Tomorrow-Land (12 page)

While Genauer's article didn't provoke Moses—though it surely irritated him—Geller's group did make some headway with August Heckscher, a former cultural advisor to President Kennedy. Heckscher requested a meeting with Moses at Flushing Meadow to discuss the matter. “Back of these Washington people and their associates are a number of critics and writers who have been anything but friendly to the Fair,” Moses complained to a top staffer. “They picture us as barbarians not interested in the finer things.”

Moses set up the meeting and made sure that there was “a record of the proceedings” and a final report; he wanted to be able to use his critics' words against them, if necessary. But like so many other of the various proposals from artist coalitions or wealthy patrons that had been discussed over the previous three years, nothing came of it. Moses had insisted all along that there was room for such a display of contemporary American art—albeit, a smaller one—in the Federal Pavilion. Not only was this pavilion the Fair's largest, but Heckscher was also a key player in developing its exhibits. “He has had opportunities right along to take care of the art and cultural exhibits there,” Moses sniffed.

On November 17 the Committee of Artists' Societies fired another salvo. At a press conference held at the Whitney Museum, Heckscher, playwright Arthur Miller, conductor Leonard Bernstein, and others joined Geller and Genauer in denouncing Moses and the Fair. “It's a disgrace that there is no pavilion for contemporary American art at the World's Fair,” lamented Miller. “It shows the world that this is a nation of blind men without culture, that we just live for money, and that we are gross—without any spirit.”

Genauer charged that Moses had wasted an opportunity for the World's Fair to host the immense modern art collection of multimillionaire investor Joseph H. Hirshhorn—a Latvian-born, Brooklyn-raised immigrant who owned some of the great masterworks of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. According to Genauer, Moses insisted on breaking up the collection and distributing Hirshhorn's abstract sculptures, including pieces by Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Serrano, and Henry Moore, throughout the Fairgrounds in an ill-conceived sculpture garden. “This shows what Moses knows about art,” she huffed.

Heckscher, who was unable to secure any space for contemporary art in the Federal Pavilion, where real estate was as politically complicated as the US Senate, put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the man behind the Fair. “Mr. Moses,” he said, “was not interested in art.” If Moses, the president of the Fair, wouldn't help them, then Geller insisted they would go over his head and petition President Kennedy, a vocal supporter of the World's Fair.

The next day, the story hit the papers. Not only did the
New York
Times
give it prominent coverage, but it also ran another piece about art at the Fair, which only added fuel to the critics' fire. According to the
Times,
there was a brand-new oil painting hanging prominently on a wall at the Top of the Fair restaurant in the Port Authority Building depicting various images of New York, including a number of Moses' works, such as the Verrazano Bridge (which would open in 1964), the Robert Moses Dam, and Jones Beach, among others. It was seemingly an artistic tribute to the Master Builder, who regularly entertained VIPs there. Hanging in the same restaurant was a large-scale reproduction of
a cartoon by Rube Goldberg, a funny papers regular whose name would become synonymous with homemade contraptions.

Neither was an example of high art or what his critics had in mind, but Moses insisted the cartoon—titled “How to Cure World's Fair Tired Feet”—stay put, much to the dismay of the restaurant's staff. “It is vulgar,” the eatery's art director complained. “It is the most ugly comic caricature I have ever seen. . . . [Moses] is a genius in some ways but he knows absolutely nothing about art.”

Moses' counterattack appeared in the papers the next day. The
New York
Times
quoted liberally from his statement addressing both articles, which he said didn't possess “a suspicion of the truth.” While Moses insisted he knew nothing about the mural depicting his handiwork until after it was hanging on the Top of the Fair's wall, he wasn't about to move the Goldberg, for which he said, “I will go down the
Times
' artistic drain.” Moses attacked the accusations one at time, calling Grenauer's version of the Hirshhorn story “fiction.” He offered to print the Fair's entire, voluminous correspondence with Hirshhorn, which he noted couldn't have been any more “cordial.” Said Moses, “We begged him to come into the Fair.”

