It was in these works that postwar America would discover itself: in O’Hara’s casual reference in “Personal Poem” to the clubbing of Miles Davis by police on the sidewalk in front of Birdland in 1959; in Ginsberg’s anguish over his mother’s suffering in “Kaddish”; in LeRoi Jones’s determination “to smash / to smash / capitalism / to smash / to smash / capitalism”; and in such plays as Koch’s The Election at the Living Theatre, in which Rivers starred as LBJ, a junkie politician addicted to the popular vote.
Thanks to the efforts of Pollock and de Kooning, Ginsberg and O’Hara, America was changing. Robert Flaherty’s former protégé Richard Leacock watched the change unfold through the eye of a movie camera, Flaherty-style, as he filmed the presidential primary race between the Democratic candidates John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in the documentary Primary, produced by a former Life magazine editor named Robert Drew. Armed with new lightweight, hand-held cameras and sound recorders that Flaherty would have killed for, Leacock and fellow cinematographers Albert Maysles and D. A. Pennebaker kept silent and invisible as the camera’s objective lens captured the reality of the campaign. Yet, as would later become clear, the images created in this way were so direct and powerful that they not only recorded history but helped create it—viewers remembered the events they saw unfold on the screen as clearly as if they had actually experienced them.
America was changing. The space race lay ahead. Enovid, a form of oral birth control, had been approved by the FDA. On West Twenty-Third Street, within sight of the Chelsea, Jay Gould’s nineteenth-century Grand Opera House was finally torn down. And after four years of marriage—a marriage of drinking, sleeping pills, FBI surveillance, a movie shot in Reno, and an affair or two—Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe agreed to divorce. Not long after that, Miller, feeling “wonderfully uninvolved in anything at all,” arrived at the Chelsea, suitcases in hand.
“Is not this what architects have long been looking for, this material and spiritual need for a new kind of building?” wrote a utopian-minded critic. “We are clearly in the beginning of a new era.”
“A Seventh Son of Mars,” reporters called James Ingersoll, the minuscule bagman for the notorious Boss Tweed, who amassed a fortune on the backs of New York taxpayers.
The idealistic architect and writer Philip Gengembre Hubert (shown here with his grandson) bought Ingersoll’s “stolen” land and returned it to the people in the form of the Chelsea Association Building.
Hubert’s design for the Chelsea, with apartments ranging in size from three rooms to ten, ensured a mix of residents of different economic classes for the first time in New York.
The landscape painter John Francis Murphy and his artist wife, Adah, were but one of the couples occupying the top-floor studios; they whipped up enthusiasm for their “purely American,” Thoreau-inspired style.
The American impressionist painter Childe Hassam celebrated “the exuberant spirit of America . . . a new world capital” with depictions of fashionably dressed young women promenading in Madison Square.
“I’m going to show you where I live, where I dream,” confided an artist in The Coast of Bohemia, a novel by William Dean Howells.
With Sunset, West Twenty-Third Street, the artist John Sloan conveyed the Chelsea’s unique aura of mystery and grandeur decades before he moved in.
Two New Yorkers in particular were attracted to this atmosphere of mystery: the artist Arthur B. Davies (top), who maintained a mistress in his Chelsea studio while juggling two wives, and the popular writer William Sydney Porter (bottom), better known by his pen name, O. Henry, who hid in the hotel from editors and creditors, signing in under an invented name.
John Sloan (left) and Spoon River Anthology author Edgar Lee Masters (right) enjoyed getting together to drink whiskey, play gospel and fiddle tunes on the Victrola, and savor their decades-old gripes against the city’s arts critics like “an amphora of sour wine.”
At the Chelsea, Thomas Wolfe transformed crates full of manuscript pages into The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again.
During the Depression and the war years, artists were drawn to the Chelsea’s tolerant, easygoing atmosphere.
Dylan Thomas’s “simoons of words” brought American audiences out of their postwar catatonia. When Thomas was in America, the Chelsea became his second home.
“Lust to one side, we owed it to literary history to couple,” Gore Vidal wrote of his one-night stand with Jack Kerouac. Checking into the Chelsea, each signed his real name in the hotel log, assuring the night clerk that this register would be famous someday.
In an apartment adorned with Irish lace doilies, the Communist Party leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (left) cooked stewed peas for Allen Ginsberg, Arthur C. Clarke, and Brendan Behan. The choreographer Katherine Dunham (right) was evicted after bringing a pair of live lions upstairs for a rehearsal of an upcoming production of Aida.
The Irish writer Brendan Behan (left) and the American artist Ray Johnson (right) were just two of many visitors to composer George Kleinsinger’s jungle-like studio, which was populated by exotic birds, tropical fish, a monkey, and an eight-foot python.
With his famous “Missouri dinners” served at home, the composer Virgil Thomson built a network of artists from all fields, including (left to right) the painter Maurice Grosser, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, and Barbara Epstein, coeditor of the New York Review of Books.
The atmosphere was “like a snake pit” as, following Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, Jason Robards, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and Barbara Loden (in blond Marilyn wig) read through Miller’s After the Fall in his Chelsea Hotel bedroom.
