Remembering Sundlun: A Reporter’s Recollection
Friday, July 22, 2011
Bruce Sundlun died last night. So many Rhode Islanders have memories. I have mine.
It's a day in October, 1991, when he was a Governor and I was a reporter. I'd been assigned a major profile of the controversial businessman who'd run as an outsider for Governor three times, finally been elected, and had used his first day in office to close the state's banks to stem a financial crisis. I also happened to be pregnant with my first child.
In late August, a month into a series of interviews with the Governor, my daughter was born prematurely at Women and Infants. The profile would have to be set aside indefinitely. But in October I found myself in another hospital. A sudden and near-fatal auto accident involving his then-wife, Marjorie, had shaken his world nearly apart and put him in the hallways of Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY, while surgeons tended her broken skeleton and assessed the trauma to her brain.
The basement in Rochester
I caught the next flight to Rochester and spent one long day with Bruce Sundlun, just the two of us, in a drab conference room in the hospital's basement. Whether he cared or not that there was someone to talk to, to sit with, I have no idea. But for me, it opened a glimpse into one of the most controlled, and controlling, subjects I'd ever encountered.
He'd cried, famously, during his first press conference at Strong. Now, again, he fought tears and shook with a frailty that even in his 70s, was surprising to witness. He lost his temper with my questions in a way I hadn't seen before, taking issues with my thoughts, jumping up in his seat, banging his hand on the formica table between us, and stalking out of the room. And finally returning, subdued but not forgiving.
He chewed Mentho-Lyptus lozenges in a rapid succession and shot the wrappers at a nearby wastepaper basket. He missed. He mumbled. And then, most remarkably of all, dropped his practiced glances, stares, sideways looks, and squints, and began looking me calmly in the eye. FInally, for the first time in our many hours of interviews before both our lives fractured in unexpected ways, he just plain talked.
The man in front of me
Suddenly I had a man in front of me, and the themes of what became the longest profile Rhode Island Monthly had ever published, took shape. What I glimpsed in the basement at Strong was the vulnerable core of a man who had spent a lifetime growing and hardening his own carapace.
Bruce Sundlun's storied, dramatic life, his considerable achievements, were now obviously the ongoing layering of that shell, and what lay beneath it had been forever damaged by his earliest days as a Jewish kid growing up in the 1930s in a Providence rife with antisemitism. He was also a son of a cruel and humiliating father. He was a masterful self-protector, a reviser, a large man who made a lifetime of fleeing his youth. The softness of that youth, the hurts of a boy pummeled on his neighborhood streets, revealed itself just long enough to register. Soon, I knew, he'd heal over it, and it would be locked away again.
Finally, because of circumstance and tragedy, I had my story. I flew home and began to write.
Glimpses of Bruce Sundlun from "From Going It Alone"
"Is Bruce Sundlun an irascible S.O.B.? Take a look. Physically, he's in your face: his soldier's iron back makes him tower over you and thrusts his belly into your air space. He is occupying, it seems, just a little more than his share of the room, maybe even breathing your share of the oxygen..."
"He can appear puffed-up, rigid, and yes, arrogant, a word that sticks in his craw more than just about any epithet hurled his way in the past year of his governorship. But Bruce Sundlun is 72 years old, and he is vulnerable. His denture bridge has broken, and he needs to have it repaired. His hearing is marginal in one ear, and so he finds himself asking for things to be repeated. The state he is trying to govern is in a shambles. Two of his best friends in the world died in the last couple of years. And, as all Rhode Island knows, he now finds himself at the mercy of the medical gods while his wife struggles to recover from severe head injuries suffered in an accident..."
Youth
"Every afternoon as Bruce made his way [from the John Howland Elementary School] across Elmgrove Avenue, a trio of boys would ambush him and beat him up. But Bruce Sundlun was beginning to figure things out, to cope. 'I learned to hit first,' he says, 'and then to run like hell.'"
"No one was more confounded by his father than Bruce Sundlun. 'Bruce always said he hated his father and adored his mother,' says [former wife] Joy Sundlun. Now, Bruce Sundlun reconsiders his father, Walter - lawyer, politician... 'He was a difficult man,' he finally says, carefully. 'In the family, in the community.' This is understatement. Walter Sundlun may truly have been an irascible S.O.B. His reputation at Providence's Superior Courthouse still rattles the bricks."
Love
"For a man who uses the word 'love' with such reserve, he readily admits that he loved the Air Force, that he loved the military, that he loved flying. What did he love so much about the military? 'It got me out of the ghetto,' he answers, for once without pause. 'It got me out of the Jewish ghetto.'"
"The challenge of a bad situation is nectar to Sundlun, and the quicker he can solve a problem, the better. Statehouse staffers say it's impossible to get the governor away from an event because when he is waylaid by an individual with a particular problem, he hangs in to hear to the whole thing."
Escape
"Some say Sundlun married away from his roots to suit his social aspirations. His first wife, Maddy, came from New York. His second wife, Pam, is, even in Bruce's own words, 'a Yankee WASP aristocrat,' and his third wife, Joy, led him to circles in Newport and Washington.... A close friend confides that Sundlun tried, from the beginning, to leave his family behind, representing as they did a Jewish past he'd rather forget."
"A political insider and a friend of Sundlun's says that he, and others, have told the governor to loosen up, to show the folks he cares. ... But nothing's changed. ... Bruce, after all, is Bruce, and showing himself is not part of the deal. For in this case, in Rhode Island, it's not the case of the Emperor not wearing any clothes, it's just the opposite. And nothing, it seems, can ever really change that."
Photo: Bruce Sundlun's official COMSAT photograph, 1962
Related Articles
- UPDATED: Bruce Sundlun Dies at 91, Tributes from Civic Leaders
- Bruce Sundlun Dies at 91: Rhode Island Remembers
