The Purple Decades Page 3

  Make it—now!

  That cry, that cry, burning like valvulitis in so many hearts in New York tonight …

  Bob and Spike are the folk heroes of every social climber who ever hit New York. What Juarez was to the Mexican mestizo—what John L. Sullivan was to the Boston Irish—what Garibaldi was to the Sardinian farmers—what the Beatles are to the O-level-dropout £8-a-week office boys of England—what Antonino Rocca is to the Garment Center aviator Puerto Ricans of New York—what Moishe Dayan is to the kibbutzim shock workers of the Shephelah—all these things are Bob and Spike to the social climbers of New York.

  In a blaze of publicity they illuminated the secret route: collecting wacked-out art. It was a tricky business. Art has been a point of entry into New York Society for seventy-five years or more. Duveen, of course, made millions selling cultural immortality to John D. Rockefeller and Henry Clay Frick in the form of Old Masters. After World War I the Protestant elite turned to Recent Masters as well. The Museum of Modern Art, after all, was not founded by intellectual revolutionaries. It was founded in John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s living room, with Goodyears, Blisses, and Crowinshields in attendance. They founded the museum in order to import to New York the cultural cachet of the European upper classes, who were suddenly excited over the Impressionists and post-Impressionist masters such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque. In either case, Old Masters or New, the route was through art that had been certified in Europe.

  Bob Scull had started out collecting Renaissance bronzes, but he quickly found out two things: (1) after World War II the prices of certified art, even in an esoteric field like Renaissance bronzes, were rising at a rate that made serious collecting out of the question; (2) the social world of certified art, even modern art, was a closed shop controlled—despite a dazzling aura of cultural liberalism—by the same old Protestant elite.

  Then, in the late 1950’s, a great thing happened: Pop Art; and pop publicity for Pop Art. In the financial world they speak of the tens of millions a man would be worth today had he invested $10,000 in IBM in 1926. But who ever has the daring or the foresight to do these things at the time? Bob Scull. Socially, Scull achieved a stock coup of IBM magnitude by plunging on the work of a painter, Jasper Johns, in 1959 and 1960. Rather amateurish stuff it was, too, renderings of flags, targets, numbers—and two bronzed ale cans. How they sniggered over that! But Johns became the “axe man for abstract expressionism,” as Scull likes to put it. The ten-year-rule of abstract expressionism, which had seemed like the final style, was over, and in came a new movement, with Johns and Robert Rauschenberg as the key figures. Two years later, in 1962, it picked up a name: Pop Art.

  Abstract expressionism was so esoteric it had all but defied exploitation by the press. But all the media embraced Pop Art with an outraged, scandalized, priapic delight. Art generally became the focus of social excitement in New York. Art openings began to take over from theater openings as the place where the chic, the ambitious, and the beautiful congregated. Art museum committees replaced charity committees as the place where ambitious newcomers could start scoring socially.

  By 1961 the Sculls were being invited everywhere. “It was a whole thing going on,” Scull told me, “where we got invitations from important people we didn’t even know. You feel a little strange—you know, you go to some famous person’s to a party or a dinner and you don’t even know them, but you figure some friend of yours asked them to invite you, and then you get there and you find out there’s nobody you know there. They just invited you. And everybody is very friendly. It’s great. They come up and embrace you like you’re the oldest friends in the world.

  “I’ll never forget once in Washington, at a gallery, Dean Acheson was there and I heard that he wanted to meet me. He came all the way over and shook hands with me very warmly and congratulated me on my collection—the whole thing was just as if we had gone to school together or something. Acheson—he was always practically a god to me, you know? One of the great leaders. And I walked in and here he walks all the way across the room and says he had looked forward to meeting me. And all the time I had always thought there were two worlds, this world full of all these people who did these great things, all these great, faultless people, and then this other world the rest of us were in.”

  From hoi polloi to haute monde—just so!

  The success of Bob’s original plunge, investing in twenty of Johns’s works at one clip like he did, might be called luck. But the way Bob and Spike traversed that difficult interval from hoi to haute proved they had something else: Fifth Avenue guts, east side of the Park.

  Throughout the period of transition—how they sniggered!—Bob and Spike were blessed with that gyroscope a few lucky people get built into them growing up in New York. It is an attitude, a Sat’dy aftuh-noon Weltanschauung, that always keeps them steady somehow. It is the cynicism of the cab driver with his cap over one eye. It is the fatalism of those old guys who sit out in front of the stores in the Lower East Side on Saturday afternoon in old bentwood chairs of the 1930’s drugstore variety and just survey the scene with half a smile on, as if to say, look around you, this town is a nuthouse to start with, right? So don’t get your bowels in an uproar. Relax. Enjoy.

  There was, for example, the ticklish business—how they sniggered—of Bob learning how to dress. As I said, Scull is emerging from the 57th Street Biggie phase. Somebody turned him on to the big time in men’s fashion, the English tailor shops on Savile Row, which is in the sort of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue area of London. The Savile Row shops still like to maintain the impression that they are some kind of private clubs and that you have to be recommended by an old customer. O.K., said Bob Scull, enjoy, enjoy, and he had two wealthy English friends, Harry Lawton and Murray Leonard, recommend him. All the same he can’t resist it; he has to swing from the heels. So he walks into this place, amid all the linenfold paneling and engraved glass with all the “by appointment” crests, HRH King George, The Prince of Wales, etc., and a man about 55 in a nailhead worsted suit with a step-collared vest comes up and Scull announces that Harry Lawton and Murray Leonard recommended him and he wants … a sport jacket made of the material they make riding pinks out of.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” says the man, turning his mouth down and putting a cataractic dimness into his eyes as if he hopes to God he didn’t hear correctly.

  “You know that material they make the riding pinks out of, those coats when they go hunting, riding to the hounds and everything, that material, they call it riding pink.”

  “I am familiar with that, yes, sir.”

  “Well, I want a sport jacket made out of that.”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible, sir.”

  “You don’t have the material?”

  “It’s not that—”

  “I know where I can get you the material,” says Scull. “There’s this place, Hunt & Winterbotham.”

  Now the man looks at Scull with his lips tight and tilts his head back and opens his nostrils wide as if his eyes are located somewhere up his nose. Telling a Savile Row tailor that there is this place, Hunt & Winterbotham, is like telling a Seventh Avenue coffee shop that there is this thing called a cheese Danish.

  “We are aware of the availability of the material, sir,” he says. “It’s just that we don’t do that sort of thing.”

  “You can make a sport jacket, can’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “And you can get the riding pink.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then why can’t you get the riding pink and make a sport jacket out of it?”

  “As I said, sir, I’m afraid we don’t …”

  “ … do that sort of thing,” says Scull, finishing the sentence.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, all I know is, Harry Lawton and Murray Leonard said you could take care of me.”

  “Oh, you come very highly recommended, sir, it’s just that we …”

  “ … I know …”
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  It is at this point, if not before, that Savile Row tailors are used to seeing Americans, 1960’s style, at any rate, bow out, shuffling backwards like they are leaving the throne room, thoroughly beaten, cowed, humiliated, hangdog over the terrible gaffe they have committed—a sport jacket out of traditional riding pink—but Bob Scull just starts in again, still exuberant, smiling, happy to be on Savile Row in Harry Lawton and Murray Leonard country, and he says, “All right, let’s go over this thing again. You can make a sport jacket and you can get the material …” They are so amazed to see an American still standing there and talking that they go ahead and agree to do it, and they take his measurements.

  A week or so later Scull comes back in for the first fitting, and they bring out the riding pink, with the body of the coat cut and basted up and one arm basted on, the usual first fitting, and they put it on him—and Scull notices a funny thing. Everything has stopped in the shop. There, in the dimness of the woodwork and the bolt racks, the other men are looking up toward him, and in the back, from behind curtains, around door edges, from behind tiers of cloth, are all these eyes, staring.

  Scull motions back toward all the eyes and asks his man, Nostrils, “Hey, what are they doing?”

  Nostrils leans forward and says, very softly and very sincerely, “They’re rooting for you, sir.”

  Enjoy! Enjoy!

  Scull is so pleased with this, he goes back and starts shaking hands with everybody in the place, right down to the Cypriot seamstresses who made buttonholes and can’t speak any English.

  “I got news for you,” says Scull, by way of congratulating those who are happy and consoling those who are desolate over the riding pink sports jacket, “you’re going to be very proud of this jacket when we get through.”

  Later on, as Scull tells it, he saw one of his friends and said, “Well, I went to your tailor, and I want to thank you, because they made me a very nice jacket.”

  “Oh, that’s very nice. I’m very glad.”

  “You know, it was funny. They didn’t want to make it at first. I walked in and I said, ‘I want a sport jacket made out of riding pink’ and …”

  “You what! Bob—you didn’t use my name, did you …”

  Afterwards Bob Scull tells me, “It’s funny. The English treat their tailors like they were clergymen. Yeah. And their clergymen like they were tailors.”

  Spike’s parents had money, and, if the truth were known, helped set Bob up in the taxi business in 1948. But as for social cachet—well, Spike had to learn all the subtleties of chic the same way Bob did, namely, the hard way—how they sniggered—but she always showed class, in the New York street sense of that term; moxie. When the going got tough, Spike just bulled it through and made it work. In the midst of the social galas attendant upon the opening of the Venice Biennale in 1966, I saw Ethel Scull stroll at twilight through Venice, heading for Countess Anna Camerana’s in a dress of silver gossamer see-through by St. Laurent and silver shoes. The citizens of Venice and the tourists of all nations, including a man whose monocle fell out of his skull, stared bug-eyed at this vision of Scientific Cinderella chic with her head held high and one perfect rose in her hair. She topped this off by standing on one foot and hoisting the other one up and rubbing it and delivering the last word on strolls through Venice at twilight: “I got news for you, this girl’s got sore feet.”

  Bob hasn’t lost the common touch, either. Today he has 130 cabs in his fleet, the Super Operating Corporation, which is $2,625,000 worth of medallions alone, and a big taxi insurance business involving a lot of fleets. He goes up there every day to his garage in the Bronx, at 144th Street and Gerard Avenue, in the Mott Haven section, about ten blocks south of Yankee Stadium, and he deals directly with the drivers right there in the garage, guys like Jakey, The Owl, Cream Cheese, Moon and this guy who used to be there, Do-Nut or whatever they called him.

  You know what would be funny? It would be funny to pick up Liza or Philip or Nicole or Peggy—that’s Mrs. Peggy Guggenheim of New York and Venice, who has one of the world’s greatest private art collections—or Chester or Alex or Bob or Dean or any of the other wonderful people who make up the art world set Robert Scull now moves in—it would be funny to pick up some of these people and suddenly sit them down in the grease moss at the Scull garage in the Bronx and let them try to handle a New York taxi operation for about one hulking hour. Never mind the heavy problems. Just imagine Philip or Alex or Ave dealing with a minor problem, like Do-Nut.

  Philip! Ave! Do-Nut was a driver, a huge guy, and every morning he started out from the garage with a big brown paper bag full of donuts and pastries on the seat beside him. He kept on eating the day away and getting bigger and bigger and Scull tried everything. He had them push the seat in Do-Nut’s cab back so far, to make room for his belly, it got so the only fares he could pick up were infants and midgets. Then they took the padding off the seats so he was back up against the metal plates. And then one day it was all over. He managed to get into the seat, but he couldn’t turn the wheel. It would turn about 15 degrees and then just lodge in his belly.

  “Bob, I got news for you,” says Do-Nut, there behind the wheel. “This don’t make it.”

  “You want to know something?” says Scull. “This is the day I dreaded.”

  “Wait a minute,” says Do-Nut, “look at this. If I hold my breath, I can turn it.”

  “Yeah,” says Scull, “but what about when you let it out.”

  Do-Nut exhales and the wheel disappears like a strawberry under a gush of whipped cream. Do-Nut looks up at Scull. Scull shrugs, pulling his shoulders up over his ears like a turtle, in a primordial gesture of the New York streets, the Hopeless Shrug, which says, What can I do after I’ve said I’m sorry. The guy had eaten himself out of the profession.

  Scull still has to shake his head over that. Those guys. But the great thing is, the men, Scull says, the men … “generally speaking they’re very proud of my art kick. They’re proud that their boss is something special. They want a boss they can look up to. That’s class.”

  Bob’s art kick, as I say, was tricky business. The economics of collecting the latest thing in art, as Bob has been doing, are irrational. A collector can count on the latest work by almost any of the current avant-garde artists to depreciate more drastically than a new car; it will lose one third to one half its value the moment it is bought. The explanation gets at the heart of the whole business of collecting the latest, the most avant-garde, the most wacked-out in painting. The price of, say, a new Lichtenstein or a new Johns or a new Stella is not determined by market demand in the usual sense (i.e., a mass of undifferentiated consumers). Aside from museums, the market is, in effect, some ten or twenty collectors, most of whom are striving to become Bobs and Spikes, although they would bridle if it were ever put to them just that way. The game, when one is collecting the latest thing—as opposed to certified Old or Recent Masters—is to get one’s hands on just that: the latest thing by a promising avant-garde artist and, preferably, to be publicized for purchasing it. One has … the new Lichtenstein! the new Poons! the new Rauschenberg! the new Dine! the new Oldenburg! The competition to buy it hot from the studio is what drives the price up in the galleries. Once that little game is played out, the re-sale value may be but a fraction. The galleries dealing in the hottest avant-garde artists are driven to frantic juggling to make sure each of the handful of players wins a bout every now and then and remains interested. Collector X got the first shot at the last hot one—so Y gets first shot at the next one; and so on.

  So Bob Scull got an idea. Why not get to the artists before their work reaches the gallery even? Why not do even better than that—why not discover them?

  One evening a friend of Bob’s, a psychiatrist, said to him: “Bob, did it ever occur to you that when you commission young artists to create works of art, you may be influencing the course of art history?”

  Patron. Shaper of history. If the truth be known, it had already crossed
Bob’s mind that he had influenced art history by buying twenty works by Johns in 1959 and 1960. Before that, Johns was just some kind of odd man out in the art world, some guy from South Carolina trying to bug the establishment with his fey, representational rendition of banal objects. The fact that he was actually being collected —well, that’s what started Pop Art. Yes, that thought had crossed Bob’s mind. But why not go even one step further—discover the greats of tomorrow yourself and commission the future of art history. Stalk their very studios. That was how Bob ran into Walter De Maria.

  It was a Saturday. Another Culture Sabbath. Bob Scull was walking down Madison Avenue, and you know, it’s funny on Saturday in New York, especially on one of those Indian summer days—God, somehow Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather, all of the antique shops on Madison Avenue, with a little blaze of golden ormolu here and a little oxblood-red leathery marquetry there, and the rugs hung up in the second-floor display windows—rich!—a Bakhtiari with a little pale yellow setting off the red—and the galleries, God, gallery after gallery, with the pristine white walls of Culture, the black wooden floors, and the Culture buds, a little Renoirish softness in the autumn faces.

  Through the window of this particular gallery, Scull can see two girls who are tending the place, and one is sitting with her legs crossed, a short skirt on, great pre-Raphaelite hair, the perfect Culture bud, and it is not that he wants to make a pass or anything, it is just part of this beautiful atmosphere of Culture in New York, Indian summer, Culture Sabbath, all the rest—so he goes in. It is just a pleasure to go on in there and let the whole thing just sort of seep through you like hot coffee.