There’s a Storm Coming

A ninety-year old father and his youngest daughter come together to unpack a secret that altered—and ultimately made sense of— the shape of each of their lives.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guests today
are a father and daughter, David and Maggie Sith. We
record it in person at a studio in New York City.

(00:32):
David is almost ninety years old and has had a fascinating,
many chaptered life. He's been a professor, a writer, author
of a memoir, Eleanor's Rebellion, a mother, a son and
her secret. He's been a journalist, He's been an actor.
His is a story of a bedrock secret that shaped

(00:53):
him from the inside out and the ripple effect of
that secret. In a way, this is a story of
before and after. Maggie, David's youngest daughter, is born into
the aftermath of the Secrets revelation, but is nonetheless impacted
by it in ways that profoundly shape her own life.

(01:15):
You'll be hearing more from Maggie in the second half
of this episode, and oh, if her voice sounds familiar,
you may know her from her remarkable acting career on
both stage and screen. Particularly her role as psychiatrist Wendy
Rhodes on Billions. I'm going to start at the beginning.
Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
The problem is that I remember my childhood literally as
a before and after reality because I wasn't aware of
the first two years of my life, which I spend
at an orphanage and didn't discover that until forty years later.
I remember my childhood as more or less happy, middle class,

(02:00):
secular Jewish life, mainly in the Bronx. My parents were.
They were parents, you know. I tried to avoid them
as much as possible and at the same time coax
them into getting everything I wanted in their being, doting
on me and loving me and caring for me to
the point where I was oblivious to what was going

(02:21):
on between the two of them, which was really important
in my childhood because my biological father was not the
guy who was raising me, and he was mainly interested
in my mother, not me for a long time. Then
he slowly got turned around. I was part of his
family too. He was rescuing my mother, who was a

(02:44):
single mom. In the word they used in those days
was illegitimate.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Tell me about your mom tell me about her background
and how she came to make the choices that she
made that so acted your early life. In your life, she.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Was something of a wild child. She never got out
of high school. She was kicked out of high school
because she forged a letter for a friend of hers
who was didn't want to go to gym class because
she was a lesbian, and my mother really understood that
that was difficult for a young woman at that time.

(03:27):
My mother got a relative of hers to forge a
medical excuse for her, and they found out about it,
and they kicked her out of school.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
What year are we more or less well?

Speaker 3 (03:35):
I was born in thirty five. She was born in fourteen,
so this would have been around nineteen thirty, nineteen thirty one,
nineteen thirty two, just when the Depression was hitting full
stride and FDR was becoming president, which was a big
deal in my family. I think her rebelliousness her she

(03:56):
thought of herself. I think, although she never really quiet
defined it that way, but her sister did. The people
around her did as a nonconformist, and I think she
was open in a way that she was not ready
to know to really incorporate into her her growing years.
She was very bright. Eventually she went back, you know,

(04:19):
late later on, after she was married and settled down,
she went she went back and got a college degree
and got a master's degree, and was she was a
very She was a really intelligent, creative, interesting person who
I think was very much trapped in the circumstances that
she didn't want to be in. And I don't think
she really wanted to have a child when she was eighteen,

(04:41):
but she did and she was a loving mother.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
So when we talk about the sort of split screen
of your childhood, there was all of this that you
did not know, right, And just because you didn't know
it doesn't mean it wasn't there. It just means right,
you didn't know it, but it was in the air
around you.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
It was emotionally part of the fabric of my life.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
So if you can go back to your childhood in
that time and do the magic trick of entering that
state of not knowing, what did your family as you
were growing up feel like to you and your place
in it? And just what you know, what was it
like to be you as a kid and a teenager, as.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
A young kid, what I experienced and did not understand,
was a lot of anger, a lot of trouble making.
I went out of my way to make trouble wherever
I was. I enjoyed it. And at one point I
must have told my parents, because my friends were doing this,
that I wanted to go to Hebrew School. I didn't

(05:45):
want to go to Hebrew School. When I went, I
got thrown at.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
It seems like a family tradition of some sort.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
Yeah, I mean, I just following in a long line.
But what I did, and I can't imagine that this
came from anything other than real anger and willingness just
to make trouble, was the rabbi in this classroom was
putting something up on the blackboard and his back was

(06:13):
turned to the class and I jumped up out of
my seat and started crossing myself in front of the kids,
and they all were laughing, and the rabbi turned around
and caught me and down. I went to the principal's office.
I didn't get thrown out. Then I got thrown out
for fighting. A couple of weeks later or something. I
was kicked out of other schools too.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
And how did that all play in your family? Like,
how did they our families tend to label us in
some way or another, like were you the troublemaker?

Speaker 3 (06:45):
I was the troublemaker, and I was a troubled I
was a troubled person. I was packed off to a
psychiatrist who had some reputation, and we used to play
cards when I went to see her. I guess that
was a form of therapy. And one time she gave
me the deck too, and I riffled the deck and

(07:07):
she said, what game do you.

Speaker 4 (07:08):
Want to play?

Speaker 3 (07:08):
And I said fifty two card pick up? And I
threw the cards all on the floor and she slapped me.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
That doesn't sound very therapeutic.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
It wasn't. It was. It was interesting, though, oh what
have I done in that moment? But I didn't. I
wasn't able to to in any way incorporate that in
a thinking or understanding way in terms of seeing what
I had done and what had happened to this person

(07:36):
who really in some way lost control of her own
professional reality.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
So interesting, aside from like troublemaking and you know, and
rage any other kind of dominant emotions during those years
in this in this state that you were in, you know,
one of the things we to talk a lot about
on this podcast is this term that I came across
when I was doing my own research, which is the

(08:06):
unthought known, you know, the thing that we know but
we can't allow ourselves to think because it would be
too dangerous. And you can't imagine something that you can't
suspect something that you can't imagine, right, So you had
no way of knowing that there was this whole other,
huge kind of field, if you will, and yet it

(08:27):
impacts us, right.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
I think there were two things that come to mind.
One is that on some really on the deepest level,
I thought of myself as a kind of criminal and
couldn't really process that. There were things that I did
as a child that I almost feel I can't imagine

(08:53):
that anybody would do that, but I did that. I
concoct episodes with friends that what are you doing in retrospect?
And I did. And it was because I thought of
myself as a kind of criminal and I could get
away with anything, do anything. I never understood the source

(09:15):
of this anger in myself. I never thought of myself
as angry. I thought of myself as a peace loving child,
which was a croc. And the other part of that
was that I lived in a fantasy world. I mean
I remember thinking that I read Batman and Superman comics,
and I'd walk around the house with a towel tied
around my neck as though I could jump out the

(09:37):
window and fly. And I never thought that, oh, maybe
I really want to jump out the window. I think
that was part of what was going on. I never
would have jumped out of the window. I was a
hypochondriac from the time I was two, so I wouldn't
have done that. But that kind of chaotic inner life was.
I had this dark side to it, and it also

(09:57):
had this imaginative side to it. I remember when I
was in the second grade, I got to play Columbus
in a second grade play and I discovered America and
I stood on the stage and I had the whole
world in my two arms. That was part of my
life too. I had this imaginative yearning for what I

(10:20):
couldn't define, but was always there. My brother was not
a model student, but he was. He really went by
the book. He was my father's first born and he
could never could could never be acknowledged. He was always
the brother trailing in the wake of the first born prince.

(10:42):
How much younger than you, four years and three months.
And my sister is four years and three months younger
than my brother, and she had epilepsy from an early age.
She was very smart and very she was very turned
out to be very artistic, and then also she picked
up the mantle of making trouble in her you know,

(11:05):
in a much more serious way than childhood trouble. She
got involved in a lot of political stuff later on.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
But in your shared childhoods, you were the troublemaker.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
I was the troublemaker. I was a protector of my sister,
an antagonist to my brother, who was too goody goody
for me. I was always trying to lure him into trouble,
and when we got into trouble, dumping it off on him.
I very much clung to my mother, and I instinctively
understood that she embraced me fully, that she loved me.

(11:42):
And I was frightened of my father because he had
a really serious problem with temper and he could also
be physical with his temper. At the same time, I
relished the time that I had with him because I
was pretty much of a freidie cat as well as

(12:04):
being an angry person, so when it was bedtime, I
didn't want to go to bed, and I didn't want
to have a I didn't want to be in the dark.
And my father would come in and sit down with me,
and he would tell me stories, and I loved his storytelling.
This was one time he told me the story of
Joan of Arc and he went all the way through

(12:26):
it to the point where the flames started coming up
around her, and I started crying. And then he said,
but then the rains came, and the rains put the
fires out, and she was saved, and I was saved.
So he was in retrospect. Now when I think of him,
I think of all that he went through as a kid,

(12:49):
from the ages of nine to thirteen. He was in
the middle of the Russian Civil War and was running
with his father from town to town as a Jew,
literally trying to escape being killed. And I never quite
was able to assimilate that as a young person, as

(13:10):
a teenager, and I have since.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Well, to me, this is so much a story about
the ways in which sometimes life allows us to come
to understand and know our parents as human beings and
not you know only as our parents, which is the
way that most of the time. That's how we walk around.

(13:35):
It's hard to imagine a before us, and certainly when
we're kids and teenagers and young people, it's I think,
almost impossible to imagine.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
Right it is it is, and later on the you know,
the the sword and shield drop away, and then they're
just human beings like we are as older people.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
David gets thrown out of the same high school, not once,
not twice, but three times. Quite an achievement. He does
manage to graduate and goes to Adelphi College for a year,
then transfers to Bard. Bard's a very creative place, and
there David finally feels at home.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
At the same time, I was lugging along all of
the fantasies I had about writing the Great American novel,
which was never going to happen. But I carried that
around like a like some sort of invisible trophy that
I thought I had and didn't have, and I think

(14:40):
I intellectually awoke at Bard College. I wasn't much of
a reader until I got to Bard, and then I
started reading. My father, the guy who raised me, went
to Columbia, and that's where I really wanted to go,
and I knew that Columbia accepted the children. There was

(15:03):
a legacy admission policy that Columbia had, but I somehow
wasn't part of that legacy, and I never picked up
on that.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
Oh how interesting I.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
Understood years and years later after my brother Mike went
to Columbia, and I realized, why didn't I go to Columbia.
I mean that sort of passed through my brain and left.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
As and then returned when you eventually.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
Put it all together.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Right, So your story is, in so many ways a
story of a life almost bisected, almost evenly in midlife
of you, a life lived until the age of forty
with one set of data, hugely important data, and then

(15:48):
you know the ensuing decades after forty. David intellectually wakes
up while at Barred, and when he graduates, he goes
to the Iowa Writers Workshop, a hotbed for young, talented,
ambitious writers. But David can't quite handle the pressure. Besides,
he isn't sure what he wants to do. He describes

(16:08):
this time as a sort of half awakening.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
I spent one semester there and I was just too
lonely and too scared, So I hustled back to New York.
Had no idea what I wanted to do, other than
I wish I could be an actor. And I went
and I got a job teaching in the yeshiva in Brooklyn.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
And they hadn't heard your Hebrew's cool story.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
They hadn't heard that had I didn't advertise that. But
somewhere in that process I ran into somebody who's who
I told that I want, you know, I really love
to be an actor if I could, And he said,
why don't you go to an open call for the show? Okay,
I didn't know what an open call was. I went
to an open call for this show. I did what

(16:58):
I had to do, and nothing ever came. I was
walking out of the audition and I ran into this
friend of mine from high school, you know, fellow schoolmate,
and he was a theatrical producer, he said, and I
told him that I wanted to be an actor, and
he said, well, let me give you the names of
two two agents. You need an agent. And he gave

(17:21):
me the names of two agents and the name of
a photographer. He said, because you're going to need you're
going to need a head shot. And I said, headshot,
What's I didn't even know what a headshot was but
the agent that he sent me to was somebody who
literally when I when I met him, said okay, we'll
sign you to a contract. And I got a job

(17:43):
as a lead in one and an off Broadway production
right away. And I was in this production for seven months.
And then I you know, lots of things happened right
away as I became a professional actor, and I thought
of this, this is my future. And of course it
was my future so long as everything was handed to

(18:04):
me and it was easy. And then as soon as
you know, after a while, I went out to Hollywood
and got a Hollywood contract right away, but nothing was
really happening. And then after several years, you know, the
jobs didn't start flowing to me like you know, like popcorn.
It it was kind of barren and I didn't know

(18:26):
what I was doing. By then, I had met Jenny,
my women and I who've been married to for sixty
two years, and at one point I decided, well, it's
time for me to become a responsible human being. I
wasn't going to be an actor. I told my wife
that I'm going to go back to graduate school. We
were living together at that time. We weren't married. And

(18:47):
she said, you're going to go to graduate school. He said,
I'm leaving you. She was going to be with an actor.
She wasn't interested in somebody going back to graduate school,
so she left me and I was on my own.
And a few months later, because I was so I
was just so lonely and heartbroken that Jenny had left.

(19:10):
She was from Mexico. I called her in Mexico and
I said, you know, we chit chatted back and forth,
and I said, you want to get married? She said,
what the fuck? Why not? We got married. I mean,
it was as mindless as that, and at the same time,
there was something really deep in it, because here it

(19:32):
is sixty two years later, thirty something years of separation,
through all kinds of hell that we went through, and
she's the closest person in my life and always has been.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
I'm so struck by the ways that you know, our
lives unfold. The you know, the ease with which you
got those early jobs, you know, the relationship with Jenny ending,
and then you know, out of your mouth comes let's
get married, which are exactly the words that changed changed

(20:05):
everything there when you left acting that first time. I'm
thinking about what you said about being in second grade
and being Columbial and how it felt, and also struck
by the way that you were describing, you know, running
around your house with with the towel and the cape
and you know, the fantasy and the entering, the embodying,

(20:29):
entering the internal life of a character of another, especially
when you don't really know what's going on inside yourself
in some way. So I'm wondering when you left acting
whether you experienced that as a loss or did you
like when you describe the loneliness and that that feeling,
was it entirely about Jenny at that time, or were

(20:50):
you also feeling.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Like, now, there's a part of me that's always been
not the exact word, but for as long as I remember,
there's always been a part of me to this day
it feels desolate. And the part of maturing for me,
of growing up was filling in the other side of desolation,

(21:15):
that is understanding the richness and the gift that a
single life brings to you. That is the present moment
for me. It's both a it's a split screen between
desolation and joy, and I don't know how, I don't
know how to quite mix them. I lately, only lately,

(21:38):
And this is strange for a sixties freak. Discovered Leonard Kohn,
the Prince of Gloom, and he's brilliant, and he's nuanced,
and he understands the exact relationship between despair and absolute rapture.

(21:59):
And he doesn't try to fine either. It's just there.
It's present in the music. And I feel like, emotionally,
that's been present in my life from the first memories
I have.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Well, I would wager that maybe it was present in
your life from before the first memories.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
That you have. I'm entirely open to that. I don't
know how that works, but I'm entirely open to it.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
I guess what I mean is the way that we're
formed by what we don't know.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
Yeah, oh yeah sure.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Despite Jenny's initial misgivings, David does go to graduate school,
where he does well doesn't get kicked out. After graduating,
he does a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin,
arriving in Madison in nineteen sixty eight. At this point,
he and Jenny have had their first two children. Their
son is four and their daughter is two. So it's

(22:53):
the late sixties on a college campus and not just
any college campus, but the University of Wisconsin, another high
did a perfect storm for all kinds of protesting, activism
and exploration. David embraces what he calls the craziness.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
I remember in the first I got fired within the
first three months that I was on campus.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
That's a three weeks to pattern here, David.

Speaker 3 (23:18):
Yeah, there. I was four years old again or whatever
it was. I walked into my department chairman's that my
chairman's office one day. And during that year there was
sixty eight I guess because there was a presidential election.
Eldridge Cleaver was running. It was an off candidate for president,

(23:41):
and he was being banned from speaking on different college
campuses because he was a black panther. And I didn't
know this department chairman. From a hole in the wall,
walked into his office. I've got a great idea. I
introduced myself. I'm David Siff, I'm new assistant professor. I said,

(24:04):
why don't we invite Eldridge s Cleaver to speak here?
He said, that's very interesting. Oh, I'll take it under advisement.
Within the next couple of months, there was a faculty
meeting and one of the propositions at that faculty meeting
was to terminate my contract. So at the end of

(24:24):
three years there was no possibility of promotion. That passed.
I knew I was out on my purchase. There were
incredible campus protests over that, real physical protests on campus
about my firing. I was not well enough adjusted emotionally

(24:47):
to go much beyond the fact that, oh, this is
this is such an injustice, this is terrible, and at
the same time, oh my god, it's like it like
I really am Superman. It was a I mean, I
was really I don't want to use the word stupid lightly,

(25:08):
but I really, in retrospect, I was such a stupid
position to place myself in. I was as helpless as
any other of millions of people who were facing these
tidal waves of you know, of war and retribution and

(25:32):
that none of us were going to fix individually. No
less understand But I carried on, like a lot of
other people in that time, as though I understood what
was going on. I didn't. I stayed after I was
fired because by then I was a full blown hippie
with you know, having sky high adventures with acid and

(25:57):
you know whatever. I could smoke and so kids.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Were old enough to have memories of that time and place.
So then you come back to you returned to New York.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
I returned not to New York City. We moved upstate
New York and we moved one rented house after another,
and really beautiful places in Columbia County. My kids, my
two oldest, went to local schools for a year. We
took them out and homeschooled them. Those years seemed like
it was a refuge and at the same time and

(26:33):
it was just it was just being able to live
in the wilderness without feeling pressure to decide anything.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
So in that period of time, you're in your thirties
at this point, what was your emotional state and also
what did you think was next? You're in this kind
of liminal place of like an like you were kind
of in an in between place.

Speaker 3 (26:57):
The war was over, but not the issues that produced it.
I remember during the Wisconsin years having this understanding that
a lot of the political activism that I was so
caught up in was posturing. There was a point when
Tom Hayden came through. He was making a tour of

(27:20):
universities about some day some more, one of the moratorium
days or something, and he gave a speech to selected
activists on campus and his slogan was, if the government
doesn't stop the war, will stop the government. And I thought,
holy shit, what are you talking about, man, That's never

(27:42):
going to happen, and you know, stop stop doing this.
I think I understood, at least subliminally on that level,
that I could I could not sustain myself as the
kind of activist that I had been. And then there
was also in that period shortly after this bomb went off,

(28:02):
blowing up one of the campus buildings, and I had
been really involved in doing a lot of research and
writing about this center and interviewing people at the center.
And I felt very much responsible for what happened, and.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
You felt responsible because you had brought it into kind
of a public life.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
Absolutely, there was a friend of mine and I who
did all of the investigative reporting on this center. I
mean it was really intricate. Was involved and really involved
getting documents and interviewing people who didn't want to be
interviewed and getting them to be willing to talk about stuff.

(28:45):
When the building blew up, I remember we were riding
home from Wisconsin for the summer and we heard this
on the radio, and it was just like, oh my god.
The first thought I had is thank God would there
And then the next thought was, yeah, I'm as responsible
for that as the people who blew the place up,

(29:07):
because I was fomenting for that to get rid of
this place. But I never thought of it in terms
of a bomb. I thought of it in terms of intellect.

Speaker 5 (29:15):
Well, you were exposing it to the campus as an
army math research center.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
Right, that's Maggie David's daughter.

Speaker 5 (29:23):
The university was involved in developing weapons for the Vietnam War. Yeah, exactly,
so you were you were part of an expos but
you weren't involved in the No.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
I wasn't involved in planning to do any physical damage
to the place, but I was very much interested in
seeing this center dismantled. It just didn't get dismantled the
way I was fantasizing her.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah. I keep on thinking about sort of the interplay
between naivete and disillusionment.

Speaker 3 (29:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
I mean you use the word stupidity, and I was thinking, No,
that's harsh. There's like this this naivete about again. What
you can't imagine happening happening or you know, an outcome
that's just totally different from what you can possibly imagine
or fantasize about.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
Yeah, I think naivete is a word that much more accurate,
because I think stupidity is is is a kind of
grandiose term that I would use from the first moment
of discovery of what I wasn't seeing and realizing that
I hadn't seen what I needed to see.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
As David approaches forty, his life has already been marked
by a series of upheavals, disillusionments, reckonings, and unexpected turns

(30:58):
during his time in column A County. He gets another
teaching job, this one at Brooklyn College, but well, he
gets fired from this one too, but as always, he
presses on. It's during this period that a seismic event occurs.
He sees his birth certificate for the first time, a

(31:18):
revelation that will shake loose the pieces of everything he
thought he knew.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
My father had died fairly recently in Maggie. Maggie was
born by then and was ill and was in the
hospital in Hudson, New York. She was in an ice crib.
She was misdiagnosed as having three kidneys turned out not
to be the case. But my father had come up

(31:47):
to Columbia County that weekend and had a heart attack
and was on his way to the hospital in Hudson,
where Maggie was in her ice crib, and on the
way he said his last words was I'm going to
see my granddaughter. And then the next thing was he died.

(32:08):
I didn't have an inkling at that point except a
couple of weeks later ago, within a within less much
less than a month, I had a vivid dream one
night that I was driving along with my father and
it was a beautiful day and he was he was driving,

(32:29):
and he said, there's a storm coming. That was the dream,
and I said we I would never have thought of
the dream again until I found out what was going on,
and then shortly thereafter I began the process that led
to the discovery.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
And why were you undergoing that process?

Speaker 3 (32:50):
Because I was. I was still in my hippie years
and I was very much interested in getting an astrology
chart and I needed to get an exact birth time
for the rising sign. And the only birth certificate I had,
said birth certificate for day was nothing on it, and

(33:11):
I asked my mother what time was I born and
she said she gave me some time, and I asked
her a sister, my aunt. She said a totally different time.
And I said, this isn't going to work. I can't
do my chart, so I'm not thinking anything. I went
down to the Department of Health in New York City
to get you an original birth certificate. They gave me one.

(33:36):
I looked at it and it had a I don't
even remember if it had a time on it, but
two weeks later. It took two weeks for me to
see this. On the top of that birth certificate was
certificate of birth by adoption, and that sort of detonated
something inside. So when my mother came up for a weekend,

(33:59):
I said, MA, let's go down. I want to talk
to you about something. And I showed her this birth
certificate and she said, oh that, And I said, what
do you mean? Oh? That? Said? You know your father,
he wants to cross every T and dot every eye.

(34:19):
You were born before we were married, and so when
we got married, in order for you to know, in
order to convert your birth certificate, we had to adopt you.
And I thought Okay, this doesn't quite make sense, but

(34:40):
I'll take it in. I don't remember exactly the thing
that made me aware. I kept questioning my mother, and
at one point she sort of threw up her hands
and said, of course you know who your father is.
And at that point I was sitting out in the
back and this uncle of mine was walking across the

(35:01):
lawn in this place they had in the country, with
a bag of garbage over his shoulders, and I thought, oh,
my god, not Uncle Morty. And she said, your father's
van Heflin. And I couldn't process that. I wanted to

(35:23):
accept it, but then there were all kinds of things
going through my head that I looked nothing like my father,
and I just didn't quite believe her story. And I remember,
I don't know how I managed to what it was
I said that triggered her saying, oh, of course you
know who your father is.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
It's the quality of her saying well, of course, you know.
I mean, that's there's no of course here.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
You know, she gave up something she had been holding
on to for forty years, and I think the secret
for her was as much life defining as it was
for me and for my father. I mean they both
lived with that and made decisions and choices and about

(36:13):
conforming to the secret rather than conforming to what their
hearts wanted.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
Where does that go? What do you do with that?

Speaker 3 (36:22):
She was more questioning about, well did he know? Did
you tell him? And she said, I never said a
word to him about it. You were my child. I
didn't have to tell him. And her sister said, Eleanor
I was right there when you called him and told
him so.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
By and by him, you mean Van Heflin. Van Heflin,
for the uninitiated, Van Hefflin was a well known actor,
an Academy Award winner who played opposite Judy Garland, Lana Turner,
Katherine Hepburn, and many others. He had roles in iconic
films such as Shane three, ten to Yuma, and worked

(37:07):
steadily throughout the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties and sixties. David's forty.
Now he and Jenny have an eight and ten year
old Ivan, and Ellen and baby Maggie, and now his
mother has casually dropped into conversation that Van Heflin is
his father. It's a lot, it's world rocking. In fact, it.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
Sort of undid whatever I thought was reliable in my
relationship with my mother. I mean that there were other
small episodes, like I drove her up to our house
for dinner one night, and she was a widow living
alone and at a clear blue sky. While we were
driving along, she said, I just want you to know something.

(37:54):
If you change your name to Heflin, I'll never talk
to you for as long as I live. What are
you talking. I've never said anything about changing my name
to Halflin. I never thought about it, but that was
in her mind. There was part of the secret that
she was wrestling with.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
Misattributed paternity stories are now common. Of course, the advent
of inexpensive recreational DNA tests have made these discoveries epidemic,
and it is also common that secrecy surrounds these stories.
David could have easily spent his entire life not knowing
the truth had he not taken an interest in his

(38:39):
astrological chart.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
All I know is I'm glad I found out, you know,
when I was trying to track down his family and
I met some of them. I met his sister. His
sister lived here in New York, and I had written
her a letter. She said, come and visit us, and
I walked into this Upper West Side apartment. She was

(39:03):
an actress and she worked all for a long time
on a daytime soap. And I could tell from the
moment I walked into their apartment that they were not
exactly believers. You know. They were looking at me up
and down in the same way I was looking at
them up and down, trying to say, is there any
family resemblance here? I don't see any family resemblance. And

(39:24):
she was the same thing. And she when we finished,
I don't think I spent more than a half an
hour with them. She walked me out to the elevator
and she didn't say anything. Before I got onto the elevator,
she turned she said, well, I'll tell you one thing.
You do have the Hefflin hands. And I went down

(39:45):
that elevator ride say I have the Hefflin hands. And
it was like, it's like, I believe you, And all
the while underneath that was I don't know if this
is so.

Speaker 2 (39:55):
Or not right, because in a way it was so
upending when your mother told you that too could have
been a fabrication.

Speaker 3 (40:07):
Yeah, she told me a story about there. You know,
I tried to talk to her about their relationship. I
knew at the time that she was spinning something around
the cotton candy, but it wasn't real. And she said,
we had this wonderful relationship. We read James Stevens Crock
of Gold together and I said, this.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
Is a a crold.

Speaker 3 (40:31):
And I had no idea what her relationship was. It
could have been anything from a one night stand to
something that lasted a short while, and that was really
intense for her and for him. You know, you know,
as soon as I'm moving on to the next big gig,
that's it for this lady.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
I never knew in the immediate aftermath or the next
couple of years, as you're metabolizing this new identity in
a certain way, or this identity, this reshuffling of memory
and of the past and rethinking things, what is this

(41:08):
next period of time like for you and Maggie. I
want to bring you in and ask about your experience
of your dad when you were little and what you knew,
what you knew about this story that Washy was never
a secret for you as you were growing up.

Speaker 6 (41:29):
Right, I just always I knew it to be true.

Speaker 5 (41:34):
Well, I mean, when I was growing up he had
gone back to acting. So my earliest memories of my
father are of seeing him on stage. So I have
these sort of early core memories that were very significant,
and I think him being on stage did have a

(41:55):
charge for all of us because it was new. Like
the first thing I remember seeing was mister Roberts. Is
that what it was called.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
I was doing a number of regional theater things. Mister
Roberts was one.

Speaker 6 (42:07):
Of them in North Carolina, and I remember must have.

