Now, at the Chelsea, Miller devoted much of the play’s second half to the story of Quentin’s love affair with Maggie and the damage they suffered from her attempts to use alcohol and drugs to fill the enormous void between her true self and her image in others’ eyes. Quentin had loved Maggie, he recalled onstage, because she wasn’t defending anything, upholding anything, or accusing—she was just there. She had confessed to Quentin that she had been with many men, but “I never got anything for it. It was like charity, see. . . . I gave to those in need.” In Fourier’s world, this attitude would have qualified Maggie for sainthood. But in the society she inhabited, her natural sexuality made her disposable. “They laugh. I’m a joke to them,” she said to Quentin when a group of young men harassed her as she was waiting for a bus.
Quentin recalled how determined he had been to rescue Maggie, marrying her as though dedicating himself to a new cause. But, he now wondered, what if someone is bent on destroying herself? In Miller’s confessional, Quentin concluded that he had been both observer and participant in Maggie’s tragedy, “as all of us are” in America, taking what we want at others’ expense.
Miller’s fascination with the parallels between private and public responsibility held him in thrall throughout that winter of 1962 to 1963 as excitement built about the theater under construction at Lincoln Center. Under increased pressure to finish his play, Miller took a permanent suite on the Chelsea’s sixth floor, where he could live with Inge while meeting regularly with Kazan. He was glad for the chance to catch up with Virgil Thomson, George Kleinsinger, and Katherine Dunham and to meet such new neighbors as Charles Jackson, the gentle, alcoholic author of the 1940s bestseller The Lost Weekend, and the abstract expressionist Kenneth Noland, a hard-working painter with a flattering enthusiasm for Inge’s photographs. But there were other newcomers in the hotel who intrigued Miller even more, such as the former IWW rabble-rouser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, now out of prison and at work on the second volume of her memoirs.
If there was anyone who pondered issues of responsibility toward others as deeply as Miller, it was Flynn. Although she was now past seventy, arthritic, and extremely overweight, she had traveled the world since her release from prison, promoting the rights of women and the economically dispossessed and charming crowds everywhere with her unflagging support and good cheer. Unlike Miller, she seemed to have made her peace with the misjudgments of the past. Despite her increasing private certainty that the Soviet Union was a failed experiment, she accepted an appointment as national chairman of the American Communist Party—a largely symbolic position, in any case, bestowed on her in recognition of her continuing popularity with working-class people. Looking like someone’s grandmother in her white-collared dresses and nun-like shoes, she continued to promote the radical idea that someone had to watch out for the discarded people in America and that no one was more willing than the Party to do that.
In the meantime, though, Flynn—who had not had an easy life, with her years in prison and her only son, Fred, dead of cancer—was determined to enjoy what time remained. When her passport was revoked under a new provision of the Smith Act, preventing her from writing her memoirs in Moscow as she had planned, she was more than satisfied with the Chelsea as a second choice. “I like a hotel,” she had written in her Daily Worker column decades before. “This is a sample of the future, what every woman ought to have, a room to herself and release from domestic tasks”—just as the proto-socialist Charles Fourier had recommended. In a hotel, “The telephone doesn’t ring incessantly, no doorbell, bill collector, laundryman, grocer, or peddler interrupts my thoughts. . . . I read the Daily Worker and the Times thoroughly . . . I do my work.”
As a leading defender of the International Hotel Workers’ Union a half a century before, she respected the Chelsea staff for the professionals they were, befriending the longtime elevator operators Percy and Purnell and helping their captain, Charles Beard, a former boxer and a compassionate Christian, look after the Chelsea’s needier residents and pets. She laughed with the West Indian cleaning women over the peccadilloes of the more outrageous residents and celebrated with them when a union raise occurred, then offered advice on how to respond when the owners tried to rebalance the books by firing a few people.
In her comfortable Chelsea suite replete with Irish lace curtains, antimacassars, and a copy of a book by Gabriele D’Annunzio lovingly inscribed to her by her fellow Wobbly leader Carlo Tresca, she entertained visitors such as Allen Ginsberg, who dropped in frequently when not on his travels around the globe. When Gus Hall, the Party’s general secretary, was in town and staying at the Chelsea, she would cook up a pot of her famously bland Irish peas with pearl onions for him, unless he managed to lure her out to her favorite restaurant, John’s on East Twelfth Street—a gangsters’ restaurant, as she liked to point out, so you knew the food was good.
