Agee’s weeks-long benders became the stuff of legend. A chain-smoker all his adult life, he had persistent heart troubles. In 1955, in a cab from the Village to his dentist’s office, he would suffer a fatal heart attack at forty-five. A Death in the Family, an autobiographical novel he’d worked on for years and not quite completed, was posthumously published to wide acclaim in 1957. That encouraged Houghton Mifflin to reissue Famous Men in 1960, when it was rediscovered as a lost classic.
WHILE JIMMY WALKER HID THROUGH THE EARLY YEARS OF THE Depression, in Albany the progressive governor Franklin D. Roosevelt took an active approach. He doubled the state income tax and gave the millions to Harry Hopkins, formerly a social worker at the Christodora House settlement in what’s now the East Village, to start up relief and jobs programs. When FDR went to Washington in 1933, he brought Hopkins down to run the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. FDR followed with a slew of other programs: the Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired young men to upgrade the national parks; the National Industrial Recovery Act; the Tennessee Valley Authority; the Public Works Administration; the Civil Works Administration; the Works Progress Administration. The federal government put millions of Americans back to work. Not everyone agreed this was a good thing. There were dire warnings that this was the prelude to American bolshevism and complaints that the programs generated useless make-work—the term “boondoggle” was coined in this era.
The WPA mostly focused on infrastructure, putting people to work building roads, highways, dams, airports (including New York’s LaGuardia), schools, libraries, and firehouses. But Hopkins and his administrators treated bringing the arts and literature to the people as valid a civil works program as building roads and schools, and the WPA employed tens of thousands of writers, artists, musicians, and people in the theater as well. Many Village artists and writers kept body and soul together in the 1930s by working for the WPA. From early on, conservatives in Congress and the newspapers complained that it was a jobs program for a bunch of commies and bohemians. Which of course many of them were, and much of the work they produced for the program proved it.
The WPA’s Federal Art Project had some five thousand visual artists and art teachers on its payroll. During the program’s eight-year run they made an estimated two hundred thousand easel paintings, drawings, murals, prints, posters, and sculptures, usually displayed in public settings like schools, hospitals, and libraries. Working for the FAP in the 1930s had a huge psychological impact on the artists who would emerge as the so-called New York School in the Village and East Village after World War II—Pollock, Rothko, Lee Krasner, Ad Reinhardt, Louise Nevelson, Philip Guston, Arshile Gorky et al. For the first time in their lives they were paid to make art as a job, earning roughly twice what the average store clerk did, and working in the program created a sense of community among them that they’d carry on after the war. Also, on a superficial level, the murals program taught them to paint big, which became a hallmark of Abstract Expressionism. (“We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal,” a group of them would declare.) Congressional conservatives condemned the project as another WPA boondoggle; the conservative Hearst newspapers denounced the artists as “Hobohemian chiselers.”
THE RISE OF FASCISM AND NAZISM IN EUROPE THROUGH THE 1930S had another effect on the intellectual and cultural life of New York and Greenwich Village, as many artists, writers, and scholars fleeing Europe arrived. Through the program termed the University in Exile and others like it, the New School brought in Hannah Arendt, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychologists Erich Fromm and Max Wertheimer, the extremely controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, the theater director Erwin Piscator, the economist Karl Brandt, the sociologist Hans Speier, the photographer Lisette Model, and scores of others. Some settled in the Village and on the New School faculty, others filtered out to other universities. Vladimir Nabokov and his family arrived in the city in 1940. Max Ernst, freed from the Gestapo, came with Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married. Duchamp came back. Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, André Masson (whose bags, when inspected by customs men in the New York Harbor, were found to contain erotic drawings, which they ripped up before his eyes), Fernand Léger, and many others arrived. When Guggenheim opened her Art of This Century gallery on West Fifty-seventh Street in 1942, it “represented . . . a meshing of an entire international set of assumptions that flew, like so many iron filings, to the single magnet of New York,” Dore Ashton writes. The gallery showed the European greats side by side with emerging New York artists. Pollock had his first solo show there in 1943, followed by Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko. To design the gallery Guggenheim hired Frederick Kiesler, who’d created the Film Guild Cinema in the Village. Mingling with all the European avant-gardists had a huge impact on Pollock and the other Americans. In a few years the drive to create their own American avant-garde would give birth to Abstract Expressionism.
