The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  The Manhattan district attorney had his man in the Au Go Go audience furiously taking notes when Bruce opened on March 31. He caught a lackluster performance. Bruce, as he would for what was left of his career, spent much of it obsessing over the minutiae of his court cases, interspersed with some of his raunchy old bits. One new routine of note was about JFK’s assassination the previous November. Time had claimed that when Jackie scrambled out of the limo after the shots, she was courageously seeking help for her stricken husband. “That’s bullshit,” Lenny said. “That’s a dirty lie. [She] hauled ass to save her ass.” He said he hoped his daughter would do the same. A few nights later, cops entered Bruce’s dressing room before his show and arrested him and Howard Solomon for violations of Penal Code 1140-A, which prohibited “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure” entertainment that might “tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and others.” Out on bail, Bruce went onstage the following night. This time he and Ella Solomon were arrested.

  At Ginsberg’s request, Helen Elliott and Helen Weaver, big fans of Bruce’s, wrote and circulated a petition against his “censorship [and] harassment.” Dan Wakefield and Lucien Carr helped. Nearly one hundred cultural heavyweights signed, including Arthur Miller, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Paul Newman, Henry Miller, Dick Gregory, Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Gore Vidal, Malcolm Cowley, Nat Hentoff, and Irving Howe. Kerouac, who never dug Bruce’s act, refused. The venerable theologian Reinhold Niebuhr signed, never having caught Lenny’s act. He later asked for his name to be removed. Many of them were the type of liberal do-gooders Bruce despised. Contrarian to the bitter end, he quipped: “The problem of people helping you with protest is that historically they march you straight to the chair.” Privately, however, he called Weaver to thank her, and when he visited her in her West Thirteenth Street apartment, she writes, “His aura struck me almost like a physical blow when he walked in. It was a strange aura, almost repellent: very sexual, but like both sexes at once, like half man half woman. He reminded me of Di Angelo, my lesbian lover, that slightly sinister quality she had.” They had sex, napped, cracked some jokes, then he was gone.

  The trial began that June. Protesters showed up to denounce the “Courtroom of the Absurd.” Bruce fans (Ginsberg, Weaver, Jules Feiffer, Philip Roth) packed one side of the courtroom, opponents the other. The testimony of the inspector who’d taken notes at Bruce’s show amounted to a terrible Lenny Bruce impersonation. Bruce complained that the guy was not only flagrantly misquoting him but murdering his act. Both sides trotted out expert witnesses; Dorothy Kilgallen and Hentoff appeared on Bruce’s behalf. Weaver remembers the prim, devoutly Catholic Kilgallen saying, “They’re just words, Judge.” Mort Sahl, who’d followed Bruce at the Au Go Go, turned down the defense’s request to speak out for him. America’s other leading satirist, Sahl had always envied Bruce’s notoriety. Weaver visited Bruce once in his room at the fleabag Hotel Marlton, where Kerouac had holed up after Weaver tossed him out of her apartment years earlier. Bruce’s room was like a representation of his mind by that point, a manic clutter of law books, legal briefs, and his personal trial tapes, “a very sad spectacle,” Weaver writes.

  As the trial dragged on, Bruce fired his lawyer, whom he couldn’t pay anyway. He proceeded to make a pitiable shambles of defending himself, at one point pleading with the three judges, “Don’t finish me off in show business!” They did. They pronounced him guilty and sentenced him to four months in the workhouse, which he never served. More damagingly, his cabaret card was revoked, ending his career in New York City. But his career was all but dead everywhere by then. Almost no club owner would touch him. He found some work in San Francisco, but—again, one thinks of Elvis—he was a distracted, drug-addled ghost onstage. His final performance was at the Fillmore, with the Mothers of Invention opening for him. He was like Elvis in one last way: he died on the toilet in his home, of an overdose, in August 1966. He was forty. He joined Ferlinghetti, Rosset, and a few others as a pioneering saint (and in his case martyr) of the postwar free speech movement. In 2003 New York governor George Pataki granted him a pardon for the 1964 conviction, the first posthumous pardon in the state’s history.

