In 1962, as spring moved toward summer and Miller mulled over these ideas, he was approached by a former collaborator, the producer Robert Whitehead, with a request that he contribute the inaugural play for an interesting project: a new state-subsidized theater at Lincoln Center. The Vivian Beaumont Theater would present a rotating program of plays, performed by a repertory company, with a focus on the kinds of social issues in which Miller specialized. It was a welcome opportunity for the playwright at a time when realist plays were falling out of fashion and when Miller’s funds were at a worrisomely low ebb. He was intrigued, too, by the presence of Elia Kazan as artistic director. Miller had never gotten over his distaste for this former close friend who had chosen to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. But, as it happened, in an effort to understand the director’s choice and its consequences, he had created a character based on Kazan for After the Fall. How often did a playwright get the chance to see the model for one of his lead characters direct the play? Miller could not resist the opportunity, even if the scheduled opening in 1963 meant he would have to hurry to meet the deadline.
That summer, writing “like a man possessed” nine days out of ten at his country home in Connecticut, Miller completed work on a new structure for After the Fall. By autumn, as he migrated back to the Hotel Chelsea for longer periods, he had developed his lead character, Quentin—a lawyer contemplating marriage to a new lover while at the same time wondering, in light of his past failed marriages, whether he can ever freely love again. Quentin’s story, told in the form of a confidence or confession to the audience, would serve as a framework for the questions Miller wanted to examine.
It was good to be back at the Chelsea after the Connecticut summer. By now, Miller and Morath, who would marry that winter, considered it “their” hotel, and they had even developed a certain fond tolerance for the dusty drapes, leaky refrigerator, and “swamp cooler,” an air-cooling device into which one had to pour pitchers of water and then dodge the spray. Perhaps due to the weighty seriousness of a play that Miller described to a reporter as “an attempt to drive a man to his last illusion and to see what lies beyond it,” the Chelsea’s human population struck him as even wackier and sillier now than when he had first taken a room there the year before.
Some of this eccentricity, while extreme, could be considered typical for the Chelsea. George Kleinsinger, the sociable composer of the children’s symphony Tubby the Tuba and the chamber opera archy and mehitabel, had celebrated a recent escape from what he considered the cultural abyss of suburban family life by turning his penthouse apartment into, literally, a jungle, with twelve-foot trees imported from Borneo and Madagascar and tropical ferns embedded in earth a foot deep on the floor. His menagerie of exotic birds, tropical fish, a five-foot iguana, a pet skunk, a monkey, and an eight-foot python (Kleinsinger’s favorite) were all illegal possessions in the city, but Kleinsinger enjoyed the animals’ companionship while he was working and found them invaluable for attracting pretty young women to his rooms.
Others were also attracted to the delightful spectacle of Kleinsinger performing on his grand piano while his doves cooed and a turtle named Gray danced a step or two. On any given night, the Millers were likely to find there Eartha Kitt, star of Shinbone Alley (the Broadway adaptation of archy and mehitabel), chattering nonstop about her new film career; Kitt’s mentor, the elegant choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, recalling her experience working with Virgil Thomson on his 1947 production of The Mother of Us All; or Dunham’s close friend Sophia Delza, an expert on Chinese theatrical dance, adding an extra-exotic touch to Kleinsinger’s jungle with the stunning Chinese costumes she liked to wear.
When the weather was warm, these impromptu parties were likely to spill onto the roof, where Dunham, who taught voodoo drumming in her own rooms downstairs, might demonstrate some rhythms while her dancers performed. Only at the Chelsea would a neighborly get-together end in the hilarity of Kleinsinger trying out the drums while the Hungarian cartoonist André François attempted the dancing, or with Arthur C. Clarke getting perfect strangers to dance on West Twenty-Third Street by aiming a red laser beam down onto the sidewalk so that pedestrians, bewildered, chased the tiny red dot on the ground.
