Money
Personal wealth
Gerber’s perception of the importance of money, created by growing up in an essentially liminal habitus18 formed by feeling both a lack of money and a sense of being a millionaire’s child, helps to explicate the impressions that he created about his personal wealth. In two instances in his autobiography Gerber presented a contradictory impression of his personal wealth—the impression of self-sufficiency at a young age and the impression of the bicoastal Hollywood lawyer.
When Gerber started to work for Morris Hillquit, he earned a salary of $12 a week, and given a quick reading of the passage in which he described that salary, he seems to claim a self-sufficiency for himself based upon that salary. Gerber described his salary as
The pool at Wayside, 1935
enough for me to pay for my entire law school training, transportation to the office, and I had money to clothe myself and feed myself. … I got enough money to pay for my law school, enough money to clothe myself, feed myself, pay for my books, my newspapers, and never again, never, was I dependent on anyone for my sustenance.19
Returning back to the same theme a little later on in the work, Gerber stated, “Again, going back to that munificent salary of twelve dollars a week—it doesn’t sound like much does it? But it was enough for me to become independent from that first day of my employment.”20 Gerber’s language presents an image of a young man who was financially responsible for himself. It is only when we pause to consider what is missing from Gerber’s description that the impression is revealed as a misperception. Gerber mentions nothing about paying for a place to live, an expense that generally takes a substantial portion of a self-sufficient individual’s income. He in fact lived at home not only through his time in law school, but up until the time he moved to Washington, DC.21
The second instance of Gerber creating an impression regarding his personal wealth that implied he had more money than he actually did comes later in the work. He talked about having a house in Hollywood and an apartment in New York City. His descriptions convey an impression of status or prestige about each property.
At the end of the autobiography Gerber revealed that the impression he had created was misleading. As he talked about a special souvenir from a trip to Mexico that was in his living room he said, “And let me tell you about that apartment. It’s a lovely apartment. I did not pick it. I did not buy it.”22 The transcript shows an emphasis on these words with italic type; the effect of Gerber emphasizing those words within his story about travel is to make them stand out, rather than get lost as a minor digression in the flow of the narrative.
Beyond the understanding that he appeared to be wealthier than he was, this passage serves to provide us with other questions about Gerber. For if he did not choose or purchase the apartment he lived in, who did? Did the individual(s) who financed the apartment provide Gerber with other financial assistance, and what was their motivation for helping him or relationship with him?
While Gerber sought to create the impression that he had more money than he may have had in actuality, he perceived a less tangible concept of his self-making, success, through the famous people he met, his connections to Hollywood, and the importance of positions that he held.
18 For more background on habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
19 Gerber, "Happenstance: A Man of the Century Remembers," 26.
20 Ibid., 32.
21 Joseph H. Gerber, "Telephone Interview," (2002).
22 Gerber, "Happenstance: A Man of the Century Remembers," 110.