My First New York

by New York Magazine

  I was never choosy about jobs—I would take anything. One of my first was cleaning old parts of ship machinery, a very oily and dirty job. I remember very clearly working at a bed factory in Queens, where work would end at five o’clock and I would have only thirty minutes to rush to the 5:30 screenings at MoMA. People would look at this shabby, smelly person in his displacement jacket, but nobody ever bothered me. Maybe the only job that I would not take is a policeman, because in those days in New York it was fashionable to yell at police officers, “Stop being such a Nazi pig!” I would think, What do you know of Nazis?

  I was very lucky to move to this city at that time. My friends Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus: we were all starting. We were all new. It was very special, after so many years in Europe that seemed only to be about the ends of things, to be in a time of beginnings. We would drink and eat at the Cedar Tavern or the White Horse Tavern. And when all the places in the Village would close at night, there was a twenty-four-hour night cafeteria for the taxi drivers at Twenty-ninth Street and Park Avenue South.

  Two weeks after I arrived, I borrowed $300 to buy a Bolex 16mm camera. I took photos of everything, and made a fifteen-minute film about my thoughts upon arriving here. New York really saved my sanity. I had come here so despondent with civilization, and the city got me to believe in passion again. The Metropolitan Opera House was at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway. When they destroyed that theater, I had spent so much time there that I had to take a piece of it. I still have it. It’s a chunk of hard plaster from the interior decoration. People think, Oh, he is experimental and avant-garde, always looking for the new things. Not always. This city makes even the experimenters sentimental.

  LIZ SMITH

  gossip columnist

  arrived: 1949

  New York had gone dark for the war—they had thought it was going to be bombed—but by the time I arrived everybody was relieved and the city was electric with things. South Pacific and Kiss Me, Kate were opening. The theater was just booming. Of course, everything was new to me.

  I had just gotten out of the University of Texas, having gone back to school after getting married and divorced. I arrived on a train, and at Penn Station a wandering vagrant tried to get into the phone booth with me. I was pretty staggered and thought, what the hell? What a great beginning is this?

  It was absolutely idiotic that Scotty, my friend from Texas, and her boyfriend, Floyd, were not there to meet me. Instead, I made my way to the hotel, and I remember noticing how dark and unwelcoming the streets were and wondering if I had made a mistake. The next night, though, Floyd brought his car in from Jersey, and we all drove up into Times Square. That was one of the most thrilling things that had ever happened to me.

  I had been a terrible wife and the first in my family to get a divorce, but I arrived in New York and nobody even noticed. Scotty and I rented an apartment on Eighty-first and Central Park West. We realized immediately that we couldn’t afford it, so we looked in the newspapers for a roommate. We didn’t like the one we found—she was just some nebbishy kid, I don’t remember her name, poor thing—and three months later we were making enough money to throw her out.

  I went to work as a typist for the National Orchestra Association. I only had about $50, but you could ride the subway for a dime and buy a ticket for a Broadway show for $2.50. I saw Carol Channing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes one of the first months I was here. Still, I was bent on survival and went everywhere applying for better jobs. I showed them what a fabulous writer I was and what I’d done at the University of Texas, and they couldn’t care less. I couldn’t even get arrested.

  Three months into this insane effort I saw in an item that Zachary Scott, a Hollywood actor from Texas whom I’d profiled in my college paper, was in New York. I found him in the phone book, and he said, “Liz! How great that you’re here.” He said to go to Modern Screen magazine at 11:00 am and tell the editor he sent me. That guy hired me cold.

  Floyd, Scotty, and I would go out to bars in the Village. One night we were at a place called Seven Oaks, and a very nice man came over and bought us drinks. Scotty and I went to the ladies room and she said, “You know, Liz-O, I think that guy is as queer as a $5 bill.” And I said, “Scotty, $5 is not queer.” But then I realized she was right: we were in a gay bar and didn’t know it!

  Gay men in those days wore suits and little narrow ties—they were very elegant. When my brother, Bobby, came to the city, he worked as a waiter at a gay restaurant, which he liked a lot. He was beautiful, like a movie star, and he enjoyed having to fend them off every night. I was more narrow-minded. I had never seen any gay people before, and it was fascinating.

