Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The only other member of the Leo household was Mrs. Fenton Maclay. Mrs. Maclay’s role was as mysterious as the origins of the Leos. She was not a housekeeper, exactly—at least she received no salary for what she did. She was more like a companion, or family friend. And yet she was not really treated as a friend, either, because she never slept in the Leos’ apartment, despite the many empty bedrooms. Mrs. Maclay would retire at night to her room beneath the eaves. In the old days Miss Leo and Mrs. Maclay had lunched together almost daily at the Plaza. But by 1961 Miss Leo had settled on a steady diet of mashed bananas which Mrs. Maclay prepared at home. Miss Leo also had her own theories about sleeping. She could not sleep, she explained, lying down, and so she always slept sitting upright in a canvas deck chair in her entrance foyer.

  During the day Miss Leo sat in the dining room, next to her banging wall, where the telephone was, to be near the phone in case anything should happen. Her brother, when not in his office, preferred to sit in a tall tapestry chair in the drawing room with the stuffed horse. Mrs. Maclay disliked going into the room with the stuffed horse but one day, attracted by a strange, unpleasant odor, she entered it. Brother had died in the tapestry chair. He had been dead for several days. Miss Leo had known it but could not bear the thought of his leaving her. He was removed by the Board of Health.

  Though everyone assumed that Miss Leo was well-fixed financially, when the building was in the process of becoming a cooperative she announced that she could not afford to buy her apartment. The Dakotans looked around for a smaller place for her; one was located in the northeast corner of the ground floor. One of the people who volunteered to help Miss Leo move was Henry Blanchard. He recalls vividly his first sight of the interior of apartment 17. All the rooms were painted the same institutional green. Closets were filled with piles of ancient newspapers and magazines that reached to the ceilings. One of the windows had apparently been left open for years, and a thick layer of black New York dust covered everything. “As we packed her things,” Henry Blanchard says, “clouds of dust swirled around us like fine, black snow.” While Miss Leo was being moved, the armor collection, including the stuffed horse and its rider, stood for several days in the Dakota’s courtyard to be wondered at by all the neighbors. And when Miss Leo was finally moved to her new apartment she left everything in the center of the floor where the movers had put it, and she never unpacked the barrels and cartons. When she died—at the age, some people said, of one hundred and nine—the Metropolitan Museum was contacted about the armor collection. The Museum’s Department of Arms and Armor turned down the gift. All the pieces, it seemed, were fakes, and the stuffed horse, by then a sadly deteriorated piece of taxidermy, was carried away to a grave in New Jersey. Mrs. Maclay lived on in her attic room. She lives there to this day.

  Several years later apartment 17 was bought by Lawrence Ellman, a New York restaurateur and his wife. The Ellmans redecorated the apartment lavishly in a belle-époque style, covering the once-green walls with expensive fabrics. In the process of the renovation a plumber uncovered what appeared to be a sunken bathtub. As he dug in the floor the sunken tub got bigger, wider and deeper. “How much more should I dig?” he asked the Ellmans. “Dig till you get to the bottom of it,” Mr. Ellman told him. When the plumber finished digging he had uncovered what amounted to a small swimming pool, measuring about 8 by 10 feet and 5 ½ feet deep. The Ellmans lined it with blue tile and installed a ladder. The pool, it turned out, antedated Miss Leo. It had been installed by an early tenant whose wife, so the story goes, liked to fill it with milk for baths. “When he was about ten years old,” Elaine Ellman says, “my stepson went through a period when he didn’t like to take baths. But when we uncovered the little pool he wanted to take baths all the time. We told him he could, provided he used plenty of soap.”

  Even more mysterious, as the Ellmans redecorated, were the silver-dollar-sized indentations in the floors of certain rooms and corridors. “We couldn’t figure out what caused these strange holes,” Elaine Ellman says. Then it dawned on them. The holes had been where the various heavy swords, sabres, maces and lances had stood on display.

  Not far down the hall from Mrs. Maclay lives Jimmy Martin in a room with his elderly nephew George. Jimmy Martin celebrated his ninety-third birthday in May 1978, and is therefore of roughly the same vintage as Mrs. Maclay. Jimmy Martin and Mrs. Maclay do not get on. Mrs. Maclay had been using what had once been a maids’ kitchen to do her cooking, and since the kitchen was on a communal hallway, Jimmy Martin asked whether he could use it too. Mrs. Maclay flatly refused. There has been bad blood between the two nonagenarians ever since, and when Jimmy Martin is in the vicinity of Mrs. Maclay’s room he will sometimes bang his fists on the walls or on her door just to rattle her up a bit.

  In fact, there are not too many people in the building with whom Jimmy Martin gets on. A particular enemy is actress Ruth Ford. It started a long time ago when Jimmy Martin was coming into the building with an armful of groceries and was having trouble getting his burden through the door. Miss Ford happened to be coming into the building at the same time and held the door open for him. But Jimmy was still having trouble with his parcels, and finally, impatient, Miss Ford said, “I’m not a doorman, you know.” “She’s a bitch,” says Jimmy Martin. “I said to her, ‘You bitch! If you’d stop bleaching your hair, maybe some of it would grow back!’” Miss Ford feels no more generous toward Jimmy Martin, calling him “a seedy, disagreeable, pretentious little man. In the summer he goes up on the roof and sunbathes in his undershirt—sunbathing, at his age.” “Ha! She was a chorus girl who worked for the Schuberts,” replies Jimmy Martin, making light of the fact that Ruth Ford is also an actress for whom William Faulkner expressly wrote his only play, Requiem for a Nun.

  Of other neighbors in the building Jimmy Martin is more charitable, referring to Roberta Flack as “a fine colored woman—she’s going to give a birthday party for me.” And he is even more enthusiastic in his recollection of his own theatrical career, which started in the synagogue of Rabbi Stephen Wise, where he was a choirboy, and carried him to Broadway and vaudeville. He appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies and in such long-forgotten shows as Mary, The Wild Cat, The Wanderer, Molly Darlin’ and Hoker Poker. “See how I’ve kept my figure?” Jimmy Martin says proudly, and to show he has also kept his form, he executes a few quick dance steps and, in a fluty vibrato, sings a few notes from Hoker Poker. In one show, the name of which he has forgotten, one of the lead performers became ill. “I was in the chorus, and I jumped into the show. George M. Cohan said, ‘Had it not been for the brains of Mr. Martin, I would have had to close the show’—I made two hundred and seventy-five dollars a week.”

  Jimmy Martin is still bitter about the fact that after his eye injury he was denied a pension by the Actors’ Fund: “They’re crooked people in the Actors’ Fund,” he says. When the building became a cooperative, and inherited such problems as what to do with people like Jimmy Martin, who was then well into his seventies and had no regular source of income, the Dakotans—not altogether cheerfully, and not exactly unanimously—agreed to chip in to buy him an insurance policy that would yield him a small annuity.

  Today, Jimmy Martin’s little room is hard to reconcile with a deluxe apartment house or a “tradition in elegance.” It is cluttered with piles of old clothes, pillows that are losing their stuffing, an ancient sofa covered with a soiled sheet that serves as Mr. Martin’s bed. The walls are cracked and peeling, in want of paint. There is one window. A small refrigerator holds soft drinks, which Jimmy Martin offers to visitors. For cooking there is an electric frying pan and a Roto-Broiler. “I love to cook,” he says, stroking his full head of astonishingly black hair. “And I’m a very good cook. Tonight, for example, for my nephew and myself, I’m fixing chop suey. I have no regrets. I have wonderful memories of the theater and the people I knew—Mr. Cohan, Mr. Ziegfeld, Will Rogers, Geraldine Farrar, George E. Hale, Florence Eaton and Nance O’Neill. Now I sit here an
d enjoy my lovely room. We live a life of luxury.”

