Run: Virgil Thomson at the Chelsea
The ancient, groaning elevator is one of the best places in the hotel to meet interesting people. In fact, you may get to know them better than you’d like to if, as occurs with some regularity, the elevator breaks down between floors.
One day I was in the elevator with Gerald Busby, a classical composer and pianist. We had just gotten on in the lobby, and the door was nearly closed when an arm shot into the small crack, and the door sprung back open again. A young man bounded onto the elevator. Tall and muscular, he was dressed in hip-hop gear: an expensive tracksuit, gold jewelry. His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated, and he was manic, hyperactive, gesticulating wildly as he spoke in a nonstop stream.
“I’m looking for Walter in 546. I really need to talk to him. I’m supposed to be staying at his place, and he knows this but I don’t know where he is. He was supposed to let me in. I’ve been looking for him all day and I can’t find him.” Despite his crazed aspect, I thought I detected a note of cunning in his eyes.
“I don’t know him,” I said.
“I don’t either,” Gerald said.
“A short, balding man, with glasses. Room 546. You couldn’t miss him. Have you lived here long? You look like you have. You must know him. I’ve got to find him. It’s very important.”
We assured him once again that we didn’t know Walter.
“If you see Walter, you’ve got to give him my message. It’s very important, please see that he gets my message.” He got off on the fifth floor, apparently to wait for Walter. I noticed that somehow, for all that, he had forgotten to say what the message was.
When the door had closed and we were safely underway, I laughed and said, “Well, I guess if I ever meet Walter, I’ll give him the message.”
“Oh, I know Walter,” Gerald said.
“You do?”
“Sure. He’s a poet. Room 546, like he said.”
“So are you going to give him the message?” I joked.
“Yeah, I’ll give him the message: Run!”
Gerald is the composer of the eerie soundtrack for Robert Altman’s strange filmic masterpiece 3 Women. (If you’ve seen this film you know that the music is more than mere background; it really adds to the mood of dread and foreboding in the movie.) Gerald was born in Tyler, Texas, in 1935 and went to Yale. After that he moved to New York to play the piano and compose music. He had early success with his score for the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s Runes. Besides his work on Altman’s 3 Women, Gerald also had a role in Altman’s 1978 film, A Wedding.
I’m not sure if I even knew Gerald’s name when the elevator incident took place. If I did, then that was all I knew about him—besides the fact that he was a friendly, pleasant guy, a kindly, white-haired man who always had a smile on his face. Then one day recently, in 2005, Susan and I saw a flyer in the display case in the lobby that said he was giving a concert at the Cornelia Street Café, and we figured we might as well go. Gerald’s show was called “The Monologing Composer”: Gerald played the piano, accompanying various singers, and between pieces told anecdotes of his early life in Texas and of his later years at the Chelsea Hotel, where he has lived since the late seventies. It was a relaxed, intimate show, designed, the program said, to take classical music out of the concert hall and give it back to the people.
Among other things, we discovered that night that Gerald had been a longtime friend and protégé of the famous composer and legendary Chelsea Hotel resident, Virgil Thomson, up until the older man’s death in 1989. Thomson, born in 1896, in Kansas City, Missouri, lived in Paris in the twenties and thirties, hanging out with Cocteau, Stravinsky, Duchamp, Picasso, and James Joyce and composing operas based on the writings of Gertrude Stein, including his most famous piece, Four Saints in Three Acts. He wrote the scores to several films, including The Louisiana Story, for which he won the Pulitzer in 1949. Thomson was also a well-known music critic, winning the National Book Critic’s Circle Award in 1981 for an anthology of his work. Thomson moved into the Chelsea in 1942 and lived there until his death, surely making him close to the record holder in that dubious category.
Thomson was also an accomplished cook, and Gerald, who worked as a chef himself at various restaurants in New York City, is writing a cookbook in which he has compiled Thomson’s favorite recipes. That night at the Cornelia Street Café, Gerald told us one recipe, for coq au vin. Here it is, as best I remember, handed down from Virgil to Gerald, to me, and now to you:
1. Cut up the chicken into eighths.
2. Braise chicken with a rendering of beef suet.
3. Add a cup of shallots and a cup of your best burgundy. Simmer until done.
4. Serve with the rest of the burgundy.
Afterward, the audience was buzzing: The recipe sounds so simple and delicious, but what exactly is beef suet? A theater critic sitting at the next table singled us out as southerners by our accents and, thinking we would surely know, followed us out to the street and asked us. Neither Susan nor I had any idea, although we felt pretty confident it was some kind of fat. Later, I looked in the dictionary and found that suet is raw beef or mutton fat, especially the hard fat found around the loins and kidneys. So not just any old fat. Unfortunately, we don’t have a kitchen here at the Chelsea, or else I’d cook it and let you know how it turned out. In any event, you’ll have to wait for Gerald’s book to come out to get the definitive version of the recipe.
Gerald was never able to build on the success he had in the seventies, and this led him to become deeply depressed. Also, at around the time of Thomson’s death, Gerald and his longtime partner, Sam Byers, were diagnosed as HIV positive. Sam died of AIDS in 1993, after a protracted illness in which Gerald cared for him. Distraught over the death of his partner, and in declining health himself, Gerald turned to cocaine and stopped composing altogether.
This was what was going on with Gerald when he and I encountered the menacing character in the elevator. Through it all, his sense of humor had remained intact.
When we learned of his troubles—around the time of the Cornelia Street concert—both Susan and I found the story extremely hard to believe. Gerald had always seemed like such a nice guy, and so levelheaded, one of the few genuinely sane people around here. But it’s easy to lose it here in the Chelsea around all these borderline cases, not to mention all the people who have already lost it. You just need something to send you over the edge, and for Gerald it was the death of his partner. Gerald ran from his pain, which is easy enough to understand. I ran myself for twenty years, though my drug of choice was alcohol.
Within the past few years, Gerald has got his life back on track, thanks in part to a program called the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. After not creating any new music for six years, he’s been composing by means of the Sibelius computer program, which has given him a big boost creatively. His new CD, The Music of Gerald Busby, has just been released on the Innova label. And he recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a retrospective of his music—though no anecdotes, unfortunately—at Carnegie Hall.
