Life at the Dakota
Page 25
Mrs. Severns agreed to help Susan Shiva out, and then phoned downstairs to Winnie Bodkin at the desk to ask for an off-duty elevator operator to help serve. Winnie told Mrs. Severns that she was sorry, but all the elevator operators had been pre-empted by the Shivas for the Israeli fund-raiser. “She had taken all of them,” says Mrs. Severns. “I was flabbergasted! I was going to have her party in my house—and with no help! The Shivas sent up wine and cheese, but I had to provide all the glasses and all the clean-up. I never even got a thank-you note! I was furious!”
Like eggs in a crate, the thin-shelled egos compartmentalized in the Dakota are easily cracked. But it should be remembered that the Six-Day War was an emotional time for all Jews, and so perhaps Susan Shiva can be forgiven for forgetting the thank you.
As a hostess, meanwhile, Susan Shiva is usually in full command of the situation, and her parties rarely get out of hand. At a party for Prince Michael of Greece, for example, a certain number of guests were invited for dinner, and certain others were invited for after dinner. On the after-dinner list was Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat head, who made the mistake of thinking that he could bring along ten or so uninvited friends to the party. The friends included Countess Gioconda Cigogna, Prince George Vassichekof, Count Yash and Eva Gabronska, the Duke and Duchess de Cadaval of Portugal, Patricia Lawford, Kevin McCarthy, Yul Brynner, and Kirk and Anne Douglas. This was too much for Susan Shiva, who threw the whole lot out, titles and all.
But there are times at the Shivas’ parties when the going does get a little rough. When Robert F. Kennedy was making his Democratic Senate bid in New York, the Shivas, who are ardent Democrats, threw a party for him in order to win the “intellectual vote” away from the Republican incumbent, Senator Kenneth Keating. Among the intellectuals invited were William vanden Heuvel, who was Kennedy’s campaign manager (and, for a while, Susan Shiva’s brother-in-law), Jacqueline Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green, Gloria Vanderbilt, Zachary Scott, Jason Robards, John Gunther, Jules Feiffer, Allegra Kent, Paddy Chayefsky, Abe Burrows, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton, Lauren Bacall and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. All went well until Arthur Kopit, the playwright (Oh Dad, Poor Dad …), announced that he was for Senator Keating. He was pushed backward over a sofa, spilling his drink on himself, the sofa, the rug and the person who had shoved him. Getting to his feet, he said, “I see the Kennedy swimming-pool-shoving syndrome is still with us.”
Because of the celebrity of the building’s tenants and their friends and guests, episodes like this have a way of getting into the gossip columns which, less celebrated tenants feel, tends to give the Dakota a bad name, and makes it sound as though the building is the scene of nothing but wild parties. In fact, almost everything that happens at the Dakota gets into the papers, and this ruffles some Dakotans’ feathers. The building is particularly proud of its security system. All visitors must be announced. The entrance gate is locked at midnight, and late-arriving guests and tenants must ring for a watchman to be admitted. All groceries and mail are delivered to apartments by the building’s porters. Workmen and repairmen arriving on the service elevators will not be admitted to apartments until they have been identified by the owners. Many apartment owners, when they are at home, still do not bother to lock their front doors, but New York has become increasingly security-conscious. And there have been slip-ups. Not long ago, David Marlowe’s doorbell was rung by one of the periodic groups of young girls who had somehow penetrated the system, and who were going up and down hallways trying to find John Lennon. David Marlowe fooled them by saying, “This is John Lennon’s apartment, but he’s in Europe for the summer.” The girls departed.
And there are fears. “One thing that worries us,” Wilbur Ross says, “is that if someone got into the building, how would we ever find him?” It is true that in some of the building’s dark storage spaces and closets and rooftop lofts a person could conceivably hide out for months undetected. But once he was inside, a prowler unfamiliar with the building would also have a hard time finding his way out, since so many of the Dakota’s doors and hallways open into cul-de-sacs.
