205. The Rich

1845

They are always there and we acknowledge the fact with our envy or our resentment.  And they’ve always been especially conspicuous in New York City.  So let’s have a look at who they are – or were – and how they got their money, starting in 1845.  Why 1845?  Because that year saw publication of the sixth edition of Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City, offering an alphabetical list of all persons in the city believed to be worth $100,000 or more, with the sums appended to their name, along with, as the preface states, “interesting biographical and historical matter, as derived from the consultation of books and living authorities.” 

     All of which suggests a compendium of The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and People magazine, a formality worthy of Barron’s spiced up with some juicy tidbits like those featured in the gossip magazines prominently displayed in supermarket check-out lanes.  But remember, this was 1845, not 2015.  And the publication was answering a need, since in those days there was no official agency offering credit ratings of individuals or businesses, and this lack became obvious during the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath, when bankruptcies multiplied throughout the city and the nation.  People wanted to know who was financial sound and who was not.  So Moses Y. Beach, publisher of The Sun, a prominent New York daily, got busy and produced this publication.  And if $100,000 sounds like a low entry level for admission to its pages, it’s worth remembering that an 1845 dollar would be worth $31.25 today, so multiply all the figures accordingly.

     So who had the biggest fortunes in 1845?  There’s no doubt about #1, John Jacob Astor, whose $25 million made in the fur trade and New York real estate established him as the richest man in the entire country and earned him two full columns of comment in tiny print, more than anyone else in the publication.  He is hailed as a truly great man, a German immigrant who arrived on these shores as a common steerage passenger, a poor uneducated boy who didn’t speak English, but who through his own industry accumulated a fortune “scarcely second to that of any individual on the globe, and has executed projects that have become identified with the history of this country, and which will perpetuate his name to the latest age.”  His princely house on Lower Broadway, furnished with “richest plate” and works of art, and staffed with an army of servants, including “some from the Empire of the Celestials,” is viewed with admiration and awe.  Moses Beach estimates his income at $2 million a year ($62 million in today’s dollars), which for 1845 was an unprecedented sum.  Also noted is Astor’s gift of $350,000 for the creation of a library in New York City that would bear his name, and that in time merged with two other libraries to create the New York Public Library of today.  All in all, the career of John Jacob is presented to the reader as a classic but exceptional example of rags to riches, a theme that Beach's preface promised to celebrate.  But his portraits  suggest only riches and dignity, no hint of rags or steerage.

John Jacob Astor, an 1825 portrait.  Dignity,
plus a neck cloth (no ties as yet).

     Sadly, the subject of this encomium, now 82 years old, was suffering from ill health.  White-haired and portly, with an iron jaw under folds of loose flesh, he walked only with the help of attendants, took short carriage rides, struck others as dignified but tired.  Yet he was still alert when it came to moneymaking and tight with his pennies, for in his mind he was still the penniless youth who came to this country in steerage.  While dining with a friend once in a new hotel, he eyed the proprietor and announced to his friend, “This man will never succeed.”  “Why not?” asked the friend.  “Don’t you see what large lumps of sugar he puts in the sugar bowl?” 

     The second richest man in the city, with $10 million according to Moses Beach, was Stephen Whitney, another rags-to-riches story, who started out poor as a retail liquor merchant, went into the wholesale liquor business, speculated with great success in cotton, and also invested in real estate.  Liquor, cotton, and real estate – three sure ways for a shrewd New Yorker to make money, and Beach assures us that Whitney was very shrewd, and also “very close in his dealings.”  Is he remembered today?  Hardly.  Unlike old John Jay and his descendants, Whitney had little time for philanthropy.

Stephen van Rensselaer no. 3

     The third largest New York City fortune, matching Whitney’s at $10 million, was not a living person but the estate of Stephen van Rensellaer (d. 1839) of Albany, who qualified for inclusion by virtue of his ownership of hundreds of lots in New York City.  But city real estate, however substantial, was simply a shrewd side investment, since Stephen van Rensellaer (the third of that name) had been the fifth in a long line of Dutch patroons, lords of the huge semi-feudal estate of Rensellaerswyck, comprising vast lands on either side of the Hudson River both above and below Albany.  Whether a vast feudal estate where a Rensellaer lorded it, however benevolently, over 3,000 tenants was appropriate in a modern, democratic age, Moses Beach never questions, though the tenants were beginning to do so in what would become the anti-rent movement and put an end to the anachronistic patroonship.

     Other multimillionaires of 1845 include William B. Astor ($5 million), John Jacob’s son, another shrewd investor in Manhattan real estate; Peter G. Stuyvesant (($4 million), a descendant of the one-legged last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, from whom Peter G., Beach informs us, has inherited and kept the silver spoon; and James Lenox ($3 million), who inherited from his father and, so Beach assures us, “devotes himself chiefly to pious objects.”  Actually, he was acquiring rare manuscripts and books, including Bibles, and paintings, busts, engravings, and other art works for what would become the most valuable such collection in the hemisphere and be housed in the Lenox Library, which in time would be consolidated with two other libraries to create the New York Public Library.  If with the Astors, father and son, one sees money-getting finding time for philanthropy, James Lenox shows inherited wealth devoting itself almost exclusively to cultural activities from which the whole community will benefit in time.  Sooner or later, money begets culture.

A Gutenberg Bible, circa 1455, in the Rare Books Division of the New York Public Library.  
From the Lenox Library.  One of James Lenox's "pious objects."
NYC Wanderer

     Of the eleven other millionaires, three names stand out, albeit for very different reasons.  Peter Harmony is said to have come to the city as a poor cabin boy born in the West Indies, and to have lately retired from the shipping business with a princely fortune ($1.5 million).  (He was in fact an immigrant from Spain.)  “Some of his ships to Africa, it is said, have brought out cargoes that have paid a profit equal to the difference in price between negroes in Africa and Cuba.”  Which is a pretty clear reference to the illegal but lucrative and still flourishing slave trade that brought Africans to the Spanish colony of Cuba, where sugar plantations still provided a market, and officials looked the other way.

     Jonathan Thorne is described as “the very pink and glass of fashion in the Parisian circles,” and this despite his descent from old Quaker ancestors who would wonder at his “gorgeous private chapel at his imperial mansion in the French capital.”  “What changes in the wheel of fortune,” Beach adds, “from an humble purser in the navy?”  How a humble purser achieves a fortune of $1 million and a mansion in Paris, Beach fails to explain.  But he is clearly on the side of hard work and business, and not on the side of fashion.

     Cornelius Vanderbilt, credited with $1.2 million, rates only a short paragraph, since Moses Beach could not anticipate the future railroad king and titan of finance.  But Beach recognizes energy when he sees it:  “Of an old Dutch root.  Cornelius has evinced more energy and ‘go aheadativeness’ in building and driving steamboats and other projects than ever one single Dutchman possessed.”  It takes the American hot sun, he adds, to clear off the fogs of the Zuyder Zee and wake up the phlegm of a descendant of old Holland.

     Though full of admiration for many, Moses Beach was at times ready to pronounce a moral judgment as well.  Just hear him, no doubt with memories of the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath, praise a team of mechanics who became celebrated engravers of bank notes.  By contrast, he asks, what utility is to be seen in “swindling stock operations … deemed more reputable than the walks of mechanic life.”  No longer, he insists, can dreaming speculators and fancy operators sneer at the “brawny arms” and “russet palms” of the honest laborer.  The false system of credit that once prevailed has been eliminated, he declares, “breaking up the nests of lounging, idle upstarts, that like mushrooms on a dung-hill sprouted up out of the masses of rag-paper and spurious capital.”  And what would Mr. Beach say today, in the wake of our own recent financial convulsion, when such novel phenomena as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps appeared, and still appear, to the bafflement of many and the enrichment of a few?

     The first half of the nineteenth century in New York was the age of the merchants, when success in trade brought wealth.  Most of Beach’s subjects dealt in things you could see, touch, taste, or smell: silks, cotton, tea, furs, chinaware, brandy, ships, and real estate.  And in a few cases, slaves.  Not that rich marriages and inherited wealth didn’t help.

     Among the names that had yet to achieve their greatest success was Phineas T. Barnum, proprietor of the American Museum and guardian of the celebrated midget Tom Thumb.  Reported to be currently in Europe exhibiting said Thumb, “by whom he is coining money,” the master of showmanship and humbug is said to be worth $150,000.  Yet his sensational promotion of Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, lay five years in the future, and his traveling circuses had yet to be organized.

     Another New Yorker just at the start of his career is Irish-born Alexander T. Stewart, worth $800,000, already a “celebrated Dry Good Merchant of Broadway whose shop is the grand resort of the fashionables.”  Yet he rates only a mere six lines.  Rest assured, we will hear of him again.

     For an unusual name no one can match Preserved Fish, a sea captain turned shipping merchant worth $150,000, and president of the Tradesmen’s Bank.  Beach presents him as “an example of an uneducated man, of strong mind, exercising great influence in his sphere.”  But how he got his outlandish name Beach does not explain.  Other sources state that Fish was of Huguenot stock, and that his father and grandfather bore the same first name, which they pronounced in three syllables, pre-SER-ved, meaning “preserved from sin” or “preserved in grace.”

Catharine Sedgwick, an illustration 

probably dating from the early 1800s.

     Women are far and few in Moses Beach’s compilation, and then almost always as widows or heirs of males.  The one exception is Catharine Sedgewick, a “distinguished novelist” famous for her “New England Tales,” a “religious satire published some 20 years since.”  Though she received a “snug” fortune by inheritance, she “has reaped a large income from her books, the circulation of which exceeded those of any American author.”  Though she seems to have resided in Massachusetts, she gets a princely seventeen lines and is credited with $100,000.  Here, then, is an early  example of the “scribbling females” that Nathaniel Hawthorne would acknowledge with scorn, writers whose novels, not rated highly today, were widely read in their time, often bringing in income that the less pecunious male writers of the day envied and resented bitterly.

1863

No other source that I know of gives as comprehensive and colorful an account of New York’s wealthy as does Beach, but the income tax imposed by the federal government during the Civil War lets us know who then were the wealthiest citizens of New York, for in January 1865 the enterprising but often controversial New York Herald published the names of prominent citizens paying the tax, prompting protests at this invasion of privacy, and a New York Times editorial observing that “the most glaring and shameless frauds are practiced in the return of incomes, and in the assessment of taxes upon them.”  Men living at the rate of anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 a year, it insisted, were put down as having no income at all, an assertion that the New York Tribune echoed.

     And that wasn’t the end of it, for later in that same year of 1865 the American News Company published The Income Record: A List Giving the Taxable Income for the Year 1863, of Every Resident of New York.  The publisher’s stated goal was “to satisfy an imperious public curiosity, which thus far has been only partially gratified by the public journals”; to let citizens decide whether their neighbors had been honest in stating their income; and to provide trustworthy statistics to future legislators for revisions of the tax laws.  Many a moneyed gentleman, one suspects, trembled in his ruffled shirtfront and shiny boots at the prospect of having his income revealed yet again, and so authoritatively, to the public.

     So who, according to this tabulation, were the wealthiest citizens of 1863?  The top three:

A.T. Stewart             $1,843,637

William B. Astor         $838,525

Cornelius Vanderbilt   $680,728

All three appeared in Moses Beach’s tabulation of 1845, but times have changed and they now eclipse all others in wealth.

Alexander T. Stewart, circa 1860.  Beards and
neckties are in, neck cloths are out.

     Stewart’s income astonished the public and probably establishes him as the most honest of the lot.  His new department store on Broadway at 10^th Street, a six-story cast-iron structure with a glass-dome skylight, built in 1862 and occupying most of a whole block, employed some 2,000 people, had hydraulic elevators, and offered fashionable society a wide range of fabrics, scarves, shawls, lamps, carpets, bric-a-brac, and toys.  Hailed today  as the father of the modern department store, this generously bearded gentleman prospered to the point of being considered – for a while – the richest man in the country.

Stewart's department store, the granddaddy of Bloomingdale's,
Macy's, and Marshall Fields.

William B. Astor circa 1850, looking just
as formal, dignified, and (let's face it)
 stodgy as his father.

     William B. Astor, the son of old John J. and his chief heir, was heavily invested in New York City real estate, earning him the name of “the landlord of New York.”  He also gave money to the Astor Library founded by his father.  Upon his father’s death in 1848, William was considered the richest man in America with a fortune of $14 million, which makes his 1863 declaration of annual income of $838,525 perhaps a bit suspect.  Photographs reveal a rather full-faced man, clean-shaven with long sideburns and a hint of jowls, a competent heir who lived a profitable but uneventful life devoid of his father’s eccentricities and flair.

     If Commodore Vanderbilt’s figure of $680,728 likewise seems to err on the side of modesty, it’s worth remembering that in 1863, having sold his ships, he was just beginning to acquire the railroad empire that would increase his fortune vastly and make him the richest man in the country, referred to endearingly in the late 1860s as Old Sixty Millions.  In photographs Vanderbilt appears tall and erect, with a strong nose and a square jaw, his gray hair turning strikingly white.  Beside such a figure the other two top moneybags of the day, Stewart and Astor, seem just a bit bland, but then, anyone compared to the vibrant and often ruthless Commodore would have come off bland indeed.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, dated by my source as "before 1877."  I should think
so, since that's when he died.  But to my eye, he comes across as more forceful
and energetic than the other moneybags pictured in this post.

    This supremely pecunious trio – Stewart, Astor, and Vanderbilt – resembled the wealthy of 1845 in that they dealt in tangibles: a department store, real estate, and railroads.  And if Astor’s making a fortune in real estate and being known as the landlord of New York didn’t necessarily benefit society at large (who loves a landlord anyway?), Vanderbilt’s New York Central line got people from New York to Chicago and back efficiently, and Stewart’s dry goods palace dazzled them with its offerings of this world’s goods.

The Gilded Age

Caroline Schermerhorn Astor -- the Mrs. Astor --
entertaining at one of her balls.  The ladies'
gowns rustle on the floor but are decidedly
low-necked.

The Civil War ended in 1865, following which came the so-called Gilded Age, when the rich dressed rich, paraded about in fancy turnouts, built palatial mansions, raced their yachts, hitched their moneyed daughters to impoverished European noblemen (most of them accomplished debauchees), and generally enjoyed the good life free from such annoyances as an income tax.  On the Upper Fifth Avenue the Vanderbilts and Astors leapfrogged over one another, building ever more palatial mansions that made their rivals’ residences lower down on the avenue look opulently shabby, while Mrs. Astor – the Mrs. Astor, whose mail required no other designation to reach her – welcomed annually to her ballroom, which held just four hundred guests, the select four hundred persons deemed by her to be socially acceptable.  Needless to say, the simplicity of an earlier age, when flaunting your wealth was frowned on, had vanished, and often as not the pampered descendants of those earlier moneymakers felt no need to smirch their hands with toil.

     On this happy note I will end.  The rich of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – a very different species -- will be looked at in a future post.  As well as The Donald, who merits a post all his own.

     The book:  The selection of posts from this blog is available in print version at $14.95 (or cheaper), and as an e-book with Nook, Kindle, etc., for $3.99.  One of the online come-ons describes it in a unique brand of English:  "Stories excluding the Authorization Agitating Metropolitan area in the Copernican universe …  art critic Clifford Browder leaves no wallpaper unturned … a invest that so muchness are worthy to caw home."  One copy of the print version is offered free on a Goodreads giveaway through November 18.

     Coming soon:  Tiffany’s: The magic of their lamps (and how to tell a genuine one from a fake), the tiny lustrous vase in our apartment, a great fraud, and how The Donald bamboozled the Tiffany’s of today.  Plus a mystery: How did Marie Antoinette’s diamonds end up over here?

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

204. People of New York

The marrying man

     Gino Filippino, a trim-looking 53-year-old who favors tailored designer suits, has an unusual occupation: when not selling real estate, in his capacity as a justice of the peace he arranges and performs civil weddings for out-of-towners, many of them foreigners, who want to achieve their nuptials not in some quiet church, but amid the bustle and brouhaha of Manhattan.  He and his staff handle the paperwork, flowers, cake, champagne, photographers, and musicians, if such are required, but above all he helps the couples pick the spot for the wedding.  He has married both gay and straight couples in Central Park, dodging power lawnmowers and the blaring noise of tree pruners at work, and on the Brooklyn Bridge amid the roar of traffic, in busy Grand Central Station, and at the Top of the Rock, the observation deck of Rockefeller Center, with its breathtaking 360-degree views of the city.

Night view from the Top of the Rock.  Okay for a wedding?
Daniel Schwen

     The unusual is his specialty.  He has bribed employees to let him do a quickie in the Waldorf Astoria and other fancy hostelries, and once even married two hippies from California in bed at the elegant Plaza Hotel.  While he has on occasion staged elaborate ceremonies on a yacht in the harbor, most of the weddings are what he calls “hitch-and-gos,” done in a matter of minutes and costing $500 and up.  Often he has to shoo homeless people away from the marriage sites, but at other times he recruits them as witnesses to sign marriage licenses.  And once he even had to read the vows for a bride who was too drunk to manage it herself.

Grand Central Station.  Would you like to be married here?

Or here?  The Waldorf Astoria lobby, okay for quickies.
Alan Light

     How many weddings has he done?  Over 200 a year, and even 11 in a single day, most of them in Central Park.  But he himself isn’t married, though in New York State he could be, since same-sex marriages are now legal.  He lives with his partner on the Upper West Side and operates out of an office in Columbus Square.  “I’m the marrying man,” he explains, his purpose in life to give visiting couples the “New York moment” they desire – a unique experience they won't soon forget.

There’s no place like home

     Eleanor Murray, a plump, white-haired 93-year-old, has one claim to distinction: she has lived all her life in an unassuming five-floor walk-up at 531 West 135^th Street in Manhattan.  “And I mean my whole life,” she told an interviewer; “I was born in the basement.”  Indeed she was, since her mother, a Hungarian immigrant, was the building’s super and lived in a basement apartment, rising daily at 4:00 a.m. to shovel coal into the boiler.  There she gave birth to Eleanor – in the apartment, not the boiler -- with the help of a midwife and then probably went right back to work.  Her family knew all the people in the building, “all good family people, no roomers.”

     By the age of 13 Eleanor, the fourth of five children, was helping to clean the building and shoveling coal herself.  Then, at 16, she and a sister moved into the two-bedroom apartment on the third floor where she still lives today.  The rent then was $31 a month; today, being rent-regulated, it is a mere $500, which gives her yet another reason to stay.  Not that she would move anyway.  “I never wanted to move, because I love the neighborhood and I’d never leave my church.”  Her church is the Church of the Annunciation on Convent Avenue, where she and her six children attended grammar school, and where she married her husband, John Murray, who managed a warehouse on the Hudson River waterfront, and who died in 2001.

     Much has happened over the years.  She remembers swimming across the Hudson to New Jersey with friends, and the time when a cosmetics factory went up in flames, and “the neighborhood smelled beautiful for months.”  She worked as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s department store, and attended Baruch College, but never graduated because she left to have children; later, she worked in the registrar’s office at City College.  In 1988 her mother, age 99, died on the very couch in her living room where she sat to be interviewed. 

     When she grew up, the neighborhood was all Irish working-class immigrants, but today they have disappeared, replaced by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and others.  “I’m the last of my gang left, but I still love the people in the neighborhood.”  Robust and cheerful with a hearty laugh, on nice days she sits with friends on a bench on the Broadway median, ignoring the traffic roaring by on either side, and takes food to an incapacitated neighbor.  When she visits a daughter in New Jersey she doesn’t stay long, missing the noise and excitement of the city.  A committed New Yorker, she leans out her window and waves to the open-air tour buses passing by on 135^th Street, shouting, “Welcome to New York!”  As for the future, she has no doubt: “I’m staying here till I die.”  And she laughs. 

A Broadway chorus boy

     Ted was a Broadway chorus boy, young, short, and blond, more “cute” than stunningly good-looking, whom I knew in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was a graduate student at Columbia and subsequently began teaching French.  We met in Ogunquit, Maine, where he was appearing in the musical Pajama Game, and reconnected in New York, where, through him and his friends, I got a glimpse into the life of Broadway chorus boys.

Broadway theaters at night.  
UpstateNYer

     Their world was a world within a world, small, exciting, self-contained.  Ted lived in a cold-water flat in the West 40s, near the theaters, his agent, and the bars that the chorus kids frequented.  Cold-water flats, being what they were, were low-rent apartments, and as such got passed along from one struggling young actor or dancer to another; Ted’s had once been the home of the veteran stage and film actress Jo Van Fleet, whom I especially remember from her role in the movie East of Eden.  Ted’s apartment, as I dimly recall, was small and sparsely furnished, probably with running cold water in a sink; for baths and other bodily needs, he had to go down the hall to a communal facility.  But this was how the chorus kids lived; they were glad to get such a place and thought no more about it.  It was less a home than a base of operations; their real life was on the stage, whether in the city or on tour, and in the bars.

     Ted had been in a number of big-time Broadway musicals, including Guys and Dolls, as commemorated by a number of photos on his wall.  Among them was one showing him in a classical ballet pose with a female dancer, but it seemed all wrong for him, whereas Guys and Dolls and Pajama Game seemed right, and he knew it.  His life was a matter of waiting for phone calls from his agent about a possible part in a musical.  He had strange and hilarious stories to tell about try-outs and casting.  On one occasion he was told, “Sorry, Ted.  You’re just what we need, but we don’t want another blond in the chorus.”  So he went out and got a dark-haired wig, hurried  back, and tried out again.  They laughed and said, “Okay, okay, you’re hired.  But don’t wear that lousy wig; dye your hair.”  And to me he explained, “Sometimes you have to do their thinking for them.”

     “Don’t you ever just walk into a part and get hired immediately?” I asked.

     “Just once.  The male chorus in The Boyfriend is supposed to be English, but there’s one American.  When they saw me, they said, ‘We hope you can sing and dance.  You’re short and blond, just what we want for the American.’ ”  Ted could sing and dance; he got the role.

Ted's world, not mine.

     Ted had tales to tell about rehearsals as well, like the time they had the heaviest of the women dancers paired off with him, the smallest of the males.  When, at one point, the girls were supposed leap up on their partner’s shoulders, Ted’s partner slid right down to the floor, taking his pants with her.  “Embarrassing,” he told me.  “There I was only in my dance belt,” meaning the jock worn by male dancers.  But he was laughing as he told me.

     At Ogunquit, on the last night of the performance there, he invited me into his dressing room, where I saw him and two other dancers, seated in their underwear, busily applying makeup.  It was the last night of the tour, always a time of joyous celebration and hijinks, with jokes and banter flying about.  Ted planned to black out some of his teeth and then, during the performance, flash a gap-toothed smile at a friend onstage, hoping to break him up.  But one of the company’s staff, wise to the ways of dancers, made an announcement warning against such shenanigans.  “Remember,” he said, “you may want to work for these folks again.”  So Ted didn’t blacken his teeth.

     When there were few shows in the offing, dancers had a recourse to industrials, lavish spectacles with dancers used by big corporations, especially automakers, to introduce a new product.  Industrials went all over the country and they paid well, so dancers took them to bring in some cash, but their heart was in the theater.  I recall seeing an industrial on a friend’s TV set, with dancers dancing around glistening new limousines lit with bright lights.  Said my friend, who was in advertising and knowledgeable, “You wouldn’t believe what all of that costs!”  Why dancers were needed to introduce a new model of car, I never quite grasped, but the automakers presumably knew what they were doing.

     The social life of chorus boys was centered in a handful or more-or-less gay bars in the West 40s.  I went to one once with Ted.  The emphasis was less on cruising than socializing, and everybody seemed to know everybody.  The latest bit of gossip was about a young dancer who had just broken up with his lover, the show’s dance captain, who had then got his ex fired.  When the kid just fired showed up, all the others flocked around him to sympathize; the dance captain was vilified by one and all.  As Ted observed to me, mixing your private life with your career was risky; he never did.

     On another occasion a friend of Ted’s told him and some other dancers how he had got a part given up by a strikingly good-looking dancer.  “I knew I couldn’t match him in looks, so I decided to strut like a stud, as if to say, ‘Honeys, what I’ve got going for me is right down there between my legs.’ ”  All the other chorus kids agreed that, under the circumstances, this was the only thing to do.

     Dancers were always socializing; they weren’t ones for quiet times at home with a good book, or for reflection.  And when they went on tour, the socializing wasn’t diminished, for they were constantly being partied wherever they went.  Once Ted met Tennessee Williams, who had invited the chorus boys to a private party.  Williams scanned each as he arrived, and said to Ted, “Hmm, yes, you can stay.”  Thanks a lot, Ted thought to himself, I thought I’d already been invited.  But in Denver a wealthy young businessman was so taken with Ted that he offered to keep him in style.  Ted  politely declined the offer, which his admirer pressed repeatedly, sure that he could wear down Ted’s resistance.  But Ted knew that in the long run such a relationship led nowhere; he stuck to his guns, said no.

     Ted and I weren’t steady lovers, just on-and-off-again partners.  Weeks, even months might pass, and then, on the spur of the moment, I would phone him and we would get together. We were of different worlds – me an academic, a teacher, and him a dancer steeped in the small, rich world of Broadway chorus boys.  But at times he needed to come out of that world, even though he always went back into it.  “It’s always good to see you,” he told me more than once.  “Theater kids aren’t in the real world, they’re off in some fantasy world of their own.”  At first I shrugged his remark off, but when he repeated it several times, I realized that it was for real, he was in that world but not altogether of it, he needed to come out and get a breath of fresh air.  Seeing me was that breath of fresh air, and at the same time I could escape from my own world, the rich, small world of academics.

     Ted knew that you can’t be a chorus boy forever – a problem explored decades later in the musical A Chorus Line.  A few dancers end up teaching dance or becoming choreographers, but only a very few.  Ted’s plan was to transition into acting.  His acting teacher encouraged him, but his agent and others resisted; “Ted,” they said, “you’re a dancer.”  Which didn’t leave much room for transitioning.  Like all young actors in search of credits and experience, he took parts in what veteran actors laugh at and deride: children’s theater.  In one, I recall, he played a mad physicist.  I never saw him perform, but an acquaintance of mine did.  “It’s fascinating how dancers get into a role,” he told me.  “When I do it, I’m exploring the character’s emotions, finding out what the character feels.  But dancers do it through movements; they dance themselves into the role.” 

     But what chance did a dancer have of getting into acting in New York, when he was competing with a host of young actors doing the same?  Often as not, an aging dancer – and in that profession aging comes fast – goes back to his hometown, Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Denver, where family and friends are waiting, and a job in some mundane profession offers the security that theater can never provide.  More than once Ted told me, “You may get a phone call that can change your life.”  Now he was waiting, not for a call offering yet another job as a dancer, but for a call offering a serious role as an actor.  But as long as I knew him, that call never came.

     One day I finally suggested to Ted that we continue as friends minus sex, prompting his wistful reply, “I hate for things to change.”  Soon after that I met my partner Bob, and from then on Ted was out of my life.  With hindsight, I regret this; it wasn’t necessary.  I suspect that Ted finally went back to Pittsburgh or wherever and the inevitable mundane job.  Now that decades have passed, I wonder what became of him, but probably I’ll never know.  So it goes, with time.

     Epilogue:  The story of Ted has a surprise ending.  After writing the above, on the spur of the moment I googled him by both his real name and his stage name, expecting nothing, since he was only one of hundreds of young male dancers who have their moment of glory on Broadway and then disappear into the maw of oblivion.  But to my astonishment, several obits in New Jersey newspapers came up, announcing the death last spring of an 87-year-old man with the same two names, an inhabitant of Bayonne.  What a coincidence! I told myself, but soon became convinced that this was, indeed had to be, the Ted I knew.  This Ted was a Broadway chorus boy back when the Ted I knew was appearing in Broadway musicals and, when he retired from dancing, began working in wardrobe, and finally retired from that with honors after 45 years on Broadway.  So Ted found a way to stay in Broadway theater after he left dancing, and it wasn’t acting.  But the obit told me things I didn’t know:

·      He was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, so that his leap into a career in dancing  anticipated the story of the Broadway musical Billy Elliot.

·      He was a year older than me, whereas I had always thought he was two or three years younger.

·      He had been briefly in the military at the end of World War II.

·      After I knew him he married a dancer and by her had a daughter.

He was quoted as saying, “I had a wonderful life.  I have no regrets.  Always follow your dreams.” 

     My reaction to this news was astonishment, then sadness, then joy.  Astonishment for obvious reasons.  Sadness because I just missed discovering him in time to reconnect, talk old times, say hello and good-bye.  And joy because he solved the problem of what to do when he quit dancing: he followed his dream and stayed in the world of theater that he knew and loved.  To be backstage in wardrobe and not out there performing must have been an adjustment, but he managed.  He had a rich,  full life; I wish I could have shared a little of it in the years after I knew him almost a half century ago on Broadway.  Good-bye, Ted, and good luck!  Have a dance with the angels.

     Source note:  For information about Gino Filippone and Eleanor Murray, I am indebted to articles by Corey Kilgannon in the Metropolitan section of the Sunday New York Times of July 19 and September 27, 2015, respectively.

     The book:  The selection of posts from this blog is now available as an e-book on Kindle and Nook for $3.99.

     Coming soon:  The Rich.  No, I don’t mean Donald Trump – not yet, at least.  I mean a young foreigner who arrived here in steerage speaking no English and became the richest man in America.  Also a slave trader, a Paris-inhabiting “pink and glass of fashion,” a ship captain named (I invent not) Preserved Fish, a “scribbling female,” the father of the modern department store, and the man who became known as Old Sixty Millions.  What did these nineteenth-century moneybags have in common that makes them different from the moneybags of today?  As for those  moneybags of today, I'll get around to them in time, including, no doubt, the Donald.

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder