An Interview with Alice Denham, Writer, Feminist and Playboy Centerfold, April 1, 2009

(Alice Denham, 1956)

My friend Alice Denham died on January 27, 2016 at the age of 89. She was a Playboy centerfold, novelist and sexual adventurer, pursuing some of the biggest writers of the 1950's and 1960's, including Philip Roth, David Markson and James Jones. (The married Joseph Heller would only make out, no sex.)

I interviewed Alice in 2009. She was a charming Southern belle, very honest and witty about her dating past.  She could also be steely. When I mentioned that her ex-lover Ted Hoagland had wrote a derogatory description of her in his own memoir, she noted that he never brought women to orgasm because his erections were never fully hard, like a piece of asparagus.

Alice was a Playboy centerfold in 1956, and had a short story published in the same issue. She had sex with Hugh Hefner and said that he was technically proficient, but more like a metronome than a lover.

(Alice with human metronome Hugh Hefner, 1956)

 In Alice's memoir Sleeping with the Bad Boys, she noted that her relationship with Playboy ended when the magazine's ad executives tried to pimp her out to their major advertisers. When Alice Denham refused to be used, the magazine cut her off.

Alice was a pure delight, wise and sexy. Here is the interview:

DYLAN FOLEY: You came up from the south to Greenwich Village as a college escapee. It took guts for a woman to do that in 1951. Was there some culture shock for you?

 (Alice Denham in the 1960's)

(Alice's first novel My Darling from the Lions)

ALICE DENHAM: I was always that way.
Back then, James Baldwin wasn’t famous. The Kettle of Fish was pitch black. I was on a great adventure. I went to Louis’ Tavern… because I knew a bunch of actors.
I went to lots of Village parties. I was modeling.

 Bruce Jay Friedman, David Markson, Joe Heller, and William Gaddis all worked at Magazine Management Company[Editor’s note: The company included such men’s magazines as Stag, For Men Only and Swank.]. They would permit them to work on their novels, and would introduce them to their clients as “our novelists.” Nothing was more important than art and literature. Male writers were gods and the women couldn’t get jobs.

There was no occupation more important for the American male than writing the Great American Novel.

I did pin-up modeling. I was known as a classy model.

DF: What were the parties like?

AD: It wasn’t like it is now, where you provide food. They would start after dinner. People would bring liquor….it was B.Y.O.B. The host might provide a cheap bottle of whiskey, some peanuts or potato chips. Most of the parties were open. There was a Village Voice columnist named John Wilcock and he would mail everyone the party list.

I was very leery of being trapped into becoming a mother. I really wanted to be a writer. In those days, if you were married, you were expected to be a wife and a mother.

DF: The writer Dan Wakefield often moaned how hard it was to get a date in the 1950’s. Did you know him?

AD: He never got it. He was a square. At that time, his face was covered with bumps. No one wanted to go with him. He was an unappetizing character.

DF: Did you think much about the sexual revolution in the 1950’s?

AD: I don’t think we thought much about it. We liked sex and had a lot of it. We all had diaphragms and felt pretty safe. We thought of ourselves as bohemians, as opposed to squares. America was very provincial and conservative then. I couldn’t have been free in Washington D.C., no matter where I lived. Things were so constricted in the 1950s. There was no such thing as a single mother. You were a fallen woman with an illegitimate child.

DF: You had a one-night stand with Anatole Broyard, where Greenwich Village’s most famous lover couldn’t perform. Why’d you bed him?

AD: It was because he was terribly handsome and women were all over him. People just assumed that he was a great lover. He always went with someone who was significantly dumber than I was. Equality threw him off. Everybody knew he was part black.

I knew other men who did not like educated women. They called us aggressive.

DF: Did you keep figurative notches on your bedpost for how many men you slept with?

AD: I did. I had a list. I’ve never told anyone my secret number,” [Denham gave the most charming laugh at this point]

DF: Could you tell me about Norman and Adele Mailer doing a striptease at a party at their how to promote a sexual reaction from you and the man you were with, a lion tamer?

AD: I wrote everything down as it happened. I had a good memory. I wrote scenes and I would put them in folders. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it.

DF: How did you wind up t the Lion’s Head on Christopher Street? [Editor:The Lion’s Head was a legendary journalists’ bar where Pete Hamill and the Clancy Brothers hung out.]

AD: I moved to this apartment on Grove Street in 1967. David [Markson] came over and said, “Why don’t you come over to the Lion’s Head? That’s where everyone goes.”
They were all dismissive of Frank [McCourt, a teacher who won the Pulitzer for his hard-luck Irish childhood memoir Angela’s Ashes.] They called him “the teacher.”

It was very much a journalist’s bar, but there were longshoremen and everybody Irish. Even the Aer Lingus pilots.

Anita [Steckel, the controversial artist] made herself up so ridiculously. She looked like a whore, the amount of paint she had on.

In the end, we are all too old at the Lion’s Head. By the time it closed, we were all going to the dining room. Most of us were too old to drink.

DF: You’re ex-lover Ted Hoagland wrote mean things about you in his own memoir. What was your experience with him?

AD: I’ll tell you about him because he talked about me. [Denham’s eyes narrowed] He had a dick like a banana. He said he’d never given a woman an orgasm. I know why. His dick was like a piece of asparagus. It was soft.

DF: You state in your memoir that the writer David Markson was the best lover in your life. To your shock and dismay, he got married very suddenly in the mid-1950’s. What happened?

