Life at the Dakota (25 page)

“She won't let me come to see her apartment,” Rex Reed says. “She says I'll hate it.” A lot of others in the building feel just as strongly about Roberta Flack's apartment. But there is little that they can do about it except sit and quietly wring their hands.

Miss Flack, meanwhile, defends what she has done to her southwest corner of the seventh floor. “I think my apartment is the prettiest one in the building,” she says. “My architect, Myron Goldfinger, is one of the best in the business. When I bought this place in 1976 it was very dark. There was a lot of fancy inlaid wood design and stuff, and a lot of marble basins in the closets—all that had to go. I wanted everything soft white and contemporary, with clean lines, to go with my contemporary Italian furniture.” What Miss Flack liked most about the apartment was that it was big enough to house her Bösendorfer piano—a huge 9'6" concert instrument with four extra keys in the bass register—considered the Rolls-Royce of pianos and worth, according to Miss Flack, between $45,000 and $50,000. “It had to be hoisted up with a cherry-picker, and now there's no way to ever get it out.” To make room for the piano the partition between the living room and dining room was removed, “though they had to leave one column standing because there was plumbing in it or something.” Ceilings in all the hallways were lowered, and central air conditioning was installed. The entire apartment was wired for an elaborate quadrophonic sound system, and four speakers were built into Miss Flack's bed. Bathrooms were enlarged—one so that it could hold a marble Jacuzzi whirlpool tub big enough, according to Miss Flack, “for four people to take a bath in, or for two people to have fun in—you know?”

Miss Flack had her kitchen made smaller, “to try to control my passion for cooking—and eating.” Miss Flack admits that the building's board gave her “quite a hassle” over her renovation plans but insists that now “They're all my friends.”

One decorative detail in the Flack apartment is the Buddhist shrine in the living room. “But a lot of people have those,” she says. “I don't worship in front of it as much as I should, but the house is full of Bibles so we're covered for ghosts.” Miss Flack has not seen a ghost in the Dakota yet, “But I won't go down in the basement. I believe in extraterrestrial beings, and I've had experiences. I saw my grandfather's ghost once, when I was a little girl. There was this hole in our backyard with a cardboard lid on it, where we dumped the garbage. I was dumping the garbage one day, and I looked up and there was this
thing.
It was my grandfather's ghost. He stood looking at me for quite a while. I wouldn't be surprised if there are ghosts here, too. After all, this building has been occupied by a lot of strong people. They stay, they have memories. They come back.”

Chapter 16

Winnie's World

Over the years, as happens in the case of most old, well-lived-in houses, the Dakota has acquired its own characteristic smell. One notices it the minute one enters the building—a faint, fruity pungency that fills the air. The Dakota's smell would seem to be a particular blend of odors—linseed oil and wax, brass and marble polishes, old varnished wood and weathered stone, along with the thin, papery scent one encounters when untying a packet of old love letters. The Dakota's private smell suggests the many hands that have tended to its upkeep throughout its history, and it is also a fragrant reminder of the special privacy the building has provided its tenants. For despite its boast of communality, the Dakota sometimes affords a privacy so complete that Warner LeRoy did not realize he had a first cousin living in the building until after she had moved out. For nearly twenty years author and critic Marya Mannes, daughter of violinist David Mannes and niece of Walter Damrosch, lived at the Dakota. So did her first husband, Jo Mielziner. Neither was aware that they shared the same address, since their apartments were on different elevator stems.

For some crises, of course, the Dakota is specially well equipped. In a blackout, for example, there is no chance that the building will be without elevator service. The Dakota's service elevators, which are water-powered, go right on working with or without electricity. But for other situations the Dakotans have had to equip themselves.

