Pater Familias | Chapter 8

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There's this thing I have not been able to figure out when it comes to the man who for 40 years I thought was my biological father, who I've now started calling my original biological father, Warren. Did he know he wasn't my biological father? On one hand, it seems like he did.
It would check out, given how he stayed out of my life for so long. But on the other hand, when I had moments of my life, periods in my life when I did have a relationship with him, he would tell me he loved me.
He would peel off a few 20s from a wad of cash that he used to carry around and hand some to me after we went to dinner. During college, he flew me out to California to reconnect with his side of the family.
Once, when we were on good terms,

he said he was upset by the fact that I avoided calling him by name.

He said I didn't have to call him Dad.

I had long ago reassigned that moniker to my adopted dad, Richard.

But he said he wanted me to call him something.

Even just Warren.

Something. to call him something, even just Warren, something.
But I wanted to know what exactly Warren knew. And I thought about it this way.
If Dr. Dubrovner had clearly stated in that office in 1977 that my mom was going to get pregnant from a sperm donor, a man other than Warren, then Warren would have remembered.
He would have known he was never really my biological father, and he would have had plenty of chances to bring it up to me through the years because he was often mad at me. He was mad at my mom, really, and he took it out on me.
His anger was part of what our very last conversation 13 years ago was about after I called to him to tell him he was going to be a grandfather before he hung up on me and said he didn't care and no one in the family liked me. If he'd known he wasn't my biological father, that's a moment when I figure he could have mentioned it.
But I still remembered his number by heart, and I decided I had to call him to tell him that I was making this podcast. And to tell him the big news.
Congratulations, you're not my father, if you didn't know already. Just like when I first contacted Warren when I was 16, I could not reach him directly.
So just like when I was 16, I called his brother, who I hadn't spoken to in years. And just like back then, his brother would not give me his correct phone number.
Instead, Warren called me back. His voice was haunting, angry.
We spoke twice over two days and had two terrible conversations. Mostly he yelled at me about things he said my mom and Richard had done to him.
He denied owing my mom tens of thousands of dollars from back in the day for money he had taken from their joint account and not paid in child support.

And then, when it came to the news about a sperm donor,

he acknowledged fertility problems but said he believed that his sperm was being, quote, supplemented by donor sperm.

In other words, he heard the thing that a lot of husbands heard

during donor inseminations in the 70s.

Another guy's sperm is going to help your sperm. Warren said, I don't know how the formula worked.
This was significant to me. He seemed as misled as my mom had been, and he used this word supplemented, which confirmed what I suspected all along.
Warren's sperm, which would have been tested to indicate it didn't work very well, was mixed with sperm that did work. That, turns out, came from an underemployed 41-year-old Irish actor living in a walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.
That practice of deceiving couples into believing they were having their own children,

I just became convinced that this is how I came to exist.

This is an answer I'd been trying to figure out as best as I possibly could for almost six years.

But I didn't feel satisfied just yet.

I didn't have that sense of closure

because I still hadn't solved all of the mysteries.

From Waveland and Rococo Punch,

this is Inconceivable Truth.

I'm Matt Katz.

Episode 8, Paterfamilius. True Crime Fix.
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McCormick, flavor sealed for unbeatable flavor. I did not have a positive reaction to talking to Warren again.
I felt, in my body, numb. And I had hazy flashbacks to other aggressive conversations with him that ended in hang-ups going back so many years.
Back to when I was just a kid and couldn't understand why he acted that way. So after my phone call with Warren, I just sat down on the couch in my living room.
The warnings of my barber, Daryl, echoed in my head. Why did I have to unearth things that were better left unknown?

Why am I awakening ghosts?

I sat there, miserable, and my daughter, Sadie, who's 12, gave me a hug.

She asked if I was sick.

I said I'd just talked to Warren and that I was just sad. It's all right, Daddy, she said.
You have a dad who loves you right there in Manhattan. She was talking about Richard, the dad who adopted me.
Sadie knows what she's talking about. Richard's unwavering support for this project, this unusual project centered on his only son finding his father, is a perfect encapsulation of how much he doesn't care about 23andMe or Ancestry.com or DNA tests.
He just cares about me. One of the things that I used to do with him growing up, the thing where it'd usually just be me and him, was go to synagogue on Saturday mornings.
Two or three hours ending with a shot of wine for him and a shot of grape juice for me and a long walk home. And always at the synagogue, there'd be an older woman who'd walk up to us, point at our faces, and turn to me and say, you look so much like your dad.
Of course, we weren't related by blood. In reality, we don't even look alike.
But we would just kind of smile and glance at each other, and my dad would say, yep, good Shabbos. Nature? Nurture? Who knows? My new half-sisters tell me about epigenetics, the scientific concept centered on how nurture shapes nature.
Maybe how you grow up, how you eat, experiences you have can cause changes that affect how your genes work in your body and mind. What I have learned for sure is that the emotional connection between fathers of any kind and their children, or the void of such a connection, can be life-forming.
When I was at their apartment a few months ago, my dad Richard was looking at old pictures of his grandfather. This is Grandpa Zuckerman.
Grandpa Zuckerman was smiling in these photos, which is not the kind of thing you usually see in black-and-white family portraits from back when. The man died 70 years ago, and that death had a huge effect on Richard, even though he never actually understood a word his grandpa said.
But I understand his eyes, because when he looked at me, it was total love. It was total love of a grandchild.
He was wonderful. And the one language he never learned was English.
But you felt close to him nonetheless. Oh, I loved him.
And then he died a year before my bar mitzvah and I resented that and everyone was crying and I was not crying and I think that's why I say so much that I love everybody because for a long time when I was growing up, I said, everybody loves and I don't. And I think it all was because Grandpa died before my bar mitzvah and how dare he leave me before I was bar mitzvahed as a man.
You resented that he had... I think.
I think. I think i resented that he died and probably felt guilty as hell about it because i love the man but whatever it was it was a very very significant feeling maybe it was my beginning to really have feelings that were feminine.

Because you grow up, you got to be a tough kid.

I was never a tough kid.

But here, how do you love?

I think I figured it out.

I think so too.

A few weeks ago, my mom sent me a video of my dad tickling my son Ruben. Is a tickle coming? When I was in seventh grade, Richard rushed home from work to take me to the doctor because contrary to the school nurse's prognosis that I had just eaten too much Halloween candy, Richard had a hunch something worse was going on.
He got me to the hospital in time for them to take out my appendix. When I was living in my first apartment, Richard rushed over after my car was stolen to bring me the title so I could report it stolen to the cops.
But when he got to my neighborhood, he was circling around looking for a parking spot, and he found my car.

Turned out it wasn't stolen at all.

Idiotically, I just forgot where I had parked the night before.

Richard wasn't mad that he drove all this way for nothing.

Opposite, he was thrilled to have helped.

I feel like I learned how to be a good husband and father from you, how to be friendly and open to the world. And that I learned by being in your home for the first 14, 15 of the 18 years of my life.
that is one of the best compliments

or of the 18 years of my life. That is one of the best compliments or things that can make me proud that I've ever heard.
The death of Richard's grandfather had a lasting impact on him. And my mom felt lost too.
The loss of her father. It affects her even now.
I don't remember my father at all, which is very, very sad. My earliest memory is when I was six years old, still in a crib, which is very unusual, but we had a small apartment.
And I knew something was wrong because I could hear some noise. And I think this is my memory, but memory does play tricks on you, that I believe I was kind of shaking the bars of the crib and saying, what's going on, whatever a six-year-old would say, because I found out that my dad had passed away.
He had a heart attack, and he was in the hospital. They rushed him to the hospital, but my mother was also in the hospital.
Supposedly, I think, about to give birth.

And it was a horrible, horrible time.

And unfortunately, my mother didn't really say much more than that.

We didn't share anything.

She had a miscarriage at the same hospital at the same time.

Yep.

As your dad died.

Yes, yes.

And of course, now I wish I could ask and talk to her more and find out a little bit

Thank you. At the same hospital, same time.
Yep. As your dad died.
Yes, yes. And, of course, now I wish I could ask and talk to her more and find out a little bit more.
Did you ever ask her about him later? I asked about him. She would say your father would love that or something.
But she didn't just say that he was a kind affectionate easygoing person that's all she really you know hard worker and that's all she told me she didn't remarry because she was worried that no man would be a good father good enough for for me. And so she sacrificed, in my eyes, she sacrificed her whole life for me.
And my father's side of the family did not come around to really support her. So you were essentially abandoned by your father's family, particularly the male members of the family.
I don't know if abandoned. Well, I guess I never thought of it because that seems like a very strong word.
But, yeah, we were not included. So you're right.
Yeah. I think deep down that's why family is so important to me today.
I miss the fact that we don't have family around now, as you well know. And I, on some level, missed it my whole life.
Yeah. That's why I always say that I hope your children will remember us, that they will remember that we took them to wherever or that I baked with Sadie or I...
I hope so. She doesn't have to hope.
My kids will have stories to tell about their grandparents. They've seen their grandmother, five-foot-nothing, retire from teaching in New York City public schools to live a rich life of theater and travels and friends and civic activism.

She survived breast cancer and still walks two and a half miles through the city every day.

She's been an example for them, a real-life example, not a sketch sussed out from census records and library archives.

They'll have stories to tell about trips to museums and games of Scrabble and tons of books and, yes, baking with Sadie. She's doing what she did for me as a mom,

creating memories. and then take the spoon and put it into my grandma's head.
And what I do, and I put it in the oven. My mom, though, does not have stories to tell about her own father, does not have memories, and it's nagged at her forever.
She didn't want me to be robbed of that also. So after she married and divorced, she would not do the same thing my grandmother did.
She decided to find her child a father. I think I felt more confident that it would be good for me to find somebody for you.
I mean, for me too, but also for you. Because you knew what it was like not to have that.
Yeah, right, exactly. That's a good point.

So you appreciate the need to know, right?

Absolutely.

So do you understand, like, then my quest to understand who my birth father was?

Yeah, I do.

No, I understand. Yeah, I do.

A few weeks after this chat is when I finally confirmed that Vincent McNally was my biological father. I call my mom to tell her the news.
Wow. So, yeah, the doctor was at least less than truthful about where he was getting the sperm from.
Right. So therefore, it stands to reason that he was less than truthful about whatever he told you he was doing in 1977 when he inseminated you.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Definitely. Wow.
I can't believe he found out all this. Wow.
Oh my God.

How do you feel?

I feel a little justified that I wasn't completely a jerk.

And I feel betrayed by him, by Dubrovna.

Thank you. and I feel betrayed by him, by Dubrovna.
I feel betrayed. He betrayed me twice, 45 years ago and six months ago.
Six months earlier, my mom had decided she wanted to meet Dr. Dubrovna in person.
I gave her his number. He lives across the street from my parents by sheer coincidence, and they set up a time to meet on a bench between their apartment buildings.
He gave her a hug when he saw her. She gave him home-baked mandel bread, delicious traditional Jewish cookies, and thanked him for giving her her son.

Dr. Dubrovna told her that she shouldn't worry about me not being Jewish,

because in the Jewish tradition, the religion is passed down via the mother.

And he repeated the claim that he got his donors from other doctors and medical students.

But he indicated that the sperm could have been mixed, which is why my mom would

have thought Warren was the father. Made me feel that I was not remembering and that I was, I guess,

ignorant. In those days, whatever a doctor told you, you accepted.

When you saw him, he told you, in no uncertain terms, that it was a medical student or a resident?

Yes. Yes.

And that he worked hard to find somebody who resembled Warren.

Yeah.

Which he obviously didn't.

Thanks for sharing this confusing tree. I'm delighted for you and I I really feel angry at betrayed and angry at Dubrovna.
It was my time to meet Dr. Dubrovna on that park bench.
I hadn't spoken to him since I'd learned who my sperm donor really was, and I wanted to confront him about that, but with some reluctance, because without the methods he employed, whatever they were, I wouldn't exist. So I'm conflicted about the whole thing.
I still think his overall aims were just, even good. It's a pleasure to meet you, sir.
You too. How are you? Thank you so much for doing this.
Dr. Dubrovna is now in his late 80s.
He acknowledged that he is experiencing a degree of dementia. He remembered certain parts of his medical work with precision, but his recounting of other details was inconsistent.
The first piece I wanted to clear up with him was mixing, this method of mixing donor semen and husband semen.

We did that fairly early on, actually.

Psychologically, obviously, it was such that the couple would really never know

whether it was the husband, it was only one sperm that did the fertilization,

whether it was the husband's sperm or the donor's sperm.

It wasn't going to really be medically effective, but psychologically it was. But on the other hand, the more you deluded...
He said he didn't remember if he was still mixing in 1977 when I was conceived. But he acknowledged that mixing did create confusion, an element of doubt.
In all due respect, it sounds deceptive. It sounds like deceit was sort of built in the process.
Well, call it deceit or psychological one way or the other. The only people who feel better about it are the couple themselves.
So they're only, are they fooling themselves? Well, perhaps they are. Memory is a whole other thing.
And we, you know, that's where my gut goes,

is that there was some element of doubt discussed in your office in 77,

and that became fact at some point in my mom's memory. Which you want to believe, perhaps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

Yes.

Yeah.

And again, I mean, I'm happy to be alive and around and having two kids of my own. So, I mean, I don't have the...
I don't have, like, harsh feelings toward you, but it does... I feel like my mother at the time wasn't given the full, correct, 100% information.
I feel like she was a little bit tricked. And that is something that she's now trying to reconcile in her brain.
It's interesting, as I say, because the longer that the practice went on, the more likely it is that couples who are having donor insemination would be counseled by my infertility counselor. And she would be doing a lot of the talk, spending much more time with them perhaps than I would be.
My mother doesn't remember there being an infertility counselor who explained that they were mixing some bad sperm with some stranger sperm in order to get her pregnant. And it's unclear if the counselor was even working there yet when my mom was getting treatment.
The counselor wouldn't talk to us for this podcast. We have sometimes split the specimen among two couples.
In other words, if we have a need for a blonde-haired, blue-eyed donor, okay? And I matched that donor to two different couples, let's say. And they both came out that their ovulation was at the same time.
I might have to take that semen specimen and use half the semen specimen to inseminate one to the other. It's funny you mention that.
Myself and two of my siblings were born within three weeks of each other. So is it possible we all came from the same sample? Three of them? We have three of us.
We were born, we're all within three weeks of each other. It's pretty amazing.
I could use two. I can't imagine using three.
That would be making the chances of working too small, I think, at that particular point.

So that's a question I still couldn't answer. Why were we so close in age? Another question.
Did Dr. Dubrovna really know all the donors personally? Any donors that we use, we personally knew both as far as we worked with them medically, so we realized they were smart.
We worked with them to know that they had the kind of personality traits that we would like to see in my child, perhaps. But then he said he didn't know Vincent McNally, my sperm donor.
He certainly didn't work with Vincent medically, since Vincent was an actor, not a doctor. Any idea how that might have happened? How an actor who was not in medical school would have come to donate sperm in 77? In 77.
Well, again, I cannot tell you because I have no situation where I would have used a non-medical person as a fresh donor insemination. But what about Michael, the donor I interviewed who was a graduate student studying psychology, not in medical school.
Or Lauren, who found out that her donor wasn't a doctor and was black. For years, her identity was hidden from her, complicating her ability to grapple with the racism that she experienced during her childhood.
She found out that her father was not Jewish. In fact, he was black.
So that's caused a good deal. He was black, yeah.
And the couple were white? The couple were white Jews. And the donor was black, and he was not a medical student or not a doctor.
I don't know what happened with that situation. And I recounted how I spoke to a woman whose father was dating Dr.
Dubrovna's receptionist in the early 80s and somehow ended up making a donation. But he did remember your name because he dated and later married your receptionist.
And that's how he must have found out about this. Does that sound plausible? Like, were there, I'm just trying to figure out if there might have been other means in which you were sourcing the semen.
Dr. Dubrovner indicated that any use of men beyond medical students and residents might have had something to do with a place called Repro Lab, which still exists, just four doors down from his old office.
He co-founded this facility to do treatments on infertile husband's sperm to isolate the semen for insemination. But it was also a place that stored donor sperm.
It's a cryobank, a sperm bank. Dr.
Dubrovna said it's possible. If he didn't have access to fresh semen from a donor that met the patient's needs, he may have suggested they go to Reprolab to get semen.
My patient at that particular point would have been sent to Reprolab, told to find themselves a donor, come back with the semen, and I'll do the insemination. I still did the insemination.
I mean, there seems to be at least a small pattern of inconsistency here, that it was not just people that you knew who were residents or medical students,

and that there was some other means of donating sperm from people whom you didn't know and didn't necessarily match the parents or the husbands?

I don't think so.

He did entertain one theory I came up with.

I know that in the 70s, doctors had trouble finding sperm donors,

and clearly at some point, the pool of potential donors widened beyond doctors. And then I realized Dr.
Dubrovna's wife was in the same profession as Vincent. She was a soap opera star for decades on As the World Turns.
Turns out, Vincent performed alongside an actor whose wife was in As the

World Turns. Maybe Vincent met Dr.
Dubrovna at some actor's holiday party and found out about

donating that way. You're at the bar drinking a scotch and you tell this guy...
I don't drink,

but Diet Coke with me. Maybe he asked you what you do for a living and he was fascinated by it

and he needed some extra money. That's a possibility.
We all create narratives about complicated life experiences. This whole podcast is about working out a narrative and doing some investigation into my own life.

In the same way, it seems to me that Dr. Dubrovna also has a narrative he's created about his life's work.
He's telling his own version of his own story that intersects and sometimes contradicts mine. I had some doubts about why are people so concerned about their identity being associated with the sperm necessarily.
So much of their identity is what their husband father gave them and taught them over the 20 years between the time that they were born and the time they left for college or whatever it may be. So much of our identity is our experience and not necessarily our gene in that situation.
Granted, some of our identity may be the gene that we inherited that gave us a bad disease or something of that sort. But how much of it really is me depends on the sperm.
I don't know. Is there really such a thing as a Jewish sperm? I don't know that either.
Right. Right.
Or an Irish sperm, in my case. Or an Irish sperm.
Yeah. Jewish sperm, Irish sperm.
We're putting disparate terms together like this because there really isn't a language to this experience for being one ethnic and religious and cultural identity and then getting a new identity. For me, the most meaningful part of being Jewish is the connection it has given me to other generations.
It makes me feel connected to history. That's why I did something that even my wife, who was Jewish, thought was a little weird.
When my son Ruben was eight days old, we invited dozens of people into our house for his bris, the Jewish circumcision. It's the same circumcision newborn boys get in the hospital, but we did it in front of loved ones and had a little ceremony along with it, with Hebrew prayers, the traditional way.

We also served lunch.

The bris happened two years before I took a DNA test.

I wanted Ruben to have a bris because I knew my fathers, both my biological father and my adopted father, had a bris. And their fathers did too.
Everyone up the paternal line going back centuries and maybe millennia did. Ruben's bris, his welcome to the world in front of our friends and family and everyone we loved, connected both of us to our past, to the ancestors who helped

us come to exist.

Of course, now we know no one up our biological paternal line had a bris.

They were instead at a Catholic church, getting baptized.

And yet, that bris that we had for Ruben, when I think back on it,

it's no less meaningful regardless of what I know now.

I remember this one moment when Richard and my father-in-law David

passed Ruben between them before the circumcision.

Ruben was lying on a cushion, wearing a little yarmulke with his Hebrew name on it.

And I remember Sadie and her buddy from preschool then put a baby doll on a cushion

and pretended to conduct their own bris.

I'm grateful to have customs, stories,

to center moments in time.

Biology be damned.

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Sorry, you're first.

Okay, oh, I'm first. Okay, great.

I'm interviewing Shirley Goldman in her apartment in Little Neck, New York.

I personally think she has had a very interesting life. Okay.
Where were you born? The other day I was digging in my basement looking for journals from when I was a kid, and I came across this paper I wrote when I was in maybe sixth grade. It's an interview between my grandmother, my mom's mom, and me.
I have no memory of it, so playing the Part of my grandmother is my sixth grader, Sadie Katz, an aspiring actress herself, maybe some Vincent in her. Sadie was named for my grandmother Shirley, the part she's about to play.
I was born in Manhattan. Pause for a moment.
You're doing a... I'm doing a New York accent.
Doing a New York accent. Okay, got it.
Okay. Do you have any siblings?

I had two brothers and four sisters.

In her interview with 12-year-old me,

my grandmother told a story I feel I was meant to hear now.

Both my parents were born in Poland.

They met and were married there in 1900.

Wow, that's old. My dad is really old.
He's born in the 1900s too. Okay, this is the interesting part.
Why did they leave Poland? At that time, the Jewish people were persecuted by the Polish people because of their religion. My grandmother then explains that her family was protected by their Catholic neighbors, who lent them crosses and other Catholic items so they could hide their Jewishness and protect their children.
So many Jewish people were forced to live in a ghetto. So they would borrow those things from the Catholic neighbors, so when...
Were the Catholic neighbors not in Diasmetics?

Right.

They were not. They helped them.

Yeah.

Not only were our Jewish relatives saved by Catholics,

but we have Catholics on this other new side of our family.

Just as I lost this Jewish connection to the past

and gained a Catholic connection,

I find out that the two identities were already intertwined. I am connected to ancestors

everywhere, and sometimes it feels like they've been there with me, helping me get to the bottom

of this story. Toward the end of this whole thing, I keep seeing connections, meaning, everywhere.

Maybe the time I've spent with my energy healer sister Tara has influenced me here, but over the five plus years of my search, what strikes me most is the weird coincidences that have occurred. Tara told me the right word might be synchronicities that seem too perfect to not be something more.
I'm not normally one to talk like this, but I can't help but find patterns, resonances, connections that are coloring my worldview now. Two years ago, when I visited Ireland with my family, we went to the home of one of my Irish great-great-grandfathers.

At the end of his life, this great-great-grandfather lived with one of his ten children.

Of all the homes in that valley, theirs was the home that we went to.

There were little kids in that house, his grandchildren.

One of them, who ended up emigrating to America, was Maggie, my grandmother, Vincent's mom. Of all the ancestors in our family tree, of all the possibilities, we had somehow visited my grandmother's childhood home before I knew she was my grandmother.
And then there were the places, certain places that kept popping up while I looked for my father, like there was some eerie geographic pole. The doctor who presided over my conception lived, it turned out, in the same apartment complex as my parents.
Across the street, a library where we ultimately found a huge trove of archives on Vincent McNally's acting career. My mom, the doctor, and Vincent, the three people all involved in making me, their stories converged off the same subway stop.
Vincent had once lived in a building that I had hung out in in New York, and he had lived in a town in California while my sister Tara was living in the same town.

My mom once said that I learned how to read an analog clock because I'd be staring at it waiting for my original birth father, Warren, to pick me up, even when he

didn't come on time or didn't show up at all.

But over the past five years, after decades of the clock tick, tick, ticking as I waited

to meet my father, I've become aware of something else, a new sense that time has unfolded at

the right pace.

I discovered things as I was supposed to. It helped me to digest it all.
For instance, for one week, I got to experience Vincent as alive. After I learned he was my sperm donor, I didn't find out right away he was dead.
And weirdly, that afforded me a chance to think of him as alive and living in California. I was excited and amused by the idea of the four of us siblings maybe one day getting a chance to knock on his door.
Then I stumbled on his death record that I probably should have found earlier. It's strange that I hadn't.
But I'm glad I hadn't. I'm glad I had that time, just a little, with Vincent alive before I read that he'd been dead for four years.
In the final shows he did in his theatrical career before donating sperm, my biological father, Vincent, played a father estranged from his children.

It was frankly pretty freaky to find out that the opening musical number of one of his final shows was called I've Got Myself a Daddy. That, I've decided, is a meaningful coincidence.
And he spoke publicly about wanting to have kids, but apparently never did the traditional way. The fact that I was even able to know that, to find that out, seems really significant to me and makes me think he might be okay with what I'm doing here.
I'm telling you, he'd be tickled pink. He's watching you right now and he's saying, boy, am I important? He would have loved it.
And he would have loved what you have done to find him. Meet Gloria, who dated Vincent in the 1960s.
He was very adventurous. I mean, he was, he was free.
He was a free soul. He loved to laugh.
His personality was larger than life. You know, it's like you picture an actor on a stage and that was how he was offstage.
He was larger than life. I found Gloria a few nights ago as I was wrapping up the last episode of this show.
I did one last newspaper archive search for Vincent McNally and came across a picture I hadn't seen before. It was a photo from the San Francisco Examiner in January 1965 of a young, glamorous couple.
The caption reported that Vincent and Gloria were attending the first night of a new show at the Koran Theater in the Mission District. Gloria had her hair up, beautiful smile right into the camera.
Vincent wore a white shirt, dark coat, and a tie as skinny as a pencil. Vincent would have been 28.
His face looked like mine. Exactly like mine.
I found Gloria easily through Google and Facebook. This was as close as I could get to meeting the man himself.
I can't imagine what a surprise, to say the least, it must have been to get my message. Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely. But the biggest surprise was how much you looked like him.
Yeah. I mean, my friends and my wife have seen the same thing when I've shown them that picture.

Was there something that particularly stood out to you?

It was just the shape of your face and I would say your mouth.

It was like a softened Vince.

Thank you. of your face and I would say your mouth.
It was like a softened Vince. You want a little bit of history about my time with Vince? Yes, please.
Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's see.
We're talking about the early 60s and it was a very special time in San Franciscoisco everybody was a flower child and love was all around i mean it really changed the way society thought about free love and marriage and not marriage and having kids out of you know stuff like that and so that's the atmosphere in which I met him. Ooh! Some sort of insect.
Be off with you. This was around the time that he was performing in a traveling children's production of Puss in Boots.
On the day I connected with Gloria, we got a trove of documents, including audio, from Vincent's performance. He played King Claude.
It was the first time I had heard his voice, even though it was clearly adapted to the role he was playing. Angelique! Angelique! Yes, Father, I'm right here.
Now. Is that better? Oh, yes, yes, much better.
Thank you. What a naughty child to play such tricks on your poor old father.
Well, I'm sorry, father. Gloria said that Vincent performed with his best friend and roommate, Ken.
They lived across the hall from Gloria in the same apartment complex in Sausalito, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Ken and Vince acted in the Shakespearean plays.
He was a wonderful actor. He was a very broad actor, but he was a wonderful actor.
He loved being an actor.

I mean, that was his life.

That's who he was.

And dating Vince was like a very informal thing.

What does that mean?

You know, he wasn't the type to say, you know, let's go to a movie tonight or let's go out to dinner.

You know, we were just sort of

there. But that was very

60-ish. Yeah, right, right.

He made me feel very

special.

And I hope I made him feel

very special.

We were a good couple.

I was interested in his

acting career. You know, I encouraged

it.

And oh. interested in his acting career you know I encouraged it and oh wow during that time too um I actually got pregnant with his child but i had an abortion.
Wow.

The reason I am so pro-abortion is because it was a nightmare.

I had to go to Tijuana.

This was before Roe v. Wade.

And the whole experience was absolutely awful.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

And he came with me.

We flew down just for the day,

but neither of us wanted to have a child at that point. Went to the doctor's office and the doctor's office put us in a car blindfolded and drove us around for a half an hour.
We could have been going around the block for half an hour I wouldn't have known and then stopped at a clinic and um I had my abortion I won't go into the details it was just horrible when it was over Vince and I flew back to San Francisco and as we were walking in the door of where I lived, he said, I can't take all this emotion. It's too much for me.
And I thought he'd broken up with me. Wow.
That's kind of a big thing, isn't it yeah yeah he couldn't be he couldn't have anyone

emotionally dependent on him

Wow.

You know, I didn't see him for a while after that, but I remember one thing that is just always stuck in my mind. We were listening to Barbra Streisand's People That Need People.
It was a song that she sang, People That Need People Are The Luckiest People In The World. And he said, people that need people are the most unlucky people in the world.
Wow. And that gives you a real good clue as to his personality at that time.
And when he said that, I remember feeling sad for him. But, you know, it was what it was.
But it's funny how something sticks in your mind from 60 years ago. Gloria says both she and Vincent wanted to move to London.
He had his heart set on attending a prestigious drama school there. So they moved together.
But Gloria told me Vincent got rejected from the school. And it was a bad blow.
I mean, this is something he really, really wanted so badly. And it was probably devastating to him.
He couldn't handle it.

He just could not.

I mean, this is something he'd been wanting for so long.

Yeah.

And he never entertained the thought that he wouldn't get in.

And when he didn't, he just had to leave.

Vincent went back to the U.S., to New York City.

Gloria stayed in London.

Thank you. Vincent went back to the U.S.
to New York City. Gloria stayed in London.
Now, I must tell you, I did love him. And when I met him, he was representative of that world.
The non-attachment to anything. The laissez-faire attitude.
Yeah. So I was intrigued by him, but I knew it was time to say goodbye when he left London.
And he must have been in love with you too. Yeah? I believe he was.
It was another several years before they saw each other again, one last time. So I thought, gee, it'd be fun to look him up and see how he's doing.
So we met. It was at that time that he told me that he was donating sperm.
Yeah. You know, actors had a way of finding ways to make money.
Ah, right, right. You know, I think they had a sixth sense about finding just to make money that wasn't, you know, full-time jobs.
I'm now 80 years old, and it was a long time ago. Sure, yeah.
But it was, for me, a very, very special time.

And it's funny because later, after I came back and we kind of reconnected a little bit,

then he said, we should have a baby because then your parents would accept us.

And I said, that ship has sailed.

In a final echo from the past, Gloria is Jewish and a journalist and writer like me. She wrote a globally syndicated newspaper column on fashion and beauty for 25 years.
I think he once made the comment that Jews and Irish get along really well. oh my god it's so interesting that you remember

that he told you he donated Jews and Irish get along really well. Oh, my God.

It's so interesting that you remember that he told you he donated sperm. It must have been, I mean, it stuck with you.
You know, he never held back. He was always very open.
Yeah. So that he told me he was donating sperm didn't in any way surprise me.
I thought to myself, what an interesting television series that would be. Well, here we are.
I wrote a treatment. I wrote a treatment and I never did anything with it.
But you wrote this like shortly after your last time seeing him, yeah yes incredible yes Incredible. Yes, because I had to make sense of it somehow.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, well, the story continues. Yes, the story continues.
In her treatment or pitch for that fictionalized TV show, a character named Vincent tracks down a daughter created decades earlier through his sperm donation. Vincent slowly forms a relationship with his child, and in the final scene he buys balloons in a park and passes them to her.
His daughter then literally and metaphorically lets the balloons go. And they float upward over the Manhattan skyline as Vincent and his daughter smile at each other.
You've remembered a lot from a long time ago. Thank you.
I'm really, first of all, impressed by your ability to recall, and I just appreciate you sharing all this. Well, you know, as we get older, sometimes the past is easier to recall.
I mean, I'm just kind of thrilled to talk to somebody who knew him so well even though it was so long ago it has so warmed my heart to talk to you because when you love someone you love them forever even after we broke up my love for him never I've never, ever stopped loving anyone that I've loved.

And you're an extension of him.

Wow.

How about that?

You are part of him.

I am.

The four of us are some sort of extension of him.

This wonderful laugh that he had,

whether he was laughing at something somebody said that was funny,

or he said something that was funny.

You know, he had this way of walking. Can we just sort of

throw his feet out in front of him?

I'm walking

around the office now, trying to...

That's...

That's so amazing.

Yeah.

I'm hearing him right

now as I'm sitting here

and he's saying

hi. Inconceivable Truth is a production of Waveland and Rococo Punch.
I'm writer and host Matt Katz. The story editor is Erica Lance, mixing by James Trout.
Emily Foreman is our producer. Natalie White is our intern.
Thank you to Gloria Linterman's

Vincent's Flame from 60 years ago for sharing her memories, her TV treatment, and for sending along the adorable children's book that she wrote, Sam, Cat Without a Tail. My kids loved it.
Special thanks to attorney Bianca Grimshaw of Roomtone and to DNA sleuth Christina Bryan, who helped unlock this case. I will appreciate her help forever.
She told me at the start of this that if I'm not able to meet my father, finding new sibling relationships will help to fill that void. She was so right.
Out of everything that's happened during this experience, finding my three new siblings has been the best part by far. I also now have a new niece and my first nephew, and I've had the joy of watching them play with my kids.
And one last word to my original and forever family. My mom lovingly and bravely supported this excavation of our lives.
And you've heard all about how great my dad Richard is, of course, but not enough about his daughters from his first marriage, Sally and Sarah, my stepsisters turned adopted sisters. As I've learned more and more about my paternity, I've talked to Sarah, who gets us better than almost anyone.
From when we were kids, Sarah helped me learn with love and grace how to create new kinds of family relationships. It turned out to be the training I needed.
The beating inner heart of my family is my wife, Deborah, who has enthusiastically and often hilariously wrote shotgun for the entirety of this experience. Thanks for reminding me to laugh through it all.
And Ruben and Sadie, you're the stars of my life and this show. Thank you for letting me put your cute little voices on the air.

Our executive producers are Jason Hoke at Waveland and John Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch.

For photos and more details in the series,

follow at Waveland Media on Instagram, X, or Facebook.

And you can reach out via email at podcasts at Waveland.media. That's Waveland,

W-A-V-L-A-N-D. If you like the series, please leave us a review.
And as always,

don't forget to tell a friend or relative. I'm Matt Katz.
Thanks for listening. It would be weird

Thank you. It would be weird if you weren't actually my dad.

Can you imagine finding that out 30 years from now?

Wait, that's going to happen?

No, it's not going to happen.

I'm your father.

I promise. Okay.

I love being your dad.

It's my favorite thing ever. I like you being my dad.
Thanks, buddy. I appreciate it.
We have so much more time to be father and son together. I'm trying to appreciate every moment.
I love you. Go brush your teeth and go to bed.
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