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

by Sherill Tippins

  The news horrified Miller. What was happening was not so much political as “something else, something I could not name,” he wrote. There was something almost sexual in these rituals of guilt and expiation, the breakdowns and confessions, the betrayals of friends; it was as though the same energy propelled both phenomena. Even before Kazan’s confession, such associations had led Miller to research the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials as potential source material for a play. Now, reading the trial transcripts, he found in the Salem prosecutors and the Cold War inquisitors the same moral intensities, the same fear of “pollution” from outsiders, and the same projection of their own vileness onto others.

  The ground was shifting under Americans’ feet; the reliable social conventions of honesty, fidelity, and fairness were turning to ash before their eyes. At times, Miller wrote, one could almost believe that all that remained to keep the world from collapsing was the conscience of a single individual—yet people’s consciences had been muffled. Then again, perhaps he was merely projecting from his own experience. It was he, after all, who was struggling to hang on to his marriage and young family in the face of an overwhelming desire to leave them behind for Marilyn Monroe.

  Miller and Monroe’s initial meeting had been brief, at a party in Los Angeles in the summer of 1951. Since then, Miller had been in New York, for the most part, while Monroe had kept busy with an affair with Kazan, the sudden upsurge of her career with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, and an engagement to Joe DiMaggio. She and Miller still hardly knew each other. But by 1953, he wrote, “she had taken on an immanence in my imagination, the vitality of a force one does not understand but that seems on the verge of lighting up a vast surrounding plain of darkness.” For the playwright, desperately unhappy in his personal life and disillusioned by the times, Monroe stood as “the seeming truth-bearer of sensuality,” a woman whose authenticity, “like a force of nature,” promised a revival of life, an antidote to 1950s respectable conformity.

  “I am the truth, for I am what they want,” Miller wrote in his notebook regarding young Abigail in The Crucible. “I am what the women hate with envy.” When the play opened on Broadway in the spring of 1953, Miller gave himself over to “fluidity and chance” in his own psyche as well as in his career. “I was sick of being afraid,” he wrote—and he hardly cared when the realization of the true subject of his play, the puritanical witch hunt being carried out by the HUAC, dawned on his audiences and turned them to ice. He almost reveled in encountering the shocked faces of acquaintances during intermission, and he responded with indifference when the reviews turned out to be mixed and the play’s run short. Letting “the mystery and blessing of womankind break like waves over my head,” he resolved to let his marriage fall apart and pledge his commitment to Monroe.

  Dropping in on Dylan Thomas at the Hotel Chelsea that October of 1953 felt like stepping off solid ground and immersing himself wholly in that fluidity. The thirty-eight-year-old Welsh poet, veteran of three national tours in the past four years, had earned his reputation as a mesmerizing reader of D. H. Lawrence, Yeats, and Eliot, as well as his own Dionysian celebrations of his youth in Wales. In venue after venue across America, audiences beaten down by the postwar atmosphere had given themselves over to Thomas’s “simoons of words,” the rolling vigor of his half-sung incantations “coming from deep within the soul, from the profound heart of nature.” Listening together in a packed auditorium, individuals from Cleveland to Seattle to San Francisco had experienced a nearly forgotten sense of brotherly communion, reveling in Thomas’s miraculous discovery and identification of Americans’ “own ego, our own wild soul, freed of the flesh.” What they heard was “a thunderbolt,” one observer wrote, bringing them back to a world they loved.

  Miller, along with several members of the experimental film society Cinema 16, approached Thomas at the Chelsea that fall to invite him to participate in a panel discussion on the film’s potential as an art form better suited than literature to the post-atomic-bomb age. Many of the society’s members were poets or writers who had grown increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the printed text; words seemed inadequate to express the horrors that had been revealed in the postwar years, and their power had been co-opted by the thriving 1950s advertising industry and by other commercial media. But, like Thomas’s live performances and like Flaherty’s poetic documentaries, the galvanizing “presentness” of experimental film transcended the rigidity of the printed page. The Cinema 16 group hoped that works such as Geography of the Body, made by the poet Willard Maas and the artist Marie Menken in 1943, and the Ukrainian-American writer Maya Deren’s heavily symbolic Meshes of the Afternoon could stimulate Americans’ imagination and open their eyes in ways that words no longer could.

  When he was asked, Miller was glad to act as ambassador for this cause, not only because it interested him but because it gave him a pretext to take a close look at this cherub-faced bard who had been sending American audiences into such raptures. The two men, only a year apart in age, made for a sharp contrast. Miller, tall and angular, with his professor’s spectacles and brooding demeanor, had worked hard to become a success by age thirty-one, whereas the slothful, bohemian Thomas, a teacher’s son from the “lumpish” industrial town of Swansea, had attracted the support of Edith Sitwell and T. S. Eliot while still in his early twenties and had published his first volume of verse at age nineteen.

  The two differed in their views of America as well: Miller despaired over its fundamental character and saw only the failure of a nineteenth-century utopian dream, while Thomas had loved America from his initial visit, in 1950, despite harassment by government officials for his supposed Communist sympathies. “I knew America would be just like this,” he had cried on his first drive to the city from the airport, beaming at the junkyards and ramshackle streets passing by the car window. From the beginning, Thomas felt most at ease in what he fondly called “Newfilthy York,” particularly after having discovered the Chelsea with his temperamental wife, Caitlin, on his second tour in 1952.

  After David Bard’s return and the expansion of the hotel’s roster of owners, a new assault on the Chelsea’s physical state had begun: floors were further subdivided, linoleum was laid down over marble, and cheap paint was slapped onto the walls. New city regulations had long since required that the remaining wraparound apartments at the building’s west end be split in half to make room for fire escapes. Owing to the same regulations, a ceiling had been installed in the ground-floor stairwell over the front desk to prevent the spread of fire upstairs, though, sadly, it also cut off the beautiful illumination from the skylight above. But none of this mattered to the couple from Wales. Drunk on the romance of the city, they loved their large, well-preserved, fifth-floor room with its glamorous view north toward the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, its heavy and outdated American furniture, and the useful little kitchenette. They felt at home among the bookies and office clerks, attorneys and insurance executives, writers ranging from James Farrell to the gardening columnist Betty Blossom, and artists ranging from the aging portraitist Joseph Burgess to the twenty-year-old mixed-media artist Jorge Frick. From Virgil Thomson, they heard all the gossip—about Jake Baker’s passion for nude sunbathing with his proper-seeming wife, Mildred; James Farrell’s rather public affair with a resident married pianist; and the visiting artist Donald Vogel’s discovery of a brown bat hanging from the ceiling of his small, dark tenth-floor room. Generously, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas provided plenty of fodder for gossip themselves with their knockdown-dragout fights in which they threw chairs, shoved dishes off the table, and matched each other blow for blow.

  Having managed to hang on to only a few hundred dollars from the thousands he had earned on his trip, Thomas had returned to perform some more readings in the spring of 1953. He was on his own this time, happy to leave Caitlin seething over “all those fool women who chase after him while I’m left here to rot in this bloody bog.” Welc
omed back by Bard, who kindly expressed disappointment that Caitlin hadn’t come along, and greeted with smiles by the bellmen and maids, Thomas felt at home once again “among friendly faces, known or unknown . . . where the only propriety was to be oneself” and nothing more was required. The city had become familiar to him by now, and he ignored the Midtown Irish pubs in favor of Greenwich Village’s gritty Cedar Tavern and San Remo Bar, headquarters for Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Franz Klein, David Smith, and other expressionist artists who had survived the postwar years in their freezing studios, selling few if any works on the rare occasions when their works were shown. There was no denying that their lives had been hard. But as their admiring critic Clement Greenberg wrote, poverty and anonymity had allowed them to achieve “the condition under which the true reality of our age is experienced.” “Like children,” de Kooning later recalled with satisfaction, “we broke all the windows.” Art “was no longer supposed to be Beautiful, but True.”

