Kurt Vonnegut was a very smart, complicated, enigmatic person. One should not try to understand or even make sense of some of his real-life conduct. Kurt made a valuable contribution to the literature and the thinking of our time. We should accept him and his writings, his thoughts and his humanitarian, caring philosophy for what it pretended to be. I select these words carefully because we know in Kurt's book Mother Night he wrote, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
This is not a biography. This book is not a compilation of information gathered from interviews with informed and pseudo-informed persons. This book is a few casual observations about a famous author's interrelationship with his friend and attorney and the attorney's wife. This is a telling of actual events in the lives of the parties, which could shed some insight into what were the thought processes of Kurt Vonnegut, née Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I had advised clients that no one wants to read about their relationship with famous people unless it is about their sex lives and getting that published by a respectable publisher is not easy. I convinced myself that because Kurt Vonnegut was such an important Author, I had an obligation to relate some things that have occurred that might give the readers some insight into the kind of person Kurt was.
I started writing the book about Kurt thinking that how important he was would be enough, and then the stories started spreading out to other people that Kurt and Annie and I associated with, many of whom were famous, and I found myself writing about some of the famous people we met and knew. I was wondering why I was not practicing what I had preached.
When some folks I have great respect for kept saying, "You ought to write a book about your experiences with all the interesting people you know," my answer was always, "I have written seven books, one in a third edition, one in a fifth edition, and I am working on the eightieth update to the ten volumes I edit and write for LexisNexis, and enough is enough." I always added that Annie said she would leave me if I wrote another book, though both she and I knew she was kidding. Not likely after our sixty-six—almost sixty-seven—wonderful years together.
I am now writing another book. I justify it by explaining I am not writing about the famous people we met and knew, but writing about us, about Annie and me and our relationship with these people, famous and some infamous, that we knew and still know.
What is ironic is that when I was in law school at the University of Nebraska and was elected to the Law Review and wrote my first article, the supervising professor didn't think that my article about polling was related to legislation, which is what the law is all about. His comment was that I could not write and that I would never be able to write. The works that I have written as set forth in the previous paragraph indicate that one of us was wrong, and it appears to have been the professor.
I Am One Lucky Guy
I am just one lucky guy. I met this lawyer in the lobby of our apartment building, you know the kind, a "Lawyer-Lawyer," one who did all that dull stuff that lawyers were supposed to do, and he says to me, "Hey, Don, why don't you retire?" And I says to him, "What would I do? I would just go nuts." And he says to me, "Oh, you can read books and you can go to theatre and you can…" And I said, "That's what I do now, and I get paid for it."
I just said I am one lucky guy, and I have said that and keep saying it, and someone always cuts me off and insists that I must have done something to make it all happen and it's not just luck. Well, go figure now, I was the only survivor of my company in World War II—the rest were killed crossing the Roer in Germany; pretty lucky. I met my wife and we have had sixty-six great years together, almost sixty-seven; pretty lucky. I have wonderful children, grandchildren, a great-granddaughter, and they all not only talk to Annie and me, but I am under the impression they love us; pretty lucky. I am in a business I didn't know existed, representing theatre people, all kinds of theatre people, some famous, the good, the almost bad, and the indifferent, but never boring; pretty lucky. I have written a bunch of books, taught all over the US and Canada, and I only had one student fall asleep on me while I was teaching; pretty lucky. Not pretty lucky; darn lucky.
When I was fifteen, I was not only lucky to play the tympani in the orchestra with Jascha Heifetz, I was just one of the few in Lincoln, Nebraska, who owned a putt-putt. For years Cushman Motor Works had manufactured farm machinery in Lincoln, and then when the Depression hit in the thirties, things went bad for the farmers and Cushman was not selling farm equipment. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy, and then a young high school student put a Cushman motor and a seat on a scooter, and the putt-putt was born. This was the beginning of the moped industry in the United States. They probably had something like them in Italy, but no one here had any knowledge of them. The Cushman Motor Works was so appreciative that they gave the young man who thought of the idea a new putt-putt.
It is not an easy job for a fifteen-year-old to convince his mom and dad to let him spend $130 for a motorized scooter. I convinced Mom that it was safe because it was a scooter and the driver did not straddle the thing but the driver's legs were free to get off easily, and I would never drive fast, anyhow. Convincing Mom meant Dad would go along. Since we were poor and it was right after the Great Depression, convincing Mom to give me the $130 was the next job.
