Rich Cohen: I remember my editor at Rolling Stone, when I got a contract, said, “What do you want? What’s your goal?” And I said my goal was to write one thing that was truly great. And he looked at me like I was the stupidest moron he’d ever met in his whole entire life.

Mark Oppenheimer: Because your goal should be to make a living? I think that’s a great answer.

RC: I know, but I think his goal was more like your goal should be to write a story about Bruce Springsteen. Do a cover story.

MO: Do coke off of Joan Jett’s left arm or something.

RC: Yeah, exactly. Have Iggy Pop shave your head.

MO: Greetings and welcome to Arc: The Podcast. I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this is the podcast of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. It’s also the podcast of Arc Magazine, which is online at arcmag.org. This week I talk with Rich Cohen, author of “Murder in the Dollhouse” about the murder of Jennifer Dulos.

And I want to say, to start off, that this is a Connecticut story. Now, I did not grow up in Connecticut. I’ve lived here more than half my life now, but I grew up in Massachusetts and one of the cool things about growing up in Massachusetts is that your state has a real culture. I mean, it’s the birthplace of America. It’s the Boston Tea Party. It’s the Puritans arriving, it’s the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it’s Boston, it’s Boston sports teams.

Speaker: It packs out the Celtics and the Bruins sell out every game, right? The Red Sox sell out every game, and all I hear from all the know-it-alls and the media is we need new facilities.

It is something to be from Massachusetts. It’s Dunkin Donuts getting mocked in that great Saturday Night Live skit.

SNL: You want to talk real customers, kid? That’s me. I’m like the mayor of Dunkins.

MO: It’s the Massachusetts Turnpike, it’s the Berkshires, it’s Jacob’s Pillow, and the Williamstown Theater Festival. It’s the five colleges. It’s the birthplace of Dr. Seuss in Springfield, not far from where I grew up.

Speaker: We will now recite together that famous tongue twister, “Fox in Socks.”

MO: It’s Andover, and Groton, and the birth of American prepdom.

Speaker: And I think that the downward fall is going to be very fast, not just for us as individuals, but the whole preppy class.

MO: It’s the South Shore, it’s chowder, it’s Provincetown at the very tip of Cape Cod and the gay community there. It’s the deaf community on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a history of native peoples, many of them obliterated, but still with some remnant of their culture and their population surviving.

It’s so, so much. It’s the fact that we had our own holiday, that we had Patriots Day in Massachusetts and that that’s the day on which the Boston Marathon was always run. If you had Patriots Day, you had the day off from school as a public school kid and you could tune in and watch the Boston Marathon on tv. It is something to be from Massachusetts.

My children are from Connecticut, and I don’t know what it is be from Connecticut. I mean, I love my city. I love my city of New Haven, and I feel very identified with it. I’m sure people from Hartford, or Stamford, or Bridgeport feel the same way, but I think about that old saw that when a New Jersey sports team wins a championship, they don’t know where to hold the parade. Do you hold the parade in Trenton, or in Newark, or in Jersey City? It’s a state with kind of three geographical hotspots, three geographical centers of gravity.

Connecticut is sort of the same way, that there’s no center to it, there’s no they’re there. The University of Connecticut is in Storrs, which is a nice quiet little town, but there’s no great college scene around it. If they want an audience for their games, they have to play the games in Hartford, which is about 40 miles to the west.

I discovered at some point in my journey as a Connecticut resident that when people from outside Connecticut would hear that I lived in Connecticut, the stereotype that came to mind was that we were just one big suburb, that it was a place rich people lived. It was a kind of “Mad Men” stereotype, or if you’ve seen the show “Your Friends and Neighbors” on Apple+, which is actually set in, I think, Westchester County, outside New York near the Connecticut border. But that’s what they thought of. They thought of stay at home wives playing tennis all day, and husbands who caught the commuter training into the city and probably had three martini lunches and then had affairs. They thought of golf, they thought of tennis. They thought of a certain kind of leisure and money and aspiration.

That is not what I recognize in the Connecticut I live in, but I have to accept that because it is a state where so much of the money is in towns that are functionally New York suburbs where New Yorkers retreat to have some suburban peace and quiet, or maybe some suburban drama of the kind that John Sheever wrote about in his stories. That is the rep we have nationwide, that we are quiet, and rich, and maybe there’s some disquiet simmering beneath the surface, but it’s sort of suburban ennui or suburban terror.

And that may be the Connecticut that will draw people to this book by Rich Cohen, my guest of this week. The book is “Murder in the Dollhouse.” It’s the Jennifer Dulos story. Jennifer Dulos was a woman who grew up in New York City and got an MFA in playwriting at NYU, but with her husband, she had retreated to several different Connecticut suburbs, Farmington, Avon, and eventually New Canaan, which is one of the wealthiest of all. And then she was murdered. And the question of who murdered her and why and how it came to this is at the center of Rich Cohen’s book.

But the book is more than that because Rich Cohen is such a master. He really is one of the great nonfiction writers we have. And so what he does with the Jennifer Dulos story is he shows us how it is also about class, and status, and money, and religion, and ethnicity, and yearning. In other words, he shows us how it is a Connecticut story, how it is the underside, or the inside, of that Connecticut stereotype that I’ve had roped around my neck ever since I lived here. I think you’ll know exactly what I mean after you listen to this interview, and I think you’ll want to go out and buy the book. Here’s the first part of my interview with one of my personal literary heroes, writer Rich Cohen.

Rich Cohen, thanks for talking with me.

RC: Sure. Thanks for having me.

MO: I can’t remember if I ever told you the story about my experience with “Lake Effect,” which was your memoir about growing up outside Chicago.

RC: I don’t think so.

MO: So I don’t know if you have these, these stories you want to tell people before you die, someone from high school, at some point you’re going to write the letter to so-and-so confessing such and such, but you can’t remember if you ever wrote it or you’ve just thought about it so much that you think you’ve written it. So I’ve meant to tell you for years I loved “Lake Effect.” It’s a great book. And I don’t really reread books much. It’s not my temperament. I tend to move on to the next thing. And when my sister, this story is not as heavy as it’s about to sound, when my sister who was living with me for the summer and was 19 and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, was waiting on the results of her biopsy, there was this week where no one in the family knew, this is my baby sister, 14 years younger, no one knew for about a week if Rachel’s cancer was stage one and was going to be fine, or if it had metastasized and was going to spread. We just didn’t know. And every time the phone rings we’re on pins and needles, it’s just one of those weeks where it’s kind of hell.

RC: I hate that.

MO: It’s torture, and I needed to read something that was just comfort food that’ll make me feel good and take me out of it. And I think I read “Lake Effect” twice that week. I think my third and fourth readings of your book were that week because I just needed something that I knew was going to feel Right.

RC: Well, thank you. That’s a great story and I’m proud to know it. And your sister?

MO: She’s fine. She’s had two kids. You can have kids with one ovary. I mean, they had to take one out. It was malignant and it didn’t spread. And she’s great. And living in Chicago, actually living in Rogers Park. Oh, great. And I think going to Cubs games and swimming in the lake, and basically I never put two and two together. She’s actually living your childhood

MO: Anyway. I would want to know that if someone felt that way about my book. So

RC: I tell people stuff like that when it affects me. I had a recent thing like that. You know who Mark Singer is?

MO: Yeah, sure.

RC: Okay. So when I worked at the New Yorker, I was a receptionist and a messenger right out of college. And all the young people, they were trying to get these talk of the town stories published and they had no bylines, and it was like scorpion stinging. Everybody hit rooted against each other.

MO: You were in the messenger pool, right?

RC: Yeah. And I got a bunch published, so people hated me. I believe I only realized that later. And the last, I got one published and then Bob Gottlieb got fired and I was sitting in the messenger room and Tina Brown had been hired but hadn’t come yet. And this guy worked with another messenger said, well, you got that story published, but gottlieb’s fired, so it doesn’t really count. And Singer was in the messenger room making a Xerox. And he’s like, “Hey,” that bugged him. And he said, it still counts on the career stats. It still counts come negotiation time, and it still makes sure you get the best contract. So recently I wrote him that story that it was like in your dream, somebody steps in and defends you.

MO: Yeah. And it’s Mark Singer. It’s a major staff writer who steps in. I have a less interesting past with the New Yorker. I was out of college four or five months, so November, December of ’96, hadn’t gotten any jobs. And a friend of mine was a babysitter for Jane Mayer, who was then, is now a staff writer for the New Yorker. And she said, Jane needs an assistant. This friend of mine was like nannying. She’d also gone to college, was two years out living at home nannying for Jane Mayer and called me and said, “Jane needs an assistant to start Monday. You should write to her.”

And email was just getting going. It was just a thing. And I wrote to her and she and Joe Klein, who had just been hired, we’re going to make the hire together. And they said, take a train down. And we took a train to D.C. So this was the D.C. office of the New Yorker, which I don’t think exists anymore. They had a room. They had a room in a building because Tina wanted a presence. And they met me and they said, “Okay, fine. You want to start Monday?” So I then worked there for six months and they wanted, they said, “And we want talk pieces from D.C.” So I kept, same thing, I kept pitching stuff, pitching stuff, pitching stuff. And I ended up getting one in. One.

