Looking down from her pyramid, Shirley Clarke was delighted by the influx of aspiring musicians, filmmakers, poets, actors, and activists gathering at the Chelsea to make their voices heard. In the summer of 1967, so many gathered on the roof to sunbathe that residents dubbed it the “Chelsea Surf and Beach Club,” despite Stanley’s refusal to grant their wish for a rooftop pool. At night, the crowd transformed itself into an audience for outdoor screenings, where images from underground films were enhanced by the shrieks of Kleinsinger’s girlfriend as a python slid up her leg or by the Australian artist Brett Whiteley’s two-year-old daughter’s cry in their rooftop garden that “a snail bit me! It had soft teeth.”
Seeing things from the perspective of the Chelsea’s rooftop, Clarke believed that the underground filmmakers’ dream of conquering mainstream culture might really come true. Yet in order to reach and influence a sufficiently large proportion of the population, artists required a well-developed infrastructure—musicians needed record companies, writers depended on publishers, and filmmakers had to have backers—and therein lay the rub. Clarke knew, for instance, what a groundbreaking film she had made with The Cool World, and she had expected the calls from Hollywood studios to start coming in shortly after it opened. But despite critical praise for the film, the delays caused by the obscenity charges, along with a commercial distributor that released it only in black neighborhoods, killed any possibility of success. For several years, Clarke waited—a period of powerlessness all the more bitter because it was that very feeling of frustration and rage she experienced as a female living “in a time when women weren’t running things” that had fed her identification with the disenfranchised junkies of The Connection and the Harlem residents of The Cool World. But still, no Hollywood calls came.
Recently, Clarke had taken the advice of her friend Jonas Mekas, who had moved into a seventh-floor room near Harry Smith that year. Rather than be “swallowed” by the establishment or ignored by it and demoralized, he counseled her, now was the time for avant-garde artists to retreat deeper into the underground to regroup and build up their strength. He had seen for himself, at film festivals around the world, that “sponsored” art, whether backed by a government, an art institution, or a commercial entity, rarely proved effective because, inevitably, the artist was inhibited by the fear of violating the sponsor’s expectations. Better to refuse the money, Mekas insisted. With 8-millimeter film, movies could be made with as little as three hundred dollars, and these self-financed “personal films” could be delivered not to a mass market but to individuals via bookshops and record stores. “Soon you’ll be able to buy prints of the films you like for three to five dollars for your own library,” he wrote. Private messages—truly avant-garde films that “deranged the senses”—could be screened in every home. Today, underground filmmakers were “fighting our ‘cases’ in the courts, but we do not exactly know any longer why we are fighting them,” he wrote, “because the methods and ways that got us into trouble are outdated, outworn.”
“A revolution has taken place,” Mekas concluded. Underground cinema had touched “something that has been very neglected. For the essence of the American man was beginning to die.” He was becoming “like a machine and like money.” The revolution was powerful, but for that exact reason, the “moneybags” were “beginning to see profitable possibilities in underground cinemas.”
The Chelsea Hotel residents could see an example of this form of exploitation in progress under their noses that year, as Edie Sedgwick was asked to appear in the film Ciao! Manhattan, a “skin flick” or “sort of vérité underground movie” whose producers hoped to profit from the expanding curiosity about alternative culture. When they approached Sedgwick to play the lead—Susan Superstar, a New York party girl in a Warhol-manqué world—Gregory Corso, her new friend and neighbor at the Chelsea, tried to protect her. “What’s this film about?” he demanded of the producers. “What are your intentions?” But Sedgwick was too desperate to be a film star again to ask questions. Right away, she opted to go along with the scheme.
Still, participating in this inauthentic exercise proved so depressing that Edie’s drug addiction took a turn for the worse, and she had to be literally dragged to the set each day. In fact, nearly all of Ciao! Manhattan’s cast and crew were too drug-addled to create work of any value. (There were a few exceptions, notably Allen Ginsberg, who appeared nude in one outdoor scene in a challenge to viewers to “make the private public” as fully as he was willing to do, and Sue Hoffmann, a funny, brazen, wiry-haired Chelsea Hotel newcomer who threw herself into her few scenes with abandon.) But nearly everyone else on the set needed a poke of speed—first once each day, then twice, one of the other particpants recalled. The problem was solved with the help of an amenable doctor who was willing to come to the set every day and shoot up the entire cast.
