Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Still, the Lennons continue to amaze. In the elevators, in front of other tenants, John and Yoko Lennon openly discuss their finances, reportedly saying such things as, “Well, we fooled them, didn’t we? It wasn’t thirteen million dollars they were offering—it was only three.” The Lennons’ immediate neighbors on the seventh floor were not too pleased when John Lennon crisscrossed the staircase balustrade in the elevator entrance with twine, ostensibly to keep the Lennons’ young son Sean from falling through the railing. Lennon also keeps a studio on the ground floor, where he plays his guitar, and neighbors were put off to see that he had scrawled HELTER-SKELTER in large letters across one wall (forgetting that “Helter-Skelter” had been the title of a Beatles record long before it became associated with the Charles Manson family.) Later, HELTER-SKELTER was removed, and the walls were painted to simulate blue sky and clouds. John Lennon, when he encounters his neighbors, is usually pleasant and friendly; his wife seems less so. As a result of the Lennons’ presence in the building, the Dakota switchboard has had to handle as many as thirty calls a day from fans trying to be put through to one or the other of the Lennons. At times, small groups of fans gather outside the building, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Lennons as they come or go. The fans may not always recognize the Lennons, but they know their cars, and each time a silver limousine appears there is a small, collective gasp. Occasionally photographers lurk as well, in which case—alerted by José, the doorman—the Lennons trick them by using the basement service door. Unsolicited gift packages are always arriving for the Lennons, either through the mail or delivered by hand, and when one of these was found to contain a chalky substance that did not quite look like talcum powder, John Lennon ordered that all such gifts be placed immediately in the garbage can.

  At times, too, Lennon fans have succeeded in slipping past the security guards and gates, and getting into the building. There they become nuisances, ringing doorbells trying to find the Lennons. A number of people in the Dakota were rather amused when, at the inaugural reception for President Carter, John Lennon stepped forward and introduced himself to the President. The President looked blank. “I used to be a Beatle,” Lennon explained, a trifle lamely. The President continued to look blank.

  When the Lennons moved to the Dakota, they took the apartment that had formerly belonged to the actor Robert Ryan. Robert Ryan’s wife Jessie, to whom he was devoted, died of cancer at the Dakota, and because of the unhappy memories and associations the apartment held for him, Ryan moved out soon afterward—to 88 Central Park South, which has become sort of a haven for ex-Dakotans who, by reason of divorce, widowhood or other change of circumstance, have felt it necessary to depart from their beloved building. There, Ryan himself later died.

  Before settling in the Ryans’ old apartment, the Lennons decided that it would be wise to hold a séance to see what spirits might be inhabiting their new home. A medium was summoned, and she very quickly made contact with Jessie Ryan. Mrs. Ryan informed the Lennons that she considered their apartment her home too, and that she intended to stay there. She would not, however, disturb them in any way. They could lead their lives as they wished. Jessie Ryan was apparently as gracious and charming from the Beyond as she had been in life.

  Yoko Ono Lennon then telephoned the Ryans’ daughter Lisa to tell her that her late mother was still happily at home in the Dakota. Lisa Ryan was not particularly pleased or amused at this news. “If my mother’s ghost belongs anywhere, it’s here with me—not with them,” she said.

  Perhaps the most interesting ghost, however, was the “man with a wig” who appeared in the late 1930’s to an electrician named John Paynter, who was working in the building at the time. Paynter had become fascinated with the building’s wiring, and some of the pieces of circuitry were so antique and unfamiliar to him that he frequently had to take them home with him to take them apart and study them to see how they worked. Late one evening he returned to the Dakota and descended to the basement to continue tinkering with wires and fuses. All at once, out of the shadows, appeared a small man in a frock coat and winged collar. He had a short beard, a large nose and wore tiny, steel-rimmed glasses. The man glared fiercely at Mr. Paynter for several moments, then reached up, snatched off the wig he was wearing and shook it angrily in Paynter’s face. Then, just as swiftly, he disappeared. The “man with a wig” appeared to Mr. Paynter on four subsequent occasions, each time pulling off the wig and making the same angry gesture.

