Other residents, however, seemed to thrive in the chaotic atmosphere. Virgil Thomson, like Masters, had been forced out of his rooms—in Thomson’s case, the second-floor suite he had occupied since his return from France in 1940. But unlike the poet, Thomson chose to turn the inconvenience into an opportunity for advancement. In The State of Music, his tart and highly amusing depiction of the American musical community, Thomson had made the case that no true musical culture could develop in the United States as long as government bureaucrats with their soul-destroying “music-appreciation” programs, private companies with their commercial concerns, and amateur patrons he called the “Opera Guild ladies” were running things. All these groups favored European celebrity musicians over the lesser-known innovators at home, he wrote. Instead, musicians themselves should be put in charge of the presentation, production, and critical interpretation of American music, because only musicians possessed sufficient passion and expertise to fill the symphony halls and record stores with relevant, potent work capable of shaking up a nation. There was no time to lose either, Thomson knew, with an oncoming flood of accomplished émigré composers, conductors, and performers from Europe threatening to overwhelm the Americans in much the same way the Armory Show had temporary halted the progress of American art.
To that end, Thomson had parlayed his book’s success into a job as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. There, as he had done earlier for Modern Music, he analyzed and critiqued all varieties of American performances, from student sopranos to gospel to opera to jazz. The Herald Tribune column provided Thomson with a gratifying bully pulpit, but he had an even greater ambition: to create an engine to power the American music scene, made up of a tight-knit network of professional musicians—preferably musicians who happened to be his friends.
First, though, he required a suite at the Chelsea large enough to host such a community. To that end, he negotiated with Mr. Bard to be relocated from the second floor to suite 920, directly below Sloan’s studio—the hotel manager’s former apartment and easily the best-preserved suite in the hotel. Suite 920 had three large, high-ceilinged rooms—half of one of the original grand apartments, rumored to have belonged to the architect of the Chelsea himself—and retained its etched-glass panels, carved-wood trim, working fireplaces surrounded by richly tinted hand-molded tiles, and bay windows offering a spectacular city view. If the apartment lacked closets, if its floors were worn and its brass locks and doorknobs unpolished—and if Thomson could barely squeeze his rotund torso into the jury-rigged kitchen crammed into a former linen closet—the space exuded a type of artistic atmosphere impossible to find anywhere else in New York, at least not at a price he could afford.
After moving in his grand piano and Louis Vuitton suitcases and hanging paintings by friends in Paris and New York on the walls, Thomson at last had a home for his own Parisian-style salon. He set to work expanding his original circle of Little Friends to include an exciting array of music professionals and other creative types, including two young composers with an interest in Balinese gamelan music, Lou Harrison and Colin McPhee; the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks; Leonard Bernstein, the handsome new assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic; John Cage, a lanky, red-haired inventor and composer from California whom Thomson had met at one of Peggy Guggenheim’s parties, and his new lover, the Martha Graham dancer Merce Cunningham; and the dance critic Edwin Denby and his loftmate, the experimental filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. Occasionally, Denby and Burckhardt brought along their next-door neighbor, the Dutch abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning—an incongruous presence in this young, mostly homosexual crowd, but he was comfortable in their world and flatteringly addicted to Thomson’s outrageously catty stories and recollections of Gertrude Stein.
Here, Thomson was in his element, hosting gatherings in a maroon housecoat and hand-tied cravat, feasting on gossip, and dispensing all kinds of amusing advice: how to find suitable housing, whom to entertain and why, whether and whom to marry, and how one’s choice of day job was likely to affect the type of music one produced. But he also performed real-world services, using his power as a critic to help his protégés make crucial professional connections, putting them to work as assistant reviewers at the Herald Tribune, and hiring as copyists such composers in the making as the extraordinarily handsome, twenty-year-old Ned Rorem, who received lessons in composition as well as pay. Frequently, the group took field trips together to eat ten-cent hamburgers in the Village with de Kooning and the still-struggling Pollock, Rothko, and Barnett Newman, watch John Cage’s percussion ensemble whack gourds, gongs, Chinese dishes, and “the jawbone of an ass” at the Museum of Modern Art, and visit the male brothels in Brooklyn and the jazz clubs downtown. Still, Thomson never overlooked the need to attract music patrons—putting together dinner parties for the Guggenheims and Vanderbilts, enticing them with fellow guests Lotte Lenya and Igor Stravinsky, and charming them with delicious “Missouri dinners” of meat loaf with pan gravy and Jeff Davis pie produced with the help of his expert cook, Lee Anna.
