Unveiling the Complex Legacies of Bernstein, Brooks, Freidan, and Mailer: A Provocative Review by David Denby
All four were quick to grasp the possibilities of emerging media: television (Mailer more than the others, but Bernstein’s “Concerts for Young People” ran on CBS for 13 years); the long-playing record (Bernstein was also prolific here, and Brooks’ and Carl Reiner’s “The 2000-Year Old Man” sketches are deathless); and the paperback (Friedan’s 1963 magnum opus, The Feminist Mystique, sold millions, as did Mailer’s 1948 novel, The Naked and the Dead). Brooks and Bernstein also had more than one Broadway musical triumph. Denby gives close attention to Brooks’ The Producers (2001), and Bernstein’s West Side Story (1958), both of which were blockbuster hits, and are revived regularly. Brooks is the only one of the four not to appear on the cover of Time, but he was just as much a darling of the media as the others. A New York Times reporter once said to me, “We love Norman Mailer at the Times.” The same is true of the other three, all “good copy.” Denby is adroit in his explanations of how each in her/his own way was sensitive to the needs and opportunities of the new media. As he puts it, “being outsiders only sharpened personal habits of risk-taking and entrepreneurship.” Another factor was the rapid shriveling (but not the disappearance) of anti-Semitism after WWII. As it faded, “Jewish reticence faded as well.”
