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

by Caro, Robert A

  If the Commissioner had doubts as to the wisdom of his decision, the reviews for the first Central Park season must have come down heavily on Papp's side. While holding down a full-time job as CBS stage manager, he had managed to produce, on a shoestring so frayed that he was sometimes opening productions without money on hand to pay for more than two performances (a gamble that always seemed to pay off in sufficient contributions for a full run), productions that were nailed as not just good but great; Papp's Central Park Romeo and Juliet, Kerr said, was "in many respects the best Romeo and Juliet I have ever seen." Papp was continually asking Moses to allow him to solicit voluntary contributions from the stage. Moses, through Constable, was continually refusing; Papp was continually making the solicitation anyway. Before one performance, a police sergeant told Papp, in a friendly way, "If you go on tonight, I'll have to pull you in." "Well, then, we'll go out on the street [Central Park West]," Papp said. "That's Park Department property, too," the sergeant said. "Across the street?" Papp asked. "And," the producer recalls, "he said that was all Park Department property, too, except the northwest corner." So Papp stationed men on that corner with big baskets. Watching Moses carefully to gauge the depth of his outrage at this defiance, Sid Shapiro was astonished to see a grin of delight sneak across RM's face. The Park Commissioner always politely refused Papp's invitations to attend—what was he supposed to do? Sit on a blanket?!?—but he had had himself driven past the scene and had been pleased with the spectators' orderliness. He had been very pleased with published reaction to the plays. After two years, New York was having a love affair with its Shakespeare Festival. A queue began to form three hours before the distribution of tickets began at 6:15 each evening; for every performance, it seemed, the lawn was filled, hundreds of standees crowded up to the fences in the back, and hundreds of other persons had to be turned away from what Horizon magazine called "This Blessed Plot, This Shakespeare in the Park." Observers noted that, as Horizon put it, "drawn from all classes and income groups, the Central Park spectators have an almost Elizabethan buoyancy and verve which are a startling contrast to the spiritual vacuity of Broadway's mink matrons and expense account aristocrats. . . . [They] come not out of duty but out of desire." And the spectators included people whose opinions Moses listened to; theatrical people like his neighbor Cornelia Otis Skinner and Port Authority chairman Howard S. Cullman were

  telling him excitedly about the brilliance of the productions and of the unknown young actors and actresses whom Papp was discovering and persuading to work for forty dollars a week; Cullman was particularly impressed by a young fellow who had gotten his first big role in Papp's production of The Merchant of Venice, George C. Scott. Moses' favorite magazine, Saturday Review, pointed out that "because the . . . Festival performance drew 2,100 persons into the park each evening, a whole section of Central Park was transformed from a threatening jungle into a tranquil gathering place for healthy entertainment." At a party thrown for Papp and his cast by the Tavern-on-the-Green ("Schleiffer had gotten quite a business out of it," Papp notes), "Constable came over to me and said, 'Don't worry about next season. I talked to Mr. Moses about it and he's going to raise the money himself.' " And Moses fully intended to do so; shortly thereafter, Papp received a letter from the Commissioner whom he had never met saying that he had already contacted Cullman about forming a committee to raise the $50,000 needed for another season, and that Papp could stop worrying. In March 1959, when Moses left for a three-week Barbados vacation, the producer believed that everything was set.

  Papp and Constable had never gotten along well, however. Two men could hardly have been more dissimilar than the intense, idealistic, informal young producer and the paunchy, mustache-tugging executive so pompous that even mild Bob Wagner cursed when he mentioned his name. "Look at that title," Papp says. "Executive Officer. The whole thing was a military operation." Constable, for his part, had found Papp suspiciously liberal; he was unable to rid himself of the sneaking suspicion, based largely on the fact that Papp was Jewish, that the young producer was making money out of the Festival somehow. During Moses' vacation, the friction between their personalities produced sparks, and someone finally brought to Constable's attention a fact of which the Moses organization had not previously been aware: that the year before, testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Papp, while denying that he was presently a Communist, had refused to say whether he had ever been one, and had refused to identify friends who had. (He had been fired by CBS-TV for this stand, winning reinstatement only after a fight by the Radio and Television Directors Guild.)

