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

by Sherill Tippins

  Sam was sufficiently excited about the quality of the finished play to push for its presentation, with himself and Patti playing the lead roles, as part of a double bill with another play of his, Back Bog Beast Bait, starring his wife, O-Lan Jones. The first night of previews, his enthusiasm seemed warranted as he and Patti exulted in improvising their own reality in their own way onstage. But then, the next night, Shepard suddenly seemed to realize that he was playing out his life for a roomful of strangers. The night after that, he failed to show up, and Cowboy Mouth closed.

  Publicly, at least, Patti was philosophical about the play’s abrupt cancellation. In any case, she had learned something: although she loved to perform, she really was no stage actress. As she later wrote, “I drew no line between life and art. I was the same on- as offstage.” But what she could do was express real life, channel all she’d experienced and all that she’d seen.

  Others at the Chelsea were not feeling so empowered. Germaine Greer, staying at the Chelsea that spring, had unwisely agreed to be photographed by Diane Arbus, unaware that the delicate, birdlike photographer was notorious for treating her subjects like objects and depicting them at their worst. Greer was caught off-guard when she ushered Arbus into her room one morning in May only to be ordered to lie on her back on the bed, where the photographer straddled her and shoved the lens of a giant Rolleiflex into her face to capture the image of “the panicking woman, no make-up, uncombed hair, large pores and all.” Freaks, that’s what Arbus liked, Greer huffed in retrospect. “As if you could penetrate the interior life of a stranger by kneeling astride her and shoving a lens up her nose.”

  And then there was Lance Loud, another in the unending stream of suburban misfits migrating to the Chelsea in pursuit of the superstar dream. Having grown up dyslexic, hyperactive, and homosexual in an uptight upper-middle-class enclave in Santa Barbara, California, Lance had fixated on Andy Warhol’s iconic image since the day his businessman father showed him a photograph of Andy and Edie in Time magazine and said with a chuckle, “Take a look at this crazy guy.” Dreaming of growing up to “ride the wild surf of New York Society” like Andy, Lance had started writing to the artist in his early teens. Eventually, Warhol had responded with his telephone number, and a transcontinental flirtation had ensued—until it was interrupted by the Solanas shooting, after which Warhol cut off all such contact.

  Warhol’s absence failed however, to deter Lance from his plan to relocate to New York as soon as possible. When he arrived at the Chelsea, he was thrilled to find Holly Woodlawn herself hanging around in the lobby with her drag-queen friends. Assigned to room 431, a decent enough space with a western view, Lance could hardly believe his luck at having so quickly become a part of the life he’d always dreamed of. He began palling around with Holly, who’d been installed in the hotel by the producers of a film in which she was appearing and who spent her per diem on cocktails and heroin and her evenings with friends on her hotel balcony (which she’d spray-painted gold), shouting, “Free pussy!” and tossing her room number to the good-looking men passing below.

  Back on the West Coast, Lance’s family had been approached by documentary filmmaker Craig Gilbert, who was looking for an “attractive, articulate California family” to serve as the focus for a cinéma vérité–style documentary for American public television. It seemed to Gilbert that family life in the United States was embattled, perhaps even disappearing, he told Lance’s parents, Pat and Bill Loud. He wanted to document the institution before it became obsolete, and he’d do it in the Leacock-Pennebaker tradition, by simply following the family around with cameras and seeing what truths surfaced.

  The Louds had agreed, with a mix of motivations: a desire to participate in what Gilbert convinced them was an important social experiment; excitement at the idea of being on TV; and, perhaps, Pat Loud admitted in retrospect, an unconscious hope that if they made “a lovely family commercial,” the commercial would become the reality. In actuality, the family was not idyllic: Bill was unfaithful, Pat’s awareness of it had her seething, and then there was the nagging discomfort of what they evasively called “the Lance situation” that had to be endured. But they were being given the chance to reinvent themselves. “Wouldn’t anybody have done it?” Pat wrote. “I was so tired of our little world.”

