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

by Sherill Tippins

  Country Joe, increasingly uneasy, met with Rubin, Hoffman, Sanders, and others at Rubin’s East Village apartment to discuss the rumors that Daley was summoning the National Guard to the convention, that a couple of thousand civilian vigilantes would be authorized to arrest troublemakers, and that the Chicago sewers were being prepared as dungeons to hold demonstrators. The rumors were making the musicians anxious, to say the least, McDonald told the organizers, and as a result, relations between the artists and the activists were fraying. Already, Judy Collins was in a huff over some perceived insult by one of the organizers, and the musician Al Kooper was incensed at Abbie Hoffman for snapping, “Fuck you, so what!” when Kooper complained that his guitar had been stolen at a Yippie benefit. Even Ochs, a passionate supporter of the Festival of Life, was stewing over Jerry Rubin’s characterization of Ochs’s chosen candidate Bobby Kennedy as just another “rich bastard” and so by definition an enemy of the people. Chances were good that the musicians would bolt, McDonald warned the organizers. Maybe they should consider hiring jugglers or circus performers, or even the Harlem Globetrotters, to lighten the festival’s mood.

  This was unacceptable to the activists, who had caught the scent of real revolution. Despite clear evidence at the student occupation of Columbia University days later that law-enforcement officials had finally mastered their own media techniques by staging a dramatic rout just in time for the evening news, Hoffman and his colleagues continued to call on America’s youth to come to the Chicago festival. When anyone suggested that what they were doing was, essentially, herding innocent people to the slaughter, Hoffman insisted that the benefit that would come from two minutes of street theater per news hour broadcast was worth the risk. “The Democratic Convention, look at their theater, right?” he said. “It’s boring, you know, like Kate Smith singing the national anthem.” Then the news shows would cut away to “us out in the streets and up in the park doing our thing . . . the new America, exciting!” Best case, television viewers would see a model of a viable alternative society thriving in this country. Worst case, a battle with police would “bring the war home” so dramatically that many viewers would be moved to join their side.

  Hoffman was fighting an uphill battle, though. Even Timothy Leary switched from boasting “We’re gonna burn Chicago down like my great-grandmother, Mrs. O’Leary!” to moaning that the Yippies were about to commit “one of the great moments of revolutionary suicide.” At the Chelsea, many who planned to participate in the demonstration succumbed to the sense of futility and dread that had begun to poison the atmosphere. Gregory Corso, still enraged by what he saw as Sedgwick’s ill treatment, “rolled through the hotel like a dark tumbleweed, alternating in moods between the demonic and the angelic,” one neighbor wrote, “marveling over the perfection of a lump of crystal in his hand or just as easily kicking in a door.” Worse, Valerie Solanas, who had finally been evicted the previous fall for nonpayment of rent and who had drifted to California for the cold winter months, was back on the streets of New York City and haunting the Chelsea again. She “was always huddled in some corner,” observed the underground film actor Taylor Mead, who’d just costarred with Viva in Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys. “Everybody was afraid to talk to her for a good reason. She wanted to kill Andy, Viva and me.”

  It was Viva’s special place in Warhol’s world that sparked Solanas’s rage and envy, and that fury was heightened when the superstar and other Factory friends were selected as extras for John Schlesinger’s Hollywood-backed Midnight Cowboy that summer. Solanas had not forgotten how, the previous fall at their table in the back room at Max’s Kansas City, Viva had held Warhol’s attention while she was ignored. Determined now to best her, the disturbed writer lingered by the front desk at the Chelsea, loudly ordering the switchboard operator to dial the numbers of famous actresses in a pathetic attempt to impress, but making the operator hang up before each call was answered to avoid having to pay. If Viva appeared, Solanas was likely to lunge at or threaten her until ordered away, and then she would return to the front desk, nursing her grievances and plotting revenge.

  By late spring, Solanas could no longer stand being ignored. Now it was Maurice Girodias who felt the heat of her murderous gaze. Having failed in her attempts to write a novel, Solanas persuaded the publisher to simply print her S.C.U.M. Manifesto as an Olympia Press book. But the more she brooded on their agreement, the more convinced Solanas became that Girodias had cheated her with his one-page contract by claiming the rights to all her future works. Through the month of May, as televisions and newspapers exploded with images of fires, police beatings, and angry occupations, Solanas’s fury simmered. When Paul Krassner, publisher of the satirical underground journal the Realist, met her for lunch at El Quijote on May 31, all she could talk about was her plan to cage the entire male population for the purposes of stud farming.