  To as passionate a Red hater as Stuart Constable, this revelation was enough to confirm all his suspicions—and he was sure it would have the same effect on RM. So sure was he, in fact, that, without checking with his absent boss, he took a step designed to drive Papp out of the park: in March —just three months before the Festival was to begin—he informed the producer that the Park Department could not afford the extra maintenance expense caused by the Shakespeare Festival, that the Festival would have to reimburse the Department for that expense and that, since the Festival had no funds with which it could guarantee reimbursement, it would be allowed to put on plays only if it charged admission. There would, Mustache said, be no more free Shakespeare in any city park.

  None of the political commandments ingrained in Robert Moses by his Gamaliel had been ingrained more deeply than the rule stating that an

  executive gives subordinates absolute loyalty and support, and Moses' belief in this particular commandment was reinforced by the iron bands of his personality. He had, to a remarkable degree, consciously made his "mucha-chos" extensions of himself: admitting to outsiders that one of them was wrong would be almost like admitting that he himself was wrong. Moreover, Moses' loyalty to the Moses Men—his refusal, no matter how harshly he might abuse them in private or in front of other members of his clique, to let anyone else criticize them at all—had become within the circles in which he moved an integral part of the Moses legend. Wagner aide Warren Moscow was to verbalize what everyone in city and state government believed: "Every [Moses] deputy could count on the absolute support of his boss, if his position was ever challenged by any outsider." That legend was terribly important to Moses. He could not bear to have it defaced. He was its prisoner. Just three months earlier, in the seventieth-birthday interviews of which he had taken advantage to refurbish it, he had made a point of saying that his men "know I'll always stand up and take the public beating for them." He could not now publicly overrule one of them.

  On Moses' return from Barbados, Papp attempted to contact him to persuade him to overrule Constable. He would not come to the phone. Then Papp wrote him, asking about the $50,000 he had promised to raise, money which would, Papp believed, enable him to reimburse the Park Department and make the season possible even under Constable's conditions. "I didn't hear from him and I didn't know about the money, and I began pressing," Papp recalls. "And finally I got a letter from him. Very terse. Very cavalier. No money. And we were planning a whole damn season on his word." A Papp letter pleading for a personal interview drew only a reply setting out for the record the "reasons" for the Park Department ruling: that fencing was necessary "for control" of crowds, that "adequate sanitary and dressing facilities" for the actors were needed and, most important, that the lawn on which the audience had sat must be paved over and seats provided because "we can't maintain grass, and serious erosion problems would soon face us unless the area is paved." Fifty thousand dollars wouldn't begin to meet the cost, Moses wrote; $100,000 to $150,000 would be needed. Certain that he could reason with Moses if he could only talk to him, Papp wrote again pleading for a face-to-face meeting. He had just read a Moses article on Irish playwright Sean O'Casey, Papp said, and "I feel certain that a genuine rapport can be established because I know that a man who can write with such depth of feeling about O'Casey will certainly understand the dilemma of our organization. I appeal to you t
o make it possible for this meeting to materialize." Moses replied that "this matter is entirely in the hands of Stuart Constable. . . ." Constable had mentioned an admission charge of a dollar; Papp said he would consider that price scale;* Constable immediately replied that he had changed his mind: two dollars would be necessary. Only

  * Whether Papp would actually have charged admission will never be known; he and his board of directors were themselves reconsidering, and, during the period in which his letters and Constable's were crossing, the board went on record against any admission at all.

  then did Papp grasp the fact that the real issue was not price but political philosophy—Constable was determined that no plays produced by a Red like Joe Papp would be allowed in the parks—and that there was no hope of intervention from Constable's boss.

