A Man With Daughters

There's no medicine like your children.

I have a younger daughter who calls me every morning to make sure I’ve had breakfast—I have little appetite and less memory these days—and threatens to have food delivered to me if I have not. I have an older daughter who ardently wants to prepare healthy dinners for me, but a healthy cuisine to her is raw food, so thus far I decline. It’s the love that counts.

Some days you question what you are hanging around for. Then you drop into any one of your two daughters’ three “Alice’s Tea Cup” restaurants and ease past the people waiting in line to behold a room full of the cozily-seated—or a patron exiting with a copy of your published daughters’ "Alice's Tea Cup" Cookbook (HarperCollins). Some days, down but not out, you brave the cold not as well as you braved radiation en route to a daughter’s opening night, and before the day is over, you’re basking in the glow of a rave review for her—the very same Lauren Fox!—in The New York Times. And, on some dark days, cerebrally scalped and emotionally threadbare, you ask yourself: is it worth it? And then your grandchildren burst through the door.

I vividly remember my mother, holding and rocking our firstborn, looking up at me as I entered the room and, with a beatific half-smile on her lips, telling me, “They say, ‘Your children’s children are twice your children.’” I don’t know who “they” are: I’ve never been able to find the saying or the source of it. But, for the first time I, a young father, came as close to understanding what the hitherto inexplicable (to me) ecstasy of grandparenthood was as I could ever come—until now.

I’ve learned what keeps us going is wanting to see how it all comes out. I’m beginning to see it. It’s a given and a gift that my wife is my best friend, but our daughters’ metamorphosis from children I blissfully squired around town to my two unconditional best friends was magical. The full measure of it is that there is nothing we can’t say to each other; we unwittingly shock others. It isn’t just love that conquers all, it’s love and respect, and it flows in both directions.

How it all comes out. I know what my youngest daughter Haley is going to be—she became it. She would have made a wonderful film director, but she wanted more to become a great mother and she became one of the best. Best of all, her children know it.

Lauren had to do it the hard way, the long, winding way—like everything else she’s done, in her own time. But her time is now. (And what timely medicine for me!)

A friend who hadn’t seen her since she was mugged and injured last June called me after he’d seen her show to say how distressed he was during it. The character Lauren created in “Hillbilly Women” had a crooked mouth and unevenly hunched shoulders and she maintained those distorting physical effects without let-up. She even took her first bow in character, so it wasn’t until her second bow—when she came out as herself, broad smile and relaxed body posture—that he was assured all was right in the Fox world.

For sure, what keeps us going is wanting to see how it all comes out. All is, or presently seems, right again.

When Henry Kissinger tried to fend off then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s entreaties with, “I’m an American first, Secretary of State second, and a Jew third,” she responded, “That’s all right. Here we read from right to left.” My answer is “I am a man with daughters.”

Dodger, the Joint-Custody Dog

When a day starts with the New York Times declaring, “Today, record-challenging heat…” no good can come from adding more heat to it. So, I’m eschewing all public and personal reflections for another week and extending the Dog Days.

Just when you think you think you can’t bear to wipe your wet brow one more time, a cooling breeze wafts across your forehead in the form of—what else?—a lovely story. Since Dodger, pictured above, is not shaggy, and his story, so far as we know it, is not long, this is anything but a shaggy dog story. Dodger, rescued from a pound, is a survivor in joint custody.

Adrienne Albert is a contemporary American composer who loved and lost a dog named Mahler. Mahler, a fawn-colored greyhound, used to sit—cross-legged—on Adrienne’s sofa without budging an inch to make room for anyone else on it. We’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I didn’t approve of Mahler’s manners. He could tell, and could be quite surly about it.

Adrienne longed for, more accurately pined for, a new dog. Her neighbor, Stephanie Burns, rescues dogs and finds homes for them. Stephanie, a truly devoted “dog person” in Adrienne’s admiring eyes, found Dodger at the pound, and not a moment too soon, because he was slated to be put down the next day.

Stephanie did what Stephanie habitually does—brought him home with her to place him with a good family. But Dodger, as you will see, has a way with women. After spending just a wee bit of time with him, Stephanie fell in love, so in love she couldn’t bear to part with him. She decided she would keep him.