  Krassner felt sorry enough for Solanas to lend her fifty dollars (which he never expected to see again), but by now, her sense of persecution had built up too much steam to be so easily suppressed. The following Monday, June 3, she dropped in on her friend May Wilson, who now lived next door to the Chelsea, at the Carteret, and asked for the bag of laundry she’d left with her the year before. Wilson knew what the bag contained: not clothing, but a gun. In the months of Solanas’s absence, May had frequently pulled out the flower-print cloth bag to show people, pressing the cloth to reveal the gun’s outline and saying, “This is Valerie’s laundry!” for laughs.

  Wilson retrieved the bag and handed it over without a word. A short time later, Solanas appeared in the lobby of the Chelsea dressed uncharacteristically neatly in khakis, turtleneck sweater, and trench coat despite the heat, her hair combed and styled and makeup applied. Clutching a small paper bag with what seemed to be a heavy object inside, she approached the front desk and demanded to see Girodias. When the clerk informed her that he had left town for a long weekend, Solanas waited in the lobby for several hours, hoping to accost the publisher on his return. But Girodias failed to materialize, and Solanas changed her mind, abruptly left the Chelsea, and headed downtown to Warhol’s Factory at Union Square.

  The story of Solanas’s attack on Warhol would be repeated so often in the years to come that it would become a kind of litany: Solanas’s arriving at the Factory, only to be turned away by Warhol’s minions, who calmly informed her that Andy wasn’t there; Warhol’s arrival at the building a little after four o’clock, along with his lover Jed Johnson; Warhol’s surprise at finding Solanas hanging about, looking unusually comely, and his offer to take her up in the elevator; Paul Morrissey, upstairs on the phone with Viva, eyeing Solanas “bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet, twisting a brown paper bag in her hands,” and telling her half jokingly that if she didn’t leave immediately, he would beat the hell out of her and throw her out; the “funny look” that came into Solanas’s eyes; and then the shooting.

  “No! No! Valerie! Don’t do it!” Warhol cried as Solanas opened fire. After badly wounding Warhol, she shot the visiting London magazine editor Mario Amaya and then aimed her gun at Factory newcomer Fred Hughes while he pleaded, “I’m innocent. Please, just leave.” She pulled the trigger—but the gun misfired. Just then, the elevator arrived. The door opened. “Oh,” Hughes said, “there’s the elevator, Valerie. Just take it.” Dazed, Solanas backed into the elevator and went downstairs.

  Warhol was taken by ambulance to Columbus Hospital, where he underwent five and a half hours of surgery. Solanas drifted uptown to Times Square, where she turned herself in to a policeman and handed over her gun. Meanwhile, news of the shooting spread through the city. Warhol’s Factory friends lit candles, wrote prayers on postcards and pasted them into works of art, and gathered at the hospital, hoping for news. Within hours, however, Warhol’s tragedy was overshadowed by another act of violence: Bobby Kennedy was shot down in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, and he died the next day.

  What was happening to this country? Arthur Miller demande
d in an essay in the New York Times that month. Americans needed to “take a long look at ourselves, at the way we live and the way we think.” The violence in the streets “is the violence in our hearts.” How could people who could not walk safely in their own streets tell any other people how to govern themselves, let alone bomb and burn those people? But few of New York’s editorial readers seemed to pay attention to his concerns. All continued as before, in the same dry, removed, strangely apathetic vein that Miller had decried at the Chelsea the previous year. Even before Warhol was released from the hospital, Girodias began rushing S.C.U.M. Manifesto into print, hoping to profit from the publicity Solanas had generated. Warhol himself was soon heard drily lamenting his loss of the national spotlight to Kennedy’s assassination. As for Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the activists reacted to the news of Kennedy’s shooting with a kind of relief: surely his elimination as a candidate would simplify their message and reduce conflict within their ranks. “Now we can go to Chicago,” Rubin said—even though members of the West Coast Diggers commandeered the New York office telephones of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s and Joplin’s manager, to call musicians and warn them to stay away from the bound-to-be-ugly Festival of Life.

