Still, expenses had to be covered, and at the end of 1972, the only social subgroup willing to pay inflated rents seemed to be the new population of Superfly-style pimps cruising the city’s streets in their Cadillacs of many colors. Virgil Thomson marveled at the sight of them in the lobby, so tall, slender, and sensational-looking with their “beautiful tailoring and picture hats.” But to Abbie and Anita Hoffman, who stayed at the hotel occasionally when not at Anita’s mother’s house on Long Island, where Abbie was working on a sequel to Steal This Book, found it a bit of a shock to enter a lobby now rife with prostitutes and narcotics agents where once there had been poets and rock stars. The Chelsea neighborhood itself had become a wasteland: homeless people screaming obscenities on the street and handcuffed individuals spread-eagled against police cars at the corner of Eighth Avenue. And, again, there were the deaths: Devon Wilson, who had been with Hendrix the night he died, leaped to her death from one of the Chelsea’s windows, and Vicente Fernandez, a popular neighbor with a much-admired transsexual girlfriend, Joy, was discovered dead on the waterfront, his bullet-riddled body flung from a car. No wonder the parents of the wealthiest young bohemians at the Chelsea began desperately trying to lure their offspring out of the city with sixty-acre farms in upstate New York and Vermont. Even Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, sick of the robberies and the chaotic street life, had abandoned Twenty-Third Street, Patti moving to the East Village with the musician Allen Lanier, and Robert to a downtown loft bought by his dream patron, Sam Wagstaff.
Still, the Chelsea Hotel’s core population held on, by necessity if not by choice. And as anyone could see, the hotel’s sense of community continued unabated. Vicente Fernandez’s neighbors organized a memorial service for him, an event beautifully commemorated in a tapestry by Juliette Hamelcourt. Near the front desk, guests could now enjoy Eugenie Gershoy’s papier-mâché sculpture The Tree of Life, a charming group portrait of Arthur Miller, Arthur C. Clarke, Peter Brook, Virgil Thomson, Shirley Clarke, and other Chelsea Hotel favorites. Abbie and Anita, their marriage rejuvenated by the birth of their son, who was now nearly two, had sometimes thought of joining one of the rural communes that had sprung up in recent years, communities whose Fourierist values—gender equality, sexual freedom, and joyful work free of economic need—coincided precisely with their own beliefs. Yet somehow, they had not managed to find a particular commune that appealed to them, and now, in 1972, it seemed as though the rural communities were falling apart at least as quickly as couples did.
Perhaps there was something still to be said for city life, with its die-hard population struggling to keep the fires of progress burning, endlessly spinning its glistening networks of intellectual, cultural, sexual, and economic connection. Life could be cheap here too—here at the Chelsea, in particular, where penniless denizens like the Hoffmans’ friends the Cavestanis, now editing their antiwar documentary Operation Last Patrol, could occupy a room with maid service for $250 per month and even have their dishes washed for an extra five bucks. And here, a person subsisting on the free hors d’oeuvres at El Quijote had a chance to exchange views with Burroughs or Ginsberg, or learn from Chief Z. Oloruntoba of Nigeria in the hotel elevator that his intricate, brightly colored paintings would soon be exhibited in Ornette Coleman’s loft. Cavestani liked to boast that there was so much going on in the Chelsea that you could spend weeks there perfectly happily without ever going outside. Bellmen would get cigarettes. El Quijote would deliver food and drink. And all the entertainment you could want was inside the building, especially up in the pyramid with Shirley Clarke, where explorations of what she now called “videospace” continued.