Cushman Motor Works, whose name you can find on golf carts and motorized small postal carts, was saved from bankruptcy, and I putted my putt-putt all over Lincoln.
From the Suburbs to New York City
When we moved from Merrick, Long Island, a suburb of the city, to the city, our life became more and more exciting. In my wildest dreams as a young guy in Lincoln, Nebraska, I never dreamed that I would know a person like Harvey Breit, who was a book editor for the New York Times. When I was in college, I read The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, but the idea that someday I would meet Norman Mailer because of his friendship with my friend Harvey Breit was beyond my wildest imagination.
I grew up not as a sports hero, not as a star of the basketball team, but as a nerdy star of the debate team, a senior speaker at graduation, a reader of Kant and Schopenhauer. All of a sudden Annie and I were the close friends of soon to be very famous Kurt Vonnegut, and as time went on, friends with David Markson, Estelle Parsons, Lucie Arnaz, Larry Luckinbill, Lynn Redgrave, Ed Bullins, Langston Hughes, Carole Shelley, Rochelle Owens, and the already very famous Duke Ellington. How could I have imagined that I would ever meet Norman Mailer? How could I have imagined that I would be talking on the phone with Gore Vidal? How could I have dreamed that Annie and I would own an old stone house built in 1650 in upstate New York and that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz would come to our house with Tommy Tune and a whole lot of famous people for the marriage of their daughter, Lucie, to Larry Luckinbill?
I didn't have time to be starstruck. Annie and I were just busy throwing parties, raising the kids, and doing our thing.
My Wonderful, Wonderful Wife
I met Ann Eis in 1947. Ann had just graduated from Barnard, and I had just finished one year of law school at the University of Nebraska. A few months later we married and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. Annie and I were not at all bothered that we had known each other only five days when we decided to marry. Her folks were bothered and who could blame them? Their only child going off to Nebraska, of all places, married to a poor law student who had finished just one year of law school and whose only income was from his service in World War II. Even I, in retrospect, can understand their misgivings. But it all worked out better than well.
While I was finishing law school, Ann got a job teaching mathematics. Annie had never taught and had no teacher training, and fresh out of Barnard she ended up teaching calculus to a class at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her teaching was interesting, if nothing else. She turned in a failing grade for the star of the basketball team, obviously unaware what the consequences of this would be at a university that prized athletics more than one can imagine.
Next thing we know, Annie is thrilled to get an invitation to lunch with the head of the Alumni Association, a Mr. DuTeau, who had a Chevrolet dealership. Annie was so pleased that someone would be welcoming a Brooklyn gal to the Midwest and would be taking her to lunch. When Mr. DuTeau asked Annie if she knew what she was doing in flunking Bob (last name withheld to protect him, but don't know why we should), Annie said she knew. He never came to class and never took an exam. Of course, Annie was not about to change the grade, so Bob was taken from her class and put in another class. He continued to play basketball and later ended up playing baseball for a New York team, but that didn't last very long, as the rumors were that he got lonesome for Nebraska.
After the year of teaching at the U of N, the job was no longer available and she landed a job teaching all six primary grades in one room in a little schoolhouse twelve miles outside Lincoln. It was a hoot. The telephone operator answered all calls in that town of 120 and obviously listened in more than occasionally, because it was not unusual for the operator to ask Annie how my cold was and did I have a fever, something she could have only learned on the line. It really was an inbred town, with one general store, one post office, two churches, and two bars.
The school had no indoor plumbing, which, of course, meant this gal from Brooklyn had access to the outhouses, as did the students. It was cold in winter and impossible in summer. At the end of the day when Annie knocked on the apartment door coming from Pleasant Dale, the school's town, I would open the door and she would say, "Get out of the way."
After a year of living in a basement apartment on the edge of Lincoln, we were lucky enough to find a one-bedroom apartment right on campus, across from the Student Union. We managed to pay the monthly rental of fifty dollars each month, and it was so convenient that friends often ended up in our living room, which was about the size of two card tables. The kitchen, a remodeled closet, had room for one person standing up, and the bathroom, also a remodeled closet, was about the same size. But we were happy.
Then one day we wandered across the street and were sitting in the Student Union lounge when Ann looks up and sees a man heading for the men's room. She says to me, "I know that guy, he lived on my block in Brooklyn." At Annie's suggestion I followed the chap into the men's room and asked him if he lived in Brooklyn. He was startled but acknowledged he did, although he was even more surprised when I asked if he lived on Eastern Parkway. I met Jack Lepke in the men's room at the Student Union and learned he was the minister on campus.
