Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties Read online

  were out on the street or in the pressroom at Centre Street, New York’s Boss Tweed–era basilica of a police headquarters, or in some tenement hallway harassing the grieving mother of a newly electro- cuted bandit. Star crime reporters, especially, were often rumored to be functional illiterates or mere neighborhood thugs who happened to have been at reform school with important successful mafiosi. They were portrayed in the movies as holding telephones in the crook of neck and chin and barking, “Sweetheart, get me rewrite!” Rewrite men, who got second place in the bylines, worked within sight of the city editor. Their desk drawers were usually empty ex- cept for a reverse telephone directory, false credentials of various sorts for the reporters, and a bottle of Gold Leaf cognac. Rewrite men on the Daily News, men doing follow-up on a story, were in- structed to assume out-of-town accents and claim they represented the Times. This was intended to disarm socialites who had fallen vic- tim to jewel thieves, or otherwise supposedly respectable citizens who might not choose to have their names appear in the Daily News. The city editors’ desks stood out in front of the rewrite men’s like the stations of staff officers at the head of a regiment standing in- spection. At one end of the big room, beside the rewrite men, a priesthood of elderly sages sat at a slightly depressed baize-topped table rather like a small craps table. The elders were equipped with tomes for their reference, everything from a Bible concordance to Shakespeare’s comedies to Bartlett’s to the Field Guide to the Insects and Spiders of Greater New York. At least two of the old-timers at the copy desk would be wearing green eyeshades. Pinned to a billboard at the chief copy editor’s head was the yellowing proof of an ancient head- line that bespoke a wholesale dismissal of copy editors long ago. PENIS MIGHTIER THAN SWORD, it read. The One Star went to the trucks about eight o’clock, after some of 34 robert stone

  the Wall Street trading numbers had been checked, and most im- portant of all the final figures of the pari-mutuel handle at Aqueduct racetrack. The Wall Street numbers were winners in various local marginal wagers, but the pari-mutuel handle was the Number—the big Policy winner for just about the whole eastern seaboard. Great care was taken by those responsible not to disappoint through care- less error. Along corridors off the main editorial rooms, in cubicles consid- erably larger than Dilbert’s is today, the feature editors and the staff worked. Sports was the size of the rest of editorial. There were, yes, Society, Theater, Movies, the Women’s Page. An English tabloid rented space in one corner staffed by three Britons whose native dress and classic features drew attention. There was a very, very tall Liverpool Irish lady with a milkmaid’s complexion and disgraceful teeth who always wore red. Her legs were good and her seams straight; she had the broad hips and wasp waist of a Gibson Girl, while the rest of her towered off and disappeared into the overhead lights. A red-faced man in a checkered shirt read the wire copy with a magnifying glass. A second man confounded us by rolling his own cigarettes from a Prince Albert can. The News when I worked there did not seem to be an equal- opportunity employer. Other newspapers, even in 1958, had mul- tiracial staffs—or at least employed a few members of minorities. I realized this when I went over to the Herald Tribune’s city room to pick up some Tribs during a strike of New York truckers and mail- ers. The editorial department of the Herald Tribune had employees of every shade. Back at the News apartheid was in place, as rigorously present as I had seen it back in Amanzimtoti, Natal, South Africa. Even the sweepers at the News were white men, gaunt, sideburned youths from southern Appalachia who were called by names unfa- prime green: remembering the sixties 35

  miliar on Forty-second Street, such as Earl and Roy. The cleaning ladies were straight from Warsaw. The News’s single employee of any African background was an elderly die maker who ran a little coffee concession on the side. He was a European, however, with an almost impenetrable Scots accent. The politics and social perspective of the Daily News were what America calls “conservative.” This meant promoting American cap- italism, the most radical transforming power in the history of the world. Familiar social arrangements and structures crumble. The mass of people find themselves dislocated, alienated, and disenfran- chised in its wake. It was the role of papers like the News to nurse and manipulate popular prejudice in its own language and discover sources for the referred pains “progress” caused, sources safely distant from any sug- gestion of economic injustice. Yet class resentment was too valuable a weapon of the dominant corporate interests to dispense with; they wanted it exploited and intensified, yet separated from the notion that corporate America and its workers could have any conflict of interest. Not that the “conservative” popular press was meant to calm sus- picion and discontent. On the contrary. Threats were to be detected everywhere—in reefer madness, in immigrants, above all in amelio- rative schemes that threatened economic elites. These had to be seen as foreign-inspired swindles and worse. And the opponents of the status quo had to be identified as “phonies,” do-gooders trying to be smarter than everybody else, professors who’d never made a payroll. “People,” as one editor used to say at the Daily News, “educated be- yond their intelligence.” Such people tried to make themselves look clever by contradicting the teachings of revealed religion, laughing 36 robert stone