Thomson’s efforts to expand his group’s influence were successful for both his friends’ careers and his own. His prominence as a critic guaranteed new commissions and performances of his works. As a result, he was able to travel to Paris as the war ended to collaborate on another opera with Gertrude Stein, planned for presentation at Columbia University’s Brander Matthews Hall. This time, Thomson found the seventy-one-year-old Stein, who had spent the war years in France, preoccupied with what she saw as the end to the optimistic, democratic nineteenth-century American worldview. She made this the theme of her libretto, in which the suffragist Susan B. Anthony looks back, with the help of a pair of narrators named Gertrude S. and Virgil T., on the lives of such iconic American figures as John Adams, Daniel Webster, Lillian Russell, Ulysses S. Grant, and Anthony Comstock. “We cannot retrace our steps,” concludes The Mother of Us All. “Going forward may be / the same as going backwards.” The sad regret would come to seem remarkably appropriate, as Stein died within a year of the libretto’s completion.
Thomson, however, looked only forward, never back. Returning home aboard a packed troopship in the fall of 1945, he reflected with satisfaction that with the end of the war, resistance to modern music had been defeated just as surely as the Nazis had. Now would come “the division of the spoils”—and he was determined to see America take the greatest share. While aboard ship, he encountered an equally resolute cultural patriot: the Seattle-born writer Mary McCarthy, author of the recent witty and scandalous short story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit.”
Thomson was amused to learn that McCarthy had her own history with the Hotel Chelsea. Seven years before, during a youthful flirtation with Trotskyism that had prompted her to play the role of girl mascot for the gang of male intellectuals producing the Partisan Review, McCarthy had agreed to let the “boys” use her as bait to lure the prominent middle-aged New Republic editor Edmund Wilson over to their journal. McCarthy, a slender, snaggletoothed beauty with a well-known rebellious streak, took up the challenge despite Wilson’s reputation as a lecher with a special taste for intellectual young women and invited the critic to dinner along with her friend (and the evening’s chaperone) Peggy Marshall. Donning a sexy black dress and her grandmother’s fox stole, McCarthy primed herself beforehand with several daiquiris at the Hotel Albert, not anticipating that Wilson would take one look at her and decide to ply her with double manhattans, red wine, and brandy and Bénédictines.
Next thing McCarthy knew, the three of them were at the Hotel Chelsea visiting Wilson’s friend Ben Stolberg, a labor journalist and fellow Trotskyite for whom Mary had worked as an assistant years before, and the next thing after that, she woke to find that it was morning and she was in bed with someone in one of the hotel’s rooms. She turned with dread to identify her companion and was relieved to see Peggy—the two women having been gallantly checked in by Wilson the previous night before he stumbled home
to his own bed. Perhaps it was his gallantry that attracted McCarthy; in any case, despite her initial amusement over the older editor’s pudgy physique and “funny, squeaky voice,” she embarked on an improbable but passionate affair with Wilson, leading to another visit to Stolberg in early 1938 to announce that they were getting married the next day.
On the troopship returning from France, McCarthy told Thomson that the marriage had been a tumultuous one: among other excitements, McCarthy had tried to set Wilson’s study on fire, and Wilson had committed her to a mental institution. Now in the process of divorcing Wilson, McCarthy was on her way home from a pre-honeymoon trip with the next husband in line, the gossipy, social-climbing Bowdoin Broadwater. Thomson marveled at the sight of the scrappy thirty-three-year-old McCarthy, orphaned at age six and hammered into stubborn independence by an unhappy Catholic girlhood, meekly seeking her fiancé’s approval of every line she wrote. It was unclear whether she understood that the sardonic Bowdoin was homosexual, something Thomson could plainly see. Perhaps she didn’t care. In any case, Thomson enjoyed McCarthy’s subversive sense of humor; the two veteran outsiders spent the rest of the trip amusing themselves by baiting the Harvard-educated “commies” aboard ship who refused to disown their prewar dream of a utopian-socialist new world order even in the face of Stalin’s purges and a totalitarian Soviet Union.
Back in New York, as one of Thomson’s frequent visitors and occasional borrowers of his flat, McCarthy found the Hotel Chelsea clinging unhealthily, in her opinion, to that aborted dream. Entering the lobby in the mid- to late 1940s, one was likely to spot John Sloan, the ultimate socialist anachronism, swapping stories with the Russian-born social-realist painter Nahum Tschacbasov and Jake Baker, one of the creators of the WPA’s Federal Art Project. On the first floor, a group of left-wing organizers were planning rallies and petitions in support of the partition of Palestine on behalf of the Communist-backed United Committee to Save the Jewish State and the United Nations. And in suite 920, Virgil Thomson’s apartment, the filmmaker Robert Flaherty (best known for Nanook of the North, his poetic 1920s documentary of Inuit life) could be found reviewing Thomson’s soundtrack for their new film on the impact of the oil industry’s exploration in the Cajun bayou country, Louisiana Story, attended by his reverential cameraman and assistant Richard Leacock, a member of the Communist Party.
No wonder the South African writer Stuart Cloete chose to make the Chelsea the city’s last utopian refuge in “The Blast,” his short story about a New York City nuclear holocaust that was published in Collier’s in 1947. In the story, the writer-narrator, one of the city’s few survivors, goes to the collapsed hotel and discovers a life-giving spring gushing from a fern-covered grotto in its ruined basement. There, he creates “a little paradise for himself,” with paintings filched from museums, excellent wines from abandoned stores, and a “very fine library,” where he reads poetry with his gun and his hunting dogs beside him. “It was we [writers and artists] who had set this thing going, who had by our apathy set this final blaze,” the narrator reflects as he reads. Perhaps now, living close to nature among the ruins of the city, they might finally produce “a new type of co-operative, nonpredatory man living at peace with his fellows.”
It was a laughable idea, in Mary McCarthy’s view, human nature and the systems it created being what they were. She argued her case in her work in progress, The Oasis, a satirical take on the utopian novel in which fictional stand-ins for her former Partisan Review friends came together to form a modern Brook Farm but inevitably tripped themselves up with the same factionalism, self-righteousness, and moral rigidity that had caused the real left-wing movement to collapse.
You could see similar disintegration everywhere in the late 1940s once you started looking beneath the surface. At the Chelsea, David Bard, who had worked for half a decade to please his clients in this artists’ residence, had grown so tired of trying to manage their complaints, not to mention the squabbles among the owners themselves, that in 1947 he threw up his hands, sold all but 5 percent of his shares in the partnership to Chelsea plumber Julius Krauss and front deskman Joseph Gross, and left—only to return a few years later when the expanded syndicate, unable to manage the Chelsea without him, persuaded him to take the helm again. During his absence, a wave of Eastern European refugee families, temporarily housed at the Chelsea by Catholic Charities, contradicted the first-floor Communists’ worldview with their stories of confiscated farms and forced labor as coal miners, not to mention their joy when assigned private rooms with three separate beds—“Imagine, and a bathroom!” And when Louisiana Story finally premiered, with Thomson’s brilliant score combining Acadian folk music and the industrial “found” sounds of throbbing engines and clashing steel, the gentle filmmaker Flaherty was crucified by the Communists for having accepted funding from Standard Oil and for allowing the camera’s poetic vision to dominate, thus wasting his chance to present a political polemic.
