HEMINGWAY, INGRID BERGMAN, MICHAEL BLANKFORT AND ME
Sunday night, July 18, 1982. The funeral. Michael Blankfort died. He had finished his 14th book and was carrying it under his arm at the accident. 74 years. Twelve highly acclaimed novels; one biography, theatrical plays; a horde of movies, collaboration on the film version of The Caine Mutiny, which he told me he actually wrote. An academy award nomination for Broken Arrow, which he told me he wrote but did not, after his death it came out that he’d served as a Front for Alfred Maltz one of the Hollywood 10. The Juggler, (1952) his novel that Stanley Kramer turned into the first Hollywood movie shot in the new State — a remarkable career as a writer, art collector and public man, president of the Screen Writers, Guild, vice-President of the Motion Picture Academy. And remarkably unknown to the public at large. Dead at 74, and frighteningly only six years beyond my age as I write now in 2018.
I met Michael in 1973. I had returned from Israel clutching a 300 page manuscript about my travels and arrest in the Soviet Union. I had heard the name Michael Blankfort a board member when I attended the Brandeis Camp Institute. I was in the drama group when we performed his play about Maimonides, The Spaniard, and almost managed to get kicked out of that program, all of this unusual as I remain a painfully good boy, except when I break away.
With the stack of page beside me, I looked up his number in the phone book. In a rush of nervousness: I was interrogated by the KGB for four days, had been the first to meet with the Hebrew teachers in Moscow (that may be an exaggeration but it maybe not be it was the summer of 1971) told him I’d written a book about my experience and asked if he had time to read it.
“No,” came his response. Then he said, “But I’ll read it anyway.”
That was Michael, he never turned anyone away. The following day I met him in his office. He was 65 and I was 23. For the next nine years we had lunch together about every ten days.
I walked through his world in Beverly Hills that morning in 1982, stood outside the Writers and Artists Building on Santa Monica Blvd and Rodeo Drive, a building subsidized by a patron of the arts that once housed Billy Wilder, Ray Bradbury, Jack Nicholson, Arthur Secunda painted in Arnold Mesches’ old office. Michael’s was a single, small, cluttered room — all the offices were similar and Bradbury soon moved to larger digs — where often, though it was warm outside, the coils of his electric heater blazed orange. An old manual Royal typewriter sat on his desk beneath a cork wall crowded with the pictures and clippings. His row of pipes and classical tapes rested to the right of the paper-strewn desk. Books spilled from the shelves and there was always the volume (or more likely the two) that he was reading at the time, there on the narrow cot against the wall behind his chair.
Though earlier he had shunned Art as bourgeois, in the 50s he and his friends started to buy contemporary works they liked and rarely paid more than $100 a painting. He told me about how a friend, a major collector, dying in the hospital took only one work with him, by a new unknown, Jasper Johns. Moved, Michael bought a Jasper Johns. Michael’s deKooning, Montauk Highway, is now on permanent display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Jasper Johns was the only painting he ever sold and I’ve just emailed his son-in-law to ask why Michael sold it. The hundreds of other works were all bequeathed to LACMA and I was there at the Preview Reception on March 31, 1982. I did not appreciate how unique and fabulous my young life was or do not fully understand why such people took me under their wing.
Michael lent his precise eye and understanding to everything I wrote. I would leave each of my manuscripts with him, then wait nervously. When he finally called, there were no wasted words. Either there would be praise or he would say quietly, “I’ve read your material. You better come over.” When that happened, I knew as I grabbed a notebook and pen that I would be out of trouble before the long lunch was over — he would exhaust himself repairing my work during the time he should have been resting from his own.