  at authority and deriding the boss, encouraging blacks to get above themselves, fostering disrespect for the police. That is pretty much where we were at the Daily News, at the end of the linotype era, the beginning of the end of the newspaper era. The cartoonist C. D. Batchelor, a colorful figure who presumably was old enough and had been around long enough to get away with wearing a cape and carrying a silver-headed cane, served as a kind of mystic seer for the News ideology. His weird, sibylic cartoons pro- vided a somber iconography for the News’s opinions. They were ul- trapatriotic, saber rattling in a fatalistic way, rather apocalyptic, and certainly without humor. On the national scene, the editors had no problem with southern racial segregation. Their support for Eisenhower was tepid; Joe McCarthy had been their man. Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey were eggheads, referred to insultingly. The News partic- ularly hated Fidel Castro. During his first official visit to New York I was dispatched with a bunch of photographers to the Waldorf- Astoria. The barbudos occupied a floor, Castro and his familiar hench- men before the first purge and a number of attractive young women in much makeup who seemed to be having too much fun to be en- tirely political. One of the photographers, a guy I used to work with at the wrestling matches, sent me up to one bearded official by Fidel’s side. “Ask him who the girls are,” he ordered me. So I did. The guy gave me a long, contemptuous look. “They are members of the Twenty-sixth of July Movement,” he said haughtily. Women at the Daily News were as yet the distant shadow of an is- sue. There were women there, which is saying something. I’ll never prime green: remembering the sixties 37

  forget one exasperated lady in rewrite explaining to the parochial- school graduates on the copy boys’ desk the literal and metaphoric significance of the Yiddish word schmuck. Surely anyone over the age of fifty who ever so much as delivered a newspaper has heard the old crack, attributed to H. L. Mencken, about newspaperwomen looking like “British tramp steamers cleaned up for the Queen’s birthday.” At the Daily News it got repeated at least once a month on every shift. The society editor, who bore a pseudo-aristocratic nom de plume that should have belonged to a Colonial Dame, was not one. She was, however, a legendary dame, having forged her own claim on the elite status by getting into the death house to witness the execution of the late Ruth Snyder. Ruth, in her day, was a not unattractive killer-adulteress on whom the Bar- bara Stanwyck character in Double Indemnity was supposedly based. Our society editor-to-be entered in the garb of a nurse. It should be recorded that the photograph of Ruth Snyder at the moment of impact was taken by another immortal, Hyman Roth- man, who, costumed as a doctor (perhaps a short, cigar-smoking doctor) and assisted by the future Miss Society, smuggled a camera into Sing Sing. Ruth Snyder’s death was the occasion of much ongoing h
ilarity at the News, where she survived as “the Babe in the Hot Seat.” All women were “babes” at the News—witnesses, victims, perpetrators, and col- leagues. And, as with what was then called the Homicide Squad, no wrongful death was beyond the purchase of institutional humor. I remember listening one night to an exchange between Hy Rothman, cruising Central Park in a radio car, and the photo desk. A guy, the police informed the News, had done a Dutch off a tree. That is, some lost soul had hanged himself from a tree in the park. 38 robert stone

  The etymology was interesting. Hanging oneself was known to the police as a “Dutch Act.” The name came from the dialect comedians of vaudeville who did immigrant humor, which included rendering German accents. German immigrants in New York in the nine- teenth century were often referred to as Dutchmen. The famous Weber and Fields were a Dutch Act. Why should German immi- grants be associated with this technique of terminal despair? Some say because nineteenth-century Germans arriving in New York, con- fronted with the horror they had rashly chosen, ended it all with a rope. Hy was in search of the man who had done the Dutch, but the police report was imprecise as to location. “What am I supposed to do?” Hyman asked. “Drive around the park looking for a guy hanging from a tree?” The police culture and that of the Daily News were closely en- twined. The editors on the News included some eccentric and cultivated characters. But as yellow journalists of the period, they were serving an icon of their own creation. They were, or pretended to be, practition- ers of right-wing populism. Their ideal imagined reader was a big- oted, tiny-minded, gum-chewing lout. Thus they became the slaves of their own golem. In the future of the century some version of this pro- letarian monster would reappear whenever class hatred needed to be dislocated from economics and drafted into service as a confusion. Downstairs, the Forty-second Street lobby had been transformed into a sunken exhibition hall where a giant globe representing the planet rotated furiously for the crowds passing in or out. The sym- bols of overheated populism were rampant. The room, lit to a cine- matic semidarkness, a cross between a spaceship’s bridge and the reptile house at the Bronx Zoo, was an exercise in fascist art deco prime green: remembering the sixties 39

  that outdid anything in Rome or Berlin. Metal silhouettes of a mob en avant marched along the wall. Over the decorations was a figure of Lincoln and a supposed quotation. “God must love the common people,” Lincoln is pictured as say- ing, “he made so many of them.” Frankly, this blood-chilling celebration of American populism, the bonding spirit that informed so many lynchings in the good old days, was a joke to us. Not that there was much we could do about it. What we did was to look for jobs with less morally demeaning publications. These often paid better than the News and were far more prestigious. Unfortunately, they usually required more distin- guished professional credentials, more extensive education and training, than many of us offered. We had not much leisure to pick and choose. We lived from paycheck to paycheck, plus or minus re- sults from the trotting races at Yonkers Raceway. For our conve- nience a bookie was located on the composing-room floor. When he retired he “sold” his handbook to some mark, a man not employed by the paper. The man arrived and stood around watching the proofs as they were spiked, waiting for customers. The foreman had to break the news to him; he could trade his handbook for the Brook- lyn Bridge. One thing that kept us going, other than youth and irony, was that we saw changes taking shape in the great world beyond the purview of the Daily News. 40 robert stone

  FOUR My normal shift on the News ended at one in the morning. By rare coincidence, the shift of a classmate of mine also ended an hour after midnight. Janice worked as a guidette at the RCA Building, and sometimes as a seller of tickets to the celebrated Rainbow Room in that building, according to the evening’s roster of assignments. She was in Mack Rosenthal’s narrative- writing class, as was I, so three times a week our working and school hours more or less coincided. At the designated hour, Janice would change out of her quasi-military Star Trek uniform, put on her black stockings,

  and braid her ponytail. She had another job as a waitress at the Seven Arts Gallery Coffee Shop on Ninth Avenue and Forty-third Street. I would go along just to watch her bring the coffee, one among a co- terie of gang kids, poètes maudits, and Times Square characters who sat around paying court to her. The proprietor of the café, an ursine beatnik, was particularly annoyed by my cheap suits, these being, like clean-shavenness, a requirement for employment at the News. My rash attempt to cultivate a set of dapper chin whiskers having nearly subjected me to dismissal, I hardly dared more extravagant affectations. This rendered me subject to his jeering. “Guys in suits don’t get the girl, man,” he would point out to me from time to time. The girl in question was my classmate Janice; my attentions to her aroused his jealous attraction and his denigration of my low- grade bourgeois wardrobe. This tempted me to observe for his bene- fit that Wallace Stevens hadn’t needed a grinding organ or a monkey with a tin cup to be a poet. Jack Kerouac read at the Seven Arts, along with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, Ted Joans, and other notables of the Beat era. Eventually I started reading the poetry I’d written at an empty dayside typewriter in the newsroom, working as long as I could get away with it. Janice worked at several of the Village espressos as well, including the long-lived Figaro. We discovered a place on East Sixth Street where the proprietor, a follower of Ayn Rand, sold peyote cactus, an indigenous hallucinogen. Peyote tasted wretched but it provided a glimpse of wonders beyond description. I say a glimpse because it was not until a few years later that I rashly blundered into peyote’s kingdom for a closer look. Later, in the seventies, everything changed. The white-shirted, Mass-attending copy boys were, with some exceptions, no longer ex- emplars. Black people, women, all sorts of people appeared on the 42 robert stone

  payroll. To be unhip was no longer so cool. There was much waver- ing then in the ranks of the culture war, and the News, as daily news- papers toppled around it, was waiting for a winner. As it turned out, however, even guys in cheap suits did from time to time get the girl. While Janice’s father nervously paced the church nave, a suitably hip clergyman arrived (he was, I believe, a kind of chaplain to the jazz community), and the two of us were married. We soon quit our several jobs and set out for New Orleans like Manon and Des Grieux, New Orleans being the most exotic but affordable destination the Greyhound Corporation afforded roman- tic newlyweds. prime green: remembering the sixties 43

  FIVE Janice and I arrived in New Orleans in 1960 shortly before Mardi Gras. We found an apartment in the French Quarter on St. Philip Street between Bourbon and Royal. The apartment was cheap and functional. We thought it looked like the place where Elia Kazan had located Stanley and Stella in the film ver- sion of Streetcar, with an interior patio and a balcony over the street. The proprietor of one of the French Market stalls on De- catur Street gave us a striped kitten. On Friday and Saturday there were a lot of fights on the street. Saturday night lasted from dusk until dawn, when bars

  closed for an hour to sweep. Every once in a while you could hear a pistol discharged, and see the welter of blue police lights reflected on stucco walls down the street. A. J. Liebling at that time described New Orleans as a cross be- tween Paterson, New Jersey, and Port-au-Prince, combining as al- ways exquisite observation with a rich imagination. Still the most self-referential city in the country, New Orleans sat at the far end of the post-Faulknerian small-town Deep South, by which I mean the far end from me. It did not really represent the surrounding region, which nevertheless separated it from the rest of urban America. An immigrant entrepôt, a seaport, a city with a strong Latin and Catholic fabric, New Orleans never seemed totally alien to me. Its accent had elements of Brooklyn speech. The city and its people seemed deeply urban, more like Boston or Philadelphia in some ways than like Atlanta or Dallas. Those latter places were bigger but in those days they were very much a part of the southern Calvinist society around them. At the same time, New Orleans never imagined itself as other than south
ern. Its relatively tolerant ways and the presence of a black and mixed-race cultural tradition had earned it the nickname of “Big Easy.” As statutorily race-minded as the rest of the South, it managed somehow to seem less ornery about it, at least to outsiders. When J. and I arrived, just a few years after Brown v. Board, southern identity was still strong, but its moral self-confidence was reacting to a national repudiation of what the politicians called its “way of life.” The South of course was famous for its politicians. Like con- temporary pols leading the struggle for values et cetera, the south- ern politicians knew there was no cause like a lost cause to keep the discontented voters in a state of offended outrage. “Big Easy” or whatever, New Orleans was a tough city for Yankees to find jobs in. 46 robert stone

  It was also basically a poor one, especially dependent on the oil in- dustry’s fortunes. The demonstrations against segregation had started in North Carolina in 1960, but when we settled in just before Lent of that year things had a long way to go. The Mardi Gras celebrations which I had sort of dreaded were disarmingly cheerful and sweet, observed by both whites and blacks. We were surprised at the number and ex- tent of racially mixed neighborhoods. At the time I thought New Orleans was as residentially integrated as any city I had seen. What most surprised me were the two-story buildings of the public hous- ing projects, many of which consisted of twenty apartments, ten up, ten down. These buildings were segregated in that their tenants alternated white-black-white-black. I had never seen people of dif- ferent races, poor people at that, living in such proximity. This of course would go. In the seventies New Orleans witnessed the most thoroughgoing white flight anywhere in the country, creating the modest suburbs that sent the Klansman David Duke to the state- house. The first jobs I found were two temporary gigs on local assembly lines. Up until then I had missed out on the mass-production expe- rience in America. First at an instant-coffee plant and then at a local liquid-soap factory, I became acquainted with labor discipline as practiced in midcentury. In both places, people got fired as the day lengthened. The irrepressibly social went first, for talking on the line. At mezzanine level, a railed catwalk led to a small glass booth in which two observers watched the line below. One faced left, the other right. Every time one of the temporaries or new hires was dis- missed, the speed of the assembly line would slow slightly and then gradually speed up. It was impossible in these circumstances not to feel a trifle jerked around, if not totally dehumanized. Sometimes prime green: remembering the sixties 47