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On Martha’s Vineyard, the Jews are WASPs too

An excerpt from Lucinda Franks’ Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me

by
Lucinda Franks
September 16, 2014
Edgartown Harbor Lighthouse in Marthas Vineyard. (Shutterstock)
Edgartown Harbor Lighthouse in Marthas Vineyard. (Shutterstock)

In Timeless: Love, Morgenthau and Me, journalist Lucinda Franks tells the story of her unlikely yet intensely durable marriage to longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau—a man 27 years her senior. When they met in the early 1970s, she was a young radical who had cut her journalistic teeth—and won a Pulitzer Prize—writing about a member of the Weathermen who accidentally killed herself while assembling a bomb. Morgenthau—already the scion of one of America’s leading political dynasties—was about to begin his history-making 35-year tenure as District Attorney for New York County. Franks makes much of how he was synonymous with the establishment, with bourgeois respectability, and how she was an outsider, an iconoclast. Yet, at the same time, the book’s underlying current suggests that for all their surface differences, they are kindred spirits, whose union, after 35 years of marriage, is as strong as ever.

Wellesley, Massachusetts, had long ago closed its portal to Jews, and in my pure-blood secondary school I had been too intense, too emotional, and too spontaneous to adopt the required air of Waspy indifference. Once in college, I discovered a kinship with my Jewish friends. Mostly born of Eastern European stock, they were intellectual, voluble, clever, antic. I began to think of myself as a Jewish soul in a Gentile body.

And then one day, in Martha’s Vineyard, where Bob vacationed, I encountered a very different breed: the elite German Jew. Meeting Bob’s extended family—cousins, nieces, nephews—I experienced once again the languid handshake, the drooping palm, the greetings to loved ones that consisted of a grazing of the cheek, a pecking the air. In other words, they were more Waspish than any Wasp I had grown up with. They were often mercurial, sometimes snooty, other times quite interested in me—but always aloof. And there were so many of them of various removes that it felt as if I were meeting the U.N. General Assembly.

That summer, I was a curiosity. Martha’s Vineyard was replete with the prominent and the moneyed, and two of Bob’s closest cousins, Nan Werner and Margie Lang—the grandes dames of Chilmark, who had little crushes on Bob—invited him to a stream of dinners and cocktail parties to meet and psych out this young woman who would steal him away. To my surprise, I was declared fit and worthy, and soon found myself at great homes, chatting animatedly with authors such as John Hersey, William and Rose Styron, and Diana Trilling and Lillian Hellman, who had begun their famous literary feud.

A few people were dubious about me and played picador. “This must be a very heady experience for you,” said Dan Lang, Margie’s husband and a prominent writer for The New Yorker, “being here with Bob Morgenthau and meeting all these famous people.”
Newly confident, I replied easily, “Oh, not really, I’ve interviewed any number of these people for the Times.”

Lucinda Franks will be discussing her new memoir with Dan Rather at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage on Wednesday, September 17, at 7 p.m.

Related: Dynasty

Lucinda Franks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of, most recently,Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me.