Ben Stein's Diary: Toughest Nails
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein Toughest Nails Friday Ring, ring, goes the bell. Up from a deep sleep. It's a woman from MacNeil/Lehrer (now "The News Hour With Jim Lehrer"). "You've been...
...Sometimes he would chuck us behind the ear or even pretend to throw a punch...
...He would stoke the furnace, get the school toasty warm for us, and then start his sweeping...
...Or freedom...
...There is a black man who works as a doorman at my building in West Hollywood...
...I didn't know that," I said...
...Now, what will you say once you're on...
...It's about a case I am not allowed to discuss...
...Pretend to be all about peace and love when they are really about fury and resentment...
...Willie retired when I was in sixth grade...
...I had a very bad experience last time I was on TV talking about race...
...This is not just sweet...
...Does Hezbollah know about Platinum AAdvantage...
...That boy became the County Sheriff...
...I can still smell that resin and remember Willie whistling...
...He was found dead on a park bench, of exposure, on a winter morning maybe thirty-five years ago...
...He would walk up and down our school's one hallway, tossing resin out onto the floor and then sweeping up the dust it collected with his push broom...
...I look at my parents' apartment with my parents lounging about, my sister and her husband wittily commenting on everything (Melvin and I bitterly disagree about securities law, but otherwise we get along well...
...Actually, I have nothing to say to the sexbombs and the con-men, but as I think of it, I have very little to say to the folks at the Cosmos Club, either...
...I saw it...
...I passed two little black boys who recognized me and asked for my autograph...
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...We gave her a photo of her graduating class at Monticello High School in what might have been 1931...
...I went to a Chinese place called the Panda Express that I think I own a few shares of, and had some delicious orange-flavor beef—just in case they forget to put food on the plane...
...At the crack of dawn, my wacky neighbor, beautiful Dotty, called to ask what was new...
...She cried and ran out of the classroom...
...The airport was under a "heightened security alert," yellow and black signs everywhere...
...A group of important black and white historians talking about race in America...
...I'll call you later," I said...
...One was fat and one was thin...
...I have to think about this," I said...
...It's a woman from MacNeil/Lehrer (now "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer...
...My pals ask me how I can find the whole subject of bonds and default rates so interesting...
...newspapers had classified sections listing houses for sale as "white" and "colored...
...My fine lawyer tells me that the bad guys in a certain legal struggle are still torturing me...
...One night at a Valentine's Dance, or maybe it was a Thanksgiving Dance or a Halloween Dance, a girl in the grade behind me, a white girl, with the lovely name of Delight, showed up with a black student...
...But it's a big one...
...Just in case, maybe you should tell me your credentials...
...Anyway, while I considered this word "discrimination," I thought about my own life...
...I can't stand the thought that we are all getting so old so fast...
...By 1957, there were Freedom Rides, and the whole world started to change...
...Codes...
...The baggage area was locked up...
...I think that now the gates are wide open for blacks, and if they do not come through the gates, that's very largely BENJAMIN J. STEIN is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...Davis needs to sit in because he does not find the regular Morton's chair sufficiently comfortable...
...There were still segregated movie theaters in Bethesda when I was in high school and as far as I recall, they were all segregated in Northern Virginia...
...Yet another little black boy came up to me and asked for my autograph...
...I told her about the article, about Begelman, about Sandi Bennett and her nails...
...I would drive by the Chevy Chase Club on Connecticut Avenue — a club that allowed no Jews as members —and feel simply overpowered with rage...
...He laughed and threw a fake punch...
...No Jews at the best country clubs...
...Definitely," she said...
...No Jews at the white-shoe investment banks...
...It's right on the Tred Avon River, with a spectacular immense yard of a beautiful grassy green lawn looking out on the confluence of river and Chesapeake Bay...
...There's nothing to do if you're our age...
...Willie was the janitor at my grade school, Parkside Elementary, which was beautifully set in a grove of trees next to still lovely Sligo Creek Park...
...I'm on my way to a business meeting...
...Wealthy people look forward all their lives to living here...
...I guess I would say that black people in this country have suffered terribly over the past several hundred years...
...The listings were like that in the Star, the Daily News, and even in the Washington Post and Times-Herald...
...But isn't that also true of the blacks...
...The landscape was utterly featureless...
...Let's just say I felt really, really bad about it...
...It's hard to drive in the dark when you are crying, especially when you know that the headquarters of the CIA is nearby...
...I'm keeping you right here with me...
...They were still suffering terribly until about twenty years ago...
...And the brave police who keep some semblance of order in LA...
...Mom and Pop went down with me and just sat in chairs looking at me...
...Can it be that he does not feel the chill the way white people do...
...In seventh grade, in 1956, when I went to the hellhole of the universe, Montgomery Hills Junior High, the schools were integrated...
...Talked of for a day, and then gone...
...I started to sing, "America the Beautiful," and that only made me want to cry more...
...He's the dude who was head of Columbia until he began forging checks for Cliff Robertson, among others...
...Do they really think racism today is what it was in 196o...
...I may be way off base, but isn't the same true for blacks in America today...
...Uh-huh, uh-huh," she said, obviously taking this down...
...If they would start behaving like Finns, and have fewer out of wedlock babies, stronger families, take advantage of the educational system, and really work with discipline for a better life for them and their children, they would soon live at least as well as whites...
...Gee, I wonder why many Americans don't trust PBS...
...The sky was a sickening light gray from smog...
...That used to really, really hurt my feelings...
...Think of all the people who fought and died and sacrificed so that I could be here with my boy...
...Why should 58 January 1996 The American Spectator I I I I I I I I I the stockholders—many of whom are widows and orphans—be made to give charity to a group they do not even know...
...We had a "colored" math teacher who did not use grammatical English...
...I checked in and went to the Admirals' Club...
...Previous computer or billing experience are not required...
...Guards everywhere...
...Whatever was going on here, America was the best place on earth...
...A few months ago, he committed suicide in the Century City Hotel...
...I was awakened to be fed my dinner on the plane by a stewardess who wanted my autograph...
...Plainclothes cops behind the check-in desk...
...Children, be good to your parents and you will have very devoted parents indeed...
...White children only...
...Tuesday I'm up real early reading a truly scary article about David Begelman...
...Dead on Iwo Jima...
...A small deputation of us went out to Willie's shack, really just a shack, and brought him a plaque expressing our gratitude...
...By high school, we had a black fellow named Sonny Jackson who was a star pitcher for our baseball team...
...Daddy," he said, "did you know that `civic,' like a Honda Civic, is a palindrome...
...Of course, I'm not sure I live like a Finn . . . ) There was a weighty sigh and a pause at the other end of the phone...
...On the way back to Washington we stopped to buy gasoline on the outskirts of Easton...
...Davis and his wife, and Joan Collins and some other folks...
...He was a portly man with a gold capped tooth...
...Wednesday This is my mother's actual birthday...
...It's great if you're 65," a boy said...
...I am trying to get them to stop using my persona in a commercial...
...It was amazing how my mother remembered each and every name and face from more than sixty years ago...
...They drove recklessly, drivers staring forward without expression...
...I got into my seat and soon I was in the kind of haze I get into when I am half asleep and the headphones are playing Bob Dylan's "Desire" for the millionth time...
...When I was a child, discrimination against Jews was standard...
...I have often said that if there is an afterlife, and I believe there is, and if what I have done that's good outweighs the bad, if I wake up and see Alex's face, I will know I am in heaven...
...He seemed very tired, but he showed a certain grace and even made a little bow...
...We all loved him...
...When I got to L.A., I rushed over to see Tommy...
...I tell them that if you get deeply into almost any subject it becomes interesting...
...Can the PC people like that woman at MacNeil-Lehrer have forgotten all this...
...Anything I thought made me feel like an idiot and a fool...
...All of this remembering left me desolated...
...America was the promised land and if the Chevy Chase Club did not want Jews, that was a pinprick compared with the gift of life...
...I think these institutions basically loot their depositors by paying trivial interest compared with the interest they get—and they do it to cover up their own gross lending errors...
...He drove in 56 January 1996 The American Spectator from his little shack in the woods near Rockville —there were lots of woods in those days...
...I didn't know what to think about Frank and Willie as I ate my roast beef at 29,000 feet...
...The cars on the freeway weredented and old...
...It has disappeared down the memory hole at the Ministry of Truth, like the war between East Asia and Oceania...
...We ate at the Old Anglers' Inn, a dark, crowded, pretentious place in suburban Maryland...
...Saturday Mom's Geburtstag...
...They looked at me as if I were crazy, and I drove away...
...A boy in my class whose parents had been Communists, Ricky, took me along with him a few times to demonstrate against the Hiser-Bethesda's segregated ticket policy...
...Well, this is going to be a very sensible discussion, very cool, very restrained and thoughtful," she said...
...My father-in-law in Germany fighting the SS...
...JUST KIDDING...
...Whatever problems we had about discrimination, they were a joke compared with the good things about American life...
...In fact, if you are good to your wife, she will be devoted as well, and the same thing with the kiddies...
...You're not leaving...
...Of course, I usually have absolutely zero sympathy for any large bank...
...Still, there was a lot that lingered of the bad old days...
...But this business of lending discrimination is just nonsense...
...It has the most respectable looking people I have ever seen in my life...
...In fact, I told them they should read a good book, get up early the next morning, and play in the park...
...Steve Tisch, billionaire heir producer of Forrest Gump...
...My cousin in the Army in Korea...
...I know that place," she said...
...Someday, all of us will be in eternity, and then other people will have this apartment at the Watergate, and it will be as if we were never there...
...Strict quotas against Jews at schools in the Ivy League...
...It also points out that he was having an affair with Sandi Bennett, ex-wife of the singer Tony Bennett...
...The Washington, D.C...
...People scrimp and save to live here...
...The story notes that when Sandi Bennett found out that her paramour was dead, she grieved, took calls, and then went to have her nails done at a place right near my condo here at the Shoreham Towers...
...Well, you could go to D.C...
...Frank drank heavily...
...Dead from his drinking, of course, not dead from life as a colored man in suburban Maryland, USA...
...He was waiting for me and jumped into my arms...
...They look as if they will be standing there staring at each other's faces for all eternity, and maybe they will...
...Are you saying that things have actually gotten better in America...
...He toiled away pulling weeds, raking, carting away leaves, all for maybe a dollar an hour or maybe a dollar and a quarter...
...Oh, definitely," I said...
...Pretend to know secrets when they know they are missing out on the biggest secret...
...Monday Here I am at my new favorite place, Trinity Church in Oxford, Maryland...
...Dead of overwork in Poland...
...My sister and my brother-in-law, the hard-working, maddeningly thin Melvin, have come down from New York to take my mother and father to dinner...
...Sometimes I would see him staggering in the immense park behind our house or just lying on a park bench...
...We walked back and forth languidly on the sidewalk of Wisconsin Avenue, but I was there mostly to keep him company...
...He was a slender, seedily stylish black man who did gardening and handiwork in our neighborhood, Woodside Park, in Silver Spring...
...Ihustled off to my meeting, which was downtown with a very funny, smart lawyer named Kevin Roddy...
...to the airport...
...After my meeting, I headed to the airport on the virtually new Century Freeway...
...She also explained that there were TVs only on the east and west coasts, and when I told her I was sure there were TVs in Cleveland and Chicago, she scoffed at me...
...Even rentals and hotels as "white" and "colored...
...How I wish I could have signed something that would give them a pass out of being sad and violent and alone...
...The lawyer is the lawyer's real client...
...Electronic Claims Processing has excellent income' potential, working part or full time...
...However, this looks to me like a possible case of what's called "the agencyproblem...
...The chaperones asked them to leave...
...She was right in the center of the front row, as valedictorian...
...Could Al-Fatah have called in...
...Then, toshow how Hollywood treats its own, he was punished by becoming head of MGM and then United Artists...
...A dead colored man...
...It's ultra sweet...
...It's really important to remember that when you hire a lawyer, in many cases, maybe in most cases, the lawyer puts his interest first...
...Then there was Frank...
...Suffice it to say, it's one of the more fascinating cases I have ever come across...
...I remember how he would walk around the neighborhood in the snow dressed only in thin summer clothes...
...You're slipping," my father said...
...Obviously, I have made a big impression on the black young male viewer...