  If Constable's bloodhounds had been thorough, they would have told him that he was dealing with a fighter, one not ashamed of his past and not afraid to go to the public with a cause. Winning reinstatement at CBS hadn't been easy, after all; Papp had in fact been the first television figure fired as a result of the Un-American Activities Committee hearings ever to do so. Mustache was, moreover, dealing—as would become apparent in later years —with an opponent who knew exactly how to go to the public, with a public relations genius of the first magnitude, of Moses magnitude, in fact. Closing down his Shakespeare Festival for a full year would mean that the foundations which had been supporting it would lose the habit, and that the company of actors and production personnel he had so painfully brought and held together would fall apart. Even the meager momentum so tortuously built up in four years of effort would be lost; the New York Shakespeare Festival that was his dream might have to close forever. With his back against the wall, the young producer did what a young state park official with his dream menaced and his back against the wall had done thirty-five years before: he went to the press. And Joseph Papp went as Robert Moses had gone —not with a defense but with an attack.

  "Erosion?" he told reporters. "Do people sitting and watching a play create more of an erosion problem than football, softball, soccer and similar sports encouraged in the parks at no cost to the players?" Perhaps, he said, "the park situation would be improved by more 'soil erosion' caused by the gathering of 2,000 people each night in an area where three years ago only squirrels dared to congregate." Papp spiced his attack—and emphasized what it was that Moses was depriving the city of—with a device that couldn't miss: quotes from the Bard. He won the heart of one reporter who asked why he had decided to fight Moses' ban instead of giving in, by asking her in return "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them." Moses himself smiled when he read that—"He had never met him, but you could tell he was getting to like the guy," Shapiro says— but he stood up for Constable, although there was a decidedly unwonted gentleness in the press release in which he replied:

  I have considerable respect for Mr. Papp's singleness of purpose, but can't adopt it as a principle and shall certainly not direct Mr. Constable to do so.

  While the present park administration is in charge, Mr. Papp will have to put his enterprise on a workable basis or go elsewhere. I believe I have the Mayor's confidence. Mr. Constable has mine.

  And when the young producer replied to this by attacking again—"To abandon our policy of free admissions would result in disenfranchising the very people we are anxious to serve"—he obtained the results the young Moses had once obtained: unanimously favorable reviews, the Herald

  Tribune calling Moses "short-sighted," the World-Telegram saying he was being "not merely inconsistent but capriciously unreasonable."

  That did it. Moses may have been pulled into the fight reluctantly, but he knew he was in one now. And he fought with his customary enthusiasm— and methods. There was behind-the-scenes pressure put on officials whose support Moses needed by the men who he knew could put it on best (former Police Commissioner George V. McLaughlin was in a position to put it on Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy; McLaughlin to Kennedy: "I am . . . taking the liberty of suggesting that you cooperate . . ."). There was the behind-the-scenes innuendo of the type that Jack Madigan believed had worked so well with Mrs. Sulzberger in the matter of Inwood Hill Park (Moses to Corporation Counsel Charles Tenney: "The place is dark and impossible to police adequately. How many couples on the grass came for Shakespeare and how many for other purposes I don't know"). And there was behind-the-scenes innuendo of the type that had worked so well on opponents during the i94o's.

  Constable had never revealed the real reason for his hostility toward Papp, but Moses did. On April 23, 1959, a personal message from the Park Commissioner was delivered to Wagner and other key city officials by a Triborough messenger who had been instructed to place it in no one's hands but theirs: "As a result of recent experiences we have looked him up more carefully. He turns out to be a typical of the breed. He took the Fifth Amendment twelve times in June, 1958, before the House Un-American Activities Committee." And when behind-the-scenes innuendo did not achieve the desired result—several borough presidents were hinting at support for Papp—Moses moved it onto center stage.