Stephanie has two other dogs, one she’s unable to find a home for because he, Buster, has a personality disorder, no doubt from being a dog who needed rescuing, the other, a wonderful beagle named Molly.

Scheduled to be away from home for a month and knowing how Adrienne craved another dog, Stephanie asked Adrienne if she would like to take Dodger for part of the time. Would she! In the time it took Adrienne to say “Yes!” twice, she fell in love with him.

In the course of her bliss-time, Adrienne, aware Stephanie was coming home, asked if Dodger could spend the night. (This begins to sound like a French film.) Stephanie, a modern woman, said she’d already sent Adrienne an e-mail to that effect, namely, suggesting they could share Dodger. They assumed Dodger’s swagger-the-tail complicity.

The result: the two women have the doggonedest of all worlds. Joint custody of Dodger. By day, he lives with Adrienne, who composes at home and often goes out at night. By night, he’s Stephanie’s, whose schedule is the reverse. At the beginning of every week, Adrienne sends her 7-day schedule to Stephanie, who comes to pick Dodger up for several hours each day and brings him back before his bedtime, which is substantially earlier than Adrienne’s, but Dodger is either none the wiser or very cool about it. Before long, conversely, when Adrienne will be traveling, Stephanie will be spending more quality daytime with the happily bi-domiciled Dodger.

It’s all in a Dog’s Day and it’s happening in Los Angeles. Stephanie hopes it will spur additional ways for people to adopt dogs. Citing an existing “huge” animal overpopulation problem, she emphasizes, “If people can work out a joint custody situation, then more dogs can be saved.” Now doesn’t that warm your heart and cool your brow at the same time?

Distant and Aloof, Inc.

I’m thinking of making myself unavailable. It worked for Madoff.

Going to open an office smack in the middle of an inaccessible area. Hard to get to is easily as cool as hard to get.

I’m going to call my company Distant and Aloof. Or, all the bigger and better, Distant and Aloof, Inc. “Inc.” as in “inconvenient.”

I’m going to have an unlisted number—in the Yellow Pages. A welcome mat reading NOT IN. A doorbell that rings like a barking dog. “Inc.” as in “incommunicado.”

The more inaccessible I am, the more my prospects and peers will seek me. Not only will I turn down all work, but I’ll also turn down work for all my clients—if I deign to have any, because I think I’ll turn down clients as well.

Then I’ll sit back and let everyone flock to me. Isn’t that what we all do—flock to those who are supposed to know more than we know? To listen for nuggets of wisdom. And the more they charge—or distantly and aloofly offer to discount—the more confident we are in the superior knowledge we think we are getting from them. Individuals and institutions begged Bernie Madoff to take money he couldn’t refuse.

We humble ourselves at the altars of those who impress us with so little need for us. We place blind faith in remote sages, physicians and clergy, lawyers and psychoanalysts, who tell us what’s wrong with us in Latin. Our insurance, taxes and tithes don’t entitle us to a translation.

We wait endless hours in doctors’ offices. Did you ever try to keep a doctor waiting? Try my prescription. Finally admitted to the inner sanctum of a specialist after an inordinate wait sans explanation or apology, I told him I intended to deduct what I estimated my time was worth from what his fee indicated his time was worth. I got his full attention. I don’t think I got the full benefit of his knowledge—but I left his office feeling better.

In mind of that now, I’m having second thoughts about Distant and Aloof, Inc. I don’t think I can ever be one of the busy people I can’t get to.

One of those busy people was Kenneth I. Starr—“I.” as in “incarcerated.” By playing as hard to get as his role model, the more-than-mini-Madoff money manager not so aloofly “distanced” more than $59 million from his starry clientele. This morning’s New York Times reports that Starr “asked to be released from jail on bail of $2 million” and “would be in the custody of his wife, Diane Passage.” Starr-Passage—what an inviting name for a company catering to the want-to-be richer and more famous! How cunning of the man not to use it.

I clearly don’t have what it takes. I answered my phone half-a-dozen times today. I shmoozed with my doorman and stopped for acquaintances as I walked with my wife. So I’m folding Distant and Aloof, Inc. before it opens.

Anyone have the number for The Wizard of Oz?

A Club, A Knife, A Metal Bar, And Thou...