  The most dreary thing in New York was to go to a female gay bar. They were just awful. But they were safe, since they were run by the Mafia and the Mafia was very rigid about good behavior. A guy I knew used to take me there because he thought it was funny.

  I couldn’t stand having a hangover, but Bobby didn’t know what one was. We lived for a time in one big room with two beds. We didn’t have any money, so we’d go to the Automat and eat crackers and catsup. I remember walking around the city with $3 in my pocket and lucking into things—going into bars and nursing a drink and seeing some great nightclub act perform. That was one of the happiest times of my life, before I knew Bobby was an alcoholic.

  After Scotty and Floyd got married and moved on, my roommate was a wonderful Jewish girl named Shirley Herz. I hate to say that all my friends were Jewish, but they were. I absorbed all their culture, and by the end of the year I spoke a little Yiddish. When my father came to visit me, his racism just astonished me. We went to the Women’s Exchange, a very elegant, Episcopalian place where women brought their embroidery, and he said, “This looks like the first civilized place with white people that we’ve seen in New York.” I was outraged. He thought I was a Communist. I didn’t even know what a Communist was.

  I was a kid through my first marriage and college, and I was a kid when I first got here. I wore bobby sox and little filmy blouses you could see the brassiere through. I was much like Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, who I think is so awful. (I dislike remembering how callow and stupid I was.) But once Mike Wallace hired me at CBS radio, I just grew up. I began to have enormous respect for hard work, and I made a study of famous, important people. I learned how to dress, how to act, how to eat properly. I had my first artichoke in New York.

  About twelve years after I arrived, my mother and father came to visit again. I had killed myself taking them around to theaters and restaurants, but they couldn’t wait to get back home. They had no concept of my real life, and couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to live in a small apartment and go to work every day. Then one night I took them to the Metropolitan Opera to see Leontyne Price in Aida. My parents were blown away. Even my father thought it was great; he didn’t object to a black woman playing an Egyptian. I remember that night well because it was so glamorous, and it was the only thing I ever did that impressed them.

  PAUL TAYLOR

  dancer and choreographer

  arrived: 1952

  I came to Juilliard very eager to be a dancer. I’m naturally shy, but I was not intimidated. I took a choreography course with Louis Horst, and studied with Martha Graham, who later invited me to perform in her company. She was always very grand in public, and she would sometimes say things in class that would shock the girls. She thought being a virgin wasn’t that great.

  I was terrific looking! Though I didn’t really know it at the time. My body was changing from a swimmer’s body—loose and long muscles—to a dancer’s body. I got thicker soles on my feet. I had a lot of encouragement at Juilliard, and got the sense that I was the Next Great One. Or at least, that’s what I intended to be. I didn’t know if it would happen, but I felt I was ordained.

  But after I left Juilliard, then it got rough. Living was hard. I found a crummy place in Hell’s Kitchen—it was really smelly, an
d for heat in the winter you just turned on the gas oven and opened the door. I went hungry a lot, but there were Automats and Chock Full o’Nuts, and you could get a sandwich and coffee for about twenty cents. The arts community in New York was much smaller then, and we all knew each other. Painters, writers, composers—we’d all get together quite often in somebody’s old loft, or the Cedar Tavern down in the Village, to talk and trade ideas. Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns both designed costumes and set pieces for me. I helped them do window displays at Tiffany, and would listen as they talked about being anti–Abstract Expressionism and wanting to change the whole scene. One night at the Cedar Tavern Jackson Pollock was very drunk, and he started shouting “I am nature!” I remember thinking that was great and true.

  JAMES ROSENQUIST

  artist

  arrived: 1955

  I hadn’t yet turned twenty-one. I got notice that I had received a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York, so I took the red-eye Lockheed Electra propeller plane from Minneapolis. I had called the Sloane House YMCA on Thirty-fourth Street, and they said that if you make your own bed it’s $1.79 a night. I checked in, then walked up to the ASL on Fifty-seventh Street, and there was the secretary—her name was Rosina Florio, she later became the executive director—and I jumped on her desk and said, “Hooray! I made it. I’m in New York now!” She got a hell of a kick out of that.

