New York in the '50s (53 page)

In his next book jacket photograph, Friedman had lost the tweed suit and grown a beard.

Clothing and style signaled deeper changes for women, too. Jane Wylie says the fifties ended when “suddenly you had to have two wardrobes. One was the classic stuff, like the sleeveless linen sheath and the dresses you bought at Bendel's and Bloomingdale's, the other was short and laced up the side and was supposed to look really sexy, and also there were pantsuits and low-slung trousers with vests. You got those things at a store called Paraphernalia, in the East 60s. You had to think where you were going before you decided what to wear. You could get kicked out of someplace ‘nice' if you had on pants that weren't elegant.

“It was around this time that women started talking—I mean to each other. It was a huge thing. Suddenly there was a lot of talk about masturbation—whether, where, when, how—and everyone was reading
The Joy of Sex
. Women began to say they didn't like the stuff about being perfect, as in ‘the perfect housewife.' I knew a woman who was married to a graduate student whose apartment was always filled with empty coffee cups and piles of books, and she stopped worrying that people would think her a bad housewife. Now you were allowed to have that kind of place and you weren't judged on your housewifeliness. That was a new kind of freedom.

“Now the girls I teach who are thirteen think about what they want to be—they have an idea about being something besides a wife. They can have a real career. In the fifties it was like women could have a career but then they were going to get married, and after that it was sort of a haze.”

For Helen Weaver, the fifties were over when ballroom dancing gave way to the twist: “Instead of having to know steps or follow your partner's lead, you could just stand there and wiggle. A woman didn't have to be a partner at all—a revolutionary concept! She could dance with herself, or the whole room.

“Literary parties in the fifties were still dominated by alcohol and ambition, but at parties in artists' lofts there was a friendly haze over
everything that seemed to emanate from the bathroom, where people stood around looking conspiratorial and reverent while blowing their minds.

“The fifties really ended on November 22, 1963, when it became clear, as John Lindsay said, two assassinations later, ‘The country's lost its way.' That day marked the beginning of the end of our innocence. In the fifties we were still innocent enough to feel guilty. In the sixties, guilt went out of style.”

For David Amram, a pioneer of racial and musical freedom in the fifties, the coming of the Beatles—and with them a revolution in pop music that rang changes through the whole culture—was not the sound of liberation that it seemed to many. “When the Beatles came to America, suddenly music took on a whole different picture. There were no black people, not just in the Beatles but in the new imitative groups throughout the country. All the time all of us spent in integrated bands, even in the South, risking our lives, and then suddenly with the Beatles came these all-white groups. It was almost as if the music industry and media gave a totalitarian answer to the miracle of the fifties. The whole fifties coming together of poetry, music, and arts looked as if it might be squashed. A lot of us were told we were passé. There was a high level of recording techniques—sound reproduction and amplification became arts. The counterculture of the sixties hooked in with the music industry, a colossal amount of money could be earned by musicians in their twenties. It began a new era—a decade of greed and narcissism.”

A lot of things were changing by 1964, and I wasn't the only one who was leaving New York around that time. On April 24 of that year, when I was at Harvard, I got a letter from Joan Didion;

Dear Dan,

Mainly I'm writing to ask if you (or anyone you know up there) need an apartment. We rather suddenly decided to go to Los Angeles for 6 or 7 months, starting June 1, and want to sublet this place to somebody we know and leave furniture, china, linens, silver, everything.…

For six months I am going to have a tan and a Thunderbird
and work very hard at talking to people and not being my own creepy self. Suspecting accurately that my entire image of our life in Los Angeles is based vaguely upon “A Star Is Born,” John has vetoed a house at Malibu, but I am holding fast on a pool. I don't know exactly how we'll like it there, actually, but he was sick of
Time
and I was sick of New York, so he just took this leave of absence until Christmas. I am supposed to finish a novel and he is supposed to finish some diverse projects and we are both supposed to Think Things Over. An unsubsidized Neiman is what we had in mind. (That is probably not the way Neiman is spelled. It looks suspiciously as if it should be followed not by “Fellowship” but by “Marcus.”)

Love

From

Joan

In her classic essay on leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That,” Joan wrote that on her first trip there she spent the first three days talking long distance to her boyfriend, whom she told she could see the Brooklyn Bridge from her window, and was going to stay for only six months, then she adds, “As it turned out, the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.”

In the letter she wrote me, she said John had vetoed a house in Malibu, and they'd planned to stay for six months. As it turned out, they later bought a house in Malibu, and stayed in L.A. for twenty years. Oh yes, and they wrote the original script that became the new version of the movie
A Star Is Born
, with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson.

“For the first three years in L.A. we kept our apartment on East 75th Street,” Joan tells me now, “even though it was a great irritation—the subletters never paid the rent.”

Other friends of mine kept their apartments when they first left the city, which enabled them to still think of themselves as New Yorkers and believe their move away from it could only be temporary.
“The Reporter
sent me to Washington in '61,” Meg Greenfield says, “and I thought I'd just be gone for a couple of months. I flew to New York on the shuttle every Friday afternoon—it cost $16
then—and went back on Monday morning. I found it wasn't so easy to leave. When I first got to Washington, I was part of a little group of displaced New Yorkers, and we all bitched about Washington. After three years, I finally gave up my New York apartment, in '64, and rented a house. I went to the
Post
in '68 when
The Reporter
closed down.”

I didn't try to keep my own apartment in New York, but turned it over to Robert Phelps, who magically transformed it from a bare, dusty, cluttered Village pad to a warm, bright, book-lined haven that surely would have pleased Henry James. When I went back to visit, I envied the way he'd made it the kind of place I'd always wanted to live in, but I didn't yearn to move back. I had rented half of that converted ice house by di Giovanni's pond in New Hampshire before I got the Nieman, and decided I could use it on weekends, then move in permanently when the fellowship year was over.

My “back to the land” dreams lasted only a year, but on the Nieman I discovered Boston, especially Beacon Hill, and I also made a connection with the new editor of
The Atlantic Monthly
, Robert Manning, who soon became a friend. The
Atlantic
under Manning gave me a pleasant and stimulating journalistic and literary base (with an office of my own in the beautiful old building at 8 Arlington Street), and I became an official part of the magazine as a contributing editor from 1967 until it changed ownership in 1980.

The extra good fortune of connecting with Seymour Lawrence at his independent publishing office on Beacon Street gave me the right publisher for the novel I finally finished in 1969 (
Going All the Way
came out the following year), and I signed up with Sam for the next three novels, completing the solid and congenial professional home I found in Boston and on the Hill. Except for two temporary displacements in Hollywood, Boston has served as headquarters and seemed like home ever since.

I made occasional trips to New York on the train and the shuttle, but they became less frequent. I'd go there for only two or three days, so I didn't have time to keep up with all my old friends. I started losing touch and even losing track of some. Sometimes I had the feeling that Joan Didion expressed in “Goodbye to All That,” when she went back to New York and found “many of the people I
used to know had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire.” I was the one she was talking about in New Hampshire, but I didn't buy the place by the pond, I only rented, and by then I had left and moved to Beacon Hill.

The cultural shift to the West had drawn the English writer Sarel Eimerl to San Francisco, though he was later to join our free-lance philosopher friend from the Village, Art “the Rug” Bernstein, in the new urban mecca of the hip, Seattle. Meg Greenfield was in Washington, the Dunnes had defected to L.A., Sam Astrachan had gone to live in the south of France, Ivan Gold and his wife and child came up to settle in Boston, and so did another novelist from the Village days, Richard Yates. Even before I got there, Cambridge had claimed Justin Kaplan, whom I met through C. Wright Mills when Kaplan was a young editor at Simon & Schuster, before becoming a Pulitzer Prize—winning biographer of
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
. He and his novelist wife, Ann Bernays, made their Cambridge living room the most active literary salon north of Elaine's, starring John Updike and sometimes, up from Connecticut, the surprisingly social Annie Dillard, who seemed as much at home at a cocktail party as at Tinker Creek.

When I went to New York, I usually stayed at the Village apartment of Ted “the Horse” Steeg, who had camped out on the floor of my basement apartment on West 77th Street when he arrived fresh from Indianapolis in 1955. I hung around with Ted in the Village or went uptown for business or editorial meetings with Harvey Shapiro at
The New York Times Magazine
or Art Cooper at
GQ
or for tea at the Plaza with Jane Wylie (I had switched from the daiquiris that got me through the Nieman interview).

When I came back to stay at Lynne Sharon Schwartz's studio to do the intensive round of interviewing for this book in the early months of 1991, it was the first time in twenty-eight years that I had the experience of living again in Manhattan. I joined the Paris Health Club on West End Avenue, went to Sunday services at All Angels on West 80th Street—an Episcopal church with the best rock music for hymns I have ever heard—and became a regular browser at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore on Broadway and 81st Street. I learned to take the subway again instead of depending on taxis, and developed my on-guard alert for the homeless
people pushing Styrofoam cups at you for change when you buy your tokens. The first time a tattered man appeared in my subway car shouting “Attention!” I thought it was a holdup or hijacking until I learned this was the sales pitch for the
Homeless News
. I loved being back, got a definite rush of the old excitement, yet I felt how much physically harder it was to live here than what seems by comparison the bucolic landscape of Boston and Beacon Hill.

When I asked my friends and acquaintances from the fifties who still live in New York what it's like for them now, I got a powerful sense of the change from the city we knew forty years ago. “I've been watching the city fall apart for the last forty years,” Norman Mailer says. “No question it's been falling apart since '69. In '69 I felt it was important to run for mayor. I had the conceit that I could do something, that I could help the city, improve it. Now I wouldn't begin to know what you could do. I also ran because I thought it was a way to pay for my sins because I thought I'd get elected—that's how ignorant I was.”

William Buckley has always commuted from Connecticut, but like Mailer he once ran for mayor, and says he would never do it again: “New York is a mess. The poor are having a harder and harder time. A lot of it stems from drugs—I believe in legalization, you know. I ran for mayor in '65, but I wouldn't dream of doing it now.”

Nat Hentoff and his wife, the writer Margot Hentoff, talk about leaving. Speaking of the contrast with the old days, Nat says simply, “New York seems more consciously show biz now than it used to be, and I'm not attracted to that.” Margot is more vehement on the subject: “New York is horrible now. We're all talking about leaving. The city we came to doesn't exist anymore. It was safe and glamorous and rich. Now, if you want to live in a Third World country that's poor but exciting, you come to New York. I never wanted to go to Calcutta. I remember jazz musicians used to come back from Calcutta in the fifties and with shock tell us there were people sleeping in the streets, and we couldn't believe such a thing. Now it's all around us.”

Ed Fancher, cofounder and former publisher of the
Village Voice
, and a therapist who practices in the Village, came to New York in 1949 and has lived in the city ever since, but now is considering
moving. “Crack has really made everything worse,” Ed says. “We're thinking about leaving when our youngest son gets out of high school. He's thinking about going to college in Boston. Maybe we'll come up there too.”

The only friends I know from the New York of the fifties who left for any length of time and came back again to live in the city are Joan Didion and John Dunne. In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan wrote that New York is “at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.” How does it feel to return after one's youth? “I don't think of it as the same place. It's not the same people and I'm not the same person. It's just different. I don't have a sense of that infinite romantic yearning. I like living here. It's irritating, but I do like being here. When I say it's different now, it's not objectively different, it's
us
. But it's a better place to be than London or Paris.”