One man’s life unfolds into a memoir of the defining cultural figures of the mid-twentieth century and beyond.
I Never Made Love with James Baldwin is a dazzling memoir told through a succession of attorney Stanley Cohen’s vivid encounters with some of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century and beyond. Moving between America, Europe, and Asia, Cohen recounts moments shared with artists, writers, jurists, and financiers, including Alexander Calder, Joseph Heller, Robert Caro, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yehuda Hanani, and members of the Rothschild family. These figures appear not as distant icons but as sharp, human presences—brilliant, eccentric, generous, and flawed. Cohen’s life unfolds like a performance, shaped less by planning than by intensity: conversations, friendships, arguments, and coincidences that flare briefly and leave lasting marks. With wit, candor, and an eye for the telling detail, he captures a vast social and creative network spanning the mid-twentieth century to the present. The result is an intimate, unconventional portrait of an exceptional life and of the people who lit its path.
Table of Contents
2.On and off a tanker
3.My son Paul and Milan Kundera
4.You don’t belong here
5.Making mountains into hills
6.Cornell, then the sea
7.Still a sophomore
8.To sea again
9.Harvard to Yokohama
10.First love
11.After Harvard, the Army
12.Learning Paris
13.Lawyering in France
14.Villa Seurat
15.Making friends with artists and writers
16.The French
17.Alexander and Louise Calder
18.The hunt
19.Michael Harrington
20.Jewelry and the collapse of France in WW2
21.Max’s Kansas City
22.Turning 30, now what?
23.A law office of my own
24.Skipping out on someone in Israel
25.The Disco Queen
26.Jeanne Moreau
27.Hollywood
28.Turkey, the perfect escape
29.Albert Speer
30.James Baldwin
31.Travels with Toby Molenaar
32.Calder’s legacy
33.A lawyer’s life
34.The Rothschilds
35.Joseph Heller
36.Unfit for retirement
37.More Rothschilds, the Predators’ Ball, Jeffrey Epstein
38.Filmmaking in Desert Hot Springs
39.Japanese American Veterans in Israel
40.WordStar
41.Betty Friedan
42.Patricia Bosworth, Joyce Carol Oates
43.Calder, Jim Haynes, Ted Joans
44.The de Portes incident again
45.Archives
46.Hélène de Portis and Paul Reynaud
47.The fall of France
48.Pauline, then Paul, Arrive
49.The Russian Samovar
50.Paul center stage
51.Carrie arrives