For the Goodman Sisters, an Eye for Beauty Began at Home
When I was growing up in New York City in the 1960s, the best place to be, when I wasn’t with my own family, was with the Goodmans. Tonne, the middle daughter, was in my class at Brearley, and we bonded over the Beatles. Our sleepovers were devoted to weaving prepubescent fantasies about John Lennon.
But best of all was visiting the Goodman family at their rangy, comfortable beach house in Sands Point, Long Island. We became a gang: Wendy, the eldest, approaching her teens, was the ringleader, organizing group swims and visits to the haunted house up the road. We lavished attention on their baby sister Stacy, while brother Ed, a couple of years behind Tonne and me, was handsome and intrepid. At the end of the day’s adventures we’d join their parents at the dinner table.
Marian reminded me so much of my own mother, Felicia—not just in her gracious beauty and her unerring eye for design, but also in the serene, natural way she ruled the household. Dr. Edmund Goodman, an eminent surgeon and gastro-enterologist, meanwhile, was quite different from my father Leonard, yet he had a similarly maestrolike quality in his affable, slightly bemused relationship to the swirl of family around him.
I was not a bit surprised when the Goodman girls turned out to be superstars on their own: Stacy the sought-after expert on Pre--Colombian art, Wendy the home design maven, and Tonne with her stunning career in the fashion industry. Who could blame Ed for putting a little distance between himself and that overwhelming sister karma by going west of the Mississippi to launch a career as a contractor and master carpenter in Boulder, Colorado?
Every year the Goodman sisters take their mother to see the film of their favorite musical, West Side Story. They jointly weep all over again, then write to tell me about it. This makes me smile in my very core.
Jamie Bernstein is an author, narrator, and filmmaker and the daughter of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein.
This story appears in the November 2019 issue ofTown & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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