The young Leacock, to his later regret, failed to stand up to his fellow Marxists and defend this mentor who had profoundly influenced his aesthetic as a filmmaker by demonstrating how a camera simply planted on location can reveal the truth of a subject in ways impossible for the human eye. But then, it was hard for anyone to know what stance to take in those days, with the political narrative being wrenchingly altered in the wake of the war, and factions turning into veritable armed camps as a result. The political polarization became clear to everyone in 1949 when a Conference for World Peace held to promote “civilized discourse” between American and Soviet intellectuals at the nearby Waldorf-Astoria Hotel disintegrated into a circus of anti-Communist demonstrators. Arthur Miller, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, and Louis Untermeyer had to pass a row of praying nuns to enter the building. Inside, the playwright Clifford Odets bellowed to one audience that the sole motivation for the Cold War was “MONEEY!” while Mary McCarthy demanded to know from another whether Ralph Waldo Emerson, if he were alive today, would be allowed to write or even exist in the Soviet Union.
As Miller later wrote, this farce of a conference marked “a hairpin curve in the road of history”—the point at which everyone realized that the shift in postwar alliances combined with two decades of left-wing infighting had destroyed American artists’ and intellectuals’ ability to create social change. With the Left disempowered, the Right pressed its advantage, initiating another Red hunt with the onset of the Korean War. The civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois and colleagues, working to outlaw nuclear weapons at the Peace Information Center on the Chelsea’s first floor, were investigated by the FBI; John Sloan’s own FBI file was reactivated after he dared to declare the House Un-American Activities Committee a “disgrace to the nation”; and his old acquaintance Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, now a “plump, graying, grandmotherly-looking” Communist Party board member, was imprisoned on a charge of advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
At the same time, Mary McCarthy’s former boss Ben Stolberg, still occupying his suite on the Chelsea’s fifth floor, saw his chance to strike back at the Communist Party. Soviet-controlled interference in American labor disputes in the 1930s had turned Stolberg from a Communist sympathizer into an enemy for life. Allying himself with fellow anti-Communists Herbert Hoover, Joseph Kennedy, and Ayn Rand, he helped create an array of Congress- and CIA-backed international journals, symposia, and cultural events aimed at spreading pro-American propaganda worldwide. When McCarthy herself, frustrated by the dearth of nonideological venues for publishing her work, checked in to the Chelsea in 1952 for a winter of fundraising for Critic, a new magazine of her own that she envisioned as a kind of intellectual “oasis” for the free exchange of nonpartisan ideas, she found that her very open-mindedness put off the wealthy donors she approached. McCarthy ended the winter not only without a magazine but in “a state of monumental brokenness”—as did the writer James Farrell, her neighbor at the Chelsea, who had tried and failed to help McCarthy find backers for her jou
rnal. In the end, both McCarthy and Farrell—along with another friend of theirs and Virgil Thomson’s, the composer Nicolas Nabokov—chose to lend their names as “cultural ambassadors” to Stolberg’s endeavors, closing their eyes to the evidence of CIA backing and parroting the fiction that their generous per diems were wholly subsidized by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
It was difficult to make a living if one was on the wrong side of the political divide or wanted to avoid ideology altogether. The spiritual plague first identified by Thomas Wolfe in “I Have a Thing to Tell You” had spread to infect virtually all public discourse. By now, American intellectuals had become so cowed by the witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee that even the most courageous dared protest only the violation of their own civil rights; they no longer defended socialist ideas or the interests of labor or the poor, and the fact that Communist Party membership was actually legal in the United States seemed to have been forgotten. The pressure to conform, the social isolation and deadening of feeling caused by this stifling of diverse points of view, threatened, as Arthur Miller wrote, to “devour the glue that kept the country together.”
The only way to break through the cultural paralysis and get the blood circulating again seemed to be through self-laceration—the self-destructive abuse of alcohol, the violence of abstract expressionism, or the soul-stabbing ritual of confession and punishment encouraged by the HUAC hearings. Miller, in his late thirties already secure with the success of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman behind him, had grown fascinated by the surreal quality of these hearings, so similar to religious inquisitions in that the accused could be absolved only by confessing to the crime. In the HUAC hearings, as, for that matter, in the now-ubiquitous realm of psychoanalysis, confession had become the equivalent of virtue in postwar America. Miller observed this bizarre transaction close up in 1952 when his longtime collaborator director Elia Kazan quietly confided to him that, under threat of being blacklisted, he had acknowledged his own former Communist Party membership and had handed over to the committee the names of about a dozen colleagues.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 14
