Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel

by Sherill Tippins

  To hell with the judgment of outsiders, anyway. A writer could only write.

  Thomas Wolfe would have agreed. By early May of 1938, he had begun to feel a sense of control over his novel. Massive as it was, and growing longer by the day, he knew what he wanted it to say. But now summer was coming, with heat so intense he was sure “he could smell all seven million inhabitants” of New York. Casting about for an escape, Wolfe seized on an invitation to speak at Indiana’s Purdue University, after which he would continue on by train to the West Coast. At the university, he decided, he would “shoot the works” by announcing his dedication henceforth to positive social action—to show that “the writer is a man who belongs to life . . . who has . . . a function to perform, a place in society just as much as an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor, or a businessman.”

  Over the course of five days, he dictated his speech at the table in his Hotel Chelsea living room, recounting his early belief that a writer was simply an artist and then his later realization, brought on by the Depression and the Nazi menace, that he had a responsibility to society. By a strange paradox, he continued, this sense of responsibility had given him new hope that “the common heart of man” would not be defeated. Finishing the speech, he realized that it could serve as an excellent epilogue for his novel in progress. He gave the speech the most appropriate title he could think of for such a summing-up of all the past winter’s thoughts: “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

  To prepare for his journey west, Wolfe spent ten days, with his secretary’s help, sorting and labeling the chapters and sections for his new novel—some completed, some only partly drafted—according to a thirteen-page outline. The enormous book, now titled “The Web and the Rock,” would consist of four large parts covering the history of his fictionalized Asheville from 1793 to the present and, in fact, summing up the whole of his own experience as a writer and as a man. As he assembled the manuscript, Wolfe felt for the first time “a tremendous amount of comfort and satisfaction” in what he had done. When finished, this novel would stand as “a kind of legend or tremendous fiction” about America, more truthful and much grander in scale than its predecessor, Of Time and the River. For the time being, he would store the manuscript with Aswell at Harper’s.

  On May 17, 1938, the day Wolfe was to depart for Indiana, Aswell arrived at the Chelsea to pick up the manuscript pages. He found the novelist sitting, unshaved, at his table, reviewing the order of chapters one last time with his secretary while the Chelsea bartender Norman Kleinberg packed Wolfe’s clothes for the trip. At 8:30 that evening, the exhausted writer handed the manuscript in two enormous bundles to Aswell and hastily left to catch his train.

  That was the last anyone at the Chelsea would ever see of Thomas Wolfe. While in Seattle that summer, he fell seriously ill. After being diagnosed with a brain abscess, he was transferred across the country to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He died there on September 15, 1938, at age thirty-seven, his great novel of American unity and redemption unfinished.

  That fall, Edgar Lee Masters’s eldest son, Hardin, visited his father in New York and found the aging poet “full of the death of Wolfe, his writing, his loss to literature, and the whole spectrum of questions and grief that death generates for the remainder at such times.” Masters himself had played a small role in the drama, retrieving a forgotten packet of manuscript pages that Wolfe had left behind the bar with Kleinberg and then delivering it to Aswell for him to add to the massive manuscript that would become Wolfe’s two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again. Masters’s sadness and nostalgia were amplified by the now clear inevitability of America’s involvement in another world war. In the months since Wolfe’s death, a torrent of world events had seemed to rain down on everyone’s head: the crushing end of the Spanish Civil War; Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia; the Soviet Union’s shocking decision to sign a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, which would lead, along with Trotsky’s assassination, to a strong anti-Communist backlash in the United States. Many leftists fled the Party. When Elizabeth Gurley Flynn refused to resign, she was expelled from the American Civil Liberties Union that she had helped found.

  In New York, the city’s artists studied Picasso’s Guernica—its dagger-tongued horse writhing in agony while one woman shrieked inside a burning house and another held a dead child—first at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street and then, later that year, at the Museum of Modern Art. The Times critic warned readers that they “may well turn in dismay or frank disgust” from the painting, but Sloan hailed it as “a giant’s visiting card,” bringing the news to America of the horrors of war a thousand times more efficiently than any realistic image. Guernica made an enormous impact on Sloan’s former student Jackson Pollock. Standing before the depiction of “the fear and the courage of living and dying,” the high-school dropout who could not draw decided, on the spot, to turn himself into an American Picasso.

  Meanwhile, as Wolfe had warned, certain sectors of the United States began to appear nearly as fascist as Germany itself. In 1939, the Nazi Bund held its largest rally ever in Madison Square Garden. When New York Democrat Samuel Dickstein proposed the formation of a standing committee to investigate such groups, Texas Democrat Martin Dies took the opportunity to broaden the mandate to investigate “every subversive group in this country.” Control of the Dies Committee was handed over to John Parnell Thomas, a Communist-hating Republican stockbroker. With the professed aim of “discovering the truth,” the Dies Committee, now better known as the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, turned its investigations away from the Far Right and toward the Left, while Thomas himself relentlessly attacked the federal arts projects for presenting “propaganda for Communism and the New Deal.” In mid-1939, the Federal Theatre Project was shut down.

  Virgil Thomson had left for Paris by then, armed with a small advance to write a book on the state of modern music in America. Even for the poor, he wrote, France still offered “the richest life an artist ever knew.” But in 1940, as the Germans bombed factories along the Seine, he realized he had no choice but to leave. His friends were adamant: “I think it is most necessary to have you here,” Jane Bowles wrote to him from the United States. His colleague John Houseman added, “What are you doing over there, in your moribund continent, that is more important than returning here to influence profoundly the cultural life of your time?” Reluctantly, Thomson packed up his musical manuscripts, silver, and favorite art, and joined the exodus to America. By August, Thomson was back at the Chelsea—this time in room 210, next to Masters’s suite.

  Masters had long decried American involvement in this war. He wrote to a friend in 1938 that he longed “to convince people that the American Idea was a wonderful thing, and that it is our business now to get back to it.” War, he repeated, benefited only thieving government leaders “trying to get coal, harbors, world trade, iron, bacon and chickens and butter. That’s what’s the matter. It can’t make any difference to the world who wins, as the last war did not.” But then, he admitted, perhaps “I am out of sympathy with these times.”

  Masters’s son Hardin was with him on December 7, 1941, and they entered the Chelsea’s lobby after a splendid day out to learn from the switchboard operator of the tragedy at Pearl Harbor. For Masters, now seventy-three, it seemed that the idyllic life at the Hotel Chelsea must surely end. His generation lacked the strength to support on their shoulders the spindly cultural structure they had built. “We could scarcely believe her report at the time,” Hardin Masters recalled, “but [Masters’s] reaction was swift and terrible. ‘It’s war,’ he remarked. ‘It will be the rape of Europe and the death of our youth.’ He was a changed man, thinking immediately of the things he had left to do, in view of the probability of New York’s being bombed.”

  “We are so lost, so naked and so lonely in America . . . Immense and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on forever and we have no home,” Thomas Wo
lfe had written in Of Time and the River. But had he been with Masters at the Chelsea that day, he might have pointed to his more recent conclusion, soon to be published in You Can’t Go Home Again: “I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found . . . I think the true discovery of America is before us.” Now was the time for waiting. After the war, they would sift through the ashes to learn if something might be built again.

  4

  Howl

  We know that the real world exists,

  but we can no longer imagine it.

  —MARY MCCARTHY, On the Contrary

  THE FIRST CRIES OF dismay brought the Hotel Chelsea waiters running, but not quickly enough to prevent a reeling Jackson Pollock from vomiting on the carpet of the private dining room. Peggy Guggenheim looked away in disgust. All afternoon she had struggled to present this beast to her luncheon guests as the great way forward for American art, but the artist had grown steadily more inebriated and more belligerent, answering questions with monosyllables and grunts as his heavy head sagged toward his plate. Seated at this table were some of the most sophisticated art collectors and experts in the United States, including her own sister Hazel Guggenheim McKinley, herself an artist with a fortune in wartime profits to spend and a new young husband to impress. Yet Pollock couldn’t hold himself together for even an hour or two to let her get on with the job.

  Peggy had earned her peers’ respect as an expert on modern-art investment through hard work in Europe during the early days of the war, when museum-quality works could be snatched up at prices so low that she had to restrain herself from buying more than one a day. Already close to the avant-garde leaders from her years spent in Paris and in London, where she had presided over her own surrealist gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, she had ferried both those artists and their paintings home to the United States following the German invasion of France. Once in New York, she had established the stunningly avant-garde gallery and museum Art of This Century and had single-handedly transformed her ragged group of exiles into a world-class international artists’ community.

  Anyone who thought such a feat was easy was out of his mind. The exiled surrealists—Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, André Breton, Piet Mondrian, André Masson, and Max Ernst (to whom she was now married, much to her regret)—were a jealous and petty lot, sneering at the ignorance of New York collectors and interested only in maintaining their European society in exile, barricaded off from America’s hoi polloi. Their leader, Breton, refused even to learn the English language, preferring to spend his time obsessing over the philosopher Charles Fourier, whose writings he’d discovered during the crossing from France and whom he now praised as the world’s first true surrealist. Yet, as the war dragged on, it began to seem unlikely that devastated Europe would rise again, and the group appeared increasingly foolish in their self-isolation—an evolutionary offshoot that had failed to adapt, destined for extinction.

  If new art was going to come from anywhere, it would have to be from this country, specifically from New York. In any case, Peggy had reminded her luncheon guests, there was the issue of patriotism: American collectors had a duty in wartime to support an indigenous artistic movement, one as bold and transformative as their soon-to-be-victorious nation. The trouble, to be honest, was less in the collectors than in the artists. Their work was weak—it lacked panache—and who wanted to associate with such boors?

  Still, she did her best. A gathering at the Chelsea Hotel, with its lingering shades of Charles Dewey, Childe Hassam, Arthur Davies, and others, lent an aura of legitimacy to her proposition, reminding her guests that, in fact, this country did have its own artistic tradition on which to build. The continuing presence upstairs of John Sloan, whose works were now collected by the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art, provided a helpful reminder of the value of investing early. Even the Chelsea’s down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere suited her purpose, as it provided her guests with an exciting glimpse of an artist’s workshop without the discomfort of the bleak cold-water lofts where her penniless abstract artists actually lived.

  She had set the stage for her presentation, but Peggy could not control her leading man. Something happened to Pollock when facing representatives of the social class that had shut down the Federal Art Project that had sustained him and his colleagues through the worst of the Depression and the onset of the war. Their glittering presence sparked visceral memories of his years of starvation, when he and his brother Sande had lived like animals in unheated rooms on Houston Street, and of the shock they’d experienced the winter’s night they’d first glimpsed the dazzling paintings of Matisse and Braque through a gallery window, like messages from another world. It wasn’t that Pollock resented being poor—John Sloan had taught his generation that poverty could be liberating. But the Federal Art Project stipends had paid for the time Pollock needed to get to know other artists at Stewart’s Cafeteria and the Twenty-Third Street Automat, to drop in on their studios and exchange ideas, to practice techniques picked up from the European surrealists, to walk the streets and contemplate this city scraped raw, and, finally, to pull from his unconscious the seminal, Guernica-inspired Male and Female, whose barbaric figures seemed on the verge of devouring each other, half obscured by a frenzy of mathematical equations and agitated designs.

  And it was the project’s demise that had thrown Pollock back into soul-killing poverty in 1943, leaving him to subsist on bowls of sugar from the Automat and to shoplift art supplies until he found work as an elevator operator at that deadly-dull “temple of high art” created by Peggy’s uncle Solomon and his mistress, Baroness Hilla von Rebay, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later renamed the Guggenheim Museum). Peggy would never have taken a chance on Pollock, or even noticed him, if not for a recommendation by the artist Mondrian. On the strength of that, along with the urging of two other trusted expert advisers, she had offered Pollock a stipend of $150 per month to produce enough paintings for a gallery show that fall. It was her money that had made manifest such works as The She-Wolf and The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, and she had stood staunchly by Pollock when, despite praise for the exhibition from Sloan and a little-known Partisan Review critic named Clement Greenberg, not a single painting had sold. Seeing American art as a growth stock and with her collector’s eye already on Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and the sculptor David Hare, Peggy had scheduled another solo show for Pollock in the spring of 1945 and set up a series of meetings between collectors and the artist to gin up talk and understanding of his work. She hadn’t counted on Pollock’s loss of nerve since the disastrous first show and his subsequent return to the bottle.

  With the artist of the moment regurgitating onto the floor, Guggenheim’s guests made their excuses and fled—though Hazel McKinley, savvy as always, did take the time to advise the restaurant manager to cut out and frame that piece of vomit-spattered carpet, as it was likely to be worth millions someday. While Guggenheim, seething, tended to the aftermath of the disaster, Pollock staggered out through the crowded lobby into the street.

  New York had become a world of blackouts and sirens, gas masks and uniforms. The lobby of the Hotel Chelsea itself was a scene of confusion: European émigrés milled about with no apparent purpose; jukebox music pounded through the walls from the soldier-filled adjoining restaurant, and elderly residents stomped downstairs repeatedly to complain about it. Two years before, following the death of the last association board member, the Chelsea had fallen into a final bankruptcy, gone into foreclosure, and was sold by the bank to a syndicate of Hungarian émigrés led by a veteran hotelier named David Bard and his brother-in-law and frequent partner Frank Amigo. With a purchase price far below its appraised value of more than $570,000, the Chelsea had been a great bargain, particularly when one considered the added advantages of its central location, striking appearance, and loyal clientele. Once in possession, however, the new owners faced the daunting tasks of updating plumbing that had been rerouted extensively as apartments we
re subdivided and bathrooms and kitchens added, and replacing some of the first electrical wiring ever installed in New York. The elevators were creaky. The walls needed painting. The floors were scuffed and worn. As for the residents, the Hungarians discovered an eclectic and eccentric population whose protective feelings about the hotel and wild collective imagination had already prompted rumors that Bard had won the Chelsea in a high-stakes game of poker, that he had paid no more than $50,000 for it, that he intended to evict them all and tear the building down.

  Some of the older denizens found the change in ownership particularly traumatic. John Sloan, then in his seventies and recovering from a serious illness in Santa Fe, had responded in panic to a letter from Bard informing him of a rent increase at the Chelsea and suggesting he give up his upstairs studio. Sloan was able to send a New York friend to intervene, but Edgar Lee Masters was less fortunate. Forced to give up his beloved suite when the new owners secured a government contract to house U.S. Marines on the second floor, Masters sputtered impotently in a letter to a friend from his new single room upstairs that the hotel had become “a mad house.” It was packed with men in uniform, and in the lobby, an officer with a microphone and “a voice like a buzz saw” called Marines to the front desk all day long. “Nerves somehow will have to stand for this,” Masters wrote. But his nerves failed him. In December 1943, he collapsed in his room and was taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital. His estranged wife, Ellen, stepped in to care for him, and she saw to it that the elderly poet never returned to the Chelsea—and his mistress Alice—again.