  Over the years, to be sure, some of Jimmy Martin’s Dakota neighbors have become a little weary of his tart and acerbic appraisals of them. Of the Henry Blanchards: “They’re nice enough.” Of Mrs. C. D. Jackson: “Thumbs down on her!” (Grace Jackson sighs and says, “That poor insurance company—I’m sure they never thought that annuity we bought for him would go on so long.”) Of Lauren Bacall: “She’s had her face lifted.” Still, he conceded that when the movie crew came to film Rosemary’s Baby, Miss Bacall suggested to the producer that Jimmy Martin be hired as an extra, and he was. “You can even see me in the picture,” he says. “I made forty-eight dollars!”

  Financially, the Browning sisters are not in the same category as Jimmy Martin. Though not rich, the Brownings were left with enough money to keep them comfortable, and they live in their small, eighth-floor room with its closet-kitchen not so much out of necessity as out of choice. “It’s easier in a small place, there’s less to care for,” Miss Adele says. Miss Adele is almost blind and very deaf. When architect Paul Segal, next door, was remodeling his apartment, he became concerned that the noise of hammering and electric saws might be disturbing the elderly Brownings. Segal rang the Brownings’ bell, and when Miss Adele answered it Segal offered a lengthy apology for the noise. When he had finished, Miss Adele cupped her hand to her ear and said, “What?”

  Miss Adele Browning still speaks in a clear, cultivated voice, however—the voice of a daughter of a leading educator of his time—and still gets out to do the marketing for herself and her invalid sister who fell and broke her hip in 1978. “My memory flickers … flickers,” she says in that rich voice. “Let’s see—what do I remember? I remember when women first got the vote, and I went out to vote with Dad. Dad said he wouldn’t tell me who to vote for, I had to decide myself. In the summers we went up to a place we had in Ossining. Mother chose the place, and boys from Dad’s school would go up there for weekends. Dad was very interested in racial equality, years ahead of his time. He wanted to experiment raising whites, blacks, yellows and reds together. Dad was a wonderful man, but Mother always had the last word when it came to raising us. Dad would say, ‘Me for Mom’—the first woman governor had just been elected in the state of Texas and that was her slogan, so that was Dad’s little joke, you see. I remember when the Eighth Avenue subway first came through—that was quite an issue. I remember we could see the Essex House across the Park, where Presidents used to stay. I remember the Theo Steinways lived next door, in apartment forty-six. His son went to the Browning School, and the son went on to invent the first upright piano. But when my sister and I took piano lessons, Mr. Steinway had to ask Dad to move the piano to another part of the apartment because he didn’t like our playing. My memory flickers … Dad used to say, ‘Blessed is she who expecteth nothing, for then she will not be disappointed.’ Dad wanted us to be independent.…”

  During World War II, Adele Browning served as an air-raid warden for the building, and she still likes to go up and down the long corridors of the eighth floor, checking on the security of everything. And she demonstrated her independence during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby. “There were lights and cameras all around the building,” she recalls. “I was coming home from an errand, and the policeman said to me, ‘Lady, you’ll have to go in through the basement.’” The officer may not have been able to tell from Miss Adele’s appearance that he was addressing a woman of substance and culture. Like many older people, Miss Adele tends to dress in the same sort of costume day after day—a buttoned, brown wool skirt, several layers of sweaters topped by a woolen vest, woolen athletic socks over her stockings, and house slippers. Also, she has little time to spend at the hairdresser’s. In any case, the policeman was unprepared for the very determined, self-assured and erect little lady who confronted him and, in that strong, well-bred voice said, “I will not go in through the basement. I live here. I was born here. This is my home. I will enter my home through my front door.”

  She was allowed in through the front door.

  Miss Anne Ives is still another kind of Dakota old-timer—a nonagenarian with a career. Miss Ives is an actress and, at ninety-two, manages to supplement her pensions by doing television commercials. With her petite figure, her carefully coifed white hair, her creamy-pink complexion and arresting purple eyes she could pass for a woman in her early seventies. Her looks make her the ideal candy-box-top grandmother type for television. Anne Ives is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (called the Sargeant School in her day) and, among other things, has played with Henry Fonda in Point of No Return, with Irene Worth in Hedda Gabler and in various stock companies in Stockbridge and Abingdon. For years she was a Sunday Bible-story lady on radio in Washington, D.C., and her most recent stage performance was as the little old lady in Tobacco Road, which she did in Lake Forest and for which she received a special award. Most recently, however, it has been television commercials.

  “My AT&T commercial has been doing very well in terms of residuals,” she says. “My Birdseye I did three years ago and that keeps coming back. My yogurt comes back, and I expect a lot from my cat food. I’ve done a couple of print ads, but the money is in television.” Compared with the Brownings, Miss Ives, who moved to the Dakota in 1954, is a newcomer, and her relative affluence permits her to live on a somewhat grander scale. Her one-room-with-bath apartment is on the second floor facing seventy-second Street, one of the former guest rooms that were set aside for visiting friends of tenants. She was able to buy this space with no difficulty when the building became a cooperative. Her room has high ceilings, a fireplace, and is furnished in dainty antiques. A handsome Oriental rug is on the floor, and her bathroom is painted royal purple, a color she also favors in clothes because it matches her eyes. To be sure, her kitchen is also her clothes closet, but from it she is able to prepare dinners for friends and, besides, “I get asked out a lot.”

  The main difference in the building that Miss Ives has noticed over the years is that, “When I came here the people were all the age that I am now—now I’m one of the oldest ones here. There are so many young people here now, so many more children. But I don’t feel old. I’m in excellent health. My mother lived to be ninety-four. One thing I have noticed, though, as I get older is that I spend a lot of time at my window, looking out at the street. People are always stopping across the street to look up at this old building, and sometimes they see me, and sometimes I get a little wave. I always wave back. Not long ago a fire truck came by, and the fireman who was standing at the end of the ladder was right at the level of my second-floor window. He passed my window and saw me standing there, and he smiled and waved. I smiled and waved back. He was almost close enough to reach out and touch.”

  Miss Ives never married. “That’s my sad story,” she says. “I was going to, but it didn’t work out.” With a smile, she adds, “As it happened, he never married either. As far as family goes, I’m almost the last leaf on the tree. I have one niece who lives in Rhode Island, but, my goodness, my niece is in her seventies! But I have my career. I’ve always worked, and with what I have now I’ll be able to live comfortably here for the rest of my life.”

  In contrast to Adele Browning, who tends to feel unsafe on the eighth floor (“We have to keep our door locked and bolted all the time”), Miss Ives has no feelings of insecurity in the building. “My room isn’t air conditioned,” she says, “but because it faces south, I never get direct sun beating in. On warm days, I just open my window and open the door, and a nice little breeze comes through.” To indicate that she is “at home,” and would welcome visitors, Miss Ives places a bowl of fresh flowers on a little table just outside her door.

  Among her social activities she has her membership in the Twelfth Night Club, a women’s theatrical group that meets weekly in the annex of the Woodward Hotel at Broadway and Fifty-fifth Street, and which recently celebrated its eighty-seventh birthday. “It was formed as a club f
or ‘nice young ladies of the theater,’” she says, “but not long ago we looked around and saw that we were all women of about my vintage. Since then, we’ve brought in a number of nice young ladies. We put on one-act plays, once a week.”

  Only one small annoyance grieves Miss Ives at the moment. “A few months ago, I was a little bit unwell. It was nothing serious, just a little thing, and I’m quite fine now. But you know how this business is. The gossip travels so fast. The word got out—Anne Ives is sick, Anne Ives is on her last legs. I stopped getting calls from agents and producers for commercials. Well, I intend to go on working as long as I can remember lines. So now what I’ve got to do, now that I’m better, is go around ringing doorbells again to let the industry know that Anne Ives is alive and well and ready for more jobs. In fact, I’m thinking of having a little dinner party and inviting the agents and producers over, just to show them how alive and well and ready for jobs Anne Ives is.”

  Part Four

  BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER