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- [00:00]
Tom Junot
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
Interviewer
Guaranteed Human what's up y'?
- [00:05]
Kohler Ambassador
All?
- [00:06]
Starbucks Advertiser
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- [00:54]
Kalpen (Hearsay Podcast Host)
Hey everyone, it's Kalpen. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:23]
Boost Mobile Advertiser
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- [01:54]
Kohler Ambassador
Kohler, Global design leader in luxurious kitchen and bath products, asked me to be their ambassador for timeless, elegant, durable cast iron, I said, I'm in. Soon after, I was in their Kohler, Wisconsin foundry watching molten iron poured enamel applied by hand and the beautiful finished pieces ready to ship. Since 1883, Kohler cast iron has been crafted by incredible artisans, and seeing it firsthand gave me a whole new appreciation for their craftsmanship. Now I'm proud to lend my stamp of approval to my favorite Kohler cast iron products for their durability, beauty and enduring style. Shop my curated picks@kohler.com. as the Kohler Cast Iron Ambassador, I say long live Cast Iron.
- [02:45]
CarMax Advertiser
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- [03:19]
Tom Junot
a production of iHeartRadio. I always suspected that he was something of a rogue. But the glamour he cultivated made me think he was a rogue. Like David Nibbon was a rogue, like Richard Bertley was a rogue. Like Cary Grant was a rogue. A charming thief who stole only from other dishonest men. Then I opened the simulated leather Samsonite briefcase and it was like discovering he wasn't a harmless scoundrel after all. He was a killer. But he didn't get away with it. Because I had found the murder weapon. And now I was possessed of tremendous power. It was the ultimate power, really. The power to blow up the world. All I had to do was tell my mother and my parents. Marriage would not only have ended, I would have ended it. Should I have told my mother? I think now that I should have, and all these years later, still castigate myself for being derelict in my duty to her. But of course, I neglected my duty to her in the name of doing it, in the name of protecting her from the terrible truth. And so the power to destroy their marriage became the power to preserve it. I had more power than I'd ever dreamed of. Power over my father. And yet, because I chose not to exercise it, he had power over me. Yes, he had a secret. But now so did I. He would never know what I knew. And that became our bond.
- [05:14]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
That's Tom Junot, veteran journalist, winner of two National Magazine Awards, writer of some of the most indelible profiles of the last 40 years, and author of the recent memoir. In the days of my Youth, I was told what it means to be a man. Tom's is a story that has taken him a lifetime to tell. The story of a boy who grows up in the shadow of an outsized, charismatic father he worships and a wounded mother who he adores. A boy who intuits secrets and lies all around him, but is powerless in the way children are. A boy who grows up to become a man who makes meaning of his father's legacy even as he chooses a different path, in fact, a different surname. There was Lou Genaud, and now there's Tom Junot. Two distinctive men, two distinctive stories. I'm Dani Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
- [06:33]
Tom Junot
My earliest memory was of me sitting on the front lawn of our split level in Wantah, Long Island. And I was with my mom. And my family had a dog named Ginger. And the thing that made Ginger so fascinating was that she predated me. She predated even my brother and sister, who are 10 years older than me. She was the original inhabitant of the family. And there was always something about her that she had sort of crawled out of the Garden of Eden. And my first memory is of me sitting on the grass and her coming over to sniff my hand. And the other person who is there is not my dad. Sort of adding to the Garden of Eden flavor of that scene is, you know, the person who was there was my mother.
- [07:36]
Interviewer
So your parents moved into the house with your twin older siblings, Kathy and Michael, before you were born. You were born, like, into that house?
- [07:45]
Tom Junot
I was born into that house, yeah. They had moved there about two years before, and they had come from Brooklyn to Levittown, and then they had moved up to Wanta. Wanta was the town next to Levittown, but it was a little bit different from Levittown. Levittown was the original little boxes. There were these rows and rows and winding streets of Cape Cod houses. Whereas Wantagh. And our house was, you know, the land of the Split level. It was nicer than Levittown, and it was. And I always thought that we were rich. My parents were the most beautiful people in the world. And I think that, you know, a lot of kids sort of idealized their parents in that way. But, you know, Fran and Lou really were the most beautiful people in the world. My mother looked like Doris Day. My father looked like a more dangerous version of Dean Martin. He looked a little bit like Sean Connery out of, you know, out of the James Bond movies. My mom had blue eyes and hair that she called platinum blonde, but which I called white. And my dad was very, very dark. He spent an inordinate amount of time tanning his skin. So he was brown as a one steak sauce. And he had the greenest eyes I've ever seen to this day in a human being. They look like a shot of chartreuse that had been set on fire. And they were head turners. You walked into a restaurant with them, and every person in that restaurant turned and looked at them, wondering who they were. And, of course, that was, like, perfectly in keeping with my experience, because I wondered who they were.
- [09:42]
Interviewer
How did that feel to you as a little kid? Like, noticing you were a tremendous noticer of everything around you, especially as it pertained to your family. What was that like to see the way that the world responded to them?
- [10:00]
Tom Junot
Well, there were two sort of sides of that. Number one, my mom, you know, especially had men catering to her, but men catered to her simply by being extraordinarily nice to her and doing her favors. I also had the experience of watching women cater to my dad. And that was a whole different kind of thing, because they looked at my dad, they took my dad in, and they flirted with him. And I was really aware of it. And I mean, I can't even explain why I was so aware of it, but I was aware of it from a very young age. And I think that the thing that made it difficult was that men catered to my mom, women catered to my dad, but they didn't cater to each other. People were in love with them, but they were not in love with each other.
- [11:00]
Interviewer
Talk to me about yourself as a child. Like, what was the emotional landscape for you? What was the experience of being in that family and being you, like, just being in your skin?
