The Bit Player: My Father with Steve Zissou by Molly Cooper

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By Molly Cooper<br>July 27, 2026<br>First Person

The art and life of Mark di Suvero<br>-->

Photograph courtesy of Molly Cooper.

In the mideighties, at my mother’s insistence, my father started seeing a psychoanalyst named Dr. Stein, who had an office on East Ninety-Sixth Street. I was around nine or ten, and could reliably be found camped out on the carpet in front of our family television, recording or rewatching scenes from my favorite shows, or poring over the latest issues of Teen Beat and Bop, a pair of nail scissors handy to clip out celebrity photos for my bedroom walls. I don’t remember much of what my father said when he’d occasionally mention his visits to Dr. Stein, but one detail that stuck was that he sometimes rode up or down in the elevator with Bill Murray, who happened to live in the building.

I’m not sure who said it, most likely my mother, but the idea was floated that they resembled each other, my father and Bill. Both were tall, of medium build, with soft, rounded features, blue eyes, wavy brown hair (fair to say somewhat disheveled), and a wry, ready grin. In this comparison, to my young ears at least, there was a sense of something appropriate, even fated perhaps, about these elevator encounters.

At the time, my father was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he had spent much of the previous two decades covering the Apollo missions and the space voyages that followed. The job, he often said, was the only one he’d ever wanted. As a child growing up in post-Depression New York City, he had been captivated by Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, which had ushered in a lifelong fascination with space exploration. As a teenager, he had set his sights on The New Yorker and—after cutting his teeth at his college paper, a mandated stint in the army, and a few frustrated months idling in journalism school—he finally caught the attention of its editor.

Some of his reverence for the magazine inevitably filtered down to me, and I can remember my excitement each week when the latest issue would land on our hallway mail table with FIRST RUN COPY printed across the front. Or the night when, celebrating my father’s fiftieth birthday, a crowd of his colleagues packed into our narrow dining room, cutting into a large chocolate cake topped with a miniature plastic spaceship and fleet of tiny spacemen touching down on a soft vanilla crust.

After I graduated from college, lacking my father’s clear sense of mission, I found myself in Los Angeles, with no real purpose in mind other than to put some distance between myself and the places I knew. I rented a house with two friends: an uninsulated, single-story bungalow with a cement front yard and a broken trampoline in the back. And I took a string of freelance reading and research jobs, in distant service of the film industry.

By this time, my father’s luck had begun to falter. The national interest in space travel had been on a steady decline since the Challenger disaster, and in the midnineties, he was let go from The New Yorker. He wrote occasionally for other publications, but eventually he found himself slipping into an early and unwanted retirement.

Then, one late-spring morning around the turn of the millennium, a day after he broke his leg in a pothole while running to catch a cab, my mother filed for divorce. Their marriage had never been a good one, but in its later years, they had settled into what felt like a comfortable sort of détente, so the move came as a surprise to everyone, perhaps my father most of all. He lingered in the apartment that summer and fall, until Thanksgiving morning, when my mother finally reached her limit. After that, he moved into a one-bedroom, ate defrosted chicken pot pies for dinner most nights, and learned to do laundry for the first time.

In those early years after the separation, he came out to California to visit me often. We took trips up the coast to Hearst Castle, south to Catalina, and east to Palm Springs, two native New Yorkers shrinking from the sun. I am the youngest of my siblings and had sometimes felt like a bit of an afterthought, so these trips offered a chance to get to know a person who had always seemed just slightly out of reach.

At some point during this time, I started to find more steady film work. After a year spent assisting a young producer in Beverly Hills, I was offered a job by a more established producer named Barry Mendel, who had an office on the Universal Studios Lot. Mendel had recently produced Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, and in the summer of 2002, when I started working for him, he was getting ready to make his third project with Anderson, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The script, cowritten by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, tells the story of an aging oceanographer, the eponymous Zissou, who sets out, after a series of failures,...