He has been writing this story for decades.
His profile of Frank Sinatra Jr., published in GQ in 1994, about a sensitive son living in the shadow of a domineering patriarch, was autobiography by proxy. His 1996 profile of Tony Curtis, also for GQ, was an attempt to understand a familiar type of vain man who in old age remained “virtuosic” in pursuit of his own desires.
And his celebrated profile of Fred Rogers, which ran in Esquire in 1998 and was later adapted for the 2019 film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” starring Tom Hanks, was, he admits now, a way of seeking an alternate male role model.
For as long as he has written profiles like the one you are reading now — with openings that coyly withhold the subject’s name; with rolling sentences delivered in a hyped-up voice that once made him, in his words, “the hot guy, when there could be a hot guy in the magazine business” — Tom Junod has been writing about his father, and not quite nailing it.
His name was Louis Junod. He died in 2006 at age 87 in Georgia, after having spent much of his life in Wantagh, N.Y. The obituary in Newsday summed him up in not many words: “Soldier (Purple Heart), singer, salesman, style-setter, subject of profiles in GQ and Esquire magazines, he was one of a kind and left his mark on all who knew him.” What an undersell! That reads like Hemingway’s iceberg without even the chunk sticking out of the water to hint at the enormity beneath.
Now Mr. Junod, 67, has written a book — his first, surprisingly — that is part father-son memoir, part family detective story and 404 pages of heart-on-sleeve prose in that voice. Its title, “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” is a reference to a Led Zeppelin lyric, but also to how Lou Junod, a traveling handbag salesman in the era of the three-martini lunch, tried to impart manly wisdom to his youngest son in a relentless indoctrination.
In Mr. Junod’s telling, his darkly handsome father moved through the world like a self-styled celebrity, although he lived in a split-level in suburban Long Island.
In winter, Lou Junod would install himself in a beach chair on his marble front steps, holding a sun reflector to his face. In summer, he would lie out on the sands of Westhampton Beach, soaking up the rays until his skin was nearly the color of A1 steak sauce. A man in thrall to beautiful surfaces, his own and others, he had a grooming regimen so elaborate that he required his own bathroom.
For Mr. Junod, a self-described boyhood weakling who loved superhero comics for their stories of physical transformation, the experience of occupying the same household as his father was overwhelming. He often burst into tears.
“You heard him, you smelled him, you loved him, you hated him, you feared him,” Mr. Junod said, sitting in a diner not far from his childhood home, in Wantagh, a small town on the South Shore of Long Island.
“You laughed at his stories,” he continued. “You wanted to be in those stories. You knew that you were holding up your existence as a man against the standard that he set, and you knew that he was also scrutinizing you. It was a continual … assault is not the right word, but it comes close.”
Janet Junod, Mr. Junod’s wife of more than 40 years, said her father-in-law had an edgy charisma. “Lou lit up a room when he walked in,” she said in a phone interview. “Took it over. And he liked it that way.”
As a teenager, Mr. Junod knew his father was not like other men, that something was off, he said. There was the way he scooped up his boss’s wife in his arms at the beach. There was a strange visit to the Hamptons, where Lou promised young Tommy a hot fudge sundae but first stopped off at the house of a female buyer, leaving his son in the backyard while he and the woman disappeared behind a locked door. There was the uneasy feeling in the house, with Tom’s mother, Fran, taking verbal digs at her husband and often crying.
Lou Junod carried a briefcase to and from his sales showroom in Manhattan, a brown Samsonite he kept locked. At 16, his son cracked the combination. Inside, Mr. Junod writes in his book, he found two enormous dildos and several pornographic film reels featuring acts of BDSM. He watched one of the films in shock.
The contents of the briefcase confirmed his long-held suspicion that his father had a sexual life outside his marriage. They also entangled him in his father’s deceptions.
“I found the nuclear codes to my parents’ marriage,” Mr. Junod said. “Had I told my mother, she likely would have divorced him.”
Instead, he kept his father’s secrets.
In 1996, Mr. Junod published an article in GQ, “My Father’s Fashion Tips.” It was ostensibly one of those life guides that men’s magazines of the era delivered to their aspirational readers. But it was also an excuse for Mr. Junod, then 38 and a rising star, to ask his father, then 77 and down on his luck after having gambled his money away, about his past. During the reporting process, father and son spent a weekend at the Dune Deck, a luxurious beach club and hotel in Westhampton.
The Lou Junod of “My Father’s Fashion Tips” is a romantic figure, a sharp dresser and amateur crooner in the Sinatra mold who is cast almost as a lost member of the Rat Pack. This was an evasion. Mr. Junod omitted from the article much of what his father told him that weekend: that he was a serial philanderer; that he had slept with two of the Gabor sisters; that he’d had a long-term affair with someone he loved, the wife of a manager of a high-end Florida hotel, a woman named Peggy who died after falling down a staircase.
“I wrote it to give him a little taste of celebrity,” Mr. Junod said.
Much to his father’s delight, after the story appeared, the department store B. Altman displayed a portrait of Lou Junod in its Fifth Avenue window.
It would be another two decades before Mr. Junod was ready to uncover the truth of his father’s life — and his own — in print.
Handbags and Magazines
Born in 1919, Lou Junod grew up in Brooklyn in hardscrabble circumstances. He put stock in his looks and style because, without an education, they were what he had to go on. He became a top salesman, earning at his peak $250,000 a year.
From careful study of movie stars like Cary Grant, he crafted his own gentleman’s guide: The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear; there’s nothing like a fresh sunburn; look people in the eye and have a firm handshake. “In my father’s pagan cosmology,” Mr. Junod said, “a cold, limp handshake was a sin.”
If he came to see his father as a little ridiculous — his hygiene practices included cleaning his naval with witch hazel for a full minute — he still accepted his maxims on faith.
After graduating from the State University of New York at Albany, Mr. Junod followed his father into the handbag trade, working as a salesman in Dallas. This was 1980. He lasted a year before being fired.
He had always wanted to be a writer. He and Janet moved to Atlanta to be close to his older brother, Michael, who also followed their father into the handbag business. While Janet paid the bills with corporate communications jobs, Mr. Junod began contributing to Atlanta magazine, having stitched together his distinctive prose style from his deep reading of Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, Gary Smith and Joseph Mitchell.
In 1991, David Granger, then an editor at GQ, plucked a submission from the slush pile — a story about Gulf oysters — and phoned the writer excitedly.
“I’d never read anything like it,” Mr. Granger said. “It was alive. Like so many of Tom’s stories, it’s never about one thing. It wasn’t just about eating oysters. It was about the state of our civilization.”
Mr. Junod’s rise through the ranks was quick. He won back-to-back National Magazine Awards for his profiles of a Florida abortion doctor (“The Abortionist”) and a serial sex offender (“The Rapist Says He’s Sorry”). He became, like Wolfe a generation before him, the magazine journalist of his era, when the pages were thick with ads and the internet was a curiosity.
“At 5 o’clock, you’d go into Art’s office and start with the martinis,” Mr. Junod said, referring to Art Cooper, GQ’s swaggering editor in chief. “And you felt like the Round Table, like Art and his knights. It sounds so ridiculous now, but it was that way.”
When Mr. Granger left GQ in 1997 to become editor in chief of Esquire, he hired Mr. Junod as his marquee writer.
Mr. Junod pushed the edges at a time when a big story in a monthly was read by everyone. In 1997, he sent shock waves through Hollywood when he slyly outed the actor Kevin Spacey in a cover story. In 2001, he made up parts of an interview with the R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe because he found him boring in real life. Some journalists and media critics felt Mr. Junod had crossed the line. He reveled in the controversy.
“Tom took things to a little bit—” Mr. Granger said haltingly. “He took more risks than most people.”
Mr. Granger’s tenure at Esquire ended in 2016. So did Mr. Junod’s.
“No effin’ way was I going to work for Jay Fielden,” Mr. Junod said, referring to his boss’s successor. “Granger was my guy. He pulled my story out of the kill pile.”
He became a senior writer for ESPN and soon found himself in the strange position of being a magazine guy at a company that no longer published a magazine. And he began work in earnest on the book that would tell the real story of his family.
The Reckoning
Mr. Junod’s writing has always had a mythmaking streak. One could be forgiven for wondering if Lou Junod was truly extraordinary or extraordinary in the eyes of his writer son.
But with “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” Mr. Junod reveals a real-life Don Draper, a self-invented success hiding dark secrets from his past and leaving emotional wreckage in his wake. In Mr. Junod’s family, secrets were everywhere.
Mr. Junod’s paternal grandmother, he learns through exhuming dusty court records while researching the book, had seven children with five men. Lou Junod was really Lou Scharnberger, which may explain why he would tell his three children cryptically, “I never had a father.”
Talking to his father’s old friends and colleagues, Mr. Junod discovers that Lou Junod may have had a child with Peggy, the Florida woman he said he loved. If his father had knowledge of this child, he took it to his grave.
Once on the trail, Mr. Junod is a dog with a bone. He visits his father’s lovers around the country and extracts details of their affairs. As an elderly aunt lies dying, he nudges the conversation toward how she really felt about her brother Lou. He shows up at the home of another aunt, age 91, with a DNA kit, which she takes unwittingly and which reveals that the man whom she thought was her father was not.
Mr. Junod spends the final third of his memoir tracking down his lost relatives, including a half sister, and reckoning with the lives of those caught up in his father’s infidelities. He also reveals a secret of his own: Back in 1996, after the weekend he spent with his father at the Dune Deck, Mr. Junod cheated on his wife in a Manhattan hotel. He offers scant details about the woman or the affair. More than 20 years after that night, in a scene described in the book, he confesses to his wife.
Off the page, Mr. Junod was reluctant to say more, out of consideration for his wife and grown adopted daughter. He included the revelation to puncture the illusion that he had escaped his family dysfunction unscathed, he said.
“Did my father’s example have an effect on me? Yeah, it did,” he said. “I was finally at a point in my life when I could be like him. So I tried to be like him.”
In unearthing his family’s hidden past, Mr. Junod knows he has risked upsetting his loved ones. As he put it, “I wrote this book on the edge of permissible disclosure.” Still, he added, “I’ve been keeping my father’s secrets all my life. How long do you keep those secrets? I decided this was my chance to tell the truth.”
As Mr. Junod’s hair has silvered, people say he more and more resembles his father. Same deep-set eyes, same hook nose, same high cheekbones, same ultra-white teeth.
He has rejected some of Lou Junod’s manly teachings — “I’ve yet to use witch hazel on my navel, except ironically,” he said — but others, even now, remain unimpeachable.
Mr. Junod showed up to our interview dressed in a black turtleneck.
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
The post Tom Junod Would Like to Tell You About His Father appeared first on New York Times.