Having tested the farthest parameters of her equipment in terms of its liberating power for the individual user, Shirley had moved in recent months toward its potential for new kinds of human interaction. For this purpose, she had drawn a tighter, dedicated group of video artists around her—including her own twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Wendy—to experiment and play with ways to collaborate and exchange visual ideas. Shirley, a former dancer, found it both important and enormously exciting to begin by developing the relationship between each videographer’s body and the equipment in use. To do this, the group created “totems”—several monitors stacked vertically to resemble a human torso, with a pair of smaller monitors attached to the sides as arms, and a small spherical monitor on top to serve as the head (frequently sporting a black silk top hat like the one Shirley liked to wear). By directing each of four cameras toward the head, arms, torso, or legs of different individuals, they made live images of body parts, which they sent to the various monitors. Moving the images from monitor to monitor and combining these live images with recorded ones, they created composite video creatures that could “dance” and “move” in ways no human being could.
“You see it, you feel it,” Shirley said with delight. Watching the monitors, responding to the images, was “like gradually being able to feel more and more different parts that we never knew existed of our nervous system.” After beginning to master this skill with their own bodies, the group began to incorporate the architecture of the Chelsea itself into their explorations. First, they created a “Tower Play Pen” inside Shirley’s pyramid, equipping the ground floor, the upper platform, and the roof outside with cameras and monitors and wiring them so that video and audio could be transmitted simultaneously among the levels. Moving live images from one level to video monitors in another, combining them with recorded images, and otherwise improvising, jazz-style, they developed their ability to engage in what Shirley called “ultimate participation video”—to be in one place physically but in many places, with many other people, in their heads.
By the winter of 1972, the group had expanded farther into the hotel, installing stacks of video cameras and monitors on the roof, in various apartments, and outside the elevators, and moving about with cameras as well, transmitting images of themselves and their surroundings to one another as they went. Now, when a person got off the elevator at the Chelsea, he saw an image of himself getting off the elevator—or else he saw someone else getting off the elevator on another floor, or Shirley eating dinner with a friend in her pyramid, or a view of the Empire State Building shot from the roof. And perhaps, in the pyramid and in other apartments, people were watching that person too. It was as though the entire building had become one interactive electronic unit, one brain with neurons careening off one another and synapses flying.
Calling themselves the Tee Pee Video Space Troupe, in playful homage to Shirley’s rooftop pyramid, the videographers began giving workshops to outside groups, inside the hotel and throughout the city. After videotaping through the night, the group would reassemble on the roof before dawn to play back their tapes simultaneously on eight or nine monitors of various sizes that were arranged like pieces of sculpture. And that was when the magic happened. No matter how random, how eccentric, or how out of focus the images appeared individually, when they were directed to the clustered monitors and viewed all together, their meaning began to emerge. Gone was the artist who created a thing, a fetish object, for a viewer. With video, anyone could be an artist, and art became a process. In those predawn moments, a connection was made, and as the playback ended and the sun rose, it was as if the exhausted revelers, through their own shamanic power, had summoned the sunlight back to the beautiful city of New York.
Experiences like this were so inspiring and intellectually stimulating that it was a shock for the residents of the Chelsea Hotel to come across An American Family, the documentary series on the hapless Loud family that was broadcast on PBS that winter and spring of 1973. The story of a disintegrating family mired in a culture of consumerist boredom, now nearly three years old, seemed as distant from their own reality as that of a tribe in far-off New Guinea. Noting the explosive media response to the Loud parents’ divorce and to Lance’s mildly campy behavior, they were grateful to share a hotel where open marriage and sexual variance were more the norm tha
n the exception. Watching Pat Loud’s public pain as she tried to live with the identity the documentary producer had bestowed on her, the videographers thanked the gods that they were free to create their own identities for themselves.
Dystopian as the conditions were in the city and in the Chelsea in 1973, there was still utopia to be found. There was joy in living, as John Noyes had suggested in 1876, in an egalitarian community “at the front of the general march of improvement,” glacially slow and indefinable as that march might be. Outside the hotel was capitalism. Inside, the fight continued to redress its ills.
