June 18, 2026 • 69 mins
Tom’s father takes up all the oxygen in the room with a presence that's larger than life. Larger, in fact, than the many lives he keeps hidden from his wife and children. Tom must reckon with this legacy as he sets out to forge his own.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I always suspected that he was something of a rogue,
but the glamour he cultivated made me think he was
a rogue, like David Nibban was a rogue, like Richard
Burton was a rogue, like Carrie Grant was a rogue,
a charming thief who stole only from other dishonest men.
That I opened the simulated leather Samsonite briefcase, and it
(00:29):
was like discovering he wasn't a harmless scoundrel after all.
He was a killer. But he didn't get away with
it because I had found the murder weapon, and now
I was possessed of tremendous power. It was the ultimate power, really,
the power to blow up the world. All I had
(00:52):
to do was tell my mother, and my parents' marriage
would not only have ended, I would have ended it.
Should I have told my mother. I think now that
I should have, and all these years later still cassigate
myself for being derelict in my duty to her. But
of course I neglected my duty to her in the
(01:15):
name of doing it in the name of protecting her
from the terrible truth, and so the power to destroy
their marriage became the power to preserve it. I had
more power than I'd ever dreamed of, power over my father,
and yet because I chose not to exercise it, he
(01:38):
had power over me. Yes, he had a secret, but
now so did I. He would never know what I knew,
and that became our bond.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
That's Tom Juneau, veteran journalist of two National magazine Awards,
writer of some of the most indelible profiles of the
last forty years, and author of the recent memoir In
the Days of My Youth, I was told what it
means to be a man. Tom's is a story that
has taken him a lifetime to tell the story of
(02:17):
a boy who grows up in the shadow of an outsized,
charismatic father he worships and a wounded mother he adores.
A boy who intuits secrets and lies all around him,
but is powerless in the way children are. A boy
who grows up to become a man, who makes a
meaning of his father's legacy, even as he chooses a
(02:37):
different path, in fact, a different surname. There was Lou
Jennaud and now there's Tom Juneau. Two distinctive men, two
distinctive stories. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(03:04):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
My earliest memory was of me sitting on the front
lawn of our split level in Wanta Long Island, and
I was with my mom, and my family had a
dog named Ginger. And the thing that made Ginger so
(03:36):
fascinating was that she predated me. She predated even my
brother and sister, who are ten years older than me.
She was the original inhabitant of family and there was
always something about her that she had sort of crawled
(03:57):
out of the Garden of Eden. And my first memory
is of me sitting on the grass and her coming
over to sniff my hand, and the other person who
was there is not my dad. Sort of adding to
the Garden of Eden flavor of that scene is, you know,
the person who was there was my mother.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
So your parents moved into the house with your twin
older siblings, Kathy and Michael before you were born.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
You were born like into that house.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I was born into that house. Yeah. They had moved
there about two years before, and they had come from
Brooklyn to Levittown, and then they had moved up to Wanta.
Wantah was the town next to Levittown, but it was
a little bit different from Levittown. Levittown was the original
little boxes. There were these rows and rows and winding
(04:49):
streets of cape Cod houses, whereas Wantaw and our house was,
you know, the land of the split level. It was
nicer than Levittown. And it was and I always thought
that we were rich. My parents were the most beautiful
people in the world. And I think that, you know,
a lot of kids sort of idealized their parents in
(05:11):
that way, but you know, Friend and Lou really were
the most beautiful people in the world. My mother looked
like Darris Day. My father looked like a more dangerous
version of Dean Martin. He looked a little bit like
Sean Connery, you know, out of the James Bond movies.
My mom had blue eyes and hair that she called
(05:36):
platinum blonde, but which I called white. And my dad
was very very dark. He spent an inordinate amount of
time tanning his skin, so he was brown as eight
one stay sauce, and he had the greenest eyes I've
(05:58):
ever seen to this day in a human being. They
looked like a shot of sharp truthse that had been
set on fire, and they were head turners. You walked
into a restaurant with them, and every person in that
restaurant turned and looked at them, wondering who they were.
(06:19):
And of course that was like perfectly in keeping with
my experience because I wondered who they were.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
How did that feel to you as a little kid,
like noticing you were a tremendous noticer of everything around you,
especially as it pertained to your family. What was that
like to see the way that the world responded to them.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Well, there were two sort of sides of that. Number One,
my mom, you know, especially had men catering to her,
but men catered to her simply by being extraordinarily nice
to her and doing her favors. I also had the
experience of watching women cater to my dad, and that
(07:06):
was a whole different kind of thing because they looked
at my dad, they took my dad in, and they
flirted with them, and I was I was really aware
of it. And I mean, I can't even explain why
I was so aware of it, but I was aware
of it from a very young age. And I think
(07:27):
that the thing that made it difficult was that men
cater to my mom. Women cater to my dad, but
they didn't cater to each other. People were in love
with them, but they were not in love with each other.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Talk to me about yourself as a child, like, what
was the emotional landscape for you, What was the experience
of being in that family and being you, like just
being in your skin?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I was, you know, my first nickname was TC. And
then when you know, at dinner time, I was supper
time Tom, because as my mom said, you know, you
were always as good as gold. But it's when six
o'clock rolled around, watch out. And I think that I was.
I was just responding to the tremendous stress at the
(08:17):
dinner table. You know, my father was this booming, commanding
and for me, a frightening presence, and I was scared
of him. I was. I was terrified of my dad
to the extent that well, Number one, I cried a lot,
(08:39):
and number two, he would kind of play with me
a little bit, like every once in a while he
would say tell me, and you know, I would start
I would start shaking and my lip would start quivering,
and my brother and sister would be across the table
sort of smiling at their cute little brother. But it
(09:00):
was a source of like unbelievable pain to me, and
I think frustration to my dad. He used to always
say things like, I don't get it. You know, I've
never laid a hand on this kid and look at him.
And that was part too, you know, the realization that
I was by being frightened of my dad, I was
somehow disappointing my dad was really was really tough to
(09:24):
deal with. And you know what I retreated to was
reading a lot. I was really young when I started reading.
I was started, you know, probably around three years old.
I started reading the comic books that my brother and
sister's friends left around the house. And it was great
because it was like the it was the dawn of
the Marvel universe. You know, they had Spider Man and
(09:47):
Thor and Hulk and all this stuff. And so I
was just you know, I was a kid with a
crew cut, I was sickly, I was skinny, I was
you know, not athletic. I was scared of my day.
But I could read, and that was like the thing
that saved me.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Why do you think you were scared of him?
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I wonder about that, I think that my best you know,
my best answer for that is, well, because a lot
of people were scared of him. I mean a lot
of people were really afraid of Luchanod. But I think
with me that fear was heightened by the fact that
my mother was afraid of him. And I was connected
(10:30):
to my mother in a very very powerful way, because
I think the way that I always looked at it
was that I was there for her. I mean, like
literally there for there. I was born for her. I
was put there on earth for her to be her
ally her confide on all of it. And so when
my mom's eyes filled with tears and no one's eyes
(10:53):
filled with tears like my mom's did, mind did too.
When she shook, when my father raised his voice, I
did too.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Tom's father is a very glamorous version of a traveling salesman.
He's in the handbag business, a job that takes him
regularly on the road. Tom begins to experience life in
the split screen. When his father's home, things are one way,
and when it's just Tom and his mom, things are
another way.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
My dad would go away for five and you know,
six weeks at a time, and it was kind of
paradise when he was gone, because my mom was was
not unhappy. She was herself, you know, when my dad
was away, and so I could be myself when my
dad was away, but when you know, when my dad
(11:50):
came home. I couldn't watch the monkeys when my dad
was home because my dad had heard, you know, during
his travel or somewhere in New York City at some
sort of club, that one of the monkeys I never
found out which one was homosexual. So I couldn't I
couldn't watch the monkeys, and I couldn't watch the Flying Nun.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Because what was wrong with the flying Nun?
Speaker 2 (12:17):
My father thought it was sacrilegious, even though he was
like the single most sacrilegious human being I knew at
the time. I mean, my father was a complete heathen.
But you know, I wasn't allowed to watch the Flying Nun,
and there was just the level of stress in the
house when my father was around. Of course, the thing
that was always amazing about my father's trips was, you know,
(12:41):
my mother explained my father being away by how hard
he had to work. But my father would come back
six weeks later after departing, you know, on the road
we'd go pick him up at like at JFK, and
he'd come off the plane even darker than he was
when he left. And he looked unbelievable when he came
(13:06):
off the plane at JFK, so much so that the
general sort of celebrity vibe that he had was doubled
or tripled. Were people just looking at him, And you know,
I would be proud that this guy was my dad,
But it was sort of like when he came off
the road, it was like being visited by a maybe friendly,
(13:30):
maybe unfriendly space alien.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Your parents, they were both beautiful people, but it seems
like it was your dad who was completely focused on
his physicality and his toilette, his way that he took
care of himself, the way that he cultivated that tan
that it seemed like that was a big part of
(13:55):
the job of being Lugenade.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, he was. He was infatuated with a certain kind
of beauty in general, and he was also infatuated with
his own beauty. I mean to the extent that he
would look in the mirror, you know, standing in front
of the mirror in his black bikinis with this you know,
mahogany colored skin and these green eyes, and this his
(14:23):
World War two dog tag, cast in gold and sort
of like nestled in his black chest air. And he
would say to me, look look at this body. Have
you ever seen a body like this? What could I
say other than no, you know, but the thing that
(14:47):
like that, Like the house was split between his beauty
and my mom's beauty. There was like one long hallway
connecting all the bedrooms, and on one end of that
hallway there was my mother's bathroom, which she was sort
of secret in its own way in that it contained
(15:09):
a lot of her pills, which she was definitely self
medicating with. And then in my father's room there was
my father's bathroom, which contained, you know, to me, the
secrets of the universe, his lubrication, his gels, his creams,
his ointments, his dyes, his everything. And it would all
(15:33):
he would carry when he came off the road. He
would empty this leather bag that was full of all
this stuff and put it out on the top of
the toilet in his bathroom. And it was his bathroom,
I mean, you needed special dispensation to go in there.
And so in the beginning, you know, when my father said,
(15:55):
learn my secrets, those were the secrets that he was
talking about, like the secrets of his hygienic excellence. It
was really just a powerful thing that.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Your father had all sorts of other kinds of secrets,
the kind that he was not referring to, and you,
as a kid, must have sensed that and you became
quite a spy. You know, there's a beautiful essay by
the writer Jane Ann Phillips that is about you know,
(16:29):
writers begin as children who are like secret agents, just
trying to learn whatever they possibly can about these people
who brought them into the world. And you sort of
elevated that to an art form as a kid, and
there was an urgency to it.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
It seems well, there was an urgency to it because
I felt myself powerless. I was like a pencil shaving
of my dad. You know, my dad was the pencil.