14
The Wrong Place for the Right People
ON ONE OF THOSE TRIANGLE-SHAPED LOTS CREATED BY THE EXTENSION of Seventh Avenue through the Village stands a low, sharply pointed, wedge-shaped building constructed in 1921. In the middle of the building, down a steep and narrow flight of stairs, is a pie slice of a basement that originally housed a speakeasy called the Golden Triangle. The Golden Triangle had been closed for a couple of years when Max Gordon moved his nightclub into the basement in 1934. The Depression and the end of Prohibition had reduced the tsunami of whoopee-making college men and flappers. Speakeasy culture had died. The Village, like the rest of the city, was a harder, more sober place. In a journal entry for December 1931, Edmund Wilson observed, “People looked whiter, more emaciated than ever . . . the sky or whatever it was seemed to be shutting the people down into the streets so that they crawled along them more dismally, dumbly, ignobly, than ever . . . the life, the excitement had partly gone out of the city—the heart had been taken out of it.” But people still needed a drink—now more than ever, maybe—and places to take a date, if on a nickel-and-dime budget. Village bars and clubs remained destinations.
Max Gordon’s family had emigrated from Lithuania to Oregon in 1908. His father sold produce from a horse cart and made enough to put Max through college, where he majored in literature. On graduating in 1926 he headed for Greenwich Village, worked odd jobs, spent a lot of time in the all-night Stewart’s Cafeteria at the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue on Sheridan Square, nursing a nickel coffee and making plans. With a friend named Ann, who waitressed at Paul’s Rendezvous on Wooster Street, he made the rounds of Village clubs in the early 1930s.
Romany Marie’s, the Gypsy Tavern, the Black Cat. Ann hated all of them. Romany Marie was a snob; the two sisters in peasant costumes who ran the Gypsy Tavern were phony; the Black Cat was dark and full of menace. Then there was the Alimony Jail on West Fourth Street. Its high-backed booths were designed for necking and fornication.
Together they opened the tiny, threadbare Village Fair on Sullivan Street in 1932. Prohibition still had a year to run, so patrons brown-bagged their liquor and the club sold setups until a waitress who let an undercover cop buy liquor inside the club doomed the place. In 1934 Gordon tried again, opening the first Village Vanguard in a basement on Charles Street. He moved a year later to the basement on Seventh Avenue where it remains to this day.
Poets were the main entertainment at first. Gordon couldn’t afford to pay them; they performed for whatever change the patrons tossed at their feet. The poet Eli Siegel, later founder of the Aesthetic Realism movement, was his emcee in the early years, but the crowd came to see three ghosts of the Village Past—Maxwell Bodenheim, Harry Kemp, and Joe Gould—who hung out there because Gordon tolerated them and his patrons were easy marks for a few free drinks. In his memoir Live at the Village Vanguard, Gordon describes how Siegel would call Gould out of the crowd with the cry, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Harvard terrier and boulevardier, Joseph
Ferdinand Gould!” Gould would shuffle up to the spotlight and do his shtick, while Bodenheim, tall and imperious, would stalk the shadows at the back, “point his finger, and shout, ‘Eli Siegel! I hate you, Eli Siegel. You rat!’ ” Gordon continues:
Eli would wait for Bodenheim to shape up so he could call on him to recite. But it was no use. Bodenheim, swirling crazily, eyes glazed, arms outstretched, would suddenly stop and point his finger at a frightened girl who had refused him a dance during intermission. “Rat!” he’d shout at her.
A teenage comedy and singing team called the Revuers got their start at the Vanguard in the late ’30s airing “beefs” about life in New York City. In one sketch, they beefed about the Sixth Avenue El being dismantled and the steel sold to Japan; the sketch ended with Japanese bombs labeled “Made in N.Y.” dropping on California. The Rainbow Room bought the Revuers away from Gordon. When one Revuer, Judy Holliday, was invited to Hollywood, she insisted the rest of the troupe appear in her first movie, which was, appropriately, the 1944 Technicolor musical Greenwich Village. The movie is more Greenwich Village Follies than Greenwich Village, rolling together every possible cliché about the Village of the 1920s—a speakeasy modeled on the Pirate’s Den, a wild studio party, short-haired Jane Heap types in men’s clothes, a man in woman’s clothes, a writer rejoicing because he’s been “banned in Boston,” starving artists and their models, drunken poets, and a pagan revel at Webster Hall, including the number “It’s All for Art’s Sake,” with lines like “That character in the lavender tuxedo / Is really a soda jerk from Toledo.” Holliday et al. appear for a few seconds as extras. Holliday went on to be an Oscar-winning star, and Revuers Betty Comden (not to be confused with Jimmy Walker’s Betty Compton) and Adolph Green wrote Broadway and film hits such as On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, and Wonderful Town, the stage adaptation of My Sister Eileen.
