This Is Us
There Never Was a Perfect Family
How I researched and wrote a book about my grandfather, Lucille Ball, and the imaginary affair between them
A commotion bangs and shakes down Old Northern Boulevard in Roslyn, New York. Dust lifts — a sedan has rattled up to the red light. Its muffler muffles nothing. You might glimpse the ancient driver leaning to the windshield, squinting. You can smell Old Spice and takeout. Exhaust echoes off suburban glass. And there in the passenger seat is a teenaged boy; you’ll hear his sobs. And then — who knows why — the sedan doesn’t move. And the cars behind start to honk…
Recently, I did something I never thought I’d want to do, or try. I exposed my family to public inquiry — their secrets and failings, their intimacies. I even placed myself in my grandmother’s marriage bed. And I’m still trying to piece together why.
In my new book, The Queen of Tuesday, I write about my grandfather. About Lucille Ball, too, and the barbed romance between them. The affair is all wild conjecture: a dead reckoning. The book is a novel-memoir hybrid. In real life, both my grandfather and Lucille attended a party thrown — and I begin the book here — by Donald Trump’s father. At the party, celebs were enjoined to throw bricks through a glass-and-steel landmark and this is where, I imagine, my grandfather met and fell in love with Lucille. (Long story. 309 pages to be exact.)
This was a party I learned about late in life — I can’t remember where I heard the story. So I began researching: pestering relatives and reading contemporary news articles online. The details sounded too good to be true: Fame being manipulated to wreck something beautiful; the Trump family using the press, even then, to hide destruction. But it really happened: In 1966, Fred Trump threw a “demolition party” and invited people to throw bricks at the world-famous Steeplechase amusement park in Coney Island. He did it to clear the way for crappy housing. That’s why it’s important even for fiction writers to ground their work in facts: No matter how good my imagination, I never would’ve been able to conceive of a more perfect metaphor for the current moment than a Trump-thrown destruction party.
Using that party as a starting point, I built a plot. I thought I was writing a story about Lucille Ball — and Lucille is, I think, the most fascinating American woman of the middle of the last century. Huge star, trailblazing feminist businesswoman; one half of the most famous mixed-marriage of her day. I thought all this would be the selling point of my book. But so far — it’s been out only about a month — early readers have been pulled at least as much to the story of my grandparents.
Before writing the novel, I’d always known our family was troubled. My grandmother Harriet had a drinking problem. And my grandfather Isidore abandoned her. I’d heard that Isidore waited until his father died, and the day the old man was put in the ground, he left Harriet to move in with her best friend. And Harriet stayed — hermitted herself, basically — in the house she’d shared with him for the last 35 years of her life. And she never, even on her deathbed, stopped thinking of my grandfather as her husband.
In the 23andMe era, when so many people are connecting with their ancestors, maybe readers’ interest in my family isn’t so surprising. We all want to know about those secret prophecies, the genes. To find out more about these people whose biology is mine, I interviewed. I interviewed my dad and uncles and my grandmother’s sister, who is nearly 100. I would conduct the interviews over the phone, via email, in person. Why did Grandma Harriet start drinking? When did Poppa Izzy start up his relationship with her best friend? You’re sure it began after he left grandma? I found my family members helpful and not; their memories were patchy, and even contradictory.
The more I learned about my grandparents’ real-life foibles, the closer I felt to them. The more, you might say, I loved them.
I learned that if you want to discover the truth about your family, you have to conduct a lot of interviews — and you need to go back and ask second and third questions after you’ve learned something new. Eventually, you can sew all the different answers into a coherent quilt. Eventually, a picture emerges.
What I found didn’t match the lore I’d heard. But, the more I learned about my grandparents’ real-life foibles, the closer I felt to them. The more, you might say, I loved them. And that’s the surprise. Though maybe it shouldn’t be. Lucille Ball, and the affair I imagined between her and my grandfather, was really the conduit for exploring these questions — and others. Questions of morality (Was it okay for Lucille to cheat if her husband did first?) and of the nature of romance (How do you tell love from obsession?).
Amy Hempel, the great short story writer, tells us this about characters one writes about: Devil on the page, angel to the reader. This truism — that we love characters who are flawed — makes sense to me. We’re flawed. We resent perfect characters because 1) they rub our noses in our own shortcomings, and 2) they’re not accurate. As the young actress Linda Manz says at the end of Days of Heaven, defending Brooke Adams, whose get-rich-quick scheme with Richard Gere has led to his death, and the death of Sam Shepard, and the destruction of Shepard’s gigantic farm: “There never was a perfect person.”
So let me tell you a little about these imperfect people.
My grandfather wanted to be a poet. He had Buddy Holly glasses and John Wayne shoulders; a Jewish crimp to his black hair and tired eyes, a strong chin. He was gentle. He was quietly funny. His father told him, “You can’t be a poet; you have to take over the family business” — a real estate company. He took it over, and drove it under. He lived with his wife’s best friend for the last 28 years of his life.
Despite what I’d been told growing up, my grandfather hadn’t waited until he left my grandmother to take up with her best friend. And my grandmother had been a pretty mean drunk. She was very thin — elegant, shy, and witty. Before I knew her she was a dance champion, she played the piano, and she liked going to hear Frank Sinatra and Benny Goodman. She’d grown up poor with a sick father. By the end of her life, she was living in a big house in Great Neck, NY, with a maid — and she died pretty much broke. Maybe the last thing she said to me was, “Why would you move back to Brooklyn? We all wanted to get out of there.” She talked to the nurse about her “husband” — and meant it — just before she died.
All of us who lose close family members share something. We live among the glimmers, the vanished stewards of our past, and hold them in the lockbox of the mind. I just opened the lid.
There is a fairly new way psychologists deal with what is called “complicated grief disorder” (a condition of people floored by misery); they ask sufferers to speak into a recording device about their pain. And then they ask the patients to play that recording for themselves every night. This sounds like mental torture. But the transformation of personal grief into an object that can be turned off is the best path to healing.
When you write a memoir, even a partially fictionalized one, you learn things all the time. You’re making that recording. The composition is the “playback.” It was only when I was 100 pages into my book that I realized my grandmother was the hero of the story.
The transformation of personal grief into an object that can be turned off is the best path to healing.
I remember my old teacher E. L. Doctorow saying “You have to listen to what the story you’re writing is telling you.” I thought I was writing about Lucille Ball and my grandfather, whom I loved. What I really was writing — what the book told me it was — was the story of a woman to whom the times were unfair. She had been a background figure in the narrative, and in the life of my family. She moved to the foreground. That was because of her dignity — the depth of her injury.
Until I wrote this book, the strongest memories of my grandfather came to me in a dream — a recurring nightmare. He is driving. Slowly, creakily. And I’m nervous in the passenger seat. And I am unsure where he is going, and then — and I don’t know why — he isn’t going anywhere. People behind him get angry, but he won’t move. He is stuck. And I am stuck beside him. And then I wake up.
I’ll never know all the details of what really happened in my family. But the reason, I think, that psychologists ask people to record their thoughts is because it’s a way of making an event into a narrative. And a narrative is something you can control. You make choices. You put words before other words, and elide things, and cut things, and highlight things. And pretty soon, the material that held you in its sway is tamed by you. At least a little.
I think that’s what happened to me and these memories; writing them made me learn how to deal with them, properly. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt closer to my grandparents than I do right now.
I have stopped having that nightmare.
