(Gloria Sukenick, 2019)
Interviewed by Dylan Foley
Born in Brooklyn in
1925, Gloria Sukenick studied art at Columbia, then went to the Yale School of
the Arts. She came back to New York, living in Hell’s Kitchen. She married and
moved down to the Village, on Perry Street. When the marriage went south, she
became a Village scenster, working as a waitress and frequenting the San Remo
Café, on Bleecker and MacDougal.
After her wild youth, Gloria
eventually became a housing activist. She was very active in the Chelsea fight
to prevent Barney’s Department Store from evicting four to five buildings full
of rent-stabilized tenants to expand their women’s store on West 17th
Street and Seventh Avenue. At one demonstration, she wore a dress made out of
fake $100 bills, mocking the greed of the Barney’s executives.
(Barney's housing demonstrations)
Though the Barney’s
tenants were evicted, the activists’ demonstrations forced Barney’s to find
other affordable housing for the tenants.
Gloria’s brother was the
late literary critic Ronald Sukenick,
who also chronicled the Village in his history Down and In: Life in the Underground.
I interviewed Gloria
Sukenick in her sunny, art-filled apartment at Penn South, on West 24th
Street, where she had lived since 1991. During our interview, Miles Davis
played softly in the background. An observant, very sharp woman, Gloria
Sukenick painted vivid portraits of the Greenwich Village characters she hung
out with in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
Gloria died on May 26,
2019, one month after her 94th birthday.
DYLAN FOLEY: Your
apartment is quite impressive, full of crafts.
GLORIA SUKENICK: I do
ceramics. I also do wall hangings, as well.
DF: The artist Larry Rivers said that Louis’ Tavern was the best pick-up joint in the Village?
GS: He had a lot of competition from the Remo.
DF: You went to art school?
GS: I was a fat kid out of Brooklyn. I had no clothes. I wore a shirt and some kind of skirt. I went to Columbia University, where I was taking a painting class and working on the Manhattan Project as a messenger in the afternoon. I went there for a year, then I went to the Yale School of Fine Arts. I could get in because it was the last year of the war. There were few young men around. They let me in. I was there for a year and a half. The white-shoe boys and I didn’t get along. The white-shoe boys, what they call the kids from the wealthy Northeast families, and me were not a good mix at all. I left after a year and a half and came back to Hell’s Kitchen, which was near the Art Students League.
My apartment was a six-floor, cold-water flat, complete with rats. How did I get downtown? I got married for a short, brief, unhappy time.
My sister-in-law lived on Avenue B and 10th Street, replete with stuff from local junkies, who would bring her stuff they stole from various apartments. I tried to buy my brother’s manuscript back once because his whole filing cabinet was stolen.
I moved to Perry Street with my husband when the marriage was really on the rocks. It didn’t save the marriage. I was about 22. I got involved in Reichian therapy, with the orgone box. Then I started hanging out at the San Remo and the Minetta Tavern, then moved to another cold-water flat on Prince Street, where Anatole Broyard, Carl Solomon and Stanley Gould, the first Jewish junkie lived. Stanley had no teeth left, so he got Norman Mailer to spring for a new set of teeth.
I’m 84 now.
This was the early 1950s. Stanley was the first guy to die of AIDS [in the early 1980’s]. I don’t think he knew what he had. He was the thinnest creature you’d ever seen.
DF: What kind of jobs have you had over the years?
GS: I’ve done many things, from teaching ballroom dancing to witnessing. I waitressed in Bermuda, Woodstock and Provincetown. I’d leave my 15-dollar-a-month cold water flat and let my friends stay there.
DF: The artist Larry Rivers said that Louis’ Tavern was the best pick-up joint in the Village?
GS: He had a lot of competition from the Remo.
DF: You went to art school?
GS: I was a fat kid out of Brooklyn. I had no clothes. I wore a shirt and some kind of skirt. I went to Columbia University, where I was taking a painting class and working on the Manhattan Project as a messenger in the afternoon. I went there for a year, then I went to the Yale School of Fine Arts. I could get in because it was the last year of the war. There were few young men around. They let me in. I was there for a year and a half. The white-shoe boys and I didn’t get along. The white-shoe boys, what they call the kids from the wealthy Northeast families, and me were not a good mix at all. I left after a year and a half and came back to Hell’s Kitchen, which was near the Art Students League.
My apartment was a six-floor, cold-water flat, complete with rats. How did I get downtown? I got married for a short, brief, unhappy time.
My sister-in-law lived on Avenue B and 10th Street, replete with stuff from local junkies, who would bring her stuff they stole from various apartments. I tried to buy my brother’s manuscript back once because his whole filing cabinet was stolen.
I moved to Perry Street with my husband when the marriage was really on the rocks. It didn’t save the marriage. I was about 22. I got involved in Reichian therapy, with the orgone box. Then I started hanging out at the San Remo and the Minetta Tavern, then moved to another cold-water flat on Prince Street, where Anatole Broyard, Carl Solomon and Stanley Gould, the first Jewish junkie lived. Stanley had no teeth left, so he got Norman Mailer to spring for a new set of teeth.
I’m 84 now.
This was the early 1950s. Stanley was the first guy to die of AIDS [in the early 1980’s]. I don’t think he knew what he had. He was the thinnest creature you’d ever seen.
DF: What kind of jobs have you had over the years?
GS: I’ve done many things, from teaching ballroom dancing to witnessing. I waitressed in Bermuda, Woodstock and Provincetown. I’d leave my 15-dollar-a-month cold water flat and let my friends stay there.
I had this job with a
fake labor newspaper. I didn’t know it was fake at the time.
DF: Did you know that artist Anita Steckel?
GS: She did a wonderful thing during the early women’s movement. She made a dollar bill with a penis running down the middle.
DF: Do you know my friend Harriet Sohmers Zwerling? She slept her way through the Village.
GS: Who didn’t?
My sister-in-law owned the shop on Avenue B. She was a gorgeous woman. She went with Carl Lee, Candida Lee’s son. He acted in “The Connection” He got my sister-in-law hooked on drugs. Sonya Milling. She had kid after kid after kid.
Did you hear of a guy named Red Madden, Rouge Montaigne? Sonya had about eight biracial kids. She was living with a junkie, shooting speed. She died, must have been in the late 1960s, early 1970s. One day, she picked up the wrong needle, and shot heroin instead of speed. The guy she was living with was so frightened, he left her there and she died. The kids were wandering around the building. My ex-husband made sure all the kids were adopted.
DF: What was the San Remo like?
GS: She did a wonderful thing during the early women’s movement. She made a dollar bill with a penis running down the middle.
DF: Do you know my friend Harriet Sohmers Zwerling? She slept her way through the Village.
GS: Who didn’t?
My sister-in-law owned the shop on Avenue B. She was a gorgeous woman. She went with Carl Lee, Candida Lee’s son. He acted in “The Connection” He got my sister-in-law hooked on drugs. Sonya Milling. She had kid after kid after kid.
Did you hear of a guy named Red Madden, Rouge Montaigne? Sonya had about eight biracial kids. She was living with a junkie, shooting speed. She died, must have been in the late 1960s, early 1970s. One day, she picked up the wrong needle, and shot heroin instead of speed. The guy she was living with was so frightened, he left her there and she died. The kids were wandering around the building. My ex-husband made sure all the kids were adopted.
DF: What was the San Remo like?
GS: You could go and get
the martini at the San Remo and that was good for hours. Everybody was buying
martinis. It was the best buy in town, and the most bang for the buck.
It was mobbed from the doorway to the bar. Maxwell Bodenheim would stand at the door, cursing everyone in a stentorian voice. Joe Gould was a Minetta man. The energy was amazing. I saw Miles Davis there once, fresh from wherever he’d come, mid-country. He had short black hair and was dressed in a suit. He was very closed. The bar was so crowded, there was a waiter who could pinch asses and nobody would know. There wasn’t even room to lift your arm and smack him.
It was the place to find out where the parties were and who was doing what. It was the place to make contact.
I also worked at the Modern Art.
DF: You lived in the same building as Carl Solomon?
GS: I lived on the sixth floor. Carl Solomon was across the hall. He was away a lot of the time in mental hospitals. He was very quiet and withdrawn.
I was going with this trumpet player Johnny Caressi. He had a brother named Jimmy Caressi who was working at an airplane factory. He was bound and determined that he was going to straighten out Stanley Gould. He got Stanley a job at an airplane plant. Every morning, he’d pick Stanley up take him downstairs. Everyday for a couple of weeks, but it didn’t stick. He was a semi-functioning junkie.
It was mobbed from the doorway to the bar. Maxwell Bodenheim would stand at the door, cursing everyone in a stentorian voice. Joe Gould was a Minetta man. The energy was amazing. I saw Miles Davis there once, fresh from wherever he’d come, mid-country. He had short black hair and was dressed in a suit. He was very closed. The bar was so crowded, there was a waiter who could pinch asses and nobody would know. There wasn’t even room to lift your arm and smack him.
It was the place to find out where the parties were and who was doing what. It was the place to make contact.
I also worked at the Modern Art.
DF: You lived in the same building as Carl Solomon?
GS: I lived on the sixth floor. Carl Solomon was across the hall. He was away a lot of the time in mental hospitals. He was very quiet and withdrawn.
I was going with this trumpet player Johnny Caressi. He had a brother named Jimmy Caressi who was working at an airplane factory. He was bound and determined that he was going to straighten out Stanley Gould. He got Stanley a job at an airplane plant. Every morning, he’d pick Stanley up take him downstairs. Everyday for a couple of weeks, but it didn’t stick. He was a semi-functioning junkie.
You could never see the floor, the Remo was so crowded. One thing the bar did have was people from uptown coming to the San Reo to make a connection with the real bohemians. It was a good source of money or drinks for people. There was one guy named Larry Burns, whose father had a men’s store on Central Park South. Did you know Marilyn DuPont? Did you know Marilyn Kanterman? Iris Brody, me and Marilyn Kanterman went to Bermuda together to waitress.
Iris was very beautiful. She was on drugs. When we went to Bermuda to work at the same hotel, both Iris and Marilyn went to live with Shane O’Neill, the son of Eugene O’Neill, whose father had a house there.
I’d only seen Shane around the Village. He was a harder gone junkie than Stanley, if that was possible. Heroin.
(The art of Iris Brody)
Iris would wind up in jail periodically. She had a bookstore at one point, and did some wonderful paintings. I remember the way she looked when she was tall and thin, model beautiful with sunken cheekbones. She’d go to jail at the Women’s House of Detention and would come out bloated, because heroin kept her very thin. The [jail] food was pretty starchy. She’d go back on junk, lose weight and start modeling again. She had a child with a musician and the musician left her. She was dependent on her mother. I don’t know if she was broken up over the guy leaving, but she jumped off the roof.
DF: Did you know Sheri Marinelli?
GS: She was pretty much a knockout.
Gerd Stern had a son whose mother had told him that Jack Kerouac was his father.
Gerd and I know a lot of the same orgone accumulator people. I owned one when I lived in a loft of 21st Street.
DF: Were you friendly with the bookstore owner Rosetta Reitz?
GS: I lived next door to her on 16th Street. Rosetta was tough and a half. Her daughters were Rainbow, Robin and Rebecca.
She had a fling with Lee Konitz.
I met her during the second-wave women’s movement. There was the Older Women’s Liberation group. She told people that she founded OWL, but she didn’t. It was a consciousness raising group.
Fairness was not one of Rosetta’s traits.
She was going with an African-American jazz critic. Very opinionated.
When I was living on Avenue B and 10th, you had to walk outside with one of those sprays, pepper spray. People were shooting at each other.
Q. Brownmiller?
At Cornell, Brownmiller had a thing about prostitutes. She tried prostitution herself, my brother said.
The original Five Spot was on Fifth Street and 3rd Avenue.
Marilyn DuPont was a friend of Iris Brody and another suicide. My brother met her at a party at my loft. He was in from Cornell. The next morning, my mother called me. “Where is Ron? He never came home last night.” I knew her from the Remo. She was madly in love with Larry Burns. She had the most beautiful smile I have ever seen. I met her at Provincetown, married to a poet. Her sexual behavior was very strange. She lived in a railroad flat. Whenever she felt like it, she’d go upstairs or downstairs and would have sex with whomever was around. Things went from bad to badder. She tried to live with the wife of the one-armed locksmith on MacDougal Street. She spent some time in a mental institution.
I was hooked speed--pills, Dexedrine and Benedrine inhalers. That’s what I was doing through my marriage and after. That’s how I got to be nice and thin. You’d soak the inhaler in juice. I got a prescription somehow from an obliging druggist on Abingdon Square. My father was the worst and poorest dentist in Brooklyn, but he had a prescription pad that I used. I was on pills from my mid-20s to 31 or 32. To keep me going. I finally had to give up waitressing and I had to learn how to type. I got off Dexedrine. I stayed home to readjust. I got a job copyediting and writing retail advertising.
Mark America was a student of my brother’s.
DF: Did you know the musician David Amram?
GS: I knew David Amram. We had a fling. He was a sweetheart. He was as folksy as you could get while still being able to work.
It could have been at
the Remo. He had just gotten back from Korea.
DF: Were you involved with the women’s movement?
GS: The second wave women’s movement. My life opened up again.To me, I saw the women’s movement as a way of reordering the world, but then I see women with Wall Street Journals under their arms, heading downtown in the morning. It turned out to be a personal solution. What needed to be fixed was the system itself.
DF: Did you go to the Minetta Tavern much?
DF: Were you involved with the women’s movement?
GS: The second wave women’s movement. My life opened up again.To me, I saw the women’s movement as a way of reordering the world, but then I see women with Wall Street Journals under their arms, heading downtown in the morning. It turned out to be a personal solution. What needed to be fixed was the system itself.
DF: Did you go to the Minetta Tavern much?
GS: They had a better, bigger kitchen. The Minetta was the place to eat.
DF: Was there a toughness to the waiters at the
San Remo?
GS: My experience was only with Joe the Asspincher. The Café Bohemia was good. David Amram played there.
GS: My experience was only with Joe the Asspincher. The Café Bohemia was good. David Amram played there.
Michael Harrington used to eat at the Blue Mill. They specialized in steak.
Rosetta Reitz worked the classified section at the Village Voice for a while. She was trying to set me up, so she put in an ad in, which said, “Loves Trumpets, Raccoons.” Crystal Field’s brother showed up because he played trumpet. He was vey unappealing.
DF: What did you think of the White Horse Tavern in the 1950’s?
GS: It was very self consciously literary.
My marriage was annulled. One of us said we didn’t want to have children. We were together for four or five years in total misery. He was very controlling. He gave me a diary with a key. Idiot here wrote down everything, including the time I was not faithful to my husband. Every night, he would open the diary with his own key and read it. I started to have terrible crying jags. I don’t know where they came from.
I was working as a 9 to 5er.. It was pretty restrictive.
There were Marxist -feminist study groups.
Red Madden was an A #1 grifter., always staying at some woman’s apartment. I was involved with him for a while. He won a million-dollar lottery.
There was Corinne
Coleman..she had a loft on Greene Street for a long time.
Bridget Poke? She used to give herself injections through her blue jeans. I’d see her at the Remo. Very tall,very beautiful.
Bridget Poke? She used to give herself injections through her blue jeans. I’d see her at the Remo. Very tall,very beautiful.
I went from Montgomery
Ward to Gimbels and Alexanders. Anti-union. I switched to housing activism. I
ran off flyers on their copy machines. That was the time they had pitbulls in
the hallways and fires to chase the tenants out in Chelsea.
(Gloria Sukenick in her Barney's demonstration costume)
I got involved with the
Barney’s protest, where they were taking affordable housing on 17th Street to
put up their ladies’ store. They took 4 or 5 tenement buildings. We had people lined up
from 6th to 7th Avenue. We had Christmas stories and Easter stories, people
reading from the same script. “Once there was a man named Barney and he had a
store for men and fat little boys.” We were reading in unison. We made their
lives miserable….some good street theater. Those boys went bankrupt. They knew
nothing about business. If it makes a buck, it’s okay.
(1950's orgone box)
There was Chuck Mangravite…he made orgone boxes. He had a loft on 6th Avenue and Canal. You’d sit in there and you’d feel energy coming off it. Something was being accumulated in the box. The therapy was effective. They’d manipulate your body and that contained certain attitudes. Verbal therapies were worthless.
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