Sunday, March 26, 2017

286. The Mafia and Me


MEET BILL HOPE, WHO ONCE CLAIMED TO BE RELATED TO MARIE ANTOINETTE THROUGH HIS MOTHER'S FAMILY, THE SHAWNZAZLEEZAYS


browder-cover-9781681143057-perfect-2
Bill Hope: His Story: ($20: Softcover: 6X9”, 158pp: 978-1-68114-305-7; $35: Hardcover: 978-1-68114-306-4; $2.99: EBook: 978-1-68114-307-1; LCCN: 2017933794; Historical Fiction; May 17, 2017) is the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his scorn for snitches and bullies; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; his brief career on the stage playing himself; his loyalty to a man who has befriended him but may be trying to kill him; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. In the course of his adventures he learns how slight the difference is between criminal and law-abiding, insane and sane, vice and virtue—a lesson that reinforces what he learned on the streets. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a yearning to leave the crooked life behind, and a persistent and undying hope.
          This is the second title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  The first in the series is The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), mention of which appears at the end of this post. 

         The book can be ordered from Amazon and will be shipped after the release date of May 17, 2017.  But the paperback, which goes for $20, will cost an additional $4.95 for shipping, unless you order books totaling $25 or more.  The book is also available now from the author and will be mailed immediately ($20 + postage).  And now on to bars and the Mafia.


*                 *                 *                *                  *                  *           

         In New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, before the advent of Gay Liberation, it was common knowledge in the gay world that most of the gay bars – bars specifically serving the gay community – were run by the Mafia.  This reminiscence conjures up in my mind a jam-packed, smoke-filled interior with a thug standing guard at the door to keep out desirables, so the undesirables would hobnob in peace – or at least without the annoyance of heterosexual tourists.  Jam-packed they certainly were, on Friday and Saturday nights, far exceeding the capacity -- conspicuously posted on the wall – that the law allowed, and smoke-filled as well.  But as for the thug at the door, I can now recall only one bar – a discotheque known as the Goldbug – with a forbidding guardian of the portal.  (More of that anon.)

         The Mafia’s control of New York gay bars in those days is covered in detail by Philip Crawford Jr.’s The Mafia and the Gays, self-published in 2015, which delves deep into such sources as FBI files now accessible (with deletions) to the public; New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) records; gay memoirs; and newspaper articles and columns of the time.  Obtaining a copy, I have scanned it for accounts of some of the bars I patronized back in those long-gone days when the gay community lived a subterranean life visible only to those knowing heterosexuals who enjoyed participating in it – far more women than men – and to those who exploited it for profit.  So what have I learned?  Plenty.

         The Cork Club at 375 West 72nd Street was mentioned in 1954 in an FBI New York field office report listing bars “catering to homosexuals and queers.”  Since this was a part of the FBI’s Top Hoodlum Program launched the year before, the Cork Club was presumably a Mafia-run joint.  It was also the first gay bar I ever visited, tremulously curious, in the company of a knowing friend in the fall of 1953, and subsequently one that I visited frequently on weekends, since it was only a short subway ride down from my dormitory at Columbia University, where I was doing graduate studies in French.  There was no thug at the door, only a friendly hat-check woman, plump and cheerful, who urged the clientele to attend the Cork Club picnic.  The very thought of being seen in daylight with a throng of queers put me off, but in the club’s shadowy interior I first beheld a very femme gay kid walking in a very fake way, doing his best to fulfill the heterosexual stereotype of gay.  He turned me off, but on other occasions I made my first connections there, some of them delightful, but none of them destined to endure.  And this in a bar that the FBI had its eye on, but where the Mafia’s shadow was nowhere to be seen. 
         Heterosexuals occasionally visited the Cork Club as tourists, and there was no gatekeeper to keep them out.  Once I saw four guys just outside, hesitating to enter.  “C’mon, c’mon,” urged one, but the others were not persuaded; in the end they walked off, presumably to some hetero bar where they would feel more at ease.  But on another occasion two hetero couples got in.  “Do you want him?” one girl asked me, indicating her boyfriend.  “No,” I replied, “he’s all yours.  I’m not attracted to straight guys.” Which was true enough.

         The Cork Club was just the beginning of my explorations, which soon  extended to Greenwich Village and a string of bars on West 8th Street: the Old Colony at 43 West 8th, and a little farther down the block, the International and (I think) a bar called Mary’s, and just across the Street from the Old Colony at 40 West 8th, a popular nightclub, the Bon Soir.  My favorite was the Old Colony, which functioned as a hetero restaurant during the day and then metamorphosed into a gay bar at night.  Juke boxes were an essential part of the gay bar scene, and I can still recall the rendering of “The whole town is talking about the Jones boy,” which found immediate resonance with the throng of Jones boys crowding the bar, sipping beer, and cruising.  Even more memorable was the plaintive rendering of “Annie doesn’t live here anymore,” a song dating back to 1933 and later sung by Eartha Kitt in plaintive English and Marlene Dietrich in German:

Annie doesn’t live here anymore.
You must be the one she waited for.
She said I would know you by the blue in your eye,
Checkered suit, a fancy vest, and polka-dot tie.
You answer to that description, so I guess that you’re the guy.
Well, Annie doesn’t live here anymore.

This song too found resonance with its message of lost love and missed opportunities, of fault and failure and its consequences.

         One of my least favorite memories of the Old Colony was the “last chance” moment when, on Saturday night close to the 4 a.m. closing, there came the announcement “Last Call!” – a summons to the last drink of the night, and the last chance to connect.  Connect I rarely did, disliking the desperate intensity of the moment, but on one occasion succumbed when a decent-looking slightly older guy gave me a nod and a smile.  And it was under the same circumstances that a friend of mine, likewise new to the scene and even – to his virginal delight – on one occasion labeled “chicken,” was spirited off by a chunky older man to distant Queens for his deflowering – a rather drab event, he reported to me on the morrow, but necessary and long overdue.

         The Bon Soir just across the street was a different experience, for one went there not to cruise but to be entertained.  The crowd at that time was a mix of gay and straight, and I remember two female performers, but not their names, one white and one black, both popular with the gay crowd and basking in their favor and applause.  It was a fun place, free from the tensions of cruising.  Only now have I learned that in the 1960s Barbra Streisand made her debut there, a prelude to enduring fame.

         So much for my first experience of the bars of the Village.  Mr. Crawford’s book informs me that the Village bars were controlled by the Genovese family, one of five Mafia families active in the city.  Their dominance in Greenwich Village resulted in part from the presence of a large Italian immigrant population in the South Village that was tolerant of their activities and unlikely to complain to the authorities.  Vito Genovese also excelled in marketing heroin to addicts, and two of his lieutenants were fronts for him, operating the Bon Soir.  None of this was known to the 8th Street clientele, nor was I aware at the time of any dancing at the Bon Soir, but Crawford says that Vito Genovese was a frequent guest there, and that the gay dancing there was wild.  But that dancing was in the 1960s; when I went there in the 1950s, dancing in gay bars was almost unheard of.  But the authorities had their eye on Vito Genovese; he was arrested for running heroin in 1959 and died in prison a decade later. 

         The Cork Club and the 8th Street bars were fine, but for a more elite experience one went to the East Side, and most specifically to the Blue Parrot at 152 East 52nd Street, which was part of the so-called “Bird Circuit,” a string of gay bars that included the Golden Pheasant on East 48th Street and the Swan on East 54th.  The Blue Parrot was just a bit more tasteful and elegant than the West Side and Village bars, though this may have been mostly in the imagination of visiting West Siders.  On the East Side I felt like a tourist, which is probably why I never seemed to connect there.  The Blue Parrot too appears in the FBI’s 1954 list of queer bars, along with the Cork Club and many others, though which Mafia family operated it is not stated. 

         For true East Side elegance and exclusiveness, nothing matched Regents Row on East 43rd Street, where I never ventured.  Coat and tie were mandatory, and a certain snobbish East Side elegance prevailed.  When a casually dressed young friend of mine connected with an older man at Grand Central Station, he was whisked away to Regents Row, where there was a great fuss about attiring him in a jacket and tie to make him presentable.  When I told this story later to an elegant older acquaintance at Provincetown (my only visit there and another story), he said with mild annoyance, “Yes, it used to be a nice place, before they started bringing in every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”  Be that as it may, Mr. Crawford informs me that Regents Row was run by Tommy Dowling and his lover Lucky Moore, who reportedly had ties to the Mafia.

         How did the Mafia get control of the bars and run them?  Quoting various sources, Mr. Crawford makes it crystal clear: a “clean” man with no police record would apply for the state liquor license, for which service in the 1950s he got $50 to $100 a week from the mob.  And since Italian names were associated with the Mafia, this front might have a name not ending in a tell-tale vowel; Irish and Jewish owners were not uncommon.  The real owners, the Mafiosi, would keep t  the shadows, only occasionally setting foot on the premises.  If the bar got “hot” – meaning it was getting too much attention, maybe from a crusading newspaper columnist – it would suspend operations for a ten-day cooling-off period.  And if it got “too hot,” the owners would be advised to sell to another “clean” operator who would have no trouble preserving the license.  And the police?  They were of course paid off.  More than once in a jam-packed gay bar I saw policemen in uniform enter, proceed to the back of the bar for a brief meeting with the manager or owner, and then leave, taking no notice of the patrons and their numbers far exceeding the posted capacity.

         A variation of the Mafia gay-bar operation in the 1960s was what was called a “bust-out” operation.  Mobsters would take over a bar and have gay agents inform the Village gay crowd that a new bar was opening, usually one upstairs or downstairs and thus not visible from the street.  A juke box was installed, patrons flocked, and in the dim light dancing was allowed, and marijuana as well.  All this was of course illegal, but the owner wouldn’t bother to pay off the police.  If he could keep the place open for six months before it got raided, he had made his money and was ready to move on to another bust-out operation.  And if problems with the law developed, the Mafia had lawyers available, among them Roy Cohn, the notorious attack-dog lawyer and AIDs denier, who later became a friend of President and Mrs. Reagan and seemed to have a finger in every pie (see post #237).

         Supervising the authorities’ monitoring of the Mafia in those days was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself, who got a weekly report on them from his New York Field Division.  Cooperating with the FBI was the New York State Liquor Authority, eager to cancel the license of any Mafia-run operation, including gay bars.  FBI reports and newspaper columns of the time refer frequently to “fag bars” and “queer joints,” and to gay men as “so-called unfortunates,” “dainty hand-on-hippers,” “deviates,” and “undesirables.”

         Julius’s, a bar/restaurant at 159 West 10th Street that I occasionally visited, has a special place in gay history.  When I first came to the Village in  the early 1950s, it was described to me not as a gay bar but as “Princeton on a weekend.”  It was a colorful joint with sawdust on the floor and barrels for tables, and unlike out-and-out gay bars, the interior was quite visible from the street.  By the late 1950s it was attracting a gay male clientele, and in 1964 it was bought by William Fugazy and George Chase, two local businessmen apparently without ties to the Mafia, though Fugazy knew Roy Cohn, whose keen and and vicious legal talents were often at the service of the mob.  Trouble came to Julius’s in November 1965 when plainclothesman Stephen Chapwick visited the bar and observed patrons whom he described subsequently in an SLA hearing as wearing “tight clothes” and speaking with “shrill voices,” calling each other “honey” and “deary.”  Some fifteen exhibited “limp wrists,” and five were walking about in a “mincing gate.”  It was immediately clear to Mr. Chapwick that Julius’s had become a nest of degenerates.

         (A personal aside:  Yes, in my experience gay bars sometimes attracted very femme young kids who might exhibit limp wrists and call each other “honey,” but I never saw what might be called a “mincing gate,” except when gay kids were jokingly imitating the straight world’s stereotype of gays.  And these kids were always a minority, albeit a conspicuous one, in the bars.  As for Plainclothesman Chapwick, he was simply expressing the heterosexual world’s view of gay people.  Today, of course, he comes off as hopelessly “square” – the worst label one could get in those days in either gay or mixed Village bars.  Yes, times have changed.  His testimony at the SLA hearing – a serious matter back then -- now comes off as funny.) 

         As a result of Chapwick’s report, the SLA issued an order dated April 1, 1966, suspending Julius’s liquor license for 30 days because the licensee had allowed “homosexuals, degenerates, and/or undesirables to be and remain on the licensed premises on Nov. 12-13, 1965, and conduct themselves in an offensive and indecent manner contrary to good morals.” 

         But that was not the end of it.  On April 21, 1966, three members of the Mattachine Society staged a “sip-in” at the bar, identifying themselves as homosexuals, insisting that they were orderly, and asking to be served.  Denied service by a bartender willing to cooperate, they challenged the liquor rule in court.  “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars” ran a New York Times caption the next day.  Though some accounts credit this trio of “deviates” with overturning the state law, it was in fact the restaurant itself that challenged the law, triggering a 1967 court ruling that a bar could not be deemed disorderly simply because homosexuals gathered there.  Far from denying service to homosexuals, Julius’s had long since been protesting harassment of its gay customers.  Since then it has appeared in several films and today it announces itself proudly as New York’s oldest gay bar. 

         Not mentioned by Mr. Crawford is the Gold Bug, a Mafia-run discotheque popular with gay men and lesbians alike in the 1960s.  I’ll admit that I don’t recall its exact location, but my partner Bob informs me that it was in the basement of a Village residence where Edgar Allan Poe once lived.  If so, that would have been a red-brick townhouse at 85 West 3rd Street where Poe and his wife resided in 1844-45, since acquired by New York University in 2000 and mostly demolished.  Guarding the entrance was a burly character charged with keep desirables out, so the undesirables could revel inside.  One was required to buy a drink downstairs at the bar, before joining in the dancing on a crowded dance floor.  One didn’t go there to talk, since the music was deafening.  One went there to dance, and Bob and I danced there wildly, immersed in flashing strobe lights whose effect was psychedelic.  Arriving there once after Bob and some other friends had already entered, I was stopped by the guy at the door, presumably because I didn’t look undesirable enough. 
         “I’m joining some friends here,” I insisted.
         “What bars do you go to?” he asked.
         I had to think a moment, since I didn’t go often to bars.  “I go to Carr’s,” I said.
         A magic word; the door swung open.

         Carr’s was an old-fashioned “talk bar” at 204 West 10th Street, a place where gay men actually went to talk – and of course (at first) to cruise.  It had a woody interior with a bar that some remember as a carved extravaganza and a sight to cherish.  It was here that I met my partner Bob on a fateful day in June of 1968, after which I went there occasionally, not to cruise but to see friends.  It was a neighborhood bar, relaxed, never “hot” like the Gold Bug, never “in.”  Gradually the clientele aged, and it earned the name of “the Elephants’ Graveyard.”  Though it probably paid off the police, it didn’t have the feel of a Mafia-run joint.  In all the years I went there, it never occurred to me to wonder who “Carr” might be.  Years later I heard that it was closing, but I didn’t bother to go there that last night.  Bob did and met many of our friends, and even reported that a Mr. Carr, the owner, had materialized and was there to say good-bye to his patrons.  To this day I regret that I didn’t attend this farewell festivity, where I could have found many friends and talked with Mr. Carr himself, pointing to the very bar stool where, years before, I had met my longtime partner.  I’m sure he would have been warmed to the cockles of his heart.


         So much for the gay bars of another time, a time when they were the only social scene for gay people, unless a friend invited you to a party in his apartment.  A sad yet joyous scene that has been celebrated and deplored in memoirs ever since, a scene reminiscent of the speakeasies of the 1920s, and one that, like those speakeasies, marketed pleasure to a knowledgeable clientele and enriched both the mob and the police.

*                *                *                 *                  *                   *

          BROWDERBOOKS:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.


No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World

The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series,  tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client   It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.





          Coming soon:  Patients from Hell (to balance out post #283, Doctors from Hell).  Unless some other idea overwhelms me.

          ©   2017   Clifford Browder





Sunday, March 19, 2017

285. Profanity and Why We Need It



  MEET BILL HOPE, WHO ONCE ESCAPED FROM PRISON IN A COFFIN



browder-cover-9781681143057-perfect-2
Bill Hope: His Story: ($20: Softcover: 6X9”, 158pp: 978-1-68114-305-7; $35: Hardcover: 978-1-68114-306-4; $2.99: EBook: 978-1-68114-307-1; LCCN: 2017933794; Historical Fiction; May 17, 2017) is the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his scorn for snitches and bullies; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; his brief career on the stage playing himself; his loyalty to a man who has befriended him but may be trying to kill him; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. In the course of his adventures he learns how slight the difference is between criminal and law-abiding, insane and sane, vice and virtue—a lesson that reinforces what he learned on the streets. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a yearning to leave the crooked life behind, and a persistent and undying hope.
          This is the second title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  The first in the series is The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), mention of which appears at the end of this post. 

         The book can be ordered from Amazon and will be shipped after the release date of May 17, 2017.  But the paperback, which goes for $20, will cost an additional $4.95 for shipping, unless you order books totaling $25 or more.  The book is also available now from the author and will be mailed immediately ($20 + postage).  And now on to profanity.


*                 *                 *                *                  *                  *             
         Followers of this blog will recall post #263, “The Golden Age of Profanity, and Do We Have a Right to Swear?”  In that post, inspired by a Times review of the two books mentioned below, I confessed my frequent resort to profanity, albeit mostly in private and with no intention of shocking others or violating things they hold dear.  That post has since become one of the most popular, with many “hits,” so here is a follow-up to this most damnedly fascinating topic.

         In the New York Review of Books of February 9, 2017, Joan Acocella reviews two new books on the subject: What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, by Benjamin K. Bergen, and In Praise of Profanity, by Michael Adams.  This article is much longer than the Times’s, allowing for a richer treatment of the subject.  Rather than summarizing the reviews, which all serious scholars of dirty words should peruse, I will merely list the values of profanity that the two authors and the reviewer cite.  Profanity is good because it

·      Relieves tension
·      Helps us endure pain (quite literally)
·      Registers a complaint against the human condition
·      Prevents violence (better words than fists or guns)
·      Encourages fellowship (we share our taste for – or tolerance of -- dirty words)
·      Expresses machismo (he-men swear, sissies don’t)
·      Enhances sex (for some, but count me out).

Ergo, we all should feel good about swearing.

         But the article shares other points as well:

·      Graffiti from a brothel in ancient Pompeii are “disappointingly laconic” (an example is cited)
·      The FCC, that vigilant guardian of our morals, levies fines, but has never published a list of taboo words
·      Jonathan Green’s Green’s Dictionary of Slang (2010) lists 1740 words for sexual intercourse, 1351 for penis, 1180 for vagina, 634 for anus or buttocks, and 540 for defecation and urination, which shows how rich our English language is, and how long the FCC’s list would be, if it existed
·      By way of contrast, the Japanese language has no swear words; to insult someone, you can tell him he’s a fool, but you can’t call him an asshole.
·      People have been giving the finger to each other for over two thousand years.

Illustrating this last observation is a photo of the Donald in Paris in November 2016, right after the election, rather grumpy-faced, confronted by several Gallic hands each with one finger defiantly extended.

         We also learn that in 2009 an author named McKay Hatch published a book entitled The No Cussing Club: How I Fought Against Peer Pressure and How You Can Too.  Mr. Hatch, we further learn, was fourteen at the time and disgusted by the swearing he heard at school.  Founded in 2007, his club now boasts 20,000 members, and teachers, the mayor of South Pasadena, and an international following have told him that he may have changed the world.  Infinitely varied are the paths to fame and glory; I wish him well.  But his website has been hacked by the website group “Anonymous,” which claims that his parents founded the club, write his material, and use his website for their own personal gain.  Mr. McKay’s  response: “I’m the most cyberbullied kid on the planet.”  Even though I don’t qualify for his club, I not only wish him well, I applaud his courage and initiative.

         At age thirteen -- one year short of Mr. Hatch’s year of inspiration -- I was so bereft of profanity that the other boys in my eighth-grade class apologized if they ventured a damn or a hell within my hearing, and did so with genuine chagrin and without a trace of mockery.  Yes, my speech was pure, but little did they know what I had been exposed to at home, when my parents had such heated arguments that the house all but burst into flames.  To this day I can hear my mother, usually the essence of gentility, telling my father, “You can go to hell!”  Too tame, you think, and verging on innocuous?  Not if uttered with passion.  You should have heard and seen her say it. 

         As for my purity of speech, that fell by the wayside eons ago, though my profanity today lacks true originality, the kind expressed by Shakespeare’s Kent in King Lear, when he calls someone “a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave,” and so on for a whole rich, savage paragraph.   

         But those naughty words we condemn and delight to use – most of them four-letter words ending in an emphatic consonant (vowels are too liquid, too soft, too wimpy) – are late arrivals in the arsenal of oaths, their emphasis on bodily functions being a symptom of our secular and perverted modern age.  Back in the Middle Ages, that blessed epoch of faith, those words hardly counted as vile; what really counted was blasphemy, the taking of the Lord’s name in vain.  In Shakespeare’s plays “s’blood!” is a common oath, meaning “God’s blood,” and as such can perhaps be viewed as not breaking (not quite) the Third Commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”  Similarly,  “zounds” derives from “God’s wounds,” while “gadzooks” and “ods bodikin,” which I have always thought deliciously quaint, come from ”God’s hooks” and “God’s bodkins,” meaning the nails of the Crucifixion.  Whether these expressions really avoid blasphemy I leave to the viewers of this blog – and to scholars and the arbiters of taste and decency.

          Concern about blasphemy did not die out with the Middle Ages.  In Catholic France, as late as 1866 the poet Baudelaire, was thrown out of a hospital for uttering the phrase sacré nom (“holy name”).  But today who would be offended by such utterances as criminy, cripes, gee, bejesus, gee whillikers, jiminy, or jeepers creepers, all of them variants of “Christ” and “Jesus”?  Or by gosh and golly, stand-ins for “God”?  No, for cussing we prefer references to sexual body parts and acts of copulation and excretion.  So it goes in this modern, and very secular, golden age of profanity.  

           Are there islands of purity of speech in this world of blatant profanity?  Yes, for I'm told on good authority that Hoosiers, the residents of Indiana and a good and decent folk, eschew (my favorite verb) profanity.  A woman newly arrived in the state asked a cousin of mine, "Don't Hoosiers cuss?"   But I'm also informed that two genteel relatives of mine, a cousin and her mother, are known to get less Hoosier behind the wheel, when another motorist cuts them off or otherwise offends them.  "Asshole!" the mother often exclaimed, within hearing of her young daughters.  So maybe the urge to curse is inherent in us, just waiting for the right provocation to explode.

*                  *                 *                 *                 *                  *

         A note on stars:  The Science section of the New York Times of Tuesday, March 14, informs us that extraterrestrial dust – in other words, dust from vanished planets, asteroids, and stars – rains constantly upon us, though we are unaware of this shower of micrometeorites.  Only experts can tell these tiny particles from the contaminants generated by human activities like construction, fireworks, and home insulation, but the fact remains that, all around us and even in our food and our hair, there is stardust.  Which confirms a poem that I wrote long ago (and which I will spare my readers), announcing that our bodies are made of bits of stars.
         And speaking of stars, another article in that same paper – a review of Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy, by Elizabeth Winder, reminds me how Marilyn Monroe, then at the peak of her stardom and between husbands Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller, fled Hollywood to spend the year 1955 in New York, an event that inspired in me no little anxiety and downright fear.  Why should the displacement of the world’s most celebrated blonde, fleeing a movie industry that had trapped her in sexpot roles, affect me, a nobody, in any way?  Because she was coming to New York, where she planned to enroll in the Actors Studio and perhaps also improve her mind by taking courses of adult education.  And what was I doing at the time?  Teaching French in General Studies, the adult education program at Columbia University, and probably the most obvious place for her to enroll.  The very thought of that stellar beauty enrolled in one of my classes terrified me.  How could I deal with her objectively, when everyone in the class would know who she was, and would be scrutinizing my feeble attempts to treat her like any other student? 
         By chance, I escaped Marilyn by getting an appointment to teach in Columbia College, where I had as one of my students Arthur MacArthur, the general’s son, who was well-behaved and caused no problem.  And Marilyn never set her lovely foot in the Columbia campus, spending her time instead drinking, reading Russian novels (not in the original, I’m sure), confiding in Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and enticing Arthur Miller into wedlock.  But soon after that I joined the Playwrights Unit of the Actors Studio and saw, posted on a wall, a photo of one of the classes with Marilyn sitting alone and apart, radiating not just beauty but that intangible known as star quality.  Yes, her presence in a classroom, however well intended, would have been vastly disruptive.

*                *                *                 *                  *                   *

          BROWDERBOOKS:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.


No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World

The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series,  tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client   It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




/
         Coming soon:  The Mafia and Me.  And then, Patients from Hell, to counterbalance post #283, Doctors from Hell.


         ©   2017   Clifford Browder