The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Lesbians found a poet laureate in Audre Lorde. Born in Harlem to poor immigrants from Grenada in 1934, she was a shy and extremely nearsighted child who turned to poetry to express herself. She immersed herself in the Village lesbian culture of the 1950s, then married a lawyer, had two daughters, and divorced him in 1970. She found her voice as a self-described “black feminist lesbian mother poet” in the 1960s and ’70s. At her best she was a sensitive, angry documenter of the city when it was a darker and harder place than it is now, for example in the poem “New York City 1970” (“There is nothing beautiful left in the streets of this city. / I have come to believe in death and renewal by fire.”). At her slightest she wrote political bumper-sticker slogans (“Woman power / is / Black power / is / Human power”), but there was a lot of that being written at the time. When she died of cancer in 1992 she’d moved to St. Croix and adopted an African name, Gambda Adisa, which means Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known.

  34

  Art in the Junkyard

  IN 1969 LANFORD WILSON AND A HANDFUL OF OTHER CINO VETERANS formed the Off-Off-Broadway company that later came to be Circle Rep. They started out in an open space above an uptown Thom McAn shoe store, performing realist plays with social commentary, most famously Wilson’s The Hot l Baltimore, set in a seedy residential hotel. In 1974 Wilson and the company moved back to the Village, renting out the Sheridan Square Playhouse, former site of the Nut Club. The company eventually signed a contract with Actors’ Equity to step up to Off-Broadway status and went on to a successful life as a repertory theater into the 1990s.

  The 1970s were good to Off-Off-Broadway. Ruinous production costs, the decline of Times Square into a seedy porn zone, New York City’s general economic collapse and its abandonment by the middle class and tourists were all very hard on Broadway and Off-Broadway in the period. But the bombed-out and abandoned New York landscape left a lot of free or cheap space for no-budget theater groups, and creative people in all forms, to colonize. The 1970s may have been a low point for New York City generally but it was a playground for the creative, remembered by many now as the last hurrah of downtown Manhattan as a culture engine. It was “a junkyard with serious artistic aspirations,” Edmund White has written. Along with punk rock, underground filmmaking, hip-hop, and graffiti art, Off-Off-Broadway companies and spaces flourished and spread throughout the city. Where there’d been a scant handful in the Cino-Judson 1960s there were more than three hundred by 1975, with their own Off-Off-Broadway Alliance. Many were short-lived, and many critics complained that the quality declined in direct proportion to the growing numbers. Still, if you wanted to make low-budget, experimental theater it could be a busy and productive time.

  “I remember times when we worked an eight o’clock show in one club, a ten o’clock in another, and a midnight show in another,” Chris Kapp, actress and director of La MaMa’s Coffeehouse Chronicles, says of the time. “We worked our asses off. On drugs. It was a terribly creative time. Tremendous energy, but really very focused and hardworking. Those of us who weren’t in the shows would build the sets, hang the lights, write the plays.”

  In 1972 Kapp moved into the small apartment on Bethune Street, half a block from Westbeth, where she was still living in the 2010s. She got a job waitressing at a place called the Gallery on Christopher Street. She remembers that the northwest corner of the Village was “very gay. Practically everybody I knew was gay.” The area was also still dark and desolate at nights, so she was charmed when gay friends would offer to walk her home. “I thought they were being so nice,” she recalls with a chuckle. Later she learned they were heading that way anyway, to go have sex on the piers. “I never knew anything about that part of their lives. Didn’t want to know.”

  She was another Village escapee from Long Island. She’d grown up in West Hempstead, where she had “a lousy home life,” with an abusive father and alcoholic mother. As an adolescent in the late 1950s she started going into Brooklyn to catch Alan Freed’s rock and roll stage shows. “Rock and roll saved my life. I was the kind of kid who would always get backstage. I wasn’t a groupie, because I was scared to death of sex. But I got to meet everybody,” including Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis.

