The Plaza

I’ll Take Manhattan

Kitty O’Brien and a Rite of Passage

1

  Sunday morning, September 17, 1950, rushing east on Fifty-third Street, hoping one phone call will keep me from fleeing ignominiously back to California, ambitions to conquer New York disintegrating with each step.

  Just fifteen hours since I stepped down from that bus with the grimy windows, touching Manhattan pavement for the first time at Park Avenue South, an olive-drab, army surplus duffel bag thrown over my shoulder stuffed with everything I own, trekking under shadowy archways to Forty-Second Street, finding myself in front of—yes! the one and only Grand Central Station!

  But where oh where are tap dancing Busby Berkley girls heralding their welcome?

  Hear those beats, of dancing fee-a-eet,
  on the Avenue I'm taking you to,
  Forty-Second Street!
  

  It’s barely twenty-four hours since, at Burbank airport in California, this great adventure was launched, buddies Mark Buchoz, Don Olson, Mickey Feay sending me off with hugs and handshakes, chain link fence fragmenting their faces as I stride across the tarmac, knees wobbling, to the four-engine prop Lockheed Constellation, the same plane Bill Sampson in “All About Eve” takes to Hollywood first class, but ours is a “Columbia Coach” charter. Only eighty-nine dollars to fly me to Manhattan Towers.

  I had imagined a trip “steaming along the Hudson” on the Twentieth Century Limited, roaring into Grand Central Station as in the Gordon Jenkins recording, “Manhattan Towers,” which I listened to night after night in California, head full of visions of scintillating penthouse parties, “and a wonderful waiter named Noah.”

  One of eighty passengers on the Constellation, seated two-abreast in a long one-class compartment is no Bill Sampson—Wally Vernon, a comedian I’d seen at the Orpheum on Broadway in downtown L.A. He’d made a few movies, but wasn’t all that famous. The loudspeaker informs us we can expect stopovers at Fort Worth, Texas, four in the morning, Chicago around noon, arriving at Newark late in the day, bus to Manhattan.

  NEWARK? Dean expects me at LaGuardia!

  After surviving almost twenty hours in the smoke-filled Constellation, then on a coughing bus seated against a dirty window, a sudden view of distant Manhattan Towers just before entering the Holland Tunnel, gives me a jolt—there it is! Only a few minutes now.

  And here we are, emerging from the tunnel and struggling up the Westside to see giant sentinels jammed together above narrow streets, shadowed canyons golden in afternoon sun, block after block of really unexpectedly tall buildings—silver shining Empire State, Chrysler Building, a distant echo.

  Inside Grand Central’s cavernous concourse, intimidated by frenzied hoards—marveling that no one knocks me down; checking the duffel bag, quickly off to find a pay phone. Slot the nickel in, carefully dial . . . one ring . . . two . . .

  Light male voice answering—it’s not Dean! A sickening death knell.

  “Dean’s not here. . . gone out. . . usually stays out late on Saturday nights,  probably won’t be home till morning.”

  Panic. “Please tell him I—tell him I—thanks, I’ll try later.” Hanging up, hand shaking, turning reluctantly to become a face in the crowd, stranger in a strange land. No, not-so-strange, thanks to movies. But where oh where is Carol Lombard smiling and waving as she rushes into a tunnel to catch the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago, leaving me abandoned in a swirling nightmare—utterly alone, fast action people moving hither and yon, and wither? penthouse parties no doubt, or trains to weekends in the country.

  Utterly lost, unable to appreciate this high vaulted edifice, windowed prisms filtering melancholy afternoon sun. One more number to call—Joan Crears from U.C.L.A.

  “I’m at the Park Sheraton on Seventh Avenue,” she says. “Stop by.”

  Comfortably sheltered in a roomy suite, petite and moody Joan Crears, small, intense grey eyes, is not the kind of girl who will invite me to stay all night, and she’s engaged to Al Supowitz.

  As I settle into a plush sofa, she finds a thick Yellow Pages, and  tosses it over to me, and then interrupted by a ringing phone. “My father,” she says.

  I stare at the Yellow Pages, hearing snatches of conversation: “Oh, yes, Dad, we’ve found a terrific apartment on the Westside. . . Well, no, Dad—not Eastside—it’s all we can afford . . .”

  She hangs up, holding the receiver as if it’s tainted with her lie. “Of course the apartment isn’t terrific at all,” she says, “it’s gloomy and a third-floor walk-up with no view, but large, unlike Eastside apartments—one-hundred twenty-five a month, but that’s for the three of us—me, Joanne and Burt. You should see some of the places we looked at, asking, like eighty-five—a hundred dollars a month! Everybody’s here—Burt and Joanne, and Robert Horton. Al’s still in Los Angeles, but he’ll be here soon—his brother Herb’s been here for some time. He changed his last name to Sargent, and  Joanne’s got a stack of introductions a mile high. Nancy Olson’s at the Algonquin.”

  Standing behind me, dainty finger flicking through the yellow pages, she says, “Look here, a lot of  cheap hotels in and around Times Square, and only twelve dollars a night!”

First Night in Manhattan in Times Square

  Thus finding myself in a surprisingly large third-floor twelve-dollar-a-night room-with-bath in a not too sleazy establishment on Forty-fifth Street, like in the “First-Nighter” radio show, just around the corner from Times Square The sheets are clean, fresh towels in the bathroom. Determined to step through the looking glass if I’m going to flee back to California in the morning, might as well take a stroll through fabled Time Square.

  Hardly a stroll—more like a nightmare, fighting my way through pulsing Saturday night crowds,   downtown, uptown, not knowing where to go—going nowhere—assaulted by honking cabs and traffic noise, not at all magical as in Manhattan Towers recording—amazed I’m not bouncing off anyone crowding the sidewalks—and not a soul in the blur of humanity touching me—not a single one!

  If only I’d known, Manhattan is offering its rite of passage accorded all sensitive souls who would dare to work and live on this fabled isle. I long to be taken in, recognized, welcomed—find someone to talk to! one day I’ll break through, feel the exhilaration of anonymity, happy to be just a face in the crowd, shaking my fist defiantly at Manhattan Towers and proclaim, as Robert Horton beneath the Palace Theatre several weeks later will shake his fist at the cluttered sky, shouting, “I’ll make it. I’ll show them!” (And “show them” he did seven years later, as Flint McCullough in the TV series, “Wagon Train,” 1957-1962, returning to the Great White Way in October, 1963 to star as Starbuck in the musical “110 in the Shade” which would have 330 performances.)

  But now I’m utterly alone, and no Dean to  comfort me.

  Hyperventilating, yet with fumbling, trembling hands managing to buy a Sunday New York Times, I race back to the hotel room, escaping the whirlwind snare of strangers. Safe and secure in the hotel room, pouring over apartment ads, squinting at columns of small print in words incomprehensible, discovering I can’t afford any of  them.