We’re a millennium beyond the great Persian poet Omar Khayyam extolling “A Jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou beside me singing in the wilderness.”

The last time I sailed the Mediterranean I didn’t say to my wife at 4 a.m., “Let’s go up on deck to look at the moon, or wait for sunrise… and bring a club and a knife with you—and a metal bar, if you have one handy."

The last time I joined a protest, I was armed with a candle. That, and what feels like a millennium of separating the wheat from the chaff since then, brings me to grapple with the grand flotilla “peace” movement.

The Israelis were mugged. Their commandos may well have turned the wrong cloud at the wrong time, but as misguided, unwarranted, over-the-top or downright foolish as their method may have been, they dropped into a trap. The do-gooders were lying-in-wait for them with open armament. As a shipboard bard might have versified wistfully after the drubbing and retaliatory fire, “A club, a knife, a metal bar, and thou beside me swinging in the wilderness.”

Let’s deal with this summarily. The Israelis blundered, hugely. But the flotilla of 546 “peaceful” activists knew what they were sailing into and what they were inviting by doing so. There’s history!—a three-year blockade; accordance with maritime law; previous flotillas intercepted; and Egypt’s co-existing blockade and independent use of force, lethal and conveniently overlooked.

Anyone desiring to stage a world-wide attention-getting event couldn’t do better. And that’s what the “humanitarians” of the six-ship flotilla wanted. According to a prior statement from their Gaza Freedom March, “A violent response from Israel will breathe new life into the Palestine solidarity movement….”

So, let’s think about this. Why does Israel have to justify inspecting the goods of six ships, or even one, from a foreign country entering its waters and bound for its shores? What country does less? What country today doesn’t have customs officers or the equivalent? What country allows anyone entry without a valid passport? What country in this day and age doesn’t have a responsibility to its citizens to protect them from harm, external or internal? The United States has a Coast Guard. And a Border Patrol. China built a Great Wall to thwart intruders from the north. Imperial Russia chose a wider gauge for its railroad tracks to prevent invasion via rail from Europe.

In 2008, a United Nations provision called for ships belonging to Iran’s state–owned Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, known as Irisl, "to be boarded and inspected at sea or in port if," according to this morning’s New York Times, “there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ they are carrying contraband forbidden by Security Council resolutions on Iran.” The Times’ report continues, “In three boardings, two by the United States Navy and one by Israeli commandos, authorities said they had discovered a virtual arms bazaar, including thousands of Katyusha rockets, grenades and mortar shells, believed to be intended for Hezbollah.” A virtual arms bazaar! How much evidence do Israelis, or their even-handed critics, need?

In New York City, a new Jewish Community Center deems it necessary to block its entrance with concrete posts to protect the lives and limbs of all those on its premises. I’ve yet to see a Manhattan church or mosque that has had to resort to such measures—upright reminders, sadly in particular to children attending to learn “Thou shalt love…” by Commandment and social ethics, that they are hated and randomly in danger for being what they are. Try to tell me Jews have no right to protect themselves and their children—and then, that the Israelis have no right to intercept a flotilla that may carry ill to them or to blockade an area that dispatches, by air and land, missiles, mines or suicide bombs of death, disfigurement, dismemberment and destruction.

Who But David Brown?

My perception of David Brown was his reality—he knew everybody. He knew people no one living is supposed to know.

When I mentioned using Irving Berlin songs for a musical about him, David said, “Ray, I speak to Irving on the phone every day. He won’t go for it.” When I mentioned I was writing a script about ballplayer-genius-spy Moe Berg, David said, “When Ernie Lehman [Oscar-nominated screenwriter] and I were cub reporters, we interviewed Moe at the Red Sox training camp in Sarasota.” And he unearthed a faded newspaper clipping from the ‘30s for me.

I’ve been introduced to some illustrious people by other illustrious people, but who but David Brown would take me by the arm and walk me across a ballroom to introduce me to Steven Spielberg? And introduce me in a way that Spielberg would remember me the next time our paths crossed? And take as much pleasure as I to learn that Spielberg knew and praised my two chief documentaries.

David was, in a word, gracious. When he heard I’d written my first screenplay, he called to ask, “Why haven’t I seen it, Ray?” When I answered, slightly embarrassed and on the defensive, “David, it’s not for you,” he said, “Ray, we’re friends. Let me be the judge of that.” He called within days of receiving it to agree with me—it wasn’t for him—but to say, “I want to see everything you write.” That’s a friend.

The one script of mine he became excited about was the one about Moe Berg. He suggested producing it with me and was briefly my partner, twice. As flickonomics would have it, he begged off—graciously—explaining he was just too overextended to do justice to “this very special” project.

In 1988, I produced an evening honoring David—and pounced on the occasion to lure a hard-to-get Shirley MacLaine onto the program. Capitalizing on her notoriety for her faith in past lives, her opening line was, “I’ve been in love with David Brown for two thousand years.” David called me the next morning to say, “Ray, you’re a great producer,” a great (disproportionate) compliment coming from a great producer when he could have stopped at thank you. Gracious.

And of course David would be one to call to make me feel like I was already a winner when one of those aforementioned documentaries was nominated for an Oscar.

I think of David every time I think of his witty opinion from his book, “Brown’s Guide To Growing Gray,” to wit, no one was ever offended by being over-tipped. And think of him every time I pass what passes today for the Russian Tea Room and wish we’d had a few more lunches together at the old Tea Room. Another former RTR habitué, agent Jeannine Edmunds, likened David to Fred Allen, “wise about the business,” adding choice words for him like “informed” and “attentive.” David was as good a listener as he was a conversationalist. His New York Times obituary referred to him as “courtly” and “urbane,” while London’s Guardian captured his charm in one succinct sentence: “Indeed, Brown was exceptional in his modesty and self-effacing geniality, traits rare in Tinseltown.” All in all, David was as kindly as he was courtly. And always, infallibly, a consummate gentleman.

The last time I saw him, he thanked me when I told him how good it was to see him, and then turned the conversation to me.

When David reached his ultimate destination, I’ll bet he was on a first-name basis with his greeter—and asked what he or she’d been up to lately.

Eminent Producer and social lion David Brown died on February 1st of this year. For his detailed achievements, please see imdb.com.

Getting Away From It All

Shortly after 9 p.m. on December 25th we got what our family had wished for since October—a White Christmas at Mohonk Mountain House.

Maddan, our grandson, was on the ice, showing his family his acquired prowess on skates—including his six-year-old don’t-puck-with-me hunched-over, hockey-player stance. His three-year-old sister Finley was perfectly content to sit on an adult’s lap in a chair equipped with skates while Maddan, showing his true nature, patiently propelled the chair around… and around… the rink.

What is a snowfall without gusts of wind? Compliments of nature, clusters of swirling snow occasionally blew in on us through the open walls of the wood-roofed skating pavilion, crystals of snowflakes dissolving on our faces. At one end of the pavilion, heat shimmers as flames dance and rise in a 39-foot-tall stone fireplace. Maddan and Finley huddled there for comfort, and a photo op.

It is a far cry from an open-air refrigerated ice rink to an outdoor heated mineral pool, but hours later I made the leap—into 100 degree water. And as the world slid ever further away, it snowed again. I don’t know what Maddan and Finley would have thought of my Indigo Herbal (hot) Poultice Massage earlier at the spa, serenity not being an operative word in a child’s word bag, though uppermost in mine.

Mohonk is no place for edgy politics or even for news. If you know of a breaking story, best you keep it to yourself. I surreptitiously read my New York Times. I saw to it that the front page was always folded inside.

Clearly, this is not how we holiday or idle in Manhattan. (But why not?) I asked Maddan what he liked most about our stay. He answered in his genuine, matter-of-fact style, “I liked everything.”

My only disappointment was the snowball fight with clean snow we anticipated that never happened. But I didn’t tell him that. Now we are looking forward to a white New Year’s. So we can have our snowball fight. May yours be merry and bright.

A la Cart

In a few hours, I will be on a China Airlines flight to China and Taiwan. I don’t expect to see Joe Biden on it with me. I am looking forward to traveling with the five other journalists I’ll be spending nineteen hours with in the air bound for Taipei, our first stop.

