Harvard
This is a post made of three comments to a FB friend who lives in Manhattan. The world is going to hell and he’s posting pictures cribbed from someone calling himself ‘Iconic Cool.’ You know. Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and the classy babes they see every day uptown.
So I’d had enough and made a Jersey boy jackass of myself on his page. You wanna see it? Sure you do.
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I hung up on my 3-yr Harvard roommate, my best man, after years of no contact. We were getting back in touch, he was recounting the humiliation of being escorted from the building with his belongings in a cardboard box, out of a bank of which he had been an executive vice president. He had been a classic golden boy Harvard legacy (father, grandfather Harvard), less than 600 SATs, Middlesex School, and I got him through Harvard. After he failed all his first midterms courtesy of a misguided Evelyn Wood speed reading course, he switched his courses to mine and became an English major(!!!) got his MBA at NYU, poor WASPy boy, and then worked for every bank in Christendom, plus Dresdner.
Yeah, he really looked like Sterling Hayden. I fell in love with his girlfriend. He was 175 lb, 6’2”, and I was just a smart baby sliver. I never told her how I felt. I’ve looked her up on the Internet from time to time since. When we knew her she was at Pine Manor Junior College. Saw her perform on stage there in Brigadoon. She could sing. She went to Brown University from Pine Manor. Loved her. But that was never a story. What makes this a story is that we were both Harvard students. Everything we do or did or didn’t has an automatic glow. Until today, when Harvard is just another tale of corruption, decline, and ruin. Why I had occasion to write this in a series of comments to another Manhattan troglodyte today.
So we’re catching up, ten minutes in, and out of the blue he makes a condescending joke about Trump playing golf when he should have been working, so offhand, so assuming I was automatically in on the joke, so Harvard accent, so not having even been curious enough over the years to find out who and what I’d become as a writer, that I just said “Fuck you” and hung up. You people are all brain damaged, smug, stuck in some time that no longer exists. I had a lot of memories with this guy, but when we spoke again we had nothing in common. He had finally met failure. Couldn’t take it. You know. He had three last names and a numeral. That’s all.
I have a numeral too. Mine means something and I folded it into the cryptic R. F. Laird, which Peter Workman tried to talk me out of. I told him I’m authoring this for all three of us. I lost everything 30 years ago but since then I’ve done 20 books, 50+ websites, and some of the most innovative media works anyone’s attempted. I’ve had two Fortune 100 management consulting firms, neither of which I mentioned to my cardboard box VP friend, but he still felt safe in dissing Trump when he was the most unfairly assailed President in history.
These people are not your friends, not my friends anyway. They’re just cardboard facsimiles of friends. I’d already lost another one from those days, who had become, as an executive editor at the Providence Journal, a progressive who no longer believed in American Exceptionalism after being to the right of Attila the Hun when he was a hanger-on from Dartmouth at the Phoenix S-K Club of Harvard (inarguably the smartest of the Harvard Final Clubs, of which I was a President at age 18), where his Tafty friend and fellow right winger Arthur Waldron was about to become the leading China scholar at the U of of Penn. Waldron was the valedictorian at Harvard College his year. Arbus was his best buddy. Now I wait for Waldron to say something, anything, about the Penn-Biden fiasco and Penn’s take of millions from the CCP. Nothing.
One more Harvard mediocrity. I’m done with Harvard, done with the Ivies, done with Grottlesex and St. Alban’s and Taft, and done with Manhattan. I’m the only one I knew from any of those who did what he set out to do and survived, poor as a church mouse, but with so much more than money to show for it. What I could call, if I wanted, Iconic Cool.
There was yet another one. Another PSK star. Harvard summa (God we were smart, summas, Rhodes, Marshalls, the whole shebang but for me), Harvard Law, right winger from the word go, hated me because he wanted to be president of the PSK and lost to a charismatic 18yo named me. From Woodbridge NJ, St. Alban’s Prep school in DC. (Basically the smartest Alban’s boys I met at Harvard made Exeter boys look dumb and sullen). Looked him up on the Internet a couple years back. He was a retired Senior Partner of one of the most illustrious law firms in Manhattan. His picture looked like he had been hit in the head. What happened?
His cv showed he had led the legal team defending some of the worst environmental offenders in the nation, as well as other disreputable clients wired into federal influence. I featured him anonymously at FB, using a jigsaw puzzle app that showed him no longer wholly whole, what with his integrity gone a’begging years earlier.
Same story with everyone I knew there, with one exception. When I looked them up, expecting all their social and intellectual credentials to make them leaders, they were never CEOs but CFOs, their looks were gone, and they looked somewhat stunned, almost to a man. My roommate’s roommate at Middlesex (Owl Club both, like Teddy) had dated two of the most beautiful debutantes I ever laid eyes on and turned out to be my roommate’s best man at the anticlimactic wedding. He became, like the rest, a CFO, this time for an agricultural firm in the Midwest.
The exception? HIS Harvard roommate, Tacho Somoza. Look him up at Wiki. Honored veteran of the U.S. Army. I never told my dad he was standing six inches away from the dictator of Nicaragua at my grad ceremony in the courtyard of Quincy House.
Anybody else who lived up to his Harvard promise besides me? Another Middlesex PSK alum named Philip Core. Artist. Single-handedly got the PSK branded a gay club in the small universe of Harvard final clubs. We didn’t care.
Everyone loved our gayest member, Page Grubb, who wrote the best last great Hasty Pudding Musical ever, “Rhinestones in the Rough.“ I spoke to him on the phone a week before he died of AIDS in a hospice. He no longer wanted anything to do with me, after having condescended to my writing 40 years before, calling it “unexpectedly writerly.” I had no grudge. He was just mad at everyone about dying. I was just sad about everything Harvard. Including Philip Core, who also died of AIDS somewhere along the way.
Who else can I tell? I’ve had five great romances in my life, all with extraordinary women, but I find myself wondering if the PSK doesn’t qualify on that count as well. It got me through that critical moment in Harvard history when it ceased to be a great university and became a shill for political nonsense. It was happening outside the whole time we were having our lobster luncheons in our brick-walled garden and I was drinking my way to a losing confrontation with two drab feminist graders who denied me ‘Honors‘ in English Literature for my thesis on the gender differences between “Tender Is the Night” and “To the Lighthouse.” I loved them equally. I didn’t convince the drab feminist grad student graders who scored my thesis. So I graduated from Harvard in 3 years at 19 years of age with the equivalent of a General Discharge from the army: “Cum Laude General Studies.” And now I am giving them a Dishonorable Discharge from my life. As I said, who else can I tell?
Did I tell you I also led a small gang of B&E volunteers when I was president of the PSK that broke into every Harvard Final Club but one, just to see what they looked like, because no one not a member was ever allowed to see the inner sanctums. We never took anything. Not even pictures. We just looked. They were all beautiful but the Owl, which resembled a frat living room. Mentioning this now because I’m coming up on a major anniversary.
It was Easter Sunday exactly 50 years ago that I stood on a railing five stories above a brick courtyard in an attempt to penetrate the top floor of the Harvard Porcellian Club. There was a moment when my life was balancing on the tip of one shoe on the railing and I wriggled through a forced open window into… an empty room. From which all the exit doors were locked. Tell you anything? I could have died that night, maybe should have. I was reckless, stupid, and drunk. My little gang was terrified. What is he doing? I wanted to know the secret of Harvard’s power. You can feel that power the whole time you are there. It’s ineffable, all-encompassing, all-forgiving. You are Harvard. You will never feel inferior to any person you meet ever again. But why? I thought maybe the Porcellian had the secret. They didn’t of course. But I was just a kid. Since then I have learned much. And I mourn the Harvard that gave me courage to be myself even as I watch it die in shame.
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I know you all think you know but you don’t. Know, I mean. About me and the city of New York. I never hated it. I’d probably seen it at its best. Done a lot of lucrative business there. Mostly my hotels had great views, Central Park or during my Whirlpool days the United Nations Building directly across from my window like a brutalist slap in the face albeit hugely impressive. I’ve been to the right places too. The Rainbow Room, the Stork Club, Tavern on the Green, Washington Square on the doorstep of Columbia U, the sad bar in the Algonquin Hotel where the great writers drank, many nights at the Waldorf Astoria, and just how much of an insider do you have to be to spend undergraduate nights in the cheap dorm room on the top floor of the Harvard Club.
I remember craning my neck on the sidewalk in front of the Empire State Building, trying to see the top of it from the street. I remember taking the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center, trying not to be frightened by the way the car shook and quaked and made me feel stupid for having attempted to see the top of New York. I had already seen the top of the world from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, no shaking or quaking involved. But I was younger then.
I’ve even been to Broadway. Saw both Cats and Phantom there. Giuliani days. Wasn’t worried. All done up in camelhair overcoat and my wife in mink.
My memories of the place get even older. We stayed at the Westbury Hotel the night before we boarded the RMS Queen Elizabeth for Cherbourg in 1963. One of those never to be forgotten moments. Me, standing in the dock, waiting to board the Queen Elizabeth.
“Where’s the ship?” I asked my parents.
All I saw was a gigantic black steel wall with rivets the size of my head.
That was the Queen Elizabeth.
So I left my home at 10 for Paris, then I returned, a much wiser old boy a few months later. And therefore I remember seeing the bronze lady as we returned to NYC and home.
Don’t tell me I’m a MAGA Rube. I’m a CHYOS Club insurrectionist. Engrave that in your half-my-intelligence brain. And never forget the advantage of being better looking than everybody.
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