I’d heard about these “manless,” independent, rich sisters who existed in a time when the world did not support any of that. I had written about my mother and her family, and now I had this fascinating piece of my father’s family to investigate. When I finished my memoir, I thought the next logical project would be a book about the Morris sisters. A secretary answered, and eventually they got to my grandpa. In 1943, he was alive, and people who wanted to talk to him looked up his telephone number in that phone book and called him at his office. The feeling I had poring over the names of the 1943 Manhattan phone book and finding my grandfather’s office address and telephone number was like I had time traveled. I loved the quest for information about my family, though: It was like searching for buried treasure and actually thinking there was a decent chance I would find it. It was a memoir, not a history book, after all. I looked through old New York City phone books-actual physical phone books-found people’s addresses, and interviewed the people who were still alive at that time, and though I couldn’t always verify their stories, it was fine. While I used the internet to research it, it was different then: Google wasn’t a verb yet, and a lot fewer documents were available online.) But his first wedding in 1965 was to my relative. Perelman, the Revlon tycoon who went on to marry Claudia Cohen, Patricia Duff, Ellen Barkin, and Anna Chapman. One was from Sam’s daughter Faith’s wedding to Ronald O. Once at my parents’ house, I found a bag of yarmulkes from various weddings and bar mitzvahs. There are buildings and hospitals around New York City that still bear his name. When I told that to my mom and Aunt Mattie, they said everyone was wrong, they were certain the family story is true. In fact, I had always been told that the name Rego Park was for my mother’s grandmother Rose Golding, but in every documented story about the history of the name, it’s said to come from Real Good Construction Company. Her mother’s uncle, Sam Golding, developed the neighborhood of Rego Park in Queens during the 1920s. In 2008, I published my first book, Please Excuse My Daughter, a memoir about my mother and me and how I grew up, and it dipped a little into my mother’s family’s history, which was rich and interesting.
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