In fact, he had. For more than two years, Moses had doggedly pursued Hirshhorn and his vast collection of art, hoping to lure the aging speculator to bankroll a pavilion that would eventually become “a permanent endowed building” in the future Flushing Meadow Park. Unfortunately, Hirshhorn and his people had balked at the notion of having his collection of sculptures, as well as his contemporary paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers, plus works by Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse, among dozens of others, permanently housed in a park in the middle of Queens. Instead, Moses noted, “Mr. Hirshhorn talked of Fifth Avenue.” (Eventually the collection and endowment would find a home at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.)

The continuous attempts by Moses to get Hirshhorn's collection rendered his critics' claims of “Fair antagonism to modern art and design . . . manifestly ridiculous.” Fair officials, he noted, may have their
individual tastes—as he most certainly did—“but these don't enter into the determination of the Fair to give every possible encouragement to every school, period, academy and fashion,” he lectured the
Times
. And apparently those tastes included James N. Rosenberg, a painter of expressionistic landscapes, who joined Genauer and the others in their attack on the Fair. “It is sad when late in the game old friends become mere acquaintances,” Moses responded in a private letter to the artist. “I guess I shall have to turn your landscape to the wall.”

Moses laid the blame for any lack of art pavilion on Heckscher or the various art groups that demanded the Fair bankroll their ventures. Multiple attempts, both inside and outside the Fair, were made to secure funding from a variety of sources and organizations such as the Ford Foundation. Ultimately, each fell through. Fair executives worked with New York City's cultural institutions—from the newly opened Lincoln Center (which Moses played a major role in creating) to all the major museums (including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim)—to hold World's Fair–affiliated exhibitions, becoming, in a sense, cultural annexes of the Fair. Both city and state officials were counting on the millions of tourists who would flood Flushing Meadow to explore Manhattan's cultural and tourist attractions, thereby boosting New York's tax coffers.

But what Genauer, Geller, and the rest seemed to miss—or ignore—was a story in the
New York Times
in early October announcing some extraordinary radical art that would be on display at the New York State Pavilion. The architect Philip Johnson had designed the pavilion, itself a strange, new, postmodern work of art. Heralded as “the architectural delight of Flushing Meadow,” by the
Times
' architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, Johnson's pavilion was a series of festive circular towers, a rounded theater, and a large open-air oval with a roof shaped like a giant bicycle tire, complete with suspension rings. Johnson, a prolific art collector, had commissioned ten artists, almost all of whom were working in the new style known as pop art (sometimes called the new realism), to create twenty-by-twenty-foot murals that would be mounted outside the pavilion's theater like a “charm bracelet.”

Johnson hired some of the most controversial young sculptors and painters—almost are were in their thirties—working in New York City, or the rest of America, in the early 1960s: Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and a former graphic artist named Andy Warhol. The
article even highlighted some of the controversial works that were being created specifically for Moses' World's Fair. According to the
Times,
millions of Fairgoers would see art that included a painted comic strip of a laughing redheaded woman; a collection of crashed car parts; a sculpture of black tuxedos made “rock hard” with resin; a sculpture of stone balloons; a collage of photographic images and oil paint showing contemporary scenes of American life; and a silk screen depicting the “Thirteen Most Wanted Men” in New York State. This was as contemporary and controversial as American art got in 1964, but none of the critics who were lambasting Moses for his lack of aesthetic grace seemed to take note; apparently pop art wasn't to their liking.

However, at least one conservative critic did take note. Wheeler Williams, the president of the American Artists Professional League, lodged his complaints in a letter to Moses, Mayor Wagner, and Governor Rockefeller—who was ultimately in charge of the pavilion and who had commissioned Johnson to design it—protesting “the use of the avant garde art” at the New York State Pavilion. “This Fair is not a circus or
jahrmarkt,
” he wrote, using the German word for amusement park, “and such a presentation is unworthy of the ideal and accomplishments of the citizens of this great State. It cannot possibly enhance the American image in the eye of any foreign or native visitor.” He added that he hoped Moses would stand his ground and not lower ticket prices for children, “so that as few as possible will see” the Johnson-commissioned works.

Williams ridiculed the pop art pieces to reporters. The artists, he told the
Long Island Star Journal,
were “way out, like man, say Beatnik Land or some haven for Bohemian artists.” A spokesperson for the Museum of Modern Art retorted that Williams's complaints were nothing more than a case of sour grapes, while Johnson defended his commissions, adding that they were not picked “at random” but because they represented the
“best” of the current generation of artists. Williams was also surprised to find that the avant-garde artists had another unlikely defender: Moses, the only public official who responded to his letter. “As to what you term the ‘avant garde art commissioned for the New York State Pavilion,' I have no opinion and express none,” wrote Moses, “except to remark in passing that your letter seems to be just a bit intemperate.”

While Moses wasn't a fan of such work, he was true to his word that there was room for all schools of art at his World's Fair, despite what his foes—whom he dismissed as the “long-haired critics, fanatics, and demagogues, perfectionists and daydreamers”—said. And like some of his most vocal critics, he spoke highly of Johnson's handiwork, defending the New York State Pavilion as a building “that grows on you.” By early 1964, he would put the postmodernist structure on his short list of Fair buildings that he wanted to grace the post-Fair Flushing Meadow Park.

The controversy over art at the World's Fair was over for now. But by the time opening day rolled around, many New Yorkers who had never heard of pop art or Warhol before would soon get their first glimpse of this odd, downtown hipster and his work that would capture so many imaginations and revolutionize art, and perhaps even more importantly, the art market. And they could thank Moses and the World's Fair for that.

12.

Americans are the youngest country, the largest country, and the strongest country, we like to say, and yet the very notion of change, real change throws Americans into a panic.

—James Baldwin, November 1963

 

Robert Moses arrived at his office in the Administration Building at Flushing Meadow early on the morning of Friday, November 22, as he always did—driven to work in a chauffeured car. After quickly getting down to work, he dictated a number of memos on a range of issues, including the ongoing controversy about modern art at the World's Fair. He happily noted that the previous day's edition of the
New York Times
ran a story about the priceless paintings by El Greco, Goya, and Velázquez from Madrid's Prado Museum that would be exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion; it was exactly the kind of press he hoped would silence his critics.

As he scoured the morning papers, scores of hard-hat workers labored in the late November weather to finish the dozens pavilions that were in various stages of construction. The World's Fair would open in exactly five months and there was much—perhaps too much—to do. Shea Stadium, the new baseball park that existed because Moses wanted a ballpark in Queens, was, as it had been for months, behind schedule. More than one hundred electricians were working seven days a week to ensure that the stadium, with its fifty-six thousand seats, would be open in time for the New York Mets to play the 1964 season in its new state-of-the-art home.

As far as Moses was concerned, the stadium was one more pavilion at his World's Fair, an ingenious way of attracting tens of thousands of fans throughout the long baseball season, which, like the Fair, extended from April to October. Shea Stadium was also a key component of Moses' post-Fair Flushing Meadow Park, which he promised would become “the most important park in the entire City, measured by size, usage, or
any other yardstick.” Although Moses was instrumental in having the stadium built, he wasn't directly involved in its construction and could only watch as others realized his vision, a position he never relished. Earlier that week he had confided to an associate that “the stadium may be completed by April 15,” but he wasn't holding his breath.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Moses' beloved England, screaming teenagers and youths were agog over a new musical quartet calling themselves the Beatles. The youth of England besieged record shops that morning to purchase the band's second LP,
With the Beatles
. The album, which featured a moody black-and-white photo of the band gazing straight ahead with deadly seriousness, as if they were the possessors of some joyless knowledge, immediately topped the British charts, where it finally dislodged their own debut album
Please Please Me,
released exactly seven months earlier.

The four Liverpudlians with matching custom-made suits, identical mop-top haircuts, irreverent attitudes, and, perhaps most shocking to the class-conscious British, working-class accents, had produced a series of chart-topping hits—“Please Please Me,” “From Me to You,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—that had, seemingly overnight, destroyed and resurrected the British pop industry in their own image. One journalist even created a new name for the mass hysteria that the band was creating among the younger portion of Her Majesty's royal subjects: Beatlemania.

Earlier that month Her Royal Majesty got a chance to hear the band in person at the Royal Variety Performance at London's Prince of Wales Theatre. Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and the Queen Mother—the latter two seen snapping their fingers and clapping along to the beat—attended the black-tie affair among other well-heeled Brits. As the Beatles were about to end their set with their roaring take on the Isley Brothers' “Twist and Shout,” John Lennon was unable to resist mouthing off in front of his social betters. “For our last number, I'd like to ask your help,” he informed his diamond-flashing, tuxedo-wearing audience. “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.”

The concert and the pandemiclike spread of Beatlemania reached journalists in America, despite the fact that Capitol Records, the American subsidiary of EMI, the band's British record label, had refused to release any of its music stateside. “American Top 40 in those days was bland white artists, and that's the way the American record companies wanted it then,” recalled Paul White, a Capitol Records A&R executive. “There were the Fabians”—as in Fabian, the clean-cut teenage pop star—“and ordinary types of things that didn't offend anybody.” Still,
Time
and
Newsweek
covered the Beatles' unprecedented popularity in the United Kingdom and Lennon's cheeky comments at the Royal Variety Performance.

Soon NBC's
Huntley-Brinkley Report
aired a segment on the group. By chance, Ed Sullivan, the TV impresario who hosted his self-titled variety show on CBS—the most important half-hour of television in show business—was at London's Heathrow Airport on October 31 where he witnessed Beatlemania firsthand, as thousands of screaming teens gathered to glimpse their heroes returning from a Scandinavian tour. Within weeks he had negotiated three appearances by the group for his show in February 1964.

The Sullivan deal helped CBS land exclusive rights to Beatles appearances for one year. The network aired its first story on the band with a four-minute segment on
Morning News with Mike Wallace
in the early hours of November 22, with plans to re-air it that evening on the CBS
Evening News
with Walter Cronkite.

While the Beatles were making news on American televisions, Ken Kesey, an athletic, golden-haired, twenty-nine-year-old novelist, was on the road in Texas headed back to his ranch in La Jolla, California. Kesey had driven cross-country to New York City with a friend to see the Broadway adaptation of his novel,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, s
tarring Kirk Douglas. While in New York, he was curious to see what the World's Fair was about and drove out to Queens to glimpse the pavilions being erected. “Wow, this is spectacular,” Kesey said, suitably impressed by the oddly shaped buildings in Flushing Meadow. “We're gonna want to come see this.” Next time, though, he thought, he would bring some friends.

As his car sped westbound on a Texas highway, Kesey heard news that would erase all the other events of the day. On a campaign trip to Dallas, in preparation for the upcoming 1964 election, America's young, charismatic president was assassinated as he sat in the backseat of a black open-air limousine, next to his wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, while their car passed through Dealey Plaza in the bright midday sun. Although doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital reportedly fought to resuscitate him, nothing could be done for the forty-six-year-old president. “Everywhere you went you looked in people's eyes and they all felt the same thing,” Kesey said. “It wasn't just sadness, it was the loss of an innocence, the loss of the idea that good is always going to prevail.”

Back in Flushing Meadow, after Cronkite informed the nation shortly after 2:30 p.m. eastern standard time that the President of the United States was dead, Moses released a short statement in honor of the commander in chief who had visited the Fairgrounds just twelve months earlier. “The World's Fair had counted confidently on the international leadership, support, and encouragement of President Kennedy,” wrote Moses, who sent both staff and workers home for the weekend. “We shall have to go on without his support but with his inspiration ever in mind.”

The World's Fair, which Kennedy had promised to attend, would open five months to the day after his assassination. To millions of Americans, whether they loved or hated Kennedy, his shocking murder—and the eventual official and questionable government explanation of it—was undeniable evidence that something had gone terribly wrong with the country. What they did not and could not know was that the events of November 22, 1963, were just the beginning: An era in the nation's history was over, and the new one that had just begun would prove to be far beyond the imagination of most Americans.