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

by Sherill Tippins

  Phil Ochs, for example—on a downhill emotional slide since the 1968 Democratic Convention debacle—checked back in at the Chelsea shortly after that spring’s War Is Over rally, already clearly disturbed. Having lost his greatest cause, with America now out of Vietnam, he gave himself up to alcoholism and what would later be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, hanging about the lobby in unwashed clothes, rambling on about government conspiracies, and breathing alcohol fumes on the tourists. In June, he surprised an interviewer with the announcement that his name was not Phil Ochs but John Butler Train, adding that he had killed Ochs at the Chelsea Hotel because the man “drank too much and was becoming a boring old fart,” and that he, Train, was here to stay. (Hearing this news, Harry Smith promptly recorded a thirty-minute interview with Train for his audio collection.) In the weeks that followed, this stranger inhabiting Ochs’s body made himself a drunken nuisance, picking fights with other residents when he wasn’t in his room staring catatonically at the television screen.

  His neighbors guessed that on some level Ochs must be aware of how tragically far he had fallen, as he produced a moving new song, “The Ballad of John Train,” depicting an alcoholic singer with an audience of street bums. But it was hard to know how to help, as Train had taken to carrying a claw hammer tucked in his belt so he could attack anyone who dared address him by Ochs’s name. And then came another devastating setback: Bob Dylan decided to lead a rollicking Anthology of American Folk Music–style Rolling Thunder Revue through small-town America, just as he and Ochs had discussed doing years before, taking Ginsberg, Baez, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, Sam Shepard, and others on the adventure but leaving Ochs behind. Shortly after the realization sank in that no invitation would be forthcoming, Ochs tried to hang himself from a banister at his former apartment, now sublet by a friend, but the wood gave way and he crashed to the floor. It was a temporary reprieve: in less than a year, he would succeed in committing suicide.

  Others at the Chelsea were having troubles as well. With the help of Dexedrine, Harry Smith had made quite a lot of progress on molding his twelve reels of Mahagonny footage into “‘One’ Big Ceremony (for that is what it is).” However, as his use of drugs and alcohol steadily increased, his behavior worsened. No doubt the Dexedrine was responsible for his obsession with building string mazes to entertain the mouse that lived in his room. The drug could be blamed, too, for the fiendish pleasure he took in provoking others—tossing his household garbage out his window onto the roof of the synagogue next door just to enrage his ultra-Orthodox friend Lionel Ziprin, and calling a black woman in El Quijote a “nigger,” which led her to break a bottle over his head. Drug dealers and other unsavory acquaintances whom Harry indiscriminately let in had set fire to his room, shot a bullet through the door, robbed him, and, in one instance, tied the filmmaker to a chair and pistol-whipped him. His life became so chaotic that, according to Barry Miles, representatives from the Smithsonian Institution started turning up from time to time to remove his world-class Seminole garment collection for safekeeping, leaving receipts and returning the collection when it looked safe to do so.

  By the fall of 1975, all of this high living had taken its toll on the fifty-two-year-old filmmaker. Already, he was ill enough that throwing up blood every day seemed “a normal thing.” Then one day he drank himself into a coma; he was saved only because a couple of maids who had been keeping an eye on him found his unconscious body and had him rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital. There, it took six people to tie Smith down on the bed while, “near death and hallucinating,” he shouted blasphemies and “dreadful condemnations” by his supposed father, Aleister Crowley. It was two weeks before the poison worked its way out of his system so he could begin to heal.

  Later, when it was all over, Smith wrote in his report to the Creative Artists Public Service Program that the doctors had diagnosed him as suffering from a “severe psychic discompensation.” But “there is admittedly a connection between art and madness,” he insisted. “I have always used my God-given gift of mental disease as perhaps the most valuable component of my work.” Granted, he had little suspected “just how far my barque would drift from its appointed mooring.” In fact, his experience in the hospital had frightened him so thoroughly that he promised the drinking would stop. Nevertheless, he regretted nothing, and he returned home to the Chelsea convinced that “you have to live Mahagonny, in fact be Mahagonny, in order to work on it.” If making his film required his “living through the birth and death of Mahagonny itself,” that was what he was prepared to do.

