Lou Reed

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FROM BROOKLYN TO THE CROTCH OF LONG ISLAND

NAMED AFTER HIS MOTHER'S late grandfather, Lewis Allan Reed was born on March 2, 1942, at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Sidney Joseph and Toby Reed. Sidney was a smart, handsome, ambitious accountant and Toby a housewife whose beauty was remarked upon by all who knew her. Three years earlier, at the age of nineteen, she had been chosen "Queen of the Stenographers" at one of the many local beauty pageants in New York at that time. She had been nominated by the firm where she was working, United Lawyers Service, and it was characteristic of her reticence that she claimed the only reason she was selected was that "the really pretty stenographer was out sick that day." Her photo ran in the Brooklyn Eagle, and she was crowned queen at the Stenographers Ball held at the Manhattan Center on Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, a run of subway stops and a world away from her life in Brooklyn.

The country was barely through the Depression and World War II was raging, but Brooklyn was a peaceful, if rough-hewn, place to live. The borough was overwhelmingly ethnic, with Italian, Irish, Jewish, and African American neighborhoods bordering one another and, in some instances, overlapping, with varying degrees of comfort. In contrast to the soaring towers and relentless modernity of Manhattan, Brooklyn was old-world and human-scale. The buildings were low and each neighborhood had everything its residents needed within a few blocks. The immigrant communities quavered on the tense balance of attempting to re-create the familiar comforts of their European homelands and embracing the fresh possibilities of life in the New World.

Both Toby's and Sidney's parents had emigrated from Europe in the early 1900s, her family from Poland, his from Russia. Sidney's father, Mendel Rabinowitz, established a successful printing business and settled in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park, a predominantly Italian and Jewish area. A recognizably Jewish name like Rabinowitz would do Sidney no good if he hoped to advance in the world beyond his neighborhood, so he legally changed his surname to Reed.

The Reeds were not religious and did not belong to a synagogue, although Lewis would eventually be bar mitzvahed. Sidney Reed, an opinionated man, despised organized religion. He was something of a loner, and the family did not have many close friends and did not belong to any neighborhood organizations. They lived in a small, walk-up apartment. Sidney was close to his younger brother Stan, who lived with the Reeds for a time, but for the most part the Reeds' family life was tight and enclosed. Lewis was the Reeds' first child, and, as the first and only son in a Jewish family, he was cherished.

Like so many men of his time, Sidney had struggled to find work in the wake of the Depression. A well-spoken man who prized the English language, he had dreamed of becoming a writer or a lawyer, but settled on being a certified public accountant, in accordance with his mother's wishes. Toby, whose given last name was Futterman, had left school to go to work and help support her family after her father died when she was in her teens.

The war was a frightening time for everyone, but particularly for Jews, as the Nazis swept across Europe and rumors and reports of the fate of that continent's Jewish population began to drift across the Atlantic to the United States. Personal disappointments were pushed aside, and a sense of tense, precarious gratitude became predominant. Simply to have a job and enough money to live and provide for a growing family—simply to be alive—seemed enough to be grateful for. Hoping for more was tempting the fates.

THE BROOKLYN THAT LOU Reed grew up in has been shrouded in a haze of nostalgia, perhaps deservedly. It sometimes seems as if the entire future of the music industry was forged by Brooklyn Jews of his approximate generation, Carole King, David Geffen, Neil Sedaka, Clive Davis, Neil Diamond, Gerry Goffin, Seymour Stein, and Barbra Streisand among them. Jewish families typically encouraged education and ambition in their children, and that manifested itself in both creative work and business. The practical business side derived from a sense that survival in post-Depression America required making sure you entered a profession that guaranteed the bills would always be paid. The creativity derived from an exactly opposite source, one out of the parents' control. As all immigrant groups tend to do, the Jews who came to New York attempted to reconstruct the homeland they had left behind. That provided a sense of comfort, and to contemporary eyes it looks romantic and charming. But these Brooklyn shtetls seemed restrictive and painfully old-world to the children and grandchildren of those immigrants. American music, radio, movies, and television all called to those young people with a wild sense of wide-open freedom that their neighborhoods and cramped apartments couldn't begin to rival. That generation would leave Europe behind and create a vision of America in the popular arts that, before long, would become the prism through which the entire world viewed the country.

For some, Brooklyn in the forties and early fifties was a world of egg creams and raucous, sunny afternoons at Ebbets Field, of men waiting at newsstands for the bulldog editions of the next day's newspapers in order to get the sports scores and racing results, of women sitting outside on stoops to escape the heat, watching their kids and sharing gossip with neighbors. If Reed noted or participated in such routines, they only rarely penetrated his consciousness in later years, and he didn't share those reminiscences with others. He would repeatedly describe his upbringing in Brooklyn as a combination of familial oppression and neighborhood tension. As a songwriter, he would eventually exalt the grittiness of New York's streets, but as a young boy growing up, he found it off-putting—both frightening and a little beneath him. He couldn't even romanticize it in retrospect, though he described it in terms far worse than it likely was. Taking his imagination to the extreme was a habit that began early with him.

Reed attended P.S. 192 on Eighteenth Avenue, four blocks from his parents' apartment. His mother would escort him to school, despite the short distance. Reed recalled that he didn't walk to school alone before the age of nine because "if you walked the streets, you'd get killed." As for the school itself, he said, "They lined you up in a school yard with wire fences, no grass to walk on. The playground was concrete and they had lunch monitors.… People were pissing in the streets. A kid had to go to the john, you raised your hand, got out of line, and pissed through the wire. It was like being in a concentration camp, I suppose." It's inconceivable, of course, that teachers, especially in a coeducational school at that time—or any other time, really—would call on boys to urinate through a fence rather than use the school's restroom. Perhaps the boys did it on their own when they were playing in the school yard and no teachers or oppressive "lunch monitors" were present, and Reed conflated the memories in order to enhance his anecdote. But then if, however ironically, you're comparing your elementary school to a concentration camp, anything is possible.

If Reed's contemporaries heard evocative street corner singing or the wonders of New York radio while growing up in Brooklyn, such charms were lost on or unperceivable to him. "I didn't hear nothin' in Brooklyn," he said. "The radio didn't exist." He concluded, "I couldn't have been unhappier than in the eight years I spent growing up in Brooklyn." Somewhat jokingly he later added, "Most of my childhood memories are not available to me. My childhood was so unpleasant that I absolutely don't remember anything before age thirty-one." Reed did attend Dodgers games with his father, though he would later disparage the experience, wryly claiming that the Dodgers' leaving Brooklyn—a source of never-ending heartbreak for, and much written about by, literary Brooklynites of those days—was the cause of his cynicism. He claimed to have cared about the Dodgers "very much," but their departure for Los Angeles in 1957—ironically, long after Reed and his family had themselves left the borough—made it impossible for him to ever care about baseball again.

When Reed was five, his younger sister, Merrill, whose nickname was Bunny, was born. Now with two children, the Reeds, like so many other solvent families who lived in cities at around that time, began to think about moving to the suburbs. The war was over, and America was becoming the world's great economic engine. The baby boom was in full swing, and the crowded urban centers were beginning to seem indistinguishable from the cramped environments that so many of their ancestors had fled. The postwar era in America was characterized by a desire to establish a reassuring normalcy, to erase the Europe of wars and genocide, to lose the past and live in America's eternally bright future. No doubt the Cold War was coming into being, and the threat of nuclear annihilation lent a persistent undercurrent of dread to the era. But that whiff of mortality only fueled the desire for stability, a kind of submerged rage for order. The booming economy and the New Deal reforms that the Roosevelt administration had put in place to combat the Depression meant that social mobility was, for once, a true possibility in America. The dream of owning your own home was becoming a reality for millions of people. And when Sidney Reed was offered the job of treasurer at Cellu-Craft, a Long Island firm that, in the true spirit of The Graduate, manufactured plastics, it seemed as if the Reeds were finally getting their shot at that dream. So in 1952, the Reed family moved to Freeport, Long Island.