  At least in L.A., friends will take me in—no doubt delighted to chastise me for rushing off without a plan. But then, I  am here, and here they are not, and haven’t I dared to challenge Grand Central Station, face Times Square on a Saturday night? Never mind I’m awakened more than once by persistent knocking at the door, with stretches of silence, then more tap-tap-tapping, through the long night.

  I found a room in a haven of  pimps and prostitutes! Thanks a  lot,  Joan Crears!

  Dawn—waking to newsprint scattered on a rumpled bed. At least the sun is shining. Only one thing to do—check out and find a telephone to call Dean—sink or swim. And if Dean’s not there? Don’t think about it. First things first—check out and find a phone booth.

  So into a Sunday morning refreshed by cool breezes, fuzzy gray-white clouds interfering with brilliant September sky; hurrying eastward, feeling newborn. Why east—who  knows? rushing to find a phone booth, double-timing along West Fifty-third Street, stopping cold in front of the Museum of Modern Art, its large glass frontage somber gray in early morning light, contemplating—Festival of Silent Films! I’ve got to see that!

  Reaching fabulous Fifth Avenue—deserted on Sunday, a phone booth! across the street from—could this be St. Patrick’s Cathedral, spires resplendent in cool blue wind-swept sky? It’s now or never, nickel in, dialing. . .one ring, two rings. . .

  “Yes, and who might be calling?” Dean! “Where the hell were you last night? You devastated my social life. I sat around LaGuardia till after the bars closed—and that’s almost four in the morning! They never even heard of Columbia Coach.”

  “We landed at Newark.”

  “What—Newark? Well then, where are you now?”

  “Fifth Avenue, across the street from, I think it’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

  “Which side of the avenue is it on—east or west?”

  “East, yes, east.”

  “Well then it’s got to be St. Pats, not St. Thomas—that’s further down on the west side. Isn’t St. Pat’s grand?”

  “Yes . . . it’s—“

  “You are to walk north uptown to the Plaza Fountain, in front of the Plaza Hotel at Fifth-ninth Street, so that will be just a few short blocks. You’ll see the Tiffany windows along the way, and Bergdorf-Goodman’s, but don’t dawdle. North and south blocks are quite short here, so it won’t take you long. You’re lucky it’s Sunday—a weekday it would take you much longer. I’ll meet you at the Plaza fountain. There’s really no other place more appropriate to meet your first day in New York.”

  Mad about Manhattan Dean Hoffmann comes smiling across the Plaza, brown eyes shining, short-cropped golden hair catching the sun, sauntering toward me in best Noel Coward manner, waving, smiling. We embrace dispassionately.

  “Had breakfast?” not waiting for an answer. “There’s only one place for breakfast on a Sunday morning in Manhattan and that’s the Automat, be ye rich or poor, reasonable prices and good food,” he’s already steering me south, casually jay walking across Fifty-ninth Street, chattering away, pointing to a drug store, “Isn’t it marvelous? Drug stores here are called apothecaries, and you can still get a beer in a Seventh Avenue bar for ten cents—and a ride on the Staten Island ferry is only a nickel! Look, Bergdorf-Goodman, you’ll never see shop windows like that in L.A.—not even in Westwood. And Fifty-seventh Street—the grandest boulevard on the island. We’ll pass Carnegie Hall on our way to the Automat.”

  “I’ve seen it already,” I reply gloomily. Dean allows little time to take in the wonders of Fifty-seventh Street, nor linger in front of Carnegie Hall—all those Sunday afternoon broadcasts!

  Stopping by a newsstand to buy a Sunday New York Times, Dean says, "We'll need this."
  The 57^th Street Automat is a large open emporium behind a concave bay window. On a ledge the other side of it, dressed elegantly in his best Sunday-go-to-church clothes, tie, jacket, short pants revealing knobby knees, a small, dark-haired boy sleeps.  Close by a crisp young couple hard at bacon and eggs, are engrossed in reading the ever-present Times spread out on the table.  Most certainly the young boy's parents.

  Dean glances at the boy as we get ourselves through the revolving door.  “New York is full of delightful surprises,” he says.

  Dean himself is a school boy buying tickets at an amusement park, gathering nickels exchanged from dollar bills, thence proceeding to rows of tiny glass windows where he explains which levers to pull, reserving his most exalted accolade for the polished brass lion-head handle for milk. “Can you imagine,” he chortles, “a golden lion head—well, all right, brass—just to pour commonplace milk! Formidable! And real porcelain cups and saucers! You’ll see no paper plates at the Automat!”

  We nudge into a small square table, begin eat ravenously, forcing myself to concentrate on scrambled eggs and sausages and avoid looking at the challenging heavy-as-a-hunk-of-lead Sunday New York Times.

  “You’re going to love New York once we get you settled in somewhere.”

  “I’m ready to fly back to L.A. if I can’t find a place to live.”

  “Nonsense! we’ll find you a home, and afterward we’ll take the grand tour, beginning on the Third Avenue El down to the Bowery.”

  “The Bowery?  You mean the real Bowery, like in the song?”

  “Precisely—the Bowery, the Bowery, they say such things and they do such things in the Bowery, I’ll never go there anymore!” he sings. “There was an El on Sixth Avenue until a few years ago but they tore it down and renamed the street Avenue of the Americas, but nobody calls it that. To the natives, it’s still Sixth Avenue. From the Bowery we’ll stroll over to Wall Street and Trinity Church, maybe end up in the Village at San Remo’s on Bleecker Street, typical mixed Village crowd. Dick Foreman hangs out there sometimes.”

  “Dick Foreman’s in New York?”

  “Yes, and Nancy Olson’s at the Algonquin.” Dreaming dreamily, he says, “You know, the Round Table back in the Twenties—Dorothy Parker, Wolcott Gibbs . . . Nancy invited me in for a drink.”

  I manage a laugh. “Maybe I should have called her last night, she might’ve asked me to stay overnight.”

  “You’re jesting, of course. Nancy’s way out of our league after Sunset Boulevard. Last March she married Alan Jay Lerner—the guy who wrote the book and lyrics for Brigadoon. I didn’t know you knew her, you weren’t in the production of Footprints on the Ceiling that summer—you were off doing the Pilgrimage Play.”

  “She was on campus in the spring semester. She’s a great  name dropper.” (A few weeks later I would stumble across Nancy at the Algonquin as I moved through the lobby on my way to  Dora Weisman who’d promised me a part in a radio show. Nancy, sitting alone in a small chair was friendly enough, greeting me like a long, lost brother. Perhaps the high altitude to which her life had soared left her breathless.)

  At U.C.L.A., Nancy would spin tales of venturing through Hollywood’s playground referring to her famous acquaintances only by their first names—“And Bill (Holden) said,” or “I ran into Eric (von Stroheim) the other day . . .”

