When Roz Roose moved into the building, in 1952, it wasn’t yet “the building”—as in “Ah, you live in the building!” To the tenants, it was half a block on Central Park West, and to the landlord, dreaming of fancy rents, it was the Turin, and to some people on the House Un-American Activities Committee, in Washington, it was the Kremlin—perhaps to distinguish it from the building eleven blocks up the street, which they liked to call the Smolny Institute. I have often wondered what those people would have made of the fact that Mrs. Roose, moving into the building with a psychoanalyst husband and two small boys, was a little embarrassed by the seven-room apartment with a maid’s room and a slice of Park view. Roz thought of the building as a hopelessly bourgeois place, compromising to her reputation; she expected to find, if not Republicans lurking there, then Democrats with “help.” Roz had help, but she didn’t think of it that way, since the help at her house was a homeless Chinese math student who had come to stay for a couple of nights in 1948 and had yet to entertain the thought of learning English, or of leaving. Roz was known even then for a disarming—her children say alarming—hospitality. If you were on the left, or if you spoke Chinese and Roz had no reliable way of checking on your politics, she took you in and fed you lox and doctrine until you came to believe that the Party was Roz Roose’s weekly Sunday brunch.
There was no doubt that Roz needed the building for her party. The building had twelve floors and seventy-two apartments, which Roz translated as seventy-two available ice-cube trays—Sasha Pressman, on the fifth floor, says that if it was Saturday or Sunday and your bell rang you didn’t need to ask who was there; it was always “the Roose boys, Stevie and Ronnie, with buckets”—and there was a big coatrack waiting in the basement. And, while the building was undeniably shabby by, say, Fifth Avenue standards, these were amenities that had not been evident at the old brownstone on 120th Street, off Morningside Drive, where Roz and her husband, Larry, their two boys, and their “implacably settled” Chinese student had shared a railroad flat. Roz had considered her old building quite bohemian—as avant-garde as you could get uptown. It was the sort of place where you would expect to find a woman who was at once a Communist, a painter, and a freethinker; a woman who, during a wartime stint as a psychiatric social worker, had doubled the cure rate at Rockland State Hospital by the sensible treatment of arranging rendezvous between the male and female patients. She had hung some Klees—her friend Clifford Odets lent them to her—and painted her ceilings green, “for an interesting look.” She had also charmed a French professor from Columbia into leading the tenants in a rent strike, and enlisted the Roose boys in some guileless agitprop, as her husband discovered when—I like to imagine him in a cab on his way to a class at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute—he opened the paper to a photograph of his three-year-old son, shivering in a blanket, with his feet in a pan of steamy water, and below it a caption about heartless landlords and freezing tenement children. And she had started giving her famous party, which began as a weekly poker party; Larry liked poker. Richard Avedon was one of the regulars, along with Odets, John Garfield, and the film director Sidney Meyers. Avedon says that “the spread was the key thing and the stuffed cabbage was the best in the world.” I have heard it said that half the New York blacklist played at Roz’s for dimes and quarters to get themselves through the seven days until the stuffed cabbage at the next game.
Roz was a beauty—“a curvy Jewish beauty” is how one of her old admirers describes her. She had long dark hair, and apple cheeks, and a dimple in her chin, and huge gray-green eyes under thick black lashes. And she had a heartstopping smile. When she wasn’t talking art or politics at her party, she liked to dress up in gypsy blouses and flouncy skirts and dance until, as Avedon puts it, “her bangs were flying.” It has been said that she invented the Upper West Side style, otherwise known as the early (meaning Jewish) New York ethnic look, and it is a measure of her charm that when she took that look to the provinces—she and Larry were married, in 1943, at an Army officers’ club in Columbia, South Carolina—no one blinked when she showed up for the wedding wearing a black dirndl, a lopsided wreath on her head, and sandals.
Roz worried that the women on Central Park West were going to be what she calls “suit-hat-and-pearls people”—people with East Side souls, who didn’t understand that a suit, a hat, and a string of pearls were meant to be kept in the closet and taken out only for persuasive purposes, the way she had taken hers out when she drove to Key West with three college friends “to meet with” Ernest Hemingway on the subject of the Spanish Civil War. Or that they were a kind of camouflage, something you put on to disarm the establishment when you were out leading a demonstration. Her friends in the Party warned her about Central Park West, and some of her artworld friends—Louise Nevelson among them—accused her of snobbery when she moved there. But the building turned out to be Roz’s natural habitat. People were suffering in the building at least as much as anyone had suffered on 120th Street, and in ways that Roz had dreamed of suffering herself: Joe Julian, the radio actor with the pet monkey, on the tenth floor, was on the blacklist, and so was Sasha Pressman’s husband, David, a brilliant director who had come home from the war with two Purple Hearts and ended up banned from television for twelve years; he had staged a Madison Square Garden revue that the State Committee of the Communist Party financed.
