BLEECKER STREET
On a pretty evening a couple of weeks ago I walked through the West Village with a friend who has lived forever on Perry Street. As we passed an old building grown over with ivy on its West 4th Street side, we heard what sounded like hundreds of sparrows getting ready for bed. My friend said: “Let’s listen,” and we stood under the ivy and did. She told how walking home from work in the evenings lately she often passes this spot and hears that sound and it makes her feel happy every time. It felt good to stand under the ivy and listen to that sweet racket, and after that, as we walked towards my friend’s apartment, we saw a group of young women squealing and photographing each other in front of one of the brownstones on a certain block. Apparently the stoop was used in the TV show Sex and the City and because of that it has become a tourist attraction. My friend said she heard a lady who lives in the building telling someone on the sidewalk one day that having so many tourists posing on her stoop was becoming unpleasant. We saw that she had put out a little collection box for a dog rescue effort, asking people to make a donation for each photo taken.
One of the worst ways that part of the West Village has changed for regular people like my friend who live there is by having disembarrassed itself of its delis and bakeries and laundries, which until a few years ago were all taken for granted like shoes. On a Saturday afternoon not long ago I walked through Bleecker Street with no delis or laundries and saw Marc Jacobs clothing stores, one after another, with long lines of people waiting to get in. I can’t say why exactly, but being there made me feel embarrassment. I imagined myself, if I had a business, having three or four shops on one street with my name on them all and the thought embarrassed me. And then I stopped in front of number 375 Bleecker Street where Marguerite Young used to live. Marguerite was a real Village character I knew for a while because of a friend in common. I can’t say that I liked Marguerite because she intimidated me, but I didn’t dislike her either. Once I sat in on her literature class at the New School and felt intimidated there too. Mostly I saw Marguerite at Tiffany’s restaurant.
I remembered meeting her one day in front of that building on Bleecker Street and helping her load box after box of manuscript pages into a taxi. It was her endless book about the American socialist Eugene Debs, which had taken her decades to write, and we hauled it uptown to Random House. Somehow it fell to me to push the six or seven boxes of pages on a hand truck into the elevator and way up high into the office of a lady editor who looked at all the boxes and said, “My goodness!” Brevity was not Marguerite, and it was around that time that she inscribed for me a copy of her endless novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which is apparently one of the most acclaimed novels that almost nobody has ever read. I haven’t read it either, but every so often I open it at random and see what sort of sentence flies up at me.
On most nights then, in the early ‘90s, you could find Marguerite holding forth in one of the booths at Tiffany’s, which was open all night on the corner of 7th Avenue and Christopher Street in a spot now taken up by a big bright Bank of America, and the whole place was always full of old ladies and drag queens. The waiters wore white shirts with black vests and it was the kind of place where you really could get anything you wanted, or where you could just sit all night with a cup of coffee and a lot of people did.
I used to jot down things she said and put them in my diary. Marguerite said that literature is nothing but gossip and that it is as much what could have happened as what did. She said you have to give Henry James or anyone else at least twenty pages to get used to their particular way of seeing the world, and she said that when she was writing Miss MacIntosh, the head of the writing department at Iowa State said to her, “The time has come to cut the baby’s nipples off.” She said that life is inherently meaningless, and that Bertrand Russell had aptly said it when he wrote about how we all come into the world by accident and go out by accident. She talked about what a wonderful guy Isaac Newton was and how he had a little dog who ate part of the law of gravity and that Isaac Newton said that the dog did God’s work by eating it. She said that reading biographies would make a person a better writer and that her favorites were the biographies of Tallulah Bankhead, Leadbelly, Benny Goodman and Ava Gardner. She thought True Detective was a very good magazine, and that when it disappeared somebody somewhere wrote in some publication, “Now what will Marguerite Young and Carson McCullers write about?”
She was eighty-something, and she said that her ideal would to always be forty-four. She said that getting old is the strangest of all experiences, and that looking back on it, a whole life looks like one long, single day. One year, I had Thanksgiving dinner at Tiffany’s with Marguerite and all of the tables were full of Village oddballs.
