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

by Sherill Tippins

  The punk musicians were riding high with the release of Television’s Marquee Moon and Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation, but it had been a hard year in New York. Job dissatisfaction across the country was at its highest level in twenty-five years. The much-celebrated Continental Baths was replaced by the heterosexual sex club Plato’s Retreat, while Studio 54 ramped up for a future of celebrities and disco. In July, a two-day blackout led to widespread rioting and looting and the biggest mass arrest in New York City history, highlighting for New Yorkers how much had changed in their city since the carnival-like blackout of 1965.

  The Chelsea Hotel denizens had grown expert at dealing with trouble. During the 1978 blackout, for instance, some residents entertained themselves by pairing off with candles and moving about the building to marvel at the shifting light and shadow, while others put on dancing clothes and headed out to the sidewalk to share sandwiches, joints, pitchers of sangria, and salsa music with their neighbors. Earlier that year, when another fire had broken out (this one caused by the spurned lover of a second-floor resident setting fire to her ex-partner’s clothes), the long-term residents had taken the emergency in stride, knowing that even though thick clouds of black smoke were filling the building, fires never spread far in this hotel. Some raced to the windows to be rescued; others slipped down the fire escapes in raincoats and pajamas, into the freezing rain. Virgil Thomson donned his finest silk shirt and black pants and got out the Jack Daniel’s and the Jeff Davis pie in case some handsome firemen stopped by. Doris Chase waved regally to the onlookers on Twenty-Third Street as she was lifted down from the seventh floor by a cherry picker. The news that an artist named Michael Richards had died dampened the mood considerably for a bit. But Viva, Stella Waitzkin, Vali Myers, and others assembled for drinks at El Quijote and reassured reporters that all would be well—they all took it for granted that there would be a fire or a suicide or a murder at the Chelsea every year. The singer-songwriter Keren Ann actually benefited from the experience when she wrote a song about the incident called “Chelsea Burns.”

  In short, compared to some other places, there was still much to be grateful for at the Chelsea. The young art student Raymond Foye, back at the hotel and helping Ginsberg interview Voznesensky about his travails in the USSR, silently thanked the fates that he lived in the United States. And the poet and filmmaker Ira Cohen, returning to the Chelsea from a long trip abroad, confessed in a letter to a friend that despite the blackout and the fire, the names of punk bands spray-painted on the walls, and the puddle of blood he’d just noticed on the sidewalk outside—sign of another jumper—“This is still my favorite hotel in New York.”

  But as Stanley had feared, the Chelsea’s magic seemed to have gone out the front door along with Harry that year. Drugs and despair eating away at the community so painstakingly created over the past nine decades were bound to take their toll. Down at the Public, Joseph Papp liked to say that drugs and prison were where artists could really learn about human nature, but “you pay the price because in the process you deteriorate . . . through the kind of life you have to go through in order to know it.” People assumed that success would solve this problem, “but it doesn’t, not at all.”

  And as with people, so with buildings. Visitors these days frequently remarked on the Chelsea’s “downright creepy” feel, with its “morbid fragrance of Lysol and human misery.” Miloš Forman returned, now with five Academy Awards to his name thanks to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but he soon fled to an apartment facing Central Park West. There were some elegant new residents, such as the South African musician Abdullah Ibrahim and his family, and soon-to-be famous transients, like Tom Waits, but these days, one most often shared the elevator with a resident like Christina, the bad-tempered, oversize punk transvestite who growled menacingly at anyone who looked at her and announced, “No, I’m NOT Divine.”

  And Stanley now spent much of his time chasing the fifth-floor hippie couple’s naked two-year-old down the corridor, shouting that the child must wear a diaper at least; leaping out of his office to intercept drunken couples seeking a dark corridor in which to grope each other (“You do not live here,” he’d say, and firmly turn them around); or engaging in screaming fights with Viva in the lobby over services he had not provided or rent she had not paid. Trying to maintain equanimity in his cluttered office, he would explain to yet another reporter on the phone, “We create a different kind of atmosphere, one of comfort and serenity. One feels good as he walks in . . . The nouveau riche, they would not be happy here, we couldn’t satisfy them.” Bard could hardly be blamed for not having noticed that the neon Chelsea Hotel sign out front had lost some light, devolving from Hotel Chelsea to Hotel Hel to the current flickering HO EL HEL (presumably as in hellhole).

  By the time Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen checked into the Chelsea on August 24 of that year, the hotel had turned sinister and tragic, in the opinion of one newcomer, lacking even the briefest moments of communal joy. Nevertheless, Sid and Nancy arrived in a buoyant mood, Sid having survived a tour through the redneck bars of Texas and Mississippi so plagued by poor planning, infighting, and hostile confrontations that it had been canceled halfway through. The band had dissolved, and Sid was able to rejoin Nancy in London in time for her twentieth birthday. The two then went to Paris, where Vicious recorded “My Way,” the biggest hit he’d ever have.

  To the press, Sid was nothing but a thug, and Nancy a coarse tramp. To mainstream society, they looked like freaks, with their bluish-white skin, deep-sunk eyes, filthy T-shirts, and strange hair. If the rest of the world was in color, wrote Nancy’s own mother, these two were in black-and-white. But even if Nancy’s boast that they’d married was untrue, they were happy together. With the money he earned from performing, Sid bought her things: first-class plane tickets, spike-heeled shoes. In exchange, as she told anyone who would listen, she was going to manage Sid’s career in the States, where he’d soon be a solo star. They fit each other’s needs, she claimed; he needed to have someone tell him what to do. To please her, Sid registered them at the Chelsea as Mr. and Mrs. John Ritchie (his real name), and the desk clerk handed them a key.

  Finding work for Sid wasn’t as easy as Nancy had expected. The hotel crawled with downtown musicians—the Dead Boys, the Contortionists, the Nuns, and other bands drawn by the hotel’s down-at-heel glamour and its associations with past rock movements and with Burroughs, now generally recognized as the godfather of punk (although Burroughs himself denied it and demanded to know what punk even meant). But punk as a movement was already dying, drained of its vitality and then discarded by the labels in less than four years. The Heartbreakers had broken up. The Ramones, who’d produced three great records but no big hits, were reportedly on the skids. Richard Hell was said to be junk-sick and no longer interested in rock and roll.

  Another problem was that Sid’s drug use was clearly making him ill. That first week at the Chelsea, he collapsed in the lobby and was taken to the hospital, where doctors voiced concerns about brain damage but released him the next day. Worried, Nancy took Sid to find a methadone center, but he ended up fighting with the other patients and soon started shooting up again. Nancy knew they were running short of money, but given Vicious’s lack of musical talent, people had little interest in signing him. When he did finally secure a gig at Max’s in September, most of the sold-out crowd booed or walked out. By October, Sid and Nancy were spending most of their time in bed, chain-smoking and staring at the TV. Once, when they nodded off, a lit cigarette set the mattress on fire. When a clerk rushed upstairs with a fire extinguisher, he found them wandering around in a stupor like a pair of lost children, oblivious to the smoldering mattress.

  Stanley moved them to room 100 on the first floor, the “junkies’ floor,” where he could more easily monitor their behavior. Still, he saw no reason for real concern. Later, he would tell reporters that Sid was “very very quiet. No one knew he was even here. When he was in his room or wh
en he was staying here, he’s not out there performing like, you know, onstage.” He failed to see that the tall, skinny kid with the spiked hair and concave chest, briefly famous and now discarded, was sinking dangerously into confusion and despair. As the days passed, Sid and Nancy left their new room less and less.

  Still, Vicious had fans. Dale Hoyt, a video artist, was thrilled to realize that one of his heroes was living down the hall. “I think at that point he was pretty gone. He could barely approximate speech,” he later acknowledged. “I sort of made a point of saying good morning to him every time he passed by . . . and I think . . . a couple of syllables would get out of his mouth.” Others boldly knocked on Vicious’s door at all hours and made themselves comfortable there—which was easy to do when the couple was in such a stuporous state that they often seemed unaware that anyone was there.

  In early October, the rumor got around that Sid had received a twenty-five-thousand-dollar royalty payment from Virgin Records for “My Way.” The rumor appeared to be true, as he and Nancy certainly seemed to have more money to spend on drugs. In fact, people said the room was awash with money, and the building’s resident pushers started dropping in to party, hoping for a score. This was the case on October 11, with many people coming and going all night and an assortment of drugs changing hands. At about ten o’clock, Sid’s neighbor Hoyt knocked and opened the door a crack, but the singer said he couldn’t talk because he had an “important friend here from England.” Much later, several visitors to the room saw Sid take as many as thirty tablets of Tuinal—a far larger dose of the barbiturate than most could survive, and one certain to put nearly anyone into a deep state of unconsciousness for hours. It seemed that Sid did pass out, and he remained comatose through the morning’s early hours.

  While Sid was unconscious, a friend of the couple—a musician who called himself Neon Leon—called Nancy at the Chelsea and heard someone with a British accent talking in the background. Victor Colicchio, another hotel resident, later reported stopping by at about the same time and seeing one of the building’s sixth-floor newcomers standing outside. The man’s first name was Michael, but no one at the hotel knew his last name. Young, slim, with shoulder-length blond hair and alligator shoes, he was assumed to be a drug addict and said to have spent time with Sid and Nancy in the past two or three days.

  Finally, in the predawn hours, most of the residents of the Chelsea fell into a fitful slumber. Across the hall from room 100, the sixty-eight-year-old artist Bernard Childs lay in bed with his wife, Judith, trying to fall asleep. The recent months had been hard: Childs, who had commuted with Judith between Paris and the Hotel Chelsea since the mid-1960s, had suffered a stroke that limited his ability to move and paint. Gradually, over many weeks of physical therapy at a facility in upstate New York, he had begun to recover slightly. That night, Judith had brought him home, and the following week he planned to join an experimental program that used dance to retrain stroke victims’ muscles. In time, these dance movements would bring Childs back to his studio. But tonight, he and his wife lay in bed wondering whether the joyful life they had led at the Chelsea was over.

  Sometime in the night, they heard a faint cry: “Ah!” But they thought nothing of it. Cries were a common occurrence at the Chelsea.

  The next morning began as always. Those residents with office jobs hurried off to work, checking their reflections on the way out and sticking their heads in the door of the former ladies’ sitting room to say good morning to Stanley, who always arrived by seven o’clock sharp. The artists tended to sleep late, but a few lumbered across the street for a swim at the Y or went for coffee at the corner diner. At about eleven o’clock, the clerk at the front desk received a call from outside the hotel. A man who did not identify himself told the clerk, “There’s trouble in Room 100.”

  The clerk sent a bellman to check out the situation, but before he returned, another call came in from room 100. “Someone is sick,” a different male voice said. “Need help.” The bellman entered the room and saw, to his horror, Nancy’s blood-smeared body in only a black bra and panties lying face-up on the floor, her head under the sink and a knife wound in her lower abdomen. A trail of blood led from the bathroom to the bloodstained, empty bed. The bellman ran downstairs and told the desk clerk, and he called for an ambulance. The paramedics confirmed that Nancy was dead, and the police who accompanied them soon found a bloodstained hunting knife with the couple’s drugs and drug paraphernalia. They found Sid, too, wandering the hallways, crying and agitated, obviously high. When his next-door neighbor came out of her room to see what was going on, Sid reportedly said, “I killed her . . . I can’t live without her,” but he also seemed to mutter through his tears, “She must have fallen on the knife.”

  Once the news broke in the press, the Chelsea Hotel was besieged by reporters, its residents cornered and questioned. One obliging friend of the couple claimed that Sid was known to beat Nancy with his guitar occasionally and had once held a hunting knife to her throat. Inside the hotel, the rumor mill churned. The news spread that Vicious had confessed to the murder, telling the police, “I did it because I’m a dog. A dirty dog,” and that it was he who had phoned the police to report her dead body after he woke up to all the blood. Some people said Sid had bought the knife a few days earlier to protect himself when he went downtown to score drugs; others said Nancy bought it for him as a lark. A debate heated up among those who had been in the room that night as to whether someone who had taken so much Tuinal could have managed to kill anyone. To them, it seemed more likely that Sid had slept through the attack and woken to find Nancy’s body.

  As time passed, questions proliferated and doubt grew. Other people’s fingerprints had been found in the room; why were those individuals not questioned? And what had happened to Sid’s royalty money? Might Sid’s dealer, a ferocious-looking Brooklyn native who called himself Rockets Redglare, have killed Nancy and taken the cash? Inevitably, the rumor soon surfaced that Rockets had in fact admitted to the murder to one of Sid and Nancy’s friends. But at the same time, there were questions about the mysterious Michael—now checked out of the hotel—who some said was later seen with a wad of cash secured with Nancy’s purple hair tie. It was hard to settle on a theory, some darkly joked, since just about everyone would have relished killing Nancy. A few even believed she killed herself, part of a suicide pact that Sid had been too stoned to complete.

  The only people uninterested in pursuing these questions, it seemed, were the police, who remained convinced that Sid was their murderer even after he retracted his confession, claiming he couldn’t remember anything. Contemptuous of Nancy and satisfied with the story of a punk gone mad, they closed their eyes to the obvious holes in their case. In the meantime, Vicious, released on bail with the fifty-thousand-dollar bond provided by Richard Branson of Virgin Records, descended into a deep depression as the reality of his lover’s death sank in. Dazed and shaking, his eyes glazed over, Sid wanted only to attend Nancy’s funeral. Every day without her was agonizing, he wrote to her mother, and each day was worse than the one before. When Barry Miles spotted him upstairs at Max’s Kansas City in late October, it was obvious that Sid was back on smack. It was a horrible sight, Miles later wrote: “fawning punks, all trying to buy Vicious drinks or hand him drugs while he staggered about, puffy-faced, one eye almost closed, barely able to mumble.” Finally, ten days after the murder, Vicious tried to slash his wrists with a broken light bulb and was carted off to Bellevue screaming, “I want to die!”

  Deborah Spungen, Nancy’s mother, arrived in New York from Philadelphia stunned by the news and grieving, though, as the mother of a heroin addict, not really surprised. Still, she was appalled by the detectives’ obvious assumption that a girl like Nancy was just another piece of female refuse in a city that had seen more than its share, that she’d deserved what had happened to her, and that she should now be swept off the streets and forgotten. It was a sentiment echoed in the British tabloid headline �
�Nancy Was a Witch!,” in the cruel jokes at her expense on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, and in the unending stream of hate calls the Spungens received at home. It was a strange world in which the victim of violence could inspire such loathing, Deborah reflected. Something about an unprotected young woman out in the world, refusing to obey the strictures placed on others, always had and apparently always would provoke society’s rage.

  Meanwhile, life went on. In November, the artist Herb Gentry returned from Paris with his new wife, a young American artist named Mary Anne Rose. Oblivious to the tragedy that had just occurred, Rose loved the hotel’s otherworldly quality and fell in love with it for life. That same month, longtime Chelsea Hotel habitué Rene Ricard published an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “I Class Up a Joint,” laying out the method behind his ability to enjoy a top-drawer existence in the city without ever having worked a day in his life. “If I did [work], it would probably ruin my career,” he explained, “which at the moment is something of a cross between a butterfly and a lap dog.” Claiming he didn’t need much money—that others bought him drinks, fed him, and lavished him with expensive art and jewels—he declared that a job would prevent him from doing his real work, which was “to amuse and delight, giving my rich friends a feeling of largesse, my poor friends a sense of the high life and myself a true sense of accomplishment for having become a fixture and a rarity in this shark-infested metropolis.” Adding that “I should be paid to go out . . . You see, I’m good for business. I class up a joint,” he concluded with the afterthought, “What’ll happen when I’m too old to crack jokes?”