  Over second cups of coffee, we relive the Billy Barnes-Dick Foreman musical, “Footprints on the Ceiling,” prophetically set in New York. A fever grips the town of New York and everyone has lost their inhibitions—which pretty much sums up the story. I  played Herb Wirth, Commissioner of Health: I’m Herb Wirth, Commissioner of Health, a bacteriologist of great fame. Dean, costume designer, the production restaged in the summer and Nancy took over the female lead, while I was on the hill playing disciple James.

  “Let’s go for rooms,” Dean says, grabbing at the classified pages, expert navigator quickly zeroing in on rooms-for-let. Running his finger down a column, he stops. “Look! here’s a room for only sixty dollars a month and it’s on West 54^th Street.”

  Leaving the Automat, we find a phone booth at the corner of Avenue of the Americas and Fifty-Seventh. I Dial. A man answers.

  “Cecil’s Tavern.”

  “Oh, I thought—it’s about the room for rent.”

  “Hold on.”

  Outside the booth Dean raises his questioning golden eyebrows. A deep, rough, gravelly voice on the other end says, “You calling about the room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you got a piano?”

  “Huh?  Na-no.”

  “You’re not Spanish, are you?”

  “No.”

  “A Spanish diplomat wanted to bring in his piano—all the way to the eleventh floor. Room’s not big enough for a goddamn piano, but it has all the comforts of home. We’re havin’ lovely boys livin’ there.” I flash on young male prostitutes lolling about on lavender divans waiting for johns to whisk them away to weekends in the country, or Saturday matinees at the opera.

  “And where would you be now?” the deep voice asks.

  “Ah, oh, I’m on Fifty-Seventh Street and . . . ah . . .  Avenue of the Americas.”

  “Avenue a’ what? Oh, you mean Sixth Avenue. The room’s at Fifty-fourth and Seventh Avenue and I want someone permanent. It’s not a flop house.”

  “Yes, that’s what I want—something permanent.”

  “Two Hundred West Fifty-fourth Street. You’ll be walkin’ over—you’re close enough. Take me about fifteen minutes to get there meself. Ask for Kitty O’Brien and be telling the switchboard girl in the lobby you’re me nephew. Don’t want them knowin’ I’m rentin’ out rooms.” Click. She’s gone.

  Bewildered, hanging up the phone, as I exit the boot, Dean asks, “What’s wrong?”

  “She was taking calls from Cecil’s Tavern.”

  “Cecil’s Tavern?”

  “The room’s at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. Sounded like a man, but I’m to ask for Kitty O’Brien.”

  “Not precisely in the Theatre District, but close enough,” Dean says.

  “If that was a woman on the phone, Comrade, she must’ve been smoking a lot.“

  “This is no time to be quoting Garbo in Ninotchka,” Dean says.

  “She said we’re having  lovely boys living there.”

  “Maybe she’s running a male brothel—high class at that address. Maybe you’ve hit pay dirt. C’mon, I can’t wait.”

  Two hundred West Fifty-fourth Street, a tall building in the triangular block between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, displays a large, spotless lobby with checkered black and white tile floor, wood paneling, etched mirrors opposite a nested switchboard. As Dean predicted, this is no dump. A young, sharp-featured woman with too much red lipstick looks up. “Yes?”

  “Kitty O’Brien, please. Tell her it’s her nephew.”

  “Another nephew, yes of course,” plugging in, pursing ruby lips, considering us warily. “Hello? Another nephew to see Miss O’Brien,” listening, unplugging. “Miss O’Brien has not returned from church. (“church” with a snarl) You may go up if you wish. Eleventh floor, eleven-ten.” Cocking an eye. “One of her other nephews will receive you.”

  We’re greeted in the elevator by a big, chunky, rosy cheeked man wearing a navy blue uniform with gold piping, speaking with lilting brogue, “I’m for bein’ the doorman, the truth be known. They ask me to stand in fer the regular operator on Sundays. I’m never stoopin’ so low if they’re not paying me extra.”

  Slowly releasing the elevator handle, “You’ll not be findin’ Miss O’Brien at home, likes a bit of the Irish after church ‘cross the street at Cecil’s Tavern. She told you that, didn’t she, on the phone? So I’ll not be givin’ her away. You’re the first ones today—from California, me boy-os?”

  “Yes,” Dean responds eagerly.

  “And sure you must be, all the lads from California have golden hair”—this obviously directed at Dean since my hair is more like umber, as in oil-stained sand of Southern California beaches.

  Making our way to the apartment Dean says, “It’s an inferior position, runnin’ an elevator.  Doormen in New York consider themselves superior to all others in service—lions at the gate, you might say, staking fierce proprietary claim on their buildings, as if they own them.”

  Knocking, footsteps, door opened by a young, bland, thoroughly respectable looking fellow with tight lips, wearing brown flecked horned-rimmed glasses matching the color of his hair; Sunday dressed, tan suit and paisley tie—far stretch from male hustler. “Come in. I’m Richard, Kitty’s not here,” soft, deeply placed voice. “She’s at Cecil’s Tavern taking calls, but you can see the room before she gets back.” Hesitating, a quick frowning look at Dean. “It’s only for one.”

  “He already lives in New York.  The room’s for me.”

  Kitty’s living room in this apartment of “lovely boys” is thickly carpeted, comfortably furnished—smartly beige and none of it threadbare—even a television set in one corner; the air now blessed with aromas of coffee and bacon frying. Richard escorts us through several rooms: an alcove near the entrance, “Where Kitty sleeps,” Richard says, dining room, kitchen—sun shining through south windows overlooking what I guess would be heavily trafficked Seventh Avenue cutting down to Times Square. Arriving at the kitchen, Richard turns back to fiddle with bacon frying on a large six-burner stove, turning to point at an open door. “That’s the room, used to be the maid’s room in the good old days, I’m told.”

  The maid’s room is furnished and large enough for a single bed and walnut chest of drawers, leaving space to move around a little. A small window at eye level brightens the room with a share of morning sun striking a mirror spindled over a chest of drawers.

  Richard comes to the door. “It’s small, but you have the run of the whole apartment—and your own bathroom with a shower.” He turns back into the kitchen and skillet.

  Dean is looking out the window. “You’re only a stone’s throw from the heart of the theater district. Come and see.”

  “Too small for a piano,” I muse, suddenly and inexplicably fascinated with the varnished smell of the chest of drawers, reminding me of  the freshly furnished house the family lived in my senior high school year—the only beautifully furnished home we’d ever known—and then only for a few months—step-dad number four was off to war. The surface of the chest is barely at eye level—six drawers below, opening them one by one—waiting for me to fill them with socks and shorts and T-shirts—urging me to take possession—a home, and only one step away from The Great White Way! I’ve come a long way from fighting through Times Square, the loneliest man in the world—and in only twelve hours!

  Dean, reflected in the mirror, is staring at me. “The Alvin Theatre is right outside your window, so why are you contemplating a chest of drawers?”

  Moving to the window I look across rooftops to find the marquee of the Alvin Theatre, today’s Neil Simon Theatre:  HENRY FONDA IN MISTER ROBERTS. Off stage, a door closes with a dull thump. Kitty O’Brien, returning from Cecil’s Tavern.

