The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (32 page)

The Dursts embarked on a conscious policy of delaying the project to death. In a furious 1990 op-ed article in
The New York Times,
Carl Weisbrod, the public official in charge of the project, alleged that the Dursts, acting in concert with the owners of the block’s porno theaters, had forged “a litigation conspiracy trap aimed at preventing the reclamation of what was—and should be again—New York’s most glorious street.” Of course, the trap worked. But while the small fry who owned the theaters disappeared from Times Square, Douglas Durst returned in glory: when Prudential, George Klein’s financial backer, forced him to sell in 1995, it was Durst, acting with the family gift for adroit timing and the well-calculated gamble, who bought the choicest of all the office parcels, at the southeast corner of Broadway and 42nd Street.

If there was any single moment that marked the emergence of the shining new Times Square of global media and entertainment firms, it was Durst’s announcement that he had secured Condé Nast as the anchor tenant of 4 Times Square. And he had been able to do so by exploiting the enormous subsidies that the family professed to despise. Whether this constituted gross hypocrisy, or merely a very high order of gamesmanship, was perhaps simply a matter of perspective. Douglas, while protesting rather feebly that the family never really tried to impede the project, concedes, in his laconic way, that the outcome was “ironic.” Lawrence Silverstein, a fellow mogul and old friend of the family, says, “Seymour, God bless him, as he looks down, what must he be thinking?” Of course, one should not entirely dismiss the possibility that Seymour is thinking, “Excellent deal.”

Douglas had vindicated his father’s faith in Times Square and paid for a twenty-five-year-old investment many times over. At the same time, he didn’t seem to feel at home in the new Times Square he had wrought: he didn’t eat in the fancy new restaurants or meet friends for a drink in the chic hotels. I persuaded Douglas, against the force of his habits, to have lunch with me one day by suggesting that we meet at the irredeemably unchic Howard Johnson’s, where he could be certain of meeting no one who recognized him, much less knew him. As we sat in an orange booth on a blazingly hot day, Douglas pointed across the street and said, “I used to go to the Ripley’s between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth after school.” He was, he said, a great aficionado of the arcades in the late fifties. When the kids were young, he would leave them to play pinball with Jimmy Glen, the owner of Jimmy’s Corner, an old Times Square bar on 44th just east of Broadway, while he and his wife went out to dinner. That was the Times Square he cared about; and none of it, he said, was left (except Jimmy’s). I asked Douglas how he felt about the new Times Square, which he had done so much to bring into being. There was a long, long pause. “I think,” he finally said, “it could do without all the development—except, of course, Four Times Square.” And he smiled ever so slightly at this shaft of Durstian wit.

AS I WALKED ALONG 42nd Street in the early months of 2002, I often looked at a shabby little structure huddled in the lee of the mighty Condé Nast building. On top of the storefront was a big billboard that featured a rendering of the American flag, an outline of a hand clutching a can of spray paint, and the slogan, “Declare Independence from Corporate Rule.” Here, apparently, was a refreshing howl of protest at all that Times Square had become, and all that was embodied in that great glass tower occupied by the world’s most glamorous media company. The storefront housed some kind of alternative arts complex called Chashama. It was Aaron Beall who told me that the founder and director of Chashama was Anita Durst—Douglas’s older daughter. It seemed that the family predisposition to the peculiar had been passed on to yet another generation.

When I went to meet Anita, in a cubbyhole office on the second floor of Chashama, she was bouncing lightly on one of those big blue balls said to be therapeutic. She was, when she stood up, tall and slender, with a ferociously cropped skullcap of black hair and the almond eyes of a Modigliani—Douglas’s eyes, actually—set in a narrow, triangular face. She was the kind of young woman (she was then thirty-two) who could war with her beauty and still look beautiful. We proceeded to have an oddly disjointed conversation; only later did I realize that Anita was so uncomfortable that she made me feel uncomfortable. She was terribly shy, as her father and grandfather were, but she also seemed to struggle in the medium of language; she would pull up short before fairly ordinary words. As a child, she had been severely dyslexic, and she still had trouble memorizing lines for a part; reading took real effort. Though trained as an actress, Anita was drawn to the kind of avant-garde work that often didn’t require much in the way of speech. A few years before, she had played a mute and sullen secretary in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s
The Bitter Tears of
Petra von Kant;
a critic in the
Times
had described her as “spectacularly creepy.”

Anita was the oldest of Douglas’s three children. She had been precociously ungovernable, appropriating a family car and driving it into trees at age thirteen—a story that Douglas told with some combination of awe and bewilderment, for she had set standards of willfulness that Douglas himself had never approached. School had been a nightmare: shipped off to prep school in ninth grade after proving a hopeless failure in public school, she was kicked out for smoking pot, took a one-year sabbatical to shack up with a biker, and was then enrolled by her obviously desperate parents in the kind of vocational school that was meant to be the last stop before the streets. “The classes were like ten minutes long,” Anita said, “and then in the afternoon you worked.” Anita earned her high school diploma by tending bar at a pizzeria. College was out of the question. She had no clear idea what to do with herself; her parents, having at least shepherded her through high school, asked her to move out. And then Seymour, of all people, invited her to move in.

Seymour was the kind of charming oddball who can seem highly appealing to a rebellious teenager. He passed no judgments, asked no probing questions, and wanted nothing more than a faithful listener, which Anita was formed by nature to be. She moved into the Fiction Room, way up on the fifth floor, and came and went as she pleased. After a few years, she was ready to leave, but Seymour couldn’t bear to be parted from her. “He said, ‘Bring all your friends here,’” Anita said. “At one point, I had four or five people living with me.” And so Anita lived, very happily, in the midst of a commune. She browsed through the giant leather-bound two-volume set of
Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection,
and through the six volumes of I. N. Phelps Stokes’s
Iconography of Manhattan Island.
She listened to Seymour’s stories and crotchets, and she had breakfast with him every morning at the Burger Heaven down the street. Seymour recruited his librarians from among the waitresses there, since he claimed that professional librarians kept trying to improve on his “quintessimal” cataloguing system.

Like many shy people, Anita fell in love with acting. Unlike most of the others, she had a father who owned Broadway theaters. In 1990, Douglas agreed to let En Garde Arts, a “site-specific” theater company with which Anita was associated, put on a play in the wreckage of the majestic Victory Theatre. Douglas quickly became Anita’s chief patron. He allowed her to use the semi-defunct Diplomat Hotel, on West 43rd Street, for a play called
The Law of Remains,
in which, Anita says, “Andy Warhol and Jeffrey Dahmer meet in Heaven.” The play was apparently based on
The Egyptian Book of the Dead.
The hotel had a series of splendid, haunted-looking ballrooms. “The big ballroom was Heaven,” Anita says, “and God was a Puerto Rican drag queen with an erection.” Douglas says that Seymour would leave after the first few scenes of these shows and report, “I didn’t understand it, but Anita was very good.”

The Law of Remains
had been mounted by Reza Abdoh, a celebrated Iranian multimedia artist who was Anita’s mentor and collaborator. Later she played “a black wench slave” in an Abdoh production called
Tight,
Right, White.
“It was very in-your-face,” she recalls. Abdoh was an enfant terrible who infused Anita with a radical politics that goes rather oddly with her gentle nature and her very real fear of giving offense. Her actual politics seem to consist mostly of an abiding sympathy for all forms of disaffection or discomfort. Anita was proud to play host to the four-day Intergalactic Convention of Anarchists, though after the anarchists left she said that most of them had been peace-loving high school students who entertained themselves making puppets at another studio she ran. In Anita’s utopia, everybody would make puppets and eat breakfast at Burger Heaven.

Reza Abdoh died of AIDS in 1995, and Anita then formed a company to carry on his work. After combing through books in her grandfather’s library, she named the company “Chashama,” a combination of the Persian words for “spring” and “eye,” more or less. In 1997, as he had begun building 4 Times Square, Douglas gave Chashama the adjacent building, which had housed Herman’s Sporting Goods. And as the leases of neighboring storefronts expired, he gave those to Chashama as well, though doing so cost him close to $2 million a year in forgone revenue. Chashama theaters and studios alternated with a Peep-O-Rama, Tad’s Steaks, and a drugstore. The billboard had come courtesy of
Adbusters,
a radical antiglobalization magazine to which Anita’s younger sister Helena was particularly devoted. Some members of the Chashama staff worried that Douglas might take the motto as a very public rebuke to himself and to all his building represented, as well he might have. But Douglas would not dishonor his inner Jerry Garcia. The billboard stayed, until Anita and her colleagues tired of it.

Anita was more or less the Mabel Dodge Luhan or Peggy Guggenheim of her particular early-millennial fringe artistic moment, though since even the most difficult artists can now gain the backing of powerful mainstream institutions, she was left with a fairly shaggy fringe. Anita faithfully maintained Abdoh’s commitment to confrontational art, though it was often hard to say what end she had in view. She herself directed The World of the P-Cult, a production featuring a group of dominatrixes and neo-go-go girls she had rounded up from downtown as well as a young man with a terrible deformity that left his arms looking like flippers. The show had an atmosphere of portent, menace, and unleashed sexuality, with antlered S&M queens vaulting down from a catwalk to swagger through the audience. It was slightly reminiscent of the unfortunate climactic scene of
Eyes Wide Shut.
A pyromaniac named Flambeau kept columns of flame lit on the stage. And few who were fortunate enough to be there will soon forget the climactic scene, in which the naked flipper-boy, his genitals in a little bag, was borne onto the stage in preparation for ritual sacrifice, singing in his unearthly, androgynous voice a tune that mixed the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Madonna’s “Material Girl.”

Though Douglas was utterly baffled that his daughter, whom he considered an incorrigible space cadet, was able to run an organization of any kind, he backed her to the hilt in all things. If a movie production company wanted to shoot a scene in the Condé Nast Building, the answer was always the same: “Only if you give Anita a part.” When Anita, in turn, had the ingenious idea of staging a series of tableaux vivants in the empty windows of 1 Times Square, the building at 42nd between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, she called her father, who in turn talked to the real estate broker. (No dice.) She once contemplated asking her father if she could broadcast a clandestine radio station from an antenna on top of the Condé Nast Building.

Anita, herself such a wounded creature, had no wish to wound anyone, least of all her own family. She was horrified at the suggestion that her plutocratic father might in any sense be the target of Chashama’s radically anticorporate posture. “As a businessman,” she said earnestly, “he’s known for being very generous and very kind.” In fact, Anita saw Chashama as a fulfillment of Seymour’s crotchety worldview. “My grandfather hated Disney,” she said. “He always said Times Square was meant to be built up by the community. That was one of his bottom lines.” It would have been heartless to point out that Seymour had tried to create a Rockefeller Center Times Square, and that the Condé Nast Building played a starring role in the global entertainment-finance-media nexus of the new Times Square.

Like Aaron Beall, Anita wanted to offer something raw and unfiltered in a Times Square increasingly given over to “corporate rule.” It was very important to her that Chashama have a presence on the street, so she had installed odd and often cryptic artworks in each of the storefront windows. These installations were often interactive, and thus offered a series of small-scale engagements between performer and spectator, animating Times Square’s street life in a way quite different from, say, the transaction between spray painters and customers farther west on 42nd Street. There was the Deli Dance, which brought dancers out onto the sidewalk in front of a delicatessen. The Seder Installation, mounted during Passover, began as a window display of matzoh surrounding a chair, and then evolved into an actual seder on the crowded sidewalk.

I always made a point of walking by to see what was new. One afternoon, I noticed a young woman with a microphone sitting in the window, with a big bag of fortune cookies next to her. “Would you like to know your fortune?” she said into the microphone. I said that I would, and she broke open a cookie and read, “Kindness is the highest form of wisdom.” When I asked whether it was a “real” fortune, she pointed a finger at me and said, “You mean if
I
wrote them, they’re not real?” This was a pretty good point, and by the time I had formulated an answer I had a little audience of passersby, which made for a very odd and uncomfortable conversation. I realized that public engagement, and my discomfort with it, was part of the point; or perhaps it was an inadvertent by-product. Chashama productions often made me doubt whether having a point was the point.