New Yorkers talk admiringly today about “Brownstone Brooklyn” neighborhoods, emblematic of the borough’s skyrocketing real estate. I grew up in Brownsville, another Brooklyn neighborhood entirely. It was still bustling, but was sliding into poverty.
People who could afford to were moving to Queens or, better still, to the suburbs. Before “defining moment” became a cliché, one occurred there in 1953, the day after my sixth birthday. My father took my sister and me to the corner of our block to observe the funeral cortege for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the executed atom spies.
For me, it proved to be the beginning of a lifelong obsession that s now being played out, in a small way, on the public stage. Reporters typically portray themselves as dispassionate observers watching other people perform. Carl Bernstein, the accomplished journalist who also plays one in real life, is that rare reporter who s been able to view himself under a lens.
Three times. Talk about being your own best audience. Bernstein was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman as an earnest straight man to the villains he and Bob Woodward were pursing in “All the President’s Men,” as vain and nerdy by Bruce McCullough in the Watergate spoof “Dick,” and as a louse by Jack Nicholson in “Heartburn,” Nora Ephron’s barely fictionalized version of their messy marriage.
Presumably, he liked himself best when Dustin Hoffman played him. But Bernstein told me the other day, quote, “It’s not exactly a hardship to have Jack Nicholson pretend to be you.” (Just imagine, though, how the columnist H.
L. Mencken would have reacted to Gene Kelly or Tony Randall playing his character in “Inherit the Wind.”) Not to suggest any journalistic equivalency, but the question of dramatic license in portraying a reporter came up again recently when I attended the premiere of a play in which I am one of the two chief protagonists.
The play is called “The Brother,” and it’s based on my nonfiction book of the same name about terminal dysfunction, family and official in the Rosenberg spy case. The entitled brother is David Greenglass. He was the Manhattan-reared machinist whose testimony delivered the Rosenbergs, his sister and brother-in-law, to the electric chair.
But what about the other protagonist, me, the reporter who finally got Greenglass to agree to be interviewed about the case? In my book, any characterizations of myself were implicit, largely unintended. If another writer ever transformed “The Brother” into a play or into the proverbial major motion picture, some actor, preferably Ryan Phillippe, but I’d settle for Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson, would presumably have wide latitude to interpret the part.
After adapting her own memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion wrote: “I never thought of the character who would appear onstage in this play as me. I thought of her as вЂthe speaker,’ or вЂshe.’” In the one-woman show, Didion wrote: “Vanessa Redgrave is playing a character who, for the sake of clarity, is called Joan Didion.
Only when I saw the play performed did I see that character clear, and I also saw her in the mirror.” Years ago, when “Superman” was being filmed at the Daily News building, I remember my editor confiding to the director, quote, “I ve got a lot of actors pretending to be journalists working for me, too.” But my sole stage experience was playing Pancho in a sixth-grade graduation production.
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