  The Café Au Go Go went on to be one of the great rock, folk, and blues clubs in the city. The list of acts who played and jammed there before it shut its doors in 1969 includes Jimi Hendrix, the Fugs, Cream, the Blues Project, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Chambers Brothers, the Youngbloods, Richie Havens, and a band called the Company that morphed into Buffalo Springfield. Professor Irwin Corey, of whom Lenny had been a big fan, also performed there, as did George Carlin, who’d carry on Lenny’s anticensorship challenges in his own way.

  BY THE MID-1960S THE VILLAGE’S PERIOD AS A RELATIVELY ISOLATED and exclusive enclave of outsiders had ended. Disaffected baby boomer youth around the country read On the Road and Howl and the Village Voice, listened to Dylan and Hendrix, and fled from whatever boring suburb or dysfunctional home where they were feeling alienated to Greenwich Village and the East Village, the hip meccas of the East Coast, or to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco (where the population jumped from fifteen thousand in 1965 to a hundred thousand in 1967). The Village that had been a rare sanctuary in the 1950s was now just one node in an international chain of counterculture centers that included every decent-sized city and college campus. The weekend beatniks with their price-tagged bongos were replaced by weekend hippies—“plastic hippies,” Villagers called them—wearing the brand-new headbands and love beads they bought in Bleecker and MacDougal Street boutiques.

  Edmund White, who moved to MacDougal Street from the Midwest in 1962, remembers, “There were so many people . . . It was really a mob scene. Cars couldn’t get through the streets. I mean like a car could never get down MacDougal.” A lot of the crowd, he remembers, were what Manhattanites call B & T (bridge and tunnel) kids, in from New Jersey and the outer boroughs to party, “who would come over and be belligerent to everybody.” It got so bad that one Friday night in March 1966 the NYPD tried barring all nonneighborhood vehicles from the entire “café area,” the zone from West Fourth Street down to Houston. Only drivers who could prove they resided in the Village were allowed past the barriers, a clear attempt to discourage the B & T crowd. It didn’t quite work as planned. Some fifteen hundred youths took advantage of the trafficless MacDougal Street to stage an impromptu protest, chanting “Up with the Village and down with the police” and “Stop the fuzz,” according to the next day’s Times. Club owners in the zone complained that their business fell way off that night. The experiment was not repeated. Still, police kept up a heightened presence in the “cabaret and coffeehouse district” that Saturday night, and teenagers continued to resist. Groups of several hundred of them marched down MacDougal Street chanting “We shall overcome” and tussled with mounted cops, with some arrests for disorderly conduct. After ending the crackdown, a beleaguered police spokesman insisted “heatedly” that “At no time did we surrender to beatniks.” Meanwhile the long block of West Eighth Street connecting Fifth and Sixth Avenues, where the painters had hung out in the postwar years, was now “All neon and noise, crowded with peddlers competing for a few feet of sidewalk . . . a vivisected slice of 42nd Street transplanted downtown, where drag queens, drug freaks, and mobs of gawking tourists promenade.”

  Although still fantastically low by today’s measure, Village rents kept climbing. Until 1969, when the city designated most of the central Village a historic preservation district, developers continued to knock down the tenements and older buildings where apartments were cheapest to build new high-rises and fill them with middle-class tenants. “Today,” one guidebook published in 1966 sniffed, “most of Greenwich Village provides a charming, interesting backdrop for thousands of unctuous middle-income urbanites bottled into prosaic, but artfully titled apartment buildings.” It was becoming “little more than an offbeat
shopping and modern-living center.” That was an exaggeration—the Village still had some years to go as a place that pioneered and influenced American culture before it turned into the affluent bedroom-and-boutiques community of the twenty-first century. Still, it’s an indication that the trend was already quite evident in the rising rents, crowded streets, and increasing commercialization of the 1960s.

