Lucking Out (27 page)
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
was accorded the socially relevant deference that Miller’s plays and Stanley Kramer’s films (
Ship of Fools, Judgment at Nuremberg
) once received as Documents of Our Time until people sharpened up.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
hammered like a judge’s gavel, rendering a guilty verdict against the zipless fuck and everything it heedlessly promoted. It wasn’t a lone psycho who killed this wayward wren, argued Molly Haskell in
New York
magazine; it was the Sexual Revolution and its miniskirt morals. “This is far and away Richard Brooks’s best film. It is harrowing, powerful, appalling. It may even be an important film, particularly for the media gurus who propound the glories of swinging singlehood and sex-on-demand without ever setting foot in the bars, and who remain comfortably immune from the demons that the rhetoric of liberation has unleashed. Never has the gap between the rhetoric, the exhortations to ‘control our bodies,’ and the out-of-control reality been drawn more clearly.” Pauline Kael, for whom the film had the “pulpy morbidity of Joyce Carol Oates,” agreed that Theresa’s cock-luring appointment with death (“Do it! Do it!” she orgasmically cries as the knife blade plunges into her) was intended to nail home “the consequence of living in a permissive society.” But Pauline wasn’t the impermissive type and rejected censorious browbeating dealt from a stacked deck. “Terry has been maimed; her parents have neglected her and didn’t notice that polio had affected her spine; as a result of her not having been loved enough, she is left with a scar on her back and a faint limp. It’s as if a woman [who] wouldn’t want sex unsanctified by tenderness … was crippled, psychologically flawed, self-hating.” Such tragedies happen today, as witness the murder of the young designer in the hotel bathroom at Soho House, but they’re treated in the press as individual collisions of intimate violence, not Indictments of the Times We Live In.
The threat of violence could thorn the atmosphere in New York almost anywhere you turned in the seventies, and yet I felt safer in the West Village than I did in almost any part of the city at the time. I didn’t court danger, it didn’t court me, no one had a monopoly on the night. While nipples were being thumbed under leather vests at macho-man bars, a cabaret known as Reno Sweeney (named after a character in the musical
Anything Goes
) was flourishing on West Thirteenth Street, a lyrical springboard for Karen Akers, Peter Allen, Marvin Hamlisch, Phoebe Legere, Andrea Marcovicci, Ellen Greene (later to excel in
Little Shop of Horrors
), and, for one engagement, the mummy-wrap style icon “Little Edie” Beale of
Grey Gardens
fame. It, along with similar showcases and piano bars, provided a melodic counterpoint to all the musclings going on, a Sally Bowles anthem call. I was living on Horatio during the summer blackout of 1977, the season that would go down in history as the Summer of Sam, on that humid night of July 13 that began as a collective inconvenience and erupted into what
Time
magazine would call an “orgy of looting,” with residents in minority neighborhoods streaming out in the streets to engage in five-finger shopping on an epic scale: “Roving bands of determined men, women and even little children wrenched steel shutters and grilles from storefronts with crowbars, shattered plate-glass windows, scooped up everything they could carry, and destroyed what they could not. First they went for clothing, TV sets, jewelry, liquor; when that was cleaned out, they picked up food, furniture and drugs.” Clothes were stripped from store-window mannequins and the mannequins knocked silly, their arms and legs strewn like amputee spare parts. Car dealerships had their new inventories commandeered, hot-wired, and taken for one-way test drives. What freaked out New Yorkers and the rest of the country was not only the hurricane strength and speed of the ransacking hordes hitting the streets, as if on cue, but their merriment, the cries of “It’s Christmastime! It’s Christmastime!” as the orange glow in the city of fires big and small suggested wartime London following a bombing raid. Rickety-ribbed liberal platitudes about poverty and unequal opportunity would be wheelbarrowed out in the days and weeks ahead, but they were no match for pictures of jolly teenagers considerately helping their elders carry large appliances home during this special one-time-only all-you-can-steal sale.
In the West Village, the atmosphere was charged with the radio-static apprehension that was citywide, but windows went unshattered and streets unmobbed, although there was word of a gay orgy breaking out like a Broadway musical on one popular corner, a rumor later confirmed in Jonathan Mahler’s
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning
, which placed the party on Weehawken Street. While others robbed and raged, the West Village had its own way of celebrating Christmas in July.
If this wasn’t the last hurrah, however, there weren’t too many hurrahs left. No one could have known the magnitude of what was heading down the tracks, the epidemic that by the late eighties would give the West Village a haggard, ghost-ravaged air, a ground zero of loss created not in a single morning but over the toll of years. It amounted to a slow, unmerciful massacre that was both a human tragedy and a cultural catastrophe, depriving the future of more than can ever be measured and properly mourned, a mass grave of unfulfilled promise. The creative ranks were skeletonized by what was first labeled a “gay plague.” Choreographers, designers, playwrights, artists, dancers, actors, photographers, and so many other creatives whose names we knew made the obituary pages: Michael Bennett, the choreographer and deviser of
A Chorus Line
, the musical about aspiring dance gypsies going through the peeling exposure of the audition process that started downtown at Joe Papp’s Public Theater and became such a public sensation that it was transplanted to Broadway, doing more to save Times Square from fatal rot than any other single production; the actor-playwright-director-impresario Charles Ludlam, whose Ridiculous Theatrical Company was the bedlam gingerbread cottage of camp; the fashion designer Halston, whose handsome rectangularity recalled Michael Rennie’s distinguished interplanetary delegate in
The Day the Earth Stood Still;
the graffiti artist Keith Haring. Maybe I’m telling you what you already know, but I don’t know what anyone knows anymore, those who came to the city after have no idea, they breathe a brighter air. As Fran Lebowitz points out in the documentary
Public Speaking
(it’s the best monologue in the movie), it wasn’t simply the talent lost to AIDS that was so calamitous; it was the devastation of an audience equally brilliant and alive. “An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists,” she said. “That audience died in five minutes.” A discriminating, demanding, wit-appreciative audience for the performing arts that has never been regrown, replaced by a shipment of clapping seals for whom (in Lebowitz’s words) “everything has to be broader, more blatant, more on the nose.”
The audience whose loss Lebowitz mourned was still bumble-beeing when I made my first sortie into Lincoln Center, not realizing that I was about to embark on the longest romance of my life and the most incongruous. It began on a Sunday afternoon that might have otherwise lay fallow, with me lying fallow in it. I had bought a single ticket for a matinee performance of New York City Ballet, a seat in the fourth ring, the equivalent of the upper mezzanine at the old Yankee Stadium, absent the wind gusts and rustling hot-dog wrappers. I’m not sure what the source of the impulse was that tugged me there to Lincoln Center’s State Theater that Sunday, but whatever was on the other end of the fishing line knew me better than I knew myself. Ballet was just a big fluffy cloud to me then, just as opera was a complicated bawl. I hadn’t seen any ballet when I was growing up in Maryland, not even a childhood rite-of-passage
Nutcracker
, and my look-in on modern dance consisted solely in catching a touring performance of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company at Frostburg State, my primary takeaway being what a godlike torso Hawkins brandished, an Apollo shield form-fitted to his body and burnished in battle, even though he may have been in his sixties then. He made the rest of us look like cookie dough. Hawkins’s history with Martha Graham, the mythopoeic roots of his choreographic philosophy and action-painting attack—of these I would have known nothing beyond what was in the program notes, assuming there were program notes. But that I went and that I remembered that I went meant it had dropped a dime in my imagination, made a deposit. Here I am, I thought, holding my program like a missal—my first ballet. If they could only see me now, I thought, “they” being nobody in particular. The arrival of the orchestra conductor, who it pleased me to think had just gotten off the phone to his bookie, was greeted with a flock of applause that sounded as if it were deriving from an adjacent banquet room, and as the musicians poised their instruments, the curtain rose with a wheely noise suggesting a crew hoisting sails.
It was probably
The Firebird
on the bill that tapped my interest when I was leafing through
The New Yorker
’s Goings On About Town listings, foraging for something cultural to do for my merit badge.
The Firebird
had a score by Igor Stravinsky, sets by Marc Chagall, and costumes by Karinska that from photographs really turned up the Cyd Charisse red. And choreography by George Balanchine, who even I understood in my heathen condition was regarded not simply as a creative genius but as God’s junior partner, handing out one ballet classic after another like year-round holiday bonuses.
The Firebird
would have made for just the sort of combo platter I was seeking in my continuing efforts at self-improvement, my knowledge of classical music, art, and theatrical costume needing some filling in, along with all the other cavities. I had an incomplete set of Time-Life books devoted to the great painters purchased secondhand at outdoor stalls in the Village—volumes on Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and Renoir—whose biographical content I would munch on before moving to the main course: studying the color-plate reproductions to educate my “eye.” Mailer wrote about how the paintings of Cézanne and Picasso taught him to see in a new surface-destroying way, and my “eye” was still stuck on the boring flat-planed obvious. I also turned on the classical music stations (there was more than one then) whenever I felt it incumbent upon me to listen to classical music because I thought it was something I should be doing, but it usually wasn’t long before my mind wandered out of the yard. Rock music had shattered my attention span into Flintstones vitamins, which may have been why I went to a mixed bill at NYCB rather than to a full-lengther such as
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The Firebird
, my first ballet, didn’t disappoint, but it didn’t ring steeple bells either. I remember enjoying it, in a self-consciously “appreciative” manner, as if my eyes were set forward a fraction more than usual, the music holding me more than the dancing, which seemed subordinate to the costuming and a folk-legend storytelling that relied on a lot of portentous gestures prophesying terrible weather heading in our direction. The Firebird herself was performed by Karin von Aroldingen, whose tall, vanquishing presence lived up to her imposing name, but dancing-wise she didn’t have that much to do under all that Vegas-red howdy-do. Afterward I felt a bit yawny, and no one ever truly yawns alone. History is made at night, as the movie title goes, and the afternoon dip of the audience’s biorhythms and the energy-conservation mode of many of the dancers, who had perhaps danced the night before or were scheduled for that day’s evening performance, made for a bit of a Valium drip. I didn’t mind. I figured it was all part of the induction process, easing me into the wonder of it all with gentle massage. At intermission I went out to the viewing tier and looked down upon the promenade, where clumps of conversationalists and solitary figures were moving like Hitchcock miniatures in a high-angle shot or positioned like map pins, the rink book-ended by the Elie Nadelman marble statues that seemed smug in the rich plenty of their fertile hips. Also on the program that afternoon was
Afternoon of a Faun
, which had the tender intimacy and caressing delicacy of a recital piece, Debussy’s piano notes strung like little drops of dew on your eyelashes. Nice, but nothing to write home from camp about.
My
Song of Bernadette
moment, my face bathed in miracle light, may have been Balanchine’s
Serenade
, which I’m hesitant to admit since it has been the portal-opening ballet for so many converts, the dropped panel that divides Before and After, and I was so hoping to be different. It was the first ballet Balanchine did in New York, and from the opening tableau—the dancers in tulle skirts raising their palms in unison to salute the blue night—to the closing processional, the ballerina held aloft and carried off, her arms and back arched in rapt surrender,
Serenade
serves as an annunciation. Unlike the other early ballets I saw, it didn’t have paraphrasable content, origin material; it seemed to have dreamed itself into existence, its seams and struts invisible. Proof that the pure products of modernism refuse to die! And it didn’t depend upon a star dancer to send it through the uprights; everyone onstage seemed equally ensouled, answering the same votive call. Or could it have been
Symphony in C
that cinched the romance—its exhilarating marshaling of forces at the end, the small attack units of the corps, employed in slashing diagonals, uniting in a ranked surge, rallying to an excelsior finish? It may have been the stereoscopic power of both: the Rapture Vision and the Victory Romp.
After a couple of more incursions, I bought a matinee subscription to New York City Ballet, something affordable then even for a low-income, hardworking unpsychotic loner like me, and became a semi-semi-regular, seeing Balanchine’s
Agon
and
Four Temperaments
and other T-shirt ballets whose names I couldn’t pronounce and still couldn’t pronounce if you pop-quizzed me, such as
Cortège Hongrois
and
Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée.”
I saw Jerome Robbins’s work for the company, including his insensibly maligned
Dybbuk
with beating music summoned from the bowels of the earth by Leonard Bernstein, which finally got its just due when it was revived in 2007. I began referring to dancers familiarly by their first names, as if we were the chummiest of acquaintances, hearing myself say things like, “I saw Patty last week in
Coppélia
”—Patty being Patricia McBride, one of my favorite principals at the company, the only ballerina who made
Coppélia
seem more like a candy factory. And Suzanne, referring to—well, there was only one Suzanne, as we shall see, make the sign of the cross when you hear her name. I should have known I was a goner once I started stopping after performances at the Ballet Shop on Broadway, which stocked, along with illustrated ballet storybooks, biographies, critical studies, and girlie souvenirs (ballerina figurines, baby toe shoes, music boxes), a cardboard box full of assorted back issues of
Ballet Review
, the magazine founded by Arlene Croce, who had since ascended to dance critic at
The New Yorker
and was virgin queen of all she surveyed.
Ballet Review
contained articles by her that were looser, swingier, and sparkier than many of her
New Yorker
columns, lacking the more raised-chalice tone of taut distinction that sounded like an abbess played by Maggie Smith with both nostrils.
BR
’s contributors even graded new dances as Bob Christgau did with his Consumer Guide, a running scoreboard that gave the revival of Balanchine’s
Donizetti Variations
, for example, a B at best, one critic docking it a D. A D—to Balanchine!
Sacre bleu!
Although
Ballet Review
didn’t pie-face the reader with the messy, chop-shop layout of a punk zine, its curt
Dragnet
poker-faced diligence—every article in the issue looked as if it had been pounded out on the same old newsroom typewriter—registered its own resistance to the angel fluff and slatternly praise thrown about most places in print about dance. Its absence of photographic spreads picturing dewy dancers holding dewy poses—a text-driven emphasis perhaps from economic necessity or production limitations—gave
Ballet Review
a frank stare of intellectual rigor reminiscent of the literary quarterlies that built their reputations piling one plain block of text upon another in the forties and fifties, a brick wall of surety.