by Lillian Ross
1934
THE DAKOTA — Charles Cooke and Harold Ross
OUR landmark reporter came in, insisting that we run a little article on the Dakota apartment house on Central Park West at Seventy-second Street, and as he had all the facts in a convenient form, we said all right. It’s fifty years old this month. It was the first apartment house to be built on the edge of the Park, and the neighborhood then was a shanty town with goats and pigs running around. There’s a legend that it got its name because of its absurd location far to the northwest of things. Edward Clark, organizer of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, began it, but died during the four years it took to build and left it to his grandson, Edward Severin Clark, who owned it until his death last year, when it passed to his brother, Stephen C. Clark. During its whole existence, it has never advertised or hung out a sign. It has never given more than a one-year lease, yet has an amazing record of continued tenancy. Ninety per cent of the original tenants lived there until they died. Two of them still live there, Miss Cordelia Deal, in a four-room apartment, and Mr. Maxwell D. Howell, nine rooms. Frederick T. Steinway (pianos) and A. J. Cammeyer (shoes) lived there for years, and Sir Douglas Alexander, president of Singer now, and Charles J. Hardy, president of the American Car & Foundry Company, still do. In all, five or six hundred people live in the house, and there are a hundred employees, who on an average have been there as long as the tenants. The head painter’s incumbency totals forty-eight years, and the head carpenter’s forty. The elevator operators are all middle-aged women, every one of whom has held her job since she was first hired. That was during the war, when men were scarce.
Tenants of the Dakota come and go through the Seventy-second Street gate, which is guarded by a new sentry box (only fifteen years old). After midnight, the gates are closed and visitors are challenged. This entrance leads into a court with two fountains, each containing twelve iron lilies. The dining-room of the Dakota is all marble, carved oak, and brown tile embossed with Indian heads, arrowheads, and ears of corn (for the Dakota region). The eight elevators are originals, Otis hydraulics run by steam pumps in the basement. Some years ago the pull ropes were replaced by levers, but otherwise the elevators haven’t been touched. All the gable rooms on the ninth floor, with first-class Park views, are occupied by resident employees. That shows how quaint a place can be.
Only one tenant moved out of the Dakota last moving day; six moved in. There are vacancies now, but from 1884 to 1929 there wasn’t a single one. Our landscape man saw a nine-room apartment being done over—it takes up to six months for the Dakota to remodel. All the doors, he says, were of hand-carved mahogany with brass knobs, and there were five fireplaces. That’s what he noticed most. The electrical and bathroom fixtures are modern, though, throughout the building, with the exception of one zinc bathtub an old tenant won’t give up. There’s a second gated entrance to the Dakota on Seventy-third Street, which few people ever see open. It was originally the servants’ entrance, but Mr. Edward Severin Clark locked it when he took the building over and decreed that it should never be used except for funerals, and it never has been. It’s used about once a year.
1934
GTDE — James Thurber
MISS STEIN was seven or eight minutes late for her autographing at Brentano’s last week and about fifty people were waiting restlessly for her when she solidly arrived with Alice B. Toklas pertly in tow. On a table were arranged solid stacks of Miss Stein’s books and next to the table was a big desk at which she sat solidly down. She was calm, quick, and smiling throughout the ordeal. Of course, it wasn’t as exciting as the immortal Hugh Walpole–Gene Tunney autographing, but it had its moments. As soon as she sat down, Miss Stein looked up expectantly and people began pushing toward the desk, carrying books. Clerks fluttered about selling the pushers whatever book of Miss Stein’s they might want: the books ran in price from ninety-five cents (the Modern Library edition of “Three Lives”) to $3.50. At an autographing, you are supposed to write down on a card your name, or Aunt Lisbeth’s name, or the name of whomever you are buying the book for, and hand the book and the card to the autographer. This speeds things up, because people standing in front of an author and meeting the author’s eyes are likely to get timid and dry-throated and say “Zassfrank Dooselinch” or what sounds like “Zassfrank Dooselinch” to the author. Miss Stein doesn’t like people to be incoherent about names.
She signed two hundred and seventy-five books in all, and her signing time was a little under an hour and a half. She wrote with a big pen, vigorously. We bought one of her books and got in line behind a man named Twifflefinks, Moited Twifflefinks (he hadn’t written his name on a card). That was straightened out after a while—Miss Stein is always gracious and patient. We just handed our book to her, and she glanced at us with her keen, humorous eyes and, seeing that we didn’t have a name, simply put her own name on the flyleaf, and the date. She signs herself always Gtde Stein. Now and again somebody (once it was a girl of twelve) would slip her an autograph book or a blank sheet of paper, but she would push these away and say “No,” and these autograph-hunters would retreat in humiliation. There are ethics in autographing: you can’t just walk into a bookstore out of the street and get an author to sign his name for you. You have to buy or bring one of the author’s books.
One confused man somehow found himself standing in front of Miss Stein without a book, so he shouted at a clerk, “ ‘Three Saints’! ‘Three Saints’!” he said. “Give me a ‘Three Saints’!” The right title is “Four Saints.” A clerk corrected the gentleman coldly. Miss Stein just laughed. She doesn’t get peeved about things like that. Behind us was a lady named Mielziner. Miss Stein, hearing the name, looked up and asked about Leo Mielziner, Jr. “Leo Mielziner is Kenneth MacKenna,” said the lady. Miss Stein took that in her stride. Now and again someone would ask the hovering Toklas to sign a book, and she always did. Somebody asked Miss Stein what had been her greatest thrill in America. She said her airplane trip to Chicago.
A friend of ours who heard the great lady lecture a few days after the autographing said it was very interesting and seemed to make sense. Our friend, however, copied down a few sentences that Miss Stein said and showed them to us. Our favorite was “When the inside had become so solidly inside that all the outside could be outside and the inside inside.” The lady who listened said that when you hear Gtde talk that way, you can see what she means, or think you can. People who hear her always like her as a person. After her lectures she will answer any questions—if they are sensible. Once she waved her hand and said pooh at a woman who asked her what she thought of the effect of psychology on literature. She then said that psychology hasn’t any effect on literature. She told some other questioner that she doesn’t believe much in the subconscious. “It’s subconscious because it’s inarticulate,” she said.
This is probably all we’re going to tell you about Miss Stein.
1934
MISS RAND — A. J. Liebling and Harold Ross
WHEN Dr. Dafoe of the quintuplets came to town and said one of the things he wanted to see was Sally Rand’s bubble dance, we thought it was time we were seeing her, too, and we arranged to do so, and also to interview her. Like the adagio dance, mentioned here recently, the bubble dance, which Miss Rand is now performing at the Paradise Restaurant on Broadway for an admission fee of a dollar and a half, dinner included, was inspired by Pavlova. Indirectly, that is. Miss Rand invented the fan dance because she caught the sacred fire of the great Russian, and she wouldn’t have invented the bubble dance for the 1934 Chicago Fair if the fan dance hadn’t been such a success at the Fair in 1933. Miss Rand was only six when she caught the sacred fire. She saw Pavlova in the “Dying Swan” number. “A white bird flying in the moonlight,” Miss Rand told us, “was the emotional effect I always wanted to convey. I dreamed of it all my life.” She didn’t get a chance to try it out until the Fair. Her present dance is also symbolical. “The bubble” (it’s of rubber and five feet in diam
eter), Miss Rand explained, “represents man’s dreams, which ultimately become material progress. No ship ever sailed, no spire ever rose, without a dream. The dream shimmers and floats away from you, returns. Finally, in all its movements and through the Dance of Life, it becomes part of you, of your material progress. After my dance, when I put the bubble aside, you do not, I am sure, look at me as, let’s say, a personality, a human being, but rather as some sweet, some marble abstraction.”
Miss Rand is five feet one-half inch tall, blonde, eupeptic, and weighs a hundred and eleven pounds. Her dancing costume is white adhesive tape and a coating of a white cosmetic of her own composition. She does not hide behind the bubble that represents man’s dreams, but hoists it high over her head and lets it float away from her several times before she puts it aside at the end of her dance, to the loud applause of Paradise patrons, who can appreciate a sweet marble abstraction as well as the next ones. A black-net curtain is lowered around the stage for Miss Rand’s dance, to accentuate the whiteness of her body and to protect the balloon against patrons with lighted cigarettes. The balloons stand her twenty-six dollars each. The night we saw her, her first balloon broke, anyway, when she bounced it on some pine needles left by a previous artist, and they handed her a second one from the wings. She always has three or four in reserve backstage.
Miss Rand was a Wampas Baby Star in the films in 1927, and afterward toured in vaudeville with her own company of twelve dancing boys. Originally, her name was Helen Gould Beck. The first part is for Helen Gould, the “angel of the Spanish War,” she explained. She is a native of Hickory County, Missouri. She told us that in 1929 she fell on lean days and danced in the chorus at the Capitol Theatre. She lost that job and made hats in a wholesale house, and later waited on table at the Alps Restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street. She went to the Fair with the fan-dance idea and started at a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. Since then she has received as much as a thousand dollars a day (at the Steel Pier, Atlantic City, for two days), a vaudeville salary equalled only by one other woman stage performer, Sarah Bernhardt. “And Bernhardt had a company with her,” Miss Rand commented modestly. Miss Rand’s average salary since the first year at the Fair has been around three thousand dollars a week, but she’s taking twenty-five hundred at the Paradise because it’s a small place. (Seats only eight hundred and fifty.)
1934
THE JOYCES — James Thurber
THE Giorgio Joyces have been living quietly in and around town since they arrived with their small son on the Bremen last May. Giorgio is the son of the famous James Joyce, but he has no prose work in progress himself. He’s a bass singer. He made his radio début in November as George Joyce, because he doesn’t like the name Giorgio—it was given to him because Italian was the language spoken in Trieste, where he was born in 1905. He has sung twice on the radio so far—a Mozart aria, a Tschaikowsky song, two old Irish ballads. His father sent him radiograms wishing him luck. James, who started out to be a singer himself, is proud of Giorgio’s voice and hopes he will be a great concert singer some day.
Giorgio won’t talk about his father’s work, but he told us some interesting things about the author’s way of life, speaking with a slight accent. (He lived in Trieste till he was nine, in Switzerland during the war, and has been in Paris since 1919. He and his father always converse in Italian.) James Joyce’s eyesight, his son says, is much better than it used to be, but he can see only with his left eye, the right being entirely blind. A few years ago he had to write with blue crayon on huge sheets of white paper, but now he uses pen or pencil on any paper that is handy. He can typewrite, using one finger on each hand, but uses a typewriter only for his infrequent correspondence, never for manuscripts. His friends drop in and type his manuscripts—he hates professional secretaries and has never hired one. His friends also read to him, out of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books. When he wants something read to him for relaxation, he usually asks for Ibsen. He has never had a line of Gertrude Stein read to him and seems to have no interest in her work. The two have met, but that’s all. The only thing Joyce reads for himself is his “Work in Progress.” He reads parts of it aloud to his friends, chuckling now and then, going back and rereading sometimes passages he especially likes. He never reads from “Ulysses” or any other of his old works, being bored with them after they are written and published.
Joyce sees very few people. He never goes to literary teas or other parties, but gives three a year himself—at Christmas, New Year’s, and on his birthday, February 2nd. Only his small circle of intimates are invited to these parties. Joyce always sings Irish songs for them, playing his own accompaniment. His voice is tenor and his favorite song is “Molly Brannigan.” (His son, incidentally, doesn’t play the piano.) Joyce gets up around nine, writes a little, but spends most of the morning telephoning. He actually likes talking on the phone, and chins with his friends by the hour. Before lunch he plays and sings, and afterward works until five o’clock. He has been at his new book for years; nobody knows when it will be finished, but Giorgio thinks it’s about half done. After five, Joyce takes a walk, alone. He detests dogs and wouldn’t walk with one. There are no pets at all in his household, which consists of himself, his wife (who was Nora Barnacle), and his other child, Lucia.
Joyce’s favorite restaurant in Paris is Fouquet’s. He likes the opera, the theatre (never misses a Thursday matinée), song recitals, and even the movies. His favorite opera is “William Tell,” which he has heard dozens of times. The only thing he drinks is white wine. At present he is in Zurich. Giorgio had a letter from him recently. It began “Dear Oigroig and Neleh.” That’s backward for Giorgio and Helen, the latter being Mrs. Oigroig. It ended “With much love, Obbab.” Obbab is backward for Babbo, which means Daddy in Italian. Babbo has been James Joyce’s family nickname for thirty years.
1935
MET’S MAÎTRE — Charles Cooke and Russell Maloney
SOME of our friends with musical and operatic connections have been telling us about young George Balanchine, the Met’s new maître de ballet. Quite a fellow, by all accounts. He lives simply in a one-room apartment at 400 East Fifty-seventh Street, and is probably the only man in New York who keeps a grand piano in a one-room apartment. Plays for relaxation: Bach, Stravinsky, and opera and ballet scores. He is an open-mouthed admirer of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He reads Goethe for fun, does Russian acrostics, and cooks Russian food excellently. The White Russian set here have tried to lionize him, but he usually turns down their invitations; when he dines out, it’s likely to be at a little Yiddish place in the East Nineties. He’s unmarried, and has been since 1927, when he and Tamara Geva, the dancer, were divorced. His aquiline profile, earnest poker face, and shiny black hair give him an Indian look; he’s far from showing his thirty-one years. He speaks English without conspicuous success, gesturing wildly with both hands and interjecting phrases of French and Russian.
Right now he’s busy conducting rehearsals in the big ballet-room on the fifth floor of the Opera House. His corps is composed of five youngsters from the old Met ballet, twenty pupils of his from the School of the American Ballet, and five outsiders whom he picked at tryouts. He was startled at the ineptitude of most of the candidates. “Zey say, ‘I loff so much ze dance, I want so much dance wiz you,’ zen zay pirouette and fall on zair face.” Very discouraging. At rehearsals he wears sneakers, gray trousers, and a blue plaid shirt open at the neck. Never loses his temper, never praises, never reproves. When a dancer is doing badly, Balanchine says politely, “You’re tired, aren’t you?” He has been through all this before, twice—at Copenhagen in 1930, and at Monte Carlo in 1931. He studied dancing for seven years at the Russian Imperial Dancing School (it had become the State Dancing School by the time he left). He joined Diaghileff’s troupe during a tour in England, and was the great man’s maître de ballet until Diaghileff’s death in 1929. Then followed the training of dancers in Copenhagen and Monte Carlo, and in 19
33 he came here to be director of the School of the American Ballet. He knows all the great ballets, and has composed almost thirty of his own. There are plans afoot for him to do “serious” dances for two musical shows this fall; if anybody asks him how he reconciles this hotcha stuff with the Met work, he says cagily, “Each is for different pooblic.” Besides, he considers that tap-dancing can be used in a serious ballet, and has vague plans in the back of his head involving Fred Astaire.
Balanchine wants to compose some American ballets, and this summer made a coast-to-coast automobile trip with two of his friends, in search of material. In Texas, they were marooned by a cloudburst, and dashed into a place that displayed a cafeteria sign, in search of coffee and sandwiches; didn’t get any, though, because the restaurant had been turned into a temporary drought-relief headquarters. In Arizona, Balanchine knotted a red handkerchief around his head, talked Russian to the Indians, and gave them the idea that he was a brave from a distant tribe. It all ought to make a fine ballet.
1935
DARK CONTRALTO — Charles Cooke and Russell Maloney
YOU’D have to go far to find a person more quiet and modest than Marian Anderson, the young Negress whose contralto voice is, as you probably know, the latest sensation of the musical world. We called on her while she was here for her Town Hall recital of December 30th, and found her living in a Y.W.C.A. in Harlem; it’s not improbable that she will make use of the same unpretentious diggings when she comes to town for her next recital—Carnegie Hall, on the twentieth. She hasn’t even bought herself a car. She plans to live, between concerts, with her mother and her two young sisters in a little brick house she bought in Philadelphia’s colored section. She has been in Europe since 1931, and is still startled by her success there. “Why,” she says, “we gave a hundred and fifty concerts in Scandinavia alone last year.” “We” includes Kosti Vehanen, who has been her accompanist for the past five years. He’s white—Finnish.