Several readers have expressed a liking for those features in Did You Sleep With the Models? that take them back to the New York, meaning the Manhattan, of the 1980s. The early days of that decade were pure bliss; I wrote about them in Chapter Two. All too soon, however, the shadow of AIDS eclipsed the carefree days and orgasmic nights, those delirious hours we imagined lasting on and on.
I hope these few vignettes will please those who are nostalgic for a New York that’s gone forever. If you weren’t there, perhaps you’ll savor these little stories like the dry petals, still slightly fragrant, of a forgotten bouquet.
The offices of Modernismo Publications, publisher of Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy, occupied the eleventh floor of 155 Avenue of the Americas, which is always called Sixth Avenue by New Yorkers. A year or so after I became editor-in-chief of the gay
division (heterosexual magazines were also Modernismo money makers), a new security guard arrived. John was a congenial black man around forty. His job, from roughly nine to five, was to be a presence on the ground floor near the elevators. More concierge than cop, he seemed never to have a problem with roughnecks or street people. I imagined him politely asking intruders to leave, and their surprise at such gentle treatment. Our building was on the fringe of SoHo, far removed from those parts of Manhattan considered high-crime areas.
John always had a cheery “Good morning!” for me and for others when we arrived. He and I would sometimes exchange a few moments of small talk as I waited for an elevator, and after a month or two he would occasionally visit the eleventh floor when his shift ended, for he was also friendly with several of my colleagues.
Two or three times in late afternoon he brought his wife up, an attractive woman about his same age who worked somewhere in the neighborhood and would stop to collect him on her way home. They were as American as — well, they were so normal that I have nothing unusual to report.
Until that night.
I can’t recall John’s wife’s name, so I’ll call her Dorothy — she actually resembled Dorothy Dandridge, now that I think about it. One summer day I arrived at my ususal
time, ten o’clock or ten-thirty, and John greeted me. This time he added, “Sam, Dorothy and I would like to invite you to dinner. Anytime that’s convenient for you, we’d love to have you.”
We fixed a date, and a week or so later I took the subway with John, after work, to their building, which was on the Lower East Side not far from the East River. On this particular evening Dorothy arrived half an hour or so after us. Now, John had told me several times during the week that he and Dorothy were looking forward to my visit. He asked if I had any favorite dinner items, or any dietary restrictions. “No,” I said, “whatever you serve will be delicious.”
Enter Dorothy around seven o’clock. “Oh,” she said, obviously taken aback. “Why Sam, what are you doing here?”
If you’re expecting John to remonstrate, “Why, honey, don’t you remember? We invited him for dinner” — he didn’t. He sat placidly on the sofa. Befuddled, I felt as out of place as un cheveu dans la soupe, to use a picturesque French phrase: as out of place as a hair in the soup.
Dorothy again: “If I had known you were coming I would have made dinner.” A pause. “Well, let’s see what’s in the kitchen.” She absented herself, and just then John led me to a window. “Look over there,” he pointed. “That’s the Brooklyn Bridge.”
It wasn’t. It was the Williamsburg, which is considerably upriver from the
Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge. “Oh yes,” I said, drily no doubt, for I wondered whether I was hallucinating, or whether they were.
“Let’s watch a show,” John said, turning on the TV. “I’ll put in a video.” My next surprise was the Jane Fonda Workout, which might not astonish patrons of a sports bar but which I found on the odd side as dinner entertainment.
And here comes dinner: a bagel, a dollop of strawberry jam, a dill pickle, and a bottle of Coke. “I hope you like it,” Dorothy said, apparently as pleased as Julia Child.
“My favorites,” I replied, remembering Elsa Maxwell’s Etiquette Book. “How did you guess?”
A few more leg raises by Miss Fonda, and it was time to say goodbye. “Thank you for a lovely evening,” I said, wondering if a creature resembling E.T. might appear to beam me up. Once in the street I tried to analyze the situation — New Yorkers are forever analyzing situations — but soon decided that no rational explanation would ever come to me. It would be too obvious to mention that movie, The Brother From Another Planet.
A week or so later, John was absent from work. I never saw him again.
Space aliens? Or maybe they just hadn’t read Martha Stewart’s first book, Entertaining.
For a time after my arrival in New York in the 1970s, I shared an apartment with a college friend on 106th Street between West End and Riverside. Broadway was a few steps to the east, and at Broadway and 110th Street was a large pharmacy. (It’s still there, only now coverted to a CVS.) Four blocks north of the pharmacy was St. Hugh’s and St. Hilda’s, a day school run by nuns of the Episcopal Church under the
administration of Reverend Mother Ruth. You’ve heard the phrase “more Catholic than the Pope” — Mother Ruth and her nuns were that. From the beginning, in 1950, into the ‘70s and later, they draped themselves in the garb of Roman Catholic nuns, long after the Romans had adopted modern dress.
Checking the school’s website now, I find not a single nun, or at least not one identifiable by costume, and the name of the institution has been reversed for reasons of p.c. chic: it’s now St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s. The etiquette, if not the feminist intent, is old-fashioned: call the lady’s name first.
Back to the late ‘70s, or maybe it was already 1980. I was waiting for a prescription in the pharmacy at 110th and Broadway. Standing nearby was a tall nun, as chastely swathed and coiffed as Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story. The pharmacist on duty that afternoon was one I had encountered before, a tall, gay Jewish man in his early
thirties with mischievous eyes and a tendency to joke rather aggressively with customers. Did he fancy a TV career as comedian, with gigs at Catskills resorts? No doubt — but Mama wanted a pharmacist. Once when I picked up an antibiotic for a sinus infection, he asked sotto voce, “Is it for the clap?” We can assume he didn’t have a filter.
Meanwhile, the tall nun had stepped away from the prescription counter and was perusing something a couple of yards distant. Just then, I heard him call out in clarion tones, “Okay, Sister, your birth control pills are ready!”
Expecting Sister to collapse in a dead faint, I watched as she strolled to the counter, handed him a couple of greenbacks, smiled like a Renaissance madonna, and went on her way.
To this day, I wonder: what were her habits outside the habit?
Later I lived at 270 West 91st Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. One summer afternoon in 1981 I left my apartment for a stroll, and just as I rounded the corner onto West End I heard a piercing shriek that might have come from an angry mccaw, loud even for a noisy city like New York. Startled, I turned to see what creature had emitted the bellow, the one word “TAXI!” reverberating loud enough, I imagined, to be heard across the Hudson in New Jersey.
I turned and saw Estelle Parsons running toward the taxi almost the way she ran from the law in Bonnie and Clyde. Only this time, of course, she wasn’t grasping a spatula in her hand
It’s now 1984, a few days after Christmas, and I have a visitor from North Carolina. He will move in next year and we’ll be together for eleven years. Tonight we’re at a play, The Garden of Earthly Delights, at St. Clement’s Church on West 46th Street, a 160-seat venue that still functions as an Episcopal church on Sundays but which has been converted to an off-Broadway theatre, the starting point of plays by David Mamet, Sam Shepherd, Terrence McNally, and other illustrious playwrights, along with performances by the likes of Faye Dunaway, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Harvey Fierstein.
We’re on the front row, and just as the lights go down a woman hurries to the end of our row and quickly seats herself beside me. I glance to the side and see Lily Tomlin. In New York, then and perhaps even now, there’s a celebrity on every corner, or so it seems, and the custom is to leave them to their privacy. Gushing and grabbing autographs is not the done thing; that’s for the provinces.
The audience is enraptured by the play — it’s more performance piece than traditional drama — and Lily Tomlin in the seat to my right is forgotten. At intermission she stands up, glances in my direction, and says, “Hi.” I return the greeting and she exits. I hear her say to the woman seated beside my boyfriend, “Hello, Celeste,” but pay no attention until my sharp-eyed companion whispers to me, “Do you know who that is?”
“No, who is it?”
“Celeste Holm.”
“I suppose that’s her husband beside her,” I whisper back, which is the extent of my interest. At the time, I knew very little about this actress, who in future years would loom across my path and who would eventually receive a cease-and-desist letter from my lawyer. But on this cold Manhattan night, as flurries drift over the theatre district when we leave St. Clement’s, nothing could seem more unlikely.
My boyfriend knows more about the actress than I do at this point. Back in my apartment, he says, “She looked toward me as though expecting me to recognize her and speak. I almost did. I wanted to ask if she did the voice over in A Letter to Three Wives.” Which I had not seen, so I asked him to explain. He gave a brief synopsis of the film, which was directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who also directed All About Eve, the picture that my soon-to-be partner and I would watch many times in the coming years, and which I would write a book about long after life had called him and me in different directions. If you’ve read that book, you also know all about Celeste Holm.