The Last Time I Saw My Dad
A eulogy for Dan Greenburg—a great writer, and an even better father.
Technically speaking, the last time I saw my dad was December 18th, 2023—the day he died. But by that point, it already felt like he’d been gone quite a while.
The last time I really saw my dad—my vibrant, witty, warm, wonderful dad—was in 2019, over one of our monthly “Man Dinners.” We sat in our usual booth by the window at Pershing Square, a bustling restaurant across the street from Grand Central Station, and he started telling me a story about his time with renowned artist Salvador Dalí back in the 1960s.
By the time of our aforementioned dinner, my dad was 83, and had authored almost as many books as years he’d lived. He was best known for How to Be a Jewish Mother, his 1964 debut, which sold over 1 million copies. He’d found further success with humor in the 1960s (How to Make Yourself Miserable), thrillers in the 1970s (Love Kills), horror in the 1980s (The Nanny), and children’s books in the 1990s and beyond (the Zack Files series).
But in the months leading up to that particular night in 2019, I’d noticed some changes. My dad never had the best memory, but he was becoming increasingly forgetful. And though he loved to tell—and retell—his best stories, he appeared to be repeating them more than usual.
Still, I was excited to share some of my own outrageous anecdotes with him that night, especially from reporting a recent Forbes cover story on Kanye West. I told him how the rapper led me into the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains by the light of his iPhone one night—to see a Star Wars-inspired structure he’d created with the goal of ending homelessness—and that I wondered if I’d be a footnote in Kanye’s obituary if we were both eaten by pumas. I think my dad particularly enjoyed the part where Kanye told me he had “gold wolverine pharaoh blood” in his veins.
My dad relished our commonalities, and this latest professional one prompted him to start retelling his favorite story about an interaction with an eccentric artist: Dalí. I had a feeling that, with each passing recollection at each passing Man Dinner, the details would get blurrier as age—and perhaps more than just age—began to set in. So I summoned some courage, pulled out my iPhone, and asked if I could record as he spoke.
His smile faded slightly. For a moment, I thought maybe I’d let him know too soon that I’d noticed something was off. My dad always spoke about living past age 100, and rarely about the prospect of his inevitable decline. But eventually he shrugged and started talking again.
“So, you want the long story?” he asked.
I nodded eagerly. And I’ll tell you that long story. But before we get to Dalí, you should know a little more about my dad’s life.
Dan Greenburg was born in 1936 to Leah and Samuel Greenburg. Leah, a Hebrew-school teacher who spoke five languages, grew up in Lithuania; Sam, a celebrated painter and art instructor, was born in Ukraine. They fell in love while she was studying at the Sorbonne, and married in Paris. The Greenburgs arrived in the U.S. the day the stock market collapsed in 1929, and settled in Chicago, where my dad was born. They raised him and his younger sister, my late aunt Naomi, on the North Side.
Nearly all of my grandmother’s family members perished in the Holocaust. It’s hard to understate the impact that must have had on my dad growing up. He didn’t have the term “generational trauma” then, but looking back, that’s what it was. And it informed many of the decisions he made. He was never religious, but always fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage. My dad made sure to pass these traditions on to me, with his own spin. Instead of breaking out the Haggadah for Passover seders, for example, he’d read sections of his book Moses Supposes: The Bible as Told to Dan Greenburg.
My dad studied art as an undergrad at the University of Illinois, but ultimately gravitated toward literature instead. His favorite book was Catcher in the Rye and, in 1958, he rewrote “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” in the style of J.D. Salinger. An editor named Ralph Ginzburg picked it up at Esquire.
After graduation, my dad bought a stick-shift car he didn’t know how to drive—and spent a summer lurching across the country to California. He studied industrial design at UCLA, convincing the faculty to award him their first MFA in Fine Arts by nabbing an internship with famed designer Charles Eames (“Charlie,” as he called him). But my dad quickly grew to despise the politics of grad school, and started looking for a way out of academia.
Following a postgraduate stint in the Mad Men advertising world, my dad’s old editor Ginzburg hired him to be managing editor of Eros magazine, a sort of higher-brow quarterly version of Playboy. One day, the two of them decided to commission original artwork from Pablo Picasso. They tried everything to contact him, even dispatching an attractive young editor to stand outside his house and sing French folk songs while strumming a guitar.
“Long story short, she never got in to see him,” my dad recalled that night at Pershing Square. “She camped out on his doorstep, or not far from it, for a month ... I said to her, ‘Would you be willing to ship yourself into his house?’ And she said, ‘No.’ I don't blame her.”
Shortly thereafter, my dad came up with another idea. Salvador Dalí was living at the St. Regis Hotel in New York—perhaps they could commission him to do original artwork for Eros. Ginzburg and my dad arranged to meet the artist at the King Cole Bar in the lobby.
“In walks Dalí,” my dad remembered. “He was wearing [this] gold lamé vest, and he had a very interesting silver-headed cane that he walked with. But the best thing, of course, was his mustache. Do you know the hood ornaments on Texas oilmen's Cadillacs that go way out and then curl up? That's how his mustache was. And he was very gracious. I had bought a copy of his book from the hotel, and he inscribed it to me and made a little sketch of—it turned out—me.”
