Remembering the Hotel Chelsea

The exterior of the Hotel Chelsea

By Mary Reinholz

There was a time during my stay at the Hotel Chelsea more than three decades ago when I wondered if Valerie Solanas’ vengeful spirit had become flesh in the art-filled lobby.

Leaving my cramped space on the fourth floor and heading outside one winter day in 1972, I looked back and thought I saw Valerie in her blue jeans and newsboy’s bop cap, sitting stern-faced beneath some of the wilder abstract paintings and sculptures left behind by generations of grateful guests. She had to be plotting something terrible, I surmised, maybe murder and mayhem. Or perhaps she was planning to shake down people she knew—a year after her release from jail for shooting and nearly killing Andy Warhol in 1968.

Such dark visions were not unusual at the red brick hotel with the wrought-iron balconies at 222 W. 23d Street. For me, then an impressionable California girl looking for love in all the wrong places, this bohemian stronghold was a funky crucible of creativity that had nurtured the likes of Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Arthur Miller and a multitude of other marquee writers, artists and musicians—long before becoming known as the notorious New York landmark where punk-rocker Sid Vicious allegedly stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death in 1978 (and then allegedly committed suicide a few years later).

Solanas, of course, was no less a lethal force. The deranged late actress, writer and panhandler apparently believed that Warhol, her one-time director in his film “I, a Man,” had stolen one of her scripts, which he had lost, and owed her money. After her shooting spree, which also injured a Warhol colleague, she became an instant radical-feminist icon and something of a literary sensation with the publication of her iconoclastic anti-male tract “The SCUM Manifesto” (SCUM was said to be an acronym for a fictional Society for Cutting Up Men). In it, Solanas described men as “incomplete” females, genetically and emotionally deficient, ”walking abortions,” calling for their destruction. Years later, she claimed she was just kidding around.

But after completing her three-year prison sentence, Solanas was no joke to those in Warhol’s Factory circle who were living at the Victorian 12-story, 220-room hotel, then known simply as The Chelsea. Viva, one of Warhol’s so-called superstars, was said to have been threatened by Solanas. According to one Warhol associate in an interview taped by another, Viva’s then-husband, Michel Auder, started carrying a hunting knife, which he supposedly stuck to Valerie’s throat, saying he’d “slit it” if she ever came back.

As a young reporter, who having previously lived in a reclusive Lauren Canyon cottage above the Sunset Strip before relocating to New York City, I was unaware of such harrowing details. Still, I was fascinated by Solanas, labeled a “girl assassin with balls” by one of my editors. I flew to New York for a week’s visit in 1968, interviewing Solanas’ legendary publisher, Maurice Girodias, for a story I was writing for the Los Angeles Free Press, and booked a room at the Hotel Chelsea, returning in late 1971 as a full-time resident.

Girodias, whose Olympia Press had put into print such banned erotic masterpieces as Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” lived in the Chelsea during the same time Solanas was there, giving her a book contract shortly before she grievously wounded Warhol (and later pleaded guilty to attempted murder). He also felt threatened and stalked by Solanas, who hustled him for money. But he told me in wry tones that she had looked “rather sweet” when he saw her in her prison uniform, after having taken aim at the pop pope. In his preface to her manifesto, Girodias ascribed her awful deed to “a crisis of culture, a crisis of the heart and of the intelligence.” He did not hail her as a literary genius.

But the feminist author Vivian Gornick, who wrote an introduction to “The SCUM Manifesto” for Olympia Press, put Valerie in the company of underground titans, claiming her “love-hate” document was written with the secret knowledge of the victim, echoing the “unholy accents of inspired madness and calling to mind such other penetrating unholies as Swift, de Sade, Celine, Henry Miller.”

That kind of intense artistic mission—to dive into the murky waters of the subconscious and come back with powerful plays, lyrics or exhibition images—was the obvious attraction of the Chelsea to many of the eccentric artists, wannabes and full-blown nut jobs I eventually met during my nine months living there in the early 1970s. It was the hip place to be, a shadowy nesting spot where offbeat ideas and opinions were tolerated, even encouraged. In the hotel’s gothic womb, it was okay to have dangerous dreams and delusions, okay to rant and rave against the war in Vietnam and the military-industrial complex like a windy soap-box orator. If you couldn’t or wouldn’t end the carnage in Vietnam by bombing the Pentagon, you could try blowing up brain cells, to paraphrase the more aggressive rhetoric of the late yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, who also stayed at the Chelsea shortly before he jumped bail on charges he sold cocaine in 1974 (and granted me an interview at the nearby Horn & Hardhart automat, now also long gone).

