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  New York in the ’50s

  Dan Wakefield

  To Sam Astrachan, Jane Wylie Genth,

  Ivan Gold, Mike Standard,

  Ted Steeg, and Helen Weaver

  And to the memory of C. Wright Mills,

  Robert Phelps, and May Swenson

  Loved ones all, in New York

  in the fifties, and beyond

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction: The “Silent Generation” Speaks Out

  1 To Grand Central Station

  2 Lions and Cubs on Morningside Heights

  3 Getting Started

  4 Miracle in the Bowery

  5 In Spanish Harlem

  6 Home to the Village

  7 What Rough Beats?

  8 Roses, Dreams, and Diaphragms

  9 From Joe McCarthy to Jean-Paul Sartre

  10 The New Word, the Old Dream

  11 Graduating to the Five Spot

  12 In Exile Till We Come Again

  Image Gallery

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca.… It persists, an indelible part of my young manhood, imbedded in the very core of my being.

  —Harvey Swados, “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn”

  Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hands of God.

  —George Washington to his troops, as quoted on the Washington Square arch

  Author’s Note

  In the 1950s, “Negro” was the accepted term of respect for the minority people who in the next decade would find both beauty and power in the word “black,” which before then could have been taken as an insult. In the 1990s, “African American” is for many the preferred designation. In the 1950s, a definition of the word “girl” in my American College Dictionary (a standard reference book of the time, published by Harper’s) was “2. a young unmarried woman.” That usage was preferred by the young women I knew at the time, though their counterparts today would reject the term as disrespectful, or even demeaning, and prefer to be called women.

  In using the terms “Negro” and “girl,” I have tried to be faithful to the sound and speech of the 1950s. I do not intend any disrespect to current sensibilities by such usage.

  INTRODUCTION

  The “Silent Generation” Speaks Out

  The decade I lived in New York was the heart of the 1950s. I arrived at Columbia the year that Dwight D. Eisenhower exchanged his presidency of the university for that of the United States. One of my early assignments as a reporter for the Columbia Daily Spectator was to photograph him at a campaign picnic before the homecoming game, and I captured a view of his famous bald dome bending over a piece of fried chicken. Despite opposition from the Spectator (most of us on the staff were “madly for Adlai”), Ike was elected, and he began an eight-year reign that marked the mood of the decade as one of benign middle-of-the-road Republicanism. The era was summed up in the comforting slogan so soothingly repeated by the solid majority of Americans, but—and this significant fact is forgotten—heard with teeth-grinding frustration by the rest: “I like Ike.”

  The autumn I left New York, for a Nieman fellowship in journalism at Harvard, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. If the charismatic young JFK’s succession of Ike as president was seen as the end of an era, his death was a deeper, more tragic close to the innocence of the Eisenhower years. But these were endings, like the closing of great doors on the past, offering little or no vision of what was to come.

  I got my first glimpse of the new era the following spring of 1964, when I returned to New York for the wedding brunch of a friend at the Plaza Hotel. I looked out the tall windows of the Edwardian Room and saw mounted police holding back a mob of unruly young people trying to get beyond traffic barricades to touch or glimpse a new pop music group from Liverpool who had come to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

  These English kid musicians, who were called by the odd name the Beatles, seemed in age, attire, manner, attitude, and music to be the polar opposite of the patriarchal Ike. Their arrival in New York represented the real changing of the guard, not just the political switch in style and rhetoric represented by JFK, but the real if belated beginning of the counterdecade—the anti-establishment, youth-on-the-loose, psychedelic sixties.

  The time from Ike’s election to the coming of the Beatles was a decade in which the taste, politics, mores, and culture of our society underwent a deep change, one that not only unleashed the tidal wave of the sixties but formed the patterns from which future decades would flow, shaping the way we live now in the closing years of what began as “the American century.”

  The sixties supposedly ushered in the era of change, revolt, and excitement, while the fifties have been dismissed as dull and boring, a time of quiet acquiescence to the status quo. My Columbia College classmate Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People (a best seller of the eighties), articulated the feelings of many of us when he said in his address to the thirty-fifth reunion of the class of ’55: “Ours is seen as a time when nothing happened—the Eisenhower years, the age of conformity, of passivity instead of passion, of panty raids instead of protest marches, the years of Levittown and The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd. I think the time has come for us to look back in charity and ask ourselves: were the fifties really that dull and empty?”

  In finding the strengths, virtues, and contributions of what he called “the last generation to trust our elders,” Rabbi Kushner struck a chord in those of us who have long believed we were mistakenly stuck with the label of “the Silent Generation.” In fact, I didn’t know how strongly my friends from the fifties, many of them writers, felt about the inaccuracy of our generational dog tag and about the bad rap our decade was given until I began to ask them about it. I was pleased to find my own feelings affirmed, but I was surprised by the passion and eloquence with which these writers spoke of our time.

  One of my friends when I lived in the Village was Meg Greenfield, who worked as a staff writer for The Reporter and is now the editorial page editor of the Washington Post. “I felt the Silent Generation thing was sort of a libel,” she says. “Now it’s simply become the accepted wisdom, but the fifties are a badly researched and badly reported time. There was more social action, and more sense than we’re given credit for. Subsequent generations have politicized every emotion and believed it was happening to them for the first time. We experienced as much and understood more than we’re given credit for. It didn’t occur to you if you were having a problem with a boyfriend or with your family—all of us who left home and came to New York had a terrible struggle with our parents—to announce that it was the problem of the American political system and write articles denouncing something.”

  Max Frankel, who was my early idol and boss as editor of the Spectator when I went to Columbia in 1952 and now is executive editor of the New York Times, says without hesitation, “I thought the label ‘Silent Generation’ was dumb and inaccurate. When I was on the Spectator, we were noisy about not liking Ike and about upholding academic freedom and other issues we felt strongly about.”

  Marion Magid went to Barnard when I was at Columbia, but I didn’t meet her until I was living in the Village, when she was writing critical pieces on the theater. She is now an associate editor of Commentary, which she has worked for as a writer and editor for many years. We met again recently in New York. “I don’t believe the fifties was
so namby-pamby as people later made it out to be,” she says. “It was the last time it was possible to have a ‘personal’ life. There was a sense of discovery then, but later everything became so codified. Now relationships are mapped, there are pre-established attitudes. There’s a sense that everything’s been ransacked—every secret, ethnic and sexual. There’s no more privacy. You meet and everyone exchanges credentials. We had more room to live the inner life.”

  Columnist Murray Kempton, who had already begun his career by the 1950s, says of my generation, “You were the country’s younger brothers.” Like many of my friends in New York, I regarded Murray as a wise older brother, and we would devour his iconoclastic column in the New York Post, which appeared three times a week. Murray now writes his column for Newsday. “When people came to America in those days,” he says, “they wanted to know how we did it. It was like being in the Soviet Union in the thirties. We were the repository of every illusion of ‘the better.’ It was fun, and life was much clearer then. I was wildly patriotic. Of course, I was young then.”

  I’m aware that the passionate feelings my friends and I have about the decade when we came of age must in part be due to the fact that, as Kempton says, we were young. The day I called him to get together and talk about those years, he was writing a column on the death of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., the mayor of New York City who was first elected in 1953. Murray read me the line that became the lead of his piece: “If you live in New York long enough, what you thought was an age of lead will look like an age of gold.”

  I don’t deny the nostalgia I feel, nor do I deny the darkness peculiar to the time and place I now celebrate. Almost everyone I reminisced with spoke about the heavy boozing without my bringing it up: “We drank too much,” “How did we drink so much?” We abused our bodies with booze and lack of sleep, and inhaled packs of cigarettes as if they were oxygen. We cared nothing for diet or exercise. A few of us smoked pot, and many of us took the popular uppers of the time, on prescription from doctors or psychiatrists—Dexedrine and Dexamyl, those heart-shaped green and orange pills. But for all our excesses, which we often justified as “literary” in imitation of our Roaring Twenties idols, we somehow managed to survive and observe and create in an especially fruitful time.

  I went to Columbia as a mid-semester sophomore transfer student in January of 1952 from Indiana University at Bloomington, leaving with excitement and relief the somnolent southern Indiana landscape of rolling hills and limestone quarries for the concrete canyons and skyscraping spires I had dreamed of while listening to Stan Kenton’s mushy “Manhattan Towers,” a romantic anthem for many of my peers. I graduated from Columbia in 1955, lived for a while on the Upper West Side near Riverside Drive before moving on to what would be home in Greenwich Village (appropriate antithesis of what the Midwest means by “home”), until I said goodbye to New York in 1963.

  I was lucky to learn from professors at Columbia whose work helped define the times, from the poet Mark Van Doren and the literary critic Lionel Trilling to C. Wright Mills, the rebel sociologist whose controversial books White Collar and The Power Elite delineated in disturbing strokes the new middle- and upper-class structure of America in the fifties.

  Reporting on politics and culture for The Nation, I interviewed leaders and covered events that were shaping the period, from protests against civil defense air raid drills which were supposed to save New Yorkers from an A-bomb attack by sending them down to the subway, to Jack Kerouac’s drunken reading from On the Road at a Village nightclub, which signaled the arrival of the Beat Generation. Writing about the Catholic Worker movement led me to live for a while in Spanish Harlem and write my first book, Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem, and I got involved in the grassroots effort to help narcotics addicts and treat them as patients rather than criminals. For Esquire, I drew assignments to profile a spectrum of luminaries, dining (with notebook) in Harlem with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and at the New York Yacht Club with William F. Buckley, Jr.

