New York in the '50s by Dan Wakefield

Author:Dan Wakefield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504011853
Publisher: Open Road Media

EIGHT

Roses, Dreams, and Diaphragms

A ROMANTIC EDUCATION

The throaty lilt of sexy June Christy swinging out with “I’ll Take Romance” seemed to me a companion song to Mel Torme’s crooning “We’ll Have Manhattan.” A bright young man like Gay Talese came to live in New York because it was “the capital of newspapers,” while for others it was the capital of commerce, the arts, entertainment, intellectual life—and for all of us it seemed the capital of love and romance, at least for America and perhaps the world. Though Paris held the title in the twenties, romantic as well as literary and artistic supremacy seemed to have shifted from the Seine to the Hudson in the fifties.

New York’s romantic spirit was epitomized for me by a stately Negro lady named Mabel Mercer, who sat on a high stool beneath a single spotlight in a pitch-dark nightclub on the West Side called the By-Line Room and huskily sang-spoke sophisticated love songs like “Dancing on the Ceiling” and “My Funny Valentine.” Couples crunched hands and mashed knees together beneath tiny tables as the chanteuse raised one hand from her lap in a single gesture of finale, declaring each day Valentine’s Day or proclaiming Manhattan an isle of joy, just made for a girl and boy (as we males and females under thirty were known in those days).

Romance was everywhere in New York, even if you couldn’t afford a nightclub cover charge. For a nickel you could ride the Staten Island ferry, reciting the famous lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay: “We were very tired / We were very merry / We went back and forth / All night on the ferry.” Some grand Saturday nights we took our dates to the Amato Opera House, a converted movie theater where unemployed singers performed to the accompaniment of a piano, and we dropped coins into a hat that was passed between the acts. We went for beers to Chumley’s, the former Village speakeasy with no sign on the door, which Richard Lingeman remembers as “a great place for sophisticates—you had to know where it was” on Bedford, one of the winding little streets of the Village.

This aura of romance and sophistication emanating from the island of Manhattan made many of our parents in the hinterlands fear for our bodies and souls when we announced our intentions to live in a city they regarded as nothing less than Sodom, with skyscrapers. When Mary Perot Nichols told her Philadelphia Main Line mother she wanted to live in New York after graduating from college, her mother, like any God-fearing parent, went to the minister for help. “My mother told our minister to talk me out of it,” Mary says. “She warned me that if I moved there I’d be ‘kept’ by somebody. Later, when I was living and working in New York I used to wonder why I didn’t get kept like my mother said I would be.”

At least some parents would have been reassured to know that much of

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