PART 6: GOODBYE 10024

PART 6 GOODBYE 10024

While I was away at Edgewood, we moved. Or more accurately, my parents moved; I was not part of the decision or the process. I learned of it one Thursday evening when my mother called me at Edgewood to tell me not to come home to where I still though our home was. She gave me, instead, a new address: 2West 67th Street.

            It wasn’t in 10024.

But it was in 10023, not so far away. It was, not coincidentally, where the Carrs had lived for thirty years, and at first glance it was indistinguishable from the phalanx of imposing old apartment buildings that line Central Park West, except that for two things: its entrance was not on the avenue but on the crowded side street, which cab drivers hated, and half its windows were 25 feet high, giving onto two-story living rooms that had been designed as artists’ studios.

           Built in 1918, the building was a 15-story structure with two elevators, one for the 30 park-facing apartments and one for hoi polloi, like us. Our new apartment, like our old one om 77th, had two bedrooms and only one bath, but the living room was enormous. And though it faced 67^th Street, it had a great view of the truly iconic building across the street, the Hotel Des Artistes. Its name might sound pretentious, but it was merely descriptive; the Des Artistes was built as an artists’ cooperative, and it too had double-height windows to provide light for the studios of its many painters, Childe Hassam and Norman Rockwell being the most famous. But other notables had lived there: Noel Coward, Isadora Duncan, and the illustrator Howard Chandler Christy, who, in lieu of paying rent, painted murals for the ground-floor restaurant where the residents dined. In fact, our building had been built as part of the same project, by a consortium of artists who apparently wanted to make Central Park West what Greenwich Village in fact became, Manhattan’s epicenter of the plastic arts. Indeed, what those two buildings had in abundance that many Village studios lacked was light, flooding in from the unobstructed sky over Central Park.

Many New Yorkers lived in “hotels” until the war, where families occupied separate apartments but ate communally, because in those days, before food became the obsession it is today, very rich people employed cooks but most of the upper crust ate in their building’s dining room. Christy’s murals for the space that later became the Café des Artistes are a fantasy of naked, sun-dappled woodland nymphs. Peter Carr told me that the model whom Christy had used for all the bodies of his subjects was still alive (this was in the 60’s) and could be found almost every afternoon sipping an aperitif at a table under a depiction of her younger self, the only one that portrayed her face. But Peter liked to make up stories, so I can’t vouch for it.

                                 

The Cafe Des Artistes as it looks today.

 2 West was the first building I could remember living in that had elevators, and manually operated ones at that-- the old-fashioned kind with sliding metal gates, through which you could watch the floors going by. The elevator men were a crew of elderly Irishmen right out of Central Casting, each of whom spoke with a rich, authentic brogue. Once, when I was home from Cornell on a vacation, I mentioned to one of them, Brian Callahan, that I was taking a course on Joyce. “Jimmy Joyce?” he exclaimed. “I knew him. We was at Trinity College together. Wonderful poet, but his prose is feckin’ unreadable!” I told my professor, Robert Martin Adams, about Brian, and he gave me a list of references to Dublin places in Portrait fo the Artist and Ulysses that he’d been unable to track down himself – what, for example, was the South Circular? Back in New York between semesters, I rode up and down with Brian for four hours one night, working my way through the list of queries, and he supplied answers to most of them. But Adams had done a little digging on his own, and he told me that the records of Trinity College contained no trace of Brian. The information, however, was solid, and much of it appeared in his book on Joyce when it appeared.

 Moving to Central Park West put my parents socially on par with their friends, and their friends’ children became my friends. Now in addition to Jeff, my crew came to include David and Michael Bennahum, who lived next door at 65 Central Park West; Alice Kinzler, further up on CPW; and Susan Strasberg, daughter of Lee, the founder of the Group Theater. That requires a bit of explanation. Dad wrote over twenty plays, and though none of them was ever produced, he was in the social and professional orbit of that famous organization, whose members  included the playwright Clifford Odets, the director Elia Kazan, the actors Stella Adler and her brother Luther, and the producer Harold Clurman. During the 1930’s, the company produced socially conscious plays that were politically far enough to the left to interest Congress during the McCarthy era. Odets’s Waiting for Lefty almost caused a riot at one of its previews; it was about cab drivers being exploited by their bosses, and this performance was a benefit for cab drivers, who were so aroused by what they saw and heard on stage that they poured out of the theater shouting "Strike! Strike!" 

