CALL ME PHAEDRA. Lise Pearlman
to students caught talking in study hall or not wearing their uniforms.
What oppressed Fay most was that attending Anna Head kept her isolated from her peers in junior high school who gathered after school to socialize. Instead, Fay headed home each day for three hours of piano practice under Ruby’s watchful eye. At least, unlike Lisie, Fay enjoyed exemption from household chores. Even at family picnics, Fay was not allowed to participate in volleyball for fear it would injure her hands. Ruby and Sam had grown alarmed after a game of tag ended with Lisie slamming the front door on her sister’s right hand. Lessons continued with left-handed arrangements as the family waited anxiously for Fay’s bandaged finger to heal. For Lisie, her parents’ temporary ostracism was mortifying. For Fay, it was sweet revenge. Growing up, Fay found her younger sister irritatingly prettier than she was and disliked Lisie’s normal role as the good child, far more traditional than Fay, shier and more compliant by nature.
The highlight of Fay’s young musical career was a recital at the San Francisco Symphony at age fourteen. She performed the “Emperor Concerto,” Beethoven’s last piano concerto and an extraordinary challenge for a teenager. The thirty-five-minute piece ends with a dramatic flourish, often performed to showcase a pianist’s virtuosity. The symphony gave a formal luncheon in Fay’s honor to celebrate her performance. Though Fay said nothing to Lisie at the time, Fay actually felt badly that her younger sister had to suffer in her shadow in front of so many family members and friends, including their grandmother Lena, who sat in the front row with their parents. While basking in all that attention, Fay could not resist some mischief. After they reached home, a symphony staff member telephoned Ruby: Fay had been observed taking a spoon from her lunch table. Deeply humiliated, her parents made Fay return the souvenir. Sam and Ruby did not know, as Lisie did, that whenever the family dined out, Fay pocketed a teaspoon. Fay had stashed more than a dozen such flatware keepsakes in their shared bedroom.
After her debut, Fay complained to friends about feeling chained to the piano by her mother for seemingly endless hours of practice. Fay’s yearning for a normal teenage existence prompted frequent feuds with both of her equally headstrong parents. At nearly five-foot-eight, Fay was tall and big-boned, with long legs and an awkward gait. Intense and forceful by nature, Fay matured into an adolescent with thick, dark eyebrows emphasizing her expressive, intelligent eyes. Her features bore some similarity to the sensuous Mexican-Jewish artist Frida Kahlo.
Soon after the San Francisco Symphony recital, Fay rebelled in earnest. Anna Head had become even more intolerable when Lea Hyde’s second husband, Theophilus Hyde, returned from service in the Navy and resumed his stern leadership of the school. In shouting matches with her parents that sent Lisie scurrying out of the room, Fay declared she would no longer commit to concert piano training or go to Anna Head with its ugly uniforms. After finishing ninth grade, Fay wanted to attend Berkeley High School like her friend Hilde Stern, who had been the valedictorian of Fay’s confirmation class. The Abrahams held Dr. Stern and his family in high regard. Berkeley High provided a first-rate education; it ranked among the top public schools in America. So Fay won her battle, but agreed to continue with a lighter schedule of piano lessons, giving her parents hope Fay might still make a career out of her exceptional talent.
By 1946, when Fay started high school, war-time rent control had allowed the Abrahams to save enough to purchase a small, two-story, three-bedroom home with its own garage off Arch Street in North Berkeley for $6,000. For Sam and Ruby, the dormered house on Corona Court held appeal because it was located on a quiet cul-de-sac in one of two middle class sections of the city. The upper-middle class and wealthy lived in the hills, while the poor, including many newly arrived black families, occupied the flatlands of West Berkeley. All children were channeled through local elementary schools and junior highs, segregating them by the class-based neighborhoods in which they lived.
At Berkeley High, Hilde introduced Fay to a small group of bright and motivated girl friends with whom Hilde had gone to junior high school. As a Jew whose family had fled the Nazis, Hilde noticed little overt anti-Semitism at Berkeley High. Hilde’s older brother often dated daughters of well-to-do WASP families, but Hilde was drawn instinctively to those on the social fringe. More reserved than Fay by nature, the German immigrant enjoyed Fay’s vibrancy. Fay seemed particularly drawn to crossing class lines when making friends and tried harder than others to understand people from different social strata.
Hilde’s small group of self-described “shreds” included the daughter of a Christian Scientist family impoverished by the Depression, the daughter of a Baptist missionary back from China, the daughter of a carpenter with seven children, and the daughter of a divorced Catholic head nurse at a local hospital. Fay was the only other Jewish girl and the only girl with a grandparent born in the Bay Area.
Hilde’s friends accepted Fay into their circle only as a favor to Hilde. They realized Fay was a likely fellow reject of the cashmere-and-pearl in-crowd, but left to their own devices, Hilde’s friends would have been too put off by Fay’s arrogant streak. All smart and college-bound, the “shreds” engaged in mostly parallel activities to the Hill girls. They rarely gathered at Fay’s house where Ruby, now President of the Berkeley League of Women Voters, made them feel unwelcome.
Fay Stender
Source of photos from 1949 Olla Podrida: Berkeley Public Library, https://archive.org/details/ollapodridaunse_40
Source: https://www.google.com/
As a teen, Fay decided to expand her vocabulary by reading the dictionary from start to finish. She got as far as the letter “L.” Yet she and her classmates all knew the meaning of “olla podrida.” That was what the Berkeley High yearbook had always been called.
Fay joined the Pro Musica Club and, at 15, won an award as the best young musician in the Bay Area. She and her friend Hilde Stern were both members of the Honor Society, but Fay had another goal. She practiced long hours to make the cheerleading squad, to no avail.
Fay herself still pined for acceptance into the central extracurricular life of the high school. She wanted to join a sorority, but the only feasible one was composed largely of girls rejected by more prestigious sororities. Fay attempted to coax Hilde and her friends into pledging with her, but they displayed no interest. Fay also tried out for a position as a cheerleader, practicing endlessly, but failed to make the squad. Soon, Fay spent less time with “the shreds” as she initiated a series of one-on-one intense friendships that she dominated. It would be many years before Fay recognized her strong feelings for some close female friends as signs of bisexuality.
The most enduring of Fay’s new best friends was Wendy Milmore, who was a year behind Fay in school. The attractive brunette was soft-spoken and a good listener as Fay confided her insecurities and unhappiness. (Wendy would later embark on a career as a psychiatrist.) Unlike the shreds, Wendy marveled at Fay’s quick mind and fluency of expression. On more than one occasion, she had witnessed Fay busily writing lengthy diary entries. Stream of consciousness became Fay’s writing style. As a lawyer, she rarely edited anything she wrote.
Fay and Wendy liked to go on Saturday afternoon adventures by bus. On one such excursion at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the curious teens strolled past the public areas down restricted corridors and opened doors marked “Private” to see what was behind them. Fay would delight all her life in opening closed doors at public institutions to observe their secret inner workings. In one pivotal pretrial hearing when she represented George Jackson in the Soledad Brothers murder case in the spring of 1970, a surprised Salinas judge would grant Fay’s impromptu request to enter his chambers to prove the courtroom had more than one fire exit. The stunt drew applause from the crowd of Leftists Fay had bussed down to the Conservative community. Fay had just proved the courtroom