Here are a few things Bart wouldn’t tell me: Both his parents were born in Austria. His mother, whose maiden name was Clara Ginsberg, arrived at Ellis Island in 1914. Her passenger record includes this notation: “Ethnicity: Austria (Hebrew).” There is no record of a Max S. Bart entering the United States through Ellis Island. Bart’s father may have traveled under another name. But there is a listing for a Moses Bart, which was the name of Bart’s paternal grandfather. Moses came to America in 1913, when he was 57 years old. His ethnicity: “Austria, Hebrew.”
Bart has kept even his closest friends confused about his past. “He was brought up a Quaker, wasn’t he?” asks Evans. It’s an honest mistake. You can’t spend more than an hour with Bart without hearing about his attending Friends Seminary and Swarthmore College — both Quaker institutions.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Bart says of his religious heritage, as one of his knees begins bouncing up and down. “I resent people’s militancy on these issues. Everyone wants to peg everyone else because everyone is predictable. And I’m not.”
Over several months he will volunteer that he has never once dated a Jewish girl, never attended a seder, and has been inside a synagogue only once, for the bar mitzvah of then-agent Michael Ovitz’s son. (“I wanted to see what one was like.”) “Listen, I got berated by the vice president in charge of business affairs at Paramount,” he says, “because I did not take off Jewish holidays. And I was affronted. I basically told him to mind his own damned business.”
At one point he tries to explain his discomfort by comparing himself to his longtime assistant, a light-skinned black woman: “She struggles with this, too. She feels she’s a black person. But she’s about as black as Felix [Bart's Siamese cat]. I feel she is a bit victimized by, again, that need to identify with some subculture that will help you.
“You talk to a lot of the better-educated, wealthy black people. You know, they’re not very black. The big distinction is between the people they call ‘niggers’ — who are the ghetto blacks, who can’t even speak, can’t get a job, and bury themselves in black-itude — and those people who are better looking, better educated, smarter, and who own the world: the black middle class,” he says. “A lot of people in Hollywood — let’s say if they happen to be Jewish people who come from Brooklyn — they are most comfortable with those people. Which is fine. It just doesn’t happen to describe me.”
A few minutes later he asks, “Can you and I make a deal about this whole thing about religion? I would love it if we could dodge it in some way that you don’t think is dishonest.” He will repeat this request more than once.
*
Pundit Peter is in my living room, on television.
When network news shows need someone to speak for Hollywood — on the impact of possible strikes, for example, or Washington’s campaign against violent entertainment — they often turn to Bart. Tonight the man Bill Maher introduces as a “former big-time studio honcho prexy” is making his second appearance on Politically Incorrect.
The show is an ideal forum for Bart. He loves a good sword fight. Dapper in a black dress shirt and beige suit, Bart fences with Monica Crowley, a political commentator for Fox News, and actors Martin Short and Alec Baldwin, the topic: Richard Nixon. “Nixon was famous for being a self-made man who only admired self-made men,” Maher says. “What do you think Nixon would have thought of George W. Bush?”
“He would have said he was a patrician nothing,” Bart says. Then Bart assesses his fellow panelists and proclaims, “I’m the only Republican here.” Bart, too, prides himself on being self-made. He’s also self-made-up. He’s been a registered Democrat since 1994.
*
BART DESCRIBES HIS CHILDHOOD as “annoyingly happy, except there was a definite imperative to perform. My parents never said, ‘This report card isn’t good enough.’ But you weren’t supposed to fuck up.”
Bart attended the academically rigorous Swarthmore, where he succeeded upperclassman Victor Navasky, now the publisher of The Nation, as editor of the college newspaper. Bart majored in politics, did a brief stint as a copyboy at The New York Times, and then had a fellowship at the London School of Economics. He was hired by The Wall Street Journal in 1956. A few years later he returned to The New York Times as a reporter to cover advertising and the media.
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