Sylvia Ginsberg, Superstar
by Richard Grayson
Posted: May 26, 2005
**Nonfiction Contest Winner**
In 1981 I made my paternal grandmother into a
superstar.
Now you may not recall the famous Sylvia Ginsberg of North Miami
Beach, but most of her fellow celebrities of that era—people
like Suzanne Somers and Erik Estrada—no longer grace the covers
of supermarket tabloids, and they don’t have Grandma Sylvia’s
excuse: she died in November of that year.
My grandmother’s impending death was one reason I decided
to make her into a media star. The day after Thanksgiving 1980,
I took her to a Miami doctor who diagnosed a heart aneurysm that
would eventually burst and kill her quite suddenly.
“How long does she have?” I asked Dr. Reinstein while
Grandma was in the other room. We were definitely not going to tell
her.
“Hard to say,” he replied. “Six months maybe.
A year at most.”
Grandma Sylvia hadn’t had the easiest life. She’d been
in and out of hospitals for more than two decades as she suffered
with colon cancer, although repeated surgeries managed to keep her
alive. Her arthritis got so bad she could no longer walk—until
her deteriorated hips were replaced with artificial ones. She suffered
from all kinds of severe pain and sought out treatment from the
first doctor licensed to practice acupuncture in New York’s
Chinatown.
She had even brought back from death once, following some internal
bleeding in 1972. When I went to her room at New York Hospital a
few days later and said I was surprised to see her looking so good,
she promptly shot back: “You’re really just surprised
to see me at all.” She was not one for mystical near-death
experiences featuring blinding light. If she’d seen one, she
would have complained that the brightness was giving her a migraine.
In 1977, my grandfather, in a moment of self-directed rage at a
stupid play during a poolside pinochle game, suffered a stroke that
left his brain damaged after being deprived of oxygen for the few
minutes it took paramedics to get to him. Grandpa Nat ended up a
near-vegetable in the North Miami Convalescent Home.
By the time she was in her late seventies, my grandmother had gone
through a lot. But did she complain?
Constantly. She taught me everything I knew about kvetching.
I grew up with a full set of grandparents who lived long enough
so that I knew them when I was a quasi-adult. I adored them. Yet
both my grandmothers loved nothing better than to sit me down and
tell me all the tsuris they’d seen. I sometimes envisioned
the following entry in that staple of my childhood Sunday comics
section, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not:
“Mr. Richard Grayson of Davie, Florida, had two grandmothers—neither
of whom ever had a good day in her life!”
But Grandma Sylvia, complainer or not, seemed to me as worthy of
media attention as any TV star, socialite or business mogul in a
celebrity-obsessed culture.
Annoyed with the publicity given the shallow and the superficial,
I decided that an ordinary person of substance—even if that
substance was bile—deserved superstardom. Grandma Sylvia was
ready for her fifteen minutes of fame, even if she didn’t
know I was engineering it.
The first step, of course, was a slick press release in which I
announced the formation of the Sylvia Ginsberg International Fan
Club. (I thought the “International” was the crucial
touch.) Since my employment at the time was limited to teaching
a single course in remedial English at Broward Community College,
I had plenty of free time to devote to being president of the fan
club.
A fan club has got to have a publication, of course, so the press
release also announced the forthcoming first issue of Sylvia
Ginsberg Magazine, with features such as:
-
“Shocking: Why Sylvia Switched Supermarkets!”
-
Sylvia’s Struggles with the Social Security Administration
-
The Untold Story of Sylvia’s Artificial Hips
-
Sylvia’s Love Quiz: Can You Pass It?
There was also a contest in which the winner would receive a piece
of my grandmother’s famous honey cake (famous mostly because
of its dryness). And there was an article ghost-written by me under
the byline of my great-aunt, Mildred Cohen, which began:
“Sylvia is the kind of sister-in-law that everyone loves
to visit for half an hour!”
A bonus feature in the issue was exclusive photos of Grandma getting
a flu shot at the board of health.
My press release extolled my grandmother as “a superstar
we can respect. She doesn’t snort cocaine, doesn’t get
into fights in bars—doesn’t even go to bars—and
never uses drugs, except for arthritis medicine . . . She lives
the kind of life millions dream of: driving around, getting her
hair done, visiting her husband in the nursing home.”
Two days after I mailed out the batch of press releases, a Miami
News reporter called. As I had predicted, the public was hungry
for a different kind of celebrity. My grandmother was turning out
to be big news.
The paper wanted a photo of Grandma Sylvia and me, but unfortunately
I couldn’t find a suitable one of us together. So I gave them
a 1958 photo of my brother Marc and our other grandmother, Ethel
Sarrett, and I told them it was Sylvia and I. They ran it on page
one, cropping it in the shape of a star. The headline: “Grandson
Fans the Flames of Stardom for Sylvia.”
For people tired about reading about Jackie O. and Burt Reynolds,
here was the perfect antidote: an eighty-year-old great-grandmother
living in a North Miami Beach condominium.
And so the Sylvia Ginsberg frenzy was off and running.
Associated Press picked up the Miami News story and it
turned up on front pages in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Charlottesville,
Virginia.
A number of people sent in their five-dollar membership dues to
join the fan club. A Cuban-American woman in Hialeah who owned a
printing firm offered to do the fan magazine for free, and we were
able to get out the twenty-page magazine by publication date, April
15, Grandma’s birthday.
(Actually, that was the day she and my grandfather celebrated their
birthdays. They came from Russia as children and had no idea when
their actual birthdays were; they settled on April 15 so they’d
remember to pay their income taxes.)
More newspaper stories started appearing. The Miami Herald
wanted a photo of me kissing Grandma, and we both complied, although
my grandmother always abhorred being kissed. “I have a cold,
so don’t kiss me,” she’d usually say. Sylvia Ginsberg
was learning the price of fame.
How did my grandmother react to this instant fame? Here’s
what she told one newspaper:
“After my husband got sick, I wasn’t doing much
of anything. One day Richard says, ‘Grandma, you’re
going to be a superstar.’ I said, ‘Richard, I should
be a celebrity? What are you talking about?’”
“My Richard is a wonderful boy for doing it. He’s
so brilliant. I told him to get on Tic Tac Dough because
he’s so brilliant.”
“And he writes. Oh, he can write.”
“The only thing I don’t like is his beard. I say,
‘Richard, please take that beard off. You’d look 25
years younger.’”
I was thirty years old at the time.
Even those around Sylvia Ginsberg basked in her reflected glory.
“I didn’t realize how glamorous she was,” said
her next-door neighbor, Teddy Dietz, in a Miami Herald
story. “She just seemed like a nice, intelligent woman.”
When my grandmother went into Eckerd Drugs, the pharmacist recognized
her and asked for her autograph.
Morry Alter, the human interest reporter from Channel 10 news,
called to beg her for an interview.
“My grandmother has never been involved in a single scandal,”
I told the Fort Lauderdale News. “She’ll do
for South Florida what Anita Bryant failed to do. She’ll give
us a good image—classically elderly, glamorous, yet laid back.
And she does have to lay down a lot. When you’re eighty, it’s
par for the course.”
The fan magazine was only the beginning. I had a great idea for
a TV movie, a biopic called “The Sylvia Ginsberg Story: From
Minsk to North Miami Beach.” I exaggerated a little and told
a Hollywood Sun-Tattler columnist—that’s Hollywood,
Florida, by the way—that Sylvia Sidney, who was in Miami performing
in a play, had asked for a copy of the script.
I thought about a line of Sylvia Ginsberg designer jeans for senior
citizens. (“Sylvia’s got the look you want to know better
/ She’s got the octogenarian look that’s all together
/ Shopping, kibitizing, day and night / The frail-cheeked look that’s
right.”)
And maybe Grandma would consent to a bid for public office.
After all, the Hallandale Digest called my grandmother
“South Florida’s condo queen for the Eighties.”
But Grandma Sylvia got tired of celebrity soon enough. As one newspaper
story began:
Everything was going so smoothly for Sylvia Ginsberg. She spent
her days visiting her beautician or her doctor or her husband, who
is in a nursing home. Evenings, she would watch Tic Tac Dough,
her favorite show, on television. But then her grandson decided
that Sylvia Ginsberg should become a superstar.
“I’m not up to this, Richard. I’m not up
for being a celebrity. I don’t need this,” Mrs. Ginsberg
tells her grandson.
“That’s why you should be famous, Grandma,”
replies Richard. “You’re the only person in America
who doesn’t want to be famous.”
The young reporter who wrote this story later called me up to say
she’d been expecting to interview a cuddly Jewish grandmother
but instead got “someone with the sensibility of an angry,
bitter punk rocker.”
Grandma Sylvia told the press that she never had a sense of
humor, didn’t know how to tell a joke, and wouldn’t
appear on Johnny Carson’s show. “It’s too late,”
she was quoted as saying. “Who needs it? I go to bed early.”
And so the clock ran out on Sylvia Ginsberg’s fifteen minutes
of fame.
Was I disappointed? Not really. I respected my grandmother more
than I ever had because she wasn’t seduced by superstardom.
She went about her life once again, although health problems made
things increasingly difficult.
On Thanksgiving, I picked her up to take her to a holiday dinner
at the home of family friends. She’d been bedridden with bad
chest pains for a week, but for some reason that day she felt fine.
At the dinner she was more friendly and talkative than usual, and
she ate heartily rather than just picked at her plate. My brother
Jonathan told me he couldn’t remember our grandmother looking
better.
I had to leave early. As I said my good-byes and was about to go,
my grandmother waved to me from across the room and mouthed the
words “I love you.” She had never done that before.
That night, one year to the day that Dr. Reinstein had given as
her maximum life span, Grandma Sylvia died.
Though she may have been in the public eye for a very brief period,
Sylvia Ginsberg will always be my favorite superstar.
And as she would have said to Erik Estrada and Suzanne Somers:
Eat your hearts out.
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