Fear of Dying. Erica Jong

      3

       Wondermans Rampant

      The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

      —Dorothy Parker

      In their prime, the Wondermans led a glamorous life in the penthouse on Riverside Drive once owned by George Gershwin. They gave glittering parties where famous faces were glimpsed in smoke-filled rooms. “A tinkling piano in the next apartment / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant.” I thought those lines were written for my parents; they certainly evoked my feelings about their parties—where ladies in satin and marabou smoked cigarettes in holders, clinked champagne glasses, drank in a way nobody drinks anymore, and changed husbands as they changed platform shoes. The men had darkly mirrored hair and thin mustaches like Adolphe Menjou. Limousines circled the block, awaiting them. Chauffeurs were black and wore caps. Maids were black and pretended to be obsequious. They put on their hats when they went home for the day.

      When McCarthyism ended their show-biz careers and my parents returned from Hollywood at the height of the Blacklist, they found the Gershwin duplex and filled it with three decades’ worth of memorabilia. It was a movie set as much as an apartment. Even the floor in the gallery was mirrored for exhibition dancing. The double grand pianos were lacquered white. The library had framed pictures of them from all their movies and leather-bound copies of all their scripts. The powder room off the gallery was an infinite hall of mirrors where I could stare at innumerable multiples of myself becoming greener and hazier with each reflection.

      I never really knew how the Blacklist had affected them. They had plenty of friends who were also ruined by it, but my parents were too fiercely ambitious—even in the engagé thirties—to have signed the wrong petitions. The Blacklist coincided with the end of their salad days as performers. It was time to do something else anyway.

      So they came back and set up Hollywood on the Hudson. They had smartly squirreled away their Hollywood money (despite what Dorothy Parker said about it melting in the palm like snow), and eventually their theatrical book and autograph shop, Bibliomania, also prospered. In a business—rare books—populated by nerds and ladies in Boston marriages, my parents were unusual. They had a flair for the dramatic and a flair for mixing people. Many couples fell in love at their parties. It was as if their love were contagious.

      For three little girls in black velvet dresses and British black patent-leather Mary Janes that had to be fastened with button-hooks who watched from halfway down the stairs at their parties, it seemed that our parents were the King and Queen of Cool. It seemed we’d never live as glamorously as they. And it seemed the height of ambition to grow up and become our parents.

      Now I know that many children feel that way. And that the lucky ones are the ones who outgrow it. Toni, Emmy, and I had never outgrown it. That was why our lives were so hard. We weren’t starving or drinking polluted water, but we were stuck in a kind of emotional poverty all the same.

      What struck me always, sitting at my parents’ bedside, was that it was time for me to take off the black velvet dress and stop sitting in the middle of the stairs.

      It was at one of my parents’ parties that I first decided I was going to be an actress. All because of Leporello Kahn. I was sixteen when I met Lep Kahn (at the time the pun was lost on me). Lep—whose father was a famous opera singer at the old Met—was originally named after Don Giovanni’s side-kick. It was a lousy thing to do to a child. Lep’s name was a joke, so he tried to turn his life into a joke. He grew up to be one of those merry, seemingly harmless plump middle-aged men who brilliantly know how to appeal to teenage girls. He was the first man to let me know I was beautiful, and he was so suave and clever that he promptly made all the sixteen-year-old boys I knew seem like louts. (Not that it was hard.)

      I met Lep at one of the first parties at which I actually drank vodka (in slavish imitation of my mother). I was wearing a strapless peony-pink gown with a harem skirt (those were the days of harem skirts), and with every drink, my breasts bobbled farther out of my boned top. Lep was looking at my breasts and saying, “You must come down to the Russian Tea Room and have lunch with me.” The Russian Tea Room meant show business glamour in those days. Now it has morphed into an unrecognizable simulacrum—like everything else connected with that vanished world.

      Lep was an important Broadway producer who did everything from Shakespeare to Pinter. A big macher. He promised me Juliet in a new production of Romeo and Juliet, and though the role fell through, my affair with Lep did not.

      Without Lep Kahn, would I have had an abortion at sixteen, quit school at seventeen, moved to the Village, and appeared as Anne in the road show of The Diary of Anne Frank at eighteen (the part that deluded me into thinking that the theater was a viable profession)? No. No. No. No. Looking back, I should have stayed at Walden (which was loose enough to accommodate all kinds of hanky-panky), finished high school, gone to some arty college like Bennington or Bard, and never gotten involved with Lep Kahn—but who could have known that at the time? His passion for me seemed like the key to the life I wanted.

      He was one of those attractive plump men. His stomach shook when he laughed in the nude. He had breasts almost as big as mine. But he also had melting brown eyes and long silky black lashes, wore wonderful tweed jackets, had a beard and mustache peppered with gray (which gave him