“She allows unmarried girls to go to bachelors’ apartments,” said Miss Lincoln.
“Provided they leave at a reasonable hour,” said Miss Thompson.
We downed chicken consommé, chicken Tetrazzini, and ice-cream cake, and noted with regret the absence of water glasses.
“Mother loves desserts, especially ones with chocolate and whipped cream,” said Mr. Post, who had taken a seat at our table. “She doesn’t like the rest of the meal at all. Very few people read her book all the way through. They buy it to look up the particular thing they want to know; for instance, how to address the headmaster of a boys’ school. Nobody can keep all such details in his head.”
“What a luncheon party she had in Edgartown for her cookbook a few years ago!” a lady opposite us said. “Thirty-two women’s-page writers flown up in a DC-3 by Funk & Wagnalls!”
“Everything cooked out of her cookbook,” Mr. Post said.
We got a glass of water from the bar and made our adieux.
Geoffrey T. Hellman
JUNE 16, 1956 (“WRIGHT REVISITED”)
RANK LLOYD WRIGHT had his eighty-seventh birthday last Friday, and we called on him a few days earlier, at Suite 223 of the Plaza, which he is using as his New York headquarters while the new Guggenheim Museum is being built. We found him in a large room, facing east. He was seated at a large table, going over plans marked “Archeseum for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation” with Mr. Medley G. B. Whelpley, a trustee of the Foundation and a former Guggenheim Brothers partner. Mr. Wright’s daughter, Iovanna, was taking phone calls for him and making herself generally useful.
“We’ve had ‘colosseum’ and ‘Rameseum,’ so I thought, Why not ‘archeseum’?” said Mr. Wright, who was wearing a brown suit, a tie tied like a shoelace, no glasses, and a commanding expression. “Why should ‘colosseum’ ever be spelled ‘coliseum’—with an ‘i’? It should always be with an ‘o,’ after ‘colossus.’ The word looks like a medicine. The Rameseum is where Rameses reposes. No one knows what words mean. You know, the architects come around to see me, the youngsters, and I say, ‘Boys, you know what this word means—“architect”?’ Silence. I nod to their bellwether and say, ‘Surely your leader knows.’ Silence. Well, it means ‘the master of the know-how.’ A free translation, but a good one. A museum is where you seek the work inspired by the Muses. ‘Arch’ means ‘the high.’ An archeseum is where you go to see the highest. It seemed a natural word, so I proposed it to Mr. Harry Guggenheim, chairman of the board of trustees of the Foundation. He has since advised me that it has not been accepted by the trustees.”
“I looked it up in the dictionary, but it isn’t there,” said Mr. Whelpley.
“Toilets on every floor,” said Mr. Wright. “Seven floors and a below-ground auditorium. A capacious elevator. Gravity employed so as to give you quiet, easy access to whatever show is on. Light so tempered and arranged as to suit the taste of the curator. We have dramatized the pictures. Control of lights makes them more naturally lighted in a less lighted place. We’re not going to have those big buncombe frames around the pictures. The building will be the frame. The entrance has an air-conditioned grating that sucks down and will take the dust off your shoes and trousers. I’ve always wanted to take the dust off people. It will pull the ladies’ skirts down, not blow them up.”
“No place for Marilyn Monroe,” said Mr. Whelpley.
“It’s what the old gentleman wanted,” Mr. Wright said, and we realized that he meant the late S. R. Guggenheim. “I first showed him the plans twelve years ago. He believed that a depression was in the offing, and that building costs would go down, so we waited. The depression never came.”
“Mr. Guggenheim knew that if the depression didn’t come, his stocks would go up,” said Mr. Whelpley.
“He left a bequest of eight or nine million for the Museum,” Mr. Wright said. “Now it’s more, isn’t it, Mr. Whelpley?”
“Much more,” said Mr. Whelpley.
A phone rang in another room, and Miss Wright, who answered it, told her father it was for him. He took the call and returned after a brief conversation. “Man wanted a job on the Museum as a lighting expert,” he said. “An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why? He knows. I had the exquisite pleasure of firing seven experts when I built the Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo, or it never would have been built.”