Look at Harry Smith, for example. “Day by day, with the help of all good people . . . an underground filmmaker, as an Old Master, keeps pushing ahead, roll by roll,” Jonas Mekas wrote. By now, in fact, Smith had completed the last of eleven hours of color footage and was ready to begin the hard work of editing: breaking down the hundreds of images into categories and matching them to the music of Mahagonny in meaningful ways. Applying for a grant to subsidize this work, he described the opera’s story—a “joyous gathering together of a great number of people, their breaking of the rules of liberty and love, and consequent fall into oblivion”—as both “a parody of life in America” and a universal narrative capable of reaching across all cultures. Constructed from more than thirteen hundred filmed and animated images and sequences, timed to correspond with Weill’s music on the soundtrack, and projected from four projectors simultaneously so that a four-square pattern was made on the theater screen, Mahagonny would be “by far the most complex” film Harry Smith had attempted, aimed at helping to “bring all people of the Earth closer together.” He estimated that it would take about a year to complete the editing process, but at the end he would have a film “so beautiful that no one can brush it aside.” However, he needed to hurry. As he told Jonas Mekas, asking for a contribution, “I wouldn’t bother you about this, except that I think the world is in peril and I’m trying to do something.”
But Barry Miles was worried about Harry, who, he noticed, had started periodically coughing up blood. Desoxyn, now Smith’s favored amphetamine, was probably responsible for the fiendish intensity with which he provoked Peggy Biderman, his loyal ally, over dinner at El Quijote—constantly calling her a “Jewish cunt” until, to his delight, she finally cracked and snapped back at him or, as happened in one case, until the people at the next table hit him over the head with a chair.
The downward slide continued elsewhere in the hotel too, as Stanley Bard found it necessary to eject even some of the most long-term residents to keep costs down. Viva, fortunately, chose that moment to retreat voluntarily with Michel and their baby to a mountain cabin where she could write her next book. As for the others in financial stress, Bard began to choose who would go. Florence Turner or Charles James? Bill Finn, the publisher who had lost his job, or Gregory Corso, who had been seen more than once running naked through the halls? In the end, although he cut off Turner’s maid service, then her phone, he let her keep her room. Finn he evicted, padlocking his door with his belongings inside—though the exiled publisher’s next-door neighbor obligingly cut a hole in the partition between their rooms, retrieved the belongings, and carried them out of the building to Finn one plastic bag at a time. As the evictions began, a divide opened between Bard and some residents. While some were sympathetic to his plight—with Charles James writing sadly to a friend, “Of course I understand the predicament which Stanley has to face, and I cannot blame him, as long as I am indebted to him,” younger tenants began making grumbling references to Stanley as “the Man.”
Yet, scorched and bare as the earth was that season, something new had started to grow. At the Mercer Arts Center, housed in the decrepit grand hotel where, a century ago, Gentleman Jim Fisk had been shot and killed by the lover of his mistress Josie Mansfield, a different kind of music had risen up in the gutter world of abandoned New York. The raunchy, androgynous New York Dolls, the Magic Tramps, Wayne County, and Suicide thrilled an audience of misfits, drag queens, speed freaks, and refugees from the tail end of the Warhol era with their glam-rock makeup and their defiance of society’s and the music industry’s expectations. Greeting “four more years of Nixon with a feather and a limp wrist,” as Barry Miles put it, the Dolls in particular expressed the triumph of survival in a dystopian world, as David Johansen, in black tights and diamonds, delivered “Jet Boy” and “Pills” with a rock-star leer, and Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain made their guitars screech like the New York subway.
People said the Dolls were inept musicians, but who cared? Their act was original, campy, and fun. They were so obviously having a great time that a host of people in the audience were inspired to start bands of their own. Malcolm McLaren, co-owner of the London clothing store Let It Rock and purveyor of dandyish, Edwardian Teddy Boy clothes, saw the Dolls’ show at the Mercer Arts Center too. The former art student fell so hard for their bold new style that he lingered in New York to study them further—moving into the Chelsea and making himself at home among the residents lying naked on the roof drinking beer or icy martinis. When the Dolls toured Europe the following fall, McLaren trailed behind, and even overhauled his shop in the band’s image.
Abbie Hoffman was intrigued by this urban renaissance, but he soon learned that he would not be around to enjoy it. He had finished his book that July, only to see his publisher go bankrupt the following week, and he found himself penniless with lawyers’ bills due and a family to support. Guilty of the greatest possible sin in New York—having no money—Abbie had decided in desperation to facilitate a quick cocaine sale at the seedy Hotel Diplomat in Times Square. Promptly arrested and faced with a life sentence, he felt he had no choice but to make plans to go underground. Before he left, though, he dropped in on the Cavestanis at the Chelsea Hotel, cooked up a batch of gefilte fish for them, and told stories while Laura videotaped him for posterity. Abbie Making Gefilte Fish would be shown at the city’s Avant-Garde Festival the following year. By that time, Hoffman had made himself invisible—though still visiting the Chelsea in disguise occasionally and employing Cavestani as an intermediary between himself and the aboveground world using the code name Hotel.
Abbie’s generation had tried, but they had failed. Barbara Rubin knew it. Barbara hadn’t been around much at all lately, having married an Orthodox Jewish artist from France named Yitzchak Besançon. Now, preparing to start a new life with her husband overseas, she visited Jonas Mekas, placed her one copy of Christmas on Earth in his lap, and said, “Do whatever you want with it, it’s up to you.” She died during childbirth seven years later. Mekas let her film go unseen for nearly a decade after that.
Still, some people survived, and there was excitement in survival. Patti Smith—like the ailanthus trees growing behind the Chelsea that Edgar Lee Masters had admired and celebrated in verse—had adapted to this dark new world. By 1973, her poetry collection Seventh Heaven had been published; its tributes to Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Amelia Earhart, Mary Magdalene, Edie Sedgwick, and other powerful women were rooted in the feminine renaissance that had taken place at the Chelsea as she was writing. Another collection, Witt, was due out in September. Patti had spent the summer drifting from one venue to the next with her small tape recorder, megaphone, and toy piano, reading her poems, singing occasionally, and fielding questions from the audience for five dollars a show.
Relying on Sam Shepard’s advice on improvising—“It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another”—Smith had begun to hit her stride by the summer of 1973. She ended each performance with “Piss Factory,” a prose poem about her escape from her New Jersey factory job to the freedom of the artist’s life in New York. “It seemed to bring the audience and me together,” she later wrote, and that was the aim.
In August, the Broadway Central Hotel collapsed, killing four residents and at the same time destroying the Mercer Arts Center. Venues for performance became increasingly rare. But in early November of 1973, Patti
had a chance to perform with Lenny Kaye on the roof of the Hotel Diplomat—the very hotel where Abbie Hoffman had been arrested less than three months before. Giving her show the name “Rock ’n’ Rimbaud,” Patty started off with Kurt Weill’s classic “Speak Low” from One Touch of Venus, then reprised with Lenny the pieces they’d done at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. As she moved to the rhythm of the words and guitar, she felt a sympathetic response from an audience studded with iconic New York figures ranging from Steve Paul to Susan Sontag. Inspired to give more, she reached down deeper, drawing on the energy of Harry Smith; the electricity of Shirley Clarke; the war trauma of Frank Cavestani; the tantric energy of Robert Mapplethorpe; the farce and laughter of the underground drag queens; the beauty of Jim Carroll, Sam Shepard, Juliette Hamelcourt; and the anxious brooding of Stanley Bard. She, as the archetypal vagrant, the untouchable—as Paula, the mysterious story spinner of New York myth—had found a way to channel the city’s energy, striving ever upward toward release. Diving into the fierce, angry, apocalyptic, get-even “Annie Had a Baby,” Patti and the assembled group of New Yorkers made magic. Together, they made the sun rise.
Abbie might be gone, and Barbara Rubin, and Edie Sedgwick. But Patti and her friends remained. New York could make their lives miserable, but it couldn’t make them go away. A new world was coming, and it was their world now.
Now fronting a wide, traffic-congested street and hemmed in by buildings, the Chelsea was designated an architectural and cultural landmark in 1966.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 37
