Can a Bad Man Be a Good Father?

Last year, I spent three months embedded with a capital defense team.

“Their client had been on death row for more than 30 years, and now, his execution date had been set.”

I followed along as the lawyers tried to prove something nobody had successfully done in three decades, that one of Texas's most notorious Cyril killers was actually innocent. The last 12 weeks, listen wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Babarro. This is the Daily On Sunday. The writer Tom Juno is a student of flawed men.

In a long and varied career in American magazines at places like GQ and Esquire, Tom Profile complicated figures like Norman Mailer, Kevin Spacey, and Tony Kerns, but in all of those profiles, another flawed man loomed in the background. One who informed how Tom thought about the very nature of masculinity and manhood, and that was his father, Lou, a man who had a life full of secrets. Tom's relationship with his dad is the subject of his new book,

which is part memoir and part detective story. It's called, "In the days of my youth,

I was told what it means to be a man." And it's a powerful meditation on what we need from

a father, what we inherit from a father, and how we somehow make peace with the gap in between those. Today, on Father's Day, my conversation with Tom Juno, it's Sunday, June 21st. Tom, Michael, welcome to the Sunday Daily. It's so great to be here. It's an honor and I have you.

“Can I ask you to read from the ulogy that you read at your father's funeral?”

Sure. I believe it's on page four. The ulogy had a title. If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly, and that was one of my dad's things. My father, dad, pop-up, was not like

other fathers. He was not like other people, period. A lot of people have told me that he's with

Jesus now. Well, with all due respect, I have my doubts. Unless, of course, Jesus has shaved his beard, ditched the sandals, and is drinking a martini at the El Maraco circa 1955 with Franken-Ava. This is not to say my father was not a believer. He had a whole belief system. He believed in a lot of things, and what he believed in, he believed in, absolutely. He believed that there was not a person in the world who's appearance could not be helped by exposure

to the sun, or what he called a fresh burn. He believed that there was not an ailment in the world that could not be cured by salt and water. He believed that the way Red Butler treated Scarlet was the way all women should be treated, and that Clark Gable was robbed when he didn't the Oscar for best actor in 1939. He believed that the lottery was a game of skill, rather than chance, and that he had won it twice, but for some reason, had neglected to turn in the ticket.

And he believed to the very end that he was going to win again, and then, as he said, then I'll teach you how to live. I mean, just from those brief words, it's very evident that your dad was a larger than life character. Yeah. Well, so, you know, he had all these maxims. He had all these ideas about how men should be, and he lived by him. And that's the thing about him. So it's not just that he thought that every man should have a fresh burn theoretically,

and he, you know, didn't just say where white to the face or the turtle neck is the most flattering thing a man can wear. I mean, he followed all these things religiously, and they worked. I mean,

“that's the thing I think that you have to understand, you know, with my dad, is that it all worked.”

I mean, if he walked into a restaurant, you know, everyone, what am I seeing? Yeah, so you saw guy who was wearing a blue shirt with a white collar, you know, high to the face, a big fat knot, cufflinks, floor shots, shoes, skinned, the color of mahogany or A1 steak. So it's any sort of

the color of short truce. I mean, they were the greenest eyes I've ever seen in any human being.

“They were on fire, and they were kind of beautiful and entrancing and kind of terrifying at the same”

time. I feel like I'm, I'm looking at Frank Sinatra. Yeah, I mean, so I saw Frank Sinatra once, and that's all you saw were his blue eyes. They were burning like gas jets, and that was the same with my dad. All you saw was his dark skin and his insanely green eyes. Behind this very masculine appearance, you have said, are some very specific ideas that your dad had about masculinity, it wasn't just a veneer, it was a whole philosophy. So tell me about that. Well, so it wasn't just

“closed. You know, it was also some very specific ideas about manhood and how a man should be.”

Well, number one, always look a man in the eye. Number two, always have a firm handshake.

Number three, always open the door for a woman. And then they got a little bit, like if you're sort of sort of the basics, they were complex. There was one time that he told me, basically, his overall rule for seducing women. And it was, it was, tell a smart woman, she's beautiful and tell a beautiful woman, she's smart. So he had a lot of tips and they were all acted on.

