The thing I like best about Bella is that she puts on fresh makeup and tries to have her hair done before a demonstration.
A NEIGHBOR OF BELLA ABZUG’S, QUOTED BY VOGUE MAGAZINE
THEowner of the empty Buick showroom on Fifty-fifth Street and Broadway that served as the headquarters for the Abzug mayoral campaign didn’t want his new tenant hanging posters in the windows, so her staff painted B-E-L-L-A in huge orange letters on the plate glass instead. Part of the showroom was given over to the Bella Boutique, where a big-breasted woman in a tight T-shirt and sailor’s cap sold Bella knickknacks, including a button of Gracie Mansion with an outsize hat hanging off the side. There was a gay porn theater with a twenty-four-hour pickup scene across the street. Some mornings Jackie Mason, who lived in the neighborhood, would stop by and volunteer: “What can I do for Bella?”
Not that Bella herself was ever there. The only candidate without a day job, she was out crisscrossing the boroughs, a bullhorn affixed to her mouth, one of her big hats flapping on top of her head. Abzug’s day started early, even if that meant powdering her nose in the back of her campaign car, a yellow Chevrolet Impala convertible.
She was a full-contact campaigner, a polka-dotted beach ball bouncing from one outstretched hand to the next. “How arya? I’m Bella Abzug. I think I’m gonna be your next mayor. So let’s get to know each other,” she’d say. “Give ’em hell, Bella,” or, “You’ve got my vote,” they’d say back. “Bella was always fabulous on the streets,” recalls her press secretary, Harold Holzer, who had first met Abzug while covering her 1970 congressional race for a small Manhattan weekly.
Abzug even looked different when she was campaigning. Her scowl turned into a smile; her round face grew soft and pink. “Campaigning does the same thing for her that pregnancy does for some women,” Jack Newfield once observed. When Abzug and her aides returned to their Fifty-fifth Street offices, usually after midnight, they’d head around the corner to the Stage Deli. The candidate would have the corned beef on rye, even though she was, notionally, on a strict sixteen-hundred-calorie-a-day diet designed personally by her friend Shirley MacLaine. (US magazine was already planning a feature on Abzug’s weight loss regimen.) Back home after 1 a.m., she might call an old friend or two from the movement. When they complained about her waking up their kids, Abzug would assume an indignant tone: “What? Aren’t you a liberated woman?”
Abzug’s radical, protofeminist past was never far behind her. She was born Bella Savitzky in 1920, the year women got the vote, and grew up in a South Bronx railroad flat. She struck her first blow for feminism at age thirteen, when her father died and she flouted the rules of her family’s Orthodox synagogue by reciting the Kaddish—the Jewish prayer of mourning reserved for sons, not daughters—before school every morning. She had learned to stump by weaving in and out of crowded subway cars as a teenager, raising money for the creation of a Jewish state. “I shook my can for the JNF [Jewish National Fund],” she would later say.
The Depression stirred left-wing passions in Abzug’s South Bronx neighborhood, an enclave of first-generation immigrant idealists,
many of whom had already lived through the depths of privation in the Jewish ghettos of Europe. By the time she was elected president of the student council at Hunter College in 1942, the New York Post was already referring to her as a “known campus pink.” Before entering politics, she worked as an attorney, defending alleged Communists—McCarthy called her one of the most subversive lawyers in the country—and a thirty-six-year-old black man who had been convicted of raping a white woman in Laurel, Mississippi, on whose behalf Abzug appeared in court eight months pregnant.
Abzug became an early champion of gay rights during her 1970 congressional race, after her campaign manager, Doug Ireland, encouraged her to stump in the Continental Baths, the bathhouse/ cabaret/disco in the basement of the old Ansonia Hotel. Abzug headed gamely up to the baths with no idea what she was in for and promptly called Ireland from a pay phone, screaming: “What the hell have you gotten me into? There are hundreds of guys up here wearing nothing but towels held together by Bella buttons!” Ireland talked her down, and Abzug addressed the half-naked crowd in a navy blue dress with white polka dots and a Calamity Jane hat. “I’m sorry that I’m not quite dressed for the occasion,” she began. She was a huge hit.
In June 1977, after the citizens of Dade County, Florida, had voted overwhelmingly to repeal a local law banning discrimination based on sexual preference, New York’s gay community sought solace from Abzug. The referendum was the work of Anita Bryant and her grassroots group Save Our Children. Campaigning on its behalf, the beauty pageant queen–cum–homophobic ideologue had worn her familiar winning smile, only now, instead of extolling the virtues of Florida orange juice, she inveighed against the “human garbage” who practiced “a lifestyle that is an abomination against the laws of God and man.”
After learning that the referendum had passed by a two to one margin and that Bryant was spinning the victory as a mandate to take her campaign national, thousands of gay New Yorkers amassed
in front of the old Stonewall Inn for an impromptu demonstration. A few hours later the crowd migrated to Abzug’s West Village brownstone. It was now a few hours before dawn, and she was awakened by the rhythmic chanting: “Bel-LAH! Bel-LAH! Bel-LAH!” Her long-suffering husband, Martin, groggily told her she was hearing voices in her head. (No doubt, if Abzug had been hearing voices in her head, that’s exactly what they would have been saying.) But Abzug was sure the voices were coming from outside. She rose out of bed, pulled on her bathrobe and slippers, and stepped out onto her stoop to find hundreds of gay men assembled in front of her Bank Street house. Abzug told them that the struggle for civil rights was a long one and reminded them to vote for her in September.
Abzug was New York’s feminist earth mother. For the 1977 mayoral race, she decided to update her famous 1970 congressional campaign slogan, “This woman’s place is in the House,” with “Maybe it’s time for me to return to the traditional role of women—and that is to clean up the mess they made!”
There were two ways to explain New York’s ongoing fiscal crisis. According to one, the banks were the villains. Rather than stand by the city as it grappled with the loss of manufacturing jobs, they had panicked and abruptly dumped all their New York City bonds on an unsuspecting market. Under the other explanation, the labor unions were the bad guys. They had strong-armed City Hall into concession after concession until the public sector payroll was finally so bloated that it broke New York’s financial back.
Most New Yorkers figured there was enough blame for both parties to share. Not Bella. “Everybody makes the unions the scapegoat, but it was the banks who accelerated the fiscal crisis!” she bellowed. Her first priority as mayor, Abzug vowed, would be to give all out-of-work civil servants their jobs back. At a small gathering in front of Engine Company 269, a red-brick firehouse in the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, that had been shuttered because of budget cuts, the candidate promised to reopen this and every other closed engine
company in New York. “Right on, Bella!” one local shouted. “Right on, baby!” she yelled back.
No one did protests better than Bella. At a “Disarm” rally in the Columbia quad, she whipped the young crowd into a frenzy, blaming the violence plaguing New York’s streets on America’s militaristic culture: “A society that sanctioned the horrors of Vietnam, the unbridled growth of the Pentagon, and the CIA’s involvement in the violent overthrow of the governments in Chile and Guatemala should not be surprised when so many Americans turn to individual violence and crime at home.” At a red-lining protest in front of the Greater New York Savings Bank in South Brooklyn, she accused the banks of “destroying neighborhoods” by refusing mortgages to local homeowners and businesses. In the depths of Queens, she demanded that New York State revoke the licenses of real estate brokers who engaged in blockbusting, the use of racial scare tactics to provoke panic selling among white homeowners. In the executive dining room of CUNY’s Graduate Center, she railed against the “traumatic contraction” of the hallowed institution, which had lost thirty-eight thousand students and a thousand faculty members over the past year, and cited the “moral imperative” to provide free higher education to the poor and disadvantaged.
Nothing got Abzug hotter than Westway, the city’s plan to rebuild the West Side Highway south of Forty-second Street. The blueprints called for burying the highway in a concrete tube beneath the surface of the Hudson, then extending the deck above out into the river to make room for parks and office and apartment buildings. Westway won high marks from architecture critics like the Times’s Ada Louise Huxtable, who described it as “a chance to reclaim the mutilated waterfront and West Side,” and the business community was convinced Westway would promote development in a flagging lower Manhattan. Even setting such practical considerations aside, the symbolic implications were hard to ignore: To many New Yorkers, the very fact that the city was again daring to reach seemed worthy
of celebration. Best of all, Westway would be free. The new road would be within the interstate highway system, meaning that the federal government would pick up 90 percent of the tab. The state would pay the rest.
But Westway also made a logical next front for the community warriors who’d spent the better part of the 1960s beating back large-scale development projects they feared would wreak havoc on the city’s neighborhoods. To them, Westway flew directly in the face of New York’s organically messy essence. It was a big patch that would never become part of the larger fabric of the city. Naysayers needed only point to The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s magisterial 1974 biography of Robert Moses, to underscore just how destructive overzealous city planners could be.
The plan’s critics had no trouble persuading Abzug to side with them. She sponsored a clever piece of legislation that would enable cities to swap federal funds earmarked for interstate highways for mass transit money. Instead of getting $1 billion from Washington to build an interstate highway, New York City could opt for $550 million to rehabilitate its subway system, a needy case if ever there were one. Framed as a choice between automobiles and subways, between lining the pockets of real estate developers and improving the lives of workaday New Yorkers, Westway became a perfect foil for Abzug, who saw her beloved city as an overgrown village, a place where the power belonged to the people, not to the men with green eyeshades and pocket protectors who had the nerve to talk about the “greater good.”
Still, Westway lurched forward, winning the final go-ahead from Washington in early 1977. “Mayor Beame and the real estate speculators who support this project are willing to sacrifice the needs of 89% of New Yorkers who use mass transit to benefit the highway lobbyists,” Abzug said one drizzly early summer night at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on the mostly liberal Upper West Side. The
crowd rose from its red-cushioned benches to applaud her, much as it had earlier in the evening, when she’d made her dramatic entrance, striding up the church’s center aisle, arms pumping, hands thrust out in front of her body. “This is exactly the kind of planning for special interests which has brought our city so many times to the verge of bankruptcy!”
As much as they adored Abzug on the liberal Upper West Side, they loved her even more at Camp Tamiment, a pine-spiced summer resort some ninety miles southwest of the city in the Poconos. A group of trade unionists and socialists had planted stakes here in the 1920s, and it had quickly become a favorite summer retreat for New York’s working class, who came in droves to sleep in rustic cabins, swim in a shimmering lake, and soak up lectures on totalitarianism. It was a requisite campaign stop for every New York City mayoral candidate.
In late June 1977 Abzug told the crowd at Tamiment that she knew exactly what had gone wrong in New York, this once-proud paradigm of New Deal plenty. It was a case of diminished expectations. “Almost every day we can read editorials in our leading newspapers telling us not to expect much from Washington and not to expect much from City Hall,” she said, the beads of perspiration glistening on her red temples. “The people with this outlook say we will continue to lose jobs and population. They say let’s encourage the poor to get out of town and let’s tear down their neighborhoods. Let’s continue to attack the unions because we have to drive down wages … They say let’s get rid of free tuition and the municipal hospital system, shut down child care centers, senior centers, libraries and fire stations. They say let’s fire teachers, guidance counselors and security guards, and let’s get rid of rent control. Let’s slash subway and bus service and crush more people into the trains, and maybe we’ll even make them pay more for that memorable experience. That’s not my vision and I know it’s not yours. You have invested
too much of yourselves, too much sweat, time and thought into our city to settle for a spiral of further cutbacks and reduced services that will only hasten the decline of New York.”
Abzug, pure product of old New York that she was, clung stubbornly to her utopianism, convinced that if she shook her broken snow globe hard enough, she could make the flakes fall again.