by Sarah Vowell
Sinatra eventually hears the song. But with Shirak’s luck, it’s only after his book has gone to press. Which is why the book’s denouement is Shirak’s introduction to his cassette: He reads aloud the letter he received from Sinatra that says, “What a nice tribute.”
The most stunning item in Shirak’s pages is a photograph he found in his parents’ basement. It is such a perfectly symbolic image, you can hardly believe it exists as a physical object. It pictures a young, frail Frank Sinatra sitting cross-legged on the boardwalk in Hoboken, looking across the Hudson at Manhattan. The boy’s gaunt face wears a mask of resolve. He leans forward, but just slightly, as if he is on the verge of standing up, as if his gangly arms and legs are willing themselves to that place where his heart already is. It is difficult, after you see that haunting portrait, to imagine the young Frank Sinatra as anything other than Gatsby staring at the green light at the end of the pier.
You forget that there are still folks in this town who knew Sinatra as a young man (a very well-dressed young man, of course, but still resolutely one of them). Leo DiTerlizzo, of Leo’s Grandevous, is such a person. Walking into his bar at Second and Grand on a Saturday night is like stepping into a fan letter. The walls of this comfortable, broken-in room are covered with dozens of framed images of Frank, including an especially aw-shucks shot of the singer holding a puppy, and an unintentionally grotesque green painting of him which lords over a jukebox dominated by his CDs. Leo is the owner, the bartender, and a boyhood friend of Frank’s. He tells me that the man himself has sat at this bar on two occasions, that he has visited Leo’s home upstairs, and that Leo just spoke to him by telephone two weeks earlier and that Frank’s feeling fine. Leo is a lovely, soft-spoken man who never stops moving behind the bar, filling drinks and joking with the waitresses, shuffling around to his old friend’s voice.
Unfortunately, Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” was on when I came inside, but a few quarters later I got my faves, like “That’s Life” and “I Get a Kick out of You” and, of course, “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week).” Who says happiness never comes cheap? A jukebox stocked with Sinatra can turn your world around.
I ask Leo if the woman standing next to Frank in the photograph over the bar is Dolly, Sinatra’s locally infamous mother. Leo responds, “That’s my wife.” (Obviously, years of listening to Sinatra haven’t made me any more suave.) I ask him what his favorite song is and put it on the jukebox as an apology. It’s “Summer Wind,” a song I’ve heard a thousand times, which does not mean that I ever paid attention. You can live with a tune for years and it never seeps in; it just lingers, waiting to be noticed. Normally, I prefer the Frank extremes—either vainglorious or defeated, the macho thrill of “Come Dance with Me” or that rock-bottom classic “When No One Cares.”
“Summer Wind” is an in-between song. It’s relaxed, seductive. The arrangement is perfect, the voice sexy and dear. Frank’s old pal Leo, who has been married for fifty-nine years, sways ever so slightly to its pretty pulse, occasionally mouthing the words. Watching him, watching what looks to be a picture of contentment, makes you wonder about the man Frank Sinatra might have been if he had never crossed the river, if he had never sung this song. Maybe he would still be married to the mother of his children. Maybe he would be as blissful as this hardworking Leo appears to be, though where would that leave Leo, not to mention the rest of us? We would all be doomed to waste away in one stifling Margaritaville after another with no sweet, blue breeze on our skin. Leo says, “I go upstairs, and I go to sleep, and I dream Sinatra.”
If you were born Somebody, you might expect that. You might expect starring roles in other people’s dreams. If you were born Somewhere, hubris would come easy. But if you are Nowhere’s child, hubris is an import, pride a thing you decide to acquire. That’s what all the punks know. That’s why a cocksure Patti Smith could cover “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” and sound as if she wrote the song herself. That’s why the then completely unknown Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney could sing “I’m the queen of rock and roll” and make you believe her. And it’s why you buy the chutzpah of Hoboken’s Frank Sinatra when he sings a silly song like “New York, New York” and tells you he’ll be “top of the heap.” One thing punk—and Sinatra especially—never does is take that kind of self-confidence for granted. Because anyone who comes from Nowhere knows how easy it would be to go right back.