  That August, the Chelsea’s public rooms echoed emptily once again; the migration of past and present hotel residents to Chicago—where Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s ashes were now interred alongside the graves of the Haymarket martyrs—rivaled even the Chelsea Association convocation at the Chicago Exposition in 1893. The nineteenth-century travelers had been motivated by a desire to experience the utopian White City; today’s travelers hoped to claim their own version of that dream. All spring and summer, Chicago’s deputy mayor David Stahl had delayed providing the permits the organizers needed to hold their festival in Grant Park. On August 22, as it became clear that no permits would be issued, a frustrated Hoffman printed an eighteen-point manifesto calling for the creation of a new great society modeled on the Yippies’ alternative community, a society based on cooperation, equality, and creativity and dedicated to ending the war in Vietnam, abolishing censorship, promoting “full-unemployment,” and legalizing marijuana and psychedelic drugs. Then, despite the lack of permits, he and Rubin set up camp in Lincoln Park, ten miles from the convention site, and went to work feeding a hungry press rumors of “Top Secret Yippie Plans” to poison the convention delegates’ food, spike the city’s water supply with LSD, present a hefty hog named Pigasus as the Yippie Party candidate for president on the “Garbage Platform,” and other wild scenarios aimed at attracting more young people to the event.

  Excitement grew as the possibility of a battle with Daley’s forces looked increasingly likely. John Giorno turned up with a tape recorder to capture the events so that he could play them back to New Yorkers in Central Park. On August 23, Terry Southern arrived, fresh from the set of Easy Rider, to cover the convention for Esquire, as did William Burroughs, now living in London, Jean Genet from Paris, and the journalist John Sack. Ed Sanders joined the activists, hoping “to help keep peace,” along with Ginsberg, who said he had dreamed of Chicago as a bloody sea and himself as Moses walking between the clashing forces. But Burroughs argued that people in power didn’t disappear without a fight. He didn’t want flowers put in gun barrels, he said; in fact, “The only way I’d like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.”

  When Country Joe McDonald arrived that weekend for a show elsewhere in Chicago, he found the vibrations in the city “so incredibly vicious” that he felt compelled to withdraw not only as a performer but also as a supporter of the festival. Reluctantly, he agreed to Rubin and Hoffman’s request that he at least come by the park later and take a look, but after a drunken Vietnam veteran fractured McDonald’s nose following his Saturday performance, he and his band packed up and left town. In the end, only Phil Ochs and the MC5 made an appearance at the advertised rock concert in Lincoln Park. Ochs was deeply disappointed to find that instead of the expected one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand demonstrators, only five thousand gathered to hear him sing—one of every six of them a government agent, according to a later estimate by CBS News.

  Even before the MC5 finished their set, random beatings by the police began, and with each subsequent night, the violence increased. As it turned out, the exciting news footage of the battle attracted more young people to Chicago than the rock concert would have. Daley’s police, goaded by SDS and other rabble-rousers hoping to provoke a confrontation and irritated by Ginsberg’s, Sanders’s, and other peacekeepers’ marathon mantra chanting, removed their badges so they couldn’t be identified and then savagely attacked demonstrators with billy clubs, tear-gassed a group of priests raising a cross in the park, and tossed kids into vans and hauled them off to jail.

  On Monday evening, Southern, Burroughs, Genet, and Ginsberg were photographed entering Grant Park together, Burroughs lighting a cigarette, “probably considering which riot sounds on his tape recorder would recreate psychic conditions for further escalation of hysteria,” while Ginsberg talked to Southern about the importance of keeping calm and Genet salaciously eyed “the blue pants of the soldiers or the police.” Later that night, when three thousand or more young people refused to leave the park, Southern and his colleagues joined the group marching on police barricades and witnessed the chaos as the police charged with tear gas and clubs and beat celebrities, reporters, photographers, teenage demonstrators, and innocent bystanders alike. “We had no idea it would be that dangerous,” admitted Southern, who sat out much of the battle in the bar of the Chicago Sheraton with Genet, William Styron, and other friends. “I got hit on the head and back a couple of times. You have no idea how wild the police were . . . I mean, it was a police riot, that’s what it was.”

  Inside the convention center, Arthur Miller—a delegate for Connecticut, site of his country home—listened to the rumors of the awful violence taking place outside. One night, an usher slipped him a note that read in a wild scrawl, “They are killing us in the streets, they are murdering us out here.” He looked up at the podium, where the Democratic Party leader Abraham Ribicoff was calling Daley’s methods of dealing with demonstrators “Gestapo tactics.” Daley, “in his overcoat” and “flanked by his immense team,” drew his index finger across his throat and then, according to lip readers watching the news clip, said, “You motherfucker Jew bastard, get your ass out of Chicago.”

  The next night, Tuesday, the Yippies helped organize an “un-birthday” celebration at the Chicago Coliseum for President Johnson’s birthday, with Ed Sanders as master of ceremonies and speakers including Burroughs, Hoffman, Krassner, Jean Genet, and the pacifist David Dellinger. Sanders read a statement by Ginsberg, who was too hoarse from chanting and inhaling tear gas to speak. As Ochs took the stage to sing “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” a young man in the audience stood up and set fire to his draft card. People cheered. Others took out their draft cards and followed suit. Soon, cards were burning everywhere, like votive candles. But in this case, the symbolic power of these gestures did not carry over into the real world. Even as Ochs sang, the Democratic Party inside the convention hall voted down the peace plank of their platform.

  From then on, as far as Ochs was concerned, America was a lost cause. Hoffman, feeling much the same, prepared for the day of the presidential nomination by scrawling the word fuck on his forehead with lipstick so that the media would be unable to show photographs or film footage of his face. The police found him breakfasting in a diner that day, threw him into a squad car, and put him in jail for thirteen hours. “I don’t think I was much of a pacifist after Chicago,” Hoffman later wrote. And yet, when asked on television a short time later whether, looking back, he would have taken a million dollars to call it all off, the Yippie organizer looked startled. “The revolution?” he asked with a grin. “Yeah,” said his interviewer. “What’s your price?” Hoffman stopped smiling, and his eyes went dark. “My life,” he replied.

  In fact
, the price for the violence that erupted in Chicago turned out to be Richard Nixon’s election. As Miller wrote, “Chicago, 1968, buried the Democratic Party and the nearly forty years of what was euphemistically called its philosophy.” In its wake, Ginsberg retreated to a farm that Barbara Rubin had found for him in upstate New York, a place where he could write while his partner Orlovsky weaned himself off amphetamines. Ochs, depressed by what he considered “the formal death of democracy in America,” produced the apocalyptic Rehearsals for Retirement, an album of songs rooted in the events in Chicago, its cover depicting a tombstone engraved with his own name. And Hoffman, having turned down numerous job offers from ad agencies following the convention, wrote Revolution for the Hell of It before immersing himself in the greatest media extravaganza of his career—the Chicago Eight trial, in which he, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot under the Interstate Riot Act.

  The trial, presided over by Judge Julius Hoffman, who had overseen the Big Table obscenity case a decade before, would make for wonderful political theater, with Abbie blowing kisses to the jury and quipping, “Conspiracy? We couldn’t agree on lunch!” Yet even as the corporate media sent the defendants’ message across the nation—inspiring more high-school students to question authority, more college students to protest the war, and more women to start thinking about starting a revolution of their own—thirteen state legislatures passed resolutions forbidding Hoffman to speak within their states’ borders; newspaper distributors were pressured not to handle underground papers; surveillance was increased; and the political Left shattered into factions, creating a vacuum in which the militant Weathermen rose to prominence.

  At the Chelsea, residents began to sense that their period of innocent hedonism was over, along with the nineteenth-century notion, built into the bones of the hotel, that artists had the vision and the power to change the world. The hotel denizens saw evidence everywhere of the end of the dream: in the stunned expression on the face of Roger Waters, the star of Pink Floyd, as he stumbled back to his room after having found himself standing in oncoming traffic on Eighth Avenue, stoned on acid and unable to move; in the new cynicism that led to the thefts of iron sunflowers and bits of stained glass; and in the shocking revelation that the security guard’s apartment was packed with objects stolen from residents’ rooms as well as an arsenal of weapons and ammunition. By 1969, the drug use in the hotel had attracted a retinue of pushers, some of whom were residents who became pushers so they could afford to buy drugs and who gave themselves aliases such as “Chanticleer” and “Charlemagne.” With the dealers came organized crime and violence. Holdups became regular occurrences at the front desk; criminals flashed knives while terrified clerks handed over wads of cash. One night, a gunfight between two men ended with a pusher named Angel dead in the corridor outside his fourth-floor room.