Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  Advertising came to be more about words and about young Italian and Jewish guys from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx working in an industry they never thought they could work in before. We weren’t the Wasps going to 21. We ate at our desks. We worked day and night, dreaming of what to do. Not many marriages succeeded in those days of the creative revolution; we were married to our business. One day we were poor kids with no prospects, and the next day we were creative mavericks, people who were breaking down barriers in a growing business. We all became friends.

  In 1967, with absolutely no money and no prospects, I started an agency with another Italian kid. Della Femina and Travisano opened an office at 625 Madison Avenue and quickly ran out of money. We were down to our last eleven thousand dollars. We owed a lawyer who wanted a piece of the agency in return for his work; we owed the landlord. We figured we had a month and a half to go. I turned to my partner and said, “We’re gonna die if we wait for the month to go by. Let’s take all the money and throw a party.”

  We invited everybody in advertising to L’Etoile, a restaurant on 59th Street. It was the ultimate crapshoot; it was Brooklyn. Everybody from the business came, including potential clients. People were talking to each other and said things like, “Yeah, I’ve been considering them,” and “They look like they’re doing well.” We got three accounts as a result of that party, and we were in business.

  I started appearing on television shows. Part of our pitch was nobody knows the city like we do. There are a lot of people with a lot more talent, there are a lot of bigger agencies. But I’ve become a kind of symbol for Manhattan.

  I have some favorite ads: “The magic is back” for the New York Mets; Joe Isuzu, the guy who tells lies about his cars; the Blue Nun ads. Before I had my own agency, I saw Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara in a small nightclub in the Village. Afterwards, I went up to them and said, “One of these days I’m going to use you in a commercial.” We did it around 1971. These two people are shopping, and he says, “May I suggest a little Blue Nun?”

  I came from people who were beyond schleppers, who worked the way people built the pyramids, lifting heavy things. I loved not lifting things. I loved getting paid for thinking. I loved being able to move to 30 Beekman Place, where I had once delivered messages.

  Wherever I go, I’m in a place where I used to deliver messages for the Mercury Messenger Service. Like the Fred French Building on Madison Avenue. I delivered many a message there. Later on, when I was looking for a copywriter’s job and had an interview uptown, I stopped off there on a day when it was three degrees, and I was walking to save the bus fare, going into building after building to warm up. When I got into the lobby of the Fred French Building, I was shaking. I was so cold I wanted to cry. But I went on and finally got to the interview, where the man wouldn’t see me because I was late.

  That was a turning point in my life. I realized I would never be afraid of anything again. It was cold, but it wasn’t that bad. That was when I started sending ads to Daniel and Charles and got my first copywriting job. I’m still part of the four jobs my father had, his work ethic, the way he and my mother lived, all that.

  SID BERNSTEIN: I was in the music business, a fast, high-blood-pressure business. In the mid-fifties I started taking courses at the New School just to get away from the craziness. They had some amazing lecturers, one of whom was Max Lerner, who was a featured political columnist in the newspaper PM and later on the Post. I signed up for his course: America as a Civilization.

  As part of the course, Max Lerner suggested we read British newspapers. I read the Manchester Guardian. Naturally I was attracted to the news about the musical scene in England, and that’s how I learned about this group of four young musicians from Liverpool. Every week the font of the stories about them got bigger and bigger. I had not heard their music; all I knew is what I read. But it was like I got a whiff of this new act, and I felt I had to bring it to America.

  In February 1963, I contacted their manager, Brian Epstein, and told him I wanted to arrange for the Beatles to come to New York in May or June. But he wanted to wait until they had a hit record so there would be no chance of their playing to an empty house. I booked the concert for February 12, 1964. It seemed to me Lincoln’s birthday would be a good date.