  She stands in the dining room in velvety purple dress, short-cropped, glistening silver hair, narrow velvet mauve band around her neck—holding my future in her hands. She approaches, head just reaching my chest, faint aroma of rose water and nicotine, looking up at me with dark eyes, smoking the short stub of a cigarette, its drooping ash falling on the carpet. Her steady black eyes study me from a powdered, lightly rouged face.

  Is she wobbling? If she’s been hitting the Irish, there isn’t a trace of it on her breath; only the licorice hint of sen-sen and a degree of unsteadiness. She glances at Dean. “The room’s only for one,” she says with the deep, rasping voice I’ve heard on the phone.

  “Dean’s just a friend. He has his own apartment.”

  “On the upper Westside,” Dean offers.

  “Have you seen the room?”

  “Yes, it’s perfect.”

  “Well, I’ll not be knowin’ how perfect it is,” looking at me skeptically. “You’re not from New York.”

  “No, Los Angeles.”

  “What’re you doin’ in New York?”

  “I’m an actor.”

  “A female impersonator?”

  I  choke. “No, why would you—”

  “Nothin’ wrong with bein’ a female impersonator.”

  “I’m not—“

  “You’ll have to meet my friend Randy. He’s a drag queen, always out a’ work—lost his police card—the bar he worked in was raided. Not payin’ enough to the moral vigilance committee—the coppers,” she laughs. “Not like the good ol’ days.”

  “I belong to Actor’s Equity.”

  “You’re in a play?”

  My heart is sinking. “No—I’ll get a job.”

  “I’ve been takin’ me calls at Cecil’s Tavern because I don’t want the landlord here to know I’m rentin’ out rooms, so mum’s the word. Would you be believin’ a Spanish diplomat called me last week wantin’ to bring a piano up here, and wouldn’t that go over big with the landlord? I told him he could go fuck himself—no pianos!”

  I’ve never before heard a woman her age—hell, a woman any age, say “fuck.” Dean shoots me a quick happy face.

  “Well, okay,” she says. “You look okay, as long as you get a job.”

    I’m in, I’ve got a home! clenching to stifle a shout.  Dean is beaming, Kitty, he wants to hug.

  “Have you got the sixty dollars?”

  I eagerly hand her three twenties as she pushes the almost burnt-out stub of her cigarette to the end of a fresh one, inhaling deeply, the fresh cigarette dangling from her lips. She takes the money. (A chain smoker, she is.) She slides a saucer out from under a cup with traces of what must be cold tea or coffee and smashes the smoked-out butt into it; opens a drawer and takes out a receipt book, sits at the table and begins writing carefully.

  “I sleep in there,” she says, indicating the foyer’s alcove.

  “Yes, Richard told me.”

  “You have the back room all to yourself. In the heyday it was the maid’s room, so you have your own private shower. If you want Saturday night in a tub, you’ll have to go for the Turkish baths.”

  “I like showers, Miss O’Brien.”

  “Me boy-os call me Kitty. You can use the kitchen to cook your food whenever you be wantin’ to. There’s room in the refrigerator for your food unless you bring in blue fish or red snapper. Don’t want any fish stinkin’ up the icebox! And you do your own laundry. I don’t do laundry.” (But she did, as I  would discover returning from work one evening to find clean socks and jockey shorts laid out on the bed.) “And I don’t cook meals for me boys.” (But she did—a fresh red snapper bought at a nearby fish market.)

  She hands me the receipt and a set of keys. “One’s for the top lock, the other’s for the bottom. You don’t get a key to your room, couldn’t lock it anyway. We’re all friends here and I don’t allow no carryin’ on behind locked doors.”

  The receipt is dated September 17, 1928.

  “I think you wrote down the wrong year.”

  Looking at the receipt, she smiles wistfully and changes the date to 1950. “Must-a been thinkin’ of the speakeasy we ran here in twenty-eight—before the crash. The Mayor himself came here, the police, city officials—all the big shots. They all came to Kitty O’Brien’s, one time or other. You can have parties, but you be sure to let us know ahead of time, and you got to invite everybody in the house, I mean everybody in the apartment—not the whole buildin’.” Laughing, she drags on her cigarette and coughs. “You can move in today—whenever you want.”

  Getting up, she grabs the saucer-ashtray, opens the window, and clutching the saucer, flings out the ashes.

  “Birds love it,” she says.

  Dean is fired up as we across Seventh Avenue, calling out breathlessly, “What a character–only in New York!” I’m thrilled to have found a place to hang my meager belongings—two one-piece suits and a couple of shirts and ties—ready to stuff  my very own chest of drawers with socks and shorts and T-shirts—a place to sleep at night—a home.

  Stopping at the top of stairs leading down to the dark cavern of a subway, Dean says, “Now to learn everything you will ever know about the underground.”

  Time to relish Dean’s Manhattan recipe of delights as we double-time down the stairs, greeted by cool air, not foul but stale and certainly not an autumn breeze—to a booth to purchase seven-cent tokens—Dean showing me how to slot the token in, pushing legs against the arms of a wooden turnstile, open sesame to the platform.

  “C’mon,” Dean shouts, taking my arm and pulling me into the train, “we’ll ride the front!” Robot doors close behind us, Dean urging me on as we slam our way through connecting doors, deftly stepping over swaying couplings beneath our feet, at last reaching the first car. A dim yellow light illuminates the tunnel, Dean shivering with rapture, “Just like a roller coaster, isn’t it? more fun on lower Eastside trains—more curves.”

  Swooping now through dark tunnels, tracks rising and falling in the dull, yellow headlight. Dean cries above the train’s clatter, “Actual hills, Manhattan’s not at all flat, you know—not even in mid-town!” as if he alone has made the discovery. “There’s Murray Hill, isn’t there? a real hill. And wait till you see the Cloisters on the north end of the island.”

  Grand Central can’t be avoided, Dean quick to point out that “Pennsylvania Station’s elegant rococo architecture over on Thirty-fourth Street is much more glamorous.”

  Quick trip back to Kitty’s to drop off the duffel bag. Kitty’s not there. She’s visiting a sister in the Bronx.

  Dean’s joyous enthusiasm infects me with as much pleasure as the tour itself, all rapid fire narrative from the moment we once more race from Kitty’s, high-tailing across Seventh Avenue to the BMT subway next to the Wellington Hotel at Fifty-fifth Street. (I will find myself spending lots of time on the sixteenth floor of the Wellington Hotel in weeks to come, studying Shakespeare with Daisy Belmore.)

  “We’ll take the BMT to Thirty-Fourth Street,” Dean says, “close to Third Avenue. BMT means Brooklyn Metropolitan Transit, but nobody I know ever rides it, except me—I work at a bank in Canarsie—don’t you just love that name—Can-ar-sie!?”