  At nineteen she got married. It lasted “about a year and a half. Nice Italian guy, nice family, all that. But I did it just to get out of the house. A lot of women did that,” she said. By 1965 she was on her own and living on the Upper West Side. Petite and pretty, she modeled clothes for buyers in the garment center during the day, went home for a nap, and headed out later to dance at Ondine. “The Chambers Brothers were the house band. They were fabulous.” One night when she was dancing with a friend Mick Jagger cut in. She swears he stole a dance step from her. “He would never say that. He wouldn’t remember me. He was just a snotty asshole then.” Phil Spector was a regular. “He was a creep. Just looking at him was creepy.” And she met Hendrix there. “Jimi was sitting at the bar. I told him I could get some pot. He said, ‘You can? I’ll give you the money.’ ” She took a cab back to the Upper West Side, scored from her dealer there, and returned to Ondine. They smoked it in the ladies’ room. “But I was a little bit wary of Jimi. I wasn’t a hip kid. I wasn’t a nerd but I was just scared. So I shied away from Jimi.”

  She started going with Bobby Callender, who worked at the time for the legendary disc jockey Murray the K (Murray Kaufman). “He booked Murray the K’s shows. He was the kid who listened to all the records and told Murray what to play.” She became a dancer in Murray’s live stage shows, “and met everybody.” She babysat performers’ kids backstage, including a young Whitney Houston, met Otis Redding and Jim Morrison and the Beatles. She was in Murray’s car when a crowd surrounded it after the Beatles’ second Shea Stadium concert, which he emceed. She was terrified. “I cried, ‘Murray, get us out of here!’ ”

  Meanwhile she was coming to the Village to study acting with Bill Hickey at HB studios. That led to her first acting gig, in a pair of one-act plays starring and directed by Al Pacino. “Of course I had a crush on him. I made out with him once. But I was too innocent for Al.” She also performed with two very campy East Village–based troupes. She was one of the actual females in the good-naturedly drag-queeny Hot Peaches, alongside Marsha P. Johnson and Agosto Machado, and performed with the darker Play-House of the Ridiculous. Play-House founders John Vaccaro, who acted and directed, and playwright Ronald Tavel came from backgrounds in Off-Off-Broadway, but their aesthetics were just as reflective of the underground film of the time. Their first evenings of one-acts in the mid-1960s, tossed together with production budgets as low as twenty dollars, were scripts Tavel had originally written for Warhol to film. The filmmaker Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures) acted and built costumes for them, and many Factory types participated. Where Harry Koutoukas’s plays were camp at its highest, Tavel’s were the lowest, loose grab bags of stupid jokes and bad puns and goony smut thrown together in parodies with titles like Indira Gandhi’s Daring Device (a gigantic dildo) and Gorilla Queen. “We have passed beyond the Absurd,” Tavel declared. “Our position is absolutely preposterous.” The drugs everyone was on added to the anarchic antics. Tavel soon broke with Vaccaro and took his work to the Judson and Cino. In the 1980s Kapp became an assistant to the powerful Broadway producer David Merrick and also got small parts in the soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live and many more. “Any soap opera that was shot in New York, I was in.”

  By then she’d gotten a notice that her building was turning into a co-op and she could buy her apartment for seventeen thousand dollars. “Seventeen thousand dollars was not in my vocabulary . . . That was the first sign of change for me.” She went to court and won the right to remain a renter, the only one in her building. To this day, whenever new people buy into the building—always wealthy people, she notes—they say, “Oh, you’re the renter.” (As she speaks, the town house next door has just gone on the market for $12 million.)

  Charles Ludlam followed
Tavel as the Play-House’s chief writer. Like Kapp, he’d come to Manhattan from suburban Long Island, where he’d had a cold and disapproving father but received unconditional love from his mother and sisters. He was already dressing in drag as a child, trick-or-treating as a girl. As an actor at the Play-House he upstaged everyone, and as a writer he out-Taveled Tavel, producing sprawling parodies, including Conquest of the Universe, aptly subtitled When Queens Collide, a joke-strewn mash-up of old Flash Gordon serials and Christopher Marlowe. Ludlam and Vaccaro fell out over the staging and Ludlam defected in 1967, forming his own company he dared to name the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. He was the director, principal playwright, and star, often in drag, with advice from Minette, who turned down numerous requests to join the company—she said she could make more money on her back than on the stage. Early productions were just as chaotic and druggy as Vaccaro’s had been. By the 1970 Bluebeard, a farcical update of The Island of Doctor Moreau in which the mad scientist wants to create a “third genital,” they were more coherent and structured, though they remained just as wildly silly.

  Bluebeard premiered at La MaMa, then moved to Christopher’s End. Villager and Times critic Mel Gussow became a believer with this show and would continue to be a cheerleader throughout Ludlam’s career. Others fell into place more gradually and not always as enthusiastically. Ludlam cranked out new plays at a furious pace, grazing the broad landscape of high, low, and middlebrow culture for his material, with lavishly threepenny productions that were the ne plus ultra of drag chic. His formula, he later explained, was “Steal lines. Orchestrate platitudes. Hang them on some plot you found somewhere else.” In Camille he played Marguerite in hairy-chested drag to great success. Stage Blood, his spoof of Hamlet, and Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, a lampoon of Wagner, were also mid-1970s hits. Off to the side he wrote and performed puppet shows for children and demonstrated his skills as a ventriloquist in the chamber piece The Ventriloquist’s Wife.

  In 1972 Ludlam moved from the East Village to an apartment on Morton Street, where he stayed the rest of his life. The company, however, bounced around from venue to venue—the East Village, a Times Square porn theater, a fan’s loft—until 1977, when Ludlam was able to rent the old Cafe Society space in the basement of 1 Sheridan Square. Ludlam was by then the toast of downtown, yet he bit every hand that petted him with Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde, his rewrite of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, making savage fun of the downtown arts scene and its philistine supporters. After running through all the movements from Futurism to Postpostmodernism and back again, his artists invent “the avant-derriére” movement, so retro it’s futuristic. They wear fake buttocks in front for their fans to kneel and kiss.

  Harvey Fierstein brought drag and gay camp from the Village to Broadway in 1982 with his highly celebrated Torch Song Trilogy, which had begun Off-Broadway at the Actors’ Playhouse just below Sheridan Square. The following year he collaborated with Jerry Herman—who’d started out satirizing Village life in revues like Parade—on the Broadway hit La Cage aux Folles. Fiercely envious, Ludlam responded with his most traditional play, The Mystery of Irma Vep, a tour de farce for two actors playing multiple roles, originally starring Ludlam and his lover Everett Quinton, whom he’d met in the mid-1970s cruising on Christopher Street. Irma Vep ran for two years at Sheridan Square, went to Off-Broadway, and has gone on to be Ludlam’s most successful and widely produced work. He continued to write, direct, and act at a great clip until a few months before he was taken to St. Vincent’s, where he died of AIDS in May 1987, just past his forty-fourth birthday. Quinton took over as artistic director of the company, which continued performing Ludlam’s works and new plays by Quinton until 1997.

  LIKE MARKY IANNELLO AND DERMOT MCEVOY IN THE 1950S AND ’60s, George Tabb, music writer and founder of the punk rock band Furious George, saw the Village of the 1960s and ’70s through a child’s and teen’s eyes. He was born in Brooklyn in 1961, and after his parents broke up he and his two brothers spent weekends, summers, school holidays with his mother and his stepfather, the photographer Nick Gurwitz, in Greenwich Village. He moved there himself in 1980. In the 2010s he was living on Bank Street, across from Westbeth.

  Through most of Tabb’s youth his mother and Gurwitz had the basement apartment at 243 West Fourth Street, between West Tenth and Charles Streets. They slept in the back, the kids in the front room by the street. Tabb’s mother was a friend of the author Lee Israel, who wrote the landmark biography Miss Tallulah Bankhead. “Lee was a big woman, tough, like a truck driver.” He puts on a deep, manly growl. “ ‘Hey George, how ya doin?’ Cussing, this and that. She went to the dyke bars in Sheridan Square. One night at like four in the morning there’s this pounding on the door. It’s Lee. ‘I have to come in. You have to close the door and hide me.’ There’s a little blood on her face. Lee had gotten into a fight at one of the dyke bars, which was not uncommon. She punched some woman through a window. When she told my mom, my mom said, ‘That’s the third time!’ They were looking for her on the street, so she slept with us that night.”