- [11:11]
Tom Junot
I was, you know, my first nickname was TC and then when it, you know, at dinner time, I was Suppertime Tom, because as my mom said, you know, you're always as good as gold, but. But it's when six o' clock rolled around, watch out. And I think that I was. I was just responding to the tremendous stress at the dinner table. You know, my father was this booming, commanding, and for me, a frightening presence. And I was scared of him. I was. I was terrified of my dad to the extent that. Well, number one, I cried a lot. And number two, he would kind of play with me a little bit. Like, every once in a while, he would say, tommy. And, you know, I would start shaking and my lip would start quivering, and my brother and sister would be across the table, sort of smiling at their cute little brother. But it was a source of, like, unbelievable pain to me, and I think frustration to my dad. He used to always say things like, I don't get it. You know, I. I've never laid a hand on this kid and look at him. And that was hard, too. You know, the realization that I was by being frightened of my dad, I was somehow disappointing. My dad was really. Was really tough to deal with. And, you know, what I retreated to was reading a lot. I was really young when I started reading. I was starting, you know, probably around three years old, I started reading the comic books that my brother and sister's friends left around the house. And it was great because it was like the. It was the dawn of the Marvel Universe. You know, they had Spider man and Thor and Hulk and all this stuff. And so I was just. You know, I was a kid with a crew cut. I was sickly. I was skinny. I was, you know, not athletic. I was scared of my dad, but I could read. And that was like, the thing that saved me.
- [13:22]
Interviewer
Why do you think you were scared of him?
- [13:24]
Tom Junot
I wonder about that. I think that my best. You know, my best answer for that is, well, because a lot of people were scared of him. I mean, a lot of people were really afraid of Luchenaud. But I think with me, that fear was heightened by the fact that my mother was afraid of him. And I was connected to my mother in a very, very powerful way. Because I think the way that I always looked at it was that I was there for her. I mean, like, literally there for there. I was born for her. I was put there on Earth for her, to be her ally, her confidant, all of it. And so when my mom's eyes filled with tears, and no one's eyes filled with tears like my mom's did, mine did, too. When she shook, when my father raised his voice, I did too.
- [14:23]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Tom's father is a very glamorous version of a traveling salesman. He's in the handbag business, a job that takes him regularly on the road. Tom begins to experience life in the split screen when his father's home, things are one way. And when it's just Tom and his mom, things are another way.
- [14:46]
Tom Junot
My dad would go away for five and, you know, six weeks at a time, and it was kind of paradise when he was gone, because my mom was. Was not unhappy. She was herself, you know, when my dad was away. And so I could be myself when my dad was away. But when, you know, when my dad came home, I couldn't watch the monkeys when my dad was home, because my dad had heard during his travels or somewhere in New York City at some sort of club that one of the monkeys, I never found out which one was homosexual. So I couldn't watch the Monkeys and I couldn't watch the Flying Nun, because
- [15:33]
Interviewer
what was wrong with the Flying Nun.
- [15:35]
Tom Junot
My father thought it was sacrilegious, even though he was like the single most sacrilegious human being I knew at the time. I mean, my father was a complete heathen, but I wasn't allowed to watch the Flying Nun. And there was just the level of stress in the house when my father was around. Of course, the thing that was always amazing about my father's trips was, you know, my mother explained my father being away by how hard he had to work. But my father would come back six weeks later after departing. You know, on the road. We'd go pick him up at, like, at jfk. And he'd come off the plane even darker than he was when he left. And he looked unbelievable when he came off the plane at jfk. So much so that the general sort of solidity, celebrity vibe that he had was doubled or tripled, where people just looking at him and, you know, I would be proud that this guy was my dad, but it was sort of like when he came off the road, it was like being visited by a maybe friendly, maybe unfriendly space alien.
- [16:51]
Interviewer
Your parents, they were both beautiful people, but it seems like it was your dad who was completely focused on his physicality and his toilette, his. The way that he took care of himself, the way that he cultivated that tan, that it seemed like that was a big part of the job of being lejanad.
- [17:17]
Tom Junot
Yeah, he was infatuated with a certain kind of beauty in general. And he was also infatuated with his own beauty. I mean, to the extent that he would look in the mirror, you know, standing in front of the mirror in his black bikinis with this, you know, mahogany colored skin and these green eyes and this, his World War II dog tag cast in gold and sort of like nestled in his black chest hair. And he would say to me, look. Look at this body. Have you ever seen a body like this? What could I say other than no? You know, but the thing that, like, the house was split between his beauty and my mom's beauty. There was like one long hallway connecting all the bedrooms. And on one end of that hallway there was my mother's bathroom, which she was sort of secret in its own way in that it contained a lot of her pills, which she was definitely self medicating with. And then in my father's room, there was my father's bathroom, which contained, you know, to me, the secrets of the universe is lubrication. His gels, his creams, his ointments, his dyes, his everything. And it would all he would carry. When he came off the road, he would empty this leather bag that was full of all of this stuff and put it out on the top of the toilet in his bathroom. And it was his bathroom. I mean, you needed special dispensation to go in there. And so in the beginning, you know, when my father said, learn my secrets, those were the secrets that he was talking about, like the secrets of his hygienic excellence. It was really just a powerful thing.
- [19:24]
Interviewer
But your father had all sorts of other kinds of secrets, the kind that he was not referring to. And you as a kid must have sensed that, and you became quite a spy. You know, there's a beautiful essay by the writer Jane Ann Phillips that is about. You know, writers begin as children who are like secret agents just trying to learn whatever they possibly can about these people who brought them into the world. And you. You sort of elevated that to an art form as a kid. And there was an urgency to it, it seems.
- [20:04]
Tom Junot
Well, there was an urgency to it because I felt myself powerless. I was like a pencil shaving of my dad. You know, my dad was the pencil. I was what was left behind by the sharpener. And I had no power next to him. And my only power was in trying to figure this guy out. And I did that. And I did that with a pretty obsessive quality that lasted, you know, from the time I was, like, 3 years old to now. It was a matter of trying to find out who this person was. That scared me so. And that made my mom so unhappy. The first time when I was very aware that my father was different from all the other fathers that I knew in Long island was the summer I was three years old, and we were in West Hampton beach in Long island, and my father had an affair with the mother of my first friend, Michael. I have photos of me and Michael Shockett, you know, in the crib in swaddling clothes. And two years later, he had an affair with Michael's mother, Valerie. And that was a big deal.