  The avant-garde zeitgeist that had resided almost exclusively in Greenwich Village through the 1950s began to look for cheaper places to live. Artists colonized the former garment industry lofts along the Broadway stem south of Houston Street, creating what came to be known as the Soho art district. The East Village became the epicenter of the new counterculture. Soon people would begin referring to Greenwich Village as the West Village. From the 1970s on, much—though not all—of the new art, music, dance, film, theater, and so on that was made and presented below Fourteenth Street was outside the Village. In 1965 the East Village got its own alternative to the Voice, the East Village Other. Hippie, psychedelic, anarchic, and sexed-up, it made the Voice look like a middle-aged “bo-lib” (bohemian-liberal) spinster, lasted a respectable six years, and achieved a circulation of around forty thousand before it ran out of gas and closed up in 1971. Meanwhile the Voice itself was becoming less identified with the Village. By 1967 it was a national presence, the largest-selling weekly in the country, the hip paper of record. It topped a circulation of a hundred thousand, yet its readership in the Village was still around thirteen thousand, where it had been for years. The new readers were elsewhere. In recognition that it was outgrowing its neighborhood roots, it changed its logo that year, downplaying the village and magnifying the VOICE. From then on, although a square like Vice President Spiro Agnew might still misidentify it as “the Greenwich Village Voice,” it was more commonly known simply as the Voice. It would keep various Village offices until the late 1980s, when it moved to Cooper Square, but the lower-case village in its name was increasingly vestigial.

  Middle-class residents began to feel they were under siege from outsiders in the mid-1960s. The Washington Square Park they had fought only a decade earlier to save from Robert Moses’s bulldozers was now overrun in a different way. In 1964 the neighborhood’s two Democratic district leaders, Carol Greitzer and Ed Koch, asked the NYPD to bear down on the park’s “alcoholic derelicts, narcotic addicts and sexual perverts.” The park also filled up with more “troubadours” than ever, few of them the well-scrubbed college kids as before; political radicals of every type and cause; and religious prophets of every calling, from Hare Krishnas to Jesus freaks to the Gandalfian character with the long white beard and white robe who warned that a new flood was coming because his listeners had been drinking and dancing and fornicating. “Oh, how you love to fornicate,” he intoned. Meanwhile, gang kids and other hoodlums and junkies roamed the Village streets in predatory packs, mugging and robbing with something close to impunity. “I was robbed on the street, on Bleecker,” Edmund White recalls. “It was around six o’clock, and there were tons of people around. These guys had hollowed out the pockets in their overcoats, and they had guns there but the coat was sort of covering it unless you were standing directly in front of them. But nobody wanted to be bothered, get involved with that, you know. I guess you could definitely say from ’67 on it was very edgy.”

  It wasn’t just college kids and young adults coming to the Village anymore. From the mid-1960s on an epidemic of underage runaways flooded both the West Village and East Village and created a whole other set of conditions and problems. Too young to get legitimate work or sign a lease, they lived on the streets, floated between friends’ pads, got rooms in cheap and dangerous flophouses, dodged cops, and often found themselves forced to hook and hustle to get by. They were easy prey for the muggers, rapists, drug dealers, and pimps who were also a growing presence. By 1968 Judson House was operating a crisis center for runaway minors. At first it offered them “a place to get their heads together” for a few nights while counselors from the church contacted their parents and tried to arrange for the kids to go home. But it soon developed into a long-term residence for more than a dozen kids, average age fifteen, who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave. A few years later, Father Bruce Ritter opened the first Covenant House shelter for runaway minors on La Guardia Place. Through the 1970s and ’80s Covenant House grew into a huge multicity program. In 1990, facing numerous charges of sexual and financial misconduct that were tabloid fodder for months, Ritter was forced to resign.

