The Garden City Hotel had a shady reputation in the old days, but now it’s like a morgue. Frank Sinatra used to hang out here, and so did W. Averell Harriman. The place is full of ghosts, many of them burned alive in a series of disastrous fires that have plagued this hotel since it was built in 1874.
Yet the game went on; they all played polo: William Vanderbilt, John Pierpont Morgan, Lillian Russell, Billy Rose. Garden City was the Aspen of the Twenties, a pastoral outpost of greed, wealth, rudeness, and women who refused to wear panties. Scott Fitzgerald, no doubt, brooded in this bar just as I am today. The place has always reeked of death, from equine fever in the 1920s to human brain death in the Nineties . . . Even today there are wild boys in the elevators, cradling rubber blow-up dolls in their arms, chatting amiably with the night porters. It’s a wonderful place to stay if you’re dead . . . I had the time of my life. The Garden City Hotel is a fiery tomb of magic, mystery, and myth. You want fun, Bubba? This is the place to be.
The polo tournament had been running every other day for two weeks on Long Island and also at the Greenwich Polo Club, in Connecticut—only ten miles away by water across the ominous gray currents of the Sound. I thought of Jay Gatsby standing on his lawn and staring across the water at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock . . . But the Garden City Hotel is a long way from Gatsby country, and Daisy doesn’t hang out here anymore. Long Island has changed drastically since Gatsby’s time. Garden City was a rural hamlet back then, and when it was originally built, the hotel was so hard to reach by horse carriage from Manhattan that it seemed as far away as Cuba.
By the turn of the century, it had become a fashionable spa for the rich and famous. Teddy Roosevelt lived nearby in Oyster Bay and was often seen in the hotel bar, haranguing the local gentry to come on up to his place for a quick game of polo. But Teddy would not recognize the place now. It has burned to the ground three times and is now in its fourth incarnation. There is a disco instead of a carriage house, and Joey Buttafuoco has replaced Gatsby as the resident celebrity manqué.
By the time I got there, a rash of shocking upsets had thrown the championship up for grabs. Most of the foreigners had been humbled, and my homeboys had emerged as one of the strongest challengers. Four teams were still unbeaten going into the final week, and Aspen was one of them. They were whores, of course, and only one of them had ever set foot in the Aspen area—and that was the wily patron, Doug Matthews. But that is the way of polo, and I was the only one who seemed disturbed by it.
But not for long. I was beginning to learn that there was no need to be bothered by certain things. It is a different world, and the only way to accept it is to accept it completely . . . I was shocked at first to learn that the official headquarters of the tournament, the legendary Meadowbrook Polo Club, no longer existed except as an eerie shell of its former self. The grounds were still beautiful, and the deserted clubhouse was still elegant, but there were no polo fields, no polo ponies, no caviar brunches, no smirking, bankrupt aristocrats strutting around the terrace with half-naked Spanish courtesans on their arms. “It’s a parking lot now,” said club president Al Bianco Sr. when I inquired, “but we still call it the polo field.”
It didn’t faze me. “Of course,” I said. “Good show. Now let us retire to the bar and have a mint julep.”
“There is no bar,” he said. “But I know a nice Italian place over in Levittown. You must come and be my guest.”
“You’re too kind,” I said, “but I’ll have to take a rain check. I have a film crew waiting back at the hotel. I have to run.”
“What a pity,” he said. “We’ll see you tomorrow at the game?”
“You bet,” I said. “We will kick ass. Those goddamn Argies are about to get what they came for. My homeboys can’t lose!”
He blanched and looked away, then he pulled a plastic hip flask out of his coat and drank deeply. “What do you mean by that?” he finally asked, fixing me with a nervous smile.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “I didn’t come here to lose, Buster. You want to put your money where your mouth is?”
He stared down at his hands for a long moment, then shook his head. “I didn’t hear that,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the game. Thanks for stopping by.”
“The pleasure was all mine,” I replied. “We are champions.”
I walked across the lobby to the darkness of the Polo Lounge, which appeared to be empty. I sat down at the bar and picked up a crumpled copy of the Sporting News, which was open to the Dog Pages. Across the room was a big-screen Sony TV, which was tuned to the dog-racing channel. I slapped my hand on the bar and called for whiskey. I hate dog racing, and the sight of it made my mood foul. I reached into the pocket of my silk shooting jacket and pulled out a small ball of hashish, which I quickly ate.
I heard a noise behind me, and then a hand touched my shoulder. “Pardon me,” said a man’s voice, “are you here for the polo games?”
“You bet,” I replied. “This is the big one. It’s now or never.”
“Who are you with?” he asked.
“Aspen Polo,” I said. “My homeboys. We are undefeated. Nobody can stop us.”
He nodded thoughtfully but said nothing. He was still standing slightly behind me, so shrouded in darkness that I could barely see his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. It made me nervous. For all I knew, he was a cop or maybe a professional pickpocket. But when he sat down on the stool next to me, I saw a finely dressed gray-haired man who looked like he might own a few polo ponies himself. He was wearing what appeared to be a black cashmere tuxedo jacket and patent leather boots. He was an elderly gent with deep-set eyes and a suave patrician presence—as if he’d just come back from a garden party at the old Gatsby place. I was impressed. We shook hands, and he introduced himself as Averell Harriman.
I recognized the name and felt edgy for a moment because I knew he was lying: the real Averell Harriman had been dead for quite a few years—but I smiled and shook his hand anyway. Why not? I thought. We all use borrowed names from time to time.
A minor problem arose when I accidentally signed Doug Matthews’ name to a receipt for the $1,000 tip I’d given to the three hotel porters. The manager brought it to me in the bar, where I was enjoying a professional conversation with my new friend. “Why are you bothering me?” I said as I scrawled my initials on the check. “We’re all on the same team anyway. There’s plenty more where that came from.”
Harriman was something of a historian, also a political buff. We knew some of the same people—but not many. He knew my friend George McGovern, for instance, and also Richard Nixon, but he didn’t know Keith Richards or James Carville, my partners in the blood business . . . So what? I thought. I like this man. He knows things. Never mind that he looks one hundred years old. He is whiskey gentry, he is one of us.
Hugo the Swiss bartender appeared, and I asked him to get that goddamn dog racing off the TV. “Punch up the news,” said Harriman. “Let’s see what’s developed in Haiti. I own a home there.”
“Good luck,” said the bartender. “You’ll never see it again.”
Harriman lashed out and hit him with a polo whip that had been concealed in his boot. “Shut up, Hugo! Get back where you belong.” He waved the weapon at him again, and Hugo cringed. Harriman hit him again, popping the whip sharply across his back.
I took it away from him. “That’s enough,” I said. “He got what he deserved.”
“Not yet,” he muttered, sitting back down on the stool. “Hugo is a cheater. He’s been cheating me for years.”
I helped Hugo to his feet, but he jerked away and spit at me. “You polo bastards!” he snarled. “Your time is coming!”
I whipped him on the face with a fanlike motion that left welts all over his head, then I shoved him away toward the kitchen.
“Good show,” said Harriman. “That’s more like it. That was very fast work.” He smiled and reached out to shake my hand. It was a graceful gestu
re, almost formal, as if to salute us both for doing the right thing. I understood and grasped his hand strongly in mine. I felt good about things. We were off to a good start, and I felt a new kind of attitude stirring in me—a Polo Attitude—and I knew we would soon find some action.
It came sooner than I thought. The minute Bill Clinton’s face came on TV, Harriman went wild. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “Not again! . . . I can’t stand the sight of this skunk. He reminds me of Mussolini.”
The president was somewhere in the White House, speaking nervously into the cameras at a live press conference. He was explaining his position on Haiti, which again caused an outburst from Harriman.
“Blow it out your ass!” he shouted. “You vulgar little bastard!” He shook his fist at the screen and moaned loudly.
I was shocked. There was an angry screech in his voice, and I was glad I hadn’t given his weapon back to him. “Get a grip on yourself,” I said sharply. “Be quiet! What the fuck is wrong with you?” It was the most violent reaction I’d ever seen to a living politician.
Harriman quickly regained his composure, but I was leery of him. I have had my own savage reactions to President Clinton—and usually for good reason—but never anywhere near the way Harriman acted. It was like he’d been stung by a wasp. I quickly put my arm around him and sat him down. He was trembling with anger, and I wasn’t sure he recognized me. I had told him earlier that my name was “Ben. Ben Franklin.” But that was only after he’d introduced himself as Averell Harriman.
What the hell? I thought. Fair is fair, especially here in the lobby of this goddamn creepy hotel full of high-strung polo pimps from Palm Beach and Argentina. The U.S. Open is the event of the year in the world of polo, and special rules applied. Half the crowd was traveling on false passports, but nobody cared. Even the horses were brought in illegally and put in false quarantine. It was safe to assume that anybody you met in this macho zirconium atmosphere was working at least one scam. Many were sleazy—this was, after all, a convention of horse traders—but a few were quite stylish.
I considered myself lucky to have stumbled on something no more dangerous than a skillful Averell Harriman impersonator instead of something much worse. Many people come to the Open and get cheated out of their life savings in the blink of an eye. Everything you see in this place is for sale, from fast horses and beautiful women to cheap whiskey and fat young boys.
My man Harriman was a real find in this crowd. He was good company, and he was obviously plugged in to the right people. He was brazenly weird, and I admired him for it. He was good at his work. It takes a magic kind of gall to aggressively impersonate a dead man on his own turf, especially a former governor of New York State eight years after his death. It was heavy.
My only problem with Harriman was his temper. I was still shaken by his behavior at the sight of the president on TV, and I felt I should speak with him about it. I was afraid he would get us arrested.
“You can’t do that anymore,” I told him. “We’re both on thin ice here. You can’t be threatening the president in public. We can’t get away with it.”
He nodded stiffly. “It’s none of your goddamn business,” he said. “He’s been fucking my wife for many years.”
“What?” I said. “Goddamn you! Stop saying that weird shit. People are watching us.”
He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Calm down, son,” he said. “You’re a little jumpy today.” He put an arm around me. “Don’t worry, old sport,” he said. “I own this place. These people work for me.”
I nodded wisely, as if I’d known it all along and didn’t want to embarrass him. But in truth, he was beginning to make me uneasy. He had too many irons in the fire. I had known from the start that he was a very suave hustler, but I had no problem with that . . . He was a decent sort, not without the odd moral blind spot, and I liked his morbid sense of humor. I was not entirely comfortable with his hair-trigger temper or his frequent jealous rages against the president for fucking his wife, but in my line of work, these things go with the territory. I have worked with the criminally insane all my life. These are my people, but I usually try to keep them at arm’s length. It is better that way.
Harriman, on the other hand, was a very valuable source of information no matter how crazy he was. He was my man on the Island.
My man Harriman had style. I could trust him, and I felt he trusted me.
He enjoyed his reputation as an aggressively eccentric personality, and he told bizarre stories about what the hotel was like in the good old days—when mysterious fires would engulf the lobby from time to time, and prominent social figures were beaten to death in the hallways with polo mallets or found at the bottom of wells with their heads cut off. “I remember one Sunday we played a whole chukker with a small human skull that Tommy Hitchcock found in the bushes behind his stables. We had a good laugh until somebody said it might be the Lindbergh baby,” he said wistfully. “But they were never able to identify it because we had bashed all its teeth out.”
“That’s rich,” I said, but neither one of us laughed. Harriman called for more whiskey and changed the subject. “You know, I got this hotel for almost nothing,” he said. “The previous owner, Mr. Hines, died horribly. The family sold out and moved to Hawaii because somebody told them there were no rats there.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Hawaii is overrun with rats.” I noticed the bartender staring at us, but Harriman continued.
“That was how he died,” he said. “The papers called it a drowning, but I knew better.” He paused and nodded darkly. “He was murdered—murdered by rats, huge pack rats, the kind with those long hairy arms and claws like a cat.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “How did it happen?”
“Rats lived in the rafters above the swimming pool,” he said. “Mr. Hines liked to swim laps at night for exercise.” He paused again, and I saw that his hands were shaking.
“The poor son of a bitch,” he said. “He never had a chance. A swarm of those filthy, hairy things fell out of the rafters and landed right on top of him in the water—he was covered with half-dead rats when they found him. They were clinging to every part of his body they could get their claws or their teeth into, just trying to stay alive.”
“Jesus!” I said. “No wonder you torched the hotel.”
He nodded, then stood up, and we parted. I went upstairs and took a long hot shower.
III
Polo people are very polite as a rule, and most of them seemed to like me. But they are wary of strangers, and most of our talk had to do with field conditions and horseshoes and other barnyard subjects that bored me into a stupor. I tried to get close to the horses, but when I went to the barns at night, I couldn’t get any closer than the bushes across from the stables at the old Hitchcock estate, where the Australian team was quartered. They were feverish brutes, drinking heavily, and their patron was Kerry Packer, the richest man in Australia.
They were favored to win the whole thing when they got here, and people cheered when they strutted through the lobby. Then disaster struck: they lost three straight games, eliminating themselves and causing Packer to flee the country in a cloud of grief and shame. People were shocked, but it was not that unusual. “Patrons always flee and abandon their teams when they lose,” explained our host, Al Bianco. “It costs about a million dollars just to enter this tournament, and they go all to pieces when they get humiliated.”
“Why shouldn’t they?” said tournament director Peter Rizzo. “They’re full of false pride, and they got whipped. It’s a terrible fate for a warrior.”
Polo is not as complex as it looks, but it is every bit as dangerous. Anything that involves people riding horses at top speed and charging into each other while swinging mallets is going to be a problem for a certain percentage of participants. Broken arms and legs are common, along with dead backs and shattered eyeballs. This is not like golf or Churchill Downs or the Tennessee Walking Horse championship. Polo is a very loud, very
fast contact sport, and the people who play it well are blue-chip athletes.
There are about 150 of these, however, and therein lies the problem.
The Aspen vs. Redlegs game was on Sunday, and it sucked: slow polo on a messy field, made worse by rain, heat, and a disappointing spectator turnout. The crowd of two hundred or so was a mix of horse traders, hunchbacks, and marginal types looking for Ralph Lauren. Shelby Sadler was there with two acid-crazed assistants from Polo Magazine. She introduced them as the Helpless Girls. They both laughed and showed me their tits . . . Just then, Joey Buttafuoco walked by, wearing a cheap imitation-linen suit that began falling apart when the rain started. My homeboys won 9–7, but nobody seemed to care. The Gracida brothers carried the attack, scoring eight of the team’s nine goals. Polo is not a spectator sport, because nobody likes to watch it.
After the game I drove over to the stabling area, hoping to find some action. I was giddy from my string of gambling victories, and I wanted to buy something. People were friendly to me, but I could see that I made them uncomfortable. The whole concept of journalism is foreign to the polo world, but I went out of my way to act charming.
I was looking for my old friend Memo Gracida Sr., who once gave me refuge in Mexico. In the polo world he is a ranking legend; he sits on the right hand of God—the lewd and lovely Belinda. But nobody in the stables had ever heard of him. They knew nothing. Omertà. The code of silence. That is the way of polo.
It was long after dark when I finally got back to the hotel, where a huge party was under way. The lobby was full of teenage girls in low-cut formal dresses. “Who are these people?” I asked the manager.
“We have Jews and Koreans tonight,” he said proudly. “It’s a bar mitzvah on the mezzanine and a Korean wedding in the ballroom.” Then he pulled me closer and whispered, “The little girls will be getting drunk pretty soon, so watch yourself.”