Speaker 5 (42:11):
Been little, I don't I don't know, maybe five or six,
but I remember he walked downstage as mister Roberts and
he found me in the audience and he winked at me,
and then he carried on and I was so shocked
that he was both somebody else and my father. He

(42:32):
broke the fourth wall there, you did, but very very subtly,
very sneakily, and and you know, I'll just never forget
the like the electricity that I felt in that moment
and and the real fascination that it instantaneously gave me.
There was also a goat in that play.

Speaker 6 (42:51):
There was a live.

Speaker 5 (42:52):
Animal in that play, and I remember the animal Pete
on stage, and that was another moment where I was like,
this animal is pete, what is going on?

Speaker 2 (42:59):
Like it's real?

Speaker 5 (43:00):
Well, it's not real, it's you know, And the whole
thing was very like electrifying. And then you did another play,
The Dining Room, and I remember I came and visited
you for like a week, and I must have been
about eight at the time, and there was another child
of another actor who was there, and I was there
for several days, and by the end of the week

(43:20):
that I was there, me and this other kid knew
the entire play by heart, and we would re enact
it for our parents. So it's just like, you know,
all of that that was what I grew up with.
But you know, by the time I was two or three,
we'd moved back to the Bronx, and I lived in
the same place my entire childhood, and you know, my
father was acting for the first part of that, and

(43:42):
then he fell out of that into sports writing, which
was a whole other chapter. But we were in one place,
and I had this feeling of I felt like I
had missed the boat. I felt like my family had
had all these amazing things happened to them, all these
amazing adventures they'd lived through the sixty and the Vietnam
War and this revelation that upbended everything and exploded everything,

(44:06):
and they'd had all these experiences together, and I was
living this really boring life, you know, sort of having
this like steady, this more or less steady childhood that
you know, didn't have a lot of financial security. But
my sister, who was ten years older than me, was
sort of like a second mom, and she was really

(44:27):
charged with taking care of me because you went on tour.
There was a year long tour that he went on
with a Neil Simon play, and so you know, my
sister was really like picking me up from school every day.
She would pick me up from nursery school and then
kindergarten and helping my mom raise me. So I had
like an extra parent. I think for my brother and sister,

(44:48):
like moving back to the city was really like a
rupture for them. I think they had a lot of ruptures,
and I don't think they necessarily loved living in the city.
But for me, it was just everything I knew, and
it was it was very stable.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
Didn't They also grow up in their early years with
a relationship to Benjamin Sith as their grandfather, and then
learning yeah, and Ben and Ellenor biologically that he wasn't.

Speaker 5 (45:13):
Ben and Eleanor were a huge part of their childhood life,
and I have no memory of Ben and Eleanor. Eleanor
died when I was in the third grade, when I
was nine, but she had been very sick for most
of my childhood, so I have no memory of her.
She had a brain tumor, so it was something that

(45:34):
you know over the years. The last ten years of
her life, which was my childhood, she was pretty much
a nonverbal for most of what I remember of her.
I remember as being a very loving presence, and I
remember loving her, but I don't remember ever really being
able to communicate with her. And I have no memory
of Ben. So they were already gone. But for my
brother and sister, they had this house in the country.

(45:56):
We all called it the ranch Us and the cousins,
and we would go there every weekend and it was
a real place of refuge for all of us, but
especially for my brother and sister and Ben. I don't
think they have any memories of him having a temper.
He was just like a real doting grandfather.

Speaker 3 (46:13):
He was right.

Speaker 6 (46:14):
They were very, very.

Speaker 5 (46:16):
Loving grandparents, and so I think for them that rupture
was also like he's not my grandfather were mad at
our grandmother?

Speaker 4 (46:25):
Why?

Speaker 5 (46:26):
Like you you know, I think you I think it
just it just caused so much distortion and and chaos.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
And that was absolutely part of the earthquake because the
impact on both of them was just profound. My oldest
daughter's sense of security really came through her grandparents in
that place they had, and that was just taken out
from under her like a tablecloth done by a magician.

Speaker 5 (46:53):
And I think, like I felt, I felt the unease
between my father and some of the older relatives in
the family. I think I think after Eleanor and Ben
were gone, there was still kind of a lingering discomfort.
You know, I would say that you had with maybe
Harriet Morty, and you know, our relationship to the ranch

(47:16):
and those cousins, and you know, there's sort of this
feeling of like do we belong do we not belong?
Although you know, Daniel and his family lived near us
in the Rocks, and yeah, we saw them every weekend,
and like you know, that side of the family, there's
been and Eleanor were always and are still our closest

(47:37):
family here in the city.

Speaker 6 (47:38):
There are you know, there are people you know.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
So in the fullness of time that feeling of I'm guessing.
I mean, you never had that feeling of rupture. But
for your brother and sister there was that feeling, and
of course, David, for you, there was that feeling tremendously
of who are we to each other? If we have
lived our whole lives together in one story and then

(48:06):
the story changes. Yeah, how much, if anything, did knowing
or suspecting or sort of half believing that Van Heflin
was your biological father did that play into your returning
to acting.

Speaker 3 (48:21):
I think it played an enormous part in my returning
to acting, because I think it was It was like
a gesture that was taken in both with passion and
with blindness. It was the only thing I could do
to give myself some sense of being who I was.

(48:42):
I had no idea who I was at that point.
Being an actor connected one part of my life to
this next part of my life, and it connected me too, well,
that's my biological father. That I see that connection. When
I started going over the photographs of him and his movies,

(49:06):
I not only looked for for well, can I see
something in his face and his gestures that are like
I concocted all kinds of similarities that may or may
not have been there. The plots of his movies were
ones that I entered into us though. That was that
was who he was, and that connects to who I am.

(49:27):
And I remember there's one movie he plays a character
named David, and.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
I said, ah, unusual name.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
Right. You know if you get hit by a huge
ocean wave and you're just up in the air with
all of that, now, that's that's the feeling that I had.
Through all of that, I couldn't make sense of any
of it. So I was grasping at anything that would
give me some sense of, well, this is coherent. And
acting seemed coherent for me, not just because of the

(49:58):
because of my ball logical father was an actor, but
because I had done that. It felt it was authentic
for me. And there is a part of me that
was then an actor. It always will be an actor.
I mean, I just in some way I chickened out,
and in some way I came up against how hard

(50:21):
the the profession really is and what I was and
wasn't prepared to do for it. And as with a
lot of things in my life. I wasn't prepared to
do everything for it some but not everything to a point. Right.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
It's interesting too that because you already had had a
first career as an actor, it seems to me that
it would have been like a connection to like the
you who didn't know somehow knew, you know, not new,
but again the unthought known, the you who didn't know,

(50:57):
and then the you who then knows. It's a way
of stitching together those two use.

Speaker 3 (51:05):
Yeah, very much. So. I think that there's a way
in which we attach to the things we don't know
at some point in our lives in a way that
seems to there is a kind of sense to it,
but it's ultimately inexplicable the way that that stitching happens.
But it does happen.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
We'll be right back. A little girl watches her father

(51:49):
on stage, a deft wink, a feeling of magic, specialness,
a wide open world, a door through which Maggie walks.
It's impossible to separate out those early core memories from
the end result, which is that Maggie becomes an actor.
Would it have happened anyway or was it absolutely formative

(52:13):
or was it in her father's genes, her grandfather's genes,
and her own.

Speaker 5 (52:20):
We look back and we can connect all the dots,
but we can't actually go back to that point and
connect the dots fast forward, you know what I mean.

Speaker 6 (52:30):
I can connect all the dots.

Speaker 5 (52:32):
Back to those moments, for sure. I think I have
an experience of myself as in some way always having
known I was an actor. And I think that's an
unusual feeling, you know, Like I think there was some
part of me that always understood that's where I was
headed from.

Speaker 6 (52:50):
The time I was.

Speaker 4 (52:53):
Early on too.

Speaker 5 (52:54):
But I also think there's a part of me that
was very open, you know, like, and I couldn't see
very far ahead.

Speaker 6 (53:01):
I remember as a kid always feeling like when I
think about my.

Speaker 5 (53:04):
Future, I felt like a wall in front of me,
Like I was like, wow, I really can't see it.
But I also had this feeling of drive towards something
like performing. But I really cared to be a good student.
I mean, I think the benefit of how I grew
up and the stories all on the table, you know,

(53:25):
the stories of who you know you're, the true paternity,
and the whatever you look off in that direction, and
there's sort of old Hollywood. But then you look off
in the Ben and eleanor direction or Ben Siff, and
he's like, you know, his father was a Russian revolutionary,
and these Jewish intellectuals, and you having had a life
in academia, and I really cared about school.

Speaker 6 (53:47):
I really cared.

Speaker 5 (53:47):
About learning, and I went to like a math and
science high school, and I was encouraged to go to
college and that there would be time to do everything.

Speaker 6 (53:54):
And I so.

Speaker 5 (53:55):
You know, I feel like there were there was mythology
in every direction I looked that was interesting to me.
None of it was really emotionally fraught for me, Like
I think, I can't imagine my brother or sister choosing
to be an actor, you know, Like I think having
grown up through all of that chaos and then maybe
the rupture of the family, and you know, I don't

(54:18):
think they would ever choose to step into that. But
where I land in the family, it all just looks
so interesting to me, you know. And I'm also the
youngest by a lot, and I grew up in a
very stable way, so I just had the freedom to
choose and to try and to move forward. And then
I also think the experience and the narrative around my

(54:41):
father's like two goes at it. I think there was
a part of me that it was also has always
been sort of very determined, like, well, this is the
path I've chosen, and I'm going to stick to it.
You know, even if there would have been other things
available to me, I really always strongly had the feeling
that that I just want to see I want to
see something through, you know, like I really want to

(55:03):
see it through.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
I'm guessing you were never kicked out of any schools. No, No,
you know, it's striking me what you said about you know,
the narratives weren't fraught for you. I think that that's
so key when it comes to family secrets, when it
comes to you know, the things that we hold and
the ease or the difficulty with which we hold them.

(55:26):
That these weren't fraught narratives for you. They were stories.
You didn't have to struggle to determine how true they
were or how not true they were, or how they
would how all those dots would connect. I mean, it's interesting,
but that wasn't the way that you were holding those stories,
because they weren't painful for you.

Speaker 5 (55:44):
Yeah, I think at the same time, I will say,
you know, my mother was also an actor as a
young woman, Like when my parents met, she had moved
to New York from Mexico, and she was an actress
and she she left it very very quickly. And she
always said that she had a dream. She said, she
had a dream one night that there was a dragon

(56:06):
flying around destroying the world. And he turned to her
and he said, and if you're not careful, I'll destroy you.
And she woke up from the dream and she knew
that she didn't have it in her to be that
kind of a performer. And you know, also that's another
myth right that I sort of grew up with. But
she and my father really loved that I was an actor.

(56:27):
Like and from the time I was little, they loved
seeing what I did. They were always the smartest people
in the room.

Speaker 6 (56:34):
You know.

Speaker 5 (56:34):
I always I cared so much what they thought, and
I trusted them, and they loved the form, and they
delighted in me doing what I did, and you know.

Speaker 6 (56:45):
And that was really that was also really bolstering.

Speaker 5 (56:48):
And I think I think a lot of artists don't
grow up with that kind of support. But I think
I think both you and Mom really really took a
kind of put pleasure in it, and that was helpful.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
It's interesting too that because you didn't really have meaningful
relationships with your grandparents, meaning with Benjamin and Eleanor, there
wasn't a loss there either, or even the anger that
we've been talking about, right, the anger toward Eleanor or
the sense of betrayal.

Speaker 5 (57:19):
Eleanor had a sister, Harriet, was my great aunt, Harriet,
and I remember when Eleanor died, Harriet and Morty told
me that they would be my grandparents, and they were.
My father had a bit of a fraud relationship with them,
but they really reached out to me and like let
me know, and it felt like an extension of ben
and Eleanor that they loved me and that they would

(57:42):
be that to me. And they were like they took
me on vacation with them, and.

Speaker 6 (57:47):
You know, they were very loving to me.

Speaker 5 (57:49):
At the same time that I could feel some of
the tension that lived between you and them. So I
feel like I got this in loco grand parentis from
my great aunt and uncle on that side. I think
that family was, for all of their secrets and dysfunction,
very committed to being family, very committed to being loving.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Van Heflin died four or five years before David makes
his discovery, so of course contacting Van directly isn't an option.
But David thinks, what about his family? What about his kids?
His other kids?

Speaker 3 (58:34):
I of course wanted to find out about who he
was and what kind of family there was. And I
knew there were these siblings or half siblings. There was
a sister who was still alive.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
Were they close in age to you?

Speaker 3 (58:49):
Pretty close? Yeah, The youngest was about ten years younger,
but the oldest sister was just about three or four
years younger, and the middle sister was six or seven.
And then that whole process of discovery was something that

(59:10):
it happened quickly, but it also happened before the Internet,
So there really is a difference in the way you
piece things together. And I tried to piece things together
sort of in the way that I did when I
was finding out about the Army Math Research Center. I mean,
it was investigative reporting more than anything.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
What did that entail? The investigative reporting.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
Going through any publication I could find that described Van Heflin,
his family, who my half siblings were, where they lived,
the miserable little town in Oklahoma that the Heflins came from.
I knew all of that before I actually sat down

(59:57):
with his sister for the first time. So that there
was a part of me that was emotionally scrambled when
I was going through this, and another part of me
that was almost sort of ruthlessly methodically trying to piece
all of this together in some coherent puzzle. I never

(01:00:18):
got rid of the sense that my life was just
simply almost incomprehensible to me. Like I was raised as
a Jewish kid in the in the Bronx, and a
sort of it was a sort of hostile environment that
I grew up in. And lo and behold, I discover
in my biological father that his family didn't come over

(01:00:41):
on the Mayflower. They came over shortly thereafter. I'm a
Jew from the Bronx. He's a gooy from Oklahoma. How
do you piece those three things together? But half of
me is not Jewish?

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Is that something that occurred to you right away?

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
Right away? Yeah, right away, because you know that part
of me where I was grown out of Hebrew School,
was a part of me that didn't want to be Jewish,
you know, at the time I felt ashamed of that
because it was to me just cowardice, not wanting to
stand up as a Jew. And later on, you know,

(01:01:16):
it's sort of stitch stitches together this part of me
that no half of me is not Jewish, and I
couldn't piece that together in any coherent way until I
found out what was really there. And so now I
can be much more at peace with myself as a Jew,
and also at peace with myself as you know, the
part that's a non Jew. And so I think the

(01:01:40):
medium for me is being a Buddhist. That's will makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
So interesting. I'm just flashing back to you know, the
kid making the cross in Hebrew school behind the back
of your of your Hebrew school teacher, or the young
man you know teaching at a yeshiva. Look, I could
so easily be accused of of having a prejudice toward nature,
which I actually really don't. I think the being formed
in all of these different ways, the being formed by

(01:02:08):
who you believe yourself to be, who you believed your
father to be, also having this lurking secret also a
year and a half spence in an orphanage that is like,
it's so in the shadows of being able to grasp.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
Part of my research too, because I researched that part.

Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
Tell me about that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
I went through all of the publications I could find,
also including photographs from the inside of that institution. So
I saw there's one photograph that I remember in meticular
where the infants were laid out. They were laid out
in a room where rows of them were in these cribs,

(01:02:47):
and I was one of those infants in a crib
in that room. So that made me see, well, yeah,
that was part of my life. I have no memory
of that, but I have that photograph.

Speaker 5 (01:03:00):
Do you remember you also found the file about your
mother sort of There was a file that you found
that described how she had a campaign within her family
to win them to they would she would bring her
family to visit her.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I was going to
be brought home as a She was going.

Speaker 5 (01:03:23):
To make them all fault, She was making them all
fall in love with you so they would let her
take you home.

Speaker 6 (01:03:27):
And she succeeded.

Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
And wasn't it that she I mean, she had an elaborate,
you know, sort of lie to the public to explain
the producing of this infant. I mean she she sort
of had it all worked out.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
She had everything worked out. There was a relative in
the family who was a doctor, and he's the one
who provided her with the phony excuse for the you know,
her pal and high school. He was going to provide
information that she was away in Buffalo at the point

(01:04:04):
when she was in New York conceiving this child.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
And what was that going to do, the Buffalo alibi.

Speaker 3 (01:04:11):
It was going to allow her to have a child
in New York City and Saint Elizabeth's Hospital without the
rest of the family knowing. And of course they all
did know. You know, her mother knew her, her mother's
sister knew.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Although memory itself is it's an ever shifting landscape. I mean,
our memories are part imagination, part memory, yep, and also
are connected very much to where we are in our
lives now and what we remember.

Speaker 6 (01:04:38):
The story is I remember it just to get real
Rajamon about it.

Speaker 5 (01:04:42):
But the stories I remember it is that she got
pregnant and they hid it from her.

Speaker 6 (01:04:48):
Father, right, and they told her that's it, that's it.

Speaker 5 (01:04:51):
They told him that she had TV right and that
she had.

Speaker 3 (01:04:54):
To go to it and she had to get to
Buffalo to a sanatorium and him to recover.

Speaker 6 (01:04:58):
Meanwhile, she was sent to live on the.

Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
Lower East Side with the on ninety fourth.

Speaker 6 (01:05:02):
Street, where she came determined, she came.

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):
Determined, she gave birth, and my grandfather was kept out
of the loop because it would destroy him.

Speaker 6 (01:05:12):
But my question is did he ever come to know?

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
Of course he knew, I mean he knew that. My
memory of my mother's father was he was an extremely
loving man, and he knew me as his grandson, and
I had no question that he was my grandfather. He was.
He was one of those people who I just knew

(01:05:36):
was my family. Same with my grandmother, who campaigned all
of them. Oh god, I don't know what they were
like before I actually was taken into the family. My
grandmother certainly wanted me adopted, adopted out out away, not

(01:05:58):
part of, not part of all of this. Same with
my great aunt. My great aunt was my grandmother's sister,
and both of them were really loving presences in my life,
and I believe their love was absolutely genuine, and I
think they're wanting to give me away was just as genuine.

(01:06:19):
And when I stitched the two different sides together, well
that's the way life works, and that's I accept that.
That's part. That's true.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
And your aunt Harriet, she's the one who at some
point said to your mother in front of you, you
know I was there when you called him. Yeah right,
so yeah, so she always she always knew. Yeah. Over
many years, David finds some equilibrium and begins to make

(01:06:50):
peace with the earthquake, the truth of his paternity, and
the circumstances of his early childhood. He processes the story
by writing about it in his memoir. He also gets sober.
He hasn't had a drink in twenty two years.

Speaker 3 (01:07:06):
I think part of the equilibrium came from sobriety, which
to me is just simply a word for being able
to see more clearly than when your mind is clouded
with either a substance or a fantasy, being able to
see other people than yourself, seeing what they went through,

(01:07:27):
feeling for them, which I don't think I was able
to do when I first found this out, and certainly
through most of the years that I was not sober,
I didn't have much feeling beyond myself except for my children,
and sobriety was really the has been a source of
equilibrium for me or coming to equilibrium and still is

(01:07:52):
It's not over and done with it. Just as I
will always be an alcoholic is the process of sobriety
will going to be my constant work. Doesn't whatever else
I do, that's a constant piece of my work.

Speaker 2 (01:08:06):
This is probably an impossible question to answer, but do
you connect the earthquake of the Discovery and it's sequel
and its impact on you with beginning to drink alcoholically
or do you think that was coming for you anyway?

Speaker 3 (01:08:25):
Well, I think that certainly precipitated it, but I think
it was always there because it was it was in
my genes. I mean I wasn't I'm not the only
one in that line who had problems.

Speaker 2 (01:08:38):
With alcohol in which line my.

Speaker 3 (01:08:41):
Paternal line, on the other hand, my mother loved her
whiskey sours, so who knows where it all came. But
I think on my paternal side that was that was
a real problem.

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
So this equilibrium, it's one of those words like closure.
It's a fantasy.

Speaker 3 (01:09:00):
It's a fantasy word.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
We'll use it since we don't have a better one
in terms.

Speaker 3 (01:09:04):
Of fine balancing on the seesaw.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
Yeah, well that's I like that and there's also that
sense of the ongoing metabolizing of something that can never
fully be digested. So I'm really interested in the way
that you both metabolized this. Took it on as part

(01:09:28):
of your identity that Van Heflin was your biological father,
and yet we're always a little bit not one thousand
percent certain. When you described having your half sisters, your
biological half sister, saying you have the Van Hefflin hands
and the oh I do the searching for those clues,

(01:09:51):
it went.

Speaker 3 (01:09:51):
Away because I think the equilibrium for me is the
awareness as fully as I can have awareness that Benjamin H.
Was my father, and I love and miss him. I
don't love and miss Van Hefflin more and well, over

(01:10:12):
the years, I really came to do as much investigating
about Ben's life as Van Heflin's life, and his life
moved me far more than whatever I ever found out
about Van. Recently, I had it around for a while.
I discovered a short story he wrote about his a

(01:10:37):
child in Russia during the Civil War, a Jewish kid
running from a village to village when the Red Army
would come through, followed by the White Army, and they
would say any Jews around and they would take out
somebody and shoot them. And he has this it's just
it's almost it's like a ten page story. It's brilliant.

(01:11:00):
My father was a wonderful writer. He emotionally was not
very curious, but he was a brilliant observer and he
really described what a Russian village was like for a
little terrified kid who is Jewish. The piece will be
published at some point. I know that my oldest daughter

(01:11:20):
has got that now and she's determined to get the
thing published. And it's a knockout. It's a real piece
of work and made me wonder about As a lawyer,
he wrote appeals briefs and as legal right. I mean,
I don't know the law very well, but his writing

(01:11:42):
as a lawyer was very succinct. His thoughts were clear,
and that little short story that I saw the same
kind of clarity as there, except that the emotional clarity
is there as well. And it's the one point in
his life where I can think that emotional clarity was

(01:12:03):
one hundred percent with him, and it was like at
other points for the and knowing him as my father,
no emotional clarity was not his strong point.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
And yet in terms of emotional clarity. You felt that
he had emotional clarity when it came to you, Yes,
and his love for you.

Speaker 3 (01:12:23):
Yes, that was acquired. He acquired that over the years.
But ultimately I knew that he loved me, and he
did not. He did not separate. In the beginning, he
might have separated me out from his firstborn. By the
end of his life, he did not. I was part
of the Mitschburch.

Speaker 2 (01:12:44):
Do you think that he knew about van Heflin?

Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
Oh, he knew. I am not one hundred percent certain.
I'm ninety five percent certain that he would have known
the whole story. But this five percent of me that
doesn't know that.

Speaker 5 (01:12:58):
Ooh, there's no way to I know all these things
that are just lost to time. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:03):
Yeah, there's no one who's no relative around who can
tell me either.

Speaker 2 (01:13:11):
In the Sliding Doors version of David's life, there's a
world in which he never finds any of this out.
I mean, he needed his rising sign for his astrological chart.
This secret could have just floated invisibly through his life
and the lives of his children, leaving puzzling and invisible
damage in its wake. When David found his birth certificate

(01:13:35):
and learned the truth of his paternity of Van Heflin.
It was many years before twenty three and meters and
ancestry dot com existed. Now millions of people have made
these discoveries. Now these kinds of secrets are no longer possible.
Someday soon secrets will be seen, like raydon or plastic

(01:13:56):
or cigarette smoking as just a bad idea. But there
is still one little question mark, because even though all
signs lead to Van Heflin, there isn't actual proof, and
proof would be comforting in such an upended world.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
Years ago, I did a twenty three and mes thing
and I forgot about it. Nothing interesting turned up from it.
In the last month or two, I looked at the
twenty three and me thing again and then I realized that, oh,
all along, I had this lurking suspicion that maybe Van

(01:14:40):
Heflin wasn't my father. I didn't know who my father was.

Speaker 5 (01:14:43):
I was like, we don't even really know if this
is true. I don't even really know if this guy
is my grandfather, my father's father, like for sure, for sure.
And I went to my father and I said, it's like,
what percentage chance do you think it is that Van
Heflin is not your biological father, and you said twenty
five percent chance.

Speaker 6 (01:15:05):
That was a month ago.

Speaker 5 (01:15:06):
And then we were on the phone and he was
looking at his twenty three and meters page because he
had done it a few years ago, during which time
he discovered that he had a lot of like Scottish
English ancestry that seemed to correlate with you know, that
family's tree Irish Irish. And then I said, well, have
you ever looked on the little tab that shows you
who you're related to? And he was like, what what

(01:15:28):
are you talking about? I said, can you just go
to the page? You went to the page. I was like,
do you see any tab that says relatives? And he said, oh, yeah,
there it is, and he clicked on it and there
was a half niece from the Hefflin side.

Speaker 3 (01:15:43):
There was the daughter of the one of my half.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
Sisters shows up as your half He shows up.

Speaker 3 (01:15:50):
The closest relative that I have.

Speaker 5 (01:15:51):
Yeah, And so it was like, oh, okay, a question asked.

Speaker 6 (01:15:55):
And answered vanished. But all all my life, it's.

Speaker 5 (01:16:01):
Never really mattered, you know, like our family as our family,
Ben and eleanor are our grandparents, you know, it always
existed in my life as sort of like some backdrop
mythology possibility, you know, And but I find the proof
of its sort of comforting, just because it's.

Speaker 6 (01:16:23):
Good to know.

Speaker 5 (01:16:24):
It's good to fill in some of the blanks. It's
good to not be wondering. I felt happy for you, Dad,
actually that is.

Speaker 3 (01:16:33):
I felt relief of that, even though I told myself
I've made peace with all of this when I found oh,
there's the actual proof.

Speaker 5 (01:16:41):
But in terms of like you know, Benjamin h is
somebody who imprinted himself on you, who you've imprinted on us,
You know that that reality is more real than whatever
the biology is, and whatever the biology is is ultimately
a mystery too, you know, like who knows how genes work,

(01:17:04):
how talent works, why we pursue things Like sometimes I think,
I mean, I think I've always felt like what I
do and why I do it is sort of from
within me, And then I have moments where I'm like, God,
maybe it has nothing to do with me, and it's
all conditioning and genetics.

Speaker 6 (01:17:20):
But there's no way to know, you know that.

Speaker 5 (01:17:23):
It's so those things are almost impossible to parse out
in oneself.

Speaker 2 (01:17:28):
Right, which is kind of wonderful. There's a freedom in
that at a certain point of you know, containing multitudes,
holding all of it.

Speaker 5 (01:17:40):
I have an eleven year old daughter, and I had
a moment the other day thinking about mothers and daughters.

Speaker 6 (01:17:48):
I was thinking about my mother's line.

Speaker 5 (01:17:49):
Actually, I was thinking about my relationship with my mother
and her relationship with her mother, and her mother's relationship
with her mother, and the singularity of all these mother
relationships and how even though you lose your knowledge of
who your ancestors are, the relationship of mother daughter, I
can think back to all of that mythology and connect

(01:18:11):
it all the way up, and that's very comforting. But
the static in your father son relationship, you know, that's like,
I just it's sad that that static was there for
so long and that there's this.

Speaker 3 (01:18:27):
You know, well, the secret dominated what my family was
for so long. The secret defined who we all were.

Speaker 2 (01:18:36):
That's exactly it.

Speaker 3 (01:18:38):
Yeah. I forget which of the Buddhist masters said this,
but I think it's sort of common in Buddhist teaching
that at one point or another you were someone's father, mother, brother, sister,
and uncle. Because they go through former lives and I

(01:18:58):
mean all of that is you. You, in a sense, are
not only imagining the life that's in front of you.
You are that life. It's in every person you encounter.
You are part of that life.

Speaker 4 (01:19:12):
You are that life.

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acre
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

(01:19:53):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this
pot podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.

Speaker 1 (01:20:22):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.