The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  Oddly enough, Little Alexander is proof of just how stupendous the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art is. He is one of those thin young men who live in one-and-a-half-room apartments, as they are known in New York, but at perfectly fine addresses, such as East 55th Street, and come out, when summoned, to escort rich, splendid, dazzling but aging women. It has to be a pretty fine occasion or they aren’t going to the trouble of getting someone like Little Alexander. As for himself, he has only to worry that someone like his current charge, Mrs. Annette——, will drink too much and conclude, in the dawn, that it is she, at last, who will be able to coax passion out of this beautiful boy.

  Already Annette, in a gown like an Arthur Rackham soul bird, is abroad in the museum garden. She is circling like a sea pigeon around this and that splendid group. Out in the garden, near the new black pools, which, for a fact, look like rectangles in the architect’s drawing, stands Saul Steinberg, the artist, with the face of a Bronx cleaning and pressing shopowner, talking to Zaidee Parkinson—a daughter of the Parkinsons who helped found the museum thirty-five years ago—a beautiful girl, and the others, charming people, about mnemonics:

  “… and then 2 and 1 and 4 and 8 …”

  “Well, I never in my life, if you know what I mean!”

  Up on the terrace, Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior of the United States, is sort of aw-shucksing around, wearing a white dinner jacket and a crew cut, still looking as though he is standing on the free throw line in the school gymnasium in June wondering if he is going to ask anybody to dance. Stewart Udall is talking to Nicole Alphand, the wife of the French Ambassador. Madame Alphand is still a symbol of all that is, at this late date, still glamorous about the diplomatic life. On the other side of the terrace, across the bobbing heads, Mrs. Jacob Javits, Marion Javits, the wife of the Senator from New York, is standing just beyond the welded legs of a huge black widow spider by Alexander Calder. Mrs. Javits would probably be the symbol of what little remains glamorous about the life of congressmen, but most of the time she won’t go near Washington. Both of them, Nicole Alphand and Marion Javits, are caught in the strange spot, on the one hand, of not quite being celebrities themselves but being, on the other hand, more than just wives of the illuminati. All sorts of people are paying court to Helena Rubinstein, looking serene as a Taoist mask; she is currently a local heroine because when robbers broke into her apartment, she said, “Go ahead and kill me; I’m an old woman and I’m not going to give my jewels to two ferrets like you,” and they fled without them. Jacques Lipchitz, the sculptor, walks by, and Kathy Marcus walks by. Ah, good for Kathy Marcus. She is East Texas turning right into the boutique-land of East 64th Street. Beautifully! And in the middie of the caroming mob, in the doorway from the new wing to the garden, while the Burns guards gaze, Huntington Hartford, the millionaire who opened his own museum in New York last March, is saying: “I haven’t seen so many people since J. Paul Getty’s party and I lost everybody for three hours there.”

  The Burns guards have white ribbons up in the garden between the pools and the terrace. On the pool side are five thousand people, haunch to paunch, who merely gave a hundred dollars or a couple of thousand or something of the sort to the building fund for the museum’s new wing. They just have unimpeachable, not staggering, credentials. The spotlights in the garden beam down on their skulls with a pale ochre haze, as at a night baseball game in Denison, Texas. On the terrace, on the other side of the ribbons, stand the true illuminati, for example, Adlai Stevenson and Lady Bird Johnson, the President’s wife. In a few minutes she will address them all, in a drawl that sounds like it came in by mail order from Pine Bluff, concerning God, Immortality and Inspiration through Art for the free peoples.

  Mark Rothko, the painter, is talking to Thomas Hess, the executive editor of Art News, and Frank O’Hara, the museum employee who writes poems and blue plays, about the funny time Hedy Lamarr—it was Hedy Lamarr’s birthday—about the funny time it was Hedy Lamarr’s birthday and they were all in Franz Kline’s studio.

  Hedy Lamarr and everybody and Mark Rothko in Franz Kline’s studio in New York. And Adlai and Lady Bird and Huntington and Nicole and Marion and Stewart and Zaidee and Kathy and everybody standing around on the terrace of the Museum of Modern Art. It doesn’t even seem unusual. There may have been a time, sixty years ago, or whenever it was, when Renoir was walking down a road and ran into Cézanne, who was stumbling down the road dragging a big painting of some bathers, with one end of it bumping up and down in the dust. Well, he told Renoir, he was taking this over to a friend who liked it who was very sick. Fat chance of any of that bohemian homefolks stuff going on today. Today Robert Rauschenberg does some comic paintings, now known as Pop Art, for a couple of years and here he is in dinner clothes and a seat of honor at the Museum of Modern Art, being lionized by Adlai and Lady Bird and Nicole and the rest. Today the world of art in New York, the world of celebrities, the world of society, press agents, gossip columnists, fashion designers, interior decorators and other hierophants have all converged on Art, now in a special, exalted place. Art—and the Museum of Modern Art in particular—has become the center of social rectitude, comparable to the Episcopal Church in Short Hills. The people involved look to the opening of new art gallery shows the way they used to look to theatre openings. Today they consider a theatre opening pretty bland stuff, unless it is at least Richard Burton in Hamlet. But the galleries! Sometimes two or three or more galleries will get together and assemble the work of a major painter, such as they did in the spring of 1962 with Picasso, or last spring with Braque. They divide up a man’s lifework among them, and the grand opening is like a cattle call, with all these people roaring in clusters from one gallery to another on and right off Madison Avenue, plastering each other with social kisses and blazing away with 150-watt eyeballs.

  The thing is, then, that the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art is the biggest gallery opening possible. It was only closed six months, but never mind. When it reopens, it is a state occasion. The wife of the President of the United States delivers the re-inaugural address. The Cabinet is there, the diplomats are there, Adlai Stevenson, Ambassador to the United Nations, is there. The clergy is there; some noted Chicago preacher is reading the text of an address by Paul Tillich, the theologian, who prepared a sacred discourse for the occasion. The new realm of man’s holy spirit!

  Years ago a nice woman with a million dollars’ worth of real estate she wanted to dispose of in some devout way would have left it to the church. But Mrs. E. Parmalee Prentice left both her town houses on West 53rd Street to the museum. It seemed only natural and proper. Then the new wing goes up. No church building fund, except for some Mormon churches, ever piled up so fast. They stormed the place with tens, hundreds of thousands, millions at a time. In the banquet hall, David Rockefeller extends his big right hand like a frond toward the chairman of the fund drive, Gardner (Mike) Cowles, the publisher, who stands with a large red flower in his buttonhole and his teeth ablaze.

  And then David Rockefeller is telling how he remembers when he was a little boy just watching and listening on those afternoons back in 1928 when Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Lizzie Bliss and A. Conger Goodyear and the Parkinsons and the others were sitting down in the Rockefellers’ living room to found a museum of modern art, which they did, the next year. Modern Art had no uphill battle in America, not with Rockefeller, Goodyear, Bliss, all that irresistible, golden cachet. They had discovered Modern Art in Europe, where it was fashionable in the 1920’s. It became fashionable in the United States from the moment the group founded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. In fact, they had to go into the provinces and beat the bushes to find enough opposition to Modern Art to give the project a sense of spiritual mission, wicked outrage and zest. And today—they rally behind modern art in Kaffeeklatsches at the supermarkets in Bethesda.

  Only six hundred people could be invited to the dinner at the reopening, and there were a few heartaches over t
hat. Outside, the six thousand other culturati, who will stand behind the white ribbons in the garden, are still piling up in front of the new main entrance. Marvelous! The poor—the poor artists—are picketing the place. In front of the museum, men and women debouch from back seats in a billow of couturier colors and ribbed silk and on the other side the police have backed up the poor artists and the bystanders behind the barricades in front of America House and other places across the street. The artists are marching with placards bearing huge question marks. The artists are from the Artists-Tenants Association and the question they are asking is, What do you fat, posh, splendid, starched consumers of culture really care about art? What are you doing to see to it that the City of New York allows us—the progenitors of the art and of the openings of the future, the carriers of the sacred standard—to keep our lofts? The leader, Jean-Pierre Merle, short, slight, wearing a marvelously elaborate mustache, runs back and forth across the street, delivering manifestos and appeals to the museum, passing out buttons bearing the symbol, the question mark.

  Inside, William Burden, former Ambassador to Belgium, is talking surrounded by yellow felt. Felt lines the walls of the room and bears the signatures, blown up huge, of the entire pantheon—Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Braque, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, him, too, all of them. At Huntington Hartford’s table sits Edward Steichen, the immortal photographer, eighty-five years old, who can look up from the table and see his own signature a foot high on the yellow felt. Across the table, his wife, Joanna, who is thirty-one years old, sits there with the smile of the queen who tells no secrets. Steichen’s beard is full, long and squared off at the bottom. He wears clear plastic spectacles and sits up straight. One has only to look and almost see a magenta ribbon of silk stretching across his shirt front with little taffeta pools of shadow on it and maybe a sunburst here and there on his dinner jacket. But of course. What is the Museum of Modern Art but the American academy? The Royal Academy in London—the National Academy in Paris—a hundred, a thousand dinners with thin crystal, long-tined lobster forks, aging aesthetes, art, honor and national glory. Somebody comes up and hands Steichen a plum-colored velvet pouch. He peers down through spectacles and eases the drawstrings open in what is known as a stately manner. It is a gift from Shirley Burden, the Ambassador’s brother, celebrating the opening of the museum’s new photography gallery, named after Steichen. Steichen reaches in the pouch and pulls out a miniature silver candlestick. Huntington Hartford looks over, Mrs. Edward Hopper looks over. He sets it up on the table and the poor artists are hollering for lofts in front of America House.

  Six hundred leading artists were invited to the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art. Except for twelve who were asked to dinner, they are all waiting out on the sculpture terrace. About 9:30 everybody leaves the banquet hall and already there are six thousand minor culturati packed behind the ribbons in the garden. There are no lights on the terrace, and the six hundred artists are waiting up there like sacred monsters in a pen. The six hundred dinner guests follow Mrs. Johnson, and the television crews and the reporters and the photographers following Mrs. Johnson, and the hustling, elbowing procession is like a flying wedge, plowing into the artists and driving them back into their own corner.

  Six hundred sacred egos are getting batted around. It is dark up there, and nobody recognizes these damned artists anyway, especially in dinner jackets. Somehow Jean-Pierre Merle materializes up there with his question mark buttons, and some of the artists, the guests of honor, start saying, Here, give me one of those damned buttons, man, like we’re tired of being batted around up here. J———, the abstract expressionist, has had enough of this———. He jostles and elbows his way down the steps from the terrace, glares at the Burns guards, glares at Babe Paley, even though she looks like a million dollars, and then he comes upon Little Alexander, hanging from Picasso’s goat. He just stops. “What the hell—,” he says.

  “Screw you,” says Little Alexander, in his most forthright way.

  J——— doesn’t know what to do, so he just turns around slowly, and in so doing he has an awful moment, one of those awful moments when you find out that the despised enemy is, after all, right. Through the plate glass, he can see quite clearly in the garden another of those pieces of immortality, the outstretched arms of “Mother and Child” by Jacques Lipchitz. There are empty champagne glasses stacked all around it. One glass is on top of another and up, up, up they rise like crystal stalks. J——— sinks, drowns, decays in the smell of old grape and the morning after.

  The Museum of Modern Art has reopened. And Little Alexander hangs there from Picasso’s goat.

  Chapter 15

  The Secret Vice

  REAL BUTTONHOLES, THAT’S it! A man can take his thumb and forefinger and unbutton his sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes there. Tom, boy, it’s terrible. Once you know about it, you start seeing it. All the time! There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or—yes!—men who can unbutton the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the sleeve really buttons up. Fascinating! My friend Ross, a Good Guy, thirty-two years old, a lawyer Downtown with a good head of Scotch-Irish hair, the kind that grows right, unlike lower-class hair, is sitting in his corner on East 81st St., in his Thonet chair, with the Flemish brocade cushion on it, amid his books, sets of Thackeray, Hazlitt, Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, Cardinal Newman, and other studs of the rhetoric game, amid his prints, which are mostly Gavarni, since all the other young lawyers have Daumiers or these cute muvvas by “Spy,” or whatever it is, which everybody keeps laying on thatchy-haired young lawyers at Christmas—Ross is sitting among all these good tawny, smoke-cured props drinking the latest thing somebody put him onto, port, and beginning to talk about coats with real buttonholes at the sleeves. What a taboo smirk on his face!

  It is the kind of look two eleven-year-old kids get when they are riding the Ferris wheel at the state fair, and every time they reach the top and start down they are staring right into an old midway banner in front of a sideshow, saying, “THE MYSTERIES OF SEX REVEALED! SIXTEEN NUDE GIRLS! THE BARE TRUTH! EXCITING! EDUCATIONAL!” In the sideshow they get to see 16 female foetuses in jars of alcohol, studiously arranged by age, but—that initial taboo smirk!

  Ross, thirty-two years old, in New York City—the same taboo smirk.

  “I want to tell you a funny thing,” he says. “The first time I had any idea about this whole business of the buttonholes was a couple of Christmases ago, one Saturday, when I ran into Sturges at Dunhill’s.” Dunhill the tobacco shop. Sturges is a young partner in Ross’s firm on Wall Street. Ross idealizes Sturges. Ross stopped carrying an attaché case, for example, because Sturges kept referring to attaché cases as leather lunch pails. Sturges is always saying something like, “You know who I saw yesterday? Stolz. There he was, walking along Exchange Place with his leather lunch pail, the poor bastard.” Anyway, Ross says he ran into Sturges in Dunhill’s. “He was trying to get some girl a briar pipe for Christmas or some damn thing.” That Sturges! “Anyway, I had just bought a cheviot tweed suit, kind of Lovat-colored—you know, off the rack—actually it was a pretty good-looking suit. So Sturges comes over and he says, ‘Well, old Ross has some new togs,’ or something like that. Then he says, ‘Let me see something,’ and he takes the sleeve and starts monkeying around with the buttons. Then he says, ‘Nice suit,’ but he says it in a very half-hearted way. Then he goes off to talk to one of those scientific slenderellas he always has hanging around. So I went over to him and said, ‘What was all that business with the buttons?’ And he said, ‘Well, I thought maybe you had it custom made.’ He said it in a way like it was now pretty goddamned clear it wasn’t custom made. Then he showed me his suit—it was a window-pane check, have you ever seen one of those?—he showed me his suit, the sleeve, and his suit had buttonholes on the sleeve. It was custom made. He sho
wed me how he could unbutton it. Just like this. The girl wondered what the hell was going on. She stood there with one hip cocked, watching him undo a button on his sleeve. Then I looked at mine and the buttons were just sewn on. You know?” And you want to know something? That really got to old Ross. He practically couldn’t wear that suit anymore. All right, it’s ridiculous. He probably shouldn’t even be confessing all this. It’s embarrassing. And—the taboo smirk!

  Yes! The lid was off, and poor old Ross was already hooked on the secret vice of the Big men in New York: custom tailoring and the mania for the marginal differences that go into it. Practically all the most powerful men in New York, especially on Wall Street, the people in investment houses, banks and law firms, the politicians, especially Brooklyn Democrats, for some reason, outstanding dandies, those fellows, the blue-chip culturati, the major museum directors and publishers, the kind who sit in offices with antique textile shades—practically all of these men are fanatical about the marginal differences that go into custom tailoring. They are almost like a secret club insignia for them. And yet it is a taboo subject. They won’t talk about it. They don’t want it known that they even care about it. But all the time they have this fanatical eye, more fanatical than a woman’s, about the whole thing and even grade men by it. The worst jerks, as far as they are concerned—and people can lose out on jobs, promotions, the whole can of worms, because of this—are men who have dumped a lot of money, time and care into buying ready-made clothes from some Englishy dry goods shop on Madison Avenue with the belief that they are really “building fine wardrobes.” Such men are considered to be bush leaguers, turkeys and wet smacks, the kind of men who tote the leather lunch pail home at night and look forward to having a drink and playing with the baby.