by Lillian Ross
The trumpet contingent—Gillespie, Byrd, Faddis, and Owens, now joined by Wynton Marsalis and by Nabate Isles, a fourteen-year-old graduate of the Louis Armstrong Middle School, in Queens, who has been playing the trumpet for six years—collected itself on the stage. Nabate played “St. Louis Blues,” and then he and four of his elders took a whack at it together (not including Mr. Gillespie, whose upper lip was suffering from wear and tear that day).
It was right about this time that we began thinking, Got to get some of those stamps. It was Mr. Gillespie’s fault, really. He’s the one who put the idea in our head. Earlier in the program, he mentioned that he had been trying to get the Postal Service to issue a Louis Armstrong stamp—an honor that he thought was overdue. He said, “I’m going to write a personal letter to the President and say, ‘Hey, man, what’s happenin’?’ ”
1991
MURPHYS — John Seabrook
ROBERT MEYERS, the founder of the Murphy Bed Center of New York, Inc., on West Seventeenth Street, spends most of his day in the field. He may be at the site of the new Flatotel, on West Fifty-second Street, supervising the installation of dozens of Murphy beds. Or he may be at Tudor City or the Parc Vendôme, both of which were built at the peak of the Murphy-bed craze, in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties, and contain lots of antique jalopies that few people besides Robert can understand. Robert wears a beeper, so that his wife, Susanne, can contact him in the event of a Murphy-related emergency. “A lot of my job is just talking clients through their beds,” Robert says. “They don’t understand their beds, or they’re actually afraid of them, because of the stigma these things have got from Hollywood.” When Robert is explaining a Murphy bed to a client, he resembles a flight instructor coaxing a novice through his first landing. He looks the client directly in the eye, enunciates carefully, as though speaking for lip-readers, and measures out instructions with his hands. Not one of Robert’s customers has been trapped or clobbered by the product. In fact, he has only ever heard of one such incident—an eighty-year-old woman in England was stuck inside her bed for three days.
The Murphy Bed Center is in a small second-story loft just west of Sixth Avenue. Half the space is devoted to furniture that is not what it seems to be— dressers, desks, cabinets, and walls of shelving that turn into beds. The other half, behind a door marked “Employees Only,” is where Robert and Susanne spend their spare time. Their couch is an ordinary bifold Murphy, the Model T of the industry. On Long Island, where they go on weekends, they sleep in a bookcase-type Murphy, which is more upscale. On their showroom floor are some top-of-the-line Murphys—German Murphys, which work with pistons, and Italian Murphys, which Robert greatly admires. “The Italians have mechanisms where you go, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe this is happening,’ ” Robert said the other day, showing off an Italian model. “Watch how the legs fold out. Wild, huh?” Nearby was a filing cabinet that turned into an ironing board. “I just had to have this on the floor,” he explained. “Basically, anything that can pop out of something, I enjoy.”
Robert is in his early thirties. He has neatly groomed shoulder-length hair and the physique of a person with a high metabolism. He likes to wear jewelry, but he has found that thrusting his hands into the guts of Murphy beds ruins watches and bracelets, and so now he wears eight three-inch rubber gaskets on his left wrist and, as a wedding band, one three-quarter-inch gasket on his left ring finger. (He wears his real wedding ring on his right hand, surrounded by more gaskets). Robert started out in the furniture-moving business. In an effort to establish a niche for himself, he began to take apart and reassemble installations—cabinetry, bookshelves, entertainment centers—and in this way he became familiar with the anatomies of Murphy beds. The ingenuity, delicacy, and precision of the mechanisms appealed to his mechanical side. “I began telling people that if they needed the Murphy beds worked on, call me,” he says. “I found out which apartment buildings had the old Murphy beds, and I’d leave my card with the doorman. Pretty soon, I became Number One in the field.”
Occasionally, in older apartment buildings, Robert comes across an original Murphy In-A-Dor Bed, designed by William L. Murphy himself. Murphy was a colorful northern Californian who broke horses, drove a stagecoach, served as a sheriff, and, around 1900, had the idea of making a bed that folded out of a closet. “Basically, the idea had been around since the drawbridge,” Robert says. “But Murphy got the patent on it.” Someone in the movie business in Los Angeles perceived its slapstick possibilities, and Murphy’s beds quickly became popular props in silent comedies. In the nineteen-twenties, Murphy was selling several thousand beds a month. In the thirties, he expanded into Murphy Cabrinettes—tiny, Pullman-style kitchens. These, together with the beds, were incorporated by developers into efficiency apartments, which were then a brand-new concept. Dale Carnegie wrote articles about Murphy. In Europe, Murphy was viewed as a kind of urban visionary.
The Murphy-bed business isn’t what it used to be. After the war, the popularity of the beds began to decline. People didn’t want to save space—they wanted to sleep in huge beds in big suburban bedrooms. Also, the sofa bed, popularized in the late forties by Bernard Castro, eroded Murphy’s market. Robert is contemptuous of sofa beds. “It’s such a misconception when people say that they don’t want a Murphy bed because they want to sleep on a real bed,” he says. “They say that because they’re coming off sofa beds. There is just no comparison between a sofa bed and a Murphy.”
Two years ago, Robert made a proposal to the Murphy Bed Company, which has its headquarters in Commack, Long Island, and is still entirely owned by the Murphy family; the president, Clark Murphy, is William’s grandson. “Look,” Robert said to the Murphy Bed people. “I think your bed needs some of my personal attention and focus. Because if you promoted these things aggressively they’d sell like crazy—you have a fabulous product here. I am offering to be your exclusive sales representative in Manhattan.” The company turned Robert down. So he decided to start the Murphy Bed Center. “My thing is, How far can I get into this without being afraid of how far I can go?” he said, and then he raised his arms and widened his eyes. “I see a bed coming down from the ceiling, with four winches, one at each corner, slowly lowering it.” He let his fingers float slowly down to his waist. Business was good, he added, and he was selling mechanisms as far away as Alaska. “In Alaska, space is a big problem,” he said. “You know why? Heat. You have to have small spaces to stay warm.” He paused a moment, and then shouted, “Hey, Sue!” Susanne was behind the “Employees Only” sign, watching TV. “Where’s the picture of the eighteenth-century Murphy I got out of a magazine?”
“I don’t know.”
“This picture would blow your mind,” he said. “It’s a piano that turns into a bed, plus it has a dresser and a washbasin inside. I mean, it’s humbling.”
1992
FLOWERING — Garrison Keilor
WE slipped away to the New York Flower Show last Monday, not telling anyone, so that nobody could say, “I didn’t know you were interested in flowers,” in a dry tone suggesting something prosaic and unflorescent about us—something indehiscent. “Indehiscent” is a new word we’ve learned. It means “not dehiscent, not opening at maturity,” as in “indehiscent fruit.” During the blast of freezing cold that has been rattling our windows lately, we have sometimes dehisced in the form of a sneeze, and then hisced up all the tighter. But, of course, a dry or undehisced person, an afloral person, is exactly the kind of person a flower show is there to stimulate, and that’s why we went. We took a taxi to Pier 92, one of the big passenger-ship terminals on the Hudson, and paid our eight dollars and breezed in.
We saw rex begonia and asparagus ferns and a plant labelled “A String of Peas”—a plant with leaves that look like peas—and shamrocks, violets, cyclamens, azaleas, Johnny-jump-ups, and battalions of tulips. There were whole gardens, and there were ranks of plants arranged by genus or variety—competing plants, with the prize ribbons beside
them, and the judge’s scoring card right there for all to see.
Roaming among sections of streptocarpus and primula, we noted how terse were the judge’s compliments on the winning plants:
“Magnificent!”
“Superb plant!”
“Spectacular and showy.”
“Showstopper.”
“Excellent specimen.”
“Beautiful.”
And how sharp, how barbed, were their comments on the second- and third-place plants and the honorable mentions:
“Good start.” (A third-place begonia semperflorens)
“Poor color. Severe pruning is obvious.”
“Unusual growth habit.”
“Slightly off-center and overpotted.” (A third-place Andromischus cristatus)
“This plant would look better with more foliage.”
“Lovely plant but a little beyond its prime.” (A third-place narcissus)
The withering irony of “This plant would look better with more foliage”! The faint contempt behind “Unusual growth habit”! And imagine the poor grower bringing his best begonia down from Connecticut, an affable man in bib overalls and porkpie hat leaving the tropical calm of his greenhouse for the honk and harangue of New York: his station wagon plows south on the West Side Highway, the begonia terrified and perspiring on the seat beside him, and he parks blocks away and hauls the plant to Pier 92 and sets it in its place and spritzes it with bug juice, and a judge comes by, a big, beefy man with a long waxed mustache, and peers down at it and scribbles “Good start” on a card. How would you feel?
Once in a blue moon, a judge handed out a flowery compliment, such as “Wonderful presentation with bonus of bloom” for a winning Mammillaria plumosa, but most of the plants came in for digs. A pot of tulips was criticized for a lack of “floriferousness” and a narcissus for “meager growth.” One of the succulents was said to have had “a cultural problem in its development,” and a hippeastrum was dismissed as “immature.” “Lacks ornamental value,” said the card attached to a sea onion. Perhaps, we thought, but couldn’t the same be said about us? The remark that the narcissus was “a little beyond its prime” stung us especially.
We had come to the end of Pier 92, and were in front of a ceiling-high window that looked south to the next terminal and to the floodlit U.S.S. Intrepid beyond. The next terminal was where, one afternoon last June, we embarked for England aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2. We stood at the port rail as she slipped down the Hudson, the blocks of Manhattan drifting past like rows of tall corn, and when we got to Forty-third we snapped a picture of our companion with the Chrysler Building coming out of her head like an immense stalk of wheat. A fireboat zipped alongside and shot a fifty-foot plume into the air, the Staten Island ferry bobbed in our wake, our funnel eased under the Verrazano Bridge, and we sailed along the coast of Brooklyn and out to sea.
We normally prepare for a trip by imagining the worst and then are grateful for what doesn’t happen to us, so we fully expected cold weather and fierce winds on the crossing, with sheets of salt spray lashing the deck, and the ship rolling and plunging; and we imagined ourself lying on a bunk quietly retching into a plastic bag, and then the inevitable iceberg and the rush for the boats, with us caught in a despicable act of cowardice and going down with the boat in shame and disgrace, and then our obituary (“Was fondly regarded despite insufficient flowering over the years”). But, of course, the first day out was bright and balmy, and we lay in a deck chair and dozed and slowly burst open.
From dread comes dehiscence, just as from winter comes spring. From stern judgments come better begonias. You let a flower show drift toward permissiveness, and soon they’ll be exhibiting dandelions and skunk cabbage, and where will we be then? We bought a bottle of soil conditioner and an asparagus fern and went home.
1992
JUDY HEAVEN — Nancy Franklin
IF you’re like most people, you probably couldn’t tell us right off the bat where Judy Garland was and what she was doing on, say, January 24, 1964. And the blank expression on your face would freeze solid if we went on to ask you what Judy Garland was wearing that day and who designed it. Relax. As of now, you’re off the hook, and you can thank John Fricke and Michael Benson. Mr. Fricke and Mr. Benson are serious collectors of the effects and ephemera of Garland’s career, and between them they’ve got the five “w”s covered: who, what, when, where, and wardrobe. About two years ago, they joined forces and approached the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts with the idea of putting on an exhibition to celebrate what would have been Judy Garland’s seventieth birthday, on June 10th of this year. (This is a birthday that Garland herself did not come close to celebrating; when she died, in 1969, she was forty-seven years old.) The show opened a few weeks ago, in the library’s Amsterdam Gallery, with a party that drew Garland admirers and collectors from all over the country—many of whom had been persuaded to part with their own Judyana for the two and a half months the show will run—and several performers who had rubbed shoulders with the legendary Miss G.
At the party, Michael Benson was zipping around the room, saying hello to friends and pointing out some of his favorite costumes. There were twenty-two costumes on display (and a couple of pairs of shoes, but no ruby slippers) from Garland’s movie days and her later concert and television career, including a brown suit she wore when she rehearsed with Fred Astaire in “Easter Parade” and the off-white winter coat she had on when Tom Drake (the boy next door, whom she could not ignore) proposed to her in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Quite a few of them belonged to Mr. Benson. He told us he had bought his first Garland costume—a short-sleeved cotton dress that was made for Judy to wear in “Everybody Sing”—eight years ago, when he was twenty-five. “I’d gone to an auction at Christie’s with a friend of mine who collects Hedy Lamarr, and when this dress came up I thought, You love her—why not buy it?” But his feeling for Garland had started long before that. “I can remember being five and glued to the TV,” he said. What was he watching? “I’ll tell you, it was not ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ A few weeks after President Kennedy was shot, she came out and closed her TV show with the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ She sang magnificently. She got a standing ovation, and tears were streaming down her face. That’s what turned me on to Judy Garland.”
Garland’s birth certificate was posted just inside the entrance to the gallery, and from there Mr. Benson took us on a quick tour of the costumes, starting with the cotton dress and ending with the high-wattage outfits that Garland favored in the sixties. One display case was lit from within by three sequinned pants suits—a red one, a white one, and an orange-and-green paisley one— and another case held the beaded jacket she wore when she sang at Carnegie Hall in 1961. The bead-and-sequin industry got a further boost from Garland’s 1963–64 television series. Mr. Benson showed us an elegant white cowl top embroidered with gold beads, which was designed by Ray Aghayan with the assistance of Bob Mackie, and which Garland wore during the taping of her twentieth television show, at the CBS studios in Hollywood, on—here it comes—January 24, 1964.
Across the room, a video monitor was showing film clips in which Garland was wearing the clothes on display. A dozen people stood and watched “Broadway Rhythm,” which is the finale of “Presenting Lily Mars.” It’s a big production number that has Garland, looking lovely in an upswept hairdo and thousand-inch heels and long black gloves and a sparkling black tulle dress, dancing over every available inch of a huge Deco stage. (In the Amsterdam Gallery, the dress was being worn by a mannequin standing ten feet away.) The camera moves in for a closeup as she belts out the final note and characteristically sweeps one arm way up over her head. When the number ended, several people shook their heads in awe. Just then, a woman Mr. Benson recognized walked by, and he reached out and tapped her on the shoulder, and said, “Hi! Is this Judy heaven, or what?”
Posters from many of Garland’s M-G-M movies and other memorabilia lined the walls, and the
y were being examined closely by the crowd. A photograph from 1937 showed Clark Gable hugging the fourteen-year-old Judy at his birthday party after she sang “Dear Mr. Gable, You Made Me Love You” to him. There was a 1938 letter signed by Judy authorizing General Foods to use her name and likeness with the words “Nothing drives away that tired, strained feeling like a cup of Maxwell House” in advertising its product. A woman standing near the Oscar that Harold Arlen won for “Over the Rainbow” was pointing to a small figure in a photo spread about “The Wizard of Oz” from a 1939 issue of Life. A television camera was trained on the woman, and she looked into the camera and said, “This one—this member of the Lollipop Guild is my cousin.” The magazine had come out several months before the movie, and the captions seemed to have been written by junior State Department officials who had been sent ahead to check out the situation in Oz. Under a picture of Dorothy and her pals was this dispatch: “In poppy field near Emerald City, quartet is doped by bad witch, who later uses flying monkeys. She dislikes Wizard intensely, is a bad influence on the countryside generally.”
Eddie Bracken, who was in Garland’s last M-G-M film, “Summer Stock,” was among the guests, and he was easy to find. He has wavy white hair, bright-blue eyes, an Eddie Bracken nose, and a crackly voice that instantly called up images from the Preston Sturges movies he made fifty years ago. It has been said that Garland loved working with him, because he made her laugh. “Yes, that’s true, and I never knew why,” he told us. “I guess she just thought I had a funny face. I used to play practical jokes on her—April Fool’s Day was murder. I could make Judy laugh at the drop of a hat, and I never wore a hat. She was wonderful. I love her to this day.”