  It wasn't really erosion he was concerned about, he told reporters; it was "muggers, degenerates and pickpockets" preying on the audience. "This was a disorderly type of performance," impossible to police properly, he said. In his mail one morning he had found a three-page letter attacking Papp's "Communist" background and questioning his "probity" in accounting for the donations he collected. The letter contained no proof of these charges, and after Moses was through with it, it contained no signature either. He cut the signature off, turning it into an anonymous communication. Then he had copies made and mailed them to anyone—editors, officials, politicians—he thought might be interested, along with either a covering note stating ominously: "What he [the anonymous writer] says is true and there is a lot more to it," or a longer letter, such as another one to Corporation Counsel Tenney, stating: "Papp . . . adopts the old left wing technique of the agitator among artistic and so-called liberal groups, the big lie, etc. He was a communist of long-standing, affiliated with all the radicals, took the Fifth Amendment again and again, etc."

  But it wasn't the 1940's any more. It was not even the early 1950's; the Senate hearings that had put an end to the McCarthy era had occurred in 1954. The tactics that had driven Stanley Isaacs out of his borough presidency and Rex Tugwell out of New York City backfired when the press learned about them now, especially after Constable, asked by Bill

  Haddad if the letter did not smack of McCarthyism, replied: "What's wrong with McCarthy?" The letter produced the desired effect in the Daily Mirror and Daily News ("Back Big Bob, Mr. Mayor. Papp . . . has used the smear tactics you'd expect from one who took the Fifth Amendment") but nowhere else; the Post's anger ("The letter . . . was the kind of reckless assault no man with any claim to decency would utilize") was echoed even by Newsday ("Perhaps . . . Jove has nodded").* And Papp kept attacking—eloquently.

  Dear Commissioner Moses:

  . . . Perhaps in politics you have learned that by standing the truth on its head you can get enough people to believe a lie. . . . You were responsible for circulating a letter questioning . . . my political background, and my probity in handling festival funds. . . .

  The letter represented your second position for denying the Festival the use of Central Park. Your first was soil erosion. ... In position number three, you called the operation a disorderly type of performance.

  May I bring to your attention the remarks of a prominent critic who described the Central Park audiences this way, "the long patient line of people hoping to get into an amphitheatre that seats 2,300 is a humbling sight for anyone who believes in the theater. The alert attention of the people who do succeed in getting in chastens anyone familiar with sophisticated audiences." . . .

  Every civic minded organization has . . . exp
ressed the opinion that Shakespeare in the Parks has had a civilizing effect rather than a disorderly one. One letter writer said "Thank you for making the park safe again." To keep Shakespeare out of the park because certain elements "might prey on the audience" is to say that we discontinue all gatherings of people in the park and leave it as a haven for crime. It is my conviction that the more activity in the parks, the less lawlessness.

  I think everyone is growing tired of the distortions, outright fabrications and anonymous allegations put out by your office. No new excuse you can conjure up will stop us from pressing for the right to continue the free presentation of Shakespeare in Central Park.

  In the court that mattered most to Moses—the court of public opinion —the Second Battle of Central Park, like the first, was a battle he couldn't win. Like the first battle, the second leapt onto the front pages with the initial exchange of salvos, and stayed there, getting the full New York media spotlight, for weeks. And in that spotlight Moses was again portrayed as villain. Media oversimplification had made that first fight "Moses Against Mothers." It made this fight "Moses Against Shakespeare"— ]ree Shakespeare at that. FREE FESTIVAL DIES MOSES CHASES SHAKESPEARE OFF PARK

  grass; the bard vs. the commissioner —those were the headlines. Papp

  * A Post editorial writer also contributed the following ditty, which ran as an editorial: My name is Robert Moses, I'm Commissioner of Parks;/On the subject of free Shakespeare I have a few remarks:/If the people of this city want this theater on my grass,/They'll have to pay two bucks a head to get a Moses pass./Now it is clearly logical that those who disagree /Are probably subversive, or at least a threat to me./ That's why I took it on myself to McCarthyize Joe Papp;/ Who questions my sagacity gets purged right off the map.