Seen and Unseen

At Home with Mom and Dad

My mother’s TV show was canceled in the fall of 1950. At age four, I don’t remember details of that, but I do remember starting school then - and life at home with Mom and Dad..

We had moved to Mount Vernon, north of New York City, from White Plains, another suburb in Westchester County. I don’t remember much about White Plains, other than a neighbor who my mother always called “that cow.” One day when I saw her, I waved a friendly greeting, “Hello, Miss Cow.” I was hustled quickly back into the house.

My parents were big believers in public schools, and they wanted to send me to the public school in Mount Vernon. That’s where all of the kids on our block went.

It was truly a different time. For all my parents’ money and fame, we did not live in a gated compound: We were at the end of a dead-end street in a suburban neighborhood. The father of the kids next door was a dentist. The father of the kid diagonally across the street from us was a conductor on the New York Central Railroad. And the father of the kids who moved into a new house across the street ran a dry cleaning store. The wives were all housewives. But I was the only kid who had the same dentist as Frank Sinatra, who either was on the same cleaning schedule or had to visit the dentist pretty often, as I saw him there at least once a year. But he was just another of Mom’s skinny musician friends.

Years later I learned that Dad, coming home from Washington, would often stop to play cards with the dry cleaner’s delivery guys. And Mom would drop in on my friends’ mother at 1 or 2 in the morning, home from work, to hang out. One night when she was there, one of the kids told me years later, their phone rang, and his brother said loudly, “I don’t care if you are Sammy Davis SENIOR, it’s too late to be calling.” Mom lunged for the phone.

But public school was not in my future: Mom had a piano teacher, named Richard McClanahan. “Mister Mac,” as she called him, would come to the house and spend hours with her. I was puzzled: You make a lot of money playing the piano, I remember asking her, why do you need a teacher? Her reply: Because I can always get better.

Mister Mac, I later learned, would not hear of my going to public school. He was the head of the Music School at the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, and there, he insisted, was where I had to start classes. He must have been one strong-willed person to roll over my parents, but it was to Riverdale that I went, starting in pre-kindergarten. And “Mister Mac’s” wife, “Mrs. Mac,” became my piano teacher; I even played recitals. And I stayed at Riverdale all the way through high school, except for the years I lived overseas. More of that later.

Every morning Joe, my mother’s driver, would take me to the Riverdale Neighborhood School, for pre-K through the third grade, and then pick me up in the afternoon. My grandmother had taught me to read and write, plus some adding and subtracting, so I already was ahead of everyone else in the class. But I made a lot of friends.

One friend was a classmate named Willy Leonard. I already knew how to cross the street by myself and he didn’t, so I would walk with Willy to his home near the school, to make certain he arrived safely. Every now and then his father was there when we arrived, and I remember him as a kindly man who sometimes gave us milk and cookies. His name was Bill Leonard.

Years later our paths would cross when Leonard was a CBS News executive and I was in my first summer internship there, including at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, where I wound up on the air. (More of that later.) And 17 years after that, Leonard was President of CBS News, and it was to him that I went to ask to be released from my contract (which he did, reluctantly. More of that, too, later.) And by now, dear reader, you are beginning to grasp just how many childhood friends became so important to my later years.

Other memories from those years involved a step stool. I would pull it over to the bathroom sink and turn on the faucet, playing with the water, which I thought was quite magical. I also remember pulling to the refrigerator, so I could reach the freezer and remove the ice trays. I could fill them with water, put the trays back in the freezer and to my amazement, the water would have expanded. I even tried measuring it, using a stick to measure the depth of the ice tray and then filling it half full, measuring the depth of the liquid water.

Once my parents caught me playing with the freezer – it must have been a Saturday morning - and they decided to turn it into a spelling game, asking if I knew what the letters on the freezer cabinet spelled. And I still remember my answer, as I looked up:

“G-E-N-E-R-A-L script E-L-E-C-T-R-I-C. Icebox!”

They burst out laughing. What was so funny? Those were the letters, and that’s what they called it, so that must be how “icebox” was spelled.

More discoveries: For Christmas, my parents gave me a model train set, which I thought was terrific. But one feature puzzled me: For the cattle car, inert pieces of rubber or plastic would climb up a ramp, defying gravity, to enter the car. How did that work? Eliminating magnetism, I closely examined the cattle pieces and discovered, instead of feet, they had tiny rubber hairs, all pointing from front to back. When the feature was activated, the ramp vibrated, and the cattle pieces moved forward – even up an incline. That was fascinating: If inert objects would climb a ramp simply because of the design of their feet, that meant, for more complicated things (such as people and other living creatures), we must have design features that force us to do things.

