Tomorrow-Land (11 page)

11.

The New York World's Fair is a misnomer; it is a trade mart, no more and no less.

—Hugo Geller, artist and activist

 

There are no substitutes for courage and loyalty and no way of making everybody happy.

—Robert Moses

 

By September 1963, with the opening day of the World's Fair just months away, the “Countdown Clock” inaugurated by President John F. Kennedy back in April had become an object of scorn at the massive construction site that was Flushing Meadow. Dubbed the “Ulcer Clock” by staffers, it served as a constant reminder of all the unfinished tasks at hand. Robert Moses made sure it wasn't the only reminder: An exact count of the days left until opening day—April 22, 1964—was typed at the bottom of every memo, letter, report, and daily correspondence on Fair stationery. Moses wanted everyone to remember exactly what they were striving for: to stage the most successful World's Fair in history.

To the Master Builder, anything that distracted from this goal was an attack against the “Olympics of Progress.” He wouldn't tolerate even the slightest criticism. By the fall of 1963, this meant he was in a state of open war with the media, whether print, television, or radio, and in particular the half-dozen metropolitan daily newspapers. Moses never passed up an opportunity to lodge his complaints in “URGENT” hand-delivered memos to the top brass of New York's media, many of whom where long-standing associates, if not old friends. He constantly worked his personal connections to influence the news in his—and the Fair's—favor, and he made a habit of disparaging the work of any reporter whose prose was not to his liking.

On September 9, 1963, the
New York Times
ran a friendly front-page article—
World's Fair Gains Impetus Despite Snubs
—that jumped
inside to a full, eight-column story. Of the article's thousands of words, Moses took umbrage with a few sentences that implied he doled out contracts to favored firms. He immediately fired off a memo to Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, the paper's newly installed president and publisher. “Why this stuff about employing pets who have worked for me before and profited through me in the past?” he demanded. “The effect is to suggest to the average reader that there is considerable suspicion of patronage and private profit.” Moses denied any and all charges, insisting that nearly three-quarters of the Fair's work was being done by subcontractors and almost all other contracts were related to the vast highway or park construction he was overlooking, leaving “perhaps 2 or 3%” to his discretion.

The following month, when he found a WCBS radio editorial “totally inaccurate,” he immediately informed William S. Paley, CBS's chairman of the board. He requested an investigation and lectured Paley, who was a member of the Fair's Executive Committee, about his responsibility to the Flushing exhibition. “You are a Director of the Fair,” Moses chided him, “and I assume continue to be interested in its progress and success.”

For all of his thin-skinned paranoia toward the press, Moses wasn't completely off base. While on friendly terms with those at the top of the New York media world, his standing with the rank-and-file reporters who covered his various projects—almost all of them newsworthy—could hardly have been worse. “The mood of the media seemed against him, tired of him, not only the
Times
but the other newspapers as well, plus radio and television,” wrote author Gay Talese, who covered the World's Fair as a young Timesman. “It was not that they reported the news incompletely or anything inaccurately. If anything they were
too
complete,
too
accurate, they overlooked nothing. . . . They had fun with Moses, this cranky old man trying to ballyhoo the Fair, and they picked it apart before its flimsy construction was complete, and they continued to downgrade it through the next two years.”

Even if the reporters on the city's metropolitan dailies largely detested Moses, the Master Builder still held sway with top editors and publishers of many newspapers, particularly the
New York Times,
where
he was close with the Sulzbergers, who owned the paper. “Moses was a power and the
Times
is responsive to power and powerful people,” said Talese. The
Times
' only potential rival, the
New York Herald Tribune,
however, could afford to take a more strident tone with Moses, since by the early 1960s it was “a sinking ship with declining ad revenue.” What the
Trib,
as it was known, did have were innovative writers like Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Dick Schapp, who would go on—along with Talese—to pioneer a new form of writing dubbed the “New Journalism.”

Still, for a beat reporter covering the World's Fair, there was no shortage of stories to report. Several controversies threatened to overshadow the Fair's progress throughout the autumn of 1963; each was played out in the papers, and every story was helped along by Moses' insistence to counterattack his enemies, therefore keeping the story in the headlines for weeks or even months.

The first scandalous story had to do with the price of tickets for New York City's 1.4 million schoolchildren. Tickets to the World's Fair cost $1 for children age twelve years old and younger; adults paid $2. By February 1963 the World's Fair Corporation had sold $28 million in discounted tickets. But now some officials—like labor lawyer and City Council candidate Paul O'Dwyer (and brother of Moses' ex-boss, the former New York mayor William O'Dwyer)—picked up the rallying cry for a reduced fee for schoolchildren, first sounded by the Board of Education. O'Dwyer was soon joined by a chorus of politicos who found it all too easy to pontificate to newspapers, which loved a good Moses controversy, especially one that portrayed the septuagenarian Master Builder as a miserly bully who wouldn't cut children—particularly poor schoolchildren—a break to come see his “Olympics of Progress.”

Unable to resist lashing out at his critics, or to engage in good-hearted negotiations with the enemy, Moses fell right into their trap. Deriding his critics as “assorted Santa Clauses” who didn't have their facts or figures straight, he flatly refused any discount, claiming it would be detrimental to the Fair's financial health. The World's Fair, he claimed, could lose as much as $9 million if it cut prices. And he noted that it was his stated intention of using the exhibition's profits to “leave a great
legacy to the city—another Central Park for the future—wholly without cost to the public.” To create this post-Fair Flushing Meadow Park that he had dreamed of for so long
would cost at least $23 million, according to Moses' in-house figures.

The war of words filled the pages of the daily papers. “It should be brought to the attention of Mr. Moses by the appropriate bodies,” O'Dwyer told reporters, “that the World's Fair is not an exclusive club. Millions of dollars of our taxpayers' money has gone into it.” Amos Basil, seeking the same City Council seat as O'Dwyer, out-quipped his opponent on the campaign stump. “Moses thinks he's God,” Basil joked, “but fortunately he's just Moses.”

The brouhaha wouldn't go away. Soon City Council passed a resolution demanding a price decrease for schoolchildren; eventually Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. joined the fray, and in a rare public instance sided with the anti-Moses forces. Moses, perhaps sensing that his hard-line stance was damaging the Fair in the eyes of New Yorkers, who after all were intrinsic to the exhibition's success, put the matter to a vote by the Executive Committee. As he told Bernard Gimbel, a key ally and one of the committee's eighteen members, this was no time for getting weak in the knees. “The Executive Committee will simply have to stand up and be counted,” Moses declared.

On October 16 the committee voted and sided with their leader. Their counterproposal was to allow children age two to twelve to pay only twenty-five cents on Mondays in July and August. But their offer didn't please the critics, who were growing in number—now the New York State legislature in Albany was considering a vote on the matter. By the end of October there were threats to revoke the Fair's 5 percent state admissions tax exemption and a serious threat by City Council to have the Fair's books audited (which Moses denied they had the authority to do).

Moses kept a brave face publicly but privately sounded the alarm. He sent a telegram to top deputy Charles Poletti, who was in Jordan on one of his frequent international trips, asking him to return immediately. “There are serious threats to the integrity of the Fair,” Moses wrote. (Poletti, who had stipulated in his contract that his wife, Jane, could travel with him at
the Fair's expense, stayed put in Jordan.) By December, Moses sensed the tide of popular opinion turning against him. Wanting to avoid further damage to the World's Fair's image in a “rather pointless and destructive argument,” as one committee member put it, he conceded the fight: Groups of schoolchildren from the Tri-State area could purchase tickets for twenty-five cents throughout the school year.

While Moses lost that battle, he played to his advantage another controversy that erupted. Back in 1961 the World's Fair Corporation had sought the services of eccentric right-wing billionaire H. L. Hunt, reportedly the fourth-richest man in the world, to take over three and a half acres of prime real estate at the Fair for a Tivoli Gardens–inspired children's playground. The idea was a favorite of Moses, who held the Copenhagen park in the highest regard. The seventy-four-year-old Texas oil tycoon paid $1.1 million up front to seal the deal, but by October 1963 he was holding a press conference at the Waldorf Towers to announce that he was getting “evicted” from the Fair. The Dallas-based free-market fundamentalist, who during the 1950s had supported Senator Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced red-baiting demagogue, read a rambling eight-page statement, repeatedly referring to himself in the third person and announcing that he had been “pressured and taken in” by Moses, whom he referred to as “the ruler of the World's Fair.”

Soon after Hunt had gotten involved with the Fair, he had started to rub Moses the wrong way. For starters, he was concerned about the type of amusement rides Hunt was building; there would be absolutely no Coney Island–style entertainment at the World's Fair—“Coney Island” being Moses' oft-repeated catchphrase for low-end, déclassé amusement parks. He told Hunt that the Fair wouldn't tolerate anything “gaudy” or high-priced. The Texan reportedly wanted to charge a fifty-cent entrance fee for each of his proposed eleven rides—at the exact time that the newspapers, the City Council, and Albany were pressuring Moses to reduce the entrance fees for schoolchildren.

Hunt denied both charges, insisting to the reporters during his press conference that his rides would neither be expensive nor gaudy. In fact, he bragged that his mini amusement park would have included “a very
ancient carousel said to be of 1900 vintage and something called a ‘Wild Mouse Ride.' ” The
New York Herald Tribune
noted dryly, “Those last three words were not further explained.”

The New York reporters didn't know what to make of the rotund bow-tie-wearing billionaire who was apt to interrupt his speech with his outside-the-mainstream political views, which Moses described as “absolutely free old-fashioned, capitalistic enterprise, reminiscent of the late nineties of the last century.” Noting that the New York papers, including his least favorite of the dailies, the
Herald Tribune
, didn't seem to take Hunt or his charges seriously, Moses, for once, let the matter fade into oblivion. “Old boy H. L. Hunt has gone down the drain,” he wrote a friend. “Thank God we seem to be rid of him.”

But the most enduring controversy of autumn 1963 dated back to the earliest days of Moses' tenure at the Fair: the amount of art—or the lack thereof, according to his critics—on display in Flushing Meadow. This controversy was rekindled when Emily Genauer, the highly regarded art critic for the
Herald Tribune,
who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for her criticism, lashed out at Moses in August. An outspoken champion of modernism and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Diego Rivera—precisely the kind of art that ran afoul of Moses' more conservative tastes—Genauer had established herself in the 1930s as the art critic for the
New York World-Telegram
. In 1949, after a red-baiting congressman mentioned her by name, the paper's conservative owner, Roy S. Howard, told her to stop writing about “Communists and left-wingers” like Picasso. Genauer quit on the spot, then used Howard's phone to call an editor she knew at the
Herald Tribune
. By the time she hung up, she was the
Trib
's new chief art critic, a position she still held in 1963 when Hugo Geller, a painter, printmaker, and activist, came to her office to discuss his attempts to create a pavilion for contemporary American artists at the 1964–65 World's Fair.

Geller was the chairman of the Committee of Artists' Societies, a collective of more than a dozen groups. Their goal was to erect a forty-thousand-square-foot, $1.5 million pavilion designed by the architect August Sak and made of aluminum and rubberized plastic, which could
be built in a mere ninety days, if only Moses would foot the bill. Instead, Moses was offering free rent but per Fair policy, he insisted exhibitors pay for their own pavilion.

Geller had fought—and won—this battle before. A quarter of a century earlier, he had been part of another cooperative that successfully pressured Grover Whalen, the president of the 1939–40 World's Fair, to create the Contemporary Art Building on the Fair's dime. When he handed Genauer a yellowing newspaper article extolling his earlier efforts, it took her a few moments to realize that the February 5, 1938, clip she was reading was, in fact, her own. “If you want to see an art show,” Genauer had written twenty-five years earlier, “they will tell the millions who visit the Fair, you must leave this great exposition of everything important in contemporary American life and go eight miles away to the Metropolitan [Museum of Art].” Genauer recapped all of these details in her 1963 article and added, with derisive déjà vu: “Absolutely nothing has changed in twenty-five years.”