I was what was left behind by the sharpener, and
I had no power next to him, and my only
power wasn't trying to figure this guy out. And I
(17:08):
did that, and I did that with a pretty obsessive
quality that lasted, you know, from the time I was
three years old to now. It was a matter of
trying to find out who this person was That scared
me so and that made my mom so unhappy. The
(17:30):
first time when I was very aware that my father
was different from all the other fathers that I knew
in Long Island was the summer I was three years
old and we were in West Hampton Beach in Long Island,
and my father had an affair with the mother of
(17:51):
my first friend, Michael. I have photos of me and
Michael Shocket, you know, in the crib in swaddling clothes.
And two years later he had an affair with Michael's mother, Valerie,
and that was a big deal.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
What did you know about that at such a young age.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Well, I think I knew plenty, because the relationship with Valerie,
it wasn't hidden. I have home movies of that summer
that I've looked at pretty obsessively, and it's amazing how
obvious they both are. And so this was all taking
(18:33):
place right before my eyes. And later that year, or
maybe a year and a half later, you know, my
parents actually had a fight over it that almost ended
their marriage. It was New Year's Eve nineteen sixty two,
in the beginning of nineteen sixty three. That would have
made me around that time just about five years.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Old, something else transpires. When Tom is around five, one night,
his father asks him to go with him to get
a hot fudge Sunday an errand no kid could possibly resist.
But on the way to the ice cream store, his
dad says he needs to make a stop. He needs
(19:14):
to see a professional acquaintance, a buyer. And when they
stop at this person's house, it's a woman. And even
at five years old, Tom can tell something is not
quite right.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
I don't think that I had the context for, you know,
an affair or even like the word divorce, like that
word is like was at the very very edge of
my awareness and was just, you know, a word that
was full of like untold terror. But the difference between
(19:48):
my father and other fathers was something I think that
I was aware of and you know, and capable of
being aware of because my father and all these women
in his life, I mean, he worked with women on
the job. He had buyers, you know, and the buyers
were all powerful. He had a phone in the room
(20:11):
that he you know, in the master bedroom, in the
room that he shared with my mother, that had two
different kind of rings. There was the ring that was
the general ring, and there was the ring that was
more bird like, and when that ring went off, there
was something that happened. Number one, we were never ever
(20:32):
ever allowed to pick the phone up when it was
ringing like that. The number two, when that ring happened,
my father would go into the bedroom and close the
door behind him. It was like one of those English
you know, English drama where there was like two levels
of the house, you know, and there was the house
of the family, and then there was the house of
(20:52):
my dad who was carrying on this life that was
his secret life, and I was just aware of it
from the start.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
These days, it's not uncommon for people to have different
ring tones for their phones, one for their kids, their partner,
their boss. But in the nineteen sixties, in most homes
(21:29):
the phone rang one way and it was always answered.
Tom missed nothing. He may not have understood how unusual
it was or what was going on, but he clocked it.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Some years ago, I was talking to somebody on the
board of my daughter's school, and I told some of
the stories about the secrecy and the secrets in our household,
and there was somebody on the board said something to
me that has just stayed with me ever since. He
goes And nobody had to tell you not to say anything, right,
(22:05):
And I said, yeah, exactly. I mean when I went
to the so called buyer's house on the day that
we were supposed to be going out and getting hot
fudge Sundays, I knew that there was something off wrong
about it because with the way it made me feel.
But did I tell my mom? Did I mention that
we went to a lady's house? Of course not. And
(22:28):
I was I was really young. I was like five
years old. I remember being so young that I couldn't
start myself. She had a swing set in the yard,
and I couldn't start myself on the swing set. And
that's one of the things that sort of called me
back to the door of the house, was like I
wanted my dad to help me. And then I went
(22:48):
and you know, the door was locked.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
And then there was a short while later a moment
that becomes very important later in your story. That a
moment where her father asks you to sing fly Me
to the Moon to a lady in Florida, as he
puts it, who he's on the phone with, and he
puts you on the phone and you sing fly Me
(23:13):
to the Moon, and this lady is really warm and
really kind, and at the end of the call, when
you're handing the phone back to your father, she says,
you know, Tommy, I hope I get to.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Meet you sometime.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, did that cause the same feeling.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
It was always always that sort of you know, that
sort of a combination of the thrill of having something
that I knew about my father and that my father
shared with me that we weren't going to share with
my mom, of something sort of ilicit, but then also
at the same time of trying to please you know,
I mean, I was My father was a you know,
(23:51):
he was a crooner during World War Two. After he
got wounded, he toured Europe as a big band singer.
Father sang in the household. He was a crooner in
World War two, and he was a crooner in the shower.
But nobody else sang, nobody else could sing, nobody else
was really allowed to sing. And so my father asking
(24:13):
me to sing to this woman was both like scary
and exciting and flattering.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
When Tom is eight, his twin siblings are eighteen, and
they leave home. He's always been a snooper. But now
he starts to take it to the next level. He
begins to record things around the house, conversations, fights, secrets.
He's not sure what he's searching for, but he is
searching tape recorder at the ready.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I had gotten a small reel to real tape recorder
when I don't know, eight or nine, and it was
something that like kids at the time were getting. It
was like a classic sort of want to long Island
birthday gifts. But you know, I would set it up
on the stairs that connected the kitchen and the den
(25:10):
of our house. I would set it up at the
top step, and I would record dinner conversations. And I
did it to find out something. I did it to
find out whether the conversations, you know, about politics and
movie stars and whether the guy the star of Mannix
had a hair piece or not, like all of these
(25:31):
ridiculous arguments that would go on at the dinner table.
You know, I kind of wanted to find out if
they were real. But there was something that was secret.
You know, it became a secret that I was keeping.
You know, my parents kept secrets from me, but the
finding out became secrets that I was keeping. The tape
(25:54):
recorder was a secret I was keeping.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Well, which goes back to power, and.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
There was comfort that one of the things about it
was I didn't cry at the dinner table. If the
tape recorder is running.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Tom's father continues to ascend in the world of handbag cells.
He becomes wealthy and surrounds himself with ostentatious trappings. He
buys a house on Westhampton Beach, rents an apartment in
the Essex House in New York City, and back in Wantau,
the family home is set apart from all the other houses.
(26:28):
When Tom's father has white marble front steps installed winters,
he can be found sunning himself on these marble steps
using a reflector working on his tam. When Tom is sixteen,
his father returns from a work trip and Tom notices
a small glitch in his father's meticulous routine. His bag
(26:50):
of toiletries is not in its usual spot. Ever, the
detective Tom investigates.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
This huge bag of toiletry all his stuff, his consort, hairspray,
his nivias, luberderms ginette after bath splash for men. You know,
it was sort of one of those things that people
talked about with my dad, because if he went to
your house, he would colonize the bathroom with this bag.
(27:19):
So he took it everywhere. And then one time I
was helping him unload the car after he came back
from the business trip, and that bag was missing. So
I took it upon myself to look for it. And
it was usually on the floor of his closet, which
(27:40):
was on the top floor of the house. And where
I found it was in the closets where my mother
kept her very rarely used furs, and that was in
the basement. So there was four floors or three and
a half floors separating from where it usually was to
where it was. And you know, I opened it and
(28:02):
I found out why because in that bag, instead of
all the toiletries was a copy of The Joy of
Sex and two vibrators. And you know, my response to
it at that moment was not horror. I assumed that
he had brought it back for my mom. You know,
(28:25):
this was early seventies and The Joy of Sex was
already like well known as a book that married couples
would use to sort of spice up their marriage. And
so that's what I thought originally was that it was there.
Then all that stuff was in that bag to sort
of spice up parents rather chilly marriage. And then it
(28:49):
disappeared again, like the next day. I went to look
for it and it was gone. And the next time
I saw it was it was back on the floor
of my father's closet filled with toiletries, filled with his stuff.
So I wondered where it went. And then one day
he came home on the Long Island railroad carrying something
(29:13):
he never carried, which was a briefcase. All the other
guys whom my father called squares, carried briefcases, and all
of a sudden, there was my dad carrying this brown
samsonite briefcase. And I became obsessed with that because it
was something that, you know it was. It had a
combination lock, and it was something I couldn't get to
(29:36):
and I didn't know what was inside, but I suspected
it was something.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
So what did you do?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to crack
the coat, trying to figure out the combination. And one
day my father came back and he and he hit it.
It was either it was he kept it either at
the bottom of his closet under all these shelves or
(30:02):
in the huge trunk of his white Lincoln Continental. He
would keep it in the truck and not even bring
it in the house. And so but one day he
had it on the bed and the latches were flipped open.
It wasn't open, the briefcase wasn't open, but the latches
were open. So I recorded the number on the tumblers,
(30:24):
and you know, kept them in my memory where they remained.
By the way, it was the number. It was number
six one six. And one day when my parents went
to the track, as they so often did, especially when
my dad came back from a trip, they would go
to Roosevelt Raceway and leave me by myself, the sort
(30:45):
of fend for myself. I went upstairs to my father's bedroom,
and I knew that there was something in there. And
I knew that like opening the briefcase was not like
taping the family dinner conversation, was not even like you know,
looking for the bag of toiletries and finding the joy
of sex in there. I knew it was different, and
(31:06):
so my heart was like thumping when I opened it.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Well, one of the things that's striking me listening to you,
is that is the determination like the both this potent
mixture of fear and forbiddenness and guilt probably yeah, guilt
for sure, and at the same time, something that's bigger
than all those things, Bigger than the fear, bigger than
(31:32):
the guilt, bigger than the terror of being caught or
the fear of what you're going to find, which was
you needed to know.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah, And I think that the word that you chose
right there, need is exactly it. I mean, I didn't
just want to know. I needed to know. And because
I knew it was something and it was I flipped
open the briefcase and it was as if you were
(32:01):
watching a movie where something that could be regarded as innocent,
like the joy of sex and two vibrators had like
mutated into something. And what they had mutated into was
this stack of you know, not just like pornography that
(32:21):
was like popular at the time, but like really extreme pornography,
like subjugation pornography, S and M pornography that was unbelievably
disturbing and explicit. And then instead of two vibrators, two
huge rubber dildos.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
What I keep coming back to, because really, ultimately, what
I keep on thinking about is what we know, what
we don't know, what we know but can't allow ourselves
to really consider or think.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
So now you have a secret? Yeah, yes, and you've
had one for quite some time.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
You know that you're keeping from your mother, and now
you're keeping from your father. This knowledge of your father,
or this knowledge of what the contents of the briefcase.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Might mean in terms of your father.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
Where does that live inside of you as a sixteen
year old kid who is you know, just sort of
coming into his own and has so much confusion about
what it means to be a man.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Yeah, it was the crossing of a line because you know,
I watched the porno movies. It wasn't like I looked
at the what was inside the briefcase and shut it,
you know, forever Pandora's box was open, and I watched
those there were Super eight movies, and so I watched
(33:49):
them on the projector where my father used to show
home movies down in the basement. And can I just
say it messed me up? Because it did. It messed
me up because, as you say, I had a secret,
I felt guilty. I knew without a doubt it was,
(34:11):
you know, incontrovertible evidence that my father had a completely
different life outside the house that I couldn't even imagine.
And yet because I knew it, and because I decided
at that moment that I was never going to tell anybody,
(34:33):
especially my mom. I mean, I lost all of my
illusions about my dad, or at least most of my
illusions about my dad. But at the same time, I
kind of migrated to his side, if that makes any sense.
There was always this like really like uneasy daytunt in
my household, and there was my mom at one end
(34:56):
of the hall, there was my dad at the other
end of the hall, and I sort of, you know,
shuttled between them. But I was always always on my
mom's side, And this, because I was covering for my dad,
moved me to his side. In some sort of strange way.
I became more loyal to him, even though I'd say
he became sort of less loyal to me, because around
(35:19):
that time, I started, rather predictably, like smoking a ton
of weed. I was stoned all the time, and my
dad sort of knew that and didn't really mention it
to me in the same way that I didn't mention,
you know, the porn and the dildos to him.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
But at the same time, it also seems like his temper,
which had always been a thing and part of the
reason why you had been afraid of him, you tussled
more we did during those years, and you wrote, shut
up is a thunderclap of my childhood. And then there
is this feeling that you also have very intensely about
(36:05):
your father, which is you will not shut me up.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Right. So when you know, my dad and my mom
used to argue at the dinner table, my father would
end those arguments with a resounding shut up, and he
would talk differently when he said that. You know, my
(36:30):
father had an actor's diction. Look at this body. Have
you ever seen a body like this? But when he
said shut up to me or to my mom, mostly
to my mom, he was like out of a gangster movie.
He didn't say it with the T there, he didn't.
He said it with a d shut up. And it
(36:53):
was like, you know, the mask had fallen off him
because he was, you know, sort of self created in
a lot of different ways, and the mask, that mask
would fall off him. And it was after I opened
his briefcase that we started really battling in ways that
were you know, I think, ultimately, you know, kind of
(37:13):
damaging to me. There was a moment when he came
drunk into my room when this is when I was,
I think a at the end of my senior year
in high school or even that following summer, and you know,
he came up to me and said, what are you
doing today? And I said nothing? And he goes, yeah, yeah,
(37:36):
you know, why are you doing nothing today? I was like,
why because you are in nothing? And we got into
this whole thing that, you know, when I did the
audio tape of the book, I think that was the
hardest part that I read, was that part where my
father and I went back and forth on that because
he was challenging, He was challenging me. He was challenging
(37:56):
me to fight him. There was just no doubt about that,
and I didn't. I mean, some of that might have
been because I was afraid of him and had always
been afraid of him, but something there was like a
new emotion that arose in me at that moment, and
(38:17):
probably when I opened the briefcase, which was a certain
amount of coldness towards him.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
Some years pass and Tom goes to college there he
meets Janet, the woman who will become his wife. It's
a real love match, but Tom's father is determined to
turn his son into him, determined to turn him into
someone who isn't going to be faithful.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
One time, he invites me into New York City. This
is when I'm dating Janet, and he invites me into
New York City to go see Woody Allen. I was like, oh, great, great,
I'll come into this, you know. And you know, he
tells me one thing before he gets off the phone,
which is dress. So I get dressed up as best
(39:18):
I can. I go into New York City to go
with my dad to see Woody Allen. And we stop
at a bar and these two really beautiful, you know,
middle aged women walk in and they walk right towards us,
and I say, Dad, who are they? And he looks
at me and says, they're are dates, and you know,
(39:44):
they were buyers, and they were buyers. He wasn't just
calling them buyers. And it was clear to me in
an instant that he was having an affair with one
of them, and that was what he was. He was
trying to teach me in his ways. There's another moment
(40:06):
when the summer, I'm first going out with Janet and
he comes in to have his say and he says,
you know, I know you like this girl. And I said, yeah, Dad,
I like her. I think I love her. And he
was like, well, there's one thing I need to tell you.
I've lived a little and I know chicken tastes pretty
(40:29):
good until you've had steak. And I've forgiven my dad
a lot of things, but not that.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
Yeah, I mean, just so instidious and poisonous and meant
to be poisonous.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Tom is living in Atlanta, working in his first journalism job.
When his grandmother dies. At her funeral, one of his
cousins pulls him aside and says, I have a story
for you. That's story leads to a whole other layer
of questions, ones that Tom's father has no interest in exploring.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
One of the things about growing up in our household
is that, you know, we had no genealogy, you know.
I mean it was as if there was the founding
of America in seventeen seventy six, and then there was
the founder of our family. And you know, when my
grandmother was born and when my father was born to
(41:29):
my grandmother and it was just all shrouded and shadow
and secret and nonexistent to the extent that when you know,
we would ask my dad, like, Dad, tell us about
your father, and he would look at us and say,
I never had a father. And we knew that this
(41:51):
wasn't true, because there was a man who used to
call and ask for money, and that was his father.
But his complete denial was how he dealt with his past.
Like that denial like I never had a father, actually
extended to everything else. So when I found out that
(42:15):
his mother was married when she was sixteen, and she
had a daughter, and she abandoned that daughter, and that
she then became sort of the scarlet woman in the
New York City tabloids as a serial adulterer. But when
(42:36):
I tried to tell him that he had a sister
out there, the sister from my grandmother's first marriage, and she's,
you know, just a few years older than you. She's
probably out there. Maybe you could meet her. Do you
want me to try to find her. I'm a journalist,
I can find her. And he looked at me and said,
(42:59):
never happened. And I was like, what do you mean
it never happened? I have a copy of a daily
news article that gives me her name. It had to happen.
And he looked at me and said, And it wasn't
just what he said, it was how he said it,
and the look on his face. My father hadn't scared
me in a long time, but he scared me when
(43:22):
he said this, And he said, listen to me. Never happened.
That was the last time I talked about it.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
So Tom drops it. He drops it for twenty years,
and those are twenty very busy years, both personally and professionally.
Tom and Janet Mary. They adopt their daughter. His journalism
career takes off, and he writes huge cover stories for Esquire,
often almost always of men Frank Sinatra, Fred Rogers, always
(44:00):
circling around the subject of his father, but never going there.
There's an energy, though thrumming was in the subtext of
these profiles that is part of what gives them their
tremendous power. The thing Tom is born to write, to explore,
to know, is one he's unable to touch. During these years, too,
(44:22):
Tom's parents make a precipitous fall from grace. Like Icarus,
lou Janad gets too close to the son, both literally
and metaphorically, he gambles and loses big.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
My father was not an educated man. I think he
was smart, Like when I listen to tapes of him
and I listened to him talk, you know, he was
the kind of person who spoke in full paragraphs. His
diction was, you know, intentional and incredibly seductive. But he
learned all that from watching the movies. He learned how
(44:58):
to talk from Carry Grant, He learned how to address
from Fred Astaire, learned how to treat women, you know,
from Clark Gable and Rhet Butler. But he didn't pass
eighth grade, and so you know, he was one of
those guys who was unique. He was very much himself,
but he was very much trying to transcend himself. And
(45:23):
where that effort failed and sort of you know, had
a tragic not a tragic end exactly, but at least
an uncomfortable end. Was him trying to become richer than
he was. He made a lot of money selling handbags,
(45:44):
but he began gambling in nineteen sixty six, so that
the other group of people who called the secret phone,
in addition to his so called buyers, were bookies. We
had bookies calling the house all the time. But worse
than the bookies were the stockbrokers. Those are the worst
(46:06):
because my father had incredibly bad luck and no business
sense in pursuing stocks, and he put a lot of
money into the stock market and lost everything, lost the
last penny, and his debts to the bookies were enough
(46:27):
that they had to sell the house in Westhampton and
moved down to Florida where they lived in a rented condo,
and the money just eventually just ran out, and my
father became somewhat different. Then he became a person that
was rather than this guy who lived in the light
(46:51):
of his own grandeur, he became this guy whose life
was full of regrets, and he was that guy. He
was woodish should have coulda to the extent that when
he began talking about his bad financial choices and bemoaning
his fate, people would wave their hands out him and say,
all lou just stop and then you know, and get
(47:12):
up and leave, Like there were guys at that Florida
condo who, when he started telling his stories of past
glory would say, Okay, it's time for me to leave
and leave.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
What's interesting to me too, That another kind of parallel
tracks going in opposite directions in a way where his
decline is happening parallel to and at the same time
as your increasing success.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
So it's nineteen ninety six and you decide you're going
to do a piece for GQ about your dad. But
it's not going to be the investigative piece. It's going
to be lu Jenad's fashion tips. And this is an
opportunity for you, as an investigative journal list and as
(48:00):
a profile writer per Exalans, to interview your dad.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah. I mean I sold it to my editor at
GQ and to my father as a story that I
would be using his fashion tips to sort of get
at him. And so I took him out to this
(48:26):
hotel in Westhampton Beach where he used to go at
five o'clock in the evenings, you know, after spending the
day with the family, he would go down to the
dune deck and always wear the same thing. He would
wear his orange ol pack, a sweater and his white ducks.
He would wear these tight white pants and go down
to the dune deck. I think his second life or
(48:48):
third life or whatever it was, you know, extended to
the dune deck. So I sort of wanted to take
him back to the scene of the crime. And you know,
I knew my father's fashion tips. I didn't need to
interview them for the fashion tips. What I wanted was
the chance that talked to my dad with a tape
(49:09):
recorder between us and I did that and I asked
him everything. I asked him about Valerie with whom he
had the affair when you know, I was three, four
and five years old. I asked him about you know,
the rumors that he had gone to bed with the
Goobor sisters, all of them. I asked all of them.
(49:31):
And then something you know, really remarkable happened. I had
spent a day with him talking about all the secrets
that I wanted to ask him about all my life.
And we went out to dinner and it was a
celebratory dinner and Susan Lucci, you know, the soap opera star,
(49:57):
was there at the restaurant and my father said, who's
that woman over there. I turned around, I was like, Dad,
that's Susan Lucci, And he looked at me and he said,
can't keep her eyes off your father. And you know,
he was seventy seven years old. You know, I had
(50:19):
heard that story. I had heard growing up. That's like
all you heard about at the dinner table is he
had gone to El Morocco and Liz Taylor was there
and couldn't keep her eyes off your father. And so
I really felt like I was sort of giving him
this gift when I was doing this story, and also
(50:40):
giving myself the gift of having his secrets revealed. So
it was sort of a deal. But the next day,
we were having breakfast, it was our goodbye breakfast, and
a woman who was eighty one years old the night
before had asked him for his number, So, you know,
(51:00):
we were having breakfast. I was starstruck again, you know,
and I asked him, Dad, Dad, that when that woman
asked you for her your number last night? Was was
that what it was like? You know, when you were
when you were my age, and that you were and
you were going into New York City. Well, they weren't
eighty one. I was like, yeah, Dad, I know they
weren't eighty one, but you know what I mean. And
(51:20):
that's when he, you know, he said, Tommy, there was
a time in my life when I couldn't walk down
Fifth Avenue without being propositioned. And I was at the
time I was thirty eight, and I was still enough
of a kid to say, you know, she, Dad, did
(51:41):
you take any of them up on it? And he says, well,
not all of them. And the minute he said that,
you know, it was just like all of the other
times growing up, I knew something was going on. And
I said, Dad, you know how many? I'm not telling you.
(52:02):
I'm a gentleman. And I said, why don't you give
me a percentage? Oh, I don't know, twenty five percent.
I was like, twenty five percent. Is that too little?
I was like, no, Dad, it was a huge, huge number,
(52:22):
twenty five percent. Oh my god. And then I asked
him the question, I said, Dad, did you fall in
love with any of them? And he looked at me
and he put out his hand, and you know, his
(52:43):
hands were as brown as any other part of him.
He had like the tannest hands any human being had
ever had. And he put out this tan hand with
a single finger extended, and he looked at me and
he said one. And you know my life changed in
(53:03):
that moment.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Yeah, it strikes me that had that not happened exactly
as it did, had you not been in the mode
of interviewing him, had you not been writing that piece
as a way of doing that. Had you not had
experience the night before that sort of led to those questions,
you might never have known that there was one woman
(53:31):
who right he was in love with.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Of all the women, there was a woman he was
in love with.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
Lu Janaud lives another decade after Tom writes his profile,
and Tom's mother dies two years later. It is then
that Tom renews the hunt to understand this enigmatic man
and his legacy. The truth does not come tumbling out,
but reveals itself slowly. The boy who was once a
(54:00):
silent witness is now a man with a toolbox. Patiently, forensically,
he follows a trail of faint footprints in an attempt
to know more.
Speaker 2 (54:11):
Two years after my dad died, he had a friend
in Miami Beach named Frankie Kleine. And Frankie was a
wonderful guy who was another handbag salesman. But he was
also sort of like my dad's wingman in Miami Beach,
and my dad, you know, he would when he traveled
as a salesman, and when he would go and spend
(54:33):
a couple of weeks at the end of his sales trips,
you know, just soaking up the sun. It was in
Miami Beach, and it was with Frankie, so he knew
my dad really well, and he knew him. He knew
him as the Miami guy rather than the Wantau Long
Island guy. And when my dad died, he asked me
(54:54):
for some of my dad's ashes because he wanted to
sprinkle them in the lake behind his house. And so
the day before I turned fifty, I went to visit
Frankie with a shot glass full of what was left
of my father's ashes because he had been buried and
we had spread some of the other ashes in the
(55:14):
ocean at Westhampton Beach. So I go to see Frankie.
We needed a bagel place in Miami, give them the ashes,
and he says, is there anything, Is there anything that
you want? Is there anything that you need? And I
said yeah, Frankie, I said, can you tell me about
the woman in Florida? And it had some of the
(55:38):
same feeling as opening the locks of the briefcase, because
Frankie looked at me and he said, so, you know,
And the minute he said that, I was like, oh shit.
And I didn't know her name. I didn't know the
(56:02):
one's name at the time, and I liked to Frankie.
I said, well, I didn't let on that I knew
as little as I did. I said, yeah, Frankie, I know.
And he said, well, because if you didn't know, I
wouldn't tell you. And I said, I know, and then
he told me, and he said, you know, they were
(56:24):
very close. But you know, she died in nineteen seventy
six when your father and the one that he loved
were planning to run off together from each of their spouses.
But then she fell down the stairs of her home
in Helendale, Florida and died. And Frankie went with my
(56:50):
father to the funeral and had to hold my father
up during the funeral because he was so bereaved. And
the woman's name was Peggy Monahan. And so all of
a sudden, you know, I was in a place of
knowledge where I had not been before. And yet I
(57:14):
made a decision not to pursue it. I made a
decision not to try to contact your children and not
to investigate it. And then in twenty fifteen that changed.
Speaker 1 (57:27):
What changed?
Speaker 3 (57:29):
What was the sort of cesaw between thinking that you
maybe should let it go and then changing your mind
because the need to know was greater than whatever the
sequelae of that might be.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
At my father's funeral in two thousand and six, I
planned and choreographed his funeral service, his memorial service in Wantshall,
Lot Island, picked the music, brought in a singer, did eulogy,
all of it. And you know, I was trying to get,
(58:05):
you know, the last word on my dad. I was
trying to put not just him to rest, but my
gnawing unease with not knowing about him to rest as well.
And at the very end, when after I'd given the
eulogy and his friends had stood up to tell funny
(58:25):
stories about him, this gorgeous woman who I knew from
the handbag business, her name was mon two, went up
to the electern, brought her hands down on electern and said,
can we all just agree that this was a man.
(58:46):
And so Montus plays a large role in me sort
of changing my mind about figuring out who the one was.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
And you didn't know at the time, but you knew
that she wasn't the one, or she could have been
the one.
Speaker 2 (59:02):
She could have been one, but she wasn't thou Wild exactly.
Speaker 3 (59:05):
And you learn because your older brother, Michael, has lunch
with Montu, not suspecting anything and just thinking that she
was someone who worked with your father, And at lunch
it comes out that she had had a relationship with
your father that spanned eleven years.
Speaker 2 (59:25):
Right, So, my dad died in two thousand and six.
I found out the name of the one in two
thousand and eight. And then in twenty fifteen, my brother
has lunch with Montu and he calls me up and
he says, did you know that dad had an eleven
(59:47):
year affair with mon two? And I said yes, And
he said, why didn't you tell me? I said, because
I didn't know. And he said, wait a second. You
just said you didn't know they, did you? Or didn't
you know? And in that moment, you know, I felt,
(01:00:08):
you know, a seismic shift, because I felt the schism
in me that had been there forever about my dad
and about my relationship to him and to his secrets
and to the lives that he led. And I decided
at that moment to find out and that included finding
(01:00:36):
Peggy man Hand's children.
Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
And ultimately.
Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
That reveals to you that your father and Peggy that
one of her four children was your father's child, and
that you have a sister.
Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Yeah. So in twenty fifteen, after my brother's visit and
after the revelation about month two, I started calling up
people and asking about my dad. And Frankie Klin was
dead by this time. He had died in twenty eleven.
But I called his kids and we had, you know,
(01:01:15):
a talk about a lot of things, you know. One
of them was of them knowing Peggy Monaghan seeing my
father in her company at the Klein House, swimming in
Frankie's pool, using the bedroom in Frankie's house. And then
one day I got a call from Frankie's daughter, from
(01:01:37):
his first wife, Nancy, and she said, there's something I
need to tell you. And you know, I've been thinking
about this and I've been sort of agonizing about this,
and I asked my husband about this and she gave
this long introduction about it. But what she said was
that one of she had heard before Frankie died and
(01:01:59):
when Frankie's wife died, that one of Peggy Monahan's four
children was my father's and that was in twenty fifteen,
you know. So I started looking for them, and it
real even just looking at them. I found them where
you find anybody everybody else these days. I found pictures
(01:02:19):
of them on Facebook. And at the time, Nancy didn't
know which of the kids it was, and she didn't
even really know. She told me it was one of
the boys. That Peggy had three boys and one one daughter,
and she told me it was one of the boys.
(01:02:40):
But I went on Facebook and I looked at the boys,
and then I looked at the girl, Lizanne Seyring. She
had married. Her name was not Monahanna, it was Syring.
And I looked at her photo and it was just,
you know, it was not like physical. It wasn't like
I said, oh, she looks like me. Was that like
(01:03:02):
I recognized her as if I had known her? And
that was twenty fifteen, and then three years later I
made my first approach to her.
Speaker 3 (01:03:17):
So, Tom, let me ask you, it's sort of like
the work of your life to come to know who
your father really was that began when you were, you know,
three years old. What was it that drove you at
the point where you were there was much that you
learned that we're not going to be able to cover
terms of your father's life, his history, where he came
(01:03:38):
from the secrets that he came from. You sort of
shook the family tree and it reshaped and became a
different kind of tree. But what was it that was
so important? What was the drive at that point? You know,
your father gone, your mother gone, to continue to need
to know.
Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
I think I had more sophisticated tools with which to
pursue that need, but I think the need itself was
the same need that I had when I was three
and eight, and sixteen and twenty and twenty two. I'm
(01:04:22):
kind of naming the years of all like the years
of milestone discoveries about my dad thirty six and then finally,
you know, I'm in my late fifties and realizing that
whatever it is I'm trying to find, I better find
now because I'm never going to be able to do
it except now. Now is the time. It's hard to
(01:04:46):
explain what drove me. I said early on that it was,
you know, a way of me finding some sort of
power in the house where I was powerless. And then
I had this moment where it's, you know, you'll never
shut me up, and so there's those things that are
driving me. But when I started looking for my sibling,
(01:05:13):
for my sister. It didn't feel that way. It felt
like those things were preordained, you know, for this search,
Like the earlier searches were one thing, but this search
was the main thing. You mentioned early on me singing
to a woman in Westhampton. Fly Me to the Moon
(01:05:37):
came out in the summer of nineteen sixty four, and
I sang fly Me to the Moon in the summer
of nineteen sixty four to a woman that I believe
was Peggy Moniha, And that was the summer that she
gave birth to my father's daughter. So when I started
(01:06:00):
looking for her many many decades later, I was terrified
in a way that I hadn't been terrified in a
long time doing the work I do. I was questioning myself,
but at the same time, it felt like it was something,
(01:06:21):
you know, I had to do, and I think I
had to do it to make things right.
Speaker 3 (01:06:26):
That makes all kinds of beautiful sense, And it's making
me think of one other moment in the book, something
just really you know, sort of shattering around your father,
and you'll go into your car and something comes out
of you and you just like scream into the silence
of your car.
Speaker 1 (01:06:45):
I will survive this. I will survive.
Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
This, And I think you know my interpretation is that
you had to put all of the pieces together of
this jagged, chattered story in order to be able to
survive it in the deepest way.
Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
Yeah, you know. I'd been given a puzzle when I
was a little kid, and it took me a really
long time to put the pieces together. But I never
stopped putting together. And you know I finally put the
the last piece in there. In twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
Here's Tom reading one last passage from his big hearted,
brave and beautifully written memoir. In the Days of my youth,
I was told what it means to be a man.
Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
You came so close dead, so close to getting away
with it. You've been dead now for nearly twenty years,
and you were resting in peace at a national cemetery,
your body already consumed by fire. You and Mom are together,
your ashes, under a plaque stamped with the words Mom
(01:08:09):
and Dad, You bother nobody, and nobody bothers you. Fewer
and fewer people remember you. Fewer and fewer people are
alive to remember you, but those who do remember do
so fondly. So the sons and daughters of your sisters
(01:08:29):
and best friends. You remain Uncle Lou to your grandchildren.
You are pop Up to Michael and me, you are
and will always be Dad.