  And Mahagonny’s theme, Smith had decided by now, was “boredom”—the deadening of the spirit that came from everything being too available, too easily bought. In Mahagonny, he wrote, “You could fish, you could smoke, you could look at the vellum-colored skies.” Yet something was missing. “The thing that was missing was any excitement . . . other than to spend money.”

  Money—that was the catch. Money had built the great city of Mahagonny, and it was the insatiable need for money—that addiction, as Burroughs would say—that was destroying it. Outside the hotel’s doors, the proud city of New York had been forced by the federal government to hand over control of its budget to a shadowy board of bankers and money managers called the Municipal Assistance Corporation in exchange for the funds needed to avoid collapse. Meanwhile, down on the Bowery, all the fast guitar playing in the world couldn’t stop the Nixon-empowered corporate behemoths from amassing greater political leverage and taking control of more and more natural and man-made resources with less and less regulation—then feeding it all back to “consumers,” as people were now called, for a price. Legislatively, business had refined its ability to act as a class; it killed the spirit with its language of indifference, drained the lifeblood out of a populace fattened on its empty calories and empty promises.

  The artist at the Chelsea who most effectively captured this new mood was a newcomer from the South named William Eggleston. The thirty-eight-year-old photographer, a native of Memphis raised amid the Southern aristocracy, was in town to prepare for his first show at the Museum of Modern Art, in May 1976. Eggleston’s strange, haunted images of muddy pickup trucks, discarded shoes, and barbecuing suburbanites demonstrated the influence of the black-and-white work of his predecessors Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Cartier-Bresson. But in 1973, after he stumbled across a process called dye-transfer printing used to create supersaturated color images for magazine ads, Eggleston permanently switched to color photographs. The bright blues, lipstick reds, and shimmering greens obtained through this process imbued his images of small-town America with an uncanny hyperrealism, making them glow with a kind of vulgar, commercial, manufactured version of the “shimmer of meaning” that had been painted into the Chelsea artists’ tonalist landscapes nearly a century before.

  This was what was left for us, the photographs implied—an abandoned democracy littered with detritus, and lives deprived of all meaning save that provided by the corporate machine. It was an unpleasant message. When the show opened in May, viewers moved slowly past the sequence of images, from low-key snapshots of backyards and tricycles to more unsettling photographs: an open oven; a harried-looking matron caught in a moment of uncertainty; a beautiful girl, eyes closed, lying as though crucified by boredom on a patch of carpet grass.

  They were radical images—deeply disturbing. The city’s critics, who associated color photographs with snapshots and ads, responded to the show with scathing reviews. Chelsea Hotel alumnus Hilton Kramer called the photographs “perfectly banal” and “boring,” and the New York Times dubbed the exhibition “the most hated show of the year.” But if there was something to hate in Eggleston’s dark vision, it wasn’t the photographer’s fault. “A picture is what it is,” was all he would say, “and I’ve never noticed that it helps to talk about them.”

  That same spring of 1976, the Ramones’ eponymous first album also met with failure, despite some decent reviews. The disappoin
ting sales turned their mood from defiant to sour. They would have to make up the earnings deficit with a grueling tour, and Dee Dee panicked when he realized that he would now be expected to “give up my freedom and be part of something and commit.” But as it turned out, the New York punks met with an enthusiastic reception in London. British fans, hit as hard as New Yorkers by the tough economic times, were ready and waiting for their liberating message of do-it-yourself music, and the Ramones’ Fourth of July performance at the Roundhouse, a former venue for sixties rock bands, became a crystallizing moment for punk.

  On the way to the venue earlier that day, someone in the car had said, “There’s Sid Vicious!” Dee Dee had looked out the window in time to spot a tall, skinny guy in baggy red loon pants, a black fishnet top, eye makeup, and short blue-black hair standing alone on the sidewalk, looking blankly off in space. An ardent fan but not yet a member of the Sex Pistols—the band that McLaren had finally organized and gotten into the London clubs that spring—Sid, born John Simon Ritchie, looked clueless and not too bright. But Dee Dee liked his strange, unsettling aura of innocence. After the show, the two ran into each other and hit it off immediately. Later, when Sid joined the Pistols, he would start wearing ripped jeans and a leather jacket like the Ramones.