  Tabb recalls being taken to the Tiffany Diner on Sheridan Square in the wee hours. “It was all transvestites, hookers, gay men, cops, mob guys, everybody, in the middle of the night. It was a wild scene. It was fun to see all these wild people dressed up. So when the Village People happened after that I thought it was so cool, because people did dress up like that in the Village. I didn’t understand that they were gay. They were just, you know, Village people.” Tabb was sixteen when the Village People put out their first single, “San Francisco,” in 1977. Morali and Belolo had intended the group to appeal to a gay audience, but disco had gone so mainstream by then that songs like “Macho Man” and “YMCA” made fans of many kids like Tabb, on whom the campy gay subtext was lost. “One morning I hear all this noise outside. They’re filming the movie Can’t Stop the Music right in front of my mother’s apartment! The Village People are all sitting on our stoop—the Indian, the Cowboy, all of them. ‘Mom! Mom! The Village People are on the stoop!’ ” She offered them something to drink and let them use the bathroom. “So all the Village People are coming in our basement apartment, using the bathroom. I talked to them all. Randy Jones, the Cowboy, became my favorite.”

  Tabb also offers a unique take on the origins of punk fashion, arguing that it began in the Village and initially had nothing to do with punk rock. “People got it all wrong about punk. People started dressing for punk rock because of Rocky Horror,” he insists. The Rocky Horror Picture Show originally bombed when released in the United States in 1975. It owed its global cult following to a long Friday and Saturday midnight run that started in April 1976 at the Waverly Theater on Sixth Avenue, by the busy West Fourth Street subway station. (In 2005 it became the IFC Center.) After almost two years at the Waverly it moved to the Eighth Street Playhouse. Early in the Waverly run fans began talking back and dressing up like the characters, complete with props. In the spring of 1977 Sal Piro, a former seminarian from New Jersey, founded the movie’s fan club and became the host of the raucous “floor show” in which the costumed audience performed along with the film. Tabb, still an innocent, went to one of these shows with his mom and Nick, “and I was scared shitless. I was petrified. I did not know what was going on. But it was exciting in a way. Also, girls were there changing their clothes in the aisles, getting completely naked. Wow!” Tabb soon joined the cult, becoming a regular at the Waverly midnight shows.

  Meanwhile, he discovered another great love, the Ramones, whom he first heard at CBGB. Tabb insists that Rocky Horror and punk rock fused to form a single cultural moment. “After Rocky Horror, we’d walk over to CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas City, as a group, in these wild outfits—fishnets, safety pins, leather jacket with buttons all over it and chains like Frank-N-Furter wore in Rocky Horror, the girls in wild makeup. We’d walk over to these clubs where bands like Blondie were playing, all dressed up, and that became the punk rock look. To this day people don’t k
now that. It all came from Rocky Horror. That’s also why places like CBGB got popular. There’d be nobody there until two in the morning, when Rocky Horror got out and we went there. The best band slot would be two-thirty in the morning. There’d be huge crowds.”

  35

  The 1980s and AIDS

  BY 1977 ED KOCH, STILL A VILLAGER, HAD RISEN FROM DISTRICT leader to city councilman to the U.S. Congress. But what he really wanted was to be mayor. He’d made an unsuccessful run at it in 1973, and now, after four years of Abe Beame—whom Pete Hamill would later characterize as “a clubhouse mediocrity” and “a kind of still life”—Koch and a crowded field that included Mario Cuomo and Koch’s fellow Villager Bella Abzug announced their candidacies. Even Barry Farber, the radio talk-show host, ran as the Conservative Party candidate. (He would get fifty-eight thousand votes, not bad for a conservative nonpolitician in 1970s New York City.)