Viva
Deadlines at Dawn The many lives of Sidney Zion
By Jerry Tallmer
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Photo by Brett C Vermilyea
Sidney Zion at his Upper West Side home
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In the pitch black at 3 o’clock in the morning of June 5, 1968, after I’d been up most of the previous 24 hours putting together and writing a backgrounder on the Valerie Solanis who had shot Andy Warhol the day before, the telephone rang. It was Sid Zion. “You better get your ass out of bed and go down to the paper,” he said. “Bobby Kennedy’s just been shot, out in Los Angeles.”
This was printer’s-ink Sidney talking – Sidney the newspaperman. There were – and are, to this minute – a large number of other Sidney Zions, well befitting Sidney’s own large, joyous, explosive physical self. There is Sidney the lawyer, Sidney the reporter, Sidney the columnist, Sidney the sometime magazine editor, Sidney the novelist, Sidney the Roy Cohn autobiographer, Sidney the diehard New York Giants football nut, Sidney the jazz and Sinatra and Tony Bennett and any other uncrapped-up-music nut, Sidney the enthusiast of good food and good drink, Sidney the restaurateur (as owner/host — briefly, in the early 1980s — of Broadway Joe’s on 46th Street’s Restaurant Row), Sidney the smoke-wreathed scorner of the Smoke Fascists, Sidney the man-about-town habitué of Gallagher’s, Elaine’s. the Players’ Club, the Yale Club, etc., Sidney the possessor of a fine eye for female grace in any form, Sidney the to-the-death partisan of embattled Israel, Sidney the equal-opportunity pomposity piercer, Sidney the anecdotalist, Sidney the inside-story truth-teller – and, of course, Sidney Zion, husband, father, grandfather, widower, bitter-end crusader for medical and hospital reform.
When Sidney, that 3 o’clock in the morning, said I’d better get my ass down to the paper, he didn’t mean the good gray New York Times, where he had worked, mostly on the Supreme Court beat, until he went off in 1970 to help Warren Hinckley start a political-exposé magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly. He meant Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post, where I worked – had indeed been working since shortly before Sidney, changing careers 180-degrees from law to journalism, had broken in as a Post reporter on the legal beat in the early 1960s. It was from there that he had gone to The Times, but it was at the Post that he and I had become fast friends.
To Sidney, a story was a story, and if he, in the middle of that terrible night in 1968, didn’t have an outlet in which to say something in print on the life and death of RFK, he wanted to make sure that I didn’t sleep through that necessity. The irony, of course, was that Robert F. Kennedy – under whom the pre-journalistic Sidney Zion had worked, as a young lawyer in the U.S. Attorney’s office back in New Jersey – was one of the people in this world Sid Zion most feared and detested. The further irony is that when, in 1971, three years after that assassination in Los Angeles, Sidney had a huge scoop on his hands – the name of the person who had fed the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times — he again had nowhere to break it.
“I’m home, and Libby is 5 years old,” Sid said during a recent evening of interview and recollection – Libby, the redheaded daughter of Elsa and Sidney Zion, restless, gifted Libby who would go into New York Hospital with a fever one night in 1984, when she was 18, and be dead, there in the hospital, by morning. “I go to Gallagher’s, and everybody is talking about who could it be that leaked that Pentagon stuff? I get a big list of possible names from the Washington Post, eliminate the faux guys, and center on a couple of Jews.” In the center of that center: Daniel Ellsberg. “I come home and say: ‘I’ve got the biggest story, but nobody wants to hear it.’ And Libby says: ‘I’ll hear it, Daddy.’ And Elsa says: ‘Why don’t you call up Barry Gray?’ ”
So he did, and on Barry Gray’s radio show Sid spills his scoop to all the world — and the sky falls down. “Everybody’s there at the studio, 477 Madison Avenue. I see them [the press] all phoning. I see Murray Schumach [of The Times] smiling, and a few minutes later he tells me: ‘Arthur Gelb [Times managing editor under terrible-tempered executive editor A.M. Rosenthal] says: ‘You are never to show your face in The Times again.” It went beyond that, far beyond that. In parts of this town – newspaper hangouts – Sid Zion for a great many months was treated as a pariah (unclean! unclean!) by various of his peers who would have murdered their mothers for just such a scoop. “Blacklisted for six years because I broke a true story. So all those years I had to go back and practice law.”
What finally breached the ban was New York Times Magazine editor Ed Klein asking if Sid would like to do some “easy” pieces. “I was sitting in Elaine’s one night, listening to Bunny Berrigan on the jukebox and wondering: Why did it all go away?” – America’s great, poetic jazz and popular music. “I told Ed Klein I thought I could knock something out in three weeks; it took a year and a half.” To this day Sid’s June 1981 j’accuse on how disk jockey Alan Freed and the record companies and rock-and-roll and other noises have been destroying that heritage is one of the most provocative pieces the Times Mag has ever printed, likewise the one that stirred up the greatest tide of pro-and-con mail it ever received. “The younger guys on the staff hated it, said they couldn’t find a picture of Sinatra [!] to put on the cover – but the printers loved it, it was their music.”
