Life at the Dakota (18 page)

Freddie Victoria spotted Miss Leo one blizzardy night. She was
huddled in the archway outside the Dakota's gate, waiting in the drifting snow for a taxi that was clearly never going to come. Freddie asked her if he could be of assistance. “My poor brother is trapped in his office because of the storm,” she explained. “I'm trying to get a taxi to go and collect him and bring him home.” Freddie Victoria's car was parked nearby, and he offered to drive her to her brother's office. “That would be very kind,” Miss Leo said. She gave him an obscure address on the far West Side in an area of abandoned docks and warehouses.

In the car Miss Leo said, “My poor brother works all day in his office. He's an inventor, you see. All day long he invents things.” When Victoria located the address—from the outside it looked like a derelict packing shed—there was Miss Leo's elderly brother standing in the doorway waiting. Victoria then drove both Leos back to the Dakota. It was one of the few direct encounters anyone in the building had had with them.

The next morning a case of Dom Perignon champagne was delivered to Freddie Victoria's door.

The older Miss Leo got, the odder she became. A neighbor named Katz became concerned about a persistent banging on pipes in his dining-room wall, and blamed the Quinlans' children for the disturbance. When the Quinlan children were proven innocent, Mr. Katz had the entire wall taken out but was unable to locate the source of the banging. Eventually it was discovered. It was Miss Leo, next door, banging on the wall with her cane. She had already hammered a hole eight inches deep in the masonry. She passed her time that way, she said. She was persuaded to tack a piece of foam-rubber padding on her banging wall.

Miss Leo had an obsession about germs, and wore plastic Baggies on her hands to protect them from contamination. One of few outsiders ever permitted to enter her apartment was a plumber, called in to repair a broken pipe. The plumber found his work considerably impeded by the fact that Miss Leo insisted on following him about, wiping down everything he touched with Lysol. Gradually, Miss Leo moved into a world of dream. Her apartment was unusual in that it had its own stairway to the basement. One night, the night porters were startled to see a pale apparition moving slowly through the shadowy arches and were sure for a moment that it was another ghost. But it was only Miss Leo, singing happily to herself. She was stark naked.

Originally, Miss Leo and her bachelor brother had shared the big apartment with their mother. But Mother had departed long ago, and now it was just Miss Leo and Brother. No one ever discovered what Brother's “inventions” were, but he had a conspicuous hobby. He collected medieval suits of armor, swords, lances and maces. “The collection is priceless,” Miss Leo used to say. “It is the most comprehensive collection of armor in the world. One day it will all go to the Metropolitan Museum.” Long before, one of Miss Leo's favorite carriage horses had died, and she had had the animal stuffed, mounted and placed in her drawing room. He had then been fitted with a full suit of equestrian armor, and a suit of human armor was placed astride him, brandishing a lance. The stuffed horse and its rider were visible through Miss Leo's Seventy-second Street windows and became objects of curiosity to passers-by. After a while it became common to identify the Dakota as “the building with the stuffed horse in the window.”

The only other member of the Leo household was Mrs. Fenton Maclay. Mrs. Maclay's role was as mysterious as the origins of the Leos. She was not a housekeeper, exactly—at least she received no salary for what she did. She was more like a companion, or family friend. And yet she was not really treated as a friend, either, because she never slept in the Leos' apartment, despite the many empty bedrooms. Mrs. Maclay would retire at night to her room beneath the eaves. In the old days Miss Leo and Mrs. Maclay had lunched together almost daily at the Plaza. But by 1961 Miss Leo had settled on a steady diet of mashed bananas which Mrs. Maclay prepared at home. Miss Leo also had her own theories about sleeping. She could not sleep, she explained, lying down, and so she always slept sitting upright in a canvas deck chair in her entrance foyer.

During the day Miss Leo sat in the dining room, next to her banging wall, where the telephone was, to be near the phone in case anything should happen. Her brother, when not in his office, preferred to sit in a tall tapestry chair in the drawing room with the stuffed horse. Mrs. Maclay disliked going into the room with the stuffed horse but one day, attracted by a strange, unpleasant odor, she entered it. Brother had died in the tapestry chair. He had been dead for several days. Miss Leo had known it but could not bear the thought of his leaving her. He was removed by the Board of Health.