Roz, being just a painter, had—to her evident regret—nothing to be blacklisted from, but she fitted right into the building. She knew the Pressmans; she and Sasha Pressman, who was a dancer, had both modelled for the W.P.A. Artists Project. She knew the Russian pianist Alexander Uninsky, who, she likes to say, “had had his passport seized.” She knocked on doors and got to know everybody else. She got to know the Wylers, whose daughter grew up in the building and is now the Manhattan Borough President, Ruth Messinger. She got to know the Adlers: Freyda Adler, who had written an article called “I Passed for Colored in a Jim Crow Bar,” and her husband, the psychiatrist Kurt Adler, who was the son of Alfred Adler, and who moved into the building three years after Roz did, carrying the works of Stalin, Marx, and Gorky and a collection of Hanns Eisler songs that he had smuggled home from East Berlin labelled as Bach cantatas. (Their daughter, Margot, who lives in the building now, grew up to become the New York correspondent for National Public Radio, and a Wicca priestess.) Roz missed the French professor from her old building, but it pleased her to think that her neighbors now were the sort of people Joseph McCarthy considered subversive. The building incorporated all her enthusiasms and all her worlds. If there were not many artists in the building, there were “art people,” like René d’Harnoncourt, the director of the Museum of Modern Art (“I’d give him rides; so did the Rockefellers,” Roz says), and Peter Selz, who was one of the moma curators. There were book people, like Adrienne Rich, who had the apartment next door to Roz’s (“Her husband, Alfred Conrad, was a Communist, from Harvard; I gave him a ride when he was on his way to commit suicide”), and whose public anguishes Roz watched, privately, from one of her living-room windows. And there were music people—Roz loves music, and subscribes to every chamber-music series in town—like the duo pianists Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold, and the violinist Roman Totenberg, whose daughter, Nina, grew up to break the Clarence Thomas scandal. Roz collected people, and gave them rides, and the building was her resource. She told me once that what she loved about Larry—who died in 1989—was that “he wasn’t dazzling but he was progressive,” and she felt that way about the building, too. The building had so many progressive people that by the time it got to be known as “the building” it was said that if you lived there you could have the most inspiring social life in New York City without ever leaving home.
The writer Jane O’Reilly, who lived in the building for twenty years, thinks that Roz was able to make a community there because she had “that wonderful, Old Left, collective, biographical way of looking at things”—by which she means that “who Roz is is who she knew.” Roz liked groups, for comfort, confirmation, and security. She had no appetite for private life, and it may be that the difference between Roz and, say, Diana Trilling (or any of the other famous hostesses of the Upper West Side left) was that Roz was joyously undiscriminating. Roz loved everybody except Richard Nixon, a woman who charged her seven hundred and fifty dollars in key money for some old curtains (which Roz dyed black), a neighbor who wouldn’t lend her a book by Rilke that she wanted to read in 1976, and a right-wing superintendent by the name of Leo, who she claims stole the money and mink coats during her “Salvador Allende party,” in 1973. I have heard it said that Roz’s credo was “When you’re in love, the whole world’s Jewish and Communist and belongs in the building,” and that seems to me to be an accurate description even now. I remember not long ago introducing her to a black Brazilian friend named Caetana, whose ex-husband had been active in the Party in Rio. Caetana had been seized and tortured during the military junta, and she told Roz how mad she had got at her husband every time a policeman pushed her head into a bucket of freezing water and held it down. Roz was so moved (“You’re so courageous,” Roz said. “It’s like taking the Fifth”) that she flung her arms around Caetana and announced, “I knew you were Jewish!” It took us an hour to persuade Roz that Caetana was black—“Mediterranean,” Roz kept saying—and Caetana, seeing how disappointed Roz was, tried to cheer her up with the news that now she had a Jewish boyfriend. Roz said, “Marry him! They make the best husbands!” and presented her with a first edition of Langston Hughes. Roz, for all her causes, was untouched by feminism. Jane O’Reilly says that for years Roz told her, “We have to get a man for you!” and Margot Adler remembers complaining to Roz about doctors who lie to women and Roz saying, “The men know best.”