Always lunch. Unlike many people who listed their office numbers and held their homes sacrosanct, Michael did the opposite. The day I looked him up in the phone book, I found only his home number. He thought he wouldn’t be disturbed as much with his office unlisted. It didn’t work. The phone rang constantly and with a humanity I came to be in awe of, he made time for everyone. There was a different name scribbled in pen every day at 12:45 in his little appointment book. In addition to me, there was an entire stable of young writers he helped. For example, he worked with Kate Braverman chopping out overwritten sections of Lithium for Medea (1979.) He worked long hours with Lem Kitaj, the artist’s son, who sold his first screenplay to Fox through an agent Michael introduced him to. And there were many more he touched even deeper personally than professionally.
And for me, of course, he was the father I didn’t have as mine, almost staggeringly, the emphasis on almost who continuing into his 100th year, repeats when he’s angry at me for not having more money, which is often, that “you could have been a lawyer.” Walking out my pulmonolgist friend, Bob Wolfe, from my dad’s 100th birthday in October 2018, I mention this to Bob and he says, “He told me that too.” This is in keeping with my father never letting anything go or overcoming anything, chiefly the destruction of his nuclear family by the Nazis who are tragically his primary family.
On rare occasion, I stop at Walter’s Café on S. Beverly Drive and get a schnecken, a German cinnamon pastry that Michael always loved, as a remembrance. They go fast so Michael would make sure to order his as soon as we entered the café. They still go FAST but they allow you to call up in the morning and reserve one, I never had, just take my chances.
After I left his office this morning (1982) I walked to the three tiers of Michael’s lunchdom. First there was Walter’s Café for a quick bite when only the food mattered; then the dimly lit Swiss Café for better food and more social chatter; and, on only the most special occasions to celebrate a sale, a wedding engagement, a stock market killing or the like, there was the elegant LaScala. And while these writers were struggling, Michael always picked up the check.
Later I would be represented by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and bring Michael to my agent there who would sell his last published novel, An Exceptional Man (Atheneum 1980) to a young editor, Neil Nyren, who expressed frustration to me then that he was only being sent thrillers. I saw Neil at Thrillerfest in NY, summer of 2017 and we chatted about his publishing Michael then which he remembered. Neil would go on as Editorial Director of Putnams Books to publish Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler and for a time, Daniel Silva among others so I guess he got over people sending him thrillers.
An elegant, dashing man, with a moustache and a full head of wavy gray hair, Michael was always ebullient and full of humor. He had a breadth of spirit: there was nothing small or petty about him, something I only partially achieve as I’m inclined to dream of revenge though I don’t pursue it. And perhaps most of all, he was a lover — -of people, and especially of women. The eyes of the maitresse d’ at the Swiss Café lit up when he came through the door; he always had a few moments to smile that huge smile of his and talk to her. He transformed Mrs. Kramer, a little old lady who owned a tobacco shop near his office, into a young, beautiful woman with all his attention and the way he flirted with her. He went to see her every day, and if he didn’t need anything, he’d buy a candy bar or some gum. But most importantly was Dorothy — Dossy — his wife partner, companion. He discussed everything with her and made no major moves without her counsel. Yet late in life, not sure if late 50s or early 60s) he abandoned her for a torrid affair with a woman in the Marina. When he broke it off that woman had screamed, “You’ve ruined me for other men.” Michael would be a hard act for any man to follow. He told me that he had returned to Dossy, she had never on a single occasion brought up his leaving.
Once he took me to see The Juggler (Columbia Pictures 1953), screened as part of a Film Festival at UCLA. He was in a wonderful mood, bear-hugging friends as he always did though a little nervous; he had not seen the movie in over twenty years. I watched Kirk Douglas, as a German juggler, the toast of Berlin who believes he won’t be touched by the Nazis, a concentration camp survivor running through the streets of Haifa, unable at first to accept either his new homeland or what had happened to him.
Afterwards Michael told me that he had been set to direct the picture — had written the screenplay from his own novel — but he McCarthy hunters had taken his passport. The only part of the movie he saw filmed was the scene of a hora danced around a fire shot in a Hollywood backlot.
Michael’s fiction is a remarkable eclectic yet cohesive body of work. The Brave and the Blind (1940) about the Spanish Civil War which Hemingway panned in a national review and then apologized years later to Michael saying it was a great novel and he had been worried it would eclipse the coming For Whom The Bells Toll. The Strong Hand (1956) about the dead hand that holds back change when an Orthodox rabbi falls in love with a woman whose husband has been killed over the Pacific but not declared legally dead; I Didn’t Know I Would Live So Long (1973) about an out of fashion painter who leaves his marriage and then returns; Take the A Train (1978) about a Jewish boy who befriends a charismatic black con man from who he learns honor; and The Exceptional Man (1980) which considers a psychoanalyst in a sexual relationship with his adult daughter and whether he is exceptional enough for that to be healthy. And half a dozen others.
A contract screen writer in the 40’s at Columbia and Fox, among his numerous credits were Texas, Blind Alley, Adam Had Four Sons (with Ingrid Bergman) and Halls of Montezuma. He wrote screenplays at the studio during the day and novels at home in the evening. To continue to write fiction, he told me, was his “test of integrity.” I pull this off the internet now from a Medium piece by Steve Newman:
That evening Hemingway again visited the Stork Club, and this time Ingrid Bergman was dining with Hollywood scriptwriter, and novelist, Michael Blankfort, whose novel, The Brave and the Blind, had been a huge best seller some years earlier.
Blankfort had always resented Hemingway’s description of his novel as phony for no other reason than Blankfort had not actually been at the siege of Alcazar, which is an important part of the book. Blankfort had heard about the altercation between Hemingway and Boyer from Bergman, and when he saw the hulking novelist come into the club he blanched and prepared to put up a fight.
When Hemingway saw Blankfort he made straight for him. The young novelist stood and prepared to belt Hemingway in the mouth first, if he got the chance. The two men stood face to face. Hemingway spoke first.
“ Blankfort, that novel of yours…?”
“ What about it?”
“ I just wanna say…”
“ Say what?”
“ That it’s great. One of the best goddam novels ever written about Spain, and far superior to mine.”
“ Oh.”
“ I owe you an apology.”
“ Accepted.”
“ Good. What’re you and the Swede drinking?”
The heart of Hemingway’s print rebuke of the novel was that Michael had never been to Spain, and no man of honor, grit, letters could write about a place without having been there. Early on I saw a TV interview with Ken Follett about his novel set in Afghanistan, one of his first books. The interviewer praised the mis en scene, and Follett volunteered that he’d never been to Afghanistan and that it had all been research. It gave me the path to write The Damascus Cover with great detail about the locale and scents of Damascus though I’d only been there half a day.
I knew at 23, that I would never achieve such an output or prominence. I didn’t have the confidence, or the drive, or maybe even such passion. But I had a lot in me, knew I could do good work and that would be enough. Unlike my own father, Michael was proud of me both as a person and a writer. The only work of mine my father ever praised was a magazine piece I wrote about him and our trip to Poland together. When I published dovish pieces Israel on the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages, my father countered them with points he’d heard on the Sunday talk shows. I think in ways other than business he is very insecure and where I celebrate when my son eclipses me, my father denigrated the threat. I blame him not at all for anything I didn’t achieve; that is on me. By paying attention to what hurt me, I am able almost always, sometimes with work to overcome the tendencies to repeat the parenting I experienced. In a sense it worked for me that my relationship with my father was SO painful, so often, as it clarified for me in flash how to be a different kind of dad. I remember once and I’ll have to look up the details I have them somewhere, that I picked up a pizza and was fuming in the car about to yell at my son for some, I’m certain deserved misstep, and I just stopped inside myself and say, I don’t need to raise my voice. And I rarely have since, almost never, at him.
Michael called me frequently when I was wading through difficult personal periods. He listened, shared his past problems with lovers and parents and was at my side as I attempted those hurdles myself. Michael helped get me through my turbulent 20s and put a foundation under my feet that I never was alone, not professionally, not personally. It helped make me.