Thinking of Marguerite today I opened the giant Miss MacIntosh at random, closed my eyes and put down my finger on page 996. The line under my finger read: Could anything be worse than a drunken arithmetic teacher?
One of the worst ways that part of the West Village has changed for regular people like my friend who live there is by having disembarrassed itself of its delis and bakeries and laundries, which until a few years ago were all taken for granted like shoes. On a Saturday afternoon not long ago I walked through Bleecker Street with no delis or laundries and saw Marc Jacobs clothing stores, one after another, with long lines of people waiting to get in. I can’t say why exactly, but being there made me feel embarrassment. I imagined myself, if I had a business, having three or four shops on one street with my name on them all and the thought embarrassed me. And then I stopped in front of number 375 Bleecker Street where Marguerite Young used to live. Marguerite was a real Village character I knew for a while because of a friend in common. I can’t say that I liked Marguerite because she intimidated me, but I didn’t dislike her either. Once I sat in on her literature class at the New School and felt intimidated there too. Mostly I saw Marguerite at Tiffany’s restaurant.
I remembered meeting her one day in front of that building on Bleecker Street and helping her load box after box of manuscript pages into a taxi. It was her endless book about the American socialist Eugene Debs, which had taken her decades to write, and we hauled it uptown to Random House. Somehow it fell to me to push the six or seven boxes of pages on a hand truck into the elevator and way up high into the office of a lady editor who looked at all the boxes and said, “My goodness!” Brevity was not Marguerite, and it was around that time that she inscribed for me a copy of her endless novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which is apparently one of the most acclaimed novels that almost nobody has ever read. I haven’t read it either, but every so often I open it at random and see what sort of sentence flies up at me.
On most nights then, in the early ‘90s, you could find Marguerite holding forth in one of the booths at Tiffany’s, which was open all night on the corner of 7th Avenue and Christopher Street in a spot now taken up by a big bright Bank of America, and the whole place was always full of old ladies and drag queens. The waiters wore white shirts with black vests and it was the kind of place where you really could get anything you wanted, or where you could just sit all night with a cup of coffee and a lot of people did.
I used to jot down things she said and put them in my diary. Marguerite said that literature is nothing but gossip and that it is as much what could have happened as what did. She said you have to give Henry James or anyone else at least twenty pages to get used to their particular way of seeing the world, and she said that when she was writing Miss MacIntosh, the head of the writing department at Iowa State said to her, “The time has come to cut the baby’s nipples off.” She said that life is inherently meaningless, and that Bertrand Russell had aptly said it when he wrote about how we all come into the world by accident and go out by accident. She talked about what a wonderful guy Isaac Newton was and how he had a little dog who ate part of the law of gravity and that Isaac Newton said that the dog did God’s work by eating it. She said that reading biographies would make a person a better writer and that her favorites were the biographies of Tallulah Bankhead, Leadbelly, Benny Goodman and Ava Gardner. She thought True Detective was a very good magazine, and that when it disappeared somebody somewhere wrote in some publication, “Now what will Marguerite Young and Carson McCullers write about?”
She was eighty-something, and she said that her ideal would to always be forty-four. She said that getting old is the strangest of all experiences, and that looking back on it, a whole life looks like one long, single day. One year, I had Thanksgiving dinner at Tiffany’s with Marguerite and all of the tables were full of Village oddballs.
Thinking of Marguerite today I opened the giant Miss MacIntosh at random, closed my eyes and put down my finger on page 996. The line under my finger read: Could anything be worse than a drunken arithmetic teacher?
IT IS, OR IT ISN'T
On the subway going uptown yesterday, a man got on with the crowd at 34th Street and when the train started moving again he gave his version of a familiar spiel: “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I am not doing this because I have any kind of problem with drugs or alcohol. I never imagined myself becoming a beggar, and had I any other choice I would not be doing this. I’m asking you for whatever you can spare because I have a family here in the city and this is the only way I have to make any money.”