And I think I’m far enough away from this that I can tell the story. They rewrote it completely and also changed the quotation to make it better. What they did with the ellipsis and the rewriting, I think was unethical, but the person who was editing it who was no longer there was just like, we got to make it sing. And I finally just realized I see the people who stuck it out ten years and became staff writers. And I realized I don’t have that. I can’t suffer the whims of these incredibly entitled people at the bottom of this pile for that long. I think I wasn’t secure enough.

RC: Yeah, no. When I was doing it, the talk stories were different. They were more whimsical and writing really funny stories. And the idea was to go from talk writer to staff writer, but when you got right up to the edge, you saw, I can’t make that jump. No one had made it.

MO: No one makes it.

RC: I mean, no one had made it since the seventies. Since the Ian Frazier group. I think Alec Wilkinson might’ve been the last one.

MO: So interesting.

RC: I just at some point said, and you saw these people stay in these low jobs for decades. Waiting for just because they were so connected to this place. It’s kind of like how I feel about New York, which is fear of leaving New York because it’s being associated with New York. That gives you your sense of self-worth. And it ends up being this kind of, I don’t know, it’s like you’re stuck to it. It’s like you’re plugged into this plug, but there’s plugs everywhere if you look up.

MO: Exactly. And there are great writers who live–Lori Moore lives in Wisconsin, and Walker Percy lived in New Orleans, right? I mean, they’re great writers everywhere.

RC: Yeah. Walker Percy, one of my heroes lived in actually Covington. It’s really interesting. Right across the water, right across Lake Pontchartrain.

MO: So I wanted to tell you the story about “Lake Effect,” and maybe we’ll circle back to that book, but the new book you have out is “Murder in the Dollhouse,” the Jennifer Dulos story. Am I saying her last name right? Yep.

RC: Dulos.

MO: Okay. So for those who don’t know, as I didn’t until I read the book, who was Jennifer?

RC: Well, when I first was asked to write this story, it was on the cover of the New York Times, and it was more than that. I heard about it via gossip. All the parents around where I lived, I lived close to New Canaan, we’re talking about this very scary, horrifying story, which is this mother with five little kids, drops her kids off at the New Canaan Country School, which is already puts you up into the elite, elite and disappears is never seen again. And it starts as almost a missing person story. And then quickly becomes a murder story about her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos and his girlfriend who’s referred to in all the police stuff as his paramour a word, which I thought was 18th century novels or something.

MO: You thought it’d been retired.

RC: They were like, yeah, but realized it had this perfect use and it sort of unfolded as the weeks went by. And these were two people very recognizably from my sort of world, which is they met at Brown, she went to St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, he went to Columbia Business School, she went to the NYU MFA playwriting program. And then Grayden Carter asked me to write about it. And at first I’m like, well, this story is really well covered. But then when I looked at the arrest warrants, it had all these status markers. It was almost like a Tom Wolf story that ended in this brutal murder.

And then as those stories came out, I wrote ’em like 12 of ’em as they came out, I started realizing I was a lot closer to her than I thought because a lot of my friends knew her. I’m surely probably met her. We were in all the same places in the same parties. And a good friend of mine, Tom Bellar, had dated her very seriously in the nineties.

Now, the reason why I never put that together is she had changed her name. Her maiden name was Jennifer Farber, and everybody knew her as Jen Farber. And she was very smart, very beautiful people, said she looked like Stephanie Seymour, and she was sort of like a star on the literary scene of New York in the 1990s. So it was almost like in her path from New York then leaving New York and coming out to Connecticut and having kids, I saw kind of a reflection of what I had done.

MO: Interesting. And I think I’m not giving anything away by saying it seems pretty clear that he killed her, that her husband Fotis Dulos, who was never convicted of it because he killed himself before he went to trial. But can we agree that the evidence was overwhelming that he did it right? Yeah.

RC: Well, actually the only person tried was the paramour, and I had some doubt about that. But then after the case, there’s a thing in “The Producers,” the original Mel Brooks movie, where they are on trial and the head of the jury says, how do you find, he says, I find the defendants incredibly guilty. And that’s how it seemed to me, the people incredibly guilty. And what’s crazy is he went to great effort, her estranged husband to hide his tracks, create false leads, throw the police off. But I believe he was sort of a psychopath. And one of the things that defines psychopaths is arrogance. And he believed he was smarter than everybody, but he got caught with incredible police work.

MO: And so that’s the story. I mean, the book that you’d be reading if you bought “Murder in the Dollhouse” is this woman who had been a kind of New York literary scenester is getting worried that she’s not going to find the right man. Her parents had this incredible storybook romance. She was hoping to find the perfect man, and it was just going to be obvious. But she’s there in her mid-thirties. The perfect man has not presented himself. And then a man who seems good enough presents himself because he’d also gone to Brown and he was rich, or seemed to be rich, and good looking.

RC: Yeah. Somebody said, one of her friends said, that she wanted to look great on the Dance Lord or wedding, and he fit that bill. I mean, he was a great looking person. He wasn’t rich. He was a Greek national who let people think he was one of the sort of shipping heirs from Greece. But he was a middle class guy striving very hard and striving is very important. He was climbing all the time. He was not right from the start really.

But it’s interesting, it becomes about options, which is she knew him at Brown and he was interested in her. Everybody was, and she wasn’t interested in him because she found him boring. She met him again when she was in her mid-thirties and now suddenly the guy that isn’t interesting when the whole world is open now in the mid-thirties, he seems interesting because she’s running out of time to have kids. Most of the sort of eligible people are married. She broke up with a lot of people because he was always looking for the perfect person, who doesn’t exist. And she was careful about who she let in. But because he’d gone to Brown and had gone to Columbia and was great looking and charming, she sort of lowered the bar. He checked off all these boxes.

MO: And he was short, but that didn’t matter as much when she was 36 as it had mattered when she was 19 or twenty right, because she was tall.

RC: Because she was tall. So she was the same height as him.

MO: So to me, the book ends up being really, really interesting, not just as a narrative and it’s a totally engrossing narrative, but on a couple other levels. One is, as you say, it’s sort of about options. She sees her options as closing and ends up making a really bad decision in a way that I think could be haunting for some people to read. Because yeah, marriage is a leap and you hope to get lucky. You hope that your intuitions are correct. And yours, you’ve been married a long time, and mine have been and hers weren’t, and it cost her life. But the other thing that you’ve already alluded to is it is also about class in a really, really profound way.

MO: Did you ever read Paul Fussell’s book class?

RC: No.

MO: The two best books about class are–Lewis Lapham wrote a book called “Money in Class in America,” which is very funny. And Paul Fussel wrote an even funnier one. And one of Fussell’s insights is artists kind of stand outside it. If you’re a business person, you have to have the right cufflings and the right golf club membership, the whole “Your Friends and Neighbors.” But if you’re an artist, you can show up with a skunk around your neck and a monocle and people say, “Oh, he’s an artist. He’s weird.”

MO: And she initially, she’s running with these category X people, he’s downtown playwrights, and it was kind of bohemian and kind doesn’t fit onto the class scheme except that she goes home at night to her doorman building, but she hides that from them. She’s doing this bohemian thing with her NYU playwright friends, and then at some point she decides to just get reabsorbed into the normal money structure. At some point she opts out of Bohemia and writerliness, which doesn’t pay as well and doesn’t have as many kids and doesn’t have the au pair and just decides, I’ll go with what my dad did.

RC: Right. Well, I think a couple things happen, which is one, the reason why it’s called “Murder in the Dollhouse.” She had this obsession with dollhouses when she was a little girl, and it was just not about Dollhouse. It was about the perfect life. So she couldn’t get that perfect life and be a playwright. She had to go do it somewhere else. And I think she was really deciding between the two.

The thing that a lot of things, when I reported this book shocked me. I read all the newspaper stories, I reported them, but I didn’t really go deep deep until I really got into her old friends and everything. And one of the things was she had this play that she wrote called “The Red Doors” about Elizabeth Arden. How’d you go to Elizabeth Arden salon, I guess when she was a kid with her mother, and they’d look at dollhouses and they go to Elizabeth Arden. It was sort of a light satire of her class, her family. And the person who directed it was this guy Eduardo Mecado, who I worked with on a TV show and he’s like a very ferocious artist.

MO: Because they brought you in to do the Jewish gangster dialogue, and they brought him into the Cuban American dialogue.

RC: It was about the Fontainebleu, really about the Fontainebleu Hotel. And it was on two seasons of Stars called “Magic City.”

MO: Is it good? Should I look it up?

RC: It’s incredibly dirty.

MO: Okay, good.

RC: And my mom watched it and I was sort of proud, but also horrified that my mom watched it.

MO: Okay.

