suggestive lyrics of popular songs. In his day as in ours, most writers were trying to break the bounds of censorship. By contrast, Dad was calling on the network censors to come out of hiding and cleanse the airwaves of such provocative lyrics as “As you desire me, So shall I come to you . . . Let come what may.” Just on the borderline of acceptability, he wrote, was “Let’s put out the lights and go to sleep.” (Rumor had it, he told his readers, that “in the original lyric, the last word was not ‘sleep.’”)
His inflexible thinking about such things gave me a pretty accurate notion of turn-of-the-century standards in polite society. Now, at this new turn-of-the-century, when I note how those standards have altered, I find the change quite as drastic as the other great developments of the past hundred years. Each generation, of course, remarks on how much more freedom there is in speech, books, magazines, theater, and on other media, and each generation seems convinced that permissiveness has gone about as far as it can go. Just a few years after my father’s death, Cole Porter jokingly compared the “olden days,” when “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” with the licentiousness of 1936, when, “Heaven knows, Anything goes.”
How would my father have reacted, I wonder, to the movies of the 1990s, with male and female frontal nudity, their almost obligatory intercourse scenes and, in dialogue, the forbidden word “fucking” as a leading modifier? Or to the recognition of gay and lesbian behavior as acceptable variations of sexual expression? During my early years in the movie business, the long list of words forbidden by the motion picture production code included floozie, trollop, tart, and at least a dozen other ways of describing a loose woman. There were also a large number of restrictions on what could be shown visually. These fell for the most part in two areas: first, explicit treatment of sex and certain designated parts of the human body; second, criminal acts or acts considered sinful unless the perpetrators were duly punished for them, usually by death. The cause of death, incidentally, could be completely unrelated to the offense. It was okay for a character to get away with robbery, murder, or adultery—with almost any offense imaginable, in fast, as long as you tacked on a scene later in the story in which he met a terrible end in an earthquake or some other chance disaster.
These days, characters are no longer required to do penance for their misdeeds, and there is no word that cannot be spoken on the screen. M*A*S*H, in 1970, was the first major American movie in which the word “fuck” was spoken. Although the script was mine, it was Bob Altman, the director, who added the expletive. After the picture received an “X” rating from the censors, the studio executives decided to fight it. In the end, they succeeded in winning an upgrade (or downgrade, depending on your perspective) to an “R.” Things have grown even more permissive between then and now, and you might be tempted to conclude, on the basis of recent releases, that there is nothing that cannot be shown on the screen today. Based on the record of the twentieth century, however, it is probably safer not to predict what will be allowed in the twenty-first.
Fame and its rewards affected us profoundly. The house we moved into in the East was a large one on a hill in Great Neck, Long Island. There was a series of terraces in front and artificial levels behind that dropped gracefully toward the waters of Manhasset Bay. The first of these, our mother’s territory, was a more or less formal flower garden with a circular lawn and a goldfish pool. The next contained a three-car garage, stables, and a vegetable garden. Then came a tennis court, which on a few choice winter nights could be flooded and converted into a hockey rink, and finally the largest level of all, accommodating a full-scale playground with an elaborate set of gymnastic equipment and a baseball diamond big enough for Little League play.
Two strong forces encouraged us to use these facilities to their fullest. There was Dad, a firm believer in the interdependence of a healthy mind and healthy body; and there was Miss Feldman, our Prussian-born, uniformed, trained nurse, who was even more partisan on the subject. Added to the familial entourage after my youngest brother David’s birth in 1919, she had come home from the hospital with Mother. Her then-comfortable live-in salary was seven dollars a day for as much time as she was needed, which turned out to be ten of the next twelve years.
Most employees try to limit the scope of their responsibilities; Miss Feldman only strove to increase hers. Her supervision became an increasingly dominant factor in our lives, more so than our parents realized because it was in her nature to move inexorably into any vacuum. Such vacuums were created in the main by two strong drives of Mother’s. One was to be with other people—to entertain and be entertained, to keep abreast of books and the theater, and to fill her guest bedrooms with as many Lardners and Abbotts and unrelated visitors as she could possibly coax into them. The other impulse (often in conflict with the first) was to be the most helpful wife she could be to an ever more famous man, assuming the roles of social secretary, business agent, and protector against his many admirers and his inclination to do favors for relatives and friends. These duties expanded steadily as his health and his resistance to alcohol declined.
The passage of time has not fully vindicated Miss Feldman’s approach to child-raising. Besides providing us with a diet packed with cholesterol and rigidly supervising our toilet visits, she was obsessed with the benefits of fresh air. The third floor of our house was occupied by servants, generally three of them, among whom Miss Feldman, as she frequently reminded us, was not one. The six bedrooms on the second floor should have been more than a reasonable number for seven people, but not the way they were actually allocated. Dad and Mother, at her insistence because of his drinking and working habits, each had a room; so did Miss Feldman, and there were two guest rooms. That left one room for the boys, but it didn’t even have a single bed in it; we used it as a dressing room. The four of us spent our nights, including the ones when we froze the tennis court, sleeping on a screened porch with awnings that could be lowered against anticipated precipitation. The unanticipated kind made its way through the screens with considerable freedom. I can recall lying awake while an inch of snow accumulated on the floor. Each of us waited in silence for a more enterprising brother to get out of bed and let down the awnings.
After entering the house to dress and have breakfast, we would be dispatched to the playground until the time came to leave for school. John, from the age of nine on, was regularly driven to a private school in a neighboring community and picked up daily by our current chauffeur-gardener. Jim and I, and eventually David, were transported in the other car to a different, expensive private school by Miss Feldman, relentlessly dressed in a white, starched uniform and matching nurse’s cap. Mother, who had driven during the first two years of her marriage, never took the wheel after a Chandler, with the standard soft-top of the day, overturned and John, then a baby, was thrown out unhurt. It was at Dad’s request that she gave up driving.
While all the other children had lunch at school, Miss Feldman, more days than not, arrived in uniform and cap to whisk us off to the superior fare she provided at home, and then, if there was time, to our private playground, before returning us to the afternoon session. The school day usually wound up with athletics outdoors: the colder the winter weather, the better the hockey on the school pond. Even so, we were invariably dispatched to the playground upon our return home. For roughly the duration of Daylight Savings Time, that was also where we went after supper until darkness impended. As for summer vacation, I doubt if we ever averaged more than two hours out of twenty-four indoors on a rainless day.
Our father didn’t communicate much with Miss Feldman directly, but when it came to exercise they were very much on the same wavelength. His own upbringing had been deplorably soft, he believed, and he didn’t want us to carry the same burden of indolence. One summer, he went as far as to hire an All-American end from Vanderbilt University to teach us basic gridiron skills. We devoted two days a week to our football studies for about a month, without any promising results. Jim, the only one of us with speed and agility, was too light for football, never reaching a hundred and fifty pounds. The other three of us were simply not the stuff of which athletes are made, and in this respect I was outstanding. Consistently overweight until my mid-twenties, I was also physically inept.
We certainly made use of the tennis