He was forty-something, with a trim gray beard and short-cropped hair and wearing a tan overcoat that he held closed at the neck with his fist. “Anything will help out,” he said. “A penny, a dime, or a folded dollar bill.” He walked through the car and his voice got a little rougher. “Yeah, okay! You all know what it is, right? Yeah, he got a promotion, that’s right! They wanted to say that I’m on security detail. That’s what they said! I’ll tell you what. They just wanted me down here in the subway! That’s right! But I haven’t got a nickel. That’s the truth. I haven’t got a nickel! I haven’t got a nickel and any one of them who tells you something different is a LIAR.”
The train stopped at 42nd Street and he got off with the big wave of people that poured out, the way it happens at 42nd Street, and his last words hung in the air as crowds of other people poured in, oblivious. Something about him was different from other train beggars, I thought, but it took a moment to figure out just what the difference was. And what it was, I realized, was his diction. He had perfect, precise, impeccable diction. And it was not just the diction either, but the way his words came together when he said, “I haven’t got a nickel!” That little sentence and the way he pronounced it and everything else he said made me think of Jimmy Stewart. I did not think he was pretending; he wasn’t. But everything about him somehow brought to my mind a play, written in the 1950s, about a man with a lot of troubles.
One evening some years ago I was walking to see a play in a little West Side theater in Hell’s Kitchen, near 10th Avenue. All of sudden I heard screams coming from a three or four story tenement building across the street from where I was, and someone shouting, “I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya!” Another terrible scream followed and I stood there, paralyzed on the sidewalk. I looked around for a pay phone, thinking: My heavens! Someone has just been stabbed or worse in there! There was not a single other person on the street, but in the next block over I could see the yellow and red awning of a bodega and a pay phone out front, and I thought: I better hurry before the killer comes canon balling out that door and sees me standing here! And I actually felt the hairs on my neck stand up. I started to walk, very fast, but at that moment there were more screams, and then: “I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya!”
It was exactly the same thing, happening again. I stopped and listened. I heard a woman’s voice say, “Could you put more emphasis in there when you say that line? I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya! OK? Let’s do it again.” And then the scream came. I felt a tremendous relief. I walked on, very glad that I had not called 911. How real that seemed, while I stood there truly believing that I was overhearing somebody being murdered in a crummy tenement just like something I might read in the Post. The man on the train I think was probably the real thing, just a fine elocutionist not taking his pills.
A few weeks ago on the downtown number 1 train a man beside me, who looked perfectly ordinary, suddenly leaned forward and said to the a man across from him, “You got somethin’ ta say? You want to reach in my pocket? You gonna stare at me?” His voice was loud and full of menace. The man across from him got up and moved down a few seats. The man next to me shouted: “Yeah, he’s lookin’ at ME! This whole train fulla sex perverts and homosexuals and he’s gonna look at ME? Yeah, he’s the one. Are you a sex pervert, sir? You a homosexual? “Cause I know I’m not!”
The whole train glazed over. The lady across from me stared into space but I saw one of her eyebrows rise. I was glad when the man got off the train and I think everyone else must have been too. I thought about my friend Charlie Schick, and how, when he was in a Tennessee Williams play a month ago, he took the train in his makeup and costume. The makeup made him look like an old man in ratty clothes, and he carried a cane that had cracked and been repaired by winding duct tape around it. He sat on the crowded train like that. An old lady got on and he got up and offered her his seat. The old lady said something like, “Well, you old too, and you got a cane, so you sit yourself back down.”
Charlie found that lots of people believed the makeup. In a bodega somebody called him “Pops.” He went home in the makeup and decided to knock at the door and see what Regina would say. She’s his wife, but when she looked through the peephole and saw him, even she didn’t know who he was for a minute. I saw Charlie like that in the play, and it seemed to me he was just made for Tennessee Williams.
He was forty-something, with a trim gray beard and short-cropped hair and wearing a tan overcoat that he held closed at the neck with his fist. “Anything will help out,” he said. “A penny, a dime, or a folded dollar bill.” He walked through the car and his voice got a little rougher. “Yeah, okay! You all know what it is, right? Yeah, he got a promotion, that’s right! They wanted to say that I’m on security detail. That’s what they said! I’ll tell you what. They just wanted me down here in the subway! That’s right! But I haven’t got a nickel. That’s the truth. I haven’t got a nickel! I haven’t got a nickel and any one of them who tells you something different is a LIAR.”