RC: Anyway, he took this, he saw underneath her sort of light comedy, there was something really intense about that class of people and the emptiness of their lives. And he brought that out and he turned the play as people who worked on it said, from a light comedy into a dark, dark satire. And the play was a huge hit. And this was called the Playwrights Collective in downtown, and they extended the run, which is something that they never did. And her father came. Now, her father was a person named Hillard Farber, who was the first Jewish head of the bond department at JP Morgan Chase, and then went out on his own and started this consulting business, very successful, and very much a Jewish guy who knew how to get along in the Waspy, old New York world, and sold her on this ideal of a very Waspy guy who drinks certain kind of liquor, whereas a certain kind of suit reads a certain kind of book, likes a certain kind of play.

RC: And that’s who she was looking for. She was looking for a figment of her father’s imagination. Her father called Bank. That was the name for that kind of guy. Her father came to see this play, and he threw an after party for the cast. And at that after party, he sort of told her that her play horrified him. He used a kind of gross word, I hate to say, but he sort of trashed her, trashed the play. And it’s like she reached that point where all writers have to reach where you have to be willing to piss off your family.

MO: Totally.

RC: You have to symbolically be willing to kill your parents. That’s like the quote when a writer’s born into a family that family’s finished.

And she got right to that point where the split is supposed to happen, and she sort of chickened out. She said she canceled the play and she canceled the extended run, and she quit the writers collective. And some of those people never talked to her again, these are people she’d been in intense relationship with since the time she started at NYU in graduate school. And then she went out, she wandered around, she ended up in Aspen, Colorado where she meets Fotis Dulos again 15 or whatever many years since they graduated from Brown.

So that’s like, you don’t really get these clear markers, but it’s like she kind of went for the original dream and the joke of it was a fantasy. Fotis didn’t fit comfortably in it. I think that he saw–to me a definition of evil is a person that doesn’t have any empathy and sort of sees people as objects, not as real people either. And when he first met her, she was an object that could help him get what he wanted, which is he wanted to set up this contracting business, building houses, and he needed money. And he saw that in her father. And then at the end, after she had five kids, and he saw her as an object in his way because he wanted to be with this other woman and whatever, and he removed her.

MO: And he wanted the kids’ trust funds. There was money from grandma going to the kids, and if she was gone, he’d be probably the custodian of trust.

RC: That seems to be one of his motivations, which is Hillard Farber had given him a lot of money to set up this home building business, which built these giant 10,000 square foot sort of McMansions where they lived, a series of these almost display homes.

MO: It’s “Arrested Development,” where they’re living in the model home.

RC: Yeah. That’s basically what it was.

MO: That’s literally, it’s like Jason Bateman and Portia di Rossi living in the model home.

RC: And moving from town to town to town. And then when Hillard Farber dies, several people said when they saw that Jennifer was dead, they knew that Hillard must be dead because Hillard would’ve protected her because Hillard had Fotis Dulos, pegged. He had so sheltered Jennifer with wealth, I think, and she, even in high school, she had a car, car and driver. So she never had to take the subway, never had to stand in the rain, never had to try to get a fight for a cab that he sheltered her so much that she never really dealt with bad people.

MO: This is like one of my kids was on a summer program where they met a kid whose parents made sure that wherever she went, there was bottled water.

RC: Or an air conditioned room close by, or something, right?

MO: It’s like the people who say, “My daughter must have a doorman building.” That sort of thing.

RC: Well, it had this double effect when I looked at it. One is when she had a really bad guy in her life, she didn’t recognize him. She never dealt with somebody like that. And two, Hillard Farber set up a system almost. He was so hard to get past that he almost had to be a little nuts to get past him. So it almost let in, you know what I mean? It was such a tight gate that you had to have a cat burglar to make it over the gate.

So basically, Hillard recognized, had him pegged and dealt with him, and they had a big fight early on, and the guy actually, Fotis Dulos, threw a chair at Hillard Farber. So he’d sort of kept giving the guy money. He figured, I think as long as he’s happy, as long as he’s satisfied, then he died. And after he died, I think that Fotis Dulos was intimidated by Hilard Farber, he brought his paramour out into the open, setting off what ended up in this separation, in this divorce. And Jennifer’s mother did what any normal person would do–what I would do–which is, “We’re not giving you any more money. You humiliated my daughter. You’ve trashed its family, and not only we’re not giving you more money, we’re going to try to take back the money we’ve given you.”

MO: Yeah. She sues him for the debt he owes debt to the family.

RC: And she won.

MO: He went from having a father-in-law who kept giving him money to having a mother-in-law who bankrupted him by calling in the debts.

RC: And what’s more, the guy was like a male chauvinist. I don’t know what the best term is at this point, but he didn’t really respect women. He thought they should be in a slightly subservient position in a relationship. And he had a weird thing about Jewish people, too. So now you’ve got these Jewish women, and then ultimately the judge is a Jewish woman.

MO: Donna Heller.

RC: And he believes the Jews have all joined up in conspiracy against him. And he believed, he seemed to believe, from what I read of his statements, that at night all the Jews were getting on the phone talking about what they were going to do to people tomorrow.

MO: You mean they weren’t?

RC: If so, I haven’t been included in those calls.

MO: Shit, he figured us out. Oh my God.

MO: So I mean, one way to read this book is money makes everything worse. And I’m actually a little bit curious. I mean, your books are not about money really, but they often involve people who have it. You’ve written about elite athletes, you’ve written about Jewish gangsters, who sometimes have it and sometimes don’t. You’ve written about your mom’s family in “Sweet and Low,” which founded Sweet and Low, right? Your great-grandfather or something.

RC: Yeah.

MO: So money has been around. And you grew up in, was it Winnetka or Glencoe?

RC: Glencoe.

MO: Birthplace of Fred Savage from the Wonder Years, I believe.

RC: And also Mike Bloomfield.

MO: Oh, really? That’s cooler. And you went to high school with Liz Fair, right?

RC: Yeah.

MO: And that’s a town that–those suburbs of Chicago went, during your childhood, from being places that were kind of upper middle class to, in some cases, galactically wealthy.

RC: Right.

MO: And I guess I’m curious, you’re a writer, and so I can see into your soul enough to know that you probably are never getting paid enough and are kind of worried about money because writers are in such a precarious situation. All of us probably at times have thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we had the trust fund that Jen Farber had or whatever. Writing this book, did it change your view of the super, super rich? Did you like them less? Did you shed any envy? Or maybe you were so well-developed psychologically, you already knew that rich people were no happier than the rest of us.

RC: I would like to have more money, but also, to me, these are all books about human nature. I don’t see people with a lot of money as any different. I mean, so to me, this is people in a situation that enables bad behavior because for example, the divorce case, somebody I spoke to said to me, if these people had no money and they went to divorce court in Stamford, Connecticut, it would just be settled. But because they had this money, they were able to hire all these lawyers, psychiatrists, and this moment of high tension, which is the beginning of the divorce, they got frozen in that moment for a year and a half.

They never got, there were over 400 court filings, and they hadn’t even gotten to the divorce yet. And that was a lot of money to do that. And ultimately, it put so much pressure, probably, on a guy who was already a psychopath that he blew and he killed her. I think money messes you up in a lot of ways. It’s like, I’m going to make the craziest quote you’ve ever heard. Clarence Clemens had a solo record, and he says, money will make a mess if you got too little or you got too much, it’ll make a mess of you, I think is what he says. And I think it’s true. If you don’t have enough money, then you can’t do what you want and you’re in a constant stress. But if you have too much money, you become a jerk who ultimately thinks you can do whatever you want and you can hire people to do whatever you want.

So I think that, I grew up in a town, you’re right, it was an affluent town, but now it’s become a really rich town, which it wasn’t. I asked a friend of mine if everybody is getting in fights all the time, because they’re all billionaires, and he said, no, they’re incredibly polite. He said, when you come to a four-way stop, no one will go first. They’re afraid. The next guy’s a billionaire, but none of my friends I grew up with can afford to live there. It’s kind of the town, the place changes.

MO: Is that the Clarence Clemens record, I don’t know if there was more than one solo record, where he had the duet with Jackson Brown?

RC: Yeah. There was only one solo record.

MO: With Darl Hannah in the video.

RC: Yes, yes. It was the moment of peak Springsteen. It was after “Born in the USA.”

MO: Right? It was like all of his band mates were doing their own, like Stevie was going off doing his thing. Clarence got a solo record.

RC: It was very similar to right around the same time the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl, and every player in the team opened a bar.

MO: And was the Super Bowl shuffle playing in all those bars at all the times?

RC: Yes.

MO: So I want to go back because money and class are not the same thing. And one of the ways I think this book is really, really shrewd is that it kind of separates the two. And Jennifer Farber Dulos had one published piece. It was an essay in an essay collection about young writers in New York, and she explains that term “bank,” and you quote from her essay, would you read it for us if I give it to you?

RC: Sure.

MO: It’s the little block quote in there.

RC: “Bank was the furthest thing from new eighties money for which students from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School came to Wall Street in droves. Bank was the old money mystique of firms like Brown Brothers Harriman, Scudder Stevens and Clark, money managers known primarily for handling trust accounts. The gentleman at these investment banks, which did not hire Jews, spent their off hours sipping Dickel old fashions at the university club, the all male, all WASP bastion on 54th and 5th. They were the red nose crowd who came back from bonafide three martini lunches with red noses.”

MO: So that was a great passage because I learned a lot. I’d never heard of Scudder Stevens and Clark, or what’s a Dickel old fashioned?

RC: It’s just a brand of alcohol used in the old fashioned. Brown Brothers Harriman was something I’d always heard of.

MO: I’ve heard them. I got Brown brothers. I just didn’t know Scudder Stevens and Clark.

RC: You get deep into it, and it’s even about what kind of fabrics you wear and all that. It’s too much to fill your mind with. But she did fill her mind with it.

MO: I mean, in some ways it’s so heartbreaking because for one thing, the desire to be something you’re not, I mean, she was a Jewish new money girl, really. Her dad had made the money and her uncle made money because he married–

RC: Liz Claiborne.

MO: Liz Claiborne, her uncle married Liz Claiborne, and her dad made all this bond money, but it’s not like they were fancy even by Jewish old money standards. They weren’t that. They weren’t–

RC: No, they weren’t the German, they weren’t the Schiffs or whatever.

MO: No, they weren’t the Lehmans or the Schiffs or the Lobes. They were the Farbers. And yet she’s obsessed with being old money. And she’s obsessed really with being Protestant, right? I mean, doesn’t she at one point say that she’s Episcopalian or something?

RC: Well, she wanted to be Episcopalian. She converted to Episcopalian, and then ultimately she started wearing a cross. This is something her family didn’t know and her friends didn’t know. It made everything make sense to me. Somebody said, “She looked at the wedding pages. She could read the wedding pages the way I could read a box score. She knew what towns meant, where they got married, who was there.” “And she read it,” somebody said, “Like the sports pages in The Times. The way I dreamt of playing left field for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, she dreamt of this certain kind of marriage in this certain kind of way.”

RC: And it was, I think, created by her father who explained to her what bank was and gave her this whole image. And she went for something that wasn’t real. It was a mirage. And she chased it down, and she ends up in this nightmare situation. Now, it’s really interesting to me, is that at the end of her life, I saw this, she wrote this herself. She said she was thinking back to a guy she’d gone out with in college who really was bank, she says.

MO: This is a lacrosse bro.

RC: Yeah. She at the time, didn’t go out with him because he bored her, but she’d gone out with him for a while and he really was bank. And now she says her big regret is she didn’t marry him. And then she said, you never know you had the right thing until you have the wrong thing. But the joke is that that thing she was longing for at the end of her life, that was just as much a fantasy.

MO: Yeah. She was totally cursed because on the one hand, she wanted the dollhouse. She wanted the perfect, the money and all that, and she wanted it to be bank, and she wanted to be refined and Protestant. On the other hand, she was really smart and had the soul of an artist. And that’s a tough place to be in because when she dated the bank dude he didn’t read presumably.

RC: And he thought there was something crazy about her going up into her office and writing. He thought it’s a very selfish, stupid thing to do. She was at war with herself.

MO: She was at war with herself. She didn’t have a stable self where she said, “Okay, I like nice things, but I also want to live downtown and write plays and go to the theater. And maybe I won’t have everything my daddy prescribed, but all of the stuff that I like most. But I’ll also have writer friends.” I mean, she couldn’t integrate it all into a stable self.

RC: But all her plays were about getting her fear of getting married, her need to get married. “The Red Doors” are these red doors that she’s standing before she gets married.

This book, I wrote a couple books ago, about being a hockey parent called “Peewees.” And the thing I realized is you see these crazy sports–

MO: It’s actually one of two books of yours I haven’t read because I don’t like hockey. That’s not to say it’s not a great book on the merits,

RC: But it’s really, it’s about sports parents. It’s about sports parents.

What’s interesting is they’re sports parents. Fotis Dulos was an intense sports parent, but it was water skiing, which was weird.

MO: Which is so weird. She married this guy who tortured their five kids with dreams of water skiing.

RC: At the highest level. To me, water skiing is something you did at Camp Menominee.

MO: And by the way, so I went to high school in Windsor, Connecticut. I went to a private school where a lot of kids were from Avon, and Avon is not, you know, it’s whatever, it’s a nice suburb. It’s not bank. You have a little money, you don’t live Hartford you live in Avon.

The idea that past a warehouse and a self-storage place and a gravel pit, there’s a man-made lake where people water ski feels to me, the snob in me wants to say, “That’s the trashiest way to spend a Saturday.” It’s like you’re out there drinking beers, water skiing behind a self U-Haul self storage in Avon. I’d put a bullet in my head.

RC: It was a club that you had to join, and there was a waiting list of 300 people.

MO: It’s insane.

RC: And the guy who ran the club spoke during the paramour’s trial, and he was talking about–

MO: We’re just going to keep calling her the paramour. I love it.

RC: Michelle Triconis. He was talking about how the police came and they dragged, because they’d never found her body, the water ski lake looking for her body. And he was almost in tears on the stand about how the lake, the precious–

MO: It had been defiled.

RC: Yeah, it had been violated, and Fotis had brought this upon the place that was–but what my original point is, I recognize crazy sports parent behavior, and that’s what the book “Peewees” was about. Because you see these sports parents and you judge them, as I do, and then you become a sports parent and you find yourself acting in the same exact way. It’s like when you scratch a dog and behind its ear and its leg goes up and down, you can’t help it. You see your kid out there doing something good or bad, and you can’t help acting like a lunatic. And the worst part is to be kind of smart about it, because then not only do you behave that way, you know what an idiot you’re acting like. So you have both the bad behavior and shame.

MO: And the shame, right.

RC: And I think that was kind of like her, it’s like at one hand she was living this life and dealing with this, and she knew it wasn’t right. She was very smart. If she had lived longer, if he hadn’t killed her, she maybe would’ve synthesized all that. She was recontacting the people she’d been a playwright with and maybe it would all have been material. And a lot of the people she wrote with became very successful creating shows. Maybe she would’ve been like Nora Efron, or, I mean, who knows.

MO: And this play that she wrote that ultimately became the kind of caesura in her life where she wrote this great play, the director turned it into a really dark satire of her family. Her dad comes and at the after party basically laces into her, and she never writes another play again. No copy of that play exists, right? Or does it?

RC: I asked everybody, and one of the people who ran the Playwrights Collective said they’d taken everything they had and they’d given it to the New York Public Library. And there’s a big file on it at, it’s the Rose Library or the Rose Room. It’s near Lincoln Center because it’s performing arts, and they have all the, it’s very weird. It’s like a Borge story in that you have all the reviews and all the reactions and all the comments, but the thing all that is built around is gone, which is the play.

MO: And probably somewhere in a basement, there’s a VHS tape of it, which 20 years from now, someone will send to you. But for now, we have no idea what this play said.

RC: Except for the occasional quote in the newspaper article or the Village Voice.

MO: It’s insane.

RC: And maybe there’s a copy of it that Eduardo Mecado will find. He’s the director. When he starts digging through his stuff in 20 years.

MO: It’s like, it’s the lost town of Atlantis or something.

MO: It was funny for me to read this book. I know some of these people. I’m younger than you. I think you’re what, 56? 57?

RC: 56.

MO: 56. I’m 50. So you write about how whenever you show up in New York, you feel like the glory days are just passed. And then you make a case that you lived in the actual glory days. And then I showed up when those were passed. I mean, I showed up in like ’97 when Nells wasn’t the place anymore, and the car services weren’t, I mean, it was a different, but maybe if you show up now, you think, wow, the late nineties were the glory time. I don’t know. But I did know some of these people. I’ve never met Tom Beller, but my brother Dan, who’s also a writer, he did the Columbia MFA program in nonfiction. And one of his early published works was for Tom Beller’s old website. Do you remember Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood?

RC: Yeah. Yes.

MO: And Dan wrote a piece–

RC: It still exists. I believe.

MO: Are they still publishing stuff?

RC: Not like before, but yes, on occasion.

MO: And Dan wrote a piece, I think this was where he published his piece about Three Lives Bookstore in the Village.

RC: Oh, yeah. I was just there.

MO: I think Dan wrote that piece for Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. But I didn’t know much about Thomas Beller. I’ve read some of his stories. He’s a very good writer. Now teaches at Tulane, right?

RC: Yeah.

MO: Speaking of your hat and your alma mater.

I was reading your chapter or two on their relationship, and it sounded like he was the perfect guy for her. I mean, for one thing, he’s from an older, more interesting family and came from some money though perhaps it was all dissipated off somewhere. And he’s tall and handsome and literary and sort of Jewish, but not super Jewy. I mean–

RC: Give me a Jew, but not too Jewish.

MO: But not too Jewish. And his name Beller, could be, might not be. I mean, that’s not the one where she looked–and he broke up with her.

RC: He broke up with her.

MO: I mean, don’t you think she looked back and thought, “He’s the one that got away? Why would it be the Waspy lacrosse bro?

RC: Because he broke up with her.

