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

by Sherill Tippins

  “You hear Bob Dilon?” Allen Ginsberg wrote to his lover Peter Orlovsky from San Francisco in November of that year. “I heard disc of him singing song Masters of War very cowboy Blakean—Nice.” Dylan had figured out how to use the timeless resonance of an English folk melody from the Middle Ages to power his slice-up of America’s warmongers. Hearing the singer’s direct attack, delivered in the flat, disillusioned voice of an American outsider, Ginsberg recognized a powerful force for change and another potential ally just as the cultural revolution was shifting into high gear.

  A month later, Ginsberg met the twenty-two-year-old singer at a party in New York—only to find him in the midst of a debilitating identity crisis. A couple of weeks before, Dylan had made a fool of himself on the dais of the annual Bill of Rights dinner. The National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee—a group of mostly older leftists who had cut their teeth on the McCarthy hearings—was presenting him with an award in recognition of his political songwriting in the hope of attracting some younger members. Dylan, however, had arrived still reeling from the uproar caused by the recent revelation in Newsweek that Bob Dylan, the romantic drifter and American visionary, was really just Bobby Zimmerman, the son of a middle-class Jewish appliance salesman in Hibbing, Minnesota. The unmasking was traumatic for a young man so fully immersed in the world of folk ballads and myths that he literally forgot at times that he didn’t live in that world.

  Stepping up to the dais, he had reminded himself that no one knew who he was or what he was up to. These old lefties wanted to claim him as a protest singer, but he was no more a protest singer than Woody Guthrie or Jelly Roll Morton; he, and they, sang “rebellion songs.” Looking out at the audience, Dylan had launched into a half-incoherent diatribe in which he declared that their older generation would no longer be “governing me and making my rules”; criticized the Negroes then marching on Washington for wearing suits to prove that they were respectable; and concluded, to a chorus of boos, that, actually, he could understand Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in some respects—that “I saw things that he felt, in me.”

  Now, at the party with Ginsberg, Dylan appeared still half dazed by the media-generated hazing that he had endured and foolishly amplified. But Ginsberg, who still regretted having let Kerouac suffer the same kind of public scrutiny alone, hastened to assure Dylan that critics who had not “lived where the artist has lived” could not possibly understand the process of imagining oneself inside other lives and other worlds. Before the night ended, a bond had formed between the Minnesota songwriter struggling to break through to a more poetic expression and the New Jersey poet searching for a way to engage the masses. “There was an undercurrent of upheaval reverberating, and in a few years the American cities would tremble,” Dylan wrote later. “I had a feeling of destiny.” But in order to ride the changes, he felt the need to “change my inner thought patterns,” to “start believing possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before.” More than anyone else in America, Ginsberg was equipped to help him make those changes.

  The following month—as though all he needed was Ginsberg’s permission to begin—Dylan wrote “Chimes of Freedom,” a stormy first flight into poetry, with its lightning chimes flashing and tolling for the outcasts of the world. In February of 1964, he embarked on a cross-country road trip with friends, stopping in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and reaping “Mr. Tambourine Man” as his reward. Back in New York, he turned up at Phil Ochs’s door in the Hotel Chelsea one morning before dawn to play his new song. Ochs himself was on a different path (still wanting to “change the world” despite Dylan’s insistence that “politics is bullshit”), but even half asleep, he recognized the song as a masterpiece—the work of a generation’s poet, not just another protest singer-songwriter like himself.

  Destiny was about to manifest itself. “It was looking right at me, and nobody else,” Dylan wrote. Driving cross-country, he had heard the Beatles playing nonstop on the radio in the wake of their Ed Sullivan Show appearance and thought, “They were so easy to accept, so solid.” Like Harry Smith, Dylan saw popular music as living music, and he wanted that kind of connection and reach. After recording Another Side of Bob Dylan in New York in June, he retreated to Woodstock to immerse himself in the writings of Rimbaud and T. S. Eliot; to tap into his unconscious with the help of marijuana, red wine, and LSD; and to experiment with freeform poetry and prose under Ginsberg’s supervision.

  “The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses,” Rimbaud wrote. “Because he reaches the unknown!” And in fact, Dylan pushed through the wall of his own limitations with “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” recorded for Bringing It All Back Home in January 1965. Dylan had always loved LP jackets that “you could stare at for hours,” back and front. The cover of this half-acoustic, half-electric album, released that March, would feature a host of iconic images, Harry Smith–style, while on the back, Barbara Rubin—Smith’s and Ginsberg’s close friend and now Dylan’s too—massaged the head of the rising-genius songwriter.

  “Strike another match, go start anew,” Dylan sang at the conclusion of the album. By the end of 1964, he knew what he was doing. But he needed new rootstock on which to graft his ideas. It was a woman who would provide the “cuneiform tablets,” the “archaic grail to lighten the way” for his next stage of work. Over the course of the past year, dark-eyed, serene Sara Lowndes—“one of the loveliest creatures in the world of women”—had become one in an array of lovers, including most prominently Joan Baez. As the pace of Dylan’s life intensified, he came to rely on Sara to soothe what he called the “constant commotion burnin at my body an at my mind.” Her knowledge of the tarot, the I Ching, and Zen Buddhism helped stir Dylan’s imagination as well, prompting the reflection that he knew “just two holy people” capable of “crossing all the boundaries of time and usefulness”—Allen Ginsberg and Sara Lowndes.

  It didn’t hurt that Sara, recently divorced, had moved with her young daughter into the Hotel Chelsea. To an artist of Dylan’s sensibility, the rooms of this hotel resonated with the spirits of the realist novelists, tonalist painters, and Depression-era poets who had lived here before him. People said there were ghosts here. As Dylan would write of other spirits at another time, you could almost hear their heavy breathing as they raced up toward the light, “all determined to get somewhere.” Like Julian West in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a person could fall asleep at the Chelsea and wake up in a different era—only, in this case, instead of discovering a glorious utopian twentieth-century future, he would find a disorienting version of America’s nineteenth-century past with its ecstatic visions, alchemical experiments, and utopian free love.

  Many of the current residents looked as though they had stepped out of that other world: the fat lady from Barnum and Bailey’s circus, who took up all the space in the narrow elevator; the tall, gaunt figure called the Preacher who roamed the halls in a black trench coat looking for a chance to minister to the bereaved; the sweet-faced burlesque dancers Patti Cakes and Cherry Vanilla; the solitary woman who talked only to God; the pretty West Indian maid with her hair dyed bright red; the Japanese sculptress; the Danish composer; the jazz musicians; and the flock of orphaned immigrant children sponsored by the Catholic Committee for Refugees. From the top of the building came the tap-tap of Arthur C. Clarke’s typewriter as he hammered out the tale of an intelligent computer determined to murder its human masters. Bubbling up the stairwell were the potent vibrations of psychedelic drugs and experiments in the occult. Scrawled on the signature lines of the framed inspection form in the elevator were the lines Feb. 13, 1875—Barry Goldwater and Dec. 25, 1963—Santa Claus.

  Dylan, polite and diffident as always, rented a room near Sara’s in this shabby caravansary and worked on his songs during the brief periods when he wasn’t touring. Bard noted approvingly his ability to slip unrecognized through the building—past Larry Rivers ch
atting up Patty Oldenburg on the stairs; the director Peter Brook rushing out to his Broadway production of Marat/Sade; Arthur Miller walking his basset hound to the elevator; and eighty-nine-year-old Alphaeus Cole hobbling through the lobby muttering “Monstrous!” as he averted his eyes from the art on the walls. Neighbors noticed Dylan’s arrival, but his privacy was respected. That was the Chelsea way.

