Manhattan Memories

Chapter 03. The Village Voice
More trouble with our star novelist
Lasting insignificance: the 3-dot column
Jean Shepherd’s phantom novel
ECHO  and Larry Adler
Woody Allen plays classic nerd
A sample Village Square column

JW and Rock Hudson.

     Anyway, we'd all be beavering away at this grotty printing plant when our new columnist Norman Mailer would arrive bearing his lengthy column, insisting it appear word for word in the already made-up tabloid. This would involve cutting a story here and another one there, jig-sawing in the Great Novelist's priceless prose an inch or two at a time. Here was this young guy who'd written a best seller while barely out of his teens, who'd thus acquired all the arrogance of a star without any of the graciousness. The worst thing, as I saw it, was that unlike my newspaper friends he'd never been edited--and was never likely to be. There's something about being paid several dollars per word for one's writing that doesn't encourage brevity and so, good writer though he was, he could have been infinitely better. Like most of us he would have benefited from a good editor, one not intimidated by his instant fame.

     He was temperamental, too, once throwing a hissy fit because a typo in one of his columns came out as "the nuisances of growth" instead of the nuances. Boy, did he create a stink over that one! An apology was never enough for Mailer; what he demanded was complete obeisance.

     A letter in response to one of his columns noted that he had made a total of 43 references to himself (I, me, my, I'm, I'll  etc ) and added: "Anyone who didn't know what a swell guy you are, might think you were in love with yourself".

     Thus, our fights were inevitable. Although I was a cocky, young newspaperman, unfamiliar perhaps with the deference that most readers seem to have for novelists (I never read any), I was determined to hold my ground as a professional journalist against what I saw as ant arrogant intruder (although he had given the Voice its name, and was soon to own half of it). In retrospect, I think I backed the wrong side. Ed and Dan, conservative in everything except politics, were essentially cautious people—they had passed up the chance to print the paper in the newly-popular offset mode--whereas their tempestuous partner really was an outlaw. Maybe if I’d backed him instead of defending my own ego by fighting with him, I might have made a difference. But I doubt it. I was nobody’s favorite around that office, although to this day I’m not sure why.

Mailer, Fancher & Wolf photo by Gene Dauber	Fancher, Tallmer & Wolf photo by Daniel List
Both pictures from Kevin Michael McAuliff The Great American Newspaper (Chas Scribner’s Sons, 1978)

Our favorite radio DJ, the all-night talker Jean Shepherd, was the complete opposite of our nagging novelist: an amiable, offbeat intellectual with the ability to get his way through charm and humor. He had a folksy, intimate manner that made his listeners feel sure that he understood them, felt their heartaches and had been through exactly the same thing himself. Many of his fans—and although he died in 1999, aged 77, there are plenty of them around today still playing tapes of his old shows--will tell you, that he always seemed as though he was talking to "me".

     There were occasionally serious moments when he would read a piece of poetry or quote somebody like Robert Service or George Ade. But mostly it was just a continuous narrative, punctuated by occasions when he would urge his listeners to place their radios outside their windows and turn up the volume. Then he would yell: "You filthy pragmatists; I'm going to get you".

     Discussing a recent trip abroad or his attendance at some sporting activity, Shep (as he liked to be known) sounded uncannily like he was sitting right next to you indulging in some casual conversation. An entire generation grew up listening to him, utterly captivated by his personality and, who knows? having their views shaped for years to come.

     He was under contract to WOR when Fancher and Wolf first introduced me to his all-night rap on our trips out to the printer, but when his initial 18-month contract expired, the radio station decided he wasn't commercial enough and let him go. Hundreds of his fans--Shep called them the Night People--gathered to protest in the recently burned out Wanamaker Building near Cooper Square. He told them: "Radio is governed by beliefs rather than thinking, beliefs that are cleverly called ideas. One of them is that there is such a thing as the average man and he is 10 years old".

     WOR brass read about the massive gathering in the next day's papers, concluded they had been too hasty and rehired him. But a couple of days later he was off the air again when, responding to a caller's challenge that he could be commercial and sell soap with the best of them, he plugged his favorite brand, Sweetheart.

     Sweetheart wasn't paying for any commercials at this time but when they read the publicity and noticed the response, they instructed their ad agency to call WOR with an offer to sponsor Shep's show.

     Then along came Shepherd's make-believe book, I, Libertine as yet unwritten. On the DJ's urging, customers began to besiege bookstores for copies. "I had gotten into a discussion with somebody about those people who pretend to know everything and we thought it might be a good gag to create a demand for a book that didn't exist. We dreamed up the title, and the author's name--Frederick R. Ewing--on the spot", Shepherd told me over a drink at a 6th Avenue bar, recalling how he had plugged the book endlessly on his show and even smuggled the title into the New York Times Book Review.

     Friends would call me to say they'd met people at cocktail parties who claimed to have read it and some disc jockey in eastern Pennsylvania actually interviewed the mythical Ewing on his radio show. Whoever played the part had a slightly irritated British accent".

     Pausing in his tale, Shep looked over mischievously. "Another drink?" I pointed to my almost-untouched beer and shook my head. Shep rattled the ice cubes in his glass, picked one out with two fingers and slipped it into his mouth. "Mmmh!" he said, rolling his eyes appreciatively. "I'd say a '59 Frigidaire ...(pause)...from one of the rear trays".

     He spat out the ice cube, summoned the waitress for another Scotch on the rocks and continued his story.

     Doubleday's 5th Avenue store had received 27 requests for the book in a single morning, he said, a tactic that was repeated all over the country when an airline pilot who was a listener persuaded his colleagues to spread the word. At the Philadelphia Public Library, a Shepherd disciple who asked the reference department for "any information about Frederic R. Ewing" was shown Ewing's name in a card index. Beneath it was neatly typed the word 'Excelsior'--an expression Shep used frequently on his show. At Columbia University, a student who submitted for his thesis a review of the non-existent book received a B-plus. Underneath it the teacher had annotated: Excelsior!

     The thing was really picking up speed by this time. Next thing I knew was a call from Ballantine asking me to write the book that everybody was asking for. To cut a long story short, I sat down with Ted Sturgeon and knocked it off in ten days. Ballantine printed 25,000 copies."

     I, Libertine became such a success it eventually sold almost a quarter of a million copies and an autograph party at a Times Square bookstore brought out more than a thousand crashers, most of them barefoot.

By the late Sixties, the Voice was preoccupied with what eventually became a successful battle with the autocratic Parks Commissioner Robert Moses who had proposed a highway through Washington Square. The paper, supporting the Village Independent Democrats and Ed Koch against old time kingmaker Carmine De Sapio, had replaced me with a more politically-minded news editor. But my weekly column, The Village Square, was taking up most of my time.

     After the first few issues of the Voice, I had no trouble filling the column, aided by the floods of mail that poured in from readers all over America--and eventually all over the world as the Voices I left with or sent to various foreign contacts got passed around.  By this time I was living in a $46-a-month apartment on Perry Street and had gotten a job on the travel desk at The New York Times. My column was being handled at the paper by the surly Jerry Tallmer who was always scornful of what he felt were my banalities. Even today, half a century later, he won’t reply to my letters.                        

     I was never popular at the paper--and to this day Ed Fancher and his cohorts insist that I was not "a founder"--at least partly because, never one to mind my own business, I would take it upon myself to return unacknowledged mss. or reply to readers' inquiries that had lain unanswered on the editors' desks for weeks on end. My meddling eventually got me evicted from the office but I continued with the column. When Lyle Stuart published a collection of them I wrote to ask Kingsley Amis who was teaching at Princeton if he would be kind enough to review it. A curt note came back to inform me that he wrote only for money.

     So much junk mail was arriving that I devised something called The Surprise Club, inviting readers to send me stamped, self-addressed envelopes which I would return filled with book galleys, seeds for midget vegetables, 12c Mexican lottery tickets, origami and London matrimonial brochures. Walter Winchell had been nearing the end of his reign when I arrived in New York and apart from my one-subject columns soliciting funds for foreign aid programs and listing numbers for usefully located public phones, I was being drawn more and more to the three-dot style.

     Most people who have started newspapers will affirm that of the dozens of volunteers who seek to write for them, nine out of ten want to write a column. Unfortunately, the vast majority of such people have only one subject on their minds and their columns soon exhaust it. The natural form for a writer is the essay and the beauty of a column is that in most cases it doesn’t have to have a “today” angle: it can be unapologetically about anything at any time. I understood immediately why Gilbert Seldes preferred to write every week rather than occasionally.

     With the Village Square, I realized that if I sufficiently condensed the myriad subjects that came to my attention, the three-dot column was the obvious solution. In the next chapter I’ll reprint one of my earlier columns..

     I unashamedly modeled my style (although not the content) after the master, and although three-dot columns were far from rare at the time, the only other writer using similar material was the San Francisco Chronicle 's Herb Caen. His column was almost always local, mine was international, aided by items I picked up from the London Sunday papers which were little read in the U.S. at the time.

     According to a 32-page marketing research survey the Voice commissioned in November 1960, The Village Square was the third best-read feature in the paper, after the ground-breaking cartoon by Jules Feiffer and the letters. The average Voice reader was reported to be 29.4 years old, with 72.7 per cent being college graduates.

     In the early days of the Voice, Fred Mc Darrah was unfairly criticized by some people as a lousy photographer but as I constantly pointed out in his defense, even if that was true (which it wasn’t) the important thing is that he was there. Covering a beat which few others bothered about, he missed very little of consequence, building up what is probably the most complete documentation of early-60s New York. His specialty initially was the art scene and he was reputed to have shrewdly built up an impressive collection of works, by swapping photographs for pictures from artists who later became famous. Remaining “consultant” picture editor at the Voice until his death, he was sometimes bitter about the cavalier way the paper treated him.

     In one of his letters to me he mused about the fact that, although still on the masthead, when he walked into the Voice office nobody except the picture editor knew him and he could rarely get any pictures into the paper. Eighteen months before he died (Nov 2007), he wrote:

     “This will be my last word on that piece of shit called the Village Voice.Betty Friedan died and there was not one word in the paper on her, considered by those retarded pricks as old hat “like nobody remembers her”. Fortunately the so-called managing editor Doug Simmons is on his way out…”

     I began to head my column—which I subtitled, "The Column of Lasting Insignificance"—first with my own picture and then vintage engravings. I would inform readers how to enter the annual Calaveras County Frog Jumping contest inspired by a Mark Twain story, or where they could buy coffee cups with permanent lipstick stains (promoted for lonely bachelors); drop unstamped letters in the street to see if anybody would mail them; seek challengers on behalf of a wandering British tiddlywinks team; publicize the efforts of a talent agent who planned to install stand-up comics on subway trains.

     I wrote about The Embarrassment Shopper who stood ready to obtain items for people too abashed to shop for themselves. Who had the nerve to ask for such items as Mr Clean or fig newtons? I followed up ads on the back of book matches, solicited generic love letters that I could pass on to other readers and surveyed poets to reveal how they lived without working. Always in search of eligible women I couldn't resist asking my laundryman why a bundle on his shelf was labeled "Sex" and on learning it was short for one of his customers, Miss Sexton, insisted on leaving her a note. She was amused but told me she had a steady boyfriend.

     For one column I rode the A-train to Harlem to meet the much admired poet Langston Hughes, controversial because of false accusations of being a Communist, based presumably on the fact that he happened to have toured Russia and whose writings displayed an obvious sympathy for the underdog. The title of one of his books The Ways of White Folks, a droll recount of practices that might have become a polemic in angrier hands, pretty much epitomizes this gentle human being. But what had attracted my attention was the warmth and understanding of the “Simple” books, perceptive musings by his fictional alter ego Jesse Semple.

     Hughes died in 1965 but lives on in the title of a play which was taken from his poem What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

     On another occasion, I asked readers to concentrate at a particular time while I tried to transmit a picture to them telepathically (none of the postcard replies got it right), another time I persuaded the Taylor Wine company to seal a note in a champagne bottle before I tossed it off the Staten Island ferry. (While I dreamed of making a pen pal in the Seychelles, it was actually picked up disappointingly close, down the New Jersey coast).                   

     Every year I invited readers to send in poems for an annual contest which I was able to persuade Kenneth Patchen and Randall Jarrel to judge, and my letter to Ezra Pound asking why such a great poet was also an anti-Semite was answered with a testy postcard--long since lost--justifying his stance.  Damned as he was for his controversial broadcasts for the Nazis, he was obviously half crazy. But I was impressed by his ambiguous admonition that "a slave is one who waits for someone to free him".

     As a general rule, Ed and Dan gave me a free hand with my column but on at least three occasions they refused to print what I wrote, the first occasion being my disclosure that the use of that new-fangled European invention, the bidet, was gaining in popularity. In this current era of $2,000 models, the public seems to take them for granted but back in the Fifties their very mention seemed to be upsetting to the Voice editors. I think “bad taste” was the reason for the column’s rejection, just as was the column by Paul Krassner whom I invited to guest-write my 50th column. The most annoying rejection was when I wrote about the habit of Jehovah’s Witnesses of knocking on apartment doors early on Sunday mornings and inveigling respondents into conversation fronted by an attractive young lady who soon stepped aside, allowing her hitherto unseen proselytizers to step forward with their distinctly unwelcome sermons.

     Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were local Greenwich Village heroes because of their comedy radio show in which they played all the parts. I went to interview them and listened to their innocent repartee:

BOB: "There's a tribe in Africa whose members can all run the100-yard dash in sixty seconds..."

RAY: "The Imbala. They practice by taking naps in lion country."

My theory about writing columns was that in the 600-1000 words allowed, there should be a minimum of 20 varied items, nothing longer than one and a half sentences. and the whole operating like a roller coaster.

     The big advantage of writing a regular column, as Gilbert Seldes had taught me, was that it completely erases the necessity to have a ‘today’ angle which is the bane of most newsmen's life. With a regular piece of space you can write about anything at all with no excuses. In fact your readers expect to be surprised, and so I made a special point of always being unpredictable with the subject matter varying widely from raising money from readers for CARE parcels to listing the  numbers of strategic public telephones around town. Unfortunately, most people--even non writers--think of themselves as potential columnists and 90 per cent of the people who offer to write for new papers bill themselves as such. Even more unfortunately nine out of every ten of those write the same column over and over again.

     I quickly discovered two things: one, that absorbing all the items in a good column gave the reader a feeling of  omniscience--that he/she knew about everything that was happening (notwithstanding the fact that it could have been 20 items about anything else); and two, that it was easy to insert what I defined as ‘time bombs’. The "three-dot" style (which, as I said, I copied from Winchell, who was still writing for the New York Daily Mirror) offers a wonderful hiding place for nuggets of information or provocation that many readers skip right over without noticing unless it was something with which they were already familiar.

     For example, I noticed the unfamiliar words A C I D  R A I N spelled out in plastic letters on somebody's refrigerator and, on hearing the explanation, planted the phrase between wordier items in one column. Most readers would literally not register these words until, at some later date, they popped back into their consciousness in some other context. Then, they would remember having seen them before. My old friend Stan Russell once made a shrewd comment about observation. "You'll see something and not consciously notice it" he said. "Then you'll see it again and go on partial alert. The third time it appears, is like a neon arrow from God".

     With his indisputable logic and rationality, Stan became an enormous influence on my life not least because he had read everything ever written about marihuana and swore that nowhere was there any evidence of its physical or medical dangers. He could argue the hind leg off a donkey, as my old grandmother used to say, and never lacked convincing evidence for his assertions. The time I went to him and moaned about some dilemma I was faced with--that I absolutely couldn't decide whether to do A or B--he gazed at me with mock sorrow and said: "I don't see those as the only choices".

     "You don't?"

     "Not at all", said Stan. "Why don't you do both of them?"

     After that I almost never saw only two alternatives.

     "We build a box around our freedom of action", I wrote in a subsequent column , "and then complain there is no room to move about. Knock down the walls, burn the box, vote maybe, spoil the ballot".

Rarely would a column pass without a plug for some noteworthy book or--more often--an obscure, iconoclastic publication of some kind.  Ed Sanders' provocatively-titled Fuck You magazine was carrying the poems of William Burroughs, W. H. Auden, Leroi Jones, Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure. The Realist's Paul Krassner and Sanders'  fellow member of The Fugs, Tuli Kupferberg ("Give My Regards to East Broadway/Remember me to Tompkins Square/Tell all the muggers on East 10th Street/That I won't soon be there...") had all been publishing subversive chapbooks for years but when I mentioned them in print, Voice editor Dan Wolf's plaintive comment would be: "Why are you always writing about your friends?" and "Isn't it time you got all those dirty words out of your system?"

Ed Sanders with Allen Ginsberg.

     When Dan died in 1996, there were endless eulogies about his editorial skills and encouragement of young writers, but to me he always seemed an amiable cypher, never attending any public function and rarely being seen outside the office. Certainly he never offered me any encouragement, or indeed thanks, unless one counts the maximum $25 that I was ever paid for a 1,000-word column. Tightlipped and un-humorous he was difficult to relate to on a warm, human basis, and always acted as though he was doing me a favor by running my column. "Pay him?" he replied when somebody asked how much the popular cartoonist Jules Feiffer got for his weekly cartoon strip. "Pay him? He ought to pay us !"

     And yet, and yet....he produced a marvelously interesting paper, almost by inertia. His modus operandi was rarely to plan anything, waiting patiently to see what his contributors brought. He was, Sey Krim later wrote, "an early exponent of chance".

     His colleague, publisher Fancher rarely commented (to me, at any rate) about editorial matters. He had cultivated the soft-spoken, reassuring manner of the typical psychologist, but often gave the impression of being narrow-minded, slow-thinking and authoritarian. He would sometimes leave me vaguely intimidating notes--"Please come and see me in my office in the morning" --rather than say what was on his mind, and the advent of the drug generation left him petrified with nervousness. He flatly refused to allow my column extolling Aldous Huxley's seminal "Doors of Perception" without an accompanying cautionary essay by, of all things, a Freudian psychologist.

     Two decades later, in the 1980s, when a Voice editor named Geoffrey Stokes edited what was ostensibly a compendium of the paper's writings from its beginnings to the present, once again I was not included: apparently the hundreds of thousands of words I had written for the paper were not good enough to make the cut. Or maybe it was just that I was so obnoxious that revisionists thought it wise to exorcize me from the Voice 's history. Stalinist historians did it all the time.

     Later when I mentioned this whimsically to some obese lady contributor, suggesting that I must have become persona non grata around the paper, I was actually rewarded with a mention: some gratuitous remarks about my "egotism". In the Voice 's 40th anniversary edition I did a little better, being the subject of one sentence in a story of the paper's history and a putdown about my "banality" by Tallmer who was by then approaching the end of his illustrious career as a third-string drama critic for Murdoch 's New York Post. In the 50th issue, in 2005, my essay, Andy Warhol Learns How to Make Movies, was included, but lacking any mention of my early role at the paper. I was not informed in advance about use of the Warhol piece, nor was I sent a copy by the then-management.

     Perhaps Dan’s problem was somehow related to disapproval of my philosophy which I had laid out in one of my earliest columns  "Everyone Is Assumed To Be An Ally", suggesting that it was best to offer a handshake or a friendly wave in passing to all, ignoring those who opted for aggression. Any expression of identity, whether unorthodox behavior or unpopular opinions, laid the grounds for a charge of exhibitionism, I had written, but an "exhibitionist" was usually making an honest statement of who and what he was, so that the like-minded could reach him.

     "The first thing that must be accepted--and how few people will allow themselves to accept it--is that you are alone. Who thinks your thoughts? Who feels as you feel? Who dies when you die? You are alone, you have a life to live and you must have allies.

     "No, that is wrong. There are no needs beyond physical needs; only wants. Life is easier with allies but it is not impossible. If you declare yourself, if you are honest in your intentions (whatever your intentions) you will always have allies...There is only one immorality and that is insisting that others live as you do".

In January 1958, harmonica wizard Larry Adler returned briefly from London to play a gig at the Village Gate. He had left some time before, after being incorrectly maligned as a communist for his collaboration with dancer Paul Draper, and I decided to devote a column to him. The first thing I wanted to know was why so few people played such a simple instrument that, in his hands at least, produced such wonderfully poignant music.

     "I think one of its drawbacks is that it's almost too easy to play. I could teach somebody in 15 minutes, but then they might play all their lives and never put anything of themselves into it".

     I loved Larry's poignant and evocative music—teamed with pianist Ellis Larkins he produced some stylish Gershwin--and he seemed to be the perfect choice for a new project with which I was getting involved. Several years of offbeat columny had given me a reputation for the bizarre, so it was fitting to be approached by Barrie Beere, a wealthy entrepreneur. who came to me with the idea of producing a record magazine with a spiral binding. With a hole in the centre, the magazine’s feature pages were interspersed with plastic '45s that could be played right on the phonograph. A similar magazine, Sonorama, had debuted in France, and Barry thought the idea was adaptable.

     The magazine’s format was so unconventional, that its application to be sent through the mail at second-class rates prompted a lengthy discussion by Post Office examiner William A. Duvall.

“The issue is whether the publication is formed of printed sheets”, he noted in his official report.  “I have more difficulty with this, for the reason that there are printed sheets in the publication. The publication is composed in part of printed sheets, but it is not composed entirely of printed sheets. I am not an authority in the publishing business, but looking at this publication there are five so-called sheets in it which are of rather heavy stock paper or cardboard and it appears that the musical record that comprises this sheet has been impressed in some manner other than printing upon this particular type of sheet”.

“One other thing that might be pointed out is that these pages or sheets on which these phonographic records appear are susceptible of being removed from the publication but there is no indication that that is what is intended to be done with it because the instructions as to how to play these records indicate that the publication is opened to the record that it is desired to play and the remainder of the publication is folded underneath it so that the desired record appears on the top. The publication is then put on the turntable of the phonograph, and the needle is placed manually in the grooves that appear on the surface so that it appears that it was intended that the pages remain within the binding in which they come; and it is entirely possible, it appears on the surface, that the publication be used in accordance with the instructions for its use that appear in the publication”.

   “On the basis of the findings I conclude that as a matter of law that the publication is not entitled to entry in the mail as second-class matter, and the ruling of the Director in denying the application for second-class mailing privileges for the publication, Echo Magazine, is affirmed”.

     We had already converted a backstage rehearsal tape of Julie Styne and Gypsy Rose Lee into one record, induced Jules Feiffer to illustrate a couple of routines by Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and picked up the sounds of Fred Astaire dancing to accompany an interview with him by Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, a noted jazz critic evolving into a human rights activist who had undertaken to write for the Voice on condition that he didn’t have to cover music.

     But Adler presented a problem: he had been virtually hounded out of the country during the Joseph McCarthy era and the unjust taint of communism still surrounded him. How could we "rehabilitate" him for a magazine?  Then I remembered reading that James Thurber had been a friend of his for years, so off I went to Thurber to ask if he'd write the laudatory accompanying piece to Adler's music. He did, and then collaborated with Tony Schwartz by providing the drawings for the latter's sound montage about city dogs. Sadly, ECHO was before its time and despite contributions by Fleur Cowles (on Salvador Dali), Thurber, Feiffer and Hentoff, it folded after three issues.

IN 1960, WHAT I later defined as the MMM Mutiny, was brought about by a visit Mexico where I grew a mustache and was introduced to marihuana, mescaline and the works of Henry Miller. At this juncture, my columns began to get more serious. I was ready to give space to almost every anti-Establishment movement whether it be against nuclear testing or ending the laws against abortion. The unimaginative inadequacies of local politicians, the short-sightedness of American policies towards Cuba or China or examples of racism ("You've got to be taut to hate"  my friend Hal Kapplow remarked) all vied for space with items about a man offering "No Tip" coins or plugs for Bob Kaufman's famous Abommunist Manifesto. ("Abommunists join nothing but their hands or legs, or other same...").

     I asked readers to concentrate at noon one Saturday while I tried to transmit a telepathic message to them (nobody got it right); smuggled actress Julie Bovasso disguised as a man into McSorley's men-only saloon (we were caught and evicted) and invited readers to send in unaddressed love letters which I matched up and sent out again.

     Along with early anti-nukes activist and Fuck You publisher Ed Sanders and others, I broke into the Washington Square Arch in the middle of the night. We climbed to the top and hung a banner condemning the Vietnam War, thinking for sure it would make the papers. But before any photographer arrived, a police cruiser went by and without further ado broke our new lock and removed it.  Voice photographer Fred McDarrah who’d caught Kerouac, Ginsberg and Dylan in their early days and who invariably managed to document everything that happened, missed that one.

     Nightly I would make the rounds of the Village clubs, sometimes flirting with the staff and occasionally writing about an act. I met Ellen that way, an irresistible, fast-thinking brunette with whom I eventually spent ten years. We traveled together for four years and then got married in a registry office in Tokyo with the editor of the English language Mainichi Daily News  (which carried my column) as best man. He hosted a party for us at the press club where we shared a cake inscribed "Make Love Not War". Ellen had changed her name to Amber and our honeymoon was spent putting together, addressing and mailing subscriber copies.

     I kept meeting interesting people and usually wrote about them. One night I was very taken with the stand-up act of a new comic, Woody Allen and suggested that instead of me doing a routine interview we go off to some event together. A couple of days later, he called me to ask if I knew about Dr. Moreno's Psychodrama and would I care to accompany him to that? Of course, he said, he wasn't going to take part but it would be interesting to watch. Of course.

     By the time we were seated in the class and Dr. Moreno called for volunteers to act out some little drama from their lives, Woody's hand shot up immediately. He called himself Walter Allen and nobody recognized this still-unknown comic. Walter's gig was to recreate the time when he came out of a Broadway theatre in the rain and couldn't get a taxi for his date who was nagging him unmercifully. Moreno's technique is very interesting because he continually has the participants swap roles "to tighten things up" but even with Walter/Woody playing the girl's role his partner got so upset with his nerdy behavior that she slapped him across the face. For real. It made a great column even when I realized it was just another way for Woody to work out one of his bits in front of a different audience.

     All of my fleeting encounters with celebrities seem to have been happy ones, so let's do all the name-dropping at once.  Katherine Anne Porter told me my writing reminded her of Ring Lardner; Leonard Cohen seemed as familiar with my column when we met in the harbor at Hydra as I was with his ethereal songs; my neighbor during all my years at 26 Perry Street was Jerry Ohrbach, although he and his wife Marta Curro never became more than the amiable couple who lived next door; Burt Bacharach, while pianist at a tiny Fire Island bar in the '50s, good-naturedly never showed his boredom with my repeated requests for Have You Met Miss Jones? .

     I was always running into Mary Travis around the Village—usually at the laundromat—although after attending her wedding party at the Figaro, I didn't see her again until 20 years later when I went backstage to see Peter, Paul and Mary after one of their Tokyo concerts. Was their famous 1963 song Puff the Magic Dragon actually about marihuana as has been rumored? I never asked and doubt if she would have answered if I had.

     Another Village acquaintance--we had several friends in common--was the ethereal Judy Collins and I was egotistically flattered by her announcing my arrival over the sound system when I went to the studio as she was recording Where Have All the Flowers Gone? 

     The writer and later New York Post reporter Al Aronowitz invited me along on a trip to Las Vegas to interview Bobby Darin and took me over to meet Peter Falk at the Bronx studio where he was making a Colombo episode. When Falk, in turn, introduced me to Cicely Tyson who said it was her birthday, I offered her a joint. She drew back abruptly. "No thanks" she said, although it couldn't have been from a fit of moral indignation from the future wife of Miles Davis.  Before the Beatles came to the U.S., Aronowitz invited me up to the Plaza Hotel to meet their manager, Derek Taylor. Did I have any ideas about the forthcoming visit that might be helpful? Nothing came to mind. Some years later Yoko Ono, whom I knew from around the art scene, bumped into me at a London gallery and glowingly reported how she had become friendly with John Lennon. They both signed a postcard from their bedroom protest (about the war) in Montreal but I never met either of them after that.

     While visiting Nashville, Amber and I met a young entrepreneur Peter Rachtman who was producing a show at the by-then dilapidated Grand Ol' Opry and he gave us a lift back to New York in his private plane. A few days later he dropped over to our Village apartment with Karen Black and although—and maybe, because—we spent the afternoon talking and toking I can't remember a word of it. When I think about all these people now I realize how derelict I was not to have kept a diary. What kind of a careless writer can remember only the names and not the details?

     At one Museum of Modern Art opening I was sitting in the garden when a middle-aged lady joined me at the table for a few minutes before getting up and moving off. Art critic Gregory Battcock rushed over. "What did she say? What did she say?" What did who say, Gregory? "That was Elizabeth Taylor, you idiot. You didn't notice?" No, I hadn't noticed. Truth to tell I was usually too blasé about stars to be aware of their significance, or maybe I was too stoned to pay attention.

     The alternative press had made some impression abroad: in Italy, where one of the earliest readers of Other Scenes was the Marxist millionaire Arturo Schwarz, the definitive biographer of the magnificent artist Man Ray; and in London, where the television comic writer Denis Norden turned out to be a subscriber to the Voice. Later, when that superlative artist Feliks Topolski rang my Perry Street doorbell and said that in London I was a "famous" name to him, I blurted out "You're certainly famous to me." I had long admired the sketches of the Coronation he had done for CBS.

     It was in the gas station next to our apartment that Norman Mailer introduced me to Anthony Haden-Guest with whom we were to later spent happy afternoons in his Kings Road flat at The Pheasantry, since torn down but at the time still  notorious as the earlier home of King Charles II's mistress, Nell Gwynn. Mailer was acquainting Tony to the Village Vanguard jazz club, around the corner and whose proximity was what had brought Lenny Bruce into my life.

NEXT:
Chapter 04. Into the '60s
More Working at The New York Times….Mexico On $5 a Day….What Richard Condon taught me….Henry Miller's wise words….. London’s underground press….Jean-Jacques Lebel burns US flag…..Everybody’s friend: Jim Haynes….Lenny Bruce and the kitchen tapes
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