Robert Patrick was one of the first timers. Geographically and psychologically, he’d grown up about as far from Greenwich Village as a kid could. He was born Robert Patrick O’Connor in 1937 in Kilgore, Texas, “in the shadow of somebody else’s oil well.” His dad was an oil rig worker, a drunk who “beat us like crazy.” He dragged the family around the Southwest following the jobs, from one tent camp to another. Patrick says he was an adolescent before he lived in his first home with a solid roof on it. “Our family moved so much looking for work that I never went to one school for a whole year until my senior year in Roswell. So I still call Roswell my home town.” They moved around so much that he and his two sisters “never got socialized.” They made up stories, acted out comic books, and that was “as near to a background in theater as I had.” He remembers seeing his first movie—appropriately, it was Boom Town, about wildcat oilmen—at a makeshift outdoor screening in a Louisiana tent camp. “The government, I guess, threw some park benches in a clearing, and there on a bedsheet stretched between two trees were Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. I never forgot it.” He first saw images of Greenwich Village in movies and first looked at modern art in other people’s copies of Look.
“I was a horrible, misfit kid,” he recalled. “Completely detached . . . Where I came from they hated gay people, they hated artistic people, and they hated intelligent people. Being all three, all I could think to do was skulk in the corner and read my comic books. You can always tell what anybody in my generation was like in high school by which role they played in Our Town. I played Simon Stimson, the drunken outcast artist.”
In the summer of 1961, at the age of twenty-three, he headed east for the first time, to take a job washing dishes at the Kennebunkport Playhouse. “It was summer stock theater and I learned everything. We did twelve, fifteen shows in three months. I didn’t care if I was only backstage with a towel to dry Nellie Forbush’s hair in South Pacific. I was in theater.”
Heading home at the end of that summer he got a ride as far as New York, left his bags with a friend’s landlady, and asked her how to get to Greenwich Village. When he came up out of the subway he “followed a boy in the street who obviously wasn’t wearing underwear. He had long hair. I followed him into a little café. His name was Johnny Dodd, lighting genius of all time, and that café was the Caffe Cino. They were having a rehearsal at the time. I didn’t know it was a rehearsal. I thought it was a show. They kept stopping and starting again. If they made a mistake they’d back up a few lines and start again. I thought it was brilliant theater.”
He decided to stay in New York, moved in with his friend—“a two bedroom apartment a block from the Museum of Natural History for a hundred and forty dollars a month”—got a job as an office temp, “and started hanging around the Cino. After a while they’d say, ‘Would you go pick up pastries?’ or ‘Would you go pick up these flyers at the printer?’ Soon I was just there. Ultimately Joe bought me a West Point cadet’s jacket and a sombrero and I was the official doorman.”
He met Lanford Wilson and the actor Michael Warren Powell at the Cino. “They were so scruffy and hopeless-looking I said, ‘You can move in with me if you want to.’ ” They alternated, one of them working a month to pay the rent and utilities while the other two worked on plays. “Lanford would write days, and when I came home he’d clear his stuff off the kitchen table and I’d write at night.” It didn’t last long. After the two months off Patrick spent to write his first play, The Haunted Host, “I came home one day to find an eviction notice on the door. Lanford and Michael had not been working at all. They had an absolute allergy to work.”
When he handed Joe the Host manuscript, Joe threw it in the trash can. “He said I was too nice a person to be a playwright.” Wilson, Eyen, and others said they wouldn’t write any more plays for the Cino unless Joe produced Patrick’s. He did. It premiered in 1964, with Patrick and the playwright William Hoffman in the two roles. Surprisingly assured for a first effort, The Haunted Host is set in a Village apartment, where Jay, a bright, bitter gay man, locks horns with Frank, an innocent-seeming playwright manqué from the hinterland. They both fling Oscar Wildean bon mots like daggers. Frank asks Jay, “What’s life like in Greenwich Village?” He fires back, “Nothing’s very lifelike in Greenwich Village.” Having the play staged opened a floodgate for Patrick, who went on to an extraordinarily prolific career. His Kennedy’s Children, a mournful epitaph for the 1960s set in a Lower East Side bar, was a surprise hit on London’s West End in the mid-1970s, had a brief run on Broadway, and went on to performances around the world. A revival of Host in the 1970s featured Harvey Fierstein in his first role as a male—that is, not in drag.
Paul Foster was another first timer. He grew up in New Jersey, where his dad was a patent lawyer for DuPoint, and went into corporate law himself, working for a firm called Combustion Engineering. “They manufactured the atomic cores for the first atomic submarines, the Savannah and the Nautilus.” The job took him to Paris, where he started to write fiction. After a term in the navy he moved to the East Village, met Cino and Stewart and their crowds, and “decided to give up being a lawyer. I just fell out of love with it. It pissed off my parents mightily. My dad said, ‘You’ll see. You’ll starve. You’ll be on the Bowery.’ As it so happened I was damn close to the Bowery. I had saved up my money carefully and had enough for a down payment on a town house on Fifth Street just off Bowery.” His first play, the Beckett-inspired Hurrah for the Bridge, opened at the Cino in 1963. After the fiasco with Milligan’s theater on Second Avenue he helped Ellen Stewart start up La MaMa, where a number of his plays were presented. One, called Balls, featured two swinging Ping-Pong balls and recorded voices. His Tom Paine, directed by O’Horgan, premiered at La MaMa in 1967. The Times’s Clive Barnes hailed it as “alive and vital,” and its meditations on revolution and anarchy struck a chord with younger audiences. Grove Press published it that year.
Robert Heide came to the Cino with a couple of plays already produced Off-Broadway. As a kid growing up across the Hudson in suburban New Jersey in the 1940s, he’d climb a hill and gaze over at the spires of Manhattan. “I always used to think, ‘I’m going to live there someday.’ That was my escape plan.” He’d come over to the city with his family sometimes to Radio City Music Hall or Broadway shows. He loved the Automat on Times Square. “They had a second tier and you could look out at the Camel sign, all the neon. One day when we were there a woman came in wearing a black Persian lamb coat with peaked shoulders. She had black hair in a pageboy and full-face theatrical makeup on. Two guys were with her who I would now identify as gay chorus boys. She looked out at the lights and said, ‘Yeah boys, it’s good to be back in li’l old New York.’ ”
His first trip to the Village was with a high school class tour in the 1950s. After that he and friends would drive in or take the Hudson Tubes (now called the PATH) and hang out at Lenny’s Hideaway. When he finished college in 1959 he moved to the Village permanently. He eventually settled in an apartment on Christopher Street that he shared with his longtime partner John Gilmore. He studied acting with Uta Hagen and Stella Adler, and he hung around with downtown theater people at the Village Drugs soda fountain on Seventh Avenue and at Mother Hubbard’s on Sheridan Square, famous for its apple pie, where Harry Belafonte briefly waited tables. Among his neighbors were Zal Yanovsky, who’d cofound the Lovin’ Spoonful, and actress Sally Kirkland, who was waiting tables at Le Figaro Cafe, and Dick Higgins, who’d help found the Fluxus art movement. He “vaguely remembers” an all-night pub crawl with Albee and the Irish playwright Brendan Behan, which started at the White Horse and ended at Julius’ with Behan, shades of Dylan Thomas, roaring incoherently.
Heide first went to the Cino in 1960, where he was the sole person in the audience at one performance of that infamous production of No Exit. Meanwhile, he was writing his first one-acts. Hector played at Cherry Lane on a bill with plays by Kenneth Koch and Cocteau; West of the Moon, “an encounter bet
ween a hustler and a religious fanatic” set in a rainy doorway on Christopher Street, appeared at the New Playwrights theater on West Third Street. The mainstream critics were appalled by its frank homosexuality—one suggested that Heide “break his typewriter over his hands.” Joe Cino liked it and asked him to write something for the Caffe. So The Bed premiered at the Cino in 1965. It presented the foundering of a young gay couple’s relationship, sinking into existential boredom and ennui. (Heide, like so many Villagers at the time, read a lot of Sartre and Heidegger.) Because of the rep Heide had after West of the Moon as a writer of troubling homosexual content, a pair of FBI agents took in one performance. Cino stuffed them full of pastries and cappuccino and they left peacefully. Andy Warhol also came and later filmed a version of the play in a loft on the Bowery.
In 1965 the first one-act play by Jean-Claude van Itallie, the surrealist War, was produced at the Cino, with Gerome Ragni in the cast. There was only one performance: the next morning the Cino was a charred husk. It was March 3, 1965, Ash Wednesday. In the Voice Michael Smith wrote that it was an accidental gas fire but among themselves the Cino crowd said that Cino’s lover Torre had torched the place in a jealous rage.
The scene was unraveling. “It wasn’t Wonderland,” Robert Patrick says wryly. “It was a gay, drugged theater in Greenwich Village in the sixties.” Freddie Herko had taken his swan dive the previous autumn. He was strung out on speed, his longtime lover had left him to marry his close friend the writer Diane di Prima, and at twenty-eight he felt the end of his dance career looming. Broke and effectively homeless, he’d come to Dodd and Smith’s fifth-floor apartment to use the shower. He came out of the bathroom nude and started dancing around the room. The impromptu performance climaxed with a beautiful leap out the open window. “Maybe thought he could fly,” his friend van Itallie says. “Maybe was afraid he couldn’t fly.”
After the fire in March, the downtown theater crowd instantly organized benefits, for instance, a performance of Maria Irene Fornés’s one-person Dr. Kheal at the Village Gate, and Ellen Stewart gave Cino use of La MaMa. The Cino reopened in May. The Times ran its first features on the scene that year, one in April, a long if rather arch and condescending overview, and a more enthusiastic one at the end of the year. The second featured a photo of Patrick and declared Sam Shepard the “genius” of Off-Off-Broadway. Patrick later recalled that it sparked bruised egos and jealous rage at the Cino. One playwright “almost physically attacked me,” another threw the newspaper in his face. “[W]e had all laughed about this sort of thing, but then we had never been in the Times before.”
In 1966 the director Robert Dahdah rummaged through a stack of old scripts Cino had tossed in the trash. Early on Dahdah had brought his repertory company to the Cino for an extended stay; it was his production of No Exit that Krim reviewed. The play he found was a few years old, a campy homage to Busby Berkeley movies called Dames at Sea. It was a light, frothy musical revue with some winking gay-sailor innuendo, like a pre-echo of Village People schtick—not really the sort of thing that happened at the Cino but Dahdah convinced Joe to let him stage it. He designed a production that was all in black, white, and silver, like an old movie, and reworked the script so a cast of six could play it on the tiny stage. He cast a sixteen-year-old singer-dancer, Bernadette Peters, in her first leading role. It opened in May and was a smash hit, bringing in the Cino’s first uptown, mainstream audiences. It moved later to the Theatre de Lys. There would be a London production and a small-screen adaptation starring Ann-Margret as well.
Among the new audiences the Times and Dames drew were people from Warhol’s crowd. Cino regulars, maybe a bit disingenuously, say it was the Warhol crowd, especially Ondine, who introduced the hard drugs that were the Cino’s undoing. “We all took drugs,” Patrick says. “It was the sixties. We all took acid and pot, and played a little bit with speed. But when the Warhol people came down they brought drugs like you never saw in your life. I’m lucky I didn’t wind up hooked on something.” It wasn’t just the Cino or the Warhol crowd, Paul Foster cautions. “Drugs and alcohol ruined a generation. The box office staff at La MaMa? Gone. Some of them died with the needles still in their arms. Drugs and booze, that was the dark underbelly of Off-Off-Broadway theater. But that’s a dog with a very long tail,” he adds, citing all the drinking that had marked Village life since the 1910s.
The Cino took on a crazy speed-freak intensity. Joe, who’d been working seven days and nights a week since opening the place in 1958, got hooked on meth. “That was when I think Joe started his decline,” Patrick says. Old hands like Foster and Dahdah dropped away. In January 1967 word came that Jon Torre, who had left New York, had electrocuted himself. Some suspected suicide but the official verdict was that it was accidental. Cino, by then mixing acid and meth, fell apart. At dawn one morning he phoned Dodd and Smith from the café to say good-bye. Smith ran in to find Cino covered in blood on the floor. He’d mutilated himself with a knife. He died at St. Vincent’s on April 2.
“There was a great deal of that, of tragedy,” van Itallie recalls. “And this was pre-AIDS. I have no scientific analysis for it, for why particularly sensitive, gifted gay men ended up tragically. It’s a question. Sometimes I feel that we made a pact with our mothers, if ever we emotionally grew out of the nest, either the mother or the son had to die. Literally. I have no scientific basis for telling you that, but there are many friends with whom I feel that’s the case.”
Smith and others kept the Cino open for another year before it closed for good in March 1968.
ALONG WITH THE CINO AND LA MAMA, JUDSON MEMORIAL Church, on the south side of Washington Square Park, was a major center of Off-Off-Broadway theater in its early years, as well as an important presenter of avant-garde art, music, and dance. Howard Moody, the marine vet, had come on as pastor in 1956 with the intention of continuing and extending the church’s missionary work in the neighborhood by getting the church involved in Village politics and culture. He put the Judson on the forefront of the liberation theology movement, which would push the Roman Catholic Church toward the liberalizing reforms of Vatican Council II in the early 1960s. The Judson being a Village church, the reforms Moody oversaw there, with the backing of the church board, were sweeping and radical. As symbols of those populist and secularizing changes, Moody and his assistants stopped wearing clerical outfits, the cross and pews were removed from the church, and the altar became a stage. Moody recruited the Village arts community to help develop services that grew less like liturgy and more like Happenings or hippie pagan celebrations. Writing for Esquire, Murray Kempton witnessed one service where a man, naked to the waist, stood on the altar and poured blue paint on himself while others sang a Bessie Smith song. Agosto remembers one where the muscular actor-dancer Eddie Barton, a Cino favorite, twirled down the center of the nave wearing only glitter, “then up on the stage as a glorification of God created man and Mother Nature and all this thing. And I thought, ‘Golly, where in the world? Aren’t we the blessed people? Nowhere is this freedom. Only New York City.’ Because I had traveled a little in the other parts, so-called liberal San Francisco or what have you, you still had to mind your Ps and Qs.”
The Judson Gallery, organized by an assistant minister and a few students and artists, including Jim Dine, started in 1959. It was in the basement of Student House, aka Judson House, the church’s residential building on the corner of Thompson and West Third Streets, later demolished by NYU. Ray Gun Specs, an early Happening, took place in the gallery in 1960, created and performed collaboratively by Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Dick Higgins, and others.
Judson Poets Theater and Judson Dance Theater followed in the early 1960s. The director Lawrence Kornfeld and Moody’s assistant the Reverend Alvin Carmines oversaw the theater program and collaborated on many of the performances. Carmines, who grew up in Virginia, was from a musical as well as a religious background. He’d come to New York to attend the Union Theological Semina
ry and seen both Living Theatre productions and the Judson House Happenings. In all probability he was the only openly bisexual minister serving at a Baptist church in the country at the time. Over the years he would write thousands of songs for both performances (comprising, by his own count, scores for eighty musicals) and services at the Judson. Kornfeld came to the Judson from several years with the Living Theatre; he told Bottoms that producing The Connection was initially his idea. Although it was home to a variety of plays in a range of styles, the Judson became best known for a species of joyfully experimental musical theater. The congregation, being a Greenwich Village congregation, backed them, including voting never to censor any performance in the church for its language or ideas. Performances were in the church itself, either up in the choir loft, which could fit an audience of about a hundred, or down in the sanctuary for larger productions. Budgets were minuscule: the church put up two hundred dollars a year, which was supplemented by small donations from the congregation and often the performers as well. The first production, a double bill of the Village poet Joel Oppenheimer’s The Great American Desert, a send-up of cowboy lore, with Apollinaire’s surrealist The Breasts of Tiresias, cost all of $37.50 to put on. Production budgets rarely topped a hundred dollars. The spirit was as communal and everybody-pitch-in as at the Cino. Casts included Village poets, painters, and bartenders as well as actors, and everyone was welcome to bring bits of costumes and sets in from off the streets.
Playwright, novelist, and artist Rosalyn Drexler fell right in with the Judson’s everything-goes spirit. She’d grown up in the Bronx, married the painter Sherman Drexler, and for a few months in 1951 had performed on the professional women’s wrestling circuit as Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire. She later explained she did it on impulse. She heard about a promoter while working out at a gym on Forty-second Street used by pro wrestlers, tumbling midgets, other carny and circus acts. She met the promoter around the corner at the notorious fleabag Hotel Dixie (later the Hotel Carter and still a fleabag), and “the interview with me consisted of me trying on a bathing suit.” She performed in a wig and heavy makeup, with audiences “yelling things at me in Spanish, which I didn’t understand.” Lady wrestling was “poor people entertainment,” presented in airplane hangars, and once, she recalled, in a graveyard. She left when the tour hit the South, where the segregated facilities upset her.
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