Robert F. Kennedy, remember him?
“When I was in that U.S. Attorney’s office in Newark,” Sidney said as we shot the breeze in his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment – a painfully hollow apartment, now that Elsa is gone and the two boys, Adam and Jed, are long off on their own – “no one butchered civil rights more than Bobby Kennedy. I know he was a hero to [leftish columnist} Jack Newfield and all these guys, but Bobby was terrible on civil liberties. Now it’s the ‘terrorists,’” Sidney said dryly, “then it was the Mafia. Bobby would call up a judge and tell him what to do [during the trial of a headlined Mafioso], but he wouldn’t go after any [of New Jersey’s] crooked politicians because they were for his brother Jack. He was a big phony, a crumb-bum.”
He was also — so says Sidney — the miniature bulldog who, but for chance and fate and political circumstance, might have been at Senator Joseph McCarthy’s side and ear as majority counsel all through those tumultuous 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Which is to say that, if McCarthy hadn’t blackballed RFK because of events in Massachusetts, Bobby Kennedy would have metamorphosed into the Roy Cohn of those proceedings; the Roy Cohn that so much of America – but not Sid Zion — still loves to hate.
“And the great irony there,” said Sidney, “is that if Bobby had gotten that job” — instead of having to settle for minority counsel [to the Senate committee holding the hearings] – “he never would have been assassinated and his brother would never have got to be president. The tragedy of that family, all dying when they could have lived … ”
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Right, Sidney and Elsa Zion’s wedding photo.
Below, Libby Zion. |
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By the time you read this, Sidney will have been without Elsa for something more than two years; without Libby for what is now 23 years, none of it made easier by the cruelly indecisive 1995 trial in the wrongful-death case of Zion v. New York Hospital. Still, the great plus that came out of the death of Libby Zion is the enforced reduction – the “Libby Zion law” — of the sleepless working hours of interns and residents at hospitals in New York State.
Elsa and Libby died on the same day of the same month – the 5th of March – 21 years apart. They sleep in the same ground in New Jersey, leaving a husband, a father, a joyous, furious, Rabelaisan-funny, deadly serious human being of unquenchable vitality and multiple talents – a larger-than-life figure out of Saul Bellow or Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud – to pull that life back together and go on.
When Elsa died, the Players’ Club on Gramercy Park South had a memorial evening during which many wonderful and true things were said about her. It was later, when the speeches and the dinner were over, that Sidney and I, he with drink in hand, were briefly thrown together by the crowd. I seized the moment to say: “You know, Sid, I always just thought of her as a beautiful, bright, funny, sexy, gutsy Irish girl.” Sidney, who is never soft, tossed me a glance and softly said: “That’s the way I think of her.”
There is, however, for the writer of this article, one other ineradicable memory of Elsa Zion: It is Elsa on the stand in New York Supreme Court, white-faced, courteous, even-voiced, in icy control, reliving how on the early morning of March 5, 1984, she had finally broken through the tangled verbiage coming over the phone from New York Hospital to say – to ask — “Are you trying to tell me that my daughter is dead?”
“When Libby died I was 51,” said Sidney Zion – “no, I had just turned 50 in November. She’d been at my 50th birthday party at the Players’, and then she died. Nothing went on the same way after that. I was in the middle of writing Markers,” his novel of New York City power and power brokers. “It wiped me out for a long time. Libby was my editor on Markers. She used to come in and say: ‘This was good, this was not so good.’ ” He laughed and added: “She even edited my ties.” Not laughing: “After she died I couldn’t do anything, sitting in that study. I don’t know how I got through it. The worst thing to be as a writer is to sit there alone, thinking of it. Numb.
“Then what happened, I got a call from this big editor at Random House. Yeah, Jason Epstein. Roy Cohn, who was dying, had submitted 700 pages of an autobiography. Epstein wanted me to fix it. I needed money now. I called Roy and said: ‘Roy, there’s nothing there, you’re trying to be a nice guy, but it’s a bullshit book, it isn’t you.’
“When Roy died I was able to tell some truth. That’s why it’s called The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, by Sidney Zion. Random House paid me a lot of money, twenty-five-thousand bucks, and two weeks later they knocked it off their list. My agent called and said: ‘They canceled it, but they don’t want the money back.’ ”
Sid pauses, then sourly adds: “It made me out a writer for hire.”
When The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, by Sidney Zion did come out, in 1988, the publisher was Lyle Stuart, a gentleman who did not spend money freely. “He sent it to the West Coast and the reviewers out there by Pony Express – well, by train – to save $8,000, and then Nicholas Von Hoffman’s Citizen Cohn came out, and I was dead in the water again.”
Roy Cohn is, even now, hated by millions of Americans who remember the Army-McCarthy hearings and, before that, the prosecution and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. How about Mr. Cohn?
“I liked him. Everybody loathed him, but,” said Sidney, “I liked him. I first met him on the steps of the Federal Courthouse in 1964, my first year with Dolly [i.e., on The Post]. Cohn said: ‘I like your stuff, let’s go have a drink.’ I thought: This guy who’s about to be convicted is so cool and collected. He’s a piece of work. Roy had one principle and one principle only: Be loyal to your friends. Even [radical New York politico] Paul O’Dwyer liked him.”
Indeed, one of this writer’s own vivid memories is of a jam-packed party chez Zions with Paul O’Dwyer holding court on one end of a six-foot sofa, Roy Cohn holding court on the other end.
“Roy was a very fast study. He understood the first time, and wouldn’t listen to you the second time. Angels in America? Not only did I see it, I talked to [Tony] Kushner before he wrote it. He called me, to ask about Roy. In the play, all that crazy screaming and spitting and yelling, all over the place. The crazy fagele stuff. Mrs. Rosenberg coming down on him from heaven. A piece of shit show and a piece of shit movie.
“Yes, Roy was gay, and yes, he denied it to everybody, would never, never have admitted his homosexuality. I’m sitting with him at the end, and Roy’s boyfriend is there, putting unguentine on Roy’s lips. If Roy had ever admitted he had AIDS, he would have sued the hospital for giving him bad blood! Once a teacher who had been fired for being gay asked him to take his case. Roy said: ‘I don’t want your money – I’ll take the case against you because homosexuals are destroying this country.’ ”
If Sidney Zion liked Roy Cohn, he, all his life, has hero-worshipped another fairly controversial Jew – the immensely prolific, hugely talented newsman, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and pro-Israel militant Ben Hecht. Back in Sid’s New York Post days he had given columnist Leonard Lyons a scoop – “something about Jack Dempsey” – and in return, Lyons had fixed it up for Sid to visit the ailing, aging Ben Hecht.
“It was on the day of Lyndon Johnson’s first State of the Union address after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hecht, watching the TV, said: ‘This is the most evil man I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen evil men. He’s going to destroy this country. I won’t live to see it, but you will.’ Imagine that! He also told me: ‘Being a screenwriter is like being the plumber who fixes your toilet and then watches to see if it goes down. If you ever sell a book to Hollywood, don’t go see the movie. You will have less to do with it than the usher.”
Sidney E. Zion, who was born in Passaic, New Jersey, November 14, 1933 – he shares November 14 as a birthday with Mamie Eisenhower, Prince Charles, and, guess who, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy – was at Yale Law School a year or two behind a fellow named Victor Navasky. It was in fact Navasky – founder, even then, of the satirical Monocle, future editor of radicalism’s The Nation – who (a) introduced Sidney Zion to Elsa Ruth Heister, (b) nudged Sidney into switching from law to journalism. “He said it would change my life. I didn’t want to change my life, but I think he knew that I did want to be Ben Hecht more than I wanted to be Clarence Darrow.”
Elsa – half Irish, half German, and a dab of Scottish, actually — was a graduate of Bard College. “She knew all about writers, from Bard. The first thing she ever said to me was: ‘Thank God you’re not a writer.’ ”
Of the final illness of his one and only wife, Sidney said now: “We didn’t know exactly when it started. She’d had a breast removed much earlier, with only a 10 percent chance of the cancer coming back – and she got it back. Five years ago she had a heart thing, and a doctor had said: ‘She’ll probably never get out of the hospital.’ He said that in front of the kids [sons Adam and Jed, then in their 30s]. Adam nearly died on the spot. Then another doctor – a great doctor, Howard Bruckner – kept her alive for five years, but she never could survive the chemo. She did live to see Adam’s children.
“A few weeks before she died a doctor in Mt. Sinai said to her – again, right in front of the kids: ‘You’d better make sure they don’t keep you alive.’ She signed the [living will] paper. On one of the last days she looked scared and grabbed my hand. I knew she wasn’t afraid to die; she was afraid to be kept alive. She fought as long as she could. Then everything started to break down. The doctors didn’t tell me. A nurse told me … ”
Some of Sid’s newspaper and magazine pieces over the years are gathered in Read All About It [Simon & Schuster] and Trust Your Mother but Cut the Cards [Barricade Books]. He has been a columnist for The New York Post, New York Magazine, the New York Daily News, the Post again, the News again …
Once it was a piece about radical fugitive Kathy Boudin that somebody upstairs didn’t like. More recently it was a piece about Connecticut’s Joseph Lieberman. “It has occurred to me,” says Sidney Zion, “that I am journalism’s Billy Martin. I get hired and fired. I get fired for doing what they want me to do.” The last person to fire him as of this writing was Daily News publisher Morton Zuckerman, winner of a Louis Brandeis Award. It’s the first time in history, Sid notes, that the winner of the first Ben Hecht Award was fired by the winner of a Brandeis Award.
