A '50s Feeling

By Andrea Sachs Sunday, June 16, 2002
    • The past is a foreign country," the novelist L.P. Hartley famously observed. "They do things differently there." Well, yes and no. When Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan decided to write a joint memoir of their lives in the 1950s, they found plenty of differences. That was the decade of McCarthyism, The Lonely Crowd, "I Like Ike" and Sputnik, and of manners and mores that now seem downright quaint. But in Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York (Morrow), Bernays and Kaplan (who are wife and husband) also found lines of continuity with the pres- ent, and the roots of who they are today.

    Bernays, 71, is the author of eight novels and two nonfiction books and is a writing teacher. Kaplan, 76, is a biographer and an editor, whose 1966 study Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain won a Pulitzer Prize. They live in a tony neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass., a few blocks from Harvard, on so-called Professors' Row, which real estate agents refer to as the smart street because such high-IQ figures as John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have called it home. It was a long leap from there back to Manhattan at mid-century.


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    "There were a lot of codes that asked to be broken in the '50s: codes about sex, codes about drinking, codes about what you wore, codes about what you saw," says Bernays. But, she adds, "it was easy to be rebellious, if you didn't make too much noise doing it."

    In their book — which is written in alternating chapters, a lovely duet — the couple notably break the code against frankness about sex, describing in detail their sojourns through the bedrooms of New York. "Sex before marriage remained vaguely illicit for members of my generation," writes Kaplan. "This gave it an extra thrill — the thrill of 'sneaky sex.' We were cat burglars of pleasure." However, their sexual adventurousness ended at the altar, the couple say: their long marriage has been monogamous.

    Both Bernays and Kaplan came from privileged backgrounds. Bernays was the daughter of Edward Bernays, who pioneered the field of public relations. Hers was a gilded childhood on Manhattan's East Side, with servants, chauffeurs and private schools. Sigmund Freud's spirit hovered over their home; she was the psychoanalyst's grandniece, and was named after Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter. Kaplan was raised on the more intellectual, arty West Side. His father, who had studied to be a rabbi in Vilna, Russia, founded a shirt factory in New York that made him rich.

    After finishing college (Bernays at Barnard, Kaplan at Harvard), each settled in Manhattan seeking a job in publishing. She landed at Town & Country, where she accidentally set a fire in a pail. She moved on to the literary journal discovery. He found a job at Simon & Schuster. Through work, the two met, and sparks flew. "Annie had a core of sweetness, shrewdness and merriment," writes Kaplan. She was "immensely attractive, a proto-feminist, self-assured, easily amused, wary of anything pretentious, street-smart, privileged without ostentation or snobbery, comfortable with luxury but unspoiled by it, and professional minded." Bernays was equally attracted. She writes, "He was adorable — sweet, a little sad, greatly humorous, generous, and blessed with what teachers call 'character' and Jews call Menschlichkeit."

    The '50s was a restrictive era for Jews. Certain jobs, housing and social milieus were off limits to them. "They were discouraged from entering professions like architecture, banking, and through restrictive quotas, even medicine," writes Kaplan. For Bernays, anti-Semitism began at home; her father tried to deny his Jewishness altogether. "My father would have rather lived on the Bowery alongside the bums than among Jews and assorted Old Worlders on the Upper West Side," she writes. "I knew nothing about Jewish holidays; they were as invisible as our many cousins in Austria and Germany who did not survive the war."

    The vogue for psychoanalysis was running high in those years, and Bernays acknowledges the seminal influence of her great-uncle Sigmund: "In many ways, the 20th century — and probably the 21st as well — is indebted to him for so many things, for the way we think about things." Yet she deplores the practices of many of his therapist followers. "They have you coming and going," she says. "If you say, I really was dreaming of a baby, then they say, No, if you dream of a baby, that means you want to write a book. If you want to write a book, they say, You really want a child."

    Therapy even intruded on their courtship. "Soon after Annie and I became engaged, a psychologist we met at a party told us we were the worst imaginable marital risk," Kaplan recalls. The therapeutic view proved wrong again: Bernays and Kaplan have been married 47 years, and they have three children and six grandchildren. Every day the two go off to their individual offices in their Dutch colonial home to work on their next books. It's just life on Professors' Row.