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

by Sherill Tippins

  It was this diffusion of values, Miller was convinced, that enabled the majority of Americans to live their lives so passively. In essays and interviews, he and other Chelsea Hotel denizens regularly railed against the war, with Miller pointing to its destruction of the nation’s moral health, and Terry Southern suggesting that the only way to resolve the issue was to “quickly silently . . . slither out, on our stomachs” and advocating trying to wake America up to the horrors it was committing by bombing “the entire public consciousness of the USA with LSD.” Yet their words struck readers as no more urgent or real than the advertising slogans presented with equal conviction in magazines and on TV. The result was a strange collective abdication of moral responsibility, a belief that Americans could do whatever they liked—invade nations, discriminate against others, fill their homes with useless goods—without consequences.

  But by 1967, Miller saw signs everywhere that the bill was coming due. They were evident not only in the growing numbers of protesters in Washington, DC, and in the nihilism of such creative works as Southern’s screenplay in progress Easy Rider, but also in the sense of restlessness and anxiety exuded by city dwellers passing through the increasingly crowded Chelsea Hotel. One new resident in particular set off alarms for Miller. Valerie Solanas, a drab-looking brunette in men’s clothes who wore her hair stuffed into a Bob Dylan cap, had “eyes so crazy that one remembered them as being above one another,” Miller later wrote. She’d lurk about the lobby, hide near the phone booths, then leap out at passing residents to demand that they buy her mimeographed pamphlet “The S.C.U.M. Manifesto”—a diatribe in support of her organization, the Society for Cutting Up Men, that advocated as a solution to the crimes of a patriarchal society the extermination of the entire male population.

  Solanas, who had been sexually abused throughout childhood and now made her living as a part-time prostitute, knew what she had gotten in life and expected someone—at least half the population, in fact—to pay the price. At the Chelsea, she found sympathy in the cluttered room of the artist May Wilson, a former Baltimore housewife whose subversive collages made from photographs of her winking, grandmotherly face attached to the body of a showgirl in pasties or that of a sixteenth-century nun, spoke to Solanas’s own sexual resentments and fears. As mother confessor to many of the down-and-out young people passing through the building, Wilson thought nothing of providing Solanas with food and occasional small loans while the young writer waited in agony for Warhol to tell her if he wanted to film the script she’d submitted to him, Up Your Ass, and then raged over Warhol’s admission that he had lost the manuscript (lost it accidentally on purpose, in fact, as the play was so obscene that Warhol assumed Solanas must be a cop trying to entrap him). Grudgingly, Solanas accepted Warhol’s offer to make it up to her by paying her twenty-five dollars to play a small role as a lesbian in his film in progress I, a Man. She surprised everyone by how funny she was in the film, but her agitated demeanor put the Factory denizens off, and she soon drifted back to the Chelsea.

  Miller noted with frustration that instead of acting to prevent a clearly immiment homicide or other disaster, his fellow Chelsea residents accepted Solanas’s outrageous leaflets with maddening equanimity, merely pointing politely on occasion to errors in grammar or syntax. The playwright tried to approach Stanley Bard on the matter, but the manager, now in his thirties and a family man, was so overburdened by the challenge of trying to make this madhouse work on the balance sheets—overcharging the crazy rich to carry the talented poor—that he chose to look the other way. “As I slowly learned, they were simply not interested in bad news of any kind,” Miller later wrote of the owners of the hotel. Like everyone else in this American Age of Abdication, they wanted all the benefits of a life without limits without any of the costs.

  Aside from Miller, the only Chelsea resident who seemed to comprehend Solanas’s poisonous intent was the publisher Maurice Girodias, recently hounded out of Paris by government censors and busy re-creating Olympia Press in New York. Knowing that Solanas needed money for rent and hoping to profit from her revolutionary zeal, Girodias offered her two thousand dollars, payable in small installments, to write a novel based on “The S.C.U.M. Manifesto.” By accepting these terms and signing a contract, Solanas, troubled as she was, became just another working artist in a hotel where “nothing is true—everything is permitted,” a world with no limits, no moral absolutes, where the artist drifted aimlessly in the current of the wealthiest society ever to exist. And even as she sat down at her cigarette-scarred desk at the Chelsea to begin work, another group of artists were offered what appeared to be a free ticket—no strings attached—to take their outsider message to the world at large.

  In the year since the release of Blonde on Blonde, the rock-music industry had exploded, reaching an apotheosis that summer of 1967 with the Monterey International Pop Festival, the subject of a documentary filmed by D. A. Pennebaker. At the festival, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and other West Coast bands broke through the acid-rock bubble and into the mainstream stratosphere. The concert’s success had recording executives and representatives lining up to sign the acts. The stakes were so high that when Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, now known as the “pope of the music business,” met with Joplin and her band in November to discuss the possibility of representing them, he simply asked how much they wanted to earn that year. Joplin, a twenty-four-year-old from Port Arthur, Texas, laughed and countered recklessly, “Seventy-five thousand.” Grossman raised it to a hundred thousand, handed them a contract, and then got them a quarter-million-dollar deal with Columbia Records, the most the company had ever paid for new talent.

  Meanwhile, Bill Graham, owner of the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, stepped up his plans to open a Fillmore East the following spring, in a former Yiddish theater in New York’s East Village. Staging rock concerts in New York had always been difficult due to Manhattan hoteliers’ reluctance to house the musicians and their retinues of troublesome hangers-on. At one time, Graham had considered opening his own “rock hotel” in the city to resolve this issue, but by the end of 1967, thanks to Dylan, Phil Ochs, Robbie Robertson, Brian Jones, and others, the Chelsea had taken on that role. The fit hadn’t always been ideal. The previous June, days before the Monterey International Pop Festival made him a star, Jimi Hendrix was checking in at the front desk when a middle-aged white tourist mistook him for a bellman and ordered him to carry her bags upstairs. Hendrix departed in disgust as one of the actual bellmen took over. Then, in August, when Shirley Clarke hosted an impromptu Grateful Dead concert on the roof to raise money for the Diggers—a San Francisco group dedicated to providing free food, housing, and other services to the young residents of Haight-Ashbury—the Dead shut down the performance shortly after the arrival of Andy Warhol, an “ambulatory black hole,” they claimed, whose New York vibe sucked the energy out of the experience and made it impossible for them to play.

  Still, the Chelsea remained Graham’s best hope for housing his Fillmore East performers, and his friend Stanley Bard, always on the lookout for steady streams of income to subsidize less financially reliable residents, was glad to oblige him. The opening date for the new venue was set for March 8, 1968, with Big Brother and the Holding Company to perform along with Tim Buckley and Albert King. Weeks ahead of time, Joplin and her band arrived at the Chelsea for some warm-up publicity and a concert at the Anderson Theater.

  For a young woman from a small Texas town—a lifelong outsider who had drifted since she was eighteen from one bohemian scene to another and who had only recently found a real place for herself in Haight-Ashbury’s “Victorian fru-fru” subculture of herbal tea, vintage clothes, and lazy afternoons spent with friends at Hippie Hill—life at the legendary Chelsea was a thrilling experience. Through some fluke, she’d been assigned one of the smaller rooms initially, but once she’d had a chance to wander the corridors and step out onto a balcony overlooking the snow-c
overed city, she realized that this was where she belonged—street noise, clanking heating pipes, and stained carpet notwithstanding. During those first weeks, she would write to her sister of the aura of history and magic that resonated through the halls of this “very famous literary type intellectual hotel,” whose current population of hippies and musicians, artists and writers, superstars and regular working folks had grown so large that it had begun to spill over into the twelve-story Carteret building next door.