MO: Oh, okay.

RC: You know what I mean? And I think that was probably an unusual experience for her, and that probably wasn’t so pleasant. And then he was writing about the relationship disguised, but she would know if she was…So I think he was sort of the person who could bridge the gap. He could be presentable at the uptown fundraisers and at the downtown parties. And he was sort of a king of that scene in lower Manhattan. He worked at the New Yorker right after I left. He actually was hired as a writer, which was a new thing. I mean, for somebody who was like, he’s my age. And it’s interesting because for somebody who was so young, he knew maybe he didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want, and he didn’t want a super comfortable life.

And one thing that Jennifer wanted was a super comfortable life, and one of her friends said, you should just quit all the money for a while, move into your own place. She lived in this very fancy doorman building that her father had bought for her and get a job at a bar. And she seemed to think of it, that’ll give you more experience. And she seemed to consider for a second and then said, “Yeah, but then I’d have to sweep up cigarette butts.” So she basically didn’t want that. She needed what she needed, and Beller did want that, but he realized it that this is, I need something a little less comfortable. Partly because he was a very serious writer, and he believed that as a writer, you have to have varied experiences and things can’t be too easy for you.

MO: You can’t be too cosseted. I mean, look, there are people, Proust was cosseted. I mean, there are people who are, and it works out for them, but–

RC: It’s not very American.

MO: It’s not very American, that’s right. Sort of the way Nabokov grew up with just money and servants and just used it to learn languages and be more refined.

RC: But look what was the best, I think the best thing he wrote was about losing that.

MO: Which were?

RC: “Speak Memory.”

MO: “Speak Memory.” You’re right. It’s about being kind of cast out of Eden. You’re totally right about that. Yeah.

I mean, it was sad. It’s so poignant because she was eighty-five percent of the way toward being an actualized person, but not far enough. And so she ended up with this sociopathic murderer.

RC: Yeah. Well, the person who played her in “The Red Doors” is a really great actress. She was so interesting about it. She said she wanted to play this part because she had lived the same life. She’d been sort of a British aristocrat with a lot of money, and she was married to the wrong guy and she ran away. She ran away to the United States.
And when she thought Jennifer was living the same thing, and she was in the process of making the break, and when she read about her death, she thought, “Oh my God, she never made it.” And she said she felt terrible. Of course, her death is a tragedy, but also felt bad that she didn’t ultimately go ahead and cross the bridge to the other side. And I like to think that she was, at the end when she decided to leave Fotis, she was still getting there.

MO: And the fact that she reconnected with her writer friends is probably, from your point of view, a good sign she was going to get there.

RC: Yeah. She was going to synthesize these two parts of her life, which was the sort of high end and the Bohemian end.

MO: I have to say I got the sense that you didn’t like her very much.

RC: Oh, I liked her.

MO: Really? I mean, there was a lot of, it wasn’t snark, too good a writer for that. But you pretty skillfully anatomized her family’s pretensions, their kind of, you say it’s not self-loathing about their Judaism, but it’s something, it’s something unpleasant.

RC: Well, every Jewish person I grew up with on the Northshore Chicago, with the exception of my father, because he was from Brooklyn, his name is Cohen, and whatever was like that. You wouldn’t know. You’d think there were these incredibly Waspy guys in Winnetka and Kenilworth and Wilmette and even Glencoe. And there were so many times I would say, “Oh, I can’t believe he’s Jewish.” And they would let you know. They’d make some comment. And my father, the joke is he was so obviously Jewish that when I was growing up, people would ask him where he was from and he’d always say, “I’m from Cheyenne, Wyoming.” So maybe it’s some of that, which is, it was so familiar to me. I have these cousins I wrote about in “Sweet and Low,” and they were kind of like that.

MO: Well, and see, I have relatives like that too, and I always saw that part of the family as–it’s a problem. You don’t want to be that it’s torturous to not love yourself for who you are.

RC: Right.

MO: It’s a real brokenness.

RC: Our generation, I think there’s a real desire for, at least where I grew up, to not be different. If you’re trying to be a great writer or great anything, you almost can’t be a Jewish writer. You have to be an American writer.

MO: Well, and you and I both got really into Joseph Mitchell, who is so not anything. I mean, he’s sort of the American writer. I mean, he’s writing about New York, but he’s certainly not Jewish. Those New Yorker people were not Jewish. Right. E.B. White and Joseph Mitchell and James Thurber.

RC: They were, but–

MO: Some of them were.

RC: But William Shawn was Jewish but you would never know it.

MO: You would never know it.

RC: Right. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s like this is the culture of a certain kind of New York. This is the price of belonging, which is you have to just joining the club, you have to fit in, man. You can’t walk into the private elite Waspy Club in Brooklyn wearing a yamaka.

MO: Well, this is just coming to me now, but I think one reason maybe I’ve always liked your writing so much is at a very early place in your writing–I mean, when was “Tough Jews and “The Avengers,” and you were–

RC: 1998.

MO: I mean, you were in your thirties still, barely.

RC: I wrote “Tough Jews” came out when I was 29.

MO: You were leaning into it. You were saying, I’m not going to write about old Dutch Presbyterian New York plutocrats. You were saying I’m going to write about dirty Jews, basically.

RC: Because I was aware of the things we’re talking about, and I knew you could never get away from it. Not that I want to.

MO: But that’s a lot of wisdom. I mean, it’s funny because some of those cultural touchstones you were writing about, you were doing Limelight and Nells and all that. It sounds like you, by the way, did a lot more partying than I did, and–

RC: Well, that was the golden nineties.

MO: I mean, you were doing a lot of coke, let’s be honest.

RC: No– *laughs*

MO: By the time I got there, the drugs, it had been cleaned up a lot. I think you were there in the real Jay McInerney days.

RC: Yeah, well, a little later. I’m between him and you. I think that the real estate got so expensive, you had to shut down the store.

MO: So it wasn’t quite “Bright Lights, Big City” or “Less than Zero.”

RC: It was sort of an in-between. That was sort of perfect.

MO: Okay. But you were running with these people who were definitely running from any sort of ethnicity. I mean that vibe, that literary vibe would really disdain saying, “I can’t come because it’s shvues.”

RC: Right.

MO: And then you wrote these books about guys who knew from shvues.

RC: Right.

MO: So that takes a certain gumption I want to say. Did you know you were doing this? Like, “Fuck them. I’m going to write about being a Jew.”

RC: Yes. And I realized that everyone knew I was Jewish. I mean, I was very proud of who I was. My parents, my background, I grew up on these stories about the Avengers and everything else, and I thought that the idea of sort of disguising myself to be more like everybody else was never going to work anyway.

I keep talking about my father. But he had this great thing I thought of when I wrote these books, which is he was talking about the Los Angeles Rams back in the day, and they had Deacon Jones, I think it was the best defensive end in football, and he said, teams that would try to run away from Deacon Jones, it didn’t work because he’d catch ’em from behind. He said, the only possibility you had for success was you have to run at the Deacon. So that’s what I sort of thought when there was something you sort of scared of or something you’re trying to hide, you got to run directly at it and embrace it. Now it’s become so many people writing about their individual identity. For me, it was the tension between the two ideas because in my head, I thought I was like this classic American.

MO: Well, I mean, I want to say, I’m too much a fan of yours to actually have the critical distance to know if what I’m about to say is true, but I feel like you’ve tried to marry that New Yorker prose sensibility to a lot of stories that involve Jews more than almost anyone.

RC: Yeah. Well–

MO: Because who else is doing that? I mean, there are Jewish writers there at these magazines who don’t do that. They won’t do that.

I mean, I’ve tried to tell certain writers who live in Jersey and said, like, “Go to Lakewood and do the story there of how Haredi Jews are absolutely, I don’t mean this disparagingly, taking over, but literally. numerically it’s gone from being a seaside town to being a Haredi ultraorthodox town. When I suggest Jewish stories to people that I can’t do because I don’t live there or whatever, to Jewish writers, some of them recoil. They wouldn’t want to be seen doing that. I had somebody refuse to blurb my book about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, a Jewish writer, a Jewish New Yorker writer, because basically they said, well, I don’t know enough about Judaism. But really it was like, I don’t want to be on a Jewish book.

RC: Well, I mean, first of all, I grew up with all these stories, and there was the example of my father’s Bensonhurst friends who were Jewish. And very culturally, they seemed, and my mother’s family who were, my father would say basically Jews who don’t like Jews. And my father’s friends were funner and their stories were funner. And they’d sit around and they’d tell these great stories. And it was closer to, as I imagined, hanging out with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. I just liked those guys better. They had better stories. Basically The New Yorker thing, I know what you’re talking about, but because I first wrote those Talk of the Town stories and I was nobody, I had to find a story that only I would have access to. And when I wrote about Jewish gangsters, I thought, “I understand them at some level that maybe other people can’t.”