- [21:26]
Interviewer
What did you know about that at such a young age?
- [21:30]
Tom Junot
Well, I think I knew plenty because the relationship with Valerie, it wasn't hidden. I have home movies of that summer that I've looked at pretty obsessively, and it's amazing how obvious they both are. And so this was all taking place right before my eyes. And later that year, or maybe a year and a half later, you know, my parents actually had a fight over it that almost ended their marriage. It was New Year's Eve, 1962, and the beginning of 1963. That would have made me, around that time, just about five years old.
- [22:15]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Something else transpires when Tom is around five. One night, his father asks him to go with him to get a hot fudge sundae. An errand no kid could possibly resist. But on the way to the ice cream store, his dad says he needs to make a stop. He needs to see a professional acquaintance, a buyer. And when they stop at this person's house, it's a woman. And even at five years old, Tom can tell something is not quite right.
- [22:45]
Tom Junot
I don't think that I had the context for, you know, an affair or even, like, the word divorce. Like, that word is like was at the very, very edge of my awareness and was just, you know, a word that was full of, like, untold terror. But the difference between my father and other fathers was something I think that I was aware of and, you know, and capable of being aware of, because my father had all these women in his life. I mean, he worked with women on the job. He had buyers, you know, and the buyers were all powerful. He had a phone in the room that he, you know, in the master bedroom, in the room that he shared with my mother, that had two different kind of rings. There was the ring that was the general ring, and there was the ring that was more bird like. And when that ring went off, there was something that happened. Number one, we were never, ever, ever allowed to pick the phone up when it was ringing like that. And number two, when that ring happened, my father would go into the bedroom and close the door behind him. It was like one of those English, you know, English drama where there was, like, two levels of the house, you know, and there was the. The house of the family, and then there was the house of my dad, who was carrying on this life that was his secret life. And I was just aware of it from the start.
- [24:23]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
- [24:31]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Hi, it's Karen and Georgia from my favorite murder.
- [24:33]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamar.
- [24:39]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Want the full story? Take a listen.
- [24:42]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
Hetty. She starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him?
- [24:46]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
I mean, I watch the Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him. But incredible innovator, right?
- [24:54]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
She says he's a, quote, very strange man. But they do get along really well.
- [24:59]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Give us examples.
- [25:00]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
I know they do get along intellectually. And in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings and she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like, what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy Lamarr and Billie Jean King.
- [25:29]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
- [25:31]
Tom Junot
Goodbye.
- [25:33]
Cindy Crawford
Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty. Well, I don't know about you, but like, never liked being told, oh wow, you look so good for your age. Like, why even bother saying that? Why don't you just say you look great at any age, every age. That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about. We create products that make you feel confident in your skin at the age you are now. Meaningful Beauty.
- [25:59]
Tom Junot
Beautiful skin at every age.
- [26:01]
Cindy Crawford
Learn more@meaningful beauty.com.
- [26:08]
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- [26:37]
Coldwater Creek Advertiser
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- [27:08]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway for you. Save days are here now through June 25th. Find hot deals throughout the store and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from Triscuit, Quaker, Reese's and Dot's Pretzels. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of saving when you shop in store or online for easy pickup or delivery, restrictions apply. See the website for full terms and conditions.
- [27:41]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
These days, it's not uncommon for people to have different ringtones for their phones. One for their kids, their partner, their boss. But in the 1960s, in most homes, the phone rang one way and it was always answered. Tom missed nothing. He may not have understood how unusual it was or what was going on, but he clocked it.
- [28:04]
Tom Junot
Some years ago, I was talking to somebody on the board of my daughter's school and I told some of the stories about the secrecy and the secrets in our household. And there was somebody on the board said something to me that has just stayed with me ever since. He goes, and nobody had to tell you not to say anything, right? And I said, yeah, exactly. I mean, when I went to the so called buyer's house on the day that we were supposed to be going out and getting hot fudge sundaes, I knew that there was something off wrong about it because of the way it made me feel. But did I tell my mom? Did I mention that we went to a lady's house? Of course not. And I was really young. I was like five years old. I remember being so young that I couldn't start myself. She had a swing set in the yard and I couldn't start myself on the swing set. And that's one of the things that sort of called me back to the door of the house was like, I wanted my dad to help me. And then I went and, you know, the door was locked.
- [29:14]
Interviewer
And then there was a short while later, a moment that becomes very important later in your story, but a moment where your father asks you to sing Fly Me to the Moon to a lady in Florida, as he puts it, who he's on the phone with. And he puts you on the phone and you sing Fly Me to the Moon. And this lady is really warm and really kind of. And at the end of the call when you're handing the phone back to your father, she says, you know, Tommy, I hope. I hope I get to meet you sometime.
- [29:49]
Tom Junot
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:50]
Interviewer
Did that cause the same feeling?
- [29:52]
Tom Junot
It was always, always that sort of, you know, that sort of a combination of the thrill of having something that I knew about my father and that my father shared with me that we weren't going to share with my mom of something. Sort of. But then also at the same time of trying to please, you know, I mean, I was. My father was a, you know, he was a crooner during World War II. After he got wounded, he toured Europe as a big band singer. And so my father sang in the household. He was a crooner in World War II and he was a crooner in the shower, but nobody else sang. Nobody else could sing. Nobody else was really allowed to sing. And so my father asking me to sing to this woman was both like scary and exciting and flattering.
- [30:47]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
When Tom is 8, his twin siblings are 18 and they leave home. He's always been a snooper, but now he starts to take it to the next level. He begins to record things around the house. Conversations, fights, secrets. He's not sure what he's searching for, but he is searching. Tape recorder at the ready.
