New York in the '50s (42 page)

“I wrote around that time how in England there was a different spirit among people of conflicting political views. There, the editor of
Time and Tide
, which was conservative, could be godfather to the
son of the editor of the liberal
New Statesman
. But that couldn't happen in the United States. I don't think there was that much intercourse between right and left until after McCarthy passed from the scene. I don't mean when he died—he was really out of it by '54. A few years later, there was an easing of tensions, room for more interchange of a friendly nature. But McCarthy was such a fighting word. A leading liberal tried to keep me out of the Century Club because of McCarthy. Vietnam came close to being that divisive an issue, but McCarthy was such a
personal
issue.”

In that window in time, from the end of McCarthy's power to the beginning of the Vietnam War protests, the last years of the fifties and the first few years of the sixties, young people of right and left lay down together like the lion and the lamb—sometimes more like the boy and the girl. I can testify to its happening. I was there, in the back room of the White Horse, stronghold of Mike Harrington and the Young Socialist League, haven of the Clancy Brothers and their songs of Irish rebellion, watering hole of the Catholic Worker and the
Commonweal
staff and the
Village Voice
—when who marched in to join us but the Young Americans for Freedom, the leaders of the New York's Youth for Goldwater movement.

The socializing and friendships that came about between right and left were possible in part because we of the fifties generation had no political pasts to live down. By the time I got out of Columbia in 1955, McCarthy was on the decline and there were only scattered hangovers of the effects of his reign, as in a piece I did for
The Nation
, “The Case of the Outdated Victim,” about a Queens College English professor who was fired because of “evidence” of a photograph showing him in a May Day parade twenty years before.

I never actually knew a card-carrying Communist, nor saw such a card. The only real live American Communist I ever knowingly laid eyes on was the correspondent for the
Daily Worker
who covered the Emmet Till murder trial in Mississippi. He was about the last person there I would have identified as such. I remember him wearing a blue suit and white shirt with a rep tie and smoking a pipe, looking like somebody's kindly uncle, no red tail peeking out of his trousers or pointed ears sticking up through his gray hair.

The politics of my friends in New York, supporters who worked and voted “madly for Adlai” in 1956, is best summed up by Meg
Greenfield: “We were part of a community of people who objected to the Republican philosophy of government—ours was the politics of objection. We all had a shared sense of being fugitives from the provinces and from the values of our parents and former high school friends.

“The Hungarian revolution was a big thing,” she says. “I went with my boyfriend to the UN, and we were sitting in the gallery when the debate went on. That event had a whole lot of importance in our lives—seeing the tanks, seeing people on TV hollering, ‘Help me.'”

If there was any vestigial sympathy for Soviet Russia and its brand of communism, or any need to see its totalitarian nature in our own time, the tanks in Hungary gave us a graphic jolt on television—perhaps the first time the terror of tanks and guns and bloodshed was brought into people's living rooms. With the demise of McCarthy, politics in the early sixties had become more like a spectator sport for us journalists, and though most of my friends and I backed Kennedy against Nixon, the young JFK didn't stir the passion in us that Adlai had raised, and seemed a smooth lightweight compared to the eloquent Stevenson.

The level of passion during the 1960 campaign is summed up for me in a scene I remember at a hotel ballroom in New York—a rally, Republican or Democratic (it could have been either; they haunted the same ballrooms), with the now familiar crowd of journalists who gathered at such places, as if someone had been ordered to round up the usual suspects. Murray Kempton was prowling around with his pipe and steno pad, and there was Joan Didion, whom Murray referred to as “the correspondent from
Vogue,
” huddled in a raincoat and colorful scarf (since few of us read
Vogue
, we were not yet aware of the original and brilliant essays she was writing amid the fashion pages). Joan often wore sunglasses, not common in New York then, and at one cocktail party we went to, a noted liberal lawyer asked her, “Why do you wear those intriguing dark glasses?” I broke out laughing and told him, “I think you've answered your own question.”

Noel E. Parmentel, Jr., the tall, shambling New Orleans freelance pundit, was there too, and Meg Greenfield of
The Reporter
, looking sharp in a Peck & Peck blouse and circle pin, ready to
skewer the rhetoric of some platitudinous politician—I thought of Meg as our political Dorothy Parker. And, of course, Bill Buckley, tall and elegant, surveying the scene with a happily jaundiced eye and those large, knowing winks for everyone, his casual greetings rolling out like oratorical gems. When I greeted Buckley he bent down toward me, peering at a small badge on my lapel that said
JFK
, then uttered “Ah!” and rose up smiling, his teeth alight with the famous grin. He gave me the big wink and said, “I see you're
engagé
.”

That summed up the level of my passion:
engagé
for JFK.

Kennedy was young, handsome, and hip. (We didn't know
how
hip until he said in an interview that his favorite book by Norman Mailer was
The Deer Park
, the sexually suggestive novel that was called “the most controversial” of 1955, which showed Kennedy had taste and really read books, otherwise he'd have cited the best seller whose name everybody knew,
The Naked and the Dead.
) He showed his respect for intellectuals by having Robert Frost read a poem at his inauguration and inviting Pablo Casals to play cello at the White House (though everyone said that was Jackie's doing). He gave idealistic college grads a way to see the world and serve their country without joining the military when he created the Peace Corps, everybody's favorite government program and avenue of escape. Many young people told themselves, “If this job (or book, or magazine assignment, or marriage) doesn't work out, to hell with it, I'm joining the Peace Corps!”

It was chic and fun to go to Washington now, especially if you got to meet the great-looking girls who worked at the White House, with cute preppy nicknames like Fiddle and Faddle. Best of all was if you wangled an invitation to one of Bobby's parties at Hickory Hill, where you could become really In by getting pushed into the pool with all your clothes on. Harold Hayes sent me on assignment to “do” Bobby for
Esquire
, with special orders to make the pool party scene, but the best I could manage was a touch football game with Bobby, Ethel, and the kids on the White House lawn, and I dropped a pass.

An unexpected new aggregation of young conservatives began to form around Barry Goldwater at the 1960 Republican convention in Chicago. That fall, more than a hundred of them from forty-four
states encamped at the Buckley family estate in Sharon, Connecticut, to draft the Sharon Statement, which endorsed “eternal truths” like the law of supply and demand—and the Young Americans for Freedom was born.

Rally!

American flags, an explosion of confetti, then red white and blue balloons and a brass band filled the air as more than eighteen thousand young conservatives packed Madison Square Garden to overflowing on a spring night in 1962, where the Young Americans for Freedom showed their strength and support for Senator Barry Goldwater and his right-wing principles. Fresh-faced usherettes with good teeth and clean hair (what a refreshing respite for the press after the beatniks!) cradled copies of Goldwater's
The Conscience of a Conservative
the way my friends and I used to hold
Franny and Zooey
, and welcomed the faithful who carried signs that said “Better Dead Than Red,” “Let's Bury Khrushchev,” and “Stamp Out ADA.”

The crowd chanted “We want Barry!” and Goldwater took the podium as the band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As each speaker was introduced, music blared forth to match his image: “Dixie” was played for Senator Strom Thurmond, “Boola Boola” for L. Brent Bozell, a fellow graduate of Yale with Bill Buckley. Perhaps most depressing was the appearance of John Dos Passos, in a kind of symbolic culmination of his journey from left to right, from the twenties through the early sixties. Before he took the stage, a roll call was read of the famous authors of his generation of flappers and flaming youth—only F. Scott Fitzgerald got a hand from the young conservatives—and then “Dos” was introduced as our only remaining literary giant, and the band struck up “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

All this made good copy for me and Murray, Joan and Meg, Noel and Bill, and the other members of the press who were eager for something new and colorful to come along. YAF was good at providing it, with rallies and efforts to outdo the traditional appeal of the left to youth, like composing its own folk music and running an article in the YAF magazine,
The New Guard
, posing the question that surely has plagued generations of conservatives: “Must the Devil Have All the Best Songs?”

These card-carrying, flag-waving members of YAF were suddenly appearing with greater frequency in the press, and now they were showing up at the White Horse. Just like Bill Buckley, they turned out to be perfectly pleasant, witty, intelligent people, and we lefty liberals and right-wing conservatives found we had more common ground of conversation and interest with one another than with all those people who didn't give a hoot about politics, the great yawning masses of the middle.

Added to the social life and political repartee in the back room of the Horse were fresh young righties like Myrna Bain, a bright Negro student who started a YAF chapter at Hunter College, and Bob Schuchmann, a law student at Yale who was master of ceremonies of the big YAF rally at Madison Square Garden. Most noticeable was Rosemary McGrath, a tall beauty who was president of the YAF chapter in Greenwich Village. When asked who in the Village joined a young conservative group, Rosemary listed “civil libertarians, free-market economists, anti-Communists, Ayn Rand followers, longshoremen, students, one Teamster, and a couple of anarchists.” With her long black hair, bright red lips, soulful dark eyes, and Goldwater rhetoric, Rosemary soon became known as “La Pasionaria of the Right,” giving conservatives a heroine to match the legendary Communist orator of the Spanish civil war.

Rosemary once told me the story of her finest hour before making her dramatic entry into Greenwich Village political circles. She attended a Catholic girl's school north of the city, on the Hudson River, she said, and was often asked on dates by the dashing cadets of West Point. So magic was her name among them that when the Army crew rowed past her school, a chant rose up, a call from the Hudson, to the classroom where Rosemary studied dry mathematics, a chant of longing and homage that sang out in plaintive tones, “Ro-o-o-ose-mar-y … Ro-o-o-ose-mar-y …”

The unflagging energy of Rosemary's political activism came not so much from the inspiration of Barry Goldwater, I suspected, as from F. Scott Fitzgerald—the Fitzgerald of “Winter Dreams,” “Absolution,” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” My judgment was not one of dismissal but, rather, affection; I knew the appeal of those stories myself.

Future historians of the White Horse will probably find that the
young conservatives found their way to the back room courtesy of Noel Parmentel, who had satirized their movement in
Esquire
in a piece called “The Acne and the Ecstasy.” Like most of the targets of Noel's pen, the YAFs laughed and became part of his fan club, or at least if not fans, then among those who knew about him, and anyone who knew anything about New York then knew Noel.

I can no more remember how and when I met Noel than I can remember living in New York in the fifties without knowing him. He was as much a part of the scene as Moon Dog, the blind street musician and poet who wore a robe and what looked like a Viking headpiece with horns sticking out. Moon Dog stationed himself in the doorways from Times Square to the Village. Jaded New Yorkers automatically gave him coins, listened to his odd music that seemed to come from another sphere, greeted him by name, and later reported in passing to a roommate or friend, “I saw Moon Dog today,” as if mentioning a cousin whose business took him to various parts of the city.

Noel was not offbeat in appearance, but his big frame, easily spotted lumbering along Fifth Avenue or MacDougal Street, decked out in white suits and other Rhett Butler–type menswear, with a shock of light brown hair falling over his wide brow, was considered the ultimate in masculine charm by many of the girls who succumbed to his southern charms, which were spiced with put-downs that seemed to engage as well as enrage the ladies.

Even for his time, Noel was the most politically incorrect person imaginable. He made a fine art of the ethnic insult, and dined out on his reputation for outrageousness. In print, he savaged the right in the pages of
The Nation
, would turn around and do the same to the left in
National Review
, and blasted both sides in
Esquire
—and everyone loved it. The mention of his name brought a smile to the face of Carey McWilliams, editor of
The Nation
, just as it did (and still does) to Bill Buckley of
National Review
, and Harold Hayes of
Esquire
would break into a broad grin when he told you “I got a piece in from Noel.”

Noel always had a number of projects going, including his famous option for the movie rights to Robert Penn Warren's novel
Night Rider
. The movie never got made, but some of the best parties in New York were given to celebrate each stage in the movie
option's progress. I doubt that anyone has gotten more fun out of a project that never got off the ground.