  Now he’s alerting me to push myself in and out of doors during rush hour before getting squeezed between them, how to transfer from Eastside to Westside, from BMT to IRT, IRT to IND; how to get cross town in the Fifties on the F-train and where to get from B-train local to A-train Express. “Take the A-Train! just like the song!”

  (In later years, I would again stand in the front car of subway trains, but at the time I left Manhattan for good in 1983, no longer. Dean had copped-out to San Francisco, and I no longer raced down Broadway on the upper Westside jumping over fire hydrants, as I had in the Seventies.)

  At Third Avenue I follow Dean up metal stairs to catch the El, riding again in the front car, eyes riveted on rails reaching toward the Bowery at the end of the line. Walking cross town to the financial district, strolling empty streets beneath grim, lofty buildings—empty, except for a few wandering tourists.

Trinity Church, Wall Street

  Dean points out the Woolworth Tower, “Tallest building in the world until they built the Chrysler and Empire State,” musing, “I love these deserted empty streets on Sundays.” At Broadway and Wall he guides me to Trinity Church’s graveyard, reading headstones dated since before and including the American Revolution. Now down Broadway to Battery Park, through clumps of trees to water’s edge.

“This is where the Hudson flows out into the ocean. That’s New Jersey over there,” pointing out the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, Ellis Island. “C’mon, you’ve got to ride the Staten Island Ferry. It’s only a nickel! Of course, there’s absolutely nothing to see on Staten Island, so we’ll just turn round and come back. You’ll love the ride—great view of lower  Manhattan.”

On the ferry we spot a cruise ship in the distance, farewell streamers still flying from its decks, a tug nudging it toward the Verazzano Narrows. Of course I didn’t know the Narrows were called “Verazzano” until the graceful span, Verazzano Narrows Bridge was opened on November 21, 1964.

Entranced, Dean’s gaze reaches out to the cruise ship as if he’s imagining himself on board.   “Bermuda probably,” he says quietly, “they’re going to Bermuda.” Has Dean transported himself into the state room to sip pink gins with Cole Porter in his cabin, Ivor Novello, Noel Coward? Bea Lillie bursting in, shouting, “Not wanted on the voyage, eh, No-el!” Dean greeting her, “Lady Peel! How clever of you to find us!”

  After dark at San Remo’s on Bleecker Street in the Village we run into friends from U.C.L.A.  Dean’s not particularly interested in them, having “cut the umbilical chord” a year before. For me, it’s time to return home. . . to Kitty’s, get some sleep, back to stark reality tomorrow. I’ve got to find a job.

3

  Sure enough, I find work—as savings-bank teller, the worst kind of job for would-be actor, painfully reminded of the miraculous beginning of my rite of passage by the view out the front windows of Federal Savings at 44th and Lexington. I can see Grand Central Station—rear entrances, no winged Mercury above to welcome me as on 42^nd Street. I’m trapped in a teller’s cage each weekday, most certainly I’m “not wanted on the voyage.” No wealthy mentor to pave the way. Visions of a glorious future blur, and forever rankling is the hope I’ll find a guy to love, bringing it into  focus.

  “You are totally misdirected,” Dean advises. “You didn’t come to New York to find a lover!” I do manage occasional visits to Actors Equity HQ, looking at casting lists—mostly weighted toward musicals.

  Nights are lonely, writing Mark and Don long detailed letters of my wanderings, checking out Faison d’or,  “Golden Pheasant” (Dean’s suggestion) across the street from the Ziegfeld Theatre on the fringes of the “Bird Circuit,” the East Side’s smattering of bright gay friendly clubs where unknowns get their start.

  The Faison d’or, however, is totally gay, a dimly lit bar. Dick Foreman who’d directed the Billy Barnes musical at U.C.L.A., appears one night and nails it. “I hate this place. Look around—nobody’s talking to anybody—just like bars in Hollywood. I’m getting out of here.”

  Retreating to Kitty’s, to my chest of drawers and view of the Alvin Theatre, haunted by the recurring fear I’ll never find a lover, and if by some miracle I do conquer Broadway, I’ll become an empty shell of a man. Career first! warns the Muse of Fire, but I’m not listening, scratching out a poem—a Narcissus malingering alone through Manhattan’s streets seeking mirror images of myself.

  Out my window I can see Alvin Theatre, Mr. Roberts, Henry Fonda, near and yet so far. . . Take your dream there, quickly paste it on the mirror above your chest of drawers. . . Glass is shiny, glass you see through, mirrors mirror vacant faces, as the windows do, on Fifth Avenue. . . Gray, gray, collared fur, black, gray, peppermint tie, blue shining on the Plaza, as it could never do, on Eighth Avenue. . .

  Or let us wear our heels down, cold reflection in front of windows, contemplating antique candlesticks, seek new images of love, and when we’ve found them, turn again to people never touching! plunging down long subway escalators, nameless contours wrought heavily, I must remember them all.

  Or let us forget loneliness, scintillate among cocktail party canapés, and if they see in us a mystery, they’ll believe that we belong. . . where we shall talk of nothing and be respected.

  Let us mount them one at a time until we reach the top, looking down at all we’ve forgotten to bring with us.

  Favio Maximilian Barueghetti, lost among shadowy men, appears one night at Faison d’or, a pale aristocratic boy, small round face crowned with dark black curls. “I was born in Mexico City,” he explains defensively. “We’ve got no Aztec blood in our family—only Spanish and Italian.”

  He’s staying at the Sloan House YMCA—visitors to rooms, not allowed, so we’ve got no place to go—certainly not Kitty’s, and making out in public places is dangerous. I walk him to Sloane House and that’s the end of it, until quite strangely many years later, a surprising encounter in a bathhouse in Los Angeles, remembering half-way through our love making it’s the same Favio! For now it’s back to Kitty O’Brien’s, alone.

  Curtis Harrington enters the scene one Saturday afternoon, lunching with Dick Foreman at the oyster bar beneath Grand Central Station. Curtis has graduated from the Film Department at U.C.L.A., where he didn’t mix with theatre majors—seldom using  any of us for his experimental films. He’s more complex, I’ll discover, than is revealed by his bland features framed in a head of tight ringlet curls and perpetually serious expression.

Curtis Harrington

  Surprisingly, I seem to attract him, and he invites me to his 20th Century Fox offices in the Times Square Palace Theatre building to show me his films run on a clickety-clack projector, most notably, sequences from an unedited “Night Tide” with beautiful, young Dennis Hopper playing a sailor who’s caught up in a fantasy world in and around Southern California’s Santa Monica pier. “Night Tide” wouldn’t have general release for another twelve years.

  Then a short quirky film Curtis calls “Picnic,” with an odd-ball family clumsily making their way down to a beach through dusty green ice plants—Zuma Beach near Malibu—sand blowing into their food. Another without a title, shots of boiling mud pots filmed somewhere near the Salton Sea in Southern California.

