The Christmas Con: Ben Lucien Burman at the Chelsea
Susan and I were on our way to see the composer Gerald Busby’s seventieth-birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall. (Gerald is the guy who wrote the music for Robert Altman’s film 3 Women. ) On the way down in the Chelsea Hotel elevator, another couple got on at the seventh floor. They were a little bit older than us, in their fifties: the man had a flowing mane of steel-gray hair styled into a pompadour, while the woman had her long, straight hair dyed black with bright-red highlights. We knew their names, Peter and Carrie, and we knew that Peter was a furniture designer and Carrie an artist, but we had never really spoken to them much over the years. In the elevator we just exchanged pleasantries.
We walked through the lobby—past the Christmas tree where somebody had hung a photograph of Bob Dylan, another old Chelsea resident. Dylan appeared to be sitting in the lobby—though it was hard to tell since it wasn’t a very good photo: there was a lot of glare coming from the reflection of the flashbulb in the window behind him.
Stepping out into the chaotic weekend party scene of 23rd Street, we noticed that Peter and Carrie seemed to be going the same way as us. I asked if they were going to the Gerald Busby thing.
“Yes, we are,” Peter said.
“Riding the subway?”
“We were going to,” Peter said, “But since we’re all together, maybe we can share a cab. It won’t be any more than the subway then.”
“Subway’s only a dollar today,” I said. It was a special deal for the holidays.
“Oh, come on.”
“Yeah, it’ll be okay,” Susan said.
“All right,” I gave in. “I guess it’s only a few dollars more.” But then, once we had hailed the cab, settled into it, and gotten under way, Peter, who had sat in the front, turned around and said, “You know, I forgot to bring any money.” He said it cheerfully, without any trace of embarrassment. “Honey, did you bring any money?”
“You know I didn’t,” Carrie said gravely.
“Hmmm. Don’t worry about it,” I said.
Carrie seemed a little bit embarrassed. She said, “This must seem like a real con we’re running.”
“I always thought you two seemed relatively sane,” I said. “But now I can see why you’re living at the Chelsea.” I was implying, jokingly of course, that they were insane like everyone else at the Chelsea, for, I don’t know, sauntering out into the mean streets without any money—la dee da!—and without a care in the world.
But Carrie didn’t quite get it: “Yeah, we conned our way into the Chelsea,” she said crossly.
The cab ride cost ten dollars. “You know we’re never gonna see that money again,” I said as soon as we had gotten away from them.
“Maybe not, but just because they’ll forget it,” Susan maintained. “They didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I know that,” I said. “Or maybe not. Sometimes con men are real slick like that, you know? They act like they’re scatterbrained just to put you at ease so they can take you in.”
“For five dollars!?” Susan exclaimed.
The moment the concert ended, I grabbed Susan and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here before somebody makes us pay for another cab.”
When we got back to 23rd Street, we saw that Peter had beaten us back. He was standing in front of the hotel—which was mobbed with hipsters waiting to get into Serena’s, the club in the basement. “Here’s your five dollars,” Peter said as we walked up.
“Oh, thanks,” I said, taking the bill. “But you know what? I was really hoping you wouldn’t give it back, since that would’ve made a way better story.”
“I’ll take it back if you like,” Peter said, laughing.
“We’ll keep it,” Susan said. “It’ll come in handy, since Stanley just raised our rent.”
This had just happened the day before—talk about ruining the Christmas holiday!—and the increase had been a whopping 36 percent. We were still reeling from the whole thing, disoriented, wondering where we were going to come up with the money, not knowing what to think. In our ten years at the Chelsea, Stanley had never raised our rent before. But now he could get much more for the room, he said. The board of directors was breathing down his neck, he told us, they didn’t care about writers and artists; they wanted him to rent to anybody off the street who could pay.
“Oh, he did, did he?! You can’t let him get away with it!” Peter exclaimed. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “I have something I want to tell you.”
Peter wanted us to go into El Quijote with him, but I wasn’t drinking anymore and so, sadly, had to decline. Instead, the three of us went into the hotel and sat down in the lobby.
“Let me guess,” Peter said once we had settled into out chairs.
“One day Stanley yelled at you as you were going through the lobby, then dragged you into his office and sprang this increase on you out of the blue.”
He had that right: that was pretty much how it had happened.
“Everyone who’s been here for any length of time has had the same thing happen to them,” Peter said. He said that that was Stanley’s pattern: that he would leave you alone for a while, let you get attached to the place, then one day he would spring on you without notice and raise your rent through the roof.
“Well, I guess he could have been raising it all along,” I said.
“He hasn’t raised our rent in ten years. We would probably be paying a lot more by now if he’d been raising it every year.” (Actually, as we found out later, due to rent-stabilization laws he couldn’t have been raising it very much, if at all.)
“He’s not being a nice guy. You should get that thought right out of your head. It’s just that he hasn’t thought of you in a while,” Peter said. “But one day he sees you and that jogs his memory, and he says to the manager, ‘Hey Harvey, who is that guy? What’s he do? How much rent is he paying?’ And then Harvey tells him and his mind starts to working; he starts thinking about how much more money he can get out of you.”
Peter seemed like a figure from another era, a gentlemanly, well-mannered type. He was a cheerful, easygoing guy with big, red, happy cheeks. That must have been how he avoided being driven insane by this place: he just let it roll off his back. He had a kind of old-world charm, like an English lord. I found him convincing and at the same time reassuring:
That’s exactly what happened to us. When we moved in, we were paying a lot more than market value. It wasn’t a very desirable neighborhood. But I didn’t care since I liked the place and I was working on Wall Street then and had plenty of money. Over the years it turned into a pretty good deal.
Then one day, without any warning whatsoever, I was walking through the lobby and Stanley called me into his office and gave us an enormous increase. I said I couldn’t pay that much, but you can’t negotiate with him. He’s completely irrational. He wants his money and that’s all there is to it. If you don’t like it you can just pack up and get out.
I couldn’t accept that, so I called a lawyer, and he told me that what it comes down to is rent stabilization. Any apartment in a rent-controlled building that rented for less than $88 a week in 1969 was rent stabilized under the new law passed that year. Now of course Stanley’s not going to tell you whether your apartment is rent stabilized or not. There’s an agency you can contact, but their information is based on what the landlords report, so you can bet that’s not going to be too reliable either.
Peter asked around the hotel, and from one of the older residents he found out that the previous tenant in his apartment had been an obscure writer named Ben Lucien Burman. Peter couldn’t find out much about him, but one time he was in the Players Club for some function or other and saw a picture of Burman on the wall receiving an award. He asked the people who worked there, and though no one knew anything about Burman’s time at the Chelsea, they told him that Burman’s papers were stored at Tulane University in New Orleans.
In reviews of his work, Ben Lucien Burman is often compared to Mark Twain. This has nothing to do with the fact that they both lived at the Chelsea but is rather a reference to both men’s home-spun humor and their obsession with the Mississippi. Though Burman’s work now seems neglected, he’s not as obscure as all that: his books have sold sixteen million copies and been translated into eleven languages. He was able to make a pretty good living from his writing.
Like Susan and I, Burman was a native of the Bluegrass State. He was born in Covington, Kentucky, in 1895. He fought in World War I, came back to the states and graduated from Harvard in 1920, and then continued his education working on steamboats on the Mississippi River. Deciding to become a writer, Burman moved to New York and published his first story in 1924. He was paid $500 for the story, a sum that seems nearly unimaginable these days.
In addition to short stories and novels, Burman wrote Reader’s Digest articles with such sensationalistic titles as: “Witchcraft—Mexican Style,” “The Weirdness of Death Valley,” and “King of the Pygmies.” When World War II came around, Burman worked as a war correspondent in Europe, receiving the French Legion of Honor for an exposé he wrote about the Pétain regime in Vichy France.
Burman is best known for his series of novels chronicling the adventures of a community of anthropomorphic animals—with names such as Doc Raccoon and Judge Blacksnake—in the mythical town of Catfish Bend, Louisiana. (I like to think that this is how Burman retained his sanity: by retreating from the mad chaos of the Chelsea into a more genteel world of traditional values, simple pleasures, and talking animals.) Aimed at young adults, several of these novels became best-sellers. Burman continued writing these animal tales right up until the end of his life, concluding the series with his tour de force, The Strange Invasion of Catfish Bend, in which Judge Blacksnake is possessed by a space alien and goes about infecting the entire community with both his radioactive venom and his unorthodox brand of justice. (Actually, I’m joking: it’s just about an invasion of fire ants.)
Several of Burman’s novels were made into movies. Will Rogers starred in the film version of Burman’s second novel, Steamboat Round the Bend, and John Ford directed, although, unfortunately, this was not one of the animal novels. Heaven on Earth (apparently a retitled version of Burman’s first novel, Mississippi) is the only Burman novel still in print: it was reissued in 2005.
Burman spent his early years in New York living in rooming houses and SROs in Greenwich Village. When he sold his first story, he didn’t even have enough money for a ride uptown to get the check. His future wife, Alice Cady Stanton, had to cash in some stamps to come up with the bus fare. They were married soon afterward, and traded in the romance of Village bohemia for what was at that time the comparative luxury of the Chelsea. Alice was an artist and soon enough she was illustrating her husband’s books, and together the Burmans took the publishing industry by storm.
When Ben and Alice moved into the Chelsea in the thirties, the building was still pretty nice, but in the fifties the management ripped out all the ornate fixtures and transformed the hotel into what was basically a flophouse. The period of its greatest artistic flowering, with the Beats and the Warhol people, coincided with the hotel’s physical decline, a decline that would continue through the sixties and the seventies. The Burmans stayed put through these dark days, growing old in the Chelsea, even as many of the more respectable tenants moved out.
The neighborhood went downhill too. To hear tales of 23rd Street in the seventies, it was pretty much a no-man’s-land. There were few stores on the street, no restaurants, and certainly no trendy clubs. In the last years that Burman was there, the neighborhood had deteriorated to such a degree that he—himself a frail old man by this point—feared to let his guests go out on the street to hail a cab for themselves. The last straw was when Alice was mugged around the corner from the hotel on 22nd Street. After thirty-eight years in the Chelsea, the Burmans finally moved out in 1974. Alice died in 1977, and Ben followed her in 1984, passing away in his comfy chair at his beloved Players Club, at the age of eighty-eight.
Literature is not high on the list of priorities in Kentucky—not even literature of the talking animal variety—and so no college in Burman’s home state wanted his archives. (On the bright side, they did give him a highway marker in Covington.) That’s how Burman’s papers ended up at Tulane, where his stories were prized for their realistic portrayal of Mississippi River life.
Peter said that he and his wife figured it was worth the trip down to New Orleans to visit the Ben Lucien Burman collection. “They had forty-one feet of his papers,” Peter said. “Drafts and manuscripts of everything he had ever written, all his articles and stories and novels. But more importantly, we found out that he was one of those people who never throw anything away. He had saved all his leases—all the way back to the thirties—all his rent receipts and cancelled checks, everything. A perfect record of his tenancy. That was how we established that the room was rent stabilized. We just made copies of all those papers. We took our case to court and won. Now he can’t raise our rent more than 5 percent a year.”
Peter gave us the name and phone number of his lawyer. “You can’t let this go unchallenged,” he said. “The lawyer is as much for your peace of mind as anything. Before I hired a lawyer, it had got so I dreaded walking through the lobby, since I knew at any time Stanley might call me into his office for a dressing down. Now I don’t have to worry about it. I just say, talk to my lawyer. He absolutely hates that. The first time I told him that, Stanley said, ‘I hate your lawyer.’ And I laughed and said, ‘Then why are you giving him such a good living?’ It was a very satisfying moment, believe me.”
At around that point I noticed that the Bob Dylan photograph was already gone from the Christmas tree: someone had stolen it while we were at the concert. Though this was no real surprise—after all, this is New York, and the Chelsea to boot—I was amazed at how quickly it had happened.
“This lawyer is not cheap,” Peter said. “He asks for a big retainer, right up front. But then again, you’d just be paying that to Stanley anyway, so you have to figure out who you’d rather pay. And if you go with the lawyer, you’ll save money in the long run.”
I did think about that, whom I wanted the money to go to, and I wasn’t sure. For all his faults, Stanley was the one who had made possible the wondrous dynamic of this place that we all loved. (Even as this thought went through my mind, I realized how naïve it sounded.) “I think it would be a good idea at least to talk to a lawyer,” I said. “That way we can find out what our rights are, if nothing else.”
Susan seemed to be thinking along the same lines as me. She said, “I think Stanley’s rent policy is like the rest of the hotel: kind of idiosyncratic and weird. He said he wanted some of his good tenants to volunteer for a rent increase, so the hotel could continue as before!”
We all laughed at that, because it was so absurd. Of course, there had been no question of refusing to “volunteer.”
“Don’t let his act fool you,” Peter said. “Stanley is not a kindly old man. That’s all an act. He’s manipulative and calculating.”
I chuckled at that. I thought Peter was exaggerating a bit, since I believed that on some level Stanley did actually care about the Chelsea’s residents. But Stanley is a complex character; I could see Peter’s point, and I didn’t see any reason to contradict him. Both Susan and I were glad we had talked to Peter. His words had lifted some of the burden we had been carrying around, helped us to see that we weren’t alone in our predicament, and, most important, helped us to laugh about it. Peter stood up and put on his hat, suddenly eager to make his escape. I supposed that his drink at El Quijote was by now long overdue. I wouldn’t be having one myself, but the need for it had passed, and I wished Peter a good one.
Seemingly out of character with his genteel persona, Ben Lucien Burman once said that if he had to kill a man, he’d do it artistically. “You have to keep your sense of humor,” he said. That was the Chelsea talking there, for sure.
