The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Not everybody agreed, including Jack. When the final edit was done, Leslie screened it for the cast and friends at MoMA, “and every single person there, except myself, hated it,” Leslie says. They were disappointed, he believes, by “the fact that it was essentially about nothing, all these small moments, all the characteristics of its modesty, in the sense that it doesn’t try to force you into believing anything, because it’s all music from beginning to end. People were expecting something more like Shadows. They were all very unhappy with it.” That’s why, he says, he was shocked after the Cinema 16 premiere when it became “a cultural event.”

  AFTER THE PREMIERE, LESLIE, KEROUAC, AND FRANK TOOK PULL My Daisy out to the West Coast, where they got strange and often hostile receptions. In LA Leslie visited his friend the Abstract Expressionist Bill Brice, who as the son of Fanny Brice was “part of old Hollywood royalty.” At Brice’s urging, he reluctantly screened Daisy in Brice’s home for a few of Brice’s friends: Vincent Price, Gypsy Rose Lee, André Previn, the screenwriter Jim Poe (Lilies of the Field), British poet turned screenwriter John Collier (he worked on The African Queen with James Agee), the novelist Harry Brown, and Brice’s brother-in-law, the notoriously hardcase Hollywood producer Ray Stark. Stark would later produce the movie adaptation of Funny Girl, the musical based on his mother-in-law’s life. He wanted a proven star like Edyie Gorme to play the part, but David Merrick persuaded him to try an unknown youngster he’d heard at Bon Soir in the Village. Stark hired Barbra Streisand only when she agreed to sign a crushing four-picture deal. “So we show the film, and there is complete silence, of course, at the end,” Leslie recalls. Stark particularly seemed to hate it.

  Pull My Daisy was scheduled to be screened at the 1959 San Francisco Film Festival. Leslie rendezvoused in Venice Beach with Kerouac and they met a dude ranch cowboy, “a nice guy, has this big beautiful white convertible, an Oldsmobile or something,” who “drove us straight through to San Francisco. When we get to San Francisco early in the morning, the streets are all festooned, all the so-called beatnik bars have banners out, ‘Welcome Kerouac,’ signs put up, ‘Beat Street.’ Jack and I get a motel mainly for blacks, the motel that black musicians can stay in. We’re the only two white people that come there. They’re not too friendly, they’re a little worried, but they’re accepting, so we go in.”

  Barnaby Conrad, who’d written several books on bullfighting and owned a swank bullfight-themed bar called El Matador, had arranged a cocktail reception for Kerouac. “It was where all of the celebrities and literati or whatever meet. An upper-class, super-privileged scene bar.” Leslie rented a tux but Kerouac wore his usual lumberjack outfit, which miffed Conrad, Leslie recalls. He abandoned them, unrecognized, at the bar. “One woman sidled up to Jack, but he was in sort of a disagreeable mood—a very difficult situation for him. Because you never know who to trust, what people are trying to do at you, for you, against you, what they want. It was very tricky. So she left, and we’re sitting there.” Then David Niven swanned in, “with two or three beautiful dames on his arm, wearing a tuxedo, looks his most sparkling, wonderful self.” It turned out that Niven was a Kerouac fan and Conrad had arranged the party at his request. Niven called Leslie and Kerouac over to his table. “Now everybody is in heaven, they love us because we are accepted, we have been given the olive branch, you know, the prize. So everybody is accepting and ecstatic. And the drinks are brought to the table, and Niven bangs his glass, everybody stands up and holds their glass out. He says, ‘I want to propose a toast to Mr. Kerouac, striking a blow for freedom.’ And at that point, I gotta tell you, the club went crazy. If Jack and I had told everybody to drop their pants and turn around, we could have fucked every living thing in that goddamned club. They were there in the palms of our hands. It was delightful. We went to Niven’s house with this whole group of people. Jack had a liaison with somebody and went off to the right, I went off to the left.”

  The following night they met up with Frank for the festival screening. Shirley Temple Black, whose husband was the festival’s president, introduced the film. “The audience was really hostile. We were supposed to talk. Jack had nothing to say, Robert had nothing to say, so it was all on my shoulders. There were just bad vibes.” The film won the festival’s first prize for “Best American Experimental Film” anyway.

  BY 1959 THE BEATNIK INVASION OF THE VILLAGE WAS IN FULL force. The Bleecker-MacDougal fun zone was crowded with door-to-door coffeehouses and cafés. In the summer of 1959 the Cafe Borgia, the Figaro, the Rafio, the Flamingo, the Dragon’s Den, the Cock and Bull (later the Bitter End), and the Take 3 were all operating on Bleecker, while the Rienzi, the Reggio, the Continental, Cafe Wha?, the Gaslight, and Playhouse Cafe lined MacDougal, with the Fat Black Pussycat around the corner on Minetta Lane. On weekends hordes of tourists strolled MacDougal Street past sidewalk pitchmen trying to lure them inside. The crowds spilled into the street, blocking the path of the tourist buses and taxis.

  A few weeks after shooting Pull My Daisy, Amram and Kerouac wandered into the Figaro for a disheartening lesson in what they, or the media, had wrought.

  We eased our way through to the back room of the Figaro. It was jammed with young people, many wearing black berets, all black clothes, the young men sporting glasses and goatees, some carrying what appeared to be recently purchased knapsacks. Most of the young men and women were carrying books, whose covers they displayed as they spoke to one another. There were copies of On the Road, a poetry anthology of Dylan Thomas, and books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Most of the young women wore black fishnet stockings, black skirts, and tight-fitting black sweaters. Many of the young men carried brand-new bongos, some with the price tags still dangling from the tuning keys.

  “It’s like Catholic school,” said Jack. “Everyone’s in uniform.” For a place packed with young people, the atmosphere was remarkably tense. I felt a knot slowly developing in my stomach.

  On the walls were photos of Amram and Kerouac, Charlie Parker, Monk, Miles. Kerouac remarked, “We’re like tourists in a museum about ourselves.” The beatniks glowered at them. “We weren’t ‘authentic,’ ” Amram recalls. “They thought Jack and I were two old unemployed dudes from Elizabeth, New Jersey, trying to score.”

  “It’s a new scene,” the manager explained to them. “The fun times are over. Business is booming all over the Village. More money than you would believe. Look at all these kids in their outfits. It’s like a Shriner’s convention. They all get dressed up and come down to the Village to be Beatniks. This is happening all over the country. You guys started a trend.”

  At the manager’s request, Amram and Kerouac gave an impromptu performance, Kerouac reading something he’d just written over Amram’s French horn. The beatniks were hostile and scornful. They refused to believe that Kerouac was Kerouac. He and Amram left, as a bus decanted a group of middle-aged tourists in front of the café. A guy from Ohio gave them the once-over and started advising them on how to dress and talk if they wanted to fit in with the Village scene. He’d read up on it in a how-to-be-a-beatnik book.

  Three Kerouac books appeared in 1959, and four more in 1960. He’d written most of them years earlier but the appearance that he was churning the stuff out at such a furious pace confirmed for the public Capote’s quip that he was just typewriting. Reviews tended to be harsh and dismissive and sales dropped off. He retreated farther, both physically and mentally. Kerouac was always a bundle of contradictions and confusions. There was the ebullient, spontaneous, fun-loving guy Amram knew, but also the suspicious, surly brooder many others saw. “Jack Kerouac was scary,” Timothy Leary, who first met him in 1961, noted. “Behind the dark good looks of a burly lumberjack was a New England mill-town sullenness, Canuck-Catholic soggy distrust. This is one unhappy kid, I thought.” He was the free spirit who never cut his mother’s apron strings, the prophet of the open road who never learned how to drive, the avatar of a counterculture he never liked or trusted. By the mid-1960s h
e’d withdrawn completely and spent much of his last years holing up with his mother in Florida, in Lowell, and on Cape Cod, staying in contact with Amram and Clellon Holmes and other friends only through long, lonely, drunken telephone calls.

  In 1968 Jack and his mother moved to his last little house in suburban St. Petersburg, Florida. He lay around in front of the television drinking beer, growing fat around the middle—becoming, in effect, the fat suburban slob the Beat Generation was supposed to have opposed. He watched from the wings as his books went out of print. He didn’t get or like the hippies, even though so many of them cited him as an inspiration, and could get as angry as any World War II vet at the Vietnam war protests. In 1969 he wrote an article, “After Me, the Deluge,” that appeared in various papers around the country. It is a sad and presumably drunken rant in which he disavows his role as “the great white father and intellectual forebear who spawned a deluge of alienated radicals, war protestors, dropouts, hippies and even ‘beats.’ ” Always more conservative, politically and socially, than his cultists admit to this day, he told a reporter for the Miami Herald that it was about “the Communist conspiracy,” that the Communists “jumped on my movement and turned it into a Beat insurrection.” He also said the New York Jewish literary mafia had conspired against him. One morning that October, as he sat watching The Galloping Gourmet on TV, already drunk before noon and eating tuna from a can, a vein in his abdomen burst. He was soon dead, at forty-seven.