That seemed to be confirmed when our pet dog had puppies in the middle of winter. She left the house and had the litter in the back yard, carefully burying each new pup in a hole she dug in the snow and earth. We had no idea what she was doing until we could see the tiny puffs coming out of the snow when the puppies were exhaling. But how did she know to do all of that? We had had her since she was a small puppy, so she had never seen any other dog do that. And if a dog was born with that much onboard instruction, then we must have onboard instructions, too. I kept wondering about that, but more about that later.

My parents’ bedroom was gray and blue, full of magical devices and objects. When they were away, I began to play with Mom’s perfumes. She had large bottles in a mirrored stack of glass shelves, some bottles round and others square, with different fragrances. But for some reason I did not understand, the perfumes in the different bottles were at different levels: some were almost full, and others were almost empty. So finally I decided to help Mom by oh so carefully pouring from one bottle to another until they all had the same amount of perfume. But no, I don’t remember her reaction.

Saturdays were our days. Every Friday night, if they were out of town, Mom and Dad would travel back to New York so we could spend the day together. Often we went to the neighborhood movie house, the Parkway Theater, which on Saturdays featured a kiddie show that began with cartoons. My parents were huge fans of Chuck Jones’ Warner Bros. cartoons, featuring jokes full of references to opera and other classical music, aimed more at adults than us kids, and they laughed louder than anyone else in the theater.

After the cartoons came a movie for kids, such as “Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” usually short, just over an hour. And then finally came the main feature, which might have been an epic, such as “Quo Vadis,” or the latest Alfred Hitchcock film; “Strangers on a Train” was one of my parents’ favorite. It was a long day at the movies, and on more than one occasion, my mother had an ice bag for her forehead.

Sometimes we drove to football games at Yale or West Point, were once I recall Dad asking an officer “to take care of my car.” That officer was General William Westmoreland, Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, who became somewhat better known later as the officer in charge of American troops in Vietnam.

More about “my car.” That was a metallic blue 1950 Jaguar sedan. It was billed as a convertible, but when Dad and I tried to put the top down, it took close to an hour – and longer to get the top back up. We only did that once. What we did far more often was to wash the Jag, with buckets of sudsy water, so it would be sparkling for our drive to church on Sunday.

Dad also had a Nash Healy sports car, a silver-gray two seater with a red leather interior. Since there were only two seats, if Mom was in the car, I would ride perched on the railing behind them. Remember, there were no seat belts back then. Sometimes Dad drove the Nash Healy to Washington, but usually he took the Jag. And on Sunday, for church, it was always the Jag.

Saturday nights after dinner we usually watched television on a console TV in the guest bedroom, “the pink room.” It was the only TV in the house. Before I had to go to bed, I could join them watching Jackie Gleason on CBS. If they were home on a weekday, sometimes we would watch “Kukla Fran and Ollie,” Burr Tillstrom’s terrific puppet show on NBC from Chicago. My favorite was the puppet Oliver J. Dragon (Ollie), Mom loved that it was ad libbed, without a script, and Dad would often be moved to joke that someone he knew was a “Kuklapolitan,” a word he had invented that meant a person wasn’t all there. Intended as a children’s show, they told me the program eventually attracted more adults than kids.

Sundays were also our days, starting with the drive to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, then the largest Protestant congregation in the United States. Men wore suits, women dresses, and both men and women wore hats.

There were three services: First service at 10:00, always full, was for what my father called “the pillars of the church” – including Mom and me. We always sat in the second pew, all the way to the left, behind the deacons. After a short break, second service was at 12:00, also full, for younger churchgoers, who according to my father might have been out too late Saturday night to make the first service; Mom must have attended that service, too. The third service was a junior service downstairs, after Bible study.

During second service, I would hang out in the church office with the church ladies, with audio from the service piped into the office. They always had paper for me, and I would draw designs, houses and mechanical devices. I wanted to invent things.

After the second service, Dad would be in the pastor’s office, greeting visitors. And almost every week there were reporters waiting for him, including one from WOR radio with a huge tape recorder, and Dad would hold a brief news conference.

