Sweet and Low: A Family Story | Rich Cohen | Talks at Google

It's a story of immigrants, Jewish gangsters and Brooklyn, of sugar saccharine obesity and diet crazes, of jealousy, betrayal, and ambition. Rich's work has appeared in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and he is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. Time magazine says it is Cohen's good fortune to be on the side of the family that was disinherited. Sweet Revenge is the energy behind this glorious book. And Rich will be signing books after the talk and answering questions afterwards. So please be sure to use the mics during the Q and A because we are recording this. And so please join me in welcoming Mr. Rich Cohen. Thanks. The part about it being better to be on the side that's disinherited. Maybe I'm not so sure. The book is called Sweet and Low, and it is really about. To me, it's like, I thought it was this great American business story and sort of a story of what happens to a family over three generations as almost personified by the business, you know, because in some way, this business, which started out as a diner in Brooklyn, became the family. And you see, you go from the first generation, which is my grandfather, who's sort of the patriarch of the family, and he has this simple idea, and it becomes a great fortune. And the second generation of the family, which are my uncles, become interested in preserving, and you get down to the third generation, and that's the generation where the business tends to be lost. And in that case specifically, I'm thinking of Equal and Splenda. So the colors blue and yellow are like dirty colors in my family. So it's all around my grandfather. So I'll tell you a little bit about him. His name was Ben Eisenstadt, and he grew up in. He grew up mostly, like, as an orphan. He wasn't actually an orphan, but he grew up his mother and took his siblings and left. And he was left to be raised by his uncles. And he grew up on couches and on floors, moving from uncle to uncle in Brooklyn and in northern New Jersey. And when he was a kid, he had kind of a rough childhood, and he, for a time, worked in a factory. When he was a kid, it was a factory owned by one of his uncles that made tea bags that bagged tea. And he did that. And then he went through high school, and after high school, he worked for a lawyer, and he decided he wanted to be a lawyer. And in those days, if you wanted to be a lawyer, you didn't have to go to college. You could just go straight to law school or Just take the bar. I guess you could probably still do that now. But he went to law school. He went to St. John's Law School and he graduated first in his class, or so I am told. I say so I am told because it's sort of a family story, which means it's about sort of unpacking family mythology. And mythology, it turns out, is like a fancy word for things that often aren't true, which is like another even slightly less fancy word for lies. So I never really know what's true and what's not. And some part of this story is trying to figure that out. But anyway, my grandfather Ben went to St. John's Law School and graduated first in his class, or so I'm told. And he couldn't get a job after law school because it was the Depression, there weren't a lot of jobs. And he wound up meeting my grandmother, whose name was Betty Gelman, and working in her family business. And that business was diners. So in other words, my grandfather Ben's law school degree from St. John's basically enabled him or qualified him to work as a counterman at a diner in Brownsville, Brooklyn. And that's what he did. And it was at that diner that a lot of the guys from Murder Incorporated hung out. That's where my first book, which was called Tough Jews came out of these group of Jewish gangsters used to hang out there. And those were guys like TikTok Tannenbaum, AB Reliso, Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, Happy Levine, and my favorite Genghi Cohen. Abe Rellis, I should say, was the first sort of major rat in the mob. He turned on the other gangsters and put a lot of people in the electric chair. And for a time he was held in a hotel called the Half Moon Hotel in Coney island with 16 police watching him and brought to court every day in an armored vehicle. And one day he went sailing out the window of the Half moon and. And died. And was thereafter known in New York and still by people of that era as the canary who could sing but couldn't fly. So sort of the story of my family is somehow wrapped up with the story of Abe Rellis nickname Kid Twist. And anyway, my grandfather was sort of an ambitious guy and he wanted to. He took over this business from his father in law and he wanted to build it. And he moved from Brownsville, Brooklyn to a bigger location in Red Hook, Brooklyn. And then ultimately he bought a huge building in kind of a not so great neighborhood and that nothing was going on there in Fort Greene Brooklyn, on the corner of Cumberland street and Flatbush Avenue. And he bought this property for almost nothing. And it was across the street from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And he opened this huge cafeteria of the kind they don't really have anymore. There's one in New York called Katz's on Houston Street. There's one in Chicago called Manny's. But it used to be a thing where they had this huge room where you'd get these cards and you go station to station and they'd check off what you ate. You'd pay at the end. He had a bar there. It was open virtually 24 hours a day. And started off kind of small, but then there started to be, like, rumors of war in Europe. And suddenly the countries of Europe started to rearm and they had to buy ships, and there was Lend Lease, and they had to buy. They were getting weapons from the United States. So people started coming into Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is across the street and is still there. And suddenly people started coming into the diner. And then the war started. And suddenly 50% of all the people in the US army would pass through the Navy Yard. And, like, the only place to eat if you didn't want to eat on base in the Navy Yard was in the Cumberland Cafeteria, owned by Ben Eisenstadt across the street. And this was a booming business. And it sort of allowed my mother's family to live a version of kind of the American dream. They moved from an apartment house on President street in Brooklyn to a house in Flatbush in the Midwood section of Flatbush, which was very fancy. And they. At that point, the family consisted of my Uncle Marvin, the oldest, who we called Uncle Marvelous, who is still the President and runs Cumberland Packing, which makes Sweet and Low and is still in Fort Greene. My Aunt Gladys and my mother. And this was going on supported by this diner where he was working, like, 20 hours a day. And this continued until the war ended. And generally, the end of the Second World War throughout the world was considered good news. People were happy about it. There were parades. Somebody in Times Square got kissed. Maybe you've seen that picture. But sort of, if you're a guy who runs a diner that's based on people coming in who are in uniform, it's sort of like a mixed blessing. And basically overnight, his business vanished. No more customers. He now had this house, he had this family. He had debts. There's sort of out of ideas, money flying out of his pocket. And there's a story told in my family. It's sort of a Bible story. It's a foundational myth. It's like our Garden of Eden story in my family. And it's a story of Grandpa Ben and. And Grandma Betty go to eat in Cookie's Diner in midward Brooklyn. It's like the scene at the end of the dream. They don't know what they're going to do. They're sitting there. Betty orders tea. Ben is sitting there with his head in his hands, and he's saying, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? I have this family. And Betty has got her tea now, and she's trying to pour sugar into her tea. And the bottle's all jammed up and the sugar won't come out. And so he's saying, sort of like on a split screen, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? And she's saying, what? Why won't this pour? Why won't this pour? See, I have this. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Why won't this pour? Why won't this pour? And she says, why don't you pack sugar? And it's like the Reese's Peanut Butter cup, the chocolate and the peanut butter, and it's like the simple idea. And he goes back to his diner and he buys an old tea bag machine, which is like the thing that he knows how to do from when he's a kid is bag tea. And he converts the old teabag machine into the first ever in history sugar packing machine. And he packs, Starts. Figures out how to pack sugar, solving a problem that he always had as the owner of this diner. And now he has the product, but he's got no market. And the thing, like, the thing, it turns out in America is inventing the product is like the easy part. It's like inventing the market. That's the tough part. So he thought, who needs sugar packets? And he went to Domino Sugar, because that was the largest sugar refinery in the world, and it was in Brooklyn. And they closed a few years ago, but the sign is still there. And he set up this pitch meeting and he showed them his sugar packing machine. And he showed them, and they said, first, show us how it worked. And he showed him. It was this amazing machine, and packets went in and sugar packets came out. And they said, fantastic. One more question. Did you get a patent for this? And he had never patented the machine, so they just simply built their own. So he was sort of beaten down for a couple days by that, but then he sort of picked the pieces up and he went around to small sugar makers and they didn't want to build their own machine. He signed contracts with them. And he changed the name from the Cumberland Cafeteria to the Cumberland Packing Company. And he started packing sugar. And if you look on the back of the Sweet and Low packet, it still says the Cumberland Packing Company. He started packing other things too, which is. He packed soy sauce, he packed duck sauce. My favorite is he packed sea monkeys. You know, sea monkeys, little amoeba shrimp. You order brine shrimp, you order in the back of comic books. And from the picture it seems as if they're going to sit on couches, ride bikes and have very intricate interpersonal relationships. And then they arrive and you can't even see them. And then you realize it's important rite of passage in America, at least when I was growing up, it's how you realize that you've been had for the first time. You're a sucker and the world is crooked. And it seemed perfect that it came out of my grandfather's factory, speaking as a disinherited heir to the fortune. So anyway, he started packing all this stuff. But like I said, he was a very ambitious guy and he wanted to have his own product. You know, he was packing other people's products. And he was also a guy who was always on a diet. And he. In those days, if you didn't want to eat sugar because you're on a diet, they had these little tiny white pills that were 10 parts cyclamate, 1 part saccharin, and you drop them in your coffee or they had a little liquid version of it and you'd use an eyedropper. And he liked what he called the mouth feel of sugar. I know that because that's the wording on his patent, which he got this time. And he liked the texture. And he used to take those little pills and he'd crumble them up and put them on his strawberries or whatever. And to go from there to the idea of inventing a fake sugar wasn't so far, I mean, actually didn't exist. He worked with my uncle Marvin, he worked with the chemist. And they started developing all these different formulas that they tried to make it taste like sugar. At this point, my father entered the picture. My father, another guy from Brooklyn, from a different part of Brooklyn, never had a great relationship with his in laws. When he first showed up at the house, he was usually greeted by like 15 cups of coffee. And he'd have to try each one with slight variations of this formula and say which tasted the Most like sugar. I should say that about 30 years later, when they decided that saccharin might cause cancer or had caused cancer in rats, my father's first reaction was not, oh, what about the business? It was, I knew it. I knew that guy was trying to kill me. All those years ago, when they got the formula that they thought would work the best, they put it in a pink packet because the sugar packets were white, and they thought pink would just sort of jump out of the sugar dispenser. They called it Sweet and Low, which was a lyric, really, from a song that my grandfather loved that was based on a Tennyson poem that went, sweet and low, Sweet and low. Wind of the western seas. I tried to figure out if that lyric could tell me something about, you know, the soul of my family. And I realized, no, it can't tell me anything. So. But it's nice. It's a nice name. Sweet and Low. And they started originally selling it to hospitals and pharmacies. They thought it would be, like a medicine that it would be for diabetics mostly and for people that, for one reason or another, were told they couldn't eat sugar. And what happened is they found out that people were stealing them from hospitals. And then they found out that people were calling the factory and ordering them in bulk, and they had accidentally plugged into this thing. I mean, it turned out that my grandfather was on a diet, so it was like 70% of America. He just didn't know it. And it was really the birth of the diet economy, which is still like, one of the hugest economies in the country. And he had plugged into it accidentally, I always say. He plugged into the zeitgeist. He plugged into a Zeitgeist bullet train that I call fat but still hungry. And basically, it was this huge thing, and it just blew up. And it went from this little business that was a little factory among little factories on the shore of Brooklyn making like $100,000 a year, to a company making ultimately hundreds of million dollars a year very quickly. And so that basically is the story of my family. It is a story of your basic, normal, mildly dysfunctional Brooklyn family plus a couple hundred million dollars. So what you have here is a science experiment, really. And me and this book are the result of that science experiment. Sort of like what you realize about a lot of money in a family is it doesn't create any problems that don't exist. It just magnifies everything like a funhouse mirror until everybody goes completely nuts. So I was going to read a couple parts of this book. The first is the very beginning of the book that sort of introduces who all the characters are. And when I say characters, I mean my family. So you close the book and they're done, but I still live with them for the rest of my life and sort of my position in the story. Everyone in my family tells this story, but everyone starts it in a different way. My mother starts it in the diner across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard where my grandfather, Benjamin Eisenstadt, a short order cook, invented the sugar packet and Sweet N Low, and with them built the fortune that would be the cause of all the trouble. My sister starts it with his wife, Betty, the power behind the throne, the woman who in this version found in Ben a vehicle for her dreams. Whenever anyone asks what Betty was like, I say Betty had her name legally changed to Betty from Bessie. My father starts the story in downtown Brooklyn, in the courtroom where my uncle Marvin, the first son of the patriarch, a handsome, curly haired man who insists on being called Uncle Marvelous, is facing off against federal prosecutors after assuming control of the Cumberland Packing Company, which makes sweet and low sugar in the raw new salt and butter buds. Marvin, among other things that caused a scandal, put a criminal on the payroll, a reputed associate of the Bonanno crime family. That criminal made illegal campaign contributions to Senator Alphonse d', Amato, who sponsored legislation that kept saccharin on the market. Saccharin, a key ingredient of Sweet n Low, had been found to cause cancer. In the end, Marvin cut a deal with prosecutors, testifying for the government and keeping himself out of prison. In other words, Uncle Marvelous turned rat. I start this story at the Metropolitan Club on Manhattan's Upper east side, where my cousin Jeffrey, the oldest son of the oldest son, the scion of the third generation, is getting married for the second time. Jeffrey, a burned out surfer, a bloodshot member of the high school class of 78 whose yearbook picture still tells the story, is earmarked to inherit the empire. If Jeffrey read more widely, he would know that he is fated to screw the pooch, lose his grip, open his hands, and let the money blast back into the whirlwind. Or I start with Uncle Ira, the youngest son of Ben and Benny, a vice president of the company who controls 49% of the stock. Ira, who Control, who has always struck me as an extreme eccentric, is years younger than his siblings, a pampered, interesting kid who grew into a genuine nut, a man who carries a purse, wears sandals, follows whims, sports an unruly red beard and lives in an east side townhouse with his wife and many cats. Ira has been to his office at the factory just twice in the last 10 years. He is the trick that fate played on Empire, the inscrutable brother who has to be watched. At Jeff's wedding, he approached me in the bathroom. Standing next to me at the urinal, he said, what is the last thing you want your crazy uncle to say to you in the bathroom? What? Nice dick. My brother starts the story in Flatbush, in the icebox showroom of my Aunt Gladys, a woman who, for mysterious reasons, had not been out of the house, her childhood home, where she still lived with Ben and Betty in almost 30 years. I once heard a politician describe a rival's tax scheme as the crazy aunt hiding in the attic. And I said to myself, you know, she actually lives on the ground floor. Whenever I asked what was wrong with Aunt Gladys, why she never left her room, words were muttered about arthritis, psoriasis, lack of confidence. Even though she is the least physically active of the Eisenstadt siblings, Gladys, with her telephone, drives the action of this story In a way I am still trying to fathom, Gladys is its protagonist. When I was briefing my brother in law on his new family and told him that Gladys had not left the house since the Nixon administration, he said, you mean mostly she stays in the house, but now and then she leaves the house to go to the store? I said, I mean, mostly she stays in her room, but now and then she leaves her room to go to the bathroom? As I mentioned, my aunt's room, for reasons I still do not understand, is kept as cold as a meat locker. To this day, if we're in a movie theater or a mall where the AC is really cranking, my brother will say, it's like, Aunt Gladys room, it's so cold in here. By which we know him to mean more than just the temperature. Gladys Room is where my brother Stephen learned the nature of things. Once a week before I was born, my brother and sister were taken to Flatbush to visit their grandparents. Aunt and cousins. There was an ancient form of primogenitor at play in the family. As the son of the oldest son, Cousin Jeffrey was golden. One week, Grandma Betty decided that a grandchild, for no particular reason, would have a party thrown in his or her honor, complete with cake and gifts. While standing in my aunt's room, Betty wrote the names on a slip of paper and dropped the slips and a hat. A winner was drawn. Jeffrey. Since Jeffrey seemed to win many such contests, my brother grew suspicious. When he picked up the hat, Betty said, don't look. Unfolding the slips, he had the great early shock of his life. Every ballot was Mark Jeffrey. I should say my brother is now a federal prosecutor, largely because of this incident. Later, when my brother refused to follow some instruction, Ben led him upstairs and spanked him. A grandfather who spanks. Ending for my brother the sweet ignorance of childhood. In 1995, when my grandfather collapsed in the hospital, the first relative on the scene was my brother. In a nice twist of fate, Steven found himself charged with making life and death decisions for the man who had helped him recognize the unfairness of the world. And the winner is Jeffrey. In the months following Ben's collapse, the family battle moved into its titanic phase, with Ben shuffling from doctor to doctor and everything up for grabs. The money, the legacy, and the story itself. When Grandma Betty died, I found out that my mother had lost this battle and that she and all of her children had been written out of the will. The factory, an asset to the company, was are worth an estimated several hundred million dollars. Betty's last words came in a legal document. I hereby record that I have made no provision under this will for my daughter Ellen and any of Ellen's issue for reasons I deem sufficient. Her issue. It was like being called discharge or refuse or excrement. She swallowed a dime, but it came out in the issue. So fate has placed me in the ideal storytelling position. The youngest son of the once favorite daughter, outside, but inside, with just enough of a grudge to sharpen my sensibility. I am Napoleon staring at Paris from Corsica. All they have left me is this story. To be disinherited is to be set free. So that's a. That's it. That's me and my family. A lot of this book, you know, disinherited for reasons I deem sufficient. It suggests a mystery. You know, if you're somebody that's curious, you want to find out what those reasons are. And a lot of this book is that search. You know, I felt like it was a kind of detective story wrapped around this great American story that I thought was a story to me was like a story like Citizen Kane or something, you know, it was this guy who built this thing and changed the world. But when you really, you know, my father has a saying. When you pull back the phony tinsel there, you find the real tinsel, and it's sort of like, you know, it's like a box in a box in a box. And a lot of it, you know, there's why we're disinherited. You could. I say it's like thinking about infinity for me. You'll go crazy if you do it for too long. But there's a million reasons and there's no reasons. But I thought a lot of it went back to really old world stuff. And to me, I grew up in Illinois. The old world is Brooklyn, where all my relatives came from. And it had to do with all this kind of Brooklyn stuff and immigrant stuff and new people to America. And the fact is that my parents came from different neighborhoods. My father was from Bensonhurst. My mother was from Flatbush. To me, growing up in Illinois, that seemed like the same neighborhood. But apparently to the people of Brooklyn of that era, they were incredibly different neighborhoods. So different, you know, that my father said when he and my mother were married, and these are both Jews whose parents or grandparents come from Poland, that their marriage was considered a mixed marriage and was frowned upon by the community at large. I mean, it was this weird thing. And it had to do with the fact that my mother's parents were born in America. They were educated. My Grandpa Ben went to St. John's Law School. He graduated first in his class. And I have no reason to believe that that isn't true. And my Grandma Betty went to nyu, studied English, studied with Thomas Wolf, the author of look, you Can't Go Home Again, Look Homeward, Angel. And that's what she told me. And I have no reason to believe that that isn't true. And my mother's parents, my father's parents were immigrants. They spoke Yiddish, was their first language, really. They spoke with a heavy accent. Neither of them had gone beyond, like, the seventh or eighth grade of school. They came here when they were in their teens, and they were basically what my Grandma Betty, I think, was trying to escape. She was trying to become an American. And my mother sort of like, said Beetlejuice three times and brought, like, all the old immigrant stuff back into the house. And that's what I mean, by the way, when I say, to me, it's so defining that my Grandma Betty changed her name from Bessie to Betty. I mean, originally she changed her name from Pessy to Bessie to Betty, which I always thought was like that drawing of the guy coming out of the swamps and walking more and more upright until he walks away in a suit, you know, that was like. That was my Grandma Betty. So I always thought that in some way it was this sort of struggle to become American was somehow tied up in the story I was going to read Something else which is about my other grandparents, my father's parents, which sort of gives you an idea of their world and where my father sort of came from. My father lived 20 minutes by bus from my mother, but an epoch away. Flatbush was middle class and coming Bensonhurst was red brick and open fire hydrants. If you lived in Flatbush, your grandparents or great grandparents came from Stettaland. That's a theme park I hope to open in Wisconsin, which will include a ride called Cossack Attack. If you lived in Bensonhurst, your parents came from Stedeland. Bensonhurst is on the edge of the borough, the sort of half known terrain cartographers signify with sea monsters. Its western edge is the Belt Parkway. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge starts in Bensonhurst and goes away in the fog. A ladder with its top in the clouds. Kids from the neighborhood take pride in its hooligans and wise guys. A few years ago, when Sammy Gravano, a mafia capo who testified against John Gotti, told his story to Peter Moss, the book was called Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia. My father sent me a copy of the book, annotated as if it were a work by James Joyce with such marginalia as. We hung it on that corner too. And this guy was related to Hoo Ha by marriage, I should say. Hoo Ha is one of my father's friends still who got his name by. Somebody asked him a question once and he said who? And they repeated and he said, huh? So he's Hoo Ha to this day, like whatever. 75 years old, Grandma Esther outlived Grandpa Morris by 30 years. Grandma Betty was careful about what she said and to whom. Esther said everything to everyone. She was a loud mouthed immigrant who suddenly becomes a member of your family. She took an afternoon to tell a story that could be told in five minutes, then wound it up by saying, that's it in a nutshell for me. An early memory is my father on the phone saying, ma Ma, please. I've heard this before. Oh, ma ma, ma, ma ma. I once heard her ask a woman in her condominium complex, why do you hate me, fatso? When she took me and my sister to Siento, she asked for three tickets. One senior, two children. My sister was 30, I was 22. The three of us saw Yentl. For $4, she could defrost a three course meal in six minutes. She was, according to my father, the nation's foremost expert in cryogenics. She believed there was a book in Jerusalem, in which her name was inscribed in gold. She was old, but then she got really old. When I was driving her home, she demanded to see my license, studied it, then gave it back like a skeptical cop. She said the angel of death had lost her address. This was something she said all the time. Near the end of her life. She'd say, he must have gone to a party, put it down on the counter, poured himself a drink, been distracted, walked off and totally forgotten about me. And here I sit, I should say, as I mentioned, I grew up in Illinois. And for me all these stories were like fables, you know, it was something happening on the other side of the country. It was sort of like the old country, like I said. I always thought that Brooklyn to me was like Poland to my father. In some way. It was stories where my father's and mother's childhood took place. You know, we'd go there, we'd visit there, but it was like the Sweet and Low factory, the Sweet and Low fortune. Even the stories I heard about the Jewish gangsters who hung out in the diner, the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was like all this land of imagination. And I realized growing up after a while that my parents had jobs apparently, but like the real full time job was just being from Brooklyn. And that was like even their religion. And something I always heard when I was a kid is that one in five Americans have their roots in Brooklyn. Everything good comes from Brooklyn. If you want to know what's really going on, go to Brooklyn. On and on and on and on. And it gave me sort of a warped sort of sense of where I was growing up. I used to say, my father is a guy. He looks like a guy from Brooklyn. And he speaks with a very heavy Brooklyn accent of the kind you don't hear anymore. And his sort of thing was unusual in Illinois when we were first there. And when people would ask him where he was from because they knew he wasn't from Illinois, they'd always say, where are you from? He had this standard answer. He'd go, me, I'm from Cheyenne, Wyoming. And if they asked him what he did, well, what do you do for a living in Cheyenne? He would go, I'm a Presbyterian minister. This is like a routine joke. Until he said this enough that people heard about he was actually given honorary citizenship in Wyoming, which he has to this day. So I was going to read one more thing which is like what it's like to grow up in the middle of the country when your parents religion is being from Brooklyn. In 1967, my parents moved to Illinois, where my father, a corporate executive at Allstate Insurance, had been transferred. For my family, it was like a second crossing to the Herbies and Ellens of Brooklyn. America is the thirteen colonies, plus Miami Beach. The rest of the country was just the words in the Irving Berlin song. Mountains, prairies, oceans, foam. When my parents speak of their first years in Illinois, it's the way that at school the teacher spoke of the journeys of Marquette and Joliet, the French explorers who mapped the lakes and rivers of the upper Midwest. You have to imagine this is my mother talking to me. Your father came into this country dressed in buckskin. He carried only a Bible. This was a wild country then. There were no Jews in the territory, nor any from Brooklyn. You could not find the New York Times or good Peking Duck. The bagels were like donuts and the spaghetti was like paper mache. The natives were happy when we moved in. They said, thank God. We thought they would sell it to Catholics. Libertyville was surrounded by farms. My father chose it because it was near the Tollway. That's never a good reason to pick a house out, by the way. There was a barber shop, a Ford dealer, a Dairy Queen. Chicago has since flowed over its rim, turning such towns into suburbs. But Libertyville then was still an outpost of NowHere America. In 1968, Ben and Betty visited for my Brisbane. My brother was 5. My sister was 8. Because I had been sickly handsome but small, the brist was put off until I was five weeks old. I can remember large parts of the ceremony, or think I can, though everyone calls that nuts. I remember the layout of the house perfectly. A wooden brick colonial amid a sea of oak trees. That house was summer, the smell of laundry. The street dead ending at the Des Plaines river, which was warm and drowsy, marked the termination point of the known world. Because I was born in Illinois, I came to know my grandparents at a distance. I hardly saw them. For me, the world began with Ellen and Herbie. I came to think of myself as a first generation American, the only Cohen untouched by Brooklyn. When I was five, we moved to Glencoe, a town in the lake north of Chicago. I have talked and written so much about this town that it's become a dream. Its streets overhung by trees, its pathways leading to the lake. It gets tangled in my mind until every street leads to every other street and every road ends at the beach and the house parties rage and the parents have gone on vacation and the cops don't care and the teachers are busy grading Makeup exams and all the seasons and moods collapse into a series of images. A sailboat at the pier in August. A lifeguard asleep in the changing house. The shadow of a passing plane. It's sad because I know the town is not really worth all this romantic attention. But for me, it's the town against which all others are measured. I wish it had been Cannery Row in Monterey, which is a poem and equality of light. Or Miguel street in Port of Spain. But it wasn't. It was Vernon Road in Glencoe. My father told me we were the only Jewish family in Glencoe, which was not true. About 40% of the people in town were Jewish, which is one of the reasons we moved there. In Libertyville, there really were no Jews, which meant a 40 minute drive to the preschool at the synagogue. I was returning from such a trip with the Nanny B. When our station wagon was rear ended. Bea threw me against the seat as she went into the steering wheel. When I looked at her, she said, everything will be fine. As she said this, all her teeth fell out. I was unconscious when the paramedics arrived. My eyelashes scattered across my shirt front from shock. For my mother, this was the end of Libertyville. She found a house in Glencoe, closing the deal while my father was out of town. Also not a good idea in choosing Glencoe because of the good schools. She was part of a demographic shift that continues. The Jews are coming, a friend told me. Glencoe is now so Jewish that it's referred to as Glencoen. I hated this. At first I did not like it that the many small ideas of my town were being replaced by one big idea. But the more I think about it, the more I like it. In Glencoen you have the suggestion of a hybrid. A new kind of Jew raised on the icy shores of a great lake. In Poland, we were Kohens. In Brooklyn, we were Cohens. In the Middle west, we're Glencohans. My father was not lying when he said there were no Jews in Glencoe. As far as he was concerned, there weren't. Not what he recognized as Jews anyway. To him, a Jew is from Brooklyn. A Jew knows him Yiddish. A Jew is wound like a spring. These easy, mannered Glencoens. How would you even know they were Jewish? This is how my father happens to see the world. And it left me with the sense that there was something bogus about where I was growing up. The bagels were a joke, and so were the people. The only real place was back east. Brooklyn was where you came from. Manhattan was where you went, my world was out of bounds. It was always preseason. Every player was a scrub. My father encouraged me to ditch the Cubs, my favorite baseball team, for his much more successful Dodgers. Formerly of Brooklyn. He said, a Cubs fan learns to accept defeat as the natural condition of life. On holidays, we would fly to New York to get a taste of real food and see real theater. When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a story for English class about a child born and raised in middle America who, when he starts speaking, dumbfounds his parents and doctors by speaking with a heavy New York accent. In this story, I now hear a cry for help. Proof of the condition bred by my father's intense, backward looking love for the home country. The members of my family were expatriates, New Yorkers trapped in Illinois, landlocked and dreaming of the Narrows with the longing of exiles. When my brother was applying to college, my father said he could go anywhere but nyu. So that's where he went. Stephen sent back pictures of Greenwich Village. He took the train to Flatbush. At Christmas, my brother asked him to bring home an order of chow mein for from her favorite restaurant in Chinatown. He stowed it in the overhead bin. It stank up the entire plane. When he got it home. The carton was sweaty. We stood around the kitchen table as my mother opened it and stared inside and held it to her nose. She dipped in a fork and slurped up a noodle. She passed the box around like it was a joint. We each took a bite. It was not much better than the chow mein at Chin's Chop Suey in Uptown Glencoe. But it was from New York and that's all that really mattered. So that's a sense of the book and the story. And I guess the best thing now is if anybody has any questions about anything. Book, story, life in general, dating. There's a microphone right there that I think they both work. Does it work? Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. You mentioned the characters that your family. I'm just curious if Jeffrey's read the book and what feedback you've had from the family that wasn't disinherited. Well, I should say it's not like I wrote this book and suddenly my family stopped talking to me. It's more like suddenly my family stopped talking to me and I wrote this book. The book did not cause a rift in my family, but in the sense is. Although I like to think I'm a writer. And at some point I would have written a version of the story. However, being disinherited sort of set me free to write completely honestly and to tell the story like it should be told. I felt there's been very little feedback. The one bit of concrete feedback I did get was my cousin Jeffrey called me and said he didn't like being described as a surfer and that would embarrass his kids and could I take it out. And I considered taking it out, but I only really knew him when I was a kid. At which point he owned several surfboards, and he liked bands like the Ventures, which I like, too. And he liked movies that featured surfing. And he had Lava Lamp, which you guys have, too. And he. I think he had three like you guys have. And he, you know, went to school in California so he could surf all year. And so I thought as a reporter, you know, adding all that up, I thought I could make a fair case that it was fair to call him a surfer. Somebody else have a question? I could answer questions on any topic. And I know tricks, too, and some magic. Hi. I'm curious about the writing process and what kind of research went into this and then how long it took and what challenges you faced and how you overcame them. Well, it was like, a lot of research in this book because there was this huge case against this company. I mean, the FBI raided Cumberland packing in the mid-90s and shut it down for a few days. And there was a giant court case where my uncle testified it was supposedly reputedly linked up with a mob case. It was really kind of exciting, you know, And I didn't know a lot about it, but what I read in the paper, it made the front page of the Journal and the Times, and everything went out. It was a big story. So I went back and I got all those stories, but then I went and got the court documents. And then ultimately there was a will contest, or the beginnings of a will contest, where my brother, if you want to talk about, like, a Freudian scene, went back into the room where he had lost the party on the rigged contest and deposed his Aunt Gladys with the video camera rolling, you know, and a stenographer in the room. And I went back and I read all this stuff, and one of the really interesting things they did is a lot of the money that was the scandal involved. It's complicated, but all these shell companies and money being siphoned out of the company by these executives, a few of who ended up going to jail for, like, 10 years. And a lot of this money, a lot of this money was taken and used to build these giant houses, these sort of McMansions on Long Island. And I went out there and went to those places, and that was pretty cool. So the whole process, I don't know how long it took. It took a few years. But the things I write tend to be things that are part of my life. So it's hard to say. I start this story on this day, and I'm done with this story on this day. It's sort of like, as seen by the phone call about don't call me a surfer. You know, it continues to evolve. But I did feel that in some way, it was this bigger story about what had happened in America. And one thing I was really fascinated about was all these people came to this country on ships, very poor, with nothing in one generation or another. And you get down to my cousin Jeffrey, and he's a surfer, and to him, the same body of water that was this terrible obstacle and scary for his grandparents had become like a thing just for pleasure and for play. And I thought that somehow that captured this huge change that had happened in the country. And my other grandfather owned a company where he made bindings for hats, which. They don't make those anymore. And you go from that which is in New York, one kind in New York, to Ben, who makes a product that is valued because it has no nutritional value. So in other words, sweet' N Low is valued because it has no value. It's zero. And that's. I just thought that was like a symbol of something. And what's more is all the bitterness in my family I felt and everything that happened. Well, the big problem with saccharine, which is the main ingredient of Sweden Low, is that it has this terrible aftertaste. And it's really the business that my family is in making is fake sugar. I mean, that's just the story of the whole family right there, or part of it. So, anyway, it was a very intense and kind of interesting thing to do. Any other questions? I've already read the book, and I liked it a lot. Thanks. But I was surprised when I first opened it that it wasn't a graphic novel. So I'm wondering how the COVID came about. Well, actually, I signed a contract to write it as a graphic novel, but it turns out I can't draw. No, it was. It's because it's like a memoir, but it's not really just a memoir. I don't really write memoirs. I feel like I like there to be a new genre called stuff that actually happened. I mean, in that it's not revealing about myself, but it's sort of a story that any reporter might write, except I have this unique kind of access to it. And when I gave it to my editor, his sort of response was, how do we signal that this book is different in some way? You know, that there's a story here, that it's about people and characters, and it's not just a history book, and it's not just a memoir. And they had this idea of actually illustrating the COVID like, in the. Like, as if it was a movie trailer. So basically they. They hooked it up with a graphic novel. With a graphic novelist. And we worked together that we never actually met. And I sort of drew a version of the COVID with stick figures. And then he. Who. He read the book, and then he sort of chose some things I hadn't put in that he wanted in. And out of it came this cover. So it evolved. And I think it's really cool. It's really one of the cool things that happened with the book. So you mentioned that some fact checking went into this book, and I saw that there was a credit for a fact checker. Were there any facts that had been passed down from your family that were later found by your research or by the fact checker to be untrue things that you now know are definitely lies or exaggerations of the truth? Well, what I did was I did have this really serious fact checker who's worked at the New Yorker and then worked at the Village Voice and is also a lawyer. So it was perfect because a lot of the stuff was legal documents. And then a piece of the book ran in Vanity Fair, so it was checked again by their fact checking department. But like, a lot of this stuff, like I said, it's mythology. It's like, it's beyond true or false. It's just Paul Bunyan dragging his axe and heading with his ox. Babe, is that the name of the ox? Or whatever? You know, it's just. It's lore. It's legends, you know, it's like stuff in the sky. So. And I suppose I could have figured out for sure if Ben graduated first in his class at St. John's maybe it wouldn't have been that difficult. It wasn't really that important to me. What was important was the stories about the factory and a lot of this stuff, people have different versions. That's why I started the book the way I started it. I wanted to get a sense that everybody has their own version. But what really surprised me, because I went and interviewed my Uncle Marvin and I interviewed my Aunt and I interviewed a lot of people is how much they agree on stories that I thought were just my lore or things I heard from my parents that couldn't be true turned out to be true. And often all that was different was, like, the emphasis. And I'll give you one sort of stupid example. My mother used to complain that her brother and sister, when they would go to Coney island together, they'd each get money when they were little kids and they'd be sent with money. Her brother and sister would always take her money away and she'd have no money and couldn't go on any rides or have any food. And it was just a stupid little thing from when you were a kid. And basically I interviewed my aunt and uncle that asked them that, and they said that was true. And they thought it was really funny, that it was a really cute thing that they had did. And they thought that they could always trick her out of her money. And it was so cute how gullible she was. But to my mother, now, to this day, if my mother's eating a salad and you ask her for a bite, she goes, take it, take it, please take it. And she won't eat anything because I'm convinced. Because when she was a kid, it was like she was going to be taken away anyway. So just give it away before they take it away. And it's like. And you think like, now that I'm older and I have little kids and all these things that happened between me and my brother and my sister when I was like 6 and 7 come back and all of a sudden I remember, and they really pissed me off, you know? And you realize that those little things are your personality, they are the way you are. And it was like my mother told me these stories and they were dramas. It's like as if she told me the plot of Goodfellas. And then suddenly my aunt and uncle tell the same story, except now it's a musical. You know, there's people singing and dancing. So that's what amazed me is how the basic plot was always the same. It was just the emphasis that was different. So there's a question from the Irvine office. What's your take on other artificial sweeteners and the competitive marketplace and its impact upon Sweet N Low? Well, basically, right when I was finishing this book or research on the book, I did actually a taste test where I ate without any food, both Equal Sweet and Low and Splenda. And this is something else, actually my cousin got pissed off at I wrote in the Book, which is that Sweet and Low without anything in it or in anything will make you want to vomit. It's just a fact. It is a very strong aftertaste. And to test this out, because I was told I was being a little unfair, I gave some to my son, who's three and a half. Just a little drop to see the reaction. And it was the vomit reaction. Okay. Equal is not as sweet as Sweet N Low. And Splenda is the best. I mean, as a product, it's the best because what they did with Splenda is it's a new kind of product where they reconfigured the molecule. It's in a whole different kind of science where I always say it's sort of sugar solved. So they took the sugar molecule, they replaced, I think, hydrogen atoms with chlorine atoms. So your body doesn't recognize it and has no use for it, doesn't store it. So it tastes like sugar, but it's like it never happened. Like that piece of cake never happened. Something like that. But it's a lot more expensive to make and all this stuff. But what's amazing about this product, and this would be about three generations, is when my grandfather was really running the company in the mid-70s. At one point he had like a 70 or an 80% market share when Equal. When it wasn't equal, it was Searle had Aspartame, which was a new product, wanted to put it on the market. Their first move, which is the classic business school move, was to buy Cumberland, a much smaller company with the brand name product, and then put out Equal as new and improved Sweet and Low, like new formula, Coke or whatever. And my uncle and my grandfather, my grandfather was getting older, didn't do that. And later they were, according to my uncle, also offered the opportunity to buy out the patent on Splenda from Johnson and Johnson. And they didn't do that either. So now when I was researching the book, they had a 15% market share. And then I hired the fact checker. And she said, you know what? You were right when you wrote that. It was like a year from when I wrote it to when it was being fact checked. But in that year, they've gone from 15 down to 12. It's this sort of shrinking market. So it's really, to me, it was sort of like the thing that my Grandpa Ben did was he's always trying to invent new products. He had a sense that the market was changing very fast and he had to do these new things. So he invented when there was the whole scare, cancer scare, he came up with Sugar in the Raw, which is a big product. And he came up with things that weren't so big, like butter buds, which I was a guinea pig for when I was a kid. I ate so much frickin butterbuds and there was a constant attempt to find fool me that it was butter, but it never really did fool me. And then with the second generation, with my uncle, there's this desire to keep what he's got and protect what he's got. And in my opinion what happened with the scandal in the company was a result of that desire, which is they wound up sort of making campaign contributions to congressmen to change legislation to protect the product rather than just inventing a new product or inventing Splenda or buying out. And then you get down to the third generation, which is my cousin Jeffrey, and basically that's the generation that loses the money. And I've always heard that. And I finally figured out why. It's because that generation doesn't believe the money can be lost because they've had it their whole lives. You know, it's sort of like it's always going to be there because it always has been there. And that happens, I think, with families, it happens with businesses and it happens with countries. So it's like this very big thing that happened. I think that ultimately the future, probably 10 or 15 years, who knows what's going to happen. But I bet if you were to go and figure out what percentage of people use Sweet' N Low, it's people over 70, people over 60 and those people will get old and then they'll be gone and then what'll happen? So we'll wait and see. And perhaps another book down the road. Any other questions? Any questions from Irvine or Outer Space? Yeah, I was just wondering if you think it's inevitable for the third generation to always lose it and just waste everything previous generations have done. Do you think that, I mean, do you think there's anything that can be done for that? Yeah, actually the question was, because I know it wasn't on the microphone, is it inevitable for the third generation to lose the fortune, lose the business, or can something be done about that? And actually that is something I looked at in this book and I looked specifically at the Warburgs, which was a banking family that was a family business that existed for way past, for many generations. And I tried to figure out how they did it and I came up with some general rules, but basically I can't find them exactly here. But basically they had this idea that they would sort of outsmart the normal way generations work. And what they would do is they wouldn't go with that primogenitor. They wouldn't go father to son to son to son. They had these big extended families, and they would look for the talent in their extended family, wherever the talent was. So it might be that the real dynamo in the family in the third generation wasn't the grandson of the founder or the direct descendant of the founder, or the son of the first son. It might be that he was the son of a third cousin that lived in a distant city. And they would find him. They'd watch those people and they'd bring those people into the business. And then even when they found him and they spotted the people in the extended family they thought were going to be the leaders of the family, they didn't bring them right into the business. They would send them to some other city where they weren't known, where their name didn't mean anything, and they'd put them into a business and make them work for 10 or 20 years. One, so they could learn something new and bring it back to the company, and two, so they would have to work and prove themselves. And the real reason for this was, wasn't just that it gave people confidence in the person. It gave the person confidence in themselves. You know, so when this person came back, he felt like he'd already sort of done something. He could run something. He made it. It wasn't just that he was stepping into his grandfather's shoes and, and now is suddenly doing battle with Equal and Splenda, who are run by all these guys who are self made. He would be, in a sense, a rich kid who was also in some way self made. So the big question is, how do you have the son of a rich man who isn't a rich man's son? And it's really tough. And it's what I sort of think the Warburgs gave a little bit of a blueprint for. And to give you an example, when Sweet and Low was battling with Equal, Aspartame, you know who was the head of that company? It was Donald Rumsfeld. Donald Rumsfeld is the head of Searle. When Aspartame was approved by the FDA and Equal went on the market and within two years had taken over 50% of the market. So suddenly, you know, he went from, Marvin, my uncle, went from competing with little places here and there and there to competing with the giant corporations. So it's like you move into the bigger water as you get the bigger sharks. I think. Any other questions? All right, thanks.