The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (26 page)

ACT III

ONE AFTERNOON IN T HE first week of May 2002, I walked up to the third floor to see Aaron and noticed, in an adjacent cubbyhole, an entirely unlikely figure, a man of about fifty dressed in a white shirt and tie, a pen clipped to his pocket, his silver hair combed straight back. Aaron said, “Would you like to meet our general manager?”—and just like that, the silver-haired man walked in. His name was Marc Barbanell. Marc began talking in a strangely indirect fashion about how Richard Basciano—not “Richie,” as Aaron called him—had organized and amplified and modernized and so forth the “concept” downstairs. I noticed he never used the word “sex” in connection with the concept. He talked about a “longtime association” with Richard, though in a “private, personal capacity.” Now, he said, he had been asked to join “the corporate side of the organization. ” He was, himself, a “corporate” person. He proved this point by using elaborate metaphors about pulling the trigger, and not going beyond the water’s edge, and so on. “You could say that I’m the vehicle,” he said, and now for the first time he looked at Aaron—he was the vehicle to ensure that the enterprise succeeded in regard to dollars and cents. That didn’t necessarily sound like a positive development. And in fact, when it came to the bottom line, Marc wasn’t the least bit ambivalent. “I am under serious profit pressure from Richard,” he announced. He talked about thirty-day, sixty-day, ninety-day “time frames.”

There may have been some setting in which Marc Barbanell wouldn’t have seemed out of place—a scene from George S. Kaufman’s hallucinatory
Beggar on Horseback,
for example—but at Todo Con Nada Show World he stood out like a unicorn, or like a unicorn in a suit. I immediately followed Marc back to his cubbyhole, where I found that he had busied himself with paperwork. He had a beeper clipped to his pocket. I asked Marc whether he thought I might be able to talk to Mr. Basciano. This provoked another monologue: this is an organization that plays close to the vest, that operates according to certain principles, that is not interested in celebrity . . . Marc said that the organization received “requests” from a wide variety of sources—“Air Force One—”

“Air Force One?”

“Yes; Richard’s response was that he was not interested.” In what? Marc wouldn’t say. The cryptic drone resumed: “We will make a determination as to whether this opportunity fits with our organizational goals . . .” I finally excused myself and backed out the door. I went over to Aaron’s office and gave him a skeptical waggle of the eyebrows. Aaron said, “Marc is a corporate person.” He appeared not to be joking, which I took to be a bad sign.

The next time I saw Marc, in early June, he explained that he had agreed to talk to me, though Richard would not. He said that he, Marc, had just booked a new play,
Hopscotch—
“a real uppity play, attracts a nice, clean, uppity crowd, kind of a midweek, clean-cut dating crowd.” This didn’t sound very much like the audience for
Pervy Verse,
not to mention for nonpornographic video booths. Then I noticed that Aaron’s door was locked. “He went out,” Marc said brusquely. “I ruffled his feathers. He’s having trouble accepting what’s going on here. I told him, ‘Aaron, Marc is here: We’re going to make some money.’” Apparently, Aaron had drastically misread the tea leaves: he had run through his patron’s stock of patience, as well as his bankroll. Marc was heading out for a meeting, and as we walked together down the ratty staircase to the second floor, he recalled his last exchange with the young Hammerstein. “I said to him, ‘Aaron, you’ve had two years. When are you going to start making money?’ And he goes, ‘We’ve got a new play coming in, we’ve got this thing and that thing.’ ‘Aaron, it’s a fucking loser. It’s a quarter of a million dollars so far, and no end in sight. I mean, it’s getting embarrassing.’” Marc had suddenly stopped talking in metaphors, which perhaps was also a bad sign. The name “Todo Con Nada,” he said, had already been removed from the marquee. In future, Marc said, “Aaron will have control over nothing.” He would be a promoter; he was free to promote, and Marc was free to buy or not buy.

Workmen were climbing all over the second floor, creating a very new kind of Show World. As we walked by, Marc pointed to a gray-haired figure standing with two workmen. “That’s Richard,” he said. I asked if I could at least say hello. Marc shook his head. “Best not,” he said.

I came by the following week for my interview with Marc and found him administering a dressing-down to Aaron. The latter was standing in the doorway in a red T-shirt and sky-blue sneakers, looking like a character from a Robert Crumb comic book. Aaron’s most recent production had bombed, and Marc, who was seated behind the desk in his tiny office—Aaron standing, Marc sitting—was delivering a lesson in accounting. “It doesn’t do any good to come to me and say, ‘Marc, I made eight grand last night’ if you lost twelve grand the night before. We’re still down four G’s, you get what I’m saying?” Marc was making imaginary entries on an imaginary ledger book. Marc talked about Frank, the accountant, and “the long finger of ET”—Frank’s probing finger, apparently. He spoke with the inch-thick patience one uses when addressing a refractory child. The child in question stood with his shoulders slumped, taking the blow, saying nothing. Aaron always seemed to know when not to be a smart-ass. He also knew when to take a punch—Mexican parochial school had taught him that. But he was still, in Marc’s ledger book, a loser.