  22

  Village Voices

  YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT A TERRIBLE LURE THIS PLACE IS TO PEOPLE WHO LIVE OUTSIDE OF THIS PLACE.

  —Jean Shepherd

  GREENWICH VILLAGE IS ONE OF THE BITTER PROVINCES—IT ABOUNDS IN SNOBS AND CRITICS.

  —Norman Mailer

  IN 2010 BARRY FARBER TURNED EIGHTY YEARS OLD—AND CELEBRATED fifty continuous years as a New York radio talk-show host. With his wide-ranging knowledge, his gentle southern accent, and his erudite political conservatism—much more like William F. Buckley than Rush Limbaugh—he always stood out in New York broadcasting. Liberal listeners often told him they hated his politics but loved his show. John Lennon, during his New York years in the 1970s, was a fan. David Amram, who feels a kinship with Farber as a fellow Jew with southern roots in the biggest of northern cities, says he always admired Farber’s courage and conviction.

  Farber was born in Baltimore and raised in North Carolina. When he was in the army from 1952 to 1954, stationed near Washington, D.C., Greenwich Village was the favorite weekend pass destination for everyone on the base. “There was one hot spot after another,” he recalled. He remembered strolling a West Third Street lined with nightclubs, and that the visible gay and lesbian presence in the Village was an eye-opener to a young man from North Carolina, where, he joked, there might be one known gay man per city and smaller towns had to share one.

  He moved to New York in the mid-1950s to be a producer for the glamorous husband-and-wife team Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, pioneers of talk radio and the TV talk show in the 1950s. One of Farber’s favorite memories from his first years in New York is the night he took a beautiful Vogue cover girl on a date to Rick Allmen’s Cafe Bizarre on West Third Street. Cafe Bizarre opened in 1957 as a tourist trap, featuring “beatnik” poets and serving “Bohemian Burgers,” but it also played a seminal early role in the Village’s folk and rock music scenes. When Farber went there the star act was the glowering, growling Brother Theodore, who called his routine stand-up tragedy. Farber took his date backstage to meet Brother Theodore, who he recalls was very impressed with her.

  Theodore Gottlieb was not, obviously, a monk and was, in fact, a wealthy German Jew who’d survived Dachau by signing over his family’s fortune to the Nazis. After the war Albert Einstein helped him enter the United States. From the 1950s on Brother Theodore was a fixture in the Greenwich Village clubs the Village Vanguard, Cafe Bizarre, and the Village Gate, as well as playing a long residency at the 13th Street Theatre. He would also be a regular on Merv Griffin’s TV show and, later, David Letterman’s and do cameos in a few grade-Z drive-in movies. His act, no doubt reflecting his own grim experiences and taciturn nature, turned apocalyptic nihilism into absurdist comedy. He became famous for gloomy aphorisms like “I’ve gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed into me, and neither of us liked what we saw.” Farber fondly remembered one of Brother Theodore’s long-standing riffs, his campaign to have humans abandon bipedalism. (“Down, I say, down on all fours, and you’ll have everything you want, be everything you want to be. Quadrupedalism is the key to every lock, the power that heals, the real McCoy.”) Brother Theodore continued to perform sporadically almost until his death at age ninety-four in Mount Sinai Hospital in 2001.

  In 1960 Farber got his own program at WINS-AM, where his first guest was a fellow southerner, an up-and-coming young civil rights preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. In 1962 he moved over to WOR, New York’s talk radio giant, where he shared office space and airtime with Arlene Francis (maybe best remembered for her twenty-five years as a panelist on What’s My Line?), Faye Henle, and Jean Shepherd. They innovated the talk format at a time when “radio was an adjunct of the music business,” as Shepherd later explained, and most radio hosts just spun a set list of new 45s and cued commercials. “To this day I get asked by Jean Shepherd cult groups to talk about what it was like to share an office with him,” Farber said. “Jean was the real article. Nobody is like Jean. He was a radio philosopher, but he was not dull and pedantic. He was very funny.”

  Shepherd was born in 1921—although when asked he often gave a later date, shaving several years off his age—and was raised in the small town of Hammond, Indiana. His bitterly comic memories of growing up in a small town as a boy named Jean inspired his friend Shel Silverstein to write the Johnny Cash hit “A Boy Named Sue.” In 1955 he came to New York, which he called “the East of golden promise.” He loved it right away. “Do you realize how—how fortunate we are?” he asked his listeners in 1960. “You have no idea what a terrible lure this place is to people who live outside of this place.” He felt especially at home in Greenwich Village, among the jazzbos, Beat writers, and assorted eccentrics and misfits. His métier—long-form, extemporaneous storytelling—was akin to both jazz riffing and the Beats’ love of spontaneous creativity. He started hanging out in the Village the instant he arrived and lived in the neighborhood from the 1960s into the late ’70s.

  In 1956 Shepherd hosted a late-late-night 1 to 5 a.m. program, which he filled with long, wandering monologues, many of them very loosely based on his Midwest boyhood and others satiric observations of contemporary life in America and New York. “I used radio the same way that a writer uses a sheet of paper, to say what he has to say about the world,” he explained. Some of this material appeared in his books In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters and, later, in the movie A Christmas Story. Along the way he spun recordings of jazz and old-time music—his own selections, not from a station list—sometimes playing along on a Jew’s harp or nose flute. He chatted with listeners who called, though with the technology at the time only his end of the conversation went out over the airwaves. He was inventing free-form radio before there was a term for it.

  He quickly developed a small but devoted following. He described them as Night People—“ ‘soreheads,’ ‘eggheads,’ ‘long-hairs,’ ‘outsiders,’ ” he once wrote—as distinguished from the dull, conformist nine-to-five Day People. Unlike freethinking Night People, he believed, Day People were such sheep they’d clamor to buy any book, see any movie, or line up outside any restaurant that the media were somehow buzzing about. One night in the spring of 1956 he decided to test this hypothesis. He asked his listeners to help him invent a fictitious book. He and his callers came up with the juicy title I, Libertine and an author, Frederick R. Ewing, retired from the Royal Navy, gentleman scholar specializing in eighteenth-century erotica, currently residing in Rhodesia. They gave h
im a fictitious British publisher, Excelsior Press. Shepherd then asked all his listeners to go into a bookstore the next day and ask for a copy of I, Libertine. If the clerk asked who published it, they were to reply indignantly, “Excelsior, you fathead!” It became an enduring Shepherd motto (and the title of a 2005 biography).

  His listeners did as he asked and the results exceeded his expectations. One listener, Shepherd later told fellow radio host Long John Nebel, called to tell him that when he went into the famous Eighth Street Bookshop and asked for I, Libertine by Frederick Ewing, the smug, all-knowing guy behind the counter (“He stands back of that cash register and you have a feeling that he wrote Kierkegaard.”) sniffed, “Ewing. It’s about time the public discovered him.” A woman wrote Shepherd that when she brought it up at her weekly bridge party, three ladies said they’d read it “and two of them didn’t like it.” Within a month, the syndicated gossip columnist Earl Wilson was claiming to have had lunch with Ewing and his wife, Marjorie, on their way to India. In two months hoaxers at various newspapers in the United States and Europe were slipping I, Libertine onto their best-seller lists. The Archdiocese of Boston banned the book sight unseen. By then Shepherd figured it had gone far enough. He cooperated with a Wall Street Journal reporter to expose the hoax in August. That only sparked a new round of articles worldwide, including one in Pravda.

  Meanwhile, a friend of Shepherd’s, the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, had told him that Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books was frantically trying to secure the paperback rights to the nonexistent book. When Sturgeon and Shepherd had lunch with Ballantine and explained the hoax, he said he’d publish I, Libertine if they wrote it. They “banged this sucker out,” Shepherd told Nebel, though apparently Sturgeon did virtually all of the actual writing, delivering the manuscript in a three-week marathon. Ballantine rushed it out in September as a thirty-five-cent paperback with a small run of hardcover review copies. Shepherd held the book signing in a Times Square drugstore. The cover art by Kelly Freas, an illustrator for MAD magazine (to which Shepherd would contribute “The Night People vs. ‘Creeping Meatballism’ ” in 1957), shows a smirking eighteenth-century dandy in a tricorner hat and a wench displaying much cleavage, with the copy: “Gadzooks!” quoth I, “but here’s a saucy bawd!” A banner across the top of the cover shouts Turbulent! Turgid! Tempestuous! As a final comeuppance to all those Day People who rushed out to buy the book—reportedly more than two hundred thousand in three months—the writing was in fact, and one suspects intentionally, Tedious! Torpid! Tiresome! The reader expecting a lusty tale of Ye Naughty Olde England must have been supremely disappointed by the resolutely unribald story of Lankford Higger-Piggott, a young swashbuckler working his way up the social ladder and through the ladies of London in the late 1700s.