Chelsea Girl
THERE ARE TWO STATUES OF Liberty in New York—the one for immigrants out on Liberty Island, and the one for weirdos at 222 West Twenty-third Street. One might imagine that the marker tacked onto the Chelsea Hotel’s Victorian facade proclaims, “Give me your junkies, your geniuses, your men in eye makeup, yearning to lay low.” But the real sign lacks any Emma Lazarus pizzazz. It straightforwardly announces that the historic landmark “opened in 1884 as one of the city’s earliest cooperative apartment houses,” became a hotel in 1905, and has been the refuge of the relatively respectable literary lights O. Henry, Dylan Thomas, and Thomas Wolfe. (What? You were expecting they’d advertise Sid Vicious?)
The list of Chelsea residents past is so impressive as to appear fictitious. Mark Twain slept here. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey here. Robert Mapplethorpe showed up with his lover Patti Smith, way back in the days when Robert Mapplethorpe would have had a lover named Patti. Teen movie actress Gaby Hoffmann of Sleepless in Seattle semifame spent her childhood here with her mother, Viva, the Warhol Superstar. American folk chronicler and filmmaker Harry Smith wiggled his way around a room bursting with his collections of Ukrainian Easter eggs and Seminole dresses. Depending on your theory of what happened in Room 100, Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen here, or Nancy killed herself, or somebody broke in and killed Nancy, leaving Sid to take the blame. Bob Dylan was here in the mid-’60s, around his Blonde on Blonde heyday, flirting with Edie Sedgwick, whose amphetamines and pearls he may or may not have been singing about in “Just Like a Woman.” And thanks to Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death here, and Sedgwick, the It-Girl-turned-burn-victim who set her room on fire, it is the only hotel I can think of where people unfamiliar with New York know the name of the nearest hospital—St. Vincent’s—because the phrase “rushed to St. Vincent’s” tends to pop up in Chelsea lore.
At the Chelsea, famous and infamous are often confused, as are eccentricity and crime. The anything-goes atmosphere isn’t without its hazards. Arthur Miller, one of the great moralists of the American century, spent much of the ’60s living here, attending what he calls the “ceaseless Chelsea party.” In his autobiography, Timebends, Miller describes walking into the lobby back then and encountering an agitated young woman handing out leaflets which outlined her ambition to shoot a man, any man. He writes, “I said to the management that this woman was going to kill somebody and maybe something ought to be done about her before she exploded, but she was a member of the party, it seemed, and it wouldn’t do to be too square about it.” Which was too bad for a certain Pope of Pop; the woman turned out to be Valerie Solanas, and she shot a man (sort of) named Andy Warhol in 1968.
The Chelsea seems to attract all the best people—the best painters, the best singers, the best killers. Its appeal is a mystery. For who knows what lies in the heart of a place—a few rooms in a fairly crummy part of town—that became a beacon to so many tattered troubadours. Any old youth hostel could harbor penniless punks. But composer Virgil Thomson, too? And Arthur Miller, he of the Pulitzer prize? What gives?
Though the Chelsea’s rep is that of a dorm of the dispossessed, it is a hotel, with rooms and reservations and check-ins and everything. I show up on the Fourth of July as an Arthur Miller joke. As Miller wrote about the hotel, “It was not part of America, had no vacuum cleaners, no rules, no taste, no shame.” True to form, on our national holiday, it has no red, no white, no blue. That night, as I return from watching fireworks around midnight, I make some quip to a man who lives on my floor like, “Well, we
ll, another year for our nation.” He says, “For your nation maybe. Me, I celebrate Canada Day.” It was the sort of treasonous claptrap I should have expected from this embassy of insurgents.
Such are the random encounters of the Chelsea Hotel: One minute you’re bathing in the aura of Dylan Thomas, the next minute you’re drowning in sticky goo. One afternoon a friend and I are sitting in the lobby. A woman who lives in the hotel sits in a chair next to us. She proceeds to transport the contents of a cup of lemonade into a bottle, the reverse of the standard bottle-to-cup operating procedure. Of course lemonade and ice spill everywhere, all over the floor, all over the table next to us. When she catches us staring at her mess, she justifies it, harping, “You think this is a mess? New York is a mess! Why should it matter if I spill anything inside? The whole city is a dump! I’m not pretending the inside is any different than the outside anymore!”
