Soon—just a few weeks after his first big Radical Chic party—Andrew Stein was throwing another one, this time for Bernadette Devlin, the Irish Joan of Arc. Not to be outdone, Carter Burden, his chief rival, developed what can only be termed the first Total Radical Chic life-style. In 1965 Burden, then twenty-three, and his wife Amanda, then twenty, had been singled out by Vogue as New York’s perfect young married couple. They had moved into an ample co-op in the Dakota and had coated and encrusted it with a layer of antiques that was like the final triumph of a dowager duchess in an Angela Thirkell novel. They were described as possessing not merely wealth, however, but also “enquiring minds.” To clinch the point, Vogue pointed out that “Mrs. Burden, with the help of a maid, is learning how to keep house.” Just a year after their Dakota triumph, the Burdens moved to River House, flagship of the East River co-op gold coast from Beekman Place to Sutton Place. They set up house in a duplex and hired Parish-Hadley, interior decorators to Jacqueline Kennedy, Jay and Sharon Rockefeller, the Paleys, the Wrightsmans, and the Engelhards. “Gossip has it,” said Town & Country, “that a cool million was invested in Carter and Amanda Burden’s River House apartment alone, just for backgrounds. Most of the art and furniture were already there.” But in a couple of years the Burdens went Radical Chic. True, they did not give up their River House showplace. In fact, they did not disturb or deplete its treasures in the slightest. But they did set up another apartment on Fifth Avenue at 100th Street. This established residence for Burden in the Fourth Councilmanic District and qualified him to run for the New York City Council; successfully, as it turned out. It also gave him the most exquisitely poised Total Radical Chic apartment in New York.
There was genius to the way the Burdens gave visual expression to the double-track mental atmosphere of Radical Chic. The building is perhaps the scruffiest co-op building on Upper Fifth Avenue. The paint job in the lobby and hallways looks like a 1947 destroyer’s. There is a doorman but no elevator man; one has to take himself up in an old West Side-style Serge Automatic elevator. But . . . it is a co-op and it is on Upper Fifth Avenue. The apartment itself has low ceilings, a small living room, and only five rooms in all. But it does overlook Central Park. It is furnished almost entirely in the sort of whimsical horrors—japanned chairs, brass beds, and so on—that end up in the attic in the country, the sort of legacies from God knows where that one never gets around to throwing away . . . And yet they are . . . amusing. The walls are covered in end-of-the-bolt paintings by fashionable artists of the decorative mode, such as Stella and Lichtenstein . . . the sort of mistakes every collector makes and wonders where he will ever hang . . . and yet they are Stellas and Lichtensteins . . . somehow Burden even managed to transform himself from the Deke House chubbiness of his Early Vogue Period to the look known as Starved to Near Perfection. It is within this artfully balanced style of life that the Burdens have been able to groove, as they say, with the Young Lords and other pet primitives from Harlem and Spanish Harlem and at the same time fit into all the old mainline events such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 100th anniversary gala and be photographed doing the new boogaloo.
So . . . Radical Chic was already in full swing by the time the Black Panther Party began a national fund-raising campaign late in 1969. The Panthers’ organizers, like the grape workers’, counted on the “cause party”—to use a term for it that was current thirty-five years ago—not merely in order to raise money. The Panthers’ status was quite confused in the minds of many liberals, and to have the Panthers feted in the homes of a series of social and cultural leaders could make an important difference. Ideally, it would work out well for the socialites and culturati, too, for if there was ever a group that embodied the romance and excitement of which Radical Chic is made, it was the Panthers.
Even before the Bernsteins’ party for the Panthers, there had been at least three others, at the homes of John Simon of Random House, on Hudson Street; Richard Baron, the publisher, in Chappaqua; and Sidney and Gail Lumet, in their townhouse at Lexington Avenue and 91st Street. It was the Lumets’ party that led directly to the Bernsteins’. A veteran cause organizer named Hannah Weinstein had called up Gail Lumet. She said that Murray Kempton had asked her to try to organize a party for the Black Panthers to raise money for the defense of the Panther 21.
The party was a curious one, even by the standards of Radical Chic. Many of the guests appeared not to be particularly “social” . . . more like Mr. and Mrs. Wealthy Dentist from New Rochelle. Yet there was a certain social wattage in the presence of people like Murray Kempton, Peter Stone, writer of 1776, the Lumets themselves, and several Park Avenue matrons, the most notable being Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia.
Anyway, the white guests and a few academic-looking blacks were packed, sitting and standing, into the living room. Then a contingent of twelve or thirteen Black Panthers arrived. The Panthers had no choice but to assemble in the dining room and stand up—in their leather pieces, Afros, and shades—facing the whites in the living room. As a result, whenever anyone got up in the living room to speak, the audience was looking not only at the speaker but into the faces of a hard front line of Black Panthers in the dining room. Quite a tableau it was. It was at this point that a Park Avenue matron first articulated the great recurrent emotion of Radical Chic: “These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big—these are real men!”
The first half of the session generated the Radical Chic emotion in its purest and most penetrating form. Not only was there the electrifying spectacle of the massed Panthers, but Mrs. Lee Berry rose and delivered a moving account of how her husband had been seized by police in his hospital room and removed summarily to jail. To tell the truth, some of the matrons were disappointed when she first opened her mouth. She had such a small, quiet voice. “I am a Panther wife,” she said. I am a Panther wife? But her story was moving. Felicia Bernstein had been present up to this point and, as a long-time supporter of civil liberties, had been quite upset by what she had heard. But she had had to leave before the session was over. Each guest, as he left, was presented with a sheet of paper and asked to do one of three things: pledge a contribution to the defense fund, lend his name to an advertisement that was to appear in The New York Times, or make his home available for another party and fund-raising event. By the time she left, Felicia was quite ready to open her doors.
The emotional momentum was building rapidly when Ray “Masai” Hewitt, the Panthers’ Minister of Education and member of the Central Committee, rose to speak. Hewitt was an intense, powerful young man and in no mood to play the diplomacy game. Some of you here, he said, may have some feelings left for the Establishment, but we don’t. We want to see it die. We’re Maoist revolutionaries, and we have no choice but to fight to the finish. For about thirty minutes Masai Hewitt laid it on the line. He referred now and again to “that motherfucker Nixon” and to how the struggle would not be easy, and that if buildings were burned and other violence ensued, that was only part of the struggle that the power structure had forced the oppressed minorities into. Hewitt’s words tended to provoke an all-or-nothing reaction. A few who remembered the struggles of the Depression were profoundly moved, fired up with a kind of nostalgie de that old-time religion. But more than one Park Avenue matron was thrown into a Radical Chic confusion. The most memorable quote was: “He’s a magnificent man, but suppose some simple-minded schmucks take all that business about burning down buildings seriously?”
Murray Kempton cooled things down a bit. He stood up and, in his professorial way, in the tweedy tones of the lecturer who clicks his pipe against his teeth like a mental metronome, he summed up the matter. Dependable old Murray put it all in the more comfortable terms of Reason Devout, after the manner of a lead piece in the periodicals he worshipped, The New Statesman and The Spectator. Murray, it turned out, was writing a book on the Panthers and otherwise doing his best for the cause. Yes, Masai Hewitt may have set the message down too hard, but
that was of little consequence. In no time at all another party for the Panthers had been arranged. And this time in the home of one of the most famous men in the United States, Leonard Bernstein.
“WHO DO YOU CALL TO GIVE A PARTY!” SAYS RICHARD Feigen. “Who do you call to give a party!”
And all at once the candid voice of Radical Chic, just ringing out like that, seems about to drop Don Cox, Field Marshal of the Black Panthers, in his tracks, by Lenny’s grand piano. He just stares at Feigen . . . this Yale-style blond in a tuxedo . . . And from that moment on, the evening begins to take on a weird reversal. Rather than Cox being in the role of the black militant mau-mauing the rich white liberals, he is slowly backed into a weird corner. Afro, goatee, turtleneck, and all, he has to be the diplomat . . . He has to play that all-time-loser role of the house guest trying to deal with a bunch of leaping, prancing, palsied happy-slobber Saint Bernards . . . It’s a ball-breaker . . . And no wonder. For what man in all history has ever before come face to face with naked white Radical Chic running ecstatically through a Park Avenue duplex and letting it all hang out?
One of the members of the Panther defense committee, a white, manages to come up with a phone number, “691–8787,” but Feigen is already pressing on:
“There is one candidate for governor,” he says—quite an impressive voice—“who feels very deeply about what is going on here. He had hoped to be here tonight, but unfortunately he was detained upstate. And that’s Howard Samuels. Now, what I want to know is, if he were willing to come before you and present his program, would you be willing to consider supporting it? In other words, are the Black Panthers interested in getting any political leverage within the System?”
Cox stares at him again. “Well,” he says—and it is the first time he falls into that old hesitant thing of beginning a sentence with well—“any politician who is willing to relate to our ten-point program, we will support him actively, but we have no use for the traditional political—”
“But would you be willing to listen to such a candidate?” says Feigen.
“—the traditional political arena, because if you try to oppose the system from within the traditional political arena, you’re wasting your time. Look at Powell. As soon as he began to speak for the people, they threw him out. We have no power within the system, and we will never have any power within the system. The only power we have is the power to destroy, the power to disrupt. If black people are armed with knowledge—”
“But would you be willing to listen to such a candidate?” says Feigen.
“Well,” says Cox, a bit wearily, “we would refer him to our Central Committee, and if he was willing to support our ten-point program, then we would support that man.”
Feigen muses sagely inside of his tuxedo. Dapper. A dapper dude in pinstripe suit and pencil mustache in the rear of the room, a black named Rick Haynes, president of Management Formation Inc., an organization promoting black capitalism, asks about the arrest the other night of Robert Bay and another Panther named Jolly.
“Right on,” says Cox, softly, raising his left fist a bit, but only as a fraternal gesture—and through every white cortex rushes the flash about how the world here is divided between those who rate that acknowledgment—right on—and those who don’t . . . Right on . . . Cox asks Robert Bay to stand, and his powerful form and his ferocious Afro rise from out of the midst of the people in the rows of chairs in the center of the room, he nods briefly toward Haynes and smiles and says “Right on”—there it is—and then he sits down. And Cox tells how the three detectives rousted and hassled Bay and Jolly and another man, and then the detectives went on radio station WINS and “lied about it all day.” And Lefcourt gets up and tells how this has become a pattern, the cops incessantly harassing the Panthers, wherever they may be, everything from stopping them for doing 52 in a 50-mile-an-hour zone to killing Fred Hampton in his bed.
The beautiful ash-blond girl speaks up: “People like myself who feel that up to now the Panthers have been very badly treated—we don’t know what to do. I mean, if you don’t have money and you don’t have influence, what can you do? What other community programs are there? We want to do something, but what can we do? Is there some kind of committee, or some kind of . . . I don’t know . . .”
Well, baby, if you really—but Cox tells her that one of the big problems is finding churches in the black community that will help the Panthers in their breakfast program for ghetto children, and maybe people like her could help the Panthers approach the churches. “It’s basically the churches who have the large kitchens that we need,” he says, “but when we come to them to use their kitchens, to feed hot breakfasts to hungry children, they close the door in our faces. That’s where the churches in the black community are at.”
“Tell why!” says Leonard Bernstein. Hardly anybody has noticed it up to now, but Leonard Bernstein has moved from the back of the room to an easy chair up front. He’s only a couple of feet from Cox. But Cox is standing up, by the piano, and Lenny is sunk down to his hip sockets in the easy chair . . . They really don’t know what they’re in for. Lenny is on the move. As more than one person in this room knows, Lenny treasures “the art of conversation.” He treasures it, monopolizes it, conglomerates it, like a Jay Gould, an Onassis, a Cornfeld of Conversation. Anyone who has spent a three-day weekend with Lenny in the country, by the shore, or captive on some lonesome cay in the Windward Islands knows that feeling—the alternating spells of adrenal stimulation and insulin coma as the Great Interrupter, the Village Explainer, the champion of Mental Jotto, the Free Analyst, Mr. Let’s Find Out, leads the troops on a seventy-two-hour forced march through the lateral geniculate and the pyramids of Betz, no breathers allowed, until every human brain is reduced finally to a clump of dried seaweed inside a burnt-out husk and collapses, implodes, in one last crunch of terminal boredom. Mr. Pull! Mr. Push! Mr. Auricularis! . . . But how could the Black Panther Party of America know that? Just now Lenny looks so sunk-down-low in the easy chair. Almost at Don Cox’s feet he is, way down in an easy chair with his turtleneck and blazer on, and his neckpiece. Also right down front, on the couch next to the wall, is Otto Preminger, no piece of wallpaper himself, with his great head and neck rising up like a howitzer shell from out of his six-button double-breasted, after the manner of the eternal Occupation Zone commandant.
“Tell why,” says Lenny.
“Well,” says Cox, “that gets into the whole history of the church in the black community. It’s a long story.”
“Go ahead and tell it,” says Lenny.
“Well,” says Cox, “when the slaves were brought to America, they were always met at the boat by the cat with the whip and the gun . . . see . . . and along with him was the black preacher, who said, Everything’s gonna be all right, as long as you’re right with Jesus. It’s like, the normal thing in the black community. The preacher was always the go-between the slavemasters and the slave, and the preacher would get a little extra crumb off the table for performing this service . . . you know . . . It’s the same situation in the black community today. The preacher is riding around in a gold Cadillac, but it’s the same thing. If you ask a lot of these churches to start working for the people instead of for The Man, they start worrying about that crumb . . . see . . . Because if the preacher starts working for the people, then the power structure starts harassing him. Like we found this one minister who was willing for us to use his church for the breakfast program. So okay, and then one day he comes in, and he’s terrified . . . see . . . and he says we have to leave, that’s all there is to it. The cat’s terrified . . . So we say, okay, we’ll leave, but just tell us what they said to you. Tell us what they did to intimidate you. But he won’t even talk about it, he just says, Leave. He’s too terrified to even talk about it.”
Bernstein says, “Don, what’s really worrying a lot of us here is the friction between groups like the Black Panthers and the established black community.”
No problem. Cox sa
ys, “We recognize that there is not only a racial struggle going on in this country, but a class struggle. The class structure doesn’t exist in the same way in the black community, but what we have are very bourgeois-minded people”—he uses the standard New Left pronunciation, which is “boooooooozh-wah”—“petty bourgeois-minded people . . . you see . . . and they have the same mentality as bourgeois-minded people in the white power structure.”
“Yes,” says Bernstein, “but a lot of us here are worried about things like threats against the lives of leaders of the established black community—”
Suddenly Rick Haynes speaks out from the back of the room: “This thing about ‘the black community’ galls me!” He’s really put out, but it’s hard to tell what over, because what he does is look down at the Ash-Blond Beauty, who is only about ten feet away: “This lovely young lady here was asking about what she could do . . .” What a look . . . if sarcasm could reach 550 degrees, she would shrivel up like a slice of Oscar Mayer bacon. “Well, I suggest that she forget about going into the black community. I suggest that she think about the white community. Like the Wall Street Journal—the Wall Street Journal just printed an article about the Black Panthers, and they came to the shocking conclusion—for them—that a majority of the black community supports the Black Panthers. Well, I suggest that this lovely young lady get somebody like her daddy, who just might have a little more pull than she does, to call up the Wall Street Journal and congratulate them when they write it straight like that. Just call up and say, We like that. The name of the game is to use the media, because the media have been using us.”