Speaker 3 (01:08:57):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
(01:09:22):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(01:09:53):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I always suspected that he was something of a rogue,
but the glamour he cultivated made me think he was
a rogue, like David Nibban was a rogue, like Richard
Burton was a rogue, like Carrie Grant was a rogue,
a charming thief who stole only from other dishonest men.
That I opened the simulated leather Samsonite briefcase, and it
(00:29):
was like discovering he wasn't a harmless scoundrel after all.
He was a killer. But he didn't get away with
it because I had found the murder weapon, and now
I was possessed of tremendous power. It was the ultimate power, really,
the power to blow up the world. All I had
(00:52):
to do was tell my mother, and my parents' marriage
would not only have ended, I would have ended it.
Should I have told my mother. I think now that
I should have, and all these years later still cassigate
myself for being derelict in my duty to her. But
of course I neglected my duty to her in the
(01:15):
name of doing it in the name of protecting her
from the terrible truth, and so the power to destroy
their marriage became the power to preserve it. I had
more power than I'd ever dreamed of, power over my father,
and yet because I chose not to exercise it, he
(01:38):
had power over me. Yes, he had a secret, but
now so did I. He would never know what I knew,
and that became our bond.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
That's Tom Juneau, veteran journalist of two National magazine Awards,
writer of some of the most indelible profiles of the
last forty years, and author of the recent memoir In
the Days of My Youth, I was told what it
means to be a man. Tom's is a story that
has taken him a lifetime to tell the story of
(02:17):
a boy who grows up in the shadow of an outsized,
charismatic father he worships and a wounded mother he adores.
A boy who intuits secrets and lies all around him,
but is powerless in the way children are. A boy
who grows up to become a man, who makes a
meaning of his father's legacy, even as he chooses a
(02:37):
different path, in fact, a different surname. There was Lou
Jennaud and now there's Tom Juneau. Two distinctive men, two
distinctive stories. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(03:04):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
My earliest memory was of me sitting on the front
lawn of our split level in Wanta Long Island, and
I was with my mom, and my family had a
dog named Ginger. And the thing that made Ginger so
(03:36):
fascinating was that she predated me. She predated even my
brother and sister, who are ten years older than me.
She was the original inhabitant of family and there was
always something about her that she had sort of crawled
(03:57):
out of the Garden of Eden. And my first memory
is of me sitting on the grass and her coming
over to sniff my hand, and the other person who
was there is not my dad. Sort of adding to
the Garden of Eden flavor of that scene is, you know,
the person who was there was my mother.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
So your parents moved into the house with your twin
older siblings, Kathy and Michael before you were born.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
You were born like into that house.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I was born into that house. Yeah. They had moved
there about two years before, and they had come from
Brooklyn to Levittown, and then they had moved up to Wanta.
Wantah was the town next to Levittown, but it was
a little bit different from Levittown. Levittown was the original
little boxes. There were these rows and rows and winding
(04:49):
streets of cape Cod houses, whereas Wantaw and our house was,
you know, the land of the split level. It was
nicer than Levittown. And it was and I always thought
that we were rich. My parents were the most beautiful
people in the world. And I think that, you know,
a lot of kids sort of idealized their parents in
(05:11):
that way, but you know, Friend and Lou really were
the most beautiful people in the world. My mother looked
like Darris Day. My father looked like a more dangerous
version of Dean Martin. He looked a little bit like
Sean Connery, you know, out of the James Bond movies.
My mom had blue eyes and hair that she called
(05:36):
platinum blonde, but which I called white. And my dad
was very very dark. He spent an inordinate amount of
time tanning his skin, so he was brown as eight
one stay sauce, and he had the greenest eyes I've
(05:58):
ever seen to this day in a human being. They
looked like a shot of sharp truthse that had been
set on fire, and they were head turners. You walked
into a restaurant with them, and every person in that
restaurant turned and looked at them, wondering who they were.
(06:19):
And of course that was like perfectly in keeping with
my experience because I wondered who they were.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
How did that feel to you as a little kid,
like noticing you were a tremendous noticer of everything around you,
especially as it pertained to your family. What was that
like to see the way that the world responded to them.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Well, there were two sort of sides of that. Number One,
my mom, you know, especially had men catering to her,
but men catered to her simply by being extraordinarily nice
to her and doing her favors. I also had the
experience of watching women cater to my dad, and that
(07:06):
was a whole different kind of thing because they looked
at my dad, they took my dad in, and they
flirted with them, and I was I was really aware
of it. And I mean, I can't even explain why
I was so aware of it, but I was aware
of it from a very young age. And I think
(07:27):
that the thing that made it difficult was that men
cater to my mom. Women cater to my dad, but
they didn't cater to each other. People were in love
with them, but they were not in love with each other.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Talk to me about yourself as a child, like, what
was the emotional landscape for you, What was the experience
of being in that family and being you, like just
being in your skin?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I was, you know, my first nickname was TC. And
then when you know, at dinner time, I was supper
time Tom, because as my mom said, you know, you
were always as good as gold. But it's when six
o'clock rolled around, watch out. And I think that I was.
I was just responding to the tremendous stress at the
(08:17):
dinner table. You know, my father was this booming, commanding
and for me, a frightening presence, and I was scared
of him. I was. I was terrified of my dad
to the extent that well, Number one, I cried a lot,
(08:39):
and number two, he would kind of play with me
a little bit, like every once in a while he
would say tell me, and you know, I would start
I would start shaking and my lip would start quivering,
and my brother and sister would be across the table
sort of smiling at their cute little brother. But it
(09:00):
was a source of like unbelievable pain to me, and
I think frustration to my dad. He used to always
say things like, I don't get it. You know, I've
never laid a hand on this kid and look at him.
And that was part too, you know, the realization that
I was by being frightened of my dad, I was
somehow disappointing my dad was really was really tough to
(09:24):
deal with. And you know what I retreated to was
reading a lot. I was really young when I started reading.
I was started, you know, probably around three years old.
I started reading the comic books that my brother and
sister's friends left around the house. And it was great
because it was like the it was the dawn of
the Marvel universe. You know, they had Spider Man and
(09:47):
Thor and Hulk and all this stuff. And so I
was just you know, I was a kid with a
crew cut, I was sickly, I was skinny, I was
you know, not athletic. I was scared of my day.
But I could read, and that was like the thing
that saved me.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Why do you think you were scared of him?
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I wonder about that, I think that my best you know,
my best answer for that is, well, because a lot
of people were scared of him. I mean a lot
of people were really afraid of Luchanod. But I think
with me that fear was heightened by the fact that
my mother was afraid of him. And I was connected
(10:30):
to my mother in a very very powerful way, because
I think the way that I always looked at it
was that I was there for her. I mean, like
literally there for there. I was born for her. I
was put there on earth for her to be her
ally her confide on all of it. And so when
my mom's eyes filled with tears and no one's eyes
(10:53):
filled with tears like my mom's did, mind did too.
When she shook, when my father raised his voice, I
did too.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Tom's father is a very glamorous version of a traveling salesman.
He's in the handbag business, a job that takes him
regularly on the road. Tom begins to experience life in
the split screen. When his father's home, things are one way,
and when it's just Tom and his mom, things are
another way.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
My dad would go away for five and you know,
six weeks at a time, and it was kind of
paradise when he was gone, because my mom was was
not unhappy. She was herself, you know, when my dad
was away, and so I could be myself when my
dad was away, but when you know, when my dad
(11:50):
came home. I couldn't watch the monkeys when my dad
was home because my dad had heard, you know, during
his travel or somewhere in New York City at some
sort of club, that one of the monkeys I never
found out which one was homosexual. So I couldn't I
couldn't watch the monkeys, and I couldn't watch the Flying Nun.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Because what was wrong with the flying Nun?
Speaker 2 (12:17):
My father thought it was sacrilegious, even though he was
like the single most sacrilegious human being I knew at
the time. I mean, my father was a complete heathen.
But you know, I wasn't allowed to watch the Flying Nun,
and there was just the level of stress in the
house when my father was around. Of course, the thing
that was always amazing about my father's trips was, you know,
(12:41):
my mother explained my father being away by how hard
he had to work. But my father would come back
six weeks later after departing, you know, on the road
we'd go pick him up at like at JFK, and
he'd come off the plane even darker than he was
when he left. And he looked unbelievable when he came
(13:06):
off the plane at JFK, so much so that the
general sort of celebrity vibe that he had was doubled
or tripled. Were people just looking at him, And you know,
I would be proud that this guy was my dad,
But it was sort of like when he came off
the road, it was like being visited by a maybe friendly,
(13:30):
maybe unfriendly space alien.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Your parents, they were both beautiful people, but it seems
like it was your dad who was completely focused on
his physicality and his toilette, his way that he took
care of himself, the way that he cultivated that tan
that it seemed like that was a big part of
(13:55):
the job of being Lugenade.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, he was. He was infatuated with a certain kind
of beauty in general, and he was also infatuated with
his own beauty. I mean to the extent that he
would look in the mirror, you know, standing in front
of the mirror in his black bikinis with this you know,
mahogany colored skin and these green eyes, and this his
(14:23):
World War two dog tag, cast in gold and sort
of like nestled in his black chest air. And he
would say to me, look look at this body. Have
you ever seen a body like this? What could I
say other than no, you know, but the thing that
(14:47):
like that, Like the house was split between his beauty
and my mom's beauty. There was like one long hallway
connecting all the bedrooms, and on one end of that
hallway there was my mother's bathroom, which she was sort
of secret in its own way in that it contained
(15:09):
a lot of her pills, which she was definitely self
medicating with. And then in my father's room there was
my father's bathroom, which contained, you know, to me, the
secrets of the universe, his lubrication, his gels, his creams,
his ointments, his dyes, his everything. And it would all
(15:33):
he would carry when he came off the road. He
would empty this leather bag that was full of all
this stuff and put it out on the top of
the toilet in his bathroom. And it was his bathroom,
I mean, you needed special dispensation to go in there.
And so in the beginning, you know, when my father said,
(15:55):
learn my secrets, those were the secrets that he was
talking about, like the secrets of his hygienic excellence. It
was really just a powerful thing that.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Your father had all sorts of other kinds of secrets,
the kind that he was not referring to, and you,
as a kid, must have sensed that and you became
quite a spy. You know, there's a beautiful essay by
the writer Jane Ann Phillips that is about you know,
(16:29):
writers begin as children who are like secret agents, just
trying to learn whatever they possibly can about these people
who brought them into the world. And you sort of
elevated that to an art form as a kid, and
there was an urgency to it.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
It seems well, there was an urgency to it because
I felt myself powerless. I was like a pencil shaving
of my dad. You know, my dad was the pencil.