Though everyone assumed that Miss Leo was well-fixed financially,
when the building was in the process of becoming a co-operative she announced that she could not afford to buy her apartment. The Dakotans looked around for a smaller place for her; one was located in the northeast corner of the ground floor. One of the people who volunteered to help Miss Leo move was Henry Blanchard. He recalls vividly his first sight of the interior of apartment 17. All the rooms were painted the same institutional green. Closets were filled with piles of ancient newspapers and magazines that reached to the ceilings. One of the windows had apparently been left open for years, and a thick layer of black New York dust covered everything. “As we packed her things,” Henry Blanchard says, “clouds of dust swirled around us like fine, black snow.” While Miss Leo was being moved, the armor collection, including the stuffed horse and its rider, stood for several days in the Dakota's courtyard to be wondered at by all the neighbors. And when Miss Leo was finally moved to her new apartment she left everything in the center of the floor where the movers had put it, and she never unpacked the barrels and cartons. When she died—at the age, some people said, of one hundred and nine—the Metropolitan Museum was contacted about the armor collection. The Museum's Department of Arms and Armor turned down the gift. All the pieces, it seemed, were fakes, and the stuffed horse, by then a sadly deteriorated piece of taxidermy, was carried away to a grave in New Jersey. Mrs. Maclay lived on in her attic room. She lives there to this day.

Several years later apartment 17 was bought by Lawrence Ellman, a New York restaurateur and his wife. The Ellmans redecorated the apartment lavishly in a
belle-époque
style, covering the once-green walls with expensive fabrics. In the process of the renovation a plumber uncovered what appeared to be a sunken bathtub. As he dug in the floor the sunken tub got bigger, wider and deeper. “How much more should I dig?” he asked the Ellmans. “Dig till you get to the bottom of it,” Mr. Ellman told him. When the plumber finished digging he had uncovered what amounted to a small swimming pool, measuring about 8 by 10 feet and 5 ½ feet deep. The Ellmans lined it with blue tile and installed a ladder. The pool, it turned out, antedated Miss Leo. It had been installed by an early tenant whose wife, so the story goes, liked to fill it with milk for baths. “When he was about ten years old,” Elaine Ellman says, “my stepson went through a period when he didn't like to take baths. But when we uncovered the little pool he wanted to take
baths all the time. We told him he could, provided he used plenty of soap.”

Even more mysterious, as the Ellmans redecorated, were the silver-dollar-sized indentations in the floors of certain rooms and corridors. “We couldn't figure out what caused these strange holes,” Elaine Ellman says. Then it dawned on them. The holes had been where the various heavy swords, sabres, maces and lances had stood on display.

Not far down the hall from Mrs. Maclay lives Jimmy Martin in a room with his elderly nephew George. Jimmy Martin celebrated his ninety-third birthday in May 1978, and is therefore of roughly the same vintage as Mrs. Maclay. Jimmy Martin and Mrs. Maclay do not get on. Mrs. Maclay had been using what had once been a maids' kitchen to do her cooking, and since the kitchen was on a communal hallway, Jimmy Martin asked whether he could use it too. Mrs. Maclay flatly refused. There has been bad blood between the two nonagenarians ever since, and when Jimmy Martin is in the vicinity of Mrs. Maclay's room he will sometimes bang his fists on the walls or on her door just to rattle her up a bit.

In fact, there are not too many people in the building with whom Jimmy Martin gets on. A particular enemy is actress Ruth Ford. It started a long time ago when Jimmy Martin was coming into the building with an armful of groceries and was having trouble getting his burden through the door. Miss Ford happened to be coming into the building at the same time and held the door open for him. But Jimmy was still having trouble with his parcels, and finally, impatient, Miss Ford said, “I'm not a doorman, you know.” “She's a bitch,” says Jimmy Martin. “I said to her, ‘You bitch! If you'd stop bleaching your hair, maybe some of it would grow back!'” Miss Ford feels no more generous toward Jimmy Martin, calling him “a seedy, disagreeable, pretentious little man. In the summer he goes up on the roof and sunbathes in his undershirt—sunbathing, at his age.” “Ha! She was a chorus girl who worked for the Schuberts,” replies Jimmy Martin, making light of the fact that Ruth Ford is also an actress for whom William Faulkner expressly wrote his only play,
Requiem for a Nun.

Of other neighbors in the building Jimmy Martin is more charitable, referring to Roberta Flack as “a fine colored woman—she's going to give a birthday party for me.” And he is even more enthusiastic in his recollection of his own theatrical career, which started in the synagogue
of Rabbi Stephen Wise, where he was a choirboy, and carried him to Broadway and vaudeville. He appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies and in such long-forgotten shows as
Mary, The Wild Cat, The Wanderer, Molly Darlin'
and
Hoker Poker.
“See how I've kept my figure?” Jimmy Martin says proudly, and to show he has also kept his form, he executes a few quick dance steps and, in a fluty vibrato, sings a few notes from
Hoker Poker.
In one show, the name of which he has forgotten, one of the lead performers became ill. “I was in the chorus, and I jumped into the show. George M. Cohan said, ‘Had it not been for the brains of Mr. Martin, I would have had to close the show'—I made two hundred and seventy-five dollars a week.”

Jimmy Martin is still bitter about the fact that after his eye injury he was denied a pension by the Actors' Fund: “They're crooked people in the Actors' Fund,” he says. When the building became a co-operative, and inherited such problems as what to do with people like Jimmy Martin, who was then well into his seventies and had no regular source of income, the Dakotans—not altogether cheerfully, and not exactly unanimously—agreed to chip in to buy him an insurance policy that would yield him a small annuity.

Today, Jimmy Martin's little room is hard to reconcile with a deluxe apartment house or a “tradition in elegance.” It is cluttered with piles of old clothes, pillows that are losing their stuffing, an ancient sofa covered with a soiled sheet that serves as Mr. Martin's bed. The walls are cracked and peeling, in want of paint. There is one window. A small refrigerator holds soft drinks, which Jimmy Martin offers to visitors. For cooking there is an electric frying pan and a Roto-Broiler. “I love to cook,” he says, stroking his full head of astonishingly black hair. “And I'm a very good cook. Tonight, for example, for my nephew and myself, I'm fixing chop suey. I have no regrets. I have wonderful memories of the theater and the people I knew—Mr. Cohan, Mr. Ziegfeld, Will Rogers, Geraldine Farrar, George E. Hale, Florence Eaton and Nance O'Neill. Now I sit here and enjoy my lovely room. We live a life of luxury.”

Over the years, to be sure, some of Jimmy Martin's Dakota neighbors have become a little weary of his tart and acerbic appraisals of them. Of the Henry Blanchards: “They're nice enough.” Of Mrs. C. D. Jackson: “Thumbs down on her!” (Grace Jackson sighs and says, “That poor insurance company—I'm sure they never thought that
annuity we bought for him would go on so long.”) Of Lauren Bacall: “She's had her face lifted.” Still, he conceded that when the movie crew came to film
Rosemary's Baby,
Miss Bacall suggested to the producer that Jimmy Martin be hired as an extra, and he was. “You can even see me in the picture,” he says. “I made forty-eight dollars!”

Financially, the Browning sisters are not in the same category as Jimmy Martin. Though not rich, the Brownings were left with enough money to keep them comfortable, and they live in their small, eighth-floor room with its closet-kitchen not so much out of necessity as out of choice. “It's easier in a small place, there's less to care for,” Miss Adele says. Miss Adele is almost blind and very deaf. When architect Paul Segal, next door, was remodeling his apartment, he became concerned that the noise of hammering and electric saws might be disturbing the elderly Brownings. Segal rang the Brownings' bell, and when Miss Adele answered it Segal offered a lengthy apology for the noise. When he had finished, Miss Adele cupped her hand to her ear and said, “What?”

Miss Adele Browning still speaks in a clear, cultivated voice, however—the voice of a daughter of a leading educator of his time—and still gets out to do the marketing for herself and her invalid sister who fell and broke her hip in 1978. “My memory flickers … flickers,” she says in that rich voice. “Let's see—what do I remember? I remember when women first got the vote, and I went out to vote with Dad. Dad said he wouldn't tell me who to vote for, I had to decide myself. In the summers we went up to a place we had in Ossining. Mother chose the place, and boys from Dad's school would go up there for weekends. Dad was very interested in racial equality, years ahead of his time. He wanted to experiment raising whites, blacks, yellows and reds together. Dad was a wonderful man, but Mother always had the last word when it came to raising us. Dad would say, ‘Me for Mom'—the first woman governor had just been elected in the state of Texas and that was her slogan, so that was Dad's little joke, you see. I remember when the Eighth Avenue subway first came through—that was quite an issue. I remember we could see the Essex House across the Park, where Presidents used to stay. I remember the Theo Steinways lived next door, in apartment forty-six. His son went to the Browning School, and the son went on to invent the first upright piano. But when my sister and I took piano lessons, Mr. Steinway had to ask Dad to move the piano to
another part of the apartment because he didn't like our playing. My memory flickers … Dad used to say, ‘Blessed is she who expecteth nothing, for then she will not be disappointed.' Dad wanted us to be independent.…”