The Old Gent

Get yourself a copy of coffee. I'm going to tell you about my great grandpa.

My dad never talked much about his family- truth is he didn't have one really. His mother must have died soon after he was born. To this day I don't even know what her name was. He had two older sisters but his dad (my grandpa) put them in "service" as soon as they were big enough to make a bed.
We were all named Ned -- my grandpa, my dad and me in fact my legal name is "Ned C. ..... III)
I went out to California when I was seventeen. I'd planned for almost a year- working in a factory double shifts (13 hours a night, 6 nights a week )
One night, my dad and I had one of our usual imbroglios and I terminated it with "OK, I've had it - I'm getting out of here"
My dad; "And where do you think you're going?"
Me: "As far away from here as I can get - California"

So a couple of days later, I was on a "Flying Irishman" unscheduled flight to San Francisco. It took close to 24 hours and we made about 15 stops enroute.

I stayed with my father's sister Aunt Helen for the first six months she was a great gal and had a daughter who was just a year older than me and a Freshman at San Jose State.
Shortly after I moved in and we'd gotten acquainted (I"d never even seen either Helen or her daughter Susan before) Aunt Helen started telling me about the family - things my dad had never even mentioned.
One night she told me about "The old Gent"
"That was what we called hime" she said "Not Grandad or Grandpa, and we never referred to him by his name, which was 'C.C.' just "The Old Gent".
She went on "You know my sister, Polly, is very interested in family history and geneology - she even managed somehow to join the DAR. So she kept trying to find out about "The Old Gent"- who his family was, where he came from before he had the feed business in Ohio. . Finally in desperation she hired private detectives to check records back there. After about a month they came back to her with nothing. There wasn't a trace of "The Old Gent"before he owned the feed business- not even a marriage certificate or any recording of your grandfather's birth. Christopher Columbus Smith just materialized in that small town in western Ohio a full grown man with no past"

When I told the story to a buddy of mine, he thought about it for a few minutes and then he said:
"Man, I got it- your great grandpa was Jack the Ripper, Christopher Columbus Smith ? Man that's bogus"
That shook me a little but later, when I checked dates and calculated when my Great Grand "materialized' in Ohio, it didn't check out at all with Jack the Ripper's history.

So he wasn't Jack the Ripper but who the hell was he?
A fugitive or an ex-con?
Black Sheep of a wealthy eastern family (He did have money)
Native American or half breed who wanted to live as a white man?

One of the few things I do know about him is that he knew Abe Lincoln pretty well. I've got a walking stick with the inscription "A. Lincoln to C.C. Smith-1860" on the gold handle.
"The Old Gent" made a lot of money in the feed and seed business. Then he went back to Chicago and bought some land there. They call it the Chicago Loop now.

After "The Old Gent" died (must have been right around the turn of the twentieth century) My Grandfather (Ned C no. 1) Sold most of the Chicago land and lived off the proceeds until he died in the early nineteen forties. He left each one of his grandchildren a $10,000.00 Savings Bond

My dad had gotten and spent his share of the family fortune about 10 years before I was born.

The Old Gent
(The Sequel)

After I told you about “The Old Gent”, I realized that OG rides again and he’s me.
Now, at three score and ten I’m my own grandpa. Sometimes I forget... (everything!)
but tonight I realized that there is a big gap between the people who were born before WW II and the ones who came after.
Like the Boomers - sure they’re not exactly kids anymore - Cher is pushing 55 or something and the surviving Beatles are running hard to stay in place but the gap is still the War.

So what’s the big difference? Why should a few years separate me and my generation from those who came later?
The War (not the Korean police action, not Vietnam, not the Gulf War and obviously not the current disaster)

World War II, “the last of the great wars” was the one that made heroes of all serviceman,
“our boys overseas” in Okinawa and Wake Island, the Phillipines, Burma, Dunkirk, the Battle of the Bulge, Salerno, Normandy, Berlin etc.

The kids that were growing up while the troops battled overseas, were reminded day and night on radio and in the newsreels, in Life Magazine and all the newspapers in the U.S. that our troops were “making the world safe for Democracy”, and they were heroes, every single one of them.

My uncle Gene, who beat up his wife regularly and then knocked her up before he went back to his outfit was a hero.
The kid whose dad ran the liquor store on the corner and took bets on the side was a hero.
My dad, who was rejected because he was almost blind in one eye was not a hero

Old/New York

Old/New York



9/13/03
6:30 AM

Ad introibo ad altare...
30 E. 60
Converted Apt. Bldg.
French Book Store on the ground floor
Doorman in the front
Lobby with white marble floors
Starter and elevator operators:
“floors please”

We were on the fifth and the eighth and various rooms in between
My father and his two partners’ Ad Agency
Clients were the Sri Aurobindo Library,
Martex Towels, Playtex (Living bras and girdles)
Union Bag, Camp Paper ,
and the guy who sold rose bushes by mail order , Greystone Press and the Fiction Book Club of America and a couple of dozen more

On the street: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor stepping out of their house across the street almost bumped innto Rex Harrison who lived on Park.

The Gabor sisters (clients of the Agency) had their jewellry store a couple of blocks up
On Madison Avenue. Zsa Zsa told us “Darlings, look at that guy taking the bracelett out of the showcase. In Hungary he was a Count and my family were peasants- now we are the Owners of this business and he works for me and Mama, Jolie and Eva”

Going west on 60th: El Morrocco - the wise guys from downtown
“White on white”shirts and big cufflinks” having cocktails with some of the folks from the nieghborhood like Jimmy Roosevelt and Faye Emerson, Rex and the Duke (who wasn’t too bright but sure dressed well )

Around the corner, on 59th -FAO Schwartz (the greatest toy store in the world) hand painted lead soldiiers, Scotts Guards, Commandos , Red Coats and hundreds of other regiments, armies and tribes.
Bloomingdales was three blocks east but it really wasn’t part of the neighborhood.
Plaza -2 -14300, Murray Hill was downtown in the east thirties. Did they name the hotel after the Phone exchange or was it the other way around. Actually the hotel and the exchange were named for the place in Central Park - the Fountain that was in front of the Plaza Hotel but that that was way over on the West Side (you know the Story) and not a part of our neighborhood.
We never went to the West Side at all except to go to the theater or the clubs.
I took my girl friend to see South Pacific with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza we had seats in the fourth row orchestra. She was really impressed but I never made it past first base (with her)

I lost my virginity at sixteen to a forty year old divorcee who picked me up in a bar on Madison (the one where the art dealers hung out) and took me back to her place “for coffee”
Veda Clark was a copy writer in the Agency, she’d been working with my Dad for quite some time - in fact she’d known him and my mom since the early days in Chicago (where I was born) We left there and came to New York when I was three but I never told anybody that I was born in Chicago.
Veda was born in Indiana (that’s even cornier than Chicago) but she was the epitome of sophistication and in those days in our neighborhood, that wasn’t a pose or an attitude
It was a religion.
Birdland was on the West Side, not far from the Brill Building where I took trumpet lessons.
Louie, my teacher had a small room on the fifth floor of the Brill. He was kind of jammed in between a couple of rehearsal rooms. I wasn’t all that talented - a good ear but I couldn’t read a note. If you gave me a minute, I could recognize a b flat on the sheet but I couldn’t play anything unless I heard it and memorized it first. But I could remember almost anything I heard. I even worked for ASCAP for a while, listening to the radio and logging the songs that were played.
The big bands (and some smaller groups) held their rehearsals in the Brill (unless they had a gig) I remember coming out of lesson and seeing the Duke noodling on the piano while the guys in the band were warming up.
I think I paid my teacher around five (maybe seven) for a lesson but since I never practiced enough I ‘d bring him a bottle of sweet sherry every other week or so.

The Paramount Theater was about three blocks south of the Brill Building, on Broadway.
I saw Frankie Sinatra play there- I can’t remember the band. The Paramount was a really big theater and it was packed when Frankie played there. Hundreds and hundreds of bobby soxers, screaming, jumping up and down (one fell in my lap- we were both excited).
All the big bands played the Paramount
Duke Ellington- Mood indigo, A Train and all that jazz. The theater jammed fool and the hush when the Duke hit the opening bars of Sophisticated Lady and the way the whole building rocked when the whole gang got into A Train.

Stan Kenton played the paramount too. He was almost as sophisticated as Duke but he had the power. When they got into the Peanut Vendor, I knew that the only thing I ever wanted to do inn my life was play like soloist (it might have been Shorty Rogers but I’m not sure.