Mr. Wright went back to the large table. “This is the literature of the building,” he said, turning the great sheets of the plan, floor by floor. “Writers and artists try to reflect man, but architecture alone presents man as he is. That’s why we architects look down on writers and artists. Twelve years of concentrated devotion and emotion over the Museum! A whirlpool of antagonism, defamation, and admiration! Seven hundred and sixty-nine buildings I’ve been given to do, and they say he isn’t practical! How could I be here at eighty-seven with this work in my hand if I’d been impractical? The contract has been let to the Euclid Contracting Corporation, and the building will be up in eighteen months. I hope I’ll be there to see it open. I spend a week a month here. I’m going to Wisconsin for my birthday. There will be quite a party this year—pageantry and fireworks. I go to bed at nine. I still drink Old Bushmills. One glass Saturday night and one Sunday night. They’re trying to get me down to one a week. I’d become a drinker if I had to live in New York. It’s badly oversized. I consider it fin de siècle. For a place that is doomed, as this is, it’s well to get out of it what you can. Bob Moses keeps putting in more parking places. The more parking places you have, the sooner the place is going to end. This is the old Diamond Jim Brady suite. It’s the best part of New York.”
Mr. Wright turned to a window, looked out at the plaza, and said, “I asked Bob Moses if he wouldn’t get the fountain going. I see there are workmen down there now. Perhaps they are doing something about it.”
A waiter brought in coffee and cookies, Mr. Wright’s daughter poured, and we all took seats around a small table.
“I’m a guest preacher at the Universalist Church of the Divine Paternity, on Central Park West, this Sunday,” Mr. Wright said. “I’m building a million-dollar synagogue in Philadelphia, and I’m doing three private houses around here—in White Plains, Rye, and New Canaan. I love American humor. I’ve tried to get movie producers to do Mark Twain’s The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, but they won’t.”
“Mother and I read aloud to Daddy,” Miss Wright said.
“I always fly to Wisconsin and back,” Mr. Wright said. “American trains are no good. They rattle. European trains don’t rattle. They have a gadget that keeps them from rattling. Why don’t we? Our motorcars are like ferryboats coming down the street. They stick out at all corners. If a fish did this, it would be floating on the surface, dead. That’s why I drive a Mercedes. I’ve designed an automobile and an airplane and a taxicab. The taxi is designed like an old hansom. It can turn on a dime. It’s going to be manufactured. It’s like the Museum—you have to wait and wait and wait.”
“Mr. Guggenheim’s stocks did go up,” said Mr. Whelpley.
“The University of Wales is giving me a degree of Doctor of Laws this summer,” Mr. Wright said, nibbling a cookie. “They offered it in absentia, contrary to precedent, if I wanted, but I’m going to pack up Mrs. Wright and our old kit bag in July and go over and get it. We’ve worked together for thirty years, and I don’t think either of us would know what to do without the other. I already have thirty-two honorary degrees, but this is the one that touches me the most. It would have delighted my mother, who was Welsh. It would have delighted my Welsh grandfather and all my Welsh uncles.”
We finished our coffee, wished him a happy birthday, and left.
Bernard Taper
SEPTEMBER 7, 1957 (“PRODIGY”)
HE LATEST PRODIGY of the chess world is a fourteen-year-old Brooklyn boy named Robert Fischer, who a few weeks ago, at a tournament held in Cleveland, upset some two hundred of his elders and putative betters, including a number of
the country’s top-ranking players, to win the United States Open Chess Championship. There have been chess prodigies in this country who flashed to prominence when considerably younger than Fischer, but none has ever captured a major title at such an early age. Honors are beginning to pile up for Robert. The United States Chess Federation has elevated him to the rank of master (some of the wits among his teen-age friends now address him as Master Master Fischer); he has been invited to be one of the ten distinguished players, from all over the world, who will participate in the highly regarded invitation tournament at Hastings, in England, this Christmas; and shortly after that he is scheduled, if the Chess Federation’s present plans work out, to visit the Soviet Union and show off his prowess before the world’s most discriminating mass audience, the Russians having been notorious chess addicts for centuries.
Young Fischer took to the game of chess from the time the moves were first explained to him. This was when he was six, and his teacher was his elder sister, Joan. Before that, his only hint of precocity had been his authoritative war with jigsaw puzzles. He entered his first tournament at the age of nine, and has twice won the United States Junior Chess Championship. His most striking achievement before the United States Open Championship was winning the brilliancy prize last year in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament here, for a game so inspired that it was hailed on the cover of Chess Review as “the game of the century.” When he started playing in tournaments, he burst into tears each time he lost a game, but now he merely bites his fingernails and glowers. The United States Open Champion is at present in his second year at Erasmus High School. Though school tests have shown him to have generally superior intelligence, he does no better than average in his studies, displaying little interest in most of the subjects taught and being restless in class. His teachers are amazed when they hear of his chess victories—not so much at his revealing mental powers that they hadn’t suspected as at his being able to sit still for the five hours a tournament game may last. “In my class, Bobby couldn’t sit still for five minutes,” one of them says. A chessboard, with pieces set up on it, is always beside his bed. From the moment he wakes up, he works at chess problems—even during meals and while watching television.
Most of this intelligence we gleaned from Robert’s mother, Mrs. Regina Fischer, when we talked with her one evening recently. We also gathered that Mrs. Fischer, though proud of her son’s triumphs, is by no means convinced that his devotion to chess is a good thing. “For four years, I tried everything I knew to discourage him,” she said, with a sigh, “but it was hopeless.” She told us that almost any evening during the summer vacation her son was to be found at the Manhattan Chess Club, on West Sixty-fourth Street—a venerable institution, with an imposing number of champions and chess masters in its membership. “That’s Bobby’s favorite hangout,” Mrs. Fischer said. “Sometimes I have to go over there at midnight to haul him out of the place.” Robert’s mother and father have been divorced for some years.
After our talk with Mrs. Fischer, we made our way to the club. In the hushed, gray-walled main chamber, several games were in progress, but none of the men brooding over their boards came within three or four decades of resembling a teen-ager. A white-haired man in his sixties approached us with soft, slow steps and introduced himself, in a whisper, as Hans Kmoch, the club’s secretary. When we asked about young Fischer, he whispered, “Bobby’s out, getting a soda or something. He’ll be back.” In the club’s tournament room—a small, square alcove just off the main room—an important challenge match was being played between Samuel Reshevsky, an international grand master, who is considered perhaps the finest player in the Western world, and was once himself a dazzling child prodigy, and Donald Byrne, a leading American player. We stepped into the alcove to join six or eight spectators of the game. Here the silence was solemn. The game had been in progress over two hours, and the players had made sixteen moves. It was Reshevsky’s move now. A tiny man in his late forties, with a huge bald head, he sat with his hands tightly clasped in his lap, frowning at the board. Unclasping his hands, he half lifted one of them. The spectators leaned forward. The scorekeeper tensed, and picked up his pencil to write down the move. A minute passed, and then Reshevsky let his hand fall into his lap. The spectators settled back. The scorekeeper laid down his pencil. Suddenly, we heard a most unexpected sound from the other room—a burst of exuberant laughter. Stepping through the open doorway, we saw Kmoch making shushing gestures at a group of people gathered about a table in the far corner of the room. “Just can’t keep those boys quiet,” he muttered as we came up to him. “You want to see Bobby play? He’s over there in the middle of that gang. They just came back.” He led us to the group, introduced us, and then left us.
We sat down to watch what was going on. Young Fischer, whom we discovered to be a lanky lad with a mischievous, rather faunlike face, was playing against a stout, elegant man in his middle twenties—an Argentine named Dr. Dan J. Beninson, who, we were told, is scientific secretary of the United Nations’ Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. They were playing chess such as we had never seen before—making their moves with split-second rapidity, while exchanging banter with each other and the kibitzers, most of whom were of college age. Within a few minutes, they had finished one game and were launched on another, and Fischer was asserting, with a triumphant grin, as he pushed his queen, “You’re dead now.” “That’s what you think, Bobby, my boy,” Dr. Beninson answered, instantly bringing his bishop across the board—an unexpected stroke, apparently, since it caused young Fischer to clap a hand to his head and brought a burst of laughter from the kibitzers. Everybody seemed to be having a high time. Once, when Dr. Beninson lingered over a move for perhaps three seconds, Fischer threw up his hands in feigned disgust and groaned, “It’s no fun to play chess if you take all year over a move.”
We asked what they called this kind of hopped-up chess. “Blitz,” replied Fischer, and added, making several moves in the course of his brief reply, “That’s what we all play for fun. Much more fun than tough, slow chess.” Every few minutes, the elderly Kmoch padded over to the group and whispered, ineffectually, “Sh-h-h, boys!” We watched the lad and Dr. Beninson breeze through a dozen of these lightning, carefree games, involving perhaps as many as a thousand moves, in the half hour or so we stayed there. On the way out, we looked into the tournament room. All was exactly as before—silent, solemn, tense. Checking the score sheet, we saw that Reshevsky still hadn’t made his move.
Whitney Balliett
NOVEMBER 30, 1957 (“FREE ASSOCIATION”)
ORT SAHL, THE lightning, inexhaustible thirty-year-old monologuist and nonconformist’s nonconformist from California, is back in town and doing a full-house business at the Village Vanguard, near Sheridan Square. There, armed only with the bulldog edition of the News or the Mirror and dressed in a red sweater, a white open-necked shirt, and gray slacks, he improvises non-stop several times a night, for as much as an hour at a crack, on such sacred and profane themes as foreign policy, hi-fi, spies, sports cars, and integration; raps knuckles on the Right, Center, and Left along the way; and speaks at top speed a language that is a unique cross between a philology paper and the argot of modern jazz. We tracked Sahl down one afternoon last week at the apartment of a friend of ours, and found him a thin, compact, jumpy, hawk-faced man with deep-set eyes and dark hair, a hair-trigger laugh, and a broad smile that creases his face into enormous, identical parentheses. He was wearing a yellow open-necked shirt, a tan jacket, and dark-brown slacks, and for three non-stop hours he talked, pausing only to catch his breath. “I couldn’t get a thing going when I came here for the first time, in 1952,” he said. “I lived in a hotel on West Forty-seventh Street on eighteen dollars a week, which covered room, laundry, and loaves of day-old bread from the A. & P. I’d been starving on the University of California campus, in Berkeley, for a couple of years, auditing courses, and graduating by osmosis. I’d got a B.S. from the University
of Southern California, in Los Angeles, in 1950 in public administration, with a minor in civil engineering, and I was really doing graduate work there on street-traffic engineering. But I scuffled up to the U. of C. all the time because my family was putting this dollars-and-cents thing on my back and the base period of bohemianism was just starting around there, and nobody judged you. I was trying to be a writer. I wrote four one-act plays that were produced in L.A. I wrote a novel and a lot of short stories. I even wrote an oratorio for Stan Kenton—a big, heavy, serious, epic thing for half a dozen actors and the full band. I bound it up nicely in a book and showed it to Stan, and he was stunned. I wrote eighteen sets of lyrics for some songs one of his arrangers was doing. I used words like ‘misanthrope,’ and he was stunned. But I had a very jealous attitude toward my writing. I sat on it. Then I discovered I had to talk. I’d go into the strip joints in L.A. and ask them to let me perform for free during intermissions. I did intermissions at the Palladium when Kenton was there, before four thousand people. Despite all the folklore about the faith of friends in the struggling young artist, my friends constantly discouraged me. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ and ‘How are you going to make it doing that?’ I became very bitter.
“Suddenly I got my first job, as a vacation replacement at a very bohemian place out in North Beach called the hungry i, all in lower case—the hungry intellectual, yes, and under the bohemianism and the nonconformism the anxious asp—at seventy-five a week. That was Christmas, 1953, and I laid a very big egg. They were interested in the folk singer on the bill—one of those guys with their shirt open to the waist—and I guess they didn’t think I had any right to be so caustic when I didn’t show any self-confidence, even though I had a latent Christlike vision of myself. Knocking the pharisees and publicans. I was so nervous I began bringing a newspaper onstage with all my cues stapled to the inside pages. I was free-associating, indicting all the bright young people. Then, one night, somebody laughed. I think he was an economist connected with the National Labor Relations Board. Then somebody else laughed—the conformist—and the thing started building. I stayed eight months, because the owner never had the courage to fire me. I was already losing discipline as a performer. I’d get going within the cadence of the audience’s laughter, and sometimes I’d build for a solid thirty minutes and still never reach the core of what I wanted to say. I don’t kid myself. I’m not a comedian. I don’t build jokes around myself. There’s too much to say about everything else, and nobody is saying it. I began getting discovered when I went to Chicago. I’ve been discovered—and dropped—six or seven times, all over the place. Eddie Cantor (‘Don’t wear that red sweater. Wrong associations’), Groucho Marx (‘I love your act, but it’ll never go’), Ed Sullivan, Perry Como. I was on Jack Paar’s television show, and he spent two hours backstage before it demoralizing me by telling me not to be esoteric. He said the audiences were made up of Rotarians. I was on nine and a half minutes, being esoteric, and had to stop six times for applause.
The 50s Page 50