Hall, the same age as Flynn’s son, had grown up in the mining towns of northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range with parents who were active in the IWW. He, too, had served time in prison thanks to the Smith Act, and he now enjoyed regular exposure to Flynn’s salty humor; for example, one day at the Party’s headquarters, she snapped at a Communist Youth official who’d been complaining that the switchboard operator was sleeping around, telling him, “Do you know that I have slept with almost every man in the party starting with William Foster and if you have a free afternoon, I’ll tell you about it.” Knowing how strongly she disagreed with the Party’s stance against homosexuality and abortion, he appreciated the lifelong discipline that prevented her from criticizing the Party or the Soviet Union in public.
Both admitted to a shared dream of a more American form of socialism, grounded in the democratic ideal and designed to meet this country’s needs, not the Soviet Union’s. But that was not likely to happen, Flynn pointed out, unless the “stodgy old men” in the Party’s leadership stepped down and gave the new generation a chance. There were a few promising young Communists still in New York, including the filmmaker Richard Leacock, then at work with his Primary associates Robert Drew and D. A. Pennebaker on the documentary Crisis, about Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s battle with Governor George Wallace over the integration of the University of Alabama. Leacock had begun giving free classes in cinematography to African-American residents in Harlem, hoping to open the doors to the profession for this segment of the population. Flynn herself would be happy to retire, she said, if it meant passionate young people like Leacock would take her place. But Hall talked her out of resigning, assuring her that it would be a useless gesture, as she would be the only one of the older generation to do so.
Arthur Miller understood that Flynn’s life had been defined by her commitment to a moral cause and by a profound sense of responsibility. She had, like Miller himself, struggled with difficult decisions whose ultimate results she would probably never know. She had endured her share of hardships: kept from her son by her political work; the victim of a decade-long depression following the betrayal of her greatest love, Tresca, with her younger sister; imprisoned more than once; spied on by the government; and harassed by the press. Commitment to the Party had provided her with a purpose in life, but had her loyalty been worth the cost? Had she done any good, really, in her time on earth?
Another newcomer dragged the weight of the past behind him to the Chelsea that year: the hard-drinking, loquacious former IRA radical and author from Dublin, Brendan Behan. Imprisoned at age sixteen for smuggling explosives into England and then again, a few years later, for the attempted murder of two police officers, Behan had turned his experiences to good use with the autobiographical novel Borstal Boy and the plays The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. Like Flynn, Behan had grown up poor but in a cultured family of Republican idealists who passed on to him their love for literature, music, and the theater along with their love of politics. Handsome, short of stature, sensitive by nature, and bisexual with a taste for the type of blond, athletic Englishman he had first encounte
red in prison, Behan concealed a complex personality behind the stereotyped persona of a lovable working-class Irishman that he presented for public consumption.
In the mid-1950s, flush with early success, Behan had slipped off to Paris, befriended Terry Southern and his group of high-living expatriates, and so dramatically increased his drinking that he left with many more pounds on his delicate frame and without a number of teeth (those were left on barroom floors). Once he arrived in New York, he quickly understood, as had Dylan Thomas, that America was where the money was—and he needed money, he claimed, as “the number of people who buy books in Ireland would not keep me in drink for the duration of Sunday opening time.” The catch was that, like Thomas, Behan had to expend more and more energy living up to the Americans’ simplistic expectations of how he should behave—a job even more demanding for Behan than it was for Thomas, as Behan’s lilting accent, gift for storytelling, and physical resemblance to Jackie Gleason made him a favorite on the now rapidly multiplying television talk shows. Still, following each public reading, publisher’s meeting, or Broadway play debut, he did his best to make an appearance in the Third Avenue bars and live up to people’s idea of a drunken Irishman—an increasingly dangerous activity once he was diagnosed with diabetes.
