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

by Sherill Tippins

  In April, the act moved to the Dom, a performance space inside an East Village Polish-immigrant social club recently discovered by Rosebud Feliu, followed by Rubin, the Fugs, and the rest of their crowd. With a new name constructed of words randomly plucked from the back cover of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home album, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable picked up where Up-Tight had left off. As Allen Ginsberg pointed out, it was not just music, performances, and colored lights but an entire “exploding” tableau of personalities and egos among the audience members, the creation of a “giant communal orgy revolution” that would, in Marshall McLuhan’s words, reconstruct “the entire human environment as a work of ‘art.’”

  Finally, in June—following a nightmarish trip to acid-tinged, utopian California that ended with Fillmore Auditorium owner Bill Graham shouting, “You disgusting germs from New York! Here we are, trying to clean up everything, and you come out here with your disgusting minds and whips!”—the band took a break while Lou Reed checked into a New York hospital to be treated for hepatitis. In July, he hobbled out to attend the wake of Delmore Schwartz, who had died alone in a Times Square transients’ hotel. Two weeks after Schwartz’s death, the poet Frank O’Hara was run down and killed by a beach buggy on Fire Island after a night out drinking with Virgil Thomson and other friends. Ginsberg, Larry Rivers, and playwright Arnold Weinstein drove together to the funeral, with Ginsberg chanting “Hare Krishna” and Rivers and Weinstein swapping stories about Frank on the way. To them all, O’Hara’s death symbolized the waning of the joy and lightness of the early sixties, which would be replaced by psychological isolation and obsession with that “nemesis from the past,” their careers.

  At that moment, Warhol may have wondered where his own career was going. His greatest supporter, Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had retreated in recent months, appalled by the drug-enhanced paranoia and narcissism that now pervaded the film-besotted Factory. On his final departure, he had left behind a message on a Factory blackboard: “Andy Warhol can’t paint any more and he can’t make movies yet.” But Warhol was determined to make a breakthrough film that would have a real impact on a larger public as well as bring in some cash.

  That summer of 1966, spurred by the success of Up-Tight and EPI, Warhol and Morrissey took a page from Barbara Rubin’s book and experimented with ways to throw their subjects emotionally off-guard in order to capture on camera the raw authenticity Warhol needed for his work. The filmmakers’ techniques—casually repeating a nasty rumor about a subject or asking an intrusive personal question just before turning on the camera—made for some riveting performances in borrowed apartments and at the Factory as poets, artists, actors, and addicts fell into rages, wept, made love, and attacked one another in astonishingly savage portrayals of themselves or of the characters they fantasized becoming. When questioned about his methods, Warhol countered that his films dealt with human emotions and human life, so “anything to do with the human person I feel is all right.” He was really less a creator than he was a pencil sharpener, he said—honing what was already there.

  By the middle of the 1960s, a number of Factory regulars had gravitated to the Hotel Chelsea, checking in as official guests or camping out in friends’ rooms. The building, now in its eighth decade, was falling into decline, an embarrassment to the Community Planning Board, whose members vigorously protested the city decision to award the hotel official landmark status that July. Bard was proud to point out that theirs was the only building in New York honored for both its architectural and historic significance. But only an artist of Warhol’s sensibility and background could understand that the source of the Chelsea’s fascination derived from both its former grandeur and its present squalor, in equal parts.

  Most intriguing were the private dramas implicit behind each door in the enormous nineteenth-century hostelry—moments that might in turn open still more doors of insight into the human condition in mid-1960s New York. Warhol could easily imagine the inside of room 121, for instance, where his handsome twenty-three-year-old assistant Malanga was likely to be sitting up in bed, blinking in the morning light, as John Wieners rolled a joint nearby and the teenage poet Rene Ricard, wrapped in a bed sheet, stumbled to the door. He could picture the slit-eyed beauty Mary Woronov in room 723 murmuring slyly to the luscious new teenage superstar International Velvet applying her makeup, “No matter how much you put on your face, it won’t make your butt any smaller,” and, on the ninth floor, Brigid Berlin, the overweight hellion daughter of a top Hearst executive, giving herself a poke of amphetamine through her jeans. But part of what gave these scenes their aura of dark glamour was the fact that so many other, very different, lives were spinning out above, below, and all around them.

  What was it like in the midget Mr. Normal’s room on a lonely summer Sunday evening? In the early-morning hours when no one was around, to whom did Mr. Zolt, the garrulous front deskman, recite his past accomplishments as a singer of gypsy songs? How was the novelist Theodora Keogh faring with her efforts to mate her pet margay with one of the hotel’s black cats, since, as she firmly informed any skeptics within earshot, “There is nothing in the annals of animal lore to prove this cannot be done”?

  The Chelsea, with its tarot deck of midcentury American archetypes, struck Warhol and Morrissey as the perfect place to continue their work. At first, Stanley Bard hesitated to give his permission for Warhol to film there, out of concern that a film crew and equipment would interfere with the residents’ ability to work. But Warhol assured him that his lightweight equipment would be minimally intrusive, and Bard’s sense of the artist’s seriousness of vision finally overcame his doubts.

  John Cale later recalled how empty and forlorn the Factory seemed on those days when everyone disappeared to Twenty-Third Street and crammed into one of the hotel rooms with their cameras to watch another story unfold. Bullied by Morrissey, stressed to exhaustion by the August heat, the strung-out superstars reached deep down to produce something that Warhol might find pleasing: a lesbian torture fantasy, an intimate confession, or just quiet weeping while trimming one’s bangs on a hot, lonely afternoon. The actors threw themselves into their roles with such enthusiasm that the hotel staff had difficulty differentiating between fiction and reality. Brigid Berlin’s performance as a hyped-up drug dealer making connections over the phone so frightened the eavesdropping switchboard operator that she called the police. The narcotics squad’s arrival convinced Bard that Warhol and his friends had to go, and that was the last day of filming at the Chelsea. Still, the artist had enough footage to piece together his own Jungian-shadow counterpart to Hollywood’s Depression-era Grand Hotel. Offered a screening opportunity at the Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque in mid-September, he and Morrissey selected twelve of the best thirty-three-minute reels shot over the summer and arranged them into a six-and-a-half-hour-long film. To reduce the running time, the filmmakers decided to show two reels at a time, side by side, with the sound alternating back and forth between them.

  Warhol and Morrissey were surprised by how effective this was. The juxtaposed scenes—some of them in color, others in black-and-white; some of them violent, some tender; some of them dark, some full of light—generated a far greater visual and psychological resonance than the separate films had. As with Harry Smith’s collage-like Anthology, the stories seemed to bounce off each other in a complex conversation, creating a textured, multidimensional experience full of meaning, much like real life. To enhance this effect, the filmmakers placed a narrative framework around the disparate stories, creating the fiction, through the use of establishing shots of various room numbers, that all of the dramas took place within the hotel. They called the film Chelsea Girls and developed a program for the screenings that indicated the Hotel Chelsea room in which each scenario supposedly took place. Everything happens at the Chelsea, the film implied, and at the Chelsea, all guests, no matter how damaged by the outside world, “can be whatever they are.”

/>   As Harry Smith had hoped, Warhol’s movie, enhanced by music by the Velvet Underground, became the experimental art community’s greatest success. Much mainstream outrage greeted its September premiere, of course: Rex Reed called it a “cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion which is about as interesting as the inside of a toilet bowl.” Stanley Bard’s partners at the Chelsea, outraged by what they saw as a potentially lethal blow to the hotel’s reputation, threatened to sue the filmmaker until he agreed to eliminate the shots of specific room numbers and all spoken references to the hotel. But despite this flurry of discontent, many in the audience responded almost ecstatically to the film. The photographer Dominique Nabokov, who saw it with her Hotel Chelsea neighbor Virgil Thomson, recalled, “He enjoyed it. He was intellectually curious.” Having experimented with peyote extensively as a college student five decades ago, he could hardly be shocked by the film’s druggy aura. Shirley Clarke enjoyed the way so many of the film’s extraordinary sequences lingered in the mind. Jonas Mekas praised it for presenting life “in the complexity and richness achieved by modern literature” simply by “looking at the face—what film does best.” And Ginsberg pointed to the deeply moral, even religious quality of a filmmaker who hadn’t invented the destructive forces evident in Chelsea Girls but simply exposed the toxicity in the soul of a nation addicted to what the SDS leader Carl Oglesby called “a stolen and maybe surplus luxury”—a nation with 5 percent of the world’s people now consuming half the world’s goods.

  So many performances sold out during its first run that the film was brought back for a second week, and then a third. In December, it became the first underground film to make the leap to a two-week run in a Midtown art theater—the six-hundred-seat Cinema Rendezvous. Within five months, the film that had cost between $1,500 and $3,000 to make grossed approximately $130,000 in New York. It then toured the art houses in Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, San Diego, Kansas City, and Boston, where, to Warhol’s delight, the cinema was raided and the film was banned.

  Chelsea Girls brought mainstream attention to others in their group as well. In Newsweek, Time, and Playboy, critics now puzzled over Rubin’s Christmas on Earth, worrying that a utopian film that looked “as if it had been shot through a proctoscope” might become a rallying cry for the “new youth culture.” At the Factory, however, the unprecedented influx of profits further intensified the atmosphere of paranoia. Chelsea Girls’s notoriety had made police raids on the Factory so common that Warhol put his lawyers on call twenty-four hours a day.

  As for the actual Hotel Chelsea, Arthur Miller bemoaned Warhol’s transformation of the hotel’s mystique from generally “quiet and respectable” to “wild and unmanageable.” Even Bob Dylan later remarked that “when Chelsea Girls came out, it was all over for the Chelsea Hotel. You might as well have burned it down.” Dylan himself, never wanting to write in the same place twice, had already moved on, going into hiding in Woodstock. Over the past four years, during which he’d written nearly two hundred songs, the twenty-five-year-old Minnesotan had grown from “a boy who hardly seemed to have an original thought in his head” into “an authentic poet,” a “true writer.” The rapid rise had almost killed him, though. Accounts circulated of his passed-out figure on the floor of a Hotel Chelsea room surrounded by drinking band members while Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, and a parade of angels and parasites came and went. As he later wrote, “I really never was any more than what I was—a folk musician . . . Now it had blown up in my face.”

  By the fall of 1966, Edie Sedgwick had fully succumbed to her drug addiction. Methedrine had enhanced her love affair with Bob Neuwirth, making her “like a sex slave to this man,” as she boasted in the film Ciao! Manhattan. But “the minute he left me alone, I felt so empty and lost that I would start popping pills.” Then, in mid-October, following a pot-enhanced evening with Malanga, she accidentally set her apartment on fire. Following a trip to California for Christmas and a brief confinement in yet another psychiatric ward, Edie made the Chelsea her next New York home. Life in a hotel gave her “a sense of freedom, of artistic license,” Neuwirth said. And at the Hotel Chelsea, Edie was a star.

  Edie Sedgwick, Mario Montez, Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov, and all the other cards in the deck of mid-1960s New York had been dealt out by Dylan and Warhol in different ways—Dylan had incorporated their worlds into a phantasmagorical new form of American song while Warhol had used their faces and emotions to create a stunning new form of visual truth. Opposed as they were in temperament and aesthetics, each artist had learned to coat his canvas with a mirror surface to draw the viewer in. As viewer and subject grew closer, the barrier between them grew thinner and more transparent. Soon, Harry Smith’s dream would come true: the dividing line in America would disappear altogether, and artist and subject would exchange places at will.

  7

  The Price

  You wanted a real life. And that’s an expensive thing. It costs.

  —ARTHUR MILLER, The Price

  THE EXPLOSIVE IMPACT OF Chelsea Girls and Blonde on Blonde shattered the privacy that had protected the Hotel Chelsea, releasing its voices to merge with others in a rising countercultural chorus. In New York, now led by John Lindsay, the handsome young mayor who had run on the campaign slogan “He is fresh and everyone else is tired,” Chelsea denizens participated in Charlotte Moorman’s New York Festivals of the Avant-Garde, gave readings at the St. Mark’s poetry workshop, performed and debated on community-supported WBAI radio, and kept an eye on the avant-garde Fluxus art group’s fledgling efforts to create a communal village in the half-abandoned manufacturing district of SoHo. In 1967, Chelsea residents traveled west to join ten thousand others for a Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, a response to California’s banning of LSD and a warm-up for that year’s Summer of Love. As the number of youthful initiates to the movement increased, the chorus grew loud enough to attract the attention of the mainstream media. Ed Sanders’s face on the cover of Life magazine beneath the years-overdue headline “Happenings: The Worldwide Underground of the Arts Creates the Other Culture,” as well as Terry Southern’s statement to a Newsweek reporter that “this is a golden age for creative work of any kind,” drew even more aspiring outsiders to the East Coast and through the Chelsea’s glass doors.

  Magic was afoot at the Chelsea, people said. For about ten dollars a week, you could rent a room next to Edie Sedgwick or hang out on the roof with Allen Ginsberg. You and your neighbors could share ideas, music, money, clothes, hot-plate meals, and maybe beds, if you were lucky, under the protection of a manager not much older than you. The more outside mainstream society you were, the more inside you would be here, drinking beer at El Quijote with Bobby Neuwirth, exchanging nods on the stairs with Betsey Johnson and her new lover John Cale, and squeezing to the back of the elevator with the German anarchists and artists’ widows to make space for the tourists, music producers, miniskirted models, and globetrotters in from Goa who also wished to join the scene.

  In exchange for the chance to experience this freer, more creative, more connected type of life, a surprisingly diverse population was willing to put up with the Chelsea’s scuffed linoleum, embedded smells, sheets with holes in them, and webs of exposed electrical wiring that no one seemed to have time to attend to in those busy days. At one end of the seventh floor, filmmakers and musicians huddled with Harry Smith listening to Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and the occasional Folkways recording of Eskimo throat songs or croaking frogs, all of which Smith now played in rotation with the opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. At the other end, a kind of alternative high society had formed around Isabella Gardner, an ex-wife of the poet Allen Tate and a poet in her own right. The glamorous black sheep of a Boston Brahmin clan, she now served white wine and hors d’oeuvres to Mildred Baker, the Newark Museum of Art curator; the Romanian count Roderick Gheka, a descendant of Prince Vlad the Impaler (also known as Dracula); a homosexual art historian from Germany named Gert Schiff
, nattily dressed in suit and Homburg hat; the playwright Arnold Weinstein, with whom Gardner was enjoying a delightful affair; and the poet Stefan Brecht, the quiet, polite son of the Mahagonny librettist Bertolt Brecht, who was documenting the blossoming downtown alternative-theater scene from his top-floor studio.

  Some were drawn to the Chelsea not just by the prospect of creative companionship, but also of romance. The poet and novelist Leonard Cohen had arrived in New York in the summer of 1966, discovered the folk-music scene in the Village, and decided to try his luck at writing and performing songs. Success seemed unlikely, as he was a moody, suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying Canadian who had already turned thirty-two. According to the Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein, Cohen’s eyes sagged “like two worn breasts” and his voice sounded like the product of “thousands of gallons of whiskey and a million cigarettes.” But women loved Cohen, not least because he worshipped them; within two months of his arrival, Judy Collins had recorded two of his songs, “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” for her album In My Life. The album, released in November, became her most successful yet, and she would go on to include a Cohen song on practically every album after that.

  Cohen had wandered into the Dom one February night, seen the beautiful blond Nico performing solo, backed by a young Jackson Browne, and had fallen hard. Undeterred by her lack of interest (she preferred younger men—specifically, Jackson), Cohen took to tagging along after Nico in the weeks that followed, getting to know her friends at the Factory, befriending her former bandmate Lou Reed, and finally, in February 1967, relocating from the low-rent Henry Hudson Hotel on West Fifty-Seventh Street to the Hotel Chelsea’s fourth floor. At the Chelsea, he soon gravitated to Harry Smith, who encouraged Cohen’s already well-developed interest in alchemy and magic and instructed him in the best methods for casting love spells, using the black-magic candles Cohen had bought at a nearby Caribbean botánica that specialized in spiritual and religious supplies. Nico remained unswayed, but as Cohen soon discovered, there were plenty of other young muses at the Chelsea willing to provide comfort in exchange for a poem or a song or even just a kind word. The Chelsea suited him, he realized; here, as in his hometown of Montreal, he had found a community of like-minded thinkers who “could hold a conversation, hold a drink,” and “hold their silence” when he wanted to be left alone.