I became friendly with Joel Siegel in the early 70's. He was dating a college friend of mine and we shared a number of meals in Chinatown restaurants Joel had chosen. These meals had three things in common: the food was always good, the restaurant was always cheap, and Joel would tell a series of stories which always started with Richard Nixon and always ended with Georgie Jessel. This was the Watergate era, and you would be safe in thinking Georgie Jessel was a show business artifact by then, but Joel had at least six Jessel stories. He also had an Eddie Cantor story. To be fair, there he might have had more than one Eddie Cantor story, but these were to be our last meals together, at least in that century, as Joel and my college friend parted ways soon after. As far as I know, Joel was the only one of her many boyfriends about whom she had nothing bad to say.
Joel and I became friendly again on a series of plane trips in 2002. It was during what in Hollywood is called "Awards Season," which, while not an official calendar season, requires the same amount of wardrobe changes. Joel was traveling NY-LA-NY covering the Golden Globes, the SAG award, the DGA award and the Oscars for ABC. I was traveling back and forth to visit my husband, who had been nominated for these awards for producing the film, "Gosford Park." Both Joel and I were collecting United Airline mileage, and during the first two trips we found ourselves on the same flights in the same cabin. We had fun, so we started emailing each other to make sure we would fly together to the next award when we could.
I am, to put it mildly, a nervous flier, and Joel was a perfect traveling companion for someone like me. He considered it his gentlemanly duty to keep my mind off flying. He was amused to find that, in the strange way that seems unique to New Yorkers but probably isn't, we had an internist, podiatrist and marriage counselor in common. Babysitting me gave Joel the opportunity to tell stories, and Joel loved to tell stories. "Did I ever tell you the story about Marlene Dietrich and the Soldier?" he'd ask, and a fast six hours and a hundred stories later I was in Los Angeles. Joel took the opportunity to tutor me on the fine points of air travel, like which red eye from LA had seats with back massagers in business class, the necessity of using Bose noise-canceling headsets and the superiority of the Powerbook over my Sony laptop in terms of battery life; Joel said that after he watched "Once Upon a Time in America," the director's cut, on a plane without running out of batteries, he could never look back.
We became friends and poker and charades buddies. He was, to me, the best kind of poker player: he didn't mind losing. He was good-natured about most everything, losing money included. To be honest, his skills at charades were not top-notch, and he knew it. He'd shrug and say, "At charades, I'm no Jascha Heifetz." It didn't bother him; Joel loved to play because he loved to have fun, even if the fun were at his own expense.
Joel hosted wonderful Passover seders, a hundred people sitting at a huge u-shaped table with Joel leading the reading of the Hagaddah. Everyone had a turn, children and non-Jews alike. Let me say, you have not heard the story of the Jews leaving Egypt until you hear it from the folksy voice of Charlie Gibson. Joel would have the seders catered with traditional Passover food, making sure, he'd say, that the food was good, but not too good, as he wanted to be sure that everyone had a true Jewish experience.
In 2003, I had a routine scan and a blip showed up on my pancreas, a false alarm, as it turned out, but I didn't know it then, and I went into a panic. I emailed Joel that I knew enough to know that pancreas is not a word you want to hear outside an anatomy class and he emailed back with the name of a different doctor. That doctor suggested I get scanned every six months, just to be on the safe side. Joel remembered when my scans were and emailed me like a protective mother to make sure I went for the test and didn't chicken out. He'd greet me at dinner parties with, "How's your pancreas?"
"Not bad," I'd say "How's your colon?"
"Could be worse," he'd reply, and in that, I'm sorry to say, he was mistaken. The blip on my pancreas disappeared but Joel's cancer got worse and worse. Not that you'd know it from his impossibly good humored calls and emails. Joel knew what to expect from this terrible disease. His first wife, Jane, died at 31 from it; Joel co-founded Gilda's Club in New York to honor her. When his own cancer sandbagged him ten years ago, Joel fought harder to stay alive against impossible odds than almost anyone I knew. He mostly did this for his son, Dylan, whom he adored beyond all reason, if such a thing can be said about a parent and a child. Joel was told by his doctors he might not live to see Dylan born, so he wrote a book, "Lessons for Dylan," to tell his son everything he might not be able to say to him, and while I cannot remember if there's a good Georgie Jessel story in the book, I highly recommend it for its warmth and old-fashioned wisdom.
Since Joel is unfathomably not here to tell it, I would like share his "Marlene Dietrich and The Soldier" story with you:
Joel was on a plane sitting next to a guy who'd been stationed in North Africa during World War II, assigned to the USO as a stage manager. Marlene Dietrich came to North Africa to entertain the Allied troops, and this soldier struck up a conversation with Dietrich telling her he was from Brooklyn, hadn't been home for three years and hadn't spoken to his mother in two. Dietrich took the soldier's mother's telephone number and promised to call her. A few months later, the soldier received a letter from his mother saying a Mrs. Riva had called, saying she had spent some time with the woman's son in North Africa at the USO. Mrs. Riva told the mother that the son had given her a gift to bring home for her. Mrs. Riva asked the mother to tea at the Plaza, and the next day the Jewish mother from Brooklyn went to the Palm Court and asked for a Mrs. Riva. The maitre d' led her to the table of Marlene Dietrich -- Riva was Dietrich's married name -- where they had tea while Dietrich told the woman her son was safe and happy. Then Dietrich handed the mother the gift she said the soldier had asked her to bring back from the desert of North Africa -- an unwrapped Chanel purse. Even the mother knew it was a gift from Dietrich's own closet.
I know this story doesn't have much of a punch line, but I love it just the same. It's loaded with heart. Just like Joel.