The resulting mess—reels and reels of unusable film, not to mention the participants’ physical and psychological self-destruction—seemed to prove Mekas’s point. It was “time to sound a warning,” he insisted. As artists, “we should stick together more than ever” and remember that small and cheap meant freedom for the underground filmmaker. It meant direct, personal communication with the audience, even if that audience numbered no more than a dozen or so people on the Lower East Side.
Clarke, tired of doing nothing and encouraged by the success of the low-budget Chelsea Girls, decided to try it Mekas’s way. She bought an 8-millimeter camera (an act hailed by Mekas in the Village Voice as “the most important thing that happened in cinema last week”) and began to keep a private film notebook. She helped Mekas put together the Film-Makers’ Distribution Center, an extension of the Film-Makers’ Co-Op, designed to solicit films of all kinds from filmmakers across America and ship them to colleges, theaters, and “whoever wants them.” She even worked with Barbara Rubin on Rubin’s plan to film an experimental musical comedy featuring Harry Smith’s close friend Lionel Ziprin, a student of Kabbalah and an Orthodox Jew.
Finally, feeling emboldened, Clarke went on to conduct a unique experiment in cinema vérité. Given the genre’s core tenet that “people are the most interesting subject,” she wondered what would happen if a subject was allowed to speak for more than the usual few minutes at a time, as was the case in Leacock and Pennebaker’s Primary and even Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, but instead kept going, creating his own full-length film. To find out, she set up her Auricon camera in her pyramid penthouse and chose as her subject a black homosexual hustler named Jason Holliday who would be happy to remain in front of a camera for twelve straight hours in exchange for an unlimited supply of scotch and marijuana and the chance to achieve fame. Just as Harry Smith had assembled a truly genuine folk-music anthology by choosing singers who were ignorant of how they would sound on recordings, Clarke selected Jason partly because she knew that his “lack of know-how” about the filmmaking process would “prevent him from being able to control his own image of himself.” In fact, the performance that Holliday achieved—weeping, shouting, presenting an imaginary nightclub act, and collapsing as he grew increasingly drunk and exhausted over time—made for a riveting ninety-minute film when it was edited down. But what interested Clarke even more was the liberation she felt in handing over her control as a director to the subject, and the surprising extent to which she and her partner, Carl Lee, nevertheless participated in the creation of Jason’s story by shouting questions at him, laughing at him, jeering, and egging him on.
What Shirley learned was that there is really no such thing as an objective film. Inevitably, a narrative is shaped not only by the subjects but also by the decisions of even the most hands-off director—how to prepare the actors, where to place the camera, how long to keep filming, how to organize the segments in the editing phase. She felt good about the film, now titled Portrait of Jason, and once it was finished, she submitted it not to a commercial distributor but to the Film-Makers’ Distribution Center that she had helped create. And y
et, again, despite praise from critics and acceptance to that year’s film festival at Lincoln Center, it seemed to Shirley that the film might as well have dropped into the void. If Mekas wanted them all to retreat deeper into the underground, with Shirley he seemed to be getting his wish. She didn’t want to be swallowed by the establishment, she realized, but she also didn’t want to disappear. She wanted the third alternative, to “smash through the lines of the Establishment to the other side,” to become a visionary director like Stanley Kubrick and have the power to derange the senses of millions of people, not just a few dozen of her friends.
The difference in viewpoints between Clarke and Mekas signaled the beginning of a schism, though neither fully realized it at the time. As Clarke entertained Jean-Luc Godard and his friends in her pyramid and worked, like Pennebaker, Cassavetes, and a few other colleagues, to attract investors and distributors on the West Coast, Mekas found a backer of his own, a philanthropist named Jerome Hill, to help him solidify the “personal filmmakers’” position by preserving their body of past works in a kind of avant-garde film museum. In 1968, without informing Clarke, he began organizing discussions about the function of this new institution, later named the Anthology Film Archives. It was to start with the creation of an Essential Cinema repertory collection that would serve as the standard for future generations. A committee of four filmmakers, along with the film critic P. Adams Sitney, would select the films to be included in the collection.
None of Clarke’s work was included. In fact, she would later claim that she learned of the Anthology Film Archives’ existence only when she came across an article about it in a magazine. Mekas’s decision to exclude her created a rift between the two that would never fully heal. “Five guys” chose the films worth preserving, Clarke pointed out furiously. Why hadn’t she been on that committee? She felt sure she knew why—because she’d been stereotyped as a wealthy, independent female and dismissed by her friends in the underground for being not like them; they had rejected her as completely and irrevocably as had the Hollywood moguls.
Arthur Miller would hardly have been surprised by this. Every choice you make in this society comes at a price, he now believed. One simply had to be aware of the cost and choose accordingly. Clarke had chosen to widen her scope beyond the protective community of filmmakers that nurtured her, and she had lost the full support of some members as a result. Edie Sedgwick had chosen to sacrifice her Factory family to pursue a Hollywood dream. But she hadn’t understood the additional cost of letting go of the sense of herself as a unique and valuable human being—a “superstar”—that Warhol, with his artist’s sensibility, had given her. Now on her own, stumbling ineptly through her scenes in Ciao! Manhattan, Sedgwick paid the price for her decision, donning a clown’s mask provided by strangers and struggling to please the “real-world assholes” she had once disdained.
Like Marilyn Monroe, Sedgwick found it impossible to endure this life. Her personality disintegrated to such a degree that even Neuwirth gave up on her following a screaming argument in her limousine one winter’s night as it cruised west on Twenty-Third Street past the Chelsea Hotel. At the height of the dispute, Edie had leaped out of the car and into the path of oncoming traffic, compelling Neuwirth to jump out as well and pull the sobbing twenty-two-year-old to safety. After dragging her to the Chelsea’s entrance, Neuwirth handed her over to one of the bellmen, then turned and left her for good. When Leonard Cohen accepted the Factory regular Danny Fields’s invitation to meet Edie, he found only an emaciated “bright after-image” of the girl Warhol had adored. Chattering on the phone amid a chaos of discarded clothes and makeup while playing with her cat, Smoke (a descendant of one of Dylan’s pets), Sedgwick had failed to notice that her friend Brigid Berlin had passed out on the floor—on top of a tube of glue, as it turned out, which glued her to the floorboards.
Cohen’s gaze soon turned to a jumble of candles sitting on Edie’s windowsill, which he recognized as the same type he bought at the botánica for his spells. He asked Edie whether she’d arranged them in that order on purpose. “Order? Please! It’s just candles,” she responded. Cohen, alarmed, warned her that this grouping was bound to bring bad luck, something he knew from Harry Smith’s instruction.
Sedgwick ignored him, so it was no surprise to Cohen when her room caught fire a short time later, after she passed out in bed with a cigarette. Edie wrested open her door to escape the blaze—burning her hands badly in the process— fainted on the floor of the hall outside, and was carried down to the lobby by a hotel bellman. There, the disgusted staff left her to lie alone, nude beneath a blanket, as her neighbors, rousted from their apartments by the fire alarm, filed past on their way to an “evacuation” cocktail party at El Quijote—an event that was fast becoming a new tradition for the Chelsea Hotel. When the ambulance arrived, Edie Sedgwick, daughter of Boston’s and New York’s highest aristocracy, was hauled off to St. Vincent’s Hospital. In the months to follow, the former New York It Girl would drift from one temporary shelter to the next as the gossip columnists mused, “Whatever happened to Edie Sedgwick?” until another overdose landed her first in Bellevue and then in Manhattan State Hospital.
To anyone who would listen, Corso cursed Warhol for ruining the girl’s life. But Edie had made her choice and was paying the price—much like Sue Hoffmann, who had been clever enough to parlay her role in Ciao! Manhattan into a position as Warhol’s newest superstar, a position that came with a new name, Viva. She’d entranced the Factory crowd with her wit and lack of inhibition in The Loves of Ondine. But she was appalled when a piece by Barbara Goldsmith appeared in New York magazine filled, Viva alleged, with “invented quotes and imagined sex and drug scenes” and accompanied by Diane Arbus images of her sprawled naked on a couch like a “stoned bimbo slut.” Feeling violated and objectified, Viva threatened to sue. But as she would learn, the determination to present oneself without reservation to the world at large came, at least in America, with the cost of this kind of misinterpretation.
This concept—the idea of what you give away in America for what you get—interested Miller so much that he had made it the focus of his play in progress. The Price began with two brothers meeting in the attic of their childhood home to decide on a selling price for their deceased father’s estate. Surrounded by the relics of their past, the brothers begin to argue over the value of their parents’ possessions. The argument soon expands to reveal long-buried regrets and resentments over the price each has paid for his own and for the other’s life choices.
Miller’s reasons for examining this issue were philosophical but also deeply personal. The previous year, Inge had given birth to their second child, Daniel, who was found to have Down syndrome. Inge had assumed that they would raise the baby boy alongside their daughter, Rebecca, but a week after they brought the baby home, Miller insisted he be placed in an institution. At the time, institutionalization was a common practice frequently recommended by doctors, but some parents had begun to question its wisdom, and it was surprising to Miller’s friends that he, of all people, was not among those pioneers. The playwright claimed privately that he wished to protect Rebecca, that he didn’t want her to have to sacrifice much of her parents’ attention for the sake of a brother with problems. But perhaps, some speculated, he was more strongly motivated by a determination to protect his work life, the same powerful survival instinct that had pushed him off to college during the Depression while his brother, the better scholar, worked to subsidize his education, and that had pushed him out of his marriage with the troubled Marilyn Monroe.
Daniel would remain in institutions throughout his childhood, most of those years near the Millers’ country home in Connecticut, in a facility that had once enjoyed a good reputation but increasingly resembled, in Inge’s words, “something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.” Inge visited their growing son almost weekly, but Miller declined to accompany her. That was his choice. What he got was the preservation of his life as a writer
and his daughter’s bright, unmarred future. The price he paid was the knowledge of his own hypocrisy: America’s most forthright writer omitting any mention of this son’s existence in interviews, when speaking to friends, and even when writing his memoirs decades later. For such an honest writer, this undoubtedly resulted in a private misery and creative self-hobbling.
Other Chelsea alumni were also becoming aware of costs accrued. In 1965, as a way of protesting America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Mary McCarthy had joined many other intellectuals in subverting President Johnson’s plans to celebrate his signing of the Arts and Humanities Act. Now, Johnson took his revenge; he let it be revealed that many international conferences and writing assignments enjoyed over the years by several of these intellectuals, including such habitués of the Chelsea as McCarthy, James Farrell, and Nicolas Nabokov, had been funded by the CIA. In trying to co-opt American institutions to fight their ideological enemies, in other words, the artists themselves had been co-opted.
McCarthy, at least, reacted to this unpleasant truth with commendable alacrity—reverting to her outsider roots, despite her current marriage to a highly placed American diplomat in Paris, by raising money to aid American draft resisters and engaging in passionate antiwar reportage for the New York Review of Books. But traveling on assignment to Hanoi in a Chanel suit with mountains of luggage, she had only to look in the mirror, she wrote, to see evidence of her continuing complicity with American imperialism. She had gotten in life precisely what she had wanted—prestige, respect, insider status. The price had consisted of marrying the “right” men, looking the other way when certain checks were written, and retreating from an early sharp perception of the truth to a less challenging life of gossip and political infighting. Now she wondered whether “the whole Saran-wrapped output of American industrial society” could really be separated any longer into “beneficial and deleterious, ‘good’ and ‘bad.’” With life’s elements blended so thoroughly—the benefits of free elections, religious tolerance, and material abundance, and the costs of commercial TV, corporate lobbying, oil consumption, and war, all suspended like tiny particles in an amorphous social solution—was it really possible to tell them apart? Perhaps the purpose of art really was to sell tickets and magazine subscriptions. Perhaps the purpose of war was to generate profits and help politicians get reelected.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 28