95. Wall Street, Its Past and Present Sins, and Do We Need It? Part 1

     Wall Street is many things: a street, a financial community far exceeding that place, and a symbol of high finance.  Depending on your viewpoint, it can be described as a bastion of capitalism, a maze of complexities, a sink of corruption, or a nest of greed.  These posts will examine all these aspects.  This first one will have a look at Wall Street's origins and then get the feel of a boom and a bust.

     Before there was a street, there was a wall.  The wall, a twelve-foot-high stockade, marked the northern limit of the old Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, with one gate in it for the street that became Broadway.  The wall was a defense against the native peoples whom the Dutch had come to trade with and on occasion to cheat and kill.  New Amsterdam became New York with the arrival of the English in 1664, and in 1685 surveyors laid out Wall Street along the lines of the original wall.  Even in these early days merchants and traders were meeting there in the open to buy and sell stocks and bonds, and in 1711 the Common Council made Wall Street the city’s first official market for the buying and selling of slaves. 

A map of New Amsterdam in 1660, showing the wall.

     By the late eighteenth century, traders were gathering under a buttonwood tree at the foot of Wall Street to buy and sell securities.  In 1792 twenty-four of them got together to sign the Buttonwood Agreement, whereby the signatories agreed to charge each other a standard commission rate; others would be charged a higher rate.  This was the origin of the New York Stock Exchange, which to this day is a private entity with its own rules and regulations.  From the very first, it was a monopoly.

     Doing business outdoors had its inconveniences, since snow and rain might dampen the spirit of traders, so in 1794 the Tontine Coffee House, a four-story brick building, was built at the northwest corner of Wall and Water Streets to function as a merchants’ exchange for brokers, merchants, insurers, and others.  In those days before the telephone and telegraph, a merchant went “on ’change” daily to see others on business, and to make himself available to those who might wish to see him.  At the Tontine, while some drank coffee, others traded securities, auctioned goods, read or discussed the latest news, and argued politics vehemently.  It was also used for banquets and balls, and on occasion witnessed slave trading and gambling, and fistfights sparked by political differences.  One of the busiest sites in the city.

The Tontine Coffee House (on the left, with a flag) in 1797.  The smaller structure with dormer 
windows across the street is the Merchants' Coffee House, where brokers met before.  At the 
end of Wall Street the masts of anchored ships are visible.
the_adverse_possessors

The fire of 1835, showing the original Merchants' Exchange in flames.

     But in time the trading of stocks required more space, so in 1817 traders formally organized the New York Stock & Exchange Board and rented rooms at 40 Wall Street.  The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 brought boom times to New York, a major port already and now the only one on the East Coast with access by inland waterways to the Great Lakes and the goods of the Midwest.  Wall Street was still partly residential, but residents were soon fleeing its noise and bustle for calmer vistas farther uptown.  A disastrous fire in 1835, and another in 1845, devastated the business district, but by the very next day workers were clearing away the smoking debris and hot rubble to build anew.

     Midcentury Wall Street was still a simple and rather narrow cobblestoned street frequented by dogs and grunting pigs in the early morning, when it had a small-town air.  Beginning at the west on Broadway, where the Gothic grace of Trinity Church loomed piously, it ran east for less than half a mile to South Street and the anchored sailing vessels of the East River docks. 

     To Wall Street, now the financial capital of the nation, money flowed from small country banks where interest rates were low, to big city banks where interest rates were high.  It flowed from grain exporters, and importers of woolens and wine, into the coffers of insurance companies.  It flowed from raspy-voiced auctioneers and canny investors in real estate, from husbands of heiresses, successful hatters, cotton speculators, and shipowners made mysteriously rich by the traffic between Africa and Cuba, into the scented palms of brokers and the big-knuckled hands of bankers.  In good times the money sloshed around; in bad times, like the years following the Panic of 1837, it shrank to a trickle.  But once a panic ended – and they always, in time, did end – the money spigot spat, dribbled, then gushed and sloshed again.  All through the century boom followed bust followed boom, each bust wiping out the fortunes of many, and each boom hatching a new crop of the affluent.

     Money also shone on Wall Street.  It shone in newly minted specie and in fobs and studs of gold, emblems of the wearers’ success.  It shone in the blue granite dome of the Merchants’ Exchange, with its portico of massive Grecian pillars, and in the classic fronts of banks, their wide steps mounting to tall doors flanked by fluted columns.

The new Merchants' Exchange in 1852.  It was built after the loss of the old one in the 1835 fire.   With four floors and a second colonnade added in 1907-1910, it still stands today, housing
condo apartments.

     Money sang on Wall Street.  It sang in the tinkle of coins over counters, and in the crackle of crisp new bank notes, and the rustle of limp worn old ones.  It sang in the clatter on cobblestones of high-wheeled gigs, as gentlemen bankers drove to their banks behind a fast-paced trotter.  It sang too in the chime of fine crystal in their Greek Revival or brownstone residences, in the clank of pewter mugs in taverns where their sons got drunk, and in jingly harnesses when their wives, sporting brooches in their bosoms, parasols, and a rainbow of ribbons, sallied forth to meetings of the Association for the Relief of Aged Indigent Females. 

     But mostly, on Wall Street money talked.  It hummed in the Exchange’s rotunda, where at midday a thousand voices sold flour, bought steamboats, set money rates, and quoted prices for potash and iron.  It jabbered at the Custom House, a marble parthenon whose confines better suited the rites of Athena than Mammon, as ships’ masters presented their manifests to cramped and squinting clerks.  Money shrieked in the gibberish of brokers trading stocks on the floor of the Stock Exchange, or outside in the curbstone market where newcomers and has-beens excluded from the indoor exchange – the green and rotten apples of the Street – bid hoarsely in the open air, their hats bobbing like a dance of chimneypots.  It murmured in the thoughts of gray-faced clerks on stools whose scratching quills ciphered figures into calfskin ledgers in basement countinghouses, each one dreaming of a partnership, and chattered in the musings of boys shoveling coal out of bins in dark hallways to be dumped into cast-iron stoves, each one dreaming of a clerkship.  And it whispered in back offices behind closed doors, where cliques formed and schemed.

The New York Stock Exchange in the 1850s.  Stocks were traded one at a time.

     From South Street on the east, where ships’ prows lunged at third-floor windows, to Broadway on the west, where each afternoon the spire of Trinity cast a Christian shadow down the Street, always, loud or soft, harsh or sweet, it spoke.

     It spoke even louder and sweeter when, in 1848, gold was discovered in California.  Gold!  The very thought of it raced the blood and sent hordes of young Argonauts armed with picks, axes, shovels, and a surfeit of hope westward via vessels bound for Panama or San Francisco, and brought other ships eastward bearing gold dust and nuggets – stuff that you could actually touch.  Small wonder that a new boom began.  Yes, there had been some kind of panic back in 1837 – did anyone remember it? -- but these were wild new times, fierce and giddy; something like that couldn’t happen again, not soon.

     By 1857, just twenty years after that unfortunate incident, bankers were weighing the gold dust that arrived by ship from California in the amount of fifty millions a year, and were founding a new bank a month to issue notes of the best rag paper, engraved with svelte lettering and bosomy nymphs hugging a portrait of Washington throned atop mountains of gold.  Railroad men were jabbing track through wilderness, and sending silk-hatted agents with diamond stickpins and silver tongues to Paris and London and Vienna to tout their stocks and bonds.  Speculators were snatching profits out of town lots, guano, gold mines, and fancy poultry; evenings they received with their wives in parlors lit by crystal chandeliers, and dined in black walnut dining rooms on French delicacies whose names they mangled.  From Europe travelers returned with thousand-dollar cashmere shawls, blue satin dresses trimmed with pink lace, carved antique mantelpieces, bonbon boxes, a bronze Puss-in-Boots.  These moneyed legions were the pith and marrow of the nation, had much, wanted more: more ships, banks, land, more Gothic villas and European tours, more railroads and schemes of railroads, plush, chintz, gilt – and most of it on credit.

     “Immoral,” said Mr. Greeley of the Tribune, who was staunchly moral, a foe of ignorance and vice.  “Imprudent,” said Mr. Bennett of the Herald, a mocker of all things secular and sacred, who poked at the edifice of trust, picked, pried.  “Rotten,” he announced, but he had said this many times.

     All through August – even as fashionables left town for Saratoga or Newport or the Catskills -- banks made loans, bonded messengers with bags of specie scurried hither and yon, and brokers traded stocks indoors and out, and even in hotel rooms in the evening, swarming like ants in jam.  Suddenly, headlines shrieked:

OHIO LIFE AND TRUST COMPANY FAILS

     At this collapse of a respected firm, brokers gasped.  Ohio Life had invested generously in Western land and railroads; its failure reached far – who was safe?  Immediately stocks, having gone up up up, began going down down down.  Banks yanked in their loans.  Merchants and money men hurried back from Saratoga or Newport or the Catskills.  Behind closed doors of board rooms and countinghouses, there arose a whispered flurry of due notices, threats, contracts, pleas.  Two presidents of railroads resigned “for personal reasons.”  “Calm!” urged the Tribune and the Times.  “Rotten,” repeated Mr. Bennett.

     In September, stocks kept on going down down down.  Pinched for cash, brokers and merchants failed, dragging down those they owed money to.  Foundry fires sputtered, went out; small railroads cracked, then big ones.  Screamed the Herald:

                                        FINANCIAL REVULSION

                                        CRISIS IN BOSTON

                                        SUSPENSION IN PHILADELPHIA

                                        PRESSURE

                                        FAILURES
                                        PANIC
                                     

A teetery nation looked to the New York banks, those citadels of trust.  “We will not suspend,” said the banks.  “Rotten,” insisted Mr. Bennett.

     In October a murmur arose on the street, in offices: rumors, warnings, doubts.  One small bank suspended, then another.  On the morning of the 13^th  all over the city barbers and florists and tobacconists scooped up the cash in the till, bagged it, and leaped aboard a Wall Street-bound omnibus.  Among the passengers, all toting sacks of suspect paper money, the murmur swelled to a buzz.

            “The Marine Bank has suspended!” said one.

            “No, it’s the American Exchange Bank!”

            “Both!  And the Irving and the Ocean, too.”

            “Bank notes will be worthless!”

            “Only gold is safe!”

            “Get your money out while you can!”

     When they all jumped out at Wall Street, in the churning throngs the buzz crescendoed to a din.  The Merchants’ Exchange Bank had suspended … the Mechanics’ Bank … the Bank of New York … ! 

     “I got mine!” yelled a grinning depositor, brandishing a bag of chinking coins.  “Press in, boys, press in!”

     With their sacks of rag paper in hand, they wedged and bumped their way through the crowds up the steep steps of banks, determined to learn what truth of gold or hard fact of silver lay stashed behind those tall doors flanked by Grecian columns.  Against their incoming crunch and their fists, curses, and yells, the thick doors of banks slammed shut.  

The run on the Seamen's Savings Bank, 1857.

     Bank after bank had closed.  Up and down the Street merchants and money men surged, rubbing frenzied elbows with grocers and stationers and casket makers lugging bags of paper money or brandishing checks they couldn’t cash, all mouthing sad and sour jokes about lost deposits, collapsed stocks, and fortunes gone to blue blazes.

     Would his brewery survive? a brewer wondered.  He doubted it.  What would he tell his wife, another child soon due?

     “What will I do?” a pharmacist asked, his bank suspended, his meager savings lost.

     “Burst!” exclaimed a shipbuilder, top hat askew, tugged and squeezed by the crowd.  With bills for lumber, canvas, and rope falling due, plus the wages of his men at the shipyard, he was desperate for cash.  Through no fault of his own, his dream and deed of decades – the shaping of that tight, sleek wonder, a ship – was at risk.  Had he bet on America and lost?  He laughed, wept.  “Burst!” he exclaimed.  “We have burst!”

     Trinity’s chimes stroked three.

     The Great Western Blizzard had swept away fortunes galore.  For weeks and months to come, brokers languished, pickpockets idled.  Jobbers’ showrooms were full of goods, empty of customers.  “In God’s name, what does it mean?” the distraught wife demanded of her husband, who stared, stunned, as their damask ottomans, whatnots, rugs, and pianoforte were carted off to auction. Clipper ships dozed in the harbor, bank note engravers had a lean season, revivalists revived.  Urged the Journal of Commerce:

                                    Steal away from Wall Street

                                    And every worldly care,

                                    Spend an hour at midday

                                    In humble, hopeful prayer.

 In the twinkling of an eye, boom had turned to bust.

     Source note:  Much of this post is adapted from my unpublished historical novel Metropolis, a long and sprawling work that follows numerous characters, both historical and fictional, through several decades of the nineteenth century.  Its inspiration came from background research for my two published biographies.  The account of the Panic of 1857 is based on newspaper accounts of the time.

     Another note on hair:  In my last post I confessed that, having seen women with pink, orange, and blue hair here in the West Village, I had yet to see purple and orange.  A friend in Atlanta assures me that there’s plenty of both down there, and a friend teaching at Smith College in Massachusetts says the same. 

     Coming soon:  Two more posts on Wall Street, the last one looking at today's financial mess.  Then, My Suicides.

    

     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

94. The Living Theatre, and Why I Kept My Clothes on

     This post is about the Living Theatre.  It isn’t a history of the Living, just an account of my impressions of it, usually in its early years and certainly not recently, though it still exists. 

     I first became aware of the Living Theatre in 1959 when I attended their production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection, a play about a day in the life of a group of drug addicts.  The portrayal of addiction was, to put it mildly, frank, though the addicts could come off as likable, even though they at times  screamed at the audience.  It is said that the actors playing junkies came down into the audience to ask for money for a fix; I don’t recall this, but it would have made it clear from the outset that the Living Theatre wasn't going to leave the audience alone.

     I next encountered them in 1963 when I saw ex-Marine Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, a brutally realistic play about a Marine prison where the guards routinely beat up and terrorized the inmates.  When the audience went to their seats, they became gradually aware that the actors were already performing on the curtainless stage, portraying the guards talking softly to one another before dealing with the inmates.  When the play actually began, it was a seamless transition, the most natural continuation of what had already quietly unfolded.  I was with a friend and his boss.  The boss, an ex-Marine, didn’t deny that brigs exist, but insisted that this was a ludicrous exaggeration.  He didn’t convince me; the play’s gripping realism was too powerful.  Said critic Robert Brustein, “I don’t remember a more unpleasant evening in the theatre.  But it made a point.”  The Living was always out to make a point.

     Both these plays got critical attention, usually negative, and won Obies (Off-Broadway Theater Awards).  By now I and a lot of people were wondering what the Living Theatre was all about and who were the people behind it.  It was founded in 1947 by Judith Malina and her husband Julian Beck, an Abstract Expressionist painter who switched his talent to theater upon meeting Malina, a Jewish immigrant from Germany.  Influenced above all by the French director and theorist Antonin Artaud, they embraced an extreme realism meant to shock the audience out of complacency.  With The Connection and The Brig, they succeeded.  Since they wanted no truck with commercial Broadway, their productions found a natural home in Off and then Off Off Broadway.  Politically they were as far to the Left as they could get, and had every intention of moving – some might say shoving – the audience in that direction, too, though their needs and demands were such that no existing political party could satisfy them.  For Beck and Malina the footlights, that barrier between stage and spectators, did not, must not, exist.  They wanted to mix with the audience, excite them, radicalize them, get them into the streets.

     In October 1963 their antiauthoritarian stance took on a new dimension when the IRS padlocked their 14th Street theater for failing to pay $28,435 in back taxes.  Defiant, Beck and Malina continued to stage performances inside the theater for small audiences who had to climb over rooftops and enter the theater through a fire door.  Audience and cast were then arrested and charged with impeding a federal official in the performance of his duties; in the end, only Beck and Malina faced trial.  In May 1964 they defended themselves vociferously in a much-publicized trial where they presented themselves as beleaguered champions of beauty and art resisting oppression by the IRS, anonymous agents of the military-industrial complex.  By not paying the taxes, Beck insisted, they had been able to pay their actors; it was a case of art vs. money. 

     Though Beck and Malina succeeded in turning the trial into theater with a far wider audience than their productions had reached, the jury found them guilty, imposing a fine of $2500, and the judge sentenced Beck to 60 days and Malina to 30 days in jail for contempt of court.  As a result, the Living Theatre soon left these cursed shores for a four-year self-imposed exile in the fairer climes of Europe, whose Old World charm was untainted by interventions of the IRS.  But whatever the pair lacked in practicality, they had more than made up for in imagination and spunk.

     The Living Theatre returned to New York in 1968 with a host of new productions that they had ripened in Europe.  “The Living Theatre is back,” one observer observed; “God bless them and God help them.”  Reports of near riots in the audience in Avignon, and the arrest of Beck, Malina, and others for indecent exposure after a performance in New Haven, heightened the anticipation, guaranteeing attendance by avant-garde theater buffs, rebels with or without a cause, exhibitionists, voyeurs, hardy adventurers, and those anxious to “keep up” like myself.

A typical Living Theatre production of the 1960s: a tangle of actors, gestures, and grimaces, with Julian Beck in the center.  The audience was not to be soothed.

     In Europe they had embraced collective creation, whereby the whole troupe participated in developing new productions.  Beck proclaimed it “an example of Anarcho-Communist Autogestive Process” (a typical Beck pronouncement) and, more simply, “a secret weapon of the people.”  This made for cumbersome and lengthy rehearsals, since each detail of a production required consensus agreement, and there was a fair dose of amateurism as well, because some of the actors had no training.  It soon became apparent as well that the Living had tuned from grim realism toward a more expansive and imaginative realm, toward a kind of wild poetry.

     The Living’s new productions were mounted in October 1968 not in Manhattan but at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, requiring their Manhattan fans and critics to undertake a long trek into that borough’s dark and distant hinterland.  The first production, guarded at its opening by a strong police presence, was Frankenstein, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous novel, or rather a creation somewhat based on that work.  The production involved a huge scaffolding mounted on the stage, a kind of outsized jungle gym where the actors clambered about, finally assuming poses, some of them dangling in space, that created the back-lit silhouette of the towering monster: a remarkable and memorable stage effect.  Whatever the ideological intent may have been – I never did figure it out – there was nothing like it on, or Off, or Off Off Broadway.

     The second production, Antigone, based on the play by Sophocles as adapted by Bertold Brecht and then translated from German by Malina, pitted Antigone, played by Malina, against the tyrant Creon, played by a lean and craggy Beck, his scalp now bald, but with a flow of long, graying locks below the hairline.  The intention was to encourage the audience to challenge authority just as Antigone, alone and without allies, had done: a theme that found resonance in the turbulent 1960s.  As for the production, I remember a tangle of actors in modern dress (or undress, though not nude) who at moments achieved striking visual stage effects.

     The climax of their season in New York was Paradise Now, performances of which at the Avignon Festival in France earlier that year had provoked such a turbulent audience response, both pro and con, that the mayor issued a decree forbidding any further performances.  The Living had then withdrawn from the festival and, ever ready to make theater of life, left the city in a formal procession, applauded by supporters who lamented the departure of le Living.  And it was following a performance of this play in New Haven that Beck, Malina, and others, surging out into the street, had been arrested for indecent exposure.  I got  my partner Bob to go with me, even though his taste in theater ran elsewhere.

     Paradise Now was meant to encourage a nonviolent anarchist revolution, a transformation that would be both external and internal for actors and audience alike, leading toward the realization of an alternative society.  To me and many others it appeared unstructured, though the actors were performing a series of actions intended to enlist the audience in revolution.  “Act!  Speak!” cried the actors.  “Do whatever you want!”  Then they circulated among the audience shouting a list of social taboos: “I’m not allowed to travel without a passport!”  “I don’t know how to stop wars!”  “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana!”  “I’m not allowed to take off my clothes!”  Back on the stage and wearing only bikinis and sagging G-strings, they contorted themselves so as to spell the word “PARADISE.”  After this the performance – if that is the word – slid into chaos, with a few, but only a few, spectators stripping down to their underwear or less: mostly exhibitionists delighted to “do their thing.”  To my eye, no transformation occurred, no nonviolent revolution, only a mounting hubbub of confusion.  There was tedium in this four-hour-long happening, and bored spectators were beginning to peel away.  Bob left before I did, but I soon followed.  My last impression was a guy in his undershorts kissing a fully clothed girl who seemed quite taken with the adventure; far from liberating, it struck me as just plain sleazy. 

Paradise Now: totems of nudity and gestures.

     The worst thing that permissiveness can do is bore, and that, alas, was my final take on Paradise Now: it was boring.  Other performances may have come off differently; I can only comment on the one I saw.  Yes, boring.  And nobody even got arrested. 

     But arrests were not lacking as the group toured the country.  Malina told later how, when they arrived in a city, the police would come and tell them they didn’t care what they did in the theater, they could do sexual things, smoke pot, burn money, take their clothes off; but they mustn’t go out and do it in the street.  Which was, of course, what they intended to do and did; arrests followed, and with them more publicity that surely brought more people flocking.

Their home away from home.  Or maybe just
a good imitation of it.

     After their American tour the Living Theatre returned to Europe, where Beck felt they enjoyed a greater freedom.  I lost track of them after that, though they developed new works and performed them widely abroad, often in the street or in schools, slums, and prisons.  In 1971 they were jailed for two months in Brazil for alleged possession of marijuana and then deported; their exposure of injustice and corruption in the country was surely not irrelevant.  Julian Beck died in 1985, but the group returned here and under Malina’s direction performed new plays at various locations in the city.  Malina is still active, and the group is still performing in New York.  A few years ago my partner Bob saw one of their plays and wished he hadn’t.  It was about a woman liberating herself, and Malina, playing the lead, at one point – inevitably – took her clothes off: a big mistake, in Bob’s opinion, since she was plump and jowly.  Yesterday’s tease is today’s fizzle.

     Still, the Living has left its mark.  Its mission statement, as expressed by Julian Beck, includes these points:

·      To call into question who we are to each other in the social environment of the theater.

·      To set ourselves in motion like a vortex that pulls the spectator into action.

·      To undo the knots that lead to misery.

·      To fire the body’s secret engines.

·      To insist that what happens in the jails matters.

·      To cry “Not in my name!” at the hour of execution.

·      To move from the theater to the street and from the street to the theater.

Beck was rarely so lucid.  He has left us a lot to think about.

     Nudity in the theater:  In the 1960s and 1970s there was lots of it.  Maybe Allen Ginsberg, not yet the later bearded sage of Poesie, led the way, since he got into the habit of exhibiting the contours of his unlovely flesh to others, while braying at supposed prudes, “Are you ashamed of your own body?”  To which I longed to answer, “No, Allen, only of yours,” but never got the chance.

     Proponents of the new nudity insisted that there had always been nudity on the theater, to which the theatrical Old Guard replied, “Yes, but it was interesting nudity.”  And they had a point, since much of the current nudity was boring.  An exception was the musical Hair, which hit Broadway in 1968, that year of international revolt.  At the end of the first act those actors who felt so inclined took their clothes off, but the lighting was such that the audience could just barely make them out, which personally I thought much more effective.  But in many ways the show was akin to the Living’s productions: there was little structure or plot; freedom and revolt were endorsed; and at the opening the actors came out into the audience, talked casually to one another, and walked across the tops of the seats, a stunt I had never seen before.  I had an aisle seat, and when one long-haired young performer lay back across my lap for a moment, I just smiled and said, “Well, hello there!”  Unlike Paradise Now, Hair was fun.

     The fall of that same eventful year saw the opening of another unstructured piece that sought to involve the audience: Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, a production loosely – very loosely – based on Euripides’ Bacchae.  When I saw it six actors, three men and three women, performed naked, demonstrating the perils of nudity in the theater.  With the best will in the world, I couldn’t help but notice that one woman was full-breasted and another flat-chested.  And when the actors were lying prone on the stage, one of the men reached under to adjust his genitals, provoking howls of laughter from the audience.  This is what I remember, little else.  Yes, performers and audience were all mixed up together, but the real point of it escaped me. 

     Still, there’s no denying that Dionysus in 69 had a cult following and is said to have launched the vogue of “happenings,” unstructured events where performers and audience mixed freely, and chance developments were common.  Happenings were especially popular – for a while – in New York City, and were related to the hippie culture of the day.  All of which shows the matrix out of which the Living Theatre developed: a kind of joyous anarchy and lust for freedom mixed with rage at all that is wrong in society.  Yes, it was wild – often too wild – and immature, but hey, we could use a little of that joy and rage today.

     A note on hair:  Speaking of hair, in the West Village recently I have seen women with pink hair, orange hair, and blue hair.  Bold pink, flaming orange, and blatant blue, as opposed to the hint of blue that goes so well with gray and white hair.  I don't judge, I simply note.  I have yet to see green or purple hair, but look forward to the experience with intense anticipation.

     Coming soon:  Three posts on Wall Street, its past and present sins, and do we need it?  Bubbles, booms, and busts; J.P.  Morgan and his purple nose; the Depression in my home town; Abbie Hoffman and the New York Stock Exchange; how big banks become bigger; and more.  In short, everything that the Living Theatre hated, loathed, and detested.

     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

    

93. Brooke Astor, Aristocrat of the People

She loved her jewelry.  But that honey-colored hair,
is it dyed?  She said no; her friends thought otherwise.

      Philanthropist Brooke Astor burst into the news in 2006 when one of her grandsons filed a lawsuit accusing his father, her only son, of neglecting her care and exploiting her to enrich himself and his wife.  Brooke Astor, then 104, was suffering from dementia and anemia and other ailments, making her vulnerable to abuse.  Anthony D. Marshall, the son, denied the accusations, and the dispute stretched over many months, a bitter closing chapter in the long career of a woman who had come to be known as an aristocrat of the people and the unofficial first lady of the city of New York. 

     Brooke Astor died of pneumonia at her weekend estate in August 2007.  Her funeral at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue at 53^rd Street was attended by 900 people, including luminaries from the worlds of finance, the arts, and philanthropy, and Mayors Bloomberg, Koch, and Dinkins.  Her son was present and in a choked voice read a note that his mother had written to be delivered at her funeral:  “When I go from here, I want to leave behind me a world richer for the experience of me.  I want the creatures and the animals and the birds to be a little less afraid of human beings.  Death is nothing and life is everything.  I want to leave behind me a deeper sense of God.”  He then broke down in tears.

     Sadly, Anthony D. Marshall later faced criminal charges of mishandling her estate.  In 2009 he was convicted of grand larceny, and his attorney of forgery; both were sent to prison. 

     Prior to this I had known of Brooke Astor only vaguely.  So who was she and how did she come to be known as an aristocrat of the people and the city’s first lady?

     Brooke Russell was born at Portsmouth, N.H., in 1902, her father a major general in the Marine Corps, and later the Corps’ sixteenth commandant.  She remembered her childhood as secure and happy, albeit solitary, since she had no siblings.  Much of it was spent abroad, because her father’s career took him to distant lands.  At age 16 she met John Dryden Kuser, a New Jersey politician with a vast fortune that dazzled Brooke’s mother more, it would seem, than it dazzled her.  When he proposed, she reluctantly accepted, thus embarking on a tumultuous marriage that she later termed the worst years of her life, owing to her husband’s physical abuse, alcoholism, and adultery.  They were divorced in 1930.

     In 1932 she married her second husband, financier Charles Henry Marshall, the love of her life.  Twenty years of happiness followed, with life in a penthouse full of servants, dinners and parties, and a castle in Italy.  When her husband’s firm suffered financial reverses in the 1940s, they undertook to live more modestly, and she went to work as a features editor at House & Garden magazine.  In 1952 Marshall was suddenly stricken with a heart attack.  She found him lying on the floor, summoned a doctor, cradled his head in her lap; by the time the doctor came, Charles Marshall was dead.

     So far, viewers may wonder what all this is about, and rightly so, for Brooke Kuser/Marshall had yet to become herself.  That transformation began in 1953, when Vincent Astor, a grandson of the Mrs. Astor, and great-great grandson of old John Jacob, the founder of the Astor fortune, proposed.  Though hesitant, she accepted.  As her friend Louis Auchincloss, the novelist, remarked, “Of course she married Vincent for the money.  I wouldn’t respect her if she hadn’t.  Only a twisted person would have married him for love.” 

     She tried to make her new husband happy, for he was a very suspicious person who thought everyone wanted something from him, and was given to depression.  To alleviate the depression, she would sing to him or dance with her dogs, until she provoked a smile.  Still, she felt shut off, losing contact with her friends; in the end the couple were left alone.  She did, however, take an interest in his real estate and hotel empire and his philanthropies.  And when he died in 1959, she inherited some $60 million, and as much more for a foundation to alleviate human suffering.  “Pookie,” he had told her, “you are going to have a hell of a lot of fun with the foundation when I’m gone.”  She did, reinventing herself as Brooke Astor.

     “Money is like manure,” she said with a wink and a smile, quoting Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker.  “It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around.”  Since most of the Astor money had been made in New York City real estate, she decided to spread her millions around in the city in the form of grants from the Vincent Astor Foundation to museums and libraries, boys’ and girls’ clubs, homes for the elderly, and other programs and institutions.  As a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Rockefeller University, and other prestigious institutions, she spent much time in their board rooms, working with curators and other staff members, but from 1983 on she devoted herself almost exclusively to the New York Public Library, where she remained honorary chairwoman until her death.  Thanks to her, the Arnold Constable department store was converted into the Mid-Manhattan Library, and the Astor Court, a replica of a Chinese gentleman scholar’s garden courtyard of the Ming Dynasty, was created at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

     Me and Brooke Astor:  No, I never met her, never even glimpsed her in action.  But I have often visited the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Astor Court, sublimely unaware of whose largesse had made them possible, so I am in her debt.  The great attraction of the Mid-Manhattan Library is that, unlike the main library across the street, it lets you check out books.  And I have sat there reading or taking notes, in the company of restless teen-agers, and an older scholar whose innumerable scribbled notes were spread out in little piles on the table in front of him, so that any minor disturbance – a sneeze or a slight gust of air – would have sent what may have been his life’s work fluttering to the floor.  Fortunately, I never sneezed.  As for the garden courtyard, it is one of my favorite spots at the Met, since it brings alive for me the life of a Chinese gentleman scholar of earlier times.  I have also glimpsed that life in venerable scroll paintings of landscapes showing a scholar in his little house in the pine-clad mountains, while his invited guests, coming for tea, make their way up a path through the woods.  Nature, tranquility, a little house, friends: the formula for an ideal (or illusory?) existence.

The Astor Court, inspired by Brooke Astor, who had spent part of her childhood in China.  
Constructed by Chinese craftsmen using traditional materials, tools, and techniques.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

     But Brooke Astor had no intention of confining herself to board rooms and their denizens.  Considering it her duty to evaluate personally every organization seeking help from her foundation, she sallied forth in her chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz to visit churches and tenements and neighborhood programs throughout the city, to witness the ground-breaking of a playground in a Brooklyn slum, or the launching of a day care center in the impoverished South Bronx.  During these forays she was often treated to lunch on paper plates and plastic folding tables set up for the occasion, prompting her to exclaim over the “delicious sauces” – deli mustard and pickle relish. 

     On her rounds she gladly talked to anyone: a child at a computer, a library secretary or guard, a janitor at a branch library whom she thanked “for keeping this place so clean.”  No wonder that, at the institutions she visited, she made friends among the staff at all levels.  At the Metropolitan Museum of Art a burly black janitor once gave her a hearty hug when she stepped out of her limousine, and she returned the hug with gusto.  And her money often went to humdrum necessities that were never publicized, like air-conditioning or a staff lunch room, new windows for a nursing home on Riverside Drive, fire escapes for a residence for the homeless in the Bronx, a boiler for a youth center in Brooklyn, or small parks scattered around the city.

     During these trips around the city she wore white kid gloves, finely tailored suits or designer dresses, a hat in all weather, and a cashmere coat in cool weather; in her later years she carried an elegant cane.  “If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street,” she explained, “and I’m not dressed up or I’m not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I’m talking down to them.  People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don’t intend to disappoint them.” 

     But at night, even into her 90s, she returned to the world of society – high society – usually as an honored guest at some black-tie affair, sporting designer dresses and jewelry, and seated to the right of the host at dinner, while flirting freely with every gentleman in sight.  Her apartment on the 15^th and 16^th floors of 778 Park Avenue had 14 rooms and 6 terraces.  An invitation to one of her luncheons or dinners there meant you had arrived at the highest level of society.  At her formal dinner welcoming President Elect Ronald Reagan to the city, the guest of honor dropped to his knees to find a diamond earring she had dropped under the dining table, and in so doing bumped into Walter Wriston of Citibank and Felix Rohatyn, the financier credited with saving the city from bankruptcy in the 1970s, both on their hands and knees hunting the same elusive earring. 

Her bedroom, giving a hint of how she lived.

     And yet, unlike her husband’s grandmother, the Mrs. Astor of the era of the Four Hundred (see post #88), she had no desire to be an arbiter of Society, was of that world and yet apart from it.  She appreciated those who helped her help others, but had a wicked eye for high society as a whole.  “Unlike Queen Victoria,” she said, “we are amused – we are always amused.” 

     She was slight of build and, in her last years, frail and thin, but she kept fit by swimming a thousand strokes on weekends and almost daily in the summer, even in the chilly ocean waters around her house in Maine.  Her hair remained honey-colored, and on meeting a member of the British royal family she captivated him with the announcement, “I am ninety-five, sir, and never had a facelift.”  (Bravo for her!  But her friends cast doubt on the assertion.)  Even into her 90s she loved to dance.  “When that music starts,” she said, “it enters my blood like a fever.”  Which this blogger enthusiastically applauds, having in his later, less inhibited years experienced that same kind of fever.  And I’ve seen photos of her dancing; it was no prim waltz or foxtrot, it was wild!

     A widow for 48 years, she could have married again but chose not to, though she admitted to a fondness for flirting.  An acquaintance once said to her, “Mrs. Astor, you’re such a beautiful woman, you must have had many lovers.”  “When I can’t fall asleep at night,” she replied, “I sometimes start counting them, but I’m asleep long before I get to the end of the list.”  Perhaps this was said with a wink and a smile.  One wonders if her philanthropic endeavors and active social life left room for any such adventures. 

     As age and infirmity overtook her, she remained at her Park Avenue  apartment, a recluse toward the end, unable to recognize friends and family.  In the litigation following her grandson’s suit against her son, gruesome stories emerged of overflowing wastebaskets, sofas reeking of urine, her pet dogs locked in a pantry, and the grande dame of New York society in rags, stumbling about in the once palatial rooms of her apartment.  The saddest of endings to a splendid life.

     Brooke Astor was always glad that she had not lapsed into the idle life of pleasure that her fortune would have permitted.  When she terminated the Astor Foundation in 1997, it had given away close to $195 million, mostly within New York City.  Her donation to a cause signaled to the big foundations that it deserved support; much larger grants often followed.  She had long since chosen the epitaph for her gravestone: “I had a wonderful life.”

     Brooke Astor combined glamor, wealth, savvy, patrician grace, and a gently wicked sense of humor.  Like Taylor Mead, her polar opposite (see post #91), she took herself seriously but at the same time could have a laugh at her own expense.  I never knew her, but I wish heartily that our paths had crossed just once, so we could exchange a wink and a smile.  But why stop there?  I’d love to have rubbed shinbones with her, to have heard her designer dress rustling and her jewelry clinking as she danced.  Yes, dance!  Brooke Astor and I could have danced up a storm.

     Congressional perks:  Members of Congress enjoy numerous perks, as for instance

•            A private gym with a swimming pool and basketball court
•            Private elevators, and a subway to get them the vast distances from their    office to the Capitol
•            Free mailings
•            On-site medical care
•            Free parking at Washington airports
•            A generous travel allowance
•            Free dry-cleaning 

To my knowledge, none of these have been suspended during the shutdown.  Presumably they are essential services, vital to the health and well-being of the nation.

     Coming soon:  The Living Theatre (champions of freedom and nudity, and why I kept my clothes on).  In the offing: Quentin Crisp.

     ©  2013  Clifford Browder