Roz’s genius was that she could raise a constituency. She put the Upper West Side left together at her parties, and people on that left—people who were making money, becoming prominent, gaining what Roz calls “an influence” helped give the city the feisty, subversive tone that the rest of the country found so strange. The formula for a Roz Roose brunch was simple. Larry supplied the Bloody Marys, and I remember Alger Hiss’s wife, Isabel Johnson, bringing the apple crisp. Roz did the serious shopping. For years, she went to “a nova outlet” in Brooklyn, and she could be seen on Saturdays at Zabar’s and at Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King, buying the bagels and the blueberry blintzes and the smoked whitefish and the herring in sour cream, so that Central Park West’s progressive bourgeoisie would not go hungry on Sunday morning. “It was a fucking salon she maintained for half a century” is how the film director Nicholas Meyer—who is Ron Roose’s oldest friend and “practically grew up in the building”—describes it. “It didn’t matter if you came from across the hall or just dropped in from Czechoslovakia.” Meyer says you were sucked in by her “absentminded love” and by the reassurance that if you went to the revolution with Roz Roose you’d have a comfortable seat and a drink in your hand.
Some of the neighbors were unimpressed. Pauline Kael, who lived in the building in the late sixties, says that Roz’s parties were “convivial” but that what she remembers most about them is Adrienne Rich, “gripping my hands with her little brown twiglike fingers.” Some of the neighbors were skeptical. “Roz, in her effort to be friendly, invented connections she didn’t have with people she thought you knew,” the actor Michael Lombard, who used to live next door to the Rooses, on the ninth floor, says. He came anyway, the point being that in the end Roz made those connections and the people became your friends. She had learned in the Young Communist League that “with the right pitch you could sell anything, from Communism to cornflakes,” and her life work was to sell the important people she collected to each other. Her parties were a hodgepodge of celebrities, friends, colleagues, and hangers-on, anointed mainly by her conviction that anybody who showed up at Apartment 94 was interesting. Her conversation was a string of names. David Pressman says, “Roz would meet me in the elevator and say, ‘Oh, David, I just saw Arthur.’ And I’d ask myself, ‘Arthur who? Penn? Miller? Goldberg?’ ” It didn’t matter, he says, because there was usually some Arthur you knew, and that made you feel connected, and you’d go to the next brunch and Arthur Penn would be standing there, and the next time Roz said, “I just saw Arthur,” you’d be able to say, “What movie is he shooting now?” Avedon told me once that he went to Roz’s because “the people there, the place, they stood for something”—which, more than money or neighborhood or suits-and-pearls, is what distinguished Roz’s party from the one across the Park at, say, Nan Kempner’s. Roz arguably served better food, and she knew everybody, with the possible exception of the people who went to Kempner’s. Her network stretched from the shtetl where she was born to Hollywood, where, as she once told me, “the Spielberg boy has made a lot of money.”
Her party these days is much reduced by age and attrition—Roz has no birth certificate; the family thinks she is seventy-eight or seventy-nine—but it still goes on, and Nick Meyer says it must be the longest-running salon in Manhattan. He wishes that Roz had kept a diary—as do most of her friends—because so many of what could be called Roz Roose’s greatest hits exist now mainly in Roz’s head, and in the dizzying recitation of names and relationships that makes up her conversation. “Leon Edel and Bob Motherwell were here, and discovered they had lived next door to each other in Paris,” she will say suddenly, or “Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks came twice.” In the end, she brings everything back to the building. I have heard her describe the old voice teacher from the fourth floor as “Mrs. Gurewitsch, her husband’s brother was Eleanor Roosevelt’s doctor,” and the pizza she serves as “from the place where Jackie Onassis bought her pizza.” A Yoruba mask on her dining-room wall reminds her that “Elliott Wilk, the State Supreme Court judge—he was mean to Woody Allen—said, ‘You have to show this mask to the Brooklyn Museum.’ ” Her only diary is a yellowing loose-leaf notebook—a hundred and twenty coffee-stained pages, each of them worn to shreds on the bottom right-hand comer, from thumbing—that has served as her address book for forty or fifty years. I have been her neighbor for twenty of those years, and for me that notebook is a portrait: of a moment, of a place, of an optimism born, in equal parts, of Marx, money, and immigration; of people who “stood for something” and of the woman who brought them together. Ron, her elder son—he is a novelist and a film editor, and lives in Santa Monica with his family—says, “There was the Party, and there was Mom, who threw the party.” He tells a story about a young actor who found himself sitting on a plane next to Zero Mostel and, wanting desperately to start a conversation, decided to open with “Have you been to Roz Roose’s lately?” Mostel had.
