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

by Sherill Tippins

  More and more, Thomas’s life in New York was wobbling out of control. Living in squalor, he blamed the state of his room on the hotel’s general dinginess, grumbling to Liz that at the Chelsea, “the cockroaches have teeth.” At night in bed, he wept with longing for his family and in the next breath confessed to Liz that all he wanted was to die. Things came to a head at two in the morning on November 4 when, as Liz later reported, the poet sat bolt upright in his Chelsea bed and announced fiercely, “I’ve got to go out and have a drink.” Despite her pleas, he headed for the door, assuring her that he’d be back in half an hour. In fact, he returned at around four thirty; he walked to the center of the room, announced laconically (and quite likely exaggerating), “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record,” and then sank to his knees, dropped his head on Liz’s lap, and mumbled, “I love you . . . but I’m alone.”

  Those would be his last words that night, according to Liz. The next day, Thomas’s condition continued to deteriorate, and his doctor dropped in repeatedly to supply medication, then an injection of ACTH, and finally, when Thomas’s weakness and vomiting gave way to horrible hallucinations, a large dose of morphine. At around midnight, Liz noticed that Thomas’s face had turned blue. An ambulance rushed him to St. Vincent’s Hospital, but the poet was already in a coma when he arrived.

  Word spread through the city that Thomas had collapsed, and Liz was joined in the waiting room by a gradually accumulating crowd of admirers and, days later, by Caitlin herself, summoned from Wales. The long-suffering wife took one look at her unconscious husband and burst into a fit of profanity, then tore a crucifix from a wall, assaulted Thomas’s doctors, bit an orderly on the hand, and ripped the habit of a nun—whereupon she was put in a straitjacket and dispatched to a mental institution. That’s where she was when her husband died on November 9.

  Dylan Thomas was dead, but his presence had made an impact. Through sheer romantic bravado, he had managed to make a small tear in the shroud wrapped around America’s mummified culture—a rift through which forgotten sounds and images of an older America could emerge. Before Thomas’s death, Allen Ginsberg, a poet’s son from Paterson, New Jersey, and Ginsberg’s friend Jack Kerouac, a French-Canadian from Lowell, Massachusetts, had heard that siren call and followed Thomas to the San Remo and the Cedar Tavern. There they, too, had enjoyed the freedom to be who they were—outcasts; experimenters in the realms of sex, drugs, and religion; veterans of prison and of mental institutions; and, perhaps most scandalous of all in this midcentury culture, poets without money or regular jobs. They had experienced the adrenaline rush of mixing with the abstract expressionists who had so powerfully reached into their own individual psyches to reshape the world. And they had befriended and learned from the social rejects whom Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West called the “fellaheen”: Gregory Corso, born across the street from the San Remo and educated in prison while doing time for robbery as a teenager; Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler who had introduced their friend William Burroughs to heroin; and the charismatic, hyperactive railroad worker Neal Cassady who would someday, through these young writers, help the nation recover its soul.

  If the ground was shifting under the country’s feet, as Arthur Miller suspected, it was happening in these downtown bars. But thanks in part to Dylan Thomas’s well-publicized misadventures, the Chelsea had become an iconic institution in this separate society as well. Kerouac and the novelist Gore Vidal paid formal tribute to the hotel’s significance one sweltering late-summer night in 1953, just two months before Thomas’s collapse there.

  It was one of those nights of “metropolitan excitements,” Kerouac wrote, “a round of beers, another round of beers, the talk gets more beautiful more excited, flushed, another round.” He and his girlfriend had taken Burroughs to the San Remo to celebrate the publication of Junkie, Burroughs’s autobiographical tale of addiction presented in the form of a lurid thirty-five-cent paperback under the pseudonym William Lee. With the book’s publication, long in coming, Kerouac assured his friend that money and fame were now imminent—not recalling, perhaps, that his own first novel, The Town and the City, published to some praise three years before, was already largely forgotten. Since then, Kerouac had written in a three-week, coffee-fueled frenzy a book he called “The Beat Generation,” typing the story of two “Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God” in one single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of drawing paper that he then cut up and taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. When he had finished, he dropped the result on the desk of his editor, Robert Giroux, as if it were a roll of paper towels. He had invented a new literary form, he claimed, one derived from the rhythms of bebop improvisation, Dylan Thomas’s poetry, and Thomas Wolfe’s rivers of prose. When Giroux protested mildly, “But Jack, how can you make corrections on a manuscript like that?” Kerouac bellowed at him, red-faced, “The hell with editing! . . . This book was dictated to me by the Holy Ghost!” Then he snatched back his scroll and left.

  Eventually, Burroughs’s publisher, Ace, offered to introduce in paperback the novel now called On the Road. But on this night in 1953, Kerouac was still awaiting its publication. When he spotted Vidal across the room, “not so great a writer like me nevertheless so famous and glamorous etc.,” he excitedly waved him over and ordered another round of beers. Kerouac and Burroughs had both been intrigued by Vidal’s notorious The City and the Pillar, in which homosexuality had been presented with a cool matter-of-factness impressive in a culture still so rigid that alternative sexuality could not even be referred to directly on the stage. The novel, published within months of the earth-shattering Kinsey report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, had made the urbane, good-looking Vidal’s name at age twenty-seven. Kerouac was still almost unknown at age thirty-one.

  Vidal joined them willingly enough. He recalled having been introduced to Kerouac four years before, during the intermission of a production at the Metropolitan Opera House; Kerouac had been there with a publisher and Vidal with one of the publisher’s friends. Vidal had appreciated Kerouac’s good looks—the muscular body of a former football player, the Indian-black hair and clear blue eyes—but he was put off by the French Canadian’s almost pathetic eagerness to come on to him “as one writer on the make to another.” Kerouac’s life had not gone smoothly since then. Aside from money troubles and publication problems, there had been a marriage and a divorce, an escape to Mexico to avoid paying child support, arrests and imprisonments, amphetamine-crazed road trips, and a rather confusing round of infatuations as Ginsberg fell in love with Kerouac, Burroughs with Ginsberg, Kerouac with Cassady, and so on—all of which had taken a further toll on Kerouac’s self-confidence, if not yet his looks.

  The fellaheen life was not an easy one. Vidal sat down, eyeing the taciturn Burroughs in his traveling-salesman wrinkled gray suit. Burroughs kept quiet, but Kerouac, in his sea captain’s hat and Marlon Brando T-shirt, announced to the room that this meeting of Burroughs and Vidal was an important literary moment that tied everything together—a conviction that grew stronger with each round of drinks. When Kerouac’s girlfriend pestered him to take her home, he sent her off in a cab and led his two male companions into the nighttime streets. He preened and chattered, then hooked one arm around a lamppost and swung in a circle until Burroughs, annoyed by Kerouac’s “Tarzan routine,” left the two other writers to themselves.

  With the declared reason for their evening gone, Kerouac hesitated, apparently unsure of what he wanted from Vidal now that he had him to himself. Veteran of a “varied & adventurous & shy sex life,” as Ginsberg put it, Kerouac generally relied on others to direct such situations. In any case, at some point in the delirium of the evening, the two novelists agreed that “lust to one side, we owed it to literary history to couple.” So, of course, they found their way to the Hotel Chelsea. At the front desk, each signed his real name in the hotel log, grandly assuring the bemused night clerk that this register would
be famous someday. They climbed the worn marble treads of the Chelsea’s central stairway, slipped silently down the late-night corridor, and pushed open a heavy wooden door to find an old, worn Victorian chamber that looked like a room in a time capsule, incongruously drenched in rosy-red light from the flickering neon Hotel Chelsea sign now attached to the hotel’s façade.

  Perhaps the pressure to perform would have been too great even without the added impediment of the alcohol. Once in the room, the two writers found that their ambition disintegrated into some drunken fumbling, a shared shower, and a final collapse on the low double bed. Vidal bent over Kerouac’s naked form, admiring his sweaty dark curls, and Kerouac raised his head from the pillow to look at the younger writer over his left shoulder, then sighed and dropped his head back down. “I liked the way he smelled,” Vidal recalled after the deed was done.