We’ll be visiting China’s Golden Triangle, which I like the sound of. Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei. My Manhattan triangle consists of the Upper West Side, the Theater District and Gramercy Park which, while highly desirable, doesn’t have quite the same siren call to it.

Flying is always an adventure. Nineteen hours presents limitless possibilities, but my most bizarre time in the sky took only moments during a one hour and fifteen minute flight to ingrain itself forever in my memory.

I was on a shuttle flight from New York’s La Guardia Airport to D.C.’s Washington National Airport (renamed the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in 1998). I was en route to meet privately with an ex-President of Lebanon whose foes wanted him ex-living and were not beyond following him to Washington to do it. Not long before, they’d bombed the life’s breath from a Lebanese president-elect on their own blood-drenched soil, so meeting places and meeting times were planned, and then changed, with wary, painstaking care.

Everything surrounding my suddenly-green-lighted flight to D.C. was clandestine; my “orders,” to draw no attention to myself. My head was buried in the morning’s New York Times while a flight attendant was pushing a beverage wagon forward through the aisle from the rear of the plane. As she got to me, a bottle of red wine tipped and poured into my lap. Whatever its provenance, it was full-bodied and anything but dry. Flustered, she grabbed two napkins and started frantically wiping the wine-soaked fabric clinging to my inner thighs and crotch. Some heads went up. A second attendant tore over to us, grabbed a bottle of soda water from the wagon and emptied it into my crotch. As I watched. A napkin in each hand, she began to pound on my lap. The first woman joined in. Now four hands were flailing in my lap. I was no longer inconspicuous.

Everyone noticed, but no one understood. By the time we landed, all was forgotten. The only thing identifiable about me was the dried crescent-shaped stain on my light tan slacks—and the ill-concealed glint in my eyes. I had a story.

"Now That's Power!"

Former superagent Sam Cohn is dead. But if there are phones in the afterlife, he’s already tying up two of them.

So Sam is history now, but what a history he had. If this were the eighties, the walls of his agency, ICM, and the chandeliers of his daily lunch site, the Russian Tea Room, would be shaking and lights might even be dimmed on West 57th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues for a commemorative minute. Sam Cohn was the film business in New York.

From our booth at the Russian Tea Room, film archivist Herb Graff and I once watched Sam tie up the main aisle to the tables with a telephone cord stretched from the hostess’s station to his booth. Oblivious to the hostess, the customers waiting to be seated and the waiters trying to serve their tables, Sam chatted for as long as it took to make the deal. No one interrupted or even gestured to him. Herb said to me, “Now that’s power!"

Sam knew power. He dressed indifferently—or perhaps deliberately—to prove it. His ubiquitous worn-looking pale pastel crew neck sweaters, counter de rigueur for anyone else, were standard attire for Sam at lunch, office or opening nights. I hope someone thinks of burying him in one.

I was having lunch with director Joan Micklin Silver one day after she had been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine—no small thing, particularly at the Tea Room. Sam walked right past us. “Doesn’t your agent say hello to you?” I asked her. “Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t,” she replied.

Sam loved New York and everything it offered. He couldn’t have traveled much because he was always present at the usual Manhattan haunts. Hollywood came to him in a trail of glittery stars and dark Hugo Boss suits.

But it was stopping and stooping at the table with the conspicuous kid in our presence that I remember Sam for. I saw him hand McCauley Culkin a dollar bill. And soon another, and another. I knew it wasn’t for a film and it wasn’t a bribe—McCauley’s deportment was beyond reproach. After McCauley and his parents left, I asked Sam about it. He explained they were playing their simplified version of Liar’s Poker (which I suggested they dub Cohn-Culkin Poker), matching eight-digit serial numbers on their respective one dollar bills to see who had the highest and won the other’s money. I chose not to ask Sam how he managed to lose every round to his client.

I was far from the first to observe it was a good thing the napkins at the Tea Room were linen or Sam would have eaten them; he was famous for eating paper. At a gala event in L.A., Robin Williams told the audience Sam Cohn is the only man who can eat paper and screw you at the same time. And everybody got the joke. That’s power, too.

But power is as fleeting as fame and eventually he fell from it. An epitaph etched in stone in a show business hall of fame somewhere should state he was the founding father of the superagent. In his illness, he may have become forgetful, but he’s not likely to be forgotten.