Professor Irwin Corey, “The World’s Foremost Authority,” got his start as a nightclub comedian at the Vanguard in the 1940s. He was born in Brooklyn in 1914 and later placed by his struggling parents, with all five brothers and sisters, in the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. In the late 1930s he performed in a Borscht Belt musical revue called Pots and Pans, on Broadway in the long-running comedy revue New Faces (Mel Brooks, Eartha Kitt, Imogene Coca, and Paul Lynde were later New Faces alumni), and in the ILGWU’s hit musical Pins and Needles, which ran from 1937 to 1940 with numbers like “Sing Me a Song with Social Significance” performed by an interracial cast. He perfected his signature comedy routine at the Vanguard, the Copacabana, and on radio with the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. A small man with messed-up hair, in a too-long frock coat and crooked string tie, the Professor gave mock lectures on everything from Shakespeare to religion to “sex: its origin and application,” reducing it all to surreal, extemporaneous gobbledygook that was a parody of the obfuscations and doublespeak of scholars, experts, and authority in general. Buried in his tangled skein of wordplay was the occasional one-liner that entered the American vernacular—though often without his being credited as the source—for example, “You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word” and the oft-repeated “Wherever you go, there you are.” Like most everyone in the Village at the time his politics were leftist, which got him blacklisted in the Red Scare after World War II. He survived that and went on to be one of Johnny Carson’s regular guests on The Tonight Show, run for president on the Playboy ticket in 1960, and perform on Broadway and in movies, including Woody Allen’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.
In 1943 Gordon and his partner Herb Jacobi opened a second club, a very different club in a very different neighborhood: the Blue Angel, on East Fifty-fifth Street. At the time, and for the rest of the twentieth century, “uptown” and “downtown” weren’t just geographical terms in Manhattan; they described two distinct cultures. Uptown meant money, power, breeding, class, chic, high society. Downtown was hip, arty, scruffy, bohemian. Fourteenth Street was the accepted boundary line. Uptowners who ventured below Fourteenth Street were slumming and, as Ronald Sukenick explained a few decades later, “Village people might go Uptown but it was a kind of slumming in reverse.” Gordon writes, “Everything above Fourteenth Street was another world.” The Blue Angel was appropriately chic and swank. “Black patent leather walls in the bar, tufted grey velour walls with pink rosettes in the main room, banquettes of pink leather, a bright red carpet, black marbletop tables.” Opening night the entertainment was “Mme. Claude Alphand, the wife of the French ambassador, an amateur chanteuse who preferred singing in a nightclub to living in the embassy in Washington; an Ecuadorian baritone who sang strictly Spanish; Brenda Fraser, an arch British comedienne; and Sylvia Marlowe on a harpsichord, playing Bach and boogie.” Over the years Gordon and Jacobi experimented with swapping acts between clubs, a kind of cultural exchange program across the great divide of Fourteenth Street. The Vanguard sent the acts Barbra Streisand, Pearl Bailey, Corey, and Alan Arkin, then a young folksinger, uptown. The Blue Angel sent Orson Bean, Woody Allen, Mort Sahl, and Lenny Bruce (who bombed at the Angel) to the Vanguard. The Blue Angel would close in 1963 as the golden era of lavish nightclubs faded and a new generation of rock clubs and discotheques was coming on.