- [31:10]
Tom Junot
I had gotten a small reel to reel tape recorder when, I don't know, eight or nine. And it was something that like kids at the time were getting. It was like a classic sort of want to Long island birthday gift. But, you know, I would set it up on the stairs that connected the kitchen and the den of our house. I would set it up at the top step and I would record dinner conversations. And I did it to find out something. I did it to find out whether the conversations, you know, about politics and movie stars and whether the guy, the star of Mannix had a hairpiece or not. Like all of these ridiculous arguments that would go on at the dinner table, you know, I kind of wanted, wanted to find out if they were real, but there was something that was secret. You know, it became a secret that I was keeping. You know, my parents kept secrets from me, but the finding out became secrets that I was keeping. The tape recorder was a secret I
- [32:19]
Interviewer
was keeping well, which goes back to power.
- [32:21]
Tom Junot
And there was comfort in that. One of the things about it was, I didn't cry at the dinner table if the tape recorder is running.
- [32:31]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Tom's father continues to ascend in the world of handbag sales. He becomes wealthy and surrounds himself with ostentatious trappings. He buys a house on West Hampton beach, rents an apartment in the Essex House in New York City. And back in Wantagh, the family home is set apart from all the other houses. When Tom's father has white marble front steps installed winters, he can be found sunning himself on these marble steps, using a reflector, working on his tam. When Tom is 16, his father returns from a work trip and Tom notices a small glitch in his father's meticulous routine. His bag of toiletries is not in its usual spot. Ever the detective, Tom investigates
- [33:21]
Tom Junot
this huge bag of toiletries. All his stuff, his consort, hairspray, his Nivea, his Lubriderm, his Ginette. After Bath Splash for Men. You know, it was sort of one of those things that people talked about with my dad because if he went to your house, he would colonize the bathroom with this bag. So it was. He took it everywhere. And then one time I was helping him unload the car after he came back from a business trip and that bag was missing. So I took it upon myself to look for it. And it was usually on the floor of his closet, which was on the top floor of the house. And where I found it was in the closets where my mother kept her very rarely used furs. And that was in the basement. So there was four floors or three and a half floors separating from where it usually was to where it was. And you know, I opened it and I found out why. Because in that bag instead of all the toiletries was a copy of the Joy of Sex and two vibrators. And you know, my response to it at that moment was not horror. I assumed that he had brought it back for my mom. You know, this was early 70s and the joy of Sex was already like well known as a book that married couples would use to sort of spice up their marriage. And so that's what I thought originally was that it was there, that all that stuff was in that bag to sort of spice up my parents rather chilly marriage. And then it disappeared again. Like the next day I went to look for it and it was gone. And the next time I saw it was, it was back on the floor of my father's closet filled with toiletries, filled with his stuff. So I wondered where it went. And then one day he came home on the Long Island Railroad carrying something he never carried, which was a briefcase. All the other guys, whom my father called squares, carried briefcases. And all of a sudden there was my dad carrying this brown Samsonite briefcase. And I became obsessed with that because it was something, you know, it was. It had a combination lock and it was something I couldn't get to. And I didn't know what was inside, but I suspected it was something.
- [36:03]
Interviewer
So what did you do?
- [36:04]
Tom Junot
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to crack the code, trying to figure out the combination. And one day my father came back and he. And he hid it. It was either. It was. He kept it either at the bottom of his closet under all these shelves, or in the huge trunk of his white Lincoln Continental. He would keep it in the trunk and not even bring it in the house. And so. But one day he had it on the bed and the latches were flipped Open. It wasn't open. The briefcase wasn't open, but the latches were open. So I recorded the number on the tumblers and kept them in my memory where they remained, by the way. It was number 616. And one day when my parents went to the track, as they so often did, especially when my dad came back from a trip, they would go to Roosevelt Raceway and leave me by myself to sort of fend for myself. I went upstairs to my father's bedroom and I knew that there was something in there. And I knew that like opening the briefcase was not like taping the family dinner conversation, was not even like, you know, looking for the bag of toiletries and finding the joy of sex in there. I knew it was different. And so my heart was like thumping when I opened it.
- [37:34]
Interviewer
Well, one of the things that's striking me listening to you is that is the determination, like both the, this potent mixture of fear and forbiddenness and guilt, probably.
- [37:48]
Tom Junot
Yeah, guilt for sure.
- [37:50]
Interviewer
And at the same time something that's bigger than all those things, bigger than the fear, bigger than the guilt, bigger than the terror of being caught or the fear of what you're going to find, which was you needed to know.
- [38:02]
Tom Junot
Yeah. And I think that the, the word that you chose right there, need is exactly it. I mean, I didn't just want to know, I needed to know. And because I knew it was something and it was, I flipped open the briefcase and it was as if you were watching a movie where something that could be regarded as innocent, like the Joy of Sex and two vibrators had like mutated into something and what they had mutated into was this stack of, you know, not just like pornography that was like popular at the time, but like really extreme pornography, like subjugation pornography, S and M pornography that was unbelievably disturbing and explicit. And then instead of two vibrators, two huge rubber dildos, what I keep coming
- [39:03]
Interviewer
back to, because really, ultimately what I keep on thinking about is what we know, what we don't know, what we know, but can't allow ourselves to really consider or think.
- [39:15]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
So now you have a secret.
- [39:17]
Tom Junot
Yeah. Yes.
- [39:18]
Interviewer
And you've had one for quite some time, you know, that you're keeping from your mother and now you're keeping from your father. This knowledge of your father or this knowledge of what the contents of the briefcase might mean in terms of your father. Where does that live inside of you as a 16 year old kid who is, you know, just sort of coming into his own and has so much confusion about what it means to be a man.
