Tosh Berman - Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Bermans World

My mother, Shirley Morand, first saw her future husbandmy fatherdriving a convertible, with a cat wrapped around his neck, somewhere on the streets of Hollywood. Wallace Berman, at that time, never left the house without his cat. The 19th-century French writer Grard de Nerval had a pet lobster named Thibault, and he would take it out for evening walks through Paris, attached to a silk leash. Wallace, in his fashion, was returning to the eminent, artistic, eccentric personalities of 19th- and 20th-century Paris. Without a doubt, he made backward glances to the artists he greatly admired and their peculiar habits. I learned style through both parents, due to their knowledge of such dandies of the past and present, as well as the art and literature that dwell in that world of provocateurs and visionaries. I understood the importance of the past as a reference for the ideal life, and I inherited a passion for artists and poets who didnt belong in the world, who had to invent a landscape in which they could live and do their art. I learned that from Wallace, due to his numerous homages to the artistic set that lived before him.

At the time of my moms first sighting of Wallace with his cat, he cut quite a striking figure that screamed Los Angeles dandy. A man who had an understanding of the criminal street life, he knew that the results of such a life had to be fine clothing, which to him meant zoot suits. It was World War Two, the height of the zoot suit craze, and there was, in fact, a law on the books that forbade the zoot suit, owing to the excess fabric in making the outfit; all surplus material was expected to be sent to the government for the war effort. What could attract a criminal-minded youth more than wearing such clothing at the height of war?

Wallace Berman as a child

My fathers family had come from another part of the world. His mother Anna and his grandmother were Russian Jews. They settled in Staten Island, New York, where his father was an owner of a candy store. According to speculation, the store was a front, either for a speakeasy or for bootlegging. My grandfather seemed to have too much money just for owning a neighborhood candy store. In the only picture Ive seen of Wallaces father, hes wearing tennis clotheslong white pants, tight white shirtwith a racket in his hand. My mom also told me that she used to own a photograph of Wallaces mother and father in a large car with a chauffeur. When he died, which I think was from the aftereffects of tuberculosis, he only left two books for Wallace, a collection of tales by Oscar Wilde and T.E. Lawrences Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). After his death, the family, which by then included Annas brother Harry, relocated to Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.

At the time, Boyle Heights was a community of Japanese Americans, Latinos, and Jews. Much of the neighborhoods population changed after the 1950s, when the freeways were built. The Berman clan eventually moved to another Jewish neighborhood, in Fairfax, which is very close to Hollywood. Around this time Wallace had a best friend by the name of Sammy Davis, Junior. My grandmother Anna said to me that her heart began to race one morning when she went into Wallaces bedroom and saw Sammy asleep in the bed. At first, she thought Wallace had turned black, but he was sleeping by the bedside on the floor, giving Sammy his bed. I remember my dad telling me how he and Sammy went to the Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard to see Glenn Miller and his big band and werent allowed to go in because of Sammys skin color. Wallace never told me how they initially met, but I presume they first laid eyes on each other on Central Avenue, in one of the jazz or dance clubs of the 1940s. They totally lost touch with each other after their teenage years, but right before Wallace died, he saw Sammy at the dentist. Wallace popped his head into the office and said hello. My dad told me that Sammydental tools still in his mouthnearly perished in the chair. Wallace said a quick Hello, how are you? and then got out of there.

WALLACE BERMAN / Anna Berman, Wallaces mom, 1958, Larkspur

During his late teens, in the middle of the 40s, Wallace underwent a series of failures. First, he got kicked out of Fairfax High School for gambling. Then he enlisted and got kicked out of the Navy due to a nervous breakdown. Then he went to Chouinard Art School, and was kicked out of there for reasons unknown. Be they cause or effect of these failures, my fathers taste for the outsiders life and distaste for mainstream American life were firmly established. Its been hinted to me that my dad was involved in the criminal world as a teenager, though Ive never heard any stories of his actual criminal activity. But he clearly never felt comfortable in the straight world. The nine-to-five schedule wasnt for him. He had no problem with people who preferred that life, but for him, there was another world out there that was so much more attractive, the world that existed in the night. The key to that world was, at first, criminal activity, but that led to his beloved pursuits of jazz, poetry, and the visual arts.