And there have been a few burglaries. In 1971 Sidney Carroll’s apartment was robbed, and Robert and Eileen Carlson vigorously protested a search of their maid’s room by an employee and the police. A few years later Warner and Kay LeRoy’s apartment was burglarized, but the LeRoys admit that it was their own fault. “We’d gone away for the summer and given keys to a lot of workmen,” LeRoy says. Some time after that, Eugenia Sheppard reported the loss of some jewelry. Later on, the missing pieces turned up in a drawer where Miss Sheppard had forgotten she had put them. But the Sheppard “burglary” somehow found its way to Liz Smith’s gossip column, where it was reported that Miss Sheppard had said that hers was one of a “rash” of burglaries at the Dakota. For a while, everyone in the building was very cross with Eugenia Sheppard. One burglary and one non-burglary did not seem enough to constitute a “rash.” This was the sort of publicity that the Dakota did not need at all. It hurt the value of everyone’s investment.
Still, if you are famous, people recognize you and comment on what you do. One of the perils of the publicized life is public embarrassment. One of the drawbacks of life at the Dakota is that its famous tenants keep the building in an almost perpetual spotlight. The Lennons, of course, are a special problem, but other celebrities have occasionally managed to strain the rules. One is not supposed to park a car in the Dakota’s carriage entrance, but when Jason Robards was married to Lauren Bacall, and living there, he once slept all night at the wheel of his car, parked there, and no one knew quite what to do about it.
Cars frequently betray the identity of their owners. When John V. Lindsay was Mayor of New York, everyone in the building—and in the neighboring buildings—was interested to see the Mayor’s official chauffeur-driven limousine draw up in front of the Dakota one balmy evening. The tall Mayor stepped out of the car and entered the building, Who, everyone wondered, might the Mayor of New York be visiting? The car and driver waited outside.
And waited.
The next morning the question became even more intense. The Mayor’s limousine, its driver dozing at the wheel, was still there.
“Oh, there have been some really wild parties,” bubbles Ruth Ford. “One night there was a particularly wild party, with all sorts of electric guitars and amplifiers and a rock band. By around eleven or twelve at night, people began complaining. Everyone who complained was invited to the party. Finally the police poured in—and they were invited to stay. They stayed, drinking and carrying on with everyone else. It worked.”
It might not have worked a few years ago. One of Warner LeRoy’s downstairs neighbors was a woman, since moved away, who was an heiress to a beer fortune. She called the police at the slightest sound of a party, and the police arrived and broke up whatever was going on. The lady herself was fond of giving opera recitals, which she considered properly dignified and civilized in tone. At one of her recitals an elderly Dakota neighbor had the poor taste to have a heart attack and die. The indignant hostess ordered her butler to drag the dead man back to his own apartment and deposit him there, where he belonged.
Chapter 21
The Bottom Line
On Tuesday, February 22, 1898, the dining room of the Dakota offered a special menu. The Dakota’s menus were elaborate in those days, but this one was especially so. After all, it was George Washington’s birthday. The first President would have been 166 years old. The cover of the menu depicted “The Dakota Behind an Old Rock in Seventy-second Street Looking from the Bloomingdale Road, 1884.” The Bloomingdale Road was Broadway, from which the Dakota was once visible. The bill of fare announced:
DINNER
Oysters en coquille Little Neck Clams
Tortue Claire à l’Anglaise Cremè de Volaille
Consommé à l’lmpèratrice
Canape Lorenzé Lettuce Tomatoes Radishes Olives
Celery Salted Almonds
Broiled Spanish Mackerel à la Mâitre d’Hotel
Cucumbers Pommes de Terre, Dauphine
Boiled Capon à la Reine
Filet Mignon of Beef à la Cheron
Stewed Terrapin à la Maryland
Timbale de Gibier à la St. Hubert
Fricassee of Fresh Mushrooms en Caisse
Beignets de Pêches glacés au Kirsch
Ribs of Prime Beef Spring Lamb, Mint Sauce
Punch Benedictine
Ballotin de Pigeon en Bellevue
Roast English Pheasant, Bread Sauce
Boiled Sweet Potatoes Mashed Potatoes Parisian Potatoes
French Peas Asparagus Plain Spinach Squash
Pineapple Pudding, Sauce Madère Washington Pie
Apricot Tartelettes Petits Fours Chocolate Eclairs
Port Wine Jelly, Glace Fantaisie
Stilton, Roquefort and American Cheese
Fruit in season
Coffee
The old menu politely listed no prices for any of the above delicacies, but it did note: “Dishes ordered not on Bill of Fare will be charged extra.”