So that gives me an advantage in writing the story. And the same way you’re talking about a Jewish story in Lakewood, I would feel the same, which is I have an advantage here. I’m at a disadvantage if you want me to go write about, I don’t know, the U.S. Open. I know nothing really about tennis, but I’m at an advantage if I’m going to be writing about a bunch of Jewish guys hanging out in a deli in Beverly Hills. I kind of understand them completely. And I did feel that with Jennifer Farber. I felt like I understood her because basically her problems were a writer’s problems. And I saw her as a writer who sort of didn’t do, didn’t make the move where you sort of burn everything down

MO: Which you’ve done with two books. I mean, you’ve written about your mom’s family and your dad’s.

RC: It hurts to think about, but you have to do it. You just have to do it.

MO: You have to do it. You have to do it. I was once sitting in a coffee shop in New Haven with Elizabeth Wurtzel who wrote “Prozac Nation” and was somebody I knew a little bit and of blessed memory and an undergrad whom I had taught in freshman English, walked in and the undergrad had written an essay for me that was about her mom or something, and she was afraid it was too mean to her mom and Lizzie overheard this and just leaned in and said, “That’s the essay you have to write. Fuck your mom.” I mean, it was really like, this is the work. And of course, she was very extreme about that.

RC: And I knew her a little bit too, and she shocked me, the stuff she would say.

MO: She was shocking.

RC: I could be like that in writing, but I can never be like that in real life.

MO: Well, she’s one of the very few people, the one percent of the one percent of the one percent who really didn’t care what people thought, which is such an extraordinary gift.

RC: And my grandma had no filter. She would say unbelievably harsh things and you couldn’t tell if she knew what she was saying or not. And I felt like probably if Elizabeth Wurtzel had lived to my grandma’s age, she would’ve been the same kind of.

MO: Totally.

Hey, if you’re enjoying this episode, please make sure to subscribe to Arc: The Podcast. Please rate and review us if you are on social media, which frankly you shouldn’t be because horrible, but if you’re on social media, at least make that count by sharing this episode. Coming up in future weeks, I talk with Paul Kingsnorth. I talk with interfaith activist Manu Meel, and I’m excited to be having a conversation as well with Oliver Burkeman, who is the author of the only two self-help books I’ve ever liked. One is “Meditations for Mortals,” that’s his new book. And the other was called “4,000 Weeks,” which is kind of the length of our life Ii you live to be in your eighties and it’s 52 weeks a year, 4,000 weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes self-help for people who aren’t crazy, stupid, or annoying. He’s the gentleman’s self-help writer and I’m excited to be interviewing him in a week to come.

If you want to navigate over to arc mag.org, that’s A-R-C-M-A-G.org. We have posted some terrific articles lately. We have a great piece on Leo the Fourteenth’s return to traditional papal garb because you remember Francis kept dressing like the Jesuit that he was, like the monk that he was. And Leo the Fourteenth has returned to a kind of traditional papal splendor. We have a good piece on that. And the political scientist, Corey Robin, who is among other things, one of the great scholars of the life and mind of Clarence Thomas, has written a piece on whether capitalism will save us from Donald Trump. I’ll give you a little spoiler: Corey Robin does not think that capitalism will save us from Donald Trump, but the way that he argues it and the way that he gets there is well worth reading. We also have book reviews and movie reviews and interviews and so much more go over to arcmag.org. But for now, let’s return to the rest of my interview with Rich Cohen.

So you’ve written, what, sixteen books?

RC: I don’t know.

MO: It’s something it’s It’s a lot. And you seem to always, you’re productive, which is great. Have you had the career you’ve wanted? Not that it’s over, god willing, there’s thirty or forty more years, but we all grow up, we see, we have writers in mind. We think, “Oh, if I could do what E.B. White did, or if I could do what Ian Frazier did or Janet Malcolm did, or whatever, then you end up with the career you have, which is some sort of triangulation of the stuff you want to do, but also what editors are willing to assign you and what stories fall into your lap and the need to make money. How do you feel about how it’s worked out?

RC: Well, I feel like when I was young, and there was two things. One is, I thought at some point I would be made a writer and then I’d be a writer and I would get money and I would get assignments, and it would be more than just a single man operation in my case. And that’s not true. It’s like every time you’re starting all over again. And then on the other hand, as a little kid growing up in Chicago, of course everybody’s God was Hemingway because he’s from Oak Park.

MO: Oh, right.

RC: Yeah. And there were other writers I’d look at, even like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, who’s from Chicago and won the Nobel Prize. And you sort of think maybe my dream is I’m going to be like on Johnny Carson. Remember Calvin Trillon used to be on Johnny Carson?

MO: He did.

RC: And people are going to know me, and they’re going to say, you don’t even have to pay the bill for this dinner. Just sign your name. And that’s good enough. And that’s not happened.

MO: By the way, when you’re from Springfield, Massachusetts, all you’ve got is Dr. Seuss.

RC: Well, you also had Leo Durocher, I think was from Springfield.
MO: He was from, he went to Classical. That’s true. But I wasn’t, I knew I wasn’t going to be a baseball manager. But I had Dr. Seuss, and at some point I realized Tracy Kidder lived there, but it was pretty slim pickings. I don’t know.

RC: Dr. Seuss is about as successful–

MO: He’s pretty great. Yeah.

RC: He still dominates the best seller lists.

MO: He does. He does.

RC: And he still gets banned, which is unbelievable.

MO: Unbelievable.

RC: Anyway, so I feel like in a weird way, I feel like I’ve been just successful enough to feel like next time it’s going to really happen. I’m be on The Tonight Show, and then also not successful enough that I need to keep working all the time. You know what I mean? I’m in this sweet spot of anxiety and pain that keeps me productive because I think if you’ve made a ton of money, you would sort of be on a beach somewhere to some extent.

So no, it’s not exactly the career that I imagined, but what I imagined wasn’t a real career. It was something else. This is the life of a writer. And now it’s especially hard because writing isn’t central in American culture the way it was in a Hemingway’s time or whatever. A lot of people don’t read. A lot of kids don’t read. And I mean, I started reading intensely when I was in junior high. Probably just do the best you can. And the idea is ultimately, I remember my editor at Rolling Stone when I got a contract said, “What’s your goal?” And I said, my goal was to write one thing that was truly great. And he looked at me like I was the stupidest moron he’d ever met in his whole entire life.

MO: Because your goal should be to make a living? I mean, what did he– I think that’s a great answer.

RC: I know. But I think his goal was more like your goal should be to sort of write a story about Bruce Springsteen, do a cover story.

MO: Do coke off of Joan Jett’s left arm or something. Yeah.

RC: Exactly, have Iggy Pop shave your head.

MO: Circling back to “Lake Effect,” I mean, there’s a lot to be said about, it’s basically a book about growing up and kind of hanging on the character of a friend of yours, who in the book you call Jamie Drew.

RC: Right.

MO: I’m sure that’s not his real name.

RC: He’s the guy who said that nobody gets in a fight in Glencoe because they’re all afraid the next guy’s a billionaire.

MO: Is that right? And he’s living there again?

RC: Yeah.

MO: He’s back there. Not in your parents’ house anymore?

RC: No.

MO: I think everyone should go read the book. I don’t actually have any questions about the book, except I wonder, you thought so intensely about your own childhood, which seemed rich, and it’s not idyllic, but rich and textured and interesting. You have four kids, you’re in Connecticut suburbia. It’s not Chicago. You don’t have the stockyards off in the distance and you don’t have the lake. Do you think your kids have a rich childhood in the way you did?

RC: Well, I didn’t think so. But you realize that my childhood was rich because of the way I perceived it to many other people. My childhood would just be a boring one day in suburban childhood. My father’s childhood seemed rich to him. It seems like he’s got great stories. And I thought I’ll never have a childhood like that. But then when I thought back on it, and every now and then I have four kids, four boys. And last night I heard ’em talking about something in the past, and it was some amazing thing that they had happened that I hadn’t even realized was happening. And my wife and I were listening to him. It’s like they have their own culture and their own world, and if one of them were to become, well, my son is writing, but if he ever wrote about himself or something, I’m sure that that material would be there because it’s the material of, it’s just growing up.

MO: Childhood is magical everywhere, I guess. How old are your boys?

RC: Well, we have a huge, I always say “Second family, first wife.” Our youngest said, “Am I still the youngest?” We have a kid who just graduated college, a kid who’s going to be a junior in college, a kid who’s a freshman in college, and a third grader.

MO: Oh, wow.

RC: So the one who was going to be a freshman in college said, “Am I still the youngest?” And I said, “You’ll always be the youngest of Group A.”

MO: We have something a little like that.

RC: Big gap.

MO: Big gap. I mean, how big is the gap there from three to four? Like eight years?

RC: Eight years.

MO: Okay. So we have five years between our youngest daughter and our only son. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, occasionally I’ll hear my kids talking and I’ll realize they have this incredibly wondrous culture amongst them that I’m not seeing.

RC: Right. You’re missing it because you’re seeing it with your eyes. And when you’re a kid, things seem very intense, very funny. So all that is there for them. I mean, we had the closeness of Chicago, and that was unique compared to my kids.