  I left the YMCA when I heard that someone had gotten killed there two nights before. I went first to a rooming house on West Fifty-seventh Street ($8.50 a week), and then to another one on Columbus Circle run by an old lady who had a dog standing on the bed in every room. I took the one with the smallest dog.

  I was a lower-middle-class kid from Minnesota who knew what every car looked like. Then I got to New York and I never stepped in a car. I never took the subway either, and didn’t have money for a cab, so I walked and wore out my feet. Existence was so inexpensive. You could go to the Metropolitan Museum for free, and the Staten Island Ferry was a nickel for an ocean voyage.

  After a year, a friend from ASL told me about a job working for the Stearns family (of Bear Stearns fame) at their mansion in Irvington, twenty-five miles north of the city. The job was being a chauffeur, bartender, and occasional babysitter. I lived on the top floor, and all I really had to do was wear a button-down shirt and Bermuda shorts. I spent a year with them, living a high lifestyle. They’d throw many parties, where I’d meet people like George Reeves, Romare Bearden, and John Chamberlain, who I became friends with. Roland Stearns was Jewish, but he’d say things like, “Good morning, old sport.” He inherited $16 million on his thirtieth birthday, and for the party I carved his head on a big chunk of ice.

  I knew that wasn’t my place, so I drove back to New York in their 1956 Lincoln convertible. I decided to find work painting billboard pictures. I had already been in the painters’ union in Minneapolis, so I walked into the International Sign, Pictorial, and Display Union Local 230 on Twenty-eighth Street and requested to transfer. It took a while, but finally I got a job painting a Hebrew National salami sign on the Flatbush Extension.

  I had painted pictures in Minneapolis, but I didn’t know how to do lettering. I was fired in a month, at which point I started practicing on rooftops. My next job was with an ad firm in Brooklyn, which sent me to Stauch’s Bath in Coney Island. I worked with my assistant Red from Red Hook twenty feet above these big fat ladies who came out naked to get a suntan. “Red,” I said, “we better say something or we’ll be arrested for being peeping Toms.” So I shouted, “Good morning, goyls!” One woman said to her friend, “Don’t worry Sadie, they don’t look anyway.” And then Red threw his cig down on the tarp and it caught fire and the ladies ran off the roof, screaming and naked.

  I didn’t have any hobbies except artwork. I was just striving to do something, because I knew I had some talent and I was pretty good and I was still trying to get better. I did meet a southern girl named Peggy Smith, a party reporter who’d invite me to all sorts of social things. She’d say, “Would you like to meet W. C. Handy, who wrote ‘St. Louis Blues’?” And I’d go with her to a party in Yonkers where a blind W. C. Handy was sitting in his wheelchair listening to Nat King Cole sing. Another time she brought me to a fancy apartment on the Upper West Side for the artist Jack Younger-man. I met a lot of young artists there, all standing up against a wall: Bob Rauschenberg, who became one of my best friends; Jasper Johns, who used to be very acerbic; Agnes Martin; Lenore Tawney, a tapestry artist; and Ray Johnson, who later killed himself.

  Bob and I used to do some window displays for Bon-wit Teller and Tiffany. But mostly I stuck to billboards. After General Outdoor Advertising, I graduated to Artkraft Strauss, which had all the billboarding in Times Square—the Palace billboard, Castro Convertible. I painted huge things, like the sign for the Astor and Victoria Theatres, 395 feet wide and fifty-eight feet high, and over one hundred different two-story-high Shenley whiskey bottles. I got so sick of painting those that after a while I wrote on the label “Mary had a little lamb its fleece was white as snow.”

  I eventually got sick, sick, sick of it all. The color and form were fun, but I wanted to do a new kind of artwork. At that time, the height of art in New York was Abstract Expressionism. Teachers would say to students, “Throw some paint on the canvas, make a mark, and then you have the obligation to make something out of it.” After Pollock, I thought about how you can introduce imagery to get to nihilism again, and I came up with the idea of painting things so large that you couldn’t recognize what they were. I had been painting billboards so close up, the imagery was in the back of my head instead of in front of me, and the billboards were really just pure color. That was the idea.