  I don’t think I had ever been to a classical concert, but I knew all the great symphony orchestras and all the great basso profundos and sopranos performed at Carnegie Hall. So I figured that would be a good place, something different. At that time it cost three thousand dollars to rent Carnegie Hall. I took a gamble and put down a five-hundred-dollar deposit. The lady who arranged the Carnegie Hall bookings asked me, “Who are these four young men whom you’re so excited about?”

  I said, “Mrs. Satescu, they’re an incredible group.”

  When she heard “group,” she thought a chamber group, a string quartet. After the show, she told me, “Never come back again.”

  Some time later, Ed Sullivan was changing planes at Heathrow Airport, where he saw a crowd of kids waiting for a plane. They were shouting, “Long Live the Beatles!” “We Love the Beatles!” He understood this was a phenomenon and booked them. Then he found out an American promoter already had a date on them.

  Sullivan called me and said, “I understand you’re presenting the Beatles in America.” I told him I had Lincoln’s birthday at Carnegie Hall. So he booked the previous and following Sunday, and then the Sunday after that. With Sullivan booking them, the word got out.

  My tickets were sitting there gathering dust until October 1963, when the Beatles’ records hit. By February, they had the first five of the top one hundred hits, Carnegie Hall had sold out, and I was a celebrity.

  I met them for the first time at the Waldorf-Astoria. They were lovely kids, unassuming, bewildered, amazed, laughing at the crowds downstairs outside the window.

  The Beatles playing at Carnegie Hall was a breakthrough event for rock ’n’ roll. It took it out of the local clubs to a bigger arena. It was a breakthrough event for Carnegie Hall as well; they had never done music like that before. After Carnegie Hall, I took the Beatles to Shea Stadium, and that changed the face of the rock ’n’ roll concert.

  I had acted on intuition. Sometimes I have hunches that I take long-shot chances on. I do have one regret though, and that is never having told Max Lerner that he was the spur that brought the Beatles to America.

  GILLES LARRAÍN: I was born in Indochina. As my father was a diplomat, we moved to various places. During the 1950s, we lived in New York and I attended the French Lycée on 95th and Fifth Avenue. Then I went to Paris to study architecture at the School of Beaux Arts.

  In 1963, I was in Mexico studying some structures for my thesis. The only way I could document them was through landscape photography, and in taking the photographs, I began to realize I was asking questions: What does this mean? How has time affected the sculptures and the decorations on the carvings? How does perspective and light affect the image?

  By 1968 I was living in a loft in SoHo and working for an architectural firm. But while I had enjoyed the study of architecture, I found the actual practice to be eighty percent business, twenty percent design. I didn’t like the office work; I didn’t like working in groups where business is the purpose.

  The big hangout at that time was Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South and 18th Street, where there was a remarkable melting pot of artists, writers, and musicians. Norman Mailer was around. The Andy Warhol crowd was there, Leonard Cohen, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns. They were great artists, breaking new frontiers, opening new doors. But at Max’s Kansas City, they were just buddies drinking at the same bar. You spoke to them, you learned from them.

  It was at Max’s Kansas City that I met the Coquettes, a theater group of 150 transvestites from San Francisco. They were so outlandish and far out and funny that I decided to photograph them. I had them come to my loft in groups of twenty. The playwright Harvey Fierstein,
who went on to write Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage aux Folles, was one of them. They arrived wearing feathers, boas, all kinds of extravagant outfits. They were so visually amazing, it was like a living theater. Liberace would be considered quiet in comparison. Afterwards I invited people to view projections of the photographs. We played “Imagine” by John Lennon continuously. It was a perfect soundtrack.

  The magazine Zoom published twenty-six pages of these photos. I got many, many letters—some were asking how I could photograph such people. Then I put the photos together into a book called Idols.

  These transvestites were my first subjects, and this experience of graphing them led to my leaving architecture for photography. I began to go to museum exhibitions and saw amazing prints that will stay with me forever. I bought equipment and lights, and built a studio and darkroom in the building I had bought. I had never studied photography. I had to teach myself from books and looking.