  VALERIE SOLANAS WAS THIRTY BY THE TIME SHE ARRIVED IN THE Village in 1966, and she fit right in with the new outsiders crowding its streets. She’d been a teenage runaway and a drifter for some time, and like Djuna Barnes decades earlier she was quite damaged by the time she appeared. Born in 1936, she grew up in New Jersey, where, according to a sister, their bartender father regularly molested her. Later, when her mother and a despised stepfather couldn’t handle her rebelliousness, they sent her to live with her grandfather who, she said, tried to beat it out of her. She ran away at fifteen and would profess a hatred of men for the rest of her life. Over the next few years she had a married sailor’s child who was taken away from her for adoption, but she still managed to graduate high school and do well at the University of Maryland, earning honors in psychology. After adding a year of grad school at the University of Minnesota she hit the road again, a hobohemian tomboy waif who panhandled and hooked her way to Berkeley.

  She continued to turn tricks and bum change when she reached the Village, staying in the run-down Marlton while trying to make it as a writer. In the February 9, 1967, issue of the Voice she ran two small ads. One was for readings, at the Directors Theater School on East Fourteenth Street, of her play, which had one act but four titles:

  Up Your Ass

  or

  From the Cradle to the Boat

  or

  The Big Suck

  or

  Up from the Slime

  It also had three dedications: one to Me, one to Myself, and the third to I. The other ad was for her mimeographed pamphlet, SCUM Manifesto, which according to the ad was available for a dollar fifty at the Eighth Street Bookshop and other venues. SCUM stood for the Society for Cutting Up Men. The pamphlet begins, “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore, and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.” It goes on to describe all the ways males are deficient and depraved, as are all women who aren’t SCUM. It explains how SCUM will wipe most of them off the planet and create a utopia for the free, courageous, wise, and groovy SCUM sisterhood.

  Up Your Ass delivers the same basic message in satirical dramatic form, as the Solanas-like character Bongi Perez—described forty years later in the Voice as “a wisecracking, trick-turning, thoroughly misanthropic dyke”—matches wits with variously loathsome men, a couple of them designated only as White Cat and Spade Cat, and street queens and the straight women who distress her the most, who are willing to “eat shit”—literally—for their men. Both the manifesto and the play can be seen as early examples of the extremist feminist-separatist tracts that became more familiar in the 1970s.

  With its eccentric ideas about the future, SCUM Manifesto can also be read as a distant cousin to William Burroughs’s mad sci-fi visions. That’s evidently how Maurice Girodias, publisher of the Olympia Press, read it. Effectively Barney Rosset’s opposite number in France, Girodias published a mix of pornography and literature, the latter including works by Beckett and Henry Miller, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Nabokov’s Lolita. After several prosecutions on obscenity charges in France, he had moved himself and his press to the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 and was seeking edgy new writers to publish. They didn’t come with more edge than Solanas, who responded to an ad in the Voice and showed him the manifesto. He liked its bizarre sense of humor and gave her
a five-hundred-dollar advance to write a novel on a similar theme. Solanas, with her long-ingrained mistrust of all males, immediately decided he was out to cheat her and never delivered the novel.

  By then she had focused her fiercely obsessive attentions on another male, Andy Warhol. She took a copy of Up Your Ass to the Factory. Warhol liked the title but apparently never read the play. Solanas began to hound him, in person and through innumerable phone calls, demanding the manuscript back, but it had been lost in the clutter at the Factory. (It wasn’t rediscovered for decades and is now archived at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.) Trying to placate her, he let her do a small scene in the movie he was then shooting, I, a Man. It didn’t help. She continued to stalk both Warhol and Girodias, demanding thousands of dollars she was convinced they owed her, working herself up with the idea that they were conspiring together to keep her down. She became a familiar crazy on the streets of the Village and East Village, hawking the manifesto, harassing male passersby, trying to recruit women for SCUM, fitting right in with the increasingly sideshow milieu of speed freaks, flower children, acid casualties, religious nuts, and street queens. “For a while she was hanging out on St. Mark’s Place,” Agosto Machado recalls. “People would say, ‘Just leave her alone.’ She’d be picked up making threats and brought back in. I met her briefly, but I was so shy and she was a pretty strong person, even when she wasn’t talking . . . You’d choose your words carefully around her, because what would come out of her could lacerate.”