Life at the Dakota (26 page)

Winnie Bodkin remembers the names of all the Dakotans, past and present, along with their apartment numbers. But if she knows of any family skeletons, or where any “bodies are buried,” she is too discreet, too protective of what she still occasionally refers to as “my people” to reveal them. Actually, she doubtless considers it part of her duty
not
to know too much about her tenants' private lives, and if she was ever privy to any juicy secrets, she says, “When I started here, I was too young to pay attention, and now I'm too old to remember.”

She does remember Mr. Edward Severin Clark, though. “He lived upstate and didn't come down much. When he did, he'd sit in a chair just outside the office door—a little bit of a man—just watching the people come and go.”

That is what Winnie Bodkin enjoys doing, too. She also has a startlingly clear mental picture of the building's labyrinthine floor plan—something that even the oldest of the old-timers in the building have never quite managed to grasp. Visitors are always getting lost in the Dakota's corridors. Not long ago Mrs. Edward Sherrick heard her front doorbell ring. Though not expecting a visitor and still in her robe and slippers, she assumed that the caller must be someone from the building's staff. She opened the door to face Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in all her glory. Mrs. Onassis, who had come to call on Jean Stein vanden Heuvel, had rung the wrong bell. She would not have got lost had she followed Winnie's directions to the letter: “Cross the courtyard to the window with the pink curtain, turn left, go up three steps, turn right …” At the same time, Winnie Bodkin has never set foot inside most of the apartments in the Dakota. People have asked her in from time to time, but she has politely refused. That, she feels, is not her place.

As for ghosts in the Dakota, Winnie Bodkin says, “We did have one watchman who took it seriously. He used to say he heard fantastic noises—voices and sounds of people walking about. As for me, I never saw one worse ghost than myself.”

When Winnie Bodkin declined to join the strikers' picket line, and chose instead to slip quietly into the building and remain there for the duration of the strike, she was not only expressing her loyalty to the Dakota and her people but was also saying something about her attitudes toward work and strikes in general. She enjoyed herself during the strike along with everyone else, just sticking to her routine. The building ran itself without a hitch and everyone cooperated—or almost everyone. Lauren Bacall insisted on having a service elevator (manned by a tenant volunteer) at her disposal, to the annoyance of some people, since most tenants were using the stairs and Miss Bacall lived only on the fourth floor. Roberta Flack was also somewhat demanding. She had not bothered to have an identification card made up for herself, and, one day when Theodate Severns was at the front desk, a black gentleman came into the building and asked for Miss Flack's key. Miss Flack had asked him, he said, to go up and feed her cat. Mrs. Severns was reluctant to admit him but, to avoid a scene, finally let him in. A short time later, a black woman appeared and asked Mrs. Severns to buzz her in through the front gate. Mrs. Severns, who did not recognize the singer, asked for identification. “I am Roberta Flack,” said Miss Flack. “I don't need identification.”

In one of the rooftop storage rooms of the Dakota stand a number of ancient and empty filing cabinets. Several years ago Edward Downes was surprised to encounter in the hall one of the building's handymen with his arms full of bulging old file folders. Downes asked the porter what he was doing with them. “Throwing all this old stuff out,” said the porter. Hastily, Downes managed to retrieve a few random documents—old bills, rent records, correspondence between Edward Clark and his superintendent—perhaps a dozen pieces of paper in all. But the rest of the building's records, eighty years' worth of its history, were all destroyed that day. Records of who had lived there and where, who had complained about what, who had been born, who had died, who had moved on, were all gone. Jo Mielziner, during his lifetime, had collected bits and pieces of Dakota history and kept them in files and
scrapbooks. But Mielziner's executors have been unable to uncover that collection of Dakotiana, and so that also must be assumed to be gone.