  Shall Curtis become my long-time companion? Love making is gratifying, but Curtis tells me he would never cast me in his films. “You lack a strong center,” he says. I’m not sure what he means; perhaps he’s expecting me to take charge, dominate—call the shots in our tenable intimacies.

  At the time Curtis is developing strong ties with his idols—Josef von Sternberg who literally made Marlene Dietrich a star—proudly spreading out a collection of black and white photographs on the bed from Dietrich-Sternberg films. Curtis’s natural habitat is Hollywood, not New York, and he would soon return to begin a long and successful career as film maker—theatrical and for television. He was to become a close friend to James Whale, director of the first two Frankenstein movies. Curtis appears as one of the  commentators in a 1998 documentary DVD of “Gods and Monsters.”

  Our paths would cross again briefly in 1962 at Jerry Wald’s office in Hollywood. “Night Tide” at last had been released. Alas, he offers me no work in a Jerry Wald production. Apparently, in Curtis Harrington’s eyes, I still lack a “strong center.”

Dennis Hopper in Nightide

  The last I will see of Curtis Harrington in 1950, he’s standing over a gas jet in his cramped Westside apartment, looking into a pot of boiling potatoes, carrots and cabbage, turning to me to explain, “These contain all the essential food elements. Meager faire perhaps, but I’m saving my money for a trip to the Cannes Film Festival.”

  [NOTE:  Complete information about Curtis Harrington – search for Curtis Harriington Papers and Harvard University “A Tribute to Curtis Harrington”)

  Today, remembered visions of New York during those first seven months are sepia toned, or black and white—little color in them, no bright reds or orange, yellows or blues, except for faces of children’s dancing mirror images clutching golden poles on a swirling carousel at Coney Island in February on a day when the mercury in the city climbs to sixty degrees. Most  snapshots, however, are black and white—the Chrysler building hovering in the distance over Third Avenue El. Staring up at skyscrapers would get a sharp response from Dean, “People will think you’re a tourist,” but that doesn’t stop me from craning my neck, eyes up into the sky, continued fascination of Manhattan towers.

  Dean also scolds me for not devoting more time to making rounds and selling myself to agents and producers. At lunch in a theatre district hangout, he nods toward a young man who appears to be pitching himself to suits. “There,” he says, “that’s what you should be doing—getting yourself around and meeting agents and producers.” Dean’s right, of course. What’s stopping me?

  One notable episode filled with colors of every hue—Dean taking me to a Saturday matinee performance of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (later to become the Royal Ballet), standing room behind the grand tier boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House. I anticipate Moira Shearer with flowing red hair, much adored by our tea-clatch U.C.L.A. in “The Red Shoes.”

  “Forget Moira Shearer,” Dean says. “We all came running to see her at first, but what a surprise we got—fabulous Margo Fonteyn. Wait till you see her.”

  How right Dean is. How can one describe Margot Fonteyn? “Look at that face,” Dean whispers, those black eyes!” She’s dancing in “Façade,” a production notable for costuming, muted shades of gossamer greens, yellows, browns.

  Years later I will applaud more than once Margot Fonteyn’s remarkable talent, her incredible mastery, passion and skill, one of hundreds to see her dancing with Rudolph Nureyev and the Royal Ballet in their premiere season at the old Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1963.

  Without Dean’s urging, in my own narcissistic wanderings, I discover Gian-Carlo Menotti’s opera “The Consul” at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, a memorable tour de force for Patricia Neway singing the role of Magda Sorel. It would close in November, 1950 after 269 performances—a Kafka-like tragedy, woman struggling through a nameless bureaucracy to get out of a nameless country. What is my name – Agnes Sorel! My name is a number, my number, a name . . .

  Outings with Curtis Harrington include trips to the Museum of Modern Art—fulfilling the promise made in September scurrying across 53rd Street in search of a phone booth. “Broken Blossoms” and “Tol’able David,” both starring a young Richard Barthelmess who belonged to Harrington’s grouping of “centered” idols. The showings are great fun. If there was the slightest indication of inappropriate laughter during a serious film, a message would flash on the screen, “Any further levity and we will discontinue showing this film.” Levity is difficult to suppress in “Greed” when Zazu Pitts holds her nose as she sits on the manhole cover of a sewer, or falls ignominiously into the mud.

  “Do you like fish?”  Kitty’s voice on the phone at Federal Savings is a surprise. “I’m going to the fish market today, thought I’d bring home a red snapper.” Rough old lady she was, but Kitty cared for her boy-os. If Richard or Stan Price, the other fellows living at Kitty’s, didn’t get back to the apartment by four-thirty in the morning, Kitty was out on the streets, storming through Seventh Avenue bars to bring them home, and always these forays proved successful. More than once, Richard said, he was saved from a night in the tombs for public drunkenness.

4

  At last! rushing once more across town, on foot, this  time to a casting call at Equity Library Theatre—no pay, but a chance to get known. It’s Sunday so I’m wearing Levis, shirt without a necktie.

  Director Ed Ludlum, unimpressed by my “brilliant” career at U.C.L.A., casts me as “A Cop,” in an original one-act, “August Heat.” The cop—silent straight man to the mother who’s son I’m here to arrest played by Dora Weisman—sits on the front porch. Weisman comes out of the house and hovers over me. “Com-fa-ta-bul?” she says in the style of well-known and beloved Molly Goldberg, and gets one of the play’s few laughs.

    Ed’s stage manager is David Woehrle who recently had stage managed Ed’s Calypso singers tours around town—Brown skin girl, stay home an’ mind bay-bee. Fate is playing a hand. David Woehrle, a young Prince of Wales, wears simple slacks and a gray knitted sweater with deers woven into the fabric. I’m in love. He will change the course of my life.

  Ed reenters our lives in 1955 in Columbus, Ohio, directing a touring company from New York under a tent in Worthington, casting me as Sabrina’s boyfriend in “Sabrina Fair”; and at Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills, January, 1960 as Billy Herndon in Equity Library Theatre West’s first production, “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” Surfacing again at the Buck’s County Playhouse in 1968—post David.

  It is  now Halloween, October 31, 1950—lights fade on this only performance, walking with David at my side down Lexington Avenue, all the way to 34^th Street—“getting to  know you, getting to know all about you,” if such is possible.

  He’s from Columbus, Ohio, and a year back was in California studying at the Pasadena Playhouse where he met a wealthy man who was principal shareholder in Forest Lawn, burial ground for the stars. The man lured David to New York and housed him in a luxurious suite in the Essex House. (Sidebar: Dean’s story—one night the “ES” in ESSEX burned out to declare the hotel, SEX HOUSE in bright lights, seen from the north above the trees of Central Park.) David escaped to find haven on 34th Street.