The hotel was a haven for other traveling celeb radicals as well, like Jane Fonda, who had been introduced to me at the St. Regis Hotel—in Manhattan’s tony East Side—not long after I blew into New York from Los Angeles in the fall of 1970, on the prowl as a freelancer for gritty stories and “real people” after a romance with a hippie activist had gone on the rocks. Fonda was a friend of a friend, and she had become deeply involved in various antiwar and black liberation movements after leaving her French husband, director Roger Vadim, in Paris.

“This is a rip-off,” she said to the St. Regis desk clerk before paying up and storming out. She and I then got into an old car and headed to Washington, D.C., for a Black Panther Convention, before Jane surfaced a week later at the less expensive Hotel Chelsea, trying to raise money on the telephone for her various causes. I remember her uttering phrases like, ”We will fight, and we will win!” and then laughing at her grimly serious tone as she received visitors in bed. Her suite, like others in the hotel, had high ceilings and even a few glimmers of sunlight. In those days, you could walk in through the glass doors of the lobby, to the front desk, and rent a no-frills room for less than $100 a night. There were even better weekly and monthly rates.

Fonda was finishing up work on the film-noir thriller “Klute” with Donald Sutherland (another Chelsea alum) and later won an Oscar for her performance as a call girl pursued by a sinister corporate john. Prostitution, drug trafficking and violent street crime seemed to define New York in that era as much as the political militancy on the barricades, and all were evident at my new home away from the far cozier home I had left on the West Coast.

While I embraced the spirit of anarchy and revolution, the middle-class Irish Catholic girl in me was depressed by my small, gloomy room and some of the desperate characters I encountered at the hotel. Among these were young apparent pimps in three-piece suits and fedoras who would flash broad grins while we rode up in the ancient elevators, their sweet badass rap rolling out of their mouths like molasses.

Another more seasoned soul brother made his pitch succinctly as he walked up to me at West 23rd and Eighth Avenue: “Are you working tonight, sister?” Everybody seemed to be a brother or sister of one kind or another, and it took awhile before I actually met and worked for authentic writers and artists living full-time at The Chelsea.

“You’re the only writer on this floor,” one of the maids told me, when I complained bitterly about the junkie blood and vomit that I would find almost every morning in the communal bathroom I shared. I was broke by then, after a couple of assigned stories had been rejected (one by a well-known New York City publication whose assigning editor tried to put the make on me, in my room, claiming that putting out “wouldn’t hurt” my career). All the while, I was relegated to counting up loose change to buy cheese sandwiches at a nearby deli and to working at the hotel for a drunken lady poet as a part-time typist.

Then came an all too real horror story as I was leaving my room for an Uptown meeting of a feminist group called Media Women. Walking down the hall toward a stairwell, I could hear the crackling of police radios and a woman sobbing, “It’s my fault,” as she stood outside an open door. Inside on a king-size bed lay a black man wearing red boxers, dead of an apparent heroin overdose. The color television was still playing.

Shaken by a scene I had never witnessed among the upscale hippies celebrating flower power in the Hollywood hills and canyons, I recounted this sordid incident to my Manhattan feminist sisters who lived in well-appointed apartments. They tried to calm me down. So did the hotel management, whose line was, “This is New York. It could happen anywhere here.” That was certainly true. but only in the broadest of terms. One self-proclaimed “feminine” feminist wondered what kind of suitable men I could ever hope to meet at the Chelsea, and I suppose the answer was, in her elitist terms, very few. But for a time, I had my eye on Jerry, a tall, darkly handsome Jewish intellectual who claimed to be a street-savvy director, wrote poetry on the side and also held part-time sales jobs, one of which he tried out on me in his room, where we had repaired for coffee after seeing an Off-Broadway show. It was the old casting couch routine by way of the Borscht Belt.

“My dear,” he said, attempting a suave smile. ’“I would love to use you in one of my shows, but never never would I cast you as a prostitute—or model. No, I’d cast you as a nun, a missionary, because you, my dear, have a very spiritual quality.” He then retreated to the bathroom and burst out stark naked, stating with winks and more smiles, “As you know, it is better to give than to receive.” Amazed by his performance, I ordered him to put on his clothes and leave immediately, trying not to laugh at his inept seduction. Jerry certainly wasn’t Mr. Right, but he was amusing, and he told me years later that the Hotel Chelsea “suited” him, even as the rates went up.

The hotel also seemed to suit Gregory Corso, the eminent beatnik poet whose gutsy working-class language in his slim volume ”Gasoline” was a major influence in my youth. I had not met him before, but suddenly there he stood in the lobby, announcing to all who would listen that he had just been down in the basement (now partially occupied by a night spot called Star) “and it was filled with discarded furniture that looked like broken dreams.” I was immediately smitten by his free-flowing style, and we struck up a conversation.

From that starting point, I invited him to my decidedly rundown room, decorated only with a few plants and a poster of Mae West in blazing technicolor from her film “I’m No Angel.” But I mustered up the nerve to show him a story I had written at the hotel and published in the prestigious (and now defunct) Evergreen Review. He scanned it, muttering, “You’re too involved with being a woman” and made a pass. A rather rough one. It wasn’t fun. When things got a little crazy, I had a split-second urge to fight him off with a pair of scissors on my night stand, but common sense prevailed. I was shocked by my own violent reaction to his abuse, becoming in that instant something of a body double of Valerie Solanas, the fierce wonder waif whose story began this account.

Fortunately, Corso lost interest and left—possibly because, among other reasons, he had spotted a copy of Solanas’ obnoxious little book amid my stack of paperbacks. And so the badboy bard was efficiently dispatched by the mere specter of SCUM! (If true, thanks for that, Valerie, wherever you are on the other side!)

Looking back, I don’t recall if that incident ended my romantic notions about living in a semi-communal artists hotel and triggered a deep desire to get the hell out. Overall, I just didn’t feel safe there as a single woman and longed for an apartment of my own, a clean, well-lighted place with a working bathroom and kitchen that would fulfill my remaining bourgeois needs for a little stability and peace of mind. But I didn’t have enough money to move and, so, took a clerical job with the renowned independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke, now also in the shade.

Clarke, a longtime Chelsea Hotel resident, was a woman I truly admired and considered a role model even in Los Angeles, where I had seen “The Connection,” her unflinching film about heroin-addicted jazz musicians adapted from Jack Gelber’s play and a work like no other made by the few women directors of her era. She was about 50 when she hired me to help her prepare an application for a grant to the New York State Council for the Arts at her rooftop dwelling, a rustic pyramid-shaped structure in a garden far above the more fearsome elements of the street.

When I started working with her—she insisted on the words “working with” and as opposed to “working for”—Clarke, who had been a dancer and choreographer, was experimenting with video cameras and monitors, which she believed those media tools would create a revolution for women filmmakers “because they’re easier and lighter to carry” than traditional equipment. She had founded a video collective that included her daughter Wendy, by her former husband.

To my surprise, Clarke revered Judy Garland and sometimes wore a top hat and black pants that reminded her of the singer. She put on those cabaret-style duds, which she had bought at a local dime store, for lunch at a woman friend’s apartment near the hotel and invited me to join her. It was an oddly formal affair. Shirley sipped her brewed tea from a China cup and conversed politely with her hostess about the friends they knew at the Chelsea: One had attempted suicide and was in the hospital; another, as I recall, had recently been forced to vacate her room because of a fire. All of this she recounted in calm, matter-of-fact voice, as if these were normal, everyday events. It was like watching a surreal Mad Hatters party.

After my gig in Clarke’s idyllic aerie ended, I eventually found a steady writing assignment with the New York Daily News in 1972, moved out of the Chelsea Hotel and lugged my belongings into a small studio apartment owned by the hotel on West 22 Street, before moving on to my present rent-stabilized digs near Gramercy Square Park. I’ve been mugged in this elegant neighborhood twice, and my apartment has been burglarized once; there was also a Con-Ed steam pipe explosion that killed several people. But that was a long time ago, and I feel fairly safe here now. Sometimes, though, I miss the Hotel Chelsea and some of the genuinely creative and dedicated people I met there and still know. I seriously doubt if I’ll ever meet people like Abbie Hoffman or Shirley Clarke or have a landlord as generous as Stanley Bard, who has operated the hotel for years and gave me a break on my rent long ago.

Several years after I left his beloved domain, I found a way to return to the stately building on West 23rd street that had introduced me to some of the harsher realities of New York and its livelier personalities, profiling two gay British authors, Christopher Isherwood and Quentin Crisp, for Women’s Wear Daily, where I worked on staff until the early 1980s, contributing to its Eye column and Arts page.

Crisp, a witty raconteur and stage performer who had been an artist’s model in England, claimed he enjoyed the Hotel Chelsea “because I love squalor.” Isherwood, best known for his “Berlin Dairies,” was visiting from his home in Santa Monica in 1978, the year Sid Vicious did his last tango with Nancy Spungen.

Asked about all that, the great writer responded pithily: “They only do that sort of thing on the other floors.”