...There he would be, driving in on freezing days in his old Plymouth, a prewar model, and he was keeping the school warm for whites only...
...We had a teacher who routinely called black people "coons...
...It's a sad laugh all the same...
...Other major players...
...Like every school in the sovereign state of Maryland, Parkside was racially segregated...
...But when I was a young man feeling this discrimination, I never blamed America...
...I have to laugh out loud when I think of this crew and the crowd of sexbombs and con-men I usually see at my normal luncheon places in West Hollywood...
...You read to me...
...No Jews in Henlopen Acres in Rehoboth Beach...
...We went to the Tidewater Inn for dinner...
...I am forbidden to say what birthday it is...
...Willie and Frank kept coming to mind, and the days when black people led sad lives indeed in this blessed America...
...But when we got home and gave her her birthday presents, she lit up...
...Small wonder that she was valedictorian of her high school and fifth in her class at Barnard in the days when Jewish girls did not get in unless they were super smart...
...My mother looked very small and hesitant...
...Listen at you," she would say when disdaining one of our answers in elementary algebra or fractions...
...Thank you, God, I had no one sitting next to me so I could spread out my papers and then sleep...
...I'm keeping you right here," he said...
...By the time I was in my Avis rent-acar heading along the George Washington Parkway near where Vince Foster's body was dumped, I was ready to cry...
...I remember even then thinking that it was sad that Willie's children, if he had any, could not go to the school he warmed up for us...
...So I thought...
...Power players all around...
...On the other hand, I almost always think these cases are fascinating...
...Where else have blacks ever had the kinds of opportunities they have here...
...White America has done an almost unbelievable job in correcting its racism...
...There are men withbow ties, men with suspenders, men with belts and suspenders...
...He pressed my hand against his cheek and kept it there...
...You will have the most devoted parents anyone could have ever...
...It made absolutely no difference that there were elegant Jewish clubs...
...One of them recognized me and asked me what I was doing in a "noplace" like Easton...
...Then, thanks to my cousins who still live in Monticello (New York), I was also able to give her the program from her graduation and snapshots of Monticello in her early youth...
...She had a brief rendezvous with him hours before he shot himself...
...There was a slight commotion at the door as two of billionaire Marvin Davis's bodyguards handed in a huge chair, more like a throne, which Mr...
...There was an even longer pause...
...Could it be that his black skin kept him from feeling pain and snow and hurt and humiliation...
...People do not like to feel excluded...
...My father is at some meeting of brainos at the White House and so I am taking Mom to lunch at the Cosmos Club...
...and score rock and get really, really high," I said...
...It's forty bucks to get your nails done...
...They had to live in a world of total defense mechanisms...
...The school was heated by a coal-fired basement furnace...
...Then he was asleep...
...Thank you for the best night of my life...
...At the next table is a woman who is "ombudsman" of the Washington Post...
...I hugged him for along time...
...Then, onto the plane...
...My mother and father are here...
...That was the environment Willie kept warm...
...That there's less racism...
...The sole black face was Willie's...
...Or the political power...
...But you can't leave until I'm asleep...
...But it was fact...
...No doubt about it...
...Except in some corner of America, God willing, Tommy Stein will be fishing or water skiing or snowboarding...
...Definitely not paradise...
...Then, good-bye to Mom and Dad—Dad said his meeting had not been very productive, to put it mildly—and then downstairs to the Watergate Barber Shop to get my hair cut...
...If the nominal client is served, well and good...
...A knot of teenagers lounged at the candy machines...
...But I can promise you that we'll be using you soon on some other show...
...The agency problem is when an agent, such as a lawyer, puts his own interest ahead of the client's and—for example — prolongs a case to get the last possible billable hour out of the situation...
...Official, legally sanctioned racism is a thing of the past, at least against blacks...
...You put me to bed, Daddy," he said...
...But it's often incidental to the well-being of the lawyer...
...Job listings as "white" and "colored...
...Well," she said softly, "maybe this isn't the right show for you to be on...
...She had been out without her father knowing, and when he found out, he took her out of Blair and sent her to a strict all-girls school...
...Not Mommy...
...Edgar 13ronfrnan, billionaire heir/owner of Seagram's/MCA...
...Raw ignorance of history can have devastating consequences...
...Capital required: $3,495 to $7,995...
...You'll know when I'm asleep, because my mouth will drop open like this," he said, and opened his mouth...
...She sat at her dining table, crowded The American Spectator • January 1 9 9 6 57 with mail, and said, "That girl had such a lovely voice...
...He tells me he laughs when he hears black people today complaining about racism because they can't get into Harvard or UCLA without taking the SATs...
...And you want me...
...That was Frank...
...As Joan passed by, I could hear her say, "What I'd like to do is play myself as a sort of overdone version of myself in a sitcom...
...I could smell the resin on him, and I still can now, thirty-nine years later...
...I think that's the real story here...
...If we expect banks to lend to unqualified applicants, that means we want to compel bank stockholders to give charity to a certain group...
...because of pathology within their community...
...How could he possibly have lived on that...
...No Jews in vast neighborhoods in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia...
...We had a black girl who was editor of the yearbook...
...I stepped to a payphone to get my messages...
...He took my hand and pressed it against his cheek...
...They will be super-devoted...
...To make sure we were warm on winter days, Willie would get up at dawn or maybe before...
...Off I went on Flight 36 to Washington, D.C...
...I do not like to feel excluded...
...At least in Silver Spring...
...Pretend to be cool when they are seething...
...I was so agitated by the phone call and the prospect of more legal bills and more aggravation that I excused myself from my meal for a few minutes and walked around the block in Easton...
...And, in fact, they were really still suffering when I was a child to the point that it was criminal...
...It goes through South Central L.A...
...I sat next to his bed and read to him...
...That's fine, my boy," I said...
...For our Free Information 1 Packet, Call us Toll Free I 1-800-207-3711 ext...
...The chair is passed hand to hand until it finds itself at his table...
...They're standing under a huge ancient oak, holding hands...
...You've been recommended highly by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania to appear on our show on Monday about race in America...
...Then in comes Mr...
...None of them asked you for an autograph...
...He knew the name of every boy and girl at Parkside, and always was friendly...
...If Mary the dog and Trixie are there, too, it will be paradise...
...That it spells the same from front or back...
...In a few minutes I was off the freeway and on my way to American Airlines...
...I can scarcely imagine how furious and hurt blacks must have felt over their far more comprehensive discrimination...
...The beautiful but wacky Dotty with a rich older man...
...She recently was involved in some minor romantic scandal...
...He grew up in northwestern Mississippi in the 194os...
...The article points out how lonely, broke, and crazy he was...
...That boy had a great sense of humor...
...It's jumping...
...But Easton is one of the garden spots of the universe," I said...
...305 NATIONAL CLAIMS SERVICE I 5000 Windplay Dr., El Dorado Hills, CA 95762 I =NI mu me we The American Spectator • January 1996 59...
...There is no historic precedent for the revolution of decency in America about helping blacks and stopping hurting blacks...
...I have often seen Nancy Reagan going into the same place...
...No Jews at the best schools...
...Just booming...
...The people who employed him were always yelling at him, telling him he did it wrong, generally treating him as less than human and without feelings...
...The students routinely called them even worse...
...There was a pause...
...As far as I know, there is no study that shows black applicants with identical credit, family, and employment histories to whites getting turned down more than whites...
...Monday Dinner at Morton's with my pal Barron...
...He had been in World War II in some capacity, and now he was the janitor...
...Now it's an un-fact, and no one I ever meet from the Post will acknowledge that it happened...
...It did not even occur to me that he had no money for warm clothes...
...One day a student asked her why she did not wear a bone in her hair...
...Now, I am not a litigator myself, so I could be wrong...
...I had read some reference to allegations of bank-lending discrimination in the Wall Street Journal and that led me to think about discrimination...
...It's a tiny church in this tiny town...
...They were named Darrell and Lionel...
...All so Tommy and I can be together in the dark in peace...
...But in recent years, I think their suffering is largely self-inflicted...
...She has an astonishingly good memory for everything...
...The airport was mobbed...
...I often think that for the Jews of America, life is the best that it has ever been in the 5,800-year history of Jews...
Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 1
