Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim

17. My Sister, Joyce Brothers

201 17 My Sister, Joyce Brothers In the late 1960s, the New York Times assigned Krim to interview Dr. Joyce Brothers and write a feature on her for the Sunday paper. But Krim met Brothers with poison in his heart, the interview died, and the story never got written. Ten years later, Krim wrote this intelligent and moving article about his own prejudices as a Greenwich Village intellectual contemptuous of Joyce Brothers but also jealous of her accomplishments, discipline, and integrity. The essay ends with Krim seeing himself and Brothers as two poles of the American Jewish experience. Krim salutes Brothers as his “straight, smart JAP sister who has survived on a rougher track than I could ever play on.” I once spooked Dr. Joyce Brothers, the most formidable JAP (Jewish American Princess) in the country, and she has haunted my life ever since in revenge. I know she’ll never stop until I do her justice. When I call the Weather Bureau, they plug Dr. Joyce after the temperature and tell me I’ll find hope if I call 936-4444 (“Hello, I’m Dr. Joyce Brothers: Medically speaking, there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown .”). When I grab my New York Post fix each noon, there on page 24 is “America’s foremost psychologist” smiling up at me like a tireless light bulb. When I teach one night a week at Columbia, it is in a building only two doors away from where Dr. J. was a psychology assistant, 1948–1952. And when I won $1638 during a Vegas gambling weekend in the mid 1970s, I spread the money out on the bed of the same Ramada Inn room where Brothers was to be robbed of $220 at gunpoint, then briefly locked in the same john where I exultantly drank cognac under the shower. I found this out later. 202 . Missing a Beat I can’t get away from Joyce Brothers, either as a man, American, writer, reader, viewer, listener, thinker, feeler. For more than 10 years I have lived her life almost as if it were my own to try to understand her and understand myself. We symbolize opposite poles of New York Jewish need and intensity that practically led to civil war when we met, yet there was bitter, grudging respect on each side. Let me tell you what I mean. When I was orphaned and rebellious at age 10 in Washington Heights, Joyce Diane Bauer grew up in Queens the shining apple of her lawyer-parents ’ eyes (both Morris and Estelle Bauer were successful attorneys). And where I was expelled from DeWitt Clinton HS for publishing a dirty-word lit magazine called expression and at 17 had to kiss ass for readmission, Joyce Bauer was graduating from Far Rockaway HS with the best marks in her class. While I was flunking out of the U. of North Carolina and drifting through the WWII years proud, defiant and dreamy as a poem, Dr. Joyce was getting her B.S. from Cornell at 20. No poetic license for this cool cookie! At 22, she had already wrapped up in marriage the indisputable target of every ambitious JAP—Dr. Milton Brothers, boy intern. At 23, she had her M.A. from Columbia in experimental psychology (“An Analysis of the Enzyme Activity of the Conditioned Salivary Response in Human Subjects”). At 26, her Ph.D. (“An Experimental Investigation of Avoidance , Anxiety and Escape Behavior in Humans as Measured by Action Potentials in Muscles”). At 28, Dr. Joyce became nationally known by winning top prize on the first leg of the $64,000 Question, telling 20 million viewers that “cestus” was the name of the leather glove worn by ancient Roman boxers. That was the same year I cracked like an eggshell and watched Dr. J. bring down the house from a folding wooden chair in Bellevue. I was wearing a white robe, like a fighter, the subject that finally brought her a total of $134,000 after she had memorized the Ring Encyclopedia and watched every “Great Fight of the Century.” I patched myself together, dreams intact but scarred with vinegar, while Dr. Joyce quickly converted her victory into an avalanche of radio and pop psychology shows, a Good Housekeeping column (“make your marriage a love affair”) and a syndicated newspaper column, and bought My Sister, Joyce Brothers . 203 Milty a practice. “I was supposed...