Deconstructing Dad: The Unfinished Life and Times of Jerry Goldsmith
By Carrie Goldsmith
3
33 We heard a clattering of excited noise echoing from the entry. Lily, my father and stepmother’s black toy poodle, was whining in anticipation as the front door opened, and we heard my father’s wife affectionately greeting the dog in answer. Soon the pair appeared at the doorway to the den, Carol cradling and kissing the wiggling Lily before releasing her. Carol had celebrated her 58th birthday the previous October, but she easily looked ten years younger. Size one petite, with flawless olive skin and luminous brown eyes, my stepmother didn’t seem to age; she still resembled her younger self, the one who had come into our lives 34 years earlier. Her long, dark hair was silky and thick in a way no close-to-sixty-woman could ever dream to hope, and she was dressed in slim fitting, black velour yoga pants and jacket. A Chanel insignia on the upper right shoulder identified the maker.With smiling, exaggerated gestures, Carol silently pantomimed for me to turn off the tape, and after kissing me on both checks, she crossed the room to my father, still followed by the excited poodle jumping up and down for affection.
“Hi, darling,” he said, looking up to receive her embrace as she leaned over to him.
“How are you feeling,” she asked, picking up Lily again and bringing the poodle to her lap where the dog quickly settled. “Are you tired?”
“No, I’m fine,” he said.
“You need to eat something. Do you want a little ice cream?”
“No. I want tuna and crackers. And a coke. Later.”
“Okay…”
Their voices during this exchange had taken on the coyishness of baby talk. But it was normal; their interactions sometimes sifted into goo-goos. While it was a little unnerving to witness the sticky-sweetness, years had tempered it and it wasn’t nearly as bad as it used to be when they first got together.
Carol sat on the edge of the couch where Dad reclined; she straightened his shirt that had hiked up slightly to expose his swollen gut.
She said, using her baby voice, “Jerry, you need to keep your shirt pulled down! Are you trying to look like Brittany Spears?”
Dad made a pouty face at her.
“Carrie,” Carol said, turning to me. “I think we need to be careful about your daddy getting too tired.”
“Of course,” I said. “I don’t want this to feel intrusive.”
“Darling, don’t worry,” Dad said, stroking the back of her head, his hand smoothing the long strands of her hair. “Carrie and I will work out a schedule.”
Carol smiled at us both. “Thanks guys for understanding. Now, I’m going to go take a little nap, which I want your daddy to do too, soon. We have people bringing dinner over tonight, and I want your daddy to be rested up for our friends.”
“I’ll be up in a little bit,” Dad promised, and Carol tucked Lily in next to my father’s legs, kissed him in parting as she rose. When she passed the chair next to me where I’d laid my laptop carrying case, she swiftly removed it, placing it on the floor adjacent.
“Can you just leave that off the furniture?” she asked pleasantly enough. “You just don’t know where it’s been.”
“Where were we?” Dad asked after Carol left the room, and I said, early history.
My father’s mother’s family, the Eisensteins, came from Romania.
“They weren’t that much fun,” Dad said, “my grandmother was such a snob.”
“Why was Great-Grandmother Amelia such a snob?” I asked. My relatives weren‘t part of the cultural elite of European Jews. There were no university professors, rabbis, nor Felix Mendelssohns in our family tree. We were more the Fiddler on the Roof type of Jew; my relatives came to this country and sold “schmate”— rags. But Dad dismissed the incongruity with ease.
“I don’t know,” he said, “the family wasn’t educated, we were shopkeepers and farmers. But my grandmother was a bigoted old woman who would tell me we were better because we were Jewish.”
“That explained everything?”
“Yep,” Dad said, “Your great-grandmother thought all gentiles, ‘goyim’ were ‘ganefs’—thieves.”
But the Eisensteins, like many Ashkenazi Jews, were more secular than religious. Their stores were open on Shabbat, and while the meat was always kosher, butter shared the table as well. Their Jewish-ness was selective: they didn’t belong to a synagogue, and they assimilated. Their entrepreneurial endeavors flourished, and the family prospered.
“Hold on a second,” Dad was saying, “I just need to check the Laker’s score…”
While Dad was recovering from his first major surgery after they discovered the colon cancer, his private nurse Cathy fostered his latest addiction: Laker’s basketball.
My great-grandmother Amelia married Morris Rappaport in Romania, a man who farmed a little and dabbled in entrepreneurial pursuits. The couple had a daughter, Lily, and when the baby was a toddler, they followed Amelia’s family to America. There they had two more daughters, Tessa and Rose, both born in Los Angeles, and Morris Rappaport sold schmates like his in-laws before starting a furniture business, which became very successful.
Comfortably middle class, the family settled into a large house on West Adams, southwest of downtown Los Angeles, close to the University of Southern California, in a neighborhood of handsome, Arts and Crafts style homes. Amelia looked for Jewish husbands for her daughters.
“How did your parents meet?” I asked.
Dad didn’t know for sure, but assumed his parents met through a friend; “It didn’t sound very romantic,” he said.
In 1929, Hollywood celebrated its first Academy Awards presentations at a banquet in the Blossom Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel; 250 people attended, the tickets cost $10.00, and the silent film, Wings won the award for Best Picture although Warner Brothers Studio won a special award for their efforts in producing the first sound picture, The Jazz Singer. Later that year in October, the stock market crashed and a 12 year depression began; banks failed, and millions lost their jobs and homes.
Dad was born in February of 1929, and his parents, Tessie and Morry Goldsmith, brought him home to where they were living with my grandmother’s parents in the large, West Adams house. The young family continued living there for the next few years, but then they moved into a house of their own, taking with them Tessie’s older sister Lily. Lily was deaf, divorced, and a single mother of a boy, Joseph, who was four years older than Dad. While my grandfather started his career in structural engineering, my grandmother added to the family’s income by teaching kindergarten and Aunt Lily acted as housekeeper and nanny. The third Rappaport sister, Rose, married a pharmacist, Sam Pozen. Sam and my grandfather eventually shared business interests as well; they invested in Los Angeles real estate.
“Did your parents and the Pozens spent time together as friends?” I asked.
“It wasn’t that kind of family,” Dad said. “They just seemed to do a lot together, maybe because of business. Remember when Aunt Rose was hit by the car?”
It was 1970, and Rose Pozen was visiting my dying grandmother, her sister Tessa, at Cedars Sinai. While crossing the street from the hospital, Rose was struck by a speeding car. Dad and Grandpa were watching all the commotion from the window of my grandmother’s hospital room and had no idea it was Rose until they recognized Sam’s figure rushing around amidst the confusion.
“Night after night I’d go to the hospital,” Dad said, “and I’d find my father and Sam in the cafeteria eating dinner. I’ve got to tell you, it was the most depressing sight, these two guys—one whose wife was dying, the other whose wife was incapacitated for the rest of her life—and not a word from either of them. Not a word exchanged throughout the whole long, crummy cafeteria dinner.”
Dad paused; the starkness of the scene sunk in.
“That’s when I resented being an only child,” he continued. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I have a sibling to share this load with? I’m getting divorced and it’s making me broke, my mother is dying…I don’t need all this shit. I didn’t even get a brother or sister out of this.’”
“You could have ended up with a brother or sister you hated,” I said.
“Maybe…”
“I remember how you used to yell at us whenever we got into fights,” I said. “You would tell us that we should be grateful we had brothers and sisters, that you had always wished for a brother or sister; I was listening to you yell and wishing I was an only child.”
“Your older sister Ellen had the hardest time accepting your appearance on the scene,” Dad said. “I remember her screaming, ‘you can’t make me love someone!’” Dad said. “God; she was probably only six years old. What did that make you?”
“Three.”
“Yeah; Ellen had a terrible time after you were born, but I hated being an only child. My mother told me that my father never wanted children. She had to trick him into having me.”
I was quiet; I didn’t mention he’d already told me this.
“How do you think that might have affected you if you were told that I never wanted you?” Dad asked.
“Mom always says you were excited when you heard she was pregnant,” I said.
“Never mind,” Dad said. “Continue.”
“What kind of little kid were you?” I asked. “Like at five?”
“Shouldn’t I save this type of information for my shrink? I can’t remember. I think I was sort of shy. Not withdrawn, I just didn’t have a large circle of friends. My mother didn’t want it; none of my friends were good enough for her.”
Like her mother, my grandmother had an inherent sense of superiority, and again, according to my father, being Jewish was part of the schema.
“But you didn’t even have a Bar Mitzvah,” I pointed out.
“No, the family wasn’t religious.”
“Didn’t your cousin Joe have a Bar Mitzvah?” I asked.
My father yawned. “I started studying, but I quit. I didn’t like studying Hebrew.”
“You told your parents you didn’t like studying Hebrew, and they just let you quit…Sounds pretty indulgent to me.”
My father shrugged.
“Sometimes I was called a ‘dirty Jew’ on the streets, but my parents always talked about how much better you were because you were a Jew, but they never backed it up with anything except that we had more money than most did back then during the depression.”
When Dad was in first or second grade, he saw children come to school where his mother taught kindergarten in Huntington Park without shoes and only a piece of bread with a little peanut butter on it.
“My mother used to play piano at school,” Dad said, “for the poor little kids who were her students.”
“Did she play at home?” I asked.
“No, not really. Mother played in a rudimentary way; skill enough for the classroom, but she didn’t play for personal pleasure. I was the one who wore that piano out, the one my father and mother got as a wedding present from her parents. I wore it out with practice.”
“When did you start playing the piano?” I asked.
“When I was six, my parents made me take lessons. Don’t all parents make their kids take piano lessons?”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t make me take piano lessons”
“Everybody thought I was a genius,” Dad said. “Everyone would come over, and they’d say, ‘Jerrald plays so beautifully,’ and I wasn’t athletic, I didn’t play any sports, and you know, ‘Play the piano, make friends, you’ll be the hit of the party.’”
“And, were you?”
“Girls like a guy who can play all the hit songs.”
My father took from the lady piano teachers in the neighborhood; he didn’t remember his first piano teacher, but he remembered his second, a Miss Pierce, whose father was a piano tuner.
“She wasn’t too bad a teacher,” Dad acquiesced. For Miss Pierce, Dad practiced so much that his father worried the neighbors might be bothered.
Every night after work, the streetcar would drop Grandpa off at the corner, and from down the street he could hear Dad practicing. Dad practiced, practiced, and practiced, and while Grandpa admired the hard work, he worried the neighbors might complain.
But they did'nt.
“My father did take me to concerts,” Dad said.
“Only Grandpa?” I asked.
“No, your grandmother would go with us to the opera, and she’d knit. I could hear the clicking of my mother’s knitting needles when we’d go to concerts. She would knit in the dark.”
“It sounds like your parents made an effort to expose you to music,” I said.
“Of course they did. They knew I took the whole music thing seriously. That was one of the things I hated about the ranch, there was no piano to practice on.”
“You didn’t like the ranch?”
“I hated the ranch,” Dad said with disgust. “It was hot, and the first house my grandparents had was this awful, old ranch house without air-conditioning. It went back to the turn of the century, and there were bugs. Once there was a rattlesnake caught between the screen and the window pane.”
