New York in the '50s (10 page)

Just as young women fresh off the train stayed first at women's clubs, young men sometimes spent their first nights, as Richard Lingeman did, at the YMCA. “I stayed at the Sloane House Y on 34th Street. It was a huge place, with strange people—I have this memory of men speaking desperately on the phone. Then I got into an apartment with six or eight other guys on York Avenue, and after that moved to West 13th in the Village where I shared an apartment with Chris Lehmann-Haupt.”

Not everyone found comradeship when starting out in the city. John Gregory Dunne says, “I first lived in a roominghouse at 43 East 75th Street that was populated by every failure in New York. A guy who had failed the New York Bar exam twice, and failed a third time while he was there, was typical. There were four people to a room, but it had a fancy address in a good-looking townhouse between Madison and Park. Eating was on the honor system. There was a big refrigerator and pantry and a price list—a Ritz cracker was four cents, with peanut butter it went up to seven cents. A glass of milk was a dime. I was accused of cheating on kitchen privileges, so after that I never ate anything there.”

Most of us did a lot of moving around with what now seems remarkable ease, the ease that comes with the freedom of youth. That's what strikes Meg Greenfield when she recalls coming back from Europe to live in New York in 1955: “I was moved from my first apartment on 11th Street to a better one on 10th Street by
Kenneth Koch, the poet, and his wife, Janice, who were pals of mine. We had been to some dinner with poets and painters, and we came back late with their baby's English perambulator to move all my things in—I remember crossing Hudson Street with that perambulator. It was late at night and people were staring at us. We were able to move all my earthy goods in two loads of their baby carriage. Can you imagine that? And we didn't have other baggage, either.”

Bruce Jay Friedman remembers: “When I got out of the Air Force in '53, I moved to New York with my wife, Ginger, who I met when I was stationed in St. Louis, and we found an apartment on West 57th. Like a lot of New Yorkers, we bragged about the building where we lived in terms of what well-known people lived there. In our building we had Betty Clooney, sister of Rosemary, and Julia Meade, a TV hostess of the time. Also, we went to the same pizza place on Ninth Avenue as Patty Duke. She was nine years old then, but we were proud of the fact that we went to the same place for pizza.”

There was a sense that because you lived in New York, you were part of “the scene” and had some connection with famous people—actors, writers, politicians, piano players. They were your neighbors in the biggest small town in the world. I remember riding in a cab up Park Avenue after a snowstorm and seeing a woman at the curb waving to get a ride going the other way. As we got closer, I saw it was Eleanor Roosevelt. I smiled and waved to her, and she smiled and waved back. I felt that I knew her. We were both New Yorkers.

LIVING BY THE PEN

The puffs of smoke from the pipe of C. Wright Mills as he paced back and forth in his study, thinking aloud, reminded me of steam from an engine, for his mind in high gear seemed like a dynamo. The exciting part of my job with Mills was not the research work I did in Columbia's Butler Library that summer of 1955 when I moved back to New York from Princeton, but the day every week or so I went up to his house near Nyack, reporting and discussing my findings. I'd listen as Mills roamed his rustic, sunlit study filled
with books and file cabinets, asking me questions and commenting on what I'd found in my research.

When the classes he taught resumed in the fall, I moved my notes and typewriter into Mills's office in Hamilton Hall and worked out of there. But his real office was at home. The Columbia office simply contained old student papers, files of finished projects, a hot plate for warming up soup, and an electric espresso machine—this utilitarian gear was all he desired in that room. Neither his stomach nor his mind operated with its usual gargantuan appetite at the college office, and our talks there were disjointed and disappointing. Mills always seemed subdued when he came in, spoke very little, and stalked off to class. He would usually burst back into the room tired and out of sorts, as he had that day when he slammed down his books and said, referring to his students, “Who
are
these guys?”

He told me about attending a party of Columbia graduate students in sociology, which he found maddening. “I simply sat in a chair in a corner,” he said, “and one by one these guys would come up to me, sort of like approaching the pariah—curiosity stuff. They were working on their Ph.D.s, and after they'd introduced themselves I'd ask, ‘What are you working on?' It would always be something like, ‘The Impact of Work-Play Relationships Among Lower Income Families on the South Side of the Block on 112th Street Between Amsterdam and Broadway.' Then I would ask—” Mills paused, leaned forward, and in his most contemptuous voice, boomed,
“Why?
” Obviously, these people weren't “taking it big.”

Mills was not only a boss but a friend and advisor, taking a fatherly interest in my personal welfare as well as guiding my research. “Now Dan,” he counseled me, “you're not married, and you're probably not eating well with those other guys. If none of you can really cook”—he didn't count spaghetti and cornmeal mush as real food—“you must get one of your girls to come over every Sunday night and cook you up a big stew that will last a week. You bottle it up in seven Mason jars, and then you have a good healthy meal instead of that bachelor stuff.” This was, of course, in the days when it was assumed that men couldn't cook and women could, and should, though Mills himself was soon to take up the culinary arts, applying himself in the kitchen with the same enthusiasm
he brought to everything else he did. When I came to a lunch he'd prepared in his cooking days and praised the fresh bread, he said, “My God, man, don't you bake your own bread?”

Mills was full of advice that was often valuable and always entertaining, including what books I should read. He thrust James Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
on me when it was out of print and known only to a small, ardent coterie. It seems forgotten, now that Agee's lyric work on sharecroppers is regarded as a classic, that Mills was one of the few who reviewed it admiringly after it was published, writing an incisive essay of praise in Dwight Macdonald's magazine
Politics
. “You want to write journalism? Take
that
one, boy!” Mills said as he plucked the book from his shelf and pushed it toward me.

Mills introduced me to the Homestead, a restaurant that was famous for serving the biggest pieces of beef at the best prices anywhere in New York City. It was over in the meat-packing district, on the western fringe of Greenwich Village, and supposedly its proximity to the fresh meat coming in accounted for the great deals the popular, plain-style restaurant could give its customers. Mills was known to go there and after the meal say to the waiter, “I'll have the same thing again.” He'd eat a second helping of everything, including the sirloin steak, and pie for dessert. He practiced what he preached.

As it turned out, the journalist in Princeton, New Jersey, who became my most important mentor and launched my career as a writer was not my drawling, down-home fellow Hoosier Barney Kilgore but a fast-talking, hip intellectual described at the time by William F. Buckley, Jr., as “Murray Kempton, pinup boy of the bohemian left, who writes an impressionistic column for the
New York Post
.” I was thrilled to learn that Kempton lived in Princeton with his wife and four young children, for I'd read his column during my Columbia days, and he'd become my idol.

Kempton's fans were a cult, a rabid band who realized nobody anywhere was writing this kind of elegant, ironic, iconoclastic prose about the passing scene in New York and America—and in a
newspaper
. H. L. Mencken, from Kempton's hometown of Baltimore, was probably the closest model. His liberal views were never orthodox;
in fact, he and Buckley became fast friends as fellow intellectual raconteurs who sometimes seemed to be the only people who could comprehend their esoteric conversations. It wasn't Murray's politics that made the blood of his followers race, but his novelistic perception of current events and figures. For a nickel I got to read a new column by a journalistic Proust that was hot off the press three afternoons a week.

Kempton's first book was published the season I went to work in Princeton, and I seized the opportunity to review it for the
Packet
on the grounds that he was a local man, a point I stressed in my lead, which ran: “Murray Kempton of Edgerstoune Road and also the
New York Post
has written a book that was published last week called
Part of Our Time: Some Monuments and Ruins of the Nineteen Thirties
.”

The book was a series of essaylike portraits of leading political and literary figures who were shaped by “the myth of our time” in the thirties, like Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, and it was the first thing I read that gave me a sense of the passion and excitement of what had always seemed to me a drab and dreary decade, the hangover after the Roaring Twenties.

But the book was more than the sum of its parts or the political or historical significance of its subject. It was a young person's book, a book that stirred the blood and caught the imagination of my friends and me, who not only read it but memorized parts and recited them aloud, as we had memorized the poetry of Yeats and Millay and that other dreamer in the guise of a journalist who brought ideas alive, John Reed. We took Kempton's words as wisdom, coming not from some graybeard but a journalistic genius in his prime, who had seen into the heart of things and understood them for us. We called
Part of Our Time
“the Good Book.” It was our bible.

I can see Bill Chapman, the twenty-two-year-old copy boy who years later would be a foreign correspondent for the
Washington Post
, pacing the paint-peeling living room on West 92nd Street as we recited from Kempton's book and drank Chianti. I still remember these words: “Each of us lives with a sword over his head. There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are the ones who make the special myth of their time.”

Another passage switched on like a light in my mind for years afterward, in times of crisis far from New York, reminding me of the eerie power of Kempton's prose to predict the inner feelings of our futures: “There were new endeavors and fresh disasters, for they are the way of life, and the art of life is to save enough of yourself from each disaster to be able to go on in something like your old image.”

In my review for the
Princeton Packet
I tried to sound like a critic, not just a fan. The next morning, after the paper came out, the landlady in my roominghouse shouted up the stairs that someone wanted to talk to me on the telephone. It was Murray Kempton, calling to thank me.

“You really dug the book,” he said, then hastened to explain he meant “dug” in the sense of “understood,” not just in its other sense, “liked.” I dug what he was telling me—in both senses of the word. He invited me to come by sometime and have a beer. I was there that afternoon.

Kempton had reddish hair in a crew cut like Mills's, but unlike Mills he was strictly Ivy League straight in dress and appearance. No motorcycle gear for Murray: rep tie, tweed jacket, and cordovan shoes. He noticed other people's clothes as well. When I introduced him to the literary agent James Oliver Brown, he complimented Jim on his English shoes. Once when I showed up in Murray's office at the
Post
wearing a raggedy sport shirt and corduroys in need of a press, he looked at me with a grimace and said, “You look like something out of Judge Horowitz's court.” That judge sat on juvenile delinquency cases.

Murray discussed books, baseball, and politics with equal fascination and interweaved them all, if you could only see the pattern. He knew the details of everything, from Shoeless Joe Jackson's batting average the year
before
the World Series to Thomas Jefferson's reading preferences
after
he left the presidency. While we were both covering the Teamsters Union convention in Miami that elected Jimmy Hoffa president, I found Murray in his hotel room poring over what he said was the key to understanding this whole damn thing—Robie Macauley's new introduction to Ford Madox Ford's novel
Parade's End
.

Once I had lunch with Murray and with Marion Magid, whom I
thought of as one of the most brilliant and witty people I knew in New York. Even she sometimes felt daunted by the rush of Murray's conversational connections and allusions. “After lunch with Murray,” she told me, “my mind is so tired I feel like I have to lie down for an hour.” We ate at Le Moal, a fancy East Side French restaurant near the office of Marion's magazine where many of its editors dined, and Murray dubbed it “the
Commentary
commissary.” That consonance reminded him of the time he was having lunch at an Italian restaurant during the McCarthy era. As the diners discussed who was now an anti-Communist and who had become an
anti
-anti-Communist, the waiter came. A jaded reporter, despairing of getting everyone's latest affiliation straight, tossed aside his menu and said, “I'll have an anti-antipasto.”

Toward the end of the summer of my work for Mills in 1955, I began to read about the case of a Negro boy from Chicago named Emmet Till, who was murdered in Mississippi for the crime of whistling at a white woman. The trial, scheduled to take place in the little town of Sumner, in the Mississippi Delta, promised to be one of those turning points in our history, a classic American courthouse drama like the Scopes trial, and I ached to go down and write about it. But not only did I need money to get there; I had to have credentials. I needed an assignment, and yet I hadn't published anything in a magazine and so had no contacts. I called Murray Kempton.