  Assured that shooting would last just a couple of weeks, a month at the most, Pat Loud agreed to begin with a visit to Lance in New York for the Memorial Day weekend that summer of 1971. When she told Gilbert, in all innocence, that her son was staying at the Hotel Chelsea—picturing, she wrote later, “a nice, quaint, middle-class hostelry where a white-haired grandma type with a big bunch of keys at her waist clucked over boys far from home”—the filmmaker, who lived near the Chelsea, practically passed out. He made sure to have a film crew ready to record Pat’s arrival at the hotel, and he kept the implacable eye of the camera on her every step of the way as she took in the dingy lobby and the old front desk now equipped with a bulletproof barrier, accepted the grimy key to room 814 from a preoccupied clerk, looked around at the Chelsea’s clientele, and realized, for the first time, “what was going on with Lance in New York.”

  What followed was an exercise in awkwardness: Pat’s son unable to resist camping it up the moment the camera was on him; Pat’s face rigid with embarrassment. That night, Lance and his roommate, Soren Ingenue, accompanied Pat to a performance of Jackie Curtis’s new play Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned, which succeeded in its purpose: “shocking mom to her shoelaces.”

  Shirley Clarke could have told them that this experiment would not end well. It was true that Pat’s greatest fear would be realized, that uncomfortable family secrets would surface for mass-media inspection. But Shirley knew that even worse developments lay in store, because Pat had given the power to define her family to another individual—in this case, Craig Gilbert, whose view would inevitably be skewed by the fact of his recent divorce. With Gilbert directing, the dissolution of the Louds’ marriage became inevitable, and with middlebrow PBS promoting the series, Lance’s painstaking presentation of his fabulous, free self would be eclipsed by the “scandalous revelation” that he was gay.

  Far better to wield the camera oneself, in Shirley Clarke’s opinion—to depose the omniscient filmmaker in favor of the interactive “live process” of video. If everyone had a camera and could exchange and combine images at will, people could dispense with the division between the artist and society that killed progress, killed all truly creative thought. In modern America, “we’ve lost the tribal culture and we’ve lost shamans and the campfire and the group energy that’s needed if the rain dance is to produce rain,” she said. But video could change that by reconnecting individuals—“that is, if we can learn how to use video properly.”

  With this in mind, Shirley had taken to hosting frequent experimental get-togethers in her pyramid apartment and on the roof outside, inviting not only Michel Auder, Viva, and Harry Smith to come up and play with this new medium but an entire range of individuals from every artistic discipline. Filmmakers Richard Leacock, Nicholas Ray, Agnès Varda, and Paul Morrissey; the theatrical director Peter Brook and the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud; the writers Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky; the philosopher Alan Watts; the musician Ornette Coleman; the artists Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota—all made an appearance and participated. That fall, the urbane, Harlem-raised expressionist painter Herb Gentry arrived at the Chelsea from self-exile in Europe and joined in as well. So did the Czech film director Miloš Forman, who had washed up penniless at the Chelsea with Ivan Passer, a Czech screenwriter, following the underwhelming response to their low-budget American feature Taking Off.

  By design, these parties were as fun as they were revelatory, something even Jonas Mekas, who didn’t see much in the medium, admitted. It enhanced the group experience for Larry Rivers to move among them with a camera and record the laughter set off by Forman’s confession that he had known he would never le
ave the Chelsea the day he checked in, stepped into the elevator, and was joined by a beautiful, completely nude young woman. It was thrilling to watch Arthur C. Clarke (in town to help Walter Cronkite cover the Apollo 15 landing) aim a camera at the moon while agreeing with Shirley that satellite technology enabling people to send videos around the world in real time could become a weapon of democracy “mightier than the ICBM.”

  Shirley worked to spread enthusiasm for the medium beyond her Chelsea rooftop as well, installing a forty-five-foot-high “Video Ferris Wheel,” with a monitor in each seat showing live and taped images, at New York’s annual Avant-Garde Festival and helping to organize a free Wednesday-night experimental videotape series at the Kitchen, a new nonprofit performance space in the Mercer Arts Center, part of the gritty old Broadway Central Hotel.