On May 3, 1976, the Building Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, New York Council No. 11, went out on strike, and picket lines appeared in front of every New York apartment house. Residents of high-rise apartments which still had manually operated elevators were sorely inconvenienced and found themselves having to learn how to be elevator operators. But the strike had not progressed for long before New Yorkers found themselves pervaded with a spirit of high adventure. The strike was just the sort of thing New Yorkers liked to have occur from time to time—like a great blizzard—to remind them that for all New Yorkers' fierce feelings about privacy, New York was really a one-for-all community. The strike was turning out to be great fun, as tenants learned how to staff and run their buildings. Every building in the city had its favorite strike stories. It was like London during the blitz, but even better because no one was being killed or injured. It was more like pretending to be poor, and there was a feeling in the air that New York was really just a village after all, where everyone looked after his neighbor.

A sense of camaraderie and sharing pervaded. The spring weather was balmy and pleasant, and the forsythia was in full bloom in the Park. A duty roster was sent around the building, volunteers were solicited, and tasks were assigned and eagerly taken up. It was like being at summer camp, as the gentry “Upstairs” discovered what life was like “Downstairs.” “The most popular job, on the part of the wives,” Wilbur Ross recalled not long ago, “was sorting the mail, so that they could read the post cards and see who was hearing from whom.” The most popular job on the part of the husbands turned out to be collecting garbage—a more muscular form of nosiness, since garbage can be tattletale too, and reveals how many empty liquor bottles one's neighbor tosses out each week, among other things.

Another popular chore was manning the desk in the front office, answering the phone and screening visitors—particularly on nights when there were large parties. In addition to the fun of seeing famous people toting garbage, there was the fun of announcing famous guests
who came to call on famous people, and being able to note how long their visits lasted. Identification cards were printed for all tenants so that those not immediately recognizable could come and go without interference, and a number of night owls were discovered in the building who were delighted to man the desk on the midnight to eight
A.M.
shift. Mr. Godfrey Flaker took the night shift and spent the wee hours hooking rugs.

Outside on the sidewalk the striking Dakota staff seemed a little awkward and embarrassed as they walked up and down their picket line, responding somewhat sheepishly to the cheerful greetings of the tenants who regarded the staff as their friends. But one member of the staff had not gone on strike, and her loyalty to the building came as a surprise to no one. She was Miss Winifred Bodkin, and the night before the strike was called she quietly moved into the Dakota from her apartment in Astoria, so that she would not have to cross the picket line. The tenants took turns shopping for her groceries.

Winnie Bodkin's title at the Dakota is a little vague, but she is more or less the building's concierge, and she is indispensable. She normally arrives at the Dakota at the stroke of eight in the morning, and departs at four in the afternoon, five days a week. Her principal duty is to manage the desk, but she does much more than that. She is the building's heart, some people say, its very soul. Through the slow attrition of the staff over the years, Winnie Bodkin has remained. She has seen superintendents come and go. Some of them she liked, and some of them she didn't like at all and made no bones about it. Still, Winnie has remained. Most Dakotans today cannot remember a time when she was not at the desk. And since Winnie is assumed to “know where all the bodies are buried,” some people are terrified of her. After all, Winnie likes some of her tenants better than she likes others.

Winifred Bodkin came to the Dakota on November 11, 1930, not long after her arrival in America from the little village of Tuam in County Galway. She was a lass of twenty then. Though she has never been back to her native Ireland, her soft voice, some fifty years later, still carries a trace of a brogue. In the beginning she worked as one of the Dakota's elevator ladies, but by the early 1940's the Clarks had realized that Winnie Bodkin was a young woman capable of assuming more than routine responsibilities, and she was promoted to the front desk where she has remained.

Today, Winnie Bodkin is a trim, erect, bespectacled woman who wears simply cut dresses and keeps her short white hair carefully coifed. In appearance she reminds one of a high-school English teacher, and her customary expression is stern and somewhat preoccupied. When one of her favorite tenants walks into her office, however, her eyes and her whole face light up. For her pets Winnie Bodkin will perform all sorts of special favors. When photographer Peter Fink is too busy to go to the bank, for instance, Winnie will go down the street and cash a check for him. Still, Winnie has her standards. When Fink married his French wife Monique a while back, he neglected to apprise Winnie of this fact. For several weeks afterward Winnie insisted on announcing the new Mrs. Fink to her husband, as she would a guest, whenever Mrs. Fink entered the building. This continued until Fink made his marriage official by telling Winnie about it.

In addition to screening and announcing visitors, Winnie's job involves receiving and sorting mail and packages, answering the telephone and operating the switchboard, but she also keeps track of other matters. If, for example, a tenant's weekly cleaning woman has a free day, Winnie usually knows of another tenant in the building who is looking for someone to clean. When a tenant plans to entertain, Winnie is nearly always notified, and she will, if need be, line up off-duty members of the building's staff to moonlight as waiters and bartenders. There are some things she will not do. In 1962 Winnie was asked if she would write out the building's payroll. She declined. She was then told that if she would do the payroll, she would be given a raise. Though her salary was only $82 a week, she declined the raise and the payroll job. It was, she said, just too confusing.

Winnie Bodkin dislikes change.

As every apartment dweller knows, the only proper Christmas gift to an employee of a building is cash in a white envelope. Or, if not cash, a check will do. Several winters ago Ruth Ford decided to give the building's staff more personal Christmas gifts, and her gift to Winnie was a bottle of perfume. Winnie returned the gift politely, saying that it was not her scent.

Over the years Winnie has seen the building change more than a little. “It used to be like one big happy family,” she says. “It was strictly a family place. Now it's become commercialized somewhat, and there are all the show-business people. There was a period in the thirties and
forties when the building didn't want show people, and there was a period when it didn't want Jews. Then in the middle forties the times started to change, and now it's every other one. Before that there were
families
—families like the Charles Grayson Martins, he was a leading real estate man. And the Charles J. Hardys—the head of American Car and Foundry, and the William Arbuckle Jamisons of Arbuckle Sugar. They were wonderful people, and it was easy to control the children because everyone had servants. Nowadays, there are so many people who work out of their apartments, who use their apartments for business. In the old days this was not allowed. Nowadays, I have to announce business callers. And so many people are doing renovations now—each one of those workmen has to be announced. So, the older I get, the harder I have to work.”

Paul Segal, meanwhile, thinks that Winnie secretly enjoys announcing business visitors. “I admit,” he says, “that this is supposed to be a
residential
building. But for a while I used my apartment as my office. When I finally had to have a bigger place I moved my office to 730 Fifth Avenue. I told Winnie that she wouldn't have to be announcing my clients any more, and she actually acted a little hurt and disappointed.”

It is also possible that Winnie secretly enjoys the new breed of celebrity tenants and their celebrity friends who come to visit them, and finds conspiring with John Lennon to avoid the
paparazzi
an exciting part of her job. “There was a truck with cameras parked across the street for days and days, just waiting for him to come out,” she says. “But he escaped through the basement when I warned him. The phone is a nuisance, though. I get between fifteen and twenty calls a day from people trying to get through to him. People try to leave messages, and they try to leave gifts. We don't take the messages, and we don't accept the gifts.”

But times may be changing. Not long ago Warner LeRoy became concerned when he noticed that a group of teen-age girls was going up and down the street, talking to various doormen. He asked one of the doormen what the girls were after. “They're trying to find out which building Rex Reed lives in,” he was told.

In terms of renovations Winnie Bodkin is decidedly a traditionalist. “I feel terrible when I see the beautiful paneling and mantels being shipped out,” she says, “or when I hear that someone is painting over
the lovely mahogany. People never used to do things like that.” She is also disparaging of the building's elaborate new security system. New York, in Winnie's opinion, began to get security-conscious in the late 1950's and 1960's, and by the 1970's people had become obsessive about it to the point of paranoia. “In the old days there were no burglaries,” she says. “Now we have an electric door and an electric gate. What good does it do? If a burglar wants to get in, he'll get in. The trouble with people nowadays is that they don't want jobs, they don't want to work. People just work a few weeks so they can collect unemployment.”