(David Markson, Village heartthrob, 1960's)

AD: David and Elaine Markson went out on their first date and decided to get married.

A month later, David called me, pleading that it was a mistake and trying to sleep with me.

David would show up at 4 a.m. “Go down on me,” he’d say. I’d say, “You go down on me!” He once said, “You give me a hard-on, maybe because you are so mean.”

An Interview with the Novelist David Markson, July 2007

An Interview with the Novelist David Markson, July 5, 2007

David Markson was a novelist who moved to Greenwich Village in the early 1950s and spent the last six decades of his life there. He was friends and drinking companions with Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Jack Kerouac and many other literary figures.

Markson’s books included The Ballad of Dingus McGee, Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Epitaph for a Dead Beat. After many years of being a revered cult novelist, Markson had a late-life literary renaissance, gaining wider  attention with his last several novels, including The Last  Novel and Reader’s Block.

With his dark good looks, Markson was also a famous Village Romeo. In the early 1950's, while his friends like Michael Harrington (America’s last great socialist) and Clement Greenberg (the powerful art critic for The Nation and the Partisan Review) were in the back room of the White Horse arguing politics, Markson was in the front room picking up women. From the 1960's onward, he drank at the Lion’s Head, a famed journalist’s bar on Christopher Street with the likes of Pete Hamill, the novelist Frederick Exley, the Clancy Brothers (known at the time as the “Irish Beatles”) and Frank McCourt, who was just a schoolteacher then.

Markson died in the Village at the age of 82 in 2010.

In July 2007, we spoke at Markson’s rent-stabilized apartment in the West Village. In our meeting three years before his death, he was still a good-looking man. With his high cheekbones, corona of white hair and his sensual lips, I could see the outline of the old 1950's ladykiller.

David Markson

Q. How did you wind up going to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street?

Everybody went to the White Horse. I'm one of the few people, possibly the only one, who was taken there by Dylan Thomas in 1952. He did a reading, I chatted with him and I asked him he'd like to have a drink. He met us at the West End Bar, up by Columbia. We had a pleasant evening. Afterwards, I asked him if I could give him a shout, and he said, "Sure, call me at the Chelsea.”  When I came down there with several friends, he said, "Let's go to the Horse." I didn't know what he was talking about. It was the White Horse. A few times, we went elsewhere and wound up there. Eventually, I began to spend time there by myself. I made up a list of White Horse regulars. I'll read it to you.

There's Dylan, of course.
Michael Harrington,  author of The Other America, which taught the Kennedys about poverty.
--Will Barrett, the philosopher used to come in. What's that book about the existential philosophers? The Irrational Man.
--Nick Pileggi drank there for a few years.
--Greg Corso was always there. He was a pain in the ass. One night, he was screaming at a part-time bartender named Kevin Rooney. "I'm a poet. I'm life. You're an editor. You're death." Kevin vaulted over the bar and dove at him, shoved him through the door and threw him to the sidewalk. Kevin was literally hammering Corso's head on the concrete.  I was nearest. I threw myself at Kevin, knocked him off, grabbed Gregory and pushed him to the corner, and said, "Asshole. Stay away for a day or two." Kevin Rooney, not that much later, actually killed himself. That's the kind of temper he had. He was ready to kill Gregory.

Gregory was that way. I'd be at a table with a woman, and he'd say, "I'm a poet. We have orgasms. You people don't have orgasms." He hadn't written anything yet.

At the White Horse, there was also
--Kevin Sullivan, an academic, who wrote a very good book about Joyce called Joyce Among the Jesuits.
--Fred McDarrah, the Voice photographer
Pat Moynihan, before he was a senator.
Will Geer, an actor. Marcus Bewley, Clem [Greenberg], Bewley and I would go to Bewley's apartment a few blocks away and play the I-Ching 'til four in the morning, to tell our future.

The Novelist William Gaddis and David Markson in the 1960s

Q. What was the scene like at the White Horse?

When Dylan was there, people would stand around staring. One night we came back (to the bar). He had done a reading. I'd made a date to meet him with a girl I was going with who he hadn't met yet. Oscar Williams, the old anthologist, had introduced him at the reading, which was at the old theater on Commerce Street. We strolled into the bar together and pulled a few tables together. There was only one backroom then. I became aware that people were just staring at us. It became damn clear after a while when you are that much the object of people's attention. I remember sitting alone with him at the bar, bullshitting. I did him a favor once. I got him a reading. He was only getting $100 at the time. Remember the economy in 1952. It was $100 plus expenses. I knew somebody up at Skidmore that I called. When he came back, he wouldn't let me buy a drink for a week.

I remember he was angry about something. We were sitting at the bar. I was drinking a beer. He was drinking boilermakers, as he frequently did. We talked about problems at length. Nobody bothered us. He was like another customer.




Q. What was your relationship with Dylan Thomas?

A. He[Dylan] was the first poet I ever knew. I was in correspondence at the time with Malcolm Lowry, who later became a very close friend. [It helped that] I was able to mention that. Everybody in England knows each other. They drink in the same three saloons. That gave me an entre. It was at most a dozen nights together. We never corresponded. I can't tell you how famous or infamous he was. His reputation has faded to some extent, I gather. Hugh Kenner was already dismissing him 20 years ago. He was so popular then. I discovered him in college. He was my favorite living poet. There was a certain honesty in my desire to be with him.

I never saw him recite at the bar. It was casual conversation. He was quick witted. He once said something like "So and So and his wife don't have enough wits to run a hen farm." Sometimes I would meet him with a couple of friends. It would be like any other conversation.

Caitlin was there a few times. She's get pissed off because people were paying more attention to him than to her. One day, we were at the table in the back. She took out a cigarette and nobody noticed her. She said, "Would one of you satellites give me a light?" On a different night, I noticed that she had been gone from the table for a while. I said, "Dylan, hasn't she been in the ladies room for a long time?" "Oh, David, she's in the saloon across the street because she's pissed off that she's being ignored." She gave as well as she got. Dylan said, "Do me a favor and go buy her a beer and bring her back. She'll be less angry if you show up than if I do." He was right. She was in whatever the nearest bar was. I said Dylan was sorry or whatever I said. She cursed, but she came back.

You'd walk in on a Friday or a Saturday night and it would be eight deep at the bar because Dylan was there.

One night after he died, somebody walked in and yelled, "So this is where they buried Dylan Thomas?” The bartender said, "Throw the guy out."

It was mobbed after he was dead. It became a shrine.

Q. I heard the back room was for talking and the front room was for pick ups?

The owner's son once said to me, "God damn it, David, I'm facing the door and your back is to the door. Every time a beautiful woman walks in, even before I've noticed her, you've moved next to her at the bar."

Michael Harrington and I talked about it years later. "You were in the back room talking politics," I told him. So was Clem Greenberg. Clem might have been a public intellectual, but in the saloon, Clem Greenberg was just a guy having a beer.

I was always in the front, looking for women. You are who you are. If your interest is politics, you sit and talk with your friends about that. You did have a sense, though, that there were a lot of young people who wanted to be writers and talked about it.  They went to the White Horse because it was a writers' center. One guy was going to be "the world's greatest novelist." I've forgotten his name. He died young, and he published one book at two o'clock on a Tuesday that was forgotten by 2:07 p.m. I liked Chandler Brossard better than Anatole [Broyard], for Chandler worked for a living.

Everybody would occasionally walk into the San Remo for a drink, but I didn't know the crowd there. You'd go if you were in another place and somebody would say, "Let's go."

I was in the San Remo when a very minor writer was sitting there and said, "Holy Shit...Jim Agee just died." I had been talking with him on a street corner two days before. It's a strange thing. The newspaper said he died in a taxi. We had been talking at either 6th Avenue and Washington or Waverley, and after a while, he said "David, I've got to run. I've got to get to the doctor.” He went in a taxi cab. I think it was a day or two earlier.

Q. Did you notice changes in 1950s sexual culture?

I'm the only person in New York who gets laid in Dan Wakefield's book New York in the Fifties. I said to him, I don't understand what the bullshit was about a sexual revolution in the 1960s. When I was in the Village in the 1950s, in a phrase, everybody fucked. If you were talking to a woman who was mature or sophisticated enough to come in alone or with friends, if you walked out together, it was understood that you were going to bed. It must have been the deeply entrenched, middle-class people who felt so little freedom. I told Dan, "Everybody was doing it."

One night, I was at a bar at Columbia. It was the night of the Kentucky Derby. The beer we were drinking for 15 cents a glass. I get into an argument with this Columbia football player who was a friend. Who could get laid the most?

What time was the Derby? Five or six o'clock. Who could get laid the most times between then and midnight? I won 3 to 2. The minute the bet was made, he walked over to one girl and I walked over to someone else. There was no rule over not sleeping with someone who you had been to bed with before. I came back in a couple of hours and found someone else. About 10pm, I was with this young woman in what was probably a one-room apartment. There was a banging at the door. "David, emergency!" I realized they wanted me back. "I don't know what it is," I said.  I got dressed and said good night to the woman.  They said, "He's with another woman. Get back there.” This was 1951.

In December of 1947, I was 20 years old.  Elaine and I split 25 years ago. I moved in here. I was going with someone else. This place is rent stabilized. I live on very little money. I just got an award from the American Academy for $7500. I panicked that it would affect my rent subsidy. My rent would jump permanently by $200 a month.

Q. Do you think that the sexual revolution started in the 1950s?

I went to Union College in Schenectedy. We went to Skidmore all the time. Skidmore girls were screwing the late 1940s, early 1950s. I didn't understand what this sexual revolution was about. It's no news that a good-looking woman gets around. It depends on what circle you move around in. Look at Alice Denham's book Sleeping with the Bad Boys. Look at all the writers she's been with. She was a writer herself. She was the only Playboy playmate centerfold who had her own short story in the same issue of the magazine. The story wasn't there because she was taking off her clothes. It was a reprint. It had been in print elsewhere.

In the '20s or '30s, people were screwing, but because of the mores, they didn't talk about it. Don't you think in the Jazz Age that Scott and Zelda were screwing before they got married?

Q. How did you support yourself?

I had a couple of editorial jobs. I worked at Dell Books. I worked as an editor at Lyons books. It is now defunct, but I worked at a place called Magazine Management. A number of good writers worked there. Bruce Jay Friedman worked there. Mario Puzo worked there. You worked in a place like that, who are the friends of these people? Somebody had a party. "You know my friend Joe Heller?" He was working in public relations. Everybody was sleeping with everybody. I never understood that "sexual revolution."

Before he wrote Catch-22, Joe Heller was a "writer." When Elaine and I came back from Mexico, people told us, "Joe's just finished his book." It sounds exotic, but dentists know dentists, stockbrokers know stockbrokers. Writers get to know writers. A lot of them aren't really writers. Nothing is really going to happen for them.


Q. Was there food at the White Horse?

They didn't have hamburgers then. One of the reasons Thomas liked it, I've heard, was that the bar looked like an English pub. They had hard-boiled eggs. The old man who owned it was German. He lived upstairs. His wife Frieda would make meatloaf. She'd bring down this good meatloaf, solid as a rock. You could get a slice of meatloaf and hardboiled eggs. If you wanted a hamburger, we'd go to a place on 10th Street. It's still there. I think it's gay…Julius’. Thomas knew the Village well enough. There were two Julius'. He startled me once when we were going for hamburgers and he said "Let's go to the good Julius'."

Q. How did you start going to the Lion’s Head?

I was drinking a little in the bar next door, the 55. This great bartender, the ultimate Village dropout Malcolm Raphael, who had a law degree and a masters in anthropology, and he was tending bar. One day he sent me next door. “The poet John Lofgren really likes your work,” he said. He described him and I went to talk to him. That would have been it, but the next day, somebody else dragged me in. Who was there but Pete Hamill and another writer that I knew. I started drinking there and was locked in until it closed. That was 25 years. I was there all day, every day. You are a writer and alone. Even if you are married with kids, you are still alone. The kids are at school, the wife is at work. Any time of day or night, there would be intelligent, sensitive and creative people do talk to. The last few years, I wasn’t drinking at the bar, but I ate there so much. I figured I’d paid my dues. I’d stand at the bar and I didn’t have to fake it with a club soda. Two days before it closed…naturally I was there the last night and the next morning…I walked in the back room and Rod Steiger was there. Where else would you find something like that?  You’d walk into the bar and there would be half the journalists in New York. The New York Post was a good liberal paper before this Murdoch guy got it. All those guys. The Voice, which I don’t read anymore, was good and active and was right next door.

I made a long list [of the Lion’s Head regulars].

--Pete Hamill,. He was the center. He’s awfully bright. He quit drinking after a few years.

--Rupert Sheed. Some people thought he was an important writer. He had a column in the Sunday Times book section. He wrote novels.

--Fred Exley. I brought Exley into the Lion’s Head. He’d get the New Yorker and just live in there.

-Joe Flaherty, who was the house wit.
--Mike Harrington. He was a big socialist, but moved to the country to get better schools.
--the only non-writer, the high school teacher Frank McCourt.
--the American Indian spokesman Vine Deloria who wrote Custer Died for your Sins. He never spent a night in New York without spending it at the Lion's Head.
--Ted Hoagland, Edward Hoagland. I knew his second wife very well.
--Richard Price. The novelist used to come in in the afternoon in the later years.
--Derrick Mahon--the great Irish poet. Some people think he's better than Seamus Heaney
--William Kennedy
--John Leo, who was the only non-liberal in the bar.
--Rod Steiger
--The writer Nick Tosches. I asked Dennis Duggan if he'd ever spoke to Nick Tosches. He said he sat at the front of the bar, with his back to the window. "Everytime I came in, we nodded hello, and that was it. We nodded hello, but we never spoke."
--Jack Neufeld.
--Malcolm Brawley, the novelist. One of his books was just reissued. (On the Yard.)
--Jim Bounton, who wrote Ball Four, which is probably the most popular baseball novel ever. Jim would be in the backroom. People would eat in the backroom, and sit and order drinks. It's a different mentality. You stand at the bar and talk to everyone. You go in the backroom and you sit and talk with your friends. The good-looking women were in the bar.
--French-horn player David Amram, a major figure in the music community.
--Lawrence Ritter, who wrote The Glory of Their Time, which some people think was a great baseball book.
--Vic Ziegel
--Sidney Zion, he was a Times columnist.
Mike McAlary, the Daily News columnist. Every third day, on the cover of the News there would be a 1920s scoop by McAlary. He wore out shoe leather... He was always there.
--Dennis Duggan, the Newsday columnist.
[During the big anti-war march in Washington…] It was on a peace bus. I knew the guy who punched Dennis out. I'm visualizing the guy. He was a tough guy, who'd been a rodeo rider. They'd picked up the Lion's Head contingent. All these guys were drunk. These guys were singing and Dennis was making noise. Finally, he punched Dennis out.

You know that Jessica Lange  and Eve Ensler were waitresses there.
The actor Jack Ward used  to come in.
--Ed Sanders, the writer. He was a member of The Fugs. He was a good poet and died young. [NOTE: ED SANDERS IS STILL ALIVE]

----Al Koblin --was part owner of the Lion's Head. He'll talk to you forever, unless he's in a rotten mood.
--Barry Murphy--he''s a friend of mine who drank there all the time. He's a fancy carpenter.


Q. How did you wind up in the Village?

I came down here in 1951, but then I lost my apartment.. When Elaine and I got married in 1956, we weren't going to live anywhere but the Village. We lived on 11th Street. We lived in Mexico for three years, then we were back on 11th Street. We had kids and we were in Europe for a year and a half. Then we came back and got that place on West 4th Street. It as called 39 1/2 Washington Square South, but it really could have been a West 4th Street address. Except for three years in Mexico and a year and a half in Europe, it has always been the Village.

When Elaine and I got married, we were looking for an apartment. We stayed at a place called the Hotel Earle, on the northern edge of the park. We had a one-bedroom with a dining room. I swear to God, we paid $97 a month. Cigarettes cost 17 cents, coffee cost a nickel. Robert Rauschenberg offered his landlord two pieces of art in lieu of $15 rent. His landlord said no.

The woman I went out with after I broke up with Elaine, the painter Joan Seney, got into SoHo early. One night, she took a cab to Spring Street and Mercer. The cab driver said, "Lady, I am not going to let you out here."

I don't know if it would have closed if somebody wise was running it. Wes and Judy were spending money like crazy.. They had their kids in the best schools. They had a fancy boat. Everybody went to that saloon. Nobody could believe that it was closing.

Q. What is your own history with alcohol?

I just drank too much. A lot of drinkers have the same story.. One morning, I said, "I'm not going to have a drink 'til noontime. By 8 am, I grabbed the nearest bottle. I finally said, "That's it." I quit. No A.A. No nothing. That was right before Elaine and I broke up. After a couple of years, I had a glass of wine. With one exception, I haven't had hard liquor in more than 20 years.

I don’t  do the bars anymore. I was a real drinker. A quart [of vodka] a day was nothing. As a lot of alcoholics do, I had excessive tolerance. I wrote a volume of literary criticism and I was drinking from 8 in the morning…I didn’t mix up Schopenhauer and Spinoza. I’d walk into the Lion’s Head at 5 o’clock and everybody was just off work, buying each other drinks. People didn’t know that I had been drinking steadily all day. When I lived with Elaine in Mexico, I had a wobbly table. I cut a hole in it that deep, a quarter-inch, to rest the glass in for when the table wobbled all day long. Down there, it happened to be rum, which was cheap, so I wouldn’t spill it. My son said to me recently, “Gee, Dad, it wasn’t until I left home that I learned that not everybody had a glass of vodka in their hand at 8 in the morning.

Q. What was the quality of the pick ups at the Lion Head?

Women came in, yeah. There were romances. The women who came in were relatively sophisticated.

--Everybody was there. It’s shocking and sad that no one has done a book on it. I tried to persuade Denis Duggan to do a book on it. He was thinking about it, but he was doing a column and he was a little old. He couldn’t see putting all that time into it.

The San Remo was there when I was in the bars. Remember, I started in these places before the Lion’s Head. I was there for the first time after it closed a few months ago An Irish friend, Joe Kennedy, was in town. We had to do an event on John McGahern. It‘s over. I said, “Where do you want to go?” He said, “I‘d like to see that Lion‘s Head, to see what‘s become of it.” We walk down there. It is physically exactly the same, except the picture and book covers are not on the wall. And the graffiti is pretty low grade in the bathroom. The average age was 19. It was 8 dollars for a glass of beer, and they have a guy at the door checking IDs. Joe and I looked like a couple of narcotics cops.

The list of the dead is getting longer.

  

Dylan Thomas' Fatal Tour in Greenwich Village

 In commemoration of Dylan Thomas' 100th birthday, here is my piece on his downward spiral in New York City.

By Dylan Foley

The White Horse Tavern opened in 1880 in Manhattan to serve the longshoremen who worked the teeming docks on the Hudson River. A rough-and-ready establishment, the bar first achieved underground literary cache in the teens of the last century when the playwright Eugene O’Neill hung out there with Dorothy Day, the future Catholic activist.

The White Horse reestablished its literary bona fides in 1952 when Dylan Thomas was brought to the tavern during his second American tour by the Scottish poet Ruthven Todd. Thomas’ 18-month reign at the White Horse until his death in November 1953 paved the way for other writers drinking at the tavern. Jimmy Baldwin drank there in the early 1950s, before the publication of his first novel “Go Tell It On the Mountain” and his self-exile to Paris.

Thomas’ biographer Paul Ferris has suggested that the White Horse’s proximity to the nearby Hudson River docks reminded Thomas of his hometown of Swansea, Wales. In his book “Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal,” the poet and the director of the 92nd Street Y’s Poetry Center Malcolm Brinnin said that “the British who came to New York liked the White Horse because it resembled an English pub. Before Todd took Dylan to the Horse, I’d been trying to keep him in check, take him to places like the Blarney Stone, which wasn’t all that interesting, didn’t have a lot of people for him to talk to, but when he got to the White Horse it was all over.”

With Thomas’ exploding popularity, the bar was packed with his admirers. The White Horse “had become his favorite rendezvous,” wrote Brinnin, “and much to the delight of his proprietor, who found his business doubled by the many people--friends and mere ‘ardents’--who would assemble there at all hours in the chance that Dylan might turn up. This wave of prosperity at the White Horse was to continue until Thomas’ death.”

David Markson was a graduate student at Columbia in 1952 when he met Thomas at a reading on the Columbia campus. “Thomas did a reading, and I asked him if he wanted to go for a drink,” said Markson. “He met us at the West End Bar with some friends. We had a pleasant time. Afterwards, I asked him if I could give him a shout, and he said sure, call me at the Chelsea Hotel. When I came down with several friends, he said, ‘Let’s go to the Horse.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, but it was the White Horse. Eventually, I began to spend time there myself.”

During his second trip to New York City, Thomas had brought along his fiery wife Caitlin, who he would sometimes bring to the White Horse. “She’d get pissed off that on one was paying attention to her,” said Markson. “One day we were at a table in the back with Thomas. Caitlin took out a cigarette. No one noticed her. She finally said, Would one of you satellites give me a light?’

“On a different night, I noticed that Caitlin had been gone from the table for a long time. I said, ‘Dylan, hasn’t she been in the ladies’ room for a long time?’ He said ‘Oh, David, she’s in the saloon across the street because she’s pissed off that she’s being ignored.’ Caitlin gave as good as she got.” Thomas asked Markson to fetch his wife. “He asked me, ‘Do me a favor, go buy her a beer and bring her back here. She’ll be less angry if you show up than if I do,’” said Markson. “Thomas was right. I found Caitlin in the nearest bar. I told her Dylan was sorry or whatever. She cursed, but she came back.”

Caitlin and Dylan Thomas had a passionate, jealous relationship with adulterous affairs on both sides. They baited each other while on tour in America in 1952, where Caitlin declared loudly at a party, “Is there not a man man enough for me in America?” She hated Thomas’ success in America and despised the girls that screamed for him as if he was a pop star. Once before he went on for a reading in New York, she said to Thomas of his poems, “Just remember, they are all dirt.”

The rift in their marriage became public in America, noted Brinnin. During a cocktail party at a wealthy admirer’s home, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas trashed the apartment. “I had witnessed one of these myself--at an evening party, given in their honor,” wrote Brinnin. “After watching their skirmishes, incredulous guests had abruptly departed from rooms littered with smashed glasses, overturned tables and broken objects d’art, leaving their hostess in a state of hysteria, as she contemplated her loss, part of which was a plaster section of the wall of her bedroom.”

The Thomas’ drinking during their 1952 stay in New York was prodigious. When traveling through Arizona on the reading tour, Thomas wrote on a postcard to a friend back in Wales that

“We were killed in action, Manhattan Island, Spring 1952,
in a gallant battle against American generosity.
An American called Double Rye shot Caitlin to death.
I was scalped by a bourbon.
Posthumous love to you and Irene.”

Despite the legions of admirers on the American tours, Thomas had to deal with crackpots. At the White Horse, a student approached Thomas, and said “I want to say to you, Fuck you, Dylan Thomas.” At a reading at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville on the same tour, a man told Thomas, “I’ll tell you what, Dylan Thomas, if you hadn’t written any poems, no one would have heard of you.” Thomas admitted to friends that he was unsettled by the occasional abuse.

Thomas was famous for several mistresses in England, and there were at least a few entanglements in America.

In a memoir published 30 years after Thomas’ death, Caitlin Thomas recounted a story of their ongoing mutual warfare: “Another awful evening I was with him at the White Horse Tavern when some woman came in, whispered in his ear--and he walked off with her as meekly as a lamb. I was in a quandary. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go running off after him. There was nothing innocent about it (she wasn’t a journalist arranging an interview), it stank a mile off, and I went into a decompression after that. I don’t know how I got back to the Chelsea Hotel. Someone must have put me in a taxi.”

Caitlin, a striking Anglo-Irish dancer who was proud of her exceptional body, was hellbent on exacting revenge from her poet husband. According to her close friend Rose, Slivka, the wife of sculptor David Slivka, Caitlin would pick up the occasional sailor or longshoreman from the nearby docks, not far from the Chelsea.

One of the wilder stories of Caitlin Thomas’ stay in New York in 1952 involved the events at a party at the filmmaker Maya Deren’s apartment. Deren, fresh from a stay in Haiti, was showing off some Voodoo dance moves to the accompagnyment of frenetic drumming. Caitlin was the only one bold enough to challenge Deren to an impromptu aggressive dance off. Anatole Broyard witnessed the scene.

“I first saw Caitlin Thomas at a party given by Maya Deren in her apartment in Greenwich Village,” wrote Broyard in his memoir Kafka was the Rage. “I only saw the bottom half of her, her legs, thighs and cotton underpants, because she was holding her dress up over her head as if she was pulling it off, or hiding behind it like a child. She was dancing, a sort of elementary hootchy-kootch that didn’t have much to do with the fast Haitian drum music that filled the room.”

The stocky Deren faced off with Caitlin. “It was like a war or the worlds out there on the floor: the child-bearing, cottage-keeping, pub-crawling wife of the Welsh bard against a rising star of Greenwich Village,” wrote Broyard. “Caitlin relied on the immemorial argument of bump and grind, while Maya Deren, who wore trousers, danced not exactly to the tapes, but the different drummer of the American art establishment.”

Broyard found Dylan Thomas hiding from the antics of his wife in a nearby bedroom, ignoring a circle of male admirers. Broyard had his own views on Thomas’ wrecked appearance.: “[Dylan] was no longer the pretty, pouting cherub of the Augustus John painting, but a man swollen by drink, and by sorrow, perhaps, or poetry. He looked like an inflatable toy that had been overinflated.”

Deren and a young confederate tried to usher Caitlin off the dance floor. She punched the young man out, then proceeded to grab the small Voodoo statuettes that Deren had arranged on a shelf, flinging them against the far wall. Deren was horrified. “Plunging her fingers into her curls, she cried like an Ibsen heroine, She’s smashing my universe.”

Dylan takes control at this point by grabbing Caitlin’s arm, spinning her around and flinging her, with great accuracy noted Broyard, from the living room into the bedroom. At one point, Broyard is given the job of restraining Caitlin Thomas on a bed. She stops struggling, then asks Broyard, “Are you queer?” The offended Broyard says no. “She threw her arms around my neck. Then for God’s sake, man, she said, love me! Love me!” He takes her back to the Chelsea by cab and runs away when she invites him in for a drink.

At the same time as Thomas was holding court, Norman Mailer set up a Sunday writers’ salon at the White Horse with the novelist Vance Bourjaily. Word had been passed around that Mailer wanted to meet some of the writers that hung out at Bourjaily’s apartment.

Hortense Calisher was one of the writers invited to the first event, which was not a brilliant beginning. “’Norman’ wanted us to meet pn a Sunday and get some needed cafe discussion started, the bar chosen being the White Horse on Hudson Street--which is how it came to be known as a place where writers went, by the time Dylan Thomas was taken there,” wrote Calisher in a memoir she published in the early 1970s.

The locals were not impressed with the uptown writers. “The day we first go,” wrote Calisher, “in a group of about ten, of which I recall for sure only Mailer, the Bourjailys and Frederic Morton, the bar and it’s usual patrons, mostly the remainders of indigenoous Greenwich Village Irish, are no more unhandy with us--don’t we know wherther we want a glass or a stein?

“The White Horse doesn’t know yet that it is going to be a literary pub. And we had the sad sense, or I do, that stuff like this is hard going in America. At one point Mailer takes out a dollar bill, and pleads with somebody to start an argument going with him ‘on anything.’ Nobody takes him up on it...Nothing memorable having been said by anyone, we leave, unsure whether we have consecrated the place.”

The awkward salons went on for about a year before they petered out. Mailer biographer Mary V. Dearborn notes that the salons were a place where some of New York’s important writers of the moment congregated for a while. This was all eclipsed by Dylan Thomas’ powerful explosion on the New York scene. It is also pretty clear that Mailer and Thomas never met.

Dave Van Ronk, who was to become a legendary folk singer, was one of the fans who would go to the White Horse to listen to Dylan Thomas reel off the occasional bit of verse. Van Ronk later mused that Dylan Thomas writing often didn’t make sense. like the work of Van Ronk’s friend Bob Dylan.

“I used to hear Dylan Thomas at the old White Horse Tavern back in the 1950s,” wrote Van Ronk, and when he had enough to drink--which was frequently--he would recite his poetry, and my draw would drop. it was beautiful, gorgeous stuff, and he recited it marvelously. But when I would go back and look at the page, a lot of it was bullshit. Not all of it, by any means, but I would challenge anyone to explain what some of those things were about.”

When Thomas showed up in New York for his third tour in February 1953, he confessed to Brinnin that “Under Milk Wood,” his epic “play for voices” that he had promised to the Poetry Center, was unfinished. On Thomas’ first day in New York, he and Brinnin went drinking at a series of Manhattan bars, winding up at the White Horse, where they were greeted warmly.

“At the White Horse Tavern, which we reached by midafternoon, everyone along the bar turned to greet him,” wrote Brinnin. “Ernie, the rotund proprietor, sent scotch to the table and sat down with us to reminisce about memorable evenings the year before. Dylan seemed happy, more than a little excited and most of all at home. His only genuine ease, I had long before observed, was among friendly faces, known and unknown, where the only propriety was to be oneself...I put aside the lists of urgent appointments and lecture tour matters...and simply basked in Dylan’s open and infectious delight at having come back to America.”

Nights for Dylan Thomas in Greenwich Village always included barhopping--going to Julius’s for hamburgers, then the San Remo, then back to the White Horse, where Brinnin wrote, “the usual crowd awaited his entrance.”

In April, Thomas’ Collected Poems was reviewed in Time magazine. The backhanded criticism praised his poetry and pummeled the man.

“[Thomas] is a chubby, bulb-nosed little Welshman with green eyes, a generally untidy air and the finest lyrical talent of any poet under 40,” went the unsigned Time review. The article continued to rip into Thomas’ personality: “When he settles down to guzzle beer, which is most of the time, his incredible yarns tumble over each other in a wild, Welsh dithyramb in which truth and fact become hopelessly smothered in boozy invention. He borrows with no thought of returning what is lent, seldom shows up on time, and is a trial to his friends and a worry to his family.”

After the piece came out, Thomas sued Time-Life International for libel.

During his third American tour in April 1953, Thomas was introduced to Liz Reitell, the secretary of the 92nd Street YW-YMHA’s Poetry Center. Though they initially disliked each other, they became lovers. Reitell, a sophisticated ex-Army WAC who’d been divorced twice, was responsible for pulling together “Under Milk Wood” from Dylan Thomas’ last-minute changes for the world premiere of the play at the Poetry Center in New York in May 1953.

Reitell and Dylan Thomas’ affair was common knowledge at the Poetry Center. Reitell was 33-years old, a striking woman with high cheekbones. She had been a painter and a dancer. A colleague described her as a “’flap-sandal-clad, artsy-crafty type,’ very possessive of Thomas: the nurse, the guard, secretary,” who pops up when famous men need looking after. As noted by the same colleague, Reitell also took Thomas’ abuse: “The few times I saw them together, Dylan was hostile to Liz and made personal, hurtful remarks that I wouldn’t have accepted from God but she, of course, ‘understood.’”

After the success of “Under Milk Wood” in Boston and New York, Thomas spent the last nine or 10 days of his spring tour walking around the Village with Reitell and hitting the bars. Years later, Reitell described Thomas as “terribly, clinically alcoholic...There was no great muse that made Dylan drink. He drank because he was an alcoholic. He had all the devils, and some angels, too.”

Dylan Thomas returned to New York for his fatal stay on October 19, 1953. His health was devastated. Thomas plowed through New York in a drunken haze, with the exception being his spectacular reprise of “Under Milk Wood” at the 92nd Street Y.

As in his relationship with Caitlin, Thomas had added an element of emotional cruelty to his love affair with Liz Reitell. In the last weeks of Thomas’ life, Reitell and Brinnin had a heartbreaking conversation about him. “He was, Liz said, without any question, the most lovable human being she ha d ever known,” wrote Brinnin. “While she adored him, she also knew that he was destroyer--that he had an instinct for drawing to him those most capable of being annihilated by them.” Reitell admitted she was going to break up with him.

That night, when Reitell refused to go on to the White Horse with Thomas, “Dylan went to the White Horse, stayed out most of the night, and returned to his hotel with a girl ‘loaned’ to him by one of his drinking companions,” wrote Brinnin.

Thomas’ health continued to collapse. After a particularly bad hangover, he had Reitell take him to the White Horse, where he drank beer and raw eggs, which had become his only source of nutrition.

Ironically, a good source of information for Thomas’ movements in his last few weeks of life was a private detective, who was following the poet around the Village because of the Time-Life libel suit. On October 31st, four days before he drank himself into a coma, Thomas entered the White Horse drunk with two friends. At a nearby bar and grill later that night, Thomas loudly confessed to sexual impotency and said that he loved his wife, and his adulterous affairs were just substitutes for Caitlin. He also admitted to contracting gonorrhea as a teenager. At 2:20 a.m., he was “seen taking benzedrine.” As his biographer Paul Ferris notes with sympathy, it must have been a tiring night for the detective.

Liam Clancy of the original Clancy Brothers , a group that was once called “the Irish Beatles,” hung out at the White Horse five or six years after Thomas died. He recounted the myth of Dylan Thomas’ death: "The doctors told [Thomas] that even one more whiskey would do in his liver, so he set up a pyramid of thirty-six shot glasses of whiskeys on the counter of the White horse. He looked a long time at the pyramid, contemplating. The he took the top shot glass off the pile, downed it and with suicidal certainty drank glass after glass until the pyramid was demolished.”

A more authoritative account of Thomas’ death comes from Paul Ferris, who said that Thomas spent the day of November 3rd drinking, sleeping and having delusions in his room at the ratty Chelsea Hotel on 23rd. At 2 a.m. on the 4th, he told Liz Reitell that he had to go out for a drink. He came back 90 minutes later, probably going to the White Horse, and said that line that started his death legend: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskeys. I think that’s a record.” He told Reitell, “I love you, but I am alone,” then fell asleep.

During the day of November 4th, Thomas was raving in his hotel room. Reitell took him to the White Horse for what was hoped would be a restorative two pints of beer. A quack doctor who he was seeing named Feltenstein, who boasted of having “a winking needle,” gave Thomas an injection of morphine, six times the amount he was supposed to have given him. Soon after, Thomas was taken to St. Vincent’s.

After Thomas went into his coma, his poet friend Ruthven Todd, who had introduced him to the White Horse, and Stuart Thomas, a Welsh lawyer from Swansea, tracked his last movements. Todd interviewed the White Horse’s bartender, who figured by checking his stock that Thomas could have only have had six whiskeys maximum.

Caitlin Thomas was in Wales when she was notified of Thomas’ serious medical condition. She went to a local party that night, but then took the train to London to wait for a plane. Caitlin Thomas flew into New York on November 8th, swept into St. Vincent’s and demanded of Brinnin, “Is the bloody man dead or alive?” Brinnin had the thankless task of hiding Liz Reitell, who’d spent days at Thomas’ hospital bedside, out of sight from Caitlin’s rage.

Caitlin Thomas’ actions at the hospital were fit for a short Irish drama. When she spent 15 minutes alone with the comatose Dylan, she tried to smash her head through the window of his room, but was unable to do so because the glass was reinforced. She was taken away by friends, but returned to the hospital later. On the second visit, she was initially more composed. “She was wearing a striking, close-fitting black wool dress; her tawny yellow hair was loosely done up; she looked radiantly beautiful, and she had had too much to drink,” wrote Brinnin. She refused to stop lighting cigarettes near Dylan’s oxygen tent. She then pulled a crucifix off the wall and smashed it, and splintered a statue of the Virgin to bits. She assaulted Brinnin and several others who tried to comfort her. She then bit an orderly, attacked a doctor and ripped a nun’s habit. She wound up sedated and in a straight jacket. The doctors at St. Vincent’s wanted to send her to Bellevue, but after the intervention of Brinnin and others, she was sent to Rivercrest, a private psychiatric institution in Queens.

Dylan Thomas died the next day, November 9th, while a nurse was giving him a sponge bath. Brinnin and Reitell were at Dylan Thomas’ side right after he died. “When I took his feet in my hands all warmth was gone,” wrote Brinnin. “It was as if I could feel the little distance between his life and death. Liz whispered to him and kissed him on the forehead. We stood then at the foot of the bed for a very few long minutes, and did not weep or speak. Now, as always, where Dylan was, there were no tears at all.”

In August 2008, Caitlin MacNamara Thomas’ diary from the 1950s was put on the auction block for $500,000. In a diary entry a few days after his burial in Wales, Caitlin wrote, “Oh God, oh Dylan, it must be cold down there; it is cold enough on top in November: the dirtiest month of the year that killed you on the ninth vile day. If only I could take you a bowl of your bread, and milk, and salt, that you always drank at night to warm you up.”

Sources:

Broyard, Anatole, Kafka was the Rage

Calisher, Hortense, Herself: An Autobiographical Work

Ferris, Paul, Dylan Thomas: The Biography

Interview with David Markson, July 2007

Thomas, Caitlin, Double-Drink Story

Van Ronk, Dave, The Mayor of MacDougal Street

Brinin, Malcolm, Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal

The Independent (London) August 12, 2008

Time Magazine, April 6, 1953