  “I have these things ready,” Dylan told a reporter that spring, “nothing’s finished . . .” But he would have to write on the run: with the release of Bringing It All Back Home, preparations began for the British tour that would transform his career, not to mention American music. When seven thousand tickets to the London concert sold within two hours of going on sale, Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, realized what was coming. Wanting to capitalize on the moment and knowing of Dylan’s interest in film, he began exploring the possibility of a Beatles-style tour movie or even a series of Elvis Presley–type feature films. But Sara had met Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker through her secretarial job at Time-Life, and she suggested that Grossman talk with them instead. The two filmmakers had parted with Robert Drew, their partner on Primary and Crisis, to form Leacock-Pennebaker, Inc., so they could continue to produce their innovative, Direct Cinema–style documentaries.

  Dylan liked the raw quality of their documentaries and dispatched Grossman to discuss their filming the tour. Anticipating the roller-coaster ride ahead and fully convinced that in a couple of years he’d be “right back where I started—an unknown,” Dylan wanted to preserve as truthful a reflection of the experience as possible. As for his fans, if what the artist Brice Marden said was true—that modern art’s aim was to pull the subject closer and closer to the surface of the canvas—then why not bring the audience closer to their subject as well? For that matter, why not use Direct Cinema to pull the audience through the movie screen to the other side, to experience the tour from his point of view? Leacock, immersed in another film, turned the offer down. But Pennebaker had yet to make his own feature-length documentary and was pleasantly surprised to find that this young songwriter knew something about the experimental film movement and what the documentarians were after. The meeting with Grossman convinced Pennebaker that Dylan was a once-in-a-lifetime subject.

  In fact, when completed, Dont Look Back exceeded everyone’s expectations as a unique, objective record of the moment when some of the most powerful movements in American film, literature, and music converged. The images caught on film would brand the imaginations of a generation: Dylan retorting sarcastically to questions from reporters; a spurned Joan Baez bravely singing folk tunes while pretty Marianne Faithfull watched Dylan type a song; Ginsberg brokering an awkward meeting between Dylan and the Beatles at the Savoy Hotel and then chanting behind Dylan in an alley as the songwriter flashed cue cards at Pennebaker’s camera with BASEMENT, LAID OFF, BAD COUGH, and other “glyphs,” as Harry Smith would call them, from “Subterranean Blues.”

  It was clear on the screen that the assault on the participants’ own senses was huge. “No one went to bed if they could help it,” Pennebaker said later. They sat up all night singing. Faithfull knew why. “They were all so fucking high.” Amphetamines seemed the only way for Dylan to manage the pressure of performing, not to mention the boredom and frustration of walking alone onto an English stage with nothing but a harmonica and an acoustic guitar and performing “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and other songs from what seemed a lifetime ago. It was only at the end of his sold-out concert at London’s Albert Hall, with Ginsberg in attendance, that Dylan revealed what he’d been up to recently, singing “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” to a rapt audience.

  Coming off the tour with a head full of ideas, Dylan went directly to Woodstock to spew forth, Kerouac-style, one “long piece of vomit about twenty pages long” from which he carved out “Like a Rolling Stone.” As he wrote later, “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Later that summer, he produced “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Desolation Row,” “Tombstone Blues,” and the title song for his next album, “Highway 61 Revisited”—all Anthology of American Folk Music–type songs plugged into the current of the mid-1960s collective unconscious. What did it matter if Pete Seeger turned bright purple and tried to pull the plug when Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival the next month, or if folk-music aficionados shouted “Traitor!” at the Forest Hills Stadium when he played his new songs? These were “city songs” for Dylan’s “New York type period.” They fed on artificial power. And with them, as Ginsberg observed, Dylan showed the world that “great art can be done on a juke box”—that popular music could do more than entertain.

  While Dylan was in Woodstock—preparing to change the world with music, just as Harry Smith had intended—Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and their entourage returned from Paris, where Warhol’s Flowers show at the Sonnabend Gallery had created “the biggest transatlantic fuss since Oscar Wilde brought culture to Buffalo in the nineties,” as John Ashbery observed. The show marked a turning point for Warhol as well. At the reception, he coolly described himself to a New York Times reporter as “a retired artist” who planned to make films for Hollywood because at least in Hollywood “you can eat.”

  Besides, now, with Edie, he had a true superstar. Through the summer and into the fall of 1965, the New York Times and Post joined the chorus trumpeting Edie as Warhol’s newest discovery. Reporters worked themselves into such a frenzy when she encountered Mick Jagger at the Scene that she had to flee to the ladies’ room and missed her chance to talk with him. Being a superstar was “frightening and glamorous and exciting at the same time,” she confided to the pop-art collector Ethel Scull. Still, “after the bad and sad times in my life, it’s something I want to do.”

  Occasionally, Edie asked a friend whether she should try to start a real Hollywood career. But the real-world people were “such assholes,” one confidante recalled. “She wanted to be with her friends” at the Factory. Besides, here she could continue her drug habit. No one at the Factory had any desire to forgo the rush provided by Methedrine’s “celestial choir.” As Giorno pointed out, if it weren’t for speed, “Andy Warhol would not be Andy Warhol. My work also.”

  Years later, George Plimpton would recall being mesmerized by Sedgwick’s fragile vulnerability in Beauty No. 2 as she struggled to fend off an invisible inquisitor while also trying to satisfy the man beside her. What made the scene so captivating was that it appeared unscripted—and therefore profoundly real. Plimpton was acquainted with Edie socially, but he now said to his friend, “I don’t know that girl. I don’t know anything about her at all.”

  Like Dont Look Back, Beauty No. 2 brought viewer and performer so close to the screen that divided them that they could practically enter each other’s world. But the woman on the other side of the looking glass in Beauty was not the woman Edie wanted people to see. The image Warhol offered—a portrait of isolation, sorrow, addiction, and doom—was both pitiless and undeniably true.

  In August, Warhol began experimenting with a video camera, taping Edie having her hair cut or talking beside a monitor on which her speaking image also appeared. But now she began to object to his voyeuristic work as meaningless and stupid. When shown Kitchen in its finished version, she shouted in outrage that the film was totally inappropriate. On other occasions, she screamed that she would “not be a spokesman” for such perversities and that she would no longer be made a fool of in Warhol’s films. Warhol responded by turning to other actors, and Sedgwick, in her druggy haze, began plotting to retake control of her life, to become an artist herself instead of just an art object.

  Bob Neuwirth, Dylan’s closest friend and “supreme hip courtier” during this period, later recalled that it was on a snowy night sometime in the late fall of 1965 when he and Dylan first crossed paths with Sedgwick. Dylan had finally returned east after a harrowing tour with his new band, the Hawks
, and had more or less abandoned the house he had bought in Woodstock, not believing he could write something new in a place where he’d written before. “It’s just a hang up, a voodoo kind of thing,” he said. “I can’t stand the smell of birth. It just lingers.” Instead, he had returned with Sara to the Chelsea—the perfect environment for writing the city songs he had in mind.

  Dylan had made tons of money, but the pressure had been great. For the past year, at least, he had sustained himself with what he euphemistically called “a lot of medicine,” which had left him whip-thin, sharp-tempered, and hardly able to sit still. At the same time, the Kennedy assassination, the splintering civil rights movement, and the escalating war in Vietnam were all pushing people toward a fin-de-siècle state of mind further nourished by the speed and acid now ubiquitous in New York. At the Chelsea, amphetamine addicts screamed insults in the lobby at three in the morning, and marijuana smoke lingered on the stairwell while the twenty-four-year-old international sensation sat up nights scribbling notes about “the undertaker in his midnight suit” and “the rainman . . . with his magic wand” as he embarked on his “magician” phase.

  On November 9, a vast power failure had blacked out the entire Northeast. In its wake, newspapers around the world reported on the medieval, carnival-like atmosphere that had taken over the city of New York during those moonlit hours: young men selling candles on a patch of pavement near Astor Place, subway riders trapped in trains, visitors to St. Patrick’s Cathedral warming their hands over vigil candles, Bergdorf’s employees dancing out of the store hand in hand. A few weeks later, at the Chelsea, Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” was born—more than seven minutes of flickering lights and coughing pipes, escapades on the D train, and visions of Johanna rising up like an elusive, longed-for, genuine old America to haunt a darkened New York night.