Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir Read online

  One time I asked my dad and his buddies a question: “You mean a Catholic or a Jew has never been president?”

  “All been Presbyterian,” one guy answered, which, of course, is not totally accurate. But I began to wonder what the fuck is a Presbyterian anyway? If you were a kid growing up like me in the neighborhood and someone says Presbyterian, he could’ve been saying Hindu. I knew a lot of Catholics and I knew a lot of Jews, but I didn’t know any Presbyterians—those were people who lived in a different neighborhood from mine. In fact, it didn’t seem like they were even on the same planet as I was.

  Yeah, we all grew up with the air-raid shelters and the Red menace. On the radio the House of Un-American Activities was playing out in the news and was the background noise I heard while doing my homework. But when I was a kid the first time I could recall a connection to anything other than sports figures and movie stars was JFK. From 1959, when he started running for office, you could sense this was going to be a game-changer. It was so palpable that you couldn’t avoid it, even if you were a kid like me who didn’t give a shit about any of that. It happened because Kennedy was this guy who looked like he stepped off a wedding cake and had this twinkle in his eye. He seduced men and women alike as good as any movie star on the planet.

  Before Kennedy there was the fifties, with Eisenhower, who was just plain vanilla. I mean, there was nothing distinctive about him. He was more like a banker—completely unsexy, completely unspectacular, and completely unremarkable. In the 1960 election it was either Kennedy or Nixon. Nixon was politics as usual, and you knew what you’d get. He was another boring empty suit, with no personality, but he was supposed to be the next president of the United States because he’d been the vice president. Then this upstart kid comes along, this young guy with this stunning wife and brothers galore, and this father who pushed around kings, and there was just all this legend surrounding him. He starts giving press conferences, and every fourth question he has the floor laughing because his wit is so unbelievably sophisticated. He was always on point and was a truly witty guy who dared to take the ordinary events of the day and make them into something extraordinary.

  It was a thrilling time, even as a kid, during those three years when he was president. We got a place in the world; we were the envy of the world because we had JFK and Jackie Kennedy in the White House. It was not like Camelot; it was Camelot. I actually was deeply invested in being alive during the Kennedy years and very deeply invested when the assassination took place, because that was a kind of end of innocence. I cried, just as I had done at my own father’s funeral.

  But in the early sixties Kennedy, in only three years, gave us a symbol that was worth living and dying for. He was as much of a prince as anything you’ve seen in this country in the last 150 years. He was charismatic, gorgeous, brilliant, and strong. He stared down the Russians and created the Peace Corps. Imagine giving seventeen-year-olds, who had all of this energy and idealism but didn’t know what to do with it, an opportunity to put their energy and ideals to incredibly good use helping those less resourceful, all while seeing the world. He created the space program, thus opening the door to a new age of technology. He was a man who did not like to lose and took on any competition. He was going to make America the first to put a man on the moon. This sudden frenzied attention to science and technology was the initial catalyst that transformed our world into the techno age in which we currently exist, in full digitization, right now. He also ushered in an agenda to fix the broken promise of the American Constitution that said all men are created equal—it said nothing about color. He had the balls to finally say enough is enough, bringing the civil rights conversation to national attention.

  Then all of the promise and all of the innocence and all of the purity, whatever it is that inspires somebody deep down into the bowels of their emotion, was removed in a couple of bullets. His death gave way to the entire cultural shift in the sixties. Once you took our innocence away, you created an environment for rebellion. How did they rebel? Rock ’n’ roll, baby. Bob Dylan, man. The Beatles, the Stones. Bell-bottoms, long hair. Fuck you. Fuck me? Fuck you. That’s when I was coming of age, right when JFK jumpstarted the modern era and lit the fuse that became the sixties.

  I was thirteen and in middle school when the civil rights movement came to its head. I don’t remember a lot of discussion about race in my family or among my friends. New York was already a melting pot, and I knew and liked all kinds of kids. It did play out on the TV news, though, with images of students being barred from entering college because they were black. Then you started seeing the news flooded with Cronkite reporting on the images of people having fire hoses turned on them because they were marching for something and Rosa Parks making a stink by not giving up her seat on the bus, such that you began to see this pattern of discontent, so you couldn’t help but feel the sand shifting under your feet. There was no avoiding it, whether you had discussed it with your parents or not. If the news was on at your house always between six and seven at night, which it was, as it was in every house that owned a TV in America, this was what you were seeing.

  When I think about how core values are formed, this one was forced upon me because of the era in which I lived. I guess I felt I needed to make kind of a call, thinking, Holy shit, there’s a big world out there. It’s so big that you need to know about it because you need to figure out where you stand in all of it. I agreed with everything the civil rights movement tried to achieve—it was common sense. I empathized with the spirit that was at the heart of this ostracized segment of the population: “We’ve eaten the crumbs for long enough, and we’ve gotten kicked in the face for long enough, and we’ve been hung from trees for long enough, and we’ve been led to believe that we’re second-class citizens for long enough.”

  It was those feelings I got as a kid watching police-held German Shepherds biting people who were protesting when I began to see the blacks’ real struggle. I had an automatic default of sympathy for this cause that was not superficial, was not passing—it was deep. I remember talking with one of my black friends from school: “Of course you guys should be fucking mad, of course you guys should be fighting for your rights. This is insane, and it’s insane that anybody could be judged by the color of their skin.”

  My friend said he just hoped it’d play out without warfare.

  If not for Kennedy and then LBJ taking up the mantle, there might’ve been just that, or at least a lot more bloodshed. So yeah, I was not just witnessing; I was also forming my own opinions about what it all meant to me and my own values. It altered me in such a way that runs deep and is deeply personal to me: the family I have created is with a woman of color from Jamaica, and my two kids have the blood of many cultures streaming through them. We have a family who was at one time against the law—can you imagine that? We don’t think about color but rather about love and devotion and loyalty and admiration. I learned this watching the civil rights movement. If you think that what your kids are seeing and hearing from the age of five to thirteen is unimportant, you are seriously mistaken. A kid who plays hours of violent video games every day for all those years, for example, is going to have issues to deal with as an adult, of that you can be certain, and I bet it won’t be pretty. What core values are being formed?

  Two months before Kennedy was assassinated and Martin Luther King gave his epic “I Have a Dream” speech, I was going to temple to get trained for bar mitzvah. My gang of neighborhood buddies who I had been hanging with since kindergarten went too. I got through it, and we had the ceremony. My entire family came from all over, even an aunt who flew in from California. It’s a big deal when a kid gets bar mitzvahed in the Jewish religion. Everybody shows up, everybody wears their spruced-up best at the temple. There’s a ritual in which the kid gets up and sings a portion of the Torah. That’s what your bar mitzvah is, and then you’re part of the whole congregation. You participate in it, and when you get through the ordeal you are, so to speak, a man, and t
here’s coffee and cake by the temple. Then you throw a party afterward at some reception hall. Depending on how much money you have, some people go on fuckin’ safaris. My family had hotdogs. But we had a party, and people came with presents: fountain pens, US war bonds, and all the other shit people gave back then. I still have bonds from my bar mitzvah that I haven’t cashed.

  What I remember as the most formative aspect from this experience was a chance to see the guys in the group who were really committed, the guys in the group whose families had real skin in the game, and which guys in the group were going through the motions because their parents wanted them to. I concluded I was one of the guys doing it because my grandmother wanted it, but it wasn’t anything I knew my dad could give a flying fuck about. He listened when I told him about what I learned at temple, about ritual and the tradition of it all, what it means to go through this rite of passage. He didn’t relate to it on any level, but he said nothing to negate it. He dropped me off at Hebrew school. That was the extent of it. And he picked me up. He helped me buy the suits we both wore on the day of the ceremony. That was it.

  When it was over, one day we were driving somewhere and had passed the temple. I asked him, “What is your view?”

  He started to talk about a book he was reading by a guy named Robert Ingersoll, who had taken agnosticism to a philosophical level. Ingersoll was the Sigmund Freud of agnosticism. And he wrote a lot of books about his position and was a famous orator in the late 1800s during the “Golden Age of Free Thought.”

  I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous—if they aver that doubt is a crime—then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

  —Robert Green Ingersoll

  My dad found sense in these books and gave me some quotes as we drove. “I just like the guy,” my father said. “The guy says shit like this: ‘Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.’ Or how about this: ‘Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.’”

  I don’t remember any of his opinions being forced down my throat, and I said nothing after he told me what he believed in. In hindsight, my takeaway from all that is that it made me start to look around. I did see a lot of people who went to temple and synagogue and church who were the most racist muthafuckas I’ve ever seen, who were always throwing really bad words around. They had this attitude about anyone who wasn’t like them. Whether you were black, Puerto Rican, Asian, or whatever—there was this blatant hypocrisy. On one hand, they were church-going, religion-keeping people, but on the other hand, they were as far from what religion was intended to embody as you could possibly imagine. Whereas my dad was the only completely nonreligious committed person I ever met, and he had the type of ethics I wanted. He was never racist, he was really kind, and he would go out of his way to help anybody who was down and out. By his actions he embodied the Golden Rule, and I realized you don’t need to belong to any fuckin’ edifice or ascribe to any dogma to have a relationship with God, to be a good person. You just have to be a good person.

  What’s the point in having a hero in name only? What good is it to admire someone and not be willing to emulate them and to try to live up to the qualities that made them inspirational to you in the first place? They stood for things that were noble, spoke about the human condition. What good is it to complain about cowardice or the lack of backbone or resolve that you see in others if you’re going to do the same things? Whenever I catch myself being hypocritical I chastise myself, have trouble sleeping at night. Over the years I developed a reputation in the industry as a guy who doesn’t keep his mouth shut when I see some injustice or disrespect happening around me. Even when I didn’t have the self-respect I have now or was loathing who I was, I still didn’t sit back and take it. In making movies there’s egotistical, greed-driven fuckers at every turn. If I saw crews or actors being mistreated or taken advantage of, I got into people’s faces.

  Many looked at me sideways: “This Perlman doesn’t mind his own business. We hired him for a job, and he’s like some fuckin’ unionizer.”

  I like being this guy who says we’re all in this together. I’ve gone right up to the top and said, “You might be the producer, the guy with all the money, but treat people with respect goddammit, because if you don’t, you’re going to hear from me. We’re all equal here, from the lowliest guy to the filmmaker. We are all trying to bring our A-game here, so don’t fuck with people.”

  Sometimes this instinct that I learned when I was a kid was to the detriment of my own career and reputation. But this was core stuff, which I eventually learned how to grow into, to find the proper balance and regulate it to be most effective and do more good than harm. All of it came from what I learned as a young man, from people I admired.

  But of all the gifts I borrowed out of my old man’s passions and then went on to make my own, the most enduring sprung from the aesthetic. To this day the artists he taught me to love are the artists I revere the most—in fact, way more intensely these days than when I was first discovering them. Because—and to my enduring regret—those artists who exploded off the screen, out of the Victrola, through the TV box remain unsurpassable: Gable, Tracy, Bogie, Cagney, the Coop, Eddie G, Erroll, Fred and Gene, the Marx Boys, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Crawford, Jimmie, Cary and Kate, Garbo and Harlowe, Capra and Curtiz, Irene Dunne, Fonda, the Duke, Kirk and Burt, Monty and Brando, Malden and Freddie March, Steiger and George C, the “kings of cool,” Lee Marvin and Bob Mitchum and “Wild Bill” Wildman, F and Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd, Ford, Wilder, Hawkes, Chaplin, Keaton, George Stevens, William Wyler—I could go on and on. And Gleason, Sid Ceasar, Red Skelton, Uncle Milty, Hope and Crosby, Dino and Sam, Lucy and Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Stooges, and Martin and Lewis. Need I say more? And Frankie and Ella and Mel Torme and Donald O’Connor and, and, and . . . these were his heroes.

  And why not?! No disrespect for the current crop but . . . well, you know what I mean. All these artists were walking the earth when I was figuring out what was good, some at the peak of their powers. These beauties who my dad passed down to me, they were the stuff that dreams truly were made on. Shit, they were the ones who started me dreaming. Dreaming bigger than the biggest $200 million tent pole can buy. Those are the shoulders we have stepped down from to assume the mantle of progress in modern-day cinema. That step has yielded . . . well, let’s put it this way: we’ve replaced humanity with technology. We went from an obsession with figuring out the glory of being human to the desensitization of the very same. And so I don’t write this book, this letter to my kids and my kid’s friends, and every fuckin’ kid who dreams big and aspires to a life in the arts with anything less than the fiercest sense of urgency. ’Cuz although the progress we’ve made has taken us to lots of unimaginable places, the price we paid is vast. And the chasm is widening with every passing day. So for me, this shit is personal!

  A couple of drunks walk out of a bar. One sez to the other, “I betcha a hundred bucks if I shine this flashlight up to the sky, you can’t climb up the beam of light.” The other one sez, “Ah, I know you. When I’m halfway up you’ll shut the fuckin thing off!”

  —Bert Perlman, 1953

  (CHAPTER 3)

  Out of the Drink

  George Washington High School was built in 1925 and took up an entire city block. It had architecture like you’d see in Philly, with a doom cornice on top and looking very historical from the onset. Inside, the drab hallways had been livened up to help motivate our class of neighborhood kids who went there. Some halls had been painted by famous artists from the Works Progress Administration era; that’s when President Roosevelt had the brains and guts to put unemployed artists, writers, and actors to work. I remembered one mural, The Evolution of Music, painted by Lucienn
e Bloch in 1938. Kids didn’t graffiti the murals much, maybe just a scribbled signature or something small, because if any of those murals were ruined, the kids who had done it would be hunted down by the rule of the pack. Screwing with the murals would be like somebody who killed the mockingbird when all it was trying to do was sing—even us city kids could see the talent that went into those paintings. In this case, the school’s administration hoped the murals would instill, by osmosis, some culture into our uncouth asses.

  These were also important core forming years. I learned how to cut classes, how to roll doobies, how to sing doo-wop in the subway (fantastic reverb)—shit was happening. I was fourteen when I went to high school, having skipped eighth grade and taking my first year of high school (ninth grade) in junior high, which is a New York tradition.

  On my first day of high school there was a pit in my stomach that’s normal when you’re starting something new. It was no surprise what school I’d go to; each neighborhood had its preordained scholastic path or schools you’d attend unless you were wealthy and could go to private schools. My mom and dad had gone to George Washington, as did my brother, so there was history there. My brother had graduated some four years prior, and he had made a name for himself in the school band and was recognized for his virtuosity playing drums. So my first move was to try to endear myself to the orchestra/band teacher. The man not only ran the official school orchestra that played at assemblies and sporting events but also had an elective band for kids who were serious about music and were good at it.

  When I introduced myself he said, “Okay, you’re going to be the new school drummer because your brother was a drummer, and he was phenomenal.” I was able to buy myself a couple of weeks with the band by playing so softly I practically couldn’t be heard. Eventually, however, the teacher caught on; it didn’t take him very long to figure out there was a vast space between the apple and the tree!