IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, I had a phone call from a man who identified himself as Maurice Rosenfield. He claimed he had been reading me in magazines for years, said that he had an option on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and asked if I would mind reading a manuscript he had commissioned in which an Englishman attempted to turn the story into a musical. “Sure,” I said, “send it.”
After I read it, I told him the manuscript seemed hopeless. He agreed but said that he was glad to have me confirm his instincts. Would I, he wondered, like to attempt the job? I was to think about it. And might he take me to lunch so that he might thank me in person?
Writers are fantasts, and the notion of writing a successful musical was fodder for a grander fantasy than I am generally accustomed to indulge. “We saw Joe Epstein’s Diamond in London.” “Really? We saw it New York, and then again in Chicago. The New York cast was better.” Gold rained down upon me, in this fantasy, normally cold maitres d’ smiled and bowed as I entered their outrageously expensive restaurants. In the shower I worked on the lyrics for the show’s big song, but all I could come up with in the way of rhymes for Ritz was blitz, kibbitz, and a chauffeur named Fritz. I dropped the idea.
When a few weeks later I met Maury Rosenfield for lunch, he turned out to be a large man, handsome, well turned out, in his mid-seventies but full of energy, and with no crap about him. I liked him straightaway. We met at his posh country club, the Lakeshore, whose membership was once strictly limited to German Jews. When I told him that the story was that the only Jewish event celebrated at this club in the old days was Kristallnacht, he roared with laughter. He had a great laugh, Maury.
He also, as I was slowly to learn over the next eighteen years, had a great life. We had attended the same Chicago high school, and we had both gone to the University of Chicago. He went on to law school there, graduating at the top of his class; he didn’t tell me this–he had no brag to him–I learned it from his son Andy.
He had a successful legal practice, one both lucrative and important. He specialized in First Amendment cases–at different times he defended Lenny Bruce and Playboy magazine–and in 1941 wrote an important article, “The Contemporary Function of the Class Suit,” that is said to have paved the way for class-action lawsuits.
The law apparently wasn’t enough to hold his wide interest and abundant energy. Ben Hecht, the Chicago journalist and later playwright and screenwriter, set Maury on a case to free a falsely convicted (for murder) black man who was languishing in Joliet prison for fifteen years. Maury took the case to the Supreme Court, where the conviction was reversed. Hecht next convinced him to go in partners on a movie about the case, but he died before it got off the ground.
Maury and his wife Loie were enormous appreciators of talent in all its forms. He was large and earnest, she small and witty. (Note to casting director: As a couple, imagine them as a Jewish version of Joel McCrae and Barbara Stanwyck.) Together they decided to do a different movie. As independent producers, they made Bang the Drum Slowly, a baseball film that introduced Robert DeNiro, who signed on for the now piddling sum of $10,000, in one of the starring roles. Maury himself was drafted to play the team’s owner; someone who looked prosperous and authoritative was required–he filled the bill. A lovely flick, Bang the Drum Slowly, and whenever I told people that my friends the Rosenfields made it they would reply by saying how much they adored that movie.
The toughest thing about producing a movie, Maury once told me, was serving the cast and crew lunch. They complained so much during the shooting of Bang the Drum Slowly, he said, that he went across town, where The Godfather was being shot, and hired the caterer working on that movie. Henceforth, when anyone complained about the food, Maury would tell them to knock it off, they were eating the same damn lunch that Marlon Brando was eating. The Rosenfields never made another movie, though they did produce plays, among them Barnum (in which Glenn Close had her first leading role) and Singing in the Rain (which used Twyla Tharp as choreographer) and a revival of The Glass Menagerie with Jessica Tandy.
Maury lived off and for ideas. In politics, as a younger man, he was among the small but effective crew at the University of Chicago who worked to secure the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination for Adlai Stevenson; later he became a devotee of free markets, an admirer of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and Aaron Director, who began the economics in law movement. He attended Mont Pelerin Society meetings. He loved stories about the stringent critical spirit of the University of Chicago Economics Department. He told me that he heard George Stigler, one of Chicago’s Nobel Prize economists, say that Gary Becker, another Nobel Prize winner, might just be the greatest economist of the twentieth century, then add, “Of course it hasn’t been a particularly good century for economics.”
He was full of opinions. He thought Casey Stengel the great genius among baseball managers, and could back it up by introducing all the innovations Stengel had brought to the game. He held heretical opinions about Israel. His son reported that, when they came out of Elton John’s rather shoddy remake of Aida, he asked his father what he thought of it: “A bit pro-Nubian,” Maury said.
Maury made you wonder what was the point of experience without coming to a judgment about what one had experienced. He had opinions on movies, ballplayers, politicians, ideas, and he always asked you your opinion.
The nice thing, though, was that if you differed with Maury, he did not cast you into hell. He was argumentative without being at all mean. To slow up his admiration for free markets, I used to tell him how poorly they worked when it came to culture. “Look,” I would say, “at television.” He conceded that I might have a point. Maury took the pejorative out of the word “opinionated”; he made having passionate opinions seem a perfectly sensible reaction to life.
For a man of strong opinions, he kept an equally strong sense of humor. I recently told him that I had met a few wise Jews but no serene ones; serenity had nothing to do with being Jewish. He thought for a moment, then laughed and said, “That’s very amusing, and I think it’s true.” He was a man who could add on and take off thirty or so pounds, and during one of his heavier phases, when his daughter-in-law, thinking to buy him a belt for his birthday, inquired of his wife Maury’s waist size, she answered, “Equator.” Maury, not Loie, told me that story.
Maury once told me that, when still a young man, he decided that he wished to be wealthy and anonymous. An interesting set of ambitions, both of which he achieved. The first of them is easily enough understood. But why anonymity? I’m not certain, except that I know Maury to have been a man who wanted in on the action, as he was both in law and in the arts, but, somehow, he didn’t need any of the attention that came with fame.
The death of his wife, two and a half years ago, was easily the greatest sadness of Maury’s life. It halved his existence. And then, soon after, owing to unsuccessful knee surgery, he lost the easy use of his legs, and his life was diminished yet again. The philosopher George Santayana says that “the world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.”
Saddened though Maury was by his serious losses, he was a long way from being ready to close his eyes, even though he had achieved the age of ninety. He kept in the game; he continued to stay engaged with life. The Rosenfield family were long-lived, and my sense is that Maury was hoping for another four or five years in which to watch his grandchildren set full sail upon life. Although his death was, as modern deaths go, an easeful one–his weakened heart closing down, over and out, all in less than a minute–and though his life was nothing like the joyous thing it was when he had Loie with him, I know he wanted still more of it. He wasn’t ready to give up.
In my last phone conversation with Maury, which took place the Friday before the Sunday night on which he died, we talked about the World Series–a lifelong Cubs fan, he was nonetheless a fierce critic of the team’s manager, Dusty Baker, who drove him into the camp of the White Sox–about the meaning of the withdrawal of the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court, about recent movies, about his concerns in connection with possibly having further surgery, and then, perhaps twenty or so minutes into our conversation, he noted, from a CNN crawl, that Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, had been indicted. He said that he thought he ought to break away, but would get back to me if he heard anything of interest in this. I never heard from him again. I am going to miss him, a lot.
Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