5
After the Fall
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
—CLAES OLDENBURG
“EVERYTHING IS PERFECT,” DAVID BARD announced, blue eyes shining in his moon-shaped face as he ushered Miller into his potential quarters at the Hotel Chelsea. “All the furniture is brand new, new mattresses, drapes.” Waving proudly toward the living room, the crisply dressed Hungarian appeared so pleased by the vista that Miller half doubted his own perception. What he saw was a dim if high-ceilinged chamber furnished with cheaply made castoffs and a rumpled carpet with a path worn down the center by the shoes of hundreds of anonymous predecessors. “A maid comes every day,” Bard marveled, leading Miller to the bathroom to demonstrate the workings of the new faucets of the bathroom sink. “But be careful in the shower, the cold is hot and the hot is cold.” This was to be expected; the plumber was Hungarian and so naturally plumbed the building in the European way.
Miller nodded. Plumbing issues were nothing compared to the recent events in his life. Since his last visit to the Chelsea to meet Dylan Thomas, Miller had been through a wrenching divorce from the mother of his children; married a glamorous and powerful movie star; endured the grim daily struggle with Monroe’s fame and her addictions; and, finally, left the marriage in order to preserve his life as a writer. All of this drama, and more, had pushed that long-ago first impression of the Chelsea to the dark reaches of his mind.
Now, though, as he followed Bard into the suite, the musty smell and dingy furniture brought back in a rush that earlier time—the relatively innocent period before the beginning of his affair with Monroe, when the world seemed populated by “good people and bad people” and he felt born to correct its injustices. Miller recalled, viscerally, the state of earnest idealism in which he had approached Thomas about the Cinema 16 panel, as well as the shock he felt at the sight of one of the world’s most admired poets retching into a sink. The memory was uncomfortable—particularly now, in November 1962, as Miller himself endured the pressure of public scrutiny after the announcement of his impending second divorce. When the news hit the papers, he had retreated for several weeks to the Plaza Hotel, but press photographers got wind of his presence there and maintained such constant surveillance that Miller felt compelled to put on a su
it and tie just to go downstairs and check his mail. He needed privacy, and time, to regain his equilibrium. Inge Morath, a photographer he had met on the set of The Misfits—the film he had written for Monroe that, ironically, due to his inability to tolerate her drug use, had brought their marriage to an end—had recommended the Chelsea as a good place to hide. It was a little shabby, Morath acknowledged, but it was so full of writers and other artists that he would blend right in.
Certainly the neighborhood, with its tawdry bars and low-rent offices, was not where one would expect to find the husband of a movie star. Semi trucks roared down West Twenty-Third Street, giving the area an industrial feel. Looming over Eighth Avenue, an enormous brick housing cooperative under construction for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union added an unappealing Soviet-style blandness to the area where the Grand Opera House had once stood. The sidewalks were crowded until around five o’clock, but then the work force abandoned the district to the occasional stray tourist stepping around the homeless people sprawled in the doorways of ruined hotels. The Hotel Chelsea itself had adopted a kind of brisk, workaday atmosphere, with its lobby now hung with art of mixed quality and the formally attired front-desk manager—tiny, bespectacled, polite Mr. Gross—comically at odds with the shabbily dressed creative types draped over the leather sofa and fake-Victorian gilt chairs that had replaced the circular banquette. Miller, averting his gaze from a particularly overwrought engraving of what looked like cavorting angels and devils that was hanging near the front door, had to agree with Morath’s assessment: art aside, the Chelsea brought to mind the kind of comfortable, family-run, second-rate hostel one found in every large European city. This one just happened to be incongruously but conveniently embedded in the heart of New York.
In any case, the rates were so low that there was really no room for debate. In 1961, as Jack Kennedy took the oath of office—incidentally providing the distraction Monroe needed to slip away unnoticed to Mexico to initiate their divorce—Miller paid his bill at the Plaza and sank with gratitude into the Chelsea’s arms. It was a relief to give himself up to the vaguely distracted hospitality of David Bard, whose conversation zigzagged so pleasantly from rhapsodic descriptions of his hotel as a “place of happiness” to his quiet confession that “some days when I feel down . . . I go fishing in Croton Reservoir” and his invitation to Miller to join him sometime. Miller was amused as well by the sight of Bard’s tall, gangly son, Stanley—a doe-eyed fellow in his midtwenties with the uncertain smile of the unsuccessful offspring—shadowing his father on what Miller guessed must be painfully low assistant’s pay.
At the Chelsea, free from the money-based status structure that pervaded the city outside, Miller could wear rumpled clothes and let his hair grow a little too long. He could live, unnoticed, among not only well-known composers and artists but also long-distance truckers, ship’s officers from the nearby docks, elderly pensioners in fur-trimmed coats, and even a few lost souls shuffling about in slippers and robes—all of New York’s successes and failures, knowns and unknowns. He could laugh off the shocked look on the face of a relative when he mentioned his Hotel Chelsea address, even as he felt “the winds of my social descent [go] whistling past my ears.” In such a bohemian environment, Miller could get on with the work of processing his experiences of the past few years. He could also begin a romantic relationship with the svelte, sophisticated Morath, a professor’s daughter from Austria who had survived the war in Europe to become a successful photojournalist, covering stories for Vogue and illustrating Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed, among many other projects.
