It was a perfect environment for the actor-writers Gerome Ragni and James Rado to join as they prepared for the Broadway production of their musical Hair—an introduction of the East Village utopian vision to tourists from the suburbs of middle America. The play had been a hit off-Broadway the previous fall when presented as the inaugural production of the New York Public Theater. The Public’s founder, Brooklyn native Joseph Papp, a former Communist Party member who had already created the popular Shakespeare in the Park series at the Delacorte in Central Park, envisioned the Public as a vehicle for amplifying the voices of the people of New York, much as Philip Hubert had dreamed of the Lyceum eight decades before. It made sense, then, to launch the Public, housed at the edge of the East Village in the decrepit former Astor Library, with a celebration of the countercultural milieu outside its doors.
Hair had begun its journey as a few pages of notes for a musical thrust into Papp’s hands by the wild-haired, irrepressible Ragni when they were both on a train from New Haven to New York. It had continued with a tribe of mostly amateur actors from the neighborhood who showed up for rehearsals stoned and wearing flowers in their hair. Somehow, nevertheless, Papp and his staff of professionals had managed to turn Ragni and Rado’s exuberant project into a unique theatrical tribute to their community’s free-love, antiwar ideals. Hair had a transformative effect on audiences. Newsweek critic Jack Kroll called the production “alive and a sign of life,” with a “strong happy heartbeat that can be felt in every seat of the house,” and concluded that Hair was “the most exciting theatrical prospect New York has seen in years.”
Yet throughout the musical’s development, some East Village denizens grumbled that this so-called celebration was a sellout. The Public was commodifying their culture, some believed, just as the record companies and music magazines fed off the rock phenomenon. In October of 1967, the same month as Hair’s debut, Haight-Ashbury residents staged a mock funeral billed as the “Death of Hippie,” parading through the streets a coffin supposedly containing a neighbor killed by “overexposure and rampant commercialism.” East Villagers shared the demonstrators’ fear that capitalism and its corrupting influence could kill their democratic subculture. Papp may have begun to believe this too, as he declined to extend Hair’s run despite its success and moved on to a previously planned adaptation of Ergo, an expressionist tale by the Chelsea Hotel resident and Nazi-occupation survivor Jakov Lind, and an experimental version of Hamlet that he himself would direct.
As actors, however, Rado and Ragni were more than prepared to risk trivializing the avant-garde’s mission in exchange for fame. When a wealthy fan, Michael Butler, offered to take the play to Broadway, they jumped at the opportunity, even though it meant revamping the production considerably to draw a middle-American audience: making it less angelic and more madcap, less politically than socially provocative, and adding full-frontal nudity to titillating effect. A Broadway budget meant better accommodations for the participants, and the play’s high-spirited co-creators lost no time relocating to the Chelsea. Although the two of them drove many of their neighbors half mad with their clownish behavior and frequent spats, most of the Chelsea residents went to see the musical, out of morbid fascination if nothing else. Joplin, who attended several times, loved the way even a diluted message like this from the Lower East Side got people up and dancing onstage at the end; in fact, in its new incarnation, Hair proved even more popular with audiences than it had been downtown. Yet critics gave the Broadway version mixed reviews, wondering what a commercial presentation of avant-garde culture was trying to say, exactly. Arthur Miller, who had hoped to see an effective antiwar message onstage as well as some serious pushback against the sense of denial and alienation infiltrating an increasingly corporate American culture, saw only a wasted opportunity in the “seeming chaos of the production.”
That disaffection was brilliantly conveyed, however, in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which premiered at Loew’s Capitol Theatre in Midtown New York in April 1968. The advance word on the film had not been encouraging, and MGM executives agonized over the fortune spent by Kubrick on sets and special effects and over the poor audience response to early press screenings. “Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick,” Clarke overheard one viewer mutter, to his dismay. But another guest, Terry Southern, loudly praised Kubrick’s ability to express the feelings of alienation caused by high-tech gadgets and megacorporations. What other director would have the courage to present a film whose first half hour had not a word of dialogue? It was thrilling, this full thirty minutes of grand, Warholian visual contemplation, finally interrupted by a receptionist’s polite “Here you are, sir. Main level, please.”
