The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) by Douglas Kennedy Page B

the fellow in the Army uniform looked even younger). And the big talk in the room was of that romantic notion called the Limitless Future. Because winning the war also meant that we’d finally defeated that economic enemy called The Depression. The Peace Dividend was coming. Good times were ahead. We thought we had a divine right to good times. We were Americans, after all. This was our century.

Even my brother Eric believed in the realm of American possibility … and he was what our father called ‘a Red’. I always told Father that he was judging his son far too harshly - because Eric was really more of an old fashioned Progressive. Being Eric, he was also a complete romantic - someone who idolized Eugene Debs, subscribed to The Nation when he was sixteen, and dreamed about being the next Clifford Odets. That’s right - Eric was a playwright. After he graduated from Columbia in ‘37, he found work as an assistant stage manager with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, and had a couple of plays produced by assorted Federal Theater Workshops around New York. This was the time when Roosevelt’s New Deal actually subsidized non-profit drama in America - so there was plenty of employment opportunities for ‘theater workers’ (as Eric liked to call himself), not to mention lots of small theater companies willing to take a chance on young dramatists like my brother. None of the plays he had performed ever hit the big time. But he wasn’t ever aiming for Broadway. He always said that his work was ‘geared for the needs and the aspirations of the working man’ (like I said, he really was a romantic). And I’ll be honest with you - as much as I loved, adored, my older brother, his three-hour epic drama about a 1902 union dispute on the Erie-Lakawana Railroad wasn’t exactly a toe-tapper.

Still, as a playwright, he did think big. Sadly, his kind of drama (that whole Waiting for Lefty sort of thing) was dead by the start of the forties. Orson Welles went to Hollywood. So too did Clifford Odets. The Federal Theater Project was accused of being Communist by a handful of dreadful small-minded congressmen, and was finally closed down in ‘39. Which meant that, in 1945, Eric was paying the rent as a radio writer. At first he scripted a couple of episodes of Boston Blackie. But the producer fired him off the show after he wrote an installment where the hero investigated the death of a labor organizer. He’d been murdered on the orders of some big-deal industrialist - who, as it turned out, bore more than a passing resemblance to the owner of the radio network on which Boston Blackie was broadcast. I tell you, Eric couldn’t resist mischief … even if it did hurt his career. And he did have a terrific sense of humor. Which is how he was able to pick up his newest job: as one of the gag writers on Stop or Go: The Quiz Bang Show, hosted every Sunday night at eight thirty by Joe E. Brown. I’d wager anything that nobody under the age of seventy-five now remembers Joe E. Brown. And with good reason. He made Jerry Lewis appear subtle.

Anyway, the party was in Eric’s place on Sullivan Street: a narrow one-bedroom railroad apartment which, like Eric himself, always struck me as the height of bohemian chic. The bathtub was in the kitchen. There were lamps made from Chianti bottles. Ratty old floor cushions were scattered around the living room. Hundreds of books were stacked everywhere. Remember: this was the forties … still way before the beatnik era in the Village. So Eric was something of a man ahead of his time - especially when it came to wearing black turtlenecks, and hanging out with Delmore Schwartz and the Partisan Review crowd, and smoking Gitanes, and dragging his kid sister to hear this new-fangled thing called Bebop at some club on 52nd Street. In fact, just a couple of weeks before his Thanksgiving party, we were actually present in some Broadway dive when a sax player named Charles Parker took the stage with four