- [39:50]
Tom Junot
Yeah, it was a crossing of a line because, you know, I watched the porno movies. It wasn't like I. I looked at the. What was inside the briefcase and shut it, you know, forever. Pandora's box was open, and I watched those. They were Super 8 movies. And so I watched them on the projector where my father used to show home movies down in the basement. And can I just say, it messed me up, because it did. It messed me up because, as you say, I had a secret. I felt guilty. I knew without a doubt it was, you know, incontrovertible evidence that my father had a completely different life outside the house that I couldn't even imagine. And yet, because I knew it and because I decided at that moment that I was never going to tell anybody, especially my mom. I mean, I lost all of my illusions about my dad, or at least most of my illusions about my dad. But at the same time, I kind of migrated to his side, if that makes any sense. There was always this, like, really, like, uneasy detente in my household. And there was my mom at one end of the hall, there was my dad at the other end of the hall. And I sort of, you know, shuttled between them. But I was always, always on my mom's side. And this, because I was covering for my dad, moved me to his side. In some sort of strange way, I became more loyal to him, even though I'd say he became sort of less loyal to me. Because around that time, I started, rather predictably, like, smoking a ton of weed. I was stoned all the time. And my dad sort of knew that and didn't really mention it to me in the same way that I didn't mention, you know, the porn and the dildos to him.
- [42:05]
Interviewer
But at the same time, it also seems like his temper, which had always been a thing and part of the reason why you had been afraid of him, you tussled more. We did during those years. And you wrote, shut up is a thunderclap of my childhood. And then there is this feeling that you also have very intensely about your father, which is, you will not shut me up.
- [42:31]
Ryan Seacrest
Right.
- [42:33]
Tom Junot
So when, you know, my dad and my mom used to argue at the dinner table, my father would end those arguments with a resounding, shut up. And he would talk differently when he said that, you know, my father had an actor's diction. Look at this body. Have you ever seen a body like this? But when he said shut up to me or to my mom, mostly to my mom, he was like, out of a gangster movie. He didn't say it with a T there. He said it with a D. Shut up. And it was like, you know, the mask had fallen off him because he was sort of self created in a lot of different ways. And the mask. That mask would fall off him. And it was after I opened his briefcase that we started really battling in ways that were, you know, I think, ultimately, you know, kind of damaging to me. There was a moment when he came drunk into my room when. This is when I was, I think, at the end of my senior year in high school or even that following summer. And, you know, he came up to me and said, what are you doing today? And I said, nothing. And he goes, yeah, yeah, you know why you're doing nothing today? I was like, why? Because you are in nothing. And we got into this whole thing that, you know, when I. When I did the audio tape of the book, I think that was the hardest part that I read was that part where my father and I went back and forth on that because he was challenging. He was challenging me to fight. He was challenging me to fight him. To fight him. There was just no doubt about that. And I didn't. I mean, some of that might have been because I was afraid of him and had always been afraid of him, but something. There was like a new emotion that arose in me at that moment and probably when I opened the briefcase, which was a certain amount of coldness towards him.
- [44:50]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
We'll be right back.
- [44:54]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Hi, it's Karen in Georgia from My Favorite Murder.
- [44:56]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.
- [45:02]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Want the full story? Take a listen.
- [45:05]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
Hedi. She starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him?
- [45:09]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
I mean, I watch the Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him. But incredible innovator, right?
- [45:17]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
She says he's a, quote, very strange man, but they do get along really well.
- [45:22]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Give us examples.
- [45:23]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
I know they do get along intellectually. And in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings. And she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of, like, what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamarr and Billie
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Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Jean King presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
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- [48:32]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Some years pass and Tom goes to college. There he meets Janet, the woman who will become his wife. It's a real love match. But Tom's father is determined to turn his son into him. Determined to turn him into someone who isn't going to be faithful.
- [48:51]
Tom Junot
One time he invites me into New York City. This is when I'm dating Janet and he invites me into New York City to go see Woody Allen. I was like, oh, great, great, I'll come in. And, you know, he tells me one thing before he gets off the phone, which is dress. So I get dressed up as best I can. I go into New York City to go with my dad to see Woody Allen. And we stop at a bar and these two really beautiful, you know, middle aged women walk in and they walk right towards us and I say, dad, who are they? And he looks at me and says, they're our dates. And, you know, they were buyers and they were buyers. He wasn't just calling them buyers. And it was clear to me in an instant that he was having an affair with one of them. And that was what he was doing. He was trying to teach me in his ways. There's another moment when the summer I'm first going out with Janet and he comes in to have his say and he says, you know, I know you like this girl. I said, yeah, dad, I like her. I think I love her. He was like, well, there's one thing I need to tell you. I've lived a little, and I know chicken tastes pretty good until you've had steak. And I've forgiven my dad a lot of things, but not that.
- [50:33]
Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, just so insidious and poisonous and meant to be poisonous.
- [50:38]
Tom Junot
Yeah.
- [50:42]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Tom is living in Atlanta, working in his first journalism job, when his grandmother dies. At her funeral, one of his cousins pulls him aside and says, I have a story for you. That story leads to a whole other layer of questions, ones that Tom's father has no interest in exploring.
- [51:03]
Tom Junot
One of the things about growing up in our household is that, you know, we had no genealogy. You know, I mean, it was as if there was the. The founding of America in 1776, and then there was the founding of our family. And, you know, when my grandmother was born and when my father was born to my grandmother, and it was just all shrouded and shadow and Secret and non existent to the extent that. That when, you know, we would ask my dad, like, dad, tell us about your father. And he would look at us and say, I never had a father. And we knew that this wasn't true because there was a man who used to call and ask for money, and that was his father. But his complete denial was how he dealt with. With his past. Like that denial like, I never had a father actually extended to everything else. So when I found out that his mother was married when she was 16 and she had a daughter and she abandoned that daughter and that she then became sort of the scarlet woman in the New York City tabloids as a serial adulterer. But when I tried to tell him that he had a sister out there, the sister from my grandmother's first marriage, and she's, you know, just a few years older than you, she's probably out there. Maybe you could meet her. Do you want me to try to find her? I know I'm a journalist. I can find her. And he looked at me and said, never happened. And I was like, dad, what do you mean it never happened? I have a copy of a Daily News article that gives me her name. It had to happen. And he looked at me and said, and it wasn't just what he said, it was how he said it. And the look on his face. My father hadn't scared me in a long time, but he scared me when he said this. And he said, listen to me. Never happened. That was the last time I talked about it.