MO: But I will say that, I know this just a little bit from having…the truth is I did read half of your “Peewee” hockey book and I read your stuff in the Wall Street Journal, and my sense is you’re doing them the favor of not being really a sports parent. It sounds like you let them have free time. And one of the things about Lake Effect is you had free time, you had time to hang out with friends, and you had boredom to fill. My sense is you’ve had the wisdom to not be the overscheduling crazy dad.

RC: Well, I tried, but I failed. I mean, basically my oldest kid, I tried to get him to play hockey, and I coached and everything. That’s what I grew up playing. It was like trying to drag a mule across the field. So I gave up the youngest of group A. He just took to it like a duck to water while I wasn’t watching. And then I’m like, oh, I can ride this train all the way into the NHL, and then he revolted. And so at some point I’m just like, I’m not even going. Because when I was a kid, my dad grew up in Brooklyn. He did not care. They did not care about sports. So I would get dropped off.

MO: You literally had to make up your own sports on the street using chalk and sticks and trash cans.
RC: Mostly a whiffle ball. So I had to, which I think was invented in New Haven, by the way, and I was an outstanding pitcher in whiffle ball. Now, I’ve blown out my arm because of it, but my parents, my dad would drop me off and pick me up. And they would say, how was it? I’d say, “Oh, great.” They’d say, “Good.” And they didn’t want to hear any more about it.

MO: That was it.

RC: And I think there’s a big difference that changed. That’s a big cultural change. I was interest in it, which is if you watch old sports movies, there’s a change that happened back in the day of like Lou Gehrig, if you believe the culture, Lou Gehrig’s mom, parents did not want him to play baseball. They considered it a waste of time, big waste of time. And he would have to sneak out to play. And a big issue was he’d slide and he’d tear his pants and his parents would find out he’d been playing baseball, and he’d be hit with a paddle. And then by the time you get to Mickey Mantle, Mickey Mantle’s dad was the first real sports parent who had failed in his own career and made his son into the ultimate baseball machine: lefty, righty, fast, power. But look what happened. Mickey Mantle became a great baseball player and a total personal wreck who died at a very young age because he drank so much. So I think there was a change. And now it’s so bad because all sports at every level has become professionalized.

MO: Right. I mean, I have a daughter who’s a good soccer player, and my contempt for the soccer moms and dads on the sidelines is pretty strong. I mean, some of them really, they have no other goal in life other than to see their child make the travel team or it’s sick. And they don’t know that they’re that person. They don’t have the shame of knowing that they’re that person.

RC: Well, that’s what I’m saying. It’s like that second level of hearing things come out of your mouth you know. And then you feel terrible about it. The great thing about the youngest to group A is he loved to play hockey and he would’ve just played. And the thing that wrecked it for him is if you’re good, they keep pushing you up until you reach the level where you hate it because it becomes so intense and it becomes so much about traveling, the amount of traveling. So when you said, oh, thanks for coming in because it’s an hour away. Are you kidding? Every Saturday and Sunday for fifteen years or whatever it is, I’d wake up at dawn and drive to whatever, to Lake Placid.

MO: Hockey’s particularly brutal. There’s a lot of Rochester, Lake Placid, Buffalo, Northern Maine, Quebec. You can get all the tennis you want in Connecticut.

RC: Well, you could in hockey because now there’s so many rinks. I played travel hockey when I was a kid, but there weren’t any rinks. Nobody played. You had to travel to find other teams. Now you could just travel around Fairfield County and you could play all the hockey you wanted. And instead, the part of the mystique of the thing is, I’m suffering for hockey. There was a great meme that went around. Some kid had put a thing online that said, “We have a six hour trip and at hour five. I suddenly realized I haven’t brought my equipment. How do I tell my dad?” And it was commented on by all these NHL players. They all–
MO: They’ve been there.

RC: Oh my God. That’s like the biggest nightmare.

MO: Some really interesting religious holidays coming up in the next two weeks. The Islamic New Year begins on Sunday, June 29th, and that’s kind of cool. There are a number of Hindu holidays coming up. They have so many different holidays because so many different local customs. But Ratha Yatra is coming up. That’s a chariot festival. Definitely Hinduism is the only religion I know of with a chariot festival.

And of course, June 20th is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, which is meaningful to all of us who like being outside and like sun, but especially meaningful to people whose religiosity is to be found in Wiccan and Pagan traditions. So happy New Year, happy Chariot Festival, and a happy summer solstice to us all.

Celebrity birthdays. We’ve got to do ’em because the morning zoo on the radio doesn’t anymore. June 17th, Kendrick Lamar turns 38, Barry Manalow turns 82, Paul McCartney will be 83 in the week to come. Blake Shelton 49, Nicole Kidman 58, which is sort of hard to believe. Lionel Richie 76, same age as Meryl Streep. He is two days older than Meryl Streep. Amazing to think that on this earth in a two day span, 76 years ago, Lionel Richie and Meryl Streep were both born. July 1st we wish Pamela Anderson a 58th birthday. Missy Elliot a 54th, and Liv Tyler a 48th birthday. Happy birthday to all of you.

My birthday is coming up in August, so if you’re wondering what to get me, well keep wondering, keep working on it because I’m expecting cards, emails, and even presents from all of my listeners.

Alright, so ready for our final questions?

RC: Yes.

MO: I have never sent them ahead of time before, and then I thought I should do that.

RC: I thought about it and I’ll do my best because some of ’em are hard.

MO: Okay, do you believe in God? And if so, what does that mean?

RC: I do believe in God, and I believe almost in the Old Testament sense of it’s not my business to know exactly what it means. You know what I mean? You know what you can know and what you don’t know, you don’t know. So it means that there’s something else and there’s order, and there’s the stuff you do counts, and you should play it as if it counts. Just like Mark Singer said to me, even though the editor got fired, the game still counts and it matters how you play it.

MO: I love that. I’ve never met Mark Singer, but I love him more now. So we talked a little bit about this, but I really am always curious how do people support themselves financially? And it sounds like you have a lot of hustles.

RC: Well, part of the problem for me is I did learn, my father always said that there are three worst professions you can have are number one ballerina. And I think number three was being a writer because you can’t make any money. And I’ve been writing for so long and started at such a young age that now there’s nothing else that I can do. And at some point, if you’re a writer, you reach the realization that I’m making something in a market driven world that nobody needs.

You’re asking people to pay money for something they do not need, and that’s a very hard thing to do. So I write these books and I support myself with that. And then I’ve done a bunch of other things, like I ghost write books for people. Sometimes I write for a magazine, a lot of magazine stories. I write this column for the Wall Street Journal, and every now and then somebody hires me to give a speech. Every now and then I sell a screenplay or I work on a TV show. But it’s sort of make it up as you go along. And every now and then things get a little tight, and then you just hope something falls out of the sky. And sometimes it does.

MO: And your wife has the health insurance.

RC: She has a job, but it’s not…no health insurance.

MO: Wow. You’re like on Obamacare or something. You’re paying own, you’re buying your own health insurance.

RC: Yeah. So my big plan, my retirement plan, a couple years ago, I looked at my financial, I looked at my kid’s agent and I says, my retirement plan is don’t die.

MO: Don’t die.

RC: Try not to die for as long as possible, at least until the last one’s out of college. Try not to die before that.

MO: If you could have any other career within reason, something you actually could have maybe done. So I think that probably rules out left wing for the Blackhawks, but I don’t know how good. But it has to be something where if you’d made a different set of choices, it’s within reason.

RC: Well, so I would’ve been interested. And it’s kind of writing too, because you put it that way. I might say be an archeologist and discover something, but I was never something in foreign policy because that’s what I studied in college. I worked on Capitol Hill and Washington in college, and that’s what I expected to do. And I had applied to get a master’s and a PhD in history. And the summer I first worked at The New Yorker, I was just killing time that summer until I went to graduate school.

But then I published something and it messed up my brain. So I think it would’ve been working maybe for ideally working in the state department or working for a president or something, writing some kind of policy papers. And the whole game of foreign policy always interested me.

MO: So what’s a big regret you have?

RC: I was thinking about this and I have trouble with regrets for two reasons. One is the Frank Sinatra song, my Way Regrets. I had a few but too few to mention. And two, it’s like basically you feel like all the decisions you made, good and bad and got you where you are.

MO: You like the life you have.

RC: I like my kids. I like my life.

MO: You don’t want different kids. You don’t want a different wife.

RC: Right. So I mean, maybe in that softball game, I should have not pitched to that hitter who we should have walked him because he hit a home run and we lost the championship. So that was my job as a, oh, I know one in college, I was a captain of a softball team, and there was a guy who was really bad, but he was on the team and his girlfriend came to a game and I’m like, this guy probably wants to get in because his girlfriend’s here. So the other guy on the team said, you’re an idiot. We can win this game. I put him at second base, I’m like, the ball won’t even get hit to him. The ball got hit to him and went through his legs. We lost. And the guy I thought I was helping said to me, you know what? You’re a real jerk. My girlfriend now has to see me humiliated.

