GLR July-August 2024

ESSAY

Almost Famous A NDREW H OLLERAN

T HE HISTORY of New York City in the 1970s is now something of a cottage industry. It’s not just Andy Warhol; it’s memoirs like that of Patti Smith about her friend Robert Mapplethorpe and his mentor Sam Wagstaff; or the recent biogra phy of Candy Darling; or the fact that the pho tographs of Peter Hujar are on exhibit at the Venice Biennale. The epicenter of this cultural era may remain Warhol and the Factory, but now less famous figures are being given their due. The latest in this excavation of the late ’60s and ’70s demi monde comes from Guy Trebay, who’s now a reporter for the “Styles” section of The New York Times covering men’s fashion. The subtitle of his memoir ( Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York ) captures how the ’70s are now viewed—as New York City on the skids. When President Ford refused the city’s request for a financial bail-out in 1975, the headline on the front page of The Daily News was “ FORD TO CITY : DROP DEAD .” Crime was up, the middle class was fleeing to the suburbs, and Johnny Carson seemed to take special pleas ure in the city’s incompetence in plowing the streets after a snowfall, before The Tonight Show moved to Los Angeles. But down to sift through the ashes for a suitcase that once belonged to his mother. Born in modest circumstances, Trebay moves from the Bronx to the Gold Coast after his father—an account manager for Parade magazine—develops a cologne called Hawaiian Surf whose popularity makes the family rich enough to move into the sort of mansion that inspired F. Scott Fitzger ald to write The Great Gatsby . It’s a milieu that Trebay’s adored mother knows well, because she grew up on one of those es tates, but only because her father was “the help”—the chauf feur of an heir to the old Marshall Fields department store fortune. Trebay describes running wild while his family lived on Long Island, the son of two parents he describes as “children raising children”: taking drugs, letting his hair grow long, los ing his virginity to a girl at fifteen in her father’s car, and shoplifting “anything that was not nailed down.” Every Christ mas morning the family would open presents and then go to the Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance was set in 1970s New York. rents were low and eccentrics abounded, and all sorts of art was being created—a heady time in which to come of age, despite the poverty and perils that make Trebay’s an al most Dickensian saga. The book opens, however, more like Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. The narrator has returned to a once grand house on the North Shore of Long Island that has burned

airport and fly off to places like Antigua. But after a close friend of his father swindles him out of his fortune, the family has to move back to their point of origin: the Bronx. Still, it’s the pre mature death of his mother while still in her forties that shatters the family. Trebay drops out of high school and moves into the city—the only part of New York he can afford, the South Bronx. The Bronx in a way haunts this book, a place where great wealth (the north part) and great poverty (the south) are reflected in very different racial demographics. But it also has affordable rents that allow Trebay to commute to Manhattan and search for what he really wants to do in life. At this point, Manhattan is still a curious mix of the ’50s and ’60s. You can still eat at Chock Full o’ Nuts and the Horn & Hardart cafeteria. There are still old movie stars like Garbo walking the streets. Trebay writes a fan letter to Anita Loos ( Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ) and is invited over for tea. He gets to know artists like Ray Johnson, “the founder of the New York Correspondence School, who signed his relentless mail-art pieces using, among other aliases, the name Cora Spondant.” In a string of bookstores on 4th Avenue south of 14th Street called Book Row, he discovers books by Gore Vidal. He’s Twenties, where his job is to serve nonalcoholic drinks, empty ashtrays, and refill the bowl of fruit and nuts for people who are mostly on drugs. The Tenth Floor contains a crowd he’s never seen before: “slick and confident professional gay men who obviously had money. Pines queens, they were called, after the prosperous gay summer colony on Fire Island ... a sharp contrast to the penni less bohemians we were running around with—not least be cause many had taken up bodybuilding, still a relatively new phenomenon at the time.” But this is not his scene. For one thing, he’s ten years younger than they are. For another, he con siders himself a “nerd preppy” who doesn’t fit in with the Fac tory crowd either. He gets a job as a busboy at Warhol’s favorite hangout, Max’s Kansas City, but quits after “an unappetizing glimpse of the famous back room, which to my eyes was less a bohemian paradise than a plywood-paneled high school cafete ria packed with free-loaders desperately sponging off Andy.” Nor, when he gets a job at Warhol’s Interview , is he “swept up into Andy Warhol’s glamorous coterie, as I wished to be.” Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, he pops up in scenes with people more friends with Candy Darling, Holly Wood lawn, and Jackie Curtis, who flock to a thrift shop on Second Avenue named Bogie’s to find their outfits. Back in the Bronx, he makes jewelry and handbags that are bought by Henri Bendel and Bonwit Teller. He writes scripts for videos that rarely get made and gets a job at a dance club on the tenth floor of a nondescript building in the West

Guy Trebay captures the essen ti al things about the sexual playground that wasManha tt anduring the transi ti on from DoomtoGli tt er.

July–August 2024

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