  Hours later, as another stultifying August morning dawned in the city, Kerouac woke to a hideous hangover. In the light of day, his encounter with Vidal seemed less historically significant than he’d imagined. Mortified, he pulled on his clothes, mumbling that he would have to take the subway home. The cool Vidal, having drunk less and feeling “reasonably brisk,” gave him a dollar for a cab, and said lightly, “Now you owe me a dollar”—fully aware, as he later wrote, that his words, spoken in such a room after such a night, rang with significance. Kerouac thanked him and promised to pay back the money at once—though in fact, Kerouac never did return the dollar.

  In the months that followed, Kerouac was known to brag about their tryst to the entire clientele of the San Remo. But when describing the evening in his autobiographical novel The Subterraneans that fall, he faithfully re-created every incident except for that final scene. His cowardice disgusted Vidal and deeply concerned Ginsberg—ordinarily Kerouac’s greatest supporter. Hiding the truth compromised Kerouac’s integrity as an artist, Ginsberg insisted to his friend. It was their duty to make the private public so they could free others along with themselves. But this was beyond Kerouac’s capabilities, fearful as he was of censure and of harming his career. That same year, Kerouac’s new editor, Malcolm Cowley, asked him to delete scenes of homosexual couplings in his still-unpublished On the Road, and the young author complied, for the sake of publication, cutting half the text he had refused to touch for Robert Giroux. The cuts transformed his dark portrait of postwar America into a more romantic vision that would inspire a generation, though less truthfully and, arguably, much less effectively than the original version might have.

  The self-censorship may not even have been necessary in 1954, with the Korean conflict over, the Dow up, the Kinsey report’s startling statistics on male and female sexuality beginning to sink in, and a general thaw starting to pervade the culture. In New York, at least, the Village clubs, cafés, galleries, and bookstores attracted an increasingly diverse and freely mixing population. At the San Remo, the tall, handsome, twenty-nine-year-old Texan writer Terry Southern; his bug-eyed, junkie-poet cohort Mason Hoffenberg; and Avram Avakian, who photographed jazz musicians, were importing a hip new outlook that they’d picked up during their recent years as expatriates in Paris from the likes of James Baldwin, Thelonious Monk, and Jean Cocteau.

  Over at Joe’s Diner, where a “café society” of hard-drug users had coalesced, the beetle-browed sax player and artist Larry Rivers made no secret of the casual sex he sometimes enjoyed with his art dealer John Myers and with the hawk-nosed, charismatic poet Frank O’Hara. Gay sex was “an adventure,” as far as Rivers was concerned, “on a par with trying a new position with a woman.” As one friend observed, Rivers wasn’t in it for the sex but for the opportunity to improve himself. “He thought by hanging out in gay company he could be classier.”

  Ginsberg would continue the job of ripping open the shroud of inhibition the following year, in October 1955, with his first public reading of “Howl,” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco’s North Beach. The poem had begun as a private exercise—an attempt to create through words the flash of poetic telepathy, or “eyeball kicks,” as he and Kerouac called them, that Ginsberg, like Sherwood Anderson, experienced when looking at certain paintings by Cézanne or reading poems by William Blake. To Ginsberg, they seemed more a neural response than an aesthetic one, and he wanted to see whether, by juxtaposing unrelated images or words, the subjective and objective, the distant and close-up, he could jar the brain’s perception in a way that might alter the reader’s consciousness, at least temporarily.

  To fully share with the American reader his own sense of life’s possibility and excitement, Ginsberg would have to “make the private public” to a far greater degree than Kerouac had dared to do. To this end, he rejected the objective stance taken by the established postwar poets and instead placed himself at the very heart of the poem with the brash, confessional, melodramatic line “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Setting the poem in New York, he filled and enriched it with vivid images of “fairies of advertising” and “sinister intelligent editors,” “roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn” and “the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx.” He borrowed Whitman’s cataloging style (“who wandered . . . who lit . . . who studied . . . who thought”) and Gertrude Stein’s rhythms (“boxcars boxcars boxcars”) to make the poem move the way its subjects’ lives moved, and he tried to literally speed up his imagined reader’s pulse with such action words as burned, trembling, and leap. Then he administered a shock to the consciousness with celebratory references to friends who “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy” and “who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors.”

