By Jim Vespe
Ask most people to name their favorite movie father and they’ll probably say Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird, or if they value strength over sweetness, Don Corleone, of if they’re sarcastic or sadistic, Darth Vader.
But my choice would be someone I know almost nothing about, never saw, whose name I have only heard once.
David X. Cohen.
His time on screen consists of a single mention: at the end of The Way We Were, when Barbra Streisand (Katie) runs into Robert Redford (Hubbell) outside of the Plaza Hotel. Hubbell had fathered her child, and apparently left mother and daughter soon afterwards, losing contact with them both.
He was now a successful television writer, accompanied by the kind of woman you would expect to see on Hubbell’s arm: as blonde and stunning as he is, and probably unable to name the Vice President of the United States.
Hubbell knows Katie is married, and asks if her husband is a good father to the child he abandoned.
Katie assures him he is.
She then volunteers his name…”David X Cohen.”
And adds, “for the only David X Cohen in the phone book.”
That is all we know about David X Cohen. And it is all we need to know.
I picture him as an attorney, or a CPA, or a healthcare professional, perhaps an orthodontist who spends one afternoon a week at a clinic in Harlem fitting braces on poor Black children.
I don’t see him as a garment center jobber or a builder of tract houses on Long Island…Katie could never marry someone like that…or as a Senior Vice President, anywhere. The kind of companies that had Senior Vice Presidents in the 1950’s rarely hired, or much less promoted, men named David X Cohen.
But mostly I see him as a decidedly average guy, definitely not better looking than Hubbell (who is?) but surely a better person.
He has chosen to marry a feisty woman whose baggage includes another man’s daughter, and over the years he has been there for this little girl.
Reading the bedtime stories he knows so well he can close the book and recite them from memory.
Sitting through endless ballet recitals.
Going door to door with her to distribute the Girl Scout cookies she has sold.
Congratulating her for her A’s, consoling her for her D’s.
Buying her a puppy that she promised to clean up after, and cleaning up after it when she didn’t.
He has probably not yet sat up with her half the night, trying to convince her that the first boy to break her heart is not worth her tears, but he someday will.
So on Father’s Day, let us salute the David X Cohens of the world. They define what it means to be a father.
And, if Katie’s daughter ever met Hubbell, I’m sure she would gladly introduce him…
…to her Dad.
Because it takes a minute to be able to call yourself a father, but it requires a lifetime to deserve to call yourself a dad.
And as she and David X Cohen walked away from Hubbell, she will probably say, perhaps not under her breath…after all, she is the daughter of a woman played by Barbra Striesand:
“What a schmuck.”
Jim Vespe, Mamaroneck
Jim Vespe is a retired advertising copywriter and comedy writer who lives in Mamaroneck.