  Mr. Paynter had never heard of the first Mr. Edward Clark. But Clark had a short beard, a large nose, wore small, steel-rimmed spectacles and a wig. If the apparition was indeed Mr. Clark, the angry gesture might have been Mr. Clark’s way of expressing his feelings about the fact that the building was losing money.

  Part Two

  THE CHRISTMAS CRISIS

  Oh, blessings on this lordly pile

  That saves us from the city

  And makes us, in asylum, smile

  On those outside—with pity!…

  FROM “Ballad of the Dakota”

  Chapter 9

  The Panic of 1960

  New Yorkers, New Yorkers like to say, pull together in times of crisis. They are magnificent at rising to difficult occasions. In a blizzard they reach out to help the aged lady cross the street. In a transit strike New Yorkers with automobiles offer lifts to strangers. In a blackout they emerge to help direct traffic and open up their houses to the hapless and the stranded. New Yorkers have learned to cope with life’s worst vicissitudes, and this nil admirari attitude, they say, is one reason why New York considers itself a city of survivors. Only the fittest make it here. The unfit, having tried and failed, go home to Peoria, where they do just fine. The notion that New York is a community of success is perhaps the greatest source of the New Yorker’s immense self-pride.

  We are not talking here of Harlem, or of the Bronx, or Queens, or Brooklyn or Staten Island. These remain, Rand-McNally notwithstanding, foreign places. New York—the New York that counts—consists only of the lower two thirds of Manhattan Island, and some might limit the New York territory to an even smaller strip of real estate than that—to the blocks immediately east, south and west of Central Park.

  By 1960 the Dakota had become a survivor in itself—New York’s oldest standing luxury apartment dwelling, a city showplace for nearly eighty years. Its very appearance—that block-long crenelated façade of weather-stained yellow brick and chocolate-colored stone, surrounded by a dry moat—was no longer technically beautiful but was imposing, not to say daunting. If New York had become a city of expanded egos, the Dakota had become a building designed to swell the ego even more. Its very scale seemed to boost and bolster a sense of self-importance among those privileged to call the Dakota home. From within its apartments, vast by contemporary standards, with their lofty ceilings, their floor-to-ceiling windows, one could feel in command of the city. New Yorkers had long been known for their ability to retreat, tortoise-fashion, within the protective shells of their homes, but the carapace of the Dakota was now the thickest one in town. The Dakota had become a fortress within a fortress, and this lent its residents a feeling of instant superiority. There was, after all, nothing left in New York quite like it, nor was there anywhere else in the country. It had become a little like an exclusive suburb. It had the pomp and circumstance of Shaker Heights and Grosse Pointe, the glamour of Beverly Hills, the self-satisfaction of the Main Line, but though there were similarities to all these “good addresses,” the Dakota was more so.

  Living at the Dakota has also been described as like living in a small European village; at least one tenant says he half expects to see the women of the building gathered at the courtyard fountains to do their wash. For years, however, it was more like living in a small, private kingdom, each apartment a separate duchy with its ruling lord and lady.

  Though there was no real precedent for the Dakota, it seemed to fill, from the moment it opened its doors, a particular New York need. New Yorkers, to
a greater degree than residents of most large cities, are obsessed with privacy, and the Dakota was designed for this—to insulate and protect privacy, as well as nourish the egos it sheltered. In New York, neighbors are neighbors only in a rather special sense, and there is the distinct feeling that too much urban familiarity breeds discontent and that proximity breeds distrust. The massiveness of the Dakota’s construction and design was such that those who lived there would never have to endure the discomfitures so commonly associated with apartment living today—the sounds of children’s footsteps running on the floor above, the noise of a domestic argument next door, the smell of someone’s cooking permeating the elevator shafts. Each tenant was provided with a place of splendid isolation from all the others. In this hothouse atmosphere, egos increased in size to championship proportions, developed idiosyncrasies, whims, quirks, fetishes, peculiarities, temperaments and tempers.