  Back in New York, as serial killer Son of Sam cut a swath through the city and as spray-painted graffiti spread through the buildings downtown, the recording industry dug its claws a little deeper into the pale flesh of the unsophisticated, drug-dazed punk musicians. Years later, Bruno Wizard of the punk band the Rejects would recall how he had seen the establishment “pull the teeth out of the ’60s revolution” and now “saw the same thing happening all over again to Punk” as bands that were barely on their feet fell over themselves in their eagerness to sell out. It was hard to resist the offers. Wizard’s response was to put together a new band and call it the Homosexuals, knowing a name like that would keep the bloodsuckers away.

  Perhaps it was no coincidence that about the same time cockroaches took over the Chelsea Hotel. Isabella Gardner—who had returned alone to New York from California and been irresistibly drawn back to her friends at the hotel—wrote a poem about massacring the insects: “I put on solid shoes / and stamp on your cocky twitchers CRUNCH / Crunch-crunch, and sweep you up.” The pests poured out of George Kleinsinger’s piano one night when he sat down to play a song for filmmaker Doris Chase, his new lover. Kleinsinger could only sympathize with the insects as he recalled John Sloan’s long-ago remark that artists themselves were “like cockroaches in kitchens—not wanted, not encouraged, but nevertheless they remain.” But they proved the last straw for Chase, who retreated permanently to her own neater quarters downstairs.

  It was still possible to fall in love at the Chelsea, though. Viva, charmed by the soft-spoken Eggleston, who had a reputation as a hellraiser with a taste for bourbon and antique guns, fell into a long-lasting affair with him that both would recall with pleasure in the decades to come. And it was still possible to have friends. Eggleston himself quickly befriended Ching Ho Cheng and Vali Myers, among others at the hotel. And despite the cockroaches, Isabella Gardner managed to resume her elegant Sunday-night readings of Plato’s Symposium, with Virgil Thomson playing Socrates, Gregory Corso as Alcibiades, and guests such as Behan’s biographer Ulick O’Connor and the art historian Gert Schiff attending. Thomson continued mentoring younger men, including, that year, Gerald Busby, a former church-revival pianist from Texas who won, with Thomson’s guidance, a commission from the Paul Taylor Dance Company and a job composing the score for Robert Altman’s Three Women before he and his lover Sam Byers moved into the apartment over Thomson’s in the Chelsea Hotel.

  But there was no denying that even with such fleeting pleasures, the hotel was no longer Gardner’s “once rather noble Chelsea,” despite its rather bizarrely timed designation as a national historic landmark that year. Now there was a video-monitoring system in the lobby—a feeble attempt to prevent more holdups. Drunks and junkies spent entire nights in the halls and bathrooms, Gardner wrote, and whores now proliferated, making noise in the corridors until all hours of the night and pushing out “many of the grand people.”

  “I don’t deserve this,” moaned the protagonist of Amos Poe’s experimental film The Foreigner as he lay across a Chelsea Hotel bed—an expression of what seemed to be a pervasive feeling in the building that year. It was a predictable response to the dissolution of a society, the loss of its common values and moral center, as Arthur Miller pointed out in The Archbishop’s Ceiling, a play so thoroughly pummeled by critics when it opened at the Kennedy Center that spring that the producers closed the play rather than bring it to New York. With conscience now unfashionable and the past discarded and forgotten, those in the present found themselves robbed of the traditional forms of social support. As Terry Southern wrote that year, to be hip required “a certain death of something, somewhere near the center.” While it began with “an awareness far beyond the ordinary,” that acute degree of empathy became unbearably painful and had to be anesthetized. What remained in the end, he wrote, was “iron in the soul”—awareness but total insulation from emotion. “The big trick, of course—and I don’t know that it’s ever really been done,” he concluded, “is to eliminate all negative emotion and retain positive. About the hippest anyone has gotten so far, I suppose, is to be permanently on the nod.”

  But some, like Harry Smith, lacked the ability to insulate and anesthetize. More than a half a dozen years had passed since he had begun work on Mahagonny, and now, in 1977, he confessed to an interviewer, “I’ve spent all the money.” It was hard to keep going because, “well—everybody is mad at me.” The magic spells, the fires, the burglaries, the constant battering down of Harry’s door—even Stanley Bard had reached his limit. It pained Harry deeply, “Mr. Bard claiming that I’m the sender of everything bad that goes wrong in the hotel . . . due to the fact that I will let anybody in here . . . well, especially when I was drinking.”

  True to his vow, he had cut out the vodka, replacing it with a milk-and-beer beverage designed to satiate both his alcohol addiction and his ulcers. Still, he admitted, “My life . . . is like the life of an insane person,” with strangers always coming and going, work that never ended, and the constant pursuit of money.

  Yet he had no regrets. As he said, “I would not live my life in any other way than I am.” But the fact was, Smith had reached the end of the road. If he spent no more than five dollars a day, he could get by at the Chelsea for another three weeks. However, he acknowledged, “I’m sure to take that money and waste it.” For the sake of his work and his neighbors, and for Stanley’s sake as well, “the destruction of Mahagonny has to occur.” To be penniless was a capital crime; to be in debt, even worse. It was time to leave the Chelsea Hotel.

  No one knew how Harry managed to slip out undetected with his many collections, nor did anyone know where he had gone. Raymond Foye, who happened to be in town for a visit, learned that Harry was missing only when Stanley Bard called him into his office and told him the news, practically in tears. Harry owed tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent, Foye recalled, yet “all Stanley wanted to know was how to get him back.” For Bard, it was as though the magic had left the Chelsea Hotel.

  The summer of 1977 was the summer of the Sex Pistols in London. The band, as assembled by Malcolm McLaren, originally consisted of Steve Jones on guitar, Paul Cook on drums, Glen Matlock on bass, and John Lydon (renamed Johnny Rotten by Jones, in reference to his poorly maintained teeth) as lead singer. By the spring of 1976, they were a hit, delighting audiences by smashing equipment, throwing chairs around onstage, and declaring, “Actually we’re not into music. We’re into chaos.” That fall, their first single, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” and the obscene language they used on television talk shows, caught the attention of the British mainstream. At that point, the middle-class Matlock decided to quit the band, and he was replaced by the more malleable, working-class Sid
Vicious, whose well-known excesses were bound to make for good theater and draw the attention of the press, even if he couldn’t play bass.

  By the time the Ramones arrived for a second UK tour that summer, 1977, William Burroughs himself had sent the Sex Pistols a congratulatory telegram for their new single “God Save the Queen.” He considered the lyrics “We’re the poison in the human machine / We’re the future, your future” the first positive thing to come out of England in years. On tour, Dee Dee ran into Nancy Spungen, who had been in England for more than a year and who couldn’t wait to inform him, in her recently acquired British accent, that Sid Vicious was her new boyfriend.

  “She was a pest,” Dee Dee grumbled, “a party crasher.” The next night, he ran into Vicious himself at a party on King’s Road. After repairing to the toilet with him to share some speed, Dee Dee was appalled to see Sid produce “a horrible blood-caked syringe,” tap some speed into it, and then dip it into a filthy toilet to draw up water for the injection. Moments later, the bass player was “shaking on the floor having a fit, with green foam coming out of his mouth, his eyes popping out of his head.” Ramone ran out to get help, but he slipped and fell, knocking himself unconscious, and was taken in an ambulance back to his hotel.

  Nights like this were par for the course for Sid, as Dee Dee soon learned. Far from exuding malevolence, the singer was just phenomenally self-destructive. Shy, easily confused, prone to expressing himself in grunts and brief phrases (“Fuckin’ good food”), he was easily manipulated by the more intelligent and aggressive Nancy. The other band members blamed her for turning him on to smack, for monopolizing his time, ordering him around, and engaging in screaming fights that ended in trails of broken glass, bloodstains, and evictions. Still, whatever the problems, Dee Dee acknowledged, one had to admit that the Sex Pistols’ album was “one of the best of all time.” What he liked most about the Pistols was that they were “totally street.” They didn’t go around in limos like the Ramones. The two bands were often pitted against each other by critics and fans. In Dee Dee’s opinion, the Sex Pistols had been winning until they left England to promote their album Never Mind the Bollocks on a first American tour.