New York in the '50s (37 page)

Regardless of age, New York provided one of the greatest assets for illicit, or at least unmarried, love affairs. It was so big and there were so many people, the very size and scale of it gave you privacy. When my beautiful cousin Coo from Kentucky came to visit New York as part of “Mr. Boyd Martin's Theatre Tour,” an annual cultural trip for the citizens of Louisville led by the drama critic of the
Courier-Journal
, she said, “Why, Danny, ah just love New York, ah just love the anonymity of it. Ah hardly know which crime to commit first!”

Calvin Trillin says, “You could do what you wanted in New York because you weren't going to run into your aunt Martha. If I was in Kansas City, there was no way I wouldn't run into someone I went to school with, dozens of people I knew every week. There were only fifteen restaurants where you might possibly go in the whole
city. The anonymity part of New York doesn't exist in any other city.”

But evidently this anonymity so prized by lovers was threatened for employees of
Time
magazine by Trillin's good friend John Gregory Dunne. “When I worked at
Time
there was a lot of underground romantic stuff,” Trillin says. “I wrote about it in a novel called
Floater
[the term for a staff writer who went from one department to another within the magazine]. Many novels have disclaimers that the characters are all fictional and bear no resemblance to any real person, but I had a
claimer
saying the character named Andy Wolfersham was based on my friend John Gregory Dunne—though I said my portrait in the book tended to flatter.

“John Dunne was always discovering two people who worked for
Time
necking in some place you'd never go, like Washington Heights. His typical sentence would begin, ‘I just
happened
to be going through the lingerie department of Bloomingdale's yesterday, when who should I see but …' John and I tried to figure out how many romantic couplings were going on. You didn't know people were involved until there was some awful scene in the hall or you got an invitation to a wedding.

“Working at
Time
, you had to be in close quarters with fifty people through the week. There were late closings, time spent with feet up on the desk waiting for editor's initials on a piece. There were lots of girls—or young women, as we say now—working as researchers. All the writers were male, all the researchers female. It was a totally sexually divided magazine—based on a researcher crying at the end of the week, arguing with a writer over what he should or shouldn't change. There was lots of screaming in the halls, tearful confrontations.”

Those of us who didn't have the social advantages offered by working for the Luce empire mainly met one another at parties. There were always parties, and any gathering of more than two people with a bottle of wine was considered a party. All you had to do to organize a party was get on the phone and tell people you knew to bring friends and booze.

“We all went out hustling to parties,” Meg Greenfield recalls. “We had a sort of base of good pals—all of us had been boyfriends and girlfriends at one point or another, and when the romance cooled
we became friends. We always watched one another trying to meet new people, and there was a whole lot of searching. We all smoked heavily and drank. We really drank a lot of the time. Being drunk was considered a source of amusement. There was lots of conversation about it, and everybody drank to get drunk.”

John Dunne says, “I'm amazed at how much more we all drank then. When we left New York to go to California, Joan said, ‘You know, I think I've had a low-grade hangover for eight years.'”

Joan Didion agrees, adding, “With all those drinks at lunch, and drinking all night, I think we all did. Can you imagine having another drink when the sun came up?”

But we did. It was thought of as romantic, as living to the hilt, carrying on the great traditions of the twenties, of Edna St. Vincent Millay's burning the candle at both ends. Our candle burning did not include pot smoking, and the only people I knew about who did dope in the fifties (except for the legal uppers and downers dispensed by our psychiatrists and analysts on request) were Ginsberg and the beats—and Norman Mailer, who wrote about it in
Advertisements for Myself
. I knew only one friend who kept marijuana on hand, and that made her, in my mind, incredibly exotic (even more so than eating prune whip yogurt), but I didn't care to indulge. I attempted it once but choked trying to inhale the stuff, and didn't pursue it. Pot was part of being beat, and I was loyal to my own addiction to alcohol.

The booze we drank certainly lowered our inhibitions, as well as our awareness, at the parties we staged. I was reminiscing with Donald and Dawn Cook about those parties at their apartment in the Village, and they were talking about how everyone danced. I said I didn't dance at all—I had never been able to dance and felt very shy about it.

