Quat stands up with a terrific one-big-happy-family smile on and says: “I think we’re all ready to agree that the crisis in this country today comes not from the Black Panthers but from the war in Vietnam, and—”
But there is a commotion right down front. Barbara Walters is saying something to one of the Panther wives, Mrs. Lee Berry, in the front row.
“What did she say to you?” says Lenny.
“I was talking to this very nice lady,” says Barbara Walters, “and she said, ‘You sound like you’re afraid.’ ”
Mrs. Berry laughs softly and shakes her head.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Barbara Walters says to her, “but maybe I am about the idea of the death of my children!”
“Please!” says Quat.
“All I’m asking is if we can work together to create justice without violence and destruction!”
“Please!” says Quat.
“He never answered her kvestion!” says Preminger.
“Please!”
“I can answer the question—”
“You dun’t eefen listen—”
“So—”
“Let me answer the question! I can deal with that. We don’t believe that it will happen within the present system, but—”
Lenny says: “So you’re going to start a revolution from a Park Avenue apartment!”
Right on!
Quat sings out desperately: “Livingston Wingate is here! Can we please have a word from Mr. Livingston Wingate of the Urban League?” Christ, yes, bring in Livingston Wingate.
So Livingston Wingate, executive director of the New York Urban League, starts threading his way down to the front. He hasn’t got the vaguest notion of what has been going on, except that this is Panther night at the Bernsteins’. He apparently thinks he is called upon to wax forensic, because he starts into a long disquisition on the changing mood of black youth.
“I was on television this morning with a leader of the Panther movement,” he says, “and—”
“That was me”—Cox from his chair beside the piano.
Wingate wheels around. “Oh, yes . . .” He does a double take. “I didn’t see you here . . . That was you . . . Hah . . .” And then he continues, excoriating himself and his generation of black leaders for their failures, because non-violence didn’t work, and he can no longer tell the black youth not to throw that rock—
In the corner, meanwhile, by the piano, Preminger has reached out and grabbed Cox by the forearm in some kind of grip of goodwill and brotherhood and is beaming as if to say, I didn’t mean anything by it, and Cox is trying to grab his hand and shake hands and say that’s O.K., and Preminger keeps going for the forearm, and Cox keeps going for the hand, and they’re lost there in a weird eccentric tangle of fingers and wrist bones between the sofa and grand piano, groping and tugging—
—because, says Livingston Wingate, he cannot prove to the ghetto youth that anything else will work, and so forth and so on, “and they are firmly convinced that there can be no change unless the system is changed.”
“Less than five percent of the people of this country have ninety percent of the wealth,” says Lefcourt the lawyer, “and ten percent of them have most of the ninety percent. The mass of the people by following the system can never make changes, and there is no use continuing to tell people about constitutional guarantees, either. Leon and I could draw up a constitution that would give us all the power, and we could make it so deep and legitimate that you would have to kill us to change it!”
Julie Belafonte rises up in front and says: “Then we’ll kill you!”
“Power to the people!” says Leon Quat . . . and all rise to their feet . . . and Charlotte Curtis puts the finishing touches in her notebook . . . and the white servants wait patiently in the wings to wipe the drink rings off the Amboina tables . . .
STILL WOUND UP WITH THE EXCITEMENT OF THE MENTAL Jotto they had all just been through, Lenny, Felicia, and Don Cox kept on talking there in the duplex, long after most guests had gone, up to about 10 p.m., in fact. Lenny and Felicia knew they had been through a unique experience, but they had no idea of the furor that was going to break the next day when Charlotte Curtis’s account of the party appeared in The New York Times.
The story appeared in two forms—a preliminary report rushed through for the first edition, which reaches the streets about 10:30 p.m., and a much fuller one for the late city edition, the one most New Yorkers see in the morning. Neither account was in any way critical of what had gone on. Even after reading them, Lenny and Felicia probably had little inkling of what was going to happen next. The early version began:
“Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, who has raised money for such diverse causes as indigent Chileans, the New York Philharmonic, Church World Service, Israeli student scholarships, emotionally disturbed children, the New York Civil Liberties Union, a Greek boys’ school and Another Mother for Peace, was into what she herself admitted yesterday was a whole new thing. She gave a cocktail party for the Black Panthers. ‘Not a frivolous party,’ she explained before perhaps 30 guests arrived, ‘but a chance for all of us to hear what’s happening to them. They’ve really been treated very inhumanely.’ ”
Felicia herself couldn’t have asked for it to be put any better. In the later edition it began: “Leonard Bernstein and a Black Panther leader argued the merits of the Black Panther party’s philosophy before nearly 90 guests last night in the Bernsteins’ elegant Park Avenue duplex”—and went on to give some of the dialogue of Lenny’s, Cox’s and Preminger’s argument over Panther tactics and Lenny’s refrain of “I dig it.” There was also a picture of Cox standing beside the piano and talking to the group, with Felicia in the background. No one in the season of Radical Chic could have asked for better coverage. It took up a whole page in the fashion section, along with ads for B. Altman’s, Edith Imre wigs, fur coats, the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, and The Sun and Surf (Palm Beach).
What the Bernsteins probably did not realize at first was that the story was going out on The New York Times News Service wires. In other cities throughout the United States and Europe it was played on page one, typically, to an international chorus of horse laughs or nausea, depending on one’s Weltanschauung. The English, particularly, milked the story for all it was worth and seemed to derive one of the great cackles of the year from it.
By the second day, however—Friday—the Bernsteins certainly knew they were in for it. The Times ran an editorial on the party. It was headed “False Note on Black Panthers”:
“Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans. This so-called party, with its confusion of Mao-Marxist ideology and Fascist para-militarism, is fully entitled to protection of its members’ constitutional rights. It was to make sure that those rights are not abridged by persecution masquerading as law-enforcement that a committee of distinguished citizens has recently been formed [a group headed by Arthur Goldberg that sought to investigate the killing of Fred Hampton by Chicago police].
“In contrast, the group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstein, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday was solemnly observed throughout the nation yesterday.
“Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal create one more distortion of the Negro image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful.”
Elegant slumming . . . mocked the memory of Martin Luther King . . . Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal . . . the Beautiful People . . . it was a stunner. And this was not the voice of some right-wing columnist like William Buckley (al
though he would be heard from)—this was an editorial, on the editorial page, underneath the eagle medallion with “All the News That’s Fit to Print” and “Established 1851” on it . . . in the very New York Times itself.
Felicia spoke to Charlotte Curtis, and Charlotte Curtis agreed with her that the Times was wrong to characterize the party as “elegant slumming.” The following week she wrote a story testifying to the sincerity of many society figures, including Felicia, who had worked diligently for the less fortunate. But she stood by her original story down to the last detail. Felicia seemed to accept this in good grace. But Lenny was not so sure. The whole thing sounded like a put-up job. Look at it this way: they held a meeting—not a party, but a meeting—in his home on one of the most important issues of the day, and the Times chose to run a story not by Homer Bigart or Harrison Salisbury but a Society writer who puts in a lot of “hair-brained” details about his Black Watch pants and a lot of sappy quotes he never uttered—right? This sets him up like a dummy for a roundhouse right from the cheap seats—the editorial about “elegant slumming” and the mockery of the memory of Martin Luther King. Not only that, he himself was already beginning to be mocked in New York in the old word-of-mouth carnival. It was unbelievable. Cultivated people, intellectuals, were characterizing him as “a masochist” and—and this was the really cruel part—as “the David Susskind of American Music.”
Felicia sat down that very day, Friday, and wrote an aggrieved but calmly worded letter to the Times:
“As a civil libertarian, I asked a number of people to my house on Jan. 14 in order to hear the lawyer and others involved with the Panther 21 discuss the problem of civil liberties as applicable to the men now waiting trial, and to help raise funds for their legal expenses.
“Those attending included responsible members of the black leadership as well as distinguished citizens from a variety of walks of life, all of whom share common concern on the subject of civil liberties and equal justice under our laws.
“The outcome of the Panther 21 trial will be determined by the judge and jury. That was not our concern. But the ability of the defendants to prepare a proper defense will depend on the help given prior to the trial, and this help must not be denied because of lack of funds.
“It was for this deeply serious purpose that our meeting was called. The frivolous way in which it was reported as a ‘fashionable’ event is unworthy of the Times, and offensive to all people who are committed to humanitarian principles of justice.”
Felicia delivered the letter in person to the Times that afternoon. The Bernsteins picked up Saturday’s paper—and no letter. In fact, it did not appear until Wednesday, after the publication of a letter from someone named Porter saying things like “we shall soon witness the birth of local Rent-a-Panther organizations.” This fed the conspiracy theory, at least in the Bernstein household. By now columnists all over the place were taking their whack at the affair. Buckley, for example, cited it as an object lesson in the weird masochism of the white liberal who bids the Panther come devour him in his “luxurious lair.”
But if the Bernsteins thought their main problem at this point was a bad press, they were wrong. A controversy they were apparently oblivious of suddenly erupted around them. Namely, the bitterness between Jews and blacks over an issue that had been building for three years, ever since Black Power became important. The first inkling the Bernsteins had was when they started getting hate mail, some of it apparently from Jews of the Queens-Brooklyn Jewish Defense League variety. Then the League’s national chairman, Rabbi Meir Kahane, blasted Lenny publicly for joining a “trend in liberal and intellectual circles to lionize the Black Panthers . . . We defend the right of blacks to form defense groups, but they’ve gone beyond this to a group which hates other people. That’s not nationalism, that’s Naziism. And if Bernstein and other such intellectuals do not know this, they know nothing.”
The Jewish Defense League had been formed in 1968 for the specific purpose of defending Jews in Low Rent neighborhoods, many of which are black. But even many wealthier and more cultivated Jews, who look at the Defense League as somewhat extremist, plebeian, and gauche, agreed essentially with the point Kahane was making. One of the ironies of the history of the Jews in America was that their long championship of black civil liberties had begun to backfire so badly in the late 1960’s. As Seymour Lipset has put it, “The integrationist movement was largely an alliance between Negroes and Jews (who, to a considerable extent, actually dominated it). Many of the interracial civil-rights organizations have been led and financed by whites, and the majority of their white members have been Jews. Insofar as a Negro effort emerged to break loose from involvement with whites, from domination of the civil-rights struggle by white liberals, it meant concretely a break with Jews, for they were the whites who were active in these movements. The Black Nationalist leadership had to push whites (Jews) ‘out of the way,’ and to stop white (Jewish) ‘interference’ in order to get whites (Jews) ‘off their backs.’ ”
Meanwhile, Black Power groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers were voicing support for the Arabs against Israel. This sometimes looked like a mere matter of black nationalism; after all, Egypt was a part of Africa, and black-nationalist literature sometimes seemed to identify the Arabs as blacks fighting the white Israelis. Or else it looked like merely a commitment to world socialism; the Soviet Union and China supported the Arabs against the imperialist tools, the Israelis. But many Jewish leaders regarded the anti-Zionist stances of groups like the Panthers as a veiled American-brand anti-Semitism, tied up with such less theoretical matters as extortion, robbery, and mayhem by blacks against Jews in ghetto areas. They cited things like the August 30, 1969, issue of Black Panther, which carried an article entitled “Zionism (Kosher Nationalism) + Imperialism = Fascism” and spoke of “the fascist Zionist pigs.” The article was signed “Field Marshal D.C.,” which may have stood for Field Marshal Don Cox. The June 1967 issue of Black Power, a publication of a different organization, the Black Panther Party of Northern California, had carried a poem entitled “Jew-Land,” which said:
Jew-Land, On a summer afternoon
Really, Couldn’t kill the Jews too soon,
Now dig. The Jews have stolen our bread
Their filthy women tricked our men into bed
So I won’t rest until the Jews are dead . . .
In Jew-Land, Don’t be a Tom on Israel’s side
Really, Cause that’s where Christ was crucified.
But in the most literate circles of the New Left—well, the Panthers’ pronouncements on foreign affairs couldn’t be taken too seriously. Ideologically, they were still feeling their way around. To be a UJA Zionist about the whole thing was to be old-fashioned, middle-class, middle-aged, suburban, Ocean-sided, Cedarhurstian, in an age when the youth of the New Left had re-programmed the whole circuitry of left opposition to oppression. The main thing was that the Panthers were the legitimate vanguard of the black struggle for liberation—among the culturati whom Leonard Bernstein could be expected to know and respect, this was not a point of debate, it was an axiom. The chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic, The New York Review of Books, regularly cast Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver as the Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti of the black ghettos. On August 24, 1967, The New York Review of Books paid homage to the summer urban riot season by printing a diagram for the making of a Molotov cocktail on its front page. In fact, the journal was sometimes referred to good-naturedly as The Parlour Panther, with the -our spelling of Parlour being an allusion to its concurrent motif of Anglophilia. The Review’s embracing of such apparently contradictory attitudes—the nitty-gritty of the ghetto warriors and the preciosity of traditional English Leavis & Empson intellectualism—was really no contradiction at all, of course. It was merely the essential double-track mentality of Radical Chic—nostalgie de la boue and high protocol—in its literary form. In any case, given all this, people like Lenny and Felicia could hardly have been expect
ed to comprehend a complex matter like the latter-day friction between blacks and Jews.
To other people involved in Radical Chic, however, the picture was now becoming clear as day. This was no time for Custer’s last stand. This was time . . . to panic. Two more couples had already agreed to give parties for the Panthers: Peter and Cheray Duchin and Frank and Domna Stanton. The Duchins had already gotten some of the static themselves. Peter had gone to Columbus, Ohio, with his orchestra . . . and the way some of the locals let him have it! All because Charlotte Curtis’s article had quoted Cheray saying how thrilled she was at the prospect of meeting her first Black Panther at Felicia’s. Columbus freaking Ohio, yet. Nor did it take the Stantons long to put two and two together. Frank Stanton, the entrepreneur, not the broadcaster, had a duplex co-op that made Lenny’s look like a fourth-floor walkup. It had marble floors, apricot velvet walls, trompe-l’oeil murals in the dining room, the works. A few photos of the Panthers against this little backdrop—well, you could write the story yourself.
On Saturday evening, the twenty-fourth, the Duchins, the Stantons, Sidney and Gail Lumet, and Lenny and Felicia met at the Bernsteins’ to try to think out the whole situation. Sidney Lumet was convinced that a new era of “McCarthyism” had begun. It was a little hard to picture the editorial and women’s page staffs of the Times as the new Joe McCarthy—but damn it . . . The Times was pushing its own pet organizations, the NAACP, the Urban League, the Urban Coalition, and so on. Why did it look like the Times always tried to punish prominent Jews who refused to lie down and play good solid burghers? Who was it who said the Times was a Catholic newspaper run by Jews to fool the Protestants? Some professor at Columbia . . . In any case, they were now all “too exposed” to do the Panthers any good by giving parties for the Panthers in their homes. They would do better to work through organizations like the NAACP legal defense fund.