The Note in the Brass Knocker

In the summer of 1979, at the age of 20, I found myself once again sharing a house with my father. My father was single again and I had just finished my junior year of college. He would be leaving for Europe after teaching the first summer session, which ended in the latter half of June and asked me to mind the house until his return.

In the meantime, we had to spend a month and a half trying to live together somewhat harmoniously, which, with my father, was never easy. I had a job at a private club downtown called Élan, which was Philadelphia’s equivalent to New York’s Studio 54. I didn’t see him that often as I worked nights as a buffet runner, porter and bar-back and my father was teaching during the day.

The trouble first began when he complained I was eating too much. I would come home from work at about 3:30 am ravenously hungry and raid the refrigerator. Then one day my father said I had to contribute more groceries as I was eating more than half the food in the house, but buying considerably less than half.

I tried to keep up with the grocery buying, but apparently it wasn’t enough because one day I came home late at night, or rather, early in the morning to find a bicycle chain lock around the refrigerator door handles. A typed note was stuck to the door inviting me to take my meals elsewhere until he was gone.

I had bought some of the food that was in that refrigerator and, damn, I was hungry and bicycle chain locks are notoriously easy to crack. It took me all of about two minutes to open it. I tried not to eat so much that it was obvious I’d been in there and when I was finished I wrapped the chain lock back around the handles.

This cat and mouse game went on for about a week and then one afternoon I came home to get ready for work and found the lock was off the refrigerator. I figured he had finally come to his senses and felt some sense of obligation to feed his son. So I probably was a little less conscientious about how much I ate.

That night I came home from work as usual in the middle of the night to find the front door locked with the chain on the inside. It was at that moment I saw a typewritten 3x5 index card in the brass knocker. It read:

IF YOU WON’T LIVE BY MY RULES
YOU CAN FIND SOMEWHERE
ELSE TO SPEND THE NIGHT.

I remember smiling and thinking at that moment, even in the heat of anger, my father took the time to sit down at his IBM Selectric and type the note. This I viewed as only a minor inconvenience. I ran through all the options in my mind, none of them having to do with looking elsewhere to spend the night.

No one knew that house better than I—from the cellar crawl space to the roof—I knew every inch of it. There was a hatch in the ceiling of the back third-floor bedroom that was never locked, so I knew I would have to get on the roof. 

I went around to the narrow alley in the back, saw that it was easier to get on to the roof of a neighbor’s house two doors down. All the houses on the block were attached row houses so I could walk across the roofs to my father’s house. I climbed up a drain pipe and then tip-toed across to my father’s roof, opened the hatch, and dropped down quietly.

Once inside the house I went down the staircase, which was in the back of the house, to the kitchen on the first floor. I unlocked the chain lock, which was back on the refrigerator, and ate my fill. When I was done, I took the 3x5 index card my father had left in the knocker, folded it in half and wrote on the other side:

I then took the tent-folded index card and put it on the top shelf of the refrigerator and locked it back up. I went quietly upstairs to my room, which was next to my father’s, closed the door and went to sleep, expecting to be woken up by his rage.

True to form he hammered on my door so hard I expected it to come off the hinges. He didn’t wait for a response, but barged in as I had not locked it.

“How did you get in?!” he demanded, holding up my note.

I opened one eye and said, “A magician never reveals his secrets.”

At that moment he must have come to the realization he’d been one-upped and nothing he said or did was going to change that fact. He turned around and stormed back out. He would be leaving for Europe in a week. There were no more arguments about food and the lock never went back on the refrigerator.

Voice Mail from The Living Legend

Rocket's Red Glare: Launching the Ashes of The Living Legend

For the last 28 years of my father’s life, he made the same pilgrimage every summer. It started in the UK with the boat races on the River Cam and Wimbledon, then to France by car or train. Some summers it included a stop in Paris, but always a week in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, arriving at the very end of June. From there it was on to The Fiesta of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain where he would arrive every 5th of July at noon. His kids and friends had a standing invitation to join him on any of the stops along the way. We always knew, depending on the date, where to catch up with him.

In 1995, after he died, my stepmother decided my father would take the trip one last time. She asked my brother and I to join her as she made the trip he did every summer, leaving bits of his ashes scattered along the way.

