The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But there is something else that may be what Acapulco was. It is a great stretch of beach that lies about sixty miles to the north of Acapulco, just south of the little town of Petatlán. The mountains come to a thundering point here, then cascade down. The Pacific comes thundering in, dashes against rocks, then subsides against miles of sand. Flying fish flash against the sky. It is a long climb down the rocks from the road to the beach, but worth it. The place is called Playa del Calvario—perhaps because the promontory of rock that addresses the beach reminded someone of Calvary. In any case, in the amphitheater between the sea and the outlying arms of rock there is the same warm, moist, sexy air. There is no town here, no buildings—nothing. But perhaps some such lovely, lickerish Eden as this was what Acapulco was before anyone came there—anyone at all.

  Photo by the New York Times. Courtesy of P. J. Clarke’s

  A quiet night at P.J.’s

  11

  New York, N.Y. 10022: Indestructible P.J.’s

  Meanwhile, in thoroughly spoiled New York City, as everyone knows, it is no longer chic to be elegant. The wrong places of yesteryear are becoming the right ones of today. That is, anything that is not somewhat disreputable is presumed to be somehow impertinent, and this supposedly accounts for the decline of, among other things, New York’s “pretty” restaurants—the closing of the Colony, Le Chauveron, the sudden abysmal emptiness of the Four Seasons, the rapid fall from grace of Raffles. Consider, on the other hand, the saloon at the corner of Fifty-fifth and Third which has just completed the most successful year in its eighty-year history, and is a happy gold mine for all concerned. “This place,” confides the slender young man with the over-the-ears hair to his blond ladyfriend in the knitted skullcap, “is perhaps the place in New York. You won’t find anything like this in Altoona. Down there, that guy in the blue sweater is what’s-his-name of the New York Knicks.”

  What’s-his-name of the Knicks, seated in display position at the corner of the bar, is surrounded by kids, many of whom cannot be of legal drinking age but who are drinking beer nonetheless. He displays the easy grace and confidence of a star among fans, grinning at the kids’ questions and shrugging off their “oh, wows.” What’s-his-name is not a regular, but drops in occasionally because he’s sure to be recognized. Down at the other end of the bar, near the garbage cans, sit two regulars, a pair of ladies whose favorite topic of conversation is New York under Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. Tonight, they are discussing what has happened to the subway fare since La Guardia’s day. The regulars sit at this somewhat less appetizing end because there is a better chance of seats here. It is five o’clock, and the place is filling up again after the brief post-luncheon slump. Outside, the city is a mixture of rain and unsatisfactory air, and the Third Avenue bus stop on the corner is disgorging passengers headed for the swinging doors with the cut-glass panes. Inside, against mirrored walls that are not only flyspecked but in desperate need of resilvering, the decor consists largely of signs which warn against the danger of overcrowding, the management’s lack of responsibility for lost articles, the fact that minors will not be served, that tax is included in the price of each drink, that gentlemen without escorts might think twice before coming here to meet other gentlemen without escorts. Over the bar hangs a sign that says, “BEER—THE BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.” A vase of plastic lilacs blooms among the bottles. “This is really New York,” says over-the-ears-hair solemnly.

  He may be right. As the hour approaches six, the noise level reaches din proportions, with Joan Baez contributing lustily from the jukebox. Rocky Graziano—a regular—has just arrived with Jake Javits, and is moving along the bar greeting friends with “Hi, guy!” (They call him “the Thespian” here.) At one of the corner tables, Bobby Short is showing off his new fur-lined overcoat. “Something gorgeous happens when I put this on—watch!” he burbles, putting on the coat and briefly parading the gorgeousness. A blond young woman enters carrying an ocelot on a leash. The place frowns on pets, but the young woman explains prettily, “He’s just like a little putty-tat,” and is allowed to stay. What at first appears to be a tiny child has just pushed through the cut-glass door, but it is quickly clear that she is a midget with a five-year-old’s body and a rather pretty fortyish face. She is apparently known here, for a chivalrous male patron hoists her by the armpits onto a bar stool, a position she could not achieve unaided.

  But the clientele is not composed just of oddities and celebrities and put-ons. There are also intense young men in J. Press suits with skinny briefcases, silver ID bracelets and gold wedding bands, waiting for wives or girl friends and discussing parking places. Hairy, bearded types in denim jackets and beads and boots glare truculently at one another and talk sporadically of Film. A very pretty airline stewardess wearing a diamond wedding band flanked by sapphire guards is explaining to three very interested young men the availability of free passes to exotic ports on her carrier. She seems to suggest that these passes could be theirs for the asking. Behind a counter in the corner, a short-order cook is setting up his grill for hamburgers, lining up his bags of buns, bottles of catsup, and plates of onion slices in neat rows. Behind the bar, the two bartenders are shouting jovial obscenities to one another as they work, epithets accompanied by appropriately indelicate gestures. Two off-duty patrolmen are in earnest conversation (this is, after all, an Irish bar, and the Irish have always had the Police Department in the family), interrupted by a drunk who keeps tugging at their sleeves, trying to tell them something. The drunk speaks in syllables, but the syllables do not form words in any recognizable language. (“There’s a medical term for that,” one of the bartenders explains to a customer. “Brendan Behan used to get that way in here after he’d had a few.”) The policemen shuffle their feet in the sawdust on the floor, in embarrassment or perhaps to keep warm; this saloon, perhaps because it encourages the consumption of alcohol, is drafty and underheated. Through it all, via another swinging door, there is a frank and unlimited view of the men’s room that opens, closes, and opens up again. To anyone who giggles over this circumstance—or who, heaven forbid, protests—the bartender’s reply is “Them that’s proud never complains!” It is, in other words, a typical evening at P. J. Clarke’s, the pub where the primary rule is never be surprised at anything.

  There are one or two other rules—unwritten, of course. For example, one is not supposed to enter P.J.’s expecting such a queer reward as solitude, or even privacy. P.J.’s is a determinedly social saloon, and anyone standing at the bar is expected to engage in lively conversation with whomever he is standing next to. Nontalkers are frowned upon, sometimes even asked to leave. Not long ago an uninitiated customer had the poor taste to bring out a paperback book and start to read it at the bar. The bartender’s reaction was swift and decisive. “If you’re going to read,” he announced, “go on down to Tim Costello’s. That’s where all the goddamned intellectuals hang out!”

  At the same time, P. J. Clarke’s customers are expected to take the unexpected in their stride. One is not supposed to react to the sight of the famous blue eyes of Paul Newman across the room, or to Mr. and Mrs. Aristotle S. Onassis dining quietly at a corner table. Arlene Francis and Martin Gabel are regular customers, as are Artie Shaw, John Huston, and Mayor John Lindsay. Nor was anyone particularly surprised to read, among the 1971 findings of the Knapp Commission, that P. J. Clarke’s was the payoff spot where two men—one of them a police officer—negotiated the price that would allow a lady with the unlikely name of Xaviera Hollander to continue operating one of the neighborhood’s glossier brothels (specializing in kinky sex) free of police harassment. (Mrs. Hollander’s price for peace, according to tapes from the bugged P.J.’s bar, was twenty-one hundred dollars in three installments.) This was regarded as simply another aspect of P.J.’s raffish charm. “They always did get a lot of gamblers and racketeers and crooks up there,” sniffs Fred Percudani, bartender at the rival Tim Costello’s down the street. “Here, we attract more of an executive-ty
pe crowd.”

  P. J. Clarke’s is possibly the only saloon in town where the jukebox offers the latest hit by Melanie as well as “Paper Moon” as selections. (Tim Costello’s provides discreet radio music from WPAT.) When, for reasons that have never been quite clear, a definitely non-executive type named Lawrence Tierney found his head involved with one of Clarke’s old-fashioned ceiling fans, nobody thought a thing about it, not even Mr. Tierney, who not only announced that he would not sue anybody for the lacerations incurred in the encounter, but apologized, and offered to have the fan repaired. When, after a particularly bibulous evening, a well-dressed young couple lay down on the dining room floor and went to sleep, no one paid them any heed except for Eddie Fay, one of Clarke’s ex-wrestler bouncers, who gently tried to coax the pair back to consciousness with cups of strong coffee. About a year ago, two men wanted by the FBI on narcotics charges were arrested while relaxing at P. J. Clarke’s. A few months later, Clarke’s became the first Third Avenue saloon to be the subject of a snooty New Yorker cover. And through all these varied goings-on P. J. Clarke’s customers rejoiced in the knowledge that their favorite watering hole has achieved something of the status of a New York monument, that it will now in all likelihood remain at the corner of Third and Fifty-fifth for as long as the Statue of Liberty remains in New York Harbor. As the sole holdout in the block otherwise occupied by a new forty-five-story Tishman tower, Clarke’s is a nineteenth-century anachronism, a dowdy oasis in a street of tall steel and glass. Clearly, shabbiness is not only chic but offers a kind of passport to immortality.

  The success and survival of P. J. Clarke’s make, as the Irish say, a tale to tell, and from the beginning involved an uncommon combination of fiscal wizardry and Old World witchcraft. Patrick Joseph Clarke was a dead ringer for Admiral Bull Halsey, and his conversation consisted mostly of grunts. Apprenticed in the old country, he was a strict saloonkeeper and when he opened his place in 1892 there was no nonsense allowed. Woe betided the waiter who failed to put his tips in the kitty, or the bartender who tippled from Paddy Clarke’s stock. It was he who established the anti-intellectual cast of P. J. Clarke’s. Some said this was simply because his chief rival, Tim Costello, courted the writers and artists—Hemingway, Thurber, Steinbeck, Robert Ruark, and John McNulty. “Pansies and willie-boys!” Paddy Clarke called them, and that was that. A bachelor, he was pious and churchgoing, and also strongly superstitious. During Prohibition (“It’s like a bad cold, it will go away,” he used to say) he was once badly beaten by thugs, and his relatives began urging him to write a will. But Paddy Clarke was convinced that if he wrote a will he would surely die the next day. And so, with his fingers still crossed against the morrow, he died intestate in 1948.

  It was this single fact, ironically enough, that set the course of Clarke’s saloon toward becoming an unofficial city landmark. (A spokesman for the Landmarks Commission has said that Clarke’s architecture is not sufficiently distinguished to warrant making it an official landmark, as though Clarke’s customers could possibly care.) Because when Paddy Clarke died with neither direct heirs nor a will, all his relatives—brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, both here and abroad—fell to wrangling over who should receive which share of Paddy Clarke’s estate, the most important part of which was the building with the bar downstairs and three floors of cold-water flats above. Visions of wealth and the easy life danced in the eyes of all the relatives, particularly those back home in County Longford where exaggerated reports of Paddy’s wealth had filtered. But when the relatives could not agree—and there is bad feeling between a number of Clarkes today over the matter—the court ordered that the building be sold. Thus it was acquired in 1949 for thirty-three thousand dollars by a young man named Daniel H. Lavezzo who, with his father, had been running a business importing Italian antiques, but who had also made a profitable sideline out of dabbling in real estate properties, particularly those in somewhat rundown neighborhoods.

  From the beginning, Dan Lavezzo admits that he had no consuming interest in being a saloonkeeper. But he was interested in making money and so, since he was now running a saloon, he decided to run a profitable one. Clarke’s had already acquired a reputation as a popular spot for society and show folk, in a day when debutantes and Park Avenue blades considered it fun to go “slumming” in the slightly dangerous shadows of the old Third Avenue El. Two movies—The Lost Weekend and Portrait of Jennie—had used Clarke’s, or a reproduction of it, as settings. And it had become increasingly a place where out-of-towners headed when they wanted the feeling of rubbing shoulders with the greats of Manhattan, even though, in most cases, the out-of-towners just rubbed shoulders with one another. Because it was also a popular bar with the police force, Clarke’s customers also enjoyed the feeling that they were rubbing shoulders with men whose exciting task it was to deal with crime. The occasional presence of a lady no better than she should be was merely titillating, particularly when she was balanced with a diamond-encrusted Hope Hampton or a Barbara Hutton. Lavezzo determined to change as little of this ambiance and clientele as possible, and went about the task of preserving Clarke’s special Irish flavor with a fine Italian hand.

  He installed Charlie Clarke—P.J.’s favorite nephew—as his general manager. Charlie, who had been born in one of the flats upstairs, and who had been a popular waiter and bartender for his uncle, gave the place a valuable aura of family continuity that kept the old trade from straying elsewhere. When Glennon’s Bar & Grill, competition from across the street, was forced to close by a landlord who wanted to sell the building, Dan Lavezzo hired Jimmy Glennon, the popular bartender, and brought him—and his customers—over. (For years, Glennon has been writing a book: How to Be an Irish Mother.)

  By the mid-1950s the El was down, and Third Avenue had begun its renaissance as a street of glittery skyscrapers. Advertising agencies and publishers and film companies abandoned Madison and moved to Third, bringing with them new customers for P. J. Clarke’s. In 1955, Dan Lavezzo bought three small two-story rooming houses behind Clarke’s on Fifty-fifth Street, broke through into them, and added the back dining room, which, because it was darker, cozier, and slightly less noisy than up front in the bar, quickly became the most “exclusive” dining area.

  Lavezzo had been living in Greenwich, but when the State of Connecticut gobbled up his property to make way for the New England Thruway he needed, for tax reasons, to spend the money realized from the sale of the Greenwich house on another residence. At the time, the flats in the two top floors above Clarke’s had been condemned, and so Lavezzo decided to throw these tiny flats together into two large apartments, one to a floor. The third floor thus became bachelor quarters for Dan Lavezzo, who is divorced, and the top floor became an elegant pad for Michael Butler, the millionaire sportsman and producer (Hair and Lenny). The second floor, meanwhile, housed the Lavezzo antique business, which was taking increasingly less time than the real estate and restaurant business. This was the state of affairs when the Tishman Realty and Construction Company, which has been responsible for some of the city’s more monolithic structures, announced plans to build 919 Third Avenue, which was to occupy the entire east side blockfront between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth streets, including P. J. Clarke’s. The interests of the Tishman brothers and Daniel H. Lavezzo were about to collide.

  Robert Tishman, who heads the construction company, has a reputation of driving a hard bargain. “He is one tough cookie to deal with,” says Lavezzo, with more than a touch of respect in his voice. So, though on a smaller scale, is Danny Lavezzo. “He is a very sophisticated trader,” say the Tishmans. Lavezzo, a compact, wary-eyed man in his early fifties, has the air of a man not easily persuaded to do anything he doesn’t want to do. Though he has been known to consume as many as fifty beers a night at P.J.’s—“I never drink the hard stuff on the job”—Dan Lavezzo is known as a hard man to catch off guard. He was not at all anxious to sell his building to the Tishmans, nor to lose the one-to-two-million-dollar-a
-year business which his building was then providing. “There’s a lot of superstition in this business,” Lavezzo says, “and most guys who run a successful joint believe that it’s bad luck to move. If things are going good, you don’t even fire a busboy—much less go to a new address.” Clarke’s to be Clarke’s, had to be at the northwest corner of Fifty-fifth and Third.

  Dan Lavezzo also owned a building in the middle of the block that the Tishmans wanted and which, because of its central position, was even more pivotal to their plan. This gave Lavezzo the upper hand. And so, after a battle of nearly two years’ duration, during which negotiations broke down several times, Lavezzo and the Tishmans reached an agreement. Lavezzo would sell both Clarke’s and the second building to the Tishmans. The mid-block building would be razed to make room for the tower, but Clarke’s would be permitted to stand untouched and, as a guarantee, Dan Lavezzo was given a ninety-nine-year lease on the property as part of his price. In the deal, a figure of somewhere in the neighborhood of one million dollars went to Lavezzo for the air rights above his store—or not a bad appreciation on his original thirty-three-thousand-dollar investment. Other restaurateurs in the city turn positively glassy-eyed with jealous admiration of Lavezzo and his feat. “The monumental chutzpah of the man!” cries Vincent Sardi. Lavezzo, typically, just shrugs it off. “Air rights? Air rights?” he asks innocently. “I don’t remember anybody talking to me about air rights.” “He’s putting you on!” snorts Jerry Speyer, a Tishman vice president and Robert Tishman’s son-in-law. “He knows goddamn well what he got for the air rights.” Also as part of the deal, because of a complicated zoning conflict between commercial and residential properties, the top two floors of Clarke’s had to be lopped off, forcing both Messrs. Lavezzo and Butler to find new apartments elsewhere.