The Group espoused the dictates of Konstantin Stanislavsky, which came to be known as “The Method,” but it was not perfectly clear what the method was. A doctrinal dispute occurred when Stella Adler, convinced that Strasberg had totally misunderstood the great Russian’s theories, took herself to the Moscow Art Theatre to receive his blessings first-hand, returning triumphantly to announce that she had gotten it right and Strasberg hadn’t. Eventually, she left the Group and instead of pursuing her career as an actress, founded her own acting studio, which became the Holy Grail of young actors, despite the fact that she was notoriously, even cruelly insulting to them.

She and my mother were great friends, and when I was almost out of college and wondering what to do with my life, she offered me a scholarship to her acting school, but I knew my strengths by that time, and acting was not one of them. (I did make my professional stage debut when I was in my 60’s, in a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I played the Stationmaster – a part that consisted of nine lines.) Stella was haughty and imperious, just the kind of celebrity my mother loved, and loved to talk about. One evening, after spending the afternoon with Stella, she told me that they had encountered Zero Mostel by chance. As soon as he spied them, on the sidewalk outside Tiffany’s, Zero sank to his knees before them, spread his arms, and brayed out “Stella! Come back! The children and I can’t live without you.”

“Zero, stop it! Go away,” she told him, but he was undeterred; he followed them for blocks – on his knees, my mother swore. He was a very persuasive actor, and before long a crowd had collected; people were saying things like “That poor man!” and “What a bitch she must be!”

A postcard Stella sent my mother from Italy.

Another Group Theater alumnus with whom my parents were close was the actor John Garfield. That was his movie-star name, but he had grown up as Jules Garfinkle, and everyone called him Julie. One summer, we shared a house on Fire Island with him and his wife Robbie and their daughter Julie and son David. The kids too young to interest me, but Robbie was a pistol, funny and sexy. She was the first person I ever heard use the word "orgasm" in ordinary conversation. That summer, Big Julie was doing summer stock in New Jersey, starring in a revival of Golden Boy – an Odets play about a man who has to make an improbable choice between prize-fighting and playing the violin – but he spent his weekends with us. The thing I remember most clearly about him is that he was constantly chewing gum, and snapping it, which drove Robbie nuts. “Jesus Christ, Julie!” she’d yell. “Will you stop with the gum? You don’t even chew gum!” But he kept right on doing it. On Labor Day weekend we all drove down to New Jersey to see his show, and in Act 2, wouldn’t you know that he was chewing gum on stage? And when another character made a cutting remark to him, his reply was to snap it, which he did loudly enough to fill the theater. Well, he’d had all summer to rehearse, hadn’t he?

 Every New Year’s Eve, the Strasbergs gave a huge party filled with celebrities. Because I was semi-friends with their daughter Susan, who was just my age, I got invited along with my parents. Susan had been carefully groomed to be the Toast of Broadway; after graduating from the Professional Children’s School and the High School of Performing Arts, she starred, at 18, in The Diary of Anne Frank, and won a Tony nomination. But that was the high point of her career. She had a couple of plays and movies after that, but never much success. We weren’t close, she seemed unapproachable whenever I saw her, and always a little sad. On New Year’s Eve, there she’d be, a tiny figure surrounded by what resembled the Red Carpet at the Oscars, famous people fabulously dressed. Everyone who was anyone on the stage or on the screen was there, including Marilyn Monroe. One year, I spied my father deep in conversation with Kim Novak, who was not yet an A-list star (Vertigo hadn’t yet been made), but a woman who certainly fit my idea of what a movie star should look like. I remember her as being about seven feet tall, with pink hair and an amazing amount of cleavage on display.  It wasn’t surprising that she and my father had things in common to talk about; they were both from Chicago, and he’d been a screenwriter. And when he wanted to turn it on, his charm was potent; Dad was a tall and handsome man. He beckoned me over to where they stood, and as soon as I got there, he walked away. I think he was trying to give me a treat, face-time with a goddess, but I was so dumbstruck, I couldn’t speak, and she had to suppress a laugh.

When I went away to college, I didn’t miss New York as much as I thought I would. It was still fun to come home for vacations, particularly since the apartment on 67th Street was big enough to contain me and my parents without continual bickering (except about bathroom privileges). The parting between me and 10024 was amicable; the neighborhood couldn’t have cared less, and I was looking forward to all the things going away to college was supposed to promise: new friends, parties, football games, sex.