  A few years after I arrived, I lived in an apartment where Lincoln Center is now. It had a kitchen table, no chairs, no stove. On Thanksgiving Day, I was painting a Merry Christmas sign on top of a big billboard in Times Square, and I thought, son of a bitch, I’m tired of having turkey at the Automat alone for Thanksgiving. So I went and bought a big, frozen turkey. Then I called three girls I knew from the south and said, “You got a stove?” They said, “Yeah, we got a stove, but we don’t have a pan!”

  I called Wing Dong, a Chinese artist. I said, “Wing, I got three girls, a frozen turkey, and a stove, but I got no pan.” He had a pan and offered to cook, and I insisted he stay for dinner. The franc was really low then, so you could get an exquisite bottle of French wine for ninety-nine cents. The boyfriends of two of the girls brought the wine, and we all had a big turkey dinner on the floor of their one-room apartment.

  DAN RATHER

  journalist

  arrived: 1956

  In the Texas of my youth, New York might as well have been Neptune. It was the stuff of children’s stories. But it was the capital of the world, and I was damn sure not going to miss that.

  The first time I went to New York—for two and a half days, when I was twenty-five—I hitchhiked from Houston to Atlanta, where I then caught a Greydog (that is to say, a Greyhound bus) to New York. I stayed at the YMCA in Times Square, which was a good bit tattier and sleazier than I had anticipated. I was slack-jawed and wide-eyed. And a little bit scared, to be truthful about it. I was not a country boy; I had considered myself a big-city boy from Houston. I realized in Times Square what a rube I was.

  But, boy, I wanted so much to go into one of those Times Square places with the bright lights. I saw a nice jazz joint that I now think was Birdland. I stood outside looking for a menu or something to tell me if they would charge for entering, because, frankly, it looked too expensive for me. I eventually just decided to open the door and take a step in. Smoke clung to the ceiling like draperies. A short man with a snap-brim hat and a cigar came up to me and said, “Check your hat and coat, sir.” I was not prepared for that. So I stared at him for some time in silence and then mumbled, “Will it cost me anything?” He said, “No. I’m a fucking Chinese coolie.” I got out of there, taking a bus to Philadelphia
and hitchhiking the rest of the way back to Texas.

  Although I visited New York many times since then—and took the train up from D.C. when I hosted the Sunday-night CBS news broadcast at eleven—my family and I didn’t return to the city for good until 1979. We found a three-bedroom apartment on Seventy-second Street between Park and Madison. I remember my wife, Jean, said, “It’s only $92,000.” I blew a gasket. Let me get this straight: No lawn? No yard? And it’s still $92,000? Well, Jean is by far the smartest of all the Rathers, and she explained to me that it was actually a good price. After we signed the papers, she said she wanted to renovate the kitchen for $50,000, and that we had to pay maintenance fees around $600 a month, which was like paying rent to live in a place you had supposedly bought. We argued a bit, but she prevailed in her great wisdom.

  She was also smart enough to figure out that New York is never a megalopolis of however many millions; it’s always just your neighborhood—the shoe repair guy, the carpenter, the grocer, the post office—like any small town in Texas, really. And everyone was so friendly; a neighbor welcomed us with an upside-down chocolate cake, which really impressed Jean because it is very difficult to make. She was a fan of tennis, and learned something in tennis that we took to heart for life in the city broadly. She told me, “When you play tennis in New York, you’ve gotta get your first serve in.”

  Like any immigrants, we had this Ellis Island mentality where we said we weren’t going to give up our heritage and stop being Texans. Jean would tell the kids we were like Indians, and we had to go where the buffalo were; there’s a hell of a lot of buffalo in New York. But it’s odd, because New Yorkers and Texans get along so well. They have those same outsize personalities, that determination and passion, that “don’t mess with me” quality. And they have the same law my maternal grandmother would tell me from the time I was a little boy: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” Self-reliance, confidence. I really believe those lyrics, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”