The Chelsea Affect
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday January 2, 2003
Part one: The Chelsea in New York is the world's most famous Bohemian hotel. Arthur Miller, who lived there on and off between 1960 and 1968, remembers days of Ginsberg, Warhol and threadbare carpet.
I decided to move to the Chelsea in 1960 for the privacy I was promised. It seemed a wonderfully out-of-the-way place, nearly a slum, where nobody would be likely to be looking for me.
It was soon after Marilyn [Monroe] and I parted and some of the press were still occasionally tracking me, looking for the dirt in a half-hearted way. A friend, Inge Morath, who I would later marry, had done photos for a book on Venice by Mary McCarthy and Mary had recommended the Chelsea as a cheap but decent hotel. Inge, who normally lived in Paris, had stayed there for short periods of work in America and found it shabby but, to say the least, informal. "Nobody will bother you there," she assured me.
The owner, Mr Bard, showed me a newly redecorated sixth-floor apartment overlooking the parking lot (since covered by an apartment house) behind the hotel. The parking lot is important. I did not know quite what to make of Mr Bard. A blue-eyed Hungarian Jew, short and with a rather clear, delighted round face, full of energy, he waved a hand over the room saying, "Everything is perfect. All the furniture is brand new, new mattresses, drapes ... Look in the bathroom."
As we walked to the bathroom I noticed a worn path down the middle of the carpet and what felt like coal dust crunching under my shoes. "The carpet," I started to say, but he cut me off. "A new carpet is coming tomorrow," he said with raised index finger, and one knew he had not thought of replacing the carpet until that very minute. He turned on both sink faucets and pointed proudly to the water pouring out. "Brand new faucets, also in the shower. But be careful in the shower, the cold is hot and the hot is cold. Mr Katz," he said.
We returned to the living room and stood there. "What about Mr Katz?" I asked. "He does the plumbing. Sometimes, he ..." Again he broke off and said, "So what do you say?" Before I could answer, he continued, "I guarantee you nobody will know you're living here. A maid comes every day. Some days when I feel down, maybe you'd like to join me, I go fishing in Croton Reservoir."
One almost knew what Mr Bard was talking about, but not quite. He had a talent for overriding probability, an emotional fluency which sent his thoughts on swallow loops from subject to subject, a progressive, enthusiastic view of life. In a word, anarchy. "The furniture is all new." "You told me," I said. In fact, it was raw, south-of-the-border furniture, Guatemalan maybe, or outer Queens, and I gingerly touched a bureau but thankfully the varnish was dry.
Within a week the gossip columns, as I half expected, were reporting my new abode, and friends in Europe noted the same great news in some Continental and British papers. "That's too bad," Mr Bard said when I confronted him, "we did our best not to mention it. Everybody."
"Everybody what?"
"Who we told not to mention it."
"Including the newspapers."
"Including the newspapers, what?"
"Who you told not to mention it."
He thought that was funny and laughed. I laughed too. I was getting into the swing of things. I had heard a rumour that he had won the hotel in a high-stakes card game played in the New Yorker Hotel which had also changed hands a few times as a result of the game.
Despite parboiling myself in the shower a few times I began to like the hotel, or at least some of the residents, or denizens as some liked to call themselves. You could get high in the elevators on the residue of marijuana smoke. "What smoke?" Mr Bard would ask indignantly.
Allen Ginsberg was hawking his new F--- You magazine in the lobby sometimes, Warhol was shooting film in one of the suites and a young woman with crazy eyes would show up in the lobby now and then, distributing a ream of Mimeographed curses on male people and threatening to shoot a man one of these days.
I had a serious talk, or what I took to be one, with Mr Bard and his son Stanley, who was gradually taking over, but they pooh-poohed the idea of her doing anything rash. As I slowly learnt, they were simply not interested in bad news.
Of course she shot Warhol two days later as he was entering the lobby from 23rd Street, aiming for his balls. But this only momentarily disturbed the even tenor of the Chelsea day, what with everything else going on. Anyway, it was certainly more gemutlich than living in a real hotel.
In the early '60s, truckers still took rooms without baths on the second floor and parked their immense rigs out front overnight, and the Automat was still on the corner of 7th. There I often had breakfast with Arthur C. Clarke, who in his dry Unitarian-minister manner tried to explain to me why whole new populations would soon be living in space.
Feigning interest in this absurdity I wondered what the point of living in space would be. "What was the point of Columbus wanting to cross the ocean?" I supposed he was right, but not really. Meanwhile, at tables around us, numerous street people were hugging their coffee mugs to delay ejection into rain and wind, and would ultimately drive the Automat out of the area with their unappetising ear- and nose-picking, quick fights, copious coughing fits and exhausted deep sleeps from which the manager could sometimes not awaken them.
At the time I doubt that either Clarke or I registered the strange contrast between his cloudy space-talk and the grimy Automat reality. But unlike space it was the reality that would soon disappear from public view, tucked away in shelters for the homeless.
One could tell how bad the weather was by having a brief chat with a gaunt, six-and-a-half-foot tall minister, denomination unknown, who, in his perpetual ankle-long and droopy raincoat, seemed to appear in daylight only after it had been raining or snowing for several days. He had the exaggerated reactions of a man living alone with mice and one light bulb, leaping forward to grasp a proffered handshake with a simultaneous deep bow of obeisance.
He always wore the same eviscerated black tie, whose lining hung loose, and harassed black suit, his trouser turn-ups flapping high above his bulbous shoes, and rose to his toes with each loping stride, a man of 50 or so, with a sympathetic if dour expression which fairly exploded with instant gratitude to anyone at all who addressed him. He carried a black doctor's satchel, not for thermometer and stethoscope but for a prayer book and yellowing satin stole which he would drape over his shoulders for the funerals he specialised in presiding over, deprived as he was of a church or income.
The worse the weather the more frequent the funerals and after a week or two of freezing rains one came to expect a certain bright businesslike expression in his face. "How's it coming?" I would ask as the clanking elevator rose. "Oh, just fine, just fine," he would intone.
"Tough weather."
"Oh, yes, yes indeed," he would reply, his contentment barely disguised, the water dripping off his black hat onto his brown grocery bag with its celebratory bulge.
Europeans soon began showing up, expecting God-knows-what adventures in this celebrity artists' hotel they'd read about, and some just as quickly fled in polite panic.
But for many it met their expectations; it was thrilling to know that Virgil Thomson was writing his nasty music reviews on the top floor, and that those canvases hanging over the lobby were by Larry Rivers, no doubt as rent, and that the hollow-cheeked girl in the elevator was Viva and the hollow-eyed man with her was Warhol and that scent you caught was marijuana.
More important for me was that my shoes were still grinding the grit in the carpet. Rose, the maid, came every day, as promised, and waved at things. She had a carpet sweeper but walked about the apartment pulling it behind her as she smoked.
A fateful, rather amazing delivery of a new roll of carpet was made one morning. It was left temporarily in the lobby where denizens stopped to stare at it as the first new object many of them had ever seen entering the Chelsea. Its size and heft being central to a grasp of the succeeding events, it may be described as about four feet in height and about a yard in diameter, its weight probably over 500 pounds [200kg]. It was destined for the second-floor corridor and was deposited there awaiting the installers who were to come the next day.
Its arrival suggested a possible new reformist management attitude which had disturbing implications for some; it might mean the building was to be fixed up. This would surely raise rents and send some unimproved tenants into the street. But the new carpet roll was especially inspiring for Mendel Rubin, the building "engineer", a bulky, benign, Jewish ex-marine private, who dared hope now that some of the below-stairs equipment he was forever nursing might also be replaced.
Between bouts with his oil burners, Mendel would occasionally surface to help hang pictures in the lobby or strike up little time-passing artistic conversations with the guests. Learning of the astronomical sums Rivers got for his work, Mendel saw no reason not to begin scribbling designs of his own on leftover linoleum tiles he had found in the basement, splashing them with orange, green and black paint from leftover cans down there. These tiles he would display here and there in the lobby, and a lady visitor from Iceland, I think, or possibly New Zealand, bought several, and paid him in money. He would never be the same. All his time now was spent on his tiles and he even managed to have a show in a downtown gallery.
I never knew how or why he disappeared from the hotel, but before he did he confided in me a deep and abiding hatred of the house detective, who he was sure was a phoney; something which would have a profound connection with the new roll of carpet.
The writer
Arthur Miller
Born New York
When 1915
Track record One of the most influential American playwrights of the 20th century, Miller has written more than 40 plays, screenplays and books. His Death of a Salesman appeared in 1949. The Crucible (1953) used the Salem witch-hunts of the 17th century as an allegory for the McCarthy era.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald
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