Stars of David (46 page)

Morley Safer

MORLEY SAFER, the seventy-four-year-old, wizened newsman, is reclining on a well-worn leather couch in his handsome carriage house, smoking the cigarettes he's never quit, and sipping coffee he can't do without—even on Yom Kippur. “I'm not a total hundred percent faster as I once was,” he says with a smile. “I do have coffee. I need it. Giving up coffee would be cruel and unusual.” Aside from caffeine, fasting is not a hardship. “I never eat breakfast anyway and not much of a lunch,” he explained. “But I remember the agony of it as a kid. I mean,
agony
.”

He and his wife, Jane, are not observant, but they do go to synagogue each year. “Then we go for a long walk. I think the sheer disengagement, even if one didn't go to synagogue, does make you think. Which is hardly a punishment once a year, and in fact, may be a bonus. It's not exactly wearing a hair shirt or flogging your back or climbing one thousand steps on your knees.”

Safer grew up in Toronto, where he experienced some anti-Semitic incidents he prefers not to talk about: “I don't want to go into all that,” he says, stubbing his cigarette out in a large ashtray.

His family observed a modified Shabbat—attending Saturday services, then a matinee. The only holiday he still celebrates without fail is Passover. “We've been doing it for the last thirty-odd years, since Sarah was born,” he says, referring to his only child, who is thirty-four when we talk. “It's an interesting, really jolly mix of people.” Not all the guests are Jewish. “I think it's about evenly split,” Safer says. “And the most insistent ones—the ones who start calling weeks before, saying, ‘We haven't been invited yet'—tend to be the non-Jews.” He chuckles.

For the traditional meal, the Safers order their gefilte fish from Rosedale Fish and Oyster Market on the Upper East Side—“it's the oldest fish market,” Safer tells me, as if that should be obvious to any true New Yorker—but he's still in search of the perfect lump of pike. “I've yet to find gefilte fish that is as close to the one my mother made,” he says wistfully.

Sarah was sent to Hebrew school, he says, so that she'd be equipped to spurn Judaism with intelligence. “You've got to know what you're going to reject,” Safer says. “You should not be allowed to reject something without learning it first.” Today she is non-observant. “It was her choice,” he says. “Would I like her to come to synagogue on Yom Kippur with us? She has once or twice. But I can't impose—she's a thirty-whatever-old woman. As a young woman she kind of rejected it, probably more strenuously than she does now. She has a son—our first and only grandchild.” Sarah's husband is a Russian Jew, but they chose not to circumcise their son. “I would have wanted it because it's such an ancient tradition,” he says. But he didn't pressure her. “There's nothing more destructive than that.”

The Safers never celebrated Christmas, and I ask if he has any reaction to Jews that do. “I find it a little alien, but I'm not a tyrant on these things. I find excessive Christmas stuff kind of gives me the willies anyway. And I hate Christmas in New York because of what happens to the city. I mean, you can't get a cab, the weather is lousy—you freeze your ass off, and there is no joy in it. I love the idea of it—the idea of charity and all of that.

“I'll tell you a story,” he continues. “At the office, you always get presents for the people you work with around the holidays. I'd been doing it for the thirty-three years I've been at
60 Minutes
; I always give a couple of very good bottles of wine, or one very good bottle of wine and one very good bottle of spirits or malt. And it was just fascinating: One year, it was at the height of the homelessness crisis, and I said to my staff, ‘Look, I have a thought: What I would love to do is go and buy food and gloves and scarves. And we'll distribute the stuff and then all go and have a nice supper together.' They looked at me like I was crazy: ‘What? That's the worst idea you ever had.' I was devastated,” he says with a laugh. I tell Safer they probably couldn't stand the idea of giving up their malt liquors. He nods. “Here I am, engaging this holiday with the kind of heart that you're supposed to have. And people were appalled.”

The doorbell rings. “That's our dog coming back from her walk,” he says, looking suddenly like a thrilled little boy. “Come here, Dora! We have a houseguest! Dora!” Dora runs to Safer and they canoodle each other. “Hello, my little lady; here's my sweetie pie,” They clearly have a mutual admiration. I try to pat her casually, despite my complete awkwardness with animals, and think of the right thing to say. “She's so clean,” I manage.

“She likes you,” Safer says with a smile. “She loves loving. I warn you.” After some genuine ardor from her owner, Dora pads away, ostensibly to seek a second breakfast.

As Safer fetches a bottle of Pellegrino water from the open kitchen, I ask him whether he thinks being Jewish has affected his reporting in any way. “I think, after all these years, and having spent a lot of time covering Middle East wars and covering Israel between the wars, you really are able to detach when you do this work.

“But I remember the first time I went to Auschwitz—it was probably in the fifties. I was working for the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation], doing a half-hour documentary on Poland. This was after the food riots—late fifties, early sixties—and the full horror had really been revealed. That was just one of the most powerful moments in my life. The camp hadn't been museum-ized yet; it was in many respects not much different from how it was left.

“And it was also very powerful the first time I went to Germany, which was even earlier. I remember getting off the plane in Frankfurt and hearing that sound of the guttural language.” He pauses. “And you think, ‘There but for a few years . . .'—this was 1954 as opposed to 1944—it's not that much time.”

So, would Safer say that his Jewishness is a significant part of him? “Oh yes,” he responds. “It's who I am. I think it's an important part mainly for what many people may regard as secular reasons, though I don't think they're entirely secular. That is, I think it leads to a more contemplative kind of life. I think it gives you a very, very clear idea of ethics, which I'm not suggesting I may practice. But I certainly have a clear idea. Which is why I never understood why they go through this charade now of
teaching
ethics. You can't teach ethics. You have to be a zombie not to know the difference between right and wrong. I think that a Jewish background does give you a very, very strong sense of doing the right thing.”

William Shatner

STAR TREK'S CAPTAIN KIRK used to recite the four questions and lay tefillin during morning prayers. That's difficult to imagine. William Shatner's image has never been exactly Jewishy. He's sandy haired and barrel chested—his bearing, at the height of his fame, was that of a classic leading man. “There was a whole thing where people would say, ‘Funny, you don't
look
Jewish,'” Shatner recalls. “The racial stereotype bothers me to this day. I'm very sensitive to it; I find it offensive.”

Today, at seventy-three, he looks like he actually could play the archetype if he wanted to; he's got the paunch and the weathered face. But he's still a far cry from Tevye.

My interview with him turns out to be brief—our scheduled L.A. meeting unexpectedly conflicts with a rehearsal for a benefit performance he's appearing in that evening. The Shakespeare Festival/LA, whose mission is to connect the community to the classics, is producing a reading of
Two Gentlemen of Verona
. Shatner's assistant, Robin, tells me to meet her at the David Geffen Theatre and promises to grab Shatner during a rehearsal break.

When I walk into the theater to watch a run-through, my eyes have to adjust to the star wattage on the stage. Dressed casually, in shorts, jeans, and flip-flops, are Tom Hanks, his wife, Rita Wilson, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Martin Sheen, Christina Applegate, Drew Carey, and Shatner himself, perched unobtrusively on a wooden stool among the megastars. His button-down black shirt doesn't deemphasize his girth and he appears to be sweating under the lights, but he looks happy to be in such A-list company. Williams, Crystal, and Hanks are the jesters—constantly injecting silliness that makes everyone break into giggles; Shatner laughs along but doesn't initiate any of the shenanigans.

When there's a pause in the rehearsal, I finally get some time with him in the theater lobby, both of us leaning on a high refreshment table. “I was brought up in a Conservative Jewish home in Montreal,” he tells me, “and compared to the United States, Conservative there is pretty much like Orthodox here. My mother had a kosher home and I went to Hebrew school until I was bar mitzvahed and I did tefillin for a few years. And in the context of those times, there were some really tough fights between the Jews and some of the population, generally in places that wanted the Jews out— a club that didn't allow Jews, or areas that didn't sell homes to Jews. What I was mostly aware of was that kids were jumping on me at school and I had to fight. Sometimes two kids at once.

“I recall the worst moment was when I was playing football for the high school and it was Yom Kippur and I had to stay home instead of practice. And the coach replaced me because I missed practice and I never got my position back. And I remember to this day being really hurt because we were a really good championship football team. I was a back and I loved football.”

He says he didn't try to convince his parents to let him skip Yom Kippur services; he knew by that age it was sacrosanct. “It wasn't a choice,” he says matter-of-factly. “It was Yom Kippur.” Schoolyard ridicule was also a given. “When I would go to Hebrew school after regular school, I'd walk on the opposite side of the street to the shul and then look both ways and run across the street and run into the synagogue before anybody could see me,” he recalls. “There was some kind of unspoken feeling of oppression. Being Jewish was difficult as a kid. I got the strangest questions about what we Jews did in the chapels. My non-Jewish friends were filled with bizarre knowledge about things we did with dead cats and blood. I mean, just the strangest things that, looking back, I wonder what the parents must have thought about Jews; because they're clearly where the misinformation was coming from.”

He says he feels no vindication having become a star. “I wish I could say that I felt some sense of satisfaction that the kid who had to fight for his life on the streets of Montreal sure showed those bullies after achieving some measure of celebrity, but I've long since forgotten the humiliation. It's probably—in fact likely—lodged in the recesses of my brain and affects my behavior to some degree. Being humiliated for any reason will leave a scar, but my adult life has taken over and I no longer think of what it was to be a boy on the streets of Montreal. On the other hand, I'm acutely sensitive to people being mutilated—emotionally or physically—because they are Jewish, and this has stayed with me all my life.”

He never denied his religion, but he didn't advertise it, either. “There were many times when I kept silent about being Jewish as I got older, when Jewish jokes were told,” he confesses. But he says he wasn't closeted when he became famous. “I've made no secret of it,” he insists, “and a lot of people know I'm Jewish now.” Really? I tell him I haven't found that to be true. Shatner rethinks it. “Perhaps they would be surprised,” he says with a shrug. “So is Mr. Spock.” He smiles, speaking of his former
Star Trek
colleague, Leonard Nimoy. “He's Jewish as well.”

Unlike Nimoy, who based his Vulcan greeting on a Jewish blessing, Shatner never incorporated any Jewish signs on the Starship
Enterprise
. “I never knew what Leonard Nimoy was doing with his forked fingers,” he says now. “I tried in vain to fork my fingers but always got a singular raised digit that was always misinterpreted.”

Shatner has, however, been developing a film comedy with a Jewish theme: “It's a glorious idea,” he explains, “in which a young group of people who come to the aid of some folks sitting shivah decide to start doing that as an occupation to make money. That is, they find a person who is mourning their loved one and help them in a variety of ways while they are sitting shivah. They call themselves guess what? The Shivah Club.” The project is currently in limbo, or as Shatner puts it, “in a state of vibrating stillness”: “It's out there on the many highways that lead to producers who have money,” he says. The idea came to Shatner when he was mourning his third wife, Nerine, who was found to have drowned in their Los Angeles pool back in August of 1999, with alcohol and Valium in her system.

But aside from this project, Shatner makes it clear that his faith isn't at the forefront of his identity. “I'm Jewish because my mother was Jewish and because my background was Jewish and I understand Jewishness. I like the comfort food of Jewish dishes and the lilt of the language—people speaking English in a kind of Jewish lilt is a kind of familiar, homelike sound.” But it's not at the center of who he is. “I would say it's like twentyfive percent of my life. It's a four on a scale of ten in terms of influence right now.”

He says he dropped the rituals because they didn't make sense to him. “I didn't understand the effort to be Jewish. I am Jewish, and the formalities—although I recognize the necessity of keeping them up, because it's what being Jewish is—by the same token, there's more to being Jewish. So I'm Jewish without the protocols.”

The actors are called to resume rehearsal and Shatner returns to the stage.