LENNY COULDN’T GET OVER THE WHOLE AFFAIR. EARLIER IN the evening he had talked to a reporter and told him it was “nauseating.” The so-called “party” for the Panthers had not been a party at all. It had been a meeting. There was nothing social about it. As to whether he thought cause parties were held in the homes of socially prominent people simply because the living rooms were large and the acoustics were good, he didn’t say. In any case, he and Felicia didn’t give parties, and they didn’t go to parties, and they were certainly not in anybody’s “jet set.” And they were not “masochists,” either.
So four nights later Lenny, in a tuxedo, and Felicia, in a black dress, walked into a party in the triplex of one of New York’s great hostesses, overlooking the East River, on the street of social dreams, East 52nd, and right off the bat some woman walks right up to him and says, “Lenny, I just think you’re a masochist.” It was unbelievable.
But by the twenty-fourth, ten days after the Panther night, Lenny’s distress was easily matched by Elinor Guggenheimer’s. She had already sent out invitations to a party for the Young Lords in her duplex the following day, Sunday the twenty-fifth. This was a fine situation. The Young Lords were in some ways Spanish Harlem’s Puerto Rican equivalents of the Black Panthers and were, in fact, actually allied with the Panthers—and her duplex was just ten blocks up Park Avenue from the Bernsteins’. Elinor Guggenheimer’s husband was Randolph Guggenheimer of the law firm of Guggenheimer & Untermyer. She had been a city planning commissioner and the head of many major charitable and educational organizations. Not only that, she was the running mate of Herman Badillo in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for mayor last year. Nobody was likely to write her off as a dilettante. Nevertheless, while the Bernsteins’ duplex might be described in the Times as “elegant,” hers would rank as sumptuous. There was enough aged and seasoned marble, fruitwood, and Oriental weaving in the place to illustrate one of those $30 Christmas books on decor through the ages.
Already newspaper and magazine writers, including Charlotte Curtis, had approached her about covering the event. She told them she wanted no press whatsoever. This was not for her sake, however. It was for the Young Lords’. Two things she repeated over and over. “Don’t erect a barrier at 96th Street”—this being a Park Avenue allusion to the fact that the “good” part of the Upper East Side ends at 96th Street. “If you write about this, the Young Lords will never trust anyone south of 96th Street again.” The other was: “It’s not going to be a party. It’s a meeting.”
“In fact,” she told one reporter, “if you’re going to write about the meeting, then I’m not going to have it. I’m going to call it off. It wouldn’t be fair to the Young Lords.” Then she added: “I’m no jet-setter, and I don’t go around to parties.”
A whole new era, it was, for the duplex life of Park Avenue. Nobody gave parties. Nobody went to parties. Nobody was in anybody’s alleged jet set. Ellie Guggenheimer was in good company there, and not just with Lenny. The fact is that only one person in the history of New York has ever publicly averred membership in “the jet set,” and that was a young lady who was caught off-guard at the weird and disarming hour of 10 a.m. in the Zebra Room of El Morocco on February 3,1965.
In any case, the party—meeting—was held the following afternoon, closed to the press. About a hundred people were admitted, including Felipe Luciano, leader of the Young Lords. According to one of Mrs. Guggenheimer’s friends, a number of people who seemed “too social” were dis-invited as a precaution. The only raving socialites present were Carter and Amanda Burden, and they were legit, because he was a city councilman representing part of Spanish Harlem. Still, the party was a first for Radical Chic on Park Avenue. Mrs. Guggenheimer’s helpers served up tossed salad and spaghetti. Tossed salad and spaghetti . . . the soul food of Radical Chic Panic.
The panic turned out to be good for The Friends of the Earth, somewhat the way the recession has been bad for the Four Seasons but good for Riker’s. Many matrons, such as Cheray Duchin, turned their attention toward the sables, cheetahs, and leopards, once the Panthers became radioactive. The Stantons, meanwhile, dropped their plans for a Panther party and had one instead for the anti-Thieu & Ky Buddhists of Vietnam, and Richard Feigen dropped his plans for a party because of the Panthers’ support for Al Fatah. Leonard Bernstein went off to England to rehearse with the London Symphony Orchestra for an already scheduled performance in the Royal Albert Hall. He couldn’t have been very sorry about the trip. Unbelievable hostility was still bubbling around him. In Miami, Jewish pickets forced a moviehouse to withdraw a film of Lenny conducting the Israel Philharmonic on Mount Scopus in celebration of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.
In general, the Radically Chic made a strategic withdrawal, denouncing the “witchhunt” of the press as they went. There was brief talk of a whole series of parties for the Panthers in and around New York, by way of showing the world that socialites and culturati were ready to stand up and be counted in defense of what the Panthers, and, for that matter, the Bernsteins, stood for. But it never happened. In fact, if the socialites already in line for Panther parties had gone ahead and given them in clear defiance of the opening round of attacks on the Panthers and the Bernsteins, they might well have struck an extraordinary counterblow in behalf of the Movement. This is, after all, a period of great confusion among culturati and liberal intellectuals generally, and one in which a decisive display of conviction and self-confidence can be overwhelming. But for the Radically Chic to have fought back in this way would have been a violation of their own innermost convictions. Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses; but to put one’s whole status on the line for nostalgie de la boue in any of its forms would be unprincipled.
Meanwhile, the damnable press dogged Lenny even in London. A United Press International reporter interviewed him there and sent out a story in which Lenny said: “They”—the Panthers—“are a bad lot. They have behaved very badly. They have laid their own graves. It was the Panthers themselves who spoiled the deal, they won’t be rational.” The next day Lenny told a New York Times reporter that the UPI story was “nonsense.” He didn’t remember what he had said, but he hadn’t said anything like that. At the same time he released a statement that he had actually drawn up in New York before he left. It said that there had been no “party” for the Panthers in his home in the first place; it had been a “meeting,” and the only concern at the meeting was civil liberties. “If we deny these Black Panthers their democratic rights because their philosophy is unacceptable to us, then we are denying our own democracy.” He now made it clear that he was opposed to their philosophy, however. “It is not easy to discern a consistent political philosophy among the Black Panthers, but it is reasonably clear that they are advocating violence against their fellow citizens, the downfall of Israel, the support of Al Fatah and other similarly dangerous and ill-conceived pursuits. To all of these concepts I am vigorously opposed and will fight against them as hard as I can.”
And still this damned nauseating furor would not lie down and die. Wouldn’t you know it—two days after the, well, meeting, on the very day he and Felicia were reeling from the Times editorial, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that renegade, had been down in Washington writing his famous “benign neglect” memo to Nixon. In it Moynihan had presented him and Felicia and their “party” as Exhibit A of the way black revolutionaries like the Panthers had become “culture heroes” of the Beautiful People. Couldn’t you just see Nixon sitting in the Oval Room and clucking and fuming and muttering things like “rich snob bums” as he read: “You perhaps did not note on the society page of yesterday’s Times that Mrs. Leonard Bernstein gave a cocktail party Wednesday to raise money for the Panthers. Mrs. W. Vincent Astor was among the guests. Mrs. Peter Duchin, ‘the rich blond wife of the orchestra leader,’ was thrilled. ‘I’ve never met a Panther,’ she said. ‘
This is a first for me.’ ”
On February 29 someone leaked the damned memo to the damned New York Times, and that did it. Now he was invested, installed, inaugurated, instituted, transmogrified as Mr. Parlour Panther for all time. The part about their “cocktail party” was right in the same paragraph with the phrase “benign neglect.” And it didn’t particularly help the situation that Mrs. Astor got off a rapid letter to the Times informing them that she was not at the “party.” She received an invitation, like all sorts of other people, she supposed, but, in fact, she had not gone. Thanks a lot, Brooke Astor.
FOOLS, BOORS, PHILISTINES, BIRCHERS, B’NAI B’RITHEES, Defense Leaguers, Hadassah theater party piranhas, UJAviators, concert-hall Irishmen, WASP ignorati, toads, newspaper readers—they were booing him, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro . . . Boooooo. No two ways about it. They weren’t clearing their throats. They were squeezed into their $14.50 bequested seats, bringing up from out of the false bottoms of their bellies the old Low Rent raspberry boos of days gone by. Boooooo. Newspaper readers! That harebrained story in the Times had told how he and Felicia had given a party for the Black Panthers and how he had pledged a conducting fee to their defense fund, and now, stretching out before him in New York, was a great starched white-throated audience of secret candy-store bigots, greengrocer Moshe Dayans with patches over both eyes . . .
. . . once, after a concert in Italy, an old Italian, one of those glorious old Italians in an iron worsted black suit and a high collar with veritable embroideries of white thread mending the cracks where the collar folds over, one of those old Europeans who seem to have been steeped, aged, marinated, in centuries of true Culture in a land where people understood the art of living and the art of feeling and were not ashamed to express what was in their hearts—this old man had come up to him with his eyes brimming and his honest gnarled hands making imaginary snowballs and had said: “Egregio maestro! Egreggggggggggio maestro!” The way he said it, combining the egregio, meaning “distinguished,” with the maestro, meaning “master” . . . well, the way he said it meant a conductor so great, so brilliant, so dazzling, so transported, so transcendental, so—yes!—immortal. . . well, there is no word in the whole lame dumb English language to describe it. And in that moment Leonard Bernstein knew that he had reached . . .
—BOOOOOOOO! BOOOOOOOOO!
It was unbelievable. But it was real. These greengrocers—he was their whipping boy, and a bunch of $14.50 white-throated cretins were booing him, and it was no insomniac hallucination in the loneliness of 3 a.m.
Would that black apparition, that damnable Negro by the piano, be rising up from the belly of a concert grand for the rest of his natural life?
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
GOING DOWNTOWN TO MAU-MAU THE BUREAUCRATS GOT to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn’t have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked “ghetto” all the time, but they didn’t know any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn’t know where to look. They didn’t even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well . . . they used the Ethnic Catering Service . . . right. . . They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into iceballs and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit-eating grins, so to speak—then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn’t know.
There was one genius in the art of confrontation who had mau-mauing down to what you could term a laboratory science. He had it figured out so he didn’t even have to bring his boys downtown in person. He would just show up with a crocus sack full of revolvers, ice picks, fish knives, switchblades, hatchets, blackjacks, gravity knives, straight razors, hand grenades, blow guns, bazookas, Molotov cocktails, tank rippers, unbelievable stuff, and he’d dump it all out on somebody’s shiny walnut conference table. He’d say, “These are some of the things I took off my boys last night . . . I don’t know, man . . . Thirty minutes ago I talked a Panther out of busting up a cop . . .” And they would lay money on this man’s ghetto youth patrol like it was now or never . . . The Ethnic Catering Service . . . Once they hired the Ethnic Catering Service, the bureaucrats felt like it was all real. They’d say to themselves, “We’ve given jobs to a hundred of the toughest hard-core youth in Hunters Point. The problem is on the way to being solved.” They never inquired if the bloods they were giving the jobs to were the same ones who were causing the trouble. They’d say to themselves, “We don’t have to find them. They find us” . . . Once the Ethnic Catering Service was on the case, they felt like they were reaching all those hard-to-reach hard-to-hold hardcore hardrock blackrage badass furious funky ghetto youth.
There were people in the Western Addition who practically gave classes in mau-mauing. There was one man called Chaser. Chaser would get his boys together and he would give them a briefing like the U.S. Air Force wing commander gives his pilots in Thailand before they make the raid over North Vietnam, the kind of briefing where everybody is supposed to picture the whole mission like a film in their heads, the landmarks, the Red River, the approach pattern, the bombing run, every twist and turn, the SAM missile sites, the getaway, everything. In the same way Chaser would picture the room you would be heading into. It might be a meeting of the Economic Opportunity Council, which was the San Francisco poverty-program agency, or the National Alliance of Businessmen, which was offering jobs for the hard core, or the Western Regional Office of the Office of Economic Opportunity, or whatever, and he’d say:
“Now don’t forget. When you go downtown, y’all wear your ghetto rags . . . see . . . Don’t go down there with your Italian silk jerseys on and your brown suède and green alligator shoes and your Harry Belafonte shirts looking like some supercool toothpick-noddin’ fool . . . you know . . . Don’t nobody give a damn how pretty you can look . . . You wear your combat fatigues and your leather pieces and your shades . . . your ghetto rags . . . see . . . And don’t go down there with your hair all done up nice in your curly Afro like you’re messing around. You go down with your hair stictyn’ out . . . and sittin up! Lookin’ wild! I want to see you down there looking like a bunch of wild niggersl”
This Chaser was a talker. He used to be in vaudeville. At least that was what everybody said. That was how he learned to be such a beautiful talker. When the poverty program started, he organized his own group in the Western Addition, the Youth Coalition. Chaser was about forty, and he wasn’t big. He was small, physically. But he knew how to make all those young aces of his take care of business. Chaser was black with a kind of brown hue. He had high cheekbones, like an Indian. He always wore a dashiki, over some ordinary pants and a Ban-Lon shirt. He had two of these Ban-Lon shirts and he alternated them. Anyway, he always wore the dashiki and a beret. He must not have had much hair on top of his head, because on the sides his hair stuck out like a natural, but the beret always laid flat. If he had as much hair on the top of his head as he had sticking out on the sides, that beret would have been sitting up in the air like the star on a Christmas tree. When everybody started wearing the Afros, it was hard on a lot of older men who were losing their hair. They would grow it long on the sides anyway and they would end up looking like that super-Tom on the Uncle Ben’s rice box, or Bozo the Clown. Sometimes Chaser would wear a big heavy overcoat, one of those big long heavy double-breasted triple-button quadruple-lapel numbers like you see the old men wearing in Foster’s Cafeteria. When you saw Chaser with that big coat on, over top of the dashiki, you’d have to sm
ile, because then you knew Chaser wasn’t in anybody’s bag. Chaser was in Chaser’s bag. That was all right, because you don’t meet many men like Chaser. If there is any such thing as a born leader, he was one of them.
“Now, you women,” he’d say. “I don’t want you women to be macking with the brothers if they ain’t tending to business. You women make your men get out of the house and get to work for the Youth Coalition. Don’t you be macking around with nobody who ain’t out working for the Youth Coalition. If he ain’t man enough to be out on the street working for the people, then he ain’t man enough for you to be macking around with.”
This worked like a charm with the women and with the men, too. Chaser kept saying, “You women,” but he was really talking to the men. He was challenging their masculinity. A lot of these young aces knew that their women thought they weren’t man enough to stand up and make something out of themselves. And the women liked what he was saying, too, because he was including them in on the whole thing.
Then Chaser would say, “Now when we get there, I want you to come down front and stare at the man and don’t say nothing. You just glare. No matter what he says. He’ll try to get you to agree with him. He’ll say, ‘Ain’t that right?’ and ‘You know what I mean?’ and he wants you to say yes or nod your head . . . see . . . It’s part of his psychological jiveass. But you don’t say nothing. You just glare . . . see . . . Then some of the other brothers will get up on that stage behind him, like there’s no more room or like they just gathering around. Then you brothers up there behind him, you start letting him have it . . . He starts thinking, ‘Oh, good God! Those bad cats are in front of me, they all around me, they behind me. I’m surrounded.’ That shakes ’em up.