Roz’s shtetl was called Roshch. She puts it somewhere between the Byelorussian town of Grodno, the Russian town of Volkovysk, and the Lithuanian town of Vilna, and, while she doesn’t know which country it belonged to then, she considers the neighborhood a kind of East European prototype of the Upper West Side, since at one time or another it produced “Max Weber and Al Jaffee”—Weber being a painter, and Jaffee being a friend who drew cartoons for Mad magazine. In Roshch, her name was Esther Razel Vlosky, but nobody has called her Esther since she arrived in New York, at the age (she thinks) of three or four, and began her odyssey of American self-invention. Her parents called her Razel, and she herself tried out Rosa and Elaine and, briefly, Estelle, before settling on Roslyn, or Roz, as a name to answer to. It was a while, anyway, before her teachers knew what Roz was called, because Roz was embarrassed at school—embarrassed about being an immigrant, embarrassed to be speaking Yiddish—and for a few years she signed her drawings and her ABCs with the name of whoever happened to be sitting next to her. She lived in Harlem first, and then in Washington Heights. Her first lie was to tell a boyfriend that she came from Riverside Drive. She was the youngest child and only girl in a family that had produced five sons and lost one. It was a family with no real prospects. Her father worked sometimes for a brother-in-law in Brooklyn, but mainly he was one of those mysterious survivors who came to be known in New York as “Jews without money.” Roz slept in a chair at her grandmother’s place and never knew where the smoked salmon came from or how her mother managed to get “the best white eggs” when she went to the grocery store.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
When the Government Tried—and Failed—to Silence Catwoman
Roz says that her parents had “great dignity.” Her mother bargained with dignity for those “best white eggs,” and her father, who prayed in a synagogue all day and emerged only at mealtimes, to read the Forward, once went out and bargained with dignity for “the best muskrat coat,” which he presented to Roz when she started classes at Hunter College. She wore it to meetings of the Young Communist League and to the Irish bars where she peddled the Daily Worker and to the Friday pay lines of the Artists Project—though people who knew her from the Project remember her less for her coat than for her relentless sidewalk socializing, and a few of them claim to have been there on a day when she and a friend, who is now the fashion photographer Lillian Bassman, took off their clothes and picketed, naked, in front of the Art Students League. It was in the late thirties, and they were making twenty-three dollars and eighty-six cents a week. “Roz knew everybody on the pay line,” Bassman says. “She talked to strangers. She introduced people. She was made to be a friend.” Roz and Lillian were a team. They organized sitdown strikes. They handcuffed themselves to radiators. They shared their artists. When Roz got married, it was Lillian’s mother-in-law who made the black dirndl that, as Bassman puts it, “was so well received in that Waspy officers’ club.”
Roz had decided early “to live for art and Marx,” and, while there is some indication that she thinks “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is a symphony, and that the Marx she really knew best was Maxine Marx, Chico’s daughter, who used to come to her parties, there is no doubt that she was ardent in the cause. Her mentor was never Marx, anyway, although she can actually quote the first sentence of Engels’ eulogy at Karl Marx’s funeral: “On the fourteenth of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.” Her mentor was Lena Vlosky, an International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union dressmaker who had married Roz’s brother Ben and kept a chicken-and-fruit farm with him in Rockland County, and who helped found the American League Against War and Fascism “An authentic revolutionary,” Roz says. “Her daughter, Edna, was Wendell Willkie’s nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital.” (Sometimes it’s “The artist Peter Blume was her first cousin,” and at other times it’s “Her sister’s daughter owns the Joffrey Ballet.”) Roz says, “When Lena explained what Bolshevism was, I thought, How could anyone not be one?” And she was converted.