Other newcomers, however, seemed to float free of reality altogether—particularly the Nouveaux Réalistes, a wave of young French avant-garde artists influenced by Duchamp and the Dada movement who had rejected the traditional artist’s aim of self-expression in favor of a transformative experience shared by both artist and viewer. The first to arrive, in the spring of 1961, was Yves Klein, a charismatic young showman who used ritual, alchemy, and manipulation of the environment to create a shift in viewers’ states of consciousness. In France, Klein was best known for his exhibition The Void, which consisted of nothing but an empty gallery painted white, and for his Anthropometries, a form of “human art” in which naked women covered themselves in blue paint of a particular “spiritual” hue that he called International Klein Blue and then pressed their bodies against large canvases, leaving impressions of the human form—often while an orchestra played and silent observers looked on.
Klein was soon followed by Arman, an antique dealer’s son who specialized in “accumulations”—collections of gas masks, knives, smashed violins, and other objects displayed in acrylic containers. Next to the Chelsea came Martial Raysse, who created art by filling a plastic pool with water, plastic ducks, and animal-shaped swimming tubes, then lying down in it fully clothed and showering himself with a handheld douche. Jean Tinguely produced kinetic art—mechanized sculptures made from hammers, bicycle wheels, metal beams, and other discarded items; his lover, the beautiful, aristocratic Niki de Saint Phalle, specialized in “shooting paintings,” in which she shot artworks that concealed bags of paint inside so that paint was spattered everywhere.
Taking life as it came, transforming the effluvia of a consumerist postwar society into expressions of outrageous optimism, these artists—brought to New York for their first American exhibitions—discovered in the city a treasure trove of new material. While Klein sought transcendence in the jazz clubs of Harlem, Arman spent his days cruising the junk shops of Canal Street for material for his accumulations and his nights dancing at the transvestite bar the Carousel. Inspired by the city’s ceaseless process of self-destruction and re-creation, Tinguely produced Homage to New York—a massive construction of piano keyboards, bathtubs, a child’s wagon, and other discarded objects that bashed itself into partial oblivion and set itself on fire before amazed onlookers in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art.
“To play, to change the world, that’s all we ask,” the artists claimed. Their experiential attitude reflected France’s postwar resurgence of interest in the writings of Charles Fourier—particularly in his concept of work as a joyful form of self-expression not rooted in exploitation. In recent years, a small group of Fourier-influenced artist agitators had created the Situationist International movement, using performance art techniques to construct situations aimed at altering observers’ awareness so that real social transformation became possible. The idea of changing individuals by involving them in the art process was spreading through the Fluxus and other experimental movements in Europe as well. To the disappointment of the Nouveaux Réalistes, most Americans still didn’t “get” this approach, prompting a hurt Yves Klein to produce a defensive “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto,” declaring, “Imagination is the vehicle of sensibility! . . . Long Live the Immaterial!” But at least the artists found a welcome response in members of the New York School circle—Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Larry Rivers—whose own interest in linking art with life had been nurtured and encouraged in Virgil Thomson’s Hotel Chelsea suite.
Niki de Saint Phalle, who knew this New York group from years before through her first husband, the writer Harry Mathews, helped facilitate a series of lively collaborations between them and the French artists. In 1962, Koch
refashioned an opera libretto that Virgil Thomson had at first encouraged but then shot down into The Construction of Boston, a staged performance with Tinguely, de Saint Phalle, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, at the Maidman Playhouse on West Forty-Second Street. “They were all battling till the very moment the curtain went up about what direction it was going to take,” Frank O’Hara observed. “But it was an enjoyable struggle—collaborative art in the best sense of the word.”
Relations between the two groups continued to deepen through the following months at the Chelsea, elsewhere in the city, and on summer retreats in the Hamptons and in Europe. Larry Rivers, in Paris for a show in the summer of 1962 with his future wife, Clarice, took a studio next door to Tinguely and de Saint Phalle, where he stoically endured Niki’s rifle shots aimed at their common wall and collaborated with Tinguely on a mechanized painting called The Turning Friendship of America and France. While the adventurous Rivers prepared to have his body cast in blue plaster by Yves Klein (an experiment that was canceled when Klein died unexpectedly of a heart attack, at age thirty-four), Ashbery, also in Paris that summer, wrote a characteristically enthusiastic essay for Rivers’s Paris exhibition catalog. Meanwhile, from New York, O’Hara entertained them with a letter describing sixty-six-year-old Virgil Thomson’s deft seduction of a handsome “Negro hustler named Joe”—a report that O’Hara concluded ruefully with “he liked my chest but money more.”
O’Hara himself would become a valuable asset to these collaborators as he parlayed his insider’s familiarity with New York’s downtown art world into a job as assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art. (Thomson, not surprised, pointed out that MoMA’s administrators knew that “poets write the best advertising copy in the world.”) Both during and after office hours, O’Hara connected his French and American friends with other New York artists now “rising up out of the muck and staggering forward,” including Roy Lichtenstein, with his striking comic-strip images; James Rosenquist, who repurposed fragments of billboards and ads; Claes Oldenburg, then busy re-creating Lower East Side storefronts and sewing giant “soft sculptures” of six-foot hamburgers and eight-foot ice cream cones; and Andy Warhol, with his paintings of S & H Green Stamps and dollar bills.
Like the French artists, these Americans were entranced by the detritus of New York, capital of the postwar world order, and even more immersed in and comfortable with its extraordinary hypermaterialism than the Europeans. As Oldenburg remarked, “The amount of debris in New York is enormous, and the streets, if it snows a few days, garbage piles up, you’re made aware of all this junk and objects.” And he loved it. “I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap,” he proclaimed, art that is “as heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.” Television, advertising, magazines, movies, were “our society . . . who we are . . . absolutely beautiful and naked.” Their images and brand names had lodged deeply in America’s consciousness, as Warhol in particular understood. By placing the images in a frame or a gallery, the new artists transformed them and—more important—altered viewers’ experience of them and of themselves viewing them.
Equally important, the use of mass-market objects and images as “precious works of art” got the attention of the city’s cadre of critics. As Lichtenstein pointed out, “The one thing everyone hated was commercial art.” Although Brian O’Doherty of the New York Times called Lichtenstein “one of the worst artists in America,” bent on “making a sow’s ear out of a sow’s ear,” at least O’Doherty was writing about him. The more outraged the critics became, the more delight the artists took in provoking them. “I wanted to be a machine,” Warhol told journalists regarding his experiments with serial repetition, though he’d been inspired at least partly by the compositions of John Cage.
Still, the work of these American new realists, as they were now called, made use of a vocabulary that everyone, including the mainstream media, understood—the glamour, humor, and pop of commercial art and culture. As a result, the work attracted with remarkable speed not only an appreciative public but mass-market media attention, moving the Americans from obscurity to headlines in a single year. The new realists’ show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in October of 1962 signaled the apex of this progression, with works by both the European and New York groups, including, among others, Klein, the Paris-based Bulgarian-born Christo, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Warhol, and Oldenburg, whose Lower East Side–style “storefront” featuring ladies’ underwear was installed in an empty shop across the street.
The show’s significance was evident in the fact that the Janis Gallery was known as the city’s leading promoter of abstract expressionism, exhibiting de Kooning, Rothko, Guston, Franz Kline, and others. This show of an opposing artistic view represented, as one critic noted, “either a betrayal or a housecleaning.” The younger artists were well aware that de Kooning was the only abstract expressionist who attended the show, and even he came only to stare at the work in silence before abruptly leaving. Hours later, he appeared at the door of the opening-night party, hosted by the wealthy collector Burton Tremain, where Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and other young artists were enjoying drinks served by uniformed maids—only to be told by the host, “Oh, so nice to see you. But please, at any other time.” “It was a shock,” Rosenquist recalled. “Something in the art world has definitely changed.” The change was made official a few days later when every one of Sidney Janis’s abstract expressionists except de Kooning voted to leave the gallery en masse.
Even among the group represented in the exhibition, recognition was unevenly shared. The American artists, with their humorous, sardonic attitude informed to a great degree by their New York School predecessors, drew most of the public attention, delivering an ad-company-style pow that would be translated within weeks to the new term pop. In comparison, the Europeans appeared too abstract, too cerebral, and even anemic—at least to American collectors. As a result, the New York artists felt the tide turning in their favor, finally—nearly fifty years after the opening of the Armory Show.
It was a heady feeling. By the fall of 1962, the Chelsea was crawling with pop artists collaborating on projects in private rooms, spray-painting sculptures in the lobby, and meeting for appetizers at El Quijote in what appeared to be a nonstop party. Miller understood, to a point, their drive to turn the repressed fifties on its head by rejecting the old humanist ideal of Walt Whitman’s America to embrace, even if ironically, the new reality of American capitalism. But he was bothered by the attitude, as expressed by Oldenburg: “My procedure is entirely instinctive. I don’t believe in history very much or in duty or . . . the intellectual abstractions . . . I don’t have any kind of a program except that of my own procedure and experience as it goes along . . . In general I like things that change.” To Miller, this attitude smacked of denial—a refusal to face the uncomfortable reality of the society whose tokens the artist appropriated and toyed with. By turning their backs on mainstream society—“ignoring its right to exist,” in the tradition of the New York School—these artists seemed to abdicate responsibility for society’s actions and sever their relationship to their own lives and to others. As Quentin, the protagonist of Miller’s play, observed, “It’s like some unseen web of connection between people is simply not there. And I always relied on it, somehow.” Or, as the abstract expressionists downtown asked one another, noting the absence of the community of artists in the now tourist- and celebrity-filled Cedar Bar, “Where is everybody?” Living in the material world, the pop artists had shrugged off humanity and shrugged off the past—a dangerous choice, in Miller’s view, as Americans enjoyed an economic boom at other nations’ expense, as the CIA carried on secret operations in Indochina, and as the world reeled from the aftereffects of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
The giddy, floating atmosphere at the Hotel Chelsea—a cultural fluidity threatening to dissolve into Yves Klein’s blue Void—made the knife thrust of the news of Marilyn Monroe’s dea
th by overdose even more painful than it might otherwise have been. The news came in early August of 1962 as Miller, in Connecticut, was completing the first half of his play and preparing with Inge for the birth of their first child. As Miller wrote to Kazan, Marilyn’s suicide had made for a strange month, and he wrestled with “her ghost, as you can imagine.” By an odd coincidence, he added in his letter, the day before Miller heard of Marilyn’s death, he had decided that Maggie, the sensual beauty in his play who lures Quentin away from his first wife, would have to die in the second act.
Kazan read the letter, aghast. Miller was planning a public re-enactment of the death of his ex-wife—and not only his ex-wife, but a public figure who was still being mourned—yet he seemed to have no inkling of how appalling his idea was. Evidently, he had focused so intently on Maggie as an abstract concept in his philosophical construct that he’d forgotten she also represented a human being. The extent to which such an intelligent playwright had blinded himself to the appearance of his actions was remarkable. Kazan, who had had to read the self-serving rationalizations Miller gave the character based on himself, couldn’t help but take a certain quiet satisfaction in seeing the playwright—who, citing his aversion to the press, declined even to attend Monroe’s funeral—indulge in his own monumental form of denial.
Miller had decided to open the play with Quentin, his alter ego, standing on a nearly bare stage, with characters from his past entering and exiting on cue to act out his recollections. In addition to Mickey, the character based on Kazan, Miller had created Quentin’s fiancée, Holga; his first wife, Louise, self-righteous in her moral rectitude and hateful to Quentin for her power to judge him; and of course Maggie, who serves as a “truth-bearer of sensuality” drawing Quentin out of the Garden of Eden that was his family life.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 19