  Smashing all the windows had led Pollock to a breakthrough in 1947 as he reinvented art’s simplest element, the line, in his drip paintings. Fame had followed quickly. In 1949, Life published photographs of Pollock with the arch question “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Two years later, the magazine answered in the affirmative, publishing a group photo of downtown artist-rebels, captioned “the Irascibles,” in which Pollock appeared dead center. The photograph alone was enough to change Pollock’s career; by 1952, he was represented by the publicity-savvy gallery owner Sidney Janis, who described Pollock’s work to the press as “action painting,” not a picture but an “event” that merged the public world of the mural with the private world of the artist’s psyche in an utterly revolutionary way.

  Inevitably, the art of Pollock, de Kooning, and the other Irascibles was treated by critics as a “movement,” though their styles were hardly more uniform than those of the turn-of-the-century Independents. Like the Independents, they struggled to sell their work, but word was spreading. The San Remo and Cedar Tavern became meccas for all kinds of adventurous artists—including such veterans of North Carolina’s experimental Black Mountain College as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, and Virgil Thomson’s protégés John Cage and Merce Cunningham—as well as college students, left-wing radicals, cruising homosexuals, and tourists looking for a “genuine” New York experience downtown. It was exciting for everyone to carouse with the creators of the first wholly original American style of art, to hear the handsome, charismatic de Kooning spouting his beloved American slang (“Terrific,” “Gee!”) while Pollock drunkenly challenged him with “You know more, but I feel more.”

  Dylan Thomas was thrilled to be present too, but like the younger members of the crowd around him, he was slow to notice the difficulty that the shy, awkward Pollock and his fellows had in adjusting to life in the public eye. Pollock was happy enough to pose for pictures and to buy a Cadillac when the money started coming in, but he couldn’t shake off the anxiety of seeing his work trivialized in the press and himself lionized as an existentialist hero. Even as he grew more social, the strain—a version of the tension he had felt among the high-society collectors at the Chelsea nearly a decade before—pushed him into alcoholism and despair. “Do you think I would have painted this crap if I knew how to draw a hand?” he would shout at the San Remo hangers-on. De Kooning expressed his own anxieties with Woman I, a deeply unsettling image of a monstrous, devouring female—interpreted by many as the American bitch goddess Success—grinning at her next sacrificial victim with huge white choppers that de Kooning had, in a burst of inspiration, clipped out of a magazine and pasted on. Ironically, the work proved to be de Kooning’s masterpiece, raising him to such eminence that he soon joined Pollock on his decade-long San Remo bender, even as savvy younger artists—Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg—began lining up to replace them.

  Dylan Thomas may have thought himself merely an observer of the native customs downtown, but the American bitch goddess had her eye on him as well. Already, the strain of trying to meet America’s need for a “roaring boy, a daemonic poet,” was beginning to show, as Thomas ducked out for public appearances in Ann Arbor, Detroit, or any one of forty other cities that spring. If the readings were satisfying, Thomas dreaded the deadly-dull post-reading receptions, hosted by American academics as interchangeable as factory parts and seemingly content to spin out their sterile existences in overheated bungalows on Faculty Row. Thomas had never understood why these people cared so much about his poetry, since “he could see no evidence that they were able to face the living experience from which it sprang.” At their parties, he tried to entertain them by telling dirty jokes and snuggling up to their women, but the scandalized delight with which the academics tallied the number of martinis he spilled and cigarette burns he made on their furniture only depressed Thomas further and sent him running posthaste back to New York. There, he would take up his old routine with greater relish than before, gravitating increasingly to a former longshoremen’s bar in the Village called the White Horse Tavern, where he could always count on finding a crowd of young “ardents” eager to listen to his stories and supply him with scotch.

  This life took a terrible toll on the poet and added to the pressures of an increasingly demanding writing career. Yet Thomas couldn’t seem to get enough of it. In June, he had returned to his family in Wales, only to fly back to New York four months later. This time, his ostensible purpose was to launch a national tour for his new “play for voices,” Under Milk Wood. The drama, conceived as an aural mosaic re-creating a day in the lives of fifty-three characters in a small Welsh village, had been inspired in part by Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and had been greeted enthusiastically when it premiered at New York’s Poetry Center in May. Thomas found it easy to convince Caitlin that he needed to act on this opportunity and organize more performances, but the real draw for him was New York City.

  Miller knew of the poet’s recent history, but when he and the group from Cinema 16 arrived to talk to Thomas, Miller was appalled to see that the face once “so young, so ruddy” was now dissolute and spoiled, with eyes reddened from the day’s hangover, hair tangled and uncombed, and an unhealthy paunch beneath his tweeds. The poet’s tiny, dark, second-floor room at the Chelsea was littered with cheap paperbacks, discarded candy wrappers, and dirty laundry. As Miller and his colleagues perched uncomfortably on the chairs and windowsill, Thomas apologized for its condition, explaining that due to a mix-up with his plane ticket, he’d arrived at the Chelsea three days late and so his usual suite had been reassigned. Then he broke down in one of his terrible spells of coughing and retching. Typically, he shrugged these off with an explanation that he had a medical condition: “I think it’s called cirrhosis of the liver.”

  Still, despite his obvious ill health, Thomas did his usual best to entertain the filmmakers. Inevitably, bottles were opened and drinks distributed, and the poet spoke to them in his famously intimate, human way, with the “high, wild, wonderful laughter” that invited others in. To Miller, he was an enigma, this young man “who with a week’s abstinence would have been as healthy as a pig.” Perhaps, the playwright speculated, Thomas’s drinking was part of “the struggle to hold off the guilt” about his success and the power he had over other men. Or perhaps he simply felt compelled to act out the public’s expectation of an early death for the romantic figure of the poet. Whatever was behind the impulse, it was painfully clear that Thomas needed care.

  Miller learned that Thomas had gone to see The Crucible on Broadway in May. The more memorable part of the evening for Thomas, though, may have been a party afterward, where he drank so much that he fell down a flight of stairs, broke his arm, and so had to perform at an early reading of his own Under Milk Wood with his arm in a sling. His tour organizer’s assistant, a young artist named Liz Reitell, was called in to help Thomas convalesce, and in short order, she became his lover. She arrived now, in fact, to kic
k out the guests so the poet could dictate some new revisions to his script. Before they left, the poet did promise to participate in the panel discussion with Cinema 16 the following week.

  But the current in which Thomas was caught carried him inexorably along. Days later, during a rehearsal for Under Milk Wood, he grew so ill from drink, possibly combined with Benzedrine, that he collapsed on a couch, gasping, “I’ve seen the gates of hell to-night,” and had to be escorted back to the Chelsea by Liz. On October 24 and 25, Thomas and five American readers gave a stunningly successful performance of the drama, moving many in the audience to tears, yet the poet continued his process of self-destruction: staggering home from the White Horse with a girl “loaned” to him by a fellow drinker on one night, and throwing a woman he disliked out of a cab on another. Horrified to realize that he was unable to stop himself from grimacing and making strange faces at passersby on the sidewalk, he confessed to Liz, “I’m really afraid I’m going mad.”

  Liz later claimed that she begged him to get help, but Thomas couldn’t stop performing for the crowds. On October 28, he managed to join the Cinema 16 panel, which included besides Miller the poets Maya Deren and Willard Maas, the group’s founder Amos Vogel, and the film critic Parker Tyler. But when Deren attempted a serious discussion of the treatment of the conscious and the unconscious in her films, Thomas pretended incomprehension, saying he “just liked stories,” like those by Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Afterward, he and Liz raced back to the White Horse, where they giggled over the caricatures she’d drawn of the filmmakers as he had played the fool.