The day before the accident, Michael came to my Third Annual 30th Birthday Party. In the nine years we had known each other, it was the first time he visited my home. Two years before he had forgotten my (first) 30th birthday party (the second was never held) and called the following morning. He had remembered as he went to bed, and upset, had lain awake much of the night. He wanted to apologize and asked if I would forgive him.
Michael was slipping both from a heart condition and a loss of short term memory. When he read my work now he said, “You better come over right away before I forget.” That grace, that self-acceptance is something I admired and have tried to emulate. Once he had a heart episode while we sat at a café counter, closed his eyes and as I was terrified he whispered, “I’m doing biofeedback.” Working passionately and desperately on A Cry From a Red Field, he had been tired and worn out the last six months. He looked exhausted at the party, and when I went to talk to him, he shooed me away, telling me I should spend time with my other guests.
I found him later in the room where I write, looking at my wall of novels, amazed, because of his haphazard shelves that mine were alphabetized. He stopped at the Blankforts — some he had given to me, some I had scrounged in used book stores — and I pointed to Goodbye, I Guess. I told him that was the only one I hadn’t read and I was saving it for sometime special. What I meant but did not say was that I was saving it to read after he died to hold onto him a little longer. They were the last words I spoke to him.
He had finished his novel on Saturday, the day before the party, and was rereading it. On Monday, he took it home with him as he did each night, stood near the bottom of his steep driveway, the manuscript in one hand, the garage door clicker in the other, pushed the button, lost his balance and toppled backwards. All six feet of him. Unable to break the fall, his head crashed into the cement. Neighbors across the street immediately called the paramedics, then ran to the house to get Dorothy. Though bleeding, Michael was still alert. They exchanged a few words and she kissed him on the lips, twice. He went into surgery, then into a coma and never regained consciousness.
I’ve never read Goodbye, I Guess. I’m not, so far, able to.
The evening I write this, Thanksgiving 2018, there’s a smaller accident. My father falls at my sister’s after dinner on the step up from the outside patio into the kitchen, jams his hand under the door. I’m the older sibling. The inside of his hand is sliced, criss-crossed. His two granddaughters, my sister’s daughters take over, one calls the paramedics, she knows one at the nearby fire house, one riding with him in the ambulance. If you arrive at an ER in an ambulance you’re seen immediately. I do not step in, do not want to be the overbearing family patriarch my father is, and they are both in their early 30s and vastly competent. The younger niece is overall upset, she’s the director of Camp Harmony, which takes impoverished and homeless kids to two weekends a year for a fun weekend meant to inspire campers. They use the Camp Hess Kramer site, over President’s Day Weekend and the end of the summer — except last week the Malibu Woosley Fires burned Hess Kramer into kindling. So far she’s raised $86,000 and Camp Harmony leads in the Los Angeles Clippers charity match raising funds for temporary relocation.
As a dozen people crowd around him in the kitchen and pressure is pushed on the wound by one of the nieces mother-in-laws, I return to the living room where maybe two people remain. I take my father to virtually all his medical appointments and several weeks ago his diastolic was 48. My father rushes to the front door and a stooped gait without his cane, his left hand bandaged by the paramedics, (since he’s a 100 and Lindsay’s grandfather two firehouses came,) which is why he fell in the first place but this is how he got to 100, doing things his way so unless it’s uber idiotic I accede to it. After the ambulance leaves I realize that his blood pressure is very low, and they shouldn’t keep him overnight because he’s a terror when in the hospital maybe the place where people are least in control of their lives. I ask my niece’s husband to text her and relay this to the ER. I don’t have her number.
I go home, my sister will call on my land line if I’m needed as I turn my cell off to sleep. At 1:30 in the morning I wake from a nightmare that I’ve accomplished so much less than Blankfort and am surprised at the dream, thought I’d made peace with this. I check my cell:
15 stitches in 2 places. I picked them up after 10. He’s ok. Needs to go to his doctor in a week to get the stitches taken out.
I have trouble falling back asleep then sleep deeply until after 7 am, which is late for me.
