Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Ill feeling had already been brewing between the two families. After buying the Greenfield apartment Wilbur Ross had been heard to mutter to someone in the building that Greenfield had charged him more than the apartment was worth. Word of this had gotten back to the Greenfields, who resented the implication that they had been guilty of sharp practice. According to the Greenfields, however, this was not why they had not moved out of the apartment on the date promised. There had been, Harriet Greenfield says, a subway flood the previous day, and the Greenfields’ movers had been unable to come as scheduled. Still, the Greenfields had neglected to tell the Rosses of this change of plans. To make matters between the two families worse, when all the moving was finally completed, Gordon Greenfield telephoned Wilbur Ross to say that some of Mrs. Greenfield’s jewelry was missing; he suggested that the Rosses’ moving men might have taken it. “I hit the ceiling all over again,” says Judy Ross. The two women never spoke again, and a certain chilliness developed between the two men—though the jewels later turned up.

  Meanwhile, from its earliest days as a cooperative, there had been grumblings in the building about how it was being run. As to the Dakota’s management, the building was operated, some people said, by an “elite cadre”—by men like C. D. Jackson, Ernest Gross, Admiral Kirk, by the men who owned the largest apartments and the largest blocks of voting shares. The little guy was being ignored. From Ernest Gross the mantle of stewardship had passed to Gordon Greenfield, who directed the building in the same high-handed way, as though it was his building and not everybody else’s too. Greenfield, they said, was autocratic, dictatorial. He was uncommunicative, secretive, and when his rulership was questioned, his responses were abrasive. Year after year, for the seven places on the building’s board the same seven names appeared on the ballot. A palace guard was in command, and the voices of young Turks went unheard. Gordon Greenfield was compared with Napoleon, with Louis XIV, with Hitler, with Captain Queeg, with Richard Nixon. Late in 1970 a movement began to get underway to dethrone him—led by Wilbur Ross.

  In fairness to Gordon Greenfield, he loved the Dakota and had its best interests at heart. He was also a shrewd businessman, and his primary objective was to keep the costs of maintaining the building in check. Others, notably from the Dakota’s “artistic” community, had suggestions that, Greenfield maintained, would make the Dakota a more expensive, less desirable place to live and were, moreover, “crackpot and spendthrift.” The Dakota’s vaulted basement wine cellar, for example, had been empty for years. Someone thought that this space could be converted into an exciting restaurant and discotheque. Another large basement area seemed ideally suited for a squash court, and, without even measuring the space, plans were drawn up. (When it was finally measured the area turned out to be too small.) Then there was a proposal to turn the subterranean water tank, which held the water that ran the hydraulic elevators, into a swimming pool, and in this connection a scheme for an elaborate basement health club was proposed. Someone else wanted to restore the tents and awnings and gazebos that had long ago adorned the Dakota’s roof. Greenfield and his board said no to all these fun-and-games notions.

  Gordon Greenfield’s eye was on the bottom line. Except where absolutely necessary, he wanted to cut expenditures, not increase them, because—and it was indeed a fact—the Dakota was already walking on very thin ice financially. Why, Greenfield was asked, couldn’t the building borrow money for some of these pleasant improvements? Greenfield, in the brusque manner that was typical of him, replied that the building was heavily enough in debt as it was.

  Greenfield would dispose of what he considered trivia in a regal manner, keeping stockholders’ meetings brief and to the point. Lauren Bacall, for example, did not often appear at tenant meetings, but she did have a habit of sending memoranda in which she complained about everything from bicycles blocking the driveway to the fact that she had difficulty understanding what some of the building’s Hispanic staff were saying. At meetings Gordon Greenfield would say, “I think we can dispense with the usual Bacall memorandum,” and it would be dispensed with. To some people this seemed quite wrong. Miss Bacall was a tenant and shareholder in good standing, too. Regardless of what was on her mind, she deserved to have her say.

