Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel

by Sherill Tippins

  Stanley Bard didn’t want to take over management duties from his father, the Chelsea’s co-owner David Bard. Gradually, however, he came to know and respect its artistic legacy and its creative residents.

  Christo and Jeanne-Claude taught Stanley Bard how to look at conceptual art. In exchange, Bard looked the other way when these tenants fell behind on their rent.

  The Chelsea in the 1960s projected an atmosphere of “scary and optimistic chaos,” Arthur Miller wrote, yet at the same time it maintained “the feel of a massive, old-fashioned, sheltering family.” Here, Chelsea co-owner Joseph Gross keeps an eye on Miller’s daughter Rebecca.

  The feminist Village Voice columnist Jill Johnston posed at the Chelsea for Larry Rivers’s Moon Man and Moon Lady, 1965.

  In the early days of their collaboration on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke tried working in Kubrick’s Manhattan office. But Clarke depended for his inspiration on Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Harry Smith, and others. He soon returned to the Chelsea.

  By the mid-1960s, New York’s community of underground filmmakers had reached critical mass. Shown here, dining at the back table at El Quijote restaurant, are (left to right) Warhol screenwriter Ronald Tavel, filmmaker Jack Smith, an unidentified man, Harry Smith, patroness Panna Grady, William Burroughs, and Andy Warhol.

  Under Warhol’s gaze, Edie Sedgwick felt truly seen for the first time in her life, yet she longed to abandon Warhol’s Factory for Hollywood.

  By the time he moved into the Chelsea and began work on Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan had befriended Allen Ginsberg. Together, their voices would speak for a generation, in just the way the Chelsea’s creator had hoped.

  Harry Smith, the wizard of the Chelsea Hotel, educated a generation of young acolytes as he worked on Mahagonny. “It wasn’t just all the pot smoke,” one guest said. “It was like this very bizarre sense of time and reality.”

  The artist Brion Gysin and his close friend William Burroughs arrived to market their new invention, the Dream Machine.

  The Chelsea provided a full complement of midcentury American archetypes for Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls. Stanley Bard was reluctant to allow filming, but Warhol (shown here with the actor Mario Montez) promised that no artists would be disturbed.

  By asking intrusive questions and repeating nasty rumors just before turning the camera on his actors, Warhol and his filmmaking partner Paul Morrissey provoked astonishing responses from such superstars as Mary Woronov (left) and Brigid Berlin (right).

  Warhol was not so much a creator, he claimed, as a “pencil sharpener” who honed what was already there. But once Chelsea Girls was released, Bob Dylan remarked, “It was all over for the Chelsea Hotel. You might as well have burned it down.”

  Janis Joplin reveled in the Victorian-era romance of the hotel, knowing that the rooftop where she posed for photographs had served as a backdrop for New York’s artistic life for more than eighty years.

  Years after his first encounter with Joplin, Leonard Cohen would commemorate that night at the Chelsea when both were poised on the brink of celebrity with the song “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.”

  “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another,” Sam Shepard assured Patti Smith as she struggled to improvise in Cowboy Mouth, a reimagining of their life on West Twenty-Third Street.

  Viva, Warhol’s newest superstar, became a proud and happy mother following her daughter Alexandra’s birth, embarrassing Stanley Bard by breastfeeding her baby in the lobby.

  After completing his collaboration with Dennis Hopper (left) on the film Easy Rider, Terry Southern (right) joined the Chelsea exodus to Chicago for the riot-plagued 1968 Democratic National Convention.

  When Abbie Hoffman first saw the artist Vali Myers dining at El Quijote with the poet Gregory Corso, Hoffman stopped in his tracks in amazement. Within days, he ousted Vali’s roommate from the Chelsea and started paying her rent himself.

  In the 1970s, the experimental filmmaker Shirley Clarke became fascinated by video’s potential for inexpensive, instant communication. Someday, she predicted, artists around the world would be able to exchange images instantly by satellite.

  Nancy Spungen was well known in New York’s downtown punk world before she met Sid Vicious in London. Even as Spungen’s body was removed from the Chelsea, rumors began to circulate that Vicious was not her killer.

  The pall that settled over the Chelsea following Spungen’s death was partially lifted when the residents celebrated the building’s centennial. Choreographer Merle Lister’s Dance of the Spirits, featuring dancer Gina Liors, uncannily echoed the tale of Paula, the mysterious story spinner, with which the Chelsea’s journey had begun.

  Dee Dee Ramone checked into the Chelsea to try to overcome his heroin addiction. While there, he wrote the novel Chelsea Horror Hotel.

  When the elderly artist Alphaeus Cole checked into the Chelsea, Bard gave him a rent-controlled lease to make him feel more secure. Everyone assumed that the apartment would soon be vacant, but Cole survived, paying his ridiculously low rent, to age 112.

  The Chelsea is now under new ownership, and its future is unclear. But its spirit survives, and the building keeps watch over the city in whose heart it has been embedded for 130 years.

  9

  Mahagonny

  For as ye make your bed, so shall ye lie.

  —HARRY SMITH

  EVIDENTLY, THE AUTHOR of New York on Twenty Dollars a Day had not bothered to stop by the Chelsea before relisting it in the guidebook’s 1974 edition. True, you could still score a tiny room for just eleven dollars a night. The listing failed to mention, however, that to get the key you had to make your way past an oddly jittery group of loiterers in the lobby, then shout your name to the desk clerk through a bulletproof barrier over the noise of residents shouting that the elevator was stuck again or of the Beat poet Gregory Corso smashing up the telephone booth. As for the rooms, the front of the building facing Twenty-Third Street was battered night and day by the rattle of traffic and the roar of garbage trucks, while the rear rooms endured the dynamite blasts accompanying a high-rise construction that promised to cut off even more light to the hotel.

  But for Raymond Foye, a recent high-school graduate on his first weekend visit to the city that summer, squalor was what New York was all about. Guidebook in hand, he moved through the Chelsea Hotel’s dingy, mustard-yellow corridors and beneath dusty ropes of electric wiring, avoiding eye contact with the pimps, prostitutes, and pushers who lounged in the stairwell as though they owned the place. He learned soon enough that those eleven-dollar rooms, carved arbitrarily out of larger suites decades ago, were so hot and airless that the balcony doors had to be left open at night, which allowed the neighbors’ dogs and cats to wander in and out at will.

  As gritty now as it had once been glamorous, the Chelsea looked to Foye like one big rummage sale, with such fascinating living artifacts as the ninety-seven-year-old portraitist Alphaeus Cole, confined to a wheelchair but still lambasting “modern art”; the glorious Vali Myers, with her orange mane, who responded gently to Raymond’s question about how she had gotten through customs with those tattoos on her face with the words “Makeup, darling” ; and even the fugitive Abbie Hoffman, who fooled no one with his disguise when he dropped in and ran up his friends’ long-distance bills, made love to their wives, and then disappeared again.

  Foye found himself immediately attracted to the eccentric affect of the Chelsea. He liked the fact that no matter how hard people tried to clean it up, it never got completely clean. From that first visit, the hotel struck him as a rare, unusually diverse social and creative nexus. From Brendan Behan’s old sailor friend Peter Arthur bragging about stuffing some guy’s head down a toilet bowl to Lee Grant fresh from her success in Shampoo, “We all came from somewhere else to be THERE.”

  This sense was confirmed for Raymond late one afternoon on that first weekend visit when he was approached by Harry Smith in t
he lobby. After striking up a conversation, the ragged little man with the Scotch-taped spectacles invited Foye to come up to his room sometime, telling him in his high-pitched, sardonic twang, “Just remember, I’m in room 731. That’s seven planets, three alchemical principles, and one god.” Like so many before him, the teenager took the bait and walked unknowingly into Harry Smith’s alternative world, which was filled with not only hundreds of books arranged by height and literally tens of thousands of records organized by labels but also new collections layered atop the old ones: exquisite hand-painted Ukrainian Easter eggs, crushed Coke cans sorted by shape and color, and handmade paper airplanes launched by bored New York office workers and schoolchildren and retrieved by Smith from the city streets. Raymond met Harry’s new parakeet, Birdy, which was flying freely about the room, and his new fish, Fishy, swimming in its clay bowl. He was introduced to Peggy Biderman and to Harry’s new assistant, Khem Caigan, with whom Smith was compiling the only known concordance to the angelic Enochian language. Rosebud Feliu was around as well on one of her periodic visits to Harry, who was still her spiritual partner even though she shared her room at the Chelsea with her husband, a Danish longshoreman, her young son, and three or four friends who strung up hammocks in the rented space.

  From the beginning, Foye was impressed by Smith’s flair for the dramatic: the “orgiastic pleasure” he took in shattering glass objects or tearing up paper money before astonished witnesses; his habit of standing before his immense record collection and drawling, “There’s nothing to listen to!”; his remark, when he was discussing his work in the areas of linguistics and archaeology, that actually, “My true vocation is preparation for death.” He enjoyed bragging that he had not paid taxes for forty years and wore only clothing that people had thrown away. In the same spirit of grand disdain, he would sometimes step behind the hotel’s front desk, scoop his mail out of his box, and, in one swooping gesture, drop it in the trash basket, checks and all.

  Over time, as Foye returned to the Chelsea every few months between art-school sessions in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, he learned a great deal about Mahagonny. Its original eleven hours of footage had been edited down to a usable six hours, and its thirteen hundred images waited to be identified, categorized by type, paired to specific musical notes or sequences in the opera score, and timed to coincide with not only the music’s rhythms but also the rhythms of the human pulse and respiration, all on four separate simultaneously projected reels. To do this, Smith needed to rent a Steenbeck editing deck, and so he was forced to spend time applying for grants that summer. In one such application, to the American Film Institute, he described Mahagonny as a mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp’s 1926 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), a highly complex construction full of symbols and mechanical workings that seemed to aim for the same type of neurologically transformative effect that Harry hoped to achieve with his film.

  That summer, there was an urgency to Smith’s activities relating to Mahagonny; it was as though he felt that the opportunity to create a shift in human consciousness was about to slip away. Inside the Chelsea, it was possible for some to insulate themselves—say, for instance, the artist Ching Ho Cheng to discuss the teachings of the Indian raga singer Pandit Pran Nath inside his serene, minimalist rooms, or Vali Myers to serve garlicky stews to her guests in a room bright with richly colored fabrics and her drawings on the walls. Stanley Bard was always at work in his cluttered office, his desk piled high with file folders, bills, books signed by grateful authors, and various bits of miscellany: a postcard from Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, a poem that Andrei Voznesensky had written about him, and a box he was safeguarding for Agnes Boulton containing love letters from her former husband, Eugene O’Neill. Day after day, beneath the dancing putti on the time-darkened ceiling, Bard repeated to reporters that the Chelsea was unique in providing all the conditions required by artists to do their work. Creative people had to feel comfortable, he explained, so as manager, he sometimes had to “allow things to go on that you couldn’t do in the Hilton Hotel.” And really, he insisted, it was bad only when the Grateful Dead came in; it was not even the band but its hangers-on who caused the problems. Handling these and other crises—for instance, trying to cover the losses when Miloš Forman departed to film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and left three months’ rent unpaid—he hardly had time to notice the extent to which the city was collapsing.

  But outside, it was the summer of Taxi Driver—a summer when a garbage strike had reduced the steaming streets to such a fetid state that Martin Scorsese actually had to order his assistants to haul garbage away to make the gritty urban landscape look believable. The stench was everywhere, Holly Woodlawn observed, poisoning the air “like an opened grave,” driving downtown denizens like herself to heroin and vodka to ease their misery, and pushing gay street life west toward the river, whose piers had become an all-night cruising circus for hundreds of leather boys, transvestites, and closeted suburban husbands. The reckoning had come, Ginsberg proclaimed in a response that spring to the literary establishment’s decision to give his book of poems The Fall of America that year’s National Book Award. Together, through their own greed, materialism, and “aggressive hypocrisy,” the people of the United States, himself included, had created the “fabled damned of nations” foretold by Walt Whitman a century before: they had enabled police states and dictatorships, murdered “millions,” and damaged the very planet’s chance of survival. There was no longer any hope for the salvation envisioned by the Beat Generation. All that remained was “the vast empty space of our own Consciousness.”

  “We were so happy at first—what happened?” wondered Holly Woodlawn. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was the awful vacuum created by the abrupt withdrawal of money from the system as stagflation tightened its grip. Whatever it was, New York had become a wasteland. One sensed a harsh, morning-after spirit in the air. In March, at age twenty-nine, Candy Darling had died of leukemia. Following her funeral, Jackie Curtis had gotten off drugs and gone back to being a man. As Candy had written in a farewell note to Warhol, “Unfortunately before my death I had no desire left for life . . . I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death.”

  The same boredom was evident at New York’s City University in the faces of the students whom William Burroughs had been hired to teach that fall. For some time, the sixty-year-old writer had longed to get out of England, where he’d been based for more than a decade, and so Ginsberg, accommodating as always, had set up this three-month course as part of City University’s “distinguished writers” series. In a loft he sublet on Broadway near Canal, Burroughs carefully prepared his lectures on the willingness of the establishment to fight to the death to maintain the status quo and on the need to take control of the mass media where the real battle would be fought, in order to break through the “tissue of lies and horseshit” and win the country back again.

  But when he presented this thesis to his students, Burroughs got no response. The kids looked brain-dead—so thoroughly infected by establishment memes that they seemed unable to understand what he was saying. One couldn’t help recalling what a KGB agent had said one night to Ginsberg as the latter was railing against America’s repressive policies to the poet Andrei Voznesensky and his group of Russian minders. The KGB agent had interrupted him and said, “My dear boy, let me tell you one thing, the enemy is not capitalism or communism. It’s television!” It was clearly Warhol’s America now—a nation of supermarket shelves filled with a hundred varieties of paper towels, a country whose criminal president could resign in disgrace and get off scot-free, an America where, as Warhol himself had once predicted would happen, everyone thought alike.

  Only rarely did anything break through the low hum of nihilism: the photograph of a bright-eyed Patty Hearst wielding an M-1 carbine during a San Francisco bank robbery; the sight of Gulf Oil’s Pittsburgh headquarters bombed by the Weather Underground; the
recorded voices of Richard Nixon and H. R. Haldeman discussing using the CIA to block a Watergate investigation. It was not enough. To Burroughs, his students’ faces said it all: the situation was hopeless. Teaching the course left him extremely depressed.

  Already, though, across town, the seeds planted in the rich loam of the Mercer Arts Center were starting to sprout, even if all they had produced so far were a few scraggly weeds. A couple of young poets named Richard Meyers and Tom Miller were inspired by the New York Dolls and the Modern Lovers to form their own garage-style band, the Neon Boys, which by early 1974 had morphed into the group Television, with drummer Billy Ficca and guitarist Richard Lloyd. Excited by the idea of reinventing himself, Meyers gave himself the new, more evocative name Richard Hell, and Miller gave a nod to one of their favorite symbolist poets by christening himself Tom Verlaine. They adopted a defiant “wild boys” look, with torn T-shirts, leather jackets, and spiky hair, and borrowed a loft in Chinatown to start rehearsing “Love Comes in Spurts” and “Black Generation” while keeping an eye out for a place to perform.

  They found it in CBGB, a newly opened hole-in-the-wall country music and blues venue on the Bowery whose owner, Hilly Kristal, agreed to let the band perform on Sundays from March through September 1974. Deep and narrow, with a bar along the right side, a low stage to the left, and a pool table, kitchen, and Hilly’s office at the rear, CBGB didn’t look promising, but it was a place where the band could gain experience. In August, another band, the Ramones, decked out in glam-rock-inspired silver shirts, vinyl pants, and snakeskin boots, braved the smell of stale beer, body odor, and Hilly’s defecating dog, to perform on a bill with the Savage Voodoo Nuns and a group called the Angel and the Snake, soon to change its name to Blondie.