We started in England by scattering some of the ashes in the courtyard of his college at Cambridge, then south to France by train where we were met by some of his life-long friends, in particular the artist, well-known in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Alfred “Alma” Martinez and his wife Françoise.

My father first met Alma back in the 1960s in the town square in Saint-Jean where he was selling his paintings of Basque country landscape. My father was selling bullfight photos similarly propped up on easels. Alma bought one of my father’s photos while my father bought one of Alma’s paintings and the friendship began.

Once my father arrived in Saint-Jean each summer, the routine was pretty much the same. First there was the greeting of old friends and then the procuring of fireworks in Biarritz, the neighboring city, to be used for his annual Fourth of July celebration on the beach. On the Fourth we were back in Biarritz to the American Consulate for their annual Independence Day party.

In Saint-Jean we would have a dinner of Magret de Canard (a dish of seared duck breast) and moules-frites (mussels and fries) at the Vieille Auberge. Daniel Grant, the owner of the Auberge, always referred to my father as Inspector Maigret (from the famous character in the Georges Simenon novels) as my father always referred to his favorite dish as Maigret de Canard. After dinner we would head to the beach with our fireworks and start a bonfire. There we drank champagne and set off fireworks until the wee hours.

It was a bit of a somber affair when we arrived in Saint-Jean with my father’s ashes. There was a lot of “quel dommage” and the wringing of hands. The dinner at the Auberge was low key and the entourage to the beach quiet. I’m not sure what my stepmother’s intentions were as far as scattering my father’s ashes that night, but my brother and I knew instinctively how it had to be done. There was only one way out for The Living Legend. We gathered up all the small boxes left over from the fireworks and wooden matches and emptied the ashes into them. We tied them to the large rockets, toasted my father’s memory and proceeded to fire them off one by one over the Bay of Biscay.

This newspaper article in Le Semaine du Pays Basque appeared after shooting off my father’s ashes 

and refers to one Fourth of July party in Biarritz the actor Jack Nicholson attended.

When Alma’s wife Françoise realized what we were doing, she was scandalized and screamed that it was sacrilege. She was always very conservative, would never let us interfere with Alma’s “work” and never wore anything but black and white. (I always suspected she was color blind and the black and white clothing made it easier to put together her ensemble each day.) We tried to convince her that he would have wanted it that way, but she would not be dissuaded except by physical restraint until the last rocket was off.

We took what was left of my father’s ashes and headed to Pamplona. At noon on the opening day of the Fiesta we went to the then empty bullring where my father took so many of his great bullfight photos. In the center of the ring we dumped another canister of his ashes.

“Is that it?” I asked my stepmother. 

“I have one canister left,” she said, “For the enfermería.”

We were going to have one more wake for my father in the form of what in Pamplona is referred to as an enfermería, ostensibly a party given after each day’s running of the bulls through the streets to medicate the injured runners with booze. My father’s ashes sat on the table in the midst of the merriment.

Family members and a few close friends in attendance at the last enfermería.

The enfermería was at a restaurant called the Meson del Caballo Blanco in the old section of the city near the ancient city walls that overlook the River Arga. We walked to the wall and cast the ashes over. At that moment a gust of wind came up and blew the ashes toward a group of tourist at the wall just beyond where we stood. Judging from the rubbing of eyes and dusting of clothing, he was not well received. Surely it was my father’s rage at the indignity of dying.

The Living Legend by the Numbers

I believe in my father’s case, the numbers that made up the totality of his life say more than an obituary can. Here they are for better or worse, good or bad, impressive or appalling.

Age at death: 57

57 years, 8 months and 8 days.

Number of wives: 3

Mary Ann (1957-65), Beverly (1966-77) and Janet (1993-95)

Number of children: 18 (4 legitimate, 14 illegitimate)

The four legitimate children are, of course, me and my brother and sisters. The fourteen I discovered after my father’s death recorded in a little black book. They are listed by the mother’s first and last name, country, month and year of birth and sex of each child. No names of the children.

Number of degrees held: 4

A bachelor’s degree (University of California Santa Barbara, 1958), a master’s degree (Cambridge University, 1959), a PhD (Cambridge, 1963) and a JD (University of Pennsylvania, 1981).

Number Countries in which he lived: 3

The United States, Great Britain and Sweden.

Number of states in which he lived: 7

New York, Nevada, California, Washington, Texas, Pennsylvania and Hawaii.

The number of wills he left behind: 9

According to the family lawyer, there were nine wills among my father’s papers at the time of his death. Among the nine wills, the lawyer confirmed, there were versions excluding each one of his four legitimate children at various times. Never a mention of any other children.

The number of countries to which he traveled: 34

U.S., Canada, Mexico, Curaçao, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Monaco, Spain, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Japan, Peru, Brazil

Number of women with whom he had sex: 194

The name and year of every woman my father had sex with was faithfully recorded in a little black book. I have not shared this book with anyone except my stepmother, my father’s last wife, who was with me when I found it. Although the keeping of such a sex diary is in itself of questionable taste, at least the women weren’t rated with stars. 

The list includes his mistresses, models, stewardesses, transsexuals, wives of friends, some of his children’s college-age friends, au pair girls and one Miss America contestant (But as his good friend Norman Pearlstein was quick to point about Miss Pennsylvania, “it wasn’t that impressive when you consider there were only 13 states at the time.”).

My mother recently asked me if I thought my father had exaggerated the number and I told her no, I didn’t think he did and told her my reasons, which were: 1) She was the first on the list (and they met in college). If you’re going to exaggerate your sex life wouldn’t you claim to have started at a younger age? 2) The number is only 194, if you were going to exaggerate, wouldn’t you go a little higher number? I’m sure my father thought he would reach 200. 3) I knew a lot of the women on the list personally and, just as importantly, the women who were not on the list within my father’s circle of acquaintances.

My mother still wasn’t satisfied, so she said that she would give me the names of a few women who she was certain he hadn’t had sex with and if they were on the list it would almost certainly prove my father was exaggerating his conquests. None of the women she named were on the list.

 The number of nationalities among the women with who he had sex: 14

Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, German, French, British, Irish, Swiss, Dutch, Latvian, Ukrainian, Pakistani and Australian.

IQ: 140

This IQ put him at the 99.6 percentile. He was a member of Mensa, the high IQ society, for much of his adult life. For more on this see: “Mensa and the Bye Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case.”

Books owned: 6,379

His books covered much of the wall space in his three story Philadelphia rowhouse. When he retired he cataloged his entire library, which can be seen here: Library of the Living Legend. 

Books read: 1,652

In cataloging his library, he had a column in his database to indicate whether he had read the book or not. Filtering out unread or only partially-read books leaves 1,652. I should note, however, that the number includes bound magazines such as Horizon and American Heritage. More to come on this in a future blog.

Number of books written: 3

Project Gemini: A Chronology (with James M. Grimwood and Barton C. Hacker, 1969)

Charles Darwin: The Years of Controversy (Temple University Press, 1970 and University of London Press, 1972).

He also wrote at least one unpublished autobiography, Tales of the Living Legend and one unfinished novel, The Loves of Dr. Death.

The number of people he killed: 1

On St. Patrick’s Day in 1954 while driving in Hollywood, my father accidentally struck and killed a woman. A couple of notes about this: It was something he rarely talked about over the course of his life. Ironically, the woman’s name, Bertha, was the same as his paternal grandmother’s and, as fate would have it, my father himself would not live to the age of 59. Though he was half Irish, he never celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. It wasn’t until I heard the story in the late 1970s, I understood why. My father’s own mother would also die on Saint Patrick’s Day 31 years later. 

Number of jobs he held in his lifetime: 7

The various jobs he held include three academic positions: The University of Washington (Seattle, 1963-66), The University of Houston (under contract to the NASA-MSC, 1966-67) and Temple University (1967-93). After working part-time for Diners Fugazy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he started his own travel agency, Student International Travel. He also worked for a short time as a stringer for Time Magazine, a job he held during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Number of consecutive years attending the Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain: 29

This is the fiesta featuring the running of the bulls, made famous by Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, (1926), also by the film made from the book (1957) and by James Michener’s books The Drifters (1971) and Iberia (1968). 

Number of consecutive years holding a birthday party for Giuseppe Verdi: 17

More to come on this in a future blog.  

Number of countries over which my father’s ashes were scattered: 4

The U.S., Great Britain, France and Spain. For more on this see the post: “Rocket’s Red Glare: Launching the Ashes of The Living Legend”

Mensa and The Bye Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case

I was living with my father in Philadelphia during my first year of college at Temple University. It was convenient in that it was walking distance (for an eighteen-year-old) to campus. There also was the option of riding to school some mornings with my father who taught there.

One night, just days after the spring 1977 semester ended, just before my father was going to take the rest of the family to England for the summer, he and I were watching the last episode of the season of Columbo. It was a show we both enjoyed and this particular episode featured Columbo matching wits with a murderer who was a member of an organization for people with exceptionally high IQs who kills another member. The episode was titled The Bye Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case.

Theodore Bikel (left) stars on Columbo
in The Bye Bye Sky High Murder Case.

I asked my father if such an organization exists, to which he answered that not only did it exist, but that he was a member and had been for ten years. “It’s called Mensa,” he added. “You have to score in the top two percent on any standard IQ test to be accepted.”

“In fact,” he added, “I just got a certificate from them,” which he showed me during the next commercial break, “For being a member in good standing for ten years.”

“What’s your IQ?” I asked him.

“One hundred and forty,” he told me.

“Do you think I could get into Mensa?”

“No, I don’t think you’re smart enough.” That was my father—ever the loving, encouraging, empowering parent.

At least I was smart enough not to accept my father’s judgement on matters like this. Although my father was indeed very intelligent, I always suspected he suffered from some kind of psychological disorder such as Asperger’s long before there was such a diagnosis. He was always a little socially inept especially in his interactions with his family. This despite the fact that he was, at the time, one of the world’s foremost authorities on evolution and the work of Charles Darwin.

“But, I’m your son. Shouldn’t I, theoretically at least, have a comparable IQ to yours?”

“Yes, except that my genes were likely diluted by your mother’s.” Years later I mentioned this conversation to my mother to which she simply replied, “I’m smarter than your father.”

That summer vacation I started the first of many endeavors to prove my father wrong. I contacted Mensa to find out how I would go about joining and was told that every few months there was Mensa-sponsored IQ testing at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute (EPPI). I registered for one of these tests and made the half hour bus ride there.

I knew nothing about IQ tests. I assumed they were not tests for which you could study. I knew I would be given the California Test of Mental Maturity but didn’t bother going to the library to at least find a sample of one.

I waited for the results for what seemed months. Keep in mind this was in the day in which all correspondence went through the mail. Finally I got a letter, not from EPPI, but from Mensa telling me what my IQ was and that I was eligible to join Mensa. My first reaction was to pick up the phone and call my father, but then I realized that I was not trying to prove anything to my father, just myself. I knew the right time would come to let him know.

Nor did I join Mensa at the time. It wasn’t until I was finishing college and had so little on my résumé that I thought putting “Member of Mensa” on it might help. When I finally joined, I was sent membership information and a catalog of various Mensa paraphernalia such as ties, hats, t-shirts and sweatshirts. I ordered a sweatshirt.

One day my father called and told me he needed me to clear the dead rats out of the crawl space in the basement. “At least you’re good something,” he added. My father lived in a Philadelphia row house that, like most old urban houses, had a perpetual rat problem. I was still thin enough at 21 to be able to crawl through the narrow opening, armed with nothing but a banderilla—the colorful barbed-spear that bullfighters use—and a flashlight.

I showed up with my Mensa sweatshirt on.

My father just looked at my sweatshirt and asked, “What was your IQ score?”

“142,” I said with a smile.

“That’s my boy,” he said, in one of those rare moments of pride in one of his children. “Now get your ass down in the basement.”

Over the next few years I attended many of the meetings, occasionally taking my father along, but the only thing that interested me in Mensa was the various speakers they had every month, such as authors Isaac Asimov and Jim Quinn. I also realized, with a quick calculation, it wasn’t all that exclusive an organization, as there were over four million potential members. I should note that my IQ score actually put me in the top one percent—the top half of Mensa. I did however maintain my membership for many years and it did help my career. I was hired for my first real job out of college by another Mensa member.

As an epilogue to the story, one day—a decade later—I received in the mail an envelope from Mensa. I opened it to find my own certificate of recognition for ten years of continuous membership.