- [53:32]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
So Tom drops it. He drops it for 20 years. And those are 20 very busy years, both personally and professionally. Tom and Janet marry, they adopt their daughter, his journalism career takes off, and he writes huge cover stories for Esquire, often, almost always of men. Frank Sinatra, Fred Rogers. Always circling around the subject of his father, but never going there. There's an energy, though thrumming was in the subtext of these profiles that is part of what gives them their tremendous power. The thing Tom is born to write, to explore, to know, is one he's unable to touch. During these years, too, Tom's parents make a precipitous fall from grace. Like Icarus, Lou Genaud gets too close to the sun, both literally and metaphorically. He gambles and loses big.
- [54:30]
Tom Junot
My father was not an educated man. I think he was smart. Like when I, you know, listened to tapes of him and I listened to him talk, you know, he was the kind of person who spoke in full paragraphs. His diction was, you know, intentional and incredibly seductive. But he learned all that from watching the movies. He learned how to talk, from Cary Grant, he learned how to dress from Fred Astaire, learned how to treat women, you know, from. From Clark Gable and Rhett Butler. But he didn't pass eighth grade. And so, you know, he was one of those guys who was unique. He was very much himself, but he was very much trying to transcend himself. And where that effort failed and sort of, you know, had a tragic. Well, not a tragic end exactly, but at least a. An uncomfortable end was him trying to become richer than he was. He made a lot of money selling handbags, but he began gambling in 1966. So that the other group of people who called the secret phone in addition to his so called buyers were bookies. We had bookies calling the house all the time. But worse than the bookies were the stockbrokers. Those are the worst. Because my father had incredibly bad luck and no business sense in pursuing stocks. And he put a lot of money into the stock market and lost everything, lost the last penny. And his debts to the bookies were enough that they had to sell the house in West Hampton and move down to Florida where they lived in a rented condo. And the money just eventually, just ran out. And my father became somewhat different then. He became a person that was. Rather than this guy who lived in the light of his own grandeur, he became this guy whose life was full of regrets. And he was that guy. He was woulda, shoulda, coulda. To the extent that when he began talking about his bad financial choices and bemoaning his fate, people would wave their hands at him and say, oh, Lou, just stop. And then, you know, and get up and leave. Like there were guys at that Florida condo who, when he started telling his stories of past glory, would say, okay, it's time for me to leave. And leave.
- [57:18]
Interviewer
It's interesting to me too that another kind of parallel tracks going in opposite directions in a way where his decline is happening parallel to and at the same time as your increasing success.
- [57:34]
Sean Duffy (U.S. Transportation Secretary)
Yeah.
- [57:35]
Interviewer
So it's 1996 and you decide you're gonna do a piece for GQ about your dad. But it's not gonna be the investigative piece. It's gonna be Lou Genaud's fashion tips. And this is an opportunity for you, as an investigative journalist and as a profile writer par excellence, to interview your dad.
- [58:01]
Tom Junot
Yeah, I mean, I sold it to my editor, gq, and to my father as a story that I would be using his fashion tips to sort of get at him. And so I took him out to this hotel in West Hampton beach, where he used to go at 5 o' clock in the evenings, you know, after spending the day with the family, he would go down to the dune deck and always wear the same thing. He would wear his orange alpaca sweater and his white ducks. He would wear these tight white pants and go down to the dune deck. I think his second life or third life or whatever it was, you know, extended to the dune deck. So I sort of wanted to take him back to the scene of the crime. And, you know, I knew my father's fashion tips. I didn't need to interview him for the fashion tips. What I wanted was the chance to talk to my dad with a tape recorder between us. And I did that. And I asked him everything. I asked him about Valerie, with whom we had the affair when, you know, I was three, four and five years old. I asked him about, you know, the rumors that he had gone to bed with Gabor sisters. All of them. I asked all of them. And then something, you know, really remarkable happened. I had spent a day with him talking about all the secrets that I'd wanted to ask him about all my life. And we went out to dinner, and it was a celebratory dinner, and Susan Lucci, you know, the soap opera star, was there at the restaurant. And my father said, who's that woman over there? I turned around, I was like, dad, that's Susan Lucci. And he looked at me and he said, can't keep her eyes off your father. And, you know, he was 77 years old. You know, I had heard that story I had heard growing up. That's like all you heard about at the dinner table is he had gone to El Morocco and Liz Taylor was there and couldn't keep her eyes off your father. And so I really felt like I was sort of giving him this gift when I was doing this story, and also giving myself the gift of having his secrets revealed. So it was sort of a deal. But the next day, we were having breakfast. It was our goodbye breakfast. And a woman who was 81 years old the night before had asked him for his number. So, you know, when we were having breakfast, I was starstruck again, you know, And I asked him, dad, dad, when that woman asked you for her your number last night, was. Was that what it was like, you know, when you were. When you were my age and that you were. You were going into New York City? Well, they were in 81. I was like, yeah, Dad, I know they were in 81. But you know what I mean? And that's when he. You know, he said, tommy, there was a time in my life when I couldn't walk down Fifth Avenue without being propositioned. And I was. At the time, I was 38, and I was still enough of a kid to say, you know, gee, dad, did you take any of them up on it? And he says, well, not all of them. And the minute he said that, you know, it was just like all of the other times growing up. I knew something was going on. And I said, dad, you know how many? I'm not telling you. I'm a gentleman. And I said, why don't you give me a percentage? Oh, I don't know, 25%. I was like, 25%? Is that too little? I was like, no, dad. It was a huge, huge number. 25%. Oh, my God. And then I asked him the question. I said, dad, did you fall in love with any of them? And he looked at me and he put out his hand. And, you know, his hands were as brown as any other part of him. He had, like, the tannest hands any human being, like, had ever had. And he put out this tan hand with a single finger extended. And he looked at me and he said, one. And, you know, my life changed in that moment.
- [63:01]
Kohler Ambassador
Yeah.
- [63:01]
Interviewer
It strikes me that had that not happened exactly as it did, had you not been in the mode of interviewing him, had you not been writing that piece as a way of doing that, had you not had the experience the night before that sort of led to those questions, you might never have known that there was one woman who he was in love with.
- [63:30]
Tom Junot
Of all the women, there was a woman he was in love with.
- [63:34]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Lou Gennaud lives another decade after Tom writes his profile, and Tom's mother dies two years later. It is then that Tom renews the hunt to understand this enigmatic man and his legacy. The truth does not come tumbling out, but reveals itself slowly. The boy who was once a silent witness is now a man with a toolbox. Patiently, forensically, he follows a trail of faint footprints in an attempt to know more.
- [64:06]
Tom Junot
Two years after my dad died, he had a friend in Miami beach named Frankie Klein. And Frankie was a wonderful guy. He was another handbag salesman, but he was also sort of like my dad's wingman in Miami Beach. And my dad, you know, he would. When he traveled as a salesman and when he would go and spend a couple of weeks at the end of his sales trips, you know, just soaking up the sun, it was in Miami beach, and it was with Frankie. So he knew my dad really well, and he knew him. He knew him as the Miami guy rather than the wanto Long island guy. And when my dad died, he asked me for some of my dad's ashes because he wanted to sprinkle them in the lake behind his house. And so the day before I turned 50, I went to visit Frankie with a shot glass full of what was left of my father's ashes, because we had. He had been buried, and we had spread some of the other ashes in the ocean at West Hampton Beach. So I go to see Frankie. We meet at a bagel place in Miami, give him the ashes, and he says, is there anything. Is there anything that you want? Is there anything that you need? And I said, yeah, Frankie. I said, can you tell me about the woman in Florida? And it had some of the same feeling as opening the locks of the briefcase, because Frankie looked at me and he said, so, you know, and the minute he said that, I was like, oh, shit. And I didn't know her name. I didn't know the one's name at the time. And I lied to Frankie. I said, well, I didn't let on that I knew as little as I did. I said, yeah, Frankie, I know. And he said, well, because if you didn't know, I wouldn't tell you. I said, I know. And then he told me. And he said, you know, they were very close, but, you know, she died in 1976 when your father and the one that he loved were planning to run off together from each of their spouses. But then she fell down the stairs of her home in Hallandale, Florida, and died. And Frankie went with my father to the funeral and had to hold my father up during the funeral because he was so bereaved. And the woman's name was Peggy Monaghan. And so all of a sudden, you know, I was in a place of knowledge where I had not been before. And yet I made a decision not to pursue it. I made a decision not to try to contact her children and not to investigate it. And then in 2015, that changed.
- [67:22]
Interviewer
What changed? What was the sort of seesaw between thinking that you maybe should let it go and then changing your mind because the need to know was greater than whatever the sequelae of that might be.
- [67:37]
Tom Junot
At my father's funeral in 2006, I planned and choreographed his funeral service, his memorial service in Wanta Long Island. Picked the music, brought in a singer, did the eulogy, all of it. And, you know, I was trying to get, you know, the last Word on my dad. I was trying to put not just him to rest, but my gnawing unease with not knowing about him to rest as well. And at the very end, when after I'd given the eulogy and his friends had stood up to tell funny stories about him, this gorgeous woman who I knew from the handbag business, her name was Muntu, went up to the lectern, brought her hands down on the lectern, and said, can we all just agree that this was a man? And so Muntu plays a large role in me sort of changing my mind about figuring out who the one was.
- [68:52]
Interviewer
And you didn't know at the time, but you knew that she wasn't the one. Or she could have been the one.
- [68:56]
Tom Junot
She could have been one, but she wasn't the one.
- [68:59]
Boost Mobile Advertiser
The one.
- [68:59]
Interviewer
Exactly.
- [69:00]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
And you learn.
- [69:02]
Interviewer
Cause your older brother Michael has lunch with Montu, not suspecting anything and just thinking that she was someone who worked with your father. And at lunch, it comes out that she had had a relationship with your father that spanned 11 years.
- [69:20]
Tom Junot
Right. So my dad died in 2006. I found out the name of the one in 2008. And then in 2015, my brother has lunch with Mantu. And he calls me up and he says, did you know that dad had an 11 year affair with Mantu? And I said, yes. And he said, why didn't you tell me? I said, because I didn't know. And he said, wait a second, you just said you did know. Did you or didn't you know? And in that moment, you know, I felt, you know, a seismic shift because I felt the schism in me that had been there forever about my dad and about my relationship to him and to his secrets and to the lives that he led. And I decided at that moment to find out. And that included finding Peggy Monahan's children.
- [70:33]
Interviewer
And ultimately, that reveals to you that your father and Peggy, that one of her four children, it was your father's child and that you have a sister.
- [70:48]
Tom Junot
Yeah. So in 2015, after my brother's visit and after the revelation about Monthu, I started calling up people and asking about my dad. And Frankie Klein was. Was dead by this time. He had died in 2011. But I called his kids and we had, you know, a talk about a lot of things. You know, one of them was of them knowing Peggy Monaghan, seeing my father in her company at the Klein house, swimming in Frankie's pool, using the bedroom in Frankie's house. And then one day, I got a call from Frankie's daughter from his first wife, Nancy. And she said, there's something I need to tell you. And, you know, I've been thinking about this, and I've been sort of agonizing about this, and I asked my husband about this, and she gave this long introduction about it. But what she said was that one of she had heard before Frankie died and when Frankie's wife died, that one of Peggy Monahan's four children was my father's. And that was in 2015, you know, so I started looking for them. And really, even just looking at them, I found them. Where you find anybody, everybody else these days. I found pictures of them on Facebook. And at the time, Nancy didn't know which of the kids it was, and she didn't even really know. She told me it was one of the boys that Peggy had. Three boys and one one daughter. And she told me it was one of the boys. But I went on Facebook and I looked at the boys, and then I looked at the girl, Liz Ann Searing. She had Mary, so her name was not Monahan. It was Searing. And I looked at her photo, and it was just, you know, it was not, like, physical. It wasn't like I said, oh, she looks like me. It was that, like, I recognized her as if I had known her.
- [73:01]
Starbucks Advertiser
And
- [73:04]
Tom Junot
that was 2015. And then three years later, I made my first approach to her.
- [73:12]
Interviewer
So, Tom, let me ask you. It's sort of like the work of your life to come to know who your father really was. That began when you were, you know, three years old. What was it that drove you at the point where you were? There was much that you learned that we're not gonna be able to cover. In terms of your father's life, his history, where he came from, the secrets that he came from, you sort of shook the family tree, and it reshaped and became a different kind of tree. But what was it that was so important? What was the drive at that point? You know, your father gone, your mother gone. To continue to need to know.
- [73:55]
Tom Junot
I think I had more sophisticated tools with which to pursue that need. But I think the need itself was the same need that I had when I was 3 and 8 and 16 and 20, 22. I'm kind of naming the years of all, like, years of milestone discoveries about my dad, 36. And then finally, you know, I'm in my late 50s and realizing that whatever it is I'm trying to find, I better find now, because I'm never going to be able to do it except now. Now is the Time. It's hard to explain what drove me. I said early on that it was, you know, a way of. Of me finding some sort of power in the house where I was powerless. And then I had this moment where it's, you know, you'll never shut me up. And so there's those things that are driving me. But when I started looking for my sibling, for my sister, it didn't feel that way. It felt like those things were preordained, you know, for this search. Like, the earlier searches were one thing, but this search was the main thing you mentioned early on. Me singing to a woman in West Hampton. Fly Me to the Moon came out in the summer of 1964. And I sang Fly Me to the Moon in the summer of 1964 to a woman that I believe was Peggy Monahan. And that was the summer that she gave birth to my father's daughter. So when I started looking for her many, many decades later, I was terrified in a way that I hadn't been terrified in a long time. Doing the work I do, I was questioning myself. But at the same time, it felt like it was something, you know, I had to do. And I think I had to do it to make things right.
- [76:21]
Interviewer
That makes all kinds of beautiful sense. And it's making me think of one other moment in the book, something just really, you know, sort of shattering around your father. And you go into your car and something comes out of you, and you, like, scream into the silence of your car, I will survive this. I will survive this. And I think, you know, my interpretation is that you had to put all of the pieces together of this jagged, shattered story in order to be able to survive it in the deepest way.
- [77:01]
Tom Junot
Yeah, you know, I'd been given a puzzle when I was a little kid, and it took me a really long time to put the pieces together, but I never stopped putting them together. And, you know, I finally put the last piece in there in 2022.
- [77:27]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Here's Tom reading one last passage from his big hearted, brave, and beautifully written memoir. In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man.
- [77:42]
Tom Junot
You came so close, dad. So close to getting away with it. You've been dead now for nearly 20 years, and you are resting in peace at a national cemetery, your body already consumed by fire. You and mom are together, your ashes under a plaque stamped with the words mom and dad. You bother nobody, and nobody bothers you. Fewer and fewer people remember you. Fewer and fewer people are alive to remember you. But those who do remember do so fondly. To the sons and daughters of your sisters and best friends, you remain Uncle Lou. To your grandchildren, you are Pop Pop. To Michael and me, you are and will always be, dad.
- [78:52]
Narrator (Dani Shapiro)
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. Molly Zakur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is 1-88-8-SECRET0. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram anny writer and if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance.
- [79:47]
Tom Junot
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
- [79:49]
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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
- [79:52]
Tom Junot
listen to your favorite shows.
- [79:54]
Sean Duffy (U.S. Transportation Secretary)
I'm U.S. transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The sound of a seatbelt. It's one of the most important sounds in our car. It means everyone is ready and everyone is safe. The more our kids see us put on our seat belts, the more natural it is for them to put theirs on, too. Make it a priority. Buckle up every time. Hear the sound. Make it a habit. Paid for by NHTSA Hi, it's Karen
- [80:25]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
and Georgia from My favorite Murder.
- [80:26]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.
- [80:32]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Want the full story? Take a listen.
- [80:34]
Georgia (My Favorite Murder)
She starts dating Howard Hughes, and in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. So she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamar and Billie Jean King.
- [80:56]
Karen (My Favorite Murder)
Presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
- [80:59]
Tom Junot
Goodbye.
- [81:01]
Kalpen (Hearsay Podcast Host)
Hey, everyone, it's Kel Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and documents. Dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [81:31]
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Paramount plus is now the home of all your BET favorites.
- [81:34]
Ryan Seacrest
What?
- [81:34]
Paramount Plus Advertiser
Yeah, with all new episodes of Tyler Perry's Divorce Sisters you've always liked, a little drama, plus a whole new world of movies like Gladiator 2.
- [81:42]
Tom Junot
Now I will control an empire original
- [81:45]
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series like the Shy.
- [81:47]
Tom Junot
Just make sure we protect each other
- [81:48]
Paramount Plus Advertiser
in live sports like ufc.
- [81:51]
Tom Junot
Welcome to the history books.
- [81:53]
Paramount Plus Advertiser
New home, same family. Your BET favorites are now on Paramount. Subscribe Now.
- [82:00]
Odoo Advertiser
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- [82:45]
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