When people say New York is bad now, I want to ask them: Compared with what? Places without a Met or a Cyclone or Ethiopian food? No, thank you. For all the changes, if you squint in the right part of town or at the right parties, you can still see the city O’Hara saw. I’m glad when I hear my father push back on the tapes whenever anyone says a word against New York or O’Hara’s life here.
George Montgomery had a long life in the arts without ever becoming a household name. He had some poetry books published, got some exhibits as a photographer, served as director of the Museum of American Folk Art, and drank at the Cedar Tavern. In this interview, he functions as the classic college friend of the celebrity who insists the star has forgotten where he came from.
George Montgomery—SoHo, New York City (791 Broadway)—3/28/77 George Montgomery: I just know we got on different paths. And even though we stayed close to each other because we’d been friends and still were, I didn’t like the parties nor the people. I didn’t like the fact that Frank didn’t seem to be able to operate without an admirer. I came to believe in myself as an anarchist, on my own. It disgusted me to see people want to talk with Frank about what they all talked about last night and to flatter him. Their whole lives became bound up in what they meant to him, or what they meant to others being that close to him. I came to hate the circle of people and to see it as a real danger. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in it. I came to loathe it as a way of life.
My father defends O’Hara’s choices—maybe because they are his choices, too. He says that O’Hara and fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler made his life possible.
Peter Schjeldahl: What he and John Ashbery did, certainly, and then Kenneth to some extent, and then Jimmy Schuyler, and so on, was to create an option for a lifestyle for poetry that had not existed up to that time. At that point, the only lifestyle was university.
GM: I wonder if they created it or it simply happened and now it appears as though they did, like all of us when our lives—when someone else viewing it thinks that you’ve done it.
PS: Oh no! Not that they did it consciously.
GM: But that it is now possible for us because of the way they lived.
PS: I’m a poet. I dropped out of college. I came to New York. And I’ve made my living writing art criticism ever since, which was an option that was created by Frank and John. It didn’t exist before.
My father tells Montgomery that he wound up with O’Hara’s lifestyle and even with a descendant of his pets—a kitten named Basil born to O’Hara’s cats Boris and Zelda.
Seeming determined to shock, Montgomery says that for O’Hara, part of being a poet was the sexual adventuring.
GM: I can remember a time when I brought home, believe it or not, two sailors. John [Ashbery] and Frank [O’Hara] were downstairs. The two sailors went downstairs to the bathroom, and they never came back. We always laughed about it because they both went off to John and Frank, and they never came back upstairs.
My father refused to be scandalized. While he’s said that his own experimentation with homosexuality lasted just two weeks in the 1960s, he seems determined to defend O’Hara at all costs, even if that means hypothesizing a romantic encounter with him.
GM: Frank was very attracted to a married type.
PS: That’s notorious.
GM: And to have a married man attracted to him really was wonderful, almost irresistible.
PS: As an old married man myself, I probably would have fallen for him if he had— [Laughs.]
GM: Yeah. And Frank was very, really unbelievably charming in actuality. You met him. He could really charm the birds from the trees. Maureen has a great deal of it. Maybe it’s just in knowing Frank, but when I speak to Maureen, I can hear Frank talking. I don’t know. There’s a kind of Irish hyperbole or something. There’s a kind of a lilt, a charm to the language.
PS: I have great trouble with Maureen.
GM: Really?
PS: Yeah. She chose me to write the book and since then … I’ll turn off the tape recorder. [Click.]
While I still believe I’ll have better luck with Maureen than my father did, I’m beginning to worry a little. As I start reading books about O’Hara and asking people about him, I keep noticing ways in which his work is less available than you’d think it might be given his stature. O’Hara’s poetry is not available in eBook, for example.
And I keep hearing stories about projects for which she’s with-held permissions—including, most surprisingly to me, a picture book about Frank O’Hara by a respected children’s book author.
In her academic book Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, published in 1977 and dedicated to Maureen Granville-Smith, Marjorie Perloff wrote that O’Hara’s friends persuaded her “that the time is not yet ripe for a biography, because their versions of specific incidents did not always coincide.”
Next to this line in my father’s copy, he’d written a large exclamation point. I mentally added my own. Why would the time be ripe later? How would their versions of events grow together? What was everyone so scared of?
The largest void in O’Hara scholarship are his letters, which have never been collected. I’d heard that my father’s friend Ron Padgett, who lived just five blocks from us on St. Marks Place, at one time was given the job of editing a volume of O’Hara’s letters. I emailed him to invite myself over.
Walking toward Ron Padgett’s East Village apartment one winter afternoon, I think of this piece of his “Poem” (1980):
Funny, I hear
Frank O’Hara’s
voice tonight
in my head—
e.g. when I
think in words
he’s saying them
or his tone
is in them.
Ron greets me at the door of his apartment wearing brown corduroy pants and white sneakers. Frank O’Hara is still one of his favorite poets: “He seemed to be giving us permission to do a lot of things artistically. Also, there was just this magic to him. That’s a bad word, I know, but some of his poems actually have this magic to them. I read them and I still can’t quite puzzle some of them out and yet they affect me.”
He saw O’Hara a number of times and each time found that there was something about him that set people at ease. Given that the scene could be competitive, this warmth was especially disarming: “He made it seem okay to like other people.”
In Manhattan, Padgett wound up at parties with O’Hara and other writers he’d admired as a teenager in Tulsa. One night, he and his wife, Pat, and his teacher Kenneth Koch and Koch’s wife, Janice, went to dinner at O’Hara’s loft on Broadway and Eleventh Street when O’Hara was still living there with Joe LeSueur. Pat and Ron were buzzed in and climbed the industrial stairs until they arrived, slightly winded, at the landing. Ron looked down the hallway, and Frank was standing there with the door propped open. O’Hara said, “I’m so glad you could come tonight.”
Padgett said, “Oh, thank you for inviting us.”
Then O’Hara said, “I like your poetry.”
Flummoxed, Padgett blurted out: “I like yours, too!”
O’Hara cracked up because of the awkwardness. “But he cracked up in a nice way that made me feel good and not in a way that made me feel like a fool.”
The apartment itself “was pretty magnificent,” Padgett said. “It had white walls. The bricks were painted white. I remember an orange butterfly chair. He had a de Kooning and a Jean Dubuffet. It was spacious. It was cool. Joe LeSueur made his famous chili that night, which is one of my favorite dishes. It wasn’t that easy to get in New York back in the sixties.”
After dinner they were sitting on the couches and once again O’Hara set Padgett at ease.
Ron Padgett—East Village, New York City—2/7/19
Ron Padgett: I found myself talking to Joe LeSueur, and Frank and Kenneth fell into this very animated conversation. I was kind of half listening to Joe LeSueur, half trying to catch what they were saying. Anyway, at a certain point in the evening, Frank sort of shifted his attention to me, and he said something like— I don’t know how we got on to the subject of Jean Genet. I had read a number of Genet’s books by that time. This would have been about 1964 or so. Maybe I was still a senior at Columbia. Frank said something like, when I said, “Jean Genet,” he said, “Oh! What have you been reading of Genet?” And I suddenly went blank. I couldn’t remember the title. I think it was Our Lady of the Flowers, but I’m not sure. I went totally blank, and I looked at him and I said, “Oh, I don’t know. I just read books just so they’ll make me write.” He gave me this great chuckle and warm smile and said, “Yeah, it’s all just grist for the mill, isn’t it?” And that was a very sweet thing to get me out of an awkward moment, I thought. That was typical of the way he treated me, always.
A contemporary of my father’s, Padgett grew up in Oklahoma, the son of a bootlegger. Aside from the occasional cowboy novel or Field and Stream magazine, there wasn’t a lot to read in his house, but his middle school English teacher taught him how to diagram sentences and made him keep a reading chart that he still has. It starts with Hot Rod magazine and ends with Shakespeare. By then he was haunting Tulsa’s public library, and he got a job at the bookshop, where the owner one day asked a fateful question of Padgett, who was sixteen, and his friend, the poet Dick Gallup, who was seventeen: “Have you boys read Kerouac?”
Padgett started reading Evergreen Review and everything from Grove Press and City Lights. He decided that he and Gallup and Joe Brainard should start their own magazine, so they wrote to their heroes asking for submissions and got a 90 percent response rate. Between 1958 and 1960, they published five issues of the White Dove Review. A neighbor named Ted Berrigan (who later moved to 101 St. Marks Place, a block from my parents) started shoving poems into their money box at the bookstore.
As soon as they could, Padgett and Brainard moved to New York. Padgett started studying at Columbia with Kenneth Koch, and there he was, bam, a member—along with his friends Berrigan, Gallup, Brainard, and my father—of the second generation of what he referred to as “the so-called-so-called New York School” because its members were self-conscious from the jump.
The last time Padgett saw O’Hara, O’Hara wasn’t wearing pants. As Padgett was about to leave a party, he headed to the bedroom, where guests’ coats were piled on the bed. He passed painter John Button and author Christopher Isherwood (whose book Berlin Stories inspired the musical Cabaret, then soon to debut on Broadway) and opened the bedroom door.
RP: I went into the bedroom. I walked in and looked across the room and there was Joe LeSueur and there was Frank, who was just putting on his pants. But there was nothing erotic about it. Nothing had happened. Frank was actually just changing clothes because he had to go to a fancier party uptown, like a MoMA event or something. He was putting on a serious suit and tie kind of thing. He was just pulling his pants up. Just as I walked in, Frank had his pants about at his knees and he looked over at me and he looked at Joe and said, “Oh, what’s he going to think of us now?” Which struck me as so funny. That was typical, again, of the wit, but also relieving me of my embarrassment.
Padgett met my father through the poetry scene in 1962. Padgett’s first impression of him was that he wasn’t a rich kid, exactly, but that he seemed to have a safety net that not a lot of poets his age did. “I didn’t know anybody else in New York who had a sports car,” Padgett said.
While attending Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, my father had begun publishing an offset-printed poetry magazine called Mother. He did such a good job pretending Mother was a legitimate enterprise that he was able to solicit work from some of the star poets of the day and to strike up friendships with some of them. He even wrote, in his hero’s honor, a poem titled “After Frank O’Hara” and got one of his new friends to show it to O’Hara.
O’Hara responded: “Oh no! Someone’s after me!” He also said he liked the poem.
Hoping for a job, my father sent resumes to newspapers all over the country. The only one that invited him in for an interview was the Jersey Journal, so he packed up his books and drove the aforementioned sports car, a new yellow Austin-Healey Sprite, a convertible two-seat roadster his parents bought for him, to Jersey City. On regular trips into Manhattan, he attended poetry readings and took Koch’s classes at the New School.
In 1963, my father went back to Carleton for his junior year but soon dropped out for good and returned to New York with a college girlfriend, Linda O’Brien. They married at city hall and, after a year as expatriates in Paris, took a tenement apartment on Avenue B.
My father and Ron Padgett became good friends. In 1968, they gave a reading together at the painter Red Grooms’s loft to coincide with the publication of an anthology called The Young American Poets, edited by Paul Carroll.
“Peter and I cooked up this plan that I think worked wonderfully, without telling anyone in the audience, although a lot of the people were friends of ours and could figure it out, but the unsuspecting wouldn’t know. We read each other’s poetry without saying so: ‘Here’s a new poem,’ and then I would read a thing by Peter. Funny thing was, I liked your father’s work, obviously, but that day I gained a new respect for his work by reading it as if I were he. That was so much fun. He and I both felt a mischievous glee at doing it.”
We talked about my doing this project, and Padgett told me about writing a biography of his father, the bootlegger. He found it very difficult: “I couldn’t get my head around who my father was. I couldn’t quite deal with the power of his personality. I don’t mean he was oppressive or awful or anything. Not at all. All in all, he treated me quite well. I just thought, I’ve got to do justice to the person he was without lying.”
Toward the end of our time together I get around to asking about why the collection of O’Hara letters he was editing never came out. His eyes flash and his lips purse. This is so unlike him that I am taken aback. All Padgett will say is that he and Maureen came to a disagreement that caused the project to be canceled.
As I continue to pull every book about Frank O’Hara that the New York Public Library has to offer, I realize that, to date, the only one who has come close to substantially collecting the O’Hara letters is a CUNY graduate student and Legacy Fieldwork Fellow named Josh Schneiderman. His two chapbooks contain sixteen effusive letters exchanged between Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara in 1955–56.
I decide to invite Schneiderman out for a drink and to ask him how Maureen might like to be approached. It’s the kind of thing my father would never think to do. And thinking of things like that is why I am sure to succeed where he failed.