Miller’s creativity had dried up in the wake of his divorce, his greatest accomplishment that season being a children’s story written guiltily for a daughter already in her teens. He envied Morath for the passion with which she and her colleagues discussed how they could use their skills as photographers to expand social awareness, extending the Beats’ efforts to “make the private public” by exposing intimate details of individuals’ lives, while conversely making the public private with historic or political images injected into people’s daily routines. To Miller, “They were all innocents because they cared so much. I wanted to be that way myself, taking for granted that what they thought was of some decisive importance to the human condition.” Europeans like Inge seemed to live much more integrated lives than Americans did; he wondered whether that was because so many of them had confronted death during the war. In any case, he found that with Inge at his side, he was able to thoroughly enjoy slipping upstairs to Virgil Thomson’s picture-crowded rooms, where, over cocktails with such fellow guests as Katherine Anne Porter, Glenway Wescott, and the composer Nicolas Nabokov and his photographer wife, Dominique, Thomson would toast to the imminent end of the academy’s postwar hijacking of serious American music and the birth of a new, yet unknown, fully American form of expression. At Thomson’s, guests could get an update on the French sculptor René Shapshak’s progress with the Seven Arts, a plaster frieze to be installed above the lobby fireplace, and hear stories of Shapshak’s days as an art student and a friend of anarchists in Paris before the Great War. They could laugh at Arthur C. Clarke’s excitement over Yuri Gagarin’s recent orbiting of the Earth and have another of Thomson’s “paralyzing potions” as Clarke cited evidence that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere threatened a sooner-than-expected end to planetary life. If Joseph Byrd, a young experimental musician from Kentucky and Thomson’s new copyist, was in the room, he could fill them in on the latest avant-garde opera by the downtown artist Yoko Ono, a fellow student of John Cage’s who had lent Byrd her loft for the first public performance of his vocal and instrumental minimal compositions.
Such conversation, in all its variety, brought Miller back to himself, and he soon began mulling over ideas for a new work for the stage. He pulled out an old manuscript he called simply the “Third Play,” begun in the midst of his crumbling first marriage and reworked as he was preparing to leave Monroe, and reconsidered its core theme of the limits of personal responsibility: How does one live with the knowledge that, despite a personal commitment to a moral and rational existence, one has caused damage and suffering? Miller had explored this idea through a story of a group of scientific researchers whose work for a pharmaceutical company leads to their being ethically compromised. Dissatisfied with that example, Miller focused instead on the wartime designers of the atomic bomb. Was it enough, he wondered, to say that they were only human, these people whose well-meaning actions had led to the horrible deaths of so many, and so they couldn’t be held responsible for the consequences? But then people would have to give up moral judgments altogether—and was this really possible, to live without discriminating between good and bad?
The questions interested him, but the characters still struck Miller as too contrived, and the play refused to gel. He wanted a story that grabbed audiences on a personal level and forced them to consider its implications in their own lives. The “Third Play” “failed to embarrass me with what it revealed,” he later wrote, “and I had never written a good thing that had not made me blush.” In the end, the only way he knew to touch a nerve in his audience was to share his own deep reservoir of guilt.
A breakthrough of sorts came about with the death of his mother in March of 1961. The funeral was an awkward affair, attended by Miller, with Inge at his side, and a stricken Marilyn Monroe, who was by then Miller’s ex-wife. Standing beside the grave in a strange state of emotional numbness, Miller reflected on his long, conflicted history with his family—his father’s financial and psychological defeat during the Depression, his bright brother’s forfeiture of a college education, his own miraculous escape by way of literature and the theater—all of which he had examined in depth in his earlier plays. Now, here was Monroe, recently released from the Payne Whitney psychiatric unit, where she’d thrown a chair through a plate-glass window because, as he put it, she was “tired of being Marilyn Monroe.” Always, Miller acknowledg
ed to himself, he had been the lucky one—the fortunate survivor—and again today, he stood whole at the edge of his poor mother’s grave beside his lover, who had suffered through a terrible war, and with his ex-wife, martyr to the repressed desires of a puritanical American public, weeping nearby.
This was what his “Third Play” must be about, Miller saw now—stripped down completely, taken from the theoretical to the personal. He would have to make of it a confession of his own real betrayals—of his father, his brother, his first wife, and Monroe—all of which had, he feared, fatally undermined his own idea of himself as an ethical human being. One did what one did not intend, and yet one was responsible for the outcome: that was the rub. Thinking of Camus’s The Fall, in which a lawyer who has always thought of himself as compassionate watches a young woman jump to her death and inexplicably fails to try to stop her, Miller named his play After the Fall: The Survivor.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 18
