Five Stories Of The Music Hall

Working for a strange Uriah Heep sort of a nut, in order to pay for the printing of this monograph (book) on Radio City Music Hall. It's really of the Music Hall, rather than about the Music Hall. Uriah Heep wasn't the real first name or the real last name of the nut, but his name isn't that important to the incident anyway. It was late summer or early fall, but it wasn't spring. I'm in his apartment now, which is cluttered with scraps and papers. A bed-spring leans up against an off-white wall, and closets can't be opened. I was afraid to look at any piles on the floor because they might start moving towards me, thinking that they know me from somewhere. This time its a run-down boarding house on West 12th street, 38 blocks from Radio City. Several years before Fritz Lang had used this very site for the main set for one of his movies. Joan Bennett had sat where I now sit. I take out a cigarette and start looking for an ash-tray, some rubber cement, and a sheet of 78909 typeset. He is not here now, but any minute now he may come back, so I can't waste any time. If Only I can finish pasting up this last page of his magazine called "Off-Off...Whats Happening Off Broadway," I can leave. Everything is going as planned. Nancy is doing all the typing at her office at Seventeen Magazine, and each night the pages are smuggled out to me via a Mercury Messenger. It is early evening now and the street outside the dirty windows is taking on that 1969 look of evening that one can really appreciate after being locked up in a hole for two hours. Uriah is back now, the hair on his head going off in all directions, dripping Mr. Custard down the front of his black and blue sport Jacket. I can actually visualize the pages of the Music Hall book before my eyes.

Now it is the fall of 1957, waiting outside the second mezzanine on a long line with my mother and sister. It is a fall evening but it's warm and feels like a spring evening. Spring afternoons in New York are quite different from spring evenings and I feel this is important enough to point out. It is two years before a woman tourist will trip and fall in front of me and my uncle Natie as we enter the Music Hall to see "Count Your Blessings." This time we--by "we" I mean my mother, my sister, and me---are waiting to see George Cukor's "Les Girls," in Metrocolor. My sister is wearing red lipstick like Mitzi Gaynor will have on, when she does her big dance number in the movie. My sister is looking at the program, as the sound of the biggest organ in the world filters out into the foyer. I don't have this program anymore, and it's quite possible that I miss it, especially the smell. (More about the smell of the Music Hall Programs later.) She points out to me in the program that one of the numbers in the stage show, that we will see very soon is called "Silhouettes" which was the nineteenth most popular song in 1957 (according to Cash Box.) We both like the song very much, and look forward to hearing it. As it happened, it turned out to be something completely different, the wrong "Silhouettes," and we are very disappointed. On the way home in the car we sing the songs to each other that were done in the movie.

1965. (We will have to go back further than that for all the facts, but this will do for now.) It's May in New York. Spring and warm. I'm on the subway coming from Brooklyn and going to Manhattan. The Brooklyn I've lived in for all my eighteen years. The Manhattan I've visited for all my eighteen years. I'm to apply for a job as an usher at Radio City Music Hall. I don't get the job, but it doesn't matter that you know this before the incident is over, before I finish telling the incident, because there are no surprises. Out of the subway and up to 61 West 50th Street to a small door on the side of the Music Hall. I'm to enter through this same door eight years later to meet with Patricia Robert, the Director of Publicity, to discuss with her the article on Radio City Music Hall for Artforum Magazine that I might write. But now I'm met by an acquaintance of my mother who works at the Music Hall at some job I can't recall. As I walk down some small steps he says: "Your mother tells me you're interested in art. You Know the Music Hall awards scholarships in art every year to the children of parents who work here. Perhaps if your mother got a job here, you too could qualify." "But my mother sells donuts on the 50th Street subway station of the BMT. She can't work here. Besides what will she do with all the donuts?" Then he said: "Well, maybe if you get the usher job, your children will be able to qualify for one of the scholarships." "Impossible! I don't ever intend to have children and even If I did they wouldn't be interested in art." An elevator takes me down to the basement of the Music Hall. It's not unlike the subway stations that New York is famous for. There are tiles on the wall; there are hard wooden benches for tired ushers to rest on; there is even some graffitti, but not in the epidemic proportion that has recently manifested itself in our subway system. There are only boys down here, some off-duty, some about to go on. Each one checks the big black board outside the head usher's office for his daily assignment, and the schedule of the program for the day. Nausea sweeps over me as I'm led into the head usher's office.

A number of incidents take place in New York in the springtime. It seems that everything happens in the spring. I would tell this to my analyst ten years later on a spring evening. But in the spring of 1959, I'm on my way to the Music Hall with my uncle Natie. It's a Sunday, because it had to happen on a Sunday. We had already been to the Paramount, stopping to take photographs of coins in a window, finally reaching our destination via Sixth Avenue. It was spring and just as we were about to enter the theater, a woman tourist, leaving, tripped on something and fell on the sidewalk in front of us. I felt rather strange and had a feeling of deja vu, followed by a mild case of depression for the rest of the afternoon.

Now it's the beginning of spring 1961, March 15, 1961, and we come to see "The immortal story of the loves and triumphs of a man and his woman...the epic cavalcade of a headlong surge to a glorious new land with its deep passions, earthy humor and throbbing romance." Waiting on a small line of people along the side of the 50th Street facade, I'm there with Bob Smithson and everyone is there to see Anthony Mann's remake of Edna Ferber's "Cimarron." A light spring rain, lukewarm by the time it falls on Atlas holding up the world. Bob takes out a cigarette. I wonder if perhaps it would have been a good idea to have used the hidden passage-way that connects the IRT Sixth Avenue line to the Music Hall. The head usher beckons the crowd to come forward and we enter, paying our admissions one right after the other. I pick up some programs and smell them for a few minutes; Bob does likewise. Now another line. This one is located in the Grand Foyer. Two chandeliers weighing two tons each hover over our heads and I wait for them to fall. Now everything finally starts to come together. Bob points up to the people leaving the auditorium from every mezzanine, first, second and third. Leisurely leavers lean over the mezzanine balconies that open above the Grand Foyer where Bob and I stand, waiting to enter the auditorium and our front row seats. Mirrors reaching six stories in height reflect the whole scene. Brahms' "Hungarian Dances" can now be heard and just as a woman standing in back of us starts to hum along, I spot a man leaning over the third mezzanine balcony, trying to see if he recognizes anybody on the line. Bob thinks he knows him from somewhere and starts to run up the main staircase in an effort to warn him that he is hanging over too far, that he's in danger, that he will fall or be pushed over the edge by the crowd that is now surging all around him. I hold my breath and wait. Perhaps this man falling to his death from the third mezzanine balcony on to the carpet below was necessary. Bob tried and I held my breath and waited. He was pronounced dead by the head nurse, Emma Heller, as we found our seats in the auditorium and waited for the lights to dim and the film begin. As we left the Music Hall, I knew that it would be eight years before I would see Bob again.