My mother had a reataurant downtown on 24th St. just off Fifth Avenue. Not an uptown place at all. In those days, all of the big insurance companies had their headquarters in that neighborhood and at five o’clock - Monday through Friday, they’d be standing four deep at my mom’s forty foot bar. She had two regular bartenders plus a couple more who just worked the rush hour. She had a freind, kind of an uncle who had owned clubs and bars since prohibition when he rode shotgun on a beer truck. Once she told him that she was sure that one of the bartenders was toweling change.
(A customer would pay for his seventy-five cent Manhattan with a five - George , the bartende, would break the five and put three singles and five quarters on the bar . Each time he wiped the bar , he’d “towel” a quarter. )
My “uncle” listened to Mom and started to laugh. He said “Bella, if the worst that happens is a little toweling - your lucky. All Bartenders are on the take one way or other and George’s game is pretty harmless. The one’s that don’t towel ‘forget’ to ring up a tab, Others pimp and some guys gamble and their Bookies are at the bar every night.)
Mom was a little naive so when the representative from our local precinct came in at Christmas time and handed her “The List” she didn’t have ay idea what it was soi she asked:
“What’s this?”
“It’s The List”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“The stars are the Captains - they get fifty, diamonds are the lieutenants they get twenty five, Sargeants, like me get five and you work it out for yourself with your beat cops usually a good meal and a couple shots on a cold night will keep them quiet”
She looks at The List for a while and then:
“That looks like almost three hundred dollars, I can’t afford anything like that”
The cop picks up his drink and takes a sip-
“Lady, I ain’t gonna tell you what to do but if I was you, I’d get a loan or something”

When she tells Uncle Bill he says:
“You’d better pay Bella, they could really make your life miserable”
7:26 AM

It Was Good (while it lasted)

Suzanne aka Rayette
Chapter 2

In retrospect, I suspected that Marion wasn’t like other people at the time I met her. Her moods were long and intense- she could go from almost giddy happiness to a somber and sullen mood without any apparent reason and, after I’d known her for a while a few people, including her brother-in-law, would make hints about Marion was “more than a little ‘weird’”
I’ d gone through this before with my first wife and I still thought that I could help people, even if they had no desire to be helped. I’ve always thought of it as my “JC Complex”. Fortunately I finally outgrew that bit of childishness.

Moving to London was really fun and exciting - It was in the early seventies and a lot of American artists and such had moved to London from the States, some to avoid the draft and others because London seemed to be “where it was at” Among the expats was my sister, Nicole, who had moved to London soon after her marriage in ‘69. Her new husband was a very talented advertising art director and had joined a hot ad agency in London.
But I didn’t have their address and I was in London almost a year before I ran into them.

As director of european advertising and public relations, I spent a lot of time traveling between London and the European capitals. I traveled first class and nobody ever questioned my expenses. It was great for me but not much fun for Marion. She was alone with her son in a foreign country no family or friends and a husband who was away on business about three weeks out of four . It wasn’t long before her behavior became totally erratic and problematical. I tried to find psychiatric help for her but she refused to see anyone I suggested. Things were becoming seriously unglued. Finally, one night I came home from a week in Italy and found her lying on the floor in dark room - no TV or music, just Marion on the floor apparently just staring at the ceiling. She screamed when I called her name and attacked me with a knife when I entered the room.
She spent a few days under hospitalization under observation and I had a conference with a psychiatrist who advised me to get her home, back to familiar surroundings and family etc.
I called Marion’s sister and we agreed that she would fly to London and bring her sister back to their parents’ home.

A week later I was alone in my London flat. Marion was gone and I never saw or spoke to her again. The family, who were the inheritors of a large fortune, arranged a quick and quiet divorce. We weren’t married long enough to celebrate an anniversary. As I write this I can feel a certain sadness - I don’t miss Marion, I just regret all the unnecessary pain and suffering. Was I to blame? Obviously, but I only expedited the collapse of a marriage that was doomed from the very beginning. I married Marion on the rebound. My first wife had been French and I thought that part of our problem was the fundamental differences in our ages (she was ten years older) language and culture. So I found a local woman, my own age that I thought would be more compatible. Unfortunately, she was insane.













For the first few months after M’s departure, I was busy with my work and took advantage of my bachelor status to take my weekends “on the continent” as the Brits would say. If I had a business trip to Italy on the calendar, I would leave on Friday evening for a Monday appointment in Milan and spend the weekend in the Alps or on coast. I had close friends in Milan and we’d have dinner together during the week. Once, my very good friend, Adriano asked me:

“Who do you think are the most emotional people in Europe?”
After some hesitation I mentioned the Spanish and Adriano laughed and said :

”You really wanted to say the Italians but you were afraid I’d be offended”
and he continued:
“ The most emotional people are the Germans, followed closely by the English. These are people who hide their emotions most of the time but when a situation becomes impossible, they explode. Leaving emotional shrapnel all over the landscape. They are completely controlled by their own emotions totally incapable of controlling them.
The Italians and perhaps the Spanish as well, emote constantly, rarely repressing any expression of feelings but we always retain control of our emotions, never going “sotto giri”, “over the top “ as you Americans say.

Now let’s have dinner, Giannino’s Restaurant has the most fabulous Risotto with
truffles. What do you say?”

One place that was demanding a lot of my attention at that time was Sweden. We had only recently started up operations there and everybody including the company’s Swedish general manager, needed to have their hands held 24/7. I was in Gothenburg at least twice a month. On one visit, the president of our European advertising agency accompanied me.
Jerry was a very pleasant and creative art director who had worked his way up the ladder to become CEO or as the Brits might say “managing partner” of his own advertising agency at
the age of forty. I had been instrumental in having Jerry appointed and he was grateful.
He was the closest thing to real friend that I had in London. We traveled well together Jerry had good taste and a very good sense humor, two indispensable characteristics for a good traveling companion.

On the flight from London we talked about Marion and the divorce which had just been consummated.
I explained that I had no regrets and felt very fortunate to have divorced an heiress, I had considered asking for alimony but it would have meant quitting my job in order to show “need”
Jerry said “Christ man, you can’t do that - I’d lose your account!”
We both laughed and I told him I wasn’t serious “Just joking of course”
Then he said:
“ And how’s your love life? “ Nudge nudge, wink wink. You must be doing all right, good looking rich american -I’ll wager the women just eat you up, er whoops, poor choice of expressions !”

The banter went on for a bit and I told him that I haven’t been actively playing the field. An occasional drink at the pub with some of the women from the office but nothing exciting.
“Just haven’t come across anyone I particularly fancy” I said.








We landed in Stockholm. There was a meeting with the president of a Swedish agency who might be the agency for our account in that country scheduled for the morning.
So we headed for our hotel, a small boutique hotel in the center of Stockholm right on the sea front. The rooms were very comfortable and nicely decorated it was a shame I didn’t have someone to share it with. Maybe that would change.

Jerry and I had dinner in a very pleasant restaurant close to the Opera, in fact I think it was called “The Opera Restaurant” after a wonderful dinner with lobster and aquavite . Jerry strolled along the quay enjoying the beautiful July evening. At ten pm. it was still very bright about what it would be at four o’clock in London. Eventually we found a night club that looked interesting - we walked in behind a group of eight young swedish women. All of them attractive and well dressed but not bar girls that you might expect to run into at that hour in a club in London or Paris. We quickly met two of the women who had gone in just before and the four of danced together until someone said “it’s two o’clock and I’ve got to work tomorrow” and my companion said “so do I- I have to go”

We stepped out into the Stockholm night but it was already daylight. During the time we were dancing in the club, the sun had set and risen again. Less than four hours of darkness in the land of the midnight sun. I accompanied Gunnilla (my new friend) to a taxi and told her I’d call her at the number she gave me the next time I was in Sweden. Instead, she called me at the hotel the following afternoon and we had dinner together. I would see Gunnilla several times in the following months. I even spent a week with her in her home at Christmas, she was very sweet and wanted me to come and live in Sweden with her but much as I enjoyed being with her, I couldn’t imagine living in Sweden, not withstanding the glorious Stockholm summer nights.

We met with the Swedish agency the following day and after a meeting that lasted through lunch and into the mid afternoon, Jerry and Lars, the Swedish company president, agreed on the terms of a contractual agreement. They would represent Jerry’s company in Sweden and in return, rebate one-third of the commissions on my company’s advertising in Scandinavia and Jerry would do the same on any Swedish clients who advertised in England.

To celebrate we drove out to the lake for a swim and some Swedish beer. The next day, Jerry flew back to London and I visited the Stockholm art museum.

It was fascinating to see the very different “look” of Swedish painting. We don’t see much of it outside of Sweden but the land of the midnight sun is bathed in a very different light. I suppose the distance from the equator ( or proximity to the North Pole) puts the sun’s angle at something less than 45 degrees and so the light is very sharp. Many paintings look as if they were painted by the light of flash guns. Walking around Stockholm is fascinating. At a glance it seems like it is quite similar to the U.S. but a little digging reveals a culture very different from our own. It isn’t surprising that this is the home of the Noble Prize. The whole country is infused with a spririt of social responsibility that would surprise the Quakers. If our national motto is “United we stand” than Sweden’s should be “We are our brother’s keeper” I can’t think of another country where people have such a dedication to the welfare of others.
Unfortunately this attitude often impinges on personal freedom and dignity. It’s a “Big Brother is watching you” kind of place and one of the reasons why I could not live there permanently.

I went on a New Year’s cruise to Finland with my friend Gunnilla. Everyone was pleasant and well mannered as we boarded the ship but they were all blind drunk and rolling on the floor within an hour of leaving port. Drinking is highly regulated within Sweden but once you’re on the high seas it’s “bottoms up”