The Collyer Brothers of Harlem

Dr. Herman Livingston Collyer, a successful gynecologist, his wife Susie, and their sons Homer and Langley moved from Murray Hill to 2078 Fifth Avenue, at 128 Street, in 1909. The house was a three-story brownstone mansion, with mahogany paneling

Dr. Herman Livingston Collyer, a successful gynecologist, his wife Susie, and their sons Homer and Langley moved from Murray Hill to 2078 Fifth Avenue, at 128 Street, in 1909. The house was a three-story brownstone mansion, with mahogany paneling, fine antiques, and family portraits dating to the eighteenth century. The Collyers were among New York’s oldest families. Their ancestors came to America on the Speedwell, which, according to Langley Collyer, “…had a better passenger list than the Mayflower.”

Two years after the Collyers’ arrival, African-Americans began settling in Harlem in large numbers. By 1925, Harlem had been transformed from an upper-middle-class white suburb into the center of African-American life.

But while nearly all the other white folks left, the Collyers did not. Dr. Collyer died in 1923, Mrs. Collyer in 1929. Their sons remained in the mansion. According to Trinity Church’s baptismal records, Homer Collyer was born on November 6, 1881. Langley was about six years younger. Both men graduated from Columbia: Homer, who graduated with the class of 1904, earned an MA, an LLB, and an LLM and practiced admiralty law. Langley took his degree in chemistry and mechanical engineering. He never worked for a living, devoting himself to music.

In 1928-’29, Homer worked in the law office of John McMullen, who would become the family lawyer. Homer then worked for City Title Insurance at 32 Broadway, spending his days researching in the Hall of Records. A former colleague described Homer as an affable, courtly, Dickensian type, with old-fashioned clothing, high collars, and elaborate sideburns who wrote with an elegant Spencerian hand.

Langley, who was last photographed in 1946, looked like a stereotype of an aging late Romantic poet, with an old-fashioned bow-tie, formal black jacket and vest, gray striped trousers, a long gray mustache, and longish hair.

By 1917, the Collyers’ telephone had been disconnected because, as Langley explained, they were “being billed for long distance calls they didn’t make.” In 1928, the gas was shut off. The brothers began going without steam heat and hot running water, using kerosene for lighting and cooking. The Encyclopedia of New York City and Jan Morris in Manhattan ’45 claim they had no water or sewer connection; no contemporary sources go that far. Some of the local kids threw stones through their windows and after Langley had spent large sums to replace the glass, he decided it was better to board them up and close the inner shutters.

Most sources agree that Homer last appeared in public in 1932. In 1933, he suffered a stroke, with “hemorrhages in both eyes,” and went blind. Thereafter, Langley cared for him. They avoided doctors, treating Homer’s illnesses with special diet and rest. Langley said Homer ate 100 oranges a week and treated his eyes by consciously resting them: keeping them closed at all times.

Their solitude was first violated by the press on August 11, 1938, when Helen Worden wrote an article for the World-Telegram about Maurice Gruber, a real estate agent who wanted to buy Collyer property in Queens. When the Collyers did not respond to his letters and then his personal visits, Gruber staked out the house. By the following day, Worden found Charles Collyer, a distant cousin working as a ticket agent for the Long Island Rail Road, who suddenly and conveniently became worried that Homer was dead. Worden’s article was accompanied by photographs posing Charles Collyer and his wife on the front steps of the mansion. Worden called Langley “the mystery man of Harlem.” She recapitulated every street rumor that behind the shabby facade was a veritable Arabian Nights’ palace of Chinese rugs, rare antiques and thousands of morocco-bound books, including piles of money that Langley was afraid to put in the bank.

She then staked out the mansion herself. One night she caught Langley slipping out to go shopping and began her interview by calling out, “Good evening, Mr. Collyer. The neighbors tell me you keep a row boat in the attic and a Model T in the basement.”

Strangely enough, Langley responded. “Yes and no,” he replied. The boat, he explained, was his father’s canoe. “He used to carry it to the Harlem River on his head and paddle down to [Bellevue] every morning and back every evening. The auto was his, too. I never got around to putting it together again after he died.”

Langley later claimed all his troubles dated from these articles. Jan Morris writes that “…nobody ever interfered with them it seems, or tried to make them live like everyone else. They were the Collyer Brothers, Harlem’s Most Fascinating Mystery, as the tabloids like to say, and fashionably mysterious they were allowed to remain.”

But they were not left alone. As the Daily News wrote, “folks attempted to see for themselves.” This phrase is ambiguous. The clippings on the Collyers leave a strong impression that from the late thirties, nosy neighbors knocked on the door, nasty kids threw rocks at the house, broke their fence, and smashed bottles in their front yard, and reporters kept interviewing obscure relatives on the steps of the house, expressing concern over poor cousins Homer and Langley.

Another story quoted a neighbor describing Langley as “the ghosty man… He did have a brother, Homer, but nobody’s seen him in a long while. They ain’t seen his ma, either. She was s’pose to be dead, but she never had a funeral… He’s like haunts in graveyards, he don’ come out before midnight.”

Langley panicked. Though gloomy, the house had not been messy in 1938. By 1942, Langley had single-handedly accumulated vast quantities of newspaper, cartons, tin cans and other refuse, transforming the mansion into a fortress. He apparently applied his engineer’s training to arrange packing boxes and cartons in interlocking tiers with concealed tunnels passing from one room or one floor to another. Langley alone was familiar with the maze. Anyone else would have to remove the entire barricade to pass. He also booby-trapped massive piles of newspapers and old luggage with trip wires.

Their final drama began at 8:53 a.m. on March 21, 1947, when a man who gave his name as Charles Smith telephoned police headquarters, saying, “There was a dead man in the house at 2078 Fifth Avenue.” Police arrived around 10 a.m. to find a crowd of Harlem residents outside the house. The police roped off the area. Some officers tried forcing the mahogany front doors. Then the police took them off their hinges. There stood a solid wall of boxes and debris, up to the ceiling.

Other officers entered the unlit, cluttered basement. The way from the basement to the first floor was blocked by a solid mass of packing cases. Then, the police forced the shutters on a first floor window. Within lay a desolation of ceiling-high stacks of boxes, paper, and furniture, crawling with rats. The officers found the stairs to the second floor blocked with yet another mass of packing cases.

Two hours after the police first arrived on the scene, officers finally clambered from a ladder into a second-story room. There they found Homer dead. He was emaciated, bearded (Daily News) or mustachioed (Times), clothed only in either a tattered robe (Times) or a few ragged fragments of clothing (The Sun), and lay with his knees drawn almost to his chin. Dr. Thomas Gonzales, the medical examiner, said that Homer’s body was extremely emaciated and dehydrated. “There is no question,” Gonzales said, “that he had been neglected for a long time.” There was no food in his stomach or his digestive tract, indicating he had nothing to eat or drink for at least three days before his death, which was attributed to chronic bronchitis, gangrenous decubital ulcer (a large, untreated bedsore), and senile pulmonary emphysema.

The story was a wild sensation: on March 22, 1947, even the Times printed a front-page story on Homer’s death. By the end of the second day, according to the Times, the police had removed nineteen tons of debris from the first-floor hallway alone.

As the search for Langley continued, thousands of curious citizens walked or drove by the house. According to the Daily News, “few lingered at the scene. They were driven away by the smells.”

A friend whose father covered the story for one of the dailies told me the cops lit up cheap, foul-smelling cigars against the overpowering stench of organic corruption—”like a blow from a mailed fist.” For not only the newspapers, garbage, and animal wastes were rotting, but as a city housing inspector told The Sun, even the house was rotting: Its floor and walls were saturated because of the open windows and roof leaks, the beams were rotted and buckled from the weight of the junk and bricks were falling from the walls.

The New York County public administrator, a Surrogate’s Court official, took over the search from the police. On March 31, the public administrator hired six professional movers to remove all articles of value from the house. They tore out the basement entrance and began emptying the law library. The 2500 law books were merely a tenth of the volumes in the house. They found numerous family oil portraits. They found Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, jammed with unused piece goods, silks, wool, damask, and brocade; three bolts of embroidered white curtain material, each containing 54 yards, that had never been unwrapped; and a batch of fine linen dish towels, stamped “Collyer,” that had never been used.

They found telephone directories, three revolvers, two rifles, a shotgun, ammunition, a bayonet and a saber, a half-dozen toy trains, toy tops, a toy airplane, fourteen upright and grand pianos, cornets, bugles, an accordion, a trombone, a banjo; tin cans, chandeliers, tapestries, a portrait camera, enlarger, lenses and tripods, a bowling ball in a canvas bag, bicycles and bicycle lamps, a rolled-up 100-foot rug runner, a nine-foot-tall mahogany clock with a music box inside and pastel painted figures on the broad face; thirteen ornate mantel clocks, including one contained in a metal bust of a girl whose ears and bodice dripped coins, thirteen Oriental rugs, heavily ornate Victorian oil lamps and vases, white plaster portrait busts, and picture frames. They found a static machine, an electrical device manufactured during the 1890s for the treatment of arthritis, rheumatism, and other ailments. They found five violins, at least two dating from the 18th century, two organs and scores of seven-inch gramophone records dating from 1898, including “Round Her Neck She Wears a Yeller Ribbon for her Lover Who is Fur, Fur Away,” “Atta Baby,” and “Nobody In Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.” They found sheets in braille from Homer’s failed attempts to learn the system. And they found a certificate of merit for punctuality and good conduct awarded to Langley at Public School 69, 125 West 54th St., for the week ending April 19, 1895.

These things merely salted the vast sea of junk and paper.

By April 3, according to the Herald Tribune, the searchers had removed 51 tons of waste. They had only reached two rooms on the first floor. By April 8, nineteen days after the search began, The Sun reported 103 tons of debris removed. Then they found Langley’s body.

He had been buried alive in one of his booby traps while crawling to bring Homer food. He had been only eight feet from his brother. He was wearing burlap draped over his shoulders as a cape, and police speculated this had snagged on a wire and tripped the booby trap. Langley wore no underwear or socks. He had on a bathrobe, three jackets, and four pairs of trousers. Around his neck as a scarf was a white onion sack fastened with a safety pin. He lay on his right side and the rats had been at him. Both The Sun of April 8 and the World-Telegram of April 9 stated that a preliminary examination indicated Langley had died quite some time before his brother. Apparently, Homer had died utterly, horribly alone.

On May 9, 1947, Robert F. Wagner Jr., the city’s commissioner of Housing and Buildings (later Manhattan borough president and mayor), announced the mansion would be demolished as unsafe and a menace to life and property. It was torn down within the year.

Langley was buried in the Collyer family plot in Cypress Hills Cemetery on April 11. The funeral arrangements were made by the public administrator’s office. The numerous relatives produced by the press apparently did little more than attend the services and file claims against the brothers’ estates.

There was no great wealth. The Surrogate’s Court probated the estates in 1949: $60,000 in real estate holdings, $2000 in savings, $4000 from the sale of personal property. Against this were claims for $15,000 in estate taxes and thousands more in city, federal, and state tax arrears. It is unclear whether the forty claimants against the estate ever saw a dime.

The only explanation Langley ever provided for the brothers’ behavior was that they preferred to live alone.

— New York Press, October 5, 1999

The Man Who Was Phileas Fogg

He went four times around the world and inspired Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. He devised the financing scheme for the transcontinental railroad, lobbied Congress to enact it, and made a fortune from it. And at the end, nearly penniless and living in a Greenwich Village single

He went four times around the world and inspired Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. He devised the financing scheme for the transcontinental railroad, lobbied Congress to enact it, and made a fortune from it. And at the end, nearly penniless and living in a Greenwich Village single room occupancy hotel, he made a living as a lecturer, the Champion Crank.

Born in Boston in 1829, George Francis Train had been orphaned before his fifth birthday when his parents and siblings died of yellow fever in New Orleans. He sailed back alone, “with a shipping tag pinned to his coat as if he had been a bag of coffee,” and was raised by his grandmother and maiden aunts (who found the sailors had remarkably enriched the boy’s vocabulary). At seventeen, he entered his uncle’s shipping business as a clerk and, proving imaginative and industrious, became a junior partner.

In 1850, Train first met a president of the United States. He walked uninvited into the White House, presented a letter of introduction from Secretary of State Daniel Webster (a former attorney for Train & Co.) and sat down for half an hour with President Zachary Taylor. Train later wrote, “He wore a shirt that was formerly white…spotted and spattered with tobacco juice. Directly behind me, as I was soon made aware, was a cuspidor, toward which the President turned the flow of tobacco juice. I was in mortal terror, but I soon saw there was no danger…he never missed the cuspidor once…”

Later that year, while changing trains in Syracuse, New York, he saw an animated, attractive young woman chatting with her friends. “Look at the girl with the curls,” Train said suddenly. “Why, do you know her?” inquired a traveling companion. “I never saw her before,” Train replied, “but she shall be my wife.”

He immediately changed his plans, jumped aboard her train, sat down in the same car and struck up a conversation with her chaperone. He learned the charming young woman, Miss Wilhelmina Davis, was stopping to see Niagara Falls. Train suddenly needed to see this wonder of nature. Once there, Train somehow took over the duties of escorting Miss Davis to the Falls. He wrote, “our love was mutually discovered and confessed amid the roaring accompaniment of the great cataract,” and they were betrothed.

Train’s bearing was assured and confident; his manner distinguished; and his wardrobe elegant. His conversation was usually brilliantly witty. In combination with his swarthy features, black curly hair, and flashing eyes, he was irresistibly attractive. He married Willie on October 5, 1851.

At the onset of the Australian gold rush, Train and Willie headed for Melbourne. When they arrived after ninety-two days at sea, they found 600 ships in the harbor and a city grown from 10,000 to 40,000 within a year. Train worked as a commercial agent for American shippers while writing feature articles for American and foreign newspapers, often about himself, his speeches, and his adventures.

He met Lola Montez, whose dancing talents were best appreciated in bed; she had been mistress of the King of Bavaria and now lived off her past by appearing in an operetta entitled Lola Montez in Bavaria. She was tough and imaginative as well as sexy: she dealt with a defamatory news article by horsewhipping the editor; when a sheriff arrived at her hotel with a warrant, she tore off her clothes and insisted that if he would arrest her, he must carry her off naked. The sheriff did not execute the warrant. Train won her friendship, probably because he was generous and funny and didn’t hit on her. (After more adventures, she died in Brooklyn, where she is buried under her true name, Eliza Gilbert, in Green-Wood Cemetery).

Train traveled home by making his first round-the-world trip. At every stop, he cabled articles to various papers. When he landed in New York, he received a blizzard of publicity, including sixteen columns in the Herald devoted to him and his tour of the world. He had written much of it himself. Years later, he would give a friendly journalist an article he himself had written reporting on one of his speeches, saying, “You see, I have put in the cheers and applause where they belong.” He wrote a series of articles on European business for the Merchant’s Magazine, later collected in his books Young America Abroad, An American Merchant in Europe, Asia, and Australia and Young America in Wall-Street.

In 1856, he was presented to the man who molded his politics and even his facial hair for decades to come.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was a nephew of the first Napoleon. In December 1852, he had overthrown the Second Republic with little bloodshed and reestablished the Empire by plebiscite. Napoleon III had set male fashion by wearing a waxed mustache and a narrow goatee, a combination called an imperial. Like most of Napoleon III’s admirers, Train was most impressed by his transcendence of special interests as “a man who goes neither left nor right but forward.”

Train was in London in 1861 and, at a time when the British establishment largely favored the South, he became the Union’s fiercest champion. He financed a newspaper, the London American, which presented the Union point of view, particularly by reporting the innumerable speeches of George Francis Train. He also gave Sunday breakfasts in his London townhouse for leading politicians and newspapermen. On one side of his invitations was a rakish photograph of Train, his eyes gleaming from beneath his mop of curly hair, and on the reverse: “Come and meet a dozen live men at my round table breakfast next Sunday at eleven.”

He was attacked by the British press: Punch suggested, “The fittest position of all for him would be that of suspension at some altitude from the ground by a ligature embracing his neck with a running noose, and maintaining him in antagonism to the force of gravitation.” In his own country, however, he was hailed as “the Eloquent Champion of the American Union.” In 1862, as he later wrote, “I…returned to my country the most popular American in public life.”

Although he had never held public office, he spoke of himself as a candidate for president in 1864. The Democratic National Convention expelled him; nonetheless, he campaigned. On Election Day 1864, Lincoln polled 2.2 million; the Democrat, 1.8 million, and if “Train got any votes at all, it is not recorded.”

Even while running for president, he started a new deal: Union Pacific. Congress had enacted legislation to subsidize the construction of a transcontinental railroad and agreed to turn over 6400 acres of public land and financial subsidies of up to $48,000 for each mile of track built. The Union Pacific Railroad Company retained Train as their chief lobbyist. In 1864, he persuaded Congress to double the railroad subsidies for construction.

Then he recalled Napoleon III had financed massive public improvements through a bank, the Credit Mobilier. Train organized the Credit Mobilier of America at the behest of the directors and leading shareholders of the UP. Somehow, the UP awarded cost-plus construction contracts to Credit Mobilier, siphoning government money into its directors’ pockets. The construction costs were wildly extravagant. Credit Mobilier became a byword for corruption. But the railroad was built and finished within five years.

In 1866, he campaigned for women’s suffrage in a Kansas referendum. His oratory was astonishing: the Lawrence State Journal wrote: “He came! He saw! He conquered!” Susan B. Anthony credited most of the 9000 votes cast for women’s suffrage to his hard work and thunderous eloquence.

Then he ran for president again. He decided to go around the world for publicity, using the railroad to cross America, and doing it faster than anyone had ever done. He paid his way by lecturing. When he arrived in France, a delegation from the First International called on him at his hotel in Marseilles. They invited him to speak. “Well,” he boomed, “I cannot keep these good people waiting.” Ten thousand people were at the Alhambra theater. He stood up and sang the “Marseillaise.” He was as eloquent in French as in English, and after rousing the crowd to a frenzy, he marched with them upon City Hall, which was seized in the name of the Commune. Within a few days, Train was arrested and deported—in a private railway car, complete with manservant and chef.

Upon his return to the United States, Train announced he had gone around the world in eighty days. This, of course, did not count his month playing revolutionary. But two years later, Jules Verne published Around the World in Eighty Days. The hero, though English, is eccentric, egotistical, eloquent and ingenious. George Francis Train was Phileas Fogg.

His growing eccentricity ended his business career: even the men who knew him no longer trusted his judgment. His oratory was wilder than ever. One writer described it thus: “He double-shuffles and stamps on the floor ’till the dust obscures him; he beats his breast, clenches his fist, clutches his hair, plays ball with the furniture, outhowls the roaring elements, steams with perspiration, foams at the mouth, paces up and down ’till he looks like a lion in a cage lashing his tail.”

His campaign literature introduced him as “The Coming President. The Man of Destiny. First Campaign Gun. Victory, 1872: Six million votes, Nov. 12, for the Child of Fate! Train and the People against Grant and the Thieves!” Again he ran as an independent. Grant polled 3.6 million votes; his Democratic-Liberal Republican opponent, 2.8 million; the Labor Reform candidate, 30,000; the Prohibitionist, 6000. And again, if Train got any votes, they are not recorded in the tabulations.

Three days before the election, Train learned the radical feminist Victoria Woodhull had been arrested. She had been charged with obscenity: One of her newspaper articles on sex had included a phrase from Deuteronomy, “red trophy of her virginity.” Train then published The Train Ligue, a title alluding to his French revolutionary experiences, consisting of Old Testament verses concerning nudity, murder, incest and adultery. Then, he dared Anthony Comstock, the “Roundsman of the Lord,” to arrest him for printing “disgusting slanders on Lot, Abraham, Solomon, and David.” To Train’s delight, Comstock had him imprisoned without bail for public indecency. At his arraignment, Train was asked whether he pleaded guilty to the indictment. He replied, “I am guilty of publishing an obscene paper composed of Bible quotations.” The judge entered a plea of not guilty.

The case became an embarrassment. The court offered to release Train if he would plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but Train refused. He stated he would rather die in jail than be a hypocrite, and cried, “Back to durance vile!”

Meanwhile, as Meyer Berger observed in The Eight Million, Train continued making speeches, even in the Tombs. The guards wearied of his magniloquence and stuck him in an unheated cell. Train wrapped himself in a traveling rug, roaring, “I’ll raise hell in this Egyptian sepulcher!” Then the guards hustled him to Murderer’s Row, hoping this might frighten him. Instead, he canvassed his fellow inmates and won election to the coveted presidency…of the Murderer’s Club. Finally, the warden moved him into solitary confinement. This was enough and he copped to the plea. Train was discharged without having been tried on the charges in his indictment. Upon his release he complained, “My lawyers did not understand me. They are like all lawyers. They think it better to lie your way to freedom than to suffer for the truth.”

Finding his career in ruins, his fortune lost, and his reputation destroyed, Train gradually began living away from his family. As one biographer wrote, “escapade after escapade, eccentric performance after Quixotic involvement, all in bewildering succession, simply made normal domestic life impossible.”

In 1876, he was adjudicated a bankrupt, listing assets of about $100. At the age of 47, he owned merely a watch and the clothes on his back. Now he made his living through his platform speeches, enhancing his marketability by living up to his reputation as an eccentric. He no longer sought the presidency, but dictatorship. He referred to himself as “Citizen” Train. It, too, bore the flavor of revolutionary France and stressed his independence: he was “not a Democrat, not a Republican, not a Catholic, Protestant, not a man marked with anybody’s brand, but simply a citizen…” He became a vegetarian; he refused to shake hands, arguing such contact drained his vital energies, and when introduced to a new acquaintance, solemnly shook hands with himself. He adopted a new calendar, dated from his own birth, and occasionally conducted services as a minister of the Church of the Laughing Jackass. He remained good copy for the papers, writing articles in his telegraphic, allusive style with a double-colored pencil, blue at one end, red at the other.

He made his last two trips around the world in 1892 and 1896. He still believed he was important: in Japan, he made a speech to a crowd gathered to watch the Emperor travel by a later train, convinced they could have come only to see him.

Upon his return, Train moved into Mills House No. 1, at 160 Bleecker Street in the Village, an impressive Italianate hotel designed by Ernest Flagg to provide “…decent accommodations at low cost for people of small means.” There he dictated his autobiography, My Life in Many States and Foreign Lands. Train presented the 19th century as if it had revolved around him, writing, “It is supreme Dictatorship with me, or nothing. I am plaintiff against the whole world. I have been in fifteen jails for expressing my opinion, but I never robbed even a henroost.”

It would be nothing. In 1903, Citizen George Francis Train (“I am sometimes the only Citizen of these United States! There should be more of them!”) joined Eliza Gilbert in Green-Wood Cemetery.

New York Press, October 19, 1999

Diamond Jim Brady

Throughout his adult life, Diamond Jim Brady was a salesman working for pure commission. If he didn’t sell, he didn’t eat. Happily, his diverse and insatiable appetites were all the incentives he needed to earn a million dollars a year. Half a century after his death in

Throughout his adult life, Diamond Jim Brady was a salesman working for pure commission. If he didn’t sell, he didn’t eat. Happily, his diverse and insatiable appetites were all the incentives he needed to earn a million dollars a year. Half a century after his death in 1917, Fortune called James Buchanan Brady the greatest capital goods salesman in American history.

He sold railroad equipment—spikes, plates, shovels, rail cutters, trucks, cars, and so forth—in the old-fashioned way, on the road ten months a year. His first big break had been a sale to George Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading, whose abstract dislike of humanity was crowned by a concrete loathing of salesmen. Brady camped in Baer’s outer office for five days. When Baer finally demanded to know why he was sitting there day after day, Brady said affably, “I’ve been waiting to tell you, Mr. Baer, that you can go straight to hell.” An hour later, he had an order for five million dollars’ worth of freight cars, and he and Baer were laughing and slapping each other on the back.

But Brady’s genius as a salesman paled beside his capacity for self-indulgence. The Cophetua of the Mauve Decade was born on August 12, 1856 above his father’s bar at 90 West Street, near Cedar Street. His father, a loyal Democrat, named him after that year’s Democratic Presidential nominee. At eleven, Brady began working as a bellboy at the St. James Hotel on Broadway and 26th Street. The hotel’s bar, as was then common, offered a free lunch counter for its patrons. Brady took his meals there until the bartender forbade it because Brady was eating for six men.

st-james-hotelFour years later, he began working for the New York Central Railroad. He studied bookkeeping and penmanship (he wrote a magnificently ornate hand and usually signed his name in full, deeming James Buchanan Brady a name worthy of a few flourishes).

In 1879, he began selling railroad supplies for Manning, Maxwell & Moore. Brady spent his savings on his first diamond ring and three superbly tailored suits to go with his Prince Albert coats, stove-pipe hats, gates-ajar collars, and white, round, detachable cuffs. “If you’re going to make money, you’ve got to look like money,” Brady said. As one biographer wrote, “If he may be said to have had a religion, that one sentence formed its ten commandments.”

As Brady traveled the country, he befriended countless railroaders: mechanics, section foremen, road gang supervisors, stationmasters, train crews, hostlers, firemen, and engineers. He gave parties, played cards, and swapped stories. In this way he learned what each railroad needed to complete its equipment. Then he would go to the companies’ front offices, tell the purchasing agents what they needed, and sell it to them. The orders poured in. He was making a million dollars a year by his thirtieth birthday. One day, after checking his accounts, he said, “Hell! I’m rich! It’s time to have some fun.”

He never stopped. He began collecting diamonds. Inevitably, someone would say they were fake. Brady would take one of the stones and write his signature with it in large and flowing letters on a window pane. It made his point while advertising his name.

Then, there was the food. “His gross displacement,” wrote humorist Irwin S. Cobb,  “was awe-inspiring. He had a huge frame to start with and fat was draped upon it in creases and folds.” Another observer describes how when Brady ate, “An oversized napkin would be tied around, not tucked into, his neck.”

The napkin is inevitably placed, for on his knee it would have been as inadequate as a doily under a bass drum. It would have been lost, bewildered, in the shadow of one of the best known stomachs in New York, a stomach that started impetuously at the neck and gained power and curve as it proceeded majestically downwards.

In the morning, after a quart or two of fresh orange juice to tickle his taste buds (“I’m willing to pay more, and I’m willing to wait, but I want my oranges squeezed fresh!”), Brady had a light breakfast of beefsteak, a few chops, eggs, flapjacks, fried potatoes, hominy, cornbread, several muffins, and a huge beaker of milk. Around 11:30 a.m., he might renew his strength with, say, two or three dozen oysters or clams. Then, at 1:00 p.m., he lunched. This meal was apt to be heavier than breakfast and generally consisted of more oysters and clams, a deviled crab or two—or three—perhaps a pair of broiled lobsters (“The snapping and cracking of lobster claws,” one observer noted, “sounded like the descent of a cloud of seven-year locusts on a Montana wheat field.”), then a joint of beef or another steak, a salad, and several kinds of fruit pie. Brady topped this off with the better part of a box of chocolates. He felt it made the food set better.jim_brady

Then came dinner: the big meal. In The Big Spenders, Lucius Beebe wrote that “so heroic were his skirmishes with the roasts, entrees, and pieces montees as to elevate them to an actually epic dimension.

Brady not only ate the full twelve-course dinner that was the conventional evening snack of the early decades of the last century, he usually consumed three or four helpings of the more substantial dishes, beginning his repast with a gallon of chilled orange juice and finishing with the greater part of a five pound box of the richest chocolates available. In between he might well consume six dozen Lynnhaven oysters, a saddle of mutton, half a dozen venison chops, a roasting chicken with caper sauces, a brace or so of mallard or canvasback ducks, partridge, or pheasant, and a twelve-egg soufflé.

There were bets taken on whether or not Brady would fall dead before dessert.

Once, a railroad president’s wife, having set before Brady and shore dinner of gigantic proportions and watched him devour it, even to the seventh helping, asked him how he knew when his appetite was satiated.

“Well, ma’am,” Brady explained, “Whenever I sit down to a meal, I always make it a point to leave just four inches between my stomach and the edge of the table. And then, when I can feel ’em rubbing together pretty hard, I know I’ve had enough.”

Yet he never touched alcohol, tea, or coffee. When he met the great John L. Sullivan at a friend’s bar in 1881, the bartender, knowing both men, gave Sullivan tall seidels of Pilsener and Brady tall seidels of root beer. Sullivan assumed Brady was drinking beer, and Brady did not disillusion him. During the next hour, Brady matched Sullivan drink for drink, never so much as turning a hair, Sullivan’s amazement grew. “By God, Sir!” he roared, “you’re a man. I’m proud to call you my friend! Shake hands again!”

Brady was always dressed at the height of conservative fashion, few noticing the slyly ingenious, perfect tailoring which softened the exaggeration of the ungainly figure. People did notice the dozens of diamonds giving off huge, glittering winks and ripples of light that covered his enormous chest and his cuffs, sparkling like a thousand tiny mirrors with every movement. He wore diamond studs instead of shirt buttons, diamond cuff links, a diamond pin in his tie, a watch and chain encrusted with stones, a boutonniere of diamonds. His belt buckle was a mass of diamonds and gold worked to form his initials, J.B.B. He even had a three-carat stone set in the ferrule of his cane.

He came to own thirty different sets of jewelry: one for each day of the month. They included more than 20,000 diamonds and over six thousand other stones. Each set included a watch, watch chain, ring, scarf pin, necktie pin, shirt studs, collar buttons, vest buttons, belt buckle, eyeglass case, pocketbook clasp, and even underwear buttons. As John Burke wrote in Duet in Diamonds, “…in full panoply, glittering with refracted light from stem to stern, he looked like a Mississippi riverboat at night coming around the bend with all its illumination turned on.”

Brady’s career on the road and his grotesque physique had early inclined him to patronize women of fragile virtue and, often, no virtue at all. His deeply suppressed romanticism escaped only through his efforts to soften the commercial nature of these relationships through giving the girls expensive jewelry rather than cash on the barrelhead.

He was a close friend of Stanford White, as profound a student and practitioner of debauchery as he was of architecture. One of Brady’s biographers found a man who had worked as a procurer for White and described a birthday party White had thrown for Brady in the Hall of Mirrors atop the old Madison Square Garden:

The meal proceeded uneventfully up to dessert. Then, a twinkle in his eye, [White] gave a signal and three of the waiters entered the room bearing aloft a huge Jack Horner–Pie. They carefully placed it in the center of the table, and then handed each of the gentlemen a white silk ribbon. Mr. Brady’s ribbon, I noticed, differed from the others. It was a red one.

At a sign from White, “all the gentlemen pulled on their ribbons” and “the pie fell apart revealing a beautiful and entirely nude girl nestled in the middle of it.”

Mr. Brady kept pulling in his red ribbon which, I could see, was fastened to the girl’s arm. And as he continued to pull, the girl got up and danced down the table to where he was sitting. She then climbed down of off the table and onto Mr. Brady’s lap where, after kissing him several times, she proceeded to feed him his dessert.

The other gentlemen guests were rather envious of Mr. Brady’s good fortune, and they proceeded to show their envy by loud wails and groans. After he had let them do this for a few minutes, the Governor smiled and suddenly clapped his hands. The doors opened and in came eleven other nude young ladies who also proceeded to feed the guests their dessert. It was a very pleasant evening.

lillian-russellYet Brady’s relationship with the most lusted-after woman in the United States—the blonde, blue-eyed, spectacularly voluptuous  Lillian Russell—was entirely Platonic. America’s sex symbol during the 1880s and ’90s, Russell had made her mark as an actress and singer, but she was also a skillful card player and and an unerringly accurate tobacco spitter. Her extraordinarily warm, intimate friendship with Brady lasted  for over thirty years. He was her frequent escort; they traveled and vacationed together; they confided in one another. She came to love him dearly. Sex, however, never entered into it.

Unlike many self-made men, Brady remained sunny, generous, and sympathetic. He was a notorious soft touch. George Rector, the restaurateur, recalled once suggesting that people were taking advantage of Brady. “He looked at me, closed one eye in a wink, and said, ‘George, I know they’re all pullin’ my leg; but did you ever stop to think it’s fun to be a sucker, if you can afford it?'”

By the late winter of 1917, Brady was paying for a lifetime of heroic indulgence: ulcers, angina pectoris, diabetes, and malfunctioning kidneys. He did not complain, believing one’s capacity for taking losses to be a measure of one’s manhood. On Friday, April 13, 1917 he died in his sleep. Three days later, he was buried from St. Agnes’ Church on East 43rd Street, off Lexington. The congregation was jammed with actors, athletes, politicians, steel magnates, rail barons, gamblers, stock market speculators, and Lillian Russell, who wept.

New York Press, December 29, 1998

Hard-Boiled Charlie Chapin

In the golden age of American newspaper journalism, those 60 years between 1890 and 1950, New York had as many as 14 English-language dailies, with telegraphs and telephones to speed the news-gathering, even as high-speed presses printed tens of thousands of newspapers an hour. The radio was not

In the golden age of American newspaper journalism, those 60 years between 1890 and 1950, New York had as many as 14 English-language dailies, with telegraphs and telephones to speed the news-gathering, even as high-speed presses printed tens of thousands of newspapers an hour. The radio was not a serious competitor and the television became a mass medium only after World War II.

Some of the journalists of that day still survive in memory: publishers such as Hearst or Pulitzer or reporters such as Gene Fowler, Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht. Editors, however, being behind the scenes, are more obscure.

Some weeks ago, I picked up Johns Hopkins University’s elegant reissue of City Editor, a minor classic by Stanley Walker. Walker discusses the great editors whom he admired. He calls one, Charles E. Chapin, city editor of the New York Evening World before 1918, “the ablest city editor who ever lived.”

He is an interesting choice. Chapin’s autobiography, published in 1920, is on its face a splendid memoir, often amusing, and utterly sane. Until the closing chapter, one never realizes its writer was serving a sentence of 20 years to life for murdering his wife. The book is fascinating in context as a masterpiece of self-delusion. To read it, one might think Chapin was a nice guy who worried too much about money. However, nearly anyone who had ever worked for Hard-boiled Charlie described him as a cruel, sadistic tyrant.

Yet he was more than that. He instituted the legman/rewrite system of news-gathering, where a reporter gathered the facts and telephoned a rewrite man, who wrote the story. He envisioned reporting news as it happened, without prejudice, color or individual style, the reporters and rewrite men working as machines.

As importantly, he forced his reporters to use the summary lead, which puts the important facts-who, what, when, where, why-into the first sentence, and the inverted pyramid story form, which works from the lead down to the less important facts. This meant that he forced his reporters to abandon lengthy and winding news articles structured by chronology and usually written in an ornate, self-consciously literary style of “fine writing.” To be sure, Chapin alone did not change this. The expense of transmitting news by telegraph favored concision. Others argue that public education created a semi-literate reading public without the patience to decipher fine writing. However, Chapin’s importance as city editor of one of the nation’s most famous papers made his judgments stick.

Charles Chapin was born to poverty in Watertown, NY, in 1858. He taught himself to set type and take shorthand. For a few years, he was an actor with a traveling theater company; his reporters rejoiced to learn he had played Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In 1879, he married Nellie Beebe, an actress: it was a love match that would endure for 39 years. He then almost immediately became a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. One of his first editors defined journalism as “the art of knowing where hell is going to break loose next and having a man there to cover it.” He took it to heart: by his 25th birthday, he would be city editor of the Chicago Star.

At 33, he visited New York with Nellie for the first time. On an impulse, he walked into the World Bldg. and introduced himself. They knew his work; they hired him immediately. Tall, slender and erect—he stood like a pouter pigeon, shoulders back and chest thrust out—Chapin dressed with an exaggerated elegance: wasp-waisted tweed or herringbone suits, always with a calendula or gardenia in his buttonhole; spats; and selections from his collections of pearl tie pins, watch fobs, studs and flamboyant ascot ties in such colors as “baby blue, pink, orange, purple, and red.” His thin gray hair was trimmed daily and he exuded bay rum. He was grim-faced and square-jawed, with an ashen complexion and a military mustache. And his voice was a nasal blend of snarl and whine.

Allen Churchill’s admirable Park Row describes his response to the greatest single loss of life in the city’s history before Sept. 11. The General Slocum, an excursion steamer, burned in the East River. The final death toll was 1021. Eyewitnesses saw “women on fire and holding children in their arms running about the deck…women and children going over the rail by the dozens…” Charred and mangled bodies lay in piles along the beach or floated in the blackened water.

At the World, the rewrite men taking down the details burst into tears. Some vomited. However, Chapin strutted about the city room, humming a happy tune. “He would run up and down, peering over shoulders to read the nauseating details of the tragedy as they were typed out. Then, standing erect, he would shout, ‘Women and children jumping overboard with clothing afire! Water full of charred bodies!'” The dead and bereaved were immaterial to his good fortune: he was editing a great paper that was covering a great story.

Thus, when New York City Mayor William J. Gaynor was shot in 1910, a World photographer kept snapping pictures. When the photographs came out of the darkroom, Chapin rejoiced: “Blood all over him, and an exclusive, too!” A World story led to the arrest of a swindler for murder. Chapin rubbed his hands together. Walker wrote that someone “remarked that he seemed to be feeling his oats. ‘Why shouldn’t I be happy?’ asked the spirit of sweetness and light. ‘I’ve started a man on the way to his electric chair.’”

He loved firing people: for being two minutes late, for staying home to minister to a sick family, for being knocked unconscious in pursuit of a story. He even fired Joseph Pulitzer Jr., his boss’ son, for absenteeism and lateness. The father said not a word. Chapin once took a dislike to a particular piece of copy and fired its writer. As the reporter headed for the door, Chapin barked to the entire city room, “That is the 108th man I’ve fired.” Perhaps this explains why Irvin Cobb, one of his best reporters, was present on the unusual day when Chapin telephoned the office to report sick. “Let us hope,” Cobb said, “it’s nothing trivial.”

Chapin wrote, “I was boss of the office for more than twenty years and…in all those twenty years I never saw or spoke to a member of the staff outside the office or talked to them in the office about anything except the business of the minute. I gave no confidences, I invited none. I was myself a machine, and the men I worked with were cogs. The human element never entered into the scheme of getting out the paper. It was my way of doing things.”

He expected his men to know what they were doing. If they did, he allowed them complete freedom to do their work. If they did not, he fired them. Once a reporter asked Chapin what to do next about covering a fire. Chapin snapped, “Go pick the hottest place and jump into it.”

Walker writes that a reporter, writing of the discovery of a body in the East River, referred to the “melancholy waters.” “Pretty good phrase, that,” said Chapin. He was overheard. For days, the Harlem River, the Gowanus Canal and the Spuyten Duyvil all developed melancholy waters. Chapin ordered that the next man who used the phrase would be fired. A new reporter had not heard the warning. The next day, his first story was of a suicide in the Hudson. The article began, “The melancholy waters of the Hudson…”

Chapin called him over. “You’re fired. ‘Melancholy waters’! Now, look here, in all sense how could the waters of the Hudson be melancholy?”

“Perhaps,” the young man replied, “it was because they had just gone past Yonkers.”

“Not bad,” Chapin said. “You’re hired.”

He came to speak almost exclusively in newspaper terms. Churchill claims he couldn’t say, “Hurry up with the story of the child who was killed.” Rather, it was, “Hurry up with TINY TOT WITH PENNY CLUTCHED IN CHUBBY FIST DIES UNDER TRAIN BEFORE MOTHER’S EYES.”

Chapin’s lavish lifestyle, complete with limousine and yacht (he had lived in the Plaza from before the day it opened to the public), concealed a morass of debt. He had been related by marriage to Russell Sage, the financier and usurer. After moving to New York, Chapin had cultivated the old miser, who had led the editor to believe he would inherit a fortune. Chapin anticipated his inheritance in luxurious living. When Sage died, he left Chapin almost nothing.

By the summer of 1918, Chapin was wiped out and he began to go mad. There is literally nothing in the record to indicate anything other than mutual devotion in his marriage. However, he obsessively believed Nellie would be unable to bear his financial collapse, and so he resolved to kill her.

Perhaps it was more a matter of the guilt being unbearable for him. (Interestingly, Eugene O’Neill, who had a copy of Chapin’s autobiography in his library, has Hickey use a similar rationalization for murdering his wife in The Iceman Cometh.)

Chapin spent the weekend of Sept. 15-16, 1918, at home with Nellie. He mailed a suicide note to the World’s business manager, Don C. Seitz, on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 16. Around 6 a.m. on Monday, as Nellie slept, Chapin drew a police special from under the bed, pointed it at a spot slightly above her right ear and pulled the trigger. For two hours, she moaned in agony. Chapin held her, weeping, speaking of nothing but love and beauty and joy. Then she died.

Chapin breakfasted and dressed for the office. He hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door to his suite. Then he began traveling the subways and elevated railways to Central Park, Bronx Park and Prospect Park, where a police officer came along as he was raising the revolver to his head.

Meanwhile, Seitz had received his letter. Mail was delivered much more quickly for three cents in 1918 than for 34 cents now. He telephoned Chapin’s hotel. The hotel manager and a police officer entered Chapin’s suite with a house key.

Chapin left the subway at W. 66th St., where he bought a paper and saw his name staring up at him from the headline: CHARLES CHAPIN WANTED FOR MURDER.

Then he became sane again. He surrendered at the nearest police station and never breathed again as a free man. In mid-January 1919, he pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life. He complained of how the newspapers handled the stories of his crime. “What’s the newspaper business coming to?”

Chapin adapted to prison life. In 1919, he was asked to edit the prison newspaper, The Star of Hope. According to James McGrath Morris’ Jailhouse Journalism, Chapin transformed the paper into an advocate for inmates’ rights. The prison authorities shut him down. Major Lewis E. Lawes, a new warden, who later wrote bestsellers such as Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, suggested that Chapin expand his autobiographical articles into a book, which he did.

Chapin took up gardening. Lawes let him direct a Garden Squad, which transformed the bleak compound with flowers. Chapin would probably have been paroled in 1933. However, in the fall of 1930, Lawes told him Sing Sing was being renovated. The garden would be ploughed under.

Chapin took to his bed. Lawes visited him. “Do you want anything?” “Yes,” Chapin replied. “I want to die. I want to get it over with.”

On Dec. 16, 1930, Hard-boiled Charlie turned his face to the wall. He had believed he would die in Sing Sing from the moment he had been assigned the number 69690. The individual digits totaled 30: the number a newspaper reporter types at the end of a story.

New York Press, April 16, 2002

The Wickedest Man in the World

In the summer of 1916, while staying in a New Hampshire cottage, Aleister Crowley crucified a frog that he had baptized Jesus of Nazareth. The man who called himself the Beast 666 offered it gold, frankincense and myrrh; he worshipped it as God incarnate and then arrested and charged it

In the summer of 1916, while staying in a New Hampshire cottage, Aleister Crowley crucified a frog that he had baptized Jesus of Nazareth. The man who called himself the Beast 666 offered it gold, frankincense and myrrh; he worshipped it as God incarnate and then arrested and charged it with blasphemy and sedition. He cried out:

All my life long thou hast plagued me and affronted me. In thy name, with all other free souls in Christendom, I have been tortured in my boyhood; all delights have been forbidden unto me; all that I had has been taken from me, and that which is owed me they pay not in thy name. Now, at last, I have thee: the Slave-God is in the power of the Lord of Freedom. Thine hour is come; as I blot thee out from this earth, so surely shall the eclipse pass; and Light, Life, Love, and Liberty be once more the Law of Earth. Give thou place to me, O Jesus, thine aeon is passed; the Age of Horus has arisen by the Magick of the Master, the Beast that is Man; and his number is six hundred and three score and six.

Then he condemned the frog to be mocked and spat upon and scourged and crucified, and it was done.

The Beast had landed in New York in late October 1914, after an uneventful voyage from Southampton aboard RMS Lusitania, and settled on West 36th Street. He had come to sell copies of his more esoteric published works to John Quinn, the lawyer and Maecenas of prewar New York.

Some thought Crowley a poet and adventurer. In 1900, he had scaled Mexico’s 17,000-foot extinct volcano Ixtacihuatl and the 14,000-foot Popocatepetl. A year later, he climbed the Himalayan peak known as K2, going higher than any man had before, without oxygen cylinders or elaborate equipment. In 1905, he attempted Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world.

But others knew him as an occultist. They thought him a fraud, pervert, traitor and black magician. Some whispered he was a Satanist. A few thought him the Antichrist.

Thus, Somerset Maugham’s The Magician, published in 1908, had presented Crowley, very thinly disguised, as the monstrous Oliver Haddo. After the book’s publication, Crowley murmured to Maugham, “I almost wish that you were an important writer.” He then published, under the pen name Oliver Haddo, an article illustrating Maugham’s flagrant plagiarism of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau as well as books on magic and medicine.

Edward Alexander Crowley (from early manhood he had used the Gaelic equivalent of his second name, Aleister) was born on October 12, 1875, in Leamington, Warwickshire. He was the only son of a wealthy brewer. His parents were rigidly puritanical. Crowley seems to have been a difficult child: By his own admission, at the age of eleven, he tested his cat’s nine lives on Christmas Eve 1886 by poisoning, chloroforming, gassing and defenestrating the animal, which failed the test.

His father died while Crowley was young, and Aleister inherited 50,000 pounds when he came of age, roughly equivalent to two million dollars today. He went through it in fifteen years.

His talents were undeniable: He was intelligent, poetic, and skilled at mathematics, chess, and mountaineering. He was witty: During Crowley’s stay in America, Theodore Dreiser, hunting for the word for a young swan, asked Crowley, “What is it? What would you call a young swan?”

“Why not call him Alfred?” Crowley replied.

But he was unstable. Perhaps there was not one but many Crowleys. He seemed to imagine himself a different man at every moment: the English gentleman and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; the visionary; the mountaineer; the world teacher; the debauchee.

He was a superb poetic technician with an exquisite, jeweled Swinburnean style. He also delighted in inventing witty, if obscene, limericks on the spur of the moment. Thus, his clerihew on the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni de’Bazzi ended: “They called him Sodoma/ Which was not a misnomer.”

One may imagine where ends the poem whose lines include “my mistress, my Great Dane, and I,” or the content of “Necrophilia” and “A Ballad of Passive Paederasty.” Most of these appear in his best-known collection, White Stains, first published in 1898 by Leonard Smithers, then Britain’s leading pornographer.

He reacted to his parents’ religious fanaticism by rejecting Christianity. Yet his work’s effect relies on Scripture, even to his self-assumed title, from the 13th chapter of Revelations: “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”

He was fascinated by magic (or, as he spelled it, magick). This was wholly different from mere prestidigitation-the parlor tricks of a David Copperfield, for example. Crowleyan magic might be defined as the disciplined exercise of a wholly focused and trained consciousness upon a given task, summoning an occult force to influence the effects of natural law. This is done by a particular ritual which must be correctly performed at a cosmically suited time to put the desired force into action. As Francis King wrote in Ritual Magic in England, “All the adjuncts of Ceremonial Magic-lights, colors, circles, triangles, perfumes-are merely aids to concentrating the will of the magician into a blazing stream of pure energy.”

To these, Crowley added drugs and sex. He experimented with peyote and other psychedelic drugs long before Timothy Leary, or before Aldous Huxley wrote Doors of Perception. Crowley believed his lust drove him to commit acts of magic, not perversion. He wrote, “Some see a phallus in every church spire. Why not see a church spire in every phallus?”

It is simply factual that he engaged in animal sacrifice, heterosexual orgies, bloody scourgings, bestiality and sodomy. Though he considered his more intimate male relationships to be such as “the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood and the most precious prize of life,” he did not shun promiscuous, anonymous bathhouse sex. He liked to think he had revived the religious mysteries of classical times and that his “Orgia,” whether with woman, man, dog or goat (or any three together) were like those in the Golden Age.

Yet despite what might seem (and what might have been) self-indulgence, he did not lack self-discipline: He had learned to meditate with a profoundly focused contemplation; he had learned yoga in Ceylon, mastering through the day-to-day drudgery and discomfort of repeated practice the positions, the breathing, the mantras by which he forced his mind into concentration.

But he lacked humility and true self-knowledge. His growing self-confidence swelled into megalomania, and he believed he had so developed his occult talents as to rise beyond the human: He wrote of passing over the Abyss, the gulf between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, and then of becoming first a Master, then a Magus, and finally Ipsissimus, which is to say a god.

Thus, according to Crowley, on April 8, 9 and 10, 1904, while he was in Egypt, a nonhuman entity named Aiwass dictated to him a prose-poem in three chapters totaling 65 pages, Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law. It referred to the Beast, who appears in the Book of Revelations, as the prince priest of a new age and to the Scarlet Woman as his partner. It enunciated the dogma, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Crowley saw this book as the basis of a post-Christian religion. To further its cause, he created an order, an occult fraternity (after all, a magician without an order is like a politician without a party). He borrowed from the ritual and degree structure of the Golden Dawn, in which he, William Butler Yeats, and others had been initiates, and drew on its teachings and practices, rewriting them into a more comprehensible form while grafting onto them his interests in yoga and other Oriental practices.

But he exhausted his funds, and so he came to New York. He published occasional articles in Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, including a series entitled, “The Revival of Magick.” More importantly, he was reintroduced to George Sylvester Viereck, a fine poet and writer who was also a hopeless Germanophile. Crowley, with his usual gratitude for material favors, described Viereck as approaching him “with extended hands, bulging eyes, and the kind of mouth which seems to have been an unfortunate afterthought.” Viereck offered him a job writing pro-German articles for the magazine The Fatherland, which was probably subsidized with German secret service funds. Crowley was also hired to edit another Viereck magazine, The International, which he largely wrote himself; it was the only salaried job he held in his life.

Crowley later argued he was in no sense a traitor to his country; rather, he was serving it by writing propaganda so silly as to bring Germany into disrepute. He might have been telling the truth. He wrote an article in which he compared the Kaiser to Parsifal. In another, he wrote about German air raids on London: “A great deal of damage was done at Croydon, especially at its suburb Addiscombe, where my aunt lives. Unfortunately her house was not hit. Count Zeppelin is respectfully requested to try again. The exact address is Eton Lodge, Outram Road.”

In the meantime, he sought a Scarlet Woman to be his regular partner in acts of sex magic. Several of them came and went, more than one repelled by Crowley’s insistence on anal sex, which he called intercourse “by the unspeakable vessel.” He treated them without tenderness: One mistress, whom he named the “Dog-headed Hermes or Anubis,” was usually called the Dog for short; he called another the Camel.

In January 1919, he met Leah Hirsig, a New York City schoolteacher whom he found overpoweringly attractive, and asked her to be his Scarlet Woman. She accepted, no doubt considering this more agreeable than life in the classroom. Then he marked her with the Sign of the Beast. John Symonds, Crowley’s biographer and literary executor, wrote in The Great Beast, “He branded her breast with a Chinese dagger already heated in the fire, with the Mark of the Beast: the cross within the circle, or the sun, moon, and balls dependent.

Thereafter, they lived together at 63 Washington Square South.

He saw the third volume of his magazine, The Equinox, through the press. In December 1919, the Great Beast sailed for England, leaving a trail of bouncing checks.

Ahead lay his adventures in Sicily, where he attempted to perform a rite Herodotus had observed in a temple in Egypt of the Pharaohs: a priestess copulating with a goat. Leah, who may have endured as Scarlet Woman longer than anyone else, was more than willing. The goat, not having been brought up to respond to a human female, refused. “I atoned for the young He-goat at considerable length,” wrote Crowley in his diary.

Mussolini’s government expelled him, and he became a penniless wanderer, living on the fees and offerings of his followers, still writing, publishing and teaching. Even his signature became obscene, as he chose to form the A as a penis, with a small loop at the base of each arm of the letter. He went from one furnished room to another, spending his last two years in Hastings, a seaside resort town, at Netherwood, a boarding house run by a man with an odd sense of humor. His “House Rules” included:

Guests are requested not to tease the Ghosts.

Breakfast will be served at 9 a.m. to the survivors of the Night.

The Hastings Borough Cemetery is five minutes walk away (ten minutes if carrying body), but only one minute as the Ghost flies.

Guests are requested not to cut down bodies from trees.

The Office has a certain amount of used clothing for sale, the property of guests who no have no longer any use for earthly raiment.

Here, the Ipsissimus died of bronchitis and cardiac degeneration on December 5, 1947. At his funeral in the chapel of the Brighton municipal crematorium, an old friend recited Crowley’s Gnostic Mass, including the violently pagan and erotic “Hymn to Pan,” and closed with this collect:

Unto them from whose eyes the veil of life has fallen may there be granted the accomplishment of their true Wills; whether they will absorption in the Infinite, or to be united with their chosen and preferred, or to be in contemplation, or to be at peace, or to achieve the labor and heroism of incarnation on this planet or another, or in any Star, or aught else, unto them may there be granted the accomplishment of their wills; yea, the accomplishment of their wills.

Then they gave up his body to be burned.

New York Press, September 7, 1999

Furniture Polish

What a piece of work is I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright’s one-hander about the German collector and transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. And what a piece of work was its subject, who survived Nazism and Communism—two of the most repressive (and repressively anti-gay) regimes in modern history—and managed to keep faith with her chosen lifestyle while vastly improving her standard of living. Between 1942 and her death last year, von Mahlsdorf—born Lothar Berfelde—amassed a small fortune’s worth of late-19th-century furniture and bric-a-brac, parlaying it into a private museum collection that she housed in the twenty-three-room, 18th-century manor house near East Berlin that she lived in for almost thirty years. There she ran a clandestine gay nightclub in the basement and with the fall of the Berlin Wall became a heroine of the newly resurgent gay community. Ultimately, she received the Order of Merit in recognition of her efforts and achievements in the field of furniture preservation.

[From New York Press, July 22, 2003]

What a piece of work is I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright’s one-hander about the German collector and transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. And what a piece of work was its subject, who survived Nazism and Communism—two of the most repressive regimes in modern history—and managed to keep faith with her chosen lifestyle while vastly improving her standard of living.

Between 1942 and her death last year, von Mahlsdorf—born Lothar Berfelde—amassed a small fortune’s worth of late-19th-century furniture and bric-a-brac, parlaying it into a private museum collection that she housed in the twenty-three-room, 18th-century manor house near East Berlin that she lived in for almost thirty years. There she ran a clandestine gay nightclub in the basement and with the fall of the Berlin Wall became a heroine of the newly resurgent gay community. Ultimately, she received the Order of Merit in recognition of her efforts and achievements in the field of furniture preservation.

Wright’s play is a bit of a puzzlement. The opening moments, in which we first glimpse Charlotte (as embodied by the actor Jefferson Mays) are riveting. Mays enters from stage left, a slim, sedate figure wearing a drab black housecoat and apron. Opening a door upstage, she appears to be walking into an empty room, but a step or two in, she stops and registers the presence of the audience. Her face lights up, and a self-conscious hand strays up to the strand of pearls at her neck. She opens her mouth to say something to us, then thinks better of it, turns on her heel, and goes back out the way she came. In a matter of seconds, Mays has managed to suggest a personality who is only ever really alive when holding court and a secret life that has to be got at indirectly, presumably by the play itself.

Unfortunately, I Am My Own Wife is less an examination of von Mahlsdorf’s life or character than an account of Wright’s attempts to gather material for a play about her. Von Mahlsdorf was no obscure figure by 1992, when Wright first learned of her existence from a journalist friend based in Berlin and contacted her with the idea of writing a play about her.

Wright traveled to Germany and visited the funiture museum, taping his thoughts, and getting the lay of the land. Back home, he wrote von Mahlsdorf a wide-eyed and effusive letter commending her on her furniture collection:

I must confess I was no less impressed by the mere fact of your survival. I grew up in the Bible Belt; I can only begin to imagine what it must have been like during the Third Reich. The Nazis, and then the Communists? It seems to me, you’re an impossibility. You shouldn’t even exist.

Wright proposed that he “continue to study” von Mahlsdorf’s life, pointing out that with her cooperation he might be able to secure funding for a play. (“As far as grant applications go,” he quipped, “forgive me, but from where I sit, you’re a slam dunk.”)

The trouble is not that Wright has included this in the play, but that it is the play. Cued by lighting changes, Mays shifts among personae as he recites the letters exchanged between Wright and his foreign correspondent pal, performs excerpts from the tapes Wright made of his observations, and impersonates Charlotte on her guided tours through the museum as well as in the taped interviews in which recounted to Wright the story of her life.

We hear about Lothar’s brutal Nazi of a father, who beat Lothar’s mother; we hear about how in 1943 Lothar went to stay with his Tante Luise, who raised horses on an estate in East Prussia and dressed like a man. We hear about how Tante Luise surprised him one day in the act of trying on a closet full of girls’ clothes, and how she gave him a copy of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten along with her blessing.

We hear about Lothar’s narrow escape from death at the hands of an SS officer, and about Tante Luise whipping out a gun and chasing his father off the property when he showed up unexpectedly. We hear how at fifteen Lothar killed his father, beating his head in with a rolling pin; how at his sentencing he and his mother locked eyes in mutual understanding; and how his prison term was miraculously cut short by the Allied invasion. It is all absurdly swashbuckling, sentimental, and inconsistent.

We also hear about how in 1963, when a venerable gay bar dating from the time of Wilhelm II was to be closed down by the Communists and demolished, Charlotte thought to herself, “That is not good,” and bought the furnishings and reconstructed the bar in the basement of her museum.

And then came the wall. And for us here in Eastern Berlin, it was finished, gay life. The bars, closed. Personal advertisements in the newspaper, cancelled. No place to meet but the tramway stations and the public toilets…

So I thought to give homosexual women and men community in this house. Yes. It was a museum for all people, but I thought, “Why not for homosexuals?”… And there was over the bar an attic. When a boy or girl met a man, and wanted to go upstairs, they could. Two men, two girls, a boy and a girl—it did not matter….

And anyone with an interest in Sado-Masochism—whether it was two or four or six—could have the room to themselves for a few hours. Whips and things to beat on the behind.

“When the wall falls,” Mays tells us in Doug’s voice, “Charlotte tells me she had the only surviving Weimar Cabaret in all of eastern Germany.” (The stage directions in Wright’s script call for the actor playing Doug to speak “reverently—in hushed tones” at this point.)

Did Charlotte ever think to herself, “That is not good,” about any of the other things going on under “the two most repressive regimes the Western World has ever known”—the suppression of intellectual freedoms, the disappearance of the families and individuals whose heirlooms she somehow managed to acquire for her “museum,” the ruined lives of which those possessions were only the outward expression? Did Wright ever question her about such things? If so, he keeps remarkably quiet about it.

Shortly before the act break, Wright discovers what anyone with half a brain and a rudimentary knowledge of history will have assumed all along: that Charlotte’s much-vaunted “survival” was contingent on her having sold other people out—chiefly other homosexuals and, in one nauseating instance, an old friend and rival collector, who was, as it happens, a truly steadfast and courageous man.

Doug is devastated, though not in quite the right way or for quite the right reason. “So—at the end of the day what have I got?” he expostulates bitterly, seeing his play slip away. When his friend suggests that he go with the truth, he whines, “But I need to believe in her stories as much as she does! I need to believe that…Lothar Berfelde navigated a path between…the Nazis and the Communists—in a pair of heels.”

Putting aside the fact that Charlotte does not wear heels—that she never wore anything other than the drab uniform of a 1930s hausfrau—what kind of naif would believe there was no more to it than that? What kind of artist would not wish for there to be more? And what kind of moral idiot would equate an inability to post personals ads with people getting rounded up and shot or imprisoned?

Wright’s problem was not his lack of material but his own vacuousness, his pin-spot focus on identity politics to the exclusion of everything else. He seems perfectly content to make Charlotte the moral arbiter of her own story, buying into the notion that whatever she did, the mere fact of her having been a cross-dresser makes her admirable. Nowhere does he acknowledge that Charlotte did what she did out of self-preservation, not moral integrity—and to collect furniture.

Moisés Kaufman, who directed the play, specializes in this sort of reality-based theater. The two plays he is best known for, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project, about the murder of Matthew Shepard, were similarly constructed from real-life sources: transcripts, conversations, interviews.

For a while I asked myself whether Wright’s play would have been any less offensive if he had actually put any work into it, if he had done anything more than apply for a grant, do a bit of traveling, and conduct a few superficial interviews, or if Kaufman had been able to help him shape a dramatic piece out of this material. I honestly don’t think it would. This is the story of a woman who thinks furniture, not people, worth saving, whose most profound relationships are with inanimate objects. Wright doesn’t see this, or if he does, it doesn’t strike him as worthy of comment.

Charlotte remains a cipher, as much in Mays’ performance as in Wright’s script. After those first moments, he does nothing to probe her pathological narcissism or her flights of self-invention, and nothing to suggest why Wright might have been so easily snowed by her. As for the score or two of other characters he plays, with one exception—the man Charlotte betrays—they are all fairly heavy-handed stereotypes. The only truly authentic aspects of the production are its surface elements—the decor (by Derek McLane) and effects. (There’s some nifty sound design by Andre J. Pluess and Benn Sussman that evokes echoes of music and weather and battles long past.)

Toward the end of the play, Wright has Doug describe a photograph that von Mahlsdorf sent him shortly before her death:

Lothar Berfelde at ten years old. He’s at the zoo in Berlin. He’s wearing a sailor suit, with a blue collar and matching cuffs… He’s on a bench. Sitting on either side of him, two tigers. Cubs, sure, but they’re still as big as he is. And they’re not fond of posing either. Their eyes are dangerously alert. At any moment they might revolt: they might scratch or bite. But Lothar has one arm around each tiger, and they’re resting their forepaws on his knees.

Wright has Doug pound home the allegorical meaning he detects in the snapshot: brave, fragile creature toughing it out between two bestial regimes. Amazingly, a blow-up of the photograph is on display in the theater lobby as the audience files out after the play; and almost everything in Wright’s description is either false or inaccurate. The little boy clearly loves having his picture taken. There’s no knowing what color his collar and cuffs are; it’s a sepia print. Wright doesn’t even get the animals right. They’re not tigers at all. I thought they looked like lion cubs, but whatever they are, they’re plainly used to being photographed with children. You never saw such relaxed, contented-looking creatures. They look positively sedated.

Stalking Genius

[From New York Press, April 8, 2003]

Vincent in Brixton
at the Golden Theater

My Life With Albertine
at Playwrights Horizons

Vincent in Brixton, Nicholas Wright’s sentimental biodrama about the year and a half that Vincent van Gogh spent living in London in his early twenties, is one of those plays that seem to believe that if we knew what happened to a great artist, we could understand his genius. The play, which Lincoln Center is presenting at the Golden Theater, is set in the period from 1873 to 1876 and concerns the relationship between van Gogh and the inhabitants of a house in South London where he boarded for about a year: the owner of the house, Mrs. Loyer (Clare Higgins), her daughter (Sarah Drew) and another lodger, a class-conscious young man named Sam Plowman (Peter Starrett) who works as a house-painter/carpenter while he waits to be accepted at art school.

Plowman’s name is a matter of historical record. According to Wright, the number of the Hackford Road boardinghouse where van Gogh lived and the identities of its other inhabitants were determined by an enterprising London postman during the postal strike of 1971. But it is Wright who gives Mrs. Loyer’s second lodger Marxist views and dreams of becoming a painter, just as he posits a clandestine affair between Vincent and his landlady, to whom he ascribes a passionate devotion to art and a longing to be the cause of someone’s greatness. She is something of an intellectual (she reads George Eliot but scorns Dickens) and something of a free spirit (she lets her daughter and Sam share a bed without benefit of clergy). She is also given to wild mood swings and bouts of depression—of the very sort, funnily enough, that will dog van Gogh in later life.

One day, when Mrs. Loyer thinks she is alone in the house, Vincent comes upon her weeping and banging her head on the kitchen table, and before you can say “peri-menopausal,” he’s declaring his affections. Mrs. Loyer takes him to bed, and pretty soon she has discarded the widow’s weeds she’s worn for fifteen years and is flouncing about in pretty frocks. It’s a May-August romance—Mrs. Loyer appears to be somewhere in her forties—but Wright and his characters all treat it like a May-December romance. Not since the quickening of Sarah’s womb in Genesis has literature made such an issue of a woman’s age. “Do you know how old I am, Mr. Vincent?” Mrs. Loyer asks self-mockingly. “I love your age. I love your unhappiness,” he replies—which is as much as to say, “You’re only as old as you feel.”

Vincent in Brixton is largely based on van Gogh’s letters and on a memoir that Theo’s wife, Johanna Gesina van Gogh-Bonger, wrote after the death of both brothers. In a program note, the playwright states that his version of events was suggested by “a mysterious six-month gap” in van Gogh’s letters home from London and by what he coyly refers to as “the well-known tendency of young men writing home to be less than frank about their most formative experiences.”

But Wright was almost certainly inspired, too, by a truly curious aspect of Johanna’s memoir, which, along with most of the letters, is available online. Johanna recounts how Vincent, on first arriving in London, lived in a boardinghouse run by two women who kept parrots but moved—because the place was “somewhat expensive”—to the house of a Mrs. Loyer, “a curate’s widow from the south of France, who with her daughter Ursula ran a day school for little children.”

Actually, Ursula was the name of the mother. The daughter’s name was Eugenie. Johanna goes on to say that Vincent “spent the happiest year of his life” chez Mrs. Loyer and that “Ursula made a deep impression on him.” According to Johanna, the key to Vincent’s happiness lay in the fact that he had fallen deeply in love with Mrs. Loyer’s daughter, whom she continues to refer to by her mother’s name.

He did not mention it to his parents, for he had not even confessed his love to Ursula herself—but his letters home were radiant with happiness. He wrote that he enjoyed his life so much—“Oh fullness of rich life, your gift O God.”

Vincent, Johanna reports, “celebrated a happy Christmas with the Loyers” that year, and “until spring his letters remained cheerful and happy.” Before summer, though, “he apparently spoke to Ursula of his love.”

Alas, it turned out that she was already engaged to the man who boarded with them before Vincent came. He tried everything to make her break this engagement, but did not succeed. With this first great sorrow his character changed; when he came home for the holidays he was thin, silent, dejected—a different being. But he drew a great deal.

The source of Johanna’s confusion over Eugenie’s name appears to be a letter that Vincent’s eldest sister, Anna, wrote to Theo in early January of 1874. In it, she refers to Miss Loyer as Ursula and quotes a letter from Vincent in which he does the same. It’s an odd document—all about how he and “Ursula” have agreed to regard one another as brother and sister, and how Anna should therefore love “Ursula” as a sister “for my sake,” but not imagine there is any more going on than meets the eye. Anna shares with Theo her speculation that there is a great deal more going on.

It’s possible, of course, that Anna herself was simply momentarily confused about the two names and a careless copyist. (Another letter, dated six weeks later, gets the name right: “I also got a very kind letter from Eugenie; she seems to be a natural and amiable girl.”) But Wright, understandably, chooses to speculate that Vincent was covering up more than the extent of his feelings. Lectio difficilior potior, say the laws of textual criticism (“The more difficult reading is stronger”—or in this case more fun) and besides, there are intriguing references in the family letters about “living at the Loyers’ with all those secrets” and how theirs “was not a family like others.”

Unfortunately, Wright’s hypothesis has led him merely to banality. Nothing in his little potboiler would be expected to hold the smallest interest for us if it were not happening to a character named Vincent van Gogh. “All I wanted was…some day, somehow…to be the cause of something remarkable,” Mrs. Loyer laments late in the play. But for all her admiration of George Eliot, she is no Dorothea Brooke, and nothing Ms. Higgins can do can make her into one or keep her from being, as she describes herself, “rather dull in most of the ways that matter.”

After a year in the West End (where Higgins and the play both won Olivier Awards this year), it’s understandable that the performances of Ms. Higgins and Jochum ten Haaf, who plays van Gogh, should have lost some former subtlety, but I was unprepared for the wholesale decline into broad comedy and histrionics that Richard Eyre, who also directed the play in London, seems to have allowed. Ms. Drew and Mr. Starrett seem like a breath of fresh air every time they appear, but then, they joined the cast in New York, as did Liesel Matthews, who may make the role of a stupid, small-minded and officious sister of Vincent’s—the Anna of the letters—even more maddening and repulsive than the playwright intended.

Or not. Wright portrays Vincent as a stereotypical Dutchman: dim, humorless, literal-minded—a sort of meta-stereotype, actually, since on top of being tactless and obtuse he’s always talking about being tactless and obtuse. Mr. ten Haaf underscores what’s in the script without filling in any details or nuance. “How,” the play seems to ask, “did such a conventional, unimaginative fellow ever become Vincent van Gogh?” Wright’s answer: by channeling his landlady’s depression.

Another production that seemed to expect us to salivate over the idea of the genius-artist was My Life with Albertine. A musical by Richard Nelson (book and lyrics) and Ricky Ian Gordon (music and lyrics) based on the “Albertine” portions of Remembrance of Things Past, it had a brief run last month at Playwrights Horizons and was a big disappointment. Say what you like about the idea of adapting Proust for the stage, I had high hopes of the project. The reasons against musicalizing Proust are fairly obvious. I was curious about Nelson’s reasons for doing it. The minute his name is joined with an unlikely project, in my view, it ceases to be unlikely and becomes intriguing. And Nelson has written with subtlety about several of Proust’s themes: the pretensions of bourgeois art-lovers (Some Americans Abroad), sexual awakening (Franny’s Way), and the tragic results of allying our lives too closely with art (Two Shakespearean Actors).

Actually, there are a number of reasons why Proust, like the Dubliners story, might lend itself to music-theater. The symphonic structure of the novel is a commonplace, but listening to parts of it read aloud, not long ago, I found myself struck by the fact that the novel is about the same things that music is about: memory, time and emotion. Moreover, what makes it so long, the digressions—those endless, page-long single-sentence paragraphs—make Proust’s prose itself innately musical. Music itself is an inherently digressive form.

Digression implies a return to the stated subject, though, which is why Ricky Ian Gordon was absolutely the wrong composer for this project. He writes bloodless, aggressively cerebral music that goes out of its way to thwart audience expectation—more often than not, by avoiding melodic and harmonic resolution. It’s a kind of music that Sondheim is often blamed for (unjustly) and that can only be redeemed if the lyrics are, like Sondheim’s, truly stunning—if their cleverness and sophistication are equal to the score. The lyrics for Albertine weren’t.

I have neither the space nor the inclination to whale on a playwright for whom I have as much respect as I do Nelson. Suffice it to say that I wish the piece had evoked a sense of time and place as beautifully as Thomas Lynch’s set did; that Chad Kimball, who played the young Marcel, seemed inappropriate for the role in every way; that it’s always a pleasure to see Brent Carver, who played the older Marcel (designated The Narrator); and that Kelli O’Hara brought a lovely stillness and simplicity to the role of Albertine.

I like the idea of making Marcel a composer and having the whole thing be a play within a play, but I wish it were being performed in the home of vulgar, bourgeois art-lovers, like the Verdurins, who would be always commenting and always missing the point. I think it’s a song-cycle, myself. But, like the fellow says, the desire to rewrite someone else’s play is the second most basic of all human urges.

New York Press, April 8, 2003

The Unsubtle Knife

Several recent obituaries of June Carter Cash referred to her early years as part of the Carter Family, singing over XER, a border blaster, one of the extraordinarily powerful radio stations broadcasting to U.S. audiences from south of the Rio Grande. XER was founded in 1931 by Dr. John R. Brinkley, whose scalpel made, as one admirer said, “the dead bough quicken and turn green again.” Brinkley took roughly $12 million between 1917 and 1942 from aging men who wanted to be “sweetly dangerous among the ladies once more.” His secret: goat glands transplanted into the scrota of some 16,000 men.

As early as the 1840s, according to David M. Friedman’s A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, German physiologist Arnold Berthold was experimenting with transplanting rooster testicles. Shortly after World War I, Russian surgeon Serge Voronoff began transplanting testicles obtained from apes into elderly men who reported “renewed vigor.” He eventually performed more than 1,000 procedures at $5,000 a pop.

Gene Fowler, the Hearst journalist who organized the first known American monkey gland transplant as a publicity stunt to increase his newspaper’s circulation, had feared being unable to find “a man who [would] permit a doctor with a knife in his hand to start fooling around with his swinging trinkets.” Thousands of limp and flaccid men soon proved him wrong.

Though aspects of his autobiography varied from telling to telling, John Romulus Brinkley consistently claimed a birthday of July 8, 1885. He reported having been born in a log cabin and graduated from high school in Tuckasiegee, North Carolina. In 1908, while a Western Union telegrapher in Chicago, he began attending Bennett Medical College. He dropped out before his senior year. Four years later, Brinkley obtained a Tennessee license to practice medicine as an “undergraduate physician”—apparently some kind of learner’s permit.

He worked for one Dr. Burke, who was a “men’s specialist,” his office decorated with papier-mâché models of male organs that illustrated the wages of indiscretion. Once a prospect had been terrified by the prospect of tertiary syphilis, selling him a treatment was easy. Then Brinkley opened a medical office in Greenville, South Carolina. He advertised in the local daily, asking “Are You a Manly Man Full of Vigor?” The suckers came in droves. Brinkley gave them injections directly into the hip at $25 a shot. He claimed it was salvarsan or neo-salvarsan; it was really distilled water. Two months later, Brinkley skipped town, stiffing both landlord and newspaper.

In June 1913, Brinkley resurfaced in St. Louis, Missouri, where he received an M.D. from a diploma mill, the National University of Arts and Sciences, for a few hundred in cash. It fooled Arkansas, which licensed him as a physician; the Arkansas license, in turn, persuaded Kansas to license him too. Brinkley later obtained a second M.D. from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, Missouri, whose proprietor, Professor Date R. Alexander, once rebuked a reporter for printing that he sold medical diplomas for $200. (“That’s a deadly insult,” Alexander complained. “I never sold one for less than $500.”)

Brinkley’s career in World War I was brief: one month and five days on duty and one month and three days in hospital, followed by release as unfit, partially due to multiple rectal fistulas. The former lieutenant drifted to Milford, Kansas, which had no sidewalks, electric lights, or water system. But he was down to his last twenty-three bucks, so he rented an old drugstore for $8 a month and began a general practice.

One night a man came in, a self-described “flat tire” who complained of being “All in. No pep.” Somehow, the subject of goats came up. “You wouldn’t have any trouble if you had a pair of those buck glands in you,” Brinkley said.

“Well, why don’t you put ’em in?” the man replied affably.

Brinkley performed the operation in his back room. The procedure involved administering a local anesthetic, opening the scrotum by incision from both sides, and—as he later wrote—“[placing] the glands of a three weeks’ old male goat…upon the non-functioning glands of a man, within twenty minutes of the time they are removed from the goat.” Within two weeks, his first patient had “regained his pep.” Within a year, the man and his wife had a healthy child, named Billy to honor the goat. Then another man came in, with a … kidney problem. Brinkley whetted his scalpel, and the second patient reported complete rejuvenation. Thousands would follow. Brinkley had found his niche.

The medical establishment held that a recipient’s immune system would either encapsulate or entirely reject animal glands. Nonetheless, Brinkley firmly maintained that goat glands renewed their recipients’ physical and mental vigor; indeed, he eventually asserted that his procedure transformed its beneficiary into “the-ram-that-am-with-every-lamb” while also curing insanity, acne, influenza, and high blood pressure. Numerous patients publicly swore the procedure worked. Soon, the Doc was charging $750—in advance—and the patient selected his own goat.

By 1923, Brinkley was also running a radio station—KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best)—that broadcast weather reports and live country music as well as “Medical Question Box,” in which Brinkley himself read letters from listeners, mostly women, on their ailments and complaints. The medications he prescribed over the air were coded (e.g., “Dr. Brinkley’s No. 101”) and could only be filled by druggists who carried Brinkley’s products, kicking back $1 to the Doc for each prescription. With a warm, down-home voice and a knack for providing listeners with the answers they wanted to hear, he was perfect for radio.

Despite his affability, the Doc was amazingly vain. Sadie Luck, one of Milford’s public librarians, later recalled:  “He autographed everything with his initials. I counted them on his Cadillac once and, hubcaps and all, his initials were on that car seventeen times!” In 1928, vanity finally overcame common sense. Hygeia, the American Medical Association’s magazine, called him a quack. Brinkley sued for libel and lost. The AMA then denounced him to the Kansas Board of Medical Registration and Examination, which revoked his medical license for immorality and unprofessional conduct.

Worse, the Federal Radio Commission yanked his broadcast license after a hearing on June 20-22, 1930, holding that his operations were not serving the public interest. Some argued that Brinkley’s candor about sex had been fatal; others noted that the politically influential Kansas City Star‘s radio station was losing advertisers to KFKB. Of course, the commission might simply have thought Brinkley a fraud and swindler.

Still, KFKB had made Brinkley famous. He believed his licenses might be regained through political influence. Although only forty-two days remained until election day, and it was too late to have his name printed on the ballots, Brinkley announced his write-in candidacy for governor of Kansas. As his attorneys had appealed the commission’s decision to the federal courts, the actual suspension was delayed until the appeal could be heard. Thus, he stayed on the air throughout his campaign.

The Democrats and Republicans thought him absurd. His name wasn’t even on the ballot and his platform promised something for everyone: free school books, free auto tags, lower taxes, better times for the working people, lakes in every county, and increased rainfall. But Brinkley was a great salesman, with a knack for anti-establishment rhetoric in a state sliding into the Great Depression.

Every day, after several hours on the radio, he would stump the state in his sixteen-cylinder Cadillac limousine and his private plane. He drew enormous crowds to mass gatherings that mixed “elements of a fundamentalist revival meeting with the mood of a state fair.” One witness wrote, “The man glittered. Standing on the platform with the sun shining on his white beard, his gold-rimmed spectacles, his rings, watch-fobs, cuff-links and tie-pins, he seemed to glow, wink and twinkle like a…Christmas tree. And, could he talk… We hung on every word, our mouths agape… The man was magical, and his words were wonderful. I didn’t understand any of it.”

In the last days of the campaign, the state attorney general ruled that only ballots bearing precisely the words J.R. Brinkley would be counted for the doctor. This saved Kansas for the system. On Election Day 1930, as many as 50,000 ballots bearing variations on his name, such as Dr. Brinkley or John Brinkly, were discarded. Even so, the vote was Woodring (Dem.), 217,171; Haucke (Rep.), 216,920; and Brinkley, 183,278.

Brinkley relocated to Del Rio, Texas, just on the Rio Grande. In the neighboring town of Villa Acuna, Mexico, Brinkley built a transmitter with towers some 300 feet tall. XER (“The Station Between the Nations”) went on the air with 100,000 watts on October 21, 1931. Soon, thanks to Brinkley’s lobbyists in Mexico City, the station began using 500,000 watts, then one million watts. (The most powerful U.S. stations were limited to 50,000 watts. ) XER thus blanketed North America, unrestrained by U.S. regulations.

XER broadcast folksy lectures from Doc Brinkley, who answered questions from listeners about anything from astronomy to religion. Brinkley held forth on his special “x-ray and microscopical as well as chemical examinations” designed to diagnose properly “the disease that’s in your body, the disease that’s destroying your earning power, the disease that’s causing you to keep your nose to the grindstone and spend every dollar that you can rake and scrape.” He pleaded with those listening, “You men, why are you holding back? You know you’re sick, you know your prostate’s infected and diseased… Well, why do you hold back? Why do you twist and squirm around on the old cocklebur…when I am offering you these low rates, this easy work, this lifetime-guarantee-of-service plan? Come at once to the Brinkley Hospital before it is everlastingly too late.”

XER had Bible-thumping preachers and astrologers. Entrepreneurs pitched get-rich-quick schemes: oil wells, real estate deals, lottery tickets, all spectacular opportunities for enrichment, and 100 percent guaranteed. Frank the Diamond Man sold genuine simulated diamond rings. There was The Lord’s Last Supper Tablecloth, the man who sold false teeth by mail, and the cures for hemorrhoids, flatulence, and that tormenting rectal itch. XER was also the first major national radio station to broadcast country music, from the Carter Family to Hank Williams.

During the late 1930s, Brinkley, who increasingly blamed his legal troubles on Jewish doctors, began broadcasting rabble-rousing anti-Semites such as Father Charles Coughlin and Rev. Gerald Winrod, the Kansas Hitler. In 1938, while staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, Brinkley met William Dudley Pelley, chief of the fascist Silver Shirt Legion of America, and gave him $5,000.

During the early days of World War II, he opened a flight school. Its XER advertisements claimed untruthfully that its students would receive draft deferments. Hustling to the end, Brinkley died on May 26, 1942. He was only fifty-six. One of his patients summed him up: “I knowed he was bilking me, but that’s okay. You see, I liked him anyway.”

New York Press, May 28, 2003

Wild Rose MacDowell

On December 14, 1894 Edward MacDowell performed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl. Although it had been first performed in Boston some five years before, the concerto had not previously been performed here. After all, before

On December 14, 1894 Edward MacDowell performed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl. Although it had been first performed in Boston some five years before, the concerto had not previously been performed here. After all, before the advent of the phonograph and the radio, orchestral music could be heard only in live performance.

Thus, the piece was in a very real sense new to New Yorkers—and MacDowell himself was a magnificent pianist at the top of his form. He triumphed, and in the hour of performance, his work seemed to stand on the edge of immortality. W. J. Henderson of the New York Times found the concerto impossible to speak of “in terms of judicial calmness, for it is made of the stuff that calls for enthusiasm…here is one young man who has placed himself on a level with the men owned by the world.”

In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, the New York–born MacDowell was world-renowned as America’s greatest living composer. His concerti, sonatas, tone poems, and song cycles were being performed throughout Europe, in Japan, even in South Africa. Some contemporaries—Seidl in particular—declared him superior to Brahms. Yet today, he is nearly forgotten.

He was born Edward Alexander MacDowell, at 220 Clinton Street in Manhattan, on December 18, 1860. His father was a prosperous wholesale milk dealer who loved the arts; his mother, having seen to it that he knew French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek, arranged his first piano lessons. In 1876 he was sent to the Paris Conservatoire, then as now one of the world’s leading conservatories.

At sixteen MacDowell was the youngest applicant in a pool of 300, and his performance in the entrance examinations won him one of the two scholarships awarded that year to foreign students. Yet he found the Conservatoire’s method of teaching piano—which relied heavily on sight-reading skills—to be pointless and absurd. His instructors wanted him to play music with the score turned upside down or to transpose it into a different key, and directed him to correct the work of earlier composers, such as Bach, so as to make it conform to the Conservatoire’s notions of what constituted proper composition. MacDowell wanted to work and felt he was being taught to play games.

After hearing the Russian virtuoso Anton Rubenstein burn up the piano in a bravura performance of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in B-Flat Minor at the Paris Exposition of 1878, he resolved to leave Paris, where he would never learn to play like that. Despite his youth (he was now eighteen), he won a place at the Frankfurt Conservatory, where most of his classmates were closer to 30. There he found instructors who, as McDowell wrote, dared to teach and play the classics “as if they had actually been written by men with blood in their veins.”

One day, one of MacDowell’s teachers, Joachim Raff, a composer, interrupted MacDowell while he was supposed to be practicing. He was actually just fooling around at the keyboard. Raff asked about the piece MacDowell was working on. Embarrassed at being caught idling, MacDowell, though usually candid, said he was working on a composition. Raff asked to see it when it was done. Feeling trapped (and liking Raff, as well), MacDowell chose to deliver. He wrote his first piano concerto over the next two weeks. Raff glanced at it. Then he scribbled a letter and said, “Take it to Liszt.”

Franz Liszt had created the stereotype of the great Romantic pianist and lived the rock star’s life, groupies and all. Now, in the fall of 1881, he lived in semi-retirement in Weimar. MacDowell arrived at Liszt’s home with Raff’s letter and the concerto’s manuscript. Shyness overcame him; he could not raise his hand to the doorbell, and so he sat in Liszt’s garden for an hour. Then the old man himself came outside and escorted MacDowell into his house. After MacDowell had warmed himself, he played the concerto. Liszt knew a good thing when he heard it and used his influence to have MacDowell’s work placed on concert programs. He also persuaded his own publishers to take the piano concerto.

MacDowell remained in Germany for the next decade, teaching, composing, and performing. He married one of his students, a young American woman named Marian Nevins, in 1884. The marriage was a wonderful success: Marian later wrote, “There was an extraordinary camaraderie between us which we never lost… Until he died, he gave me what few women ever have [from a man], his absolutely undivided affection…”

The first concerto premiered in 1885 and made MacDowell famous overnight. Stirring in mood, dazzling in technique, it provided him with a splendid vehicle for concert performances. So did his fiendishly difficult Witches’ Dance, a bit of showmanship that knocked their socks off across Europe. Critics hailed MacDowell’s mastery of the keyboard, his supreme power and control, as well as his striking stage presence. Tall, slender and broad-shouldered, with muscular arms and hands, he had jet-black hair and flashing blue eyes. All this, along with a flamboyantly waxed dark red mustache, must have made him irresistible.

In 1888, the MacDowells came home. They settled in Boston, then the center of American musical life. There MacDowell taught and went on national concert tours. His piano miniatures Woodland Sketches and New England Idylls, his settings of “To a Wild Rose” and “To a Water Lily” were on drawing room pianos throughout the country even as his larger works were being performed from Portland to San Francisco. During his Boston years, he wrote four massive piano sonatas, the Tragica, Eroica, Norse. and Keltic, each investing (or warping, as MacDowell self-deprecatingly said) the sonata form with symphonic grandeur.

On January 23, 1896 MacDowell gave a return performance of his Concerto with the Boston Symphony at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Seth Low, president of Columbia University, was in the audience. Earlier that year, Columbia had received a grant to establish its first professorship of music. In April 1896, Low offered MacDowell the job. He was thirty-five years old.

MacDowell was the music department. He taught seven year-long courses, each meeting two to three hours weekly, and—without teaching assistant or secretary—dealt with everything from purchasing desks, pianos, and library books to hiring outside lecturers, ordering chalk, and keeping the instruments in tune. (He often retuned them himself—it was easier than fighting with the university’s business managers, who refused to understand that pianos do go out of tune.) MacDowell slaved over the organization and content of his lectures to have them appear spontaneous, and also provided substantial individual instruction and individual examinations.

In 1901, Seth Low was elected mayor of New York and resigned from Columbia’s presidency. His successor, Nicholas Murray Butler, was a very different kind of man—a power seeker, far more interested in administration and in the idea of the educator than in ideas themselves, though he had taught philosophy. A mere five years in the classroom had convinced Butler that education was a science. He had founded Teachers College, successfully lobbied for compulsory state licensing of teachers (all of whom were required to have a degree in education, thus promoting the interests of the education industry), and advocated the centralization of the New York City schools, all reflecting Butler’s faith that centralized authority in the hands of men such as himself inevitably led to improvement.

Unfortunately, MacDowell chose this moment to propose restructuring Columbia’s curriculum, passionately arguing that some education in at least one of the fine arts was as essential as in science or history. Butler opposed the idea, largely because the mainstream faculty felt threatened and it seemed more politic to soothe their feelings. But MacDowell persisted. Butler saw this as a challenge to his own authority and vision for Columbia. He was not above spreading sly, personal speculations about MacDowell’s character, temperament, and intelligence among colleagues—all behind the composer’s back. MacDowell’s proposal was definitively turned down in September 1903. He resigned the following February.

In March 1905, MacDowell was knocked down by a hansom cab at Broadway and 21st Street. One wheel rolled over his spine: the injuries were physically and emotionally debilitating. He had been depressed since his resignation; now his depression darkened. Over the summer, his hair turned white. By November, his gait had become unsteady. His physicians never quite diagnosed his illness: Alan H. Levy, his most recent biographer, speculates that his depression, deepened by his physical injuries, led to a progressive aphasia. By the winter of 1905–06, he was dying. Friends raised funds to defray his medical expenses. Seth Low privately gave $2,000 to Marian MacDowell and lent the MacDowells his car. Butler didn’t even send a get-well card.

Now he was attended by a full-time nurse and a servant who carried him about. By the summer of 1907, he no longer recognized his parents. On January 23, 1908 his wife said to him, “Won’t you give me a kiss?” He managed to pucker his lips. He looked at her for the first time in days with something like recognition. Then he stopped breathing. He was forty-six years old.

His reputation was as the wild rose that fades. By the 30s, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, who should have known better, dismissed MacDowell and his contemporaries as genteel, over-gentlemanly, and bourgeois. Copland claimed that none of them wrote with fire in the eye: “There were no Dostoyevskys, no Rimbauds among them; no one expired in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe.”

Alan H. Levy has called this phenomenon “the great erasure.” He suggests that the Copland generation wanted to believe itself the first American composers in whom the nation could take pride. They weren’t, of course, but the eclipse of MacDowell and the composers of his generation reflects how the Depression-era seizure of the nation’s musical establishment by the left sent much of America’s musical culture down the memory hole. Thomson finally admitted, shortly before his death, that MacDowell’s reputation might supplant that of MacDowell’s contemporary Charles Ives, whose cantankerous personality and freakish originality long charmed the critics. Only in the last few years have people begun quietly admitting that most of Ives’s so-called major works are unlistenable.

Nicholas Murray Butler remained president of Columbia until 1945. During World War I, he purged the faculty of antiwar professors and did the same to leftists during the 1930s and 1940s. The Republicans nominated him for vice president in 1912; he sought their presidential nomination in 1920. His support for the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, one of many attempts between the wars to achieve peace without creating a means to enforce it, won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. He, too, is almost forgotten.

New York Press, April 30, 2003

Images of Elsewhere

Waiting for the light to change at Broadway and 18th, the other night, I eavesdropped on a couple of guys who, like me, had just come from seeing Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Our Lady of 121st Street at the Union Square Theater. They were talking about the unconventional relationship between the set and the action of the play, hardly any of which actually takes place in the space we spend the evening looking at—a large, institutional room that, depending on how the light is falling, can look like either a funeral parlor lobby

[From New York Press, March 18, 2003]

Stephen Adly Guirgis, John Patrick Shanley and Frank McGuinness

Waiting for the light to change at Broadway and 18th, the other night, I eavesdropped on a couple of guys who, like me, had just come from seeing Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Our Lady of 121st Street at the Union Square Theater. They were talking about the unconventional relationship between the set and the action of the play, hardly any of which actually takes place in the space we spend the evening looking at—a large, institutional room that, depending on how the light is falling, can look like either a funeral parlor lobby or a parochial school lounge. What’s curious is that the set should be so realistic, when—as the young men behind me were saying—we’re almost never supposed to take it literally. It’s there because most of the characters in Guirgis’s play have come to pay their respects to a teacher at the Catholic school they all attended. But Guirgis’s script seems, with the help of James Vermeulen’s artful lighting, to be forever taking us away from that room and relocating us in some even more transient place—a street corner, a confessional, a bar.

Guirgis’s characters are themselves transients of a sort. They’re latter-day O’Neill characters, damaged, disappointed and dispossessed: hookers and ex-hookers, alcoholics and lungers (well anyway, there’s an asthmatic), a closeted homosexual, an apostate amputee priest, a cop haunted by the moment of abstraction that led to his small son’s death, a man chained to his brain-damaged brother—you get the idea. Actually, Guirgis’s characters are more interesting than O’Neill’s. For one thing, they don’t keep saying the same thing over and over. Instead, they say things we haven’t heard before or have never heard expressed in quite that way. Also, they resist pity. Where O’Neill intends us to see his characters as tragic ruins of humanity, Guirgis writes in a way that commands respect rather than compassion for his characters, and he has no grand portentous literary agenda, both factors that keep his play from being a pretentious downer.

Our Lady of 121st Street was written for the LAByrinth Theater, where it was first produced last fall. Guirgis’s two earlier plays were both written for the LAByrinth as well; in fact, it was the actors John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman, co-artistic directors of the decade-old theater company, who encouraged Guirgis to begin writing for the stage. Since then, the New York Times seems to have anointed him God’s latest gift to American theater. No matter. Our Lady of 121st Street is worth seeing anyway.

One reason is that it’s full of wonderful voices. Another is that the LAByrinth seems to be fast becoming what Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater was to American theater in the 80s, not only a source for interesting new work but also the source of something like an esthetic. Originally founded as a sort of haven of artistic ethnicity (the acronym in the name stands for “Latino Actors Base”), LAByrinth has begun setting a standard for direction and ensemble performance that makes a good deal of what’s around it look phony, if it didn’t already look that way before.

Some of this is surely due to Hoffman, who has staged Our Lady with the same integrity and exquisite skill that informed his direction of Rebecca Gilman’s The Glory of Living in 2001 and his own performances in such roles as the drag queen protagonist of Joel Shumacher’s film Flawless and Konstantin in Mike Nichols’ production of The Seagull in Central Park. Here, Hoffman has orchestrated a cast of twelve, the best of whom all seem to be company members: Elizabeth Canavan, Liza Colon-Zayas, Ron Cephas Jones, Russell G. Jones, Richard Petrocelli, Portia, Felix Solis, David Zayas—they’re too numerous to mention, but they’re all wonderful.

Our Lady of 121st Street resists the conventions of the various genres it draws upon; and, let’s face it, it contains elements of the reunion play, the nun play, even the wheelchair play—all justly despised forms. No one really gets reunited (or even reconciled) and nothing gets reaffirmed (or even affirmed). Nothing is resolved at all, and even poor Sister Rose—the disappearance of whose body provides the single strand of plot on which Guirgis has hung what amounts to a succession of wonderful episodes—remains largely unretrieved; at any rate, there’s less of her at the end than we started out with. It seems she has nothing more to offer her former pupils. One reason that ever-present set works so well is that it’s the play’s only concrete reference to the two things that have brought the characters together: death and the Catholic-school values they carry around with them wherever they go.

The latest from John Patrick Shanley, Dirty Story, which opened at the Harold Clurman the same week that Our Lady of 121st Street transferred to Union Square, is another LAByrinth production. To the best of my knowledge, it’s unlike anything Shanley’s ever done before, a political allegory that recasts American foreign policy and the Mideast conflict as a torrid love affair glimpsed through a gauzy veil of popular culture stereotypes. Whether you greet it with mirth or disgust will probably depend on how open-minded or confused you are about American foreign policy. I am the very soul of confusion, so I enjoyed it immensely.

Shanley has always had a gift for creating complex, idiosyncratic characters and setting them at odds with one another. Also for making neurosis both lyrical and surreal. Also for plumbing the deep recesses of fear and desire that drive heterosexual passions and hatreds. Shanley fans will rejoice to hear that none of these elements is absent from Dirty Story. They may also be glad to learn that the play reunites the wonderful David Deblinger and Florencia Lozano, who played the mutually murderous pair locked in a battle-to-the-death marriage in Where’s My Money? (also a LAByrinth production).

Here Deblinger is Brutus, a poet and essayist of gargantuan ego and intellectual capacity. Lozano is Wanda, a dewy-eyed graduate student and aspiring novelist who has sent him a manuscript. In the opening scene, set in a public park, Brutus eviscerates both Wanda and her novel, while a bumbling Englishman sits listening to Mozart on headphones, making alternately whingeing and inane observations. How quickly you begin reading between the lines will depend on how attuned you are to the potential layers of meaning in references to real estate and borders and seemingly inconsequential remarks like, “Even conflict requires common ground.” But even the most dogged hunter after subtext will become mystified when the second scene finds Wanda and Brutus in the midst of a romantic dinner at his place, and a comic bout of role-playing, growing out of a discussion of the sous conversation in “The Perils of Pauline,” turns sado-masochistically nasty.

I won’t describe the Act I curtain, though I probably could without spoiling the effect. My guess is that Dirty Story is probably critic-proof. There’s so much more going on in the play at any given moment than what is happening in the story that descriptions of this or that element leave it still-virgin territory. What delights is the phenomenon of experiencing the play on both levels, the human and the allegorical.

Act II is where the fun really starts, as Lozano and Deblinger, now full-fledged embodiments of the Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints, are joined by Chris McGarry and Michael Puzzo, playing two characters named Frank and Watson, who embody America and England respectively. Questions of self-interest and historical alliance, national guilt and moral responsibility briefly surface and disappear again, eclipsed by the flashes of rage that erupt from Deblinger and Lozano or engulfed by eddies of cluelessness that swirl around McGarry and Puzzo. Shanley isn’t for or against anything or anyone. His satire takes in everyone—us, the Brits, the Israelis, the Palestinians, even the French—and he gets everyone right, too. What makes it all so delightful and disarming—in every sense—is that he isn’t looking to make any political point. He has no agenda. Even here, it’s people he’s really interested in, with the result that the pseudo-human and pseudo-political aspects in the play shed light on each other.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, is a play that pays lip service to the idea of politics. An early work by the Irish playwright and screenwriter Frank McGuinness, it purports to explore the tragedy of the Western Front from the perspective of a platoon of Irish Protestant volunteers. In fact, McGuinness (himself a Catholic nationalist) merely uses the nationalistic and religious fervor of his characters as stepping stones on the way to the revelation that fanaticism leads to war which in turn breeds bigotry. (Who knew?)

The play’s only other apparent point—that some members of The Lost Generation were bent—will be equally unsurprising to Lincoln Center audiences (and anyone who’s ever heard of Siegfried Sassoon). McGuinness’ hero, Kenneth Pyper, a highly articulate—and unlikable, in Justin Theroux’s self-important performance—gay sculptor has cut short a sojourn in Paris on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, owing to a severe case of ennui. He aims to enlist in the hope of getting killed. Newly arrived at his barracks, he baits and provokes his less sophisticated comrades, seduces one, uncoils a bit, and eventually becomes less of an outsider. Meanwhile, there is much drum-beating and tub-thumping as well as prayer, hymn-singing. Incessant references are also made to the Red Hand of Ulster as well as her rivers, islands, battles, legends, archeology, and fraternal orders. It is all exceedingly tedious—the more so as Nicholas Martin has directed at a glacial pace. (The Titanic also gets considerable mention.)

It’s difficult not to draw an adverse comparison between Sons of Ulster and Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, given the presence of the divine Richard Easton in the cast of the McGuinness play. It was Easton who gave such a haunting performance as the aged A.E. Houseman in Stoppard’s play last season. Here he’s utterly wasted playing Pyper at eighty, a role that gives him about five minutes on stage. Like Sons of Ulster, Stoppard’s play was full of esoterica—classical jokes and historical references. But Stoppard is actually interested in the abstractions he takes on. He dramatizes them for that very reason: to see where they will go. McGuinness’s play fails to dramatize or contextualize anything, so that we’re forced to fall back on the poorly written and edited program notes the Lincoln Center theater has provided, which (among other lapses) have the British following “the roles of trench warfare.” (Italics all mine.)

To my mind, the play also fails to make connections between elements in its own story. The “Carson” referred to in the phrase “Carson’s men,” for instance, which the program glosses Wikipedially as “Sir Edward Henry Carson…dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ulster,’ for opposing Home Rule…”) happens to be the same Edward Henry Carson who prosecuted Oscar Wilde (or, rather, defended Queensberry, which ended up amounting to the same thing). Yet McGuinness’s hero, an Irish homosexual artist who has spent time in Paris (where Wilde died and is buried) apparently knows nothing of this and lets the name pass without comment. I wonder what universe that would happen in.