Only one person has preserved a scrapbook on the Dakota and its history—Winnie Bodkin. Her scrapbook, a frail volume of yellowing and tattered clippings, is one of her most fiercely guarded possessions. Since its pages are in such a fragile state, she entrusts it to almost no one. In it are collected news items about the Dakota and its people, many of them obituaries of past Dakotans whom Winnie knew and worked for. Here one can read that William Arbuckle Jamison left an estate of $7,318,545 when he died in 1926. We read of George T. Wilson's death in 1933, and of how, from a $3-a-week lunchroom worker for Equitable Life, he rose to become the company's second vice-president at $24,000 a year; obviously an imposing salary in those Depression days. We read of the wedding in Old Westbury, Long Island, of Mr. F. Ambrose Clark, a brother of Stephen C. Clark, to Mrs. Jennifer Miller. The bride was sixty, the bridegroom seventy-seven. We read of sixty-eight-year-old Patrick Feehan, a Dakota elevator operator, who fell dead of a stroke at the lever of his elevator car. The elevator stopped automatically on the ninth floor. When Rosa F. Huyler Cooke, an heiress to a candy fortune, died, we read that,
LUNATIC GETS SHARE OF HUYLER ESTATE.
The lunatic was her husband, an inmate at the State Insane Hospital in Middleton, New York, and he was willed $50,000, his wife's jewelry and the life income of his wife's residuary estate. It was Mrs. Cooke who installed the swimming pool which the Larry Ellmans uncovered, and it is clear that the Cookes preceded Miss Leo in apartment 17.

One puzzling clipping is headlined
ADJUSTING FLUSH TANK EASY IF YOU KNOW HOW.
What follows is a lengthy and detailed description of how to fix a leaking toilet tank. There is no mention of the Dakota in the piece. One can only conclude that the author of the story, written for the old
Herald Tribune,
was then, or at one time, a Dakota resident.

And so it is clear that Winifred Bodkin is more than just a concierge for the building, more than a helpful screener of callers and runner of errands. She is also one of the few remaining caretakers and custodians of the Dakota's random memories. Looking around her high-ceilinged office just inside the main gate, she says, “It's a grand old building. In the old days, this building
was
New York.”

Chapter 17

Old Guard vs. New

In 1965, not long before she moved out, declaring that the place had simply become too expensive, Marya Mannes commented with her customary asperity that the Dakota just wasn't what it used to be and that she simply didn't understand the new breed of people that had moved in. “Now it's getting to be all Café Society,” she said. “I just don't run with this new set. There's a great emphasis now on show biz, on ‘in' people. There are people now who belong to the extremely up-to-date group of op art and Courrèges fashions and all these fads. It's all quite new here.”

To her, the gulf between the old and the new, between elderly matrons and young socialites, had become as wide as their differences in ages, styles and tastes. Though, as in every neighborhood, a few dowagers in black velvet suits and heavy pearl earrings still gathered to sip sherry in their apartments at four in the afternoon, most of the new Dakotans, it seemed to Miss Mannes, now darted in and out of the building in white shaggy furs, short skirts or blue jeans. And though none of the
old
Old Guard ever lived at the Dakota, this is the same
change in the “texture” of the building's clientele that is mourned by Winnie Bodkin.

The average age of Dakota tenants had already declined by at least twenty years, and the numbers of the aging few were more than offset by the increased numbers of couples with little children. In the old days, of course, the building had not attracted couples with children, and as recently as 1930, when Mrs. Charles Quinlan (mother of the rebellious William) moved into the building with her brood of three, Mrs. Quinlan remembers that hers were the only children there. During the thirty years that the Quinlans lived there, Mrs. Quinlan was able also to observe a decline in the building's amenities, and in manners as well. Her sons had been taught to bow from the waist; now youngsters wheeling bicycles barged into the elevator ahead of her.

Mrs. Quinlan also remembers the particularly gracious character of the building and its management. When in 1933, at the age of forty, her husband suddenly died of food poisoning, Mrs. Quinlan decided to move to slightly smaller quarters—five rooms and one bath on the third floor. The building helped her move, and then sent in painters, carpenters and electricians to re-do the apartment to her specifications. Bookcases were constructed, and in the process of this work the carpenter suggested to Mrs. Quinlan that she ought to have a storage cabinet for her “papers,” and so he built one. A rather awkward passageway led between the living room and one of the bedrooms. This was replaced with an additional bathroom. The kitchen was in a curious state. It had apparently once been a bathroom, or perhaps two bathrooms, because it contained two toilets which sat side by side. These were removed. All of this was done at no cost to Mrs. Quinlan.

“If you didn't feel like cooking, and didn't want to dress up to go down to the dining room,” Mrs. Quinlan recalls, “you could phone down and have your meal sent up. Everything came up in huge warmers. They would even set the table for you, and serve you if you wanted. If you got a special-delivery letter, a porter with white gloves brought it up on a silver tray.”

The dining room was nothing if not solicitous. Once, Edward Downes recalls, when his father had returned from a fishing trip with a large tuna he had caught, the Dakota's chef cleaned and cooked it for him, and served it on a huge wooden plank. “I'd never known what the expression ‘planked fish' meant until then,” Downes says. In the
old days there was a newsstand across the street that was open twenty-four hours a day, and porters delivered New York's then-multitude of dailies to Dakota tenants as the papers hit the stand. Though the only children in the building were the Quinlans,' a special city policeman was detailed at the corner to escort the children from the Dakota across the street into the Park. “I remember his name was George, and he was so kind,” Mrs. Quinlan says. It was an era of politeness and gentility that New York may never see again.

When apartments changed hands in the old days, they did so graciously and with a flourish of gentlemanly considerateness. In the summer of 1907, when Colonel George Harvey was turning over apartment 67 to Mr. Frederick J. Lancaster, Colonel Harvey wrote to the new rentor:

My dear Sir:

Of course I am quite willing that you should take possession of the Dakota Apartment at any time you see fit. I think all of our things have been removed excepting possibly the wall covering of the Reception Room, but I will ask Mrs. Harvey to communicate immediately with the house people regarding that, so that the way will be clear for you.

Yours very truly,

Even the tradespeople with whom the Dakota did business were decorous and courtly. For instance, the Dakota purchased its butter from Fenimore Farm in Cooperstown, which, by no coincidence, belonged to Edward S. Clark, and one would assume that a change in the price of butter would have no effect on this arrangement. Still, in 1906 Mr. Johnston, the agent at the farm, felt it necessary to write to Romer Gillis, then the Dakota's manager, to advise him of a price increase:

On account of the increase in the market value of butter, I am authorized to advise you that commencing January 1st, 1907, and until further notice, the price of butter furnished you from the Fenimore Farm will be at the rate of 35¢ per pound.

Thanking you for your patronage in the past and hoping for a continuance of same, I am, with the compliments of the season,

Very truly yours,

By the summer of 1907 Mr. Gillis had been replaced at the Dakota by Mr. C. B. Knott, and Samuel Couch & Sons, Elevators, Supplies & Repairs—whose letterhead also announced the company as “Manufacturers of Best Lubricating Compound, Peerless Air Checks, Sensible Grease Cups, and United States Flax and Vulcanized Packings”—felt it wise to write to Mr. Knott and say:

We are in receipt of formal announcement … of your appointment as Manager of the Dakota Apartment House, and hereby tender our congratulations.

We have, during the past fifteen years attended to the wants of the Clark Estates, when the elevators in the Dakota required attention, and sincerely trust that the same cordial relations will continue to exist. Should you at any time desire any information concerning the elevators, we would be only too willing to give you our expert advice, and assure you that we are at your command at any time you may desire us.

Trusting to have the pleasure of continuing our business relations and soliciting your valued patronage, we are,

Very truly yours,

The Oriental Tea Company of Boston supplied the Dakota with its coffee, and Mr. William North of that company also wrote a solicitous letter to the new manager:

I have your favor of Sept. 18th at hand.
*
Let me assure you, first, that I appreciate your loyalty to me much more than I do your business. The letter, however, is very gratifying and I shall do my best to see that your weekly shipment of coffee is kept up to standard from first to last; in other words, I shall do all I can at this end to make that part of your work as easy and as pleasant for yourself and your guests as possible.

I shall probably begin shipping Tuesday, October 1st, and that being as good a day as any for me, will continue shipping on that date. I presume you want the coffee ground fine, same as I sent it to you before, and will carry out that idea unless I hear from you to the contrary.