The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Shepherd did the all-night show for less than six months before being shifted to earlier, shorter slots, which cramped his storytelling style but earned him a wider audience, exposing his goofy humor and childhood stories to high school and college students, who became his most devoted fans. He liked to demonstrate his sway over them by staging impromptu gatherings he called “milling,” a precursor to flash mobs. On his Friday night show he’d invite his audience to meet him in Washington Square Park the next day to “mill around.” One Saturday in May of 1957, according to a Voice article, “several hundred young people, mostly in their teens, filled the circle yelling to one another cryptic slogans like ‘Excelsior! . . . Let’s mill!’ . . . Finally, Jean Shepherd, in sports coat and open collar, appeared and mounted the ledge, and the throng, at least a thousand strong, closed in on him.” Shepherd was apparently a bit alarmed at what he’d started. Cops arrived to break up the crowd, who booed and chanted “Excelsior!” As things looked to be getting out of hand Shepherd slipped away in a tiny red Isetta. He also solicited donations from his followers to help John Cassavetes raise the forty thousand dollars he needed to make his first film, Shadows. The opening credits declare that it’s “Presented by Jean Shepherd’s Night People.”

  In the summer of 1960 Shepherd narrated a twelve-minute short film, Village Sunday, shot by Stewart Wilensky as he strolled the Village with a three-person crew. It’s charming and guileless as any travelogue. Artists hang their work on the Washington Square fence, while collegiate folkies gather around the turned-off fountain having a hootenanny with guitars, banjos, and fiddles. Guys doing their best to look like Kerouac glide by on motor scooters. Italian men in shirtsleeves play bocce (which Shepherd, showing his roots, murderously mispronounces as bow-chay). A hand-lettered sign announces a reading at the Village Gate by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Ted Joans declaims a poem in which he seems to be instructing chicks in how not to be uptight.

  From 1964 through 1967 Shepherd broadcast a Saturday-night show live from Limelight, a popular nightspot at 91 Seventh Avenue South at Barrow Street. The original owner, Helen Gee, had opened it in 1954 as rather a different kind of place, a coffeehouse/restaurant with a photography gallery in the back. Born Helen Wimmer in 1919, she had run away from home at sixteen to live in Greenwich Village with a man, the thirty-year-old artist Yun Gee. An “Oriental” man and a teenage white girl living in sin was barely tolerated even in the Village in the 1930s, and in her 1997 memoir Gee remembers that when they left the safety of the neighborhood they walked the streets at some distance from each other. They were married in 1942, but after her husband was committed to a mental institution Helen raised their daughter single-handedly, working as a photo retoucher.

  Limelight was a long, airy space, formerly a strip bar in the 1940s that had been shut down after a shooting. The decor was white-walled and uncluttered with the bohemian kitsch typical of the Village. Coffeehouses were new to New York in 1954. Photo galleries weren’t new but still very rare. Photography was still just coming into its own as art in the mid-1950s, pushed along by the blockbuster “Family of Man” exhibition Edward Steichen curated for MoMA in 1955. It brought together more than 500 images by 273 photographers from 68 countries, a kind of United Nations of images showing “the everydayness in the relationships of man to himself, to his family, to the community, and to the world we live in,” as Steichen wrote. A quarter of a million people saw the show at MoMA; an estimated nine million saw it during its world tour over the next few years. Still, Gee’s backroom gallery, where she showed and tried to sell work by Weston, Atget, Walker Evans, Moholy-Nagy, and others, took a while to catch on. The front room was popular from the start, though never a great financial success. “The only time I see one of those Beat characters,” Gee was quoted in a 1958 New York Daily News, “is when there’s a job open for a dishwasher. They’ll come over for a few days to pick up enough money to go back to their flats on the Left Bank.” She recalled that a group of them once walked into the gallery, “looked at the pictures, couldn’t raise enough for one cup of coffee—and left.” Her regular clientele weren’t much more well-heeled. It was a hangout for professors from NYU and the New School and actors from the nearby Theater de Lys, Circle in the Square, and Cherry Lane. In her memoir, Gee jokes that with so many of these actors hanging around, Limelight was “the downtown Sardi’s.” The Voice held its first Obie awards ceremony there in June 1956, with Shelley Winters as the mistress of ceremonies. It was also popular with the writers Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer. Gee writes that “I was never too happy to see” Mailer, “never knowing what he’d do next. He’d stand on the stairs scanning the room then go weaving his way through, sometimes drunk, sometimes stoned, but always in great fighting form.” Ed Koch came in three nights a week for the steak dinner. Jean Shepherd was a regular too.

  Among the photographers who sat over coffee at Limelight were Weegee, Evans, Lisette Model, and Robert Frank. They were kindred spirits in that all four of them pushed photography away from art and glamour toward a more challenging or at least less happy-face realism. Frank and other edgy young photographers hated the feel-good blandness of “Family of Man,” which he derided as the “tits and tots show.” Weegee was the city’s most celebrated crime-scene photographer, who in his ceaseless roaming around town had taken thousands of shots of “the Naked City” (his coinage) in all its rough, unvarnished, working-class diversity—Bowery drunks, tenement kids, hoodlums dead and alive, drag queens stepping daintily out of paddy wagons, strippers, “camera club girls” (including the not yet iconic Bettie Page), crowds packed like sea lions on the beach at Coney Island. He snapped thousands of pictures in the Village, and as an older man he loved to sit in Washington Square flirting with the pretty girls. Like Frank, Model had grown up in Europe in a wealthy Jewish household, in Vienna. She left Paris in 1938 in advance of the Nazi invasion of France. Her anti-glamour photography had a sideshow quality to it—she liked shooting fat ladies, midgets, transvestites. She lived in full-on bohemian poverty in a tiny basement apartment near Sheridan Square and taught at the New School, where she had a life-changing influence on Diane Arbus.

  In 1961, facing mounting bills and pressure to unionize the staff (the AFL-CIO was aggressively organizing in Village clubs and eateries), Gee sold Limelight to Manny Roth and Les Lone of Cafe Wha? By the time Shepherd started broadcasting there in 1964 it had turned over again and was, in effect, just another Village tourist bar, which he filled up for a few hours a week with his loyal fans. Because it was a Saturday night and those fans might get rowdy and shout out “improper speech,” WOR pioneered the use of a seven-second taped delay for these broadcasts. Not a fan of Shepherd’s antics, Gee saw it as a desecration, an invasion of yahoos into the place she’d founded for artists and intellectuals. She continued to live in the Village and represented photographers as an agent until her death in 2004 at the age of eighty-five.

  Despite his adoring listeners, Shepherd increasingly chafed at the limitations of regional radio. After leaving WOR in 1977 he concentrated on film and television with some success; the bittersweet (mostly bitter) 1983 holiday film A Christmas Story, which he wrote and narrated, is considered a seasonal classic. But he never quite achieved the status he thought he deserved as a modern-day Mark Twain or Will Rogers and withdrew to Sanibel Island off the Florida gulf coast where, a self-professed sorehead, he lived in relative seclusion until dying of natural causes in 1999. No doubt he’d find some rueful satisfaction in knowing that today copies of I, Libertine are collectors’ items going for as much as $350 for the hardcover and over $200 for the paperback.

  IT’S AN OFTEN NOTED IRONY THAT THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE FLAGSHIP of the beatnik-hippie-antiwar counterculture in the 1960s, was founded in the 1950s by World War II vets. Born and raised on the Upper West Side, Dan Wolf had fought in the Pacific during the war and was, in 1954, on Christopher Street, self-conscious about still living like a callow bohemian as his for
tieth birthday loomed—he’d shave several years off when asked. Ed Fancher, another vet, had just turned thirty and lived upstairs. They met taking classes on the GI Bill at the New School. A friend in the Village, Jerry Tallmer, had enlisted a few days after Pearl Harbor and operated radio and radar in the army air corps. He watched the mushroom cloud bloom over Nagasaki from a nearby plane and didn’t like what he saw.

  They decided that the Village needed a hip new weekly, an alternative to the Villager. Founded in 1933, the Villager was a small-town paper in the big city, a prosperous weekly shopper filled with ads for local businesses, in which the news was mostly in-depth wedding announcements and coverage of bake sales. “I always thought of it as a newspaper for little old ladies with cats,” Tallmer later wrote, “and there was, in fact, a cat named Scoopy who conducted a chitchat column for the musty Villager from his vantage point, as I remember it, on a windowsill of The Villager’s office.” One of the side effects of the creation of the Voice was that it prompted the Villager to brush off the cobwebs and report more local news. When the Voice eventually outgrew the Village and became more of a national counterculture organ, the Villager soldiered on as the neighborhood’s paper of record, a role it continues to fill to this day.

  The three vets asked a fourth to throw in with them, Norman Mailer. Mailer, in his early thirties, was going through a prolonged rough patch. The Naked and the Dead had been published to enormous success in 1948, making him a star at twenty-five. It had been all downhill from there. After a disappointing year in Hollywood he returned to New York in 1951 and lived at various spots on the Lower East Side, at first down by the Brooklyn Bridge, later up in what would be called the East Village. He was with his second wife, Adele Morales, who had been Fancher’s girlfriend when Mailer met her. His second novel, Barbary Shore, had been published to general disappointment in 1951. He then agonized over final edits to The Deer Park, rejected by several publishers before Putnam took it on. Drinking too much, smoking too much pot, and gobbling speed, Mailer often held court at the White Horse Tavern, but then he was an indefatigable scene maker and held court in many places.

  The Wolf-Fancher-Tallmer trio got Mailer to invest five thousand dollars in their new venture, matching Fancher’s initial investment, which bought him a 30 percent interest in the new company. Mailer’s father, Isaac, became the paper’s accountant. They rented an office above a bakery on Greenwich Avenue and assembled a tiny staff. Wolf would do the editing while Fancher ran the business side. Tallmer was associate editor and one of two drama critics—Vance Bourjaily came on board to cover “legitimate” uptown theater, while Tallmer presciently concentrated on and championed the small theaters downtown.

  They put out the first issue of the Village Voice on October 26, 1955. It was a timid and inauspicious start, twelve pages that looked and read like a do-it-yourself Villager with a five-cent cover charge and a circulation of twenty-five hundred copies. But some people in the Village recognized its potential. A young man named Art D’Lugoff was one of the first advertisers, taking out a one-inch ad for a midnight concert he was producing at Circle in the Square. The performer was the blacklisted Pete Seeger. D’Lugoff’s friend Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun) helped him distribute flyers all over the Village and the concert was a sellout. D’Lugoff and Hansberry waited and bussed tables at the Potpourri, a restaurant on Washington Place that was another early Voice advertiser.

  Other early advertisers included the Eighth Street Bookshop, local productions of The Threepenny Opera and The Cherry Orchard, the Rienzi, Tony Pastor’s Downtown (“3 Revues Nightly”), Ernie’s 3 Ring Circus, a boxing tournament at St. Anthony’s, and classifieds like “SPACE GIRL WANTED—for vacancy in famous outer space corps. No experience necessary, but dancer, mime or actress preferred; must be very extroverted. Work fascinating, mostly evenings. If you qualify hail a flying saucer and come to see.” In June 1956 the Greenwich Village East Merchants Association paid for a full page with the banner “VISIT THE BOOMING EAST VILLAGE!”—an early use of that term.

  Probably the most famous early advertiser was Mailer himself, who ran a half-page for his new novel The Deer Park in the fourth issue. Critics were savaging it and Mailer, who designed the ad himself, quoted all its worst reviews: “Disgusting,” “Nasty,” “Silly,” “Embarrassing,” “Unsavory,” “Moronic Mindlessness,” and so on. Mailer was feeling “the empty winds of a postpartum gloom,” he writes in Advertisements for Myself. He decided to help his Voice friends by writing a column. The first installment of “Quickly: a column for slow readers” appeared in the January 11, 1956, issue. Calling the Village “one of the bitter provinces,” Mailer wrote to his readers that “given your general animus to those more talented than yourselves,” he fully expected his column to be “actively disliked each week.”

