The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York

by Caro, Robert A

At Jones Beach, Robert Moses could offer his guests cruising or fishing from his yacht, swimming at his private beach (the section then reserved for his use), and not only paddle tennis and shuffleboard and archery and roller skating but horseback riding, tennis and golf—the livery stables, rows of tennis courts and magnificently groomed golf courses of Beth-page State Park were only twelve minutes away by chauffeured Park Commission limousines. He could offer them the finest food and liquor; having built a $300,000 Boardwalk Restaurant, he turned it over, without competitive bidding, to a young concessionaire who had caught his eye—on terms so liberal that the people of the state might as well have given it to the young concessionaire as a gift.* In return, the concessionaire gave Moses one: he entertained Moses' guests, so many guests and so lavishly that the annual cost can only be guessed at; no complete tabulation has ever been made, but one incomplete tabulation (discovered in the concessionaire's files) shows that during one six-year period, at least $179,215—and probably considerably more—was spent on such entertainment.f

  * During the i96o's, the Boardwalk Restaurant burned down. Moses built a new one, at a cost of $1,500,000, and, without competitive bidding, turned it over to the same concessionaire—at a rental of $18,000 per year, an amount which, an auditor noted, was "not even enough to amortize the construction cost."

  t Each year, the concessionaire made $80,000 available to be mingled with $75,000 from the Park Commission in a separate bank account for "Alterations" and "Special Events"—which included meals for Moses' guests. During the six years between July 1, 1961, and September 30, 1967, $930,000 was spent from this account. The $179,215

  At Jones Beach, he could entertain in what was, in effect, his own theater, built with the $4,200,000 in state cash he had collected as broker in the 1950 deal between New York State and New York City that produced the New York Thruway. Erected on a lagoon he carved out of the bay side of the barrier beach, the "Jones Beach Marine Stadium" was built to peculiarly Mosaic specifications, displaying both his delight in the grandiose (it was designed for the presentation not of plays but of spectacles, for the stage was located on a man-made island separated from the nearest seats by a broad moat, so that only the biggest, most lavish productions were feasible) and his belief in the separation of the aristocracy from the common herd (the front rim of the semicircular amphitheater consisted of a row of twelve-person boxes—separated from the rest of the stadium's 8,200 seats by an exceptionally wide and deep aisle; those boxes were offered for sale—on a season-long basis—only to banks and large corporations for the entertainment of their clients; those that were not purchased were kept empty; the boxes, Shapiro told the author blandly, were "not for the general public"). In some ways, in fact, the stadium seemed designed for Moses' personal use. Several boxes were reserved—permanently —for the use of his guests, the big center box for himself and the most favored among them. The aisle behind those boxes was deep enough so that men could stand in it without blocking the view of those behind, and in it, at every performance, stood commission staffers ready to supply his guests with drinks, snacks, warm blankets if the breeze blowing off the bay became uncomfortably chilly, and any other comforts they might wish. These functionaries referred to the center box as "The Royal Box," a fitting name because, as an emperor entertains visiting foreign potentates and their ministers, Moses, close to the world of the United Nations, did the same; on one typical evening, its occupants, in addition to Moses and Governor Dewey, included Prime Minister Menzies of Australia, and the heads of the UN missions of three European nations. (Moses of course paid special attention to the ministers of the nation he reverenced; British Ambassador Sir Michael Dixon Hoare was an especially frequent guest.) Would an emperor, sitting in his royal box, be introduced to the audience? Moses would, too—with drum roll and trumpet fanfare; whenever he was in attendance, the pre-show rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" would be preceded by such an introduction by Guy Lombardo, standing in the orchestra pit, as a spotlight played on the royal box. (Moses would act ostentatiously bored during these introductions, often continuing to talk to his guests and glancing up at the applauding crowd above him with only the briefest nod, rising from his seat at last as if it were almost too much trouble to do so, indicating with every gesture the fact that public acclaim interested him not in the least; how difficult, then, to reconcile this attitude with the fact that on many evenings when he was too busy to attend the

  includes only expenditures specifically marked for "meals"; according to one source, other meal expenditures were concealed as expenditures for "publicity," "recreational activities," etc.

  play, when, in fact, he had appointments elsewhere, he would arrange his schedule so he could stop by the theater just long enough for the introduction.) Not public taste but Moses' alone (which considered suitable for public consumption only bland musical comedies with an absolute minimum of sex) determined what plays would be presented—one per season— on that huge stage; once, trying to hypo meager attendance by creating the illusion of public selection of the following year's production, Lombardo had the audience "vote" by applauding for its favorite as he read off the names of several, carefully pre-selected, popular Broadway shows of years past. The vote was clearly in favor of The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Moses preferred Song of Norway. Watching the vote from a darkened alcove at the side of the amphitheater, Shapiro smiled slyly, snickered and said: "Well, maybe we won't be guided by the results of the poll after all." (The following year's production was Song of Norway.) The productions mounted in the stadium by the three Lombardo brothers, Guy, Carmen and Lebert, were as vast as even Moses could have wished, distinguished by immense casts and trappings big enough to be seen from the seats of the hoi polloi some hundreds of feet away. But there was no public enthusiasm. In only two of the theater's first fifteen years of operation were even half the seats filled over the course of a season; in some years, fewer than one out of three was filled. But public enthusiasm was not the primary aim, as was proven by the fact that every production was presented two years running—and attendance in the second year always fell to about half that in the first year.* Unlike other, more centrally located, theaters, the one at Jones Beach drew its audience not from the whole metropolitan area population but, primarily, from Jones Beach-goers. Since few people want to see a show twice, showing only one every two years helped insure that most beachgoing families would go to the theater only once every two years. Such a policy makes sense only if the primary purpose of the show was to provide entertainment for a relatively small, constantly changing audience—an audience such as was provided by Robert Moses' personally invited guests. On many weekday nights, no more than a few hundred of the 8,200 seats were filled —and most of these were the box seats filled with guests invited by Moses

  * It has been possible to obtain attendance figures for only seven years of the theater's operation. Here are those figures:

  and by his banker allies. On those nights, the grandstand of the big amphitheater was practically empty. Endless rows of empty seats glared blankly down—on a vast, expensive production and a small select audience. The crowds of actors, sometimes seemingly outnumbering the audience, seemed to be performing almost exclusively for the guests of the man on whose stage they were performing.

  He even had his own court musicians, an orchestra whose banal, rigidly traditional arrangements complemented his personal philosophy—Guy Lom-bardo's red-coated Royal Canadians, who had, fittingly, first become famous the year Jones Beach opened and who still adhered faithfully to the musical style of those prewar decades in which Moses had been so popular and in which he sometimes seemed still to be trying to live. All summer—every summer—"The Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven" was his to command.

  Lombardo, the sweetness of whose music was matched by the shrewdness of his business sense, put a high price on his services. But Moses paid it, not only paying the orchestra leader, through a complicated method of cash "advances," more than $100,000
a year to produce the Marine Theater shows (when other producers, not allowed to bid for the right, would have paid him to produce them, had they been allowed to produce a new show every year), but also turning the whole theater, a theater built with public funds, over to the three Lombardo brothers virtually as a private concession to be operated for their private profit, allowing them to keep most of the ticket receipts, as well as the revenue from the advertising billboards in the theater and from advertising in the theater programs, even from the rental of seat cushions. To make sure the profit was not diluted, Moses even maintained the theater for them, paying the bills for cleaning, repairing and staffing it right down to the ushers. He even paid the salaries of some of Lombardo's personnel. He even paid for most of the advertising for the show from which Lombardo was reaping most of the profit. He even allowed the Lombardos to use the theater to lure patrons to the family restaurant in nearby Freeport; for $29.90, a couple was offered dinner at the East Point House followed by an after-dinner cruise ("On Guy Lombardo's Yacht") right into the theater, where they could disembark and take their seats.

  The $4,200,000 state subsidy for the theater had been a "first-instance" legislative appropriation, an appropriation the Legislature had expected would be paid back out of theater revenues. Moses never paid it back. To all inquiries, he replied that he couldn't afford to; the theater, he said, was losing money. Mentioning the "vicissitudes of outdoor theater productions ... the gambles . . . ," he implied that the Lombardo brothers had undertaken the productions only as a public service and were also losing money. Guy took care to reinforce this impression, moaning loudly about the sacrifices his Jones Beach productions entailed. In only one year, he says in his biography, did he and his brothers break even, and in that year, to celebrate, they used up the profit buying three bottles of Scotch. "We pay ourselves no salary, we give ourselves no Cadillacs; why, even when we take a taxi to the show, we pay for it out of our own pocket. So the most we've gotten out of ten years of

  putting on shows at Jones Beach is one bottle of Scotch apiece." Actually, the three Lombardo brothers reaped from their Jones Beach shows hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. And in return, of course, in addition to putting on the shows that were so largely for the entertainment of Robert Moses' guests, their Royal Canadians were available night after night to play so that Moses' guests could dance afterwards.

  Not only did the state—the state's taxpayers—not get back the $4,200,-000; the additional costs of theater operation that Moses made them bear so that the Lombardos' profit would not be diluted had, by 1967, passed the $5,000,000 mark.

  At Jones Beach, Robert Moses could offer his guests not only a royal box but royal treatment.

  Chauffeured limousines could be placed at their disposal; he had so many that on a typical day big black cars and liveried men would be stacked up in the car pool at Belmont Lake waiting for something to do; coming to the Park Commission, Perry Duryea would learn in astonishment that one executive did nothing but handle logistics—"who's riding in what car; it was almost a military-like operation." Human beings could be placed at their disposal; he had so many available to him that he could deploy them in force; any of his guests above a certain minimum level of importance would be met at the entrance to a reserved parking lot; executives dressed in mufti or staffers dressed in the navy-blue and white seahorse-emblazoned uniforms of Jones Beach would escort them on a tour of the park, show them to private dressing rooms, wait while they undressed, escort them to the reserved beach, wait for them while they swam and dressed, escort them to dinner and then to the Marine Theater—where they, or fresh men who took their place, would stand hidden in the dimness of the wide, deep aisle behind their boxes during the entire play to bring them blankets if they were cold, coffee or hot chocolate if they were thirsty, and to escort them backstage during intermission to see the sets—or simply to baby-sit with their children; needing the cooperation of Representative Stuyvesant Wainwright one weekend, Moses was distressed to learn that he was out cruising off Montauk with his two small children; when the Congressman neared shore that evening, there waiting on the pier beside his own car was Sid Shapiro, accompanied by two limousines, three chauffeurs and a secretary. One chauffeur was to drive Wainwright's car home, in order, Shapiro explained, that he and the Congressman could follow behind in one of the limousines and confer; the other limousine was to follow behind with Wainwright's children so that the conference would not be disturbed by childish chatter; the secretary had been brought along as baby-sitter.

  "And when there's some big event," Duryea says—a visit to the New York area, for example, by visiting park enthusiasts or planners from another city or Europe or the Orient (Japanese urban planners displayed an endless capacity for viewing and reviewing Moses' works)—"My God!" Duryea says. "The planning that went into it!" Buses or limousines would meet the tourists at their hotel; in each would be one or more of Moses' executives; as the tour unrolled, a tour planned down to the minute (a typical one, given

  for ten visiting German journalists in 1951, picked them up at 9:20 a.m. at Columbia University, took them over or gave them a view of the following brief sampling of Moses creations: the Henry Hudson Parkway, Fifty-ninth Street Powerhouse, United Nations, Bellevue Medical Center, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, Jacob Riis, Lillian Wald and Governor Smith Houses, Battery Park Underpass, Battery Parking Garage and Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Gowanus Parkway, Owl's Head Sewage Disposal Plant, Shore Parkway, Ullmer Park Veterans Emergency Houses, Van Wyck Expressway, Idlewild Airport, the Southern State Parkway and Meadowbrook Parkway, Wantagh State, Northern State, Grand Central and Cross Island parkways, the Triborough Bridge, Ward's Island Sewage Disposal Plant, Ward's Island Pedestrian Bridge, Ward's Island Park, and Abraham Lincoln and Riverton Houses on their way back to Columbia University), the executives would supplement elaborate mimeographed fact sheets with descriptive anecdotes. And at the end of these tours, the guests would arrive at Jones Beach for food, drink, entertainment and perhaps a brief word with the creator of all they had seen.

  A day as Robert Moses' guest at Jones Beach was a day to remember.

  The chauffeured limousine to take you there would be waiting for you and your family at your door. (If you were an especially important guest, waiting for you where the parkways crossed the city line and Moses' jurisdiction began would be an escort of commission troopers.) When the limousine pulled up to the side door of the West Bathhouse, there would be a respectful, uniformed guide waiting to take you to lunch in a reserved section of the Marine Dining Room, where a waitress would be assigned exclusively to your table. After lunch, the guide would show you around, take you to the dressing room—"Commissioner Moses' private dressing room"—take you to the beach—a private beach—be standing at the water's edge waiting to hand you a towel when you emerged. Then there would be an afternoon of sun and servant; your guide would discreetly drop by every now and then to inquire if there were any refreshments you would like brought to your blanket.

  Dressed again, and dinner. Red-coated Royal Canadians making music under a bright red-and-white-striped pavilion. Whole roast beefs and turkeys and hams, cold lobsters in stacks, shrimps pilaf and plain, stacked in great heaps, shrimp and crabmeat salad piled high on huge trays. Sid Shapiro or one of his suave aides coming over to say hello and make conversation and see if you had everything you wanted. After dinner, if you had a small boy or girl, Shapiro would explain to you that Guy Lombardo entered the theater every night by speeding up to the stage in his famed, trophy-winning powerboat, Tempo, and getting out to lead the orchestra in "The Star-Spangled Banner" from that spot. Would your little boy or girl like to ride in Tempo with Guy as he entered the theater?

  The theater. These seats that were so conspicuously the best in the house. Tempo roaring in and your son or daughter stepping out into the spotlight, and Guy Lombardo himself leading your child, dazzled, over to

  you, dazzled, in y
our seat. Glancing back during the first act and seeing your escort in the dimness of the aisle below you—and the guide darting forward just in case your glance meant that you desired something. Is your wife chilly? Would she like a blanket? Would anyone like a drink? A soda? How about the young man? At intermission, a boat waiting to take the whole family across the lagoon onto the stage and behind it to see the actors and the sets. And after the performance, dancing—under the stars or to a Lombardo band in the pavilion—or a drink with the orchestra leader and the stars of the show and beautiful showgirls in his suite under the theater.

  And, most especially, the host.

  Unless you were at least a Governor, you would probably see him only for a few minutes at dinner and after the show; he had had a small office, little more than a cubicle, built into the stadium, below the stage, so that he could work without leaving: as soon as the lights dimmed after he had been introduced to the audience, he would slip out, back to his blueprints and his maps and his progress charts; while his guests relaxed for three hours above, he would be toiling for three hours below. But a few minutes were enough. "He was the most gracious host in the world," says one ex-legislator. "He'd put his arm around you, give you that great smile of his, talk to your kids—just put you right at your ease." At the informal nightly buffets in the pavilion, he was regal but charming. At more formal dinners at Jones Beach, he was more regal—but still charming. "You liked him, he liked you." And if he had time to spend with you, a whole extra, unforgettable dimension was added to an already memorable day. For he would probably talk about his accomplishments, telling the "inside story" behind them, about how he had found out the secrets of the ownership of the bay bottoms, for example, and thus wrested the ownership of this marvelous beach from the Babylon baymen. Robert Moses telling the story of his successes was a minstrel spinning a saga so heroic, so filled with vivid personalities and fierce duels, that listeners hearing it for the first time (admittedly they lost some of the savor on the fourteenth—or fortieth —go-round) were left entranced as well as charmed.