New York in the '50s (7 page)

I elbowed my way through the homecoming crowd on assignment from
Spec
to get photos of Ike, on leave from the presidency of Columbia to run for the U.S. presidency. He was making a campaign stop at this pregame picnic lunch by the football field, and I snapped my Rolleiflex as he gnawed fried chicken with the faculty and tried to smile.

Homespun Ike never seemed comfortable at intellectual Columbia. “Dammit, what good are exceptional physicists … exceptional anything, unless they are exceptional Americans?” he fumed, questioning a university scholar. In the rah-rah fifties rhetoric he helped create, Eisenhower urged Columbia to become “a more effective and productive member of the American national team.” He surely felt even more out of tune with Columbia's student body that fall, when the
Spectator
published a front-page editorial supporting Adlai Stevenson for president and described the Eisenhower campaign as “the Great Disenchantment.”

As I worked more for
Spec
, I got to be friends with Max Frankel's successor as editor, a hard-driving newsman named Jerry Landauer, who seemed to be born with journalistic genes. Jerry was a lean and muscular man with a blond crew cut who reminded me of a student version of a
Front Page
reporter. He was literally a dashing figure, popping up wherever a story was breaking on campus with pencil poised, tie loosened, ready to fire the right question with the speed and accuracy of a bullet. Reporting came naturally to Jerry, but he sweated over the writing, fiercely rubbing his bristling hair while he composed sentences behind a typewriter or sat up late
consuming black coffee at the counter of Chock Full O' Nuts on Broadway.

“Dammit, Danny! I wish I could write like you,” Jerry said, throwing an arm around my shoulder and shaking his head as we hurried to the V & T Pizzeria on Amsterdam. He was the only college friend who called me Danny, the childhood name I wanted to leave behind in Indiana, but from Jerry I didn't mind it. How could I complain when he praised me like that?

“But Jerry,” I always replied, “you're the best damn reporter. I never ask the right questions like you.”

“Ah, to hell with it, Danny. You can
write
.”

This exchange continued throughout our long friendship. Jerry went on to become an investigative reporter in Washington for the
Wall Street Journal
, and I'd go down there on assignments for
The Nation, Esquire
, and
The Atlantic
, in the sixties and seventies, and sleep on his living room couch. I wasn't surprised when he broke a top story by rooting in a wastebasket in a Senate hearing room after everyone had left, finding on a wadded scrap of paper a witness's doodles that provided the clue to hidden corruption.

Judah L. Berger, called Joe, had Jerry's intensity but wasn't as totally focused on journalism and
Spec
, even though he became its managing editor. He saw the study of history as a key to understanding what made things, and even people, tick—the way some of us looked to literature or psychology for clues to the human condition, and hoped to find answers to our own. Joe's favorite course was a class in American history taught by Lee Benson, a lively young instructor who was writing a book on a mundane topic he presented with the passion of high drama, as if it held the mystery and meaning of the universe:
Merchants, Farmers, and Railroads
.

Joe Berger was fascinated by Benson's obsession with his subject. “Railroads,” Joe said, leaning forward, his eyes wide with amusement and awe. “Imagine, Wake-o, everything working out the way it has because of railroads!”

Who was the glamorous girl with Sam Astrachan, our fledgling novelist who paced Broadway late at night with his hands clasped behind his back? Sam was standing outside the College Inn restaurant on Broadway one early February evening in 1955 with this tall, attractive girl who had shiny black hair, bright red lipstick, and a
long black coat with a fur collar. Sam, in his customary black suit and white shirt with no tie, was smiling more broadly than usual, and invited me to come to the West End Bar & Grill and have a drink with him and “Zelda.”

She was really Jane Richmond, and she could have passed for a twenties flapper that night. She loved the legend surrounding Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, our generation's idols of literary glamour and doom. Jane had published a story in
Focus
, the Barnard literary magazine (the undergraduate women's counterpart to
The Columbia Review
, as the
Barnard Bulletin
was their
Spectator
). Gender segregation of publications, as well as classrooms, was taken for granted; the problem was, Jane told us, there was no equivalent of Columbia's humor magazine. She and her friends wanted to start their own, a Barnard version of
Jester
. “We want to call it
Shvester
,” she said. “It's Yiddish for ‘sister.'”