  My life and concerns were hardly limited to public figures and events, however. Like so many others of my time and place, I fell in love a hundred times, went into psychoanalysis, tried to write a novel, and listened to jazz musicians like Miles Davis and J. J. Johnson, going from glittery midtown music meccas like Birdland to crowded, smoky Village haunts like the Five Spot. I drank pints of arf ’n’ arf and debated politics and books with James Baldwin and Michael Harrington at the White Horse Tavern; saw Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh and Geraldine Page in Summer and Smoke at the Circle in the Square; and went with buddies and dates to the Amato Opera, a converted moviehouse with a single piano as orchestra, where music students carried cardboard elephants in the grand march of Aïda, all for whatever coins you could afford to put in the hat when it was passed.

  This was a New York where you could go on a date to Louis’ or the San Remo or the Grand Ticino in Greenwich Village and have a bottle of wine with your dinner for a little less than five bucks for the two of you. The subway was a dime and the Staten Island ferry a nickel. Four women college graduates who made no more than $50 a week from their magazine or publishing jobs could pitch in and rent a lovely furnished three-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue for $200 a month. Students could afford standing room at the Metropolitan Opera or one of the hit musicals on Broadway, like Call Me Madam with Ethel Merman. There was no cover or minimum charge to stand at the bar and hear Mingus at the Five Spot, in the Village. Carson McCullers read for free at Columbia and told how she wrote The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a novel that, along with The Catcher in the Rye, inspired my newly graduated generation.

  I threw all-night parties with new friends who, like myself, had come from the hinterlands to make their fame and fortune and “find themselves” in the pulsing heart of the hip new world’s hot center, with the ghosts of the recent past as guides. We quoted aloud Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Millay and e. e. cummings, as we drank the wine and burned at both ends the candle of early youth and bittersweet first disillusionment. We revived our faith with the incantations of Dylan Thomas, our secular poet-priest, whose chants we played at dawn on the Caedmon record that boomed the vow we took to “not go gentle into that good night.”

  If my generation was “silent,” it was not in failure to speak out with our work, but in the sense of adopting a style that was not given to splash and spotlights. Max Frankel says, “We set out essentially to be spectators and reflectors on life. A dogged kind of centrism came out of this, and it was later confused with unfeelingness in the sixties, as if we didn’t care enough for issues like the environment.”

  We had no desire to shout political slogans or march with banners, because we had seen the idealism of the radical thirties degenerate into the disillusionment of Stalinism and the backlash reaction of name-calling anticommunism. The naïve hope of salvation by politics seemed to have burned itself out in the thirties, replaced in the fifties too often by an equally naïve belief in salvation through psychoanalysis. My friends and I agreed with Hemingway’s advice at the end of Death in the Afternoon: “Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole.” Another of Papa’s admonitions from the same book was reaffirmed for us in the fifties by James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son, and it became a kind of creed: “The great thing, as Hemingway said, is to last and get your work done.”

  Ours was not the silence of timidity or apathy, but the kind James Joyce meant, in Portrait of the Artist, when he spoke of the young writer’s vow as “silence, exile, and cunning.” The “silence” of Joyce was not surrender; it simply meant not to blab or brag about your work. The “cunning” was finding a way to make a living and then doing it. The “exile” was the place far enough from the censure of home and middle-class convention to feel free enough to create. Our own chosen place of exile from middle America was not Europe but New York, where, like Paris in the twenties, you found your contemporary counterparts—allies, mentors, friends. Our fifties were far
more exciting than the typical American experience because we were in New York, where people came to flee the average and find a group of like-minded souls. “We had our community, and there was stability and solidarity,” Meg Greenfield says, recalling our group of writer friends, who were centered in the Village but also had connections on the Upper East and West sides.

  There were actually many such communities in New York then, many of them interconnected. David Amram, the jazz musician and composer I used to hear play at the Five Spot, says, “There was a cross-pollination of music, painting, writing—an incredible world of painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, and actors, enough so we could be each other’s fans. When I had concerts, painters would come, and I’d go play jazz at their art gallery openings, and I played piano while beats read their poetry. Kerouac asked Larry Rivers and me to be in the movie Pull My Daisy, with him and Allen Ginsberg.”

  Another community, which served as an intellectual and spiritual base for many young people who came to New York then, was the Catholic Worker movement in the Bowery, founded by Dorothy Day, an ex-bohemian who had turned, in the 1930s, from the lure of communism to a deeply felt Catholicism.

  It was there that I met Mary Ann McCoy, who with two other young women had started a day care center for children in Spanish Harlem, and showed me the neighborhood that inspired my first book. Mary Ann now lives in a racially mixed neighborhood in Brooklyn, where she’s a community activist. “I associate the feeling of the Catholic Worker farm on Staten Island with our time, the fifties,” she says. “There was a big oak tree and a cow mooing and the chapel was part of the barn. Mass was held every morning, and you celebrated the hours of the day. The people there had a commitment, and we gave up part of our personal life to care for the poor, like Dorothy Day. There was a balance there that the sixties didn’t have. The sixties lacked a connection with the other things of life. What’s ever come out of the sixties? What did it get us? I saw it as being one big party time.”