Can a Bad Man Be a Good Father?

From "New York Times," I'm Michael Babaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. The writer Tom Juno is a student of flawed men. In a long and varied career in American magazines and places like GQ and Esquire, Tom Profile complicated figures like Norman Mailer, Kevin Spacey, and Tony Curtis. But in all of those profiles, another flawed man loomed in the background. One who informed how Tom thought about the very nature of masculinity and manhood. And that was his father, Lou, a man who had a life full of secrets. Tom's relationship with his dad is the subject of his new book, which is Part Memoir and Part Detective Story. It's called, "In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man." And it's a powerful meditation on what we need from a father, what we inherit from a father, and how we somehow make peace with the gap in between those. Today, on Father's Day, my conversation with Tom Juno, it's Sunday, June 21st. Tom, Michael, welcome to the Sunday Daily. It's so great to be here. It's an honor to have you. Can I ask you to read from the eulogy that you read at your father's funeral? Sure. Leave it's on page four, yeah. So the eulogy had a title. If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly, and that was one of my dad's sayings. My father, dad, pop-op, was not like other fathers. He was not like other people, period. A lot of people have told me that he's with Jesus now. Well, with all due respect, I have my doubts. Unless, of course, Jesus has shaved his beard, ditched the sandals, and is drinking a martini at the El Morocco, circa 1955, with Frank and Eva. This is not to say my father was not a believer. He had a whole belief system. He believed in a lot of things, and what he believed in, he believed in absolutely. He believed that there was not a person in the world whose appearance could not be helped by exposure to the sun, or what he called a fresh burn. He believed that there was not an ailment in the world that could not be cured by salt water. He believed that the way Rhett Butler treated Scarlet was the way all women should be treated, and that Clark Gable was robbed when he didn't win the Oscar for Best Actor in 1939. He believed that the lottery was a game of skill rather than chance, and that he had won it twice. But for some reason, he had neglected the turn in the ticket. And he believed to the very end that he was going to win again. And then, as he said, then, I'll teach you how to live. I mean, just from those brief words, it's very evident that your dad was a larger than life character. Yeah. Well, so, you know, he had all these maxims. He had all these ideas about how men should be. And he lived by them. And that's the thing about him. So, it's not just that he thought that every man should have a fresh burn theoretically. And he, you know, didn't just say where white to the face, or a turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear, I mean, he followed all these things religiously. And they worked. I mean, that's the thing, I think, that you have to understand, you know, with my dad, is that it all worked. I mean, if he walked into a restaurant, you know, everything, what am I seeing? Yeah. So, you saw a guy who was wearing a blue shirt with a white collar, you know, high to the face, a big fat knot, cufflinks, floor-shime shoes, skin, the color of mahogany, or A1 steak. So, it's any sort of synonym that you can figure out from brown. He was that. And then, and then he had eyes, the color of short truths. I mean, they were the greenest eyes I've ever seen in any human being. They were on fire, and they were kind of beautiful and entrancing and kind of terrifying at the same time. I feel like I'm looking at Frank Sinatra. Yeah. So, I saw Frank Sinatra once, and that's all you saw were his blue eyes. They were burning like gas jets, and that was the same with my dad. All you saw was his dark skin and his insanely green eyes. Behind this very masculine appearance, you have said are some very specific ideas that your dad had about masculinity, it wasn't just a veneer, it was a whole philosophy. So, tell me about that. Well, so it wasn't just clothes. You know, it was also some very specific ideas about manhood and how a man should be. Like well, number one, always look a man in the eye. Number two, always have a firm handshake. Number three, always open the door for a woman. And then they got a little bit, like you have your sort of the basics, they were complex. There was one time that he told me basically his overall rule for seducing women. And it was, tell a smart woman, she's beautiful, and tell a beautiful woman, she's smart. So he had a lot of tips and they were all acted on. They were all part of who he was. Where do you think that these lessons about manhood came from? Upon what was it modeled, as best you could tell? As best as I could tell, it was modeled on the movie stars of the late 1930s. Not his dad. But definitely