Away from the lobby’s camaraderie, the Chelsea’s public gang-ways—the elevators, the stairwell, the halls—are among the creepiest psychic spaces in town. I didn’t want to let down my guard, let myself relax, almost as if I were still out on the street keeping my wits about me. Maybe it’s because I know the late William S. Burroughs used to haunt, I mean live, here, but I can’t shake the watch-your-back imperative: as if, any second, Burroughs, or someone similarly croaky, will creak open one of the doors and tap my shoulder with the bony hand of death. And after a staredown with a disquieting ghoul in the elevator, I start taking the stairs down, racing past flight after flight hung with the brushstrokes of madmen that are the tenants’ paintings, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “bad hotel art.”
The botanical beauty of the stairs’ famous ironwork would be well worth a lingering look, but every time I leave my room, a voice in my head whispers, Keep it moving.
My room, marked 923 in ballpoint on a crumbling index card taped to the door, is an Edward Hopper painting waiting to happen. So Hopperesque, in fact, that upon entering I feel a need to put on a grimy old slip and slump into the dusty armchair so that I can stare wantonly at the wall. The drapes are caked with enough dirt to house a medium-size ant farm; the rug is salted with the dander of life; the bathroom might have crumbled but for the architectural support offered by other people’s hair. Though the television has cable (a new development), the remote control does not work. Another concession to progress, a professional hotel telephone, exists for the sole purpose of receiving other guests’ voice mail, several of whom were invited to a Brooklyn barbecue at “the Delgados’ “on the Fourth, not that they would ever find out. And taking up most of the counter space of the “kitchenette” is a hot plate—is there a sadder appliance on the face of the earth?—pining for ramen, soup cans, and other suicide food. At least I end up facing Twenty-third Street: Dylan Thomas got stuck in a dark room at the back on his final trip and everybody knows what happened to him.
I’m no neat freak. It’s just that, like a lot of people from working-class backgrounds, I don’t particularly romanticize squalor. Just because I have dirty little books by Jean Genet on my shelves at home, doesn’t mean there aren’t cleaning products labeled “antibacterial” under the sink.
At the Chelsea, I know from the first night that my impulse to wear shoes at all times I’m not in bed is sound when my left sneaker crunches down on something as I’m talking on the phone. A quick, horrified glance down at my foot reveals the roommate who would keep me company for my entire five-day boho holiday: a condom wrapper, empty. I consider throwing it away, but that would require touching it.
Often in hotels, I entertain myself falling asleep imagining my room’s past occupants. Were there honeymooners? Lonesome businessmen? One-night stands? Incognito Sally Field–type mothers on the lam from abusive husbands? In anonymous hotels, anything could have happened. At the Chelsea, I’m armed with too much information. History is a two-way street. I wanted to stay here because it’s where Patti Smith was getting her act together on the verge of her album Horses, where Mark Twain cracked wise, where William Burroughs was up to God knows what. But every night when I turn off the light, all I can think of is Nancy Spungen’s blood, seeping.
In Alex Cox’s biopic Sid and Nancy, the ex–Sex Pistols bassist and his bleach-blond girlfriend get kicked from one Chelsea room to another thanks to fire (Sid never got famous for originality, and in ’78 blazes at the Chelsea were so ’65). In the movie’s best line, the bellman looks Sid in the eye and piously intones, “Bob Dylan was born here.” Though patently untrue (as Virgil Thomson said about his once neighbor in Jean Stein’s Edie, Dylan “is a perfectly nice Jewish high-school graduate from Hibbing, Minnesota, who speaks correctly and with manners”), there’s a cosmic veracity to the whopper.
Could all these Who’s Whos just be drawn to the building? “I would like to think that management had something to do with it,” grins manager Stanley Bard. If the Chelsea is a cuckoo’s nest, Bard is its anti–Nurse Ratched, a trim, deadpan man with melancholy eyes. He’s considerate, congenial, and inordinately proud of the hotel, proud of its clientele. Indeed, despite the hotel’s reputation for bohemian excess, Bard has an air of what can only be called respectability. How can such an upstanding man tend this barnyard of black sheep? Then again, Bard’s inherent straight-arrow work ethic must be the reason the Chelsea manages to remain standing no matter how many Edies there are about to burn it down. His smallish frame is a formidable wall for all the crazy balls to bounce off.