In 1948 Gordon met his future wife, Lorraine. She’d grown up a jazz fanatic in Newark and was married at the time to the German-born Alfred Lion, who’d fled the Nazis and arrived in New York just in time to be wowed by John Hammond’s “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall. With another German escapee, Francis Wolff, Lion founded Blue Note Records. It was Lorraine who talked Gordon into booking his first jazz act at the Vanguard, the Blue Note recording artist Thelonious Monk. The pianist was unknown in the Village, the bebop he’d helped pioneer in Harlem a few years earlier still new and alien. “And nobody came,” Lorraine recalls in her memoir Alive at the Village Vanguard. “None of the so-called jazz critics. None of the so-called cognoscenti. Zilch . . . And Max kept crying, ‘What did you talk me into? You trying to ruin my business? We’re dying with this guy.’ ” Lorraine left Lion and married Gordon, but it still took her some time to convince him to book more progressive jazz acts. Over time, though, the Vanguard became one of the premier jazz venues in the city. Miles Davis performed there, as did John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Charles Mingus, among others. In 2009 Barbra Streisand, who’d first sung there as an ungainly bohemian teen from Brooklyn (when Miles Davis had refused to back her, growling, “I don’t play for no broads”), gave a rare live performance at the club. Max Gordon had died by then, back in 1989, and Lorraine had taken over running the club. As of this writing she was still there most every night, walking the short distance from her Village apartment.
Cafe Society was another basement jazz club that opened in the Village in the 1930s. It had a shorter life span than the Vanguard but packed much historical significance into it. For most of the 1930s the basement at 1 Sheridan Square had housed one of that area’s many themed clubs for the tourist trade, a former speakeasy called Four Trees that had a dungeon decor. In 1938 Barney Josephson, who worked in the family shoe business in New Jersey, came to the Village looking for a spot to open a new club—and a new type of club, the first one in the city where blacks, whites, and Jews would mix freely on the stage and in the audience. “I learned about prejudice when I was a kid in Trenton,” he later told the neighborhood historian Terry Miller. “I had this idea that one day I’d open a club that would bring audiences and good music together and to hell with the racial barriers.” He picked the Village because “I figured I’d have better luck finding an audience ready to accept what I wanted to do. Also, rents were low and I only had $6,000 in borrowed money.”
He took over the recently closed Four Trees basement. It wasn’t the most felicitous space. It was an odd shape, with large pillars blocking views. There were a few good tables around a small dance floor; otherwise, the best view was from a stool at
the bar. Josephson got a trio of Village artists to paint murals on the walls in exchange for open bar tabs, and he borrowed more start-up capital from some progressively minded jazz people he knew, including John Hammond and Benny Goodman. The New Masses also backed the club. (Josephson was a supporter of the CPUSA.) Hammond helped choose the bill for the opening night in January 1939, which included a young singer named Billie Holiday, who went on to a nine months’ residency. Lena Horne sang there, as did Sarah Vaughan and Harry Belafonte; a young comic named Zero Mostel zinged the audience with leftist political satire, which would get him in trouble in the postwar Red Scare; the great stride pianist James P. Johnson organized boogie-woogie jam sessions. It’s said that when the artist Piet Mondrian came to New York fleeing the Nazis, he first heard boogie-woogie played at Cafe Society and was inspired to paint his famous Broadway Boogie-Woogie. Liberal celebrities helped pack the joint and draw the gossip columnists for press.
The new club advertised its uniquely open audience policy with the slogans “The Wrong Place for the Right People” and “The Rendezvous of Celebs, Debs and Plebs.” Not everybody got it. Once, a party at a table near the dance floor complained when Paul Robeson got up to dance with Hammond’s white wife. Josephson showed them the door. On another occasion Josh White, the black folk and blues singer, was sitting at a table with Alan Lomax when Lomax suddenly jumped up and socked another man on the jaw. The man had complained about being shown a table near a Negro. Staff picked him up and threw him out. At a time when interracial acts were unthinkable, film director Nicholas Ray put White together at Cafe Society with the white torch singer Libby Holman, aka the Statue of Libby. She was already notorious. She’d gotten her first break on Broadway in Greenwich Village Follies of 1926 and became known for the bluesy tunes “Moanin’ Low” and “The House of the Rising Sun,” a number she did with White. Scandalously, omnivorously bisexual, Holman took and tossed off numerous lovers, including Jane Bowles and Montgomery Clift; she married the fantastically wealthy R. J. Reynolds heir Zachary Reynolds, then made him so crazy with jealousy he blew his brains out. She was a goddess to the Village’s gays and lesbians.
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