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“I Can’t Abandon My Name”: The Sacklers and Me

All the cultural and medical institutions that have taken Sackler money in exchange for naming rights should take down the name, but I can’t relinquish mine.

It was a Sunday morning like so many humdrum Sundays. A corner of The New York Times Book Review was slowly soaking up the syrup from my plate. You can tell this happened almost 20 years ago because I was reading a paper paper.

I was skimming a review of a novel when my own name jumped out at me.

Molly [Sackler] was a cheerleader with bouffant hair and, worse, ‘a resident of the wrong side of decidedly unglamorous Saugerties, the widow of a Marines intelligence officer perished in Vietnam, and get this, a Republican.’”

I had never before heard of the novel, called The Company You Keep, and I was quite sure the author, Neil Gordon, was a complete stranger to me. I’m happy to report that I am not now nor have I ever been a bouffanted cheerleader, a widow, or, perish the thought, a Republican. How had my name, always a bit comical and offbeat to my own ear, ended up in this book?

As far as I knew, there were no other Molly Sacklers, notable or obscure. A Google search didn’t bring one to light anyway.

Molly Sackler’s dad, Howard Sackler, the author of the Broadway hit play The Great White Hope, backstage with James Earl Jones who plays one time boxing champion Jack Johnson. The author as a child with her father.by © Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images. Right, courtesy of Molly Sackler.

Had Neil Gordon and I crossed paths? Had he perhaps known my father, also a writer? Was there a connection between us? In 2003 it wasn’t so easy to get an author’s address. I had to do some research to find a snail mail address and write Neil Gordon a letter:

Dear Mr. Gordon:

As far as I know, we have never met…. I’m contacting you because you use my name for a character in your recently published novel The Company You Keep. Would you please let me know how and why you alighted on this name?

Neil Gordon swiftly emailed me back, saying that while it was surely odd for me to come across myself in his novel, it was astonishing for him to receive a letter from one of his own fictional characters!

He politely explained that he didn’t know me and that the way he’d come to the name Molly Sackler was quite random. Molly was a schoolfriend of his daughter’s, I believe. Sackler, too, was an arbitrary choice. The coincidence was entirely accidental, not freighted with mystery or meaning at all.

But the Sackler name is freighted with mystery and meaning. Especially for me.

Being a New Yorker, I was of course familiar with the Sackler Wing and the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A decade ago, taking my little girl there on a hot summer day, I led her through the cool halls, her sandals slapping the marble. She held her sketchbook to her chest and dutifully grinned as I snapped her photo next to the Sackler plaque.

I so wanted my adopted child to want to be a Sackler like me. I wanted it so much that I would even use the bullshit prestige of this sign to entice her. But I also wanted her to laugh with me at the Sacklers and scorn their brazen ploy for fame. She just wanted to draw and then go get ice cream in the park.

Now that name—my name—is prominent in lurid headlines like: “Who Profits From the Opioid Crisis? Meet the Secretive Sackler Family Making Billions From OxyContin” and “Is This America’s Most Hated Family?”

The Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, May 15, 2019.By Karsten Moran/The New York Times/redux.
Prescription bottles tossed by protesters float in the reflecting pool in March, 2018.By George Etheredge/The New York Times/Redux.

The rich Sacklers have emblazoned our name on world-famous institutions, but the dubious source of the family’s fortune has been coming to light in recent years. Last month my peaceful enjoyment of a plate of hummus and crackers was interrupted by the radio repeatedly hissing the name “Sackler.” Why? Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, was on his book tour.

Artist and recovered opioid addict Nan Goldin started a group called PAIN— you can find it online at sacklerpain.org. PAIN has waged a successful war on the Sacklers. It has staged die-ins all over the world at museums and galleries inscribed with the Sackler name. Its supporters festooned floors with blood-smeared money. They littered the reflecting pool at the Met, where my daughter and I had stood, with 100 prescription bottles bearing labels that read: “OxyContin. Prescribed to you by the Sackler family, major donors of the Met. Rx# 200,000 dead.”

At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, PAIN unfurled an enormous scarlet banner that read: “Abandon the Sackler name.” And I agree. All the cultural and medical institutions that have taken Sackler money in exchange for naming rights should take down the name.

But I can’t abandon my name! It’s a relief to say I am a very distant, disconnected, poor relative of the rich Sacklers (Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler were my grandfather’s second cousins). We are more kin than kind. They don’t know me. I’ve never received any money or free drugs for being a Sackler.

I laugh wryly at the ruination of the Sackler name. But it stings. I have always taken great pride in my surname. My father, Howard Sackler, was a writer and director who made his own way from the Bronx to Broadway and beyond. Mentored by W.H. Auden while still a student at Brooklyn College, youthful friend and collaborator of Stanley Kubrick, respected theater director and playwright, my dad went on to win a Pulitzer and a Tony.

The first time I became aware of his name was when I was tiny and his play The Great White Hope opened on Broadway. My mother wore a gown spun of forest and gold with her hair piled high like a queen. My father wore his name, Howard Sackler, and swept her out into the night in a haze of her perfume, Rive Gauche. I wasn’t awake when they came home. In the morning my mother, in her bathrobe sipping black coffee, told me that at the end of that first performance, the audience stood and yelled, “Author! Author!” She had to explain to me what “author” meant. For me, Sackler and author went together.

Thousands of paper slips designed to look like prescription slips for OxyContin, the powerful opioid painkiller, rain down during a protest at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Feb. 9, 2019.From The New York Times/Redux.

Years later my father wrote screenplays to support us and his work in the theater. He thought Jaws was cheesy, so he took his name off of it. Another reason I’m not a billionaire today. His name meant more to him than the potential success of the movie.

My father died in 1982, and my brother and I are now the keepers of my father’s name and work. It’s a responsibility that brings little joy these days. I recently had to clarify for a journalist that my dad was not a fourth Sackler brother, the “black sheep” of the billionaire clan.

While it’s not their claim to fame, the evil Sacklers are storytellers too; spinners of tales in which they are noble philanthropists, not drug peddlers who lied and exploited the vulnerable to amass their fortune. Now, with their/our name in tatters, they use their money and power to try to stop journalists from exposing their misdeeds, to control the narrative.

I don’t even warrant a footnote in that Sackler story. Thank God.

By the way, I never did read Neil Gordon’s novel. And we never corresponded again; he died in 2017. I suppose I could skim The Company You Keep in a bookstore, but it probably was remaindered long ago. The book was made into a film—and Molly Sackler was cut. I don’t know how Neil Gordon felt about that. It pleases me. I’m working on my own version of the name.

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