cities and attended eight grammar schools and three high schools. I was always the new kid on the block—an outsider.
Otto was a great salesman and when I started at a new school, in another city, he would always take me to see the principal on the first day, and almost invariably he would talk him into promoting me a grade. The result of that was that I was always the youngest boy in the class, creating another barrier to making friends. Consequently I became shy, pretending that I enjoyed being a loner. It was a very disruptive life. Each time I would start to make friends, it was time to say goodbye.
Where the money came from I don’t know, but Natalie bought a little second-hand spinet piano, and she insisted I start taking piano lessons.
‘Why?’ Otto asked.
‘You’ll see,’ Natalie said. ‘Sidney even has the hands of a musician.’
I enjoyed the lessons, but they ended a few months later, when we moved to Detroit.
Otto’s proudest boast was that he never read a book in his life. It was Natalie who instilled the love of reading in me. Otto was concerned because I enjoyed sitting at home, reading books I took from the public library, when I could have been out on the street, playing baseball.
‘You’re going to ruin your eyes,’ he would keep saying. ‘Why can’t you be like your cousin Seymour? He plays football with the boys.’
My Uncle Harry went further. I overheard him saying to my father, ‘Sidney reads too much. He’s going to come to a bad end.’
When I was ten years old, I made matters worse by starting to write. There was a poetry contest in Wee Wisdom, a children’s magazine. I wrote a poem and asked Otto to send it to the magazine to enter it in the contest.
The fact that I was writing made Otto nervous. The fact that I was writing poetry made him very nervous. I later learned that because he did not want to be embarrassed when the magazine rejected my poem, he took my name off it, substituted my Uncle Al’s name, and sent it in to the magazine.
Two weeks later, Otto was having lunch with Al.
‘The damnedest thing happened, Otto. Why would Wee Wisdom magazine send me a check for five dollars?’
Thus, my first professional writing was published under the name of Al Marcus.
One day my mother came running into the apartment, breathless. She hugged me and exclaimed, ‘Sidney, I’ve just come from Bea Factor. She says you’re going to be world famous! Isn’t that wonderful?’
Bea Factor was a friend who was reputed to be a psychic and there were many acquaintances of hers who verified it.
To me, it was wonderful that my mother believed her.
In the twenties and thirties Chicago was a city of noisy elevated trains, horse-drawn ice wagons, crowded beaches, strip clubs, the smell of the stockyards, and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, where seven mobsters were lined up against a wall in a garage and machine-gunned down.
The school system was run like the city—tough and aggressive. Instead of ‘show and tell,’ it was ‘throw and tell.’ And it wasn’t the students who were throwing things; it was the teachers. One morning, when I was in third grade, a teacher was displeased by something a pupil said. She picked up one of the heavy glass inkwells that were set on each desk and hurled it across the room at the student. If it had hit him in the head, it would have killed him. I was too terrified to return to school that afternoon.
My favorite subject in school was English. Part of the class assignment was taking turns reading aloud from a book called the Elgin Reader that contained short stories. We would turn to a story by Poe or O’Henry or Tarkington, and I would dream that one day the teacher would say, ‘Turn to page twenty in your reader,’ and lo and behold, there would be a story written by me. Where that dream came from, I do not know. Perhaps it was an atavistic throwback to some long-gone ancestor.
The tenth floor of the Sovereign Hotel was the neighborhood’s ole swimmin’ hole. Whenever possible, I would take Richard there to play in the pool. He was five years old.
On this particular day, I deposited him in the shallow end and I swam to the deep end. While I was talking to some people, Richard got out of the pool, looking for me. He came to the deep end of the pool, slipped and fell in. He went straight to the bottom. I saw what had happened, dove down and pulled him up.
No more ole swimmin’ hole for us.
When I was twelve years old, in the seventh grade at Marshall Field grammar school in Chicago, I was in an English class where we were allowed to work on our own projects. I decided to write a play about a detective investigating a murder. When it was finished, I turned it in to my teacher. She read the play, called me to her desk and said, ‘I think this is really good, Sidney. Would you like to stage it?’
Would I! ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I’ll arrange for you to put it on in the main auditorium.’
And suddenly I remembered Natalie’s excitement about Bea Factor’s prediction. Sidney is going to be world famous.
I was filled with excitement. This was the beginning. When the class heard the news, everyone wanted to be cast in the play. I decided that not only would I produce it and direct it, but I would also star in it.
I had never directed before, of course, but I knew exactly what I wanted.
I began casting. I was allowed to rehearse after school in the huge auditorium, and soon my play was the talk of the school. I was given all the props I asked for: couches, chairs, tables, a telephone…
It was one of the happiest times of my life. I knew without question that this was the beginning of a wonderful career. If I could write a successful play at my age, there was no limit to how far I could go. I would have plays on Broadway with my name in lights.
I held a final dress rehearsal with my classmates who had been cast by me, and the rehearsal went perfectly.
I went to my teacher. ‘I’m ready,’ I said. ‘When would you like me to put the play on?’
She was beaming at me. ‘Why don’t we do it tomorrow?’
I got no sleep that night. I felt that my whole future depended on the success of the play. Lying in bed, I went over it scene by scene, looking for flaws. I could find none. The dialogue was excellent, the plot moved swiftly and the play had an unexpected twist at the end. Everyone was going to love it.
The next morning, when I arrived at school, my teacher had a surprise for me.
‘I’ve arranged to have all the English classes dismissed so that they can come down to the auditorium to see your play.’
I could not believe it. This was going to be a far bigger triumph than I had imagined.
At ten o’clock in the morning the huge auditorium was filled. Not only were all the students in the English classes there, but the principal and teachers who had heard about my play were present, eager to see the work of the child prodigy.
In the midst of all this excitement, I was calm. Very calm. It seemed only natural that this was happening to me