The train stopped at 42nd Street and he got off with the big wave of people that poured out, the way it happens at 42nd Street, and his last words hung in the air as crowds of other people poured in, oblivious. Something about him was different from other train beggars, I thought, but it took a moment to figure out just what the difference was. And what it was, I realized, was his diction. He had perfect, precise, impeccable diction. And it was not just the diction either, but the way his words came together when he said, “I haven’t got a nickel!” That little sentence and the way he pronounced it and everything else he said made me think of Jimmy Stewart. I did not think he was pretending; he wasn’t. But everything about him somehow brought to my mind a play, written in the 1950s, about a man with a lot of troubles.
One evening some years ago I was walking to see a play in a little West Side theater in Hell’s Kitchen, near 10th Avenue. All of sudden I heard screams coming from a three or four story tenement building across the street from where I was, and someone shouting, “I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya!” Another terrible scream followed and I stood there, paralyzed on the sidewalk. I looked around for a pay phone, thinking: My heavens! Someone has just been stabbed or worse in there! There was not a single other person on the street, but in the next block over I could see the yellow and red awning of a bodega and a pay phone out front, and I thought: I better hurry before the killer comes canon balling out that door and sees me standing here! And I actually felt the hairs on my neck stand up. I started to walk, very fast, but at that moment there were more screams, and then: “I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya!”
It was exactly the same thing, happening again. I stopped and listened. I heard a woman’s voice say, “Could you put more emphasis in there when you say that line? I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya! OK? Let’s do it again.” And then the scream came. I felt a tremendous relief. I walked on, very glad that I had not called 911. How real that seemed, while I stood there truly believing that I was overhearing somebody being murdered in a crummy tenement just like something I might read in the Post. The man on the train I think was probably the real thing, just a fine elocutionist not taking his pills.
A few weeks ago on the downtown number 1 train a man beside me, who looked perfectly ordinary, suddenly leaned forward and said to the a man across from him, “You got somethin’ ta say? You want to reach in my pocket? You gonna stare at me?” His voice was loud and full of menace. The man across from him got up and moved down a few seats. The man next to me shouted: “Yeah, he’s lookin’ at ME! This whole train fulla sex perverts and homosexuals and he’s gonna look at ME? Yeah, he’s the one. Are you a sex pervert, sir? You a homosexual? “Cause I know I’m not!”
The whole train glazed over. The lady across from me stared into space but I saw one of her eyebrows rise. I was glad when the man got off the train and I think everyone else must have been too. I thought about my friend Charlie Schick, and how, when he was in a Tennessee Williams play a month ago, he took the train in his makeup and costume. The makeup made him look like an old man in ratty clothes, and he carried a cane that had cracked and been repaired by winding duct tape around it. He sat on the crowded train like that. An old lady got on and he got up and offered her his seat. The old lady said something like, “Well, you old too, and you got a cane, so you sit yourself back down.”
Charlie found that lots of people believed the makeup. In a bodega somebody called him “Pops.” He went home in the makeup and decided to knock at the door and see what Regina would say. She’s his wife, but when she looked through the peephole and saw him, even she didn’t know who he was for a minute. I saw Charlie like that in the play, and it seemed to me he was just made for Tennessee Williams.
LOREN'S ROOM
Walking by the little parking lot at the corner of 6th Avenue and 17th Street (where a weekend flea market used to be) and finding it empty and fenced, I felt blue. It wasn't my favorite flea but I liked it just the same. On one of my last walks through, I came upon an old issue of Time magazine from January 1953, and read in it the following item: “LOREN MACIVER, 43, started painting her personal world with a child's vivid imagination at three and is still going strong. A shy, blue-jeaned figure who roams Manhattan in winter and enjoys the seacoast in summer, she paints sand dunes, dilapidated beach shacks, blistered city sidewalks and budding trees. Most of the time her subjects become misty, almost phosphorescent fantasies. Sometimes she turns sharply realistic and does a meticulous study of a battered window shade or a pair of old shoes. One of her best: Emmett Kelly, a sympathetic portrait of the sad-eyed circus clown.”
And I remembered Loren telling me about Emmett Kelly herself a dozen years ago or so in her yellow-painted bedroom on the top floor of number 61 Perry Street. Thanks to him, Loren said, she was allowed to hang around the circus right up close and make a whole bunch of drawings. He was a real pal, Emmett Kelly was, and the portrait she made of him ended up on the cover of Life magazine in July 1947.
Loren was someplace in her eighties when she told me the story, but she was like a kid in a lot of ways. I can still conjure up her voice in my head. It was low, rich like honey, and very easy on the ears. She told me that on the opening night of the Big Top, she stood among the ropes and sandbags and watched as just a few feet away Marlene Dietrich mounted a magnificent white horse. Loren smiled up at her. And Dietrich looked down at Loren and winked. Then she rode out into the big ring to start the first night of the circus in Manhattan. Loren said that little exchange, just between the two of them and the wink, was a thousand times better than anything that could have been spoken in words.
She had hundreds of little stories like that. There was nothing more pleasant than going to hear her tell them, sitting side by side on the edge of her bed in her pretty bedroom with the marble fireplace, where she had been sleeping since 1938. She had some Beatrix Potter figurines sitting on the mantle that had so delighted Dylan Thomas when he first saw them that he clapped. And he wrote some of his finest poems in that very room. Loren told me how the chimneysweep used to come and use old corsets called Mae Wests to clean the chimney, and that Alexander Calder would come over and bring champagne and marshmallows after the chimney was swept and a fire was blazing. She said he used to drive around in an old Rolls Royce, delivering his sculptures. Her friend e.e.cummings lived nearby in the little mews over by the Jefferson Market Library, and hanging above her fireplace was a beautiful little painting of a carousel that he had made and given to her. Sometimes she said, “I think e.e. would have liked you and that you would have liked him.” And that was magic. Even if she was only saying it to please me, it made me feel as if it were true. She told me how several afternoons a week she would walk over to e.e. cummings’ place at five o’clock for tea and cookies. He was probably the only person living in the Village who didn’t drink, she said. Everyone else sure did. Loren drank with Dylan Thomas and she drank with Dawn Powell, and she made me laugh one night telling me about the time she and Dawn Powell went out to eat and the host told them to wait at the bar for a table to open up. They sat and downed a few and when he came back and said, “Ladies, your table is ready,” Dawn replied, “Thanks, I’ll crawl right under it.”
Sometimes we talked in her studio and she let me sit at the piano that once upon a time Billie Holiday used to play a lot just for the fun of it. That was magic too, like the studio itself, especially on nights with moonlight coming through the big skylight, or with rain pounding on it.
She told me about painting a big mural of butterflies and fish in the library of the steamship Argentina, for which she and her husband Lloyd Frankenberg got free passage to France. And then in Paris they both fell terribly ill and a young nun came every day free of charge to look after them in the little room they had, and they’d fill her pockets with sweets. She told me that once in Venice she wore a real Chanel suit in a gondola, and about some friends who had a big white kitty so beautiful they decided to give her an ugly name just to balance things out. I said, “What did they call her?” And Loren said: “McGurk.”
She told me about telling off Evelyn Waugh at a party because he was just so pompous she finally couldn’t stand it anymore. And about Greta Garbo, who she knew, she just shook her head and said very quietly: “Poor sad creature.” Sometimes though, Loren just felt like watching Entertainment Tonight, which she called “The Silly Program,” and so that’s what we did.
It was nice to ring the buzzer and hear Loren ask, “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Romy,” I’d say. And she would exclaim, “Hooray!”
Somehow, even though I know she gave that to many, she had a way of making it sound, every visit, like the first time she ever said it.
