by Tom Wolfe
The thing is, any old boy from the loblolly flatlands of Georgia knows how Saturday is supposed to work out in the United States. All the old people drive down to the railroad station and park alongside the tracks and rear back and socialize on the car fenders until the main event, which is the Seaboard sleeper barreling through to New York City. And the young people drive in from all over and park along the street near the Rexall and neck under the Bright Lights stimulation of the street lamps.
But what about New York City? Just because one lives in New York and is Greta Garbo, there is no need to give the whole business up. Never mind the charisma of the Seaboard sleeper. In New York there is the new religion, Art. And none of your parking alongside the tracks. In New York there is a route from 57th Street to 86th Street through the art galleries that line Madison Avenue and the streets just off it. And, naturally, no necking under the arc lights. In New York, on the Saturday Route, they give each other New York’s newest grace, the Social Kiss.
As the sound of the wet smack begins ricocheting between the charming little buildings of upper Madison Avenue, about noon, everyone knows the Saturday Route is on. Babs Simpson of Vogue Magazine lives up on East 83rd Street, so she starts out near the 86th Street end, walks down as far as 78th Street to Schrafft’s, for brunch, and then moves on down Madison Avenue. She meets “hundreds” of people she knows. So does Jan Mitchell, the owner of Lüchow’s and his wife, the gorgeous, demure-looking blonde, who start out from 57th Street. So does everybody, because everybody is starting out from one end or the other.
“Martha!” “Tony!” “Edmond!” “Jennifer!” “Sarah!” “Bryce!” And Tony and Martha embrace and he pastes a Social Kiss on her cheek, and she pastes one on his cheek, and Edmond pastes one on Jennifer, and Jennifer pastes one on Edmond, and then Tony and Martha trade them and Bryce and Jennifer and Sarah and Martha and Martha and Jennifer.
Irresistibly, this promenade of socialities, stars, literati and culturati begins to attract a train of vergers, beadles and hierophants of fashion. One whole set is called “Seventh Avenue”—as in, “Her? That’s Marilyn. She’s Seventh Avenue”—designers, manufacturers’ agents, who want to know what They are wearing on the Saturday Route. Also a vast crowd of interior decorators, both young and foppish and old and earnest. And jewelry makers, young museum curators and curates, antiques dealers, furniture designers, fashion journalists, art journalists, press agents, social climbers, culture climbers, moochers, oglers, duns and young men who have had pairs of leather slacks made or young women in black stretch nylon pants and alligator coat outfits who have been looking all week for somewhere to wear them. So by 2:30 P.M.. the promenade is roaring up and down Madison Avenue like a comet with the little stars trailing out like dust at the end.
At the Wildenstein Gallery on East 64th Street, Greta Garbo, a turban hat on her head and a vicuna coat over her shoulders, is standing in a corner before the Wildenstein’s inevitable velvetdraped walls, between two drawings, a Tchelitchew and a Prendergast. She is with a smashingly well-turned-out woman, who is no decoy, however. All around people are starting the business with the elbows, nudging, saying, “That’s Greta Garbo, Greta Garbo, Garbo, Garbo, Garbo, Garbo.” Everyone sort of falls back, except Marilyn, who is trying to peek around to the front to see what is under the vicuna.
“What’s that?” Marilyn says to Lila, who is also Seventh Avenue, as they say. “It looks like one of those Pucci knit things.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, relax,” says Lila. “She can’t be in the corner forever.”
Downstairs, by the door, where the ironwork rises up, inspired, in filigrees, is Pierre Scapula, the interior decorator. He is wearing a leather overcoat with a sash belt and talking in French to one of Mr. Wildenstein’s people and in English to a friend: “It’s the most marvelous place. Seven French sofas, and the minute you …”
Four blocks away, at 68th Street, Mimi Russell is walking down Madison Avenue in the direction of T. Anthony’s, the leather goods shop. Mimi, of 1 Sutton Place, granddaughter of the Duke of Marlborough, daughter of the publisher of Vogue, is the one girl among 14 young persons of good blood, good bone, indicted by the Suffolk County Grand Jury, accused of taking part in the big smashup at the Ladd house after Fernanda Wetherill’s coming-out ball. Right now, though, on Mimi that story, like good memoir material, is wearing as well as a checked coat, which she has on. Right now, on the Saturday Route, she looks like a million dollars, flanked by good-looking kids, her sister Serena, for one, and Nick Villiers.
On the other side of the street, the fellow with the trench coat and the two little girls in tow is Mindy Wager, the actor.
But up at 77th Street, on the corner near Parke-Bernet, the big fellow with the gray plaid shirt and the striped gray tie and the plaid sport jacket is an artist, Mark Rothko. How did he get out here? Well, he is heading for the Rauschenberg show at the Castelli gallery, 4 East 77th Street, where, later, Marilyn will say, “Well, some of the small ones would be nice,” and Lila says, “Oh, for God’s sake, Marilyn, you’re not buying lingerie.”
Rothko is standing out in the midst of the incredible comet and saying he usually doesn’t go near the Saturday Route with a ten-foot pole. “Yes, I go to openings,” he says, “the openings of my friends. I am an old man and I have a lot of friends. This time I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
To the beautiful people on the Saturday Route, however, it does not matter in the least that artists, and serious collectors, look down on the promenade as a social and, therefore, not very hip spectacle. The fact is, the Route through the art galleries bears approximately the same relation to Art as churchgoing, currently, bears to the Church. Formerly, Saturday was the big day for the collectors. Now they come around knowingly Tuesday through Friday, avoiding “the mob”—although at this moment at Wildenstein’s the Charles Wrightsmans are in that room of port-colored velvet and, as always, a single painting is up on an easel by the north light, and two others, never more, are propped up against the wall nearby.
“I love it,” says J———, a customer and admirer. “It’s like a game of yellow dog. Two down and one up.”
But never mind Art in the abstract. It is almost 3 P.M. and the whole comet seems to be veering toward Parke-Bernet. August Heckscher has just finished up at the Kootz (Raymond Parker’s hard-edge abstracts) and the Staempfli (those wild things by Jorge Piqueras) and is heading for Parke-Bernet. The fellow in the black Chesterfield, across from Parke-Bernet, near Stark’s, is John Loeb of the Loeb & Loeb Loebs, grandson of Arthur Lehman. All the Lehmans seem to be out on the Saturday Route. Robert Lehman has just left Wildenstein’s. Herbert Lehman, the Governor, the Senator, the 88-year-old patriarch, is already up in the great meeting place, the third floor at Parke-Bernet. The two big gallery rooms are, as always, a profusion of antiques that will be auctioned off next week, all numbered and set out for inspection: beechwood Louis XVI chairs of mustard yellow plush, Zonsei armchairs of vermilion lacquer inlaid with the playing card faces of Chinese aristocrats, draped bronze maidens holding fluted cornucopiae out of which sprout light fixtures, a Kulah prayer rug, a curved cigarette holder of cloisonné enamel, malachite Easter eggs, a pair of gilded palm trees about 8½ feet high, bibelots, silver creamers, snuff boxes, low tables, chandeliers, napkin rings and all the assorted tabourets, bibelots and marquetry inlays of bygone Czars, noblemen, Mayfair jousters and isolated West of England gentry.
On the walls—more velvet—is a crashingly forthright assortment of 19th-century paintings, all condemned forty years ago by the avant-gardists of Paris as “literary,” “academic” and “soppy,” but now rather fiercely, if sometimes perversely, “in”—Messonier, von Bremen, Vibert, Millet, Ridgeway Knight.
Off to the left is the auction hall where porters in green uniforms are lugging Adam settees, pedestal desks, dwarf cabinets and other formidable objects out onto the stage while John Marion of Parke-Bernet chants in his pulpit. But everybody is waitin
g for the two pièces de résistance, two serpentine-front Chippendale commodes with splayed feet.
G———, the young man who is selling commodes, looks a little anxious, but his wife, a blonde, is looking beautiful mainly, and his friends are not going to let this be too serious an occasion.
“G———, where are you going? You look so cross.”
“I’m going to see Marion,” he says. That would be Louis J. Marion, the president of Parke-Bernet.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not hunting for me, looking so cross.” Meantime, the comet is going full force, around and around the gallery rooms and in and out of the auction hall. Governor Lehman is looking at the Rousseau—that is Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau—the picture of the cows moseying around the marsh puddle. Jan Mitchell and his wife are looking at a sketch Gainsborough did for some gal’s portrait. Norman Norell, the dress designer, is walking into the auction hall. August Heckscher is sitting in the back row. Mrs. Edmund Lynch, whose husband is Lynch, as in Merrill Lynch, is walking out. Emmett Hughes is looking in through the back door.
“It seems to me that in the last year this place has become very social,” says Emmett Hughes. “It’s a little like those little cafés on the Via Veneto used to be.”
Society, the bright young people, the celebrities, Seventh Avenue, the vergers, the beadles, the hierophants are bubbling up on all sides.
“Darling, don’t keep telling me you’re not going to buy anything. Go buy a malachite egg or something.”
“Of course, I know what to do with two eight-foot-high palm trees. You put gas jets in the top and …”
“… What do I do? One doesn’t do anything, but you’re a darling to ask …”
“… Oh, go to Hell. I think you read that some place …”
“… the thing is, I was in his studio. But too blinding …”
“… Smart set? Everybody is from Kew Gardens …”
“… Good Lord, the galleries …”
“… This place is getting to be the coffee break …”
“Tony!”
“Martha!”
“Edmond!”
Wet smack!
Then—pow!—the second of the two commodes is sold, for $10,000, just like the first. And everybody feels it, even those who paid no attention at all. When the last of the heavy business is over at Parke-Bernet, it is like the warning bell at the Metropolitan, and everybody starts to wind up the Saturday Route. It is as if someone let the magic out.
August Heckscher is out by the elevators.
“Do you have change for a quarter?” he says.
Then he heads off to the telephone booth.
Of course, it is not all over yet. Ted Peckham and about 19 others have headed down to the Parke-Bernet garage for the auctioning of the last item on the list, No. 403, a Mercedes-Benz limousine, built three years ago for $16,000, with Naugahyde inside and on the roof, and a roll-up glass partition and portholes. The garage is rather basic-looking, you know, for Parke-Bernet. The door is up and it is already dark outside.
Ted Peckham smiles arcanely all through the chanting and picks up the Mercedes for $3,800.
Somehow it seems like an awesome acquisition.
“Ted, boy, can I be your chauffeur?”
“Sure,” says Ted. “In fact, you can buy it. It’s for sale if you want to buy it.”
Outside, on Madison Avenue, G——— and his wife—she has on a plain suede coat lined like mad with sable—are smoking and breathing easier. They now have a small entourage in their magnetic field.
Across 77th Street, Kenneth J. Lane, the jewelry designer, is walking up Madison Avenue with his hands in his pockets and his tweed coattails flying out like wings.
Up at Staempfli’s, Phillip Bruno is winding up the Piqueras show. He says goodbye to Paula Johnson of the Osborne Gallery—she hadn’t been able to get up to see the Piqueras until now—with the proper social kiss. It is really getting black outside now, and colder, but he still has some kid in his office who is looking at about a dozen pieces of jade-green sculpture resting on a pile carpet.
“Looks sort of like the ruins of Karnak,” says the kid, who has the biggest black Borsalino hat on Madison Avenue.
Mr. Bruno suppresses a few immediate responses.
“Well, they won’t look like that on Tuesday.”
Tuesday—another opening! And four days from then, Saturday, like filaments skidding toward the mother lode, all the old people and all the young people will stride down to the Avenue and rear back alongside the pedestals and socialize until the main event, which will probably be another prodigious serpentine-front commode with splayed feet at Parke-Bernet, and get the wet smacks echoing between the limestone fronts, while Joan Morse finds out, to be sure, just what did happen to everybody else during the warm season in London.
Chapter 13
The Luther of Columbus Circle
ONE LOOK AT that Kipling stuff Huntington Hartford had carved on the wall down by the elevator in his new museum—well, you can imagine how they sniggered about that. Kipling! It was practically the first thing they saw. Ah, the culturati. Hartford’s museum, the Gallery of Modern Art, the tallest art museum in the world, ten stories of white marble out on an island in Columbus Circle, opened with a series of special nights, one of them being for the leaders of the art world. Everybody came rolling into Columbus Circle and debouched from cabs and Carey Cadillacs and went gaggling past the golden subway stairs Hartford built out there and into the arcade at the bottom of the building and over to the elevators where—pow!—there was this stanza from Rudyard Kipling, cut in marble. You can almost see the scene, the sniggering, the nudging and so forth. Hartford himself was up on the fifth floor receiving guests. One minute he was in his mood of Paradise Island charm. He has terrific teeth and a great smile. The next he was in his distracted mood, in which he looks as if he were off walking in a mimosa grove somewhere. It didn’t matter. Either way the culturati missed the point, which was that Huntington Hartford, the megamillionaire, had come amongst them in the role of a Martin Luther for modern Culture.
Hartford’s Luther role has been suffering because for thirteen years now the New York intelligentsia has been taking him and his works lightly. Nobody ever knew what else to make of him. All of a sudden, in the fall of 1951, into the world of the arts came Huntington Hartford, G. Huntington Hartford II. He had been known chiefly as a playboy who squired around Marta Toren, Lana Turner and other Hollywood glamorosi and then married a cigarette girl in Ciro’s restaurant, Marjorie Steele. He was one of the couple of hundred or so richest men in the world, grandson of George Huntington Hartford, founder of the A&P, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, the fifth largest corporation in America, General Motors, Jersey Standard, AT&T and Ford being one through four. Hartford was then forty years old. He had all his hair. He was good-looking, boyish, shy, and well-preserved from playing a lot of squash and tennis and getting sun at great watering places in both hemispheres. And now he turned up with seventy-odd million dollars, an eye for Culture and the most flagrantly unfashionable taste anybody in New York had ever heard of.
Hartford always swung from the heels. From the first his transgressions against artistic fashion were so severe that nobody ever noticed the theme that ran through them, over and over. To begin with, in 1951 he wrote, paid the printer, and published a pamphlet entitled, “Has God Been Insulted Here?” which rebuked James Jones, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso and modern art and letters generally as unspeakably vulgar and profane. Was this guy serious? Several months later he publicly rejected a couple of artists who were applying to the Huntington Hartford Foundation art colony, calling them “too abstract.” This brought to light the art colony, which Hartford had set up on 154 acres in Pacific Palisades, Calif. On the face of it, it looked like the answer to everything American bohemians had been demanding of society in their manifestoes since 1908. Every budding talent got a cottage studio tucked amid sylvan verdure
for peace, solitude, inspiration and unharried work; plus all the food he could eat and spending money. For bonhomie and fruitful discussion with one’s fellow artists there was a community house. The bohos, of course, turned out to be great flaming ingrates. One thing that got them was the way a little man came around at midday and left a basket of warm food on the cottage doorstep so they would not have to break off in mid-surge of genius to go get lunch. That, and the way a chauffeur showed up with eight cylinders cooing anytime somebody wanted to go into town. Besides, after the “too abstract” rhubarb, the place was unfashionable, even though Ernst Toch’s ninth symphony and some other important work had come out of there. By and by there were fewer than three hundred applicants a year for utopia.
In 1955 he bought a full-page ad in six New York newspapers and printed another Hartford creed. This one was entitled, “The Public Be Damned?” It said, in sum, that abstract and abstract-expressionist art were a piece of barbaric humbug being put over on the public by a cabal of museum directors, gallery owners and critics in sacrilege of the great tradition of representational art in the West. He singled out Picasso, Willem de Kooning and Georges Rouault as three of the sorriest of the lot. He himself began collecting some marvelously blatant back numbers such as Sir John Everett Millais, John Singer Sargent, Sir John Constable and Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones.
In 1958, at the peak of the pop-eyed gasper school of drama—in which the hero was always a kind of emaciated Jack London writhing at center stage with a leather belt strapped above his elbow squirting eau du heroin into his brachial artery with a Vicks nose dropper—Huntington Hartford wrote a thoroughly Victorian stage version of Jane Eyre and produced it on Broadway. You had to see it to believe it. It would have closed the first night, but Hartford kept it going six weeks with sheer money.