One tape had an illegible name so I sent the audio to my father and asked if he could identify the voice. He wrote back later that day: “The painter Norman Bluhm, one of the better second-generation AbExers [abstract expressionists]. I liked him. Interview boring at first but tangy gossip later. He demobbed in Paris after the war. Cultivated air of a French tough guy. Appears in a scene of Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus. I’m vague about Frank’s falling-out with Grace Hartigan, except it was dramatic. She moved to Baltimore.”
Bluhm’s voice is booming, hyperconfident. He sounds like a cop in a slapstick comedy. The Cedar Tavern painters scene was known to have a macho vibe, but this is the first time I can hear it so clearly. The level of confidence is staggering. Not a doubt in the world. Not a moment of hesitation. In his cold studio, Bluhm and O’Hara spent Sundays painting, writing, and listening to Sviatoslav Richter’s version of Tchaikovsky’s first concertos.
Norman Bluhm—1977?
Norman Bluhm: We used to talk about music. He used to come over. After a while he’d come over almost every Sunday. We’d play music and talk about it. Like those poem paintings—that’s how they were formed, actually. Frank would come over on a Sunday, then we’d have lunch, go over to my studio, and we’d listen to the opera or to the symphony and we’d talk.
Then he tells stories about mocking people for being fat and stealing $80 from one of them at the Cedar. He recalls going uptown to art openings with O’Hara and some others on the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. They stopped off for a drink at the Winslow Hotel and he loudly asked for “a neutral table.” When a man at the bar objected, Bluhm made a crack about his weight and said it was obvious he wasn’t ever in a war.
I’m prepared for the fact that Bluhm is going to share stories of O’Hara’s sex life, because everybody seems to have stories about O’Hara’s sex life.
NB: He was telling me one night about how some guy invited him up to an apartment, put him down on the bed, and started to fly above him on a trapeze or something like that. One of the wildest stories I ever heard in my life.
PS: My impression is that he sort of cooled the adventuring around fifty-six.
NB: Yes, but I think Frank used to tell me or certain friends of his, his adventures, in order that he could somehow vicariously get a hold of your adventures.
PS: He was avid for your adventures.
NB: Yeah. Oh, he loved it. Oh! He just loved that.
O’Hara’s sex stories seem lighthearted—trapezes!—but there’s a vulgarity to Bluhm’s, an obsession with physical beauty and conquest.
I move on to Bluhm’s more famous contemporary, Willem de Kooning.
My parents have a peculiar picture by de Kooning: oil on a sheet of the New York Times, from 1977. (You can make out just enough print to identify the paper’s obituary of Woody Guthrie.) At the time, de Kooning kept the surfaces of his paintings in progress fresh by covering them with newsprint between sessions of work. My father tells me that on one of his visits to the artist, de Kooning said, “You shouldn’t leave here with nothing.” He kneeled and went through a pile of peeled-off sheets: “No. No. No good. No. Hey, this one’s not bad. You like it?” He signed it in charcoal: “To Peter, Bill de Kooning.”
The surface is alive with confident brushwork in blue, yellow, teal, pink, white. I knew it was valuable when people expressed horror that paint was sticking to the plastic front of the cheap frame. While over for a dinner party, the comedian Steve Martin and a collector friend insisted on paying to have it restored and reframed.
There’s nothing figurative there, but one time when I was sick, half-asleep on the couch, and delirious, I looked at the dark blue lines in the picture and saw a man with a hat and a long arm pointing down. Every time I’ve looked at the picture since, I’ve seen this long-armed man.
My father once told me he remembered a party at Patsy Southgate’s in the 1960s: “She lived next to de Kooning. There was a party that he didn’t come to but that was going very late. I was standing near the kitchen and there was a knock on the kitchen door. The door opened and it was Joan Ward, who was de Kooning’s mistress and the mother of his only child. And she was battered, beaten up, and somebody next to me said, ‘Oh God, he’s been at her again.’ And I thought, Oh my God, are we gonna call the police? Are a bunch of men gonna go over there? And I wanna tag along! No. Ward said they’d run out of scotch, and she wanted a bottle. She got a bottle, and she went back. That was my first whiff of de Kooning.”
I turn on the tape. From the start of the interview, de Kooning sounds drunk. His accent is strong. He gets to talking about the abstract expressionists’ “Eighth Street Club”—the members-only artists group founded in 1949 that held lectures and Saturday-night dances to Fats Waller. Mondrian apparently liked to boogie-woogie.
My father tried to bring the interview back to O’Hara but didn’t have much luck. De Kooning kept talking about the time they hosted Dylan Thomas or which artists didn’t pay their club dues (Franz Kline!) or the time in 1951 that publisher John Myers carried Elaine de Kooning up five flights of stairs because she had her leg in a cast but still wanted to go to a party.
Willem de Kooning—Springs, New York—8/17/77
Willem de Kooning: Now, Frank O’Hara.
Peter Schjeldahl: He gave a lecture.
WdK: He gave a lecture but before he gave a lecture, he would have that voice of his, you know. He would amplify his ideas.
PS: What kind of thing would he say?
WdK: Fuck you! [Laughs.] Well, “Fuck you!” he says, but he was very much liked.
De Kooning goes on to talk about how once he went to O’Hara to talk about troubles he was having with a girlfriend. They went on a long walk, and O’Hara made him feel better. Later, de Kooning says, O’Hara needed someone to talk to about his own romances and he upbraided de Kooning for being a bad listener: “He reminded me that he was listening to me and so I was supposed to be listening to him!”
When de Kooning visited O’Hara on his deathbed in the little Fire Island hospital, O’Hara was as concerned with manners as ever. He said, “Bill! So nice!” as if they were about to have a cup of coffee together. He died before de Kooning had made it home.
A couple of times on the tape, there is a terrible SLAM. De Kooning explains the noise: birds have been flying into the clear windows of his studio.
My father seems distressed but ignores the slaughter. The interview goes on, and my father quotes a line I’ve heard him say often, one O’Hara used as the kicker of an as-told-to interview with Franz Kline in the Evergreen Review: “To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in.”
Well, I’m interested in it. And I think that these people with their bird murdering and their wife beating are not right at all.
So I’m already cross when I reach the most outrageous O’Hara friend of all: Larry Rivers.
My father seems excited for this one. After so many careful interview subjects, at last here’s one who is the opposite of careful.
The painter Larry Rivers, born Irving Grossberg in the Bronx in 1923, did not hold back. Frank O’Hara loved Rivers, nicknamed “Libertine Larry.” In one of several essays O’Hara wrote about Rivers, he described him as “an enigma, and fascinating.”
My father told me that Rivers—full of energy, hypersexual, a little scary—represented New York City to O’Hara. O’Hara was a poet of the city, so of course he worshipped Rivers. My father evidently worshipped him, too, writing in the New York Times in 1979: “Larry Rivers is one of the most fascinating personalities of the last 30 years in art.”
Rivers told my father that he was a mess when O’Hara, “this Irish, broken-nosed Anglo-Saxon from up there who just graduated from Harvard … comes waltzing into my life!”
Larry Rivers—East Village, New York City (404 East Fourteenth Street)—3/31/77
Peter Schjeldahl: Want to start at the beginning?
Larry Rivers: Anything. Anywhere you want. You mean what, like how I met him?
PS: Yeah.
LR: A lot of this is probably not going to be so accurate, but I’ll try.
The pair met, as is documented by both of them, at a party at John Ashbery’s in 1950. Rivers was twenty-six, a jazz musician and painter, living at 77 St. Marks Place, below W. H. Auden in the same building, on my parents’ block. Literary stars were at that party, like Delmore Schwartz and the crew from the Partisan Review. Their mutual friends had predicted that he and O’Hara would get along, and they did not disappoint.
LR: In the living room there were very long curtains. It was one of those old houses—like on Eleventh Street or Twelfth Street—in which the wall is a foot from the window, like a deep box and then there’s a window. So the curtains actually left a foot for us to actually be in, eighteen inches. And we stayed behind the curtains kissing or something like that and acting like children. And then he sat on the bed in his sneakers and asked me to sort of sit on the bed with him. He seemed sort of exotic for me. … It was the beginning of [my] experimentation with homosexuality really. A lot.
PS: Had you been doing that before?
LR: I think so. But it never seemed as funny and confused with literature and things like that. Frank started to write poems about it. Finally, there was a night I think Arnold Weinstein, myself, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara ended up in bed and took a picture. It was like a boat. It wasn’t like we were in bed. It was as if we were going on some trip. It had nothing to do with sex. But there we were. It was a joyous period.
PS: Was there a period it did have to do with sex?
LR: With Frank? Yeah!
The line O’Hara used on Rivers before they had their tryst behind the curtain was so innocent—but also so strategic—it takes my breath away: “Let’s see what a kiss feels like.”
The pair had an affair, but the passion was mostly one-sided. O’Hara often fell in love with straight, attached men. Around the same time that O’Hara was pursuing him, Rivers was having an affair with Jane Freilicher.
LR: It was like all mixed. It was, as I say, “experimentation.” I also thought it was a certain ego thing of feeling like what a fantastic person I am if I can make it with a man, a woman, animals. I used to try it with everything. It was, I don’t think it was that original a personality but maybe it was. It was all mixed up with the literature, with sex, with the new thing. I would sleep with him one night, go be with a girl the next night. But he was much more affected by it. It meant more to him. It meant one thing to me but his was more inclusive, like what one would call romantic, what you think is love, sexual desire and interest and the—
PS: He was in love with you.
LR: I think so. And wanted it to continue.
PS: He wanted you to be his boyfriend.
LR: Right! At the same time, he knew it was impossible. He wasn’t that dumb. Even in his early twenties he was already brilliant that way. He knew that he had things for men who couldn’t love men.
Later on the tape, Rivers describes trying to seduce his sisters’ sixteen-year-old friends. He brags that he took one to the zoo and “tried to fuck her,” then went and told Freilicher about it.
Maybe he’s just making up stories, engaging in the downtown equivalent of locker-room banter, but I don’t care. I don’t like the way he talks.
This puts me at odds with pretty much everyone on the New York School scene. Here’s the cultural critic John Gruen describing Rivers: “An intense, wiry, not particularly appetizing-looking young man, he exuded an incredible electricity, and a most seductive and potent sort of sexuality. One felt one could throw oneself into the gutter with Larry Rivers and emerge purified.”
I feel repulsed by the things Rivers says and also by my father’s failure to point out that it is not cool to speak rapturously about sex with teenage girls. I understand that the tranquilized fifties were oppressive and that an energetic rebellion was in order, particularly for those who wanted more from life than comfort. It’s not lost on me that many wonderful people—even saintly Karen Koch—loved Rivers, so perhaps I’m judging him too harshly. But I also know what it’s like to be a quiet child surrounded by loud adults determined to shock. And I know what it’s like to be “taken to the zoo.”
Rare is the child of bohemia who wasn’t preyed upon by adults in one way or another. Making my way alone around the city, I was followed and flashed and rubbed-up-against more times than I could count. A babysitter’s boyfriend molested me once when I was five. One of my parents’ dinner guests always told me I had great legs. I took it as a compliment at the time. Now that my son is at the age that I was then, I can’t imagine making a comment like that to his friends or finding it amusing if a dinner guest said something like that to him. When I was fourteen, one of my father’s colleagues stared lasciviously across a lunch table at my adolescent body; I crossed my arms over my chest and studiously stared off into space as he and my father, oblivious to my discomfort, talked about art.
When I started kissing boys in middle school, at least it felt like I was in control. It turned out lascivious attention wasn’t bad if it was coming from someone cute—and I found a lot of people cute. Maybe there’s some truth to the cliché about girls who don’t get enough attention from their fathers becoming promiscuous, or maybe I just did it because it was fun. I didn’t fool around with any United Nations guards—that I know of—but my best friend, Asia, did once yell at me: “Stop sleeping with all my friends!”
When I was still in high school, I dated a man who was twenty-eight. I look back on the time I spent in his Alphabet City apartment with the bathtub in the kitchen while my less-bohemian classmates were playing extramural soccer, and I feel neither exploited nor thrilled by it. Those sorts of relationships were inevitable. We children of bohemia were older than our years—and the men of bohemia were younger than theirs.
LR: And then it used to get la vie de bohème. Frank would come over. So silly. This is a little later. I would, say, have taken a shot or something and I had one reaction: I’d vomit straight for thirty-two hours. How I could ever have continued … I practically started vomiting before I did it. I got so anxious about doing it. So I would start to think about vomiting. Then it would be quelled by the drug. Then I would be tranquilized. Well, Frank would either have had a night out or I’d tell him I didn’t want to see him. He’d come up at like two in the morning, come up the steps drunk, bang his head on the stairs. I’d come out and get him. He’d have to take care of me because I was ill. The whole place was full of grapefruit rinds and plastic from sculptures. Instead of being music—la vie de bohème going on—it was all this shit laying out in the studio. Days and days and days of no cleaning up. Horrible.
He sounds like he’s bragging when he describes a morning when he woke up, having taken heroin the night before, to an auctioneer trying to sell off his work while he was still in bed. His landlord had won an order against him. And he sounds approving when he says that all the stories you hear about Jackson Pollock are true, even the one about how he once went up to O’Hara at the Cedar Tavern and out of nowhere shouted in his face, “Faggot!” Rivers said, “When [Pollock] came in he would do something outrageous to every person there. I was known in the circle to be someone who took heroin, so he would make signs about pushing a needle into his arm. Or if a guy was gay he’d make an obscene sucking noise. He was so simple and clear—he was sort of funny.”
Maybe you had to be there.
In November 1952, Freilicher began an affair with the artist Joe Hazan, whom she would go on to marry. After she returned from a weekend with Hazan, Rivers went to see her at her place on Eleventh Street and they spent the night together. In an act of childishness, he reset her clocks to make her think it was later than it was, so she’d wake up early, something she hated to do. Then he went back to his St. Marks Place apartment to get his drawing pad. When he returned to the Eleventh Street apartment, O’Hara—yet another rival for her attention—was there posing for her.
Rivers borrowed razor blades from Freilicher, saying he needed to sharpen his pencils, and headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to do some drawings. When he got back to his place from the Met, he began cleaning the windows, looking out onto a bleak day. Then he thought of the razor blades. He hacked away at his wrists with them, then panicked when he saw the blood on his sheets. He called O’Hara, who came over and bandaged him up.
A few hours later, the painter Fairfield Porter drove in from Southampton and brought Rivers out to stay at his house for a couple of weeks. (The Porters were always flying to the rescue of their friends. They liked to joke that the poet James Schuyler came to dinner and stayed for eleven years.)
At the Porters’ estate, Rivers sprawled across couches and read Proust and complained about Freilicher not coming to see him. He did not know that O’Hara had lied and told Freilicher that Rivers did not want to see her. In his rage and isolation, Rivers went out and painted Washington Crossing the Delaware, one of his most famous paintings.
Back in New York, Rivers spent two weeks living with O’Hara, who would make them dinner at night and then, some nights, climb into bed with Rivers.
In the late 1950s, Larry Rivers dated my father’s eventual book agent, the famously beautiful redheaded editor Maxine Groffsky. Before opening her agency in the mid-1970s, Groffsky had served as the Paris editor of the Paris Review and, before that, as the model for Brenda Patimkin in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus.
When I called her, Groffsky told me that she was “a square from New Jersey” when she met Larry Rivers and the downtown poets and painters. “Can you imagine falling into that world when graduating from college? Alice in Wonderland. The art, the energy and excitement and fun in that world—simply amazing.”
She added that contrary to the “sensationally inaccurate account” published by John Gruen, who said Groffsky wanted to marry Rivers, Groffsky and Rivers were in the process of breaking up—after two years together, it was just time, she said—when, in 1960, he hired a young Welsh woman named Clarice Price as housekeeper. Rivers asked Groffsky to go to California with him and she said no. Price went instead, and that was that. Rivers married Price and they had two daughters.
Beginning in 1976, the year I was born and my father signed a contract for his O’Hara book, Rivers began making a film called Growing, for which he had his adolescent daughters appear topless. A decade ago, one of the daughters petitioned the Rivers foundation to destroy that film. Her request was denied. There’s a line from a Vanity Fair article about the situation that has haunted me since I first read it. A board member of the Rivers foundation dismissed Rivers’s daughter’s request with this comment: “You know a major artist made this film, right?”
I look around at other children who grew up in the art world. Some moved out of the city as soon as they could and became, weirdly often, lawyers. Others stayed in their famous parents’ world, and it did not always go well for them.
Lisa de Kooning dropped out of high school and hung out on St. Marks Place in the 1970s with the Hells Angels. Under odd circumstances, she died in 2012 at the age of fifty-six, a sculptor and mother of three. The New York Times story about it was headlined— repellently, I thought—HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER. The article depicts her life as both lonely and indulgent and describes her as having devoted herself to motherhood and to protecting her father’s artistic legacy. It repeatedly calls her youngest daughter, an artist, Lily rather than Lucy. And it describes her father as loving her but not being cut out for responsible fatherhood.
I’m struggling to understand how my favorite O’Hara poem, the beautiful “To the Harbormaster,” could be about someone as seemingly unworthy as Rivers. Maybe the times have just changed too much for me to see his appeal.
What’s certain is that I was not expecting to find this much darkness in Frank O’Hara’s story. One reason why I liked the idea of this project was that I’d get to think about cocktails and cigarettes, snow falling over Greenwich Village, paint-spattered lofts. The silver-toned image of a quiet city where spacious apartments could be rented for $50 a month and no one ever ran out of gin, and where, when Larry Rivers won $32,000 on The $64,000 Question, he went straight to the Cedar Tavern and bought everyone drinks. This was supposed to be a world where the witty banter never turned cruel, affairs ended in no hurt feelings, and intoxication left no hangover.
If I’m honest, as I’m listening to these tapes and trying to make something of them, it’s not going great. On the days when I’m listening to interviews with men like Larry Rivers, I’m irritable and not fully present in my own life. I’m also bothered by the fact that I spend a lot more time thinking about them than I do about O’Hara’s college lovers. Maybe it’s true; maybe villains are more interesting, and the moral high ground does lack entertainment value.
As I walk around the city these days I’m walloped by memories of random people, places, and things from my own past: Ray’s Pizza on Eleventh Street, where as fourth and fifth graders we could go out for lunch and where we dabbed with our paper napkins at the grease pooled on top of the hot cheese. The camel-colored wool coat with the big buttons I got at a thrift store when I was eighteen and wore until it fell apart. The Alphabet City studio apartment of a SPIN coworker where I used to housesit until he died of an overdose. Listening to those O’Hara tapes from the 1970s about the 1950s has me living somewhere other than the present. I keep hearing Rivers and Bluhm and de Kooning and my father even when they’re not playing through my headphones. Their voices are loud inside my head.