  I have the need to meet with people, to learn from them, but my activity I need to do alone. When I go to my darkroom, I can spend days and days there printing. Taking the photo is the tip of the iceberg; the printing is the iceberg.

  From documenting the edge of society, I moved to social portraits of friends, celebrities, as well as landscapes and record album covers. Columbia Records sent Miles Davis to me to be photographed. It was the beginning of August, very, very hot and humid. My air-conditioner was broken. He came in and said, “Are you Gilles?” in that hoarse voice of his.

  I said, “Yes. Mr. Davis, I’m Gilles.”

  He said, “I have five minutes.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know what we can do in five minutes, but are you thirsty?”

  “I’m always thirsty.”

  So he came down to my studio. I had some good wine and tapas. I put on a record of a flamenco singer, an older woman, a gypsy from Seville. I knew he liked flamenco because of his record. And he said, “What is this music? Why do you have it on?”

  “Because I love flamenco. I play the guitar.”

  He said to me, “Go get your guitar.”

  I said, “Go get your trumpet.”

  He sent his guy to get his trumpet from his limousine, and we made some flamenco music together.

  I have done many portraits of Miles and other celebrities. But they are not about fashion or looking good. It’s about having a moment with a person in front of me where I can go into a conversation with that person and reach the landscape of the soul.

  New York helped form me as an artist. If I had been elsewhere, I would not have had the opportunity to become what I did. I left Paris because I was not alive enough for me. It was too bourgeois, too contained in its habits, in its ways of beauty, of antiquity. There was not enough energy, enough freedom to move around. For me at that time in my life, I needed to see new horizons, new spaces. New York had that. There was a vibrancy not limited by culture, by arrondissement; everything was fluid, nothing was fixed—not class, not even sexual orientation.

  Part Two

  4

  Puttin’ on the Ritz

  PAULINE TRIGÈRE: When I came to New York in 1939, the food was something atrocious. Nobody cared about eating. The big change came about because of Henri Soulé, who was delegated by the French government to run the restaurant in the French pavilion at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair. After the fair closed, he decided to stay here, and he opened Le Pavillon on 55th Street and Fifth Avenue. It was the most extraordinary restaurant in America, very chic. After the war, all of a sudden, French food became important, and New York became a city where you could eat as well as anyplace else.

  Every good chef, every good waiter worked for him, and all those boys who were his waiters went on to become chefs at other great restaurants that opened up. It was like an explosion.

  ANDRÉ JAMMET: People who were working at the French pavilion in the World’s Fair were stranded here during the war and remained afterwards. There were also men from Brittany who got jobs on transatlantic ships and jumped ship when they came to America. One brought another over. They became Soulé’s staff.

  HOWARD KISSEL: When I first came to New York, the classy French restaurants were very snobbish, although in almost every case they were run by peasants from Brittany, which is the poorest region in France. But they had the Americans kowtowing to them in a way that was truly remarkable. They knew how to put the Americans in their place.

  PAULINE TRIGÈRE: Henri Soulé was a peculiar man. If he didn’t like someone coming in through his door, he would say, “I am sorry, I do not have a table.”

  SIRIO MACCIONI: He was very French, very superior. His attitude was: This is what it is, and you’re lucky we allow you to come in. With all due respect to Mr. Soulé, his restaurant today would not stay open three weeks in New York.

  Even the Colony, where I worked for ten years, had a little bit of that philosophy. When I first began, I would go around and ask, “Is everything all right?”

  The owner took me aside. “At the Colony, everything is always all right.”

  HOWARD KISSEL: Once Harry Cohn—the head of Columbia Pictures, which owned the building on 55th and Fifth—came to dinner at Le Pavillon. Soulé didn’t know who he was, and he put him back in Siberia. Cohn knew he was being slighted and got his revenge. He would no longer allow Soulé to store his wines in the cellar. So Soulé moved to 57th and Park, but he kept the restaurant space and gave it to his mistress, Madame Henriette Spalter. That became La Côte Basque.