“But you used to dance at our parties,” Dawn said.

“I can't believe it,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” said Donald, “you even danced with
me
.”

“Get yourself a pessary.”

When the Barnard girl said it to a table of college students at the West End, I laughed with the others, pretending I knew what it
meant. The line turned out to be from a Mary McCarthy short story everyone was talking about that had just appeared in
Partisan Review
for January-February 1954, called “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself” (later it was included in her novel
The Group
).

I was relieved to learn that the heroine of the story, a twenty-four-year-old Vassar graduate who worked in New York as a reader for publishers, didn't know what the word meant either. At first she thought her new lover said, “Get yourself a peccary,” which was a “pig-like mammal they had studied in zoology.” The command reminded her of Hamlet telling Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery.” Seeing her confusion, Dottie's lover explained he was talking about “a female contraceptive, a plug,” and she learned it was also called a diaphragm.

The ignorance of Dottie Renfrew could be excused on the grounds that she was living in the thirties, when such things were brand-new, even in New York. My excuse in 1954 was that “pessary” was by then an old-fashioned term from a bygone era, but more important, I'd been in New York for only two years, at college, and in Indianapolis I'd never even heard of a diaphragm.

The only forms of birth control I'd known about before I came to New York in 1952 were abstinence, aided by the cold showers and “hip baths” recommended in the Boy Scout manual of the forties; condoms, more commonly known as rubbers, which men found awkward and constricting; the rhythm method, whose calculations were always a risk; and “pulling out,” which was the most widespread practice among my friends back in Indianapolis, as well as the least reliable. A new kind of attitude was required for an unmarried woman to use a birth control device, and it was still revolutionary in the fifties, and extremely rare outside New York City and its environs.

I was amazed, and impressed, that a famous author had written a story about an unmarried girl getting a diaphragm (described in frank and sometimes humorous detail), and that it was published in the most highbrow literary journal of the known (to me) world, the periodical whose pages carried the words of such luminaries as Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, and William Phillips, high priests of intellectual life in New York. (In fact, the magazine
looked to me like some kind of holy missal, the list of titles and authors on the cover seeming to give it the weight and authority of a prayerbook.)

The story became so well known that Philip Roth's characters could refer to it in the first story of our fifties generation whose plot hinged on a girl getting a diaphragm, “Goodbye, Columbus,” which was first published in
The Paris Review
in 1959. When Roth's young librarian suggests that his Radcliffe student girlfriend go to the Margaret Sanger clinic in New York to get a diaphragm, he denies that he's sent a girl there before, but knows what to do because he's read Mary McCarthy. So has his girlfriend Brenda, who complains, “That's just what I'd feel like, somebody out of
her
.” Somebody out of Mary McCarthy meant somebody jaded and sophisticated to Brenda; but she was still in college, and she got the diaphragm anyway.

J. D. Salinger's “Franny,” which appeared in
The New Yorker
in 1956, was without a doubt the most widely discussed and debated short story in New York in the fifties. Nor have I known of another time or place in which short stories were taken so seriously as to have the impact “Franny” did in its time. The story tells of an Ivy League weekend that Franny Glass spends with a phony named Lane Coutell. At the end of the weekend she faints, and the story closes as she is reciting the “Jesus prayer.” The question readers are left with, and which was so hotly debated all over Manhattan in the weeks that followed, was whether Franny was pregnant, or having a nervous breakdown, or both.

If, in fact, Franny was pregnant and wasn't about to marry Lane, what did she do? That's a story Salinger never told us. It's not the sort of thing we think of as a “Salinger story.” If Franny had lived in Indianapolis and was going to college in the Midwest, the odds are if she was pregnant she would marry the guy—even a phony like Lane Coutell. But if Franny was like most of the young women of her age and background who went to college in the East or lived in New York at that time, and she found herself pregnant with the child of a man she didn't want to marry, she would most likely get an abortion.

Abortion was illegal, dangerous, expensive, and commonplace in New York in the fifties. It was the nightmare threat, the dark cloud
of death that shadowed the freedom of sexual liberation in the days of its first dawn, not just for wild young people who were out for kicks, but starry-eyed romantics who believed they were truly in love and dared to bring their passion to physical completion without the sanction of marriage. It was not just pot-smoking beatnik girls who got pregnant when they weren't married; it was “nice girls” who graduated from Vassar and Smith, girls as bright, sensitive, and serious as Salinger's much-beloved Franny Glass.

If, indeed, as many readers guessed, Franny was having a nervous breakdown, then she might have been able to get a legal abortion for psychiatric reasons in the safety of a hospital. Only if a woman's life was threatened by her pregnancy could she get a “therapeutic abortion.” In the fifties the proportion of legal abortions sanctioned by recommendation of psychiatrists began to rise, and one out of every three abortions performed at New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital in 1956 was “for reasons of mental health.” This led to a crackdown by conservative elements of the medical profession who anyway were hostile to psychiatrists, and some hospitals set requirements so severe that a patient had to have demonstrated “a convincing intention of suicide” to qualify for an abortion on grounds of mental health. In order not to risk her life with an illegal abortion in some tenement kitchen, a woman had to convince a hospital board of M.D.s that she would take her life by her own hand, making the threat credible with details of specific plans: a leap from the Triborough Bridge, an overdose of sleeping pills chased with Scotch, a slice of the wrist with a razor blade.

I sat in the Limelight coffeehouse off Sheridan Square one night, advising the girlfriend of a guy I knew how to convince a psychiatrist she would really kill herself if she didn't get a legal abortion. Because I was in analysis, I supposedly knew how and what psychiatrists thought (had I known, I wouldn't have been in analysis), and how to make them believe your story. Actually, the girl seemed so terrified of going the black-market route of backstairs abortions, I suggested that all she had to do was tell the truth. The trouble was, so many other young women were telling similar stories to psychiatrists all over the city, it was hard to make your own story sound more truly desperate than the others, since psychiatrists couldn't write too many such recommendations or they'd get a reputation
for it and face the possible loss of their license. Getting a psychiatrist's letter advising a therapeutic abortion in New York then was about as difficult as getting a visa to leave Casablanca in the days when Humphrey Bogart was running Rick's Café.

According to an article called “Important Facts About Abortion,” in the February 1956 issue of
Reader's Digest
(hardly the voice of radicalism), “If there is any class of patients who do not get a fair hearing when they seek legal abortion—no matter what reasons they may have—it is unmarried women whose lives and health may be endangered by pregnancy. Doctors often take a moralistic attitude in these cases, as shown by the remarks of one doctor on a hospital abortion committee: ‘She has had her fun, and she can sweat this one out.'”

The article reported that many doctors feared persecution from their own colleagues in approving a therapeutic abortion. A “conservative estimate” by
Reader's Digest
of the number of illegal abortions performed in the United States every year at that time was 330,000. A “conservative estimate” by
Newsweek
in the following decade reported that 5,000 women were killed each year “from such complications as bleeding and infections” caused by illegal abortions.

“All abortion was illegal then,” Meg Greenfield says, “and that engendered a whole lot of anxiety. It wasn't about coat hangers, but it had a lot of imponderables and danger and fear of the law and of infection and fear of pain, and they didn't like to give anesthesia.”

Women I knew experienced horrors at the hands of illegal abortionists who were not M.D.s, people who, as
Newsweek
put it, “practiced furtively in dingy walk-ups and sleazy hotel rooms,” charging as much as $1,500 for “hastily performed and often botched services.” One woman I knew who had an abortion in a hotel room on lower Fifth Avenue was shoved out the door when she started to bleed profusely. She fainted on the sidewalk, was helped by a passerby who got her into a cab, and after getting back to her apartment called a friend who helped her to a hospital. Now that she had been injured and her life was in danger, she could legally receive medical treatment.