We agreed it was a great idea, but it never came to be.

“I was a literary girl, a writing major,” Jane says, looking back. She won the Elizabeth Janeway Writing Prize when she graduated, started writing for the satirical television show of the sixties, “That Was the Week That Was,” wrote scripts for “Kate and Allie,” and continued her lifelong love of writing short stories, which have appeared in
The New Yorker
and other magazines.

Though Barnard girls were segregated from Columbia's undergraduate classes and publications, they were welcomed at the West End, whose notorious allure was unintentionally enhanced by Diana Trilling, Lionel's wife and herself a literary critic. Mrs. Trilling immortalized the place in a
Partisan Review
piece as “that dim waystation of undergraduate debauchery on Morningside Heights.” She compared it unfavorably to the “well-lighted” Stewart Cafeteria, a popular literary hangout in
her
day.

With a horseshoe-shaped bar, a steam table offering stews and other student bargains, plus wooden booths and a jukebox, the West End was the all-purpose off-campus hangout for Columbia and Barnard. It provided a respite from academia as a place to go for drinks, dates, and fun, and also served as a haven where students could moan about their troubles over a beer. When the threat of being drafted to fight in Korea struck Columbia men at the start of the decade, they knew where to go for comfort. The editors of
Spec
reported: “Rumors that the college ranks would be depleted by the end of the year [1951] caused many to lose faith and many more to find solace in the West End.”

The West End owed its literary rep to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other beats who frequented the place in the forties, and some of them reappeared in our own time. Jane Richmond saw Kerouac there just after
On the Road
came out and she was a senior at Barnard. “He loved women with dark hair,” she says. “He'd look at me and say, ‘You Greek girl? Why you all look like that?'” She had also met Ginsberg, “one of the sweetest people I've ever known. He told someone I always looked like I was wearing a big picture hat.”

Ginsberg got the right image for Jane—a sense of largesse, bigness of spirit, a celebratory air. Her smile, her ability to make you laugh, her very presence, lit up the time and place.

I didn't meet Ginsberg at the West End back then, but I knew about him. He was a personage on the Columbia scene, a mixture of mystery and legend even before the publication of
Howl
had made him famous. A rumor buzzed among literature students that he'd been the inspiration for the brilliant, troubled student in Lionel Trilling's short story “Of This Time, of That Place,” though Trilling later denied the character was based on any real people.

No one denied that Ginsberg had been suspended from the college and spent time at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute: “The people here see more visions in one day than I do in a year,” he wrote his student friend Jack Keroauc. Both Trilling and Mark Van Doren testified for Ginsberg when he was brought to trial for possession of stolen goods. He had gotten mixed up with friends who pulled a robbery and stored the loot at his apartment; Van Doren told him he had to choose between criminals and society (“Some of us here have been thinking that it might be a good thing for you to hear the clank of iron”). Ginsberg was later cleared of the charge.

Besides such notorious escapades, Ginsberg was known for his talent as a poet, and was even recognized as such by Norman Podhoretz, a fellow student who became his literary arch-rival. “What I remember about him was his virtuosity with metrical forms,” Podhoretz recalls. “I remember him writing something in heroic couplets,
and he wrote in other traditional forms, so when he busted loose it was not as if he couldn't write conventional verse. He was more like an abstract painter who was good at figurative stuff.”

Ginsberg was starting to read Whitman then, and felt at odds with the prevailing academic attitude toward poetry. “When I was at Columbia,” he says, “Shelley was considered a jerk, Whitman ‘an awkward prole,' and William Carlos Williams wasn't in the running.” Ginsberg felt alienated from the faculty in other ways was well: “I told Trilling I smoked grass and he was horrified. He thought it was a nineteenth-century disease.”

My friends and I at Columbia in the fifties would have been as shocked. “I was surprised by the beats coming out of Columbia,” Max Frankel says. “That was a side of the college I never knew, and it was just a few years before me. We were such innocents. There wasn't any dope around, and a beer party was a big thing.”

Because we were serious students who hit the books not out of a sense of duty but from a driving curiosity to find answers, to understand, didn't mean we spent all our time holed up in the library. “New York is our laboratory” was a jocular toast, as we winked knowingly and clinked glasses of draft beer at the San Remo in the Village, swilling it to give us the courage to pick up the wistful girls at another table whose long hair and sandals we hoped were signs of bohemian belief in free love (it more likely indicated a sophisticated disdain for college boys).

New York was not just our laboratory but our theater, our art museum, our opera house. It was one thing to take a music appreciation course—students at any college did that—but quite another to have the music of great professionals performed live. Mike Naver got us standing-room tickets for
Don Giovanni
at the Metropolitan Opera (the old one, on 39th and Broadway), and we looked over the massive, gilt-embellished tiers of boxes under jeweled chandeliers. This was the real thing.

New tastes burst inside me like music when I went to my first French restaurant, a modest place with red-checked tablecloths in the West 50s called the Café Brittany, where students and young office workers could afford to take a date for dinner. Continental cuisine had not made its way to the cities of the plains back then; I had known of no French food in Indianapolis. The Mandarin Inn,
with chop suey, and the Italian Village, with the first post–World War II pizza, had been our exotic foreign restaurants.

What knocked me out in the Brittany was not so much the sauces and the tender flesh of coq au vin (so different from the chicken I knew, fried to a crisp) but the revelation—to a boy who had grown up eating vegetables condemned to death by midwestern ritual boiling rites—that green beans could actually have a taste.

That sense of bursting open, of blooming, accompanied all these excursions into the city. Here was the source, the living experience of books now lifting off the page, as after art appreciation classes I went for the first time with Columbia friends to the Museum of Modern Art. I was overwhelmed, shaken up, and turned around by Picasso's stark, howling
Guernica
, with arms that seemed to stretch from the canvas into my heart and mind.

I loved New York and Columbia, and was stricken when I had to stay out the fall semester of my junior year, but grateful I was alive to return after a car wreck in August 1953 put me in the South Chicago Community Hospital with a broken and dislocated fifth cervical vertebra. I was in traction for three months, and read the Greek tragedies and Dos Passos's
U.S.A
. with the aid of a pair of refracting glasses, as well as letters and copies of
Spectator
from my friends back at Columbia. I went home in a body cast and eagerly returned to Morningside Heights in a neck brace for the spring semester of 1954.

I took to smoking little cigars called Between the Acts, which came in a red and white tin, and making forays to Greenwich Village with Malcolm Barbour, whom I got to know in a writing class. My image of Englishmen was of stiff, tea-drinking gentlemen, but Barbour was a rumpled, irreverent, beer-drinking Brit, a regular guy whose humor was simply funneled through an accent. We became good friends, comparing rejection slips, reading each other's stories, dreaming of beautiful girls.

Once, while drinking our beers in a booth of the San Remo and speaking of the stories we wanted to write and the sex we wanted to have (our ongoing obsessions), our privacy was suddenly invaded by a wild man who looked like a bum, waving sheets of paper at us with poems he had written. He wanted to sell them, for either a dime or a quarter apiece (the price was negotiable). We got rid of
him as quickly as possible and laughed as he left. A long-haired woman on her way back from the bar saw us laughing and said reproachfully, “That's Bodenheim.”

“Bodenheim?” Barbour asked me as the woman moved on. “Who the hell's Bodenheim?” I didn't know either, and we watched as the poor man went to other tables and booths, trying to sell his wares. Most everyone seemed to know him, and some greeted him kindly, but no one that night bought any poems. In our undergraduate giddiness, Barbour and I thought the name itself was funny: “Was that
Bodenheim?
” “Don't you know
Bodenheim?
” I later learned, to my shame, that the man we were mocking had been a well-known poet in the twenties, one whose work Mark Van Doren had published in
The Nation
.