not his dad. When we were growing up, my brother, my sister and I, we would always ask him, you know, dad, tell us about your dad. And he would say, in the way he spoke, I never had a father. And then one of us would say, wait a minute, wait a minute, dad, you know, your father calls, you know, every couple of months to ask for money. And he would just look at us and repeat, I never had a father. But he would go to the movies, you know, when he was growing up in Brooklyn, and he absorbed everything. He absorbed, had a dress from Feta Stair. He absorbed, had a talk from Carrie Grant. He absorbed, had a treat women from Clark Gable. And he was a student of all that. I mean, the thing about my dad, so he was like, he was a rough kid growing up in Brooklyn. But by the time I knew him, he had expunged like every bit of his Brooklyn accent. And a lot of that was because, when he was in World War II, he was wounded. And then instead of being shipped back to the front, a lieutenant heard him sing and put him in a show. And so he became, you know, a crooner singing in a traveling army act called, "For Men Only." Which is almost too on the nose, it really is. And when my dad came home from World War II, he tried to make it as a singer and did not. But one of the things he still did was go down to the basement and tape himself singing to instrumental records. And for an audience of himself, for an audience of himself. And so he behaved the way a crooner and his mind was supposed to be. He behaved the way a crooner was supposed to behave, but he crooned his daily language. I mean, he was a crooner even when he was talking. It was all, you know, a mechanism of seduction of some kind. He would stand in front of the mirror in the morning. I'd be on my way to school and I'd go in to say hello or goodbye, and he would be standing there in his black bikini in front of this. enormous mirror in his room, and he would say, "Look, look at this body. Have you ever seen a body like this?" And he had a body. I mean, he was built like Charles Atlas. How did all of this philosophy manifest in the kind of father that he was to you? What kind of dad was he? He was actually a really good dad in a lot of different ways. He was attentive. He was prescriptive. He taught me how to play football. He taught me how to box. He would kiss me hard, good night on my head, or in the morning when he went away on a trip. You know, he was a super attentive dad. At the same time, he was terrifying. Like, I was terrified of my father. He was not a violent person around the house. But the amount of force that his presence had was just the kind of thing where you felt like if you came too close to him, it was like going too close to the son that you would be obliterated. The toughest thing about growing up with my dad was having this warm, overwhelmingly, you know, demonstratively loving person who at the same time was a person I could not be in the same room with. Especially when I was like five, six, seven years old, you know, without crying. And one specific behavior would make you cry. I mean, there was definitely a time when I was so given to tears that my father at dinner time would sort of make it a game. Tommy, why aren't you finishing that steak? And I would, you know, my lip would start quivering, and I would cry. And I think it was just there was a power imbalance that was really just tough to deal with. So, here's the disconnect that I have having read your book. This intimidating guy, he sells purses. Yeah. He was a hammock salesman. Square that. Well, so he didn't make it as a singer. And he hadn't gone to school past eighth grade. And he had really nothing but his looks and his charm. And one of his army buddies had gotten a job in the leather business as a salesman. And he took my dad under his wing. And they went out on the road together. And, you know, my father quickly became the, to the degree that there were legendary handbags salesman. He was the legendary handbag salesman. Legendary for what? Legendary for two things. Legendary for, you know, being big glue. That was his, even though he was, as he would say, six feet in shoes. Meaning he spent about five, about five ten. He was big glue. But he was also known for seducing women. So, he was selling handbags. And he was seducing buyers. But his sex appeal was the thing that not only made him the celebrity that he wanted to be. But also made him money. I mean, my father was an extremely successful handbag salesman. And I think that like his earnings topped out in the early 70s or the mid 70s at around $250,000 a year. Which in the midst for 1974? Oh, that was big money. Huge money. I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to say 3X that given the relation today. Exactly. I mean, I think that he was, I think that he was promiscuous. I think that he was a dread, you know, if he was a philanderer, he was a driven philanderer. And this is a deliberate intentional order using, he's married. He's married. He's married to my mom from as long as he was alive, you know, in my, in my world. I was born to a marriage that stayed together until, until both my parents passed away. He's described, you know, often in the press about the book as a philanderer. And I guess that's the right word. But it seems almost too, too mild for what he was. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you come to understand all of this. Not just through youthful intuition, but as you write through a pretty big moment of discovery. Yes. So, tell me the story of how you come to understand that your dad's masculinity and his virility is not just an external identity, but something he's, he's acting on in ways that are perhaps not meant for you to have understood. The thing about my dad was he presented himself in a very forthrightly sexual way. And it wasn't like that was simply for show. My father had an affair with my first friend's mother when I was three years old. And I knew it. You knew it. I knew it. But somehow, somehow, I knew that something was wrong, something was off, something that made my mom unhappy. That was always sort of the compass needle. I talked to you before about always crying around my dad and that I felt, you know, sort of powerless around my dad. The way that I tried to deal with that was to try to like figure out my dad. And so, you know, I never stopped sort of spying on him, snooping around. And then when I was 16, my father came home with something that he had never had. So, my father was not like an organized guy. And he kept all his work stuff and like a Manila envelope, handwriting scrolled all over it. One day he comes home and all of a sudden he looks like every other guy on the Long Island Railroad. He comes home with a Samsonite briefcase. And the minute I saw the Samsonite briefcase, I did not think, oh my dad's like a normal guy now. I said, there's something inside that Samsonite briefcase. And you wanted to figure out what it was. And I was driven to figure out what it was. And one night he was going out to the track with my mom, which he frequently did. And I went into his closet. I pulled out the briefcase and looked at it and wondered whether I should open it. Because I knew that things were about to change right there. My heart was beating. And then I opened it anyway. And what did you find? There was this huge stack of really extreme pornography in Super 8, a celluloid format for watching home movies. And there were these two gigantic rubber dildos. It's like a woe moment. And you watched the Super 8. And it's on an old movie projector that we used to watch home movies on. And I'm watching this really extreme pornography. It was subjugation porn. I'm 16, just turned 16. You've never seen anything like this. I've been kissed. I didn't know anything. And it jams in the projector. And I smell the smoke. And it burns. And it breaks. It snaps. Oh my god. And so that presented me as a son with a problem. Like, what do I do? I rewind it meticulously. I spent hours rewinding it so that I'm terrified of him. I'm terrified of him. And I didn't want him to know my secret, which was that I knew his secrets. And I went from thinking that my dad was sort of a charming thief. And I think somebody that would be in a movie played by Carrie Grant or David Niven to a hitman. Just help me understand that. I mean, you, by this point, do seem to have understood even from toddler days. Yeah. That your dad was sleeping around. Sleeping around. Yeah. But this does what? - It made me wonder if my dad at some level was bad. Did it cross your mind to talk to your mom about this? - It crossed my mind. But then I knew that it was the nuclear codes to my family. I mean, I don't think my parents' marriage would have survived. I don't know if I would have survived. I mean, that's the whole thing about secrets. You really don't know what's on the other side of them. Well, they enlist you in them. And I was enlisted in that particular secret. I sort of got bonded to my dad through the secrets that sort of upset me most. When I was 20, you know, I went out on a date with my dad and a buyer with whom he was very clearly having an affair with. - What was that like? - It was at once of concern because it was another thing I had to keep from my mom. And also, I'll just say it. It was like one of the most glamorous nights of my life. We went out to see Woody Allen at Michael's pub. We walked my father's date and her sister-in-law who was sort of like my date, you know, back to the plaza. And it was my first night in New York City. And I was sort of, I was as swept away as the two women were. So my dad presented himself as a paragon of masculinity. But masculinity to my dad didn't just mean being able to handle yourself with your fists. It didn't just mean looking sharp. It didn't just mean having a firm handshake. You know, it meant having sex. That is the thing I think that distinguished the way I grew up from a lot of other people who