Hollywood executives and reviewers from Life might not get the connection between modern man’s unconscious feelings of loss of control and the terrifying journey beyond the Star Gate, Southern assured Clarke, but audiences would—at least, young audiences whose imaginations had already been cracked open by the recent breakthroughs in word, image, and sound. And, in fact, when exposed to the 70-millimeter images of satellites spinning slowly to The Blue Danube broadcast in stereophonic sound, young viewers responded as though they were having a religious experience. Lines formed around the block for this big-budget, corporate-subsidized “myth for the Space Age” rooted in years of avant-garde exploration by the artist-pathfinders at the Chelsea and downtown. It made one wonder what might have been achieved on Broadway with playwrights more serious than Ragni and Rado, both of whom had made so much money displaying hippies to the tourists that a rumor was spreading that they planned to buy the Chelsea Hotel.
Instead, the duo would eventually pack their new toys into their shiny new sports car and drive off in search of other markets to conquer. Long before then, though, another wiry-haired impresario would arrive at the Chelsea with plans to use theatrical techniques in a very different way. Brought up in middle-class Worcester, Massachusetts, and radicalized at Berkeley, Abbie Hoffman had worked as a traditional left-wing political organizer for years before exposure to the 1960s African-American freedom songs and Black Power speeches prompted him to think about ways to engage people’s emotions in order to motivate change. Connecting with the whole human being rather than just the intellect, Hoffman realized, was how the Beats and their allies, “like freaked-out Wobblies,” had created a new East Village subculture “smack-dab in the burned-out shell of the old dinosaur” that was New York. Hoffman discovered the magic of the neighborhood when he was assigned to help establish a People’s Cooperative store there. Living among the city’s swelling numbers of young people, getting to know Ginsberg, Leary, Corso, and Ed Sanders, experimenting with acid, street theater, free love, and nonmonetary forms of trade, Hoffman came to adopt the local approach to politics: it was “the way you live your life, not who you support.” Real change happened not as a result of political rallies and speeches but because of a shift in consciousness brought about by the right kinds of images and stories.
The question was how to communicate these stories to the masses of Americans who didn’t live in downtown Manhattan or San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. The answer presented itself to Hoffman in mid-1967, when his flower-bedecked marriage to fellow activist Anita Kushner in Central Park was covered in Life magazine as a “hippie wedding.” The article and photographs generated a tidal wave of public attention completely out of proportion to the event’s news value, Hoffman later wrote. People were fascinated by the spectacle—and not just dozens of people, or hundreds, but many thousands. If he could present politics in an equally entertaining way—through, say, Living Theatre–type spectacles styled to suit the four-minute sign-off spots on the nightly news—how many hearts and minds could he connect with and influence?
In the months that followed, Hoffman’s name became a household word as television news programs across the country showed him and his fancifully dressed East Village friends showering dollar bills onto the traders at the New Y
ork Stock Exchange, exploding soot bombs in the offices of Con Edison, releasing mice at a Dow Chemical stockholders’ meeting, plastering the Times Square recruiting center with stickers reading “See Canada Now,” and throwing bags of cow’s blood during a speech in New York by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. On television talk shows, Hoffman verbally sparred with audience members, encouraging them to voice their hatred for lefties (and for him in particular) as a way to get them to rethink their fundamental value systems. “There are lots of secret rules by which power maintains itself,” he would later observe. “Only when you challenge it, force the crisis, do you discover the true nature of society.” He put this theory into practice the summer of 1967 when he published a pseudonymous pamphlet called “Fuck the System” that explained in detail how to find free food, clothes, housing, medical care, drugs, love, poetry, and legal help without contributing fuel to the capitalist machine. In October, at Phil Ochs’s solo show at Carnegie Hall, he took advantage of Ochs’s invitation to come onstage with his new friend and fellow activist Jerry Rubin and scream at the audience, “Fuck Lyndon Johnson! Fuck Robert Kennedy! And fuck you if you don’t like it!” until the management switched the lights off and sent the stunned onlookers home.