Eighty years later, almost to the day, the Dakota dining room was the Gyora Novaks’ apartment and the month of February 1978—which could be considered fairly typical nowadays—showed that the Dakota’s tenants’ maintenance payments were in arrears in the aggregate sum of $21,912.45. Twenty-one tenants—roughly a quarter of the building—had not paid their February maintenance at all. Eighteen others had made only partial payments. The individual arrearages for February ranged in size from $1.95 (doubtless someone’s careless error) to $2,260.56. In other words, the building was trying to operate and maintain itself on a fiscal basis that would boggle the mind of even a professional accountant.
How long can such a state of affairs continue, and what ever can be done? At the same time, an eleven-room, three-and-a-half bath apartment was for sale at an asking price of $312,000, and another had just been sold at $10,000 above the asking price. In the topsy-turvy world of New York real estate, the Dakota is a topsier, turvier place than most.
“The best thing about living here is that they don’t hassle you about not paying your maintenance,” says Pauline Pinto. “I mean, they know they’ll get it eventually. You can live here and do unconventional things and not pay your maintenance. Right now I’m writing an analysis of President Carter’s welfare plan—it’s not like reading Kafka or Rilke or William Gass. The public knows nothing about Carter’s welfare plan. It makes me feel that I’m in a minority, writing about the poor, working at a mental-health center. The Pintos are an old Sephardic Jewish family from Morocco, but I’m a WASP with plenty of money. I feel estranged, I feel different—I feel there’s a wave length I’m not on. I feel ambivalent, like a cop-out, because I’m rich—and a liberal—there’s a feeling of guilt. Here I am in my beautiful apartment at the Dakota, writing about poverty. Still, I feel better here than I would on Park Avenue. It’s better for my conscience.…”
The rich, it has often been pointed out, are funny about money. In San Francisco the late Mrs. Adolph B. Spreckels, after giving away more millions than she could remember to create the Palace of the Legion of Honor and to other art museums, was approached by a member of the Legion of Honor staff. The staff had organized a softball team, which proposed to call itself the A. B. Spreckels Memorial Baseball Team, in honor of Mrs. Spreckels’s late husband. The team, however, had found itself about fifty dollars short of the money it needed to buy uniforms. Could the Legion of Honor’s wealthy benefactress help out? “What?” cried the outraged Mrs. Spreckels. She flung open her reticule and poured its contents—lipstick, emery boards, matches, a few coins, a handkerchief—on the table. “Where do you expect me to get fifty dollars?” she wanted to know. “You people have got my skin. Now you want my guts!”
The rich, as Pauline Pinto indicates, are often quite cavalier when it comes to paying bills. In Locust Valley, Long Island, for example, one woman routinely goes through her morning mail in bed with her breakfast tray. Anything that appears to be a bill she simply stuffs under her mattress. Only when the pile of bills reaches a size to threaten her sleeping comfort does she pull them all out and ship them to her husband’s secretary for payment.
The rich, furthermore, are provided with certain privileges when it comes to bill paying—privileges which are denied to ordinary mortals. If one is rich enough, one can arrange with the telephone company and the utilities concerns to pay one’s bills once a year instead of the more boring and time-consuming once a month. But the trouble is that many rich people fail to grasp the difference between AT&T, which can afford such liberal credit, and the corner drug store, which cannot. A number of years ago, for instance, the pretty Berkshire Hills around Williamstown, Massachusetts, began attracting a number of rich people, including Mrs. Alta Rockefeller Prentice, Mrs. Lillian Sanford Procter (Procter & Gamble) and Mr. and Mrs. William H. Vanderbilt; later came such successful folk from the literary and theater worlds as Sinclair Lewis, James Gould Cozzens and Cole Porter. The town’s tradespeople, it was suggested, should be delighted with the important new infusion of money, but, as it turned out, they were far from sanguine about it all. True, their sales figures jumped appreciably, but so did their amounts of accounts receivable. The same problem besets Park Avenue florists who get thousands of dollars’ worth of business from their carriage trade, while they hover on the brink of bankruptcy waiting to be paid. The Dakota has the same problem with some of its wealthy tenants.