If there is one story to be gleaned from the Chelsea Hotel, it is the story of tolerance, even when tolerance isn’t necessarily called for. It is the story of one family, a dynasty now, three generations in an increasingly homogenous, multinational, corporate world who, through passion, a sense of history, and long hours, remain resolutely local, personal, and, for better or worse, unique. Says singer Debbie Harry, who frequented the place during her Blondie days, “I think it’s a miracle it hasn’t been taken over by Ramada or something.”
The Chelsea is strictly mom-and-pop. Or, more precisely, father and son. Stanley Bard’s father David took over the hotel in 1939. Stanley Bard came on in 1957, assuming management in 1964, when his father died. Bard calls the Chelsea his father’s “second child.” He says that as a little boy—he was five the first time he set foot in the Chelsea—he was often jealous of his architectural sibling: “My mother would drag me down here as a little child to see him.” (“I used to love to ride the lift,” he says, proving that he is, in effect, now working in what used to be his playground.) But in those days, his father worked “fifteen to twenty hours a day.” Which didn’t stop him from putting his own children through the same form of orphanhood when he took over. “I’m here very often twelve to fifteen hours every day,” he sighs. And now he runs the place with his son, David, who has worked here for nearly a decade.
Stanley Bard talks about his tenants with paternal pride. He boasts, “I’ve had the pleasure of knowing these people, knowing them well, and seeing their development.” He sounds more like a guidance counselor from Fame than a service-industry bureaucrat. “I try to understand their needs,” he says. “We’re very compassionate. Creative people need that. They need to feel that they’re being considered; they need to feel that they are happy in their surroundings.” Three decades of dealing with the freakier angels and devils of our culture has left Bard bilingual in English and Artspeak. Not that I’ve chatted up that many hotel managers, but I can’t imagine many of them throwing around the terminology of painting as nonchalantly as Stanley Bard. “I’ve seen all the movements,” he points out. “The pop movement. The neorealistic movement.”
When Bard names names, he breaks his famous tenants down by medium. You can tell he’s rattled off the list so often and so fast that he’s stitched each discipline into one huge Frankensteinian art monster. “Just in painting and sculpture,” he chirps, “deKooningDavidSmithJasperJohnsLarryRiversChristo. And in acting, SarahBernhardtJaneFondaElliottGouldKrisKristofferson. A lot of nice people
.”
It’s obvious that one of the joys of Bard’s job is the intellectual challenge involved in thirty years of keeping up his end of the conversation. “Christo was a person who I really didn’t understand. He wrapped everything in his room. One of his early works: He used to wrap his wife, Jeanne-Claude. A beautiful woman. And I said, ‘Christo, I don’t understand. What are you trying to say?’ Because I used to question everyone. They felt sorry for me and my lack of knowledge. He said, ‘You look at a woman and you just accept her. They’re really beautiful objects. So what better way could I do by showing my art by wrapping a beautiful woman?’ ”
Something tells me they aren’t having this conversation over at the Grand Hyatt uptown.
I find myself staring at that condom wrapper every time I am in the room. I keep humming Leonard Cohen’s song “Chelsea Hotel #2,” his supposed ode to Janis Joplin. Its beginning is sweet enough—“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel”—then gets rather to the point: “Giving me head on the unmade bed.” Gosh. Call me picky, but after nearly a week with someone else’s sexual detritus, I decide that Cohen’s word-picture is fine enough subject matter for a pop song but not fine at all as a situation, as a fact of hostelry.
After I get over the initial gross-out, my bourgeois alarm goes off. Am I being too middle class? A prude? Of course, in any other hotel, I’d call the front desk immediately to complain. But staying at the Chelsea necessarily involves a certain self-reflection. In other words, if this was good enough for Arthur Miller, shouldn’t it be good enough for the lesser likes of me? When Miller wrote that the Chelsea was outside of America, didn’t he mean outside of McCarthyite America? The bad one? That “no vacuum cleaners, no rules” bit of his—wasn’t that a slam against all that is small-minded and neatnik and shackled? Like, isn’t my preconception that this erotic garbage should have been thrown away before my arrival a . . . rule, man?