The irritations at work made it more difficult for Miller to put up with certain aspects of life at the Chelsea. Granted, his and Inge’s neighbor Kenneth Noland was good company, and it was amusing to spot Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, giggling in the elevator with a young woman he’d brought to the city for a weekend of jazz in Harlem or to see Woody Allen perform standup at the Bitter End. But there were aggravations too. That fall, Katherine Dunham initiated rehearsals for a new Metropolitan Opera production of Aida starring Leontyne Price and conducted by Zubin Mehta. Having decided to present ancient Egypt as an African culture instead of a Middle Eastern one, Dunham began choreographing a number of glorious dances featuring Nubian warriors, high-kicking Somalis, and Bedouin girls draped in beautiful Moroccan blue, mixing dancers from her own company in with the Met troupe and training the Met’s dancers at her school. She often rehearsed the performers in her hotel suite as well, causing the building to reverberate with the sounds of African music and tribal drums until two or three each morning; one night, she even brought two full-grown lions up in the elevator to join the rehearsal in an effort to make the dances seem more “real.”
This last stunt proved too much even for the Bards, who felt compelled by the number of tenant complaints to ask Dunham to leave the Chelsea. Just as the Millers were beginning to appreciate the absence of drummers, however, more pop artists arrived at the hotel. Claes Oldenburg arrived that fall with his wife, Patty, to finish preparing Bedroom Ensemble—his replica of a bedroom suite in vinyl and Formica—for another all-American new realists show at the Janis Gallery. Shortly afterward, Larry Rivers, attracted, as he wrote, by the Chelsea’s cheap rooms, fun residents, and likable management, moved into a third-floor suite with his new bride, Clarice. He set up a studio in a room on the ninth floor and began work on his series of “Dutch Masters” paintings—campy takes on the reproduction of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild used to sell American cigars. Along with these and other artists came a steady stream of visitors from the entire range of New York’s avant-garde: writers and performers from Ellen Stewart’s new underground theater at Café La MaMa on the Lower East Side and such experimental filmmakers as Jack Smith, who had recently joined other downtown artists in picketing Lincoln Center with signs that read “Demolish Serious Culture!” and “No More Art!”
Then, on November 22, came the horrifying news that President Kennedy had been shot. At the After the Fall rehearsals, “Everybody collapsed.” Work was canceled for the rest of that day and the next day too. At the Chelsea, Clarice Rivers watched the television news reports in shock while, upstairs, Gus Hall and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn made the hasty decision to absent themselves from Communist Party headquarters for the week, fearing right-wing reprisal when word got around that Lee Harvey Oswald had recently corresponded with the Party and had written to Flynn in particular. She had assumed at the time that the writer was either a nut or a government infiltrator and so had passed the letter on to a colleague to politely end the exchange. Still, she and Hall knew enough to prepare themselves for an intense volley of visits and phone taps from the FBI—eavesdropping that would reveal only that the Communists at the Chelsea, like so many others, were wondering how the rifle used by Oswald could have fired with enough accuracy and impact to kill the president, whether Oswald had been set up, and whether Jack Ruby had been sent to silence him.
The shock of the president’s death made for a profoundly shaken cast when rehearsals for After the Fall resumed. With the January opening just two months away, the play still ran an unbearably long four hours. Miller and Kazan could barely tolerate each other, as Kazan responded to the playwright’s refusal to admit that Maggie was Marilyn by aggressively highlighting their similarities through his direction, urging Loden to move, whisper, and coo like Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps, as Whitehead suggested, Kazan believed that a frank reenactment of the Miller-Monroe romance would make for good publicity for the play. But the reality—that Monroe had been Kazan’s lover before she was Miller’s and that the director’s current lover was portraying his former mistress—complicated the issue. Kazan seemed to want to rub Miller’s nose in the fact that Maggie, uneducated but revering those who were, had offered her husband her whole life—and he had essentially walked away and left her to die.
One day in early December, following a full run-through of the play, several of the actors were told to report to Miller’s Hotel Chelsea suite to go over some cuts with the production team. Gathering in the living room, each enjoying a glass or two of wine, they were surprised when a hairdresser arrived and was ushered by Kazan into the Millers’ bedroom, along with Barbara Loden. A short time later, Loden reemerged—and conversation stopped. Wearing a carefully coiffed blond wig, Loden looked exactly like Marilyn Monroe.
The transformation—indicating as it did just how far Kazan intended to move away from fiction and toward the real—spurred endless debate within the cast. Loden herself seemed fatalistic about the decision, telling a fellow cast member, “Well, that’s the way it’s got to be.” But Miller continued to argue against Kazan’s approach, right up to the opening on January 23.
Owing to construction delays, the eleven-hundred-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater was not completed by the date of the premiere. The administrators dealt with the problem by erecting a temporary replica at the south end of Washington Square Park. On opening night, Miller and his wife sat on the floor beneath a loudspeaker in a backstage corridor listening to the “Third Play”—decades in the making and representing many of the most important moments of Arthur Miller’s life.
The response from the audience could hardly have been worse. Miller may have refused to identify the models for his characters, but the audience members had no doubt that they were watching the story of the love affair between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, and both critics and laymen were horrified by what they saw as an exploitation of the dead. With Quentin’s heartless summing-up of Maggie as “a joke to most people” and Maggie’s reverential treatment of Quentin (“You’re like a god!”), Miller’s play came off as monstrously self-serving. Miller should have realized, as Warhol had demonstrated so efficiently with his Marilyn exhibition less than two years before, that New York audiences would identify with Maggie, or at least with the vulnerable spirit within themselves that she represented. Her story—her desires and her victimization—was their story. That night in the theater, it was almost as though Marilyn had stepped through the playwright’s dialogue to take command of the audience herself.
Miller, disappointed and angered, felt that the audience had entirely missed the point of Quentin’s moral dilemma. Blinded by the brightness of Monroe’s celebrity, they had retreated into childish sentimentality and denial. The very mention of Monroe’s name in his presence now sent the playwright into a rage, as one neighbor in the hotel, a journalist, learned to his sorrow when he asked for an interview as Miller was sorting through his mail at the front desk. As Stanley Bard blanched and discreetly turned aside, Miller shouted that he was sick of having his privacy breached, and he continued yelling, red-faced, until the frightened reporter backed away. A short time later, Miller fled to Europe with Inge. While there, he was fascinated to learn that twenty-two former SS officers were soon to go on trial for the murder of Jews at Auschwitz, and he arranged to cover the story for the New York Herald Tribune. The issues raised by the trial inspired him to try again to analyze human beings’ resistance to taking moral responsibility. He returned to the Chelsea in May and completed Incident at Vichy in a mere three weeks. But this play generated little interest. It seemed Miller was right: Americans were simply not in the mood for self-examination.
As 1964 ended and 1965 began, a new memorial plaque was comissioned for the Chelsea façade, this one for Brendan Behan, who had died in a Dublin hospital in March. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, too, had died, while on a trip to Moscow; she’d gone there to visit the moment her passport was restored.
A state funeral in Red Square was attended by twenty-five thousand mourners, and her ashes were buried, according to her wishes, near the graves of the nineteenth-century Haymarket martyrs in Chicago. Miller—again the survivor—had to accept the fact that the time for seriousness was over in this country, at least for the moment. The time was over for words themselves, it seemed to him. Now was the time for images.
That winter, settled in his pleasantly shabby and cluttered Hotel Chelsea living room, thoughtfully chain-smoking in rumpled slacks and red flannel shirt, the playwright wondered aloud to a visiting reporter how O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, and Dylan Thomas could possibly have managed to concentrate here at the Hotel Chelsea. He himself found it impossible to focus on work with so many distracting things going on. Not so long ago, for instance, someone had shot a prostitute on the seventh floor, and she’d lost an eye and a finger. More recently, the house detective’s quadruple-locked apartment had been discovered to contain dozens of shelves full of television sets, hi-fi equipment, typewriters, and fur coats that the detective had stolen from the hotel guests.
Charles James, one of the postwar era’s greatest couturiers, had taken a room on Miller’s floor. The sensitive and refined design artist from Chicago had once counted Marlene Dietrich and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst among his clients, and Cecil Beaton and Jean Cocteau as his friends. His sculpted gowns, so well constructed that they didn’t require a body to hold their shape, had long been celebrated both in Paris and New York. But, like many at the Chelsea, James had proved too much the purist as an artist to survive the cutthroat commercialism of modern-day New York. Having left his beautiful wife, Nancy, to live with one of her ex-husbands, the theatrical designer Keith Cuerden, James was now losing his lover to the debilitating effects of alcoholism. Alone at the Chelsea, the aged designer spent his days puttering about with admiring young fashion interns, fretting over money, and writing long, exquisitely penned letters of hurt accusation and elaborate forgiveness to friends within and outside of the Chelsea’s walls.
Meanwhile, on the top floor, Arthur C. Clarke had thrown himself into the production of a new novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey—the first step in creating a screenplay for Stanley Kubrick, as he’d agreed to the previous spring. The two men possessed opposite temperaments: Kubrick, a consummate New York intellectual, stayed up until three or four in the morning dominating everyone around him with his dynamic, overactive personality, while Clarke, polite, agreeable, and consummately British, never stayed up past ten. Yet from their first meeting, at Trader Vic’s at the Plaza Hotel, the novelist and the filmmaker had experienced a remarkable rapport. They agreed on the need for not just another science fiction tale but a new, universal myth for mankind worthy of the space age, and had engaged in passionate debates on this topic in Clarke’s well-preserved Hotel Chelsea suite over the previous six months. Venturing down countless blind alleys and throwing away tens of thousands of Clarke’s words, they finally decided their story would center on an extraterrestrial artifact that might or might not have influenced the course of human evolution, and that it would feature three main characters—two astronauts and an intelligent computer named HAL.
Now, hammering out two thousand words per day on his gray Smith-Corona, subsisting mainly on tea, crackers, and liver pâté, Clarke struggled to create a suitable plot for a director who could be notoriously difficult to please, as Clarke’s friend Terry Southern knew from his own recently completed project with Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove. It was a frustrating process, and Clarke sometimes broke away to have breakfast with Miller at the Automat, where Clarke regaled the playwright with passionate predictions of mankind’s glorious future as colonists of space and Miller, glancing at the Automat clientele picking their noses and getting into fights, tried to believe.
And, again, there were the artists. The previous summer’s Venice Biennale had been a great triumph for the Americans, with Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Noland, and others dominating the scene and Rauschenberg becoming the first American to win the grand prize. If some Europeans expressed outrage over American pop’s hypermaterialist, even flippant approach—seen by some as a kind of American propaganda that was in fact organized with the help of the U.S. State Department—every artist at the Biennale now understood which side of the Atlantic possessed the cultural power going forward.
As a result, the world’s artists came to America. By the spring of 1965, the Hotel Chelsea had become a veritable Ellis Island of the avant-garde, in the words of one journalist, with more than twenty artists from Europe and the United States in residence. On Miller’s floor, a tall, wiry-haired, Romanian-born dynamo from Paris, Daniel Spoerri, was creating “trap” pictures by affixing to tables the remains of meals, ashtrays full of cigarette butts, newspapers, or whatever happened to be resting on them and hanging the tables on the walls. Arman had returned to the ninth floor to again fill his apartment with junk, while down the hall the Hungarian-born artist Jan Cremer, author of a nihilistic, On the Road–style bestselling cult novel in the Netherlands, moved into Larry Rivers’s former studio to produce enormous canvases covered with blindingly bright tulip fields ten or twelve feet tall. The British pop artist Allen Jones had arrived with his wife, Janet, to churn out brightly colored erotic images based on photographs from old Playboys and fetish magazines. On the tenth floor, where the bearded former PR man Harold Steinberg had recently created Chelsea House Publishers—gaining instant credibility by appropriating not only the hotel’s name but its logo for his stationery—Jean Tinguely once again lived with Niki de Saint Phalle. Inspired by Clarice Rivers’s rotund pregnancy the previous summer, Saint Phalle had abandonded her shooting paintings in favor of a series of enormous, brightly colored papier-mâché fertility figures she called Nanas, which soon grew so numerous they spilled out into the hall, badly startling Steinberg’s wife, Mary, every time she stepped out of her apartment next door.
Christo, the Bulgarian-born artist who specialized in wrapped objects, was also back at the Chelsea with his French wife, Jeanne-Claude. A show at the Leo Castelli Gallery had first brought the attractive young couple to the Chelsea in the spring of 1964. Clued in by Rivers and other friends in Paris, they had taken a taxi from the airport straight to the Chelsea, where they felt instantly at home, despite the fact that Christo spoke virtually no English and Jeanne-Claude’s accent was so poor that when she asked for fresh sheets, the maid responded, “What? You want shit, ma’am?” Surrounded by other artists, all of them “crazy,” the couple, not yet thirty, felt normal for the first time in their lives. New York dazzled them too: they delighted in putting nickels into slots to get food from the machines at the Automat; enjoyed dining in their room with the artist Ray Johnson, who brought a gift of four forks wrapped in a package, which they mistakenly believed was a work of art; and marveled at Kleinsinger playing piano in his jungle and dipping a finger in the piranha tank for an occasional nibble to wake himself up so he could play more.
Christo’s new friends at the Chelsea had soon grown accustomed to seeing the artist gesture in excitement toward wrapped bundles of newspapers or shrouded motorcycles on the sidewalks and crying, “Ah!”—unable to express in English his delight at finding real objects that conveyed his own vague feelings of mystery in a visual language he was still developing. Subsisting on the small sums he received from the few collectors who began to drop by to purchase a collage or a wrapped bottle, he created his first life-size Store Front in his hotel room for the May 1964 Castelli show, incorporating an ornate brass doorknob from his Hotel Chelsea bathroom door. After the show ended, the couple had returned briefly to Paris to retrieve their four-year-old son, Cyril. Now they were back, thrilled to resume their life in what Christo called “the most human city I have ever lived in”—it was certainly unstable, but “that is good for creating,” its very ruthless and rootless quality making it “the only place that gives us a true image of life.”
When Claes Oldenburg returned with Patty to the Chelsea that spring, a
gain followed by Larry and Clarice Rivers—this time with their baby daughter, Gwynne—Oldenburg steered Christo and Jeanne-Claude toward the Howard Street loft building, a block from Canal Street and its treasure trove of junk shops, where he had long maintained a studio. The European couple, eager to establish a permanent home, rented the building’s top two floors for seventy dollars per month and began clearing debris, painting, and battling rats for control of the frigid spaces while their neighbors and the staff at the Chelsea looked after Cyril. Stanley Bard, no older than Christo and now fully in charge of managing the hotel after his father’s death from a heart attack the previous year, kindly looked the other way as the couple ran up hundreds of dollars in unpaid hotel bills, pouring whatever money they made into the loft.
Miller had been correct in his intuition, five years earlier, that Stanley had resented working at the hotel at first, at least to some degree. As a child, he had coveted the attention his father had lavished on the Chelsea. As a young adult with a stint in the service behind him and a New York University accounting degree under his belt, Stanley was frustrated by his father’s decision to take him on as an employee and pay him only sixty dollars a week to crawl through airshafts and repair pipes with the plumber, Mr. Krauss, when Stanley’s friends were earning a hundred and fifty dollars a week or more in office high-rises. A strict upbringing kept Stanley on the job, however, long enough to realize that a number of these customers of his father’s, tucked away in rooms along the building’s labyrinthine corridors, were highly accomplished individuals whose work he had studied in school.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 21