––How has the myth evolved over the years?

Lynn: In 1987, Bette had a daughter, and named her Sophie. My grandmother used to say that Bette might have named the girl after her. I really can’t imagine any woman doing this: naming her child after the woman who taught her parents to have sex.

Neuman: When Jerry Seinfeld became a national icon, my family started referring to him as "Cousin Jerry." We started wildly speculating that the character Newman was an allusion to us (even though my father's side spells its name "Neuman" and has absolutely no relationship with any Seinfelds). When I became the editor of Heeb Magazine, my grandparents gloated that both Jerry and I had made it in "show-biz." Apparently, my mother's cousin Stewie from Huntington, Long Island (an arms dealer at the time) attended one of Jerry's performances in the Catskills to introduce himself and officially welcome him to the larger family. Unfortunately, he was unable to get a word with Jerry after the show.

Nissen: I feel like the story gets shorter every time she tells it. The listener doesn’t have time to think before she’s there with the punch line and everyone’s laughing and I’m the one standing there saying “But wait a second...!”

Pope: The myth was passed down to my brother, sister and me, and we permitted its dissemination. It was easy to pretend that we, the children of D.R. Pope, were inheritors of old-WASP wealth. We looked generically American in appearance, if a tad swarthy, and we lived in one of the better neighborhoods of West Hartford, an affluent suburb of the now-downtrodden city. I spent my high school years at prep school in West Hartford, the Kingswood-Oxford School, whose most famous graduate was Katherine Hepburn. My classmates were well-off suburban kids like me, with a few scholarship students tossed into the mix. We were required to wear blue blazers and gray slacks (except on Fridays). In school, I did not actively perpetuate the myth of my false heritage, but somehow the myth grew anyway. I let this happen because it afforded me social status among some of my classmates, these sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers, politicians and judges.

Sherman: We have all been in and out of therapy. I attempted to break the cycle at certain times, but have not fully succeeded. Other people in the family have not evolved. My myth is still their truth.


––Which part of the myth is a blatant untruth?

Lynn: Well, the naming bit. I mean, my grandmother seemed not to notice that Sophie, as a name, was quickly coming back into vogue in the late ‘80s. The name has become so ubiquitous that it would have been shocking if Bette had named her child anything but Sophie. As for the rest of the myth, it’s curious that my grandfather, who outlived my grandmother by a year, always kept oddly silent when she told this story (which was often). After she died would have been the time to get his side of things, but I never asked. Honestly, I loved my grandfather, but the idea of talking sex (even Midler sex) with him seemed pretty unappealing.

Neuman: At one point, an apocryphal feud was posited between the "Newmans" and the Seinfelds, perhaps as a result of Sam Seinfeld coming to my grandparents' (whose last name was not even "Neuman," but Speigel) apartment with a bad cold. I guess the idea was that somehow Sam felt so rejected that he passed it along to his son Kalman, who passed it along to his son, Jerry, who somehow found out that his third cousin Janet had married someone with the last name of "Neuman." As the illogic goes, he then avenged his grandfather's hurt feelings by having America forever associate our last name with the hideous character portrayed by Wayne Knight.