THE CHELSEA HOTEL: IF THESE DOORS COULD TALK. NOTES ON MY FRONT ROW DISCUSSION

I was on BBC Radio 4's Front Row Friday night, discussing the auction of doors salvaged from the renovation of the Chelsea Hotel, bought by a property company and being turned into, well, part of whatever most of Manhattan has been turned into today. You can link to the programme on the IPlayer here; it's the second item, about 15 minutes in, and sadly was rushed for time for a subject that has so much popular culture currency. But we probably should have concentrated primarily on the relative value-ranking of the sold doors.

Setting the scene was taking too long, so I never got a chance to get to the most crucial character in the story, Stanley Bard, who ran the place from the Seventies onward. This was probably my fault, as I am fascinated by its origins: the architect Philip Hubert virtually invented the concept of a 'coop', and built the Chelsea (in 1884 not 1885) to house both artisans and artists, the upper floors having studios while many apartments were allocated to people who'd worked on the construction. The twelve story building was not, as is widely reported, the tallest building in New York when it opened; it was however the tallest without a spire (Trinity Church, at 279', was almost twice as tall). But by 1890, when structural steel took over in building, as it had in Chicago, Pulitzer's World building, 20 stories and 348 feet, took the mantle.

Hubert's vision didn't work out financially, and new owners included the very rich, and one of the mainstays of the Chelsea would always been its attraction to what someone called 'the troubled children of the very rich'. When the hotel had more financial problems during the Depression, it was bought by three partners, one of whom was Stanley Bard's father, and eventually Stanley took over as manager. He was finally forced out when the heirs of the other two partners decided to sell the hotel, which finally happened in 2007.

Bard would have been a better starting place;  I should have begun with the idea that there was never a house dick at the Chelsea in its glory days. Stanley let people do what they wanted, as long as they weren't 'destructive to the hotel'. That didn't apply to Edie Sedgwick, who famously fell asleep and set her room on fire; Bard moved her to the first floor, where the lobby staff could keep an eye on the room, and protect the art, often accepted in lieu of rent, that decorated the walls.

We did touch briefly on the way the Chelsea remained a melting point for bohemian artists and what we might today call 'trustafarians'. It's first peak was probably in the Fifties, when New York was the cultural capital of the world, and lots of the people who made it so were at the Chelsea, the beat writers, the abstract expressionist painters (Mark Rothko paid his rent with paintings). Arthur Miller wound up there in 1961 after his divorce from Marilyn Monroe, before moving to his farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut.  That's him with writing with Elia Kazan looking on, in his tidy room. Miller described the hotel as having 'no vacuum cleaners, no rules, no shame'. We mentioned Dylan Thomas, who didn't actually die in the hotel, nor actually drink himself to death at the White Horse, but the fact he was staying there was enough. Most of the Beats stayed at some point, though William Burroughs didn't write Naked Lunch there. Jack Kerouac's door went for $30,000.

In the Sixties Andy Warhol's crowd and musicians made the Chelsea. Warhol's film Chelsea Girls is more remembered than watched nowadays, while Shirley Clarke's Portrait Of Jason may get the actual feel of the place in the Sixties the best; Clarke was a resident there. Oddly, Chelsea Girls doesn't include Warhol's superstar, Viva, who was a long-term resident. Bard's efforts to get her to pay rent were legendary, cornering her in the slow lift, or yelling at her in lobby, but they only once wound up in court (her rent, legally controlled, was $920 a month). Once when the people in the flat next door moved out, Viva knocked a hole in the wall and doubled the size of her apartment. If you remember her film performances, you might imagine her righteous indignation. My favourite Chelsea Hotel photo is probably Viva and Patti Smith standing on one of the beautiful wrought-iron balconies, or maybe the one with singer Eric Andersen tied up with them there. Smith and Sam Shepard lived there, in a room slightly less neat than Arthur Miller's. Which reminds me, when you hear Viva talking about the suicides at the hotel, like her upstairs neighbour who landed head-first on a table in the courtyard, you get a real sense of ho-hum, don't you wish you could watch your neighbours do that, about her. Talk about neatness.

The highest price paid for a door was $100,000, for room 211, where Bob Dylan wrote 'Sara'. I wonder if Dylan was staying there because the Chelsea was where Harry Smith lived (and died). Smith's Anthology Of America Folk Music was a bible of sorts for Dylan; listen to The Basement Tapes if you don't believe me. And of course Leonard Cohen's (424).

That door went for $85,000. Host Stig Abel opened the show by playing a clip of Cohen's 'Chelsea Hotel 2', but spared the post-Archers audience the best line: 'giving me head on the unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street', which sums up what the hotel quickly became and may be the greatest rock/sex line ever. Janis Joplin, who was giving the head, and making an exception for the less-than-beautiful Cohen,was in room 411. Jimi Hendrix stayed  in room 430; his door drew only $13,000.

After that the decline began. Rich rock stars took rooms, tourists flocked to see them. After Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen, in the bathroom of room 100, Bard divided the room into two to stop tourists making a gawk shrine of it. There's a great picture of the two of them in the bathroom. What I love about it are the toothbrushes neatly lined up in the holder on the wall. Alex Cox's Sid And Nancy is probably the best of the movies set there; it's also one of funniest films of the 80s. Much more telling than Madonna's book Sex, which was the end of the line for the old Chelsea, being sold for celebrity, the entire hotel treated like the discarded doors would be 30 years later. In its later years stars like Rufus Wainwright would check in for a year and then release a record written in the Chelsea, as if they could appropriate a sense of artistic suffering and struggle by footing the bill for its artistic rub.

Stig also mentioned Arthur C Clarke writing 2001 there. It was actually the screenplay for the film he wrote there, with Stanley Kubrick also staying: according to Barry Miles, Clarke kept a telescope in his room, and used it to look into windows. Those were the kind of stories I wanted to bring in; a painter named Alphaeous Phileomon Cole lived in the hotel for 35 years and died in 1988 at the age of 112; he was supposedly the oldest living man on earth at the time. Or the masochistic heiress Isabella Stewart Gardiner picking up fellow drunks to beat and rob her. Of Julian Schnabel's daughter doing her college homework in the bar of the El Quijote restaurant in the hotel lobby. Charles Jackson, who wrote The Lost Weekend, killed himself in the Chelsea in 1968.

I was fascinated by the families who lived there. I didn't mention the novelist Joseph O'Neill, who lived there with his wife and three children. I did mention the composer Virgil Thompson, a long-term resident, whose flat 920 was bought after his death, and kept in period features by the couple who bought it. You can find pictures of it online, and it gives you a sense of the grace of those upper floors. It also made me think of the couple who bought it, also with three kids, sending them out trick or treating on Halloween up and down the Chelsea.

At the end of the item Stig asked me whose door I would choose he opened it up to anyone in history--trying to reduce my choices I fell on Kerouac, as I'd been trying to figure out how to get his one-night stand with Gore Vidal at the Chelsea into the conversation. I should have said Rothko, far more of an artistic idol for me, and the first thing I would have done would be look for paint drippings. When I called the Gramercy Hotel 'just around the corner and down the street' I was speaking figuratively: I wanted to get in the idea Beat and Warhol crew member Gerard Malanga always used to put his friends into the East Side hotel: when I finally had some money I stayed there too: you got a key to Gramercy Park, one of the nicest squares in New York, and it was two blocks from Pete's Tavern. Charles Ives lived off Gramercy Park; I liked the contrast with Virgil Thompson in the Chelsea.

Looking at what I've just written, it's no surprise I felt I hadn't done the best presentation: there is just too much. But I was hoping for Stig to ask if the passing of the old Chelsea was the end of an era. Being me, I managed anyway to squeeze in these lines, which I did not read well as I was rushing to get the item finished quickly. They're from a poem called The Hotel Chelsea:

Anita! Soon this Chelsea Hotel
Will vanish before the city's merchant greed.
Wreckers will wreck it and in its stead
More lofty walls will swell

The old street's populace. Then who will know
About the ancient grandeur, marble stairs,
Its paintings, onyx-mantels, courts; the heirs
Of a time now long ago. 

It was written by Edgar Lee Masters. In 1936. As former Chelsea Hotel resident Robert Crumb said: "It's always the end of some era in New York".

DAVID BOWIE: CELEBRATING THE DISPLACED SELF

The outpouring of reaction to David Bowie's death surprised me, though it probably should not have. The papers gave it somewhat less space than George Harrison received (front page stories, full page obits), but if anything far more columnists and feature writers tripped over each other to give their own versions of his universal importance to them. I discussed this briefly on the Americarnage podcast (show 203 at americarnage.co.uk) but it's worth a deeper examination.

It's in the adolescent/teen years that music has its deepest hold on most people, and that music stays with them all their lives. The columnists and other opinion makers now are of a generation that grew up with Bowie, in the Seventies, rather than the Fifties and Sixties music I reference so often, which was the music of the columnists and editors when Harrison died.

But that didn't explain the emotional impact, beyond the media. One friend of mine, who hit her teens in the early seventies, told me yesterday she burst into tears when she heard the news and was crying all through the day-- and this chimed with the response that inspired my first reaction, as I said on Americarnage, which was to consider what made Bowie so meaningful to them, while it was nothing of import to me.

The music I grew up with was directed outward. It was aimed at trying to navigate and solve and fight through the problems kids encountered growing up. Originally much of it was being written by adults aimed at kids. But even as the younger generation took over the production, even at its rebellious peak, it was music aimed at coping with the world outside, and maybe changing it, of coping with the ways it would come down on you.

David Bowie's music was doing something different: it was dealing with equipping the vulnerable self to cope with the vicissitudes of that world by escaping it. Bowie's music encompassed the showmanship of adopting new identities, many of them extra-terrestrial, showing there were ways of creating a new you with whom you might feel more comfortable regardless of what was going on outside your room. It was a way of protecting yourself against the ways the world came down on you. It also suggested freedoms to be different from the world well beyond those of the generation before.

It wasn't the music per se. Many commentators wanted to cast Bowie as a revolutionary or innovator musically, but he really wasn't, and that wasn't where his influence lay. My friend Cynthia Rose, for whom I wrote at City Limits some 30 years ago, dug up an interview with Bowie she did in 1983, and she said in its introduction that 'when he achieved profundity it almost always occurred by accident or as a result of his long, usually misunderstood, relationships with three major sources: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Robert Fripp.' This is not to minimise his talent (though I'd add Brian Eno to that list of his influences); he made pop songs with catchy hooks and often fantastical themes; as an example of that, he gave Mott the Hoople their best song (the only one I ever paid any attention to); and he had a distinct flair for the dramatic tied to a moment in time. Even his final, darkest record was timed to his own passing. When he did the words for Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays's 'This Is Not America', a song I listen to often, given that I live in Britain, he sung them with his voice that was actually most effective in the lower registers, and gave the song an uncertainty and depth that the lyrics don't immediately suggest, and which Pat Metheny Group's own versions, while often more attractive instrumentally, often lack.

I said on Americarnage that Bowie's influence lay in the adoption of identities, and Cynthia made an interesting point, comparing him to dandies and pointing out how the original dandies, who confronted society, mutated into the Noel Coward or Cole Porter versions, 'men who sought to sell the world placebos for its deepest needs...demonstrating that the displaced self could celebrate, rather than solve, its losses.' She pointed out how he was 'merchandising other people's 'explorations of the isolated heart and mind', offering 'conceits of style' because he was, at heart, 'conventional'. And remember, Cynthia wrote that more than 30 years ago.

It chimes with what I said on Americarnage, and the range of Bowie's work, particularly outside the music world, reinforces that. He did telling, though not transcendent, work outside music, in a way moving with the times but also moving on from image-oriented music into fields where he could play with that image and often work against it.

Where Bowie's influence might well have been greatest is in the people who followed and borrowed from him. What is Madonna, after all, if not a David Bowie for the next generation, and there is a major essay to be written on the way she provided girls with a female equivalent of the androgynous male with whom they could identify their angst.  I think of George Clinton, Parliament and Funkadelic, as a sort of ironic parody of this, all Mothership and Garry Shider in diapers, with more than a hint of suggestion to the audience to question the placebo they're being handed. Maybe they were the way my generation could interpret Bowie.

Perhaps it's all just generation gapping in the end, perhaps it's just my being a curmudgeon not getting what the next generation gets instinctively. It's an almost inevitable progression, though, from the adoption of a new form of music to the adoption of new identities on stage, to the acting out of science fiction and the emperor's new clothes on stage. But that's not what he was being mourned for. Maybe combining Iggy Pop and Robert Heinlein was an innovation, but it was his understanding of alienation that lay behind what was covered up by the glitter; that was Bowie's real achievement, and what brought so many people to honest tears when he died.

DEREK JETER: MY 1999 ESSAY ON WHO'S THE BEST SHORTSTOP

Derek Jeter's 3,000 hit yesterday reminded me of an essay I'd written twelve years ago, and I thought I'd go back and look at it to see how accurate I'd been about his position vis a vis the other two great young shortstops of 1999. A little background: after I stopped working for Major League Baseball, and was doing baseball comentary on Sky and other satellite channels (as well as the Olympic finals, twice, for RTE Ireland!) I used to self-publish a baseball preview annual. The following essay appeared in the 1999 edition, along with previews and predictions of each team, and essays on Cuba (the Orioles went to Havana to play and I wrote a piece for the FT), the first-to-worst phenomenon (selling off great players wasn't a new thing in baseball), and an early look at 'weight training' and power hitting titled 'Popeye Arms And The Man'.

The way Jeter reached his 3,000, with a homer at the end of a 5 for 5 day, reminded me that, although the stats have often ranked him below the top, especially in the field, he has had the knack, especially useful playing in New York for the highest-payroll, highest-profile team in baseball, of rising to big occasions where his current teammate ARod has been his virtual opposite. Hence the Yankees leaving Jeter at short, when the younger ARod has more range. But ARod has less of what a NYTimes writer might call 'the right stuff'. Consider the difference in ARod's trying to slap the ball away from Bronson Arroyo, or 'Jeter the Cheater' doing a soccer-style fake of an injury to draw a HBP against Tampa. Jeter (who scored on ARod's slap) isn't tarnished, even after admitting his gamesmanship.

What I couldn't predict, of course, was that Jeter and ARod would become teammates, and ARod would move to third base, thus taking himself out of that 'greatest shortstop' equation. One thing I should point out too, as you watch various stats about Jeter's place in the 3,000 hit club, is that for various reasons there are lots of great hitters who never reached 3,000 hits (especially all those Yankees, plus Ted Williams and Jimmie Foxx) while Craig Biggio, Al Kaline, and Yaz did (Yaz being the first American Leaguer with 400 homers among the 3,000 hits). Longevity is, in itself, a sign of quality, particularly at shortstop (second only to catcher in the way it takes a early toll on bodies). Nomar, whose overly developed frame soon broke down as I speculated it might, is a good example. The length and relative consistency of Jeter's career will argue covincingly for his spot in the Hall of Fame; ARod, with all the side issues, will certainly justify my rating of him, but make the vote a harder call.

I should also point out that I wrote some snide things about Mariah Carey, and eerily anticipated ARod's dating Madonna. All three sportsters have moved on, in a sense, Jeter to Minka Kelly (via Jessica Biel) ARod to Cameron Diaz (via Madonna and whatever), and Nomar to the soccer star Mia Hamm. Why should multi-millionaire star shortstops be attractive to celebrity actresses?

While you ponder that one, here's what I wrote in March 1999:

WHO’S THE BEST OF THE SHORTSTOPS?

There may not have been a time in baseball history when three young shortstops of the quality of Alex Rodriquez, Derek Jeter, and Nomar Garciaparra have emerged together in one league. In fact, based on the past two seasons, you’d be hard-pressed to find three veteran shortstops putting up similar numbers. Most of the great hitting shortstops have stood out by a long margin from their colleagues: Honus Wagner, Ernie Banks, Cal Ripken, Robin Yount, maybe Arky Vaughn. Most shortstops, even the good hitting ones, weren’t there for their sticks anyway. In the American League just after the war you had Lou Boudreau, Junior Stephens, and Eddie Joost (who generally outhit Phil Rizzuto by good margins), but Joost never put two big years in a row together (his 1949 was a dinger, though: .263 23-81, 149bb, 128r). Stephens in 1949 hit .290 39-159 but Boudreau had an off year after his 1948 line of .355 18-106, 98bb and 9k. That’s right, nine.

But right now you’ve got three guys putting up numbers that are close to MVP quality, and they’re doing it every year. Two of them are already their club leaders, and all three are among the wave of new young players who bring back that everyday hard work and respect for the game which many of us believed the NBA/MTV generation had lost forever.

The highest profile, because he plays in New York, belongs to Derek Jeter. The other guys don’t get to date Mariah Carey. To me, she looks about as attractive as Governor Carey, but I’m old and jaded (2011 update: Minka, right, looks much better). Jeter is the middle of the our three guys in terms of age (turns 25 in June) and is already in his fourth year in the bigs. He shows the least power of the three (19-84 last year) but in the offseason this year he has worked on his hands to add more power to his swing, and I’d look for his power numbers to jump. Not that they need to, if Knoblauch becomes a great leadoff hitter again. He’s an excellent base runner (30/36 in sbs, 83%), and he managed a .384 oba despite walking only 57 times (119 Ks). Listed at 6-3 185, Jeter is big for shortstop, but doesn’t look it on the field.

Defensively, Jeter had his best season last year, cutting his errors to an amazing nine, and fielding .986. He’s got the least range of these three, and there are questions about him going to his left, but they aren’t serious ones. Given the pop in his bat, I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually moves from the shortstop position, to second or third, but that would depend a lot on who the Yankees come up with in the future. Bernie Williams was quoted this season as saying that Jeter was the leader of the Yankees and their MVP. Given the talent on that team, and the quality competitors, that is an amazing compliment.

The oldest of the three is Nomar, who turns 26 in July, and he’s only in his third season. He too is his team’s leader, if somewhat by default since Mo Vaughn lumbered out of town. But from the first day he hit the Red Sox lineup, Garciaparra has breathed a fresh attitude into the team, and moving from leadoff to cleanup hitter he proved he would do what it takes to help the team win.
Unlike Jeter and Rodriquez, Garciaparra is a contact hitter: he walked only 33 times and struck out only 62 last season. He’s the smallest of the three at 6-0 175, but looks bigger because he’s so skinny. His power (35-122) is generated by the whip he gets in his bat, and the more I look at him the more he reminds me of hitters like Henry Aaron. He’s a good baserunner, but batting in the middle of the Sox lineup he’s not going to rack up steals.

Last season Garciaparra made 25 errors, fielding .962, but part of that was because the Sox tried to get him to set before he threw, rather than complete the throw on the run as he likes to do, and once he went back to his own style, his errors slowed down. When you watch him closely, you’ll see his whole approach to picking the ball up is consistent, and lets him get the throw away so quickly he saves at least a step on the baserunner. He’s got more range than Jeter, but like Jeter he uses his arm to make up for the ground he can’t cover. Like Jeter, I see him moving off shortstop eventually (particularly if he’s injured, which he seems likely given his body type). Whether it will be an Ernie Banks type move to 1b or a Rico Petrocelli-type move to 3rd I don’t know: but I’d guess it could be tied into the development of SS Adam Everett in the minors.

Rodriquez is the youngest of the three, turning 24 in July, and has already hit 106 home runs in the majors. He may have quicker hands than Gary Sheffield, which gives him phenomenal ability to punish good pitches by waiting on them. His season, .310 42-124 123r 43sb was an MVP calibre performance, especially from a shortstop, and you could argue that could’ve been his second MVP. And don’t think that ARod is feasting in the Kingdome: last season he hit .286 18-54 at home but .335 24-70 on the road. Defensively, I’m not convinced he’s second to Omar Vizquel in range, but I won’t argue with the strength of his arm, which will keep him at shortstop even if he starts to slow down. He’s 6-3 195, which again is big for a shortstop, and you’ve got to worry when he gets hurt on the step exercises, but basically, he’s done nothing wrong thus far in his career. You’d like to see him stop chasing bad pitches (121Ks, only 43bb) but that will come.

I think we owe a lot to Cal Ripken here. When Earl Weaver was the only person in baseball who thought Cal could play shortstop, everyone laughed. Maybe Earl was remembering Ron Hansen, a big shortstop who’d played well defensively for the Orioles in the early 60s, or Junior Stephens on the Red Sox, or even Ernie Banks. For whatever reason, Ripken proved that positioning, athletic ability, and a strong arm could overcome whatever balletic quickness he gave away to the Ozzie Smiths and Luis Aparicios of the world. Traditionally, the best young baseball players all start off (if they don’t pitch exclusively) as shortstops or, in the old days, as center fielders if they were big. Nowadays, they look at shortstop as a place they want to stay, and the additional offense they provide really can change the game of baseball.

So who’s the best? In the field I’d rate them 1. ARod 2. Nomar 3. Mariah’s boyfriend. At the plate, the rating stays the same. In intangibles, it goes 1. Jeter 2 Nomar 3. ARod, but of course he plays second fiddle to the Paganini of the bat in Ken Griffey Jr. It's so close, I find it hard to drive a wedge between Jeter and Nomar, and I suspect we may have a Ted Williams/Joe DiMaggio type argument going on here for years to come. I’d give the edge to Nomar right now, but I suspect that Jeter’s bat will continue to improve, and he is a year younger with an extra year’s experience as well.

But neither guy is ARod. If this guy played in New York he’d be pushing Madonna out of the way to get to the ballpark (2011 note: or not, we can say now. Boy was that a prophetic line!). I think he’s more valuable this season than either of the other two, and remember, he’s both the youngest of the bunch AND has the most big league experience. He’s probably the guy I’d want to start with if I were building a team from stratch, and that means I consider him the most valuable property in baseball.