  Writing the poem was like casting a spell—a spell meant to set off an explosion in the reader’s mind. Ginsberg found the process cathartic, but would have stowed the exercise away if his poet friends on the West Coast hadn’t wanted to experiment with a Dylan Thomas–style evening of performed poetry. Ginsberg, always interested in ways to move poetry out of the universities and into the streets, decided to read this new work.

  The effect was more than Ginsberg could have hoped for. At first, he sounded nervous, reciting in a high-pitched voice the poem’s dedication to his friends Kerouac (beaming from the audience), Burroughs, Cassady, and another New York writer friend, Lucien Carr. But once launched into the body of the poem, Ginsberg grew more confident as the audience laughed, hooted, and cheered him on. At the end, they roared with approval, their enjoyment enhanced and made more real by the dark references to madness, drugs, and the cold-water flats that shadowed their own young lives. The experience convinced Ginsberg that the poem, especially when read aloud, had potential as a “social force.” But it didn’t yet go far enough; it needed to move from the personal to the political. A short time later, inspired by some peyote shared with his new lover Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg added a second section: a passionate indictment of what he called “Moloch,” the repressive capitalist system in America “whose love is endless oil and stone!” whose “soul is electricity and banks!” and who “frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!” Ginsberg’s solution: a transcendent dream he called the “fifth” International—a global utopian gathering dedicated to survival in an age of hypercapitalism and to the celebration of everything human. “The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! / The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!” he wrote. “Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! / everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!”

  With these words—so similar in spirit to the writings of Charles Fourier nearly two centuries before—Ginsberg blessed America and forgave its people their sins. Now the poem was complete, though it came fully into being only when read aloud, spoken by one individual to a human community. In stripping the shroud off an entombed society to reveal a truth no longer denied, “Howl” described an experience and was that experience at the same time. Participants at the reading reported “a feeling of intoxication” as togeth
er they booed and hissed the horrible Moloch and cheered and laughed as Ginsberg, also laughing, chanted, “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!” “In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before,” the poet Michael McClure later recalled, “and we were ready for it, for a point of no return.” It provided society’s castoffs with what one poet called “the language. The stance . . . the defiance” they had been looking for to escape “the gray, chill, militaristic silence . . . the intellective void.”

  Ginsberg’s intention had been to create “an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness” for generations to come—and in that, he succeeded. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, cofounder of City Lights bookstore, along with Peter Martin, son of the Wobbly leader Carlo Tresca and nephew of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, immediately offered to publish “Howl” with a selection of Ginsberg’s other poems through his City Lights Press. By the time the small black-and-white paperback appeared, the thawing of the Cold War culture that had begun in the Village was becoming perceptible to everyone. In early 1955, the city was obsessed with Salinger’s bleak, existentialist short story “Franny,” published that year in the New Yorker, but by 1956, its attention turned to C. Wright Mills’s no-holds-barred Power Elite, which laid out the facts of who was really in charge of American society and how they stayed in power. That same year, Waiting for Godot arrived on Broadway to initiate a theatrical revolution with its absurdist response to the world’s postwar despair. And Arthur Miller, whose affair with Monroe had finally taken flight in the summer of 1955 as Ginsberg was writing “Howl,” slipped off to get a Reno divorce and marry his lover—ready now to face the horror of the divorce, leaving the children for “what might truly be waiting just ahead, a creative life with undivided soul.” In such a climate, critics’ and academics’ predictable outrage over Ginsberg’s “dreadful little volume” and the arrest of Ferlinghetti and his bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao for disseminating obscene literature served only to increase the book’s sales as the attendant press coverage drew the attention of the restless young audience Ginsberg hoped to reach.