"Sorry, out of my league. I'm an enlisted man."
"Well, how much have you got?"
"Three dollars."
"Okay, how about you give me your three dollars and we do the rest on modified consignment. Give me two dollars a week. That way, you can enjoy the jacket as you're paying for it."
"All right."
As he's writing up the ticket, he asks, "What's you're name?"
"Jerry Weintraub."
He looks up, surprised. "Jewish?"
"Yeah."
"Where are you from?"
" New York."
"Hey, me, too!"
He thinks, then says: "Why don't you come here and help out when you're not on duty?"
That's how I ended up working full-time at the Sachs Men's Shop while serving full-time in the Air Force. Between the military pay, the dice game, and the new gig, I was starting to make real money. Selling clothes was okay, of course, but I was ambitious. I wanted to get something bigger going. It was just as it had been with my delivery business: Once I saw the money, I could not stop seeing the money.
Now, as I said, every few days, another crew of guys shipped in from the Aleutian Islands, picked up their checks, and went on a spree. So when these guys, chilled to the bone, holding their cash, came into the street, what's the first thing they saw? The Sachs Men's Shop. I decided to tell a story, to package a fantasy right in the big front window. I made a beach scene there, with a guy in a bathing suit sitting beside a gorgeous girl, drinking rum under an umbrella as waves break. The men stood there, mesmerized. Then they came in and talked to me. I took some of their money and in return set them up with a whole package, the plane tickets, the Florida hotel, the clothes, the beach stuff-everything but the girl. It was the Star of Ardaban all over again.
By the time of my discharge, I was running the show. I was not sure I would ever again have such a firm handle on things. Mr. Sachs asked me to stay on as a civilian, but this made me laugh. I was anxious to get back. This much I knew: As soon as you feel comfortable, that's when it's time to start over.
Because I Wouldn't Wear Tights
When I got back from the service in 1956, the Bronx had changed. Everyone was seventeen when I went away, in varsity jackets and white bucks, hair slicked into ducktails, on the corner into the night, nothing but time to argue and boast. Everyone was twenty when I returned, and ready to get on with their lives. I wandered the streets in my Cricketer coat, hands in pockets, looking into windows. The corners were empty, my friends were gone. You go away believing that when you return, your world, your house, your parents-all of it will be waiting for you when you get back. But time passes, and you change, and as you change, everything else changes, too, so when you return you realize there is no home to return to. It's gone. When you stood at the train station, waving good-bye, you did not understand what you were waving good-bye to-the world of your childhood dissolved behind you. Maybe it's better that way. If you knew how time works, you would never do anything.
One morning, my father asked me to meet him at his office. He wanted to have a talk. I'm not sure I've said enough about my father. He was a wonderful, sophisticated man, who crossed the world with nothing but a jewel case and his mind. He built a business, supported a family, taught us right from wrong. He was the greatest man I have ever known. I sometimes think his generation accomplished feats that later generations could never match. They carried their families through the Depression and the war, instilled hope in even the worst times, took terrific knocks but went on. But my father was a product of his era and many of his ideas were traditional. There was a way to do things, and a way to live. A man should, for example, build a business, which he can pass on to his sons. He should have a paycheck, a regular source of income, and, most important, he should have an inventory. Inventory-the word rang like a bell in our house. It was magic. A man should be able to go into his storeroom and count his stock. Here is something he told me: At the end of the day, write down exactly what you have. Put that number in your left pocket. Then write down exactly what you owe. Put that number in your right pocket. As long as the number in your left pocket is bigger than the number in your right pocket, you will have a good life.
We met downtown. He was in his forties, glowing with life. He had a special expression on his face, a sweet smile. He said, "Sit." There was a leather case on a chair next to him. It was black and monogrammed with the letters J. W.
"What's that?" I asked.
He put a hand on the bag. "This is your sample case," he told me, "for when you go on the road and sell jewelry."
The blood rushed to my face, the hair on my neck stood up. This monogrammed case-it was like seeing my own coffin. I stuttered and stammered. I said, "No, no, no. I can't. I just can't. That's not what I am going to do. I can't."
He seemed genuinely surprised, shocked. "What do you mean? You're my son. You are supposed to come into the business, learn it, carry it on. That's how it works."
"That's how what works?"
"The world-that's how the world works."
"No, not my world."
"What are you talking about?" he said. "It's a wonderful business. You will be able to pay your rent, buy a house, feed your family when you have a family."
"Don't worry," I told him, "I'm going to be able to pay the rent and support my family."
"How?"
"I don't know yet."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know, but whatever I do, I will do it well, the way you taught me to do everything."
It might sound like a sad scene, in which a father tries to pass a tradition on to his son and his son turns away, but it was not like that at all. It was joyful. I respected and loved my father, but I did not want to live his life-and he understood that, and let me go, and, in a sense, in going my own way, I was actually following his example, which was to find my own way, freestyle, packaging and selling my own Star of Ardaban, checking the number in the right pocket against the number in the left.
I decided I should go back to school, but I was not sure what kind of school. I looked over the list of colleges covered by the GI Bill. Cornell, Haverford, Colgate. I could not picture myself carrying a philosophy text across some leafy campus. I had trained in the South, stood up to bullies, had breakfast with a member of the Klan, sold suits in the tundra-I was just not ready for that kind of college. I decided to audition for the Neighborhood Playhouse School instead. This was one of the acting schools that taught the Method pioneered by Konstantin Stanislavsky, wherein you don't pretend to be a character so much as become that character. In the age of Marlon Brando, everyone wanted to slouch his shoulders and mumble, "Not my night? Oh, Charlie. I could've taken that bum with one hand tied behind my back." I chose the Playhouse because, yes, I liked acting, I loved attention and being on stage, but also because I figured the Playhouse was an ideal spot to meet girls-all those hopefuls fresh from the suburbs and farms of America with dreams of making it on Broadway.
The school was on West Fifty-fourth Street, in midtown Manhattan. It was run by Sandy Meisner, the legendary acting teacher. I went up a flight of stairs, gave my name, and just like that was alone on stage for a tryout, with light pouring down, being studied by Mr. Meisner and his assistant Sydney Pollack, who would later become a great friend of mine. I read some lines, acted some scenes, threw my arms around and shouted, a street kid from the Bronx spewing dialogue from one of those great midcentury plays about the nobility of suffering.
Mr. Meisner stopped me in the middle of my monologue.