“I never understood why I was so wild. I never knew how come I had to be a firebrand. I thought there was something wrong with me. Then I realized there is something right with me”
It turns out that the man I have spent 50 years believing to be my father is not my father.
Bob was at my wedding in 2015. He gave me $5,000, which stunned me at the time, but now I see why: Bob is my father.It was March of 2016. Branka, his Serbian yoga-instructor girlfriend with blonde curls, called me crying right after he died. I emailed Trish Hall, op-ed editor at the paper, to make sure there would be an obituary. I told her Bob was the father of my childhood friend.
Me and Bob Adelman in 2015. Photo: Courtesy of Elizabeth Wurtzel After Bob Adelman died, I was trying to find out about plans for his funeral. I wanted to say something in his memory. People see me now, I look the same, there I am with the same artificial blonde hair I’ve always had, and they think cancer was a phase. Aren’t you done with cancer? Isn’t that what happened in 2015? I think in this age of immunotherapy-IPO mania, it’s hard to remember that cancer mostly can’t be cured.It was the ’60s in New York. It was an uncalm time. Before you could say “What next?,” it happened. It was just like now.
My mother fretted. She got a chimpanzee named Percy for company. I know, unbelievable: a chimpanzee. But it was common enough at the time that their neighbors had one too. The two of them would roam around and climb in windows. They stole the guy upstairs’ pipes and pretended to be smoking them. When my mother realized Percy was a mistake, she gave him to the people next door, who were happy to take in their chimp’s playmate.Donald Wurtzel was from postwar Brooklyn.
She saw a classified ad in the Times under the women’s section, since in those days job listings were segregated by sex. Once a week, my mother and Bob would go together to a different school and talk to kids and get them to pose. They would take taxis because Random House was paying for it. The difference between men and women: Every woman has a clock implanted in her brain. An alarm clock with Mickey Mouse bells.We watch it all go by.
Instead, she let me struggle with my father. She let me work — she let me build pyramids in Mizraim — with the man I always believed was my father. Me and Donald Wurtzel in 2001. Photo: Courtesy of Elizabeth Wurtzel When I was little, on our Saturday visits, my father would pick me up, take me back to his walk-up studio apartment on East 88th Street, put on the small black-and-white television with a rabbit-ear antenna, and fall asleep until it was time to return me to my mother.I learned to raise one eyebrow like Spock.
When I got morose at age 11, my parents argued about what to do. They yelled about money. They went to court. I became more depressed.Because they could not agree about what to do, they did nothing.Late at night, my mother would scream at him on the phone.Life was smoky. I remember a constant miasma. There was shouting. Phones slammed. Back then you could get angry and smash the receiver. I heard clangs all the time.
But photojournalism is a sneaky art. Bob ducked behind grand old oak trees. He hid away from nightsticks. He felt only the precipitation from fire hoses. He was behind the lens of his Nikon.I love Bob. He knew intimate details about the slave trade in America, the difference between Tobacco Virginia and Cotton Arkansas. His undergraduate thesis was about the market for human beings from the Middle South to the Deep South, from Tara country to the Mississippi Delta.
When she worked at the newspaper at Random House, my mother made up crossword puzzles, which explains my penchant for doing the Times’ on Sunday in purple ink. It was an entry-level thing for sure, but my mother had a writing job — reporting to the most important editor in publishing. Jason Epstein helped found the New York Review of Books. He worked with Norman Mailer. He invented the trade paperback. You would think my mother would have mentioned her literati life to me before just now.
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