MO: Oh, geez. He wanted not to get in the game. That’s a good one. I like that one. I like that one. Okay, so if a college kid hears you give a talk, it comes up to you and says, what advice do you have for a living? What do you say? What’s a good general piece of advice?

RC: Just take risks. If you’re on a thin ice, you might as well dance. That’s something I heard when I was a kid. It’s like, I think people kind of drive holding the steering wheel too tight. Just about every risk you can take, come back from, and I’ll tell you something else, which is, when I was a kid, when my kids were little, we filled them with all the dangerous things that could happen to them. Like, don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t eat that flour. That happened once. And then I realized at some point my kid was becoming a nervous wreck and I said, oh, I left something very important out. It’s really hard to die. We make it sound like anything you do, you’re going to die. It’s actually–

MO: As somebody else who has multiple kids, my joke is always, “Look, we have spares.” I don’t want you to die. But it’s not like you’re an only child, then I think I’d be a really anxious parent.

RC: Yeah, I could see it.

MO: You have four.

Is there a song that invokes you, a serious feeling of nostalgia?

RC: I think “Jungle Land” by Bruce Springsteen.

MO: Interesting. I love that song. Why that song? I mean, what does it bring up for you?

RC: It just brings up summer in Glencoe when I was with a bunch of kids and we were drinking beer at the lake and we were too young to be drinking, and we were listening to Jungle Land and it said, I forget the exact line, but it’s girls drinking beer in the soft summer rain. And I had that moment where I thought, oh my God, I’m doing it. I’m doing it. I wanted to once make a movie called “I’m Doing It,” which just showed me doing a series of things. I’m doing it. But I had that sense of doing it.

And actually when my kids were very little, another Springsteen song, “Backstreets,” I convinced them that that was a song about my life that I had let Springsteen make a song about. And they believe me, I also convinced them, if you go to the Met in New York, they have those rooms, replicas of historical rooms. There’s a room from a Frank Lloyd Wright house. And I convinced them that was my living room.

MO: That was your house.

RC: Deconstructed and reconstructed.

MO: Have you written about Springsteen? Am I forgetting something?

RC: Not really. I wrote a Wall Street Journal, one of my columns is about how I prefer Springsteen the scraggy beach rat to Springsteen the political political pontificator because there’s about his songs who are the outsiders or there’s a fantasy of a certain kind of childhood. And when he explains how the songs work or what gave him the idea, it destroys the fantasy.

MO: Did you read his memoir?

RC: I didn’t read it for the same reason. Maybe, it’s great.

MO: It really is a great book. It’s actually a phenomenally good book.

RC: I’ll read it. I mean, I read the Bob Dylan book, which I love because what Bob Dylan did was his book is just another Bob Dylan song, and I like the idea. There is a line from Joseph Mitchell, we’re talking about him. He said he picked the mask and he kept it on. He never took it off.

MO: Dylan’s kept the mask on.

RC: Right.

MO: No, I mean, the main thing about Springsteen, it didn’t ruin the songs for me at all. The songs are still beautiful and the place they come from is still real. If there’s anything that changes a little as you realize how ruthlessly careerist you have to be to become Bruce Springsteen, that he was hiring and firing E Street band members and working them hard and that it’s not a collective, and that he’s “the Boss.”

RC: Well, they call him “the Boss” for a reason.

MO: I mean, you realize how ambitious that it just doesn’t happen that rock stars aren’t touched by God and become rock stars, that they’re exceedingly ambitious. But I was okay with that.

RC: That doesn’t bother me. That’s true of everything. I mean, that’s just the way it is. I’m saying, you’re making something people don’t need. They’re doing that too. And the rewards are bigger, but it, it’s harder and there’s fewer people that are able to do it. It’s like a play. You don’t want the director to come out and start talking during the play to tell you what’s going on. In this scene, Willie Loman is thinking about…

MO: I don’t even want them to come out afterwards. I hate the talkbacks. Just let me–can I just please enjoy the play and get immersed in it and lost in it?

RC: Yeah. But Springsteen’s one of those people where he was hugely important to me, but he’s so written about and he’s so out there and exposed. What’s amazing about Bob Dylan is he’s kind of the greatest of all time at this art. He invented it and he’s everywhere, but he’s not overexposed. Even with the biopic movie about him, he’s able to remain…When you see that movie about Bob Dylan, it’s a great movie, but you think Dylan’s untouched.

MO: Yeah.

RC: They still never explained who he was or anything. It didn’t touch him at all.

MO: I mean, no, he’s really left the mask on. It’s kind of crazy. I’m seeing him August 2nd. He’s touring with Willie Nelson.

RC: Oh yeah.

MO: And Lucinda Williams. And of course he and Nelson’s 92. Dylan’s 86 or something. I mean, I don’t know how good it’ll be, but I’ve only seen him once before. I’ve never seen Willie Nelson, only seen Lucinda Williams once. It’s like, it’ll be a good show.

RC: But it says something about America, which is what we have now is like a gerontocracy.

MO: We kind of do.

RC: All across the board.

MO: We kind of do, which is why you have to write a column called “Back When.”

RC: Right.

MO: Okay. And then finally, what are you watching that you’d recommend or what have you watched? Anytime? What are you reading and something to listen to?

RC: Alright, so a book I always go back to is this book “Within the Context of No Context” by George Trow.

MO: Never read that. I’ve heard it’s interesting.

RC: And his book that came after, “My Pilgrim’s Progress.” And it’s about television and what television did to America. And it’s about American culture. And it’s one of those books that it makes you see everything differently. A lot of things that don’t make sense suddenly make sense. It’s short, but it’s hard because you got to think about it all the time. But it’s funny. And he was a great, great writer, died tragically and young, and I just regret that he didn’t live long enough to explain what’s going on now to me, because I think he would’ve been able to explain what’s happening with the internet and the culture and AI. And it’s like many times I’d been wondering about what happened with internet culture destroying all the magazines, and I thought it’s like still TV, all this stuff George Trow wrote, it’s still television. It’s just more better television. It’s now television you can interact with. So that’s a book that I would say that people could benefit and it’s really fascinating to read.

RC: As far as watch…you know what I watched recently that I really liked, that actually is newly relevant weirdly. And it was even better than I remember because my son, my youngest of group A has gotten really into movies. “Dr. Strangelove.”

MO: Yeah, I haven’t seen that since high school.

RC: If you see it again, you’ll see that it holds up. It really holds up and it’s still unbelievably funny. And actually, I heard a story, I don’t know if it’s true. A friend of mine said that George C. Scott wanted to play it like a normal movie. He didn’t want to do it over the top. And Kubrick said, just do one over the top to sort of clean out the system and then do the serious ones, and he let ’em do these three extra takes that he knew never was going to use because the whole thing, just over the top stuff.

And that’s a watch. And what was the third one?

MO: Something to listen to. It could be a song, could be a podcast. Like something in your ears.

RC: There’s this kind of, actually this is a while ago, but this Ryan Adams album came out called “Sweet Illusions,” I think. And this was before Ryan Adams got canceled.

MO: Yeah, he had some, there’s some controversy…

RC: I believe in separating the artist from the art.

MO: Me too.

MO: By the way, that’s something I’ve passed on to my kids. If you love the art, the artist doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you if. And they believe that and I’m proud of that. They have friends who can’t do that and can’t listen to certain art.

RC: With my own kids I fight about it sometimes because it’s how they’re taught. But the thing is, if you’re Jewish and you’re a writer and interested in culture, you learn to do that early. Every writer was antisemitic, basically.

MO: I’ve said the same thing. And that’s the same thing with taking names off of buildings. I mean, you walk around Yale, every one of these people was an antisemite. Literally every one. You don’t think Timothy, Dwight and Ezra Stiles, I mean they all believed that Jews were broken Christians or incomplete Christians. The best thing they would’ve believed was simply how sad for them. That was the best thing, was a kind of pity. And the worst thing was every stereotype known to man, literally, that’s every person.

RC: But you realize early on, if you care about this, that if I write this person out of my life because they’ve said something hateful, then ultimately I’m just punishing and diminishing my own world. And it’s depressing when you come across it. I mean, you’re like, oh, it’s like being kicked by a friend. Because when you read a book, you very intensely identify with the narrator and suddenly the narrator turns around and spits on your parents. It’s how you feel about it.

RC: Anyway, Ryan Adams made this album called “Sweet Illusions,” which to me, it showed me how the culture system was broken because this had two or three songs that if it had come out in 1990 or 1986 would’ve been timeless. “Born in the USA.”

MO: A classic, yeah.

RC: But instead, only a few fans of his know what it is.

MO: Rich Cohen, thanks for your time.

RC: This was really fun.

MO: The podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer. I would love your feedback. Write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. That’s W-U-S-T-L dot edu. The show is produced by David Sugarman with audio consulting from Robert Scaramuccia. Intern help from Caroline Coffey. Our deputy director at the Danforth Center is Deborah Kennard. We have the leadership of Mark Valeri and Abraham Van Engen. And our music is by Love Cannon. Web designed by Cause + Effect. That’s causexeffect.com online. And until next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer.