Nights at Rizzoli
Author: Felice Picano
Date: 2015-01-04T13:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Biography & Autobiography; General; History; United States; 20th Century
Description: Salvador Dalí, Jerome Robbins, Jackie Onassis. Gregory Peck, Mick Jagger—S. J. Perelman—I. M. Pei. Philip Johnson, Josephine Baker, John Lennon: they, and so many more who made New York City the center of the universe in the 1970s, all had one thing in common besides their adopted hometown—they shopped at a legendary palace of books, music and art: Rizzoli Books at 712 Fifth Avenue. There, Kennedys and Rockefellers mingled with tourists and “regular” customers under the watchful gaze of sophisticated employees, themselves a multi-talented, international collection of artists, scholars and rogu
Publisher: OR Books

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NIGHTS AT RIZZOLI is the memoir of Felice Picano, an aspiring but near-starving young writer who in 1971 lucked into a job at a legendary palace of books, music and art. There, Kennedys and Rockefellers mingled with tourists and “regular” customers under the watchful gaze of sophisticated employees, themselves a multi-talented, international collection of artists, scholars and rogues.

The gig metamorphosed into a life-changing experience, one that exposed the young writer to some of the brightest lights in the world’s cultural capital. At the store, he himself became a key player on a stage that opened every night to a new drama that often featured romance, at times violence, and of course always the books and their readers.

And when his shift was over, in this post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, the handsome young bookstore manager stepped from one world into another, prowling the piers, bars and very private clubs of a different New York City.

© 2014 Felice Picano

Published by OR Books, New York and London

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

First printing 2014

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-939293-67-1 paperback

ISBN 978-1-939293-68-8 e-book

Cover artwork by Max Wittert. Lettering by Courtney Andujar.

Text design by Bathcat Ltd. Typeset by CBIGS Group, Chennai, India.

Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom. The U.S. printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship Council-certified, 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100% wind-powered.

“If you make up your mind not to be happy, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.”

—Edith Wharton

IN MEMORY OF

DENNIS SANDERS AND ADA CALABRESE

CONTENTS

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Prologue

I was in New York again recently, visiting. My friend Ross had gotten us tickets for a lecture at the Grolier Club—some British expert discussing the great seventeenth-century British architects Wren and Vanbrugh.

We arrived late enough to find the little hall filled, darkened to obscurity to show slides of the buildings, and we had to feel around for the few empty seats. After the talk was over and the lights went back on, the folding chairs were folded and collected, and people stood around talking, while Brie and brown bread, flutes of champagne, and crackers and pâté were passed around by small, elderly women in long skirts.

Assuming I would know no one there, I took in the sidewall windowed displays, all about Henry VIII. The Grolier Club on 60th Street off Madison Avenue, you should know, is one of the very last hideouts of blue-blooded, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism in America, despite the medieval-style painted brick exterior, despite its two-story, faux-Middle-Ages décor within, where Quasimodo wouldn’t feel out of place.

Mostly, I looked at big old Bibles and many allegedly revered objects of the sixteenth-century Reformation. But among all that, I was charmed to see, scrawled by a childish hand inside the flyleaf of a little sky-blue elementary school Latin reader, “This is my boke—Prynce Henry.” He must have been eight or nine when he wrote it.

I turned to show it to my friend, but he was at the lectern, having his own newly purchased book signed. Then I spotted several people nearby. One was a teary-eyed fellow close to seventy, with slicked-back hair once blond now who-knew-what-color precisely, but dressed in a bluish smoking jacket and parti-colored silk furled tie indicative of some university or other, with a mustard-hued corduroy vest. He also sported elaborately tasseled “Oxblood” shoes no one wears anymore that we used to call opera-slippers, with soles so thin they’re only good to walk from the lobby to the limo. He lumbered forward with effort, his body on a distinct thirteen-degree slant, head backmost.

Two elderly, osteoporotic women, one in a wheelchair, another in a floor-length black sweater, awaited him and meanwhile tried not to stare at me as though they knew who I was. He at last reached them. One said a few words and he half turned, looked at me through those little Caribbean’s of eyes, and greeted me with a nod; the women managed shy smiles.

I did know them, I realized, from thirty-five years ago or more. All of them used to come into Rizzoli Bookstore, just several streets away, when I worked there. None of them very regular customers; they would come in a few times a year for graduation or family birthday gifts, or whenever a new book on their topic came out: Portuguese faience, Egyptian scarabs, East Indian tomb paintings, scrimshaw carvings, prize-winning yawls, netsuke, inyo, or for that matter, seventeenth-century British architecture: we were sure to have it in stock. We specialized in having such books upon our shelves. Everyone knew that when you were looking for the very latest and most expensive volume on an unusual, arty subject, Rizzoli was where you shopped.

I went over to say hello, thinking we’d all speak about the bookstore, but one woman stopped me immediately, laying a refined down-to-skin-and-bones hand upon my jacket sleeve: “You’re so distinguished looking! Will you be lecturing here soon, too? May we hope?”

Lecture there? Me? At the Grolier Club? On what subject, I had to wonder? The overuse of analingus as metaphor in second-generation post-Stonewall poetry? No, I didn’t think so. I’ve grown up now and I no longer shock for the sake of it: especially not people as fragile looking as this trio.

I merely smiled and stuffed myself with Brie and bread and was joined by my friend Ross, who was in a cheery mood and hungry for steak dinner. We were soon having a good French bistro meal nearby.

After that, we walked down late-night Fifth Avenue mid-week Manhattan, past the new—I think of it as the pseudo—Rizzoli shop, down past the older one, the real one, the one I remembered so well—now Bendel’s—and I explained to Ross where everything once had been—George Jensen Glassware at the current Trump Tower, the Doubleday Bookstore chain’s flagship shop where that Verizon Communications palace now sits, Scribner’s with its black wrought iron transformed into a meretricious-looking Best Buy—so much of it changed, so changed and yet the same, as only New York can change and be the same.

I couldn’t help but recall what it was like for me, those years when, at one in the morning, with the day’s receipts counted and verified and in the safe, the shop locked behind me, I would emerge onto this street, free at last, headed toward the Independent Line subway at the Devil’s Building—666 Fifth—and then downtown to my flat in the West Village, and never in any real hurry to get there.

I lived a night life in those years, not going to sleep until long after my post-work dinner, sometimes at three, four, five, even later in the morning, and not awakening ’til noon or after. Living a night life meant that I inhabited an entirely different kind of New York City. Just now, I almost wrote “an elite city,” because it was so sparsely inhabited, so relatively quiet, and after all, filled with odd, often inexplicable incidents and people.

This was a world I had partly chosen in my late twenties, and also a world chosen for me. The first, because I was trying to become a writer and I needed time to write every day: after work in the early morning was good for that; so was late afternoon before work. And it was chosen for me, literally, because for some reason the only employment I could find in the fall of 1971, despite my degree and my decade of work experience, was at Rizzoli, at night. And in the fall of 1971 I was desperate for work.

At the beginning, it seemed as odd as it really was. But later on, living that late became amazingly comfortable to me. It’s only now, decades later, now that I’m living thousands of miles away, that I awaken along with everyone else in the early morning and have a “normal” day.

Turning night into day, i.e., reversing my life, led to new acquaintances and even some unexpected friendships, and also to more than a few adventures during those years of my last real job before I “retired” to become an author. It was a short but absolutely unique period for me, as the early to mid-1970s was unique for New York City itself.

There’s an air about that well-known area of Manhattan between the St. Regis and the Pierre hotels that I can barely tolerate during the day, it’s so crowded now with bodies in rapid motion. I’ve become used to wider, Southern California boulevards, emptier of people, and to people more casually strolling, not rushing about. But whenever I return East, it seems as though nothing has really changed.

That recent night of my visit, the air was precipitating without ever raining, as I often recalled it doing years ago. The night-lights in the street-side buildings and from the high, mullioned windows of the big, old, beaux-arts-style clubs and hotels, and from the dimmer illumination of the closed-for-the-evening storefronts, induced a kind of glitter within the air’s very molecules, as though by some bizarre enchantment. The streets were empty of people, of cars, of busses, even empty of the ubiquitous taxicabs.

By the time Ross and I had reached Rockefeller Center, its interior swathed in printed gauze-screens of Diego Rivera drawings to protect those Rivera murals being restored, our walk had attained for me a kind of glazed-over glamour. As he talked more, enjoying the city now that he had a knowledgeable guide, I became almost silent.

Looking back up Fifth Avenue, I remembered that night in which all my experiences at Rizzoli here seemed to culminate.

The shop’s art gallery was at last having its official opening. The remainder of the place would be closed for the night once all the guests arrived. It was 7:30, and from where we stood greeting guests at Rizzoli’s tall, heavy, glass front door, Dennis Sanders and I could look back at the shop, lights dimmed now, except for this vestibule area heading to those stairs that led up to the record department and through that, to the art gallery and the party. It was the first time I knew of that the store had been closed before midnight on a week night.

Behind us, upstairs, we could make out the tinkle of glasses and laughter, the low noise of conversation. How could it not be successful?

“Well, I think that’s it,” Dennis said.

Some fifty people had come in, every one of them famous, or a member of New York Society, or an art critic, with one or two reporters mixed in. But no one had arrived in the last, maybe, ten minutes.

We were about to lock up, in fact, we had already turned the lock, about to ourselves turn and go up to the art gallery, when we noticed the car—a long, white, vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost limousine with an open landau roof above the driver. It glided up the curb and stopped perfectly even with the building.

A large, handsome, African-American driver, wearing an immaculate silver and white uniform, with purple-tinted sunglasses, stepped out, and approached where Dennis and I lingered, gazing at him. He tapped on the glass, and when we opened up, he said, “A guest from Paris.”

We stood there waiting …

One

I had just finished writing my first novel and it was a masterpiece. I know: everyone’s first novel is a masterpiece. But mine was actually pretty good!

I’d given the manuscript to Jon Petersen, a new friend, a producer of Off-Broadway plays, a discoverer of actors for those plays (i.e., Al Pacino), a no-nonsense man who had real furniture with designer labels in his sleek Village apartment, furniture that he had bought, not gotten from friends and relatives, nor taken off the street after midnight when it was being tossed out on Sanitation Department “Throwaway Thursdays.” He owned chairs by Le Corbu with lots of de Sade–looking black leather straps and vast coffee tables of finger-thick glass and platinum-plated lamps the size and roughly the shape of a baby giraffe. Although only a year or two older, Jon was a man who had already worked for large advertising agencies, who, when I handed him the manuscript of my novel, urgently growled, “I have no plans to be kind to you! In fact I will be ruthlessly honest!”

I trembled for days. Yet he thought the book good enough to find me an agent for it. Just like that! Right off the bat!

Alas, that agent, employed at the time by Candida Donadio, a definite “player” of that literary time, never did find me a publisher, although he tried and tried and a year and a half later he finally returned the manuscript to me with a sweet letter saying I was a quote terrific writer unquote and would someday be quote discovered unquote. It would be several years before any other agent hove into view. You may guess how depressed this news made me.

But only partly, because as far I was concerned I had succeeded. I mean, how many people write entire novels, never mind novels anyone wants to read? Never mind a novel that they show to an agent, or that an agent shows to sundry publishers?

So in my mind and in those of the people closest to me, i.e., the guys (mostly gay) and gals (three, maybe) of our neighborhood group that I referred to as “the Jane Street Girls,” I had become—ta-da, trumpets please—a “writer.”

This meant that I tried to write and, as importantly, when I had to work I always tried to find the kind of work that would allow me to have time during the day to write.

One of these jobs was in the Doubleday Bookstore chain. However, I’m cursed with efficiency, and that usually brought on a real conundrum for someone interested in getting by: I tend to be promoted.

As a result, I didn’t last long in those tiny, backwater Manhattan bookshops on the very fringe of actual real life, those fifteen-by-twenty-foot indoor kiosks run by sixty-ish fellows who’d worked for the company since they were sixteen, who were now about to retire and settled into shoplets with little or no business—places where I had very little to do and where I could read, or simply waste time bullshitting “philosophy” with the equally ambition-lacking assistant manager, while the manager took four-hour lunches and two-hour naps down in the sleepy stockroom.

Foolish me, I displayed an iota of ability and soon found myself unwillingly promoted out of this little paradise—with the result that I lost my forgivingly long lunch hours and coffee breaks and boring afternoon and evening hours. I was forced to work in busy shops from eight to six, which was as bad as not being a writer at all, since I came home too exhausted to write.

After a year or so during which I scrimped and saved up, I retired from bookselling and looked for other work: part-time work.

One of the better jobs was cataloguing the room-sized record collection of a middle-aged fellow in the Village, not four blocks away. I could work from 2 p.m. until 6 when he got home from his law office, and I could listen to his records to my heart’s content. But this job only lasted a month or so. The lawyer, however, got used to having me there when he returned from work. He would offer me a cocktail—he would have two—and as I’d usually eaten breakfast but no lunch, once I was looped on a martini, I split and happily walked home, making instant pals all along Bleecker Street. One day, as I was nearing completion on the job, the lawyer offered me another, more permanent placement, as a live-in houseboy in the five-room flat.

There was a separate bedroom, but I didn’t like the look in his eyes, and I politely declined. For years afterwards, he would invite me to a play and dinner about once a year. Even after I had made the bestseller list as an author, he always paid and he was always a gentleman.

I took in a roommate to share costs, a young man named Bob Chisholm from Buena Vista, Virginia. As he was cute he was soon dating a good-looking older man who was also married to a Frenchwoman with whom he had a business. Their business was, luckily for me, as disorganized as their private lives: so I did inventory for their shop—filled with Provençal knickknacks and knockoffs, along with various objets d’something-or-other and sundry pseudo-antiques. They were so pleased by the order I was able to bring to this mélange that they asked me to also do their financial accounts. This meant hunting down receipts and bills of sale in their shop’s musty, unheated basement—in winter. I bundled up, I wore multiple scarves and woolen gloves even indoors, but again the job didn’t last long enough or pay enough.

By October of 1973, in addition to my novel, I had written extensive outlines for and the beginnings of two other novels—each one maybe thirty pages long.

The first was titled Who Is Christopher Darling? and would be published as my first book under the name Smart As the Devil. The second was called Eyes Across the Street, which would be shortened to Eyes and come out as my second published book. I’d also written five of what I considered to be publishable short stories which, whenever I had the chance, I began sending out to various magazines, which instantly rejected them. I’d also written two one-scene plays: bagatelles, really, designed for me to learn how to advance plots via dialogue. Oh, and a lot of poetry!

Naturally, none of this creative productivity produced anything remotely like an income. So, I’d also learned how to cook rice about a hundred and fifteen ways.

I bought rice in ten-pound hempen satchels imported from Santo Domingo costing ninety-nine cents a pop at a 14th Street bodega on the northwesternmost outskirts of the West Village which it abutted—a little colony from Mayagüez. There, my lying large brown Italian eyes and my past college Spanish lit. courses came in handy, since I quickly discovered that bargain-hunting gringos weren’t particularly welcome in this center of Borinquen.

I ate rice with beans. Rice with canned spinach. Rice with franks. Rice with sardines. Rice with chorizo. Rice with bananas. Rice with yams. Rice with—go ahead, you fill in the blank, I’m sure I tried it.

Friends would run into me at the trendier and far more local D’Agostino’s, carrying a shopping basket (forget carts) that closely resembled those of the contemporary Bouviers of Grey Gardens in Southampton: three carefully chosen small grocery items—and a package of dried cat food. The latter actually was for my cat, Fred, who was still an adolescent and hungry all the time.

Lucky for me, Fred also went outdoors daily, and even luckier, he’d begun to hang out at the local Éclair, a pastry factory on the nearby corner of Jane and Greenwich Streets. There, along with a beat-up, one-eyed, yellow Tabby named Butch (so said one of the grandmotherly cat ladies of the area who seemed to know the histories of all cats who wandered the area in somewhat intimate detail), Fred “worked” by day—and apparently snacked pretty well on the plentiful Hudson River rodent population drawn by room-high mounds of baker’s flour. And also, I assume, he snacked on pastry leftovers. (Fred loved pastry, and also—unique among cats of my acquaintance—green salad with Italian dressing.) And no, Fred never dragged home any mutilated mice nor mashed millefleurs for my own delectation.

The fall of 1971, like the fall of 2008, was one of those periods in which the metaphorical canaries in all the economic coal mines of America, and especially in New York City (which would end up being hardest hit), were beginning to go out like tiny lights all over the nation, one by one by one.

Let’s be honest: few occupations are as canary-like in the US as that of an artist, which most Americans—especially at that time, hailing as they did from Western ranches, Nebraska and Iowa farms, and Ohio and Michigan factories—considered no better than being a wastrel, leech, and Commie pill-popper. So by the end of that September, I hadn’t any profitable work in months, despite daily newspaper and agency searches and pavement-pounding. I couldn’t even come up with half the rent, phone, or utilities.

What to do? I considered going on welfare. In fact, I cruised the local welfare office several days in a row trying to see if I knew anyone working there. I’d been a social worker myself briefly in those years just out of college, so this wasn’t a completely unlikely scenario. I also knew it was a job that young people took all the time while they tried to figure out a real career. I figured if I saw anyone I knew in the center, I’d dash in when they were on duty in “intake.” Whatever weird feelings or apprehensions I might harbor then about applying would vanish in a haze of faked camaraderie. And they too would fake camaraderie, so as to not embarrass me, and thus ease me in.

Instead, I bumped into Dennis Sanders. Dennis was a more recent friend and he was getting a master’s in music and musicology at Columbia. We knew each other from having had an odd, somewhat shared, and for me completely devastating relationship with a man older than either of us, Ed Armour. When Ed divorced his young wife, the New York Daily Mirror’s social column announced that he was “the handsomest eligible bachelor in Manhattan.” It didn’t mention, of course, the far more useful info that you better be a guy to be considered by Ed these days. But then, this was a more innocent era all around, at least publicly. I—and Dennis, too—was completely through with Ed by then, for too many reasons to go into.

Dennis was his usual cheerful self and I my doleful self—no money, no work, writing’s going okay, but SOS.

Dennis also had a ready solution, why not come to work at Rizzoli? He was there helping out in the record department, working a night shift, until Christmas. It was temporary work but not difficult. It allowed him plenty of time for his studies and piano playing during the day, and surrounded him with music all night. He said he would introduce me to the store manager, who had also studied to be a concert pianist. “With your bookselling experience, he’d jump at hiring you,” Dennis opined breezily.

He went on to say that it didn’t pay that much, but it was a steady income. And if I were desperate … ?

I was desperate. So I said yes: set up an interview. Dennis said he’d speak to the manager and call me.

No sooner said, and Dennis had vanished around the corner off to his next errand, then an old friend from my social work days stopped me as he was headed into the building, returning from a field trip. “Slick Paul” we used to call him, because he always dressed like, acted like, and spoke like a total operator. So the first big surprise was that he was still a social worker and not a Wall Street commodities broker. The second surprise was his effusive greeting: he said he’d heard that I was looking for work (from whom?). Did I want to come in with him? He knew they were looking for experienced people to work inside.

What are the odds of getting two job offers in five minutes when you’ve had none at all in, like, thirteen months?

I knew I definitely did not want to return to nine-to-five social work which would require much too much involvement. Even at less pay, the part-time job Dennis had mentioned and that would let me write was far more attractive. So I told Slick Paul that I actually had just found a job. I’d know for certain in a day or two.

“Well, listen, you know how this system works,” Slick Paul said. “I’m guessing you’re in a financial hole?”

Well, duh, yes!

“If you do get the job, come in and ask for me,” Slick Paul said. “I’ll open a new case for you on an emergency basis. We’ll pay off your back rent, your back utilities, and even finagle you some cash to pay your phone bill. “

“Really?” I asked. “Sure,” he said. “Then I’ll be able to close the case within a single thirty-day period. Your problem is solved. You’re at work! Everyone looks good. Me. My supervisor. Her boss. As for you, you’ll start off fresh with no back-payments to make.”

No wonder he’d been called “Slick Paul,” I thought. He could rock the system to produce several ways at once. He would go far, not only in government, but probably from there to politics if he wanted.

Getting me signed up was fast, easy, and even a bit of fun. I walked out an hour later with a check for some god-awful small amount like $14.23. Small as it was, it meant more than rice and etcetera for my weekend dinners, and even some canned tuna thrown in for Fred. Checks would go out to my landlord, to Con Edison, and to the gas company, Slick Paul said. And the following week I’d get another check.

Because my stars had suddenly altered from “off” to “on,” the very next evening Dennis called to say I had an appointment with the store manager, Mr. M.

“Four o’clock. Wear a jacket and tie and the best shoes you own.”

***

I’ve gone back in my pretty good memory to that first meeting and indeed my first entry into Rizzoli Books at 712 Fifth Avenue and I’d love to say it was memorable, but the truth is, no matter how much more interesting my life became once I was working there, my entrée was brief and fairly lackluster.

Which is surprising because the shop itself was anything but. Today it is a lovely storefront for Bonwit Teller, but back then, the building that was one number short of the northeastern corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street was directly in the middle of what was known as the Millionaire Shopper’s Row. To our left, Harry Winston Jewelers. Across Fifth Avenue, George Jensen Glass and then Tiffany’s. People would dine in various overpriced Russian, French, and Italian restaurants on the side streets or in one of the Ivy League clubs nearby and then stroll past our windows. Whenever tourists phoned and asked where we were, after we provided our address we’d say, “Just south of the Plaza and the Pierre, just north of the St. Regis.” If they were still lost, we hung up on them.

The shop had extensive glass display windows on either side angled some ten feet into the central door. Right behind the front door, there was a gang of Italian language books, faced out on two good-sized movable display cases as well as filling side wall shelves of rather well made cabinetry and wood paneling. Also very well crafted was the wood cashier’s desk. After ten feet or so, the shop narrowed considerably for an equal distance, with only the shelving intact, replaced at times by floor-to-ceiling mirrors and then it suddenly opened up again both horizontally and vertically into the main area. This was two-and-a-half stories high, filled with the trademark excellent, Italian wood shelving and paneling, along with black, white and green marble floors, and—hanging from the very high, ceiling with its abundance of crown moldings—wrought-iron and glass chandeliers that might have come from La Scala or La Fenice Opera House.

A doorway to the right, I later discovered, led to a corridor and to an ancient-looking elevator, rising up to floors three through five of the building, i.e., the American editorial and administrative areas of Rizzoli. Another door off this led down to a small rest area for employees on their break, and also off to the small, swank Rizzoli screening room, big enough for twenty people.

Beyond that doorway was a long, wood-paneled stairway up to the record department which jutted out over the bookstore floor below as Juliet’s balcony does in the play. That led up a few steps to another, larger area which would in time become a small office, smaller kitchenette and the Rizzoli art gallery.

The high central area of the store was filled with more finely made wooden display cases with face-out books, as well as extensive shelving of volumes spine-out, more of the rococo chandeliers, and the signature marble flooring which almost every new customer commented upon, and which, while it was beautiful, ended up being awfully hard on your feet and back if you were standing on it six or seven hours a day.

Another work desk and a small employee check-in room were located here, just before the shop split in two. Straight ahead was another two-story-high gallery-like area with more bookshelves and display cases, covered on either side by a wooden walkway on the second floor, and reached by the central stairway directly ahead.

These stairs branched left to a small balcony office overheard, with a big desk, from where a manager could see most if not all of the floor area of the shop. It branched right to a walkway along a bare wall usually covered with smaller pieces of art, then back over to the record department balcony.

If, however, at the center of the shop you didn’t go ahead but instead turned right, you found yourself in a one-story-high and somewhat narrower gallery, again filled with bookshelves and display cases. This ended at 56th Street, where there was a second shop entrance and a second cashier’s desk, right up against the small display in the back window—usually travel books and foreign-language fashion magazines.

In the months and years to come, I got to know virtually every inch of this large shop. But at first it seemed odd: beautiful, in fact far more lavish in its decor than any bookstore I’d ever entered in my life, more deluxe than most buildings and homes I’d been in. It certainly seemed appropriate, being such a close neighbor of Harry Winston and Tiffany’s right across the street. It definitely said, “Yes, you are now in snotty, pushy, Upper Midtown Fifth Avenue.”

Later on, when I was really familiar with the place, its employees, and customers, whenever someone I knew came into the shop for the first time to meet me for say lunch or dinner and remarked on it all, and asked what it was like working there, I’d turn and look at the stairways and balconies, and alcoves, and people and I would remark, “It’s like being in the fifth act of any 19th Century Italian opera.”

Mr. M. met me in that central area. On first impression, he was like a Florentine statue of some quattrocento commendatore come to life: very tall, very square-shouldered, very square-jawed, with almost lacquered-looking black hair, a stern visage, and thin, possibly death-dealing lips.

In good English, but with an Italian accent, he asked where I had worked, and with whom, and for how long, and also asked why I had left. I’d left to write, I told him frankly. Dennis had told me that many of the staff there were musicians or writers or painters of one sort of another. He then asked what I knew of art history. I told him art had been my co-major in college, I knew it pretty well.

Almost too rapidly for me to grasp at first, he told me that he considered the Doubleday Bookstore up the street to be his major competition. He wanted to build up the English-language books in his store, especially the art books. He’d hired a young woman, an artist, to help beef these up, and I would help her. I replied that buying current books was part of what I’d done at my last two jobs. What languages did I speak? I told him I could get by in Spanish, Italian, and French. Then he asked what I thought of the store.

“It’s beautiful,” I replied. What else would I say?

“I meant what’s wrong with it? If I want to compete with Doubleday, I need to improve it. What would you change?”

Figuring “this is a test, but what the hell,” I answered, “When I first came in, all I saw were Italian-language books. If you really want to compete, you’ve got to put American books up there, right at the entry, so people know you’re selling them.”

Mr. M. made a face: only later I would recognize it as triumph. But triumph mixed with pain.

“What else?”

“I think you need more specialized arts and crafts books. Oh, and I would put in a new section of foreign-language contemporary authors in English translation. That way you’ll get more intellectuals and college students coming in.”

“Such as?”

“García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Lezama Lima. There are lots of Central and South American writers who are very hot right now. Also there are various contemporary French, Italian, and German authors: Heinrich Böll, Jakob Lind, Christa Wolf. As well as Kobo Abe and Tanizaki and Mishima from Japan.”

“Yes, but no paperbacks,” he agreed. “Only hardcovers. You’ve read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion? What did you think?” he asked, regarding Mishima.

“I thought it was kind of nuts but I liked it,” I replied.

“Today is Thursday. You begin work on Monday, at 5 p.m. You will report to Antonio Ximénez, the night manager. This is a temporary job until New Year’s Eve. You will work as a book clerk for Mr. Ximénez and report to me to order these other books.”

He turned to speak to someone on the staff, in good French. When he looked around he seemed annoyed that I was still there. He waved me away, but as I turned, he grabbed me by the elbow of my sports coat: “Mr. Picano, shave your beard. No beards at Rizzoli.”

And so I was hired as “a temporary, part-time, Christmas-season book clerk at night.”

The next day I phoned Slick Paul, and he said, “My man! You’ve just assured me a promotion. You will be the third case I’ve settled with employment in a month. Now then, you need a new mattress badly, don’t you?”

“A mattress?” I asked. We’d never discussed any mattress.

“Yeah,” he whispered into the phone. “To pay your phone bill and get you some new threads to wear at your new job!”

“Oh, right!” I agreed. “I am truly desperate for a new mattress.”

Two

Antonio Ximénez was not a large man, but he was trim and always well dressed and at times quite spiffily dressed in the slacks, jacket, and tie that were required if you worked at Rizzoli. Unafraid of color, especially in summer, he often wore pink or pale-yellow or even pale-green shirts under one or another light-gray or light-blue jacket, usually with a tie that one wouldn’t ordinarily think matched.

He had a well-knit body with a head that was identifiably Iberian in origin, and a good-looking, more or less round face with prominent cheeks, and never more than a fringe of dark hair in front. His smallish, deep-set brown eyes were ever-moving, always looking, and at times actually seemed to twinkle.

His personality and his general style, I would quickly come to know, were strongly mercurial: he was energetic, almost always in motion, and he needed a great deal of stimuli around himself—primarily visual, but also aural and intellectual. He responded to those stimuli instantly and strongly, either enthusiastically or negatively. “This Handel concerto is very beautiful!” “That Beethoven, he is too heavy.” “This photograph is very remarkable: look how the light lands on her face.” “That poem is not very good: Spanish poetry is better.”

Antonio’s opinions about people—whether customers, passers-by, employees, or simply politicians or celebrities in the news—were equally succinct, definitive, and never to be questioned.

Besides his native tongue, he spoke Italian and French with a fluency that I envied, and as a result, he easily switched from one language to the other and to English or Spanish, without missing a beat. At first I thought this feat amazing and specific to him, but later on, working there in a managerial position, I would be surprised to find myself doing it too. One had to be in constant contact with other employees in the shop, like Signor Colombo (Italian) and Madame Neff (French and Spanish), or Stella (German) who ran the various language departments of the shop, as well as with customers who would interrupt you in the middle of a conversation with staff or another customer in a different language and expect you to respond in that same language.

During his dinner and coffee breaks, Antonio read Italian and French magazines, dragging a half dozen or more downstairs at a time, and he was more intently interested (and more up-to-date) on the varied shenanigans of Princess Grace’s Monégasque royal children and the Belmondo kids than he was on then President Nixon’s daughters or any American movie actor. He also constantly read European classical literature, usually in the original language, and he was eager to discuss with me Colette’s Le Pur et L’Impur, Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony and Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, all of which, I would later discover, provided scenic material for his extraordinary paintings.

Because Antonio was a serious artist, and a good one, he’d already had paintings in many group exhibitions, as well as in a few solo shows in Europe. During the time I worked at Rizzoli, he put together two large solo shows in Europe. His painting style was “hyper-realistic,” florid, colorful, and sexually sophisticated, and he was absolutely unafraid of what anyone might think. One of his paintings was even represented in a full-page photo, albeit black and white, in a book we sold in the shop.

During the years I worked alongside him, Antonio produced his largest and possibly his best work: and I was one of a dozen models for the largest: a twelve foot long, six foot high, late 20th Century Last Supper like no other ever produced. I was also, eventually, the purchaser of another of his amazing, large paintings: Noli Me Tangere. In 2012, a large (166 pages) photo rich book of his art—Antonio Ximénez: Super-Painter, by barthobartho—was published

His most withering scorn was reserved for those who took themselves too seriously. “Ay! Que pretencioso!” he would cry, usually at me, immediately after I’d said something youthfully stupid about what I hoped to accomplish in life. Decades later, when he was living in Hawaii and I in LA, and we met for a day or two, he would ruefully correct his earlier statement, saying, “I was wrong. Your pretensions were achieved”—which amused me even more.

Antonio was an enthusiastic traveler. Any good travel or photo book of new places in the world that happened to come into the store via the dumbwaiter was usually quickly sighted by him, and gone through thoroughly with a plethora of Spanish-accented “oohs” and “aahs” and “Fay-lee-chay! You must look at this! Look! How beautiful!”

***

Mr. M. had me coming in three days a week an hour earlier than the night shift began almost from the start, so I could begin filling up the English language book shelves. So I naturally came to know some and ultimately all of the shop’s daytime staff, upstairs, and stockroom employees.

Little by little, some became friends—such good friends that forty years later, whenever we are in the same city, we make sure to see each other. These contacts would assist me later in my unconscious and completely unplanned rise up the Rizzoli hierarchy.

Dennis Sanders, who had after all brought me into the store, had a not-completely-thought-out theory that what made Rizzoli different from most retail situations and why it increasingly attracted interesting customers and hangers-on, was that at its very core it was ruled by Love. Love in its ancient Greek, Roman and early Christian religion sense—agape—as in “love thy neighbor.” And also love in its romantic and sexual sense.

He thought that the object of that love for a good portion of the staff, male and female, was Mr. M. who had only recently risen into his position as storewide manager, after having been brought in (like most of us) as part time or clerical staff. Dennis told me that Mr. M. had been a piano student, like Dennis himself, one who’d studied in Europe alongside the now legendary Maurizio Pollini. As a young man, Mr. M. had come to New York to strike it rich as a concert pianist, and instead found himself saddled with bills, a young wife, and a child. Thus the familiar sad story: little by little he had deferred his musical dream for the more practical world of the book store.

I’m guessing that he quickly discovered a notable power vacuum in the shop. The old-timers in the place, Signor and Signora Colombo, had been brought over from Italy, but they seemed interested in almost anything but increasing business and gathering power to themselves. The manager in place when Mr. M. first arrived was later described to me as “sweet, warm, and funny”—these are not strong indicators of a real go-getter either.

Mr. M. may have also seen the potential of the prime Fifth Avenue location and sensed new directions for growth. Under his leadership, the store in fact prospered as never before, and he eventually opened a second shop in SoHo, a third at Union Square, and later, in the 1980’s after I was gone, he went national, opening shops in high end sites in Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills.

Again, according to Dennis, when I first went to work there, either somewhere along the way, or soon after, Mr. M. had gained as allies several unattached young women at the shop, who had then aided him in his unstoppable rise. These included Ruth, who ran the record department, and Ursula, who, when I signed on, was daytime floor manager.

It’s certainly true that over the years I caught more than a share of small and even a few larger occurrences of both women (and other women there too) openly admiring Our Leader. And he could be as charming as he was good looking, strong, and ambitious. But not all of the female staff were so easily won over. The completely Americanized Barbara who handled travel books and the children’s section, never once dropped her “prove it” attitude to Mr. M., that I ever noticed. And Ada Calabrese, who worked in the art gallery, always seemed too sophisticated to buy whatever Mr. M. was trying to sell, although she was enthusiastic about his implementations in her department.

Perhaps many of the guys working there, including Dennis, Theo, John Brancati, and maybe Antonio too, felt a similar admiration (or even lust) for Mr. M.? Wasn’t it kind of odd how many single women and gay men were on staff at Rizzoli? Could that be completely accidental, totally a product of economics? However, for some reason—maybe because I had bookstore experience too?—Mr. M. never went out of his way to charm me. He did, however, when he got to know me and my abilities better, confide some of his plans for expansion, including that for an English-language Rizzoli art book line, which I supported. In later years, he and I ended up having a few spectacular spats, mostly over what I felt was his high-handed treatment of the staff.

Among his undoubted champions was Ursula, a strong woman in a powerful position. A greater contrast to Antonio couldn’t be found than this German, who in was in her late thirties. Tall, big, with a well-padded if very shapely body, a pleasant oval face with good features, including large, innocent-looking, light-blue eyes and light-brown hair, Ursula was a definite looker and an excellent floor manager, even a fairly good salesperson. I would later discover that she’d dated singer/composer Leonard Cohen for some time, so she wasn’t a stranger to glamour either.

Her size had to have been genetic, as she’d grown up in Central Germany during the Third Reich, and from the age of ten through fifteen she was either in hiding or on the run from opposing armies—she told me that she went hungry for days on end. When we finally got to know each other, she confided in me about the migraine headaches that still attacked without warning, leaving her helpless—I always persuaded her to go home, saying I’d take over. She also revealed the nightmares she still unexpectedly underwent that completely brought back those many months when she’d slept in Berlin’s underground subway stations among thousands of other women and children as Allied bombs thundered down. Sometimes a bomb would snake its way through gratings somehow and suddenly hit, taking out a score of people at a time, a few feet away from where little Ursula huddled screaming.

Her anecdotes about her experiences trying to survive after the war in an occupied, politically divided city were always spoken without any emotion at all, while she was “visiting me” up on the balcony where I would be ordering books from catalogues while she busily reapplied her makeup.

“Why are you telling me all this?” I once asked, after being horrified all over again.

“Because you are a writer and a writer must know everything. Good and not so good,” she replied primly. She would give herself one final check in her compact mirror and then go onto the Rizzoli store floor as though nothing had been said.

Behind her bland, easygoing, extremely polite, quite firm exterior, however, lay a complicated mass of memories, reflections, and desires, as well as a complex relationship to authority and to life. She clearly admired Mr. M. and she unswervingly supported him. She still had that totally inculcated German sense of order and respect for authority that floored so many of us when we heard her countrymen display it at the Nuremberg Trials. Still, in her private life she secretly admired hippies and radicals, gays and transsexuals. She slept with renegades and political anarchists of all kinds, whom she adored for their daring and whom she harbored while they were on the lam. While I was working there, this secret life, and one romantic relationship especially, threatened to get out of hand. Faced with authority in this case, she stood her ground, lying over and over to protect her lover, no matter what might happen to her.

Evidently Mr. M. had not told Ursula that I would be ordering English-language books, because while she seemed surprised to see me on the floor going around with a pad the first few times, it was only at the third that she asked what I was doing.

When I explained, she said, “I usually order from the bestseller lists.” She quickly added that she considered that a chore and not intrinsic to her usual work. So she ceded it to me, easily.

The shop’s main area of current books looked okay. But when I took a hard look at those handsome Italian-cabinetry shelves deeper in the shop, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Poetry, for example, was nearly empty, and contained what looked like whatever had been left over from the previous holiday season. No Frost, no Yeats, not even any T.S. Eliot, Whitman or Dickinson. Not to mention the current poets like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop or James Merrill.

Drama was even worse: some old volumes of Shaw, an ancient translation of Molière, and a copy of Broadway Theatre Book 1971! This needed a real overhaul. As for the classics, those consisted of a half-dozen very large print books with simple illustrations belonging in Barbara’s children’s section. There wasn’t even Homer in the store, except L’Odissea in Italian.

The psychology, business, film, and photography sections were filled with books I was sure no one would want. Each section needed standard titles, and whatever was new that year. The former was easy; the second would take a little more research.

And of course, I needed an entirely new section for my translations. When it was in place, Ursula asked, “Why would we need translations, when we have the books in their original language?”

“Because this way anyone who doesn’t read German can read Elective Affinities and anyone who doesn’t read Japanese can read The Makioka Sisters. The sign outside reads that Rizzoli is an ‘International Bookstore’: Mr. M. wants to make it truly that.”

As the books I ordered began to filter in and find their way onto the book shelves, others in the store began making recommendations to me, often catching me alone, or whispering titles to me.

***

I discovered that Rizzoli had two main customer “rushes” for the night shift. One from five p.m. to about 7:30 pm, when people left work and stopped in for a particular title, or left work and hung around the shop to meet others for dinner. We did the bulk of our business in this period.

A second, smaller, slower, and far more interesting “rush” occurred from about 8:30 pm until 11 pm or so, especially in nice weather. People who had dined in the bigger hotels or cafes on side streets would saunter along Fifth Avenue which, let’s face it, had the most glamorous window shopping of Manhattan all around Rizzoli. They would often come in for something a bit more affordable than a diamond tiara at Tiffany’s. Many of our most expensive books were sold during this later rush, and most of the bigger impulse and gift sales we had at night. This also was when we most often sold books in bulk to a single customer, who would have them delivered the next day to his hotel or have them shipped home, across the country.

It was during this period that I quickly figured out that Rizzoli had become a hangout of New York’s chic, glamorous, and famed.

A few weeks after I began working there, I was at a Saturday night party in Chelsea where someone asked where I worked. When I told him, he sputtered: “I hate that place! The staff is all so snobby. It’s as though they’re saying, ‘What’s someone like you doing in here?’”

“But I’m the staff and I’m not like that,” I argued. He, however, flounced off, never to be spoken to again.

The next workday I came in early to do ordering, and I carefully looked around to check out the truth of his accusation.

Ursula was trying to placate an elderly German woman who seemed to me to come into the shop only to give her a hard time. Up on the balcony, Ruth was trying to locate an album while she was on the phone, saying, “Yes. Yes. But I know it’s right here. I just had it in my hands.” Barbara, meanwhile, was trying to make room for the evening rush, not an easy task as she’d just received about four hundred Fodor’s guides, which she needed to shelve in one minute flat. She and they were all but sprawled out blocking on the floor. Carolyn Markowitz was actually sprawled out on the center floor, rearranging the lower shelves of oversized art books: a back-breaking chore. The woman at the back cashier had people lined up and was frantically calling the stockroom trying to get a price for a special edition of Elle. At the front, the cashier was wrapping what looked like a half dozen books for one very nit-picky customer, while four others tapped their heels impatiently waiting.

The staff was snobby? Come on! The staff was desperately holding on by its fingernails, was more like it.

Maybe he’d meant we were snobs because we spoke foreign languages? Well, most of us, anyway. I wasn’t that certain about John Brancati, nor for that matter Dennis. And there were two young new people working the cashiers at night, musicians, he a hornist, she a pianist. He maybe spoke German. She spoke what? French? Who knew, I’d never heard them say anything but in English.

But sometime after my nine o’clock dinner break that same day I arose back onto the Rizzoli shop floor and I suddenly got a hint of something quite different going on.

John Lennon and his current squeeze, May Pang, a tall Asian woman he was dating at the time, were at my table of hand-picked translations, either arguing or explaining something to each other, and then laughing quite volubly. Under the opposite narrow walkway balcony, Abba Eban, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, was talking quite pointedly to Senator Eugene McCarthy, who would be a Democratic Presidential hopeful over the following decade, both of them regular customers, each holding several hardcover books they were buying. Lurking at the back stairway was very tall, very quiet, movie star Gregory Peck, whom I’d been told came in at least once a week, and whom it turned out was meeting equally tall if somewhat more boisterous Anthony Quinn who all but lifted him off his feet in greeting. Quinn would also become a regular. From upstairs, I could hear liquid gems of laughter, which I recognized as coming from Bianca Jagger, another regular customer.

What was the staff up to? We were, as usual, ignoring all this celebrity—Antonio going over work-hour reports from the previous week, the others shelving, arranging, wrapping, or taking requests over the phone—until, of course, someone needed help and approached one of us. Then, I’m sure we would help them (or not) with our usual total sangfroid.

Maybe that was what that disgruntled partygoer had meant.

I was just pondering this when S. J. Perelman found me at the center of the shop and began asking about some book written up briefly in The New Yorker the previous week. Had I read it? Were there other reviews? What did I know about it?

Another regular, Perelman had quickly become one of my particular customers, along with the young stage and television actor Richard Thomas, I’m guessing because I had stocked a newly published compendium of the older author’s work, and because I had faced out, stacked up, and had the television star autograph a half dozen copies of his new book of poetry. In fact, Mick Jagger had been sitting on the marble steps in the back of the shop, awaiting his wife, when Thomas came into the store on his tri-weekly check of his book sales and he’d spotted the rock singer.

“Oh my God! Is that really him?” Thomas whispered to me, as breathless with excitement as a twelve-year-old. “Will you introduce me. Please! Please!”

I was already accustomed to Jagger hanging around the shop looking at photo books and glaring at anyone who dared approach him too closely. But I’d grown fearless with familiarity and so I got the two of them to acknowledge each other’s existence, Thomas gushing, Jagger being his “bad” self, but I could tell a little pleased too: after all, Thomas was so pretty. I even added to my intros—“You know, you both have new poetry books out? Maybe you’d like to sign copies for each other?”—hoping for a few sales.

With Perelman though, I’d already had a few real conversations. He seemed to be lonely, looking for someone to talk to: a sweet, carefully dressed man in a three-piece suit and tie at all times. I always looked around to see if Jack Markowitz was around when Perelman came in, because unlike cynical me, Jack idolized many older writers. S. J. always arrived at the quietest part of the night, and usually when Antonio was on break. He and I spoke a half-hour or more at a time, and rapidly got into unusual topics: the occult, hypnosis, Madison Avenue’s use of subliminal suggestion.

Every book Perelman looked at seemed to become the opening for some personal revelation, mostly because they were usually from the psychology section (which, later on in other shops, would become “self-help”). In this way, over the years, I came to know that his daughter suffered from what we now call a bipolar disorder, but at least was married. More tragically, he had a heroin-addict son whom he adored and despaired over. Years later when I read that son O.D.ed I wasn’t surprised: I sent Perelman a condolence card.

***

Once midnight came around and the last dawdling customers were politely ushered out of Rizzoli, and the two sets of street doors were closed and locked automatically (it would not allow the doors to open again until the next morning), and the shop’s main lights flipped off, we employees dropped downstairs and got our outerwear and left for the night.

Before I myself left I got into the habit of waiting for Antonio to come out of the shop and into the side corridor of the building, which also had doors that opened onto Fifth Avenue. Especially in winter, with all the heavy clothing and umbrellas and such that we needed, he required help carrying both locked cash register boxes and his gear up to the third floor office.

I’m not sure who had done it before, but right after it was established that I was no longer just temporary nighttime staff, Antonio asked me to aid him in this. It was by incremental steps of this sort that I ended up becoming his unofficial assistant, and then the official assistant night manager (covering him on his days off and his vacation periods), and then co-store manager—in my utterly unconscious and certainly unplanned rise within Rizzoli.

Once all his gear was settled upstairs, Antonio would accompany me back down the elevator, let me out of the building, lock himself in, and go back up to where he would open the cash boxes, collect the credit card and store account receipts, and then settle down to reconcile all of the night’s proceeds.

I’d done this work at one of the Doubleday shops for some months and found it extremely provoking, and I told Antonio that he was welcome to it.

But once out on the street, it was like I was in the middle of my day: the day was still taking place for me.

At the beginning of this night shift job, in September of the previous year, I’d awakened at my usual hours and then tried with varied success to do my writing in the early afternoon, before I’d gone to work and then gotten home exhausted, at times—especially in busy December—utterly wrecked, fit only for a bite and then sleep.

But like many people working later hours I slowly discovered that there was a better way to arrange it. I was hungry when I got home from Rizzoli. Eating a good sized meal at say, one a.m., isn’t all that conducive to sleeping at two a.m. I would stay up later, reading, at times listening to classical music, thanks to New York’s then wonderful WNCN-FM radio station’s all night program, hosted by Bill Watson or Sara Fishko.

Especially in the winter, and if we’d not had much business any particular evening, I would want to stay home and look over what I’d written earlier that day. Often I would be up revising until four am. Until, little by little, this period after work became my main writing time. I would go to bed at sunrise, my tiny bedroom on Jane Street, which I once described as having the dimensions of a cereal box—i.e very narrow and with a very high ceiling—had but one narrow window on an unused internal airshaft and so was usually pretty silent. I would then awaken around one in the afternoon and that would be my morning, beginning my day again.

But if I were not writing anything in particular, and especially as the spring wore on and summer came along, at 1:30 or 2 a.m. I would be tempted by the fragrance of pseudo-orange blossom, jasmine, flowering pear, other night foliage, and even a few bird calls coming from that uniquely green and surprisingly Edenic part of my neighborhood, west of Hudson Street in northern Greenwich Village. Today the area is so noisy and crowded at night, it’s difficult to believe, but in those days, the place was empty, empty of gangs of tourists, empty of horn-blaring taxis, and almost completely void of outer-borough drunken carousers.

So I began going out late at night.

To put all this into context, I was for the first time in my life leading a completely free life, free of any constraints, and completely and quite happily openly flouting most of the laws on the books against homosexuality in New York City and New York State. I and several thousands of men and women were doing so every day, and especially every night.

By the mid 1970s, New York City (like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, D.C., and just about every other large American city) had become a sexual playground of a kind not witnessed since the Roaring Twenties, when people were guzzling bathtub gin, DeSoto-mounted Tommy guns were rattling urban streets with mob hits, and all kinds of people were dancing on tabletops singing “Ain’t We Got Fun!”

What conservatives nowadays refer to in such a mealy-mouthed manner as the “Culture Wars of the Nineteen Sixties” had split the country in two—and for quite good reasons. Like many millions of other people, as a college student and simply as someone under the age of twenty-one I’d felt compelled to take my place on my college campus, in local parks, on my city’s streets, and even in the nation’s capital to protest the astounding inequities that defined the American life that I had been born into and grown up with.

Ethnic and racial minorities to begin with: African- Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans—including my colleagues, fellow students, and friends—were segregated and treated as third-class citizens. So I joined S.N.C.C. (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and helped integrate Woolworth’s lunch counters on Long Island, as well as schools, railroad stations, and everything else public down in the American South. Young American men of all races—including my schoolmates and cousins—were being sent thousands of miles away to die in a war in Southeast Asia that pretty much benefited corporate industrialist profiteers, and that few citizens believed in. I marched on Washington, protesting the war in Vietnam. I publicly burned my draft card, and when called down to the Selective Service Board on Rector Street, I signed in as an “Atheist Homosexual Conscientious Objector.”

Women still had virtually no rights beside a hard fought for suffrage; so I joined my female co students and friends in protest marches that closed various government offices and private businesses that discriminated against them. And, most personally for me, all American gays and lesbians committed a crime every time we made love or even associated together—and so in effect my entire life was illegal!

The truth was that the only people who could afford to be comfortable in the US of A during the first three decades of my life were rich, white, straight, adult males—i.e., those who enacted laws that protected them—and no one else but them!

Luckily, I was born at the forefront of a large post-World War II baby boom, still the largest single generation ever in American history, huge enough to make its views, likes, and dislikes known; and, because of its economic power, to get those eventually accepted. Like my friends and colleagues, over the previous decade I’d listened only to politically charged folk and rock music written by members of my generation. I’d gathered with hundreds of thousands of people my own age at Woodstock, Monterey, and in various stadiums, where we’d indulged in recreational drugs beyond mere marijuana. I’d spent time living in communes and other group living situations—one in Manhattan and one in central Massachusetts. I’d also followed Timothy Leary’s dictum to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” of society. Over the 1960s and 1970s (and well into the 1980s) I consumed recreational drugs—including LSD-25—the way most people pop in breath mints.

All of this had unquestionably loosened all kinds of previous customs and eliminated tons of taboos among myself and my cohort. Add to that the fact that a muckraking new field of younger journalists were reporting daily on members of local, state, and federal governments who were publicly caught out in the most outrageous lies, thefts, and deceptions—and that pretty much demolished the “God, Mom, and Apple Pie” way of life that had been force-fed to me and my coevals by schools and the government since our birth.

In The Wild Ones, Marlon Brando—one of our counterculture heroes—is asked, “What are you rebelling against?” His response: “What do you have?” That became pretty much my own response. My personal mantra became: if it feels good, let’s do it. If it feels good and it’s illegal and it makes old people wince, let’s do it twice—and in public if possible. I wore granny glasses, a Caucasian Afro, and one big gold stud earring. Passing strangers would yell, “Get a haircut!”

Greenwich Village had been a center of this social and artistic ferment from the middle of the 20th century: Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the Beats, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Folkies, Coltrane, Miles Davis and the Jazz movement, as well as the new painters—Rauschenberg, Johns, Kelly, etc., successors to Abstract Expressionists, all lived, played, and created in Lower Manhattan when I was young. So, from the age of 16, did I, while I attended the City University of New York. I moved to the Lower East Side, sharing an apartment for $38-per-month rent plus utilities with roommate Michael Robinson. After we graduated, he went to grad school in Minnesota. I went to Europe, relying upon the cheap new “student fares” on newly installed jetliners.

When I returned from abroad and began earning a more or less real salary, first as a social worker and then as an editor at Art Direction magazine, I moved to the West Village, where I paid a princely $109 per month rent, and where I would end up residing—moving upward, of course, into more rarefied rentals as I flourished—the remainder of my life on the East Coast, until 1995.

The older, more residential West Village, from Sixth Avenue to the Hudson River, had become the new happening area by the late sixties, especially if you were young, professional, and/or gay—partly because there were still cheap rents there.

When I moved into a first story, back apartment of four small rooms on Jane Street between Eighth Avenue and Hudson Street, most of the tenements in this West Village area still housed Irish immigrant and even some Italian immigrant families who’d moved there directly from Ellis Island generations before—although many of them were in the process of moving out to Queens and Nassau County. For every 18th Century townhouse on mine or on nearby streets being renovated for single family living, duplexes, or floor-throughs, there were five decaying, overcrowded, buildings filled with people, noise and crime.

But even that would rapidly change.

Three

It had been a mild winter so far. Christmas had come and gone, New Year’s Eve and Day had come and gone, and I was still working at Rizzoli.

Day by day and little by little I watched other help—part-time, temporary, Christmas help like myself—vanish: at the cash registers first, then from all around the shop. And yet I was still there. Some grad students, like Dennis, had a different spring-term schedule and so their hours dropped, shortened, or changed altogether. Dennis in fact was no longer on night staff and mostly working earlier. But I was still there.

Day after day passed and no one said a word, so I continued to come in and do my work. Finally, Mr. M. passed close by me one evening as he was leaving the store for the day and I thought, okay here comes the axe.

No. Instead, he said, “We’re doing the annual inventory this coming Sunday, 10 a.m. until whenever we finish. We supply a continental breakfast and you get double-time pay.”

I said for him to count me in, and that Sunday, I joined those doing inventory and had a good time, even joining Ruth and Theo and Viki Roth for a light meal afterward, where we first bonded.

The winter continued mild. In the middle of February, once day when I came in early, Ursula came over and said that Mr. M. wanted to see me in his office and I thought, “Okay. Here it is! I’m outta here!”

I sat down opposite his desk and he at last looked up from some papers on his desk and asked how I liked working at the shop. I said that I liked it fine. He asked how it was working out for me. Was I able to do my writing? I said it was working out fine. I didn’t mention that I’d socked away into my usually empty bank account his surprisingly generous Christmas bonus—three weeks’ salary—against this very day and conversation. I waited for him to say, “We’ve enjoyed having you work here. But now, you understand, it’s time … ”

Instead, he said that I was working out well for him too, and that since I was staying on, I was getting a raise. The surprise was followed by another. He reminded me that my immediate superior, Antonio Ximénez, would be gone three weeks in April with his art exhibit in Florence and he wanted me to become Antonio’s assistant and learn what to do when he was gone. I said that sounded fine. The raise was nothing special, but it was okay.

As he was leaving that night for home, Mr. M. angled me into a corner and all but whispered into my ear, “This Sunday, can you come in around noon for a few hours to help us do a little rearranging in the store?”

I said okay. Clearly he’d wanted to be sure that I was staying on before he asked me this. Even so, I gave it little thought at the time. That Sunday, I showed up in flannels, sneakers and denims, all wrapped in sweater and anorak, hat, scarf and gloves since sneaky winter had finally caught up to Manhattan and it was sub-polar freezing out.

John Brancati and Dennis were already there and they let me into the front of the shop at Fifth Avenue which was evidently the focus of our “rearranging.”

They’d already emptied the mobile display cases of books, and we carried those books over to the other, 56th Street, side of the shop where Mr. M.—dressed in a sweater and some Italian designer’s idea of chinos—had cleared a space next to the Spanish and French language bookshelves.

“Now, bring me the ones on the wall shelves,” he commanded.

Down came those dozens of red and gold backed volumes of Mondadori Classics—from Virgil to Giacomo Leopardi—which had formed the colorful background to a half decade of Rizzoli Fifth Avenue entrance cashiers. Down from the opposite wall came the fifty, oversized, white and gold binding Skira Tresori Della Arte tomes. Down from the lower shelves came the thirty or so Rizzoli Editore Gran Turista photographic travel books for each area of Italy—including Sardinia and even the now-independent Malta.

All of them went to the back of the store, or down by the dumbwaiter, headed to the stockroom.

Current English-language nonfiction went behind the cashier; current English-language fiction opposite. The display cases were filled with what Mr. M. had me select as bestsellers from each section of English-language books. The lower shelves displayed English-language photo, travel, crafts, and art books.

As we walked to the subway on our way home, I asked Dennis and John why Mr. M. had given us the next day off, paid.

“Why? Do you actually want to be there when the Colombos come in and see?” Brancati asked.

At which point I realized that I was taking part in a secret “rearrangement”!

I had other things to think about then, but clearly the atmosphere in the store was still very tense when I arrived Tuesday evening. Ursula was tight-lipped. Up on her record balcony, Ruth was playing Mozart’s Requiem, and Theo reported that she’d already played the Brahms, Berlioz, Gounod, and Duruflé requiems, not to mention Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. When Brancati arrived to replace her, he put on Vivaldi’s double mandolin concertos to cheer the place up a little.

Stella and Mme. Neff were not visible at all. As Barbara left for the day, I asked what they had said about the rearrangement. “They feel invaded,” Barbara said, and practical as always, quipped, “I told them they’d get used to it, and also,” she slyly added, referring to how slow selling they were—“to seeing the same Italian books next to theirs for a long time!”

Other staff avoided me. Like Brancati, I was seen as one of Mr. M.’s new guys, and now as one of his henchmen; not to be trusted. Very late that night, I finally got up the nerve to ask Antonio what had happened the previous day, the day I’d “taken off.”

“Poor Signor Colombo! After all he did for Mr. M., to be stabbed in the back like this,” Antonio began with the expected theatrics. “And poor Signora Colombo! She fainted when she arrived. She had to be taken home in a taxi.”

I thought that was appropriately Italian melodramatics to cap it all. As for Signor Colombo, according to Antonio, he’d evidently taken care of his wife and then returned to Rizzoli in the afternoon. He went straight up to Mrs. Murray’s office on the third floor, whom he’d remained closeted with for the rest of the day.

I saw him only once more on the shop floor, looking forlornly at his Italian-language books in their cramped new home. He smiled feebly when I tried to make more room for them, telling me not to bother.

Ruth witnessed this vignette and voiced her ire. “Imagine, Felice! Rizzoli with hardly any Italian books! It’s a major catastrophe!”

From Antonio, I soon heard that Colombo had finagled some kind of retirement package from the main office in Milan. He was well past retirement age anyway. Barbara took over the Italian books, as that was her second language, and she read the Italian scandal sheets all the time.

During this week, Mr. M. remained in his office, all but invisible to the staff. He came and went by obscure paths. At the end of that week, our little closet of a check-in room at the center of the floor held something unprecedented: a sales report of the past quarter of the just past year, broken down department by department.

English language books dominated overwhelmingly—explaining my bonus and my remaining on staff: even once they were broken down into “Trade” and “Oversized” i.e. Art books. At about a third of the sales of either of those was Records, closely followed by Magazines, then Travel, Children’s books, and, limping along, French, Spanish, German and only then, Italian language book sales, just before Russian language ones.

Upstairs the somber choral dirges were gone, replaced by Schubert’s giggling, bubbly Trout Quintet and Albinoni’s exuberant Trumpet Suite.

Meanwhile, I’d become aware that something was going on upstairs, in the mezzanine area behind Ruth’s records balcony, but when I asked, she couldn’t say what exactly, except “They are hammering away all day. It’s most annoying.”

Whatever it was, I was certain it was another large step in Mr. M.’s secret master plan for Rizzoli. After all, in only a week his palace revolution had succeeded. Within a few months, no one even mentioned the Colombos anymore, except to say they had come across one or the other somewhere in town. I believe they eventually returned to Italy.

***

One late afternoon in late winter, after I’d been at the shop a while, I’d come in a little earlier to go over the spring catalogues with Carolyn, to ensure we weren’t overlapping. We suddenly noticed three men get out of a taxi on Fifth Avenue, wearing black suits and carrying thick attaché cases. They looked pretty much alike—dark haired, fair skinned—and once inside the shop, they asked in Italian for Mr. M.

We were at the Fifth Avenue entrance when they arrived, and we watched them look around the front of the shop while the cashier phoned. Neither of us really understood what they were saying to each other. But recall, the Italian books were gone from this prominent spot, now stuffed in the back among other foreign languages. We were astonished four minutes later when Mr. M. himself came forward to meet the three men, striding broadly toward us all, smiling and shaking their hands, beaming in greeting.

Unprecedented! To our knowledge he’d never met anyone this publicly, never mind been smiling while he did so. He even introduced me and Carolyn to the three men, saying what sounded to me like “my American assistants in this success.”

“We’re not his assistants,” Carolyn pointed out when I translated that later. “If anyone is, it’s Ursula and Antonio and Ruth.”

Amen to that. Except that Mr. M. had made up another quarter of sales figures which he’d let me see, just before promoting me yet again, this time to include “English language books buyer” next to my other title. While he was on the phone at that meeting I’d spotted the sales report and he’d happily passed it over to me to peruse.

Well! Sales had gone up steadily, almost precipitously, more than doubling the sales of the previous year. Once again, English-language books predominated, with records, magazines, travel, children’s books, and then the foreign-language sections dawdling behind. One standout this year had been children’s books, taken over by a new full-time clerk who was also a writer, the sweet, modest, soft-spoken Majorca native Alex Mehdevi. He’d done a great job of expanding the children’s section in five languages and then selling them. Also standing-out this year were Russian language book sales, which had been taken over by a part-time, night-staff, Russian graduate exchange student from Minsk: red-haired, iconoclastic, say-anything-as-long-as-it’s-offensive Boris, who I found to be more fun than a barrel of Socialist monkeys. He’d also expanded his section and so that had prospered.

Mr. M. took the three men in the black suits out of the store by the side door and up to Mrs. Murray’s executive offices. But during the next three days, they were all over the shop, coming and going, standing around watching when and where they were least expected, peeking here, peering there: Antonio called them “the Italians,” as though there were no others in the store.

When they at last left to return to Italy, Mr. M. made certain to have them meet me, and Carolyn later said to meet her—also Ruth, but not Antonio and Ursula. Mr. M. was wreathed in smiles for the next week or so, an almost disturbingly unusual situation, it was so rare. If I hadn’t already just gotten a raise and promotion, I would have asked for them.

What was going on?

A month after, word filtered down: Mr. M. had gotten a raise and promotion too, the latter to vice president of Rizzoli International, in sales and marketing. More importantly, the three men had not only completely approved his changes to the store; they had given their blessing to changes yet to come.

The first of these was to create an art gallery on the mezzanine level—explaining all that noise—opening in September of that year. Second, they had approved an English language, Rizzoli publishing house, mostly for art books, headquartered in New York. These two additions would pretty much take over the shop’s life, and that of several employees’ lives, including at times my own.

When those two changes proved successful and the shop kept making money, Mr. M’s plans for expansion in Manhattan with a second store downtown would take place. That was only the beginning.

To understand how much significance all this possessed, you have to understand that Rizzoli Book Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan had been opened in 1964 to be a New York show case for a rapidly expanding Publishing and Media Empire in Italy. When Angelo Rizzoli and his sons bought the building and opened its doors, the main idea was to have a presence in Manhattan. Secondarily, to have offices for the few editors who handled foreign rights and translations for their rapidly expanding Italian book line.

In addition, there would be offices for the reporters working for their Italian magazines, newspapers, and television stations, who needed to be on the spot in New York or America. Because this mass media segment of Rizzoli had grown so rapidly, Angelo Rizzoli had started up TV and radio stations all across Italy, including places where a few years before people had never seen a television, never mind having a local radio station. Italy in the 1960s was a country newly rich and information hungry: it was the center of European design, textiles, industry, and film.

Rizzoli’s New York City bookshop was never intended to do anything quite so vulgar as actually make money. No, instead, it was set up to do that very Italian thing: to show a good face—“la faccia”—and to lose money, as little as possible and as elegantly as possible. So when, under Mr. M.’s aegis, instead it began earning money, that was big news—that was a reason for two Rizzoli sons and a son-in-law to come and see what was happening.

There’s a good reason why this success interested them, and not only from a financial standpoint: Rizzoli’s own story is a classic rags-to-riches tale. Born in 1908, Angelo had barely been out of school when he began his upward climb in Italy’s small publishing world. By 1938 he’d bought several small newspapers and magazines, mostly catering to women, and he’d expanded them. It’s unclear what if any relations he had to the fascisti. Certainly no one ever accused him of supporting them. But he must have done a pretty delicate dance, because during Mussolini’s reign, Rizzoli Editore survived, and even slowly expanded out to newspapers and bigger magazines.

A few years after the end of World War II were Rizzoli’s early glory days. Not only because of the new radio stations, but due to the magazine, L’Europeo. And, as though to make his loyalties clear once and for all, Rizzoli hired the well-known antifascist reporter Oriana Fallaci. In 1949, Rizzoli expanded yet again and began publishing books in Italian—both the classics and popular titles. These enjoyed an early and wide success.

Another American sympathizer during the 1940s, Natalia Danesi Murray, was appointed by Rizzoli to open an American office for the publisher. She’d already done so for Mondadori, Rizzoli’s biggest competitor of the time, and Angelo stealing her away was a coup. That was followed by another coup—Rizzoli publishing what would become Italy’s premier newspaper, Corriere della Sera (The Evening Courier).

By the 1960s, Rizzoli had expanded again, this time delving into visual mass media, consolidating and buying television stations and building them into what would become the communications behemoth RSC Media. He also went into film producing during an era when Rome’s Cinecittà was the largest and most productive film studio in the world, with twice the production of Bombay or Hollywood. Among the score of films Angelo Rizzoli produced were two that connoisseurs consider the great auteur Federico Fellini’s masterpieces, La Dolce Vita and 8½. This may help explain why, when 712 Fifth Avenue was bought and converted into offices and a bookshop, a screening room was also installed.

By the time he died in 1970, Angelo Rizzoli had dozens of film and television awards and honors, and his various companies completely dominated Italian mass media.

Surely this was a success story that our boss, Mr. M. must have known, growing up in Liguria. He also must have known his direct boss’s own far more unusual success story. The woman who Angelo Rizzoli put in charge of his American “face” on Fifth Avenue had her own unique history, tied to great events and people of the twentieth century.

Born in 1900, Natalia Danesi quickly became a model and actress on stage and in film. In 1924 she married William Murray, then head of the William Morris Talent Agency, and moved to the US. They had one child, William, who would become a well-known writer.

The young couple separated, and then divorced in 1935, however, and Natalia moved back to Europe, with nine-year-old William in tow. They ended up in France, and Natalia fell in with what was left of that great “Americans in France” set: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and Ernest Hemingway. Almost immediately, Natalia began a romance with the writer, Janet Flanner, ten years her senior, and they settled into what would be a wonderful and difficult, often long distance, thirty eight year relationship, which very much included William as child in the ménage.

By early 1940, with the Germans advancing in Europe and threatening Paris, the family of three relocated to London. There, Natalia was asked by the US Information Service to start up a radio service aimed at the many Italians who were chafing under first Mussolini, and then under direct German rule. Murray wrote, edited, produced, and often narrated the radio programs, which were beamed into Italy throughout World War II.

After the war, Natalia joined the US Occupation Forces in Rome, helping to put together the destroyed and compromised media of that country. Naturally, she would have been in contact with Angelo Rizzoli.

By 1949, she and Flanner were back in Paris and then eventually in New York. In 1960, Natalia began working for Rizzoli, and in 1964 she became vice president in charge of Rizzoli America. She retired in 1978 and died in San Diego, California.

If Janet Flanner’s name sounds at all familiar it’s because she wrote columns for decades from Europe for The New Yorker magazine under the sobriquet “Genêt.” She first wrote the “Letter from Paris” column, and then when that was no longer possible due to Hitler’s invasion, the “Letter from London” column. Like the path-breaking radio journalist Edward R. Murrow, Janet Flanner helped shape how Americans would think of Europe and Europeans during the war and the ensuing reconstruction.

Murrow worked though radio and news film, providing recognizable crises and great historical moments, instant heroes and titanic villains. Given her medium of the weekly essay, however, Flanner could be more subtle and could probe more, expanding the range and depth of her war coverage. Her great familiarity, knowledge, and love of those older cultures—which, to many young Americans, seemed hell-bent on destroying themselves and the world—influenced a growing US intelligentsia, which would remain Eurocentric for decades.

Once the Marshall Plan was effectively in place, Americans were returning to Europe to see the places and meet the people Flanner had written about with so much affection. And once commercial jet travel seriously began in the early 1960s, London, Paris, and Rome were the destinations of choice, thanks to people like Flanner.

Flanner had written a novel, The Cubical City, back in 1926, which was published in France, but it was only after her death in 1978 that her words became much-read and discussed books, and that her name as a writer gained its greatest luster.

This was all thanks to her life partner, Natalia Danesi Murray, who shepherded into print Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939, followed by Paris Journal, 1944–1955, and then Paris Journal, Vol. 2: 1965–1971. There were also the interim London Journals, covering the years of World War II. But perhaps the best and best-known of Flanner’s posthumous works is Darlighissima, letters between Flanner and Murray. Today, their substantial writings and unpublished letters are housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

William Murray, who had been raised by the talented lesbian couple, wrote about his upbringing in a lovely, affectionate portrait of that time and age, Janet, My Mother, and Me: A Memoir of Growing Up with Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray, in which he describes what has to be one of the oddest, most glamorous, and yet also most perilous of childhoods. Young William was determined to be an opera singer. It was only when that dream failed that he took up Flanner’s career, describing Janet as “a sort of surrogate father.”

Through her he also got work as an intern at The New Yorker, where he ended up as a staff reporter for three decades. His reminiscences about the magazine’s famous editor, William Shawn, are far from complimentary.

Murray married and left the East Coast after publishing several books that dealt with or leaned heavily upon his upbringing, A Fine Italian Hand: A Shifty Lou Anderson Mystery and City of the Soul: A Walk in Rome. But when he moved his family and widowed mother to Southern California, Murray began haunting the Del Mar racetrack near his San Diego home. He eventually wrote a series of well-reviewed crime novels set around that racetrack and the horse-racing world, books that made his name in publishing circles, especially the acclaimed Dead Heat (2005). He died in 2009.

I would see Flanner arriving at the bookstore, looking—as someone else had noticed and written—like a shorter, squatter version of George Washington in the famous Gilbert Stuart portraits. She seldom approached anyone who worked there and she only spoke to me once personally.

I’d been at Rizzoli maybe two years when I read in the Times that the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was doing a signing at Scribner’s Bookstore, ten blocks south on Fifth Avenue. Janet Flanner had just come from there, and she had a signed copy of his latest novel under her arm.

“Aren’t you a writer?” she asked me.

Surprised she had a clue who I was, I said yes, not really certain who she was.

“You should go meet I. B. Singer at Scribner’s. Do you know his work?”

I told her I was a fan.

“You mustn’t miss this opportunity. Go now!” she instructed.

When I said I couldn’t, as I had to remain on the shop floor, she said that she would “take care of all that” with Mr. M. “I know him quite well. Don’t worry. Go!”

So I went, and I met Singer just in time, at the very end of a long line of other fans. He was tiny, elf-like, and clearly already well over all of us.

“I’m a writer too,” I said. “Or hope to be.”

“Worst job in the world,” he responded. “You’re surrounded by shysters and gonifs. And other writers, who are all scum!”

I was amused. “Don’t you like any writers? Aren’t there any from the past you’d like to meet?” I had to ask.

“No! Wait! Maybe … Lev Tolstoi,” Singer mused, and then added, “But I wouldn’t cross the street for him.”

I remembered this conversation years later when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature and at another awards ceremony, Henry Giroux, got up and said, “I see other publishers in this room who, like FSG, have lost money for years publishing I. B. Singer. Now at last we get to earn some of it back!”

From that day on, I would notice Janet Flanner coming into the shop, looking around, speaking to no one, and then going out the side door, up to the offices. A few times I saw her and Mrs. Murray coming out into the store together on their way out for dinner or to the opera, arm in arm at all times, usually with a man I now recognize as William Murray. Somehow I remember them always bundled up, as though for winter weather. And no matter the weather, they always seemed to travel in their own little bubble. It would be years before I realized who they were or what their remarkable history was.

Four

A handsome, well-built, short, young Filipino, Ricardo, worked at the front cashier at night much of the time since I’d arrived at the shop and he was getting a degree in business by day. He was fairly stand-offish to the rest of the night staff, reserving his company for Antonio, the night manager, who I noticed neither wanted it nor appreciated it very much.

After a while Ricardo began talking to me, and I discovered him to be a conservative, conventional, ambitious, and very serious young man, with a clear-cut plan. He would get his MBA, nab some excellent paying job, and then after a while return home to Leyte or Mindanao, where he would marry a perfect young lady with a wealthy father who would put him into business or retire, leaving Ricardo to run the show.

Luckily, he never asked what I thought of this plan (Bor-ing! Hum-drum! Why not just commit suicide instead?!). When I was suddenly made assistant night manager to Antonio, Ricardo stopped talking to me altogether. Word filtered down that Ricardo had wanted the spot himself (Really!? It was such a nothing promotion! He could have it!)

I attempted to let him know my feelings. But he was having none of it and snubbed me publicly. Clearly, I had usurped his plan for world domination at step 2-A, or something like that, and suddenly I was the bad guy. But wait, what role did this have in his exalted plan? Had I misunderstood him? Was Rizzoli his big stepping-stone? What was I not understanding?

Now, whenever Antonio was off the floor, Ricardo began having problems: a customer whose speech he couldn’t comprehend, a request he somehow couldn’t possibly fulfill, some nonsense or other. Invariably, I’d have to get Antonio out of his nap. I slowly began to understand that Ricardo was trying to make problems to show me up as incapable—in short, to undermine me in my new position.

One evening I caught Ricardo taking his break at the manager’s balcony desk, where we did the book ordering and where Antonio sometimes took breaks. As he was coming downstairs, I said to Ricardo, “Don’t get too comfy up there.”

Two days later a regular customer I knew strode back to where I was on the phone taking an order, and he was clearly steamed. I listened carefully as he told me what had happened at Ricardo’s cashier desk, and I resolved his problem at the back cash register. The next day I came to work early and asked to see Mr. M. I told him about Ricardo and his many manufactured problems and how he had really pissed off this good customer of mine who’d been clever enough to come and see me about it.

As I was speaking, I saw Mr. M. run a fingernail lightly across his neck so casually that he could have merely been fidgeting.

I guess I was stunned. So he asked, “Well?”

I’d been rereading Niccolò Machiavelli’s little book The Prince, one of the best managerial guides I’ve ever come across. I recalled him writing that if an enemy near you declares himself, you must “rid yourself of him immediately by exile or execution, whichever is easiest.”

As I still hung fire, Mr. M. said, “Miss ___ wishes to return to work,” naming a young woman who’d worked that Christmas season as a cashier.

“Oh, she’s good. Then—yes!” I replied, knowing I was agreeing to have Ricardo metaphorically exiled and executed, as well as sent back to step 1-B of his plan.

Cool as glass, Mr. M. said, “I’ll have Ursula contact her tomorrow. And you, please come in one hour late tomorrow.”

I did exactly that and Ricardo was not present when I arrived. I heard that he’d been let go as soon as he’d come into work.

Stern School of Business: zero. University of Machiavelli: a hundred.

***

The early 1970s was also the first era of the really big, out-of-left-field best-selling novel—none quite so unexpected or best-selling as Peter Benchley’s Jaws. I’d not even seen a review of the book in the far more substantial gathering of weekly reviews of that era (I had to scan ten of the lists each week for work) when three people came in after work, asking for the book. Two didn’t even know the name and called it the “shark novel.” It had come in the previous Friday, on Monday and I sold three out of the five copies we’d received, and promptly ordered five more.

When the following Monday came along and Mr. M. was upfront changing the Fifth Avenue windows, I handed him a stack of five copies of Jaws, with its eye-catching cover. He looked at me with that glance that by then I knew meant: whatever was I thinking.

“This title sold sixty copies last week,” I explained. A realist, he shrugged and put the stack in a far corner.

Two weeks later, before coming to work, I had walked up the street to its publisher, Doubleday and I’d obtained a publicity poster of the cover three feet by two feet in size. I added a pair of snorkel goggles I owned, splashed them with Ursula’s nail polish, and added in my old rubber swim fins that I’d “chewed up” with a box cutter down in George’s stock room. “This title accounted for forty percent of all book sales last week,” I explained to Mr. M.

Everyone but he and Antonio had something to say about my “absolutely reprehensible window display, Mr. Picano”—I’m quoting Ruth, who said it with her lovely, precise English, making me a tad less offended. Of course, by Wednesday, Doubleday Bookstore up a block had an entire Fifth Avenue window for the book, and we stopped displaying it.

Naturally, with widely expanded art, craft, architecture, and photography sections now apparent in Rizzoli, artists began coming into the shop whenever some big new monograph or special tome on their or some friend’s work came out and we featured it in the window. Ditto with classical musicians and their recordings. Naturally, Carolyn had her own group of architects and designers who always came directly to her.

I recall a staid, middle-aged Asian-looking fellow coming in, ordinary except for his French style beret worn at the proper Montmartre angle, and asking for a book titled Learning from Las Vegas. This book by Robert Venturi about the “instant architecture and commercial development” of malls and strips prevalent in Nevada and Southern California, was a real eye opener for those who’d grown up studying Sullivan, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But it was sold out every time he came in, so I suggested he special order or put it on reserve. He gave me his name— I. M. Pei—one of America’s great architects.

Another, even older, yet far more confident, Caucasian man would also come in often and usually late at night, always walking very quickly, and if you weren’t careful, he’d grab your tushy—but only if you were a young man. This was architect Philip Johnson, who tried to talk me into a lavish weekend date with him in New Haven, including a haute cuisine dinner, a play at the local Long Wharf Theatre, and his nine-room penthouse suite overlooking that city—“all expenses paid.” I politely smiled and said I would think about it. A few times he came in with various well-dressed guys my age who’d apparently already said yes.

Salvador Dalí was another regular personage who was instantly—I almost wrote violently—recognizable, as he so evidently displaced everything around himself for a good ten square feet whenever he appeared. He wore obviously handmade, ankle-high shoes with off-white spats, a close-fitting suit in an unusual color—Russian green, dove gray, sky blue—with five inch lapels, an askew fedora, and his moustache was a foot long: six waxed, twisted, stiff inches on each side of his unmistakable face. (Did I mention his mad, dark brown eyes?) He carried and gesticulated with a carved mahogany-wood cane with a lion’s head silver tip. He spoke of himself in the third person —“Dalí thinks … ” “Dalí requires … ” “Dalí looks for … ”—switching languages mid-sentence sometimes three times in a phrase. After his first appearance at the shop—Antonio helped him; I was too bowled over—he began seeking me out, and we even developed a kind of customer-clerk friendship. Mostly I now believe because I more or less understood his gibberish and I was a cute guy. Despite being married to his “muse” Gala, he seemed always on the lookout for cute guys, especially European looking ones.

***

When I first moved to the West Village in 1965, I’d been warned by neighbors and especially older gay men to stay away from those nearby West Village tenements and their mostly working class Irish-American inhabitants, some of whom belonged to a gang known as “The Westies.” But I remembered that as a ten-year-old I’d also been warned away from my local suburban Catholic school playground. Why? Because that’s where all the bad boys were! And all the fun, too!

So, “out” at age twenty-one, that’s exactly where I headed, because like my ten-year-old self, who had gotten into glue-sniffing and all kinds of preteen sex, I wanted to be a bad boy myself.

By the early 1970s I was older, and that late spring and summer, I was cruising again.

Ever since I’d come out some seven years before, I’d been either getting myself into or attempting to recover from one all-consuming romantic episode after another.

Three of them in a row, Mark Hobbs, Bob Herron and the most recent, Ed Armour, had left me in a state that I can only compare with a jetliner making an emergency landing without a runway, no visibility, running lights or landing gear.

Having realized exactly how major and how consistent this disastrous pattern was, I somehow found a smidgen of self-respect and survival instinct and called a major Time Out. Next, I made a harsh but resolute decision to completely switch gears and to give up romance altogether. Along, of course, with any chance of finding that soul-mate whom I’d thought might exist out there somewhere for me.

Having dismissed romance from my life meant that I was opting for a life of impersonal sexual gratification—which I knew for a fact existed all around me, sometimes just beyond my apartment building’s front door.

Even so, before I thrust myself into that world, I was forced to take a hard, appraising look at myself in the mirror, to objectively evaluate my physical advantages and disadvantages.

On the plus side, I had a well-proportioned, natural, slender body—this was before over-muscled “puffy boys” became popular. In summer, I tanned well because of my olive complexion. I had smooth skin, almost no body hair, and a full head of dark, curly hair. I also had large, deceptively warm, Italian brown eyes.

Whatever I actually thought of my facial features, I knew that some people would brush me off instantly as not conventionally handsome; I wasn’t. But I also knew others would find me exotic, Mediterranean (“Are you Greek? Syrian? Lebanese?” I’d often be asked). And as the young women I’d dated had always told me, despite a difficult decade, I was still “cute.” Soon I would quickly discover an entire subset of gay men—mostly WASPS, but also some Jewish guys—who were strongly attracted to the media stereotype of the 1950s-1960s Italian-American rocker: Brando, Sal Mineo, John Travolta, et al. And I have to now confess that, being approached by these guys and recognizing their limited (if usually intense) interest, I have definitely been guilty of playing up being a Bensonhurst “Guido” in order to get laid—and carefully checking out their bookshelves and record collections when they were douching in the lav afterwards. Several handsome, top notch stage and screen actors that I might not have ever gotten near otherwise were among this crew, including my West Village neighbors, Larry Kert and Brad Davis.

Another advantage: all my life I’ve looked anywhere between five to fifteen years younger than I actually am. So I could play at being more innocent than I was. This especially helped in this period of my late twenties—when guys still asked if I was twenty-one! I was “carded” at bars and clubs well into my thirties, which often got someone near the door’s immediate interest.

My physical negatives were immediately evident: I wasn’t tall, blonde, or of Germanic-British extraction, i.e., the American male beau idéal. And while well-educated, I was pretty poor throughout much of this decade, although I could clean up and dress up for special occasions when needed. However, on the plus side, I looked great in what guys were casually wearing in that era. The tight-at-the-hips, low-slung then flared below the knee cords and slacks of the 1970s, along with higher-heeled narrow boots, made me look inches taller than five eight. Another look—skintight 501 Levi’s with sneakers—also made me look taller. I discovered that if the 501s were worn one size too small with the two top buttons left open, along with a size too small T-shirt that exposed my lower tummy and navel, I could saunter into a bar or club, be seriously checked out, and usually walk out with a date.

Even with my minuscule budget, I found outfits that scored every time I put them on: a pair of carmine corduroys with a brown or black Tee attracted Taurus men in particular (my type, those bulls, easily enticed by waving something red at them), while my white chinos and yellow-gold, sleeveless tunic brought in all the Leos. When I was in the mood for Scorpios, I would dress in black with one item—a belt, shoes—in a slightly different color. Later on, when I was going to Fire Island regularly, I found a deep-purple Speedo with narrow white side panels that, when paired with a mint-green or cantaloupe A-shirt, was true tea-dance catnip. I recall more than one male model that I went home with trying that outfit on after we’d had sex, and then looking at himself in the mirror and saying, “Nothing! On me it does nothing!”

In the early seventies, sometime trick porno star Cal Culver (aka Casey Donovan) phoned me to tell me to go audition for a new movie by the director of his epic film Boys in the Sand. The now legendary Wakefield Poole welcomed me to his uptown Manhattan photography studio and shyly asked me to slowly and sensually take my clothing off while he filmed and photographed me. He said this was the opening “action” of the role that I would have as one of five young men who undressed and then had sex with the very cute and well-hung young star Bill Harrison, in a sort of fantasyland warehouse space on the city’s far West Side. The new film was titled Bijou, and at over an hour long it was to be as epic as Boys in the Sand had been, and to me, when I saw it, much more interesting as it dealt with the darker side of gay life, which I was coming to know quite well myself.

Poole phoned a few days later and asked, “We liked the audition. When can you start?”

But I couldn’t start at all, of course, not if I wanted to be a famous author someday! For decades I heard second- and thirdhand of those Bijou audition tapes and outtakes having been smuggled out somehow, which were being passed around various gay parties. People who saw them, recognized me even before the inevitable close-up—an extremely questionable tribute to how much I’d gotten around New York’s gay underworld.

Unlike the East Village, where I’d lived throughout my college years (1960-1964), and which had become the drug culture’s hang out area and then a very seedy and dangerous “Alphabet City,” the West Village, where I now lived, was quiet, residential, even boring—unless you knew where to look.

Among the gay bars that had opened, the one I preferred most was the Road House on the southwest corner of 11th Street and Hudson. It had been a meatballs and spaghetti Italian restaurant, and the new owners never got rid of the red leather booths, which I liked because they were comfy for flirting and especially for a little indiscreet foreplay. The Road House only lasted three or four years before it again became a restaurant, and then another and another, but I found the Road House to be a comfortable neighborhood bar and primo cruising ground.

Six blocks south, on and around Christopher Street, were many more gay bars and restaurants, from the 9th Circle (younger guys and hustlers) at one end, past the venerable postgrad place Julius’ (even then a New York institution), way over to Keller’s (older guys and lots of leather) at the Hudson River end.

A new bar between the latter two opened called Boots and Saddles, which me and my friends quickly dubbed “Bras and Girdles.” And on West Street, up from Keller’s, a whole bunch of new places opened in that decade: Sneakers, the Ramrod, the Vault, and Badlands. Later on, Ty’s would open on Christopher Street to anchor that seventies gay Broadway scene.

But even those places soon cloyed with their omnipresent country music or hard rock tunes and the cigarette smoke that clung to your clothing for days after you’d been inside, not to mention the often overpowering stench of cheap beer that assailed you as you stepped in the door.

For alfresco fun there was the nearby Hudson River waterfront with its dozen huge, crumbling, wooden piers. Many of them had been there for a hundred years, as this area became a later, secondary port, especially for the larger ocean liners of the early twentieth century.

Before that, shipping had already overfilled the South Sea Port at Manhattan’s lower east side Fulton Street area, and so shipping began to straggle west, over to an area only newly incorporated into New York City, the village of Greenwich, first settled by Indians, then, in 1630 around Minetta Creek by the Dutch and called Nootwyck, which had by the time I lived there become just another New York neighborhood, instead of an independent town, as it had been until the late 19th Century.

An elderly neighbor of mine on Jane Street, over ninety when I moved in and as active as ever, once told me that her great-grandmother would often tell her about growing up on the Edmunds farm, its main house located where West 11th Street now ran, just west of Abingdon Square, and only a few blocks away from where we lived. The farm’s property had begun at the old North Highway (now Hudson Street), and on one corner was situated the White Horse Tavern, owned in those days by Edmunds and another man.

That tavern had rooms for hire overnight as well as a little attached stable, and was a safe meeting and war-planning site for American Rebels in the Eighteenth Century. As the highway was much traveled, another, smaller “safe” tavern soon opened nearby, owned and run by French Canadians who had been forced off their land in Quebec by the British during the massive population disruption at the end of the French and Indian War in 1764. That inn was known for two centuries as Chez Sazerac, and in later years, when I lived there and went in almost weekly, it was a restaurant called The Sazerac House.

My neighbor’s great-grandmother was a girl of twelve when George Washington and young Alexander Hamilton stopped for water for themselves and their mounts at her farm. She helped them get it at the well on what is now Greenwich Street and 11th (where, later on, I resided for thirteen years in a Federal-era building). She was thrilled to speak to the dashing American president and his friend. The short but very handsome Hamilton liked the area so well that in a few years he returned to bargain with her father to buy a plot of it to the northeast, where he built himself a little country homestead—two blocks away from where I lived in the seventies, on Jane Street.

My neighbor’s ancestor’s family’s farm had ranged in that early era from Fourteenth Street—which was only a creek then and still has an underground river today—and then south beyond to what became Christopher Street. It had extended clear west to the ragged water’s edge. When the land was finally sold and divided, the names of the cross streets—Jane, Horatio, Charles, Perry, Christopher, etc.—were all names of the children of the Edmunds family. And two new north/south streets were put through, first Greenwich Street, and later, Washington Street.

Her grandmother had been a grown woman with children when the Pacific Clippers began arriving at the brand new North River’s (as the Hudson was more commonly known) west side docks, easily seen from their farm house. The boys had run down to see Chinese and Malayan wares unloaded: incredible, exotic treasure! Examples of the miniature red-leaved maple trees brought back from Japan on those clippers ships could now be seen around the area, a century old but only two stories high.

The 1822 cholera epidemic sent hundreds fleeing out of New York City to the healthier pastures north, and many squatted in temporary shelters in the village of Greenwich, around Sixth Avenue and 9th Street, where some remained. There’s an old Sephardic Jewish cemetery hidden among Federal Era row houses from that time.

During the rest of the nineteenth century, the Hudson River frontage was slowly filled in and raised, and a cobblestone street was laid down too—named West Street. Then the Edmunds family leased the land out to various shipping companies.

But it was the steam haulers from up north, arriving laden with corn, wheat, cattle and hops from the Midwest Territories and the from new states in the Great Lakes region via the upstate Erie Canal and the upper Hudson, that gave the river the name that stuck. That really exploded the growth of this west side pier area.

Like today, back then the Hudson was wider and less turbulent than its counterpoint, which despite its name as the East River is really a only a strait between Manhattan and Long Island. Anyway, by the mid 19th Century that waterway had become so busy, it was over-filled with boating, including private yachts and a score of private ferries that constantly shuttled daily commuters between the burgeoning cities of Brooklyn and Manhattan. When poet Walt Whitman was a cub reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, one of his jobs was to write up the frequent maritime collisions on the East River.

Several fallen signs on the northernmost of the dozen decayed piers, not very far from my apartment, still partially provided the names of some of the bigger shipping lines on the Hudson: The White Star Line and The Silver Swan Line prominent among them. The White Star Line was, of course, parent company of the Titanic, among other gargantuan ships. The end of the street I had unwittingly moved to, Jane Street, was supposed to have been the official North American destination dock of that doomed vessel. In fact, the tottering, blackened brick building that faced the decaying pier, which was when I moved there just a Single Room Occupancy residence known as the Jane Street Hotel, was where the survivors of the Titanic actually stayed their first night in New York. Its decaying lobby, filled with listless unemployed men whenever I would pass by, had briefly been the scene of the first great American media storm, when over a hundred reporters converged to meet and interview and photograph the Titanic’s survivors.

Only four blocks farther up Greenwich Street, as I wandered after midnight I came across other monuments to this earlier and more glorious era. The gray stone, Beaux Arts style Customs House, on far west 13th Street, on the river side of the old Chatham Square market, all boarded up in the seventies, for example. That was where Herman Melville labored for the last twenty five years of his life, while checking in steamships and those early ocean going liners. It’s also where he is said to have written his late masterpiece, the novella, Billy Budd, Foretopman, around 1890, when there were no ships in the slips and he had time on his hands.

I, however, was generally on less literary and far more lurid errands there, looking to meet someone else wandering the streets; or, failing that, joining the often writhing mass of anonymous strangers who would risk the broken floors of the unlit, abandoned piers, to have group sex in what remained of their upstairs offices. Some people returned there nightly and some became so fond of these piers, they would go out during warm summer afternoons as well, find a spot to sunbathe upon a bath towel at the farthest edge, and there languidly wave to the surprised out-of-town tourists on the Circle Line tour boats.

Five

Almost always at Rizzoli, there were people who looked familiar and who sometimes—especially if they were women—swanned around the shop for an hour at a time at night from one section to another, apparently awaiting recognition.

Not from me. I was celebrity-challenged to the max; I’d been known to shove away a woman trying to snatch a taxicab right out from under me—only to be told by my embarrassed co-passenger once we were moving along that I’d all but mugged Angela Lansbury, who had probably been late getting to her current Broadway show. Chastened, I learned to go over to Antonio Ximénez or someone else on staff and ask, “Now who is that person, anyway?”

The one celebrity whom I did know instantly and who spent all of five minutes in the shop one night was Maria Callas. That was thanks to Ondine, a Warhol “superstar” and pal who used to shoot up speed in my apartment and then play the Greek diva’s records and chat. Callas was wearing some sort of embroidered, pale-pink, (probably Balmain) skirt, with a black lace top, tiny matching jacket, and a black pillbox hat pinned to one side of her head. Her shoes were jet-black heels. Her purse was a minuscule glittery clutch. Her black hair was pulled back in a bun low on her nape. She suddenly appeared in the center of the shop as though she had been dropped through the ceiling for a Richard Avedon fashion shoot. She looked around, searching for someone, every gesture, every one of the varied looks that played over her large, mobile facial features belonging to an obvious actor. I was about to go ask if I could help her, when she finally spotted her date up on the record balcony. She smiled, nervously relieved, and she gave the most hesitant little wave, then rushed forward past me to meet him: Violetta come to life.

Most of the celebrities who shopped at Rizzoli that I spoke with were easy-going, intelligent, and pleasant. But a few turned out to be annoying. And a very few turned out to be weird and nasty: dancer/choreographer Jerome Robbins, for example. Robbins used to come in late at night, and he developed an unhealthy interest in the young horn player at the 56th Street back cashier’s desk who claimed to know music and German language books.

Robbins sought out Marty whenever he arrived and waved off help from anyone but Marty. They had long conversations deep in the bowels of the shop, much as Perelman and I did, but with these crucial two differences: 1. Marty—a younger (aged twenty-four?), dumpy, light-haired man with glasses, drab blue eyes, and no special attractions that I could figure out, even in my horniest moments—always ended up flushed when those talks were over, and had to excuse himself to take a coffee break afterward, i.e., Robbins made him really uncomfortable. And 2. Robbins never bought a book in the shop—at least none that I ever saw.

I’m not sure who or what tipped Robbins off to the reality that Marty was not only dating, but actually living with the other—blonde—night cashier on the Fifth Avenue entrance—Elaine. There might have been an incident that no one thought to mention when I was down in the stockroom or out at dinner in which Robbins realized he was making an utter fool of himself.

All I knew was that suddenly one night, Jerome Robbins was in front of me, shaking in fury, sputtering about the gross ineptitude, bad attitude, and extreme rudeness of Elaine, the cashier. Elaine? Bad attitude? I didn’t even know she had an attitude, never mind one so bad: I’d certainly never caught a glimpse of anything even resembling an attitude. “I want her fired!” Robbins was almost apoplectic.

When I got to the front of the shop, Elaine was weeping, Marty was comforting her, and Robbins was shouting, “Get rid of her. Get rid of her now!”

I, of course, could do no such thing, but I went downstairs and grabbed Antonio, whom I annoyed out of a dinner-break nap. A few minutes later I heard shouting at the end of the store, and my name shouted out. I ran, and simultaneously, John Brancati leaped down three stairs at a time from the record department and we rushed forward to find the following scene: Robbins and Antonio in what looked like death-grip mortal combat at the front door, with Elaine and Marty cowering. The couple ran past us toward the center of the shop and I shouted at them “Call 911!” It took three men bigger than himself to calm Robbins down and to get him out of Rizzoli before the police actually did arrive.

After the Law had come and gone, Antonio placed himself at that cashier’s desk with his arms folded and heroically announced to all of us gathered around our leader: “If that Jerome person ever comes in again, call the police. I have forbidden him entrance!”

To me, privately, later that night, Antonio, himself a gay man, confided, “Who would ever think that mad queen would lose herself in amore so much—over what? A little no one! Piff!”

Marty soon left the shop and Elaine was moved to the magazines cashier post and I never saw or heard of Robbins in the shop again.

So yes, for the most part, the staff had to become pretty much inured to the increasing high wattage and concomitant demands of our customers, if only to get through any night’s work. And if that’s what that guy had meant by calling us snobby … so be it.

Still, there was one person who always managed to excite both customers and the “snobby” Rizzoli staff. The first time I became aware of this, I was on the balcony desk overlooking where the two branches of the L-shaped floor plan converged. I heard what sounded like a low wave of sound, a sort of D-flat susurration, resembling the deepest tones of the wind, approaching the center of the store from the 56th Street entrance. I stood up to see what was making that odd noise. Below me I saw nothing but a woman dressed in a patterned-green kerchief with big brogues on, galumphing toward the Fifth Avenue exit, turning only once to glance at a piece of art hung on the wall.

I noticed Ruth Oesch also peering over her balcony at the woman, which was so unusual that I went over to her. Celebrity-oblivious, I had to ask once again, “So who was that person, anyway?”

“She comes twice a month on a Wednesday afternoon at four to six o’clock and she always buys ten European fashion magazines,” Ruth reported, as starry-eyed as I’d ever seen her. “And she always dresses in green. Head to toe!”

At which point I realized that what I’d been hearing from below had been people whispering to themselves and to each other, in true astonishment at the sight: “Garbo! … Garbo! … Garbo!”

Naturally, I hadn’t even known Greta Garbo was still alive, never mind living in Manhattan.

***

Although I’d worked in bookstores before, I’d never learned poise or, really, sophistication, until I went to work for Rizzoli. The job demanded I learn it or end up out on the street. Partly, of course, this was due to the customers. When you’re dealing with celebrity-artists like Elton John, say, who at the time had just bought an empty château in the South of France and said he wanted to buy the entire store’s stock to help fill it (and who could easily do so) it’s not the easiest thing in the world saying, “Okay, let’s try to do this in an organized way. You say you have nothing and you need everything. Let’s figure out what ‘everything’ entails.” Even when that only consists of a mere ten or twenty grand spent that night.

Foolish of me? Not at all, since when the art gallery opened, Elton John returned and bought an entire Dalí-illustrated Don Quixote, several paintings, and an entire living room furniture set designed by and upholstered with fabrics made by the French artist Dubuffet. He didn’t even flinch at the price of all that, knowing by then, after all, that we were, in his own words (as I overheard on the phone to someone), “taking care of him right,” i.e., not selling him any old stuff for the sake of a sale, but rather cultivating his custom.

Then of course there was the business of dealing with people from all over the world, of differing ethnic, national, racial, and religious backgrounds, on a daily basis. This required a kind of tact that I had no clue I possessed and that I partly learned from watching Ursula and Antonio. She could be very patient and extremely politic—until she reached a certain point at which she became utterly immovable. Antonio was even more flexible, until he reached his point after which he became volcanic—spewing and sputtering.

To me it was all a big game, so unless someone was being harmed, I didn’t really care what else went down. I didn’t even get upset about thieves trying to sneak out with thirty-dollar art or photo books evident under their jackets, although I did have them stopped before they got out the door and it became a police matter. That would have been a paperwork nuisance. My managerial theory was: get along with everyone, and they will with you. Easy to do, right?

Well, not exactly. As I mentioned, under Mr. M.’s ambitious plan for dominating the Rizzoli universe, the staff altered, at times significantly. Few people set in their little fiefdoms of power when I first arrived were still at the shop when I left for the first or second or third time. A few left due to the natural turnover of a fairly low-paying job, but others disappeared for more complex reasons, not all of which I was privy to—nor, frankly, that interested in knowing.

The fastest turnover occurred in the beleaguered language sections. The Colombos, Mme Neff, etc., all slid away. Stella came and went. Boris’s Russian-book stint ended and a tall, fair, somewhat limp fellow named Adrian took over. How or why, I never discovered.

During the years I worked there, the staff was about 50 percent American born and 50 percent foreign born. But that doesn’t really explain the complexity, because there were employees like Barbara, who were American born, but to career-diplomat parents. She looked and acted and spoke like a girl from a nicer section of Brooklyn. But she had done her first eight years of schooling in a French-language convent school in Kathmandu, Nepal, and the rest all around Italy, because those were the places where her father was stationed. Barbara spoke English, French, a dialect of Chinese, Nepalese, and Italian, all fairly fluently. And while we palled around a bit at the shop, I never knew anything about her personal life at all. In truth, I was pretty surprised to come in one evening and find her gone, replaced by Alex Mehdevi. Seems she’d gotten married! Who knew she was engaged? Not I.

Viki Roth was more typical. Like Dennis, she had studied music before she came to work for Rizzoli’s music department. She only worked two years before she got pregnant and left the shop. Afterward, she performed as part of a piano duo doing recitals and concerts all over the country, and then she was a music teacher. She also moonlighted in music management. She recently confided in me that she believes she got the Rizzoli job because she had studied under pianist Ursula Oppens, who had been Mr. M’s wife’s own teacher! She also said that Ruth Oesch, head of the record department, provided her with “as good a graduate program in music as any available,” an education that Ruth provided for several of us.

Ruth Oesch was another one of these women working at Rizzoli who might almost have been a character out of a Henry James novel. I already loved music by then, and I would buy records at my discount whenever I could afford to do so. So I would go up to her balcony on breaks and at slow times, and we would discuss music, performers, and recordings in some depth. In this way, we became good friends. Or rather good enough that she soon knew a great deal about me and I knew a very little about her.

What I did know was that she was of Swiss background but had grown up in Santa Barbara, California. She went to school there, and her musical talent and interests were fed by the then-still-new Music School of the West in Montecito, which has since become one of the premier summer classical music venues in the country, currently under the leadership of famous mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne.

Ruth had gone to Los Angeles briefly to make music, but she and that city had not taken kindly to each other for some reason, and whenever we spoke and the subject came up, she always told me what a cultural wasteland it was. This despite the fact that during the 1950s and 1960s, such giants of music as Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Igor Stravinsky, Artur Rubinstein, Gregor Piatigorsky, Leopold Stokowski, and Jascha Heifetz all lived and made music in Los Angeles.

Because of her interests and musical talent, Ruth ended up in Germany, where she became part of the Munich Bach Choir under Karl Richter, which at that time was performing and then recording all of Johann Sebastian Bach’s choral and vocal music through Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft’s Archive Series.

That period had been the height of Ruth’s musical career. I never did discover how or why she’d left Germany. One night at dinner once we’d gotten to know one another better and when she was a little cheery from too much wine, something slipped out that suggested to me that perhaps she and the older (and married) conductor may have become non-professional, and that it couldn’t last. But I may have been misreading that.

There was one result of her long stay in Europe: Ruth spoke German like a native and English like a German who’d learned it in England. She left the bookstore several years after I did myself and returned to Germany, again to Munich, where she still had a circle of friends. She worked for years in a large record shop there and recently published an important book about the sources of music in primitive man.

Only in recent years did I find out that while at Rizzoli, Ruth had been befriended by the iconic twentieth-century composer Igor Stravinsky, his wife Vera, and their friend, the writer-conductor Robert Craft. They were so impressed by Ruth’s depth of knowledge about the composer’s work that they commissioned her to write much of the liner notes on the back of the twenty or so Stravinsky LPs that Columbia Records produced in that era—records still considered the authorized recordings of Stravinsky’s work. She also told me that she ghostwrote most of Robert Craft’s book on Stravinsky’s work.

Besides the “Americans” like Viki Roth, John Brancati, Carolyn and Jack Markowitz, Dennis Sanders, and myself, there were these and other “European-Americans” who worked at various levels and areas of Rizzoli New York, as well as many customers like them, who all required a special kind of “handling,” i.e., sensitivity.

Then there were the foreign born. I’ve mentioned several of them, but let’s take as an example Alex Mehdevi, whom I knew for less than a year but who ended up having a major impact on my life.

Alex’s first language was the Majorcan dialect of Spanish, as he was born on that Balearic Island. But he also spoke French, German, and English, the last with a velvety baritone voice reminiscent at times of the singer Mel Tormé. When he joined Rizzoli, Alex was about to publish his first book, Majorcan Tales for children, which would be followed by More Majorcan Tales, two charming volumes I have no problem recommending. As there were only a few writers at the shop, those few of us tended to take our breaks together and, of course, to share our complaints and our woes.

Alex had his book published through a new young female agent at an older, established, small agency. He’d met her through his younger brother, Rafael, also living in New York City, who’d dated her. Alex had nothing but great things to say about her, and since Alex was straight, he also mentioned how attractive she was. Unlike his brother, Alex was not French-film-star gorgeous. He was stoop-shouldered, with not-great skin, and he was both shy and modest, sometimes hangdog and sometimes tongue-tied around the more spectacularly good-looking females that came into the store looking for fashion magazines, or who would stop into his section asking for a gift for a child.

Week after week, Alex insisted I give his agent my novel to read. This was my first novel, recall, the masterpiece that no one recognized as such—taken on by the Candida Donadio agency and never sold and never published.

I waffled, as who wouldn’t. I’d been burned once already, and to be truthful, although I continued writing, I wasn’t all that confident that the time was right for my brand of literary brilliance (I’m still unsure). Finally, Alex said that he’d spoken to Jane about me and she was interested. If I brought in my novel, he would read a few chapters and if he, after all a published author, thought it was okay, he would pass it on to her. He promised to be a stringent critic.

Finally, I resuscitated the two-and-a-half-year-old book, found a manuscript copy in not-that-horrible condition, looked it over a little, changed this, altered that, and at last gave it to Alex.

Then I promptly forgot about it, partly because I expected nothing to happen and also because it was such an “old” manuscript. And I was writing great new stuff.

***

When I wasn’t at Rizzoli, I continued writing and living what I now recognize as one of the freest and at times loneliest periods of my life, especially outside work.

North of where I lived, around 14th Street, in the old meat packing district, a new place named the Zodiac—up a long flight of stairs and with a roof top terrace and the first publicly shown gay porn movies I’d ever seen—opened and then closed after a year. It reopened on two floors without the rooftop level as The Mine Shaft. It became one of the most infamous places in Manhattan; a place to which I seldom went unless curious out-of-towners insisted I escort them there. These were many, however, and as the decades slogged on and I became well known, they included (done up in dead-cow, head to foot) the trendy postmodern philosophe Michel Foucault.

A few blocks north of that, in a motel at the very edge of the city, was a building that looked like it belonged in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and I believe was much utilized by Manhattan office workers for their daytime trysts. On a lower floor, another club opened, the “Twinkie” dance palace, the Anvil. This venue later on caught on with the bridge-and-tunnel traffic and developed as entertainment boys who would dance right on the bar and on tiny stages. Later it got a lot more glittery and a lot more publicly lewd, somehow attracting uptown jet-setters (including society women) who watched gay men dance, strip, and even have sex on stage.

That area is now the home to multimillion-dollar celebrity lofts surrounded by Armani and Barney’s boutiques and two-hundred-dollar tasting-menu restaurants. But in those days it was the very last place in the city you wanted to be seen. Unless, that is, you were an unattractive, halfway-there transvestite hooker—or a bridge-and-tunnel Guido looking for “exotic head.”

I called it “Beat Me Fuck Me Country.” And I also called it home.

Only a few blocks from me and from the Anvil and Mine Shaft, beneath what was left of the elevated West Side highway, dozens of empty meat and produce trucks parked overnight. Poor gays and their furtive, usually suburban-dad admirers would have sex inside the trucks. And, as the day follows the night, the NYPD used to raid them. I recall hanging around one night and seeing a cop car way up the road. I yelled a warning. Within, I heard someone holler, “Run, Mary!” And someone else respond, “No names! Please!”

Once the police no longer cruised by, gangs of teens from the projects above 14th Street would swoop down to beat up queers, which was an unsafe precedent for everyone in the area. Some of us neighbors ended up forming ad hoc vigilante protection squads. A very tall, African-American Tranny named Marsha Johnson and I usually took the Thursday night midnight-to-three-a.m. trucks shift. Marsha kept three sharpened-to-stiletto-point Afro combs in her big “do” and I had steak knives hidden in each cowboy boot. One time we trounced four kids so badly, I was running and literally, repeatedly kicking one in the ass, as I chased them back across 14th Street traffic, screaming and waving my shivs at them. When I got back to the trucks, Marsha announced, “Chile, I ain’t never having sex with you!” Adding, “Either you got too much testosterone, or you just plain pissed off!”

A few blocks further north, in the Twenties along West Street, were the two grown-up leather bars, the Eagle’s Nest and Spike. Soon, a very well attended sex club called the Glory Hole opened nearby, and briefly a bathhouse too.

Along that Village through Chelsea stretch of West Street, several other famous and infamous bars and discos opened and closed in the ‘Seventies. Among the latter were dance clubs that I used to go to regularly: Mel Cheren and Mike Brody’s Paradise Garage at King Street was an actual, two-level parking garage during the week. And Twelve West—located at Twelfth and West Streets, as its name implied—had been a lamp factory. And then there was for a few years a fun, mostly gay roller disco at 16th Street off West, and another place in a converted warehouse around the corner from it with a big, half moon concrete bar atop which one cute, short-shorts dressed, hetero bartender/waiter/actor would dance solo at 3 a.m. promptly every Saturday night. He later hit it big with a starring role on a TV show called Moonlighting, before becoming a man’s man action hero in the movies.

And then there was that anything-goes place, The Strap, set amid a bunch of Jazz Clubs at 18th and Tenth Avenue, where I lost my clothing in the darkened back room and had to nakedly beg a flashlight from the amused barkeep, only to find it all neatly folded and hung on a nail.

The only taste at night I ever got of the lifestyle that actually surrounded me every day at Rizzoli took place even farther north, at 27th Street and West Street. Up a braided, uniform-manned elevator to the top floor flourished one of the most unique seventies clubs of all—and one of New York’s best-kept secrets. Allegedly financed, opened, and hosted by one of Europe’s most famous madames, the glitzy, very private, members-only, two-star restaurant, bar, and dance space was named Les Mouches, or The Flies. Was it in honor of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play? Or was it a reference to “the flies around rotting meat,” i.e., decadence personified?

I can’t recall how I got into the place the first time—at its official opening yet—probably an invitation or membership card was slipped into my denim pocket while I was otherwise preoccupied. At first, I thought it would be far too high-end for the likes of me. But the first time I tried to pay for a drink at Les Mouches, I found that it was either complimentary or someone else at the squared-central, horseshoe bar had paid for it. In fact, I don’t think I ever paid to get in, to get a drink, or even to get a late-night snack there. One night, an older man in a good suit with a strong, unidentifiable accent (Bulgarian? Serb?) and a shock of silver hair, told me and my very attractive friend Don Eike that we were “wonderful for the club’s atmosphere.” Maybe he paid? Or maybe he was the manager and he ordered us to be comp’ed whenever we showed up?

The clientele—aside from a dozen or so all-American boys like us—was mixed gender, bisexual, affluent, and distinctly Eurotrash. Were some of them customers at the shop? It was probable. But more than once after dancing under that lighting system designed to resemble a giant housefly, Don and I would take a time-out and crash on the big pillowed sofas. There, dressed only in denims and sneakers, shirtless with our Tees strung through our belt loops, we invariably met and were wooed by a brace of tuxedoed young oil sheiks with bedroom eyes and Oxbridge accents just in from Riyadh, Teheran, or Abu Dhabi for the weekend. They always came in pairs and were always named Ali, Akmed, or Dariush, and they were fascinated by America (and, apparently, by its young men). They invariably took us back in separate limos to their penthouses at the Waldorf Towers for a “nightcap.” And, as I would leave at dawn, the older male person who saw me out of the suite (the bodyguard? the major domo?) would invariably slip a hundred dollar bill into my hand, whispering that it was “cab fare home.” Home to Chicago by jet in those days, perhaps (and four-fifths of my monthly rent)—not down to Jane Street in the Village via a Checkers cab!

But maybe those frequent, often quite wild dates with foreign men and the subsequent “tip” explained why we guys were comp’d into Les Mouches: we were good for repeat business.

Watercolor of Felice Picano by Don Bachardy, June 4, 1988.

The West Village Piers in their picturesque state of collapse: used by gay men in the ’70s for sex.

Scott Facon, friend and some time boy friend of Felice Picano in the late ’70s at the Piers.

Felice Picano in 1974 on the roof of the Ansonia Hotel. Photograph by David Watt.

Postcard with a painting of the Jewel Theatre, a 1970s gay venue, by the late Patrick Angus. Courtesy Felice Picano.

Six

Shall we compare my night life to what my daytime life had become?

The scene is early spring and I’d been at Rizzoli maybe a year and a half when the new girl stood nervously at the foot of the final short flight of stairs up to the narrow balcony from where, at my desk, I could overlook the entire shop. Antonio only came up here to have dinner and read magazines. But I used it almost daily to order books from catalogues that Mr. M. left for me. Often, I was at work an hour earlier than the night manager anyway, in order to do the book ordering and hand it to Mr. M. before he left for the day.

“Yessssss!” I hissed, giving her one final chance to retreat behind the little separating chain before I struck with forked and poisoned tongue.

She told me that she knew I was working and didn’t want to be disturbed (no kidding!), but there was a customer and she was very insistent upon seeing someone, she wasn’t sure of the name, but the staff on the floor all thought it had to be me because it was someone expert in books on photography, and that could only be Carolyn or myself.

I resigned myself to leaving my catalogues. It might be a big sale. These happened infrequently but weren’t to be missed. Like that nice enough silver-haired man with a dramatically-roped-steer belt buckle who’d ambled in after dinner nearby at eleven fifteen p.m. a few weeks before and said he was furnishing the library in a new ranch house he’d built in Idaho, and he could use some art books. Okay, I’d asked, on what artists? He didn’t really know but he wanted “let’s say a half dozen from all the important periods, so I’ve got it all covered.” I’d stared at him thinking, ”Whaaat?” and then gone around the store’s lower, art book shelves, removing books. As I did, I’d explain, “Leonardo of course, Titian and Bernini” and he nodded, or “A great new book on the Post-Impressionists, but you’ll also need one on Cézanne and one on Van Gogh, of course.” I’d left them spread out all over the flat-out, book cover up tables. For him to look over, which he did in the most cursory fashion. When I was done, there were seventy-two volumes scattered about the store. He’d said, “I guess you can send these all up to my suite at the Plaza tomorrow! What’s the damage?”

Carolyn had phoned the next day, before I was anywhere near awake, to find out who had stripped her art shelves overnight. When I’d come in that evening, Mr. M. merely nodded and said, “A few more sales like that, Meester Picano, would be nice.” Sure, like a $4000 book sale to one customer was going to happen every night.

No such luck this evening, however. The woman who faced me was quite short, stout, stocky really, not young but vibrant, dressed in a camel-hair Chesterfield coat with solid-looking shoes. She also had striking red hair and a familiar face. There was solidity and yet also a barely restrained energy to her that I’ve only seen on one other person, someone her age when I met him: the actor Mickey Rooney.

“Are you the fellow who helped my daughter-in-law?” she asked.

I asked who her daughter-in-law was.

“Jacqueline Onassis. She said you knew all about photos and you could help me.”

This was startling. The daytime staff looked on, staring at me with a combination of envy, awe, and respect. Actually, what Rose Kennedy was referring to had been one of the most humiliating moments in my life—about equal in sheer embarrassment to my being eighty-sixed from the Eagle’s Nest bar a week before for allegedly starting a fistfight.

This is what happened with Jackie. Several months earlier, I was upstairs on the balcony in the north rear of Rizzoli, where I was leafing through a dozen publisher catalogues, when I became aware that there was no one else on the floor. Nor could I see anyone working in the record department, the other, wider balcony that jutted out closer to the Fifth Avenue entrance. I’d been assistant night manager long enough to have already developed a sixth sense, combined with a familiarity of the usual sounds of commerce below. This afternoon everything sounded a little off. I tried peering down to see any clerk: I could see no one at all in the shop, in itself rather odd in mid-afternoon.

Then I did see a customer wandering about below and somewhat opposite my balcony: a small woman in a pale-pink raincoat and rain hat. Where were the bookstore clerks? None showed up as I peered down, and so I at last dropped down the stairs to where she was looking around.

“Can I help you?” I asked, hoping to find someone else to fob her off on. Not a single other person in the store, except if I moved back a bit I could make out the hands of a cashier at the Fifth Avenue door turning the pages of a book. I subtly backed up so I could make out the shorter leg of the L of the store. Again no clerks, only the cashier at the magazines exit at 55th Street. Where was everyone?

The customer began speaking about a recently published book she had heard about that analyzed photographs of people, mostly people in groups, and then attempted to use those photos to understand family and group psychology.

I’d been promoted partly on the basis of reading all of the book reviews and knowing what books were reviewed, and then ordering them. So I walked us over to the photo section, where the book was cover-up in a small pile.

“What have you heard of the book?” she asked. Despite the covering rain hat—it had been pouring on and off all day—I could tell she had a small pretty face, dark eyes, and dark hair. But the raincoat was kind of ratty.

“Only the reviews.”

Well, she’d not read those. So I opened the book and began explaining what the New York Times reviewer had said. In true salesman fashion, I then handed her the book for her to look through herself.

“I’m a photographer,” she said. “Or I used to be one. Journalistic photography. But that was a while back, and in those days editors didn’t really let women photograph that much news, so I was relegated to society pages and cultural figures. Then I worked for a big magazine. That was a little better.”

I suggested that times had changed sufficiently—it was 1973—and that she might want to try her hand at newspapers again. Of course, they wouldn’t send her to Southeast Asia to cover the war, but I believed she’d get more than debutante balls to shoot.

“I’m in another field now. Book publishing,” she said.

I was still partly looking for someone else to come and help her, and yet also interested by how quickly the conversation had deepened and how one subject moved to another. She followed my rapid shifts, and I hers, easily. I began opening some of the larger photo books we had on display, and we began talking about how certain photographers had almost immediately, almost at the birth of the science, seen its artistic value—Imogen Cunningham, Lewis Dodgson—and how they’d been rapidly followed by masters like Adams and Steichen.

Finally, two book clerks came into the shop from a door that I knew led downstairs to the little employee break area. They looked startled, as though expecting others to be working. Seeing me with a customer, they quickly separated, and began doing something, anything, to not look too conspicuous. I figured they’d seen clerks on the floor and had taken a break without checking the schedule first.

By that time I was pretty much immersed in conversation with this woman and we went on talking and opening various books to illustrate various points and to check up on our memories of certain photos. We passed a good fifteen or twenty minutes chatting and I was happy to have found a knowledgeable, curious, kindred spirit, and so I was in too good a mood to chew out the clerks—which I never liked doing anyway.

She picked up a copy of the book she’d come into the shop for and we shook hands.

“You can bring that to either cashier,” I said.

“I have an account here,” she replied.

I walked us the few steps over to the middle of the shop where a little Rolodex file kept the names of the Rizzoli charge customers. We faced each other over it as I spun it. I kept waiting for her to say something. Finally:

“Your name is?” I asked.

All I heard back was a lot of low-voiced “esses.”

“Excuse me? Again please?”

And this time I did actually hear “Mrs. Onassis.”

Now, in 1973 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was hands-down the most famous person in the world. She was more famous than the Pope, the US president, and all movie stars and rock stars put together. There were entire magazines devoted to her. She had her own paparazzo, Ron Galella, who made a good living photographing no one but Jackie. She was the first person I knew of to become a transcendent icon.

Add to this that she had said she’d been a photographer and was now a book editor. And just in case I missed it, the photo on the cover of the book she’d been looking for and that we had held between us speaking at length was of the entire Kennedy clan circa 1952.

I don’t think a red exists on the standard color wheel for the shade that I turned. But ever-poised—“You are a Rizzoli employee, after all!” I remembered Ursula berating a clerk who had lost her poise—I caught myself and said, “Oh! Your daughter comes in here all the time. She’s usually up in the records department.”

“I hope she isn’t a pest.”

“No, Miss Oesch wouldn’t allow that.”

We said a few more words that I don’t recall. I wrapped her book and bagged it and she left, no longer a smart little woman in dowdy rain gear but—Jackie O!

And that was that. Later on, of course, she would ask for me whenever she came into the shop, and we got to know each other in that sometimes-intimate-sometimes-not way I found so congenial. So when she heard about the art gallery opening and that Erté would be our first artist to show, she asked me if she might be invited to the vernissage. That turned out to be perfect, as she eventually became one of the opening party’s hosts.

And so, back to Rose Kennedy in front of me.

“Now here’s the problem,” and she opened a huge flat leather purse, maybe three feet by two feet, and hauled out something wrapped thickly in a large moiré silk kerchief. “My editor at Doubleday Books up the street is this young girl, and to be frank with you, I don’t much trust her taste. They’re doing my memoir there and she asked me for a batch of photographs to put in the middle of the book, you know how they do that? She asked for photos that no one had ever seen. Well, I’ve got a barn full of those. So I went around the houses, especially at the shore, looking for stuff hidden away in bureaus and credenzas and such, and I found maybe a hundred or so, mostly Kodaks and snapshots taken with old Brownies. You probably don’t recall those as they were before your time. Anyway, I was hoping you would help me go through them and select some, because, like I said, I don’t for a second trust this editor’s choices at all, and my daughter-in-law said you were just wonderfully intelligent about photos.”

It all came out in a rush like that, and in seconds, Rose had the kerchief open. The table of foreign novels translated into English was now totally obscured, covered with Kennedy family photos, some Rose said had never been seen outside of the family.

I asked if she didn’t want to move upstairs to my desk and sit down and be more comfortable, but no, she insisted on doing it right there.

The rest of the staff backed away and I noticed how they subtly guided other customers away from us.

I asked, “How many does your editor want?”

“They’ll print maybe ten or twelve. But I thought we’d choose about twenty or so we liked best,” Rose said.

I suggested we aim for twenty-five, and we’d put them into three piles: “The first will be your favorites. Then your second favorites. And so on.”

“I like your method already,” Rose said.

Then we went over the photos, each with some little comment from her: “That’s Eunice organizing all of the boys and all of her beaux into teams for lawn football. She wasn’t happy unless she had at least two suitors. It’s a wonder she didn’t run for senator or something. She was always the most ambitious of the kids.” And: “Here’s Teddy at nine. Cute huh? Hated girls. Absolutely hated them, at that age. I wish to blazes he hadn’t changed.” And: “See how skinny Jack was. Ate like a horse. All of the kids did. When we were in London at the embassy, their father would fly food in special from the Continent and have it delivered to the back door so no one there could know exactly how much we all ate. Had some fellows from the Air Force fly in things from Boston that we couldn’t get, like real hot dogs and buns, all stashed away in diplomatic pouches so no one would know.”

And on and on like that for close to an hour.

Rose was so down-to-earth and so utterly candid that I felt I’d known her forever. We became so chatty that I was soon asking questions about the people in the photos. “Is that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.? Oh, I see. … How long did Bobby let his hair grow? Oh, only between terms in college. … That child doesn’t even look like a Kennedy. Oh, she’s not!”

But we worked too, and soon we had three stacks of photos. I went up to my desk on the balcony to get three manila envelopes for her to put them in.

Rose was peering from behind one of the shop’s fat, square, wood-paneled columns when I returned and scooped up the photos into the appropriately marked envelopes.

“Tell me,” she said, in a whisper. “Is that Mrs. Rockefeller?”

It was indeed Mrs. John D. Rockefeller the Third, i.e., Blanchette Rockefeller (she also had a charge account) who came into the store on a fairly regular basis, probably because it was right next door to Harry Winston, the jewelers. If I remember correctly, she also had a favorite subjects: 18th Century porcelain? Jugendstil artifacts?

I said yes, it was her.

“Would you mind terribly introducing us?” Rose said. “We met once but I’m sure she doesn’t remember me.”

How anyone could not remember Rose Kennedy after even a single meeting was beyond me, and I said so. But she remained nervous, so I went up to where Mrs. Rockefeller was standing alone awaiting a book, and mentioned that Rose Kennedy was in the shop. Rose bustled up behind me and they shook hands and very tall, very elegant, very soigné Blanchette Rockefeller, bent way, way down to shake hands with short, square little Rose Kennedy.

They were still chatting a few minutes later, and I went over and said, “The gallery upstairs has comfortable chairs and a coffee table. We’ll bring your book up there when it arrives. I even smell coffee being brewed.”

I led them up and Ada Calabrese indeed had coffee freshly made and Italian cookies out, and she later told me that two women remained up there for at least another half hour.

A few months later I received a card and a copy of Rose’s autobiography when it was published, hand-delivered to me at the shop.

“Gosh!” a new clerk enthused, handing me the autographed book. “You must know everyone!”

“Stick around, kid. Stick around. You will too.”

What I hadn’t mentioned was that no sooner had I gotten the two women up into the gallery than I was called to the store’s internal phone. It was George, the stockroom manager: a huge grocery order for the restaurant next door on 56th Street had arrived and was blocking his service entrance.

George and I spent the next fifteen minutes out on the street arguing with the women who owned La Boîte Rouge. The spat was enlivened by sarcastic comments from passers-by and threats from a passing patrol car.

When I returned to the shop, Rose and Blanchette were gone.

Of course, several hours later, my totally schizoid life would have me in some very dimmed backroom of some barely named downtown club, having an orgasm with one or more people I’d never met before.

***

Meanwhile, I took on more work and worked even more hours at Rizzoli, complaining all the while about having to sacrifice precious writing time. Meanwhile, I was promoted. Meanwhile I became part of the managerial staff, recognized as such, and having to deal with employees from widely different cultural backgrounds.

I don’t merely mean Boris, who had been inculcated so very deeply with Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism all of his young life that he couldn’t open his mouth without criticizing the US or Americans. This infuriated some folks on staff, but not me. When I asked why he stayed in the US at all, I expected him to say: in order to learn the weaknesses of the enemy. Instead he said, “I love American women. Russian women are nowhere near as interesting. American girls drive me crazy. I can’t get enough of them.” That statement totally endeared me to Boris; what a nut!

Anyway, I was already radicalized and subversive. I agreed with half of what Boris said in his critiques, and worse! I was working at Rizzoli, and on the floor of the shop, an early August evening in 1974 when someone ran in yelling that he had seen on television that Richard Nixon had resigned the Presidency as a result of the Watergate break-in and scandal. I remember phoning a friend for proof, and then shouting “Yes!” over and over and literally leaping into the air over and over until the staff gathered around me to get the news.

Boris’s take on Nixon’s resignation was a classic: “In Russia, he wouldn’t have flown off to Cal-ee-forn-ya in his own plane. We would have been shipped overnight to Siberia in a sealed boxcar.”

To which I added, “If he were lucky!”

We guffawed over that.

But for every easy work relationship I found at Rizzoli, there were more that baffled me, especially as I found myself being shoved, rung by rung, up what passed there for a managerial ladder.

Our most exotic employees during this period were Selina and her brother Seyoum. They were Eritrean—tall, graceful, she beautiful, he handsome. All I ever knew of them was that they were both studying in the US. Selina spoke very little English, I never heard Seyoum speak at all. I did hear both speaking Italian pretty fluently with Antonio, and they must have known Amharic, their native language, a Semitic-family tongue. They were seldom in the shop itself but all around the building, so I seldom had to deal with them.

Unlike the siblings, Maria-Conchita was a short, good looking, Central American native studying in the U.S., with abundant flowing dark hair and a bubbly personality. She was one of two women who usually worked at the 56th Street cash register, which she told me she preferred, as it was busy a great deal and it closed a half hour before the Fifth Avenue one, so she could get home to wherever she lived in the suburbs before the trains were too few and far between.

I paid little attention to her, but I always said hello when I noticed her bustling in or out—she always seemed to be carrying department store shopping bags. For her part, she never said hello without blushing. I noticed that she blushed whenever any male employee spoke to her, and I assumed she’d grown up in a Latino male-dominated and partly sequestered situation, which in fact proved true.

She was so unnoticeable really, mostly by virtue of how capable she was at her job, that I was surprised when suddenly she was not at the back cashier’s desk. This coincided with Antonio being away in Europe and with myself in charge as night manager of the store, making it more noticeable.

It began with Maria-Conchita asking someone to cover her for a half hour at a time, then I noticed the other young woman at that cashier desk working on Maria-Conchita’s days, and she could only explain that Maria-Conchita had phoned and said she was unwell. Over the next two weeks this situation worsened to the point that when she was in, her register was closed for lack of attendance almost half the night while she was somewhere else. She also had to leave early. All this came to me indirectly. Maria-Conchita never told me a thing.

Finally, I’d had enough and asked her to come in early the next day and speak to me upstairs on the balcony. She didn’t show up at all that night. I made sure all the staff knew I was on the warpath looking for her. To my surprise, Carolyn came up to the balcony to speak to me about Maria-Conchita. She explained that Maria-Conchita had been experiencing a sudden, extremely heavy menstrual flow along with bad cramps.

This explained the situation. “Why didn’t she say something to me?” I asked.

“She couldn’t possibly talk to you about that. Not given her background.”

“Well, she’s got to.”

“Well, she won’t,” Carolyn made it clear.

I asked Carolyn if she knew of a gynecologist who spoke Spanish, because I was certain that would be the only way we’d get our employee medical help.

The next day, Maria-Conchita came in and I called her up to the balcony. She was red as a beet, fumbled, and was afraid to sit down across from the desk until I insisted.

Figuring that family was the only way to bridge this immense, sudden cultural divide I now faced, I said, “My sister had a medical condition just like yours. We found her the best medical help. Now she’s fine. Mrs. Markowitz has the name and address of a doctor uptown. Esta medica es Colombiana. Habla español, y está especialimente practicado en todos tipos de enfermedades de las mujeres. (She is Colombian and specializes in women’s illnesses.) I want you to go there tomorrow. Okay?”

“Su hermana?” Maria-Conchita asked.

“Yes,” I confirmed this lie about my sister’s health, which I hoped would in effect make me a sort of half brother to her myself. “Mi hermana. She’s fine now.”

Maria-Conchita was torn between rushing away out of sheer embarrassment, and kissing my hand for taking the trouble to be a brother to her.

She worked that entire night and came back two days later and was never absent again. Problem solved.

I thanked Carolyn for being a sensitive intermediary.

She shrugged it off.

***

All this personal and storewide activity directly coincided with, and oddly enough, ultimately benefited from a less personal, social, and political context—the very uncertain fate of New York City during this period about which we at the shop were made aware every day by television and newspaper reports.

In the late 1960s, Manhattan had taken on a new sheen and prominence in the nation as a sort of “Second Camelot” (the first “Camelot,” of course, had been John F. Kennedy’s violently abbreviated presidency). This was thanks to New York’s glamorous, young, Social Register mayor, John Lindsay, a tall, blond, photogenic Ivy League graduate, smart, well-spoken, and with a lifelong residency on the Upper East Side.

Some of the policies Lindsay brought to government included “beautifying” the city, encouraging the arts, and a very public new openness to higher profile industries like filmmaking, fashion, sports, and popular music. These were intended to replace the heavier, newly taxed, more polluting, manufacturing industries that had skedaddled over to more laissez faire New Jersey, producing spectacularly colored sunsets (all those toxins in the air!) for Manhattanites to “oooh” and “aah” over, and thankfully less often breathe in.

Thus it was no surprise to anyone that when the music sensation that was The Beatles came to America in 1964, their first stop was Kennedy Airport, and their first big concert was at the New York Mets’ new home, Shea Stadium, before they taxied over to Studio 54 (yes, the same one) to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show at Sunday night at 8 p.m. for a telecast beamed across the nation.

Running for a difficult third term, and embattled by the municipal unions controlled by the city’s solid old political machine, John Lindsay warned the populace in grim detail what would happen if his opponent Abe Beame beat him.

Lindsay lost anyway. Beame won. Most of what Lindsay fore-omened came to pass. By the early seventies, New York was just another Democratic Machine town again, quickly re-mired in the same old-time graft, corruption, and internalized crime that had ruled it since the glory days of Tammany Hall.

With one crucial difference: the middle-class tax base those career pols had long relied upon to stay quiet and pay up had by then mostly moved to Westchester and Connecticut, or east, filling up Long Island’s potato farms and duck marshes with housing developments and brand-new towns with old Indian names. For the remainder of the decade, New York—Manhattan in particular—faced not only a continual small-industry drain but a substantial population exodus. A new city government set-up meant the boroughs would be held hostage to the other, long ignored, long jealous boroughs. Staten Island and Queens and Brooklyn built fancy new bridges, tunnels, highways, parks, and other infrastructure.

In a perfect illustration of the exact opposite, Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway fell first into ruin, and then literally fell apart and down to the ground one early snowy Sunday morning at Perry Street in the West Village, making it unusable below 23rd Street.

Worse was to come. The supposed crown jewel of the Beame Administration—inherited from previous Democrat Robert Wagner, and on hold for eight years of Lindsay—was Robert Moses’s renewed attempt to ram an eight-lane double-decker highway directly through Lower Manhattan. This road would exist not to alleviate any of Manhattan’s traffic but so that Nassau and Suffolk County residents could visit their in-laws in Newark and Teaneck without setting foot in the city.

Like the earlier effort, this one failed miserably. It also exposed the city’s political abuses. Even the usually ass-kissing media like the Daily Mirror and the Daily News joined Dorothy Schiff, fearless publisher of the New York Post, in running front pages featuring city planning author Jane Jacobs with scores of little old ethnic grandmothers (our bubbes!) chained and willing to die under the cruel plows of wall-demolishing machines rather than endure the destruction of their centuries-old tenement homes. Photos and articles were accompanied by scathing anti-Beame editorials.

The corruption that came to light exploded into an media free-for-all bashing. Subpoenas and indictments rained like confetti upon City Hall and Municipal Building offices. Every day was a field day if you were a local journalist: every newspaper writer from William Buckley and Jimmy Breslin to baseball columnist Red Smith found a juicy scandal to milk—and eventually a book contract too.

Before long, essential services like patrol cars and even fire trucks became rare. The police could never forget that its officers had been left to fend for themselves at Sheridan Square during the Stonewall Riot, which had not long before flash-pointed the Gay Liberation movement. Especially since everyone present there already knew that the NYPD’s corruption had provoked the melee.

This period coincided with a chain of intense blizzard-like winters in Manhattan, lasting sometimes past Easter Sunday in April. I recall snow-and-ice banks in the Village sometimes seven feet high with hand-carved steps. But New York got better, not worse. Neighborhoods began to police themselves. Block associations sprang up like the indomitable acacia bushes that grow in every sidewalk crack. Nighttime neighborhood “watches” were formed. Crime dropped.

In the Village, once spring did arrive, every vacant lot seemed to sprout a community garden; the arts flourished: pocket theaters and coffeehouse-type cabarets opened. New kinds of ethnic restaurants (Szechuan, Hunan, Muslim, Cubano) opened and did good business. Bookshops, little boutiques, and chic antique stores flourished all over the Village and south Chelsea. Westbeth, Lindsay’s utopian art community housed in the gutted remains of the old RCA Westinghouse Labs on the Hudson River, opened art galleries, invited a synagogue inside, and produced its first small Halloween parade. Designed by artists to showcase creativity and amuse neighborhood children, it’s now a huge tourist attraction.

No surprise, then, that the next important New York City mayor to emerge, Ed Koch, lived in the Village and brought neighborhood-trained activists into his administration. They helped bring about New York’s eventual renaissance.

Before being reborn, the city still had to die—which it did spectacularly. The city went bankrupt and resorted to having to beg the federal government for the first bailout in American history. The request garnered a not totally unexpected Washington, D.C. response, reported in a now-classic Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

***

After work at Rizzoli, there were times I didn’t want to be in a bar or club, I just wanted to walk around the usually vacant, untrafficked, early morning streets and think or plot out a novel or story I was writing.

That’s when most of my real nighttime adventures happened.

I was coming home at around 4 a.m. from playing with various individuals and groups of nearly silent, twisting bodies in the darkened ruins of those long-closed wooden piers that still half dangled, partly demolished, over the Hudson River in those days. Exhausted, I still had enough sexual dissatisfaction (and energy) left in me to accost a good-looking younger guy I came upon on my way home. I was piqued by the fact that he was sitting on the lower steps of one of the line of Federal era townhouses that lined Jane Street between Greenwich and Washington Street. Odd, because of the lateness of the hour, and because he was looking around as though unsure where he was.

This proved to be true. As we got to talking, he asked and I told him he was in the Far West Village, a place he never knew existed before that night. He also asked if I lived around there. One block away I said, and pointed to my lighted doorway.

His next question was even odder: was there a costume party around here tonight?

Not that I knew of. Why? I asked back.

Because he’d been riding in a taxi downtown along West Street and he’d gotten into an argument with a friend and he’d had the cab stop and he’d gotten out saying he’d take a subway home to Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. But in walking along this street, he’d passed a man in an eighteenth-century costume, complete with what looked like a short chased-metal cane, an open waistcoat and vest, an unbuttoned, frilled shirt, and, most startling, a three-cornered hat. The man had been stumbling along, almost as though he were drunk, or, since he was holding his side, as though he was sick to his stomach.

“That was Alexander Hamilton!” I said, half joking. Then I asked, “What’s today?”

He told me it was July 11th. Well, the 12th by then.

“I’m pretty sure that was the day he died,” I said.

“Died!” the young man stood up.

“He and Aaron Burr dueled at Weehawken across the Hudson River in 1802. Hamilton was shot in the side and was ferried back here to his townhouse, where he died the next day. This area was a separate municipality from New York City in those days. New York only extended up to Canal Street and this area was the Village of Greenwich. Hamilton’s house is on that street.” I pointed. “It was in the middle of open property then. There’s a plaque on it.” Before he could comment, I went on. “I’ve heard old-timers in the area reporting that people have seen his ghost around here for decades.”

And now that I was speaking, the young man changed his mind: what he’d thought was a short metal cane might easily have been an old dueling pistol.

I suggested we go look and see if Hamilton’s ghost was still around. I could see no one on the next block, but some portions were overshadowed by trees. We walked Jane Street again, him half behind me and a lot less eager, and we easily found the house with the plaque on it, but no one else. Once we were standing there, he admitted that it was the same block, but he pointed out that he had seen Hamilton almost at the end of the block, as though coming from the Hudson River.

It was both thrilling and scary for my new pal: the hair was standing up on the back of his head. He made me feel it. So naturally, kind and considerate as I am, I took him home to my flat and made sure he would forget all about big bad Alexander Hamilton—at least for an hour or so.

***

I was recently e-mailing with Dennis Sander, my friend of my Rizzoli period, and he reminded me that no matter how little money we had in those years we lived pretty well, if you consider how much cultural and social life around us was free or very inexpensive, or just fell into our laps.

He’s right, of course. I was still hanging out on weekends with that group of friends I’d made in the mid-1960’s when I’d returned from Europe to live in the West Village—or at least those who hadn’t moved to Big Sur or San Francisco. I was saving up to visit that wild and woolly Pacific Coast crew, and would be able to do so only once I’d worked a while at Rizzoli, because of the time and expense involved.

But in Manhattan, there was summer-long Shakespeare in the Park that the Lindsay Administration had begun, still rolling forward with impresario Joe Papp at its head. Chris and Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, and Raúl Juliá, among others, all played there. In the summer, there were free concerts at Central Park too; I particularly remember the annual Fourth of July ones with the Boston Pops Orchestra (they would shoot off the cannon at the Belvedere Castle during the 1812 Overture), as well as a series of New York Philharmonic ones. Also, and massively well-attended, events in the meadows that would be renamed Strawberry Fields were put on by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s band, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, a concert version of the musical, Hair, and who could forget The Supremes concert after a rain storm, with thin little Diana Ross nearly blown off the stage? We would picnic on the grass for hours beforehand, eat, chat, and nap on blankets and be ready when the music began.

Because we knew so many actors and musicians our age, we were often comp’ed into previews of opening Broadway shows and even the premieres of shows that were looking for a big and enthusiastic, first night “house.” I had begun going out onto the Morton Street Pier not far from where Christopher Street met the Hudson—by day this time—and I hung out there with a high school friend, Jerry Blatt, who was now working for Sesame Street television shows as well as writing musicals and who later became Bette Midler’s manager and director. I recall one particular Off-Off-Broadway production supposedly for children, although arch enough for us, titled Thumbelina, which included my soon to be partner Robert Lowe and future opera star Frederica Von Stade, with Jerry Blatt as co-writer and director. I believe that one or both of Jake Gyllenhaal’s parents were somehow involved too; they worked with Jerry on PBS’s newer show, The Electric Company.

Other Off-Broadway plays like Your Own Thing—a hippie take-off of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well—starred both Sarandons and a young Barry Bostwick, and was directed by Christopher Cox, who was part of our seven-member gay writing group, The Violet Quill, a decade later. I first went there because a boyfriend of my pal George Sampson, the actor Tom Ligon, was also featured onstage. Then I discovered two other guys I slept with in the cast, and so I went twice more.

Free tickets to classical music recitals, concerts, and occasionally even to the opera and ballet also came our way at the shop. Whenever any of Mr. M. or his wife’s colleagues from Italy and Switzerland were in town performing, there was bound to be a contingent of us music-loving Rizzoli employees in the audience.

I’d become close with the painter Jay Weiss in the previous decade and we still hung out at times, although he lived way uptown and I way down: we would meet halfway on Sundays for brunch in Central Park.

Under the gorgeous stone stairs and around the nearby Bethesda Fountain that Frederick Law Olmsted had constructed was an outdoor café that for a few years in the early seventies became one of the chic outdoor summer places for the young and beautiful. Fashion stars like Iman and Penelope Tree would be doing a shoot while you were savoring cappuccino and eggs benedict. And after brunch, younger gay men gathered there for another few hours, since, while the café cleaned up, it also served drinks.

It was there that I’d met friends of Jay’s like David Watt who ended up photographing me, and his partner, the beautiful and unique Zeb Freedman, who in later years became a housemate and some time bedmate of mine. There too I met the attractive and talented Ray Yeates, who became the first famous deejay when The Tenth Floor opened (he was soon doing music for Halston and Armani’s Trunk-Shows in Milan and Paris). Also there were Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff, who were just opening their all-gay, photography-only, Robert Samuel Gallery on lower Broadway. Invariably I’d bump into playwrights Doric Wilson, William Hoffman, and Lanford Wilson, three stalwarts of the soon-to-be, new, gay theater. And if they were awake yet, I’d also come upon denizens of Andy Warhol’s Factory that I knew: Rotten Rita and The Wonton, and Ondine with handsome “Little Joe” Dallesandro in tow. The personal and professional connections that I made there in an hour of any summer weekend lasted me for decades, once I became a published author.

A few private dance clubs had opened in the late sixties. I remember a stylishly offbeat one named Sanctuary, which ran almost a year before it was shut down by the police. The setting was a deconsecrated Catholic church in the lower Forties, on Ninth Avenue. All the pews and most of the religious statuary had been removed, except a prominent crucifix left upside down on the central altar. The second floor choir galleries and organ loft had become lounges, bars, and places to peer down into the strobe-lighted throng below. Invariably, during the Saturday night party, a group of masked people garbed as clerics would enter, weave through the crowd to the nave, and conduct a quite theatrical “black mass” with writhing, semi-naked folks of various genders strewn about the altar. Evidently, someone without a sense of humor was offended and the place was closed down.

But the seventies private club, and possibly the entire Disco Era, really begins with The Tenth Floor. It and the clubs that followed was another key ingredient of this life we all lived: not free so much as inexpensive, and because they didn’t serve alcohol, all you paid was a small cover charge to enter and dance, sometimes until four in the morning, usually with your own group of friends.

The proliferation of these clubs was made possible by the relative penury of New York City in those years. The clubs took advantage of very cheap rents available for large, bare, warehouse-type spaces, and of a straitened police force that didn’t have time to investigate or bust them, since most of these clubs were technically illegal.

The Tenth Floor, like Flamingo, Twelve West, and the Paradise Garage, became crucial players in the nascent disco music explosion that soon covered the country and then the world. Located on the tenth floor of a nondescript building in the Flower District otherwise leased out to light manufacturing and garment sweat shops on its lower floors, this club consisted of one huge room with huge windows, and a smaller, entrance foyer, just off the industrial elevator that ferried you up and down. I don’t think its official membership was two hundred people (that’s how few out gay men there were in New York a few years after Stonewall), but most of them were friends or tricks of the three owner/managers and thus all between the age of twenty and thirty and “hot!”—and so it soon became the cynosure of Manhattan’s gay night life.

Within a year it was charging an annual membership fee. Its bigger parties—New Year’s, and the White Party (an institution that actually began its long and tortuous history right there at the Tenth Floor in 1971 as a first-day-of-summer party, when you could finally, according to Amy Vanderbilt, wear white) soon filled the place with over three hundred dazed and often dazzling souls. Nor did it hurt the place’s reputation that it was a great cruising spot, or that the gay-centric Everard Bathhouse (affectionately known as The Tubs) was only two blocks away. You could be in most any condition when you stopped dancing (and drugging), and you should still be able to make it to that venerable, hoary (and moldy) sex palace for R & R.

Once the Tenth Floor closed, it was succeeded by several discos, but Flamingo soon became the place of choice for gay men. That club began downtown at Duane Street in an even smaller space above the Duane Reade drugstore, within sight of City Hall, in what was at that time the city’s newly established radio and electronics district. While I was growing up, those many shops had congregated around Sixth Avenue from 48th Street (the jewelry district) up to Rockefeller Center (RCA radio, LP, and phonograph money, remember, built that complex—including the appropriately named Radio City Music Hall). However, during the Beame Administration, those many longtime smaller Radio City businesses were swept away in favor of various, hopefully high-tax-paying corporations. The three-story rows of buildings were uniformly condemned and then rapidly smashed to smithereens before anyone could look into its dubious legality. As a result, glass-fronted leviathans could soar fifty stories high, lining the street that Beame oddly renamed “Avenue of the Americas.” Was he expecting scads of Guatemalan and Haitian millionaires to relocate there?

When Flamingo moved uptown—to lower Broadway just south of Houston Street, into a space above a bank—it was five times its former size and openly solicited members at Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove. Within two years, it had become the place to be. When Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were opening Studio 54 a few years later in a large old Midtown studio where the Ed Sullivan Show had been televised for years, they purchased Flamingo’s membership list and sent us complimentary membership cards.

I recently came across my “Sundays at Studio” card. We would emerge out of taxi cabs at 54th Street around midnight, two or three slightly stoned gay guys clad in T-shirts, 501 Levis, and sneakers. We’d sail right past a large, glitzily dressed crowd of straight people lined up behind the movie-theater velvet ropes, trying to be selected to enter. We’d wave a greeting to Alec or Norm or whomever was at the door, slip inside, check in, and go directly up to the VIP Lounge, where we’d often stay (except for dancing) the rest of the night.

Being gay meant something in the seventies in Manhattan, no matter how much moola you had or didn’t have.

It meant you were strongly desired at almost every nighttime venue, from the International Stud to the Rainbow Room and at many places in between. It meant you were often let into those places for free, or at a sharp discount. It meant you got free drinks, or triple vodkas for the price of a single, from bartenders in the know, or themselves gay, including the almost entirely gay, silver-Speedo-clad bar and wait staff at Studio 54. (Did Ryan Phillipe know that when he starred in the awful film?) It meant you got invited to special screenings of potential gay interest. It meant that museums and art galleries and plays didn’t consider their vernissages or premieres a success unless gays comprised half “the door.”

Being gay meant that the way you dressed, the accessories you wore, the music you danced to, the art and movies and concerts you went to, would in three weeks be all over the U.S.—since you were the tastemaker par excellence. I recall coming across my three years older and relatively with-it brother, Bob, and his pop singer girlfriend at Max’s Kansas City one night. He was dressed identically to me, except that he had a red cowboy hanky draped out of the back left pocket of his button-jeans. “You realize, of course, that means that you are looking to get fist-fucked,” I explained the queer hanky-code to brother Bob, adding that in that crowd he was sure to find some takers. He immediately pulled it out and stuffed it into Nico’s purse. Later on, he told me he’d worn it because he’d seen it around certain parts of town and he thought it “looked fun and gay.” Yeah! Duh?

In fact, being gay in Manhattan in the seventies was so “hot” that it got to the point that when a band or star—even of the magnitude of Diana Ross in 1979—wanted to break out a new song or album, they would almost be required to put in a live appearance at a gay disco in Manhattan or at Fire Island and sing the song and then remain to dance and mix in with the gay male crowd for most of the rest of the night.

By being forerunners, by actively working to change things, by putting ourselves and our bodies on the line every day in a homophobic world, we felt that we had earned the right to party ’til we dropped. Today it seems that anyone can be gay: Tennessee shit-kickers right off the farm now protest anti-marriage laws and demand to be allowed to join pals in committing official mayhem in Asia, while partnered accountants with matching outfits tend to drooling toddlers in thousand-dollar molybdenum strollers—all thanks to Gay Liberation.

Seven

Word of my nascent sensitivity to others got around Rizzoli, because only a few weeks after the Maria-Conchita problem was solved, another reared its head. I was ordering books when Adrian, the new guy handling Russian and travel books, came up to the balcony and asked if he could “take me out for dinner and discuss a very personal issue.”

Now, if you’d asked me to describe Adrian, I would have to say he resembled a younger Oscar Wilde. Very tall, thinnish, with light-brown hair, a pleasant face dominated by soulfully large gray eyes. He dressed in suits and jackets and slacks and shoes that were unquestionably a niche above what most of the other male store employees wore—not ad-man chic perhaps, more British, even (dare I use the word? okay, I’ll use it) dandified, although without the obviousness or artistic flair of Dalí’s garb.

His demeanor was equally soft, sweet tempered, and easy going. I believe I used the word “limp” earlier in describing Adrian, and that will have to stand. He wasn’t ever quite femme. Neither, however, was he overcome by a surfeit of testosterone.

Meanwhile, at age twenty-eight to twenty-nine, I was about as openly gay as anyone in the bookshop. Not that I picked up customers or employees or anything stupid as that. But I sure did nothing at all to hide my life outside of work. If I came in hung-over or looking dissipated, it was because I’d in fact spent the night in a bath house, louche dive, drugging at a disco, at the open piers on the Hudson I’ve written of earlier.

I may have been finished with romance, but I had thrown myself totally into sex. And if I needed any visual evidence of that fact, evidence that would actually show what I looked like in the 1970s, it arrived when I was asked to provide a photo for the cover of my collection The New York Years in 2001. I hunted through old stuff and brought them my first-ever author photo, taken on the roof of the Ansonia Hotel by photographer David Watt at six a.m. after an all-nighter of sex and drugs. Lolling on his messy bed after we’d done it, I noticed David’s several cameras and remembered that I rather desperately needed an author photo.

The only camera David had loaded with film he told me was a 1933 Hasselblad, and I would have to stand still a full minute under its intense, ancient, glare. I wasn’t about to let him off the hook that easily. So I rousted him out of the sack anyway. He ended up using the old Hasselblad.

I’ve since mounted the original on a board: the photo is six inches high by eighteen inches wide. I’m on the left side, gazing through an open niche down at Manhattan’s West Side, twenty stories below me. You can see the shed-like double roof of the IRT subway station at Verdi Square and 72nd, a few blocks away, and then all the way down Broadway to Lincoln Center. Given the incredible scale of the photo, it’s amazing!

Seeing the shot, decades later, the Alyson Press art-director cleverly folded it around the book, and commented “Perfect for the seventies. It’s heroin-chic!” Except that might have been the only substance I didn’t ingest that particular night.

At any rate, put Adrian’s appearance and bearing and my lifestyle next to each other and you can understand why I assumed Adrian wanted to discuss becoming openly gay like myself. Who better to come to? I was the font of all and any information on the subject as it was currently being done. Surely word had gotten to him of that fact, since I hid nothing.

Three late afternoons later, we met for dinner at a nearby restaurant. I would be going to work for the night. He wouldn’t for some reason—day off, probably? We had a nice French bistro meal and chatted about people and the shop etc. The dessert arrives and he begins to hem and haw and I think, okay, here it comes. Still nothing. So I say, “You know, Adrian, I’m about as open-minded a person as you’ll ever meet.”

“That’s what everyone in the store says. That’s why I’m here.”

“Open-minded and nonjudgmental. So why not just say what’s on your mind.”

“It’s a life decision I feel I have to make,” he assures me nervously.

“Okay, good.”

“Remember how before I came to Rizzoli I was in a seminary for several years?” Adrian asks.

“Not … really. Tell me a little about that.”

Turned out it was a Russian Orthodox seminary upstate New York somewhere. Now this was odd, as Adrian appeared to me about as Russian as Aubrey Beardsley or Lord Marlborough, both of whom he also somewhat resembled. But somehow or other he’d known many Russians in America growing up on the Upper East Side—I’d pinned him as coming from there—and he’d felt a Vocation when he was younger and had somehow or other entered this seminary and been there for years. He had come out just before Ordination, in order to see what the “world” was like.

I awaited tales of late-night orgies among the seminarians and perhaps one extra-hot older Russian guy: in vain. In fact, I awaited tales of anything pertaining to how he’d discovered he was “different.”

What emerged instead was a tale of a little boy who had indeed always felt more spiritual than anyone around him, certainly more so than anyone in his family. A little boy who had felt stifled by the Protestantism he’d known. But when he’d been befriended by some Russian kids in the private school he’d gone to, he’d discovered another kind of religion—richer, deeper, more his style. Closer, it was true, to Catholicism: the Greek Orthodox Church! Did I know anything about it, he eagerly asked. Only what my childhood friend James Kallas had told me. So Adrian described it somewhat. He added that once he was ordained, he would probably be subservient to an existing priest for a few years before getting his own Church for this fast-growing religion in the U.S. Also that, unlike Catholicism, he would be free to marry, and raise a family—indeed he was encouraged to do so. Also, that his birth family, such as they were, were not at all happy about the decision. They had more or less pulled him out of the seminary and asked him to look at life for a year or so, and that was why he was working at Rizzoli.

I was stunned. I was also rather happily surprised by this turn of events. I had to ask what he thought of “the world” as he saw it.

His response was that he liked Rizzoli and the people and all that, but he realized that it wasn’t really the world, but instead a tiny little protected upper-crust slice of it—in fact, his own family’s slice of the world. He knew he wasn’t cut out to go out in the real world and travel with no money or to live on the Lower East Side, etc. But that didn’t make any difference. Because he already missed the Orthodox Church and he believed that’s where he belonged. He realized that it was an unreal life, and an unreal situation. But wasn’t that what most of us at the shop were doing? Following some dream of art that everyone told us was impossible?

After that outburst, he asked me what he should do.

What would you say? Nowadays, people use the term “follow your bliss.” In the 1960s, it was “do your own thing.” I said, “Adrian, if you do what others want and not what you want, you will never be happy and you will never make other people happy. I’m not a big fan of organized religion, but if this is where you belong, than don’t fight it. Anyway, if you’re wrong, you’ll know it and if you have to, you’ll leave the church.”

What else could I say?

Weeks went by and I heard nothing further on the subject. It was the holiday season and Adrian asked if I would join him and some friends for Russian Christmas. He asked in such a way that I couldn’t say no. So I said yes.

Living in the West Village, it required two changes of trains for me to get out at East 86th Street and Lexington Avenue and then to walk several blocks in freezing winds off the nearby East River: an hour or more of travel on a Sunday night in January. Brrrrr!

Chatting, happy, well dressed, Russian-speaking people were going into the building I was headed for carrying presents and covered dishes and they joined me in the elevator up. By the time I got into the big apartment, I knew their names, and they introduced me around.

It was another half hour of drinking iced vodka and eating caviar and meeting more people in the crowded place before I even saw Adrian. When I did, he was ecstatically pleased with his friends and the party, and also with the fact that I’d come. About twenty of us had dinner at an L-shaped table stretched across two rooms. Adrian brought around people for me to meet, among them a lovely dark-haired woman with a peaches-and-cream complexion named—what was it?—Natalya I think. Then dinner was done and we were singing and dancing and candles were lit and handed out for us to hold, and some kind of religious rite was happening, someone intoning something in Russian. Suddenly we were singing and kissing all around and drinking more vodka and eating more desserts.

I sailed out the door with new friends who were driving downtown and who left me at my building before going off to New Jersey. It was the best holiday party I’d ever been to—maybe the best Christmas party I’ve ever been to.

That was Sunday. Monday night, when Adrian came in, he told me that he’d handed in his resignation. He lifted me off my feet and spun me around in his happiness.

There was no going-away party—there seldom was at Rizzoli—and if I was invited to the ordination ceremony, I never received it. For years I wondered about Adrian. In 1986—more than a decade later—Bob Lowe and I were at the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera, a new production of Madame Butterfly. Rollareena arrived mincing down the aisle to the front row in full geisha drag and rice makeup. It was one of those nights.

During the first interval, as Bob and I were walking up the aisle headed to the bar, I heard someone call my name. I turned and saw a tall guy in full Russian Orthodox drag, big hat, golden embroidered gown down to his toes, pointed satin shoes, a bejeweled golden crook at his side, a foot-long beard, and tiny little granny glasses.

I thought, Rollareena, eat your heart out. Here’s an outfit!

“It’s me!” he cried out. “Adrian!” Then corrected himself, “Father Adrian, actually!”

“Oh, my God! Do I kiss your ring or what?” I asked.

Natalya was there in an evening grown.

As for Adrian, he just giggled and giggled.

***

After a while I became accustomed to being acting night manager. This meant I had to close up the shop and do all of the cash reconciling for several weeks while Antonio was away in Europe. Even so, unprecedented things could still happen.

One night, after I’d done all the closing out and reconciling alone and went downstairs to leave, the building’s side door was locked closed. I could see from my side that the time-lock was in place, and the lock timer was “on.” Obviously, whoever had left the administration offices very late had forgotten that someone else—me—was still inside the building. I would be stuck there until someone came to open up at eight thirty in the morning. No way!

I had Mr. M’s home number and even though it was after midnight and I felt nervous doing so, I phoned. I woke him up, but after some initial grogginess he told me to go down to the stockroom. There, I was to move aside a book shelf placed in front of and hiding a heavy door. I was to knock on the door. It connected to the shop next door. He would call and notify them that I would be knocking, waiting on the other side.

While he did that, I moved aside dozens of books and the heavy shelves, and I spotted the secret door, which looked thick and was probably made of steel. I knocked. At first there was no response, but then I heard noise behind the door. After a while, it was unlocked and opened: indeed, a thick steel door. An older fellow in a suit peered in and asked if I was alone.

I was. He ushered me into a dimmed foyer and he relocked the door with about a dozen locks, several requiring a key to be locked, all of it finished off with a rotating X-lock like I’ve seen in submarines in Cold War movies. He then hurried me through this darkened but surprisingly well-occupied (it was 12:45 a.m. after all!) basement. I saw men putting felt-covered objects into safes in the wall and on the floor, and covering over glass display cases with black silk. I felt extremely hurried as I was rushed upstairs and over to a side door, where I was all but shoved out onto 56th Street. This second steel door was locked behind me with another loud series of clanging noises.

It was only once I was out on the street that I realized where I was: outside Harry Winston, the jewelers. The shop floor itself had looked stripped of all gems, because they were all downstairs. I felt like Sinbad must have felt in that cave amid all that treasure: even at the speed that I’d been hustled through, I’d spotted hundreds of carats, perhaps millions of dollars’ worth of precious stones.

So I had a lot to tell my friends since that night, after work. I was meeting two of them for a very late supper at one of the few places that not only remained open downtown, but that specifically catered to an after midnight crowd: The Empire Diner.

Located on a southeast corner of Ninth Avenue inside a 1920s railroad car diner, it had been refurbished and repainted a shiny glittery black and silver. Inside, its old-diner decor was upgraded and made shiny new metal, with reupholstered seating and silver-painted tables in the booths.

In the seventies, the Village is where you went when you were gay. Chelsea was pretty much off-limits, a sort of a No Man’s Land. True, there were the Hudson River leather bars and clubs, but that was all fringe. Within Chelsea, the area from 14th Street up to about 28th Street was mostly residential, part middle class, and also—because of the two sets of “projects” it contained—definitely ethnic working class. I’ve already mentioned the Irish “Westies” that had relocated there; as well as older Italian families from the Village and many Puerto Rican and other Latino families who had been pretty rudely ousted from the Upper West Side, when Lincoln Center was built.

A gay man, Richard Ruskay, lived in Chelsea, where rents were even cheaper than I was paying, and he liked the area but in those days the neighborhood was so dead at night that the few Mom and Pop Candy n’ Cigarette shops and bodegas that remained open after seven p.m. were all you could find in otherwise darkened streets. Ruskay opened the Empire, and for several years it was the only place to go to in Chelsea.

Soon I was bringing my hetero pals there, and the young woman who would become my literary agent met her lover of more than a decade there. Carl “Gabriel” York had been the first waiter to be hired after Ruskay began “auditioning” for employees. Carl later told me that it was just like a theatrical audition. That might explain why most of the waitstaff were actors—and, if male, why they were gay, except for Carl, who easily passed but who was heterosexual.

A fun, weird place, because it was open twenty-four hours, the Empire attracted not only gays but also whatever neighborhood weirdos existed. Soon we were meeting there after dancing until four or five in the morning, always finding the place as filled with strange and wonderful people as if it were 8 p.m. anywhere else. It was my on-and-off body-builder trick, Hal Seidman, who first began calling it The Vampire Diner. But the name stuck, and it became a sort of meeting place for my gang of pals, where we would check out who was left after the leather bars had closed, where we would plan out future weekends and parties, where we would discuss the unknown new hotties who’d shown up at Flamingo as someone’s guest, and where we’d carb up after dancing for five hours straight.

I once told Richard Ruskay that on my prom night in Manhattan, after the dance ended, me, my date Ruth Reisiger, and another two couples had gone to supper at a restaurant named Ruskay’s a floor above street level at 43rd Street and Broadway—and that afterwards, at 4 a.m., me and Ruth, dressed in tux and gown like Fred and Ginger, had danced all the way up Times Square to the Marlboro sign, through streets empty except for a cop and four sanitation workers washing down the pavement, who had whistled and applauded us. Richard told me that his family had owned the place we’d been at and he had learned his trade there. In later years he would be involved with other clubs that opened around Manhattan, including Bond’s in Times Square, up two blocks from the by-then-closed family restaurant, in what had been a well-known men’s clothing emporium.

A second restaurant opened a few years after the Empire, this time more central, on Seventh Avenue between 17th and 18th. And for a time, this became our weekend hangout. Claire was a straight woman, a new friend that record producer, co-owner of Paradise Garage, and gay hotelier Mel Cherin and his lover Julio Velez, the handsome “barber to the stars,” had connected with down in Key West. Claire was slender and dressed beautifully; she had big pools of brown eyes, but was otherwise horse-faced, a defect that vanished once she was talking or dancing or having fun, which she usually was. She would then became utterly enchanting. We all liked her immensely and so she became part of our set. Her older, Southern husband was mad for her, so when she wanted to also reside in Manhattan along with all of her new gay boy pals, he opened a restaurant there for her to run.

Claire of Key West served Cajun food, Southern specialties, New Orleans soul food, and tropical drinks—all of which were pretty new for New York then—as well as totally authentic key lime pie, which you simply could not get anywhere off that little Florida cay. For several years, you needed reservations to get in, but if you knew Claire—as so many of us did—once you arrived you were treated like royalty. No matter how busy the place was, if Claire was around, she always came and sat down at your table for fifteen or twenty minutes, chatting, catching up, sampling her own wares—“Aren’t these fried oysters good? Bobby, bring them another plate-full on the house, since I’ve eaten half of these!”—until she was pulled away by business.

Terry Helbing, when he became one of my partners in Gay Presses of New York, told me that it was by going to Claire that he began to see the potential of Chelsea as a theatrical neighborhood. When he eventually opened his Meridian Gay Theater on the premises of the little Shandol Theater—a sixty seater—on 22nd Street off Seventh Avenue, there were five other tiny theaters open and running on each side of the avenue. I myself had my first two plays premiere there. And the Chelsea Line, as West 22nd Street’s theatre row became known, would prove crucial as a proving ground for young playwrights, directors, and actors, and thus to American theater itself for the next two decades.

***

A mercurial and at all times complicated and problematical presence in our lives at the store and in our work lives, because she was directly connected to Rizzoli Editore’s journalistic media, was the reporter, Oriana Fallaci.

Fallaci would sweep into the store, demanding to see Mr. M., who was seldom available. As a rule, Ursula or Antonio would talk to her, usually having to calm her down over some screwup or other. But eventually, as I moved into managerial positions, it fell to me to do so. Ursula first described Fallaci to me as “a diva! She thinks she’s God,” a pretty harsh judgment in a shop where we catered to ex-first ladies, billionaires, and movie stars.

Antonio was far more simpatico to her, partly because he read her reports in L’Europeo and Epoca magazine, and he knew much of her personal history, at least the parts that had become public. He was terrifically solicitous to her, no matter how irrational she seemed. He’d escort her up to the manager’s little balcony office to sit and he would get on the phone and call someone in the administration—often Mr. Polito—trying to sort out a missed plane or a fumbled interview.

During the years I worked at Rizzoli, Fallaci was at her most powerful and most famous. She interviewed everyone from the new pope to Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-Tung. Her 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger, in which she got him to call the US intervention in Vietnam a “misadventure,” had all kinds of repercussions. Later on, during a 1979 interview with Iran’s revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini, she tore off her chador, telling the repressive religious leader, “You’re no better than I am. You wear the veil!”

Born in Florence, Italy, in 1929, the baroquely named Oriana was the daughter of Edoardo Fallaci, a staunch antifascist partisan, leader of a group called Justice and Liberty. As a girl she saw firsthand the torture, mutilation, and death of friends and family by the thugs in Mussolini’s secret police. By 1946, at age seventeen, she was a correspondent for a morning paper in Florence, and her daring, outspoken views, and her fearlessness in the face of corruption, soon brought her to the top of her field in Italy.

In 1968, while covering the Mexican government’s massacre of the Tlatelolco Indians, she was shot three times, dragged downstairs by her hair, and left to die among a score of gunned-down indigenous people. Writing from her hospital bed about what she witnessed and experienced, Fallaci’s reports were so explosive that they all but ended political relations between Mexico and Italy, indeed between Mexico and much of Western Europe. Teams of diplomats had to be convened in Geneva. Once brought to light by Fallaci, the massacres ended and those responsible were silently “disappeared.”

By the time I met her, Fallaci had taken on another government, the illegal Greek dictatorship of Giorgios Papadopoulos, brought about by an armed coup and the overthrow of a properly elected socialist premier. Legislator Alex Panagoulis was the fake new government’s most outspoken foe, and Fallaci openly allied herself with him, offering him sanctuary in Italy and in the US, and then becoming his lover. When Panagoulis was killed in a suspicious 1976 automobile accident, L’Europeo’s bold, eighty-point-tall headline read “Face of a Murderer,” showing the current premier, Papadopoulos—looking guilty. Once again, diplomats were forced to meet overnight to avert disaster. Fallaci and her many irate readers protested, essentially closing down Greek embassies all over Europe, demanding not only the end of diplomatic relations with Greece—which did occur for several years—but also urging the invasion of Greece by NATO forces.

While ambassadors talked and dithered, Fallaci went on the warpath, writing that agents of the CIA and other US government agencies had instigated and supported the Greek coup in the first place. She blamed them for every Greek assassination that had resulted. She had no fear of naming the names of CIA operatives—which her publisher printed. Sales and anti-Americanism in Europe reached new heights.

Yet such was her prestige, and so great was the fear that the seemingly unkillable Fallaci provoked in governments, that none dared stop her from entering any airport throughout this tumultuous decade.

It was this particular mess that Ursula stepped into and then almost dragged me into.

I’m not exactly sure how it happened. All I knew was that when I came into work one day, I received reports of braces of men in black suits arriving at Rizzoli—and this time they’d been from the US government. They’d come several days in a row, and they had been closeted upstairs for hours at a time with Fallaci, Ursula, and Natalia Danesi Murray.

Clearly the G-men had no idea who they were dealing with, and the Rizzoli trio outfaced them every time. But they began phoning Ursula at home after work, threatening to have her deported as an “undesirable alien.”

She told me all this quite nervously one evening up on the balcony, as she was checking herself and doing her makeup in her compact mirror before leaving the shop.

“So what?” I responded. “They have nothing on you. Right?”

At which point I learned that Ursula was harboring a rebel, a Greek air force pilot, in her apartment at that moment. He was, she said proudly, a “Greek partisan” and ally of the antigovernment politico Panagoulis. Ursula had met him through Oriana Fallaci. Ursula said to me that he “may have been responsible for an attack on a Greek aircraft carrier in the Adriatic Sea, flying an American fighter plane that had gone missing from its airfield.”

Hmmm. Two days later, she approached me and told me her days were numbered in the US unless she could become an American citizen. She looked at me hopefully, knowing how radicalized I’d become. For my part, I recalled my old friend, the poet Wystan Auden, telling me how and why he’d married Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erica Mann—to get the one-quarter-Jewish young woman out of Nazi Germany in 1941. If he could do it, so could I.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll type up a prenuptial agreement tonight when I get home. I’ll bring it in tomorrow early and we’ll get it notarized together. You tell me when, and I’ll marry you at city hall!”

We did it. We drew up and notarized the agreement. But I never did receive that midnight call to meet her at city hall the next morning, although I kept expecting it for months.

Then Ursula left Rizzoli, returning to Germany months before I stopped working there. I never did find out exactly why she left. Had someone threatened her family in Europe? It seems probable.

Eight

I mentioned earlier that my fellow employee and writer colleague Alex Mehdevi wanted to show my novel to his agent. He did. But he had switched completely to daytime hours and so I wasn’t seeing him as often. As far as I was concerned, that was as good as him avoiding me, and why would he avoid me unless? You’ve got it—unless he’d read my novel and hated it and hadn’t shown it to his agent? Or, worse, he had done so and she’d thrown it back at him. So I considered the subject closed.

However, one summer afternoon I came into work early, and before he left for the day Alex came over to me and handed me a piece of paper with a phone number on it. “Jane wants to meet with you.”

“Jane who?” I had to ask.

“Jane, my literary agent. She loves your novel. Make sure you call her!”

Jane herself answered the phone when I got up the nerve to call. She had a low husky voice, sort of like Lauren Bacall. She wanted to meet me and discuss us working together.

We set a date for the following Monday when I knew I could get off from Rizzoli for a few hours of personal time and come into the shop late.

***

Another meeting took place shortly after the one with Jane which also changed my life, and affected it as long and more strongly. It was with another Taurus, in fact someone born one day after Jane. But if meeting my second literary agent seemed momentous even at the time of its occurrence, this other meeting seemed like nothing at all.

Bless him, Dennis Sanders was responsible, as he was for getting me to apply for work at Rizzoli, several years before. In early 1974, I’d been aware that he was almost never at Rizzoli, although he wasn’t yet finished with his master’s degree at Columbia, even though it was summer, when I knew he wasn’t taking classes. Late one morning I came upon him arriving at the art gallery still under construction. I asked where he’d been, and he said he was visiting the set of a documentary film. A friend of his was shooting in the old Charlie Chaplin studios in Long Island City.

The movie was based on Charles Gaines’s book published that year, Pumping Iron. It was all about bodybuilders, real-life muscle men, guys competing in the upcoming Mr. Universe competition.

Dennis was totally starry-eyed, completely gaga as he described the muscle men and their workout routines and what it was like to be there on the set with these men with unfamiliar names: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Franco Columbu, and Lou Ferrigno, not to mention the film’s directors, coauthor George Butler and Robert Fiore, who Dennis thought were terrific. He also mentioned that there was a young guy working on the set who he thought was as terrific as any of the starring bodybuilders. I should come with him to the studio some afternoon.

If you had asked me what I thought of bodybuilding at the time, I would have placed the subject somewhere between my interest in Korean chamber theatre and my appreciation of the local cuisine of Upper Volta. On the other hand, what red-blooded American queer doesn’t like looking at good-looking, muscular men clad in skimpy Speedos at close quarters? Besides which, I also knew Roger, the cinematographer on the film. I’d even interviewed him while I was an editor at Art Direction magazine.

Eventually, I joined Dennis. We made it into an afternoon outing, complete with lunch at a local donut shop on Sunnyside Avenue. Before we left that Damon Runyon–esque dive, Dennis and I were asked to bring back various orders for people on the film set, so much of it we could barely carry it all. “These guys are big. They have to eat all day,” Dennis explained.

I’d be lying if I reported that my first time on the Pumping Iron set was in any way “memorable.” It was all new and different, of course, and the men were just as Dennis had described them: large, good-looking, and very heavily muscled. But they didn’t much acknowledge me, and Roger barely acknowledged me: had he hated my interview? And the young guy that Dennis had raved over, who seemed to be a set supervisor/props person, well, sure, he was handsome, with lovely brown eyes, curly brown hair, and a nicely shaped and muscled, but not grotesquely large body. But the way Dennis acted around this Robert person made it seem very clear to me that they were dating, or at the least that he was very interested in dating Robert. Given our own complicated earlier personal history, I decided to stay very far away from Robert, which at the time seemed easy enough.

Because it was independently financed, the documentary would end up taking three years to be completed, and its narrative content would change focus during that time until not Mike Katz nor Franco, who dominate the opening section, would be the stars, but instead Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno.

In fact, those two would become stars period because of Pumping Iron—smart and ambitious Arnold in feature movies and in politics, sweet and humble Lou in television during the following decade as the lead character in The Hulk, as well as in a series of internationally produced films about the mythical strongman Hercules.

Whenever Dennis was at Rizzoli, work moved ahead on the art gallery. And suddenly it must have been done, because one day it was being painted and last-minute ornamental woodwork was being put in, and then a half-kitchen and powder room were being installed in what had formerly been storage areas. Ruth became a bundle of nerves as men in endless lines carried in furnishings and paintings and all kinds of things, having to all pass through her narrow record department. Until she’d had enough one afternoon and came to sit up on the opposite balcony where I was ordering out of catalogues, explaining wearily to me, “I left a sign saying ‘Help Yourself and Pay at the Cashier’!” I suggested she go home early, and she did.

A few months earlier, when I was in Mr. M.’s office, he had slid across the desk at me a book published by Franco Maria Ricci in Italy, a gorgeous, rich ebony vellum octavo with a tipped-in front cover plate.

“He shall be our first art show! Do you know him?”

The author listed on the title page was Romain de Tyrtoff, which sounded vaguely familiar. But the graphics on the cover and on the inside pages were absolutely unmistakable.

“Erté? Sure!” I answered. “He and Louis Icart pretty much were the art deco movement. Only Icart remained in Europe and Erté came to the US to work for Harper’s Bazaar and then did posters for Broadway and even musicals in Hollywood and so he became famous over here for a while.”

Actually, I’d come by what was at the time pretty arcane knowledge purely by accident. I’d worked at Art Direction from 1966 into early 1968.

That was not only a great era in television commercials and print advertising, but also in American graphics and posters, especially those done for book covers, magazine covers, long-playing records, especially rock shows, and concerts. (My favorite still, for sheer effrontery, was George Lois’s cover for National Lampoon featuring a close-up photo of a worried-looking, sweet, pooch-type dog with a revolver shoved against the side of its head and the words, “Buy the magazine or we’ll shoot!”)

The 1960s was also the first retro period I can recall, in which artists were consciously looking back at the great graphics and posters of the past—from the 18th Century on through the Art Nouveau. But what surpassed even those were the graphics of the twenties and thirties, especially those featuring futuristic planes, railroad engine cars, and ocean liners. I’d written a feature article on Harper’s Bazaar for the magazine, wherein I’d reproduced examples of Erté’s work.

But Mr. M. did surprise me next when he said that Rizzoli was angling to get the artist to New York for the show. I had no idea Erté was still alive. It turned out that he was eighty-two years old and living in Paris. He prospered for another sixteen years.

Whatever the administrative offices had in the way of publicity-generating was in fact trying to get out the word on the art gallery opening. Mr. M. wanted it to be a major event. What could I suggest to help?

I suggested he get his Rolodex of charge account customers and try to get some of them to host the party. They need do nothing but put their names on the invitations, which had to be expensive and elegant, I thought. Two of the names that arose in conversation were Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Bianca Jagger, loyal and friendly customers of the shop. And in fact, they ended up becoming the cohosts and drew a wonderful crowd.

Posters using the unusual all-gray and black fashion design would be printed up and hung around the shop and perhaps in local areas like the local public library and maybe even the Museum of Modern Art only a few streets away. It would also be featured in advertisements for the opening of the gallery in Artforum and Architectural Digest.

Mr. M. brought several of us into these plans: Carolyn, Ursula, Dennis, Antonio, myself, and probably also John Brancati, and of course Mrs. Murray upstairs. This was partly because, as he admitted, he’d never put on an event like this, but also because he felt that as individuals and as a group we all knew things he didn’t about how it could be best done in the US.

A wise decision: today Erté is well known, but in 1974 there had been only one book on the artist, an out-of-print volume by Charles Spencer. And that was it. Even with the graphics explosion and its retro sidelight, Erté wasn’t really known and certainly not appreciated.

He was born Roman de Tyrtoff in St. Petersburg in 1892, the son of a Russian Naval Officer, and in fact, the admiral of the country’s entire fleet. Tyrtoff Senior tried to get his heir a naval commission on the road to emulating his own career, only to be soundly rebuffed by the soft-spoken, Beardsleyesque, but extremely strong willed young man who was enamored of art and especially of the Parisian fashion designs of Worth & Cie. that he perused in his mother’s fashion catalogues.

In conversation, later on, Erté told me that he, “like Mary Queen of Scots, had a whim of iron,” and when he heard I was a new writer, he suggested I develop that same quality. He also gave me another good, if sobering, piece of advice: “Remember, agents and reps, managers and publishers, directors and producers will come and go throughout your life. But no matter what they ask for and tell you, it’s always your name not theirs on everything you do.”

By the age of eighteen, young Roman had moved to Paris, and, under the new name Erté (using the “R” and “T” of his real name in French), he’d begun his career. Eight years later, Harper’s Bazaar, soon to become the world’s leading fashion magazine, hired him, and he moved to America. He art-directed the magazine until 1932 while he worked on his own incredibly expensive and often quite fantastic costume designs for the Folies Bergère in Paris, as well as the Ziegfeld Follies beginning in 1923, and later for that other Broadway spectacular, George White’s Scandals.

In 1925, Louis B. Mayer drew Erté to Hollywood to design costumes and sets for what would be his most expensive silent film, Paris. While there, Erté also designed for other films, including the first, Ramon Navarro version of Ben-Hur and Dance Madness.

But even that wasn’t enough for this “father of art deco,” who was making posters for the films and shows as well as designing and casting amazing bronze and glass statuary, his unique jewelry, and of course his famous series of silhouette graphics in which costumed women became letters of the alphabet, Roman numbers, or Arabic numbers. Examples of all of these would end up in the Rizzoli retrospective.

Two books by Erté himself are worth finding and reading if you are interested in the field or era: Things I Remember (1975) and My Life, My Art (1989).

***

I was covering for Antonio again at night and I was joined by a new employee, Roberto Polo, a slender, good looking young man who helped out in various parts of the store. I guess he wanted the extra hour pay, as he and his young wife Rosa were both still students. She was studying ballet with Robert Joffrey and I believe Roberto was studying art and also classical piano. They were lovely together, very young and stylish, she from a Dominican diplomat’s family, Roberto from a Cubano family that had fled to Miami when Castro came to power.

We had locked up the shop and someone in administration had looked in to say goodnight and to say he was the last person there, so we should lock up the entire building when we left. He was long gone; Roberto was reading a newspaper while I reconciled the cash box receipts. We’d been there not twenty minutes when we both heard a noise, like a door slamming. It was unclear where it was. Roberto thought maybe in one of the offices down a floor. He went out to look if it was the other employee somehow returned, and when he came back he said he’d seen no one in those offices. A few minutes later, we heard the noise again, this time louder.

Roberto stood up and his little cupid’s bow mouth twisted to one side. He suddenly pulled a small revolver out of his navy blazer’s inner pocket, and flicked off the safety.

I had to ask if it was real. When he said that yes, of course, it was real, I asked what he was doing with it.

He said he’d taken it with him earlier in the day when he knew he’d be joining me here at night. Roberto took two steps and I rushed in front of him and closed the door of the office we were in.

“Don’t worry. I know how to use it,” Roberto said. “I went to school in Switzerland. They taught us how to shoot. We practiced on the range all the time.”

“No one’s doing any shooting here,” I said. “Put the gun away. I’m calling Mr. M.”

“But it will just take a minute to go out there and … ” Roberto argued.

“I really hate guns, Roberto, even though I’m sure you’re a great shot. I’d prefer that you put it into the safe.”

Roberto continued to argue, but I called my boss about the possible intruder. He said he would call the local precinct, which had emergency keys to the shop’s Fifth Avenue corridor entrance.

I continued counting up the receipts and Roberto continued trying to convince me to send him out with the pistol.

We both jumped when we heard a knock on the door. I was closest to where Roberto had left the gun on the desk, and I swept it into a drawer and closed it. Then I went to the door and asked through the door who it was.

Police, one shouted back. I let them in and they went through the building with their own guns out.

We never did find out the cause of the slamming doors.

I closed up my receipts in the safe and the patrolmen waited and escorted us out of the building, and stood there while I electronically locked it for the night. Roberto had nudged me without saying anything, and I was able to get the gun back to him without them seeing it. As we left, they said they would check back periodically if they had the time later.

***

Even though it was midsummer, the day of my meeting with Jane began cool and breezy and it remained that way throughout—it might have been September. I’d put on the tie that fashion diva Diana Vreeland had had made for me by her staff at Vogue a few years before, when I had interviewed her for Art Direction magazine, deeming it a lucky tie. I also wore a nice sports jacket.

Vanderbilt Place is the western edge of the Grand Central Terminal where taxicabs come and go in an unending stream, letting out and picking up passengers. I subwayed up and located the address on a tall building with men’s business-wear shops in two of the four corners.

The Kurt Hellmer Agency was located on the first floor, somewhat in the rear of the 1930s-era structure, and it consisted of two medium-sized but high-ceilinged rooms, a reception chamber which doubled as Jane’s office, and, separated by a doorway, Kurt’s inner office.

Jane had long dark-blonde hair and was as physically attractive in face and figure as Alex had led me to believe: quite glam. She brought me into Kurt’s office, where I met the small, thin, dark- and gray-haired European man with the strong Austrian accent. Bookshelves all around the office contained titles in German, English, French, Russian, and other languages. I can’t recall what we spoke of, but it was innocuous.

Jane grabbed her jacket and purse and swept me out of the dingy offices onto the street, and then quickly into the nearby doorway of the Pan Am Building, an ultramodern edifice which had only recently been set atop the older Beaux-Arts-style railroad terminal, much the way figures are set atop a wedding cake. Links of escalators wafted us up to a large, well-lighted, contemporary lobby. From there we shot up in an elevator to the rooftop, where a restaurant had been constructed upon half the area, with three hundred and sixty degrees of windows, under which banquettes, tables, and cocktail bars had been placed. The other half was the city’s first skyscraper heliport.

As we were meeting for a drink, we sat at the bar, looking out at Upper Manhattan on either side of Park Avenue which extended out of the center of the tower beneath us. And there, from seven to eight o’clock at night, as lights went on in all the surrounding buildings and finally popped on along the avenue itself, Jane Rotrosen spoke to me about the novel I’d written in the way I had long hoped someone would speak about it: with passion, with knowledge from close-reading, and with psychological acuity about the setting, the characters and their actions.

It was in fact the first grown-up discussion of something I’d written I’d ever had with another person, and if nothing else had ever happened between us, I would have to eternally thank her for that.

The novel was set in New York City in the year 1911. The protagonist was a young man, a former child prodigy pianist who was returning to the concert stage after losing his parents in a tragedy and taking a hiatus for some years. A young millionaire, his social set was Mrs. Astor’s New York “Four Hundred,” which he was rebelling against. He met and became attracted to a beautiful young European couple of greater wealth who were openly, elegantly slumming. One of his moral guides was a young Midwestern feminist, herself an aspiring journalist. Another was a disturbing and mysterious young stevedore. The climax of the novel took place at the Metropolitan Opera House, the apex of Manhattan’s social life of the era. It was the US debut of a young conductor named Arturo Toscanini, leading a star-studded cast in an opening night performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

What was unique in the novel for Jane was how similar that pre-World War I period had been to the decade just past, especially in terms of spirituality, experimentation with drugs, sex, and other alternative lifestyle issues. All of it historically true. There’s a reason so many of us were reading Hesse and Mann and other pre-World War I writers during the 1960s: long before, those same people had been headed where we went decades later. Our culture utterly torn, and thrown far backward, by two world wars.

After we’d talked of my novel, Jane spoke of her plans to leave the agency where she’d been an assistant for several years and where she had made excellent contacts—mostly new editors her own age, very different than Hellmer’s contacts. She planned to open her own agency. It would differ from Kurt’s in that she would be aiming for writers who could reach large audiences. She wanted to know what else I had written or planned to write.

So I told her all about the fragments of books and the stories I had. Several of them she wanted to read, and we made a date several weeks in the future for her to visit me downtown, once I’d gotten those works in readable shape. As to her question, sure, I said, I’d be happy to go with her new agency. Why not? I didn’t know Hellmer.

Even today, recalling it, that hour seems like a scene from one of those black-and-white movies I used to see on Million Dollar Movie as a kid, doing my homework in front of the television after school—movies where glamorous people said astonishing things to each other in fabulous places all around art deco Manhattan. Because, as we watched those street lights go on, two at a time, all the way up Park Avenue from 45th street and up into the un-seeable distance of the Upper East Side, Jane enthused about what she foresaw, predicting a great future for me as a writer and for us as a team. Reading me, she said, she’d strongly sensed it. Meeting me, she told me, had done nothing but confirm it.

As we got into the elevator heading down to earth again, she said, “I’m certain you’re going to be a star!”

I floated off to work at Rizzoli in a haze, and the next week Jane began sending my novel out to editors. That novel would prove too difficult to sell, and it never was published. But Jane would come to my apartment as we’d planned and we would go through the wicker-basket base of my coffee table—the size of an old steamer trunk—and one of those novel fragments that I’d been working on and stored there, which she took with her to read that night, would become my first published novel. And another novel fragment she also took with her would become my second novel and my first best seller.

So I suppose Jane’s prediction came to pass. But while she understood that a star is exceptional because of its extraordinary power and brilliance, I don’t think she ever really appreciated that third, and to me most crucial, quality of stars: that they shine forever. Or at least seem to shine forever to us possessed of such short lives.

We parted professionally seventeen years later when she could no longer appreciate where my writing was taking me. A few years after I successfully published titles she’d not seemed able to grasp—Like People in History, Dryland’s End, and The Book of Lies (to many readers, my three best novels)—Jane left the field to focus on an older, sportier vocation: professional dressage.

***

A customer had recommended to me the Tower Records bargain shop of cutout LPs, which he told me were not only cheap but featured many European labels. As I had begun earning enough to have a bit of cash left over after paying bills, I began shopping there, on 47th Street, just west of Seventh Avenue and Broadway, often just before going to work. There I bumped into the set director for Pumping Iron Dennis had introduced me to: again and again and again.

Robert Lowe noticed me before I did him, and with his open, amiable personality, he approached me every time. At first I tried to be a little stand=offish, and whenever he invited me to join him for a snack or coffee, I would say no. He belonged to Dennis, right?—hands off! But Robert Allen Lowe, his full name he told me, ended up being so friendly, so approachable, and so insistent that after about the fifth time we met accidentally, I agreed to join him at a nearby Greek diner which he said featured inexpensive, good food.

I had coffee and a dessert while he wolfed down a huge meal, explaining that he was coming from Gold’s Gym, a few doors down from the Tower discount shop. That explained the gym bag I always saw him with, and I guess that’s how he had ended up working on the bodybuilders documentary.

He explained that he’d taken up bodybuilding at the age of sixteen on the advice of a doctor. He’d ended up in the hospital with a collapsed lung. The medic assured him that building up his sternum and the surrounding muscles meant that, should it ever happen again, he’d continue to be able to breathe, at least until he got help.

Robert quickly revealed that he was unlike any of the body builders I’d encountered on the film set. He’d graduated from Colgate University and gone to England on a Fulbright Scholarship. He’d studied theater there and also briefly in India and had returned to London to work as assistant and then stage manager for the Royal Ballet. Those were the glory days of that institution: when two teams of partners, Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, and Tony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley were top international stars, bringing evening-long shows to every international capital.

It wasn’t exactly clear to me where, but in one or more of those cities, he had reconnected with dancer/ choreographer Rodney Griffith, whom he’d first met in college, and they’d continued an affair when the Royal Ballet, and Robert along with it, landed in the U.S. Rodney was the reason that Robert had left the Royal Ballet and remained in New York. He’d gotten various kinds of work while here, none of it terribly steady—including at Sesame Street, some shows at a few Off-Broadway theaters, and a post at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. He and Rodney shared a flat on 71st and Broadway, except that Rodney had been appointed lead choreographer of the Pennsylvania Ballet and so he was away a great deal.

Robert’s cultural interests were many and evident, and he spoke of various books on theater and dance that we had at the shop. At one point, I offered to purchase an expensive one for him at my discount.

Another score of such “accidental” meetings occurred over the next year, before one day Robert said to me with his usual astonishing directness and honesty, “We’ve gotten to know each other a little. But I always feel you hold back. Wouldn’t you like to get to know me better?”

We were on my home turf this time in the West Village, in yet another Greek restaurant, one with a completely surrounding dining room mural of ancient cities surrounding beautiful harbors with fleets of biremes, framed by bucolic fields of waving wheat, and, I also recall, featuring a half-heartedly exploding volcano. The young waiter had already all but fallen into Robert’s soup while serving us, while five other guys in the place had all passed very close to our table on obvious detours to the restroom, all of them trying to get Robert’s attention. I knew how attractive Robert was to all of them. And yet … and yet … So I said, “But aren’t you seeing Dennis?”

“Did he tell you that?” Robert asked.

I had to admit that no, he hadn’t. Not in so many words at any rate. “And what about you and Rodney?” I tried, citing another complication.

“We’ve got an agreement when we’re apart. Anyway, he’s met someone else. David. I’m planning on moving out pretty soon. Probably down to your part of the Village.”

Okay, this meant that Robert was officially available.

But I felt that he wanted a relationship. He’d already hinted that he was “the marrying kind” and that he’d gone from one relationship to another since college without much of a break. For me, on the other hand, relationships had been deadly, not only because they didn’t work and always left me unhappy, but because they destroyed my inner peace and my sense of personal balance. Also, they got in the way of my writing.

The last couple of years I’d become sexually free, and it had freed me in many other ways. I was having a good time and I really didn’t want to trade all those positives for already experienced and well-known negatives.

I tried to convey this complex if possibly perverted, personal information to nice, friendly, handsome, Adonis-bodied Robert in the most positive way I could. He seemed to accept what must have been for him utterly unusual brush-off—I mean guys would literally throw themselves at him as we were walking and he and I’d have to step aside or fend them off with arms held out. But at least he didn’t question me any further on my decision. Even so, as I mentioned before, Robert was a Taurus and they are a determined set of people. Once they set their goals on something or someone, they don’t stop until they get it—or him. Or, in this case, me. For which I was eventually quite grateful.

Now, if I really had wanted to push him away altogether, I might have told Robert of one particular sexual incident I’d been quite recently involved in that had astounded even me: and I’d become a pretty broad-minded person by that time.

How broad-minded? Well, if the early 1970s had smashed open the closet doors for gay sexuality, during the rest of the decade, straights followed.

Because when I wasn’t working or writing something, and especially on the weekends, now that I had a bit of disposable income, I’d begun going to other, more mixed venues around Manhattan.

Le Jardin was one of the first of these clubs, located below ground level in a Midtown hotel, and resembling nothing so much as an old time ballroom, or 1930’s speakeasy—which might have been the case. With its large white figured statuary and enormous ferns and tropical plants, its white wrought-iron and wicker tables and chairs, it was summery and yet after-hours too: with a Deep South kind of decadence. The music was great, the crowd was attractive, and from what I could see, they came from various levels of New York society. One time, after dancing with them, I got into a heavy necking/petting session in a dark corner with a very pretty girl and a beefy, handsome Midwestern-type young man. Years later, an acquaintance assured told me that the young man had been one of President Ford’s sons. We were stoned enough that it might have been true.

Downtown was The Loft, a far larger club run by David Mancuso, who’d been one of the Three Davids, owners of the legendary Tenth Floor, which I also frequented thanks to my friend Ray Yeates the DJ. The Loft had many women members, as well as a good-sized contingent of Latinos and African-Americans and was another place where you might easily get into a three or four-way before the night was over. My pal Dave Frechette once summed it up as “exotic poontang of all genders.”

The World opened in another huge factory space, this one way over on Second Street off Second Avenue, which at the time was pretty isolated and empty at night. Another very mixed dance place, I once exited with a friend to see a straight couple right outside the door having sex against a parked car, oblivious to whomever was watching.

This was also the period of Plato’s Retreat, which opened up inside the Continental Hotel. While my agent Jane and I kept threatening to go together, we never did, so I never found out if it was in the same wonderful space as the Continental Baths.

Whenever I would leave Rizzoli after midnight and walk to the subway, I passed what I assumed to be high-class working girls. One, especially, used to say something to me virtually every time I passed her. She was very pretty, with a statuesque body. A few times I had seen her talking up a “client,” usually some older, well-dressed man who was probably staying at the Yale Club or the St. Regis Hotel.

That night, after I’d closed out the cash registers and gotten out just before 1 a.m., she was there again, on a corner of Fifth Avenue. Again she said something to me.

I’m not sure what possessed me, but I responded: “I’m a bookstore manager. Sorry. I just can’t afford you.”

She laughed. “That’s usually true of younger guys.”

I shrugged, she shrugged. But she followed a little bit alongside of me as I headed downtown.

At the next street she stopped me. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’m in the mood for young and cute tonight. For you it’s free.”

“I live downtown. And I don’t even have cab fare there and back. Maybe another time.”

“Hold on,” she said, as we reached the corner, “I’ve got an idea.” I looked on as she went up a short flight of concrete stairs to what I thought was a little side entrance to a church. She pushed at the big wooden door and it opened. She gestured me to join her as she went inside.

More curious than anything, I went up and she pulled me in. The area was no more than six feet by four feet, and there was a wooden bench built into one side, and another door, leading, I supposed, into the church itself.

She threw herself at me, loosening my shirt and belt, her hands everywhere. I thought: this cannot be happening. Then she pushed me against the bench. When I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do, she told me to stand up on the bench. The minute I did she pulled down my pants. I had a brief moment where I wondered if I could get hard. Until I saw that—sensation-junkie that I was—I already was. Everything happened very fast and suddenly she was done, outside the still slightly ajar door, spitting. Instantly she was gone.

I collapsed so totally that I almost fell, but I managed to catch myself and ended up athwart the bench.

But if all that was an incredible “scene” you can easily imagine what a shock it was when a little slot in the brick wall at eye height next to the door into the church flapped open. A plastic package of some material was shoved through it at me. As it fell on the bench, I couldn’t figure out what it was. I stood up and quickly pulled up my pants and buttoned them. Then the slot opened again and this time I could see an elderly male face, framed by dimness beyond. He whispered, “Are you hungry?”

The last question I expected to hear.

“Have you eaten today?” the voice asked.

I nodded my head and managed to utter “Yes.”

“Well, then good night,” and the little door flapped closed. I heard it locked shut.

I remained still until I thought I could hear steps receding beyond the door. Then I re-dressed myself less haphazardly. I slowly opened the door to the street and in the light I looked at what had been handed to me: it was a packet containing—and I quote from what was typed on a little attached card—“one sanitized pillow plus one sanitized blanket.” What the … ?

Then I understood. Someone—a sexton, a caretaker?—within the church, must have been going around checking up on things for the night and heard me and the Pro making noise and had thought I was a homeless person. If I was, he would ensure that I could sleep in the little room, on that bench, with a sanitary little pillow and blanket. I’d even be fed if I had been hungry.

I ripped them out of their packet and arranged them on the bench as though used—fewer questions that way—and I carefully looked out to see if anyone was coming. When no one was, I sped across the street and into the corridor leading down to the E train.

When I arrived breathless at the upper track, it was empty. I was the only one there. About five minutes later, some other guys joined me. I wonder if they’d heard my absolutely whacked-out laughter.

Nine

At last, the art gallery was having its official opening. The remainder of the shop would close for the night once all the guests had arrived. It was seven-thirty. From where Dennis Sanders and I stood, in the most formal suits and ties we could muster on our book clerk salaries, at Rizzoli’s tall, heavy, glass front door, we could look back at the shop, lights dimmed now, except for this vestibule area heading to the stairs that led up to the record department and through that, the gallery and party. It was the first time I knew of that the store was closed before midnight on a weeknight.

Behind us and upstairs, we made out the tinkle of glasses and laughter, the low noise of conversation. How could it not be successful? Erté himself had arrived the day before. He had come into the shop dressed in black with a fringed, figured purple scarf, with theatrical-looking, long-toed purple shoes, and a hunter’s fedora with a deep-green feather: color combinations he used in his graphics. He’d been surprisingly young-looking for a man his age, with the smoothest complexion and the softest hand I’d ever shaken. He’d sat in the gallery and let Ada Calabrese feed him biscotti and macchiato and speak French to him. He seemed happy to me, looking around himself at a lifetime of accomplishment. I remember viewing the art for hours when it was first hung a few days before, and marveling at the depth and saturation of the colors he’d used: they looked freshly inked-in, not forty years old.

Now I have to wonder if Erté had any inkling at the time that the exhibit, his first in decades, would usher in an entirely new phase of his career, another fifteen years of fame and glory: it must have seemed like a gift.

To me he was sweet. When he found out I was a writer, and soon-to-be published, he told me that he was now himself writing: he’d done the Ricci book and now he was writing an autobiography in French and English. And then Bianca Jagger had swept upstairs, dripping furs off her Dynasty-inspired, broad-shouldered fall tweed suit, as though wanting to look like one of his clothing designs. So I’d returned to the shop floor.

“Well, I think that’s it,” Dennis said to me.

Some fifty people had come in, every one of them a member of New York Society or an art critic, with one or two reporters mixed in, but no one had arrived in the last, maybe ten minutes. We were about to lock up, in fact, had already turned the lock, about to ourselves go upstairs to the art gallery, when we noticed the car—a long, white, vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost limousine with open landau roof above the driver. It glided up the curb and stopped perfectly even with the building.

A large, handsome, African-American driver, wearing an immaculate silver and white uniform, with purple-tinted sunglasses, stepped out and approached where we lingered, gaping at him. He tapped on the glass, and when we opened up, he said, “A guest from Paris.”

He returned to the car and opened the back door, and out of it stepped a woman we both instantly recognized as Josephine Baker. Although she was Erté’s age, she was still slender enough to have dressed in one of the costumes he’d made for her decades before, a snow-white ermine creation wrapping around her like a fine-furred python, exposing good-sized sections of her cinnabar-hued, still-well-toned dancer’s body. The costume rose behind to a great stand-up collar, and atop her head she wore a close-fitting ermine cap with giant white cockatoo feathers. She approached us, holding one hand out with a foot-long ivory cigarette holder. She never paused but entered like a queen, and with one gesture we pointed to the stairway and said, “The party is upstairs.”

She breathed out a raspy “merci” and strode past us in that incredible outfit. We watched her glide up the stairs, followed by the twelve-foot ermine tail. Before the tip had reached the top of the stairs, she had swung into the gallery. We heard a hushed collective gasp and then a bedlam of greeting and pleasure before the white ermine tail flicked out of sight!

Dennis and I stared at each other for the longest time: we’d of course seen the graphic Erté had done of her in the outfit in the gallery. Art had come to life right before our eyes.

***

The gallery opening was a sensation. The next morning’s New York Times ran an article about the party and its attendees on the first page of the Arts section: the gallery had officially arrived. Later that week, the paper ran a “much-belated appreciation” of Erté’s work, with photos of the art.

Not long after that, Mr. M. approached me, saying he had already contracted for the next exhibit. It would show the work of Anton Mucha, the Czech art nouveau master, whose work I knew from the famous JOB cigarette paper that I’d used to roll hundreds of joints of marijuana. He was in contact with the artist’s son, Jirí, in Prague, who had already sent a list of the works to be shipped to New York. There seemed so many of them that Mr. M. wanted them hung all around the store, and perhaps around the interior of the entire building.

Meanwhile, he’d gotten approval to begin the English language Rizzoli book line and he had decided upon Anton Mucha’s art as the first new book that the new company would do. My additional new job? To interview Jirí and his wife by phone, and write up an introduction.

Under Jane Rotrosen’s persuasion, I’d been doing a lot of writing, having run up four chapters and a full outline of a novel. She showed it around and sold it to Don Fine, former editor in chief at Dell Books, discoverer of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, who’d left to open his own company, Arbor House. We signed a contract for that book with an option for a second. I was to hand in the full manuscript by the end of September.

It was sometime after the gallery opening that Ursula left us, as previously noted. Mr. M. called me in early one day and told me the sad news, then slid over a sheet of paper with numbers on it. “You’re the new daytime manager. This is your new salary.” And so I was thrown to the wolves just as the new Christmas season rush began. I got through it successfully—we all did. But I also had a book contract, so after the rush I asked to see Mr. M. and told him about it.

“I can’t work here all day and also write this book. I need time off to do it.”

We haggled and we wangled, we bargained and we argued. At one point he asked how much I’d received for the novel, and I told him: an advance of three thousand five hundred dollars. Big mistake: “Pah! You can’t live on that.” So we agreed that I’d take off two months during the summer—the slowest season at the shop—to write my book. But I must return to Rizzoli in the fall. Fine with me.

I handed the book in to Don Fine in time, and I returned to work, partnering as equals with Carolyn Markowitz, who concentrated on ordering art books for the greatly increased sales coming to us as a result of the publicity surrounding the art gallery. Even as I was doing minute copyedit and proofreading revisions to the book re-titled Smart As the Devil, I was also putting together four chapters and an outline for Eyes, and managing the bookstore. My days of fun and leisure were over.

My first novel was due out February 22, 1975, and I was in the bookstore, upstairs on the balcony, when Theo, followed by several other employees, marched up the stairs holding copies of it flat in their hands, and singing “Happy Birthday to You.” It was my thirty-first.

A strange period began. Jane sold Eyes to Arbor House and they wanted it to come out the following year. As it was a longer and more complex book, I knew I would need more time to write it. I had to take days off or come in late to Rizzoli because I was busy publicizing Smart As the Devil.

The book was set in southern Connecticut, and there were book signings in Darien and Greenwich, a radio show in New Haven, a TV spot at a Hartford television studio, and a newspaper interview at the Hartford Courier. There were even “spots” on two late-night TV shows in New York, including an on-air conversation with the ghost hunter Hans Holzer.

This was what I wanted to do and what I believed I ought to be doing, and now I could be doing. Subrights to the first novel had sold to Dell, the Mystery Book Club had taken it, British Commonwealth and German-language sales had come through. There was even talk of shopping it to movie studios.

When I told him that I needed time to write my next novel, Mr. M. offered me another two-month leave from Rizzoli for the summer. Instead, I resigned. After all, I had already earned more from my books in two months than I had from the shop all year, and I felt confident I could continue doing so. Linda Grey, the Delacorte Press editor who’d bought the paperback of Smart As the Devil, had been slipped the packet with which we’d sold Eyes to Arbor House, and she wanted it big time as another Dell paperback. She also confided that she was angling for me to bring a third and fourth book to her directly in a hard-soft deal.

Mr. M. hired a middle-aged Italian-American man to take my place as store manager. Although he was quite experienced and a nice-enough guy, I could tell upon meeting him that he was in over his head. Rizzoli was, well, unique. It needed someone unique to run it—he was anything but a leader. I suggested various people; I even thought of finding my former nemesis, Ricardo, back in Manila: he’d fit the shop better than this guy. No dice. So I halfheartedly trained him and then left.

I spent most of that summer living with Jon Petersen and that year’s gay glam couple, Nick Rock and Enno Poersch (who I became close pals with), at Fire Island Pines, where I wrote and relaxed. I completed Eyes in Manhattan in late September. The book is from two different perspectives, with two distinct narrative voices, and thus its creation was far more complex than that of my first novel, written from one point of view. As I’d intuited (and feared) when speaking with Mr. M., I encountered all kinds of unexpected problems while writing Eyes. I recall once staying up after midnight working on a tricky section, then going out for a walk and fresh air. I sat in Abingdon Square Park’s upper triangle, and a cute man began cruising me. When he came over and asked me what was up, expecting me to respond to his come-on, I was still so filled with my work that what flowed out of my mouth sounded like utter gobbledygook—even to me. He took off running. Obviously, there was no way I could have written it all while working full time.

I’d barely given the book to Jane to read when Mr. M. phoned. I’d been right: the new manager was not working out. At least not well enough to carry the shop into the Christmas season. Would I come back for that?

For a writer, any work that is not writing, no matter how glamorous or how well-paid, is really only an interruption from writing; either that or a means toward earning the money to buy more time to write. So in early October of 1975 when Mr. M. called me, I was in a quandary: I’d already done all the required research into territorial law in Nebraska of 1899-1901, the basis and the setting of my third novel. I’d also outlined that book and sold the outline, so I was naturally eager to write it. Things on the writing front in general were moving along almost too quickly. Smart As the Devil had done okay sales-wise, and so publication of Eyes had been shifted half a year, from February to August of 1976, i.e., around the same time the paperback of Devil would be out. Suspecting how crazy it could all become, when answering Mr. M. I’d had to set specific time and salary demands for the upcoming three-month period of work at Rizzoli, so that it would end at the New Year. After that, I planned to go with Dennis Sanders directly to Key West, where we’d already signed a lease to share a two-bedroom flat on Duval Street for the rest of the winter of 1976. It was there that I hoped to be able to actually write my third novel, The Mesmerist.

To my surprise, it didn’t take long to get Rizzoli in humming order again. After several months of the interim manager, the staff seemed relieved at my return and eager to please me. I soon saw why: Mr. M. had been preoccupied by the new Rizzoli book line and by the art exhibits, as well as by plans to open a new shop downtown in SoHo. So he’d not micromanaged the shop as he usually did. It was up to me to micromanage and even micro-order, to get the place in shape for the holidays. And also up to me to give the staff, several of whom were now good friends, the news that I wouldn’t be around very long; and that they would soon have to adjust to another stranger as manager.

And then there were the Muchas—Jiří and his wife—all too evidently still in New York. They had arrived in the spring, and the Mucha exhibit had opened shortly after, successfully, along with the Rizzoli book on Mucha, with my uncredited introduction. Yet they were still there—in and out of the store and offices, which they seemed to be using as a base to do business with other galleries and museums around the country.

One day, I was with Jirí on the balcony. We’d been speaking our weird argot of French-English and German, when I heard him talking to someone else halfway down the stairs but well within hearing. They were discussing “wonderful plans for the St. Stephen Cathedral cartoons.” We’d only been able to show a few of those preparatory paintings on hard paper for the stained glass windows that Anton Mucha had done in Prague, as they were life sized and quite large. It now seemed that they were all going up to some place in Massachusetts the following summer. Jirí wanted to use my introduction, for which I’d be paid something more. But I got wind of other Mucha plans for the fall, and then for the following March.

I remembered how stunned and upset George in the stockroom had been when the Mucha stuff had first arrived direct from the docks, inside a well-stuffed twelve-wheeler. He hadn’t room for a third of it, and Mucha’s friends had rented an uptown storage space to hold the bulk, which, by the way, Mr. M. had signed for.

Knowing I was about to open the slimiest can of worms ever, as casually as I could I asked how much of Daddy Anton’s work had been left behind in Eastern Europe.

“Only what we could not get out of individual museums,” Jirí answered, seemingly annoyed by that fact.

“You told me when we first spoke that there was tons of art never seen before.”

“Yes. Yes. All in warehouse.” Then he added, “With us. Here.”

It now began to dawn on me, but no, it couldn’t be—could it? Had the Muchas used the Rizzoli exhibit to get all the artist’s oeuvre they could lay hands on—a substantial amount of loot—out of Czechoslovakia? And had they done so because they were planning to never go back? If that was so, I wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone.

Meanwhile, my agent, Jane, and my editor, Linda Grey at Delacorte, were doing wonders with my writing. By the time January 1976 came around, Commonwealth, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese rights to Eyes had been sold, as well as the US book club and paperback rights. Jane was even setting up meetings with film directors. She had sold The Mesmerist to Delacorte Press in a hard-soft, three-book deal.

When I mentioned this to Mr. M.—I’d never forgotten how he’d scoffed at the amount of my first book sale, so I simply had to tell him—he came back with a substantial annual salary, further promising that if I stayed on I would also become publisher of Rizzoli America books in three years, at double that salary.

It was generous and appropriate and I said I’d think about it. I did, for about a minute. But I’d become an author, which had been my intention when I went to work there.

It wasn’t lost on me how many really talented people—Mr. M. himself and Ruth Oesch, among the most outstanding examples!—had ended up never pursuing their artistic dreams once they were settled in working at Rizzoli.

Being a writer meant a rocky road ahead; Perelman had warned me, I. B. Singer had warned me, and they barely knew me. But long-range planning was never my forte—and frankly, given my long and complicated history of childhood, teenage, and young man’s diseases (I’d only just recovered from long bouts of hepatitis and mononucleosis, I had a colon cancer scare, etc.), I never really expected to live that long. So I thanked Mr. M. for his kind offer and resigned for good.

Epilogue

In August of 1977, I was going uptown to meet a friend for lunch. I stepped onto an uptown train and three people in the car were reading my book Eyes in paper. I thought, this is a joke: someone fixed this. When I got out, I passed by a Midtown bookstore on Sixth Avenue and there was my book, being sold out of a double “dump” at the front of Crown Books: two cartons of fifty copies each, cut at an angle to serve as a display case. They were already half empty. Everywhere I checked, the paperback was being sold in tall stacks. It soon became a New York Times best seller.

Naturally, as I moved more into publishing and then into gay journalism and small press publishing, I lost touch with my friends at Rizzoli. I did occasionally see them and hear about them. But for some reason, I avoided the store, even when I was in the area. I’m still not sure why: the few times I stepped in, old friends still on staff greeted me warmly enough and always seemed pleased to see me. As often happens with places that loom large in our lives for several important years, whenever I did step into the shop, Rizzoli seemed to have grown small to me. It was extremely narrow, more than I recalled, and while not quite shabby, it lacked the glitter and glamour I recalled it possessing. Then too, it seemed like a backwater to the exciting life of gay books and gay theater that was going on around me in the late 1970s and 1980s, not to mention the world of mainstream media and publishing. Rizzoli was still a special place, but one that was now paying the price for that specialness. Maybe by opening shops all over the country and sending out emissaries from Manhattan, Mr. M. had in some way thinned out, desiccated what it was that had made my years there so filled with incident, intellect, and fun?

Then too, the news that I received whenever I went in or encountered by chance a fellow staff member—Antonio at a museum, Theo and his partner at the Met Opera—now always seemed unpleasant, not at all what I felt it should be if Rizzoli were to remain a perfect pristine memory.

For example, once the art gallery was going strong, Mr. M. showed his gratitude by hiring an outsider to lord it over Ada and my friend Dennis, who, let us recall, had done all the work setting it up. They repaid this treacherous gesture by quitting quite suddenly. The newly hired woman found herself surrounded by enemies and she soon left.

When Dennis left, he finished schooling to get his degree in music, and he met an older man, a music professor. After a few years in New York, they moved to Boulder, Colorado where they taught for decades. When he was widowed, Dennis moved to eastern Spain, where he lived growing fat and bald, I thought he was quite happy, until his surprising and still mysterious death a few years ago.

Mr. M. took over Rizzoli America when Mrs. Murray resigned to retire after her partner’s death. He opened lovely Rizzoli shops in Union Square, New York, in San Francisco, at Chicago’s Water Tower, in Philadelphia, in Santa Monica, and in Beverly Hills. He left the company in the nineties to open his own art- and photo-book company, which he sold to Random House a few years ago.

John Brancati—who left Manhattan to open and run first the San Francisco and then the Chicago store for Mr. M.—ended up being the golden boy of our era, replacing Mr. M. at the top of management.

Over the years, I saw and heard even less of my coworkers. But in later years, one person from my time at Rizzoli made a public splash. I’ve mentioned the little incident with the pistol as indicative of Roberto Polo’s character. At Rizzoli, he’d worked in the art gallery, and I suppose it was there that he connected with a distributor who brought in smaller-framed prints and inexpensive paintings. Roberto evidently became enthralled by art and antiques, and he also became knowledgeable about them.

When he left Rizzoli sometime after I’d quit, he went into business for himself as an art and antiquities dealer, and soon he and Rosa were living a lavish life style. They’d lived well even as students: Rosa’s family owned a place on upper Fifth Avenue. I suppose being surrounded by the nicer things in life, Roberto wanted more. Only recently, Ruth Oesch told me of the incident that led to Roberto being fired: as he was going home one evening, Mr. M. spotted a small painting under Roberto’s coat. They tussled and Mr. M. got it away from him. Roberto complained that given the low wages he was receiving, he deserved the painting.

What I’d learned from Roberto those times we’d spoken suggested that he’d grown up with what the British call “expectations.” Roberto had expected an inheritance. It was his birthright: he’d come from a distinguished Cuban family that lived as nobility for generations, and they’d instilled those values in Roberto and his younger brother, Marco, even in exile—viz., the expensive private school in Switzerland where he’d learned to shoot.

It must have been quite a come-down for Roberto to arrive in New York where Rosa was studying ballet only to find low paying work, yet where he was surrounded by beauty, celebrities and wealthy people all the time. For a socialist like Boris or for artists like Alex or Antonio, this daily flaunted material wealth meant little. But it’s very easy to understand how frustrating it must have been for Roberto.

If you want to read about Roberto’s later years in depth, I suggest the October, 1988 issue of Vanity Fair, the late Dominick Dunne’s long and well-written article, “The Rise and Fall of Roberto Polo.”

A short version is that Roberto wangled family connections to meet with the wealthiest members of Miami’s Cuban exile community. He managed to convince many to put substantial amounts of money into art as an investment scheme, using as collateral his and Rosa’s increasingly fabulous life style. This came to include not only that Upper Fifth flat but also one in Paris and another in Milan. Like Ponzi before and Bernie Madoff after him, Roberto lived off his investors, and bought more and more personal art and antiques with their cash, attracting even bigger investors. But at some point the house of cards had to collapse and when it did, he fled, moving from place to place in Europe and the Bahamas. He was finally arrested in Italy and sent to court in Switzerland, where his case headlined those same Rizzoli newspapers and magazines he had himself once sold, not to mention many Rizzoli radio and TV news station’s news programs.

Roberto spent only five years in prison, and when he left he opened his own antique shop in Paris. I’ve been unable to trace his whereabouts since 1996, but you know what? I’d buy from him. His taste was always fine, his eye excellent, and as long as he had papers to back up his ownership of the goods I’m sure they would be of the very best quality.

***

For a while, the life I’d chosen instead of Rizzoli was confirmed to be the truly right choice. I rented a tiny gray clapboard cottage with a red front door and a high view of the ocean in front and of the Great South Bay from the back deck at the Pines in Fire Island. I ended up living and writing my books there from late May through early September for over a decade. I came into Manhattan only when I absolutely had to, usually for business, usually by sea-plane, and usually underdressed and in fact fairly discombobulated, whenever I did. In one meeting with Helen Meyer, CEO head of the Dell, Doubleday, Delacorte Book Empire, it was pointed out that I was wearing two different colored socks. But at least I didn’t make the mistake of telling Helen that it had taken me a half hour that morning to find any socks at all! In later years in California, people I met said that my group was “The Gay A-List” of the time, but of course all I saw were wonderful, distinctive, and now very much missed individuals who I had hoped would become lifelong friends. Futilely, it turned out; most of them died from AIDS.

I grew closer and fonder of my housemate, my dance partner from Les Mouches, Twelve West, and Paradise Garage, the talented, pretty, and adorable Don Eike. He left Manhattan after our era had ended, and joined an ashram in Sedona, Arizona. It wasn’t until 2003 that I encountered him again in the Bay Area, a short while before he too died.

Also, oddly enough, since I was at Fire Island so much, my sexual wanderings came to an end at this time, and I settled down.

It was all because of the third member of our little Tarpon Walk and Ocean Walk house—the handsome and persistent Robert Lowe, who contrived somehow to be around me during this period, and who eventually wore me down into accepting him as a crucial part of my life, using his beauty and brains and his unfailingly sweet temper. The tipping point was probably his rendition along Fire Island Boulevard in the Pines one afternoon, singing and dancing the entire score and all of the parts to Cole Porter’s 1950 Out of this World, a musical he had once directed in the U.K. We remained together afterward to such a lengthy extent that guys we’d known at Studio 54 and at the Ice Palace in Cherry Grove would bump into us at a Manhattan deli and ask, amazed, “You mean, you guys are still together?” Bob became a successful attorney and a partner in a law firm.

***

It turned out to be fifteen years between my previous and my next visit to Rizzoli Bookstore. And then it was to the new shop, on 57th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The gorgeous old one, 712 Fifth Avenue, had been sold, as in fact had its entire building, to Bendel’s.

By then, the AIDS epidemic had emptied my life, killing most of my friends and acquaintances and then, with a final sting of its evil tail, killing Robert. Coincidentally, most of my family also died during that decade from one cause or another. New York had become a ghost town for me, where every few streets painfully reminded me of someone dying or dead. Having no reason to remain, I was getting out of town, about to move to Los Angeles.

A few days before I left, I stepped into Rizzoli to say goodbye to my first boss there, Antonio Ximénez, who for periods of time was still the night manager there, and who I’d kept in sketchy touch with over the decades.

It was his doing. He had located my phone number and had called to ask if I would come uptown to Rizzoli and sign copies of my current novel, a gay-themed book about my own recent-but-already-by-1995 “lost generation”—Like People in History.

Instead of the stacks of books that had greeted me in most of those other shops I’d been to while on official book tour for Viking, Rizzoli had only six copies. But I signed them happily, including the one I dedicated to Antonio.

It might not be the same building, but after all, it had the same ambience of the shop I had worked in years ago, in that really crucial period of my life—and where I would wonder daily, as I placed new titles flat down or spine out on shelves, about the day when I would finally have a book in print myself, ready to go on a shelf. Now I had a dozen books in print and it seemed like nothing special. Even so, this would be a most notable, if brief and unheralded, event for me.

And although I saw him often in LA in later years, whenever he would come over from Big Island Hawaii, I never really got up the nerve to ask Antonio if he ever read my book.

I guess I was afraid of being on the receiving end of his all-too-familiar, utterly deadly, blanket dismissal—“Ay! Que pretencioso!”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for Nights at Rizzoli arose as a result of several conversations I had with Mitchell Waters, over a period of days several years ago in Los Angeles during an ABA convention. After that, he continued to encourage me to write the book. Along the way, I received further encouragement and information from former Rizzoli employees Ruth Oesch, Ada Calabrese, Viki Roth, and—in an unpublished essay—from my once very close friend Dennis Sanders. I hope I utilized that data well. As usual, I depended upon my good memory and several volumes of my memoirs when needed. Malaga Baldi has been her usual invaluable self and John Oakes has been sensitive and enthusiastic in seeing that this unusual story reaches the public.

FELICE PICANO, poet, novelist, playwright, critic and publisher, was a founding member of the Violet Quill, a pioneering group of gay male writers in the 1980s. Recipient of many awards and citations, he received the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award in 2010, and the City of West Hollywood’s Rainbow Award and Citation in 2013.

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