CALL ME PHAEDRA. Lise Pearlman
Fay and Pip met for coffee, conversations between Fay and Pip volleyed like championship ping pong. He was impressed with Fay’s vast knowledge of literature and the way she leapt from one observation to another. Fay was equally taken with Pip’s insights. She was particularly amazed that a Gentile could have such extensive knowledge of ancient Jewish history. As a special gift, she gave him her own leather-bound, official translation of the Old Testament. It would travel with him throughout his life.
When Pip’s wife Anne accepted a teaching job back East, Pip stayed behind at Cal to complete his doctorate. Both Stan and Pip then came often to visit Fay at the small apartment she shared with Betty. As Betty watched their verbal sparring, Fay impressed her as never giving ground to a man. Looking back, Betty characterized Fay as a feminist before feminism was defined by the larger population.
Fay found Pip almost as easy to entrust her innermost thoughts to as her close friend Wendy Milmore had been. Fay told him of her impassioned month with Stanley Moore, including Moore’s penchant for bondage. She said that Moore had transformed her world view. She could not imagine herself pursuing an academic life like the one Pip was headed toward. For her, writing and lecturing on literature was too tame. Fay’s goal became etched in his mind: “Pip, I want the power to change things.”
After nine months, Sam finally found work as a corporate consultant with a pest control company. Sam bought a house in the upscale Claremont Uplands neighborhood in South Berkeley. Sam and Ruby moved in with Lisie, enabling her to finish her senior year of high school at Berkeley High. When Fay introduced Betty, Pip and Stan to her family, Lisie knew that Pip was married, but her parents did not. Sam and Ruby noted that neither Stan nor Pip was Jewish. The Abrahams somehow blamed Betty, believing that Fay’s friendship with Betty reduced her chances of marrying the right man. Fay started sneaking Betty with her on visits to the Abrahams’ new home when no one else was there.
Bob Richter won parole at his first opportunity and was released from prison a year to the day from being jailed. Anxious to see Fay, he invited her to fly to Portland in February of 1952. Fay had written him in December to let him know her parents had moved back to San Francisco and she was joining them for Christmas. She no longer intended to marry him, but had torn up several drafts of letters that explained why. By early February, she felt obligated to confess her betrayal of their relationship with Stanley Moore the prior fall. Yet she sent contradictory signals when she then joined Bob in Portland for a passionate couple of days that meant far more to him than to her.
In April, Bob came down to Berkeley during spring break anticipating Fay to be waiting for him with open arms. Instead, she met him in the parlor room of International House and suggested they talk there. Only then did Bob fully appreciate that Fay had cast him aside. As he began discussing what he would do while waiting for her to finish college, Fay stunned Bob with news that she had just decided to go to law school. She told him that she did not think it made sense for him to wait for her. Miserable and befuddled, Bob headed back to Portland.
While at Cal, Fay occasionally saw her friend Hilde on trips home from college to see family. Hilde had transferred from Reed to Cornell her junior year. As a student of modern philosophy, Hilde considered herself far more progressive than Fay, whom she still regarded as relatively apolitical. On a double date weekend trip to Monterey during Fay’s senior year, Fay also startled Hilde with news of her intention to go to law school. Hilde wondered what, if anything, her flamboyant friend would wind up doing with her law degree.
In fact, Fay had for some time admired her free-thinking older cousin who was a lawyer. Fay herself was now paying closer and closer attention to the swirling First Amendment controversies around her. She had signed up for an undergraduate constitutional law course and began to explore law schools. Twenty years later, reflecting on her mindset back in 1952, Fay explained, “I felt people who were lawyers … might be listened to.”4 Fay also credited the esteem her parents placed on higher education and pursuing a career. Unlike most others of their generation, they had not expected either her or her younger sister to simply aspire to grow up to be a housewife. But as Fay well knew, Sam and Ruby never envisioned their gifted first-born becoming a lawyer.
Photos courtesy of Karma Pippin
These photos of Fay were likely taken on a trip to Carmel her senior year at Cal. That was when she surprised her friend Hilde with news she planned to apply to law school. She explained to her new close friend Pip, “I want the power to change things.”
By Fay’s college days, she had likely read Irving Stone’s popular biography, Clarence Darrow for the Defense, detailing the legendary lawyer’s successes as a defender of the poor and downtrodden. But lawyers like Darrow derided women as unfit for what was then the most male-dominated profession in America. By the early 1950s, women were still only three per cent of law students, but Fay fit the profile of those who obtained the best formal training — the first child in a middle-class, educated white family.
Female role models remained few and far between. When Fay was a junior in college, Governor Earl Warren finally appointed the first woman judge in Fay’s home county, Cecil Mosbacher, a conservative veteran prosecutor. Fourteen years would go by before the next woman was appointed to the local bench, a year after losing a contested election for an open seat to a rival who campaigned as “a man for the job.” Being Jewish added another layer of difficulty for Fay. In Unequal Justice, historian Jerald Auerbach noted, “The doors of most … law offices were closed, with rare exceptions to a young Jewish lawyer.”5 Yet Fay could look to the success of Louis Brandeis, who had first gained fame as “the people’s lawyer.” Brandeis had made his name crusading for social causes before his historic appointment in 1916 as the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice.
Fay most admired Felix Frankfurter, who held the “Jewish seat” on the high court when she was in college. A former Harvard professor, Frankfurter was also a champion of unpopular causes, who gained notoriety for his scathing criticism, published in the late 1920s, of the way in which the murder trial and appeals of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti had been handled. Frankfurter considered their execution a blatant miscarriage of justice.6
By June of 1952, Fay was on a mission. She took additional courses to finish college on an accelerated schedule. Her younger sister Lisie had just started her freshman year at Cal. Fay took time to give Lisie pointers on note-taking, but never invited Lisie to her apartment — likely for fear Lisie would share details of Fay’s home life with their parents. Lisie was then dating her future husband, Don Stone. The two would invite Fay to join them on picnics and grew concerned at her chronic melancholy.
Fay could not bring herself to confide in her sister her abruptly terminated love affair with Stanley Moore, whom she saw again briefly in Berkeley during the summer of 1952 when he was down from Oregon visiting family. Fay realized that no one in her family would appreciate her obsession with a married Reed professor nearly twice her age or the radical ideas to which he had exposed her. Instead, Fay offered opinions to Lisie and Don on a wide variety of other subjects, including sometimes in Don’s own field of science as a pre-med. Unlike Betty Lee, Don learned to be skeptical of Fay after a few instances in which she made a puzzling pronouncement or cited a spurious authority. Fay, in turn, felt disconnected. She assumed her sister would marry Don and, like their parents, head for the safe, middle-class life in the suburbs that Fay so actively shunned. There was Lisie again setting the example of the good girl Ruby desired her namesake first daughter to become.
The Abrahams would have been apoplectic if they had known that the FBI had opened up a file on Fay and her roommate Betty Lee in the fall of 1952. The FBI informant was a returning disabled veteran who considered it his civic duty to report other students and teachers whom he believed to be Communists or have Communist sympathies. At the time, an Army manual listed a number of expressions that one might overhear Communists using in conversation such as “chauvinism, colonialism, ruling class, witch-hunt, reactionary, exploitation, oppressive, materialist, progressive.”7 Fay likely used such words in conversations with Betty, as did thousands of students and faculty on liberal college campuses throughout the United States. A million dossiers on