  ANDRÉ JAMMET: In 1958, Robert Meyzen, the manager of La Côte Basque; Fred Decré, the maitre d’ of Le Pavillon; and Roger Fessaguet, the chef of Le Pavillon, came up with the idea of opening their own restaurant. They found a place on 55th Street that had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, which is why the bar was in the back. Nearby was a door that led into a hotel where Rockefeller and other wealthy people had apartments under false names. They’d slip through the door and pick up their liquor.

  As they had a low budget, the three men planned a very nice, elegant bistro, with Fred and Robert in the dining room and Roger as the chef. They decided to call it La Caravelle, after the caravels Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, as a symbol of the discovery of America. On July 14, they had the walls painted with murals of Paris by Jean Pagès, who came to this country when he was hired as an illustrator by Vogue magazine.

  Creating the restaurant was intimidating. They were coming from Mr. Soulé, who set the standard, and La Côte Basque was right down the block. Then just before they opened, there was some kind of argument between Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and Henri Soulé. Kennedy came to Fred and said, “Freddy, you open your place, we’ll be there on the first day.” And when the restaurant opened on September 21, 1960, the Kennedys were there. They backed La Caravelle morally and financially.

  Less than two months of after La Caravelle opened, John F. Kennedy became president. The timing was terrific. He and Jackie came to La Caravelle often. It became the favored place, attracting dignitaries and celebrities. It was young, new, and exciting. With connections to the White House, it became possible to import things like Dover sole and other special items that weren’t available here.

  At that time, the prix fixe dinner at La Carvavelle was $7.50, lunch was $4.00 or $5.00, but a normal white wine like a Pouilly-Fuissé could be $7.00, $8.00. That was a lot compared to the price of the food. Pétrus, the renowned Bordeaux, was $15.00. It was not a wine that was in demand before La Caravelle, La Côte Basque, and Le Pavillon made it famous. They launched it in New York, promoted it, and made it a great wine. Who knows why. It was a quality wine that did well throughout the years, but perhaps also Soulé knew the people and wanted to do something nice for them.

  After La Caravelle opened in 1960, Lutèce followed in 1961 and La Grenouille in 1962. Le Pavillon closed when Henri Soulé passed away, but a lot of other French restaurants appeared. The 1960s was a French invasion of the culinary scene in New York. There was enough business for all. La Caravelle was the
first restaurant that bridged out from Le Pavillon. But everything came from Henri Soulé.

  SIRIO MACCIONI: During and after the way, it was easy for French restaurants to open in New York because France was an ally. Italy, on the other hand, was the enemy. The Italian style was brought here by poor people who said, “Let’s open a restaurant.” In the early fifties, most of the Italian restaurants didn’t even have a name. All they said was “Italian Restaurant, Northern Cuisine” or “Italian Restaurant, Southern Cuisine.”

  HOWARD KISSEL: Nobody valued Italian cooking because it was at its most basic, basic almost always meaning veal parmesan and spaghetti and meatballs. It was only into the sixties and early seventies that people began to distinguish between southern and northern Italian cuisine.

  Around that time, I was working at Women’s Wear Daily, and a big part of our coverage was chronicling who lunched where. Orsini’s was one of the key places. The two Orsini brothers had started in a little take-out place that served northern Italian food, but by this time they had a beautiful restaurant on 56th between Fifth and Sixth. It was on the second floor with windows up near the ceiling, so when the sun streamed in it was like natural lighting to show you off. The thing about Orsini’s is everyone knew the food was mezzo-mezzo, but it was the place to be seen.

  One day a friend of mine who was very proud of her breasts (once she told me they weighed thirty pounds) was seated at a table at Orsini’s that she regarded as much better than Mrs. Onassis’s table. She remarked this to Mr. Orsini who, by the way, was a very handsome man. “In my restaurant,” he said, “women are seated by cup size.”