  Stanley Bard also felt that Janis had found a home here. Looking beyond her secondhand clothes and uncombed hair, he perceived a powerful life spirit—a hard-working young woman with “good energy and focus.” He said later that he regretted that she hadn’t become a teacher, something she told him she’d once planned to be. He worried even then that this goodhearted Texas girl who’d strung the beads her ex-boyfriend Country Joe McDonald had worn for his performance at Monterey Pop—on the same day she herself had stunned the audience with her no-holds-barred rendition of “Love Is Like a Ball ’n’ Chain”—wasn’t prepared to handle the cutthroat Warhol crowd at the trendy new Max’s Kansas City, even if “Janis,” McDonald’s tribute to her, was playing on the jukebox for all the hangers-on to hear.

  To some extent, he was right. On February 17, 1968, Joplin had earned ecstatic reviews with her gut-wrenching rendition of “Piece of My Heart” at the Anderson, and the concert was followed by a blast of publicity that promised a triumphant East Coast launch. But as recording sessions began for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s first Columbia Records album, later to be named Cheap Thrills, the first week of March, the band learned that a quarter-million-dollar contract from a major record label didn’t come without some strings attached. To play its best, Big Brother had always depended on its visceral connection with the audience. Now, there was no audience, and their producer, John Simon, was appalled by how poorly the musicians performed. Simon, with his perfect pitch, actually had to leave the studio when the band performed off-key or off the beat. Discussions about dumping Big Brother and getting Janis a professional backup band began at Columbia and in Grossman’s office.

  The musicians, shocked by the criticism, began to turn their resentment against Joplin. The press attention she had received since their arrival in New York, including a photograph in the New York Times from which every band member but Janis had been cropped, convinced them that she was on a star trip and intended to leave them behind. This feeling of insecurity poisoned the air at the recording sessions and put Janis herself into a foul mood. At the Chelsea, she spent less time with the band and more time on her own, roaming the halls at three in the morning, feeling lonely and isolated, looking for some company and a drink.

  Someone else was keeping the same hours at the Chelsea that winter. Leonard Cohen had been through his own tribulations with Columbia over the previous year. By April 1967, after further coverage of his songs by Judy Collins and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cohen had done a few public singing performances and had even been offered a college tour in the fall. Months before, Columbia’s John Hammond, famed discoverer of Bob Dylan as well as Count Basie and Aretha Franklin, had dropped in at the Chelsea to hear Cohen play “Suzanne,” “The Stranger Song,” and other tunes. “You’ve got it,” he had announced before leaving, but it was not until the end of April that he was able to persuade the record company to take a chance on a poet-singer Cohen’s age.

  Through the summer and fall of 1967, Cohen worked laboriously to lay down the songs for his first album, first with the legendary producer Bob Johnston, then with Hammond. It was a painful process; the chance to take time out to perform “Suzanne” at the Newport Folk Festival felt like being “released from jail.”

  In Newport, Cohen met a fellow Canadian singer-songwriter, twenty-four-year-old Joni Mitchell, and when the festival was over, he took her back with him to the Chelsea Hotel. For a few months, they became an official item. Joni demanded a reading list from her poet-lover, and Leonard recommended Camus, García Lorca, and the I Ching. One day a limousine pulled up next to them, and Jimi Hendrix, in the limo’s back seat, started talking to Joni; Cohen was pleased that Joni didn’t jump into the limousine and run off with the charismatic guitarist, as Nico had once done in a similar situation. But in the end, Cohen’s relationship with Mitchell developed into something more collegial than passionate. He quipped at one point that living with Joni was like “living with Beethoven.” She was clearly on her own upward trajectory, and though they would remain friends beyond their summer romance, she couldn’t resist dismissing him now and then as a “boudoir poet,” less a composer than a “word man.”

  In the wake of the romance, Cohen faced the hard reality of the recording process alone. In September, Hammond dropped out, and the project was put on hold for a month. Cohen, devastated by the prospect of having to start all over again, shut himself in his room for a week, smoking hash and seeing only his friends at the Chelsea. Then John Simon, Big Brother’s future producer, was brought in to replace Hammond, and somehow the album was completed. Songs of Leonard Cohen, its back cover sporting the image of a Mexican saint like those seen in his neighborhood botánica, shipped in December of 1967. Cohen went on a brief promotional tour. Now he was back, roaming the Hotel Chelsea’s halls again, his album having met with only limited success and the rights to “Suzanne” and two more of his best songs somehow lost to a music publisher along the way.

  By this point, as Cohen would tell a concert audience years later, he had become expert at operating the Chelsea’s notoriously stubborn elevators. It was “one of the few technologies I really ever mastered,” he said. “I walked in. Put my finger right on the button. No hesitation. Great sense of mastery in those days.” One cold, dismal night, returning home from a solitary dinner at the Bronco Burger, he realized that the woman next to him in the elevator was Janis Joplin and that she was enjoying the ride as much as he was. He understood at once: with all the problems they had satisfying the demands of their record label, here was something both of them really knew how to do. Taking a deep breath, Cohen asked, “Are you looking for someone?” She said, “Yes, I’m looking for Kris Kristofferson.” Kris Kristofferson? “Little lady, you’re in luck,” responded the silver-tongued poet. “I am Kris Kristofferson.”

  Joplin’s full-throated cackle at this remark made Cohen forget all about his record, his lost copyright, and the burger he was still struggling to digest. In no time, Canada’s poet of pessimism found himself in an unmade bed with rock’s new gypsy queen. The tryst would provide sweet if fleeting memories to this pair just beginning to perceive the price they would pay for the fame they had wished for. Too much thought and energy would be focused on “the money and the flesh” in the coming years. Well, that was all right, Joplin said, as Cohen recalled years later in his song “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.” “We are ugly but we have the music.”

  The Fillmore East’s opening concert on March 8 was a whopping success, with people fighting to get in to watch Joplin belt out “Catch Me, Daddy” in a wash of psychedelic lights. By late spring, Janis was scheduled for photo shoots with Glamour and interviews with Life and Look. Soon, her portrait by Richard Avedon would appear in Vogue, where Richard Goldstein would describe her as “the most staggering leading woman in rock . . . she slinks like tar, scowls like war . . . clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave.” As money started to roll in, Joplin lavished it on her friends, presiding over El Quijote dinner parties where Harry Smith and Peggy Biderman shared a plate of paella while Ginsberg compared notes on book royalties with Cohen and a bevy of adoring female fans looked on. Ginsberg, like Stanley Bard, found Janis to be “a very sensitive, beautiful person” and added her to the list of friends at the hotel whom he was likely to fetch for a confabulation in some room at any time of the night or day. But at El Quijote, the Spanish waiters observed the way she slugged Southern Comfort and loudly flirted with every man who walked by, and kept their opinions to themselves.


  With the launching of the Fillmore, more big names, including Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Butterfield Blues Band, Sly and the Family Stone, the Byrds, Moby Grape, and Ravi Shankar, began to fill the lobby and corridors of the Chelsea that spring and summer, along with flotillas of managers, record producers, journalists, groupies, chauffeurs, personal bodyguards, and dealers. It was easy to identify this new breed of musician at the Chelsea, Virgil Thomson noted with satisfaction, “because they wore their concert clothes—purple velvet pants—all day long to get them dirty.” At nightly parties in the musicians’ rooms, residents gained easy access to drugs of a wide variety. “The corridors filled with the acrid-sweet smell of grass, and acid became popular,” recalled Florence Turner, a resident theater scout. She accepted an invitation by the Chrome Cyrcus to try marijuana while listening to Mahler on earphones and found that “I liked being pleasantly stoned,” watching the rows of iron flowers on the staircase morph into a “line of dancing mannequins, each poised on an infinitely graceful big toe.” Soon, it became a common late-night experience to see hallucinating residents crawling back to their rooms on their hands and knees.