Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  However, Moses wasn’t about to let the issue die. Instead, as he had done many times before, he waited. And waited. And then, when he thought he had outwaited his opposition, he pushed again to get the Lower Manhattan Expressway built in August 1964. By May 1965, thanks to lobbying from Moses, David Rockefeller, and union leaders, Mayor Wagner had reversed himself: The Lower Manhattan Expressway would be built after all. Once again Jacobs led her crusaders against Moses and City Hall, this time finally winning when a dashing blond-haired congressman, John V. Lindsay, won the 1965 mayoral election. Lindsay killed the project—and Moses’ dream—once and for all.

  What the Master Builder never seemed to realize was that the negative press and criticism he garnered for trying to impose public works such as the Lower Manhattan Expressway on New Yorkers, against their will, couldn’t help but overshadow the World’s Fair, tar-and-feathering the exhibition in the minds of millions. Whalen’s Fortune article—expanded into a book in 1965—also planted a question in the minds of Americans from coast to coast: What business did New York City—or Moses, for that matter—have hosting a World’s Fair, particularly one devoted to the utopian theme of “Peace Through Understanding”? It was a question with no easy answers.

  Asked to respond to the Fortune story by the magazine’s publisher, Moses didn’t bother to hide his contempt. “You ask why should Fortune want to do such a story?” he wrote. “Search me. I don’t know. It is full of errors and misinformation.” Although he wrote a letter to the editor, published in the following issue, Moses refused to let the subject go. He hoped to write a lengthy response in the pages of the New York Times, but publisher Punch Sulzberger took a pass.

  Moses wrote the essay anyway and printed it at his ever-busy printing press as a pamphlet, circulating his broadside to the media, politicians, bankers, dignitaries, VIPs, friends, associates, and his considerable number of fans. “The Fair, the City, and Its Critics” was Moses’ agitprop attack against all the nay-saying New Yorkers who “soil their own nest” and forever badmouth New York as a “hopeless place of vulgarity, wrath and tears.” Unfortunately for Moses, that was essentially what New York City was becoming by the end of 1964. And everyone seemed to know it—except for him.

  27.

  The World’s Fair is a huckster’s paradise; everything is for sale. One feels that the Pietà is selling the Church, that the cities of the future are selling Chevrolets . . . there must be a limit to the arrogance of industry, of commerce, of international big business.

  —Jubilee, August 1964

  I’ll take any job—but yours!

  —Adlai Stevenson, two-time Democratic presidential nominee and US Ambassador to the UN (1961–65), to Robert Moses

  After the publication of Richard Whalen’s scathing Fortune story, Robert Moses could console himself with the abundance of letters he received each week praising him and his Fair. Whole classes of schoolchildren, organized by their teachers, would write letters in their wondrously childish scrawl, often illustrating their notes with crayoned pictures of the day at the Fair. In response, Moses wrote back to the teacher, thanking the children and including World’s Fair literature as a souvenir.

  Moses also fielded some complaints, including a few about the “adults only” puppet show, Les Poupées de Paris, about which a Staten Island woman complained was “filled with off-color jokes, vulgar remarks about sex, scantily clad puppets (only puppets—it’s true—but they can look so real) doing suggestive gyrations.” And Moses was being asked to write his autobiography, which he flatly refused, while exchanging letters with former CIA chief Allen Dulles over the latter’s article about James Bond scribe Ian Fleming (Moses was a fan).

  The Fair even managed to get some good press from the decidedly left-leaning New York Post, courtesy of columnist Sylvia Porter Collins. She assured Moses that he could count on more friendly clippings since her source was one of Moses’ top men, Martin Stone (“a close and treasured friend . . . that I trust implicitly”). Even the New York Herald Tribune, the paper that Moses most consistently railed against for its Fair coverage, wrote a favorable piece on September 1 about the rich variety of global cultures that were on display, including the Sierra Leone National Dance Troupe, dancers and musicians from Indonesia and Zambia, and the Flamenco Theatre of Madrid. That was the kind of press Moses wanted to see in the morning papers.

  By early September Moses was focused on the Fair’s second season, which would begin on April 21, 1965—just seven months away. Topping his list of improvements for next year was luring Brazil and the Soviet Union to invest in pavilions, hopefully by simply taking over one of the failed operations. But Moses suspected that once again, Cold War politics and the State Department’s secretive machinations would torpedo his efforts. “I think we are being taken for a ride again,” he lamented in a memo to Charles Poletti. “The State Department seems to be playing all sides and all angles as usual.”

  Also priorities on Moses’ to-do list were organizing a health pavilion of some kind with the help of the Mayo Clinic or some other nationally recognized operation, and creating an exhibit devoted to the accomplishments of organized labor. He wrote Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, CIO-AFL, in mid-September, pledging “space and cooperation” and the willingness to send his top people to meet with the labor leader “anytime, anywhere.”

  In the meantime, he received praise from dignitaries ranging from Academy Award–winning directors like Frank Capra and Elia Kazan to Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and John M. Harlan II. He also received notes of thanks from important senators whose careers would be determined by the growing war in Vietnam: Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a liberal Republican and one of only two senators to vote against President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution, who described Moses as “one of my favorite public servants”; and vice presidential candidate Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Democrat of Minnesota, whose devotion to Johnson’s Vietnam policy would ultimately prove his politically undoing. All of the above thanked Moses for the white-glove treatment they received while at Flushing Meadow, and all considered the World’s Fair as yet another feather in the Master Builder’s cap. The praise of such elite VIPs insulated Moses further from his numerous critics among the New York newspapers.

  As September ended, Moses once again railed against the newspapers, and chastised his own staff for leaks about his attempts at luring the Soviet Union to the Fair for the 1965 season (the Herald Tribune quoted a confidential memo regarding the Fair’s Soviet plans). On September 23 two stories irked Moses: The first was a page-one story in the Wall Street Journal, whose opening line read “Forget the shows—but DON’T miss the commercials . . .” before going on to celebrate the corporate commercialism of the Fair. While Moses was certainly pro-business, he didn’t want the cultural impact of his Fair to be slighted. That same day, the Trib took a parting shot at Moses, saying the Fair president was late for a celebration at the Illinois Pavilion on Illinois Day. (Moses was outside with Governor Otto Kerner and Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Kerner’s predecessor.)

  Then on September 30, the Herald Tribune published a piece about the $150,000 loan that Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston had given to the Vatican Pavilion. The money had come from a fund controlled by the cardinal—a personal friend of President Kennedy (he had presided over the nationally televised funeral). The article, based on leaked information, also revealed that Cushing was lending his personal collection of JFK memorabilia to the Massachusetts exhibit in the New England Pavilion in 1965. Moses ripped into his publicity chief, Thomas J. Deegan, promising that he would find the guilty party. “We may have to employ private detectives,” Moses threatened, “which seems almost incredible.”

  Moses then publicly labeled the New York media as “hyenas” and “jackals,” terms that his friends in the press, including Roy S. Howard, whose company owned the New York World-Telegram, and William Randolph Hea
rst Jr. publisher of the New York Journal-American, the flagship newspaper of the Hearst media empire, took umbrage with, forcing Moses to backpedal a bit. In early October, perhaps wanting to call a truce or perhaps just defend the way they covered the Fair and New York City, the New York Reporters Association held its annual supper at the Top of the Fair restaurant. While Moses abstained from attending, the association’s president, Charles Grutzner of the New York Times, told the Fair executives in attendance to “tell Bob Moses that we love him and we love his Fair and we thank him for his hospitality.” Moses quickly wrote Grutzner a memo thanking him for his kind words. “Of course, I never said all of these boys or more than a small, vicious, articulate minority were hyenas. You know that. The rest, the great majority, have been fair, friendly, enormously helpful and in fact indispensable.”

  With the close of the World’s Fair first season only weeks away, members of the Exhibitors Council of Public Relations Subcommittee, which included top executives from top-rated corporate pavilions such as GE, Coca-Cola, and Electric Power and Light, issued their report on the Fair’s PR campaigns to date and their recommendations for the future. The report found that exhibitors had done little “direct advertising since Opening Day” and that in 1965 such opportunities would naturally diminish. (“I don’t agree,” scrawled Moses in the margins of his copy of the report.) In their assessment, the Fair wouldn’t attract 40 million paying customers in 1965; at maximum they predicted 26.5 million. (Moses: “I disagree completely. This is fundamental.”) They warned that if the Fair “goes ahead” and repeats its “patterns of the past, they would miss their two-year attendance goal of 70 million by as much as 20 million—28 percent below forecast.” (Moses: “Nonsense.”)

  Moses then shot down almost every one of the report’s suggestions. The corporate executives wanted a powerful winter and spring promotional program, including films and traveling shows (“doubtful”); advertisements in national magazines and out-of-town newspapers from April to September 1965 (“no”); a sustained ad campaign in New York media for radio, papers, and television (“too expensive”); and more special events in the summer season (“in the works already”). The only suggestion Moses approved was to create a dedicated staff among the Fair’s public relations people to develop new plans for the 1965 season (“good idea”).

  Moses refused to yield to the experts who understood show business and public relations better than he did, just as he refused to listen to critics who second-guessed the need for many of his urban renewal projects or elevated highways. When the Fair’s Executive Committee wanted answers as to why the biggest shows, such as the Texas Pavilion’s To Broadway With Love, had failed so spectacularly, Moses was at a rare loss of words. “We don’t know,” he wrote the committee. “Nobody does.” But even Moses could guess why the Lake Amusement Area flopped. “We must admit that our fixed policy not to invite a conventional midway on the Lakefront, which might have attracted large crowds, as against the conservative principles we adopted, was also a contributing factor,” he confessed.

  But all that seemed forgotten as the World’s Fair closed its gates on October 21. Three days prior, a Westinghouse Time Capsule was buried in a ceremony at the Fairgrounds, just as Fair organizers had done twenty-five years earlier. Inside were objects that epitomized the nation’s mindset in 1964: credit cards, a Bible, freeze-dried food, plastic wrap, a ballpoint pen, tranquilizer pills and birth control pills (two relatively new pharmaceuticals that would transform how Americans dealt with their mental health and their sex lives), a piece of the Mercury Aurora 7 spacecraft, and a copy of the Beatles latest album, A Hard Day’s Night, which was also the name of their hit movie. The band—or the mass hysteria they provoked among American and British teenagers—was seen as ephemeral, a passing fad, something that upon the opening of the capsule at some point in the distant future, would provoke a chuckle or puzzled amusement. In less than a year’s time, however, World’s Fair organizers would see and hear firsthand just how powerful, loud, and popular Beatlemania remained.

  28.

  The critics build nothing.

  —Robert Moses, December 8, 1964

  With the first season of the World’s Fair over, Thomas J. Deegan spoke at a mid-November Rotary Club luncheon. The quick-with-a-quip, round-faced Irishman was a consummate schmoozer by nature, and he boldly predicted the Fair would pull in 37.5 million visitors in its second season. “Any attraction that can draw 27 million people in a six-month period has to be considered successful,” Deegan told the crowd, while noting that the World’s Fair had finished the year with a $12 million surplus.

  Originally, the World’s Fair Corporation estimated that the Fair would attract 40 million during its first season and 30 million in its second. However, in 1964 the Fair attracted 27 million paying customers (another 5 million had seen the Fair gratis)—13 million less than promised. Now Deegan was predicting that Season Two would bring in 7.5 million more customers than originally planned. This wasn’t just unjustified optimism; it was pure fantasy. But Deegan was playing a classic shell game: Assuming the Fair would attract 27 million again, he added another 10.5 million customers to arrive at his predicted figure. But what he didn’t say was that those 10.5 million customers represented the approximately $10 million advance tickets bought at a discount in 1963 and never used; the money from the sales was long gone, which meant approximately 10.5 million customers could visit the Fair in 1965—for free.

  How the year-old Fair was now going to attract additional customers remained a mystery. Moses had already nixed the notion that the Fair would open for an unprecedented third season, noting that most of the structures weren’t built according to strict city codes. They were built only to last two years. Furthermore, Moses insisted that no new pavilions would be created in the new year, yet somehow, he told reporters the exhibition would be a “brighter, gayer place.”

  The same day that Deegan’s promise made the papers, Moses was secretly working his network of powerful connections to orchestrate a scheme that, if executed, would make world history: Moses wanted Pope Paul VI to come to the World’s Fair. The idea was the height of hubris: No pontiff had ever come to the United States. But Moses knew that his World’s Fair was different; through the intercession of his friend Cardinal Francis Spellman, the most powerful clergyman on this side of the Atlantic, Pope Paul’s predecessor, the late Pope John XXIII, had given his personal blessing to the creation of the Vatican Pavilion and allowed the Vatican’s treasured attraction, Michelangelo’s La Pietà, to leave St. Peter’s Basilica for the first time in history. Now Moses was petitioning Spellman, who was in Rome for the Second Vatican Council, to personally invite the pontiff to Flushing Meadow. “This would be a high point in the Fair and would be enormously appreciated by all the people of the country,” Moses wrote.

  Although Pope John XXIII had died by the time the Fair opened, Pope Paul VI quickly bestowed his own blessing on the Fair by allowing his gem-encrusted papal tiara to be shown in the Vatican Pavilion. What’s more, breaking with tradition, Pope Paul had already been the first pontiff to travel extensively outside of Italy. He was, in fact, the first pope to fly on an airplane, making a historical trip to see the Holy Land, visiting Israel and Jordan, in January 1964—a trip that had captured the world’s imagination (and landed him on the cover of Life magazine). Just a few weeks after Moses’ telegram to Spellman, the pontiff would journey to Lebanon and India. A papal World’s Fair visit was nothing more than a pipe dream at this point, but more than anything else, Moses made a habit of thinking big.

  Two days before Thanksgiving, Moses sent another letter, this time to Abraham Beame, New York City Comptroller. Forced to come clean about the Fair’s finances, Moses informed Beame that that it was unlikely—still possible, but very unlikely—the World’s Fair would be able to pay back the “entire $24 million” it owed New York City. With little choice, and already privately expecting this was the c
ase, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. and his staff had adjusted the proposed 1965–66 budget accordingly. “You can only count on something you are sure is going to be there,” Wagner complained to reporters.

  Beame was more direct than the mayor. An ambitious bean counter with an accounting degree from City College, the five-foot-two Beame wasn’t the well-born son of a United States senator, but rather the product of Brooklyn’s Democratic Party machine. He had worked his way up from a Lower East Side tenement to the top ranks of City Hall and knew his way around a ledger. He already had one eye on Wagner’s job and knew better than most—or was at least willing to say so publicly—that Deegan’s and Moses’ predictions were meaningless. “If next year’s operations are no better than they were this year,” Beame told reporters, “it seems hardly likely that we will get any of this money.”

  By December Moses was drawing up his wish list of improvements for the 1965 season, which included: getting the set for the film The Agony and the Ecstasy, Hollywood’s biopic of Michelangelo and his struggle to paint the Sistine Chapel, for display in the Vatican Pavilion; pressing state and industrial exhibitors to come up with new exhibits for their pavilions; a new show for the immensely popular Johnson’s Wax Pavilion; a new attempt at getting industrialist Joseph H. Hirshhorn’s modern art collection to the Fair; a medical exhibit of some kind; and acquiring Pan American Airlines chief Samuel Pryor Jr.’s vast doll collection, which included dolls from all over the world, some priceless works of art as well as toys. In reality, the only new attraction the World’s Fair could count on was the Belgian Village—eleven acres of old-world charm, with cobblestone streets, archways, and beer gardens. Beset with financial problems and labor overruns, the attraction had finally opened at the end of the Fair’s first season. It would soon introduce Americans to a staple of Belgian cuisine: the Belgian waffle.