Marc’s office was a bit cozy for an interview, unless one was sitting and the other standing, so he suggested we adjourn to the theater lobby. We walked down the fire stairs, threaded our way through the workmen, and sat in a blood-red banquette. An article on Show World’s transformation had just appeared, and it had used words like “smut.” Marc was fairly quivering with outrage; he seemed to be scrutinizing me with grim suspicion. He talked about Richard’s “integrity,” his “sincerity,” his “legitimacy,” even his “godliness.” It wasn’t just Richard but the “facility” that was misunderstood. “It’s kind of like looking in retrospect to you in junior high school,” Marc said. “When you dated a girl, what was your real assertion of why you dated the girl?” Marc gave me a waggish look; it was one of those questions that, at least inside Show World, answered itself. “Now you’re older, you want to marry her. So when you’re young at heart, years ago, back in the days of Show World, we had another image, and another assertion. Now we’re older, now we’re wiser, now we’re up-to-date in the evolution of the city.” The new Show World was the marrying kind. The irony was that Aaron wanted to exploit the dark cachet of pornography, but Marc was thinking of the uppity, good-time feel of dinner theater. Aaron seemed to believe in Show World a lot more deeply than Richie Basciano did.

Marc was a little defensive on the whole cultural-positioning front. “I want to make it clear that we’re
very
sensitive to the arts,” he said. They would be putting on shows in GoGo 1 and GoGo 2, including whatever downtown kind of shows Aaron could demonstrate would actually turn a profit. There would be fashion shows and maybe “an environmental thing that needs glitz and mirrors and strobe lighting.” The Big Top Cabaret would become a classy lounge–cum–sports bar. “If you’re coming here as a businessman,” Marc explained, “you want to see sports, you get a free cocktail, which is a beautiful cocktail glass full of scallops and shrimps and cocktail sauce which will be free to you upon two drinks.” Marc, too, dreamed of turning Show World into a scene; but it wasn’t quite the scene Aaron had in mind. “If Times Square Entertainment Center becomes a stigma,” Marc explained—he used the word “stigma” as if it meant its exact opposite—“if it’s the meeting place for theater, all the photographers are here, all the show people are here, all the people in the know are here, why would I want to remain from the sixties image in the lobby, when I know that the people that are visiting the peep shows are visiting them on a regular basis, basically it is what it is what it is what it is?” This was Marc’s way of expressing the idea that perhaps someday Show World could dispense with pornography altogether. It was Josh Alan Friedman’s worst nightmare.

ACT IV

THE FOLLOWING WEEK I met Aaron for lunch at Joe Franklin’s Memory Lane Restaurant. Aaron had a fedora perched on the back of his head like an old press agent. He was not, I discovered, any kind of a vegan: he had a filet mignon and two glasses of red wine. Marc had suspended Aaron’s entire theatrical schedule while construction continued, but Aaron was serene and upbeat, as always. Marc appealed to his sense of irony. “He’s an amazing English stylist,” Aaron said. “He goes, ‘Hey look, guy, I’m no Darth Nader from
Star World.
’” But Aaron also insisted that he and Marc “have a nice synergy together.” They were both “salespeople.” Aaron still believed that the
No Live Girls
booths, the art gallery, and much of the theatrical schedule were going to happen. But he also conceded, “I exist within the bubble”—within, that is, a transitional moment in the history of Times Square, in which the marketplace had not yet definitively dealt some in and others out. Aaron might well turn out to be too outré for the new Times Square. But, of course, that was the larger pattern of his life: create a new thing, and then watch it be appropriated and subsumed. There would always be the next venue. “I wanted,” he said, “to leave a template of ideas that, even if I was a failure, they could be picked up at a later date.”

Aaron had, it turned out, misread the tea leaves once again. The next time we spoke, in mid-July, Aaron said that Marc had booted him, and Todo Con Nada, out of Show World. Aaron was welcome to book either of the GoGo rooms, but with rentals set at $600 and $1,000 a night, Marc had, Aaron said, “priced out the world of alternative Broadway.” I mentioned that that seemed to be pretty much the idea, and Aaron said, “Well, the philosophy at Show World has always been, ‘Accentuate the negative.’” It was a rare moment of bitterness. But no matter. Aaron had already moved his operation to an old Broadway curtain factory on 45th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The place was saturated in Times Square lore: it overlooked the park where the notorious “Capeman murders” of 1959, which Paul Simon had dramatized in a play, had taken place. Todo Con Nada Times Square would be opening soon with a few solo shows. Aaron would be mounting productions in abandoned storefronts, as he had on Ludlow Street. He wasn’t defeated in the least; if he had to move the locus of Alternative Broadway to a new site, then so be it. Big things were in the offing. Aaron was working with a collaborator on a new production, titled
Icarus and Aria.
It would be, he said, “
Romeo
and Juliet
meets
Any Given Sunday
meets
Traffic—
in verse.”

ACT V

BY EARLY 2003, the renovation of the Times Square Entertainment Center was complete, and Marc Barbanell was eager to show off his new $2 million baby. Marc was still occupying his teeny-tiny windowless cubicle, though he had doffed the shirt and tie in favor of a black turtleneck. It was snowing heavily the afternoon I visited, but Marc took me out to the Eighth Avenue sidewalk to make a point. Here, just north of the Show World entrance, was the $75,000 LED sign announcing the new cabaret space, Le Club at Show World. Show World here, Le Club at Show World there—two separate entrances, two separate places. “It’s got a different
address,
” Mark explained, as if that said it all. “One is 673, the other is 669. Show World is a different place. It’s just like I have a Duane Reade next door.” We went back upstairs to the cabaret, which was state-of-the-art everything, from the six giant drop-down screens to the “intelligent lighting” system ($328,000), the sound system ($220,000), the cappuccino machine ($6,000), the “ventless cooker” ($10,000), and the plasma screens in the bar providing “total video continuity” (no price given). It was a dream. “We’ve got smoke, we’ve got lights, we’ve got dancing, we’ve got movement,” Marc said. “This place
rocks.
”

The walkie-talkie buzzed. It was Richie Basciano. Marc seemed flustered. “I’m giving a gentleman a tour of the facility,” he said. Apparently he hadn’t cleared my visit with top management. Richie’s disembodied voice was urbane and measured; he didn’t probe. They agreed to meet later in the day, and nothing further was said of the Man Who Is Show World. But it was Basciano, of course, who had agreed to throw what he hoped was good money after bad. After Marc had noticed that professional dancers could get a sluggish dance crowd up on its feet, he had put together the Le Club Dancers—“real dancers, not go-go trash.” They were drop-dead gorgeous, they had their own special outfit of sequins and bustiers, and they were trained by a professional choreographer. “Think of the Playboy Bunnies,” Marc said, “but without the Playboy.”

Marc had done his best to transform the interior into an Eighth Avenue version of a Playboy Club. The walls were red and black with bands of mirror tile, in homage to the Show World tradition, and the tables, the chairs, the VIP banquettes, and pretty much everything else was red and black as well. The foyer had been turned into a photo gallery, with big blowups of Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn, as well as the Statue of Liberty and the Flatiron Building. The bigger of the two theater spaces, where Aaron had staged
God of Vengeance,
was now a dance space, while the smaller GoGo 2—now “Theater 2”—featured improv and stand-up comedy. Thanks to advanced soundproofing technology, Marc could have one deejay playing salsa in one space, another playing reggae in the second, and a third playing hip-hop. Marc referred to this in his own private lexicon as “the tripaletic effect.”

But the more Marc talked about the plasma screens and the fully automated micros, the more I could sense the desperate frailty of the whole enterprise. The facility was trapped between identities. “I keep trying to tell people it’s not Show World anymore,” Marc said plaintively. “It’s Le Club
at
Show World. We’re keeping that name because it still has the stigma of Show World. But it’s mostly a negative, I promise you. You say ‘Show World,’ and people think ‘nude girls, live acts.’ That’s long gone. It’s
decades
old.” The name was driving away the upscale crowd—Asian girls, in particular, didn’t want to have anything to do with the place—and attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Law & Order
wanted to shoot a murder scene on the premises;
Sex and the City
wanted a sex scene. Marc wasn’t interested. “No sex, no murder, nothing negative.” But where was the positive going to come from? Marc admitted that he was hurting; the promoters he booked in weren’t making the bar minimums he charged, and he was being forced to shift to a different pricing mechanism. The economy was killing everyone.

Maybe this bid for respectability would crash, and Show World would end with racks full of kung fu videos like everyone else. But I was rooting for Marc. It was obvious, in retrospect, that Todo Con Nada at Show World had been foredoomed. Richie Basciano did not aspire to be alternative anything; neither, for that matter, did Times Square. And this particular rear entry to Times Square, here on Eighth Avenue, was not about making weird stuff broadly acceptable; it was about making dirty stuff broadly acceptable. Aaron Beall had been a false start; Marc Barbanell was the right man to negotiate the treacherous passage to respectability— from Show World to Le Club. Someday, many years from now, with the old Times Square only a picturesque memory, Richie Basciano’s grandchildren might come to think of him just as Aaron did: as the Florenz Ziegfeld of Eighth Avenue. And who, after all, remembered Ziegfeld’s invisible fish?