“They were all part of who he was. Where do you think that these lessons about manhood”

came from? Upon what was it modeled, as best you could tell? As best as I could tell, it was modeled on the movie stars of the late 1930s. Not his dad. Definitely not his dad.

When we were growing up, my brother, my sister and I, we would always ask him,

you know, dad, tell us about your dad. And he would say, in the way he spoke, I never had a father. And then, one of us would say, what do you mean, wait a minute, dad? You know, your father calls, you know, every couple of months to ask for money. And he would just look at us and repeat, I never had a father. But he would go to the movies, you know, when he was growing up in Brooklyn, and he absorbed everything. He absorbed how to dress from feta stare. He absorbed how to talk

from carry grant. He absorbed how to treat women from, you know, from Clark Gable. And he was a student of all that. I mean, the thing about my dad, so he was like, he was a rough kid growing up in Brooklyn. But by the time I knew him, he had expunged like every bit of his Brooklyn accent. And a lot of that was because when he was in World War II, he was wounded and then instead of being shipped back to the front, Elie Tennant heard him sing and put him in a show. And so he became,

you know, a crewner singing in a traveling army act called Fremen only, which is almost too on the nose, it really is. And when my dad came home from World War II, he tried to make it a singer and did not. But one of the things he still did was go down to the basement and tape himself singing to instrumental records. And for an audience of his own self, for an audience of himself. And so he behaved the way a crewner and his mind was supposed to be.

He behaved the way a crewner was supposed to behave, but he crumed his daily language.

seduction of some kind. He would stand in front of the mirror in the morning. I'd be on my

way to school and I'd go in to say hello or goodbye. And he would be standing there in his black bikini in front of this enormous mirror in his room. And he would say, "Look, look at this body. Have you ever seen a body like this?" And he had a body. I mean, he was built like Charles Atlas.

“How did all of this philosophy manifest in the kind of father that he was to you?”

What kind of dad was he? He was actually a really good dad in a lot of different ways.

He was attentive. He was prescriptive. He taught me how to play football. He taught me how to

box. He would kiss me hard, good night on my head. Or in the morning when he went away on a trip. You know, he was a super attentive dad at the same time. He was terrifying. Like, I was terrified of my father. He was not a violent person around the house, but the amount of force that his presence had was just the kind of thing where you felt like if you came to close to him, it was like going too close to the sun that you would be obliterated. The toughest thing about

growing up with my dad was having this warm overwhelmingly, you know, demonstratively loving person

who at the same time was a person I could not be in the same room with, especially when I was like five, six, seven years old, you know, without crying. And one specific behavior would make you cry. I mean, there was definitely a time when I was so given to tears that my father had dinner time would sort of make it a game. Tommy, why aren't you finishing that steak? And I would, you know,

“my lip would start quivering, and I would cry. And I think it was just there was a power imbalance”

that was really just tough to deal with. So here's the disconnect that I have, having read your book. This intimidating guy, he sells persons. Yeah. He was a handbag salesman. Square that. Well, so he didn't make it as a singer. And he hadn't gone to school past 8th grade. And he had really nothing but his looks and his charm. And one of his army buddies had gotten a job in the leather business as a salesman. And he took my dad under his wing

and they went out on the road together. And, you know, my father quickly became the degree that there were legendary handbag salesman. He was the legendary handbag salesman. Legendary for what. Legendary for two things. Legendary for, you know, being big blue. That was his, even though he was, as he would say, six feet in shoes. Meaning he was about five, about five ten. He was big blue. But he was also known for seducing women. So he was selling handbags

and he was seducing buyers. But his sex appeal was the thing that it not only made him the celebrity that he wanted to be. But also made him money. I mean, my father was an extremely successful handbag

“salesman. And I think that like his earnings topped out in the early 70s or the mid 70s”

at around $250,000 a year, which in the mids for 1974, that was big money. Huge money. I mean, I'm going to say 3x that, given relation to Ray. Exactly. I mean, I think that he was, I think that he was promiscuous. I think that he was a, you know, if he was a philanderer, he was a driven philanderer. And this is a deliberate intentional word to using, he's married. He's married. He's married to my mom from as long as he was

until both my parents passed away. He's described, you know, often in the press about the book

“as a philanderer. And I guess that's the right word. But it seems almost too, too mild for what he was.”