I was what was left behind by the sharpener, and
I had no power next to him, and my only
power wasn't trying to figure this guy out. And I
(17:08):
did that, and I did that with a pretty obsessive
quality that lasted, you know, from the time I was
three years old to now. It was a matter of
trying to find out who this person was That scared
me so and that made my mom so unhappy. The
(17:30):
first time when I was very aware that my father
was different from all the other fathers that I knew
in Long Island was the summer I was three years
old and we were in West Hampton Beach in Long Island,
and my father had an affair with the mother of
(17:51):
my first friend, Michael. I have photos of me and
Michael Shocket, you know, in the crib in swaddling clothes.
And two years later he had an affair with Michael's mother, Valerie,
and that was a big deal.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
What did you know about that at such a young age.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Well, I think I knew plenty, because the relationship with Valerie,
it wasn't hidden. I have home movies of that summer
that I've looked at pretty obsessively, and it's amazing how
obvious they both are. And so this was all taking
(18:33):
place right before my eyes. And later that year, or
maybe a year and a half later, you know, my
parents actually had a fight over it that almost ended
their marriage. It was New Year's Eve nineteen sixty two,
in the beginning of nineteen sixty three. That would have
made me around that time just about five years.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Old, something else transpires. When Tom is around five, one night,
his father asks him to go with him to get
a hot fudge Sunday an errand no kid could possibly resist.
But on the way to the ice cream store, his
dad says he needs to make a stop. He needs
(19:14):
to see a professional acquaintance, a buyer. And when they
stop at this person's house, it's a woman. And even
at five years old, Tom can tell something is not
quite right.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
I don't think that I had the context for, you know,
an affair or even like the word divorce, like that
word is like was at the very very edge of
my awareness and was just, you know, a word that
was full of like untold terror. But the difference between
(19:48):
my father and other fathers was something I think that
I was aware of and you know, and capable of
being aware of because my father and all these women
in his life, I mean, he worked with women on
the job. He had buyers, you know, and the buyers
were all powerful. He had a phone in the room
(20:11):
that he you know, in the master bedroom, in the
room that he shared with my mother, that had two
different kind of rings. There was the ring that was
the general ring, and there was the ring that was
more bird like, and when that ring went off, there
was something that happened. Number one, we were never ever
(20:32):
ever allowed to pick the phone up when it was
ringing like that. The number two, when that ring happened,
my father would go into the bedroom and close the
door behind him. It was like one of those English
you know, English drama where there was like two levels
of the house, you know, and there was the house
of the family, and then there was the house of
(20:52):
my dad who was carrying on this life that was
his secret life, and I was just aware of it
from the start.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
These days, it's not uncommon for people to have different
ring tones for their phones, one for their kids, their partner,
their boss. But in the nineteen sixties, in most homes
(21:29):
the phone rang one way and it was always answered.
Tom missed nothing. He may not have understood how unusual
it was or what was going on, but he clocked it.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Some years ago, I was talking to somebody on the
board of my daughter's school, and I told some of
the stories about the secrecy and the secrets in our household,
and there was somebody on the board said something to
me that has just stayed with me ever since. He
goes And nobody had to tell you not to say anything, right,
(22:05):
And I said, yeah, exactly. I mean when I went
to the so called buyer's house on the day that
we were supposed to be going out and getting hot
fudge Sundays, I knew that there was something off wrong
about it because with the way it made me feel.
But did I tell my mom? Did I mention that
we went to a lady's house? Of course not. And
(22:28):
I was I was really young. I was like five
years old. I remember being so young that I couldn't
start myself. She had a swing set in the yard,
and I couldn't start myself on the swing set. And
that's one of the things that sort of called me
back to the door of the house, was like I
wanted my dad to help me. And then I went
(22:48):
and you know, the door was locked.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
And then there was a short while later a moment
that becomes very important later in your story. That a
moment where her father asks you to sing fly Me
to the Moon to a lady in Florida, as he
puts it, who he's on the phone with, and he
puts you on the phone and you sing fly Me
(23:13):
to the Moon, and this lady is really warm and
really kind, and at the end of the call, when
you're handing the phone back to your father, she says,
you know, Tommy, I hope I get to.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Meet you sometime.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, did that cause the same feeling.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
It was always always that sort of you know, that
sort of a combination of the thrill of having something
that I knew about my father and that my father
shared with me that we weren't going to share with
my mom, of something sort of ilicit, but then also
at the same time of trying to please you know,
I mean, I was My father was a you know,
(23:51):
he was a crooner during World War Two. After he
got wounded, he toured Europe as a big band singer.
Father sang in the household. He was a crooner in
World War two, and he was a crooner in the shower.
But nobody else sang, nobody else could sing, nobody else
was really allowed to sing. And so my father asking
(24:13):
me to sing to this woman was both like scary
and exciting and flattering.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
When Tom is eight, his twin siblings are eighteen, and
they leave home. He's always been a snooper. But now
he starts to take it to the next level. He
begins to record things around the house, conversations, fights, secrets.
He's not sure what he's searching for, but he is
searching tape recorder at the ready.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I had gotten a small reel to real tape recorder
when I don't know, eight or nine, and it was
something that like kids at the time were getting. It
was like a classic sort of want to long Island
birthday gifts. But you know, I would set it up
on the stairs that connected the kitchen and the den
(25:10):
of our house. I would set it up at the
top step, and I would record dinner conversations. And I
did it to find out something. I did it to
find out whether the conversations, you know, about politics and
movie stars and whether the guy the star of Mannix
had a hair piece or not, like all of these
(25:31):
ridiculous arguments that would go on at the dinner table.
You know, I kind of wanted to find out if
they were real. But there was something that was secret.
You know, it became a secret that I was keeping.
You know, my parents kept secrets from me, but the
finding out became secrets that I was keeping. The tape
(25:54):
recorder was a secret I was keeping.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Well, which goes back to power, and.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
There was comfort that one of the things about it
was I didn't cry at the dinner table. If the
tape recorder is running.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Tom's father continues to ascend in the world of handbag cells.
He becomes wealthy and surrounds himself with ostentatious trappings. He
buys a house on Westhampton Beach, rents an apartment in
the Essex House in New York City, and back in Wantau,
the family home is set apart from all the other houses.
(26:28):
When Tom's father has white marble front steps installed winters,
he can be found sunning himself on these marble steps
using a reflector working on his tam. When Tom is sixteen,
his father returns from a work trip and Tom notices
a small glitch in his father's meticulous routine. His bag
(26:50):
of toiletries is not in its usual spot. Ever, the
detective Tom investigates.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
This huge bag of toiletry all his stuff, his consort, hairspray,
his nivias, luberderms ginette after bath splash for men. You know,
it was sort of one of those things that people
talked about with my dad, because if he went to
your house, he would colonize the bathroom with this bag.
(27:19):
So he took it everywhere. And then one time I
was helping him unload the car after he came back
from the business trip, and that bag was missing. So
I took it upon myself to look for it. And
it was usually on the floor of his closet, which
(27:40):
was on the top floor of the house. And where
I found it was in the closets where my mother
kept her very rarely used furs, and that was in
the basement. So there was four floors or three and
a half floors separating from where it usually was to
where it was. And you know, I opened it and
(28:02):
I found out why because in that bag, instead of
all the toiletries was a copy of The Joy of
Sex and two vibrators. And you know, my response to
it at that moment was not horror. I assumed that
he had brought it back for my mom. You know,
(28:25):
this was early seventies and The Joy of Sex was
already like well known as a book that married couples
would use to sort of spice up their marriage. And
so that's what I thought originally was that it was there.
Then all that stuff was in that bag to sort
of spice up parents rather chilly marriage. And then it
(28:49):
disappeared again, like the next day. I went to look
for it and it was gone. And the next time
I saw it was it was back on the floor
of my father's closet filled with toiletries, filled with his stuff.
So I wondered where it went. And then one day
he came home on the Long Island railroad carrying something
(29:13):
he never carried, which was a briefcase. All the other
guys whom my father called squares, carried briefcases, and all
of a sudden, there was my dad carrying this brown
samsonite briefcase. And I became obsessed with that because it
was something that, you know it was. It had a
combination lock, and it was something I couldn't get to
(29:36):
and I didn't know what was inside, but I suspected
it was something.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
So what did you do?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to crack
the coat, trying to figure out the combination. And one
day my father came back and he and he hit it.
It was either it was he kept it either at
the bottom of his closet under all these shelves or
(30:02):
in the huge trunk of his white Lincoln Continental. He
would keep it in the truck and not even bring
it in the house. And so but one day he
had it on the bed and the latches were flipped open.
It wasn't open, the briefcase wasn't open, but the latches
were open. So I recorded the number on the tumblers,
(30:24):
and you know, kept them in my memory where they remained.
By the way, it was the number. It was number
six one six. And one day when my parents went
to the track, as they so often did, especially when
my dad came back from a trip, they would go
to Roosevelt Raceway and leave me by myself, the sort
(30:45):
of fend for myself. I went upstairs to my father's bedroom,
and I knew that there was something in there. And
I knew that like opening the briefcase was not like
taping the family dinner conversation, was not even like you know,
looking for the bag of toiletries and finding the joy
of sex in there. I knew it was different, and
(31:06):
so my heart was like thumping when I opened it.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Well, one of the things that's striking me listening to you,
is that is the determination like the both this potent
mixture of fear and forbiddenness and guilt probably yeah, guilt
for sure, and at the same time, something that's bigger
than all those things, Bigger than the fear, bigger than
(31:32):
the guilt, bigger than the terror of being caught or
the fear of what you're going to find, which was
you needed to know.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah, And I think that the word that you chose
right there, need is exactly it. I mean, I didn't
just want to know. I needed to know. And because
I knew it was something and it was I flipped
open the briefcase and it was as if you were
(32:01):
watching a movie where something that could be regarded as innocent,
like the joy of sex and two vibrators had like
mutated into something. And what they had mutated into was
this stack of you know, not just like pornography that
(32:21):
was like popular at the time, but like really extreme pornography,
like subjugation pornography, S and M pornography that was unbelievably
disturbing and explicit. And then instead of two vibrators, two
huge rubber dildos.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
What I keep coming back to, because really, ultimately, what
I keep on thinking about is what we know, what
we don't know, what we know but can't allow ourselves
to really consider or think.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
So now you have a secret? Yeah, yes, and you've
had one for quite some time.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
You know that you're keeping from your mother, and now
you're keeping from your father. This knowledge of your father,
or this knowledge of what the contents of the briefcase.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Might mean in terms of your father.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
Where does that live inside of you as a sixteen
year old kid who is you know, just sort of
coming into his own and has so much confusion about
what it means to be a man.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Yeah, it was the crossing of a line because you know,
I watched the porno movies. It wasn't like I looked
at the what was inside the briefcase and shut it,
you know, forever Pandora's box was open, and I watched
those there were Super eight movies, and so I watched
(33:49):
them on the projector where my father used to show
home movies down in the basement. And can I just
say it messed me up? Because it did. It messed
me up because, as you say, I had a secret,
I felt guilty. I knew without a doubt it was,
(34:11):
you know, incontrovertible evidence that my father had a completely
different life outside the house that I couldn't even imagine.
And yet because I knew it, and because I decided
at that moment that I was never going to tell anybody,
(34:33):
especially my mom. I mean, I lost all of my
illusions about my dad, or at least most of my
illusions about my dad. But at the same time, I
kind of migrated to his side, if that makes any sense.
There was always this like really like uneasy daytunt in
my household, and there was my mom at one end
(34:56):
of the hall, there was my dad at the other
end of the hall, and I sort of, you know,
shuttled between them. But I was always always on my
mom's side, And this, because I was covering for my dad,
moved me to his side. In some sort of strange way.
I became more loyal to him, even though I'd say
he became sort of less loyal to me, because around
(35:19):
that time, I started, rather predictably, like smoking a ton
of weed. I was stoned all the time, and my
dad sort of knew that and didn't really mention it
to me in the same way that I didn't mention,
you know, the porn and the dildos to him.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
But at the same time, it also seems like his temper,
which had always been a thing and part of the
reason why you had been afraid of him, you tussled
more we did during those years, and you wrote, shut
up is a thunderclap of my childhood. And then there
is this feeling that you also have very intensely about
(36:05):
your father, which is you will not shut me up.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Right. So when you know, my dad and my mom
used to argue at the dinner table, my father would
end those arguments with a resounding shut up, and he
would talk differently when he said that. You know, my
(36:30):
father had an actor's diction. Look at this body. Have
you ever seen a body like this? But when he
said shut up to me or to my mom, mostly
to my mom, he was like out of a gangster movie.
He didn't say it with the T there, he didn't.
He said it with a d shut up. And it
(36:53):
was like, you know, the mask had fallen off him
because he was, you know, sort of self created in
a lot of different ways, and the mask, that mask
would fall off him. And it was after I opened
his briefcase that we started really battling in ways that
were you know, I think, ultimately, you know, kind of
(37:13):
damaging to me. There was a moment when he came
drunk into my room when this is when I was,
I think a at the end of my senior year
in high school or even that following summer, and you know,
he came up to me and said, what are you
doing today? And I said nothing? And he goes, yeah, yeah,
(37:36):
you know, why are you doing nothing today? I was like,
why because you are in nothing? And we got into
this whole thing that, you know, when I did the
audio tape of the book, I think that was the
hardest part that I read, was that part where my
father and I went back and forth on that because
he was challenging, He was challenging me. He was challenging
(37:56):
me to fight him. There was just no doubt about that,
and I didn't. I mean, some of that might have
been because I was afraid of him and had always
been afraid of him, but something there was like a
new emotion that arose in me at that moment, and
(38:17):
probably when I opened the briefcase, which was a certain
amount of coldness towards him.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
Some years pass and Tom goes to college there he
meets Janet, the woman who will become his wife. It's
a real love match, but Tom's father is determined to
turn his son into him, determined to turn him into
someone who isn't going to be faithful.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
One time, he invites me into New York City. This
is when I'm dating Janet, and he invites me into
New York City to go see Woody Allen. I was like, oh, great, great,
I'll come into this, you know. And you know, he
tells me one thing before he gets off the phone,
which is dress. So I get dressed up as best
(39:18):
I can. I go into New York City to go
with my dad to see Woody Allen. And we stop
at a bar and these two really beautiful, you know,
middle aged women walk in and they walk right towards us,
and I say, Dad, who are they? And he looks
at me and says, they're are dates, and you know,
(39:44):
they were buyers, and they were buyers. He wasn't just
calling them buyers. And it was clear to me in
an instant that he was having an affair with one
of them, and that was what he was. He was
trying to teach me in his ways. There's another moment
(40:06):
when the summer, I'm first going out with Janet and
he comes in to have his say and he says,
you know, I know you like this girl. And I said, yeah, Dad,
I like her. I think I love her. And he
was like, well, there's one thing I need to tell you.
I've lived a little and I know chicken tastes pretty
(40:29):
good until you've had steak. And I've forgiven my dad
a lot of things, but not that.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
Yeah, I mean, just so instidious and poisonous and meant
to be poisonous.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Tom is living in Atlanta, working in his first journalism job.
When his grandmother dies. At her funeral, one of his
cousins pulls him aside and says, I have a story
for you. That's story leads to a whole other layer
of questions, ones that Tom's father has no interest in exploring.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
One of the things about growing up in our household
is that, you know, we had no genealogy, you know.
I mean it was as if there was the founding
of America in seventeen seventy six, and then there was
the founder of our family. And you know, when my
grandmother was born and when my father was born to
(41:29):
my grandmother and it was just all shrouded and shadow
and secret and nonexistent to the extent that when you know,
we would ask my dad, like, Dad, tell us about
your father, and he would look at us and say,
I never had a father. And we knew that this
(41:51):
wasn't true, because there was a man who used to
call and ask for money, and that was his father.
But his complete denial was how he dealt with his past.
Like that denial like I never had a father, actually
extended to everything else. So when I found out that
(42:15):
his mother was married when she was sixteen, and she
had a daughter, and she abandoned that daughter, and that
she then became sort of the scarlet woman in the
New York City tabloids as a serial adulterer. But when
(42:36):
I tried to tell him that he had a sister
out there, the sister from my grandmother's first marriage, and she's,
you know, just a few years older than you. She's
probably out there. Maybe you could meet her. Do you
want me to try to find her. I'm a journalist,
I can find her. And he looked at me and said,
(42:59):
never happened. And I was like, what do you mean
it never happened? I have a copy of a daily
news article that gives me her name. It had to happen.
And he looked at me and said, And it wasn't
just what he said, it was how he said it,
and the look on his face. My father hadn't scared
me in a long time, but he scared me when
(43:22):
he said this, And he said, listen to me. Never happened.
That was the last time I talked about it.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
So Tom drops it. He drops it for twenty years,
and those are twenty very busy years, both personally and professionally.
Tom and Janet Mary. They adopt their daughter. His journalism
career takes off, and he writes huge cover stories for Esquire,
often almost always of men Frank Sinatra, Fred Rogers, always
(44:00):
circling around the subject of his father, but never going there.
There's an energy, though thrumming was in the subtext of
these profiles that is part of what gives them their
tremendous power. The thing Tom is born to write, to explore,
to know, is one he's unable to touch. During these years, too,
(44:22):
Tom's parents make a precipitous fall from grace. Like Icarus,
lou Janad gets too close to the son, both literally
and metaphorically, he gambles and loses big.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
My father was not an educated man. I think he
was smart, Like when I listen to tapes of him
and I listened to him talk, you know, he was
the kind of person who spoke in full paragraphs. His
diction was, you know, intentional and incredibly seductive. But he
learned all that from watching the movies. He learned how
(44:58):
to talk from Carry Grant, He learned how to address
from Fred Astaire, learned how to treat women, you know,
from Clark Gable and Rhet Butler. But he didn't pass
eighth grade, and so you know, he was one of
those guys who was unique. He was very much himself,
but he was very much trying to transcend himself. And
(45:23):
where that effort failed and sort of you know, had
a tragic not a tragic end exactly, but at least
an uncomfortable end. Was him trying to become richer than
he was. He made a lot of money selling handbags,
(45:44):
but he began gambling in nineteen sixty six, so that
the other group of people who called the secret phone,
in addition to his so called buyers, were bookies. We
had bookies calling the house all the time. But worse
than the bookies were the stockbrokers. Those are the worst
(46:06):
because my father had incredibly bad luck and no business
sense in pursuing stocks, and he put a lot of
money into the stock market and lost everything, lost the
last penny, and his debts to the bookies were enough
(46:27):
that they had to sell the house in Westhampton and
moved down to Florida where they lived in a rented condo,
and the money just eventually just ran out, and my
father became somewhat different. Then he became a person that
was rather than this guy who lived in the light
(46:51):
of his own grandeur, he became this guy whose life
was full of regrets, and he was that guy. He
was woodish should have coulda to the extent that when
he began talking about his bad financial choices and bemoaning
his fate, people would wave their hands out him and say,
all lou just stop and then you know, and get
(47:12):
up and leave, Like there were guys at that Florida
condo who, when he started telling his stories of past
glory would say, Okay, it's time for me to leave
and leave.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
What's interesting to me too, That another kind of parallel
tracks going in opposite directions in a way where his
decline is happening parallel to and at the same time
as your increasing success.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
So it's nineteen ninety six and you decide you're going
to do a piece for GQ about your dad. But
it's not going to be the investigative piece. It's going
to be lu Jenad's fashion tips. And this is an
opportunity for you, as an investigative journal list and as
(48:00):
a profile writer per Exalans, to interview your dad.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah. I mean I sold it to my editor at
GQ and to my father as a story that I
would be using his fashion tips to sort of get
at him. And so I took him out to this
(48:26):
hotel in Westhampton Beach where he used to go at
five o'clock in the evenings, you know, after spending the
day with the family, he would go down to the
dune deck and always wear the same thing. He would
wear his orange ol pack, a sweater and his white ducks.
He would wear these tight white pants and go down
to the dune deck. I think his second life or
(48:48):
third life or whatever it was, you know, extended to
the dune deck. So I sort of wanted to take
him back to the scene of the crime. And you know,
I knew my father's fashion tips. I didn't need to
interview them for the fashion tips. What I wanted was
the chance that talked to my dad with a tape
(49:09):
recorder between us and I did that and I asked
him everything. I asked him about Valerie with whom he
had the affair when you know, I was three, four
and five years old. I asked him about you know,
the rumors that he had gone to bed with the
Goobor sisters, all of them. I asked all of them.
(49:31):
And then something you know, really remarkable happened. I had
spent a day with him talking about all the secrets
that I wanted to ask him about all my life.
And we went out to dinner and it was a
celebratory dinner and Susan Lucci, you know, the soap opera star,
(49:57):
was there at the restaurant and my father said, who's
that woman over there. I turned around, I was like, Dad,
that's Susan Lucci, And he looked at me and he said,
can't keep her eyes off your father. And you know,
he was seventy seven years old. You know, I had
(50:19):
heard that story. I had heard growing up. That's like
all you heard about at the dinner table is he
had gone to El Morocco and Liz Taylor was there
and couldn't keep her eyes off your father. And so
I really felt like I was sort of giving him
this gift when I was doing this story, and also
(50:40):
giving myself the gift of having his secrets revealed. So
it was sort of a deal. But the next day,
we were having breakfast, it was our goodbye breakfast, and
a woman who was eighty one years old the night
before had asked him for his number, So, you know,
(51:00):
we were having breakfast. I was starstruck again, you know,
and I asked him, Dad, Dad, that when that woman
asked you for her your number last night? Was was
that what it was like? You know, when you were
when you were my age, and that you were and
you were going into New York City. Well, they weren't
eighty one. I was like, yeah, Dad, I know they
weren't eighty one, but you know what I mean. And
(51:20):
that's when he, you know, he said, Tommy, there was
a time in my life when I couldn't walk down
Fifth Avenue without being propositioned. And I was at the
time I was thirty eight, and I was still enough
of a kid to say, you know, she, Dad, did
(51:41):
you take any of them up on it? And he says, well,
not all of them. And the minute he said that,
you know, it was just like all of the other
times growing up, I knew something was going on. And
I said, Dad, you know how many? I'm not telling you.