  What Gordon Greenfield may not have realized was that by 1970 New York—and the country—had been invaded by the Love Generation. Greenfield, who believed that a stern no-nonsense helmsman was required to steer a vessel of the Dakota’s size and costliness, may have failed to see that what many people in the building now wanted were Communication, Sharing and Love. Love had become one of the most overused and, in the process, least understood words in the country. Some people, it seemed, were ready to kill for Love. At the Dakota a passionate Love faction girded itself to go into battle against Hate, which had come to be personified by Gordon Greenfield.

  No one could fault Greenfield on his thoroughness, his honesty, his tough-minded efficiency. The Dakota and its vicissitudes consumed hours of his time, for which he received no remuneration, and, indeed, some people wondered why he seemed devoted to such a thankless job. To be sure, he may have enjoyed the power that he wielded—in fact, comparing him with Captain Bligh, some people called him power-mad. But in the end it was really not anything that Greenfield did that anyone resented. It was his personal style that grated.

  In addition to the Dakota’s financial picture, Gordon Greenfield had also become concerned about what he called a “social problem” in the building. Let him describe it:

  “After the building went co-op, a company called the Franchard Corporation was set up by Glickman. The purpose of Franchard was to sell the unsold apartments, and to sell them as quickly as possible. That, in my opinion, was the beginning of the deterioration of the quality of the tenancy, because a lot of sharks moved in and bought cheap apartments. A lot of wheeling and dealing went on within the building, and people were trying to get a bigger slice of the pie. I know that———bought a big apartment for $5,000, then divided it and sold off half of it for $55,000. Other questionable things went on such as when———bought an apartment for $10,000 and sold an antique mahogany and marble mantelpiece for $35,000. We wanted conservative types as tenants, we wanted good, solid family types, we didn’t want riffraff. We had always had an interesting group of theatrical people in the building—people like Robert Ryan and his wife, who were solid family types. The Lennons bought the Ryan apartment, and you just can’t put John Lennon in the same category as Robert Ryan. The Carter Burdens bought an apartment, and they were the sort of people we wanted, but then they sold to Freddie Mates who ran the Mates Fund, which folded, and Freddie Mates moved out. He started out with a Rolls-Royce and now he runs a bar. At the time I pointed out that it was dangerous to sell to stock speculators. But then there was what I call a special ‘social problem’ in the building. There was one couple who used to have terrible domestic fights, and the police would have to be called. Another woman was an alcoholic and used to slide down banisters. There were two young men who liked to pick up male hustlers in Central Park and bring them into the building. There was a man named———who became a homosexual, and his boyfriend set a fire. Another man wanted to move in with his boyfriend, and we turned him down because of his life-style. One tenant bought several rooms on the eighth and ninth floors, and rented them out to young men. Before I sold my apartment to Wilbur Ross I’d had a higher offer from a well-known homosexual. I turned it down. There were more fires, wild parties. Finally the board said, ‘We don’t want to show any more apartments to homosexuals.’ Things were building up to a head of steam.”

  The board member in charge of interviewing and screening prospective tenants in those days was Mrs. Eileen Carlson, a lawyer who supported Mr. Greenfield’s views. In her interviews Mrs. Carlson began asking what to some people seemed rather nosy questions related to “life-style.” “Are you married?” she asked one man who wanted to buy an apartment. “Well, I’m getting a divorce,” he repl
ied. “Can I still join the club?”

  When the gentle-mannered, bespectacled playwright Mart Crowley applied to the building, he was vigorously sponsored by both Rex Reed and Ruth Ford. Crowley had become a New York celebrity as a result of his Broadway and motion-picture homosexual drama, The Boys in the Band. Crowley was turned down by the Dakota. “I really felt terrible, afterward, about sponsoring Mart,” Rex Reed says, “because it opened such an ugly vein.”

  In taking a stand against homosexuals in the building, the Dakota’s board was touching an extremely sensitive nerve. It was not that the Dakota was the first or only New York apartment building to discriminate in this fashion. A number of buildings, particularly on the East Side, routinely denied applications to partners of the same sex, just as they turned down theater people, who kept irregular hours, and musicians who practiced on noisy instruments. But that this should happen at the Dakota seemed particularly repugnant. The Dakota had long provided a safe harbor for the gifted, the brilliant misfits, the different. This was not the East Side; it was the West Side, where the fresh breezes of intelligence, enlightenment, tolerance and freedom blew. At the same time, all over the country homosexuality was being regarded much more openly and liberally, and homosexuals were demanding—and getting—more respect. Writers such as Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote were making no bones about it. Frank and sympathetic books were being published on the subject, and in some cities, notably San Francisco, groups such as the Gay Activists Alliance were becoming a political force. It had become something of a joke at the Dakota to say, “Some of the most distinguished homosexuals in New York live here.”

  To people in the theater, homosexuality was considered a commonplace not even worth mentioning, and a person’s sexual orientation was a topic less interesting than the weather. And in a city that cherished privacy over all other blessings, sexual preference was deemed the most private realm of all—nobody’s business but the individual’s. When it was learned that the Dakota’s board was investigating and weighing such matters in terms of prospective tenants, hackles rose in alarm.

  Still, to give Gordon Greenfield credit he did have a certain point. Just a block north of the Dakota, as we have seen, a section of the stone wall that encloses Central Park had become known as “the meat rack.” The wall was a favorite perching place for young male prostitutes soliciting their clients. At least a few of these young men, it was safe to assume, had other things on their minds than sex—robbery, burglary, blackmail and extortion, for example. They were considered dangerous, and bringing them into the building, as some tenants were suspected of doing, was a threat to the general welfare.

  To Mr. Wilbur Ross, meanwhile, there were more important things wrong with the Greenfield administration than its unwelcoming attitude toward homosexuals. Ross, who had received a master’s degree with distinction from the Harvard School of Business, considered himself something of an expert in the field of finance. As a relatively new tenant in the building he had observed aspects of the board’s operation that seemed to him improper, or at least unfair. It disturbed him, for example, that for seven places on the Dakota’s board there were only seven candidates for whom to vote. To make the board more representative, Ross wanted an eleven-man board.

  The board had also proposed a regulation to the effect that any apartment for sale in the building had to be offered through a particular real estate broker. This rule had been put up in an effort to put an end to private, inside deals, but it seemed wrong. Ross believed that most of the tenants in the building were not people like Gordon Greenfield, who was independently wealthy. Instead, they were people with high incomes but little actual capital. One of the attractions of owning a cooperative apartment is that a substantial proportion of each tenant’s monthly maintenance—that which represents mortgage interest, real estate taxes and insurance—is tax deductible. The mortgage that the Dakota then had, allowed in Wilbur Ross’s opinion, too much payment against principal and not enough in interest. If a new mortgage could be obtained that would cost the building more in interest and paid less in capital, each tenant’s tax-deductible share of his maintenance cost could be increased.

  Ross also felt that certiorari proceedings could be undertaken with the city in order to get a tax reduction for the building, based on its landmark status. He felt that the building was paying too much for insurance and should have a higher deductible clause in its contract. He felt that the building had not had enough preventive maintenance, that the roof, plumbing and electrical systems had been neglected under the regime of Gordon Greenfield.

  But an overriding issue seemed to be Ross’s belief that Greenfield and his board had ruled the building in a fashion that was “autocratic,” and that it had ruled it long enough. It was time for new blood, new talent on the board, time for a new generation. Wilbur Ross, at the time, was a feisty thirty-three; Gordon Greenfield was fifty-five. It was time, Wilbur Ross decided, to throw the old fogeys out.

  Early in 1970 Wilbur Ross drew a group of tenants together and urged them to get other shareholders active. They circularized the building with a complaint sheet, and then held a large meeting and wrote up a slate for the next annual meeting. They wrote to Gordon Greenfield and asked to appear before his board with their grievances.

  Gordon Greenfield was furious. “To show you the kind of man Ross is,” he says today, “he actually brought some business to me while he was plotting behind my back to overthrow me.”

  Wilbur Ross says, “It was not intended as a personal thing. Gordon chose to take it personally.”

  But Wilbur Ross had early on gotten the support of two of the building’s most popular tenants—Jo Mielziner and Henry Blanchard. They brought with them others—Lewis Galantiere, a writer; Edward Downes, a music scholar and critic; Lauren Bacall, Ruth Ford, Rex Reed. But it was not just a conflict between practical business folk and less practical artistic types. On the dissidents’ side were Richard Defendini, a doctor; Larry Ellman, a restauranteur; and Peter Nitze, a banker. Nor was it—despite all the talk of the need for “new blood”—strictly speaking a confrontation between a younger generation and the old-timers. Mrs. C. D. Jackson and even old Miss Leo declared themselves on the side of the insurgents. It was more like a political battle between Republicans and Democrats.

  Some people in the building were merely confused by what was happening. Sheila Herbert, a young advertising woman who had practically grown up in the building, was baffled. “I couldn’t understand it,” she says. “I thought that Gordon Greenfield’s board should have been revered for all they’d done, for all the time they’d devoted to the building. I thought the building should be grateful. But suddenly everybody was going around saying these perfectly dreadful things about them.”

  The building’s rhetoric had indeed become quite martial, and what to an outsider might have seemed a tempest in a Victorian teapot was being discussed in terms that could have described a junta in a banana republic. Gordon Greenfield, meanwhile, and his incumbent board were convinced that their record of cautious, conservative economy and cost-cutting would speak for itself. They were certain that, since most of them had longer tenure in the building than Wilbur Ross, they had earned more loyalty and won more friends. “But if they wanted all-out war, we decided to give them all-out war,” Gordon Greenfield says.

  Chapter 19

  “High Noon”

  Wilbur Ross has a theory that the Dakota itself—the very physicality of the old building—somehow manages to induce a certain amount of irrationality on the part of its tenants. Certainly Dakotans seem to get more exercised about events than ordinary New Yorkers. Early in 1979, for example, the building was up in arms again about a neighborhood coffee shop that proposed to call itself The Dakota. Once again, committees of protest were formed to fight the “outrage” and “insult” to the building, though it was hard for some people to figure out what the fuss was all about. Naming shops after nearby buildings is a common practice all over the world.
(Hard by the Apthorp Apartments can be found the Apthorp Garage, the Apthorp Pharmacy, the Apthorp Hairdressers, and the Apthorp Laundromat.) But to the Dakotans, what the restaurant proposed to do seemed more of a sacrilege than taking the name of God in vain.

  Feelings ran just as strongly during the winter of 1970–71 in what would later be referred to grandiosely as the “Palace Revolution.” Gordon Greenfield still refers to what went on as “a cabal, a plot by a few mean-spirited people to take over the building and throw me out.”

  Actually, the revolt had been preceded by a number of minor squabbles and disputes within the building. There had been Jo Mielziner’s fight to retain a stained-glass door panel, for example, which Gordon Greenfield and his board considered in violation of fire laws. “But glass doesn’t burn!” Mielziner had cried indignantly. “That panel is a priceless antique!” Then, in 1964, there was blast damage to the building from the construction of the new Mayfair Tower next door, and nerves in the Dakota grew frazzled from the explosions and the general dawn-to-dusk din of the construction work. Ward Bennett had begun his renovation of his rooftop gable, but his plans had had to be approved by committee after committee, and the hammering of his builders added to the noise. The problem of what to do with the dining room had been solved, and in a way that was both ingenious and fortuitous for the building. But it had not been solved without a certain amount of haggling, arguments and suggestions for revisions from the building’s board.

  All through the winter there were secret meetings on the part of the revolutionaries as Mr. Ross tried to gather more tenants on his side. Now there were meetings nearly every night in one part of the building or another, and often these meetings went on into the wee hours. More and more tenants, it seemed, were against Greenfield, and when Greenfield attempted to invade one of the tenants’ meetings that was being held in the Scott Severns’ apartment, Dr. Severns told Greenfield that if he didn’t leave, he’d throw him out.