Sometimes there were also conference calls, which in those days had to be booked days or weeks in advance. Occasionally I could sit and listen to civil rights leaders on the green speaker phone planning protests or coordinating other moves. (More about that later.) “Remember,” Dad would say, “You are their friends. I am the irritant, the burr in their saddle.” Everyone knew the calls were being monitored by the F.B.I.

Then we would go downstairs to a huge open hall where there was Sunday dinner for hundreds (thousands?) of churchgoers. Out of the kitchen came fried chicken, greens, mac and cheese, and of course pies. If we were not going to my grandparents for dinner, sometimes we would stay and have some – but not too much, because Mom and Dad might have a special dinner planned at home.

“Mommy mommy, look at the penguins”

Summer was a very different time: Mom, Dad and I would drive out to our other house, on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach, on Long Island. We had a gray modern house; across the road was the beach and the pounding surf of the Atlantic Ocean, and behind us was Shinnecock Bay, a much quieter body of water, where I could practice rowing our rowboat.

Today, Dune Road is densely populated with expensive houses. But in 1950, there were so few people there that only one other house could be seen, across stretches of sand and waving grass. It was pink, and it belonged to a nice man who drew funny cartoons in The New Yorker. His name was Charles Addams.

In addition to the rowboat, we had my grandfather’s open fishing boat and a small sailboat. One day Dad and I were out in the sailboat when a storm unexpectedly appeared; he handed me the tiller and told me to maintain our heading while he trimmed the sails. He was so happy that when we reached shore, he announced that I was now the skipper, and that should be my nickname.

Dad loved to fish, and we often brought a pail full of fish to church on Sunday morning. Mom was less enthusiastic about his fishing, asking why she was always the one who had to clean the fish we didn’t take to church. Then she would cook them, along with crabs we had caught.

Through all of this, I had one weakness that neither they nor I knew, because I assumed it was normal. The first time they realized what was wrong was when I looked out the window at Dune Road and yelled, “Mommy mommy look at the penguins!” No dear, she said, those are nuns. They looked like penguins to me. And our cartoonist neighbor, who was over for a drink, turned it into his next cartoon in The New Yorker, depicting one of the Addams family children pointing to nuns, saying “Mommy, mommy, look at the penguins!”

When we returned to Mount Vernon, it became clear: Playing catch, a softball hit me on the forehead. What’s the matter, didn’t you see that? yelled one of the kids. Of course not, I remember saying, no one can. Which is when everyone realized I was nearsighted, so my father took me to an optometrist friend in Harlem near the church for my first pair of glasses.

More on playing in the street: Mom often joined us in the street, the only non-guy playing in the street, which attracted quite a bit of attention. It was all part of her rebellion. Her hands were insured by Lloyds of London for $1 million – close to $20 million today – and she chafed at the insurance contract. To keep her hands safe, the Lloyds contract prohibited her from playing any sports, prohibited driving a car, prohibited her cooking ( and certainly cleaning fish) – anything that might be a risk. So of course there she was, running in the street, the only mom playing with the boys on the block.

She even played touch football with us, and as the only non-guy, whenever she had the ball, everyone went after her, and she would fold the ball under her arms. Years later I laughed when I watched 49ers quarterback Joe Montana make the same move; he was protecting the football, but Mom was protecting her hands.

And she loved to cook. Her mother, knowing she was not supposed to be in the kitchen, never let her see the recipes she was using, so Mom tried to reconstruct them from what she had seen her mother cook – especially red beans and rice. And often they had friends over for dinner. Regular visitors included “Aunt” Billie (Holiday), “Uncle” Dizzy and “Lena and Lennie” (Horne and Hayton).

Everyone smoked then, so when I came downstairs the morning after one of their parties, the smell of tobacco was quite strong. And a few times I would be there for the start of the evening.

One night the Ellington band was visiting, and just as the evening was starting, I had leave the fun to go to bed. As I went up the stairs, I turned and said that my parents insisted I go to bed early and get enough sleep so I wouldn’t get bags under my eyes “like Duke Ellington.” Mom was appalled, but Dad, Ellington and the band members all burst out laughing. I wondered, What was so funny?

Next: What it was like to travel with Mom and Dad, to Washington DC, or across the country, or to Europe. And as you will soon read, almost everyone mentioned in this chapter was to have an important role later in my life, with the possible exception of Miss Cow.