But my dad’s suggestion that Dalí create original erotic artwork for the magazine was quickly rebuffed. Dalí wanted to write something instead.
“Dalí is fantastic writer,” said the artist, referring to himself in the third person (my dad attempted to recreate the accent, for better or worse).
"What would you like to write about?"
"Dalí wish to write about the most wonderful topic … Dalí write about the romantic aspects of breaking wind.”
My dad asked if he had any other ideas. Dalí tossed out several equally objectionable possibilities before reaching one that was vaguely acceptable: “Fetishes and clothing.”
“Fine,” said my dad.
He and Ginzburg had four more meetings with Dalí before finally receiving his draft.
“There were words I had never seen before—I had to look them up—they were actual words, but they made no sense,” my dad remembered. “Meanwhile, Dalí called and asked if I thought his article was the most fantastic thing I had ever seen. I said, ‘I'm sorry, I haven't been able to get to it yet.’ He called so many times. But there came a day when my secretary said, ‘Salvador Dalí is on the phone for you,’ and I said, ‘Tell Mr. Dalí I'm not in.’”
But my dad still had a magazine to finish, and his boss was getting anxious.
“You're the guy who can imitate anybody,” said Ginzburg. “Write this article in Dalí’s style and we'll run it under his byline.”
“That's illegal, first of all. It's immoral. It's unethical. And I refuse to do it.”
“You know what I think? I think you've lost your touch and you're afraid to do it.”
“Okay, let me tell you a few things,” said my dad, who’d been working 100 hours a week for Ginzburg, and had finally reached a breaking point. “Number one, I'll do it. Number two, you can't use it. Number three, I quit.”
And he did.
The story, ultimately, wasn’t about Dalí, or Ginzburg, or Picasso. It was about overcoming fears and confronting bullies—something that must have meant so much to my dad as a Jew growing up in the age of the Holocaust. My dad always told me bullies were really just cowards, and they melted when challenged. He was right, of course.
Another lesson from my dad: You can extract positives from negative situations. Take, for example, a prior conversation he had with Ginzburg, about Jewish mothers and their masterful use of guilt. “How do they do this?” my dad wondered. “Do they have a manual?” They did not—until he wrote How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual.
My dad married his first wife, the writer Nora Ephron, in 1967, divorcing amicably a decade later. He met my mom through Nora, and they married in 1980. I came along in 1985; he wrote a book called Confessions of a Pregnant Father about the experience. And despite the fact that he likened pregnancy to the film Alien, he treated his infant son more like Baby Yoda.
I’ll always remember our “talks in the dark”—my boyhood precursor to our eventual Man Dinners—where he’d curl up with me at bedtime and answer any questions about the mysteries of the universe. He would tell me I was the best boy a dad could have, and I’d say he was the best dad a boy could have. And we meant it.
As I got older, our talks came to cover everything from UFOs to sex, two topics that frightened and fascinated him most of all. Indeed, my dad loved conquering his fears through writing. In his 79 published books (a few others never saw the light of day) and hundreds of articles—for outlets including the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and Playboy—he chronicled his terrifying adventures. Among them: running into burning buildings with firefighters in New York, participating in voodoo ceremonies in Haiti, and attending orgies wherever they have orgies.
He spent most of the 1990s mired in a divorce from my mom that left him on the verge of financial ruin. But he also found great joy in that decade. He met my stepmother, Judith, and made a fruitful—and unlikely—career transition: from satirist and sex reporter to children’s book author. He penned 30 installments of the Zack Files series, named after yours truly, and thrilled thousands of young readers over hundreds of school visits.
“It’s the most fun I ever had,” he once told the New York Times. “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing you’ve turned a kid onto books.”
My dad also turned me onto books. On summer breaks, he insisted I read at least 30 pages a day, starting with Catcher in the Rye when I was maybe 11 (a few years too early, but I got there eventually). When I went to live with my dad and Judith full-time at age 14, he got me a job shelving books at the Dobbs Ferry Public Library for $3.75 an hour. The wages weren’t much better when I started my own career as a professional journalist. But when I became an author myself, he was the proudest person at my first book party.
My dad lived by two axioms that I took to heart above all else. The first: “Never do anything you don’t approve of.” It seems obvious, but given a tough dilemma, restating this mantra has had incredible clarifying powers for me, as I think it did for him—like when his boss demanded a false Dalí story. The second is, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
That was him, up until a year before his death. Well into his 80s, he’d stay awake until four or five in the morning—writing whatever he pleased, whether he was getting paid or not. His final two projects were a biography series on American heroes told from the point of view of their cats, and a memoir called Am I Brave Yet?
That meal at Pershing Square turned out to be one of the last Man Dinners we’d have before the pandemic arrived. Our meals in Manhattan gave way to family get-togethers at home in an effort to safeguard him in his octogenarian state. By the time we got back to our solo Man Dinners as things reopened, his decline was even more apparent.
