CALL ME PHAEDRA. Lise Pearlman
recital. Most had never heard any classical music before. After Fay left, Bob’s standing among the inmates rose considerably. Her performance remained a topic of conversation for many months. Looking back, Bob likes to think that Fay’s visits to him at Tucson and her small success in humanizing that bleak environment inspired her later pioneering prison work.
Fay could not resist sharing with her family the details of her prison piano performance. She also shocked them with a new announcement. Shortly after enrolling at Cal, she changed her mind and secretly reapplied to Reed in early September. She had just been accepted back at Reed and made plans to live off campus in Portland with a girlfriend. Even earning some money giving piano lessons, she could ill afford Reed’s tuition. When she told her parents they exploded in anger, but Fay was not to be dissuaded.
Fay never dared tell her parents what happened next. Back in the spring she had become intrigued by a thirty-seven-year-old Svengali on the Reed faculty, Stanley Moore, a professor who was destined to become the college’s cause célèbre. A Cal graduate, Moore had previously taught at Harvard where he had earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1940. Moore was hired to teach at Reed in 1948 on an accelerated track toward full professorship in philosophy. His peers considered him one of their most outstanding colleagues. The self-avowed Stalinist had been a Communist Party member prior to gaining tenure based on his research and writing on the economics of Marxism.
The son of a wealthy Piedmont, California, family, Moore had married war-correspondent Marguerite Higgins in 1942, but separated from her soon afterward as each pursued their own demanding careers and rumored affairs. He now lived on a romantic houseboat on a river near campus where students flocked to visit him. Bob Richter counted himself among Moore’s admirers, unaware in the fall of 1951 that he was losing his fiancée to Moore’s charms. Moore had already developed a reputation at Reed as a womanizer who often dated undergraduates. With Fay’s uncanny instinct, she had again involved herself with the most controversial figure around. She spent one thrilling month living with Moore on his houseboat that fall, unable to break off a relationship that she knew made no sense. She wrote a lengthy poem about her decision to withdraw emotionally from Bob while immersing herself in a loveless, new liaison. Then she kept it to herself for the time being.
Fay had mentioned Moore in her letters to Bob, but for many months left out the hurtful news of their affair. Yet, as she busied herself on assembling letters of support for Bob’s upcoming parole hearing, she wrote him increasingly critical letters. Going to prison for his beliefs did not make him a saint. Fay suggested it might be better to conform to society’s demands and only reveal one’s true thoughts to a small circle of close friends. At first, she just told Bob she needed time to herself when he was released. By mid-November, Fay told him they were now headed in different directions. Since his mailing privileges were limited, she suggested he would be better off not wasting his time writing to her. Even then she held off revealing her recently ended affair with Moore.
Family issues now preoccupied Fay. During the fall of 1951 Ruby Abrahams had developed vascular problems that required surgery. She convinced her reluctant husband to quit his job in Pennsylvania and return to the Bay Area where they would once again be in the bosom of their families. With no likely job prospects in California, Sam put heavy pressure on Fay to transfer back to Berkeley. He refused to pay for further studies at Reed after the fall semester and insisted that Fay needed to be nearer home because of her mother’s ill health. This time, he did not take “no” for an answer.
Fay felt compelled to return to her mother’s side, though she resented her parents’ heavy-handed tactics. Sam’s pride had kept him from telling Fay that money worries played a key role in his insistence that she switch schools and join them in their new apartment in San Francisco. On reflection, Fay actually felt somewhat relieved by the summons. She thought the challenge of attending Cal was probably good for her, but she refused to live with her parents. Instead, she insisted that the Abrahams pay for a room for her at the International House near campus.
In early 1952, Fay began attending Cal again, eager to find someone with whom to share what Moore had taught her. Fay quickly latched onto Betty Lee, a Chinese immigrant in her political science course. Born in Shanghai, Betty had adopted the English name when she arrived with her parents in California during World War II as a shy and passive 15-year-old who spoke almost no English. Betty’s family lived in Chinatown in San Francisco. She had attended Lowell High School and only moved to Berkeley for college.
At Cal, Fay flattered Betty by aggressively seeking out her friendship as a kindred spirit. The two met often for coffee. Fay was amazed that Betty did not know a Jew from a non-Jew. She captivated her new friend as she passionately expounded on Communism, racism and imperialism. Long afterward, Betty recalled that Fay talked nonstop, “a million miles a minute.” Fay bitterly complained about her forced return to Berkeley and fascinated Betty with details of her torrid affair with Stanley Moore. Moore had convinced her to reject her cloistered upbringing and bourgeois Jewish values. Betty, in turn, felt she received a fascinating insight into American Jewish intellectuals through her friendship with Fay. It was hard to tell the Jews from the Gentiles because most of the Jews she met had long since rejected their religious upbringing and cultural heritage.
As Fay bemoaned her fate and criticized her parents’ values, she did not appreciate the irony that it was she who had insisted on going to Reed — an elite, private college that the Abrahams could ill afford. It was Ruby and Sam who advocated the far more accessible public university that admitted high-achieving immigrants and minorities like Betty. Fay only knew that Reed had opened amazing doors for her. Cal felt like a giant step backward. In 1952, traditional fraternities and sororities still dominated campus life.
Photo courtesy of Karma Pippin
Fay enjoying a trip to the snow with friends from Cal after transferring from Reed. (Likely taken at Lake Tahoe.)
Much to the dismay of both sets of parents, the two friends decided to room together in their own apartment. The Lees were conservative and supported the ongoing Korean War. They considered Fay a bad influence on Betty. Their dislike of Fay hit its peak when Fay criticized Betty’s kindergarten-aged brother Gus in front of his proud father after Gus drew pictures of bombs and airplanes. Fay was not invited back. (A future lawyer himself, Gus later wrote the best-selling autobiography China Boy.)
Betty and Fay remained close friends, though Betty felt she had little to offer her brilliant mentor. Fay frequently interrupted a conversation in their apartment with “Wait a minute,” followed by a trip to her closet where she kept alphabetized 3 × 5 index cards in shoeboxes. The cards brimmed with historical facts, famous authors and notes Fay had painstakingly accumulated over several years. “Any time I had a question she would pull out a shoebox and find the answer,” Betty exclaimed. Their impassioned conversations frequently lasted until one a.m.
Despite their cramped quarters, Betty tolerated Fay’s eccentricities and her disregard for housekeeping. An undisciplined student, Fay often kept the light on, working deep into the night as due dates loomed and almost always pulled A’s. As an English major, she wrote papers every week or two, typing with an impressive staccato style she developed as a pianist. Fay’s eating habits also astonished Betty. Fay still had few culinary skills — scrambled eggs were her mainstay — but Fay had a voracious appetite for meat that she often satisfied with trips to a pet store that sold horsemeat. Fay explained to a skeptical Betty that horsemeat was a staple of French cuisine.
Shortly after she arrived at Cal, Fay joined a chamber music group and started dating a gifted cellist named Stan Seidner. A graduate student in psychology ten years her senior, Seidner was still working on a Ph.D. he would never complete. At the public library in the early spring of 1952, shortly before her twentieth birthday, Fay met another graduate student reworking his dissertation on Shakespeare. Then 28, Robert Gene Pippin would become a lifelong confidante. “Pip,” as he was often called, was brilliant and loquacious. As romantic partners, Pip preferred petite women like his second wife, Anne, who was then finishing her Ph.D. in Classics.
Even though Fay reminded him somewhat of his mother, Pip quickly