Down on LaGuardia Place the other day I passed by the statue of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and the café behind it and thought of my friend Buffie. She liked that statue and she had liked the actual man when he was the mayor. Sometimes we used to sit in that café and watch the world go by. She lived over on Greene Street in a big loft full of paintbrushes and books, where she was from the early 1970s until she died in 2006. She was a painter and a scholar, and she was also a socialite. She knew hundreds of interesting and famous people and her gossip was much better than average even though so many of the people she was talking about had already been dead for a very long time. She had a certain way of smiling when she told a certain kind of story that was so contagious it was impossible for me to not smile myself whenever I saw it appear on her face.Buffie told me that once upon a time she went to a birthday party for Greta Garbo in the apartment on Sutton Place where Garbo lived. She said Garbo looked at her and said in her slow Swedish accent, “Well, well, what have we here?” Buffie found it insulting so she ignored her. She said she always regretted doing that, looking back on it. “I might have been Garbo’s lover,” she said. And she pronounced the word “lov-ah” in the same manner that she pronounced the word “again” so it rhymed with “rain.” I could always make Buffie laugh with a little rhyme that my father liked, which went: “There once was a lady from Spain who liked to make love on the train. Not once in a while, but mile after mile, and again and again and again.”
It made Buffie laugh every time because nothing in this world appealed to her more than talking about lovers. She loved to tell stories about people she’d had affairs with, or didn’t have affairs with. She told me about an affair with a football player named Johnny Blood who took her up in an airplane and buzzed Honolulu and then filled her full of coconut wine in a big pink hotel on Waikiki Beach when it was still almost pristine. She told me about how she once gave Pablo Picasso two kittens and that he would paint with them hanging off his trousers. She said that Henry Miller couldn’t stand her and that she couldn’t stand him either.
She told me about Princess Aspasia of Greece (Queen of Greece until her husband died of a monkey bite) who she met in a bar one night near Saint Mark’s Square in Venice. Princess Aspasia hypnotized Buffie by telling her that she was the granddaughter of a mermaid. She said her grandfather found her grandmother washed up like a fish on the beach and carried her home. Buffie was spending her long summer holiday in Venice where she had rented a marvelous palazzo with the most beautiful bottleglass windows “on the Grand Canal, if you please,” and she had it all to herself for $75 a month. Princess Aspasia became completely smitten with Buffie and wanted to have a love affair with her.
“Did Princess Aspasia visit you at the palazzo?” I asked her.
“No!” said Buffie. She had an island!”
Princess Aspasia offered Buffie a splendid tour of Austria but Buffie had other plans and so it didn’t happen--but it could have.
She had an affair with Lawrence Durrell who she said was the best one of them all, but when she went with him to London to visit TS Eliot, Larry made her wait outside while he went in and she was furious. She had a one-night stand with Jane Bowles in Paris, who she first saw on the terrace of the Café Flor. All of her gestures had great charm, Buffie said, “But once you got to know her she was a pain in the neck. And I got to know her very well the first time I met her.” She said that Jane was overly dependent upon Paul Bowles and very insecure. She said she was an awful drunk and that she always embroidered the truth. She said that Paul was always stoned on half-cut kif when she had the apartment right beneath his in Tangier, and that Tangier was just crawling with beautiful hustlers.
She showed me a picture of herself standing beside her friend Carl Jung, and told me how once he and Sigmund Freud sat in Freud’s study talking for thirteen hours until a glass sitting on a bookcase shattered by psychic force.
One day Buffie and I sat outside at the little café behind the statue of Fiorello LaGuardia with tea and I told her another little rhyme my father liked that went: “My favorite pastime after dark is goosing statues in the park. If Joan of Arc could take it, so can you.” Buffie reached over and squeezed my hand and said: “I love you.” A lady with a very big behind passed by just then, and Buffie followed her with her eyes. Then she turned to me and said, “Either she cultivates it or she’s unaware.”
As I passed the statue, I realized that every time I pass it I think of Buffie. I couldn’t have known I would back then when we were sitting there together, it just was what it was: walking over from Greene Street and bringing tea to one of the tables outside and sitting for a while. One day Buffie looked at the statue and said, “What do you suppose they called Fiorello at home for short?” I think it was autumn, the day she said that, and after she did, she sat chewing her finger. And I said, “What are you doing, trying to pull off a hangnail?” And Buffie said, “No, I’m depositing spittle on it.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