  As the year drew toward its end, the raw, nervous energy of all this technological experimentation served as a massive stimulant for the Chelsea’s nervous system. A giddy atmosphere took hold as longhaired video artists loped up and down the stairs like inmates taking over the asylum, as Viva got the key to the room of one of Michel’s girlfriends, trashed her darkroom and threw her bicycle out the window, and as Auder paired a close-up shot of a handwritten death threat from Valerie Solanas with a Wagner soundtrack to create a new kind of video melodrama. But this quasi-hysteria accurately reflected the end-of-the-world mania running through the city as one year concluded and another began with no letup in racial tension or political violence and no end to the war, with the Pentagon Papers appearing in the New York Times in June, and, just four days later, an enraged Richard Nixon declaring a war on drugs. As the heat ramped up that summer at the Chelsea, Lee Crabtree, a shy, freckle-faced pianist who’d played with the Fugs and the Holy Modal Rounders, threw himself off the hotel’s roof. In mid-November, news would reach the hotel that Edie Sedgwick had died as well, having come home drunk from a party and taken too many pills.

  The Chelsea seemed to spin loose of its moorings entirely with the arrival on the scene of Clifford Irving, the journeyman writer made instantly infamous by his arrest, with fellow scribbler Dick Suskind, for having negotiated a $765,000 contract for an “authorized” biography of Howard Hughes that later turned out to be a fraud. Somehow, the writers had managed to convince themselves that no one would ever find out they had no access to the hypersecretive magnate, since Hughes would never emerge to deny their claims. They were wrong, unfortunately, and on January 28, 1971, Irving confessed to the crime. Now he awaited trial in Edgar Lee Masters’s former suite with his artist wife, Edith, and their sons, with the unhappy Suskind down the hall.

  To Irving, the Chelsea seemed the perfect hideout for the situation—full of bohemians like himself presumably open to his attitude that, yes, it had been mad to try to pull such a scheme, “but the world is mad, so what’s the bloody difference.” Instead, his new neighbors’ responses ranged from bemusement over his stupidity to irritation over the disruption caused by the dozens of news teams camped out in the lobby, playing cards. Still, as the weeks passed and it became clear that the Irvings and Suskind were actually suffering from the assault of phone calls, personal attacks, and rumors true and false, the hotel’s denizens extended what kindnesses they could: Arthur C. Clarke dropped in for dinner, the manager of El Quijote sent up a bottle of Spanish wine after a terrible day in court, and Stanley Bard auctioned off some of Irving’s wife’s artworks to raise funds for legal fees and rent.

  The disruption caused by the Irvings’ presence was momentarily eclipsed at three o’clock one morning in March when the young Vietnam veteran and video artist Frank Cavestani smelled smoke and ran downstairs with his neighbor to trip the fire alarm. The desk clerk assumed it was a joke and switched the alarm off; only after it was tripped two or three more times did he take it seriously. By then, Cavestani had discovered that all the fire hoses on the stair landings were rotted and full of holes. But never mind—at the Chelsea even a raging fire “made for a breathtaking sort of theater” as residents rushed out and gathered around the stair railings to watch the firemen make their way to the fifth floor and blast water into a smoking room. As onlookers climbed up from below to get a better look, passing on the information that an elderly woman had apparently fallen asleep while cooking a roast on her hot plate and had died in her sleep from smoke inhalation, Cavestani and other video artists ran for their Portapaks to record the events: a barefoot Clifford Irving in boxer shorts and a mink coat; Viva clutching her baby; Juliette Hamelcourt bundling up her tapestries and her dog; Miloš Forman wearing a skirt borrowed from a neighbor after he’d rushed out in a panic and then realized as his door slammed behind him that he had on nothing but a short T-shirt. When the firemen ordered Cavestani to stop videotaping, the entire populace rose up in outrage: “Stop taping in the Chelsea Hotel? What’ve you got to hide?”

  As it turned out, the firemen wanted only to protect the dead woman’s privacy as they carried her body from the room. Later, Forman recalled how the residents watched in silence as the stretcher bobbed down the hallway. “But the moment the elevator began its clanking descent, the party came back to life.” Bottles of wine and joints started to circulate, along with stories of other fires and self-congratulations for the fact that when push came to shove, no one had responded selfishly, that all had focused on a single thought: “Our Chelsea is on fire. Our neighbors may be in jeopardy. What can we do?”

  This was the story of Stanley Bard’s life at the Chelsea in 1972, as the economy continued its decline and rent checks grew increasingly rare. The previous summer, Bill Graham had shut down his Fillmore East, citing as his reason rock’s demise at the hands of big business. Stanley had lost the steady income provided by the Fillmore’s rock bands, and he still had to deal with the legacy of hustlers and drug dealers that had scared off the broad-minded stockbrokers and wealthy bohemians whose hiked-up rates had once helped subsidize the talented poor. Now, with Irving convicted, a tenant dead, and an uptick in robberies, managing the hotel was a Sisyphean task. As the gently fading Charles James wrote to a friend on his personal stationery in elegant script, “Four years ago we all seemed so happy. Now all faces are tinged with the gloom of despair.”

  Of course, the regulars continued to pass through: de Kooning with his new mistress; Jane Fonda with her new lover Tom Hayden; the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, who first came to the Chelsea as one of Arthur Miller’s guests and now returned, impeccably dressed and cherub-faced as always, to give another reading at Town Hall. Gerome Ragni was back, looking sadly older as he tried to duplicate Hair’s success with the unpromising new musical Dude (The Highway Life).

  The trust-fund kids kept coming too, each playing at living the artist’s life, and there was also a trickle of new “lady divorcées”— but undeniably, the overall quality of the Chelsea Hotel population seemed to be declining. Ivan Passer, leaving for LA for what he thought would be a week, had handed over his room key to a sort of new-age guru he met at El Quijote, and now that the man had gained occupancy, he refused to either leave or pay rent. Miloš Forman was still a pleasure to have around, of course, but after months of residency, he still lived on a dollar a day. Gregory Corso, his Italian good looks destroyed by drugs, was reduced to selling his notebooks to buy drugs—that is, when the drugs didn’t cause him to lose them. Even Isabella Gardner had gone into a decline: she was chronically depressed, drinking too much, involved in a love affair with one of the Chelsea’s bellmen, and lived in virtual isolation since she had injured a hip.

  Thank God, Allen Ginsberg was back from another trip to India, able to pay down a little on Harry Smith’s room and help keep the filmmaker under control. Lately, Ginsberg had been dropping in two or three times a week so that Harry could record him singing some blues songs he had composed with the encouragement and help of his friend Bob Dylan. It was good to see Harry occupied this way, because Stanley had been having problems with him lately. Already, it was a year past the date when Harry ha
d hoped to complete Mahagonny—his self-imposed deadline having been summer of 1971, when both Barry Miles and Ginsberg had assured him that “the serious political situation” was going to begin and “things on the planet would get really bad.” But access to production funds had been highly erratic, and though Smith had filmed most of the moving images he required, he still needed to create a large number of stop-motion animation sequences. To increase his ability to concentrate on this process for long periods, the filmmaker had upped his Dexedrine intake—resulting in terrible rages in which he smashed his collections, destroyed his work, and verbally abused the people around him.

  By late summer, Isabella Gardner was so disgusted by Harry’s treating her daughter as a “virtual slave,” and encouraging her to move to Haiti to learn to become a voodoo priestess, that she made up her mind to decamp to California, freeing herself once and for all of the Chelsea, “that cess-pool cum lunatic asylum.” Gardner was not the only one who turned a gimlet eye on the hotel that year. Iris Owens described the hotel in her novel After Claude as “dank” and “soul-eroding,” with a lobby overseen by a desk clerk in drag. The corridors of Owens’s Hotel Chelsea were as gloomy and deserted as a tomb, its residents a mix of sexual perverts, cadaverous waifs of ambiguous gender, potbellied gurus, and scarecrow-like models smoking pot. Yet in her acknowledgments, Owens made a point of praising the hotel’s management profusely for supporting artistic expression with “a humanity rare in New York, or any city . . . even when made its victim.” In fact, Stanley continued to do what he could to facilitate his tenants’ work. That August, when Frank Cavestani told the manager that he and his girlfriend Laura had a chance to make an antiwar film but that it would mean maxing out their credit cards and not paying their rent temporarily, the owner-manager shook his hand. “Make sure it’s a good one,” he said.