By relying for support on the city’s moneyed elite rather than on a community of fellow artists, Davies achieved the greatest success and financial freedom of all the Independent artists. But as fate would have it, his carefully constructed world would soon collapse. In 1928, two years after his move to the Chelsea, while visiting his second family in Europe, Davies died of a heart attack. His distraught mistress returned to the United States with her lover’s ashes, and his double life was finally revealed to the world.
As Davies’s first wife, Virginia, struggled to digest the news of Edna Potter’s presence in her husband’s life—and entered her late husband’s Chelsea studios for the first time to discover an art collection worth tens of thousands of dollars—his socialite clients and friends scrambled to organize tributes in his honor. Abby Rockefeller held an exhibition of his works in her private Topside Gallery on the seventh floor of her Fifty-Fourth Street mansion. She and Lizzie Bliss then hatched an ambitious plan: to create an entire museum of modern art in New York that would not only memorialize Davies but also serve as a safe repository for the collections that he had helped them assemble.
With the economy roaring, many members of New York’s elite were happy to contribute to such a project. As the city’s first professionally staffed modern-art institution, the Museum of Modern Art would stand as a lasting symbol of the ambitious era of its birth. But in October of 1929, two weeks before the opening of the museum’s first show, that era ended with the stock market crash. In one week, the New York Stock Exchange lost thirty billion dollars in value, more than America had spent on the Great War. The museum trustees staged their exhibition as though nothing had changed, but the United States—“the great unspanked baby of the world,” as Sloan once called it—“had come to the end of something, and to the beginning of something else.”
The onset of the Depression cracked the “dead and outworn husk of America . . . right down the back,” wrote Thomas Wolfe. But as a result of that catastrophe, “the living, changing, suffering thing within—the real America . . . began now slowly to emerge.” As the rich lost their seats atop Bellamy’s gilded carriage and the poor fell beneath its wheels, the voices of dissent multiplied. Thousands marched in May Day parades; The Communist Manifesto “threatened to outpace The Reader’s Digest” in popularity. Writers and artists, wrote Edmund Wilson, “couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom . . . a new sense of power to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a beating.”
At the Hotel Chelsea, prices dropped low enough for a host of new artists to move in, including Sloan, who set up his easel in one of the grand top-floor studios, and Masters, who relished entertaining such prominent old friends as Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and H. L. Mencken in his suite. New friendships formed among the residents after Ben Burman, the Kentucky-born author of Steamboat Round the Bend, and his wife, Alice, an illustrator, appointed themselves unofficial Hotel Chelsea social directors and sent out open invitations for evening cocktails in their rooms. There, Masters and Sloan got to know the German-born labor journalist Ben Stolberg; the outspoken libertarian Suzanne La Follette, a congressman’s daughter whom they fondly called “our bluestocking”; Reba Cornell Emory, a former soloist at the Broadway Tabernacle; and Edward Caswell, an illustrator for the New Yorker, a magazine whose visual style was said to have been inspired in part by Sloan’s Masses . Together, this group wrote the ground rules for their life together: no interruptions during work hours; no uninvited visits to one another’s rooms; no pestering the more successful residents for professional help or jobs. Appointments to meet or dine out together were made via messages left at the front desk. The sale of any resident’s story or painting called for dinner or an evening’s dancing or an outing to the country for them all. If nothing sold, they were all happy enough to pass around the Chinese food and jugs of cheap sherry in their rooms.
The Federal Art Project and Federal Theatre Project, two New Deal initiatives pushed forward by the new generation of American intellectuals drawn to Washington, DC, by Herbert Croly’s writings, brought another boon to Hotel Chelsea life. Old utopian ideas resurfaced in these first-ever official acknowledgments that American artists were legitimate workers who had a value to society and were deserving of payments of $38.25 per week for their paintings and posters, performances and plays. As word spread of these initiatives, open to all unemployed artists on Home Relief, regardless of stylistic approach or degree of success, painters, sculptors, dancers, and composers “were shouting with the excitement of children at a zoo.” Sloan, for whom making a sale was still “like pushing a boulder uphill,” could rely on the steady paycheck to maintain his studio as well as buy food. Hundreds of younger artists, including Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt, now had the time and security to explore new ideas, while those in the performing arts threw themselves into such experimental works as Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and an African-American production of Macbeth directed by a nineteen-year-old actor named Orson Welles. “I can’t begin to tell you how rich everybody was,” one artist recalled.
One new Hotel Chelsea resident proved particularly adept at making the best of this bonanza—Virgil Thomson, a young Midwestern writer and composer who had recently taken a room in the east wing of the eighth floor. Pudgy and plain, intellectual and abrasive, Thomson had grown up an outsider’s outsider in Kansas City, Missouri—a homosexual pianist who as a boy had underlined in Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis the sentence “Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer,” and who had responded so strongly to Spoon River’s tales of spiritual isolation that he was nearly expelled from school for trying to stage a public reading of that scandalous book. Like Thomas Wolfe, his neighbor on the eighth floor, Thomson had escaped the provinces early for better opportunities—first at Harvard, “because that’s where all the money was,” and then in Paris, drawn there by his interest in Gertrude Stein and Erik Satie. Paris provided all he needed to “ripen unpushed” : cheap lodging and food, proximity to new ideas from such high-caliber artists as Joyce and Debussy, and a laissez-faire attitude toward sex that allowed one to relax one’s guard and focus one’s attention on other things. As Gertrude Stein put it, “It was not so much what France gave you as what she did not take away.”
Like Sherwood Anderson, Thomson had been inspired by Stein’s Tender Buttons to experiment with ways to spark personal associations through the use of evocative fragments, although in Thomson’s case, it was through music rather than words. In time, he discovered that the “half-hick” songs of his Midwestern childhood—the same music that had sparked the interest of Antonín Dvořák and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—worked best to access the American mind. Matching Stein’s playful phrases to his own mix of church harmonies, dancehall tunes, fanfares, and nursery songs that were chopped into pieces and turned on their heads, he succeeded quite well in re-creating St. Louis on the boulevard Raspail.
His work drew Stein’s attention, and when they met, the two “got on like a couple of Harvard boys,” in Thomson’s words. They agreed to collaborate on a modern American opera called Four Saints in Three Acts, about the working lives of artists (represented by Stein as saints). The libretto, filled with fractured phrases; layered references to structure, color, and time; and the lightly lilted questions “How much of it is finished?” “How many are there in it?” “How many saints are there in it? One two three four,” communicated the artist’s subconscious experience, as did Thomson’s score, with its wisps and threads of familiar American melodies. In a final moment of inspiration, Thomson hit upon the idea of casting Four Saints with African-American singers—a provocative action, sure to draw attention to the project—and then upped the ante by claiming it wasn’t a political but an aesthetic choice, because “whites just hate to move their lips,” whereas “blac
ks sing English beautifully . . . they have dignity and bearing, and you can dress them in anything and they look wonderful.”
When the opera finally debuted at Connecticut’s Wadsworth Museum in 1934, the audience gasped when the curtains opened to reveal the “saints” clad in voluminous purple silk garments and posed in a classic tableau—Stein and Thomson’s sublime vision of the potential for a true creative American culture, as vigorous and fresh as anything found in Paris or Berlin. At intermission, Thomson was gratified to hear New York sophisticates confessing, with tears in their eyes, that “they didn’t know something so beautiful could be done in America.” Critics hailed Four Saints for having “transfigured American speech and transfigured American song,” and it quickly moved to a successful run on Broadway. But the process of finding American patrons to subsidize its initial presentation had taken five years—years Thomson could have spent composing rather than hustling for production funds.
The New Deal initiatives offered a solution to this problem. Now, the federal government would take on the burden of funding, and it would provide Thomson with a small stipend besides. With characteristic practicality, he seized on offers from both the Federal Theatre Project and the Resettlement Administration’s documentary film department so that he could focus on what he loved: creating music. With each assignment, he continued to develop his method of researching, arranging, reinventing, and assembling old American tunes into evocative sound collages. Pare Lorentz, a musician’s son and director of the Dust Bowl documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains, was so transported by Thomson’s use of ballads, blues, and cowboy songs to convey a sense of the old, democratic America being destroyed before the viewer’s eyes that he reedited his film to fit the music. In 1937, Lorentz received funding to make another film—The River, about soil erosion and water conservation—and he again asked Thomson to provide the score. With this promise of funds in his pocket, Thomson went hunting for that other essential ingredient in an artist’s life: an affordable home where neighbors would not object to his piano-playing and late-night debates with his director, and where he might entertain in reasonable style a circle of creative friends.
The painter Maurice Grosser, Thomson’s former Harvard classmate, close friend, and occasional lover, recommended the Hotel Chelsea as New York’s closest approximation to the Parisian-style environment in which Thomson thrived. The composer dropped in to have a look, and immediately took to its faded Victorian grandeur and artistic clientele. For sixty dollars per month, he secured a large, rear-facing room with soundproof walls, high ceilings, working fireplace, private bath, and the kind of carefully crafted architectural detail he had grown accustomed to in France. Quick to point out, acidly, that the stars of Four Saints would be welcome as employees but not as guests at the Chelsea due to the color of their skin, he nevertheless enjoyed his bantering relationship with the good-looking African-American bellmen who were always willing to run out to get him a newspaper or cigarettes. He enjoyed, too, the sight of the crisply uniformed, fresh-faced Merchant Marine cadets who frequented the third-floor British Apprentice Club—a gift to England from the late Katherine Mayo, swashbuckling author of Mother India, and her lifelong companion, M. Moyca Newell.
Certainly the Chelsea wasn’t Paris, but it was the closest Thomson could get to it on his budget in New York, and New York was where the money was for American composers. Setting to work on The River, whose narrative traced a single drop of water as it moved down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, Thomson created another musical patchwork quilt using scraps from “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” as well as from Library of Congress recordings funded by the WPA. When Lorentz argued against his use of commercial tunes, Thomson pointed out that popular songs were popular because they worked—that is, they carried the potency and emotional connection he was looking for. Lorentz’s poetic narration was nominated for a Pulitzer, but for most audiences, Thomson’s music lingered longer than the words.
More than four decades before, Laura Sedgwick Collins had struggled and failed to create indigenous American music at the Chelsea; with The River, Thomson had accomplished it. At the same time, Thomson had made a name for himself as a provocative and original critic through his essays, published in the composer-produced journal Modern Music, on everything from the mechanics of swing music and jazz to the “fake folklore” in Porgy and Bess. During that same period, he met with fellow composers Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and Lehman Engel to plan the creation of an American Composers’ Alliance and a composer-run cooperative music press, part of an ongoing effort to create a real home, and real respect, for American music in New York.
Soon, Thomson would address himself to a number of new music projects. But for now he broke for an “unrest cure”—his term for the nonstop round of socializing, dining, drinking, and attending of performances that he relied on to stimulate new ideas. Through the ensuing few months, he assembled a coalition of mostly younger colleagues and admirers, whom he dubbed his Little Friends: the handsome blond composer and future novelist Paul Bowles, whom he had first met in Paris; the composer David Diamond; the lyricist John Latouche; Bowles’s friend Harry Dunham and his future wife, Marian Chase; Marian’s friend Theodora Griffs, a wealthy lesbian who would later marry Latouche; the eccentric writer Jane Auer, Bowles’s companion, who walked with a pronounced limp due to an early bout of polio; and their friends Kristians Tonny, a Dutch painter, and his French wife.
Thomson liked this group partly because, being at least a decade older than most of them, he could take a dominant position at the center of the circle, handing out advice and professional criticism and basking in their adulation. Their status as outsiders aroused his affection even as it made him feel in command. On the whole, he later acknowledged, the members of his little group of acolytes were “not quite sane.” Odd eccentricities lurked beneath their proper demeanor: Bowles had a collection of knives and whips, Jane had a fondness for lesbian bars. Intelligent and undeniably gifted as they were, all seemed to Thomson to be “pursued by fatality, as if the gods would destroy them.” This sense of impending doom, combined with their light conversation and their youthful beauty, brought to mind precisely the warm humanity of the neoromantics that Stein and Thomson had tried to convey in their opera. They were uniquely suited to his Gilded Age surroundings at the Chelsea, and they made themselves at home there, staying over or renting rooms of their own, borrowing money on his hotel account, and listening to him fondly recall his mother’s favorite sayings and her sweet potato pies.
It pleased Sloan and Masters enormously to see this younger generation benefit from the surge of support created during such lean times. Both felt that all of the influences were in place for another truly formative period, not only in the arts but in society as well. It was frustrating, though, to see how many ideas and life lessons had to be relearned in each generation. Every decade or so in this city, new concepts burst forth like fireworks, “sending up sparks that spun and whirled,” only to collapse in a heap of ashes, forgotten, with nothing learned and no progress made. New York’s critics, whose job it was to place each new step in context and to interpret its significance to the public, limited themselves to the role of “fashion experts,” telling readers which paintings and books to buy. As a result, Sloan’s paintings, called “psychopathic” when they were painted three decades ago, were now praised condescendingly as “picturesque” images suitable for “period” shows. Nowhere did he find recognition of his success in capturing the full life of those times, both its horrors and joys. Who would know, by looking at his etching of a woman cradling a baby as glimpsed through an apartment window, that the baby had just died and that a woman like this one would have no money for its funeral? Who would understand by studying Sloan’s portrait of Dolly, with her determined eyes and uplifted chin, that his poor wife had just recovered from an abortion that, due to their poverty, Sloan had had to perform himself? Sloan’s
paintings were not the ravings of a lunatic, nor were they valentines. They were messages in a bottle sent forth to the artists of the future so that they might carry on.
In recent years, both men had done their best to combat this chronic amnesia, Masters through his profiles of such political and literary figures as Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, and Sloan by teaching at the Art Students League, now housed in a grand, specially designed French Renaissance–style building on West Fifty-Seventh Street. Like Robert Henri before him, Sloan focused on teaching the new generation not just how to paint but, more important, how to survive as an artist. The first rule was to learn to live frugally, he insisted to classes that included such rising stars as Reginald Marsh, Alexander Calder, Peggy Bacon, and the sculptor David Smith. A willingness to tolerate cold-water lofts and to recycle paintbrushes freed artists from having to endure just about everything petty and soul-killing. It afforded them the supreme privilege of staying true to their own visions, thus making them “the only people in the world who really live.”
Although lifestyle was paramount, Sloan insisted that his students also master the basic skills before they started out on their careers. Some gave him trouble with this, particularly one unkempt high-school dropout from out west named Jackson Pollock. The boy’s technical abilities were appalling; he himself had written to his brother, “My drawing I will tell you frankly is rotten it seems to lack freedom and rythem it is cold and lifeless.” Sloan tried to help, but Pollock misunderstood his characteristic rough manner and, put off by it, soon dropped out of Sloan’s class. In any case, Masters and Sloan agreed, all they could do was sift through their own and others’ experiences and mistakes to lay down a “usable past” for the next generation to stand on.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 11