Al Koblin, Night Bartender and former owner of the Lion’s Head, 1966 to 1984

Al Koblin, Night Bartender and former owner of the Lion’s Head, 1966 to 1984, interviewed by Dylan Foley, January 2009  

The Lion's Head was the fabled Greenwich Village bar that was located on Christopher Street. It was open from 1966 to 1996 and was patronized by such famous New York journalists as Pete Hamill, Dennis Duggan and Jimmy Breslin. The bar witnessed the Stonewall Riots in 1969 and was a headquarters of Norman Mailer's second mayoral bid with Breslin. The bar was famous for its Jewish drunks, Irish lovers and Italian intellectuals.The physical bar later became the Kettle of Fish, the old bohemian bar which moved from another part of the Village. It is now patronized by NYU students.

Al Koblin was a bartender then a half-owner of the Lion's Head from 1966 to 1984.

Al Koblin: I’m from Massachusetts. I got to New York in 1953 when I was in the Army and just stayed there.

Dylan Foley: How did you wind up at the Figaro Café in Greenwich Village?

AK: When I got out of the Army I worked in advertising for years and that sucked. There was a recession, what they called the Eisenhower recession in ‘58 or ‘59. I had started to hang out in Greenwich Village. I took a job as a dishwasher at the Figaro, then made sandwiches and became the manager. I was there for about five years. I did other stuff--off-Broadway. I was a stage manager for a few things. [Editor's note: Cafe Figaro was a famous Village coffee shop on MacDougal and Bleecker Streets, which was open from the 1950's to the early aughts.]

I’m not that familiar with the San Remo. That’s where the grown ups went, the big boys, guys a couple of years older than me. They were harder drinkers longer than me and got prettier women than me, and things like that. I was too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie. I was in that in-between Generation. [Editor's note: The San Remo was a mob-owned bar, also on Mcdougal and Bleecker that was colonized by intellectuals and writers.]

There was a woman who used to hang out there named Winnie.

DF: What was the story of Gregory Corso screwing her on the table at the San Remo?

AK: During hours, during some late night bacchannal. Winnie was very heavyset big and fat black woman, famous for having gotten on the 6th Avenue bus and the driver just drove her to Bellevue because she was completely naked. I remember walking into the Kettle of Fish. Winnie was sitting there and took a liking to me. She grabbed me around the waist and started to pull me towards her.  “I’m going to take you home with me.” I saw this woman I knew, who was not my wife. I said, “Not now. I’ve got to go meet my wife.”

Winnie said, “I don’t fuck around with married men,” and let me go. Winnie was actually a lovely person when she was not whacked out of her head. She had a smooth complexion and a lovely singing voice.

DF: Did you drink at the Kettle of Fish?

AK: That was more where I drank than the San Remo. Before I got there, Maxwell Bodenheim drank there. A lot of the guys who drank at that bar worked as furniture movers.

DF: What was the vibe at the Kettle of Fish?

AK: Like at most bars, it was the booze. That’s what the Lion’s Head was like. It wasn’t about wit or literary accomplishment or even getting laid. It was more about booze. The Kettle was like that, a place to hang out. [Dermot McEvoy] calls it Hogan’s Moat.

I started at the Lion’s Head as a bartender for six years, then I was a 50 percent owner for the next 13.

[The Lion's Head] started on Hudson Street. It was owned by Leon Seidel. He took on Wes Joyce as a partner. Leon died. Wes was not a good businessman He had substance-abuse problems that were very expensive. Finally, the place was going to get shut down by the IRS or the state tax police, or something like that.

In 1971, I finally quit being a bartender. I was a month away from turning 40. If I was a bartender at 40, I would be one at 50 or 60. I became Wes’ half partner, then managing partner for 13 years.

It was going to cost me $15,000 for 50 percent. Bartenders in those days kept lots of money in their mattresses because they didn’t have the same tax problems you have now. Now the government mandates a certain amount be held in lieu of tips. In those days, you’d declare what you wanted. You’d lie about it.

Some local guy  lent me $5000 with no vig. [The big is the interest on a street loan from a loan shark.] There were semi-hood guys we knew from the neighborhood. These were petty thieves and minor criminals…one I knew from Figaro was named Mark.

The lease was about to expire 1984 a Jewish mobster’s widow’s rent  that was $1000. It was a 500 percent increase

(Last night at the Lion's Head, 1996 (Chang W. Lee, NYT)

DF: What was the environment like at the Lion’s Head?

AK: I was the first night bartender. We had a little U-shaped, copper-topped bar, with room for one man to turn around in.
We had a pretty empty bar. Very few people came around. The only customers we had that were notable were the Clancy Brothers. They were the first that hung out there.

There was this guy who would come in around midnight, have a few drinks and would leave. He turned out to be a rewrite man for the New York Post, Normand Poirier. One night he said, “I like this place.” Sure enough, Vic Zeigel started to show up, Larry Merchant and Pete Hamill, guys from the Daily News and from the Herald Tribune, like Jim Flanagan, Warren Berry and the Mancini twins. All these newspapermen started showing up, as well as the writer Dave Markson. The agent Knox Berger started coming in. That’s how this whole bunch of people started coming in. Mostly newspapermen, but sometimes David Markson would bring in people like Kurt Vonnegut or Bill Gaddis.

Somebody wanted their book jacket up on the wall, and that started the whole tradition of book jackets up on the wall. By the time I was the owner of the place, people I never saw in the place would come in with a book jacket for the wall. That’s what writers are like.


(Bartender Tommy Butler at the Lion's Head)

Like Freddie Exeley…whenever he was in town, he’d come to the Lion’s Head. He was a terrible drunk. Exeley came in when I was still a bartender. He turned out to be a virulent anti-Semite, and I happened to be Jewish. Freddie couldn’t hold his liquor. He was hostile to people at the bar and to me as the bartender. He said to me once, “Come outside and I’ll whip your skinny Jewish ass.” He was a good friend of Markson’s. [Markson was also Jewish.]

(Denis Duggan, Judy Joice, Pete Hamill, Frank McCourt at a 1996 Barnes and Noble celebration)

DF: Do you remember Anita Steckel and Alice Denham?

AK: You can’t forget Anita. I told Dave Markson that he’s more proud for Alice Denham saying he’s the best stud she ever knew than any of the books he wrote. Mailer came into the Lion’s Head a few times, but he was by no means a regular. There was a great fight…there was another bartender, Mike Riordon, a Boston boy like me [Reardon marries a Jewish woman…most handsome Jew in New York.]

One weekend night, Mike and I were behind the bar. There was this guy named John Culver, this senator from Iowa, came into the bar. Used to be a fullback at Harvard. He was in there and so was Joe Torres and Pete Hamill, and this visiting writer from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jack McKinney, and Joe Flaherty. These are a bunch of big beefy guys, not that Jose was Irish. For some reason, Culver and Flaherty were getting into a verbal head butting. It was turning into a real mix up, then it started being a punch up. Hamill was in it, Jose was in it. I knew it was serious because Jack McKinney was at the end of the bar. He took his false teeth out, put them on the bar and went to join the fight. Mike Reardon and I were standing behind the bar. We weren’t going to break the thing up. There were 2000-lbs. of beef there. Mike turned to me and said, “Who’s the big guy?” I said, “That’s Culver, the liberal senator from Iowa.  Reardon said, “Liberal? What are the conservatives like out there?”

Like most bar fights, it just broke up. People realize, “I’m going to get hurt if this keeps up.” Most times, people are standing around laughing. That’s enough to break up a fight.

I would see guys, regular customers, come in  to meet a woman at the bar. Their eyeballs would light up. To them, booze was more important than going home with a woman. Instead of just having another drink or two, and saying “Hey Honey, let’s go,” they’d want to hang out ‘til four in the morning. At that time, they’d be useless and the woman would be long gone. What you see at 2, 3 and 4 in the morning is really a phantasmagoria. People who start as Eagle Scouts go into a Jekyll and Hyde transformation.

DF: How do you think drinking  has changed in America since the 1950s?

AK: A lot of the guys like Flaherty and Hamill, they knew they were going to die. That’s what happened to Normand Poirier. Normand became a real heavy drinker. Normand had been told, “Quit or die.” He didn’t  quit, so he died.

DF: What was your view of the poet Joel Oppenheimer?

AK: He was a sad drunk, but everybody loved Joel. He became a very good friend of mine. He was a true alcoholic. He once had a headshrinker tell him, “You are not going to quit drinking, but every time you have a drink, write it down. He had this notebook. He used to drink Heaven Hill bourbon with a beer back, and he’d write it down. It didn’t cut down on his drinking. He finally went on the wagon.

One of the wittiest guys at the Lion’s Head was not a writer. His name was Jack Cullen, from Brooklyn. He worked at Todd Shipyards in Hoboken. One afternoon, a woman came into the bar and asked, “Is this the place that is frequented by writers with drinking problems?” Jack said, “No, ma’am, they are drinkers with writing problems.” This line, I’ll credit to me because it was me. We often had these blue-haired ladies come by from Westchester County who spoke with vaguely British accents.

“What type of clientele comes to your establishment?” she asked.
I looked down the bar and saw Liam Clancy, Tony Mancini and Joel Oppenheimer. You know the old clichés? The drunken Irishman, the Italian lover and the Jewish intellectual. I said, “Ma’am, It’s a strong ethnic mix. We have an Irish lover, an Italian intellectual and a Jewish drunk.”

DF: What was your view of the Clancy brothers?

AK: I never saw a church-going attitude among the Clancy Brothers. Paddy was the best of the Clancy’s, in terms of getting along with people. Tommy could be truculent. Liam made some anti-Zionist comments.  I almost got into a fight with Liam when I asked, “Which side were the Irish on during World War II?”

DF: Did you know Frank McCourt?

He was a quiet, nice guy with a difficult first wife.

My wife used to work at the Bells of Hell for Malachy as a waitress.

When I came to Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, a couple of black guys walking up Sullivan or Thompson Streets, it wasn’t a good idea. The interracial dating made them crazy.

DF: What was the reputation of the bar Romero’s?

AK: A white woman could walk in there with a black guy.

There is a great line about Johnny Romero, who was quite spiffy and had a haughty attitude, and spoke with a cultured accent. There was a black writer who hung out there, Eli Waldron. One day, Johnny walks into his own place and Waldron was there. Somebody looks up and says, “My Johnny, don’t we look continental?” Waldron said, “And we know what continent that is.”

Romero’s was one of those lower-depths places. Next door to the Lion’s Head was the 55. The 55 was truly like something from Shanghai in the 1920s. They had one or two deaths there of methadone overdoses. You’d see all kinds of crazy things happening in the 55. It was the counterpoint to the Lion’s Head, which was a genteel, middle-class, mostly white place. The 55 was the lower depths.

Eve Ensler worked at the Lion’s Head as a waitress. Jessica Lange was the third-best-looking waitress at the Lion’s Head…that was my line. She was a very pretty, quiet girl.

DF: What was Anita Steckel’s place at the bar?

 
AK: Anita was a pain in the ass. She was loud and flamboyant.
The Lion’s Head was a male chauvinistic place. If a woman went there, they were there to get laid. There were very few women who…

Guys would stand around, and drink and laugh and argue. Women were really supposed to sit primly by and wait for the guy to say, “Okay, let’s go.” It was pretty male chauvinistic. I thought of hiring a woman or a black guy for behind the bar…it wasn’t a good idea.

The bar was not specifically racist. Amiri Baraka would stop by.
[run in with LeRoi Jones…playing ball at the hardtop at Horatio and Hudson Street. Lion’s Head team used to play against the poet-painter-hippie guys. LeRoi was a good ball player…he dove on `the asphalt…he wouldn’t talk to me for months.]

Nick Tosches was a strange guy…we didn’t know he had all those books in him.

The same with Dermot McEvoy. I said this to Dermot. You sat around all these years, sipping your Guinness and not saying a word. What you were doing, you were not supposed to be doing in a bar. You were thinking. You were drinking it all in.

DF:  What keeps a great bar going all these years, a 30-year run?

AK: The myth among bars is that it is the bartender. You see that movie with Tom Cruise, with bartenders doing their shtick? Nah. You could have robots tending bar. It’s the people. You’re there to serve them drinks and to collect the tips. If they’re regular customers, you buy ‘em back a drink and they’ll feel good. We had perhaps the most welcome guy…there was a pilot for Aer Lingus. Dick Quinn was his name. Everybody loved him. He’d play the penny whistle or strum on a guitar. What was great about the place was the mixture of various types. The Brits had a word for it, fug. A good pub has a fug going. Often at night in the Lion’s head, you could feel that going. People were standing around and there was a rosy glow. I remember one night, an impromptu singalong started. It was Dick Quinn playing the penny whistle, Liam Clancy playing his guitar and Dave Amram was playing his horn. Then this kid Jerry Rosen, who played violin for the Detroit Symphony, took out his fiddle. You had Irish folksingers, a jazz musician and a symphony fiddle player all doing Irish songs.

DF: Could you tell me about the longshoreman, novelist and political operative Joe Flaherty?

AK: He lived across the courtyard from me on Barrow Street. He was a good guy to have around. He was very funny, very passionate about his beliefs. He was articulate them. He was a good arguer and a horse player, which was a big thing among a bunch of us. Joe was a hale fellow, well met.  He had prostate cancer.

DF: Were you involved in Norman Mailer’s mayoral campaign?

AK: The Lion’s Head was one of the centers of the campaign. [I’d show up at 8am and go to work.]

Bella Abzug. Her campaign manager was Doug Ireland. One day, Doug came into the Lion’s head almost doubled over. “I was having an argument with Bella in a cab and she punched me.” Bella slugged him in the stomach.

Ed Koch didn’t drink. The Village Independent Democrats  were cheap…14 people sitting around and all of them wanting separate check. They were a waitress’s nightmare.

DF: Can you think of any other drinkers at the Lion’s Head?

AK: Wilfred Sheed. He wrote some great criticism. He had a wife who was Southern trash, who thought she was uppercrust. There was also Tom Paxton.

The Painter Sherman Drexler, interviewed in Newark, NJ, in October 2009

(Sherman Drexler in the 1950's)

Sherman Drexler was a young painter when he started hanging out at the Cedar Tavern on University Place in Greenwich Village in the 1950's. With his good looks and easygoing manner, Drexler quickly became friends with Elaine deKooning and Franz Kline, the Abstract Expressionist painters on the cusp of art world stardom. Sherman himself remained a figurative painter.

Sherman Drexler was married to Rosalyn Drexler, a fierce woman artist who painted, as well as writing plays and for television.  Rosalyn Drexler was one of the first woman Pop Artists.

Sherman Drexler died of cancer in Newark in 2014.

For the interview, I met Sherman in Newark, where he had moved to with Rosalyn Drexler twenty years before from their residence in Manhattan. We talked over tapas. “Moving to Newark was the biggest mistake of my life,” chuckled Sherman. He was an engaging, courtly interview subject.

DYLAN FOLEY: How did you wind up hanging out at the Cedar Tavern?

SHERMAN DREXLER: We were living in Washington Heights at the time. I worked with a playwright called Don Peterson, who wrote a play “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?” that I think Al Pacino was in. His wife was an art critic and painter named Valerie Peterson. She introduced me to Elaine de Kooning. It was an era when everybody was open and interested in everybody else. If an art book was mentioned, you had to go get it. What happens now, the young people have no interest and little history.

I became friendly with Franz Kline and Elaine de Kooning, as well as a host of younger painters. Bud Hopkinson has became a UFO [fanatic]. He hypnotized people he works with who claimed they have been abducted.

We looked on de Kooning, Pollock and Kline as they elder wisemen. It was great to see them at a point before they exploded.

It was a macho environment.. Rosalyn had a funny encounter with a Greek artist named Aristodimos Kaldis.  He was like Zorba the Greek, a great storyteller.  He had hair growing from his nose. His shirt was always open. He liked to come on to the girls like a mad uncle. He once tried to kiss Roslyn on the lips and at the same time tried to feel her right breast. He was close enough where both things were going to happen. She turned her face and said, “You can have the breast but not the lips.” That broke everyone up, including Kaldis. Her thing was that it was the lesser evil. Kissing him, she thought., would lead to death. He didn’t wash too much.

(Sherman Drexler)

DF: Elaine de Kooning was having an affair with the gallery owner Charles Egan, who represented Willem de Kooning. Could you tell me about Elaine and his wife Betsy Egan arm wrestling?

SD:I met the wife and she was strong and tough. She and Elaine immediately became friends when their arms strained against each other.  [Betsy Egan] was sure she was going to obliterate Elaine, who was secretly in good shape, despite the drinking and smoking.

I had promised Elaine, if she could stop smoking, any painting of mine she wanted. She said, “You’ve lost your best painting. She could stop drinking, but she could never stop smoking. She died of lung cancer.

DF: Did you know the composer Morton Feldman at the Cedar Tavern?

SD: He was supersmart. He could be obnoxious. He and Philip Guston were very close, and he turned against Guston. That was unforgivable.

 (A Sherman Drexler nude)

DF: Please tell me about Fielding Dawson?

SD: I like that he idolized Franz Kline. Kline was as admirable a guy as I had ever met. He once admired one of Rosalyn’s sculptures. He said, “I’m taking this. I’ll give you something of mine. He gave us one of his drawings on a telephone book page. We needed to stay in Provincetown one summer, so we sold it for 700 bucks. It paid for the whole summer. Now just for the sentiment, I wish I’d kept it.

Kline’s liver was gone The doctors said “No more hard liquor, so he switched to jugs of wine. In his mind, that is not hard liquor. He really couldn’t stop drinking. He’d been a baseball player as a kid.

Did I tell you the story about Pollock attacking him? Pollock lifted a table full of glasses and dumped it into Kline’s lap. Kline said, “Don’t do that.” Pollock said, “You want to fucking fight?” They started rolling on the floor. Pollock realized that though Kline was smaller, he was stronger. It looked like they were trying to choke each other. Pollock said, “Not so hard, Franz.”  That was told to me by Tom Hess. That I didn’t witness. It was not so hard to make Kline laugh. They put their arms around each other and went back to eating.

I knew Ruth Kligman, also. She lives on 14^th Street, in Kline’s old studio. She inherited his old space. She dated Pollock, de Kooning and Kline. The best part of it was she dated Jasper Johns. People would say, “What do you mean? He’s gay.” She was just friendly with Johns, but people assumed she’d converted him. [Editor’s note: Ruth Kligman died in 2010]

There is a great photo in Rosalyn’s writing room of Kline and de Kooning staring at the back of a zaftig woman, and it was Kligman. Everyone is standing outside the Cedar Bar and studying this shapely woman.

Did you hear the Herman Cherry/Franz Kline story? The great part of the story, telling Kline how pitiful he was, Kline didn’t want him to do that poormouth thing. He said, “You owe me a fuck.” I’m not buying how pitiful you are. When Kline saw him, he said “Wipe that expression off your face. We know you are happy.”

I was working with narcotics addicts on North Brother Isalnd, next to Riker’s Island. While working there, I organized a show of student work. To make sure that people came, I got work from de Kooning, Kline and Marisol. Kline was in a bathrobe and hungover. I came to see him at 3:30 or 4pm. He started drinking. By 8pm, I was completely drunk. He was completely restored. To restore himself, he drank a little more. He came back to life.

DF: What was the change at the Cedar?

AS: It was wealth, it was growing older. When it became a total celebrity situation, there was no longer this feeling of “We are all in this together.” It was totally isolating.  Fame, money and the whole thing.

DF: Everything is connected. Rosalyn wrote the play “Home Movies,” which starred Freddy Herko. I have heard there is a documentary on Freddy Herko in the works.

SD: Freddy Herko was the sweetest. He was so gay that you couldn’t hate Freddy. He could walk into a bar in Red Hook. He was so far out, they couldn’t hate him. Jill Johnson and Freddy Herko did a roof top dance. Under drink and drug, he’d walk the edge. His death was half suicide, half thinking he could fly.

It may have been someone saying, “Jump.”

DF: Could you tell me about Rosalyn Drexler working at Judson Poets Theatre?

SD: One story is that Rosalyn walked in and had both a cross and a Jewish star on. She was ready for any kind of religion.  Al Carmines knew immediately that they should do her play. Once Rosalyn saw the Theatre of the Absurd, like Beckett and Ionesco, she felt there was a home for her there. She had already been writing that way.

William Klein, the photographer, helped get I am the Beautiful Stranger published.

Dick Schraf and Carolee Schneemann were discussing her nude photos and nude videos. “I don’t know why men are always hitting on me,” she said. She’s an exhibitionist.

I think Carolee Schneemann is an awful painter. I think that “Meat Joy” was too easy.

I met Elaine when I was at a party with Rosalyn.  Elaine slept with a lot of people but she never tried to sleep with me. We were friends. Bill and Elaine had total admiration for each other. It was total attraction.

Elaine felt betrayed by Lee Hall’s book and her emphasis on Elaine and Lee Krasner’s competition.

Edwin Denby…cleanest, most elegant prose.

DF: Did you know Allen Ginsberg?

AS: I introduced Oppenheim to Allen Ginsberg. We knew Ginsberg in California in ’55 or ’56. When Rosalyn and I lived in Berkeley, we didn’t lock the door. Allen was rapacious with young boys.  If you had a 12-year-old kid, Allen was not the guy to introduce him to.

DF: Did Rosalyn do salons  at the White Horse with Norman Mailer?

AS: They were fascinated with Rosalyn. Before she married me, she hitchhiked from Florida to New York at the age of 18. A couple of truck drivers wanted to have sex with her. She got one to laugh, she got the other to talk about his mother. Their intent was to park on the side of the road and to rape her.

She had wanted to get a suntan to impress me.

Calder Willingham was a wonderful writer, though no one ever talks about him anymore. When you realize how careers are built and unbuilt, it’s just not fair.

I’ll be 85 in January.

We met in Van Courtland Park. She went to Music and Art, but was ushered out.  She cut gym and had been late too many times. The woman said, “This is the end for you. You’ll never get married or go to college.”

Years later, Mailer asked her, “How much have you lost?”

Mailer practically adopted some 17-year-old girl who was serving coffee at the Living Theatre. Mailer and Jack Gelber were interested in this girl. To free her from juvenile deliquency, Mailer adopted her. He made her box with  him. He was desperate for a sparring partner. Do you know what his last sport in life was? A writer friend of mine named Larry Shandler became close to Mailer. Mailer became a mad thumb wrestler. He had to do something competitive.

Mailer was sweet and generous, and aware of other people’s talents, then he had that crazy streak. It was a small guy wanting to be tough.

The great Bill Ward story was that Bill Ward was chatting away with another woman at a bar in Provincetown. Onlookers watched Harriet Zwerling go through the room. He’s being charming. She brings up her fist and punches him out. He never even saw it.

I always felt that Rosalyn never got enough attention. She stopped painting for a while when she got angry at the art scene, which was a big mistake because they had a big retrospective on Pop Art and they didn’t include her. All the male pop artists asked, “Why wasn’t Rosalyn included?” It’s like rewriting history, for she was part of that scene.

Brooklyn Rail is reintroducing I Am a Beautiful Stranger. They are reintroducing To Smithereens. Her novel Below the Belt failed on every level.

DF: Is it true that Rosalyn once threw her publisher across the room?

SD: He was an obnoxious guy who grabbed her and said something like “Come here, honey.” He did it to the wrong person. She worked on Lily Tomlin’s special. She got an Emmy for that.

The wrestling thing was an obsession on mine.. She was not interested, but she would take any kind of dare.

.

The Ghosts of Greenwich Village #2: The San Remo Cafe

THE SAN REMO

(William Burroughs, left, standing outside the San Remo)

The San Remo Café at 189 Bleecker St. was located on the northwest corner of MacDougal and Bleecker, occupying two storefronts. The mob-owned bar was taken over by writers and artists. Though the Italan owners and locals were hostile to gays and outsiders, they begrudgingly tolerated their business. Allen Ginsberg drank at the Remo before and after his stint at the New York Psychiatric Institute. Hanging out at the bar were writers from the Partisan Review like Clement Greenberg and Delmore Schwartz hung out there, as did the poets Frank O’Hara and W.H. Auden (on opposite sides of the bar). The bar’s literary heyday went from the end of World War II to the late 1950s.

During the early 1950s, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s theater company The Living Theatre made the Remo their de facto headquarters and the center of their parties when they were renting the nearby Cherry Lane Theatre and doing such iconoclastic shows as Genet‘s “The Maids.” The novelist Gore Vidal proudly boasts that he picked up Beat legend Jack Kerouac, took him back to the Chelsea Hotel and screwed him.

The bartenders and bouncers at the San Remo, considered to be “minor Mafia” by the hipster patrons, were a bit too liberal with the baseball bat kept under the bar. Frank O’Hara immortalized the incipient violence of the staff of the Remo in one of his poems, “The penalty of the Big Town/ is the Big Stick.”

By 1960, the Remo had become primarily a gay bar, stocked with hustlers that hung out at Washington Square Park, and the “A-men,” gay men on amphetamines. Andy Warhol loved the Remo, and stocked his early Factory with men he found at the bar. One of his infatuations was the dancer Freddy Herko, who starred in Rosalyn Drexler’s “Home Movies” at nearby Judson Poets Theatre. Herko’s career was cut short when under the influence, he danced out of a six-story window.

By the 1970's, the socialist Michael Harrington reported that the old San Remo had closed and had become a Chinese restaurant. In the 1980's and 1990's, it was an Italian coffee shop/restaurant. Recently, it was micro-chain coffee shop, but now, as of January 2018, the last coffee shop there went out of business, and it is for rent again.

James McCourt on his Writing Process, his Opera Classic "Mawrdew Czgowchwz" and his new 3200-page Fiction

My goal with this interview with Jimmy McCourt was to capture the talent and genius of a great writer. I also wanted to fill in some holes in the biography that is out there about Jimmy McCourt, including his successful battle against alcoholism and his 48-year love affair with Vincent Virga, the brilliant novelist and photo editor. Jimmy McCourt turned 72 on July 4, 2013. McCourt is presently at work on a family memoir.

(This interview originally appeared in The Recorder in 2007)

James McCourt burst onto the New York literary scene in 1972, when the New American Review published his short story “Mawrdew Czgowchwz,” about a tempestuous red-headed Czech opera star, the over-the-hill diva out to destroy her and and the fans who adored her. The story caused a stir in New York intellectual circles, beginning McCourt’s illustrious literary career

McCourt, 65, was raised in New York City and educated at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School and Manhattan College, when it was considered the Irish-American Harvard. McCourt briefly studied acting at the Yale School of Drama, but left with fellow student Vincent Virga in 1964 to go to London, to experience the exploding theater scene there. McCourt and Virga have been a couple ever since then. They stayed in London for two periods, from 1964 to 1967, and 1969 to 1971, resettling in New York City.

After McCourt’s story was published in the New American Review, the legendary writer and social commentator Susan Sontag helped McCourt find a publisher. In 1975, McCourt published the expanded “Mawrdew Czgowchwz” in book form. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times called the book “A gloriously flamboyant debut. Take it in spoonfuls and you'll find passages to fall in love with. Sooner or later, you may even find yourself reading them aloud to your friends.”


McCourt wrote short stories for the New Yorker, edited by the late Victoria Geng, which were later published in the collection “Kaye Wayfaring in ‘Avenged’”(1984), introducing readers to the movie star Kaye Wayfaring.

As the AIDS crisis exploded in the 1980s, the devastating personal toll on McCourt and his circle of friends inspired him to write two long fictions that were collected in “Time Remaining” (1993). The critic Harold Bloom has called “Time Remaining” one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.

Later fiction by McCourt included “Delancey’s Way”(2000), and “Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake”(2002), revisiting characters from his earlier books.


In 2003, McCourt published “Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-85,” a glorious examination of gay culture in New York and America. The New York Times called the book “A heroically imaginative account of gay metropolitan culture, an elegy and an apologia for a generation."

Though McCourt’s work has been championed by such prominent literary figures as Sontag, Bloom, Yale Review editor J.D. McClatchy and the poet Richard Howard, fans of his fiction have often formed a select club, championing his books and hand selling them to other readers and writers.

The novelist Dennis Cooper has written that “McCourt is that rarest of contemporary American authors -- a true iconoclast, a devoted high stylist, and a holder of the unfashionable opinion that prose is a natural extrovert and beauty that deserves the brightest polish, the best accessories, the most extravagant costumes.”

McCourt is now finishing up “Now Voyagers: Some Divisions of the Saga of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano, Authenticated by Persons Represented Therein,” his 3200-page fictional saga picking up the story of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. McCourt started this reworking of his fictional diva’s life 33 years ago, shortly before his first book was published. “Now Voyagers” will be published in four books by the Turtle Point Press, with the first part, “Book One: The Night Sea Journey” coming out in the fall of 2007. For the uninitiated, the name of McCourt’s lifelong opera heroine is pronounced “MAW-DEW GORGEOUS.”

The Recorder had previously published extensive excerpts of McCourt’s 1950s Dublin scene from “Now Voyagers."


McCourt and Virga split their time between New York City, Washington, D.C., and County Mayo, Ireland. McCourt spoke with Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Washington, not far from the Library of Congress, where both McCourt and Virga have offices.


Q. What is your family background?

A. My father started out as a banker, but then the banks closed during the bank holiday (of the Depression). By the time I was born in 1941, he was the head timekeeper on the (Manhattan) waterfront. This meant that he was management, but he was on the piers. Later, I called him “a suit on the waterfront.” He was basically an accountant, but had a great relationship with the men, specifically the checkers, who determined who was going to be in the shape up that day. My father mostly worked on the docks of what is known as the North River, which is what the Hudson is called below the George Washington Bridge.

My mother was a schoolteacher, teaching music. Both my parents were from Yorkville. My father’s family arrived in 1830. They had a quarry in the Hudson Valley. In the second generation, they became stonecutters. My great-grandfather worked on St. Patrick’s Cathedral. My mother’s family came to Philadelphia in the 1760 from Dublin..

I grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. Back then, half of Jackson Heights was Irish, half was Jewish.

Q. How did you wind up becoming a serious opera fan?

A. I’ve always had a love of music. My mother and her friends used to go to the opera. When I was a teenager, the opera became a place to hang out. Another thing was that it was bohemian. The opera always had an aura of the sexual to it, because the fans are sort of febrile. Straight and gay sex were discussed. There were more gay people “on the line,” but there was a strong straight influence. It was very bohemian, like the Village. Every night, the opera line stretched down Broadway. There were a couple of hundred people. I started going to the opera at 15, for Maria Callas’ debut in 1956.

I was on the line from 1956 to 1965. When I started going to Manhattan College, I went all the time, maybe 40 times a year. I followed Victoria de Los Angeles, a soprano from Barcelona. She eventually became my friend.

Q. Was Victoria the model for Mawrdew Czgowchwz?

In the book, she’s Mawrdew’s friend, but she’s nothing like Mawrdew. The model for Mawrdew Czgowchwz is hard to figure out. One is Jarmila Novotna, who was Czech and a partisan during World War II. There’s nothing about Callas in Mawrdew, but I used the fact that Callas got fired from the Met, and had that happen to Mawrdew so the plot would thicken.

Q. What was your inspiration to be a writer?

A. I have no idea. It just started when I was 11. I started writing neighborhood plays. In high school, I wrote for the school newspaper.

Q. What were the seeds of “Mawrdew Czgowchwz”?

A. When I was in college, I wrote a story about the opera line called “Vesti La Giuba,” which is an aria from “Pagliacci,” because there was a guy in front of the opera who sang it all the time. Leoncavallo wrote it.

I wrote this story for the college literary review called “Mawrdew Czgowchwz.” It didn’t take long to write. Donald Lyons, who is now a theater critic for the New York Post, got me to take it to the New American Review in 1971. I handed it to the editor Ted Solotaroff personally. We went back to England. Several weeks later, he sent me a telegram telling me it was great. That year, I wrote the rest of it in New York. Ted put it on the cover of the magazine and it caused a small literary sensation in New York. That’s when Susan Sontag read it. We had come back from England and Vincent was working at the New York Review of Books, where he met Susan. She asked, “Mawrdew Czgowchwz”? Vincent told her the book was in trouble, for Ted had left Simon and Schuster. Susan said, “That’s nonsense. There is only one publisher for the book, and it’s my publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.” Vincent, my agent and Susan sent the book to FSG without telling me.

Q. Were you satirizing the opera world with “Mawrdew Czgowchwz”?

A. I wasn’t trying to satirize anything. I was trying to write a fable, where it is necessary to have an adversary. It was easy to create an old bag of an opera singer, a superannuated diva to try to undermine Mawrdew. It’s necessary for the protagonist to have an antagonist. It’s a simple story. It’s not a novel. It’s a fable because it is mostly dialogue and atmosphere. One of the most interesting things said about the book was by this guy who loved the book, but he said it’s odd, she’s a ghost in her own story. That hit home. That meant that I had to develop her as a real woman, which I did. I put her in other stories and aged her. I had been writing the sequel, but then I got the idea a few years ago to frame it as a story told by her from the point of view of now, and to incorporate the first into the new book as a text written by several schoolboys.

Q. Is this 3200-page fiction a novel?

A. No, it’s not a novel. It’s a saga. I always try to avoid the word novel. Any way I can get out of it, I use it. I don’t like the idea of the novel. It’s commodified. Nothing I’ve ever written has ended. They don’t end. They stop, then start again in another book. Novelism almost always means using a linear narrative.

Q. You’ve been with your lover, the novelist and editor Vincent Virga, for 42 years. How did you meet?

A. We met at Yale Drama in 1964. We were both in the acting program. He didn’t want to stay. He was unhappy with the acting teacher. He wanted to go to Catholic University. I said, “In a pig’s eye.” I couldn’t follow him to Washington. I didn’t have the energy to look for another guy. I spirited him to England. I got two English people, a married couple, to sponsor us in London. We were together in London. We bonded. We studied acting, then we got jobs. Vincent got lots of odd jobs and made a lot of money because he is so smart. He’d work for temp agencies, then he’d end up running the show. We quit acting so we could go to the theater all the time. I wrote a couple of plays. One was based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Scarecrow.” Another was a kind of farce. A third was a play about twin brothers, an O’Neillian type of thing. I was very taken by O’Neill.

Q. What effect has your partnership with Vincent Virga had on your writing?

A. It’s very hard to say. I just do it and it is appreciated. He is critical sometimes. We don’t exchange ideas and he never reads the manuscript until I am finished. It’s like living with Virginia Woolf in that respect. He doesn’t read it, then he does. We are just supportive of each other’s work. We are also both crazy about the theater. We’ve fueled each other’s passions for the theater. We have both written about theatrical situations. His novel “Gaywick” is very theatrical. It should be noted that he is the author of the first gay gothic novel.

Q. What was the London scene like during the 1960s?

A. It was wonderful. I was more into the actors than the playwrights at the time. The older actors were Edith Evans, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. Peggy Ashcroft was an enormous influence at the time. The actors of today’s generation were just staring out. They included Judy Dench, Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren. Maggie Smith was becoming a big star in “Othello” with Olivier.

What did you do when you returned to America in 1971?

A. That was when I was drinking heavily. Vincent was working at the New York Review of Books. As they say, I was “home for the day.” I don’t really remember the seventies that well. My story was published in the New American Review in 1972. The book was published in 1975. The reason it took three years was because I was drinking all the time.

Q. You've written about the Everard Baths, the gay bathhouse on 28th Street. What was the environment like?

A. It was the late 1950s, early 1960s. I was already legal. It was basically a lot of very literate guys without their clothes on, in white robes having sex and talking, talking, talking. A lot of them were on speed. The Everard closed after a fatal fire in the 1970s. The heart and soul had already gone out of it by then. The Everard succumbed, like all the other gay baths, to the drug culture. We didn’t consider speed to be a drug. You could easily get a prescription for it. We called it pep pills. Typically people would come in smash drunk at the Everard and would sober up in the steam room, then take some speed. The baths couldn’t regulate marijuana and other drug use, so they went straight downhill.

Q. Was the story that the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association owned the bath true?

A. The PBA owned it. How they did, I don’t know. They ran it. The Everard was one of the most lucrative venues in town.

Q. On June 27,1969, you were at the Stonewall Bar in the West Village at the time of the famous riots. The mood was tense because Judy Garland’s funeral was that same day. The fighting between the cops and the drag queens started early the next morning. What did you see?

A. It’s all described in “Queer Street.” I thought I had been to the riots. There were two “takes” (cash pickups of bribes) by the police that night. The regular precinct officers came earlier and there was no riot. Then the vice quad came by later in the evening for a second take. The bar refused to pay and the vice squad got rough. The queens started carrying on. They were on amphetamines. Everyone at the Stonewall Riots was on amphetamines. I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing. I got a call the next day that the Village was burning and I never went back. We went back to England the next week.

I witnessed an incident around the first pickup. A drag queen threw a stinger in an Irish cop’s face. One cop restrained the other. It was the Italian cop stopping the Irish cop. He said, essentially, “We have to cut them some slack. They are in a bad way because of Judy.” There were a lot of straight guys involved with Judy Garland. Judy was a universal. The straight guys into Judy would understand. While this was happening, Judy was lying in state uptown at the Campbell Funeral Home.

Q. “Time Remaining,” your collection of two novellas, has been acclaimed as one of the more poignant depiction's of the human toll of the AIDS epidemic. What were your motivations with the book?

A. lot of my friends had died. I used to take the Long Island Railroad out to East Hampton, often late at night, both drinking and sober. I decided it was a perfect set up. At every station, the conductor would come by and call out a station. That would signal a turn in the story. Once you have a set up like that, you have a highly formalized structure. As The New Yorker said, it was a kind of travelogue. Basically, it was a wake with stories, like an Irish wake. The bodies weren’t there. They were distributed all over in the text. It was my most highly formalized and most successful book in aesthetic terms. That is why I want it republished.

Q. As a younger writer, you drank very heavily, but you stopped at age 38. How do you compare writing while drinking and writing while sober?

A. When I was drinking, I lived in a very enclosed world. The problem with “Mawrdew Czgowchwz,” even though I loved it, it was a world in a bubble. I wanted to break out of the bubble, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t stop drinking. When you are drinking, you are very isolated. When the bubble finally burst, I couldn’t write for a year or two. I didn’t know if I would ever write again. A woman from The New Yorker came in and she was responsible for my new beginning. Her name was Veronica Geng. She got me on my feet again. She said she wanted me to write a story for the magazine and you don’t get offers like that. In her brother’s memoir, he wrote about Veronica screaming in The New Yorker offices, “I don’t understand why you people don’t think this story is terrific.” That was me she was screaming about most of the time. I based my movie star character Kaye Wayfaring on what Veronica would be like if she was a movie star like Faye Dunaway.

As a drinker, I was acting out, and then I found a way to act in, which I had learned at Yale Drama, but I wasn’t able to do because of the drinking. “Acting in” has become an important part of what I do and what I taught. I taught a version of the Stanislavski Method applied to writing. The Stanislavski Method came to America in the days of the Group Theatre with Stella Adler, and was perpetuated by Stanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagan in all different ways.

Method acting features things like sense memory, emotional recall and the object. In other words, each scene has an object and four questions.--who am I, where do I come from, what do I want and where am I going? They are very easy to apply to writing, characters and situations, as well as to the narrator himself. I used this method when I taught writing at Princeton and Yale.

Q. You and Vincent Virga spend several months living in Co. Mayo every year. When did your annual Irish sojourn start?

A. We’ve been going since 1985. We first went to Ireland in 1966 and I went back several times after I decided that Mawrdew Czgowchwz was part Irish. In the new book, there are extended sections that take place in Dublin, and I couldn’t have written them without being in Dublin. Vincent and I went to Dublin for Joyce. We went to Mayo to see “The Playboy of the Western World” territory. We fell in love with Mayo because it is beautiful and remote. The people love us and we love them. It’s village life in the village of Crossmolina.

The verbal culture, the rural quiet and beauty are conducive to writing, as well as the interest of the people. They are not necessarily interested in what you are writing, but that you are writing and how many books you have written” “Ah, those two fellas are out on the Errew Peninsula writing books.” They mean it, because they are very literate people.

Q. How did your idea for “Now Voyagers,” your 3200-page fiction, start?

A. I started working on it right before “Mawrdew Czgowchwz” was published in 1975, as an extension. It was written in the same style as the first book. I began to realize that it wouldn’t work. It was repetitious. When I finally quit drinking, I figured out why. I started in earnest in 1979 recasting everything. The book is modeled on the epics, “The Odyssey” and “The Aneid,” and “Moby Dick.” All those epics are used.

Q. How did you find a publisher willing to publish the book in four parts?

I am publishing “Now Voyager” with Jonathan Rabinowitz of the Turtle Point Press. I’d admired what he’d done is his beautiful bookmaking. I’d only met him once, but I called him up to ask if he’d be interested. After he read the manuscript, he said it was the book that he was born to publish. He’s in seventh heaven now because he’s been getting great advance quotes from writers like Colm Toibin.

Q. Will this be the definitive story of Mawrdew Czgowchwz?

A. It will be Mawrdew Czgowchwz, as revealed by the people pictured therein, in letters, voices and things like that. I was hellbent to create a heroine who was not a ghost in her own story, and who was a great artist.

Q. How do you describe your work habits?

A. I work all the time. I write in the afternoon and through the evening, with a break for dinner. A lot of work is wool gathering, going along, thinking about nothing and gathering impressions. I write them down on anything, scraps of paper, anything that there and put them in the computer. I do a lot of writing by hand, but all my rewriting is on the computer.

Susan Sontag once said an important thing to me about writing. She said, “I am not so sure I can write when I sit down, but I am sure as hell that I can rewrite.” In my case, the writing grows by accretion, piece by piece. I work constantly and steadily, usually on three or four things at once.

Q. You’ve been called a writer’s writer’s writer, which means that you are read by writer’s writers like the novelist James Salter. What do you think of that label?

A. When I was called that, it was rather disconcerting. It was the playwright Bill Hoffman, the author of the wonderful AIDS play “As Is.” It was 1993 when “Time Remaining” came out and he interviewed me. It was meant as such a high compliment and I took it as that, but it is difficult. It abstracts you one more degree in terms of general readership. I don’t get anything out of being a secret. I’m convinced that there is a wider readership for me, if it can be reached.