The Purple Decades - a Reader

by Tom Wolfe

  But how does one really explain about the Stones, about Bailey, Shrimp and Mick—well, it’s not so much what they do, that’s such an old idea, what people do—it’s what they are, it’s a revolution, and it’s the kids from the East End, Cockneys, if you want, who are making it.

  “I mean today Drexel Duke sits next to Weinstein, and why shouldn’t he? They both made their money the same way, you know? The furniture king sits next to the catsup king, and why shouldn’t he-sort-of-thing. I mean, that’s the way it was at the opening of the Met. A friend of mine was going to write an article about it.

  “I mean, we don’t lie to ourselves. Our mothers taught us to be pure and you’ll fall in love and get married and stay in love with one man all your life. O.K. But we know it doesn’t happen that way and we don’t lie to ourselves about it. Maybe you won’t ever find anybody you love. Or maybe you find somebody you love four minutes, maybe ten minutes. But I mean, why lie to yourself? We know we’re not going to love one man all our lives. Maybe it’s the Bomb—we know it could all be over tomorrow, so why try to fool yourself today. Shrimp was talking about that last night. She’s here now, she’ll be at the party tonight—”

  The two dogs, the toy poodle and the Yorkshire terrier, are yapping, in the patina-green. Inez is looking for something besides diet. The two Rubenses hang up on the walls. A couple of horns come up through the ashy light of Park Avenue. The high wind of East End London is in the air—whhhooooooooo

  ooooooooooooosh! Baby Jane blows out all the candles. It is her twenty-fourth birthday. She and everybody, Shrimp, Nicky, Jerry, everybody but Bailey, who is off in Egypt or something, they are all up in Jerry Schatzberg’s … pad … his lavish apartment at 333 Park Avenue South, up above his studio. There is a skylight. The cook brings out the cake and Jane blows out the candles. Twenty-four! Jerry and Nicky are giving a huge party, a dance, in honor of the Stones, and already the people are coming into the studio downstairs. But it is also Jane’s birthday. She is wearing a black velvet jump suit by Luis Estevez, the designer. It has huge bell-bottom pants. She puts her legs together … it looks like an evening dress. But she can also spread them apart, like so, and strike very Jane-like poses. This is like the Upper Room or something. Downstairs, they’ll all coming in for the party, all those people one sees at parties, everybody who goes to the parties in New York, but up here it is like a tableau, like a tableau of … Us. Shrimp is sitting there with her glorious pout and her textured white stockings, Barbara Steele, who was so terrific in 8½, with thin black lips and wrought-iron eyelashes. Nicky Haslam is there with his Byron shirt on and his tiger skin vest and blue jeans and boots. Jerry is there with his hair flowing back in curls. Lennie, Jane’s husband, is there in a British suit and a dark blue shirt he bought on 42nd Street for this party, because this is a party for the Rolling Stones. The Stones are not here yet, but here in the upper room are Goldie and the Gingerbreads, four girls in gold lame tights who will play the rock and roll for the party. Nicky discovered them at the Wagon Wheel. Gold lame, can you imagine? Goldie, the leader, is a young girl with a husky voice and nice kind of slightly thick—you know—glorious sort of East End features, only she is from New York—ah, the delicacy of mirror grossness, unabashed. The Stones’ music is playing over the hi-fi.

  Finally the Stones come in, in blue jeans, sweat shirts, the usual, and people get up and Mick Jagger comes in with his mouth open and his eyes down, faintly weary with success, and everybody goes downstairs to the studio, where people are now piling in, hundreds of them. Goldie and the Gingerbreads are on a stand at one end of the studio, all electric, electric guitars, electric bass, drums, loudspeakers, and a couple of spotlights exploding off the gold lame. Baby baby baby where did our love go. The music suddenly fills up the room like a giant egg slicer. Sally Kirkland, Jr., a young actress, is out on the studio floor in a leopard print dress with her vast mane flying, doing the frug with Jerry Schatzberg. And then the other Girl of the Year, Caterine Milinaire, is out there in a black dress, and then Baby Jane is out there with her incredible mane and her Luis Estevez jump suit, frugging, and then everybody is out there. Suddenly it is very odd. Suddenly everybody is out there in the gloaming, bobbing up and down with the music plugged into Baby baby baby. The whole floor of the studio begins to bounce up and down, like a trampoline, the whole floor, some people are afraid and edge off to the side, but most keep bobbing in the gloaming, and—pow!—glasses begin to hit the floor, but every one keeps bouncing up and down, crushing the glass underfoot, while the brown whiskey slicks around. So many heads bobbing, so many bodies jiggling, so many giblets jiggling, so much anointed flesh shaking and jiggling this way and that, so many faces one wanted so desperately to see, and here they are, red the color of dried peppers in the gloaming, bouncing up and down with just a few fights, wrenching in the gloaming, until 5 A.M.—gleeeang—Goldie pulls all the electric cords out and the studio is suddenly just a dim ochre studio with broken glass all over the floor, crushed underfoot, and the sweet high smell of brown whiskey rising from the floor.

  Monday’s papers will record it as the Mods and Rockers Ball, as the Party of the Year, but that is Monday, a long way off. So they all decide they should go to the Brasserie. It is the only place in town where anybody would still be around. So they all get into cabs and go up to the Brasserie, up on 53rd Street between Park and Lexington. The Brasserie is the right place, all right. The Brasserie has a great entrance, elevated over the tables like a fashion show almost. There are, what?, 35 people in the Brasserie. They all look up, and as the first salmon light of dawn comes through the front window, here come … four teen-age girls in gold lamé tights, and a chap in a tiger skin vest and blue jeans and a gentleman in an English suit who seems to be wearing a 42nd Street hood shirt and a fellow in a sweater who has flowing curly hair … and then, a girl with an incredible mane, a vast tawny corona, wearing a black velvet jump suit. One never knows who is in the Brasserie at this hour—but are there any so dead in here that they do not get the point? Girl of the Year? Listen, they will never forget.

  The Birds and the Bees

  “No, no, son, that’s not how it works. When you’re forty-five or fifty, you’ll get a new wife, a young one, a girl in her twenties.”

  “What happens to the old one?”

  “Well, she opens up a needlepoint shop and sells yarn to her friends and joins a discussion group.”

  THE WOMAN WHO HAS EVERYTHING

  g

  It is a very odd, nice, fey thing. Helene can sit over here with her nylon shanks sunk in the sofa, the downy billows, and watch Jamie over there on one knee, with his back turned, fooling with a paw-foot chair. It’s only Jamie, an interior decorator. But all right! he has a beautiful small of the back. Helene has an urge to pick him up by the waist like a … vase. This is a marvelous apartment, on 57th Street practically on Sutton Place. In fact, Helene—well, Helene is a girl who, except for a husband, has everything.

  Helene was divorced three years ago. Even so! she is only twenty-five. She went to Smith. She has money, both a great deal of alimony and her own trust fund. She is beautiful. Her face—sort of a hood of thick black hair cut Sassoon fashion with two huge eyes opened within like … morning glories—her face is seen in Vogue, Town & Country, practically all the New York newspapers, modeling fashions, but with her name always in the caption, which is known as “social” modeling. She is trim, strong, lithe, she exercises. She has only one child. Only one child—she doesn’t even mean to think that way, Kurt Jr. is three years old and beautiful.

  Helene also has Jamie, who is her interior decorator. Here is Jamie down on one knee adjusting the detachable ebony ball under the paw-foot of one of his own chairs. He designed it. Everyone sees Jamie’s furniture. Oh, did Jamie do your apartment? It is exotic but simple. You know? Black and white, a modern paw-foot, if you can imagine that, removable ebony balls———

  Oh, what the hell is going on? Suddenly she feels hopeless. There a
re at least ten girls in New York whom she knows who are just like her: divorced, and young; divorced, and beautiful; divorced, and quite well off, really; divorced, and invited to every party and every this and that that one cares to be invited to; divorced, and written about in the columns by Joe Dever and everyone; divorced, a woman who has everything and, like the other ten, whose names she can tick off just like that, because she knows their cases forward and backward, great American baronial names, some of them, and she, and all of them, are utterly … utterly, utterly unable to get another husband in New York.

  Of course she has tried! A great deal of good will has gone into it, hers and her friends’. The J————s invited her to dinner and set the whole thing up for no other reason than for her to meet their favorite among all the eligible young men of New York. He was beautiful, he was one of the youngest bank vice-presidents in New York, a bona-fide vice-president in this case, and a great Bermuda Racer. They talked about his strenuous life among the Wall Street studs. They talked about the things her friends had been pumping her conversation full of—Jasper Johns, nouvelle vague, the bogus esthetics of fashion photographers. They grimaced, mugged, smiled, picked over crab meat—and there was no “chemistry” about it all. And he took her back to East 57th Street and they stepped into an elevator with a lot of scrolly wood and a little elevator man with piping all over his uniform and the moment the door closed on them, there was practically a sound like steam in the brain that told them both, this is, yes, rather impossible; let me out.

  Two weeks later the D————s invited her to dinner and Mrs. D————met her practically as she stepped off the elevator and told her very excitedly, very confidentially, “Helene, we’ve put you next to absolutely our favorite young man in New York”—who, of course, was Bermuda Racer. Everybody’s favorite. This time they just smiled, grimaced, mugged, turned the other way answering imaginary questions from the other side and picked over the melon prosciutto.

  Maddening! These so-called men in New York! After a while Bermuda Racer began to look good, in retrospect. One could forget “chemistry” in time. Helene’s liaisons kept falling into the same pattern; all these pampered, cautious, finicky, timid … vague, maddening men who wind their watches before they make love. Suddenly it would have almost been better not to be the woman who had everything. Then she could have married the stable boy, who, in New York, is usually an actor. Helene is in a … set whose single men are not boys. They are absorbed in careers. They don’t hang around the Limelight Café with nothing more on their minds than getting New York lovelies down onto the downy billows. Somehow they don’t need wives. They can find women when they need them, for decoration, for company, or for the downy billows, for whatever, for they are everywhere, in lavish, high-buffed plenitude.

  Very ironic! It is as if Helene can see herself and all the other divorced women-with-everything in New York this afternoon, at this very moment, frozen, congealed, this afternoon, every afternoon, in a little belt of territory that runs from east to west between 46th and 72nd Streets in Manhattan. They are all there with absolutely nothing to do but make themselves irresistibly attractive to the men of New York. They are in Mr. Kenneth’s, the hairdresser’s, on East 54th Street, in a room hung with cloth like a huge Paisley tent or something, and a somehow Oriental woman pads in and announces, “Now let us go to the shampoo room,” in the most hushed and reverent voice, as if to say, “We are doing something very creative here.” Yet coiffures, even four hours’ worth at Mr. Kenneth’s, begin to seem like merely the basic process for the Woman Who Has Everything. There is so much more that must be done today, so much more has been learned. The eternal search for better eyelashes! Off to Deirdre’s or some such place, on Madison Avenue—moth-cut eyelashes? square-cut eyelashes? mink eyelashes? really, mink eyelashes are a joke, too heavy, and one’s lids … sweat; pure sweet saline eyelid perspiration. Or off to somewhere for the perfect Patti-nail application, $25 for both hands, $2.50 a finger, false fingernails—but where? Saks? Bergdorf’s? Or is one to listen to some girl who comes back and says the only perfect Patti-nail place is the Beverly Hills Hotel. Or off to Kounovsky’s Gym for Exercise—one means, this is 1965 and one must face, now, the fact that chocolate base and chalk can only do so much for the skin; namely, nothing; cover it. The important thing is what happens to the skin, that purple light business at Don Lee’s Hair Specialist Studio, well, that is what it is about. And at Kounovsky’s Gym one goes into the cloak room and checks clothes labels for a while and, eventually, runs into some girl who has found a new place, saying, this is my last time here. I’ve found a place where you really have to take a shower afterwards. Still—Kounovsky’s. And Bene’s, breaking down the water globules in the skin—and here they are all out doing nothing every day but making themselves incomparably, esoterically, smashingly lovely—for men who don’t seem to look anyway. Incredible! Arrogant! impossible men of this city, career-clutched, selfish and drained.

  So Helene sits morosely in the downy billows watching Mr. Jamie adjust an ebony ball on a paw-foot chair. Jamie is her interior decorator, but even before that, he had become her Token Fag, three years ago, as soon as she was divorced. She needed him. A woman is divorced in New York and for a certain period she is radioactive or something. No man wants to go near. She has to cool off from all that psychic toxin of the divorce. Eventually, people begin asking her for dinner or whatever, but who is going to escort her? She is radioactive. The Token Fag will escort her. He is a token man, a counter to let the game go on and everything. She can walk in with him, into anybody’s coy-elegant, beveled-mirror great hall on East 73rd Street, and no one is going to start talking about her new liaison. There is no liaison except for a sort no one seems to understand. Jamie is comfortable, he is no threat. The old business is not going to start up again. This has nothing to do with sex. Sex! The sexual aggression was the only kind that didn’t really have that old business, the eternal antagonisms, clashes of ego, fights for “freedom” from marriage one day and for supremacy the next, the eternal piling the load on the scapegoat. Helene’s last scene with Kurt—Helene can tell one about that, all this improbable, ridiculous stuff in front of the movers. They had just been separated. This was long before the afternoon plane ride to El Paso and the taxi ride across the line to Juarez and the old black Mexican judge who flipped, very interested, through a new and quite ornate—arty—deck of Tarot cards under his desk the whole time. They had just separated—they were separating this particular evening. One does separate. One stands out in the living room in the midst of incredible heaps of cartons and duffel bags, and Kurt stands there telling his movers what to pick up.

  “I don’t mean to be picayune, Helene, but it isn’t exactly picayune. You didn’t put the Simpson tureen out here,” and he starts fluttering his hand.

  “The Morgetsons gave that to—they’re friends of my parents.”

  “That isn’t even the point, Helene. This is something we agreed on.”

  “You know as well as I do—”

  Kurt makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger, the “O.K.” sign, and thrusts it toward Helene as if he is about to say, Right, and in that very moment he says:

  “Wrong!”

  Oh, for godsake. Sal Mineo, or whoever it was. Somebody told Kurt once that “Sal Mineo and his set” are always putting each other on with his O.K. sign—then saying, “Wrong!”—and Kurt was so impressed with the Sal Mineo humor of it. Just like right now, standing out amid the packing cartons, with a couple of fat movers … lounging, watching. Kurt has to stand there with his hands on his hips and his thatchy head soaking up perspiration, wearing a cable-stitch tennis sweater and Topsiders. His moving clothes. He has to wear this corny thing, a cable-knit tennis sweater, about $42, because he is going to pick up a couple of boxes and his precious hi-fi tubes or whatever it is. They do something to these tall ironsides at Hotchkiss or some place and they never get over it. Glowering in his $42 White Shoe physical exertion
sweater—the old business.

  Kurt Jr. is out of bed, waddling into the living room and all he sees is Daddy, wonderful, thatchy Daddy. Children, to be honest, have no intuition, no insight.

  “These men don’t want to sit there and listen to you recite your parents’ friends,” says Kurt.

  But they do, Kurt. They are seated, as you say yourself. Placid, reedy fat rises up around their chins like mashed potatoes. They sit on the arms of Helene’s chairs and enjoy it, watching two wealthy young fools coming apart at the seams. Kurt Jr. apparently thinks everything Daddy says is so funny; he comes on, waddling in, chuckling, giggling, Daddy! The movers think Kurt Jr. is so funny—a Baby!—and they slosh around, chuckling in their jowls. Good spirits, and so obscene, all of it.

  Jamie was at least an end to the old business. Most of them, Helene, all these divorcees who have everything, soon move into a second stage. Old friends of theirs, of Helene and Kurt—you know? Helene and Kurt, the Young Couple? Helene and Kurt here, Helene and Kurt there—old friends of theirs, of Kurt’s, really, start taking Helene out. Fine, fat simple-minded waste of time. What do they want? It is not sex. It is nothing like that old Redbook warning to divorcees, that he, Mr. Not Quite Right, will say, She was married, so it is a safe bet she will play on the downy billows. In fact, practically nothing is sex madness with men in Helene’s set in New York. Would that the Lord God of Hotchkiss, St. Paul’s and Woodberry Forest would let them go mad as randy old goats—one wishes He would. Not for the sex but the madness. One longs to see them go berserk just once, sweating, puling, writhing, rolling the eyeballs around, bloating up the tongue like a black roast gizzard—anything but this … vague coolness, super-cool interest. Anyway, these old friends come around and their eyes breathe at her like gills out of the aquarium, such as that dear dappled terrier from Sullivan & Cromwell whom Kurt used to wangle invitations for, over and over. He did something on the Cotton Exchange. The Cotton Exchange! He came around with his gilly eyes breathing at her, wondering, beside himself with this strange delight of Kurt’s Wife being now available for him to speculate over and breathe his gilly look at. Sweet! One day Douglas, well, Douglas is another story, but one day Douglas invited everyone to a champagne picnic in Central Park for Memorial Day, all these bottles of champagne in Skotch Koolers, huge blue and yellow woven baskets full of salmon and smoked turkey and Southside Virginia ham sandwiches prepared by André Surmain of Lutèce. Kurt’s poor old dappled terrier friend from the Cotton Exchange arrived in a correct, “informal,” one understands, long-sleeved polo shirt from someplace, Chipp or something, with the creases popped up in straight lines and a sheen on it. Obviously he had gone out and bought the correct thing for this champagne picnic. Poor thing! But Helene kept on going out with him. Old Terrier never made a pass. Never! He always left at 1 A.M., or whenever, with a great, wet look of rice-pudding adoration. But he was easy, none of the old business.