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Chapter 1: Who is Tom Junod and what is his connection to complicated men?
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. 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 at places like GQ and Esquire, Tom profiled 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 Juneau. 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.
I believe 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-pop, 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 Ava. 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 Scarlett 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 had neglected to turn in the ticket.
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Chapter 2: How did Tom's father's secrets shape his understanding of masculinity?
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, every... 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, Florsheim shoes...
skin the color of mahogany or A1 steak, so it's any sort of synonym that you can figure out for brown. He was that. And then he had eyes The color of chartreuse. 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, I mean, 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 what? 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. Mm-hmm. And then they got a little bit, like after 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? Definitely not his dad.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in Tom's book about fatherhood?
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, your father calls 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 when he was growing up in Brooklyn, and he absorbed everything. He absorbed how to dress from Fred Astaire. He absorbed how to talk from Cary Grant. He absorbed how to treat women from Clark Gable. And he was a student of all that. I mean, the thing about my dad, so he was a rough kid growing up in Brooklyn.
But by the time I knew him, he had expunged 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. For an audience of himself?
I dreamed when I denied Just one look and then I knew That all I longed for long ago was you
And so he behaved the way a crooner in his mind was supposed to behave.
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?
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Chapter 4: What was Tom's father's philosophy on manhood?
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 piece became one of the most popular pieces I had ever written. There was a photo of my father in it in a tuxedo drinking a martini, and it wound up in the window of the B. Altman on Fifth Avenue. The department store. The department store.
And... He was immortalized in a way.
I thought my job was done.
Mm-hmm. And he passes away.
Ten 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 gonna 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 chanteuse 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.
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