Yet my dad still tried to hide it. This was a man who refused to leave the house without showering, even if he was just going out to pick up a newspaper. He wanted people to only see him at what he believed was his best. After a phone conversation in which he couldn’t recall my wife Danielle’s name, though, I gently confronted him, and he finally told me he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
This was about two years ago, shortly before the birth of my daughter, Riley. And my dad finally began to make some peace with his condition. He called it “Old Al” in our email correspondences as he plugged away at Am I Brave Yet.
“You are absolutely brave, already,” I wrote him. “It's a lot harder to be brave when talking about something that isn't quite as sexy as running into burning buildings or taming tigers … I hope you know how much I love and admire you, whether or not Old Al is around.”
He replied later that night.
“I was very touched by your comments,” he wrote. “I will put it in a safe place and treasure it as I treasure you as an incredible grown son of mine and as an amazing father of Riley. Can't wait to be with you on Hanukkah and at a Man Dinner.”
Sure enough, there was my dad at Riley’s first Hanukkah, last year. We lit the candles, and he joined me and Judith and Danielle as we sang bedtime songs. Just before we placed Riley in her crib, I plopped her into my dad’s arms, and his eyes lit up. He wasn’t quite himself, but he was still there.
We never got to have another Man Dinner. A few days later, he suffered a catastrophic stroke that left him mostly unable to speak or care for himself. He was shuffled from hospital to rehab to nursing home over the past year, and though he sometimes seemed to recognize us—especially Riley—he was a shell of the man I knew as my dad. After a brain hemorrhage in early December, it was only a matter of days.
The last time I actually saw my dad, at a hospice in the Bronx, the life had left his body. His hands were cold, his mouth agape, and his eyes open. Judith and Danielle and I said our final goodbyes, and I gently pulled his eyelids closed. I told him he was the best dad a boy could have.
But my dad would want us to remember him as he was in 2019 when he told me the Dalí story for the last time—or in the years when he repeated it not because he forgot how recently he’d told it, but because he simply wanted to tell it again. In any case, he had no regrets. I know this because he told me at Pershing Square.
“If I had not read Catcher in the Rye, I never would have decided I wanted to be a writer,” he said. “I never would have written the parody, I never would have sold it to Ralph Ginzburg, and he never would have hired me to come to New York. I never would have met your mother; you would have never have been born. I never would have met Judith … I love you and her so much. The most important people in the world to me.”
Perhaps my dad would also want to be remembered as Dalí sketched him—an imposing figure with a tornado for a body and whirlwinds for arms. The piece now hangs in my living room, viewed often by the most important people in the world to me. Someday, it’ll be Riley’s.
Every time I look at it, I think of my dad, and how he’d want us all to do what we love, never work a day in our lives, never do anything we didn’t approve of. And to have no regrets, like him.
Well, maybe he did have a regret or two. Dad, if you’re listening—now that you and Dalí are in the same place, maybe give him a call back? Even if you don’t, you’re still the best dad a boy could have. I love you.
For more, read the terrific obituaries on my dad in the New York Times and the Washington Post. If you’d like to make a contribution in his honor, I know he’d appreciate donations to any organization that supports cats and/or Joe Biden.
ALSO BY ZACK O’MALLEY GREENBURG
We Are All Musicians Now: The Canaries In The Coal Mine Of Business
Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office
A-List Angels: How a Band of Actors, Artists & Athletes Hacked Silicon Valley
3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z & Hip-Hop’s Multibillion-Dollar Rise
Michael Jackson, Inc.: The Rise, Fall & Rebirth of a Billion-Dollar Empire
SELECTED WORKS BY DAN GREENBURG
(Note: Some are out of print, but there are used copies on Amazon—if there’s a title you really want but can’t find, contact me and I’ll see if I can help.)
How To Be A Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual
How To Make Yourself Miserable: Another Vital Training Manual
Something’s There: My Adventures in the Occult
Confessions of a Pregnant Father
Moses Supposes: The Bible as Told to Dan Greenburg
The Max Segal Trilogy: Love Kills, Exes, and Scared To Death
wonderful, warm story about both your dad and our great country where it all unfolded. have a great new year.
Wanted to share a moving tribute from Lee Frank, a dear old friend of my dad ... here's what he wrote:
Back when Americans read, there were humorists. Among the elite — Dan Greenburg, a genuine New York City celebrity and an artist in every sense of the word. Picasso used bold brushstrokes, Miles Davis used blue notes, Dan used brightly-colored words. He resonated with a lot of people. Playboy would print another quarter-million copies when they put his name on the cover. But Dan's work had more substance than laughs; it came from a thoughtful point of view, one of bounding intelligence, unbridled curiosity, a gracious heart, and a transcendent soul. Dan personified the themes of his material; love, kindness, human connection, courage, authenticity, growth, friendship, and absolution. It was gift-wrapped in wit, but the fundamentals were, well, fundamental. Dan achieved, to use his turn of a phrase: both the profound and the corny. Pro tip: Forget giving to a charity. Give yourself the gift of reading one of Dan's books. And when you hear a car purr, think of Dan. Because between you and me and any cat lucky enough to be within reach, making cats purr was his secret mission from Gawd.