Authors: Michael Blanding
“We both auditioned for the role of a judge in a school play, and he got the role,” later recalled Hilary Chaplain, a friend from Bedford and
Derryfield, on whom Smiley developed a crush. “He just had this sense of honesty and sincerity and a strong moral constitution.” Despite his popularity, Smiley wasn’t the kind of guy girls got crushes on, and what crushes he had went unreturned. He compensated by finding other ways of getting attention. Along with three other friends—one named Peter and two named Paul—he founded the “Literary Guild,” a guys-only group of self-styled aesthetes who got together to smoke cigars, drink beer, and discuss philosophy, in that order.
When he got his driver’s license, he bought a beat-up Mercedes at a time when his friends’ parents were driving hand-me-down Datsuns. “It became kind of a marker for who he was,” remembered Statt. “He became that guy who drove the Mercedes.” In another instance, he and a few friends planned a trip to Cape Cod to fly kites and hopefully meet girls. Smiley insisted that they make their own kites, spending hours experimenting with construction to make them stay aloft as long as possible. When it came time to actually fly the kites on the beach, Statt recalled, he seemed to lose interest. The act of making them was enough. “He was always very good at sort of narrating his own life, not necessarily in a self-promoting way, but just in a way trying to make whatever he was doing into a bigger story,” said Statt, “a better story.”
—
BY COLLEGE, HIS
personality was well-formed. Starting in 1974, he attended Hampshire College, a free-form liberal arts school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where students design their own majors. It was, not surprisingly, a school full of eccentric characters. With his strange combination of ponytail and pressed khakis, Smiley managed to stand out without becoming one of them. He confidently bounded across campus, seemingly always in a hurry. In an era of
Blood on the Tracks
and
Born to Run,
he listened exclusively to classical music. And in place of the Mercedes, he began driving an old Checker cab.
To his friends, who were all more or less going through the awkwardness of finding themselves in college, he seemed enviably composed. As with the Literary Guild at Derryfield, he cultivated a group of intellectuals who sat together in the cafeteria debating philosophy and literature. Smiley immersed himself in the classics, studying Greek and Latin and the history of religion and delighting in knowing more than those
around him. He started a conversation once by asking his friend Scott Haas which translation of
The Iliad
was his favorite—and fairly howled with protest when Haas said he’d never read any of them.
Another friend, Scott Slater, began taking long walks with him every night after dinner and never failed to be impressed by the way Smiley could stop at an old church steeple and rattle off a half-dozen facts about who had made it and when. Smiley could well engage in the late-night games of intellectual one-upsmanship that characterize college life, but he didn’t do it with the insecure caviling of most of his peers. Instead, it quickly became clear to his friends that he simply knew more than they did, and when he stated something, people tended to believe him. No matter how Smiley lorded information over his friends, however, he always did it with a laugh—a great booming laugh that seemed always just below the surface in conversation.
Nor were his talents limited to book smarts. Another close friend, Dick Cantwell, worked on theater sets with him and was routinely impressed at his skill in working with wood. Fred Melamed, who later became an acclaimed actor, remembers him standing outside the dining commons at Hampshire, juggling Indian clubs while reciting Greek classics. At various times, he showed friends how to carve a turkey, cut firewood, and make a campfire. One November when they went camping, he summarily ripped off his clothes and jumped into a freezing-cold lake. No matter what he did, Smiley threw himself into projects he took on with an energy bordering on obsession. When he decided to lose weight after his freshman year, he went on a sudden crash diet, returning to campus in the fall half the size he left it in the spring.
Nothing demonstrates his drive and determination to his friends, however, more than “
the dollhouse.” Smiley began constructing miniature dollhouse furniture in his dorm room as a hobby, selling items to the local toy store for extra cash. In the summer between his junior and senior years, the owner asked if he’d be interested in building a complete dollhouse for the window. Smiley worked all summer to build a Victorian mansion on a massive scale: four and half feet wide, three feet deep, and two and a half feet tall. On the exterior, he tiled a mansard roof with real slate and added a verandah and widow’s walk. Inside, he applied hinges to the walls so they could swing outward and admirers could peer
into the rooms, which were furnished with meticulous detail based on research he did on real nineteenth-century homes.
“I took different rooms I liked and fit them into one house,” he told the local newspaper, which called the house “more like a work of art” than a child’s toy. “I wanted to combine the aesthetic appeal of a Victorian house and the idea of a doll house.” He built a tiny grand piano for the living room next to an oriental mural drawn on the wall in pen and ink. In the kitchen, he installed a woodstove and mousetraps smaller than a fingernail on the floor. In the library, he built a pinewood table that could fold out into a ladder that reached the books on the upper shelves. He plastered ceilings, painted walls, and inlaid floors with parquetry.
“It’s really carpentry in miniature,” he explained. “When I didn’t know how to do something, I fell back on the way it’s really done.” When he’d finished, the owner of the store estimated the price at $10,000—of which Smiley of course received only a fraction. But the owner resolutely refused to sell, keeping it in the window throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a landmark for a generation of local children.
As impressive as his mock mansion was, Smiley illustrated a more grandiose vision to his friends in late-night bull sessions. Among the usual talk of moving in together after college and starting some kind of art commune, Smiley expressed a larger vision. Instead of a house, he told friends that he wanted to start a small village, where they could all move. He spent hours detailing everything it would have—a school where kids could learn through hands-on work, a radio station where they could play all the music they liked. He even had a name for it:
Small Hope, which his friends recognized as a typically “Forbesian” touch, at once grandiose and humble. “By calling it small, it was like saying this is such a modest proposal I have here,” Statt later said. “But it’s going to be a utopian ideal.”
—
WHEN SMILEY FINALLY
settled down in New York after college, the place he chose couldn’t have been farther from the quaint vision he had outlined. Rather than pick a spot downtown or on the Upper West Side, Smiley decided to make this home in the gritty neighborhood of Washington Heights, finding an apartment on the corner of Fort Washington and 163rd Street. Back in the 1980s, the neighborhood was much more
dangerous than it is now. Outside, the building wasn’t much to look at—a six-story low-rise apartment house on a desolate stretch of street, with a bodega next door that sold beer through a metal grate. But Smiley saw potential in his apartment, a warren of rooms full of period details—wainscoting, a working fireplace. Smiley put up new molding and refinished the hardwood floors. It was his dollhouse writ large.
Soon he had a partner in the endeavor, a pretty blonde named Lisa who worked in the home furnishings department of B. Altman. Shy where Smiley was outgoing, she looked up to his knowledge and confident personality. The two began dating and eventually moved in together in the Washington Heights apartment, where Lisa’s decorator’s eye complemented Smiley’s own. They began to create a gathering place for friends, who made the exotic trek uptown for dinner parties and late-night gatherings.
After scattering around the country, Smiley’s old friends from Derryfield and Hampshire reunited at a series of weddings, and many found their way to New York either as residents or passing through while traveling. Smiley encouraged them to stay as long as they wanted in the roomy apartment. Shortly after college, his oldest friend, Paul Statt, went through a tough time—breaking up with his girlfriend at the same time he lost his job and his truck broke down. “I was feeling like a country music song,” Statt later said. Smiley invited him down to the city, telling him, “You are straight, you are not fat, the girls are going to love you in New York.” Smiley let him sleep on the couch for six months, never once asking for rent.
In addition to Smiley’s friends, Lisa began cultivating a crowd of creative professionals from the fashion and design world. Forbes and Lisa loved playing host—cooking meals and bringing out gourmet cheese and decent wine at a time when most of their friends were drinking cheap beer. Gatherings lasted until three in the morning, with dancing to the Talking Heads and B-52s, while the Hampshire crowd vied to outdo one another in esoteric knowledge, with enormous amounts of beer and red wine to fuel the conversation. Smiley himself was often on the periphery of his own gatherings. He could recount great stories from college with a raconteur’s gift for narrative. But even as he created space for others to socialize, he was rarely the one to hold forth in the middle
of a gathering, preferring one-on-one conversations with guests in the corners.
—
AT THE SAME TIME
that Smiley was settling into his new life in New York, he was also doing everything he could to learn about the trade into which he had fallen. He had been intrigued by what his boss, Slifer, had told him about maps and those who made them, and he wanted to know more. Slifer encouraged him to visit the
New York Public Library. B. Altman was only a half-dozen blocks south of the main branch on Fifth Avenue, which housed the Map Division. That’s where Smiley’s real cartographic education began.
“I began a twenty-year love affair with the New York Public Library,” Smiley told me as we sat talking together on Martha’s Vineyard. “It is the greatest institution I know of. There were enormous quantities of maps and atlases there that were not being given attention.” By the time Smiley pulled open the brass handles on the Map Division’s Room 117, it contained some eleven thousand atlases and 350,000 individual maps—the largest collection of any public library in the world. More than seven thousand visitors passed through each year—real estate lawyers researching property maps for land disputes; news reporters searching for up-to-date maps of Beirut or Grenada; railroad hobbyists searching for old tunnels beneath the city; and plenty of ordinary people just looking for highway maps to help plan their vacations.
The room was particularly conducive to studying antique maps. Called a “Beaux-Art jewelbox,” and the NYPL’s “holy of holies,” Room 117 was forty feet long and nearly as deep, lined with dark-wood bookcases and high arched windows through which sunlight streamed. The ceiling cavorted with plaster dragons and cherubs in gold, green, and vermillion, and golden chandeliers hung over rows of wide walnut tables. Against the far wall, long gray cabinets held thousands of maps in flat drawers, with thousands more maps in the back room.
Lording over it all as an approving mother hen was
Alice Hudson, chief of the division since 1981. A big woman with curly blond hair and a playful wit, she had established herself as the map room’s guiding spirit by age thirty-five. Originally from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, she had spent
her summers vacationing at her great-aunt’s big Victorian house in Michigan. There she often visited Greenfield Village, Henry Ford’s re-creation of Americana, full of old houses and shops, antique cars, and a historic carousel. Hudson was entranced. “I blame Greenfield Village for my career,” she later said. “I wanted to be in the map field because of all that history.”
Hudson became captivated by maps during a required geography course at Middle Tennessee State University, and after that she took one geography course after another. When she entered Vanderbilt University to study library science, her professors told her that there was no such thing as a map librarian. But she proved them wrong the year she graduated, when the NYPL offered her a job as a junior map cataloger. She wasted no time learning the collection, climbing quickly to the top post in the division. Her favorite map was the “
water map” drawn by a civil engineer named Egbert Viele in 1874 showing the underground courses of the original streams on Manhattan Island. She used to delight in telling journalists how, on more than one occasion, men in waders had come in to consult the map trying to figure out how their construction sites had gotten suddenly soaked.
As much as she appreciated the more modern maps, however, she especially loved the maps from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were kept separate in their own locked, military-green cases. She delighted in the feel of old cloth and vellum and in the knowledge that these maps had lasted hundreds of years and would someday outlive her. Most researchers came to use the more modern New York–themed maps. A rare atlas might go years in its drawer without being touched.
When Smiley came in telling her he was interested in antique maps, she began pulling them out for him one by one. He sat for hours paging through them, familiarizing himself with names like Dudley, Des Barres, Faden, and Jefferys, mapmakers who soon became central to his career. For even older material, he climbed the marble stairs to the
Rare Book Division, which included maps dating back to the fifteenth century. As someone who had always been interested in New England history, he began focusing on maps that illustrated the discovery of North America.
“And I loved the stuff!” he told me, his voice quickening with excitement. “Here was a body of evidence of enormous value for a historian
that had never been looked at in a comprehensive, serious way, and it just blew my mind. You don’t get handed opportunities like that. You just don’t.” At the time, the study of cartography was still developing, and the European map dealers who dominated were more interested in studying maps of the world or of their own countries. Smiley ordered up book after book, making connections among them—seeing which cartographers had copied from another, and which had really pushed forth the knowledge of a region with original surveys. Not only was he making findings that no one else had made before, but he was also able to impress his clients at B. Altman by directing them to maps that mattered. He could go to the NYPL and research a particular rare map, and then handle a copy of it a week or a month later at the store.