Meanwhile, it has long been apparent that one of the great financial—as well as social—drains on the Dakota has been represented on the eighth and ninth floors.
As recently as 1973—a dozen years after the building became a cooperative—there were still a few rooms on the top two floors that tenants would not vacate, or buy, even though the rooms were technically owned by other people. In 1977 there was a serious effort to co-op the eighth and ninth floors, and it was stipulated that these rooms could only be purchased by people who already had apartments in the building. About $100,000 was realized from the sale of rooms on eight and nine—a rather small drop in the bucket for a building whose monthly operating budget is $130,000. The maintenance charges, meanwhile, for some of the smallest rooms—many of which are without windows—had to be set low, as little as forty dollars a month in some cases. And so the top two floors, which represent roughly 22 percent of the Dakota’s available floor space, account for less than 4 percent of its monthly income.
One recent notion that has been proposed has been to turn the eighth and ninth floors into a series of luxury duplexes. To do this, of course, the Dakota would have to buy back the various rooms that it sold to tenants in 1977. Then the two floors would have to be completely renovated, and the new duplexes resold.
The idea would seem to have some merit. It could all be done within the limits proscribed by the Landmarks Commission, without tampering with the building’s façade. To carry out such a scheme, of course, a number of things would have to happen. Some provision would have to be made for the oldsters—for Jimmy Martin, Mrs. Maclay, the Browning sisters. Most important, however, would be the Dakotans themselves, who would have to back the idea, unanimously, in spirit. The Dakotans would have to act together, as a family, as a community. Unanimity of spirit, however, has not exactly been an outstanding characteristic at the Dakota.
A certain amount of human lethargy and apathy would have to be overcome. Many Dakotans take the attitude that, though the cost of living in their building keeps going up, Judgment Day is not quite here. Perhaps the fact that the building closes its books $20,000 in the red each year isn’t all that bad. The building continues to amortize its mortgage, “rolling it over,” as the accountants say, with cheaper dollars, thanks to inflation. It is not like Christmas of 1960, they say. And they are right. There is no real cause for panic. But for economic pessimists there might be cause for a certain am
ount of nervousness.
Such an ambitious undertaking as the duplexes would have to come out of a sense of real need and immediate urgency—a feeling that unless something is done and done soon, their building will sink and the Dakotans will lose everything they own. This crisis mentality has not emerged yet, though such pessimists as Frederic Weinstein feel that some sort of crisis is very close at hand.
A strong leader would have to take the Dakota’s helm to carry out such an ambitious plan, a benevolent despot who would run things—a Franklin D. Roosevelt who would lead the country out of the Great Depression.
But then the final question arises: Where would the Dakota, which has a small working capital, find the necessary hypothetical three-and-a-quarter-million dollars to implement such a scheme? A case could be made for the fact that there is a difference between mortgage financing and redevelopment financing. The 1972 refinancing was undertaken for different reasons. A new loan would be for building something that would increase the building’s revenues and add to its value.
But because no real crisis yet exists, the Dakota sails on into the wind with business as usual, and the eighth and ninth floors remain in the same state as they have always been.
There is an important difference between buying a cooperative apartment a condominium. When buying a condominium one buys one’s living space, and only one’s living space, outright, and gets a deed and title to it. Costs of maintaining common areas—hallways, roofs, plumbing and so on—are shared by everyone in the building. A cooperative, on the other hand, is a corporation with shares of stock to sell. The Dakota is owned by the Dakota, Inc., and when buying an apartment one buys a certain number of shares of Dakota stock based more or less on the apartment’s cubic footage. Furthermore, one does not get a deed to a cooperative apartment; one gets a lease from the corporation—in the Dakota’s case, a lease for forty years, with a six-month “escape” clause.* In other words, owners of cooperatives like the Dakota do not legally “own” their apartments, but they do own their buildings, which condominium owners do not.