had sort of macho dads. I had a macho dad who was forever on the make. And that was the difference. - And wanted you to be on the make. - And wanted me to be on the make. As your father gets older, what's your relationship to him and these secrets that he may or may not understand you possess that are bringing you closer to him, but also clearly have left you wary of him? - You know, I became in some ways his protector. He did not age well. And he went from being a guy who made $250,000 a year to a guy who had lost everything. And he-- - How did he lose everything? - He was a terrible gambler and he was even worse. He was even a worse investor in the stock market. I mean, he was the most confident man. I had ever, you know, come across. And that itself was like seductive and powerful. And then he became a guy whose pockets were lined with regrets. I mean, he was one of these guys that's all he did was talk about, you know, what a cut of shut up. And so in 1996, I was writing for GQ. I wrote the story called My Father's Fashion Tips, which was a way to sort of allow him to expound his principles and his maxims and introduce those to, you know, the wider reading public. The reason I did it was as a gift to him. I wanted to make him the celebrity that he never was. But, and there's always a but, I think, in all of these stories. I did that story to corner my dad with a tape recorder between us. And so I finally had the chance to talk to him about all this stuff. And, you know, so I found out that he had in a fair with not just Jaja Gabor, but with the Gabor sisters. I found out he had not enough. He talked about the affair that he had with my first friend's mother, Valerie Shockett. - The one you sensed when you were three. - The one I sensed when I was three. Then he told me about something that happened to him that at once, enabled him as like a tragic character. And also made me wonder if I really knew him at all. We'll be right back. (gentle piano music) Tom, describe this information your father shared with you that from lack of a better word clearly changes your life and changes your view of him. - Sure. So this was my last day with him for this story. I had taken him out to the Dune Deck Hotel on Dune Road in West Hampton. Which was sort of his refuge when I was growing up. He would leave the house, our house around four or five o'clock, dressed in his uniform. He'd wear an orange alpaca sweater, white ducks, which were white pants. And he would go out for a drink at this hotel. And so I took him there when I was doing the story for GQ. And there was a moment where I felt I felt that I didn't have to ask any more questions. I felt like I was done. And then that night when we were at the hotel, an 81 year old woman asked him for his phone number when we were at a dinner. Which was just, he was 77 at the time. So it was just a beautiful, it was just a beautiful moment. But the next morning, I asked him, I said dad, you know, when that woman asked you for your phone number, is that what it was like when you were in your 30s and 40s and even 50s. And he shook his head. And he said, tell me, tell me, tell me, not pulling your leg. There was a time that I couldn't walk down Fifth Avenue without being propositioned. And I said, she, dad, do you take any of them up on it? And his answer was not all of them. You know, and I said, okay, dad, how many? I'm not telling you I'm a gentleman. Okay, dad, give me a percentage. Oh, I don't know. 25% that led me to the next question. Which is, did you ever fall in love with one? And there was a pause, and then my father looked at me and held out a finger and he said, one, I asked who is she, what's her name, what happened to her? And he said, she died. He said she fell down the steps of her home in Florida. And she was a married woman. And it was the central tragedy of my dad's life. It was the thing that I didn't see coming. Like, I think I saw the plorn in the dildos coming more than I saw that coming. And then he could be deeply, that he could be deeply in love and have loved and lost, that he had something happen to him. That couldn't be just sort of shuffled away like any of his others lovers. - Did you end up putting the story of this great love of your dad's life in the peace about him that ran in GQ? - No, I didn't put that story in there. I didn't put any of the secrets that he shared with me at the Dune Deck that weekend in the story. - He spared him. I spared him and I put in the secrets that he wanted everybody to know. The secrets of grooming, the secrets of hygiene, the secrets of dressing. That everything else I kept to myself. - A final tribute. - A final tribute. - And to a diminished man. - To a man who was a diminished man. And it was intended as a gift to him. And it worked as a gift to him. And the peace became one of the most popular pieces I'd ever written. there was a photo of my father in it in a tuxedo drinking martini and it wound up in the window of the B. Altman on