  He invites me up to his room in an immense, foreboding structure at Thirty-fourth and Lexington, at the foot of Murray Hill. Room numbers conjure up penitentiaries, as in “F4, Section 6”; shared pull chain johns with small showers available down a murky hallway—one to a floor. The whole place smells of mould lingering in hallways, captured from hot, humid summers. Far cry from the  maid’s room at Kitty’s, I surrender to “the gnawing hunger of lonely men, for a home and all that it means. . .” to quote Robert Service’s “Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

  Previously, David experienced a brief liaison with an Irish boy, Jack Conway, who worked United Nations missions in Palestine, West Germany, Korea. Jack’s absence did not make David’s heart grow fonder. Jack wrote him from Korea: “If only I had heard from you, we might have made a go of it.”

  Small worlds indeed: Jack Conway would reappear significantly again in 1952. and again in 1962. But that story will have to wait.

David Woehrle

  Overnight visits with David seem to go unnoticed by Kitty, but after a few days,  returning early in the morning, attempting to sneak through the dining room, Kitty, sitting up wide awake in her bed, confronts me, “Where have you been? I was after sendin’ the boys out to find you. Your bed hasn’t been slept in for a week now.”

  “I’ve been staying overnight with. . . with someone.”

  “You got yourself a woman?” Hesitating too long. “You’re not sleeping with a man, are you?” “No,” replying much too quickly.

  Alas, I  will not live out treasured time at Kitty O’Brien’s much longer, nor fulfill my rite of passage. I will share David’s room with one small window through which may be seen a brick wall, no doubt inciting desire to get back to California, leave Manhattan’s  beckoning towers, abetted by David’s hatred of the New York scene, causing occasional melancholic moods. A country boy from New Rome, Ohio, a few miles west of downtown Columbus, David never takes  to big city life.

  Bill Boyett, fellow actor in “The Pilgrimage  Play” the previous summer, suddenly appears at my teller’s window at Federal Savings, slapping an Actor’s Equity contract for the touring company of “Mister Roberts” on the counter, offering it as security for a twenty-dollar loan. Hesitating to slip him money from the teller cage, I suggest a break at a street vendor and while munching on a cheese Danish, Bill explains how, after breaking up with his girlfriend (again!), he had spent a lonely Thanksgiving ending up drunk in a gutter somewhere on the lower Eastside—a laughing, hysterical drunk. This recalls my own Thanksgiving, spent alone.

  David has gone north to camp in thousand lakes country with his two Canadian girlfriends, co-workers at the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations where he works as Diplomatic  Courier, Thanksgiving “dinner” is a sauerkraut hot dog spread with hot mustard bought from a street vendor near Grand Central Station.

  A tragic event the  night before, Thanksgiving eve, doesn’t help. Alone in the room, I switch on the radio, hoping good music will embrace me. Instead, a solemn voice breaks in to report two Long Island Railroad trains in Richmond Hill near Jamaica have slammed into each other with heavy loss of life. Thanksgiving day, The New York Times details the wreck:

  When the Hempstead train approached Jamaica, passing signal block J in Richmond Hill, engineer William Murphy reduced his speed to 15 mph. Then for some reason, the air brakes locked—Murphy can’t release them. The train rolls to a stop. Murphy tries repeatedly to get it moving again but it won’t budge, so out there in the darkness, the 6:09 is stalled. . .

  It’s 6:32. After leaving Penn Station four minutes behind the Hempstead train, the train bound for Babylon comes barreling down the tracks close to 65 mph. Suddenly with a cataclysmic boom, it slams into the rear of the stalled train, precipitating the worst train wreck in Long Island and New York State’s history. The shuddering impact sends the front  of the onrushing train plunging down the middle of the other train’s last car, cutting it in half lengthwise as if sliced by a giant cleaver, driving it fifteen feet into the air. Seventy on the train are killed.

  But David will be home on Friday, and we’re going to meet our ballet teacher Julia Cross’s artist husband, Philip Evergood, taking the train bound for Babylon for transfer to Patchogue.

5

  Julia Cross Evergood, red hair erupting flaming tresses, large knitted bag over shoulders, enters the

small dance studio, a Sixth Avenue third floor walk-up. It’s six o’clock, Thursday. Julia isn’t tall, and not as young as she would like us believe, but she’s kept her body trim, and smokes a lot, coughing out instructions, “One, two, three – toin,” betraying Bronx origins. In a Paris gala in 1931 she danced as the legendary Pavlova, and there she met artist Philip Evergood.

  David Woehrle met Julia “off-off Broadway” playing Tom in Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie,” Julia as Tom’s domineering, cantankerous mother, Amanda. Obviously Julia is inordinately enamored of David, encouraging him between drags on cigarettes, “You’re an artist, dahling” (cough-cough).

  To me she says little; when partnering, “You’re so stiff, dahling,” (cough-cough), but I love making fairly respectable grand jetés. Two other men struggle with the five positions, never mastering grand jetés—two aging queens who live in Gramercy Park in a golden draped refuge overflowing with antiques and Tiffany lamps; and who at the ballet sit in row E, center, focusing their attention through binoculars on male dancers’ bulging, manly appendages enshrined in tights.

  Friday, after my lonely, depressing Thanksgiving celebration, Julia, David and I board the Long Island train which will carry us to Julia and Philipe’s Patchogue home, close to Great South Bay on Long Island’s southern shore. Traveling through the dark tunnel before coming out into evening air near Kew Gardens, I can’t help thinking of the rail disaster, and I’m sure, so are David and Julia, but not a word is spoken.

Philipe Evergood Self-Portrait

  Philip as artist is far beyond what I’ve expected of him as “mad and eccentric.” I’m  not disappointed as we enter his huge studio, blustering beneath a gigantic northern skylight, tossing a pallet at a spot-lit blank white canvass leaning against the wall, shouting, “Damn!”

  Seeing us, he  sucks in his breath, “Julia! brought home a couple of starving strays for dinner, have you? Gentlemen, please excuse my passion.” British accents coloring his voice.

  “Oh Philip,” Julia gasps in near whisper, making intros. “David is an artist,” she says.

  “Unfortunate profession! Behold the mess—messy life, fraught with chaos! Hungry?  Julia, food! food!”

  The studio is cluttered with tubes of paint and large unfinished canvasses leaning against three of the walls, one easel holding a blank white canvas aching to be violate; table littered with opened cans of turpentine, brushes, magazines and scattered papers, an uncorked expensive looking bottle of red wine poured into an oversized wine glass, large enough for a brandy snifter, the glass finger-painted with smears of reds and oranges. Unmade bed in a far corner of the room makes me wonder how he can sleep amidst this cloying smell of paint and turpentine.

  At the dinner table, Philip comes into clearer focus—overweight, young, jet black hair, round cherub face, remnants of an abandoned moustache, dark, penetrating eyes, a young Charles Laughton. He beguiles us with lurid tales as he breaks chunks of a baguette, swirling them through spaghetti sauce.

  “The French are unpredictable, and mad—all quite mad. Remember Julia the entertainment offered up at dinner by the  Count and his wife in their stately chateau? And a mistress—all at the same table. The Count makes his entrance into the room in a wheelchair accompanied by this Nubian servant carrying the Count’s gigantic balls in a wheelbarrow.” Pausing to sip his wine, laughing raucously—“Those gigantic balls!”

  From Julia, “Oh, Philip!”

  He looks at Julia benignly, recalling their days in Paris. “You should have seen Julia then, young, beautiful, about to ascend Pavlova’s throne. I fell in love with her at once, seduced her, and married her.”

  “Oh, Philip.”

  Whatever Julia’s motivation for saying it, David Woehrle is an artist, and certainly he would’ve liked Philip’s validation, but it’s not to come; probably because Philip senses Julia’s infatuation. Next day, away from Philip, with sketchpads and water colors in hand, Julia takes us to an inlet near Patchogue on the Great South Bay. A melancholic Saturday afternoon, cool, moody autumn day, southeast wind blowing low clouds.

  Julia’s effort is literal and contained; David’s shows absolute control over the elusive water-color medium, painting choppy water, shoreline, cloud-filled sky, and for good measure a clearly defined sailboat that isn’t there. I have no control whatever, swirling blues and grays and greens on the sketchpad—the scene perhaps well defined, but hardly a work of art.

  Philip greets them inside the foyer as they return, demanding to see results. Quickly looking over Julia’s and David’s water colors, he grunts, “Yes, yes,” then snatching my sketchpad, exclaims, “This is magnificent!” clearly attempting to humiliate David, but  David smiles a quiet smile. He  knows.

  Philip Evergood, born Philip Blashki in New York City on October 26, 1901, is son of an unsuccessful Polish painter who came to America from Australia. Philip graduated from Eton in 1919. To cover his Jewish heritage, he changed his name to Evergood because he’d read a comment by Winston Churchill that Anglo-Saxons were full of prejudice. Philip left Cambridge University to study drawing under Henry Tonks, head of the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1923 he returned to America where he studied with George Luks at the Art Students League in New York City, then migrated to Paris where he attended the Académie Julian. Returning to New York in 1926, in 1927 held his first one-man show and thereafter exhibited frequently.

  In France in 1929, traveling through Spain in 1931, he’s impressed with El Greco. In Paris the same year, he married the dancer, Julia Cross.

  David and I would paint frequently in our  room at 34^th Street, sometimes with a melancholy neighbor. Strangely, I was reminded of this while watching an episode of “Queer as Folk” in 2001 – Justin about to send a letter to Dartmouth accepting admittance to satisfy his father when his real desire is to go to art school, notices a denim jacket hanging on the door and begins to sketch it—an exact replica of a denim jacket I sketched in charcoal one night in our room at 34^th Street.

  Julia has been “studying Shakespeare” with actress Daisy Belmore and has introduced her to David. Daisy’s room is on the “women only” sixteenth floor of the Wellington Hotel on Seventh Avenue—painfully close to the remembered comfort of Kitty O’Brien’s. Daisy has fastened on David as a young Prince of Wales (who will  abdicate the throne and become the Duke of Windsor.)

  Daisy’s proclamation, To stand and having stood still stand! after her successful appearance as the witch in Tennessee Williams, “The Rose Tattoo,” is not enough to keep me in New York. On Saturday, April 17, 1951 we are on a Greyhound Bus with one-way cross-country tickets, stopping over in Washington, D.C. to rendezvous with Jean and René, David’s co-workers from Pakistan Mission to the U.N. A walk among the cherry trees in full bloom, touring Maryland and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, thrilled by my first sight of dogwood trees white, pink-centered flowers lacing through small green-leafed trees in Maryland woodlands—is certainly excuse enough for running away from Manhattan’s grime—but all the way to California? Had I stayed in New York one more month, I might have discovered dogwood trees transforming the land up the Hudson River—Dobbs Ferry, Tarrytown and Old Sleepy Hollow Road, Briarcliff Manor.

  That tour would have to wait one more year, traveling north from an apartment on the Hudson River in Yonkers. Now it’s stop over for a short visit to Columbus, Ohio, New Rome, David’s home, then cross the continent to L.A. Mark Buchoz, still living with Don, has found us an apartment in a  court near U.S.C.

  The true rite of passage is yet to come—to know the City and claim, “I’m a New Yorker—bitching and griping and loving the city and hating it all at once.”

  Witnessing on television the incomprehensible September 11, 2001 tragedy, I wonder if New Yorkers will recover. Will permanent psychic damage haunt their days? Wing-nut, dooms-say religionists say New Yorkers their Babylonian way of life is to blame, but New Yorkers aren’t listening. They will mourn, yet assuredly comprehend the incomprehensible, and continue to thrive. In 2001, and to this day, I feel in my bones New Yorkers will go about their business with determination to survive and know they can fix anything.

  Listening to Sarah Jessica Parker on Bravo’s Inside the Actor’s Studio soon after the 9/11 tragedy, expressing her passion for New York City, and knowing she’s one of millions of New Yorkers who share this passion, I wonder if I should regret not sticking it out—stand and having stood still stand, with single-minded purpose.

  In April, 1951, I imagine, but don’t quite believe, I’m relinquishing the Manhattan dream forever, in spite of Dean Hoffmann’s advising me, “If you’re depressed, take a trip to Bermuda.” (How wrong I was!)

  After theatre in the 1960s, wandering up Seventh Avenue, there it is—Cecil’s Tavern. Though not particularly fond of Irish bars, I can’t resist. At the bar, I order an Irish whiskey to  claim legitimacy for being there. Steeling myself, I ask the bartender, a big, strapping red head, “Did you know Kitty O’Brien? She used to hang out here—a long time ago, around 1950-51.”

  “Sure I know Kitty,” he says, swirling a wet rag on the counter. “She lived on fifty-fourth street many years. You know her?”

  “Yes, I had a room in her apartment. Is she still there?”

  “Oh now she left a long time ago. She’d be living up in the Bronx with her sister.”

  “She’s okay then?”

  “Yeah, ‘sfar as I know. Haven’t seen her for some time.”

  “I was one of her boys back in 1950. I had the maid’s room.”

  Wringing the rag, he lets go a big laugh. “Did she ever rescue you?”

  “No—”

  “Kitty walkin’ Seventh Avenue in the dead a’ night, in and out of bars and God knows where, looking for to drag her boy-os home.”

  “What happened to the apartment?”

  “Well, y’know, they finally caught on to her, tried to get her evicted for renting out rooms, but Kitty’s a tough old broad, ran a speakeasy in the twenties, y’know.”

  “She got evicted?”

  “Saints, no, fought ‘em in court, accused the owners overcharging her rent, and she won, even got money back! But, y’know, she got old like we all do, gave it up and moved to the Bronx with her sister.”

  Afraid he might reveal unmanly sentiment, he swirls the wet rag on the counter, clenching his jaw.“ They don’t make ‘em like Kitty O’Brien anymore. ’Nother whiskey?”

NEXT – Return to  New York – “The Birds of Killingworth and Daisy Belmore.”