SIDNEY REED WANTED TO raise his kids on Long Island in part because he believed it would be safer, and he "thought that the opportunity on the island would be better," said Allan Hyman, one of Reed's close friends on Long Island, of Reed's father. "That was the way a lot of people felt." Freeport was one of the small towns along the south shore of Long Island that served as a bedroom community for New York. The Reeds moved there at a time when conformity was not merely desired or valued; it was an unquestioned good. The Reeds' home—an undistinguished three-bedroom ranch-style house at 35 Oakfield Avenue—cost $10,000, and it had been built in 1951. Many of the families streaming to the island from the city were from Brooklyn, and many of them were Jewish. Jews were a distinct, if significant, minority, and Reed was enrolled in Hebrew school at Congregation B'nai Israel, which he attended three days a week—and loathed—in preparation for his bar mitzvah. In stark contrast to the identity politics of today, assimilation was the order of the day in the early fifties on Long Island, and none of Reed's friends, Jewish or not, recall incidents of anti-Semitism or bias. There was a black community in Freeport, and students socialized across racial lines at the high school level, though racial strife would erupt there later, in the sixties. "It was a fantastic place to grow up," said Doug Van Buskirk, who attended school with Reed. "Probably anybody on the south shore of Long Island would say that in the fifties. People could walk anywhere at any time of the day or night. We would return late from a party and walk across town. It was a very safe, almost totally a middle-class town."

While people identified with their local town, the various spots along the shore—Freeport, Baldwin, Oceanside, and Rockville Centre among them—all bled into one another. Class distinctions blurred as well. Professional families, like Reed's, lived on the same street as blue-collar families who owned the local shops or worked in service industries like plumbing and heating. It was an era before McMansions and the conspicuous display of wealth. Economic gradations existed, of course—a nicer car, a maid, ownership of a boat—but they were subtle and people didn't feel the need to make an issue of them. "I don't think any of us thought about someone's house not being as nice as someone else's," said Judy November, who was Reed's lab partner in high school, when her last name was Titus. "It was a different time; we were less materialistic about things. But all my friends, I thought, were economically comfortable."

If you weren't an old money family with the heritage and social cachet to show for it—and none of the families in Freeport were—your wealth or lack of it was a private matter. Even the competitive suburban ethic of "keeping up with the Joneses" was less about materialistic warfare than about maintaining the calm equilibrium of prosperous conformity that had brought everyone out there to begin with. Any sign of decay or indifference—an untended lawn, a battered car, a peeling paint job—evoked unsettling memories of the anonymous, teeming clamor and frightening disrepair of the city. In that regard, every family had to pull its weight in order to maintain the uniform and controlled demeanor that was the hallmark of suburban life. Anyone who could manage to scrape together $10,000 to buy a home in the area was likely to be "comfortable" or "middle class," to use two of the vague expressions Americans employed at that time—and since that time—in order to blur class distinctions. And in the fifties, if you had arrived in a suburb like Freeport, you had planted your stake in the soil of the American dream. Even today, Freeport looks much as it did back then. The homes have been spruced up and expanded a bit, but not torn down for massive reconstructions. It's as if the houses themselves got the message: once you arrived in Freeport, you were there to stay. What was there needed to be maintained, but nothing more was required.

ACCORDING TO ALLAN HYMAN, Reed's father was "a quiet guy. Very reserved. I viewed him as fairly strict. He set up boundaries for his family and his son. He wouldn't tolerate people cursing in front of him. He had middle-class values and he wanted everybody to act appropriately. He wanted Lou to respect him and his mother. That's the way he was. My father was similar. They were very conservative. They expected that we would behave ourselves at the dinner table and we would dress a certain way.

"I had a lot of friends whose parents were very involved with their kids in sports and stuff. They were people you could go out and toss a ball with. My father and Lou's father were not like that. Lou's father was much more cerebral. He was also very penurious. Typically, when I went out to dinner with my friends' parents, they would always pay. But when I went with Lou and his parents, they would expect me to pay my share. Like, 'You had the hamburger. You owe a dollar fifty.'" As for Toby, Hyman said, "If you wanted to cast somebody as a fifties housewife living in the suburbs with an apron, taking care of her husband and children, that was Lou's mother. The ultimate wife. She was really attractive, gracious, friendly—a very nice person. She was one of those women who, when I was there, would always ask if I wanted anything to eat. She would bring me milk and cookies." Richard Sigal, another of Reed's Long Island friends, agreed. "I never got to know Lou's father very well," he said. "But Lou's mother—not only was she beautiful, but she was always very nice to me." Reed's sister, Bunny, described her mother as an "anxious individual throughout her life" who "took a traditional role with my father, always staying subservient to him."