Fifth Avenue. The department store. And he was immortalized in a way. I thought my job was done. And he passes away 10 years later. Age of 87. That would be the moment for most people where their relationship with their father, their mother, their parent. More or less comes to an end, right? You have a bunch of secrets. They've died with him. They're probably going to die with you. But as you write, it's this precise moment when you actively start to seek out a very big and new chapter in your relationship with your father. And what made you do that? So I orchestrated my dad's funeral service. I hired a shantoo's from New York City to come and sing. I'll be seeing you. Instead of Christian hymns, I selected Sinatra songs for everybody to sing at the funeral. I gave the eulogy that I spent a long time preparing. I got the last word. I'm done. And then at the end of the funeral, this beautiful woman stands up that I didn't really even notice her presence. I was so involved in what I was doing. She's the only black person at the funeral. She's six foot tall. She's wearing a black leather jacket. She's wearing blue jeans, cut to capri-pant length. She has these gold sandals on with five-inch heels. And she stands up. She turns around. And she brings her hands down on the lectern. And she says, can we all just agree that this was a man? Wow. And that throws me. And so you discover yet another woman. So there's another woman? There's another woman. She was a person who was in the handbag business. She's not the woman that he was in love with. She was just another woman that he had a long affair with. And once again, it was something that eventually set me on the path of trying to find out everything about him. How did you actually go about investigating the parts of your dad's life that you didn't know? Because at this point, you know a great deal. Yeah, a lot. Basically, the way I did it was, you know, I tried to call people who were connected with my dad either sexually or through the business, through the handbag business. I mean, to the extent that I went and went out to California and found the woman with whom he had an affair when I was three years old. But the biggest thing that I did was try to find out more about the one. The great love. The great, the great love. And that was the hardest part as well. Why? Because she had children. She had four children. I looked at the notes that I had written to myself when I first found out the name of the one. And her name was Peggy Monahan. And when I found out her name, I found out the name of her children. And in one note that I wrote to myself, I asked myself, I say, you know, my father 40 years ago invaded this family's life. And it had a tragic ending. Do I presume to do that again? And why? Why did you want to invade this same family again, just like your father? Because when I first started doing my research into the book, I spoke to the children of my father's best friend in Florida. His name was Frankie Klein. He was my dad's wingman. He was one of my dad's best friends. And, you know, they had met Peggy Monahan. They had seen Peggy Monahan. They had seen Peggy Monahan with my father in this secret life in the secret of Florida. Like, yeah, one of Frankie's daughters said, I always knew that it was a forbidden love. And then another Frankie's daughters called up one day and said, listen, there's something I need to tell you. And what she needed to tell me was that Peggy had a child by my dad, or was rumored to have had a child, or by my dad. I didn't know which one, but I took it upon myself to find out. Because suddenly you have a sibling. It was such a powerful urge. Because I knew what my dad's secret life had done to my family. And I had an idea what my father's secret life had done to the Monahan family. And I was driven by this urge to put it all back together again. And I took it upon myself to do that. We are going to take one more quick break. We'll get right back. So Tom, after you discover that you might have a sibling you didn't know about. And you realize how deep this urge is to figure it out. What do you do? Well, I sent out an email and letters to some of the children saying in that email, hello, my name is Tom. You know, you don't know me. But my father was in love with your mother. Your mother and my father had a long affair. And I've been given to understand that your mother was the love of my father's life. What did they give me to get back to you? Well, the first person in the family that I met was named Tommy. And we met on New Year's Eve 2016. We went to a bar in Queens. And Tommy was basically trying to suss out my motives in contacting him and in pursuing, you know, because I told him I was writing a book. He asked if he could go outside and smoke a cigarette. And I said, sure, and we went outside. And the minute he turned around and lit up the cigarette looked at me and he goes, it's my sister, isn't it? And I said, yeah. And he was like, I knew it. And