In 1948, Malina found out she was pregnant with the first of her and Beck’s two kids, and the pair married at City Hall. They incorporated the Living Theatre, “the most important work of my life,” as Malina wrote in her diary, the same year. It was an uphill battle. When their first attempt to open a theater space in a Wooster Street basement in the Village in 1949 fell through, they were forced to put on the first staged readings in their living room. Then, in 1951, Beck poured his entire six thousand dollar inheritance into bankrolling the Theatre’s first real home at the Cherry Lane Theater, where members of the company binged on work, slept where they fell, analyzed each other endlessly, and carried on intense love affairs. They managed to put on plays by Paul Goodman and San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth before a fire inspector shut them down for breaking what even Beck admitted was “every law there is to break.” But they persevered.
At the end of 1953, Malina and Beck built a second theater in a defunct beauty parlor on the third floor of an old wooden building at Broadway and 100th Street. They scavenged lumber from abandoned buildings and seats from a movie theater that was being demolished, transporting it all through the streets on their shoulders. Before the building inspectors shut them down for code violations in 1955, the Living Theatre began to hit its stride with a production of Tonight We Improvise, Pirandello’s “absurd” comedy in which actors take over the plot of a play. Its theme—the effort to obliterate the difference between life and art—would characterize most of the Living Theatre’s greatest work.
June 15, 1955, was not the last of Operation Alert: it was an ongoing exercise to ready Americans for a nuclear conflict that might erupt at any time. The protests also continued. In July 1956, there was a second protest against Operation Alert. Dorothy Day called Judith Malina from a pay phone in Washington Square Park and urged her to join the pacifists and anarchists who were again refusing to take shelter. Malina couldn’t because she was taking care of her mother, who was dying of breast cancer. As she hung up the phone, Malina could hear from her house window the air raid siren at the top of the telephone poll at the end of her block screaming “like the world in pain,” as she put it in her diary that day. Hennacy and Day and a few others were arrested. The first year the peaceniks did five days. The second year they did ten.
One spring day in 1957, Malina and Beck were bouncing around Greenwich Village with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, two of the many artists who were being drawn into the Living Theatre’s ever-expanding orbit, in a Volkswagen Microbus (which Cage had recently won on an Italian television quiz show answering questions about mushrooms). At the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, they spotted an empty two-story building, the former Hecht’s department store. They brought Cage’s patron Paul Williams to look at it, and he agreed to design and underwrite a dance rehearsal and recital space for Cage and Cunningham, and a new home for the Living Theatre, in the building.
Underwriting and design was the easy part: it took another massive communal effort to build the new theater, a task that included knocking down sixteen-inch-thick brick walls from ten in the morning until the communal meal at eleven at night. One broiling July day, Malina and Beck and their friends formed a chain gang and passed 225 ninety-pound sacks of cement into the building and 3,400 bricks out. The work paid off. The Living Theatre’s first production in the new space was William Carlos William’s Many Loves, a play—three seemingly unrelated love stories based on cases Williams witnessed as an intern at the old French Hospital in Manhattan—that Beck and Malina had wanted to stage since the Living Theatre began. On opening night, Many Loves got eleven curtain calls.
In August, Beck and Malina both joined another Operation Alert protest. As the air raid sirens whined the signal to take cover, the protesters marched out the front door of the Catholic Worker hospitality house on Chrystie Street and, holding up their signs, walked toward Sarah Delano Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side. For the first time a TV news crew was present and immediately started trying to stage-manage the event, unsuccessfully urging the protesters to come out of the hospitality house a second time so they could get it on film. As the demonstrators entered the park, a Civil Defense colonel in full uniform asked Malina, Beck, Day, Hennacy, and four others if they would take shelter. When they all answered no, they were placed under arrest.
At the arraignment, Ammon Hennacy tried to explain that the protesters were doing penance for America’s nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The judge cut him off: “You are a bunch of heartless individuals who breathe contempt of the law. I have no sympathy for you or for your cause.” The peace demonstrators’ lawyer tried to get them to plead not guilty, but they refused. Led by Dorothy Day, they all pleaded guilty, guilty, in their own eyes of breaking an unjust law. They were given thirty days.
Julian Beck and the rest of the men were sent to the Tombs, Manhattan’s decrepit, overcrowded downtown prison. The “air raid ladies,” as they became known to their sister prisoners, were locked up in the old Women’s House of Detention—now a garden!—which for nearly half a century blighted the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich Avenue in the West Village.
Dorothy Day later wrote an article for the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal describing “Judith Malina Beck” entering prison. “Young and beautiful, she is an actress, which means that she carries herself consciously, alert to the gazes of others. Her black hair hung down around her shoulders, her face was very pale, but she had managed to get some lipstick on before the officers took all her things away from her.” According to Day, a prisoner “with short hair and a leather wristband” spotted Malina and barked out to a guard, “Put her in my cell!” Up to that point, Dorothy Day had borne everything, including a vaginal search which had left her bleeding and in pain, quietly. Now she spoke out, calling out to the guard with implacable authority. “She [Malina] is to be put in my cell.” Malina and Day became “cellies,” sharing a dark, airless, cockroach-infested six-by-nine foot cement room. That first night, Malina cried herself to sleep.
Dorothy Day was nobody to mess with, as anyone who came into contact with her would attest. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Day writes easily about her upbringing, the only girl in a family of hard-drinking Irish Catholic New York City newspapermen. Unlike her brothers, Dorothy loved to read, and she was religious enough in high school to make a study of the early Christian saints. In college at the University of Illinois, she organized the socialist club’s women’s section. She dropped out of school when she was nineteen and returned to New York, where she wrote for the Socialist Party’s daily newspaper, The Call. She interviewed Trotsky when he was living on St. Marks Place. She stood guard at an abortion clinic.
Day is much less forthcoming, however, about her Greenwich Village years. In her sixties, she was not amused when Malcom Cowley wrote in a New Yorker profile that when Day was in her twenties, “gangsters admired her because she could drink them under the table.” Back then, Day had an affair with Mike Gold, who would go on to edit the Communist Daily Worker and pen the classic American proletarian novel Jews Without Money. She married a man twenty years her senior, and divorced him within a year. She had an abortion. She lived upstairs from the Provincetown Players on MacDougal Street and drank rye whiskey with Eugene O’Neill at the Golden Swan, a radical hangout at Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, where he was mooning over journalist Louise Bryant.
In 1923, she published a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, The 11th Virgin, sold it to Hollywood for $5,000, and bought a fisherman’s shack on Staten Island, where she gave birth to her daughter, Tamar, whose father was an English anarchist and atheist named Forster Batterham. Throughout her pregnancy she had been praying every day. Now she insisted that Tamar be baptized, and the couple quarreled bitterly. The day of the baptism, Batterham prepared a feast from his lobster traps, then moved out. When he returned a few weeks later to attempt a reconciliation, Dorothy Day sent him away. She was baptized and took communion for the first time as an adult the next day. In 1929, she did a brief stint as a screenwriter at Pathé Motion Picture Company in Hollywood, than traveled with her daughter in Mexico. She writes that she was on the verge of losing her faith when she met Peter Maurin, an itinerant mystic from the French Pyrenees in a single ill-fitting suit bulging with pamphlets and books. Sharing a determination to do something to ease human suffering; they cofounded the Catholic Worker. For Day and Maurin and the thousands who’ve joined the Catholic Workers since, faith and action are one. Their Christ is the revolutionary Christ, their model the communitarian life shared by Christ and his disciples. The life of a Catholic Worker, as conceived by Day and Maurin, was a life motivated by profound faith and intellectual rigor, a life of compassion and cool.
Everyone at the Women’s House of Detention was awed by Dorothy Day, Malina reports. “No one sassed her.” Though she felt guilty about not being able to help her daughter Tamar, who by now was expecting her eighth child, Day welcomed the opportunity to spend time in jail. “We visited prisoners by becoming prisoners ourselves,” she later wrote in The Catholic Worker. Most of the guards were Catholic, too, and many of them brought around their daily missals for Day to autograph.
By day, the seventh floor of the prison reverberated with the clanging metal of keys and cell doors, and rec-room television blare punctuated by the shouts and jeers and taunts of nine hundred prisoners. “I think eight hundred were prostitutes,” Malina later told an interviewer, “and about seven hundred of them were drug addicts.” Malina mopped floors and Day ironed in the prison laundry. Every evening, women would stop by Cell 13, Corridor A to drink Kool-Aid, eat Ritz crackers, and shoot the breeze. Dorothy Day had been around, and it showed in the nonjudgmental, open-hearted manner with which she received these guests. Though Malina had spent most of her young life in radical politics and on the experimental edge of the theater world, this was the first time that she’d been immersed in a world of cool in its slavery-born sense, where attitude and stance is the only self-defense against overwhelming rage. “I like you,” Malina says one prisoner told her, “but let’s face it. You’re a square.”
Every night after their visitors left, Dorothy Day would read to Malina from the lives of the saints. Then, following lights out, Malina would lie awake in her bunk listening to a junkie named Thelma Gadsden rock the cell block with her raucous bedtime routines, which transformed the sad fact of the prisoners’ lives into high comedy, transmuting powerlessness into cool, making a dollar out of fifteen cents.
The San Remo, or the “Sans Remorse,” as Judith Malina sometimes refers to it in her diaries, had been a bar at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal for almost as long as there had been a Little Italy in New York. After World War II, the “Remo’s” atmosphere, its pressed-tin ceiling, black-and-white floor tiles, and dollar salads with all the bread and butter you could eat started attracting a more Bohemian crowd. “Professor Seagull,” gray-bearded Joe Gould, a madman and a sweet, pathetic old goof, was a San Remo icon—standing in the middle of the room with a cardboard sign over his shoulders selling his nonexistent “Oral History of The World,” flapping his arms and squawking like a gull. On his maiden visit to the San Remo in 1950, future writer Ron Sukenick, straight out of Midwood High in Brooklyn, saw a woman wearing blue jeans for the first time.
In The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac has his Allen Ginsberg character, Adam Moorad, describe the denizens of the San Remo (which Kerouac transposed to San Francisco’s North Beach and renamed the Mask) as “hip without being slick . . . intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.”
The San Remo crowd fascinated LeRoi Jones, who arrived in the Village in 1957 after getting kicked out of the air force as a security risk. (One of his offenses was subscribing to the then–left-wing Partisan Review.) Raised middle-class, he was anxious to jump into the growing bohemian scene. He was taken by “not just the wild-looking women in black stockings,” as he writes in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, “but the whole scene. . . This was the Village. Weird! Something else was happening other than what I knew about. Wild stuff. Free open shit. Look at that weird-looking woman. I bet she’d fuck. I bet she knows about all kinds of heavy shit. And I bet she’d fuck.” At a time when thirty states still had laws banning miscegenation, the San Remo was one of the places in the United States where interracial couples knew they would be cool.