We became close friends and through him became friendly with Joe Ishikawa, the curator of the museum on campus, with Bruce Kendall from the speech department, and a few other people. We soon became part of a group of socially conscious students who met once in a while to speculate on how we could change the world for the better and also to do something about it. Part of the group was Ted Sorensen, who I knew from high school, the same Ted Sorensen who would later write speeches for our president Jack Kennedy.
We were, of course, conscious of the inequality of the races in Lincoln, and when Ralph Bunche, the delegate to the United Nations, came to Lincoln and no hotel in town would accommodate him because he was black, this had a profound effect on us. We did find a home for him during his stay in Lincoln, but those in our group were very disturbed by this.
We were bothered that the university dorms that were for women only were for white women only. We were bothered that the black student could not bowl with the university gym class at the local bowling parlor. We were bothered that when my wife, Ann, and Ted Sorensen went to a lunch counter with our black friend Charles Gulsby, Ann and Ted got food that was edible and Charles got food unfit to eat. We as a group decided to do something about all of this, and we did. We changed all of that at the University of Nebraska and in Lincoln.
By the time I graduated from law school and we left Lincoln for New York City, women of any color could live in the dorms, the black student in the university gym class could bowl with his class at the bowling parlor, and if Ralph Bunche had come back, we could have put him in a hotel. Charles Gulsby would eat the same food the white folks got in the café.
How did we help change it? We had nice, quiet one-on-one conversations with the owners of the eating establishments. We never threatened a boycott, but we were smart enough to make the owners understand that that was a viable option for us.
We were sensitive enough to use our best instincts. We knew the owner of the bowling parlor was of the Jewish faith, so we had a Jewish member talk to him about how prejudice affected us all, especially the Jews. We were sophisticated enough to know that if the dorm was to become open to black female students, we would have to get to someone with authority over the dorms. This was a Nebraska state university with the dormitories under the control of the state. We started by getting the support of the local NAACP and the B'nai B'rith and asked the leaders of these organizations to sign a petition. We appealed to some local politicians with consciences to use their influence to convince the authorities to change this policy, and we won.
With the hotel situation and Ralph Bunche, all we had to do was to find one hotel owner sympathetic with our cause. After that was done with some ease, we simply made sure that all the other hotel owners were told that everybody was going along with it. Whatever we did had the proper result, and Nebraska is better for it.
Our friend Ted Sorensen would leave Lincoln and go to Washington to advise and write speeches for President Kennedy. Annie and I would go to live in New York when I graduated from law school and live the dream we didn't even know existed.
It was really amusing for us, with our little group of so-called intellectuals, who did all these good things to make the city of Lincoln and the world a better place to live. Of course, being socially conscious young people, we put together another group of students that also met on campus to increase our understanding of what was going on in the world. We would meet every two or three weeks and discuss the most pressing problems facing the world. Each evening we met, we would decide on the pressing problem of that time that we should discuss.
It became humorous beyond belief when it became impossible to discuss any subject except one that we had never planned on discussing, yet which we became hooked on. A guy by the name of Korzybski sneaked into the discussion, and this should be a warning to every educational group meeting, whether it is to discuss a book, a political happening, or whatever, because it can doom your group.
It started one night when a subject was decided on and someone innocently enough asked what a word describing the subject meant. One of the wise guys in the group then mentioned he had read a book called The Meaning of Meaning by Alfred Korzybski. Semantics was introduced into the discussion, and the possibility of ever discussing anything except the subject of semantics was from then on an impossibility. We no longer could talk about the subject selected until we knew what the words describing the subject meant. So we spent the evening talking about what it meant.
From then on, no matter what the subject was we decided to discuss, immediately there would be detailed differing opinions on what the word meant, always lapsing into the discussion of semantics, and Korzybski was just one of the authors discussed. If you can't agree on what you are talking about, that is, what the subject under discussion actually is, it's pretty hard to have any meeting of the minds in a discussion. We were almost saved when Bill, one almost-there participant, offered the bright suggestion, "Can't we forget about this semantics stuff and just talk?" Hallelujah!
Much later in my life when I became friendly, very friendly with Kurt and we had almost daily telephone conversations, I told him this little tale. Words are, of course, essential to Kurt's life, and he uses them very carefully. He was so amused by the story of Bill that he said to me, "Don, why don't we just forget about this gravity stuff and take a walk off the top of the Empire State Building?" Of course, his observation was accompanied by his loud, raucous laugh, which was his trademark.