then he said, but here's the thing, you can never tell her. So you're being asked to keep you at another secret, but you decide not to. You do reach out to her why. Because I couldn't live with not finding her. I couldn't live with it. I couldn't, I had started trying to, you know, trying to put the pieces back together. And the idea of not completing that task while knowing that there was someone out there. I just couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't abide by it. And I didn't think ultimately it would be anybody's decision, but hers. And so in 2018, I decided to approach her. And her name is Lizanne. And she owns and runs and cooks in a food truck at the University of Connecticut. And one day I decided to approach the food truck. And I've done a lot of interviews. And I've done even, you know, pretty scary interviews. I've knocked on any number of doors and nothing ever in my entire, you know, journalistic career scared me more than walking up to Lizanne's food truck and introducing myself. And she asked me, "How can I help you?" And I said, I said, "Lizanne, I'm Tom Juno." And she has this beautiful, beautiful smile. And she was smiling. And then the smile disappeared. And she looked at me. And then the smile came back. And she said, "What the hell are you doing here? Did she know?" I think she knew. I certainly did. There is something about seeing somebody who is related to you that is hard to describe. When I first saw Lizzie's picture on her Facebook page, it's not that I identified her. It's not that I was able to say, "Oh, yeah, we have the same nose, or we have the same smile lines, or our smiles are similar." It was beyond that. I recognized her. And I think that she recognized me. As well. I mean, it took a while, but it just turned out to be one of the most remarkable experiences of my life, not just because we found each other, but we had lost. We each had lost something enormous. In May of 2022, I lost my sister Kathy. She died in July of 2023. Lizzie lost her brother, Michael. And on Christmas Eve 2022, she called me to tell me that she had gotten the results of the ancestry test back. You had lost siblings. We had gained siblings. Yeah. And so in that moment, we each had lost family, and we each had found each other. But there was something else about it. I felt like I had settled finally what I'd never been able to settle in my life, which is my feelings about my dad and my knowledge about my dad. How does this settle? I've not disrupt. Despite a lifetime of betrayals that ends with arguably the greatest betrayal of all. A secret family, a secret child, a great love who he paraded around Florida, and a pretty cavalier way when he was allegedly off-selling person. Who knows what he was doing? It wasn't taking care of you in those moments. And we haven't talked about how much he was or wasn't a father to this sister, but are you not at all angry? So anger just come easy to me with with my dad. And not long after it was confirmed that Lizzie and I, our brother and sister, I was taking a ride on a winter day in a bus to LaGuardia Airport, and I sat next to a woman who asked me, you know, had the misfortune to ask me how my holidays were. Let me tell you about my holidays. So I told her everything. So she listens to the whole story, and then she says, "Can I ask you one question about your father?" And I'd like to read the passage in the book where I answer her. Why aren't you angry at him? She asks. She waits for an answer so I try to think of one. Why did I do the gentlemanly thing and buy her a coffee when I bought mine? Because of my dad. Why has the discovery of Lizzie and come to mean so much to me? Because of my dad. Why do I love music so much? Because of my dad. Why do I love language so much? Because of my dad. Why am I a writer in the first place? Because of my dad. I took so much from him. I owe so much to him. And when I respond to the world, I am often responding through him for better and for worse. He taught me how to live, man. And he gave me permission to enjoy life. He might not have been a good man, but he was an elemental one. And I feel his presence when I eat, when I drink, when I make love, when I breathe. Anger never had a chance. If anger isn't the right word for the way you feel about your dad right now, what is the right word for words that you tell about your dad right now? I couldn't have written this book without loving him. And there's a part of me that doesn't want to say it. But that's where it is. I am ambivalently still in love with my dad. Tom, thank you for being here. For talking about your dad and for the gift of this book. And happy Father's Day too. Thank you very much, Michael. Today's episode was produced by Tina Antillini. It was edited by Wendy Dore and engineered by Daniel Ramirez with production assistance from Dahlia Hadad. It contains music by Dan Powell. That's it for the Daily on Sunday. I'm Michael Borough. Happy Father's Day. See you tomorrow.