The more outrageous Hoffman’s antics, the more attention he drew to the social and moral injustices perpetrated by the United States. His approach proved so effective that Rubin chose Hoffman as the best man to “get all those freaks off their asses and join us” for a march on the Pentagon scheduled for October 21 and 22, 1967—just days after Hair’s opening at the Public Theater and the “hippie funeral” in Haight-Ashbury. The prospect of infiltrating the antiwar demonstration inspired a drug-enhanced orgy of creative brainstorming by Hoffman and his friends Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Gary Snyder, among others. In the end, they settled on a plan to perform an exorcism on the Pentagon, that “citadel of napalm and incineration,” and cast forth its evil spirits in “one glorious night of religious group-grog.” While they were at it, they decided, they would demonstrate the power of collective action by levitating the building before America’s eyes.
Preparations began at once. Hoffman, serving as advance man, provided the TV talk shows with East Village witches willing to demonstrate the Druid rituals they planned to use; spread word to a gullible press of a scheme to spray the cops at the demonstration with Lace, a new hallucinogen that “made people want to fuck”; and conducted a levitation dress rehearsal onstage at the Fillmore East, using piano wires to raise a huge plywood replica of the Pentagon amid an explosion of smoke bombs. Meanwhile, Sanders, who’d been working with Barbara Rubin in Shirley Clarke’s Chelsea Hotel pyramid on a treatment for a film about the Fugs, linked to the Eleusinian mysteries and set in Saigon, took time out to consult with Harry Smith, his “authority on all things magic,” on the specifics for a proper levitation spell. The anthropologist-filmmaker, surrounded as always by piles of research materials and complicated projects in progress, took interest in the potential social impact of Sanders’s experiment and provided him with a chant calling on the powers of Anubis, Dionysus, Yahweh, Osiris, and other gods “to raise the Pentagon from its destiny and preserve it.”
Thanks in part to Hoffman’s publicity work, the Pentagon march became the biggest antiwar rally to date, with the usual “straight” activists rallying for speeches at the Lincoln Memorial while caravans of hippie demonstrators sang, danced, and swam nude in the reflecting pool. The Fugs arrived in a flatbed truck carrying smoke bombs, water pistols supposedly full of Lace, and a huge poster of a thirteen-layer pyramid topped by an Eye of Providence and a phrase from the Great Seal of the United States, Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order of the Ages”). Hoffman, stoned on acid and dressed like an American Indian but wearing an Uncle Sam hat, tried to direct the show, and the Fugs beat drums and tambourines as the truck moved toward the Pentagon. There, Sanders intoned his singsong litany of exorcism, and all began to chant, “Out, demons, out! Out, demons, out!” while the underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger positioned himself beneath the truck and brandished a pentagram made of Popsicle sticks, Rubin and Clarke filmed the events, and freeform radio pioneer Bob Fass recorded the chants for later broadcast on his Radio Unnameable show on WBAI in New York.
Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of demonstrators at the Lincoln Memorial began their march toward the Pentagon, which was guarded by now by a ring of armed soldiers. At first, it seemed that the confrontation might remain limited to brief skirmishes, the tossing of one or two canisters of tear gas, and a few arrests. The demonstrations continued through the night, but no one was forced to leave, and following a small afternoon demonstration on the second day, only about two hundred protesters remained. That night, however, once it was too dark for the television cameras, heads began to roll. There were “helicopters with spotlights. Like Vietnam,” Hoffman recalled. Nearly seven hundred people—including Rubin and Clarke—had been dragged off to jail. In the wake of the battle, in the predawn hours, the acid wore off, leaving the hungry young crowds with their faces streaked with paint and mascara and their fingers stiff from cold. A Shoshone medicine man asked Abbie’s wife, Anita, to sit cross-legged facing the sun and lead them in prayer, and she and the shaman chanted. And—in the acid-cleansed eyes of the young onlookers, at least—the granite walls of the government building began to glow, and “before our very eyes, without a sound, the entire Pentagon rose like a flying saucer in the air.”
