The Jack Grossberg Project

He always had the last word. He never let anyone else pay the check. He had a strength that made you feel safe if he was behind you, and uneasy if he wasn’t. I don’t know where he learned how to be a “tough guy.” It may have had something to do with the kids he grew up with. He told me about the tough Italians and Irish kids. He told me about the kids in the Jewish mafia. He even told me about how close he came to being too tough. The kids he hung out with were pretty rough; they burned a building once. Another time the stole a trolley car and took it for a joy ride. Once though they broke into a fish market after it closed. I am not sure if they had plans to steal something in particular or just make some trouble. They were caught and when the sergeant brought them down to the station he recognized my dad as the son of a baker. My grandfather, Hymie, owned a string of bakeries across Brooklyn called the “Garden Bakeries.” He always gave free pastries to the police and they all knew him. I guess that old saw about cops in donut shops goes way back. When the sergeant realized that my dad was Hymie’s youngest son, he took him to a separate room. He said that my grandfather was a good man and that my dad was an embarrassment. He told him that his friends were scum and gave him a such a beating that I think he still winced a bit on the retelling. Then he told them that if he ever caught my dad with those kids again, he wouldn’t just beat him, he would kill him. He called my grandfather who gave another beating.

He didn’t see those kids again but years later, he told me, that he read about them in the newspapers. They had been killed robbing a train. But if a life of crime wasn’t his calling, neither was baking. His older brother was groomed as a bread baker and my dad was groomed to bake cakes. He couldn’t convince his father that it wasn’t his calling. He did manage to win the heart and sympathy of the master cake baker. He knew my father wanted out of the bakery and the two of them staged a disaster in the back of the bakery. With flour and dough everywhere the master baker threw my father out of the bakery telling my grandfather my father was hopeless and would destroy the bakery. Delighted to be free my father ran away to the Catskills at fourteen. He was tall and lied about his age. He worked at any job he could find but he shadowed the stage manager. When the stage manager quit, leaving the hotel in a lurch, my father was able to persuade the owner that he knew the job and could prove it. For that season and the next few my father booked the acts and managed the shows. He had his own bungalow where he could host parties for his friends. He greatest joy, though, was when he was able to bring his mother up, complements of the hotel.

His father, on the other hand, never understood show business. He never understood why his son would be wasting his time so frivolously. Whereas he never worked his way around a cake baking in his fathers bakery, he managed to combine creativity and chutzpa in show business.

When he worked on “On The Waterfront” as a second assistant director, he rose to any challenge presented him. Marlin Brando was apparently being temperamental one day, refusing to come down to the set. My father was assigned to bring him. Brando had barricaded himself in his room. There was a transom over the door. My dad climbed up through the transom then carefully climbed down through the furniture piled against the door. Brando lay watching amused on his bed. After finishing the decent my father stood in front of Brando and said, “they want you on the set.” Brando just said, “OK” and went with him. Years later, when my dad and Brando worked together again on “The Missouri Breaks,” Brando recalled the story adding, to my dad, “you were a lot thinner then.” My father replied with something to the effect of, “you haven’t been exactly backing away from the buffet yourself.”

His chutzpa, or bravado was not simply puff. They always had a purpose. When working in commercials, his director wanted a beautiful beach house in Florida. He rented a car and driver and searched the Miami for the perfect beach house. Upon finding stopped his driver and told him “this is it.” His driver laughed. “Do you know who’s house that is? ” his diver asked, “that’s Meier Lansky’s house.” Undaunted my father went to the front door and knocked. A large man opened and filled the door. My dad explained his purpose and asked if we could talk to the owner about using the house for a commercial. The large man told him that he was not welcome but my dad gave him his card with his number and asked the owner to contact him. Some days later he was told to go to a Miami hotel. He was lead into a room where a group of men were playing cards. He was brought to another table and asked to sit. After some time had passed Lansky got up from his game and sat with my father. My father explained his commercial and how he had been so taken with his house. “We only want to shoot the exterior facing the beach,” he assured Lansky. Lansky smiled and gave him a day they could shoot. My dad thanked him. When they arrived to shoot, on the appointed day, they found a full buffet had been set up for them.

It was simply that he was not intimated by power. It was also that he tried to give everyone the respect they deserved. The times I would tag along with him on the set I remember him mostly spending time with the teamsters, the gaffers, the grips and the carpenters. He built a family of production people who he would hire again and again. For many of them, he brought them into the business or gave them their first real job. There was a friend’s son who had had problems with drugs who he made a production assistant. There was a friend of a friend who had been a well-known hockey player, but was now so down on his luck that he was sleeping in a car that he got in the teamsters union. Someone whose career he started told me, “the greatest thing about your dad is that he believed in us.” “He would tell us to do something we had never done before, but because he told us to do it, we believed we could, and we did it.” He protected his film family, and he protected the directors from the enemy. He viewed the studio or “the suits” as he called them as trying to shut down or hamstring a movie. It was always a war and he always managed to win. He had so many back up strategies and so many contacts that he was always pulling some rabbit out of a hat. The studio complained that set designer on the Betsy was spending thousands on flowers. He pointed out that he had saved millions by shooting in real mansions in Newport Rhode Island, rather than building sets. A teamster was making trouble and threatening to shut a picture down with a strike. One phone call to one of the tough Irish kids he had grown up with, who was now a top teamster in New York and the guy disappeared.

I only know a few of these stories from him or from others. He was away a lot when I was growing up. It was only after his forced retirement due to his fungal pneumonia that I eventually heard some of these stories. That was the silver lining to terrible illness that destroyed a good chunk of his lungs and nearly killed him. After that we talked more and spent more time together. Unfortunately, retirement was very difficult on my dad. He defined himself as a “doer” rather than a “thinker.” He never really accepted that he would have to change his way of life to accommodate his illness. Instead he fought it every step of the way. He tried to find other outlets. In between movies he would throw himself into interior decorating and home improvement. During one long stint between pictures, he decided to cedar the inside of a closet to protect the clothes from insects. He was so taken by how it looked that he started adding more and more cedar around the house. Every morning at 7:00am the whole house awoke to the sounds of hammering and sawing. My mom and I would joke that if she and I and the dogs didn’t keep moving we would have cedar applied to us.

After my father retired he needed a new house to decorate so he bought a place down in Mexico. He did a spectacular job, his place there is beautiful and unique, from the wicker couches to the sky painted on the ceiling over the dining room table. Although this was a much lower energy activity than the 14 hour days he put in doing production, after some years, this too became difficult. The saddest thing for me, about his later years, was that he never found the intellectual challenge he so missed from work. He could still use personality and creativity to his advantage but on a vastly smaller scale. For example he and his brother-in-law Phil were frequent Costco shoppers. Phil was a Cornel in the Air Force and then an airline pilot, a very straight arrow. My dad had heard that they could apply for a joint membership and split the cost. When they did the Costco representative said that was impossible. “You can only apply for joint membership if you are married.” My dad looked a Phil. Then he said to the representative, “are you criticizing our lifestyle?” The flustered representative apologized perfusely and processed their application, while Phil passed through several shades of red.

Fortunately, my job permitted me to spend a couple of weeks during the winter holidays and a few weeks in the summer visiting him. For several years he, Efrat, and I, along with his partner and dog Bagel, would spend New Year’s in Mexico. He had established quite a group of neighbors down there, other people who retired or came down on weekends. In between trips to visit him we spoke on the phone. We often spoke about computers or technology. As a kid my dad raised me on gadgets and I introduced him to computers. We had one of the first personal computers in 79. When we got an early Atari, when I was in high school, my dad was hooked. He did his finance on that computer and I played games. One day my friend and I were in his office playing missile command. He came in and chased us out because he had some work to do. My friend and I decided to go out. On our way passed his office we heard strange sounds coming from inside. As we opened the door my, somewhat embarrassed father turned for away from his game of missile command, joystick in hand. Years later in grad school when I had given up on computers my father reintroduced me to them. I spent years insisting that for kind of mathematics I did, computers were not helpful. My father kept insisting that there must be a way they could be helpful. I found out I was wrong as I learned that one could test ideas using computers and explore patterns. In fact, even though there are no references to computers in my thesis, I learned out how to solve my thesis problem by playing around with a mathematical computer program.

In later years we talked more about the stock market, politics and life. Besides my father he was my financial advisor, career councilor and most of all, my friend. The last few years we were talking every day. We still argued but we both learned that it no longer was very important to be right. Growing up, my father had been a bit awkward about showing affection. His father had never told him he loved him and he always made it a point to tell me that he loved me. Nevertheless, in the years following his retirement, and perhaps partially through the limitless love of his dog, he became more and more comfortable with affection. A couple of years back, I told him that I thought he was the greatest. It sounds kind of silly but he took it very seriously at first and was quite moved. Soon though, it had become a sort of competition. I would say “you’re the greatest dad,” and he would say, “no, YOU’RE the greatest.” We would go back and forth this way as a miniature mutual appreciation society.

When I did a post-doc in Israel he came to visit me. Efrat and I were dating and the three of us took a trip together. Efrat said that seeing my relationship with my father was one of the things that she really felt was special about me. My dad loved Efrat and her whole family. It reminded him of his brothers and sisters in better times. She was like the daughter he never had, and he like the father she had lost. He dubbed Arie, Efrat’s brother, “the mystery man.” He enjoyed hearing of his exploits and his surprise visits. He loved Oren and Meital, Efrat’s nephew and his girlfriend, who visited my dad on a cross-country trip.

Sadly though, his illness slowly shrunk his world and his ability to master it. Five years after his trip to Israel he couldn’t come to my wedding there. His need for oxygen in that time had grown from an occasional use to almost full time. I also think it was difficult to see some of his old friends. He was very embarrassed at his oxygen tanks and eventually his walker. But here too he managed to find ways around his embarrassment. He would go to Venice Beach where the rich assortment of freaks and lunatics made my dad look mainstream. In fact he had made many friends there and on his walks there would take time to speak with them.

His walks became shorter and his hospitalizations more frequent. He fought each one with and incredible will to live to bounce back. Each time though he was a little weaker. In the last year he was in the hospital five times. His suffering finally began to overwhelm his will to live. He had a collapsing spine, panic attacks, stomach problems, asthma, as well as chronic pneumonia. Toward the end there was not a position, sitting standing or laying that he was not in some kind of pain.

Once a few years back I asked him which of his movies had been his favorite. He told me King Kong had been the most fun to make. I think he identified with Kong. Kong was outwardly strong, quite sensitive, and misunderstood. I one of my clearest memories of my dad on a movie set, and indecently the world trade center, was the final scene of King Kong. Kong having been fatally shot while climbing the twin towers and was lying, dying in the plaza between them. That night was the kind of logistical nightmare my father loved. They had National Guard troops playing National Guard troops. They had hundreds of New York police playing New York police. They had advertised the event in the papers and they had thousands of onlookers playing onlookers. In postproduction, my dad had made a suggestion to the director that he used for this scene. At the end, as Kong lay dying, we hear Kong’s heartbeat grow slower and weaker as he dies. Finally it just stops.

This image came back to me as I flew back to New York and reflected both on the events of the past year and my fathers last day. The day before he died was very difficult. He had been slipping slowly for days. None of the treatments seem to be working and his blood gasses got a little worse each day. Each day we, his friends and family, had found some small thing to be optimistic about, but really he was fading. He was also getting tired of fighting. Finally his lungs had so degenerated that despite breathing through a mask giving him pressurized oxygen he couldn’t get enough air. For him, it was as if he was climbing Everest without oxygen. He begged the doctor and us that he was tired. He did not want to fight it anymore. He would rather die than live like that. The doctor and he discussed morphine. The morphine would relieve his sense of breathlessness and ease the pain. It might also kill him as it impaired his breathing and decrease his desire to breath. As always he was the master of his own fate. He insisted in a clear, considered and forceful way. That night as we left, he was comfortable but groggy. Before he lapsed into a sleep he would never really wake up from I told him once again, “you’re the greatest.” Always getting the last work he struggled out a “no, you’re the greatest.”

The next morning when we arrived his breathing had become terrible. He was unable to clear his lungs of fluid. As time when on, and he continued to fade, his breathing became more gentle. Family and friends continued to arrive, as his vital signs grew fainter and fainter. His nurse Beth, who had grown so fond of him in just the two weeks she knew him, came in periodically to adjust his medicines and breathing mask. But he continued to slip. Efrat and I held his right hand. His loving housekeeper and caregiver mopped his brow. All around sat people who loved him. Just like his movie alter ego his heart slowed and grew fainter. His breathing became shallower. Finally it stopped. Beth came in as the lines on the vital monitor became flat, and said “he is gone.” Then, in tribute to a man who went out on his own terms she held his hand and said, “well done Mr. Grossberg.”

Michael Grossberg