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you come to understand all of this, not just through youthful intuition, but as you write through a pretty big moment of discovery. Yeah. So tell me the story of how you come to understand that your dad's masculinity and his virility is is not just an external identity, but something he's acting on in ways that are perhaps not meant for you to have understood. The thing about my dad was he presented himself in a very fourth rightly sexual way.

And it wasn't like that was simply for show. My father had an affair with my first friend's mother

“when I was three years old. And I knew it. You knew it. I knew it. Somehow somehow. I knew”

it's something was wrong. Something was off. Something that made my mom unhappy. That was always

sort of the compass needle. I talked to you before about always crying around my dad and that I felt sort of powerless around my dad. The way that I tried to deal with that was to try to like figure out my dad. And so I never stopped sort of spying on him snooping around. And then when I was 16, my father came home with something that he had never had. So my father was not like an organized guy. And he kept all his work stuff and like a vanilla envelope, the handwriting

scrolled over it. One day he comes home and all of a sudden he looks like every other guy on the Long Island railroad. He comes home with the Samsonite briefcase. And the minute I saw the Samsonite briefcase, I did not think, oh my dad's like a normal guy now. I said there's something inside that Samsonite briefcase. And you wanted to figure out. And I was driven to figure out what it was. And one night he was going out to the track with my mom which he frequently did. And I went into

his closet. I pulled out the briefcase and looked at it and wondered whether I should open it because I knew the things were about to change right there. My heart was beating. And then I opened it anyway. And what did you find? There was this huge stack of really extreme pornography, in super 8, a celluloid format for watching home movies. And there were these two gigantic rubber dildos. It's like a wool moment. Yeah. And you watch the super 8. I watched the super 8. And

it's on an old movie projector that we used to watch home movies on. And I'm watching this really extreme pornography. It was a subjugation porn. But I'm 16. Just turned 16.

And so you've never seen anything like this. I've never been kissed.

I didn't know anything. And it jams in the projector. And I smell the smoke in it burns. And it breaks. It snaps. Oh my god. And so that presented me as a son with a problem. Like what do I do? I rewounded meticulously. I spent hours rewinding it. So that's your terrified of them.

“I'm terrified of him. And I didn't want him to know my secret, which was that I knew his secret.”

And I went from thinking that my dad was sort of a charming thief. Like somebody that would be in a movie played by Carrie Grant or David Niven to a hitman. Just tell me I understand that.

That your dad was sleeping around. Sleeping around. Yeah. But this does what? It made me

“wonder if my dad at some level was bad. Did it cross your mind to talk to your mom about this?”

It crossed my mind. But then I knew that it was the nuclear codes to my family. I mean, I don't think my parents marriage would have survived. I don't know if I would have survived. I mean, that's the whole thing about secrets. You really don't know what's on the other side of them. Well, they enlist you in them. And I was enlisted in that particular secret. I sort of got bonded to my dad through the secrets that sort of upset me most. When I was

20, you know, I went out on a date with my dad and a buyer with whom he was very clearly having an affair with. What was that like? It was at once of concern because it was another thing I had to keep from my mom. And also, I'll just say it. It was like one of the most glamorous nights of my life. We went out to see Woody Allen at Michael's Pub. We walks my father's date and her sister-in-law who was sort of like my date, you know, back to the Plaza.

And it was my first night in New York City. And I was sort of, I was this swept away

as the two women were. Yeah. So my dad presented himself as a paragon of masculinity. But masculinity to my dad didn't just mean being able to handle yourself with your fists. It didn't just mean looking sharp. It didn't just mean having a firm handshake. You know, it meant it

“meant having sex. That is the thing that I think that distinguished the way I grew up”

from a lot of other people who had sort of macho dads. I had a macho dad who was forever on the make. And that was the difference. And wanted you to be on the make. And wanted me to be on the make. As your father gets older, what's your relationship to him and these secrets that he may or may not understand you possess that are bringing you closer to him, but also clearly have left you wary of him. You know, I became in some ways his protector. He did not age well and he went from

being a guy who made $250,000 a year to a guy who had he had lost everything. And how did he lose everything? He was a terrible gambler and he was even worse. He was even worse and bestier in the stock market. He was the most confident man I had ever you know, come across and that itself was like seductive and powerful. And then he became a guy who's pockets were lined with regrets. I mean he was one of these guys. That's all he did was talk about

you know, what I could have shut out of it. And so in 1996 I was writing for GQ. I wrote the story called My Father's Fashion Tips, which was a way to sort of allow him to expound his principles and his maxims and introduce those to, you know, the wider reading public.

The reason I did it was as a gift to him. I wanted to make him the celebrity that he never was.

“But and there's always a butt I think in all of these stories. I did that story to corner my dad”

with a tape recorder between us. And so I finally had the chance to talk to him about all this stuff. And you know, so I found out that he had in a fair with not just Joshua Gabor, but with the Gabor sisters. I found out. Gabor is not enough. He talked about the affair that he had

The one I sensed when I was three. Then he told me about something that happened to him

“that at once, enobled him as like a tragic character and also made me wonder if I really knew him at all.”

I gave my brother a near-time subscription. She sent you your long subscription, so I have access to all the games. We'll do word-o many spelling bee. It has given us a personal connection. We change articles. And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. The coverage, the options, not just news. That should diversify that. I was really excited to give him a near-time

cooking subscription so that we could share recipes. And we even just shared a recipe the other day.

The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff, we're making the same food, we're on the same page. Connect even more with someone you care about. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com/gift.

Tom described this information your father shared with you that, for lack of a better word,

clearly changes your life and changes your view of him. Sure. So this was my last day with him for this story. I had taken him out to the Dune Deco Tell on Dune Road in West Hampton, which was sort of his refuge when I was growing up. He would leave the house, our house, or on four five o'clock, dressed in his sort of uniform. He'd wear an orange alpaca sweater, white ducks, which were white pants, and he would go out for a drink at this hotel. And so I took him there

when I was doing the story for GQ. And there was a moment where I felt, I felt that I didn't have to ask any more questions. I felt like I was done. And then that night, when we were at the hotel, in 81-year-old woman asked him for his phone number when we were out at dinner, which was just that he was 77 at the time. So it was just a beautiful, it was just a beautiful moment. But the next morning, I asked him, I said, Dad, you know, when that woman asked you for your phone number,

is that what it was like when you were in your 30s and 40s and even 50s. And he shook his head. And he said, tell me, tell me, tell me, I'm not pulling your leg. There was a time that I couldn't walk down

“fifth avenue without being propositioned. And I said, gee, Dad, do you take any of them up on it?”

And his answer was, not all of them. You know, and I said, okay, Dad, how many? I'm not telling you, I'm a gentleman. Okay, Dad, give me a percentage. Oh, I don't know. 25%, that led me to the next question, which is, did you ever fall in love with one? And there was a pause. And then my father looked at me and held out a finger. And he said, one, I asked, who is she? What's her name? What happened to her?

And he said, she died. He said, she fell down the steps of her home in Florida. And she was a married woman. And it was the central tragedy of my dad's life. It was the

“thing that I didn't see coming. Like, I think I saw the plurn in the dildo's coming more than I saw”

that coming. And then he could be deeply, that he could be deeply in love and have loved and lost, that he had something happened to him that couldn't be just sort of shuffled away like any of his

about him that ran in GQ? No, I didn't put that story in there. I didn't put any of the secrets

“that he shared with me at the Dune Deck that weekend in the story. He spared him. I spared him”

and I put in the secrets that he wanted everybody to know. The secrets of grooming, the secrets of hygiene, the secrets of dressing, everything else I kept to myself. A final tribute, a final tribute. And to a diminished man, to a man who was a diminished man, and it was intended as a gift to him, and it worked as a gift to him. And the piece became one of the most popular pieces I'd ever written. There was a photo of my father in it in a tuxedo drinking martini, and it wound up in the window

of the B-altman on 5th Avenue. The department store. The department store. And he was immortalized in a way. I thought my job was done. And he passes away ten years later, age 87. That would be the moment for most people where their relationship with their father, their mother, their parent, more or less comes to an end. You have a bunch of secrets they've died with him. They're probably going to die with you. But as you write, it's this precise moment when you actively start to seek out

“a very big and new chapter in your relationship with your father. And what made you do that?”

So I orchestrated my dad's funeral service. I hired a shantoo's from New York City to come, and same, I'll be seeing you instead of, you know, Christian hymns, I selected Sinatra songs for everybody just saying at the funeral. I gave the ulogy that I spent, you know, a long time preparing. Right. I got the last word. I'm done. And then at the end of the funeral, this beautiful woman stands up that I didn't really even like notice her presence. I was so involved in

what I was doing. She's the only black person at the funeral. She's six foot tall. She's wearing

“a black leather jacket. She's wearing blue jeans, cut to prepant length. She has these gold sandals”

on with five inch heels. And she stands up. She turns around. She brings her hands down on the lectern. And she says, "Can we all just agree that this was a man?" Wow. And that's throws, that throws me. And so you discover yet another woman. So there's another woman. There's another woman. She was a person who was in the handbag business. She's not the woman that he was in love with. She was just another woman that he had a long affair with. And once again, it was something that

eventually set me, set me on the path of trying to find out everything about him. How did you actually go about investigating the parts of your dad's life that you didn't know? Because by

this point, you know a great deal. Yeah, a lot. Basically the way I did it was, you know, I tried to

call people who were connected with my dad either sexually or through the business, through the handbag business. I mean, to the extent that I went and went out to California and found the woman with whom he had an affair when I was three years old. But the biggest thing that I did was try to find out more about the one, the great love, the great, the great love. And that was the hardest part as well. My, because she had children. She had four children. I looked at the

notes that I had written to myself when I first found out the name of the one. And her name was

Peggy Monahan. And when I found out her name, I found out the name of her children. And in one

40 years ago invaded this family's life. And it had a tragic ending. Do I presume to do that again?

“And why? Why did you want to invade this same family again, just like your father?”

Because when I first started doing my research into the book, I spoke to the children of my father, Beth Friend and Florida. His name was Frankie Klein. He was my dad's wingman. He was one of my dad's best friends. And, you know, they had met Peggy Monahan. They had seen Peggy Monahan. They had seen Peggy Monahan with my father in this secret life in the secret in Florida. Yeah, one of Frankie's daughters

said, I always knew that it was a forbidden love. And then another Frankie's daughters

called up one day and said, listen, there's something I need to tell you. And what she needed to tell me was that Peggy had a child by my dad or it was rumored to have a child by my dad. I didn't know which one, but I took it upon myself to find out. Because suddenly you have a sibling. It was such a powerful urge because I knew what my dad's secret life had done to my family.

And I had an idea what my father's secret life had done to the Monahan family. And I was driven by this urge to put it all back together again. And I took it upon myself to do that. We are going to take one more quick break. We'll be right back. So Tom, after you discover that you might have a sibling, you didn't know about.

“And you realize how deep this urge is to figure it out. What do you do?”

Well, I sent out an email and letters to some of the children saying, in that email, hello, my name is Tom. You know, you don't know me, but my father was in love with your mother. Your mother and my father had a long affair. And I've been given to understand that your mother was the love of my father's life. What did they communicate back to you?

Well, the first person in the family that I met was named Tommy, and we met on New Year's Eve

2016. We went to a bar in Queens. And Tommy was basically trying to sus out, you know, my motives in contacting him and then pursuing, you know, because I told him I was writing a book, he asked if he could go outside and smoke a cigarette. And I said, sure, and we went outside. And then the minute he turned around and lit up the cigarette looked at me and he goes, "It's my sister, isn't it?" And I said, "Yeah." And he was like, "I knew it." And then he said,

“"But here's the thing, you can never tell her." So you're being asked to keep you at another secret.”

But you decide not to. You do reach out to her. Why? Because I couldn't live with not finding her. I couldn't live with it. I had started trying to, you know, trying to put the pieces back together. And the idea of not completing that task while knowing that there was someone out there.

I just couldn't, I couldn't abide by it. And I didn't think ultimately it would be anybody's

And she owns and runs and cooks in a food truck at the University of Connecticut.

“And one day I decided to approach the food truck. And I've done a lot of interviews.”

And I've done even, you know, pretty scary interviews. I've knocked on any number of doors and nothing ever in my entire, you know, journalistic career scared me more than walking up to Lizanne's food truck and introducing myself. And she asked me, "How can I help you?" And I said, "I said, "Lazanne, I'm Tom, you know." And she has this beautiful, beautiful smile and she was smiling and then the smile disappeared. And she looked at me and she looked at me.

And then the smile came back and she said, "What the hell are you doing here?" Did she know? I think she knew. I certainly did. There is something about seeing somebody who is related to you that is hard to describe.

When I first saw Lizanne's picture on a Facebook page,

it's not that I identified her. It's not that I was able to say, "Oh, yeah, we have the same nose or we have the same smile lines or our smiles are similar." It was beyond that.

“I recognized her and I think that she recognized me as well. I mean, it took a while”

but let's just turn out to be one of the most remarkable experiences of my life not just because we found each other, but we had lost. We each had lost something enormous. In May of 2022, I lost my sister Kathy, she died. In July of 2023, Lizzy lost her brother Michael and on Christmas Eve 2022, she called me to tell me that she had gotten the results of the ancestry test back.

You had lost siblings. We had you hate games. We had, yeah, and so in that moment, we each had lost family and we each had found each other. But there was something else about it.

I felt like I had settled finally what I had never been able to settle.

In my life which is, you know, my feelings about my dad and my knowledge about my dad. Well, how does this settle? Well, I'm not disrupt, despite a lifetime of betrayals

“that ends with arguably the greatest betrayal of all. A secret family, a secret child.”

A great love who he paraded around Florida in a pretty cabalier way when he was allegedly off selling persons who knows what he was doing, wasn't taking care of you in those moments. And we haven't talked about how much he was or wasn't a father to this sister. But are you not at all angry? So anger just come easy to me with with my dad and not long after it was confirmed that Lizzy

and I, our brother and sister, I was taking a ride on a winter day in a bus to LaGuardia airport and I sat next to a woman who asked me, you had the misfortune to ask me how my holiday is for. And we talked about my holiday. So I told her everything. So she listened to the whole story and then she says, can I ask you one question about your father? And I'd like to read the passage in the book where I answer her. Why aren't you angry at him? She asks, "She waits for an answer,

so I try to think of one." Why did I do the gentlemanly thing and buy her a coffee when I bought

Because of my dad. Why do I love music so much? Because of my dad. Why do I love language so much?

“Because of my dad. Why am I a writer in the first place? Because of my dad.”

I took so much from him. I owe so much to him. And when I respond to the world, I am often

responding through him for better and for worse. He taught me had a live man. And he gave me permission

to enjoy life. He might not have been a good man, but he was an elemental one. And I feel his presence when I eat, when I drink, when I make love, when I breathe,

anger never had a chance.

If anger isn't the right word, for the way you feel about your dad right now,

“what is the right word? Or words that you feel about your dad right now?”

I couldn't have written this book without loving him. And there's a part of me that doesn't want to say it. But that's where it is. I am imbivalently still in love with my dad. Tom, thank you for being here, for talking about your dad and for the gift of this book,

“and Happy Father's Day, too. Thank you very much, Michael.”

Today's episode was produced by Tina Antelini. It was edited by Wendy Door, and engineer by Daniel Ramirez, with production assistance from Dahlia Hadad. It contains music by Dan Powell. That's it for the daily on Sunday. I'm Michael Barrow. Happy Father's Day. See you tomorrow. This week on the Booker View podcast, we look back at the culture wars of the 80s and 90s

with author Isaac Butler. Culture wars are going to flare up all the time, because the arts are how we decide who we are. That's the terrain in which the soul of a nation is really explored and developed. Listen to the book review wherever you get your podcasts.