By the spring of 1963, Behan’s adventures in drinking had led to his ejection from the Algonquin Hotel and then the Bristol. Katherine Dunham happened to be in the office of Behan’s publisher, Bernard Geis, the day the drunken writer stumbled in to beg for help finding a new home. Geis, exasperated by this writer, who owed him two books he had not yet begun to write, considered having Behan committed to Bellevue for treatment, but Dunham objected and offered to care for the Irishman herself at the Chelsea if Geis would pay the rent. When Geis called the Chelsea to reserve a room, he was met with little enthusiasm from David Bard’s son, Stanley, now manager in training, who had been reading in the papers about the havoc Behan was causing wherever he went. But Geis, a professional persuader, flattered Bard with effusive tributes to the Chelsea, saying it was the one place in the city where an artist of Behan’s stature might write free of distractions. In the end, Stanley reluctantly agreed to give Behan a try.
Dunham had spent her life rescuing artists from dire straits, training them professionally, and providing them with classes in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and languages, as well as in dance and theater. It was an easy matter, then, for her to nurse a simple alcoholic like Behan back to health. She installed him in a room near her own, doled out to him only five dollars per day so he couldn’t afford to slip out for an all-night binge, and ordered her dancers to provide him with healthy meals and watch him constantly.
When Arthur Miller dropped in to visit, he found Behan lying on his back, his fat stomach forming a great mound beneath the blanket, “lisping through broken teeth, laughing and eating sausages and eggs” while the graceful dancers moved silently about, tending to his needs and answering a telephone that rang every five minutes, it seemed, with another request for an interview. Miller noted with pity Behan’s blotched skin and puffy face and wondered again what it was about fame that compelled a certain type of sensitive artist to self-destruct, as if he were doing it to satisfy the people’s will. Perhaps it was fear of exposure that caused the damage—the shame of possessing human qualities of one kind or another that the public might reject. Behan, for instance, had pursued what he called his “Hellenism” with unselfconscious gusto in his early years. Even recently, as a married man, he had been known to stop in frequently at the Chelsea, before his move there, to spend time with a young Irish seaman from Dundalk named Peter Arthurs. On the one hand, Behan loved nothing more than to toddle across the street to the YMCA with Arthurs for a swim, a sauna, and a good look at the young men passing by naked on their way to the showers. On the other, he seemed to live in terror of his bisexuality being made public in America and subsequently ruining his career. The anxiety increased his desire for drink, and the drinking had led to this collapse.
The great advantage of life at the Chelsea, Miller had to acknowledge, was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually. The hotel’s relaxed atmosphere proved healing, and as Behan began to recover under Dunham’s care, one often saw him hanging about in the hotel corridors, chomping on an apple, waiting to see who might turn up. In this way, he met and befriended Agnes Boulton, the late Eugene O’Neill’s ex-wife, who was visiting briefly with her son, Shane. He got to hear James Farrell’s account of having returned to the Chelsea after a long absence to find that the managers had added a commemorative plaque with his name on it to the building’s façade, on the assumption that Farrell was dead. To express his delight at encountering Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in the building, Behan snatched up all 270 pounds of her in his arms, lifted her in the air, and bawled, “Gurley, you’re the only Irish-American I know who’s worth anything!” And if Ginsberg was with her, so much the better: Behan, who knew and liked the Beat writers, was happy to harmonize with the poet on a few Israeli songs.
One Hotel Chelsea neighbor recalled with pleasure the sound of Behan’s voice drifting down the stairs one night as he cried out in an almost unintelligible Dublin accent, “Glory be to God. I’d like to be sitting some place heltz in a quiet shebeen with a glass of gargle and shmoking a handsome cludeen.” Just to hear Behan talk was a delight, said the neighbor. “It didn’t matter if you couldn’t understand the words.”
In April of 1963, Behan felt well enough to begin dictating Confessions of an Irish Rebel—the first of the two books he’d promised Geis—even if his hands were still too unsteady to hold a pen. Rae Jeffs, Behan’s longtime assistant and collaborator, was summoned to the Chelsea to help him begin. The first recording sessions suffered from a bit of a sloppy, “anything will do” approach, but soon the writer fell into a healing rhythm, his voice rising and falling with the vivid recollections of his prison days that had first won him fame a decade before.
By mid-May, with Jeffs’s help, Behan had managed to complete fifty thousand words. Jeffs returned to England, leaving the author with his wife, Beatrice, who had arrived two weeks before, eager to inform him of a pregnancy that she hoped might heal their unraveling marriage. But without the steadying influence of work, Behan immediately resumed his drinking life. The fact was, as he put it, “I’m a lonely so-and-so and I must have people around me to talk with.” He frequently ventured out to the Oasis and tried to persuade the owner, Jeannie Garfinkle, to give him a drink. If she refused, he fell into a rage and marched down the block to the lower-rent Silver Rail near the Seventh Avenue subway entrance.
The more he drank, the louder and more disorderly his presence at the Chelsea became. He progressed from breaking into high-pitched renditions of “I Should Have Been Born a Tulip” on the stairway and performing L’Après-Midi d’un Faune in the hall to turning doorknobs at random just to see what people were up to, chasing the maids through the corridors, and shouting obscenities loud enough to be heard nine floors down at the front desk. When Jeffs rejoined the Behans at the Chelsea at the end of May to assist the writer on his next book, Brendan Behan’s New York, she was shocked by how ill and exhausted Behan looked and found it difficult to get him started talking on tape, much less writing.
No one seemed able to prevent him from continuing in his downward spiral. Desperate to keep up his performance as the Irish Everyman, Behan drew ever closer to his worst fear—being exposed as a miscreant and becoming a permanent outcast. His neighbors stood by helplessly as he took to loitering in front of the hotel in a state of appalling drunkenness, trying to engage passersby in conversation and inviting the ridicule of those who didn’t know who he was. Under the influence of alcohol, he occasionally asked an acquaintance of his to set up an appointment for him with a male prostitute, but then, when the time came for the rendezvous, he inevitably failed to appear. Sometimes, after the bars closed, he wandered into George Kleinsinger’s jungle wonderland, directly above his own room
, and sat talking to him for hours or singing “The Soldier’s Song” and other ditties in a voice Kleinsinger praised as a “natural high tenor” while the composer accompanied him on piano. As dawn approached, his mood sometimes plunged so low that all he could talk about was his fear of death and his even greater fear that, unlike their friend Arthur Miller, he was nothing but a phony. Then, for long periods, he would simply sit staring, lost in thought, at a wall-size photograph of Charlie Chaplin taking a bath fully clothed that Agnes Boulton had given to Kleinsinger and that Behan had come to love more than any other image at the hotel.
The end of the story was inevitable. One night, after a fancy party and too much drink, Behan had a seizure. The following Sunday night, he had another, and he was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he suffered a third. When released, he returned to the hotel, sank down in one of the lobby’s gilt chairs, and spoke to phantom listeners in a state of delirium for an hour before Rae Jeffs and Beatrice managed to get him upstairs and to bed. The incident was sufficiently frightening to convince the women that Behan had to go back home to Dublin. Despite his protests, made more vehement by the deep suspicion that he would never return to the Chelsea, they departed on the Queen Elizabeth in July.
Meanwhile, Miller, the lucky survivor, continued preparing for the twelve-week rehearsal period for After the Fall that was to begin in October of 1963, with the opening now planned for the following January. Even before the casting process began, tensions had run high, as Kazan noted that while the actions of his own alter ego in the script were portrayed as so pernicious that they led to a close colleague’s suicide, “Quentin’s” betrayal of his first wife was subtly excused by the portrayal of Maggie as truth personified, rather than merely as a woman with whom he wanted to have sex. Miller, meanwhile, bridled at the long-married Kazan’s decision to cast his mistress, Barbara Loden, in the lead—an unnecessary complication, in the playwright’s opinion. And the producer, Robert Whitehead, had begun to wonder about Miller’s sanity: the evening before rehearsals began, Miller had telephoned him to say that he had just realized that people might think the play was about Marilyn. Each principal in the production seemed to exist in a remarkable state of denial while trying to force the others to face their demons head-on. As a result, the atmosphere at rehearsals was like a “snake pit,” in one actor’s assessment—rife with suspicion, defensive posturing, and gossip and confusion among the cast members.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 20