  The mail in the following issue indicates that he’d succeeded. “It certainly is so real kind and nice of the editor to hire you as a columnist,” one reader wrote. “My God, it is to be hoped so deeply this occupation will keep you from writing another novel.” Another wrote: “This guy Mailer. He’s a hostile, narcissistic pest. Lose him.”

  Over the next few months the more readers howled, the longer and shaggier Mailer’s column grew. He changed its name to the more Mailerian “The Hip and the Square.” He fought with Wolf constantly, raging over every typo in his copy—and there were some lulus, as when “the nuances of growth” became “the nuisances of growth.” Wolf in turn struggled to bring some order to Mailer’s rambling, liquor- and speed-powered rants. In one column Mailer seemed to be writing in defense of rape. In another he went on at some length about Waiting for Godot, which he’d neither seen nor read. By May they’d all had it with one another. Mailer devoted much of his farewell column of May 2 to complaining about typos in the previous week’s copy and poking fun at the editors. Then, being Mailer, he ran a full-page ad in the next issue, an apologetic “public notice” in which, having now actually read Godot, he corrected his previous opinions of it.

  Mailer’s direct involvement in the paper was brief and tempestuous but a significant influence. Mailer and his partners had “different ideas of how the paper should develop,” he later wrote. “They wanted it to be successful; I wanted it to be outrageous.” Wolf and Fancher thought the paper should establish itself in the community and with advertisers before it provoked any controversy. Mailer argued that being provocative was in fact the only way to establish the paper, give it an identity of its own. His instinct would prove to be right. The Village didn’t need a second Villager. Had the Voice remained at that level of ambition it never would have become the paper of record for hip America. Mailer pushed Wolf and Fancher to develop a paper with a distinct personality. Voice writers would become famous, and infamous, for their distinctive voices, contentious opinions, and passionate interests. Paid little or nothing for the first eight years of the paper’s existence, they came to it because it was a forum where they could express themselves freely.

  Fancher, a Jean Shepherd fan, invited Jean to write for the paper, which he started doing in the spring of 1956—articles about hi-fi at first, then his own column, “The Night People.” Fancher also bought a little advertising time on Shepherd’s show, and Shepherd, as a fan and contributor, gave the paper a lot more airtime than it paid for. Fancher credited him with selling many subscriptions at a time when the paper was struggling to get established. Over the years Shepherd would emcee a number of Voice-sponsored events, from jazz concerts to an annual Village Voice Washington Square sports car rally, which Shepherd, a car nut, and the paper’s auto columnist Dan List invented.

  The Voice distinguished itself from the start with its coverage of the arts, especially literature, music, and theater. Tallmer saw the significance of the Village’s Off-Broadway theater movement; he and Fancher invented the Obie, the Off-Broadway Theater Award, in 1956. In the 1960s the Voice would similarly be out in front on the Off-Off-Broadway movement. Jonas Mekas began the V
oice’s first film column, “Movie Journal,” in 1958. “So much was happening in cinema,” he recalls. “I kept looking in the Voice, which I liked because Norman Mailer was there,” but he didn’t see anyone covering movies. He went to the office to meet Tallmer and offered his expertise. At first he tried to cover everything from big Hollywood releases such as Around the World in Eighty Days, which he didn’t like, to whatever was showing at Cinema 16 and European art movies, for example, The Seventh Seal by the new Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, which not surprisingly he liked very much (“There is more cinema in ‘The Seventh Seal’ than in the entire Hollywood production of 1958”). “But then it became so busy, the independent scene, that I could not see everything that was happening,” he says. He called his friend Andrew Sarris and brought him to the Voice to cover commercial films while he focused on the art and avant-garde.