Deals
To some of the older Dakotans, including Winnie Bodkin, one of the most striking changes that has occurred in recent years is the way the quality of conversation—or even gossip—has deteriorated. In 1922, for example, there was good subject for talk in the new traffic-control lights that had just been placed on Fifth Avenue. These were the objects of wonder, not only for their up-to-dateness but also for the rather shocking fact that each traffic light was topped with a bronze statuette of a naked man—the god Mercury wearing nothing but a World War I infantryman’s helmet. And of course the uptown telephone circuits buzzed with the usual talk of mistresses, lovers, showgirls and scandal, but it was all quite harmless and inconsequential.
Today, however, talk at the Dakota has taken on a tougher, harder, less pleasant edge. When Dakotans meet, their conversation tends to fall into one of three general categories—money, and how much everything costs; parties, who is giving them and inviting whom; and how well—or poorly—the building is being run. “People don’t seem to converse any more,” says Winnie Bodkin, “they carp.” Of course this could be a reflection of the way conversation in the city of New York has changed.
There is carping about the way some people have turned the Dakota itself into a business of sorts. A number of tenants have purchased rooms on the eighth and ninth floors which they use as servants’ or storage rooms. (The Blanchards’ cook lives up there, and so does Leonard Bernstein’s housekeeper.) But others have bought rooms which they rent out to other people, and from which they derive income. Though this is not uncommon practice, some people in the building rather frown on this, but there is legally nothing wrong with it. Ever since the building went co-operative, there has been a certain amount of intramural wheeling and dealing in the building, with apartments being bought, sold and traded by tenants to one another. Since Rosemary’s Baby “put the Dakota on the map” (even though only exterior shots of the building were filmed), it has acquired a spookily romantic aura. And particularly in the years since 1976, when the entire country began a real estate boom that sent costs of housing spiraling upward, Dakota apartments have turned out to be exceptionally lucrative investments.
When an apartment becomes available, the building learns it first, and quite often, the apartment will be snapped up by another tenant, refurbished and sold for a profit to yet another tenant. In 1976, for example, Daniel and Barbara Quinn bought apartment 212 for $14,620—not to live in, since they already lived in apartment 55. A year later the Quinns were able to sell 212, which only has one room and one bath, to Patrick O’Neal for $18,000, a profit of roughly 25 percent. In the meantime the O’Neals had bought Joan Bingham’s big apartment (ten rooms, four baths) for $115,000 to live in, and have since acquired three more apartments for extra space. One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars for that much space was a steal for the O’Neals in 1977, because by 1978 apartment 15 (seven rooms, two-and-a-half baths) went for $120,000, which was what the Quinns got when they sold it to Mr. and Mrs. Seymour Terry.
The temptation to parlay apartments and make big money in the process becomes understandable, in light of the way Dakota prices began escalating in 1976 and 1977. In 1976 a nine-room three-and a-half bath apartment, carrying with it 860 shares of Dakota voting stock, sold for $115,000. In 1978, a smaller apartment—eight rooms and three baths, and 780 shares of stock—sold for $150,000. Paul Goldberger bought his apartment in 1976 for $42,000, and fixed it up. By 1978 he estimated that he could sell it for at least $100,000. The same year, George Davison-Ackley estimated that his might bring a quarter of a million dollars.
Michael Wager is an actor who played with Ruth Ford in Six Characters in Search of an Author. In 1974 he was looking for an apartment, and Miss Ford suggested the Dakota. He bought apartment 53-C for around $50,000—it had five rooms and two baths—and redecorated it handsomely, covering the walls with Fortuny fabric, among other things. Downstairs, meanwhile, the Larry Ellmans were in the process of dividing their “grossly large” apartment, for which they had also paid around $50,000 in 1967, and were planning to sell off roughly 40 percent of it. By 1976 Michael Wager was able to sell 53-C to Robert Renfield for $100,000 and to buy the Ellman’s 40 percent for $50,000. He even came out with one more room in the deal, and, naturally, he brought his Fortuny downstairs with him. He immediately began to redecorate, confident that he will be able to sell the maisonette and double his money again. For an actor, whose work is at best uncertain, buying and selling Dakota apartments can provide an important source of income. Wager claims that not long ago he saw a coffin being carried down the stairs. He immediately inquired, “Whose apartment is available?”
Nor are the Ellmans at all unhappy. They doubled their money too.
Of course there is nothing illegal or improper about all these in-house business dealings, but some Dakotans find them all—well, a little regrettable.
There are rumors, meanwhile, that John Lennon would like to buy the entire building, and Lennon does seem to require rather a lot of space for his relatively small family. By the early part of 1979 Lennon and his wife owned some twenty-eight rooms throughout the Dakota. And some business deals in the building have been less than profitable.
Michael Wager, who insists that you can “just take” doors and moldings from the basement in re-doing an apartment, likens the Dakota to “a kibbutz.” There are two Israelis in the building—Gil Shiva and Gyora Novak—and Wager’s late father was Meyer Weisgal, chancellor of the Chaim Weizmann Institute. “Gil Shiva’s brother was my father’s chauffeur,” Wager sniffs, but adds, “It’s all very cozy. The Shivas call down to borrow dishes, Ruth Ford rings up to have me for dinner.” And things other than apartments are traded back and forth. The Dale Kellers’ two boys had outgrown their Japanese nanny, and so the Kellers gave the nanny to the Lennons for young Sean. A very courtly black gentleman named Vassal Thomas had worked on and off for Michael Wager, helping him with parties. Mr. Thomas is a figure of some social standing in Harlem, and helps run the annual “Evening of Elegance,” a major fund-raising event of New York’s black upper crust. When Lauren Bacall was looking for a cook-houseman, Wager suggested Mr. Thomas. Some time later Mr. Thomas announced to Mr. Wager, “I’ve just fired Miss Bacall.” Wager asked how this had come about. Pointing to the enunciator call-button in the kitchen, Mr. Thomas said, “Do you see that button? Miss Bacall rang it once too often.”
Just as the quality of conversation has changed in New York, so has the quality of entertaining, and if George Templeton Strong were still around, he might be moved to comment again, “How New York has fallen off!” In the 1880’s and 1890’s, when the Dakota was young, New York was in the middle of an era of extravagant party-giving which will probably never be seen again. James Hazen Hyde gave his $200,000 ball at Sherry’s, at which the ballroom was transformed into a replica of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Suddenly every host and hostess of worth in New York was trying to outdo him—often with results that strained the imagination. Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, for example, gave her famous Monkey Dinner in the 1890’s, where the guest of honor, in full evening dress, was a monkey, who was solemnly introduced as Prince del Drago. This was followed by a Dog Dinner, at which the honored guests, wearing their mistresses’ finest jewels, were canine pets. Perhaps the oddest entertainment of that blithe period was the Horseback Dinner given in 1903 by Mr. C. K. G. Billings. For this party, also at Sherry’s, the ballroom was filled with live trees and shrubs to represent a forest glade. The floor was sodded, and all about the room “blue bloods of the equine world” were hitched at mangers filled with hay. Strapped to the flanks of each horse was a table. Guests, in formal riding attire, mounted their assigned horses and were served course after course of food by waiters dressed as grooms. From the shoulders of each horse, meanwhile, were slung two saddlebags, each filled with ice and bottles of champagne. As they dined, the guests sipped champagne through nippled rubber tubes that ran down to the saddlebags.
And yet, if this sort of thing all seems a far cry from the disco doings of the 1970’s at such popular watering places as Studio 54, where strange weeds are smoked and exotic chemicals sniffed, it would be well to remember that on every fashionable lady’s dressing table in the 1890’s stood a bottle of something called Tilden’s Extract. It cost six cents for half an ounce and could be purchased at any drug store in the city. It was recommended for “over-wrought hostesses,” who were advised to take a small dose before receiving guests or going out to dinner, to prepare them for the “rigors” of the evening ahead. Tilden’s was pure extract of hashish.
The courtyard of the Dakota has been the scene of a number of gala entertainments over the years—weddings, receptions, bar mitzvahs—and each time one of them occurs the Dakotans remind themselves that the Dakota is a cozy, one-big-happy-family sort of place, a community within a community. At the courtyard parties a spirit of neighborhood coffee klatch is usually encouraged, though sometimes things go wrong. When Michael Wager was having a bar mitzvah for his son, he asked his caterer to set up tables in the courtyard. A little later, he noticed that, on someone’s orders, the tables were being removed. Wager stormed out. For week’s he had been complaining to the board about the courtyard’s clogged drains. “If I own the courtyard,” he said, “put back the tables. If you own it, fix the drains.” The tables were put back.
The private parties given in individual apartments, meanwhile, are something else again. “The annual tax-deductible party” has become a feature of big-city life everywhere, and a number of Dakota parties are given for publicity—to promote a person, a product or an event. The number of publicity-oriented parties is another thing about which Winnie Bodkin shakes her head. With his restaurants, which he likes to keep filled with a snappy clientele, Warner LeRoy finds it wise to toss two or three large parties a year—each for at least a hundred guests—with all New York’s snappiest people in attendance. George Davison-Ackley has an interest in a theater and dance company, and, to draw attention to these interests, he too has embarked upon a career as a Dakota host, closely rivaling the LeRoys.
He certainly has the place for it. His rooms are graced with ceiling-high bamboo trees in red-lacquered wicker tubs, with Oriental rugs and Chinese tables and garden stools, needlepoint chairs and cushions, huge bowls of red tulips and white lilies. “The people who did the Seagram Building” did the bookshelves in the library. In his apartment, Mr. Davison-Ackley is able to accommodate as many as fifty people for a seated dinner. For a cocktail reception he can handle as many as 450 guests—more than could be squeezed into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. Of one of these gatherings he says, “It was the most eclectic group—blacks, whites, gays and straights. The Cronyns came, and Myrna Loy and Louis Falco. A little lady downstairs came up and sat with Myrna Loy, drinking until two A.M. I’d invited a black clerk from my law firm, and he was standing next to my mother. The next thing I knew, they went off and had dinner together! I turned my bedroom into a discothèque. It was noisy, but there were no complaints. Eugenia Sheppard got the date mixed up, and showed up two days later.”
George Davison-Ackley is the kind of fellow who complains that his telephone rings so much that it drives him to distraction, and yet maintains six separate listing (“Davison, G. W. Ackley,” “Ackley, G. W. Davison,” etc.) in the Manhattan telephone directory, all for the same number, so that his telephone friends will have no trouble locating him. He is also the kind of man who, each time he pours himself a fresh martini, pours it into a fresh Baccarat glass.
He has made great social strides in New York, where one of the city’s leading social arbiters is unquestionably Earl Blackwell. Earl Blackwell used to look straight through George Davison-Ackley when the two encountered each other. But no longer. “There was a dinner party at the Kennedy Gallery,” George Davison-Ackley recalls. “Eugenia and Earl were there. Jackie Onassis arrived and spoke to me, and Earl come over and asked me to join his group. He had finally decided that I was someone to know.”
When Gil and Susan Shiva give one of their big parties, coat racks are set up inside the building’s entrance gate, and someone is stationed at a table with a guest list to check off names as guests arrive, so there will be no crashers. So many celebrities turn up that there are inevitably photographers outside the gate to photograph the famous faces as they appear. Susan Shiva cooperates with the press by notifying them in advance that she is having a party. But she draws the line at letting the photographers up into her apartment. Gil Shiva recently embarked on a career as a motion-picture producer, and for the opening of his first film—Lina Wertmuller’s The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain, with Candace Bergen—the Shivas had a large party. Lauren Bacall, who shares a service elevator with the Shivas, came to the party through the Shivas’ kitchen door, thus avoiding the photographers. But when Gil Shiva explained that the party was to publicize his movie, Miss Bacall agreed to go downstairs into the courtyard to be photographed. “It was very kind of her,” Gil Shiva says.
Publicity, fund-raising, politics and business, after all, are what New York society in the late 1970’s is all about. But the amount of business entertaining that goes on in the building annoys some Dakotans who prefer a quieter, less publicized social life. Friendships have disintegrated over this issue.
In the summer of 1967, at the time of the Six-Day War, the Shivas were scheduled to have a party for the benefit of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Sixty people had been invited, but at the last minute the Shivas were asked to host an Israeli fund-raising affair in their apartment on the same date. The Israeli fund-raising, they felt, took precedent over the dance troupe. On the afternoon of the party Susan Shiva telephoned her upstairs neighbor Theodate Severns to ask a big favor. Would Mrs. Severns be a substitute hostess and have the Ailey party at her place? After all, the fact that the party was to be at the Dakota was the party’s main drawing card.
Mrs. Severns agreed to help Susan Shiva out, and then phoned downstairs to Winnie Bodkin at the desk to ask for an off-duty elevator operator to help serve. Winnie told Mrs. Severns that she was sorry, but all the elevator operators had been pre-empted by the Shivas for the Israeli fund-raiser. “She had taken all of them,” says Mrs. Severns. “I was flabbergasted! I was going to have her party in my house—and with no help! The Shivas sent up wine and cheese, but I had to provide all the glasses and all the clean-up. I never even got a thank-you note! I was furious!”
Like eggs in a crate, the thin-shelled egos compartmentalized in the Dakota are easily cracked. But it should be remembered that the Six-Day War was an emotional time for all Jews, and so perhaps Susan Shiva can be forgiven for forgetting the thank you.
As a hostess, meanwhile, Susan Shiva is usually in full command of the situation, and her parties rarely get out of hand. At a party for Prince Michael of Greece, for example, a certain number of guests were invited for dinner, and certain others were invited for after dinner. On the after-dinner list was Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat head, who made the mistake of thinking that he could bring along ten or so uninvited friends to the party. The friends included Countess Gioconda Cigogna, Prince George Vassichekof, Count Yash and Eva Gabronska, the Duke and Duchess de Cadaval of Portugal, Patricia Lawford, Kevin McCarthy, Yul Brynner, and Kirk and Anne Douglas. This was too much for Susan Shiva, who threw the whole lot out, titles and all.
But there are times at the Shivas’ parties when the going does get a little rough. When Robert F. Kennedy was making his Democratic Senate bid in New York, the Shivas, who are ardent Democrats, threw a party for him in order to win the “intellectual vote” away from the Republican incumbent, Senator Kenneth Keating. Among the intellectuals invited were William vanden Heuvel, who was Kennedy’s campaign manager (and, for a while, Susan Shiva’s brother-in-law), Jacqueline Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green, Gloria Vanderbilt, Zachary Scott, Jason Robards, John Gunther, Jules Feiffer, Allegra Kent, Paddy Chayefsky, Abe Burrows, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton, Lauren Bacall and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. All went well until Arthur Kopit, the playwright (Oh Dad, Poor Dad …), announced that he was for Senator Keating. He was pushed backward over a sofa, spilling his drink on himself, the sofa, the rug and the person who had shoved him. Getting to his feet, he said, “I see the Kennedy swimming-pool-shoving syndrome is still with us.”
Because of the celebrity of the building’s tenants and their friends and guests, episodes like this have a way of getting into the gossip columns which, less celebrated tenants feel, tends to give the Dakota a bad name, and makes it sound as though the building is the scene of nothing but wild parties. In fact, almost everything that happens at the Dakota gets into the papers, and this ruffles some Dakotans’ feathers. The building is particularly proud of its security system. All visitors must be announced. The entrance gate is locked at midnight, and late-arriving guests and tenants must ring for a watchman to be admitted. All groceries and mail are delivered to apartments by the building’s porters. Workmen and repairmen arriving on the service elevators will not be admitted to apartments until they have been identified by the owners. Many apartment owners, when they are at home, still do not bother to lock their front doors, but New York has become increasingly security-conscious. And there have been slip-ups. Not long ago, David Marlowe’s doorbell was rung by one of the periodic groups of young girls who had somehow penetrated the system, and who were going up and down hallways trying to find John Lennon. David Marlowe fooled them by saying, “This is John Lennon’s apartment, but he’s in Europe for the summer.” The girls departed.
And there are fears. “One thing that worries us,” Wilbur Ross says, “is that if someone got into the building, how would we ever find him?” It is true that in some of the building’s dark storage spaces and closets and rooftop lofts a person could conceivably hide out for months undetected. But once he was inside, a prowler unfamiliar with the building would also have a hard time finding his way out, since so many of the Dakota’s doors and hallways open into cul-de-sacs.
And there have been a few burglaries. In 1971 Sidney Carroll’s apartment was robbed, and Robert and Eileen Carlson vigorously protested a search of their maid’s room by an employee and the police. A few years later Warner and Kay LeRoy’s apartment was burglarized, but the LeRoys admit that it was their own fault. “We’d gone away for the summer and given keys to a lot of workmen,” LeRoy says. Some time after that, Eugenia Sheppard reported the loss of some jewelry. Later on, the missing pieces turned up in a drawer where Miss Sheppard had forgotten she had put them. But the Sheppard “burglary” somehow found its way to Liz Smith’s gossip column, where it was reported that Miss Sheppard had said that hers was one of a “rash” of burglaries at the Dakota. For a while, everyone in the building was very cross with Eugenia Sheppard. One burglary and one non-burglary did not seem enough to constitute a “rash.” This was the sort of publicity that the Dakota did not need at all. It hurt the value of everyone’s investment.
Still, if you are famous, people recognize you and comment on what you do. One of the perils of the publicized life is public embarrassment. One of the drawbacks of life at the Dakota is that its famous tenants keep the building in an almost perpetual spotlight. The Lennons, of course, are a special problem, but other celebrities have occasionally managed to strain the rules. One is not supposed to park a car in the Dakota’s carriage entrance, but when Jason Robards was married to Lauren Bacall, and living there, he once slept all night at the wheel of his car, parked there, and no one knew quite what to do about it.
Cars frequently betray the identity of their owners. When John V. Lindsay was Mayor of New York, everyone in the building—and in the neighboring buildings—was interested to see the Mayor’s official chauffeur-driven limousine draw up in front of the Dakota one balmy evening. The tall Mayor stepped out of the car and entered the building, Who, everyone wondered, might the Mayor of New York be visiting? The car and driver waited outside.
And waited.
The next morning the question became even more intense. The Mayor’s limousine, its driver dozing at the wheel, was still there.
“Oh, there have been some really wild parties,” bubbles Ruth Ford. “One night there was a particularly wild party, with all sorts of electric guitars and amplifiers and a rock band. By around eleven or twelve at night, people began complaining. Everyone who complained was invited to the party. Finally the police poured in—and they were invited to stay. They stayed, drinking and carrying on with everyone else. It worked.”
It might not have worked a few years ago. One of Warner LeRoy’s downstairs neighbors was a woman, since moved away, who was an heiress to a beer fortune. She called the police at the slightest sound of a party, and the police arrived and broke up whatever was going on. The lady herself was fond of giving opera recitals, which she considered properly dignified and civilized in tone. At one of her recitals an elderly Dakota neighbor had the poor taste to have a heart attack and die. The indignant hostess ordered her butler to drag the dead man back to his own apartment and deposit him there, where he belonged.