Life at the Dakota (29 page)

The board member in charge of interviewing and screening prospective tenants in those days was Mrs. Eileen Carlson, a lawyer who supported Mr. Greenfield's views. In her interviews Mrs. Carlson began asking what to some people seemed rather nosy questions related to “life-style.” “Are you married?” she asked one man who wanted to buy an apartment. “Well, I'm getting a divorce,” he replied. “Can I still join the club?”

When the gentle-mannered, bespectacled playwright Mart Crowley applied to the building, he was vigorously sponsored by both Rex Reed and Ruth Ford. Crowley had become a New York celebrity as a result of his Broadway and motion-picture homosexual drama,
The Boys in the Band.
Crowley was turned down by the Dakota. “I really felt terrible, afterward, about sponsoring Mart,” Rex Reed says, “because it opened such an ugly vein.”

In taking a stand against homosexuals in the building, the Dakota's board was touching an extremely sensitive nerve. It was not that the Dakota was the first or only New York apartment building to discriminate in this fashion. A number of buildings, particularly on the East Side, routinely denied applications to partners of the same sex, just as they turned down theater people, who kept irregular hours, and musicians who practiced on noisy instruments. But that this should happen at the
Dakota
seemed particularly repugnant. The Dakota had long provided a safe harbor for the gifted, the brilliant misfits, the different. This was not the East Side; it was the West Side, where the fresh breezes of intelligence, enlightenment, tolerance and freedom blew. At the same time, all over the country homosexuality was being regarded much more openly and liberally, and homosexuals were demanding—and getting—more respect. Writers such as Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote were making no bones about it. Frank and sympathetic books were being published on the subject, and in some cities, notably San Francisco, groups such as the Gay Activists Alliance were becoming a political force. It had become something of a joke at the Dakota to say, “Some of the most distinguished homosexuals in New York live here.”

To people in the theater, homosexuality was considered a
commonplace not even worth mentioning, and a person's sexual orientation was a topic less interesting than the weather. And in a city that cherished privacy over all other blessings, sexual preference was deemed the most private realm of all—nobody's business but the individual's. When it was learned that the Dakota's board was investigating and weighing such matters in terms of prospective tenants, hackles rose in alarm.

Still, to give Gordon Greenfield credit he did have a certain point. Just a block north of the Dakota, as we have seen, a section of the stone wall that encloses Central Park had become known as “the meat rack.” The wall was a favorite perching place for young male prostitutes soliciting their clients. At least a few of these young men, it was safe to assume, had other things on their minds than sex—robbery, burglary, blackmail and extortion, for example. They were considered dangerous, and bringing them into the building, as some tenants were suspected of doing, was a threat to the general welfare.

To Mr. Wilbur Ross, meanwhile, there were more important things wrong with the Greenfield administration than its unwelcoming attitude toward homosexuals. Ross, who had received a master's degree with distinction from the Harvard School of Business, considered himself something of an expert in the field of finance. As a relatively new tenant in the building he had observed aspects of the board's operation that seemed to him improper, or at least unfair. It disturbed him, for example, that for seven places on the Dakota's board there were only seven candidates for whom to vote. To make the board more representative, Ross wanted an eleven-man board.

The board had also proposed a regulation to the effect that any apartment for sale in the building had to be offered through a particular real estate broker. This rule had been put up in an effort to put an end to private, inside deals, but it seemed wrong. Ross believed that most of the tenants in the building were not people like Gordon Greenfield, who was independently wealthy. Instead, they were people with high incomes but little actual capital. One of the attractions of owning a co-operative apartment is that a substantial proportion of each tenant's monthly maintenance—that which represents mortgage interest, real estate taxes and insurance—is tax deductible. The mortgage that the Dakota then had, allowed in Wilbur Ross's opinion, too much payment against principal and not enough in interest. If a new mortgage could
be obtained that would cost the building more in interest and paid less in capital, each tenant's tax-deductible share of his maintenance cost could be increased.

Ross also felt that certiorari proceedings could be undertaken with the city in order to get a tax reduction for the building, based on its landmark status. He felt that the building was paying too much for insurance and should have a higher deductible clause in its contract. He felt that the building had not had enough preventive maintenance, that the roof, plumbing and electrical systems had been neglected under the regime of Gordon Greenfield.

But an overriding issue seemed to be Ross's belief that Greenfield and his board had ruled the building in a fashion that was “autocratic,” and that it had ruled it long enough. It was time for new blood, new talent on the board, time for a new generation. Wilbur Ross, at the time, was a feisty thirty-three; Gordon Greenfield was fifty-five. It was time, Wilbur Ross decided, to throw the old fogeys out.

Early in 1970 Wilbur Ross drew a group of tenants together and urged them to get other shareholders active. They circularized the building with a complaint sheet, and then held a large meeting and wrote up a slate for the next annual meeting. They wrote to Gordon Greenfield and asked to appear before his board with their grievances.

Gordon Greenfield was furious. “To show you the kind of man Ross is,” he says today, “he actually brought some business to me while he was plotting behind my back to overthrow me.”

Wilbur Ross says, “It was not intended as a personal thing. Gordon chose to take it personally.”

But Wilbur Ross had early on gotten the support of two of the building's most popular tenants—Jo Mielziner and Henry Blanchard. They brought with them others—Lewis Galantiere, a writer; Edward Downes, a music scholar and critic; Lauren Bacall, Ruth Ford, Rex Reed. But it was not just a conflict between practical business folk and less practical artistic types. On the dissidents' side were Richard Defendini, a doctor; Larry Ellman, a restauranteur; and Peter Nitze, a banker. Nor was it—despite all the talk of the need for “new blood”—strictly speaking a confrontation between a younger generation and the old-timers. Mrs. C. D. Jackson and even old Miss Leo declared themselves on the side of the insurgents. It was more like a political battle between Republicans and Democrats.

Some people in the building were merely confused by what was happening. Sheila Herbert, a young advertising woman who had practically grown up in the building, was baffled. “I couldn't understand it,” she says. “I thought that Gordon Greenfield's board should have been
revered
for all they'd done, for all the time they'd devoted to the building. I thought the building should be grateful. But suddenly everybody was going around saying these perfectly dreadful things about them.”

The building's rhetoric had indeed become quite martial, and what to an outsider might have seemed a tempest in a Victorian teapot was being discussed in terms that could have described a junta in a banana republic. Gordon Greenfield, meanwhile, and his incumbent board were convinced that their record of cautious, conservative economy and cost-cutting would speak for itself. They were certain that, since most of them had longer tenure in the building than Wilbur Ross, they had earned more loyalty and won more friends. “But if they wanted all-out war, we decided to give them all-out war,” Gordon Greenfield says.

Chapter 19

“High Noon”

Wilbur Ross has a theory that the Dakota itself—the very physicality of the old building—somehow manages to induce a certain amount of irrationality on the part of its tenants. Certainly Dakotans seem to get more exercised about events than ordinary New Yorkers. Early in 1979, for example, the building was up in arms again about a neighborhood coffee shop that proposed to call itself The Dakota. Once again, committees of protest were formed to fight the “outrage” and “insult” to the building, though it was hard for some people to figure out what the fuss was all about. Naming shops after nearby buildings is a common practice all over the world. (Hard by the Apthorp Apartments can be found the Apthorp Garage, the Apthorp Pharmacy, the Apthorp Hairdressers, and the Apthorp Laundromat.) But to the Dakotans, what the restaurant proposed to do seemed more of a sacrilege than taking the name of God in vain.

Feelings ran just as strongly during the winter of 1970–71 in what would later be referred to grandiosely as the “Palace Revolution.” Gordon Greenfield still refers to what went on as “a cabal, a plot by
a few mean-spirited people to take over the building and throw me out.”

Actually, the revolt had been preceded by a number of minor squabbles and disputes within the building. There had been Jo Mielziner's fight to retain a stained-glass door panel, for example, which Gordon Greenfield and his board considered in violation of fire laws. “But glass doesn't
burn!”
Mielziner had cried indignantly. “That panel is a priceless antique!” Then, in 1964, there was blast damage to the building from the construction of the new Mayfair Tower next door, and nerves in the Dakota grew frazzled from the explosions and the general dawn-to-dusk din of the construction work. Ward Bennett had begun his renovation of his rooftop gable, but his plans had had to be approved by committee after committee, and the hammering of his builders added to the noise. The problem of what to do with the dining room had been solved, and in a way that was both ingenious and fortuitous for the building. But it had not been solved without a certain amount of haggling, arguments and suggestions for revisions from the building's board.

All through the winter there were secret meetings on the part of the revolutionaries as Mr. Ross tried to gather more tenants on his side. Now there were meetings nearly every night in one part of the building or another, and often these meetings went on into the wee hours. More and more tenants, it seemed, were against Greenfield, and when Greenfield attempted to invade one of the tenants' meetings that was being held in the Scott Severns' apartment, Dr. Severns told Greenfield that if he didn't leave, he'd throw him out.

It was a particularly difficult situation for Henry Blanchard, who had been a member of Gordon Greenfield's board, but now sided with Ross and was thus a member of both the Old Guard and the New. It was a great feather in Ross's cap to have Blanchard's support, but to Greenfield his old friend seemed a traitor. Even today, Gordon Greenfield is bitter about this switch of allegiance: “Harry started going around saying, ‘Greenfield's got to go,'” he says. “He told lies, tales to stir things up—he did unspeakable things.”

Henry Blanchard is no more charitable in his appraisal: “Gordon Greenfield did some inexcusable things, made inexcusable statements. At one point he said he would leave the board if I would leave too. But he'd said so many nasty, rotten things about my wife and me that I
decided to stay. When my wife was in the hospital with a broken hip, he barged into her hospital room, didn't even take off his hat, and
demanded
—not asked—demanded that she influence me, demanded that I appear at his meetings.”

At one point Henry Blanchard, who in demeanor resembles a country judge, stood up to Gordon Greenfield and, in an even voice, said, “You are a heel.” At another point in their confrontations Greenfield shouted, “Harry Blanchard doesn't care what happens to the building—he's so rich!”

It was not long before the two men had stopped speaking to one another. They still do not speak.

Looking back from the distance of a few years, the Dakota's Palace Revolution may seem like much ado about very little. But a few things are important to remember about January and February of 1971. In 1969 and 1970 there had been a severe stock-market decline, the so-called “Nixon recession.” Compounding this was spiraling inflation, and everything was costing more. At the Dakota monthly maintenance costs were rising alarmingly, and, in addition, the building seemed to be deteriorating. The New York
Times
had published an article which made it sound as though the building were falling down, hardly a good advertisement for life at the Dakota. If the building was on the verge of collapse, how could the tenants find a market for their apartments, which, in many cases, represented the major investments of their lives? Home- and apartment-owners were feeling the pinch all over the country. How long would the recession, coupled with inflation, go on? No one knew. The Dakotans, like property-owners everywhere, were frightened. Wall Street investment-banking houses were beginning to go under, one by one. To those who remembered it seemed like October of 1929 all over again. Their homes and their pocketbooks were threatened.

Wilbur Ross, meanwhile, who
was
a generation younger than Greenfield, offered what amounted to a panacea in his mortgage refinancing plan. As for Greenfield, he was independently rich, a fat cat. What did he care about the little fellow, the fellow who had to work for every penny he earned? In this atmosphere it is not surprising that more and more tenants joined the Ross faction and swung away from Gordon Greenfield.

Still the meetings went on, the petitions and platforms circulated, and the telephones rang throughout the day as each side tried to gather supporters. The insurgents complained that when they telephoned Greenfield with their complaints he did not return their calls, and Mrs. Greenfield stood up to declare that her husband answered every telephone call, without fail, always. In connection with the Greenfield board's stand on homosexuals, the Ross faction accused the incumbent board of “practicing apartheid,” and compared the board with the government of South Africa. Another tenant complained that the Dakota was “run like Sing Sing.” At one point Mr. Edward O. D. Downes, who had joined the Ross faction and was also a Distinguished Professor of Music History at Queens College, was awakened by a telephone call late at night and an anonymous voice that said to him, “I think you ought to know that Wilbur Ross wants to take over so he can tear this building down, and when that happens the wrecker's ball will come right through your window!”