(52:02):
I'm a gentleman. And I said, why don't you give
me a percentage? Oh, I don't know, twenty five percent.
I was like, twenty five percent. Is that too little?
I was like, no, Dad, it was a huge, huge number,
(52:22):
twenty five percent. Oh my god. And then I asked
him the question, I said, Dad, did you fall in
love with any of them? And he looked at me
and he put out his hand, and you know, his
(52:43):
hands were as brown as any other part of him.
He had like the tannest hands any human being had
ever had. And he put out this tan hand with
a single finger extended, and he looked at me and
he said one. And you know my life changed in
(53:03):
that moment.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Yeah, it strikes me that had that not happened exactly
as it did, had you not been in the mode
of interviewing him, had you not been writing that piece
as a way of doing that. Had you not had
experience the night before that sort of led to those questions,
you might never have known that there was one woman
(53:31):
who right he was in love with.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Of all the women, there was a woman he was
in love with.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
Lu Janaud lives another decade after Tom writes his profile,
and Tom's mother dies two years later. It is then
that Tom renews the hunt to understand this enigmatic man
and his legacy. The truth does not come tumbling out,
but reveals itself slowly. The boy who was once a
(54:00):
silent witness is now a man with a toolbox. Patiently, forensically,
he follows a trail of faint footprints in an attempt
to know more.
Speaker 2 (54:11):
Two years after my dad died, he had a friend
in Miami Beach named Frankie Kleine. And Frankie was a
wonderful guy who was another handbag salesman. But he was
also sort of like my dad's wingman in Miami Beach,
and my dad, you know, he would when he traveled
as a salesman, and when he would go and spend
(54:33):
a couple of weeks at the end of his sales trips,
you know, just soaking up the sun. It was in
Miami Beach, and it was with Frankie, so he knew
my dad really well, and he knew him. He knew
him as the Miami guy rather than the Wantau Long
Island guy. And when my dad died, he asked me
(54:54):
for some of my dad's ashes because he wanted to
sprinkle them in the lake behind his house. And so
the day before I turned fifty, I went to visit
Frankie with a shot glass full of what was left
of my father's ashes because he had been buried and
we had spread some of the other ashes in the
(55:14):
ocean at Westhampton Beach. So I go to see Frankie.
We needed a bagel place in Miami, give them the ashes,
and he says, is there anything, Is there anything that
you want? Is there anything that you need? And I
said yeah, Frankie, I said, can you tell me about
the woman in Florida? And it had some of the
(55:38):
same feeling as opening the locks of the briefcase, because
Frankie looked at me and he said, so, you know,
And the minute he said that, I was like, oh shit.
And I didn't know her name. I didn't know the
(56:02):
one's name at the time, and I liked to Frankie.
I said, well, I didn't let on that I knew
as little as I did. I said, yeah, Frankie, I know.
And he said, well, because if you didn't know, I
wouldn't tell you. And I said, I know, and then
he told me, and he said, you know, they were
(56:24):
very close. But you know, she died in nineteen seventy
six when your father and the one that he loved
were planning to run off together from each of their spouses.
But then she fell down the stairs of her home
in Helendale, Florida and died. And Frankie went with my
(56:50):
father to the funeral and had to hold my father
up during the funeral because he was so bereaved. And
the woman's name was Peggy Monahan. And so all of
a sudden, you know, I was in a place of
knowledge where I had not been before. And yet I
(57:14):
made a decision not to pursue it. I made a
decision not to try to contact your children and not
to investigate it. And then in twenty fifteen that changed.
Speaker 1 (57:27):
What changed?
Speaker 3 (57:29):
What was the sort of cesaw between thinking that you
maybe should let it go and then changing your mind
because the need to know was greater than whatever the
sequelae of that might be.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
At my father's funeral in two thousand and six, I
planned and choreographed his funeral service, his memorial service in Wantshall,
Lot Island, picked the music, brought in a singer, did eulogy,
all of it. And you know, I was trying to get,
(58:05):
you know, the last word on my dad. I was
trying to put not just him to rest, but my
gnawing unease with not knowing about him to rest as well.
And at the very end, when after I'd given the
eulogy and his friends had stood up to tell funny
(58:25):
stories about him, this gorgeous woman who I knew from
the handbag business, her name was mon two, went up
to the electern, brought her hands down on electern and said,
can we all just agree that this was a man.
(58:46):
And so Montus plays a large role in me sort
of changing my mind about figuring out who the one was.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
And you didn't know at the time, but you knew
that she wasn't the one, or she could have been
the one.
Speaker 2 (59:02):
She could have been one, but she wasn't thou Wild exactly.
Speaker 3 (59:05):
And you learn because your older brother, Michael, has lunch
with Montu, not suspecting anything and just thinking that she
was someone who worked with your father, And at lunch
it comes out that she had had a relationship with
your father that spanned eleven years.
Speaker 2 (59:25):
Right, So, my dad died in two thousand and six.
I found out the name of the one in two
thousand and eight. And then in twenty fifteen, my brother
has lunch with Montu and he calls me up and
he says, did you know that dad had an eleven
(59:47):
year affair with mon two? And I said yes, And
he said, why didn't you tell me? I said, because
I didn't know. And he said, wait a second. You
just said you didn't know they, did you? Or didn't
you know? And in that moment, you know, I felt,
(01:00:08):
you know, a seismic shift, because I felt the schism
in me that had been there forever about my dad
and about my relationship to him and to his secrets
and to the lives that he led. And I decided
at that moment to find out and that included finding
(01:00:36):
Peggy man Hand's children.
Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
And ultimately.
Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
That reveals to you that your father and Peggy that
one of her four children was your father's child, and
that you have a sister.
Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Yeah. So in twenty fifteen, after my brother's visit and
after the revelation about month two, I started calling up
people and asking about my dad. And Frankie Klin was
dead by this time. He had died in twenty eleven.
But I called his kids and we had, you know,
(01:01:15):
a talk about a lot of things, you know. One
of them was of them knowing Peggy Monaghan seeing my
father in her company at the Klein House, swimming in
Frankie's pool, using the bedroom in Frankie's house. And then
one day I got a call from Frankie's daughter, from
(01:01:37):
his first wife, Nancy, and she said, there's something I
need to tell you. And you know, I've been thinking
about this and I've been sort of agonizing about this,
and I asked my husband about this and she gave
this long introduction about it. But what she said was
that one of she had heard before Frankie died and
(01:01:59):
when Frankie's wife died, that one of Peggy Monahan's four
children was my father's and that was in twenty fifteen,
you know. So I started looking for them, and it
real even just looking at them. I found them where
you find anybody everybody else these days. I found pictures
(01:02:19):
of them on Facebook. And at the time, Nancy didn't
know which of the kids it was, and she didn't
even really know. She told me it was one of
the boys. That Peggy had three boys and one one daughter,
and she told me it was one of the boys.
(01:02:40):
But I went on Facebook and I looked at the boys,
and then I looked at the girl, Lizanne Seyring. She
had married. Her name was not Monahanna, it was Syring.
And I looked at her photo and it was just,
you know, it was not like physical. It wasn't like
I said, oh, she looks like me. Was that like
(01:03:02):
I recognized her as if I had known her? And
that was twenty fifteen, and then three years later I
made my first approach to her.
Speaker 3 (01:03:17):
So, Tom, let me ask you, it's sort of like
the work of your life to come to know who
your father really was that began when you were, you know,
three years old. What was it that drove you at
the point where you were there was much that you
learned that we're not going to be able to cover
terms of your father's life, his history, where he came
(01:03:38):
from the secrets that he came from. You sort of
shook the family tree and it reshaped and became a
different kind of tree. But what was it that was
so important? What was the drive at that point? You know,
your father gone, your mother gone, to continue to need
to know.
Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
I think I had more sophisticated tools with which to
pursue that need, but I think the need itself was
the same need that I had when I was three
and eight, and sixteen and twenty and twenty two. I'm
(01:04:22):
kind of naming the years of all like the years
of milestone discoveries about my dad thirty six and then finally,
you know, I'm in my late fifties and realizing that
whatever it is I'm trying to find, I better find
now because I'm never going to be able to do
it except now. Now is the time. It's hard to
(01:04:46):
explain what drove me. I said early on that it was,
you know, a way of me finding some sort of
power in the house where I was powerless. And then
I had this moment where it's, you know, you'll never
shut me up, and so there's those things that are
driving me. But when I started looking for my sibling,
(01:05:13):
for my sister. It didn't feel that way. It felt
like those things were preordained, you know, for this search,
Like the earlier searches were one thing, but this search
was the main thing. You mentioned early on me singing
to a woman in Westhampton. Fly Me to the Moon
(01:05:37):
came out in the summer of nineteen sixty four, and
I sang fly Me to the Moon in the summer
of nineteen sixty four to a woman that I believe
was Peggy Moniha, And that was the summer that she
gave birth to my father's daughter. So when I started
(01:06:00):
looking for her many many decades later, I was terrified
in a way that I hadn't been terrified in a
long time doing the work I do. I was questioning myself,
but at the same time, it felt like it was something,
(01:06:21):
you know, I had to do, and I think I
had to do it to make things right.
Speaker 3 (01:06:26):
That makes all kinds of beautiful sense, And it's making
me think of one other moment in the book, something
just really you know, sort of shattering around your father,
and you'll go into your car and something comes out
of you and you just like scream into the silence
of your car.
Speaker 1 (01:06:45):
I will survive this. I will survive.
Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
This, And I think you know my interpretation is that
you had to put all of the pieces together of
this jagged, chattered story in order to be able to
survive it in the deepest way.
Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
Yeah, you know. I'd been given a puzzle when I
was a little kid, and it took me a really
long time to put the pieces together. But I never
stopped putting together. And you know I finally put the
the last piece in there. In twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
Here's Tom reading one last passage from his big hearted,
brave and beautifully written memoir. In the Days of my youth,
I was told what it means to be a man.
Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
You came so close dead, so close to getting away
with it. You've been dead now for nearly twenty years,
and you were resting in peace at a national cemetery,
your body already consumed by fire. You and Mom are together,
your ashes, under a plaque stamped with the words Mom
(01:08:09):
and Dad, You bother nobody, and nobody bothers you. Fewer
and fewer people remember you. Fewer and fewer people are
alive to remember you, but those who do remember do
so fondly. So the sons and daughters of your sisters
(01:08:29):
and best friends. You remain Uncle Lou to your grandchildren.
You are pop Up to Michael and me, you are
and will always be Dad.
Speaker 3 (01:08:57):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
(01:09:22):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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Family Secrets News
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Dani Shapiro
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