  There were almost daily indications and reminders that those who lived at the Dakota were people of particular importance. For one thing, in addition to other blessings, for years Dakotans seemed to be given special consideration in terms of what it cost. Nowhere in New York could so much cubic footage be had for so little rent—ten rooms for $500 a month, for example, and seventeen rooms with six bathrooms and eight working fireplaces for $650. In 1884 these Dakota rents had seemed substantial. But the astonishing thing was that by 1960 they had risen hardly at all.

  Then there was the caliber of the people who, at one time or another, all lived inside the principality—seemingly a cross-section of New York City leadership. At least three foreign ambassadors—the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Finnish—lived at the Dakota along with the French Minister of Cultural Affairs. There had been the distinguished Schirmers and Steinways. Other celebrated tenants have included the likes of Boris Karloff, Eric Portman, Judy Holliday, Jose Ferrer and his wife Rosemary Clooney, Zachary Scott and his wife Ruth Ford, Jo Mielziner, Sidney Kingsley, Marya Mannes, Theresa Wright, Gwen Verdon, Arthur Cantor, Robert Ryan, Fannie Hurst, Paul Gallico, Marian Mercer, Carter and Amanda Burden, Judy Garland, Susan Stein Shiva, opera singer John Brownlee, Kent Smith, Betty Friedan, fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard and her husband Walter Millis, William Inge, Syrie Maugham, John Frankenheimer, Ted Ashley, Jack Palance, Gregory Ratoff. Admiral Alan G. Kirk represented the military at the highest level, and C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Time, represented publishing. Later were to come Lauren Bacall, Rex Reed, photographers Peter Fink and Hiro Wakabayashi, ex-Mrs. Paul Simon, Dotson Rader, restaurateurs Larry Ellman and Warner LeRoy, the Leonard Bernsteins, filmmaker Albert Maysles, Roberta Flack, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. If, in other words, New York were considered to be the capital of American art, culture and fashion, the Dakota seemed to be the Capital of the capital. As such, it seemed almost sacred—inviolable, impregnable, invulnerable.

  Therefore, considering the amount of hubris the building had generated among its tenants over the years, it was with considerable shock that on the afternoon of Friday, December 17, 1960—while the rest of New York was going about its business of pre-Christmas shopping—the residents of the Dakota learned that their special status was about to come to an abrupt end and that they might have to face a life as ordinary mortals. That was when Mr. Ernest A. Gross, then one of the building’s most distinguished residents, an international lawyer and three-time delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, was sitting in his Wall Street office and a call came through from William J. Zeckendorf who, though he later fell from grace, was then the unquestioned czar of New York real estate and who, in the years since World War II, had been busily reshaping the Manhattan skyline. “I want to introduce myself,” said Zeckendorf to Gross. “I’m your new landlord.” Ernest Gross froze. Though Mr. Zeckendorf’s telephone call was by way of a greeting, it also conveyed in no uncertain terms a warning to Gross and his fellow Dakotans. Whenever William Zeckendorf acquired an old, unprofitable building like the Dakota on a choice piece of land, he razed it and erected in its place a shiny tower of steel and glass which was a modern model of efficiency and economy. “Buildings like the Dakota don’t make sense in New York anymore,” said Mr. Zeckendorf. Immediately, Ernest Gross called his friend and Dakota neighbor, C. D. Jackson, and apprised him of the situation. Zeckendorf had the Dakota, and he was preparing to tear it down. Some ninety families would lose their treasured homes.

  That something of this sort might one day happen was not entirely unexpected. Tenants of the Dakota had been watching, with some apprehension, as the building’s owner, Stephen C. Clark, passed his seventy-fifth birthday and moved toward his eighties without committing himself as to what his plans for the building’s future might be. The Dakota had now belonged to the Clark family for three generations. Everything the Dakotans had they owed to the benevolence—and extravagance (or perhaps nonchalance)—of the Clarks. There had been the building’s famous services, for example. When the Dakota first opened its doors to rental tenants in 1884, it had a full-time operating staff of 150 people. In addition to the customary elevator men and women, doormen, janitors and porters and watchmen, there was a resident housekeeper who supervised a staff of resident maids. There was a resident laundress with her own laundry staff, and laundry was picked up at individual apartments in special wicker baskets and returned washed, ironed, darned and mended and with buttons sewn on, each piece separated with a sheet of pink tissue paper. There was a gentlemen’s tailor in the basement. There was a house carpenter, two house painters, a house cabinetmaker, a house electrician, plumber and glazier. Before the days of the automobile, there had been Dakota stable boys to handle visiting carriages and a separate Dakota stables two blocks away for tenants’ horses, landaus and coupés.

  On the ground floor of the Dakota proper there was a full office staff operating under a “lady managerette” and a paging system whereby individual tenants could notify the front desk of their needs and wishes. The Dakota even had a baronial private dining room, with its own captains and white-gloved waiters, just for tenants and their guests. Each afternoon a printed menu was discreetly slipped beneath each apartment door so that tenants, if they desired, could phone down to Miss Kay, the dining-room managerette, and specify their orders for dinner in advance. Here, for $1.50, one could select, to quote from a 1907 bill of fare:

  Caviar Oysters

  Celery Salted Almonds Olives

  Cream of Asparagus

  Broiled Spanish Mackerel

  Pommes Parisienne Cucumbers

  Partridge, Fantaisie

  Potatoes soufflées Peas

  Champagne

  Lettuce and tomato en surprise

  Neopolitan ices Gâteaux assortis

  Café

  Napkins and tablecloths were of the heaviest linen. Silver was of such heavy plate that even today such pieces of the original set as have been salvaged show no sign of wear. Goblets and finger bowls were of stained glass. In each of the four passenger elevators, a silver tray was placed for messages, mail and calling cards.

  As the twentieth century progressed, of course, more and more of these lovely little services began to disappear. The laundry and tailoring and housekeeper and maid service went first. Not long after World War II, the dining room—which had never been a profitable or really practical operation—closed for good. The front-office staff was reduced to four, and by 1960 the building’s entire staff was down to only forty-five. Still, for New York this was a high staff-to-tenant ratio, and that the building had been kept up as well as it had was, in large part, thanks to the Clark family.

  As Stephen C. Clark entered his twilight years the Dakota became very solicitous of the family. Stephen and Susan Clark, who lived across the Park in East Seventieth Street, were frequently invited to dinners by various of the Dakota’s distinguished tenants, all of whom were eager for some hint of what would happen to their building when the inevitable happened to him. It was perhaps not exactly a coincidence that, in March 1959, Architectural Forum, a Luce pub
lication, published a lengthy photographic essay extolling the architectural splendors of the Dakota. Lest the Clark family fail to be impressed by the article, C. D. Jackson had the photographs put together in a twenty-two-page album inscribed “To Stephen Clark with the compliments of C. D. Jackson and the editors of Architectural Forum.” Marya Mannes, already a well-known author, lecturer and critic, showered Mr. Clark with a series of charming little verses, each calculated to convey to him how much his tenants loved him, and his building, and how certain the tenants were that he, or someone just like him, would always care for them.

  She need not have wasted her ink, nor should the others have wasted their dinner invitations, their birthday cards or their thoughtful little Christmas gifts. When Stephen Clark died, in September 1960, there was an anxious wait for news of his will. Then it was learned that Clark had not left the Dakota, which he had owned outright, to his children or grandchildren. He had left it instead to the Clark family’s foundation. At first this seemed well and good, though there was a certain nervousness in the building since dealing with the caprices of a foundation, or committee, is not the same as dealing with an individual. What the tenants of the Dakota did not realize, however, was that under New York State law a foundation cannot operate or own an unprofitable property. And, by 1960, the Dakota was not operating at a profit if, indeed, it ever had.