed his incredibly long hours as I squeezed my interviews into his nearly round-the-clock schedule. I remember his lovely wife, Lynda, telling me, David is a wonderful husband and father, but medicine is his life. Medicine defines him, and medicine consumes him.

For my part, what I observed when I met him in 1983 confirms his wife’s words. Indeed, David’s singular passion for medicine brought to my mind the testimony of numerous witnesses to Richard Tucker’s pursuit of absolute perfection as an opera singer.

Just as I was privileged to be the authorized biographer of Richard Tucker, I was honored when David and his coauthor, Burton Spivak, an award-winning American historian, invited me to contribute this foreword to their intimate book about the relationship between David and his father. I can confirm, personally, the factual accuracy of David’s memory; and I can also attest that Burton Spivak, in his vivid and elegant prose, has captured not only the voice but also the spirit and heart of David Tucker, and the electric relationship between him and his father. It is my belief that The Hard Bargain: Music, Medicine, and My Father (Richard Tucker, Opera Legend) will rightly take its place on the top shelf of a large bookcase of memoirs about sons and fathers.

James A. Drake

Merritt Island, Florida

PART ONE

BEFORE DAVID NELLO

CHAPTER ONE

Brooklyn and Great Neck

I was fifteen years old, and I thought my father was going to kill me. My brush with death began one afternoon while hanging out at a friend’s house in Great Neck, Long Island, where we had moved in 1952 from Brooklyn. My buddy had gotten hold of a box of exploding gunpowder seeds. You stick them in someone’s cigarette, he told me. When the cigarette burns down to the seeds, the cigarette explodes.

The only member of my family who smoked was my mother. I asked my friend if I could have some of the seeds. He counted out five from his stash. That night, my mother, father, and two brothers (Barry, my older brother, and Henry, my younger brother) were in our den, watching television. My father got up to change the channel, and my mother asked him if he would go into the kitchen and get her purse with her cigarettes. This was my opportunity.

I’ll get your cigarettes, Mom, I innocently said and raced into the kitchen.

I had the seeds and tweezers in my pocket. I stuffed all five halfway down a cigarette and raced back to the television show. I handed her the tampered smoke and said, like a good son, Let me light it for you, Mom. She thanked me, and I lit it with a thrill of anticipation. After four or five puffs, I saw a bright light and heard a loud crack.

My eyes, Ruby! my mother screamed in horror to her husband. I can’t see anything! I am blind!

My two brothers were in the room, but my father glowered only at me. You bastard! he screamed, rushing at me. "This time, I am going to kill you."

A half century later, I can still feel him chasing me from the house into the garage, circling after me around the car like a predator, hissing curses and promising to kill me if he caught me. He grabbed a shovel off the wall and lashed at me across the hood of his Cadillac. His furious blows carved deep gashes into the car—and would have in me if my father’s arms had been longer.

My mother’s blindness was only momentary, and I can still hear her screams. Ruby, stop! Ruby, stop! That distracted him for the instant I needed to bolt from the garage and disappear into the neighborhood night.

My father chased after me, hurling threats at me at the top of his lungs—wake the dead screams that made me fear for his golden voice. The increasing distance between the two of us as we ran on into the night allowed me to think that I might live another day so long as I did not return to my father’s house.

I was hiding in the bushes about a half mile from our home, where my older brother found me. He told me that Mom had calmed Dad down and I could return home. When I walked into the house, my father started at me again, but my mother held him by the arm with both hands, and he relented.

You are the spawn of the devil, he spat at me. Who does this to his own mother? You cannot sleep in the same room with your brothers ever again so you don’t infect them with your evil.

My father did not speak to me for a month. I was not allowed to talk at the dinner table or sit in the same room with him. My father was Richard Tucker, who, at the time these events unfolded, was the great Richard Tucker, the leading tenor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, an artist near the summit of worldwide fame and adulation. I was his middle son, and for much of my early childhood, I stacked nothing but heartbreak and disappointment at his door.

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I grew up on 919 Park Place in Brooklyn. We lived on the seventh floor of a fifteen-story apartment building, very close to Ebbets Field, where my heroes Duke Snider and Jackie Robinson and the rest of my beloved Dodgers played. Baseball was my passion when I was six or seven, and we played all the time. We didn’t play real baseball because there wasn’t a ball field near our apartment. We played stickball and sewer ball, the urban cousins of baseball.

We played sewer ball (also called punch ball when we didn’t have a bat) on the street. Unlike the suburbs where the sewers are on the curbs, in downtown Brooklyn, they were in the middle of the street. In our game, one sewer would be home plate, and another would be second base. We put ball gloves on the curbs, marking first and third base. If you hit a ball past three sewers on a fly, it was an automatic home run. You got bragging rights for the day if you did that.

We played sewer ball more than stickball because stickball required a wall on which home plate was marked off as a square with chalk. A pitch was a called strike if the batter didn’t swing and the ball hit the square. The pitcher called the strikes, which was fine with all of us because ever since Shoeless Joe, no one dared to cheat in baseball.

I remember three things about our apartment. We used to sit on the outside steps, talking with friends and neighbors well into the evening during the summer because the apartment was so hot, even with our window fans—which, back then, were a luxury. I remember how excited we all were when we got our first television and how we crowded around the twelve-inch screen, mesmerized by its black-and-white images. And I remember looking out the windows from our kitchen and living room at the throngs of people on the sidewalks below.

Before my father’s smash debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1945, he was the cantor at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, one of the most prestigious synagogues in the five boroughs of New York. Befitting the sons of a cantor, he insisted that my older brother, Barry, and I enroll at the Crown Heights Yeshiva in Brooklyn. There we were taught all the subjects that were required in public school, along with the religious courses for our Jewish education and bar mitzvah preparations.

I was a terrible student at the yeshiva because I didn’t care about school. I remember vividly that the teachers (all rabbis) would write the test questions on the blackboard, and we would answer the questions in little blue books they passed out at the beginning of the exam. I never did any homework and couldn’t answer any questions, but to look busy and avoid being scolded in class, I would sit quietly and write out the questions over and over again in my answer book. When my teachers passed the tests back, they would frown at me and hit me on my hand with a ruler when I reached for my exam.

One rabbi, a short man with a long beard, hit more than most; and even on the rare occasion that I passed, he would hit me because I was left-handed. One day, after many raps on the knuckles that made my hands hot and red, I snapped and grabbed him by his beard with both hands and pulled him to the floor and started screaming at him and kicking him. I thought I was acting in self-defense. The other students sat there in shock until the loud commotion attracted another rabbi from the adjoining room, who ran in and pulled me off his colleague. The principal expelled me on the spot and called my mother to come immediately and remove me from the school.

The next day, my mother and father went to the school without me. My father came to learn the full depth of my outrageous behavior. My mother came to plead for one more chance for me. Out of the question, the principal said. Your eight-year-old son is a violent juvenile delinquent and on his way to a life of crime!

My father, a pillar of the New York Jewish community and a leading tenor at the Metropolitan, was angered by my behavior and mortified that I had brought the humiliation of expulsion from the yeshiva onto the family. He administered a stern whipping to my backside when he got home, and the next day, my parents enrolled me in P.S. 138 for my secular education. They also required me to take courses in Hebrew at the Brooklyn Jewish Synagogue after public school so I could continue my religious instruction.

Things went from bad to worse after I was thrown out of the yeshiva, much to my father’s disappointment. I remained a poor student, barely advancing to the next grade, and only doing that to avoid the death penalty of mandatory summer school, with no stickball or summer camp. More ominous for my father was my continued proclivity to combativeness, a portent that perhaps the chief rabbi at the yeshiva was correct, and I was destined for a life of crime. What I regarded as innocent fun escalated into dangerous behavior.

World War II movies were in vogue in the late forties, and I loved the scenes where the Allied pilots would bomb the Germans or the Japanese. We lived on a busy street, and the sidewalks were crowded in the morning with mothers taking small children to school and fathers walking briskly to the bus or subway station. They became my Axis enemies, and I gleefully dropped my weaponry on them: first, water balloons, then more advanced armaments like shoes and even roller skates. Passersby were hit and sometimes injured—thankfully, no one seriously.

Today, I would have been arrested. In Brooklyn in 1948, the cop on the beat went to your father and told him to give a good talking-to, or worse, to his wayward son. The lectures and spankings didn’t mend my ways, and my menacing antisocial behavior increased. I was not a bully, but I would respond to slights and perceived insults with my fists. Looking back, most of my fights were regrettable, but some I regarded then and now as laudatory.

My religious school was near a Christian neighborhood in Prospect Park, and a gang of gentiles was always waiting after school to taunt me and the other Jewish students with ethnic slurs. My classmates closed their ears, clutched their books, and ran home; but I stayed and fought. I tried to give as good as I got, but I was always outnumbered and usually came home with a cut lip, a swollen eye, or a bloody nose. On these occasions, my father never reprimanded me, proud that his son had stood up for being a Jew.

It was my father’s strong religious faith and Hitler’s genocide in Europe that caused him grievous pain over an episode of my outrageous treatment of a friend. I can’t remember what Kenny did to upset me, but, filled with anger, I planned his punishment.

There was a chute on every floor that carried trash down to the incinerator area of the basement. I lured Kenny into the basement with some tale about interesting things in the incinerator area. When we got there, I told him, You’re not going to believe what’s over there. I pointed to a corner. When he started walking, I jumped behind him and locked the door. Yelling at the top of my lungs that the super was going to light the incinerator at any minute (please understand that he wasn’t), I ran up the stairs, oblivious to my friend’s screams.

The building superintendent heard my taunts as I passed him running up the stairs. I disappeared into the neighborhood. I later found out that the super took my friend home and told Kenny’s father and my father what I had done.

For shame! my father boomed at me when I got home. What kind of Jew locks a human in an incinerator? he screamed. For the only time in his life, my father told me that he was ashamed I was his son.

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I don’t know if many people even know the phrase Sunday drive anymore; and certainly, no one today under the age of eighty would ever think to load the entire family into a car on a Sunday afternoon for a motor trip without a destination. But the Sunday drive was a high point of the week for families crowded into cement cities and longing for glimpses of the green countryside. So after lunch on Sunday, we would pile into my father’s Cadillac and drive from Brooklyn to either Long Island or Connecticut, heading for parks, tree-lined roads, and the coast with its beautiful beaches and clear blue Long Island Sound. Along our magical route, we would drive through the towns that were growing by leaps and bounds during the postwar baby and economic booms—through Roslyn, Port Washington, Manhasset, and Great Neck.

When I was about ten, I remember my brothers and me sitting at the kitchen table and listening with excitement to our parents talking about moving from Brooklyn. Soon our Sunday drives took on the purpose of permanent escape instead of temporary respite—in a word, house hunting in the country!

My mother and father grew up in Brooklyn and had deep roots and close friends there. My father didn’t have the itch to move, but my mother did. She would tell him at the kitchen table what probably thousands of mothers told thousands of fathers in the decade after World War II when the American suburb burst upon the social scene and new towns (Levittown) sprang up as if by magic and older towns (Manhasset, Great Neck) doubled and tripled in population. You are making very good money now, Ruby, she would say. It’s time for us to buy our own home. It will be better for the children. The schools are much better, and they won’t have to play in the street.

While we probably wouldn’t have moved in 1952 without my mother’s gentle prodding, my father was not opposed to the idea and soon warmed to it. My brothers and I were ecstatic over the beaches, oceans, and ball fields we had seen on our Sunday excursions. And it’s not like my parents were leaving their close friends behind in Brooklyn. Those who could afford it were moving to Long Island too.

My parents bought a two-story house on a half acre of land in Great Neck, Long Island, on Melville Lane that was named for America’s greatest novelist who became famous writing about whaling voyages off the coast of Nantucket and dangerous paradises in the South Seas, but who was born in the Empire State and was a New Yorker all his life. The house was in a section of Great Neck called Saddle Rock, an enclave of spacious but unpretentious upper-middle-class homes, and a cut below King’s Point, where my parents had also looked at houses, the toniest of Great Neck’s neighborhoods. The house was about 3,500 square feet, with a formal living room (with a grand piano), a dining room, a kitchen, my father’s music room, a den, a master bedroom on the first floor and several bedrooms and baths on the second floor, and a playroom in a finished basement.

All this was nicer than I had ever dreamed, but what thrilled me (and my father too) was the screened-in porch, the patio, and the large backyard! When he was home during the day and not in his music room, my father would be on the porch or the patio, looking out over the yard and the trees, trying to spot the birds that he had come to love with a passion. We lived less than a mile from a beautiful park with a pool, and often my father would tell us to grab our suits, and we would all go for a swim. The house on 10 Melville Lane was the only house my father ever lived in. When he became wealthy and famous beyond anything he or my mother could have imagined, the house on Melville Lane was still the only house he ever wanted.

My mother once gently suggested that we move to King’s Point. You’re a superstar, Ruby, she told him. You should be living in King’s Point.

Why do we want to do that, Sara? he responded. Don’t we have everything we could want right here?

My mother had asked to move to King’s Point from the perspective of the heights to which her husband had climbed. Her reference points were the Met, the best hotels and restaurants in Manhattan, and chauffeurs at their beck and call. My father answered my mother from the perspective of Brooklyn. His reference points were fireplugs and fire escapes. He told his beloved Sara that their lovely home in Saddle Rock was all they should ever want and that it would make him uncomfortable to want more. My mother had wanted to move only for him. She accepted his answer without hesitation, and she never asked to move again.

As his performing and recording schedule in New York became more demanding, my parents bought a one-bedroom apartment near Central Park South, close to the Lincoln Center. My father would spend the afternoons there before his evening performances, studying the librettos, watching television,