The vision of a levitating Pentagon may have been the most memorable image for those exhausted demonstrators staggering home that day. But the iconic image—the one with the potential to change the course of the war—came from a newspaper photographer named Bernie Boston, who captured the moment when a young man inserted a flower into the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. More than any other, that photograph gave form and expression to the growing opposition to the violence overseas. The entire Pentagon levitation turned out to be “the perfect theatrical event,” Jerry Rubin claimed. Ginsberg took heart from the idea that, through the nonviolent acts of comedy and drama, “the authority of the Pentagon was psychologically dissolved.” Over the next six months, Robert McNamara broke down sobbing at a State Department meeting; Dean Acheson stalked out of a White House meeting snapping, “Tell the President he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass”; McGeorge Bundy informed the president that the administration could no longer succeed in its mission; and Johnson announced both a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and his decision not to run for reelection.
“Wow, we toppled the fucking dictator,” Timothy Leary observed. But Hoffman and his friends were not about to slow down. Now they focused on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, scheduled for August of 1968. In a fresh burst of inspiration on New Year’s Eve, they created their own prankster political party—the Yippies!—to “take over America” via the mainstream media. (“The exclamation point would carry us to victory,” Hoffman wrote.) One of the Yippies’ first acts would be to stage a wild, media-friendly Festival of Life in Chicago in August, with rock music, workshops, and demonstrations designed to counteract the “Convention of Death” that the war-enabling Democrats would be holding there.
The search for musicians naturally brought Hoffman and Rubin to the Chelsea Hotel. Their first visit that spring was to Country Joe McDonald, in town to record his second album at the Vanguard studios down the street. McDonald, a red-diaper baby named after Joseph Stalin, was more than comfortable with leftist politics. In fact, he’d met Rubin at an antiwar march in Berkeley several years before, and he welcomed the activists into a suite already crowded with his manager Ed Denson, the Sing Out! editor Irwin Silber, the folksinger Barbara Dane, and several members of McDonald’s band. At Rubin’s request, McDonald played his “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die Rag,” with its sardonic “Whoopee! We’re all gonna die” refrain. Hoffman felt that the song would make a perfect anthem for their August demonstration. After assuring Denson that they were in the process of secur
ing city permits for the festival, the activists asked McDonald if he’d be willing to help bring in other musicians to perform. The singer agreed, and the group spent the rest of the afternoon going over plans to provide medical assistance, food, and other support services for the event.
The prospects looked excellent for a successful demonstration. In the weeks following, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, the MC5 from Detroit, and other musicians signed on to the festival, and organizers printed flyers, wrote articles, and made phone calls. Hard-core SDS representatives met with the Yippies to discuss the possibility of a formal political alliance—bringing an offering of fruit on the assumption that “hippies must like fruit”—and it seemed that for the first time, all the forces of underground politics and arts in America were converging to alter the course of the nation’s future.
But as the season progressed, the spreading violence across the country introduced a new strain of anxiety for many. In March, a joyful equinox celebration in Grand Central Station, staged by the Yippies as a warm-up for Chicago, turned into a bloody free-for-all as police lit into the crowd and clubbed Hoffman himself into unconsciousness. In April, when the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. led to race riots in Chicago, Mayor Daley issued a “shoot to kill” order for arsonists and had his henchmen spread the word that he was not going to let any “niggers, commies, or hippies” get in the way of a successful Democratic National Convention.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 30
