The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  She was still at Hunter when she met Luke. Though she kept her own place, Esther was living with the folk singer Loren Nelson, who was a relation to President Taft. Loren was a large man who made no secret of the fact that his American roots ran deep. Singing Communist songs in Italian or talking about the dharma wasn’t his style, and he basically believed that anyone who could change cultures probably didn’t have a culture to begin with. Loren believed in prairie rectitude, hard work, handshake deals, and music that quenched your thirst like a dipper full of icy spring water. Esther and Loren lived in an apartment on West Tenth Street, above a bar whose pounding juke box kept them up until dawn but whose owner gave them credit. They lived on Guinness stout and hamburgers, and they lived for folk music.

  In the early sixties, Greenwich Village was full of folk singers. They came to MacDougal Street like the lame went to Lourdes. There were rich ones, poor ones, fat ones, short ones; they had beards, long hair, dirty feet, and sandals; their eyes were radiant with ambition or dulled over by hunger. The girls had voices so high and plaintive that when they sang the angels flew from the tops of Christmas trees and turned to snow. The boys dreamed of riding the rails, splitting wood, kicking the shit out of their fathers, screwing girls, and maybe one day settling down and writing that novel. From Austin, from Queens, from Bangor, Seattle, Tampa, Scarsdale, and Muncie, the folkies arrived in Greenwich Village, toting their instruments, sharing their songs, falling in and out of love, cheering each other on.

  There were plenty of places to sing, but none more central to the intersection of desire and opportunity than Golden’s Folklore Village. It was on Sixth Avenue, one rickety flight above Golden’s Guitar Village, where stringed instruments were sold and young singers could buy a guitar for fifty dollars, then bring it upstairs and accompany themselves on it in front of the regulars at the Folklore Village, aka the Winter Palace, aka People’s Parque.

  Beer-bellied, bald, bombastic Sandy Golden, in his sixties, ran the place as if it were a union hall. There was nothing on the peeling brick walls except announcements of upcoming events. A couple of ceiling fans pushed the stale air around. Bare wooden floors, a stage covered in stained, colorless carpet. Folding chairs, folding tables, coffee, sparkling water, apple juice with cinnamon sticks. It cost a dollar and a half to get in, two dollars if you wanted to perform, except on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, when Sandy booked performers who had already made something of a name for themselves, and then he charged three dollars admission. Sandy was effusive, forgetful; the real brains of the operation was his wife, Flora, gaunt and pure, fiercely ideological, and phobic about money—she washed in sudsy hot water every piece of change the club took in and wore Playtex rubber gloves when she counted the dollar bills.

  The first time Luke played the Folklore Village he sang a set of straight folk songs, the kind of ballads you could find on any folk music record, or from the stage at Pie in the Oven, or the Pegged Leg, or Harmony, or Mr. Dinky’s, or any of the other fourscore folk music dives in the Village. Luke sang as if he were English, as if he were Irish, as if he was a hardworking man from Oklahoma. He sang about moonlight, silver daggers, hungry foxes, and the high seas. None of this was in the least natural to him. He sang folk songs because they were a going thing, not because he particularly liked them. His taste ran toward blues. He grew up on the blues and he had apprenticed with the great soul singer Little Joe Washington. He would have liked to try a Chuck Jackson song. But he saw no opportunity to make a dollar or a name for himself as a reverse minstrel. The audience wanted folk songs, so he gave them folk songs.

  Did he bring down the house, that first time? Absolutely not—not even the legend mongers try to sell that story any longer. But he survived, he did not embarrass himself, he got a slightly better-than-polite round of applause, a few adoring glances—adoring glances grew on trees, back then—and, most importantly, he pleased Sandy Golden, who was not only Folklore’s owner but its self-described Commissar of Culture.

  “Luke Fairchild!” Golden bellowed to the audience, raising up Luke’s arm, as if declaring the new bantamweight champion of the world.

  “I don’t have any place to stay,” Luke whispered to Golden—he’d heard Sandy was a soft touch, figured he’d try his luck.

  Sandy smiled, as if that was great news. “People?” he said. “We need someone to give our friend a place to sleep tonight. Any volunteers?” For Sandy, it was like the thirties again, a rough-and-tumble time, comradeship.

  To hear Luke tell it (and the hagiographers repeat it), every woman in the place wanted to take Luke home. But in fact, he left with Judy Whitimore because she was the only one who came forward. Granted, she was quick about it, and maybe there were others who were considering offering Luke a place to stay and who were discouraged by the rapidity and vehemence of Judy’s response—“I’ve got a perfect spot for him!” she cried out. She was dressed in a sailor suit; she smoked a tiny cigar. She came full-blown, an eccentric, vain, and aimless woman out of a Luke Fairchild song that had yet to be written (but which would be, at least ten times over: “Trust Fund Mama,” “Another Charm on Your Bracelet,” “Payment on Demand,” among others).

  Judy Whitimore has already weighed in with her own version of her months with Luke, Come to Mama, which was published in 1990 by FIN (an acronym for Fairchild International News), a Frankfurt, Kentucky, house wholly devoted to (fairly specious) Lukology. According to Whitimore, she and Luke lived together in her penthouse on lower Fifth Avenue, where he played, sang, and plotted out his career for six months. He learned from her how to eat lobster, Brie, and croissants; he read widely in her library of twentieth-century American poetry. He slept curled next to her—Chapter 1 of Come to Mama is called “Fetal Attraction”—and where, according to Whitimore, his greatest sexual pleasure was to have her gently kiss the side of his face and whisper into his ear while he masturbated.

  “Gentle boy,” Whitimore writes,

  manchild, man-cub, oh Pan with your Magik pipe. How I loved thee. I loved thee but, yea, I knew we were doomed. I taught you to make love. I held your Pan pipe and guided it into me and when you asked me if it was all right I said Yes yes, yes I said yes.

  When I introduced you to Allen Ginsberg, he fell in love with you and came with us when we shopped for your clothes on 8th Street. He held my hand while we waited for you to come out of the changing room and he said, “Judy, the whole world is a changing room to Luke. Don’t try too hard to hold onto him.” Because you want him, Allen? I said, because he was a poet and a mystic and you could say absolutely anything to him. He looked a little surprised by—my bluntness? And then he patted my hand and said, “Luke is a killer who has not yet found his thing to kill.”

  By the time my mother and Loren Nelson went to Golden’s to see Luke, he was writing and singing his own songs, though most of his performances concentrated on the folk music classics, which he sang with less and less purity. Boredom was pushing him toward style. He was writing songs that were mostly about his life as a young man on the prowl in New York, throwing in brand names, radio call letters, politicians, and current events. And: he was getting handsome. His cheeks were sunken; his eyes were large, pleading—they backed you up and slammed you against the wall. He wore a billowing purple pirate shirt, faded jeans, boots, compliments of Judy. Though his hair was long, he wore it slicked back and it gave him a kind of buccaneer sleekness. The only piece of paper he owned that bore his original name, Stuart Kramer, was his Social Security card, and soon he would get rid of that.

  Judy Whitimore claims she was in Golden’s Folklore Village the night my mother and Loren came to hear Luke and she even claims to have noticed the expression on Esther’s face when Luke finished singing “Riding the Rails,” the first song he composed that really caught on. Again from Come to Mama:

  Sitting at the next table was Esther Rothschild, who had made somewhat of a name for herself around the Village as a cock-tease and a Communist. It was she who wou
ld get Luke into the whole Politically Correct school of folk singing, but that night at Golden’s she sure as hell wasn’t thinking about integration, world peace, or the goddamned Indians. She was staring at Luke with pure and undisguised lust. I heard her say to her friend of the moment—Loren Nelson, who himself was on The Scene, but always on the fringes—“Can you imagine what someone who plays the harmonica like that could do with a woman?”

  This story is apocryphal, though it has shown up in those oral histories into which Whitimore has been able to insert herself. There are not forests enough to grow trees enough to make paper enough to correct every misstatement about Luke, and I don’t intend to, or need to, or even care to. But statements concerning my mother must be dealt with forthrightly. She would be incapable of saying something so crude and unkind to a man whom she was, after all, living with—and I might add she would under any circumstances think too highly of herself to openly lust after a stranger. And that comparison between Luke’s agility on the harmonica with his supposed talents between a woman’s legs is (im)pure Whitimore, perhaps the product of some unfinished business between her and Luke.

  Get your hands off my head

  Don’t push me down

  Do it yourself

  It’s scary down there.

  —“Trust Fund Mama,”

  recorded 1965

  Neil Schwartz writes (in Fairchild in the Promised Land) rather more convincingly about the night my parents met. Before Luke denounced him in interviews as a “parasite” and a “bucket of snot,” Schwartz had a favored position among the Lukologists. Luke trusted and enjoyed him, and spoke freely—though not always honestly—to him. Beginning in the early sixties and continuing through 1971, Schwartz traveled with Luke on various tours; went on fishing trips with Luke during the infamous “ultra-right phase,” when Luke played the Grand Ole Opry and reveled in the company of steel guitarists, fiddlers, and paunchy, xenophobic country singers; and was the recipient of countless late-night phone calls from Luke, who tried out lyrics on him, attacked imitators and competitors, and, quite frequently, mourned angrily and self-pityingly over his separation from my mother.

  “To most of the Luke-niks and groupies who soon turned Golden’s Folklore Village into Mecca,” wrote Schwartz,

  the club was where Fairchild got his first real attention, the spot where Richard Berle of The New York Times saw him and wrote, “If you want to see the future of folk music then you better do-si-do down to Gulden’s [sic].” But to Fairchild, Golden’s was and always will be connected to a much more personal memory. It was the place where he met Esther Rothschild.

  Fairchild was still living in the penthouse with Judy Whitimore, but relations between them had soured. Now, when Luke made his gigs he insisted that Judy either stay home or go someplace else. Anything but show up in the club. Part of the reason for this was Luke had written, without Judy’s knowledge, a few songs to which she would certainly object, songs that put their relationship in a less than flattering light—most notably “Trust Fund Mama” and the never-recorded and even more wounding “I Thought You Should Know,” in which the singer describes his lover as an orangutan, a Hydra, peeling paint, Hitler, Rockefeller, Johnny Mathis, and the atomic bomb. And the other main reason was that Judy might get in the way when Luke indulged in his favorite after-gig activity, namely cruising the club and coming on to girls.

  While playing his opening set on June 20th, Luke was in fine form. He played a selection of the standard folk songs he had been performing since coming to New York, mixed in with an ever-increasing number of his own compositions. There was, of course, no spotlight at Golden’s and so Luke had a good view of the packed house. Somewhere during “Trouble in Mind” Luke first laid eyes on the woman who was to change his life—Esther Rothschild.

  Esther was a typical Village beauty, by way of Brooklyn. She combined Old Left morality with a decidedly new breed of Sexual Freedom. Dressed in a billowing home-made skirt and peasant blouse, her loveliness and the enthusiasm of her applause were not lost on Luke, and he kept his eyes fixed on her as he went through all the remaining numbers of his first set. Somewhere in the middle of “Talking Sit-in Blues,” Esther stopped making any attempt to look away from Luke’s piercing gaze. The two of them simply stared at each other, as if Luke was performing for her and her only, and all the other chairs and tables were empty.

  And so my father sat at my mother’s table, despite the fact that Loren was five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Luke.

  “Your songs were good,” said Loren, feeling for one deluded moment that he could control the situation. “Really beautiful.”

  My father, ruthless in courtship, turned his chair so all Loren could see was his back.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Luke said to my mother.

  “That sounds like a line,” she said.

  “It is. Take it and hold it, I’m drifting out to sea.” Luke smiled; his teeth showed years of neglect, Coke, coffee, cigarettes; he didn’t actually own a tooth brush.

  Brush my teeth,

  Blow my nose

  Get me out of these cowboy clothes

  You want me Red?

  Hell, I been blue

  One way or the other

  I belong to you.

  —“One Way or the Other,”

  recorded 1964

  Luke had an hour before he had to be onstage again. It’s a little unclear how he managed to get Esther and Loren to take him back to their apartment, but that’s where they ended up. Loren’s remarks about Luke’s behavior in their apartment, printed as a letter to the editor in Rolling Stone, are worth quoting:

  He grabbed my best guitar but showed almost no talent in playing it. In all modesty, I myself was something of a virtuoso, though lacking, obviously, the talent for novelty that Luke possessed. When it came to the simple mechanics of playing the instrument, Luke was clumsy. When he saw me staring at him with disbelief, he became angry and started strumming my precious Martin furiously, knocking it out of tune. All the while, I was thinking: This is the guy everyone in the Village is talking about? I thought he was a bit of a joke. He couldn’t play, his voice was weak. What he did have was a canny sense of timing. He had a way of phrasing things that was unique. When he finally left to go back to Golden’s Folklore Village, my girlfriend Esther Rothschild, much to my surprise, decided to accompany him. A week later, Esther and Luke were living together and were the talk of MacDougal Street.

  It’s frankly difficult for me to imagine my mother acting so precipitously. In my view of her, she was forever encumbered by excesses of loyalty—loyalty to ideas, ideals, people. She lived in a trance of loyalty, a miasma; she staggered through her life beneath a spell of sentiment. She was gentle with children, old people, beggars, the birds in Washington Square Park. She walked so softly, she seemed to glide. There was safety in her smile, solace in her touch; her voice was soothing, like a warm towel on the back of your neck. That she could simply walk out on Loren Nelson was inconceivable to me. Even Whitimore’s Come to Mama strongly implies otherwise:

  Luke stayed with me and in some ways our sex life was more explosive than ever, but I knew he was beginning to stray. His lifetime as an alley cat made all the sudden fame just so totally irresistible. I knew he was seeing other women. Antonia Rivera, a.k.a. Groucho, because of her eyebrows, that horny little speed freak who called herself Crystal, Esther Rothschild (Our Lady of the Bleeding Heart), and, most hurtful of all, my manipulative, torpedo-titted little sister Roxanne, who was unsuccessful in luring Luke into her perverted sexual fantasies and took her revenge on him by spreading rumors that Luke was queer.

  Wading through Whitimore’s river of venom, at least one thing becomes clear: Luke continued to live with Judy Whiti- more after he met my mother, and he went out with my mother for a time before they became deeply involved. In my view, this goes a long way toward contradicting Nelson’s suggestion that my mother took one look at Luke and packed her bags the
next day.

  I DON’T mean to suggest that Nelson was lying. In fact, of the many people upon whom I called in my attempt to gain some clarity about what happened between my mother and Luke, Loren Nelson was one of the very kindest. When I wrote to him (Rolling Stone is also to be thanked for their efficiency in forwarding my letter to Loren), he replied immediately, saying, in effect, that if I wanted to talk about my mother, he was more than happy to be my host, and I was welcome to come stay with him in Southampton for a day, or for however long I needed to answer my questions.

  It was summer, and I was just beginning my first bout of living with Joan Odiack, my difficult but involving girlfriend from Detroit. Joan was not rich, but she thought rich, and it was hot in the city and she was feeling stuck with me in our small, smoldering apartment. She was eager to accompany me out to Long Island—in Joan’s view, it was an injustice that we didn’t have a beach house of our own to repair to in the summer months. Joan herself worked for a tyrannical toy importer in the Flatiron Building, and I was living on a schoolteacher’s salary—but that made little difference to her.