Lena taught Roz about agitprop; Roz proved a master. She organized the disruption of her Hunter graduation—it was in Carnegie Hall, and Roz likes to compare it to the day Steven Roose, her younger son, graduated from Harvard, and the students, protesting the Vietnam War, refused to wear their caps and gowns. She marched in May Day parades and in American Youth Congress demonstrations, and once she borrowed a friend’s fur jacket “for the impression” (her muskrat had fallen apart) and marched her way into Harry Hopkins’ office. She marched through graduate school—modelling for the Artists Project, modelling for friends, selling dresses in the Junior Deb department at Macy’s. She ended up with a Master of Arts from New York University and a second master’s, in social work, from Columbia. Even then, her style was distinctive. She had a teacher who told her not to bother signing her papers; the teacher knew a Roz Roose paper because it slipped the class struggle into any subject. And she must have been persuasive, because she once managed to persuade her father that the Hitler-Stalin pact was a mitzvah—a kindness—from Stalin to the Polish Jews, and her father even stood up in synagogue that day and repeated the news. “He did it for me,” she says. “I was very good politically. I could give explanations.” She may be the only person on earth who believes that Stalin was worrying about Jews when he signed a pact with Hitler. “Stalin was a paranoid, sick man, and we isolated him” is the most she would ever concede where Stalin was concerned. Now she says, “As Picasso said, no one gave up Christianity because of a few bad Popes.” Her politics astonish and exasperate her friends. But no one who knows and loves Roz holds her politics against her, or even takes them seriously—something that exasperates her. She is so friendly, goofy, and benign that, whether or not she actually stayed in the Party—she won’t say—it is extremely doubtful that the Party ever took them seriously, either. A woman who was in the Party, in the fifties, says, “Roz was not an intellectual. She was the person you called for parties, for contacts, but never for strategy or planning. The left, for Roz, was like baby’s milk from a bottle. She drank it all down.” And a friend who knew Roz from the S.N.C.C. protests says, “You’d never ask her to think. You’d ask her to fill a room. You’d call a meeting, and, if Roz heard about it, by nightfall fifty people would be there. She just knew so many more people than any of us did. She’d meet you, she’d hug you: ‘What are you doing tonight? Come over for dinner.’ People don’t treat you like that in New York. So you’d respond to her. She was a very warm person.”
What was obvious to all of Roz’s friends was that, despite her best efforts to appear dangerous, her heart was clearly in the right place, if not precisely in the right country. She had fallen in love with the Soviet Union, and nothing could dissuade her—not even a visit she made there with Larry in 1960, when Khrushchev was chairman. “A thrilling, happy place,” she said when she came home. Larry said, “Listen, it may be better than Russia in 1917, but I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” She took up Lenin’s children the way she took up the people at her parties: they belonged to the building; they belonged to her; they were Upper West Siders doing their best in a Republican world. She almost left Larry over the Doctors’ Plot. Ron, Steve, and their sister, Gina, still remember the fights that went on in Apartment 94 when Larry defended the nine doctors, six of them Jews, whom Stalin had had arrested on trumped-up charges that ran from poisoning the Leningrad Party leader to spying for the United States. Roz insists, even now, that “what Stalin did was in the Marxist spirit of self-criticism.” Once, in the middle of a sleepless night after the Berlin Wall fell, she called my husband to ask him whether she was going to have to “give up Leninism.” It was the closest either of us had ever heard her come to doubt. Lionel Gilbert, a painter who is one of her best friends, says, “She is an unreconstructed sympathizer. I love her and she drives me crazy.” Alexander Uninsky’s son, Philippe—he is a lawyer, and devoted to Roz—says, “One of the most interesting things about Roz is that she’s never de-Stalinized. She has a timeless politics.” Her own son Steve, who is a doctor, like Larry, and is an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia, puts it this way: “The political memory of people like Mom has become their validating moment. It gives them ‘significance.’ You can never say to Mom, ‘We see it differently, let’s discuss it.’ ” And Ron says, “She’s impassioned, but she’s not reasoned. . . . All of her kids have reacted to her in the same way. We’re not bourgeois, but there’s a certain staidness in the way we try to recover the rational world.” Ron thinks that maybe when he straightens out his desk, or his room, he’s really trying to straighten out his mother’s mind. He has never been able to talk her out of Stalin. (He once made “the idiotic mistake” of trying to talk to her about the Rosenbergs, and discovered that “to my mother the Rosenbergs were the Ten Commandments, the Koran, the Unassailable Truth.”) My own opinion is that if Roz had ever met Stalin she would have said, “Oh, Joe, I just saw Arthur!” and asked him to brunch.
Roz likes to say that she spent the thirties in the Village—by which she means that she made her headquarters at her cousin Renee Gross’s place, on Ninth Street, and started posing for the artists who became her friends. The list is long. There was Chaim Gross, Renee’s husband. There was Raphael Soyer, and his brother Moses Soyer, and John Sloan, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Reginald Marsh, Louis Ribak, Federico Castellon, Alexander Brook, and Nicolai Cikovsky—a whole catalogue of what was then the American Realist school—and a lot of others whom Roz doesn’t remember until she looks at her walls. Roz was shrewd: she took most of her pay in paintings, and has a large collection now. By all accounts, she was in great demand as a model. (“To the best model in Manhattan” is how Marsh signed the etchings that she took home.”) She says the only painter she liked who never asked her to pose was Abraham Walkowitz, “who would only paint Isadora Duncan.” She loved the studios, the life, the freedom, and especially the painters. “In those days, you slept around,” she told me once, coyly. “To be good in bed was the best compliment. You got good values. You looked down on the bourgeoisie.” Gina—her third child, and the only one to have been “born into the building” says that, growing up, she was always “bumping into Mom” on other people’s walls. It was an experience she could handle easily enough on the Upper West Side, but she has never forgotten the night it happened at a boyfriend’s house, in Passaic. She wanted to make a good impression on these exotic, bourgeois people who went to temple and were something scandalous called “in business.” (Scandalous but “not creative,” Roz said.) Gina was nervous about Passaic to begin with—it was Rosh Hashanah and she had had to memorize the prayers “fast, at college, in the shower,” because Roz had told her children about religion being the opiate of the people and had banned religion from the house. She got by until she discovered a large Chaim Gross nude of her mother hanging in her boyfriend’s front hall. Gina looks like Roz—she is another Jewish beauty, with long lashes and huge blue eyes—and she spent the evening waiting for his parents to notice the resemblance.
In the thirties, Roz suited her politics to her poverty. She was always a shopper, but in those days she never shopped retail and only rarely wholesale. Her favorite dress came from a friend of a friend who stole from Saks, and years later, when she herself started painting, she got her Winsor & Newton and Rembrandt oils from an old Italian who made the rounds of the downtown studios with stolen paints. “It was not taking from the poor” is the way Roz looks at it. Once she married and had some money, she was at Saks often enough to make collages with the tickets she got for double-parking near the corner of Fiftieth and Fifth. Gina, who used to be a film editor, like Ron, and is now an editor at the magazine Marie Claire, says that her mother has always had “a cockeyed relationship” to money: “She’d love to be an incredibly successful starving artist, with a loft in SoHo—that’s the contradiction that defines Roz.” Roz herself prefers the word “conflict.” (“Conflict” is the name of the bronze Roz Roose that Robert Russin made for Roz and Larry as a wedding present.) She claims sometimes that she can’t remember the day, or even the year, she married Larry, and that she never wore the ring he gave her, because “everything conventional I fought against.” But she insisted on buying the ring herself: “I said to Larry, ‘They’ll charge an officer too much money.’ ” Getting married was against her principles—she told me once that the love of her life was a like-minded writer named Leonard who went off to fight for the anarchists in Spain. But when she did get married it was before a Reform Jewish Army chaplain and it was to a handsome, blond, blue-eyed, born-in-America Jewish doctor “from Pomona and New York,” whose mother was a public-school principal and whose own war was the Second World War.
Roz had met Larry at Rockland State Hospital. He had a residency there when Roz was hired as a social worker. She stayed five years. Today, she describes the hospital by the famous patients who were there. (“Tennessee Williams’ sister was there!”) She says that Jewish mothers would come up to her in the hall and tell her, “My son wouldn’t be crazy if he was married to you!” Her “only failure” at Rockland was the case of two brothers who had grown up sleeping in the same bed; one of the brothers went crazy and thought he was pregnant. When Roz visited their mother to say that she didn’t think the boys should sleep together anymore, their mother said, “What’s the matter? The room is sunny.”
Larry told Roz that he represented “maturity and responsibility,” to which Roz adds “stability, security, a car.” Larry’s father had had other plans for Larry—he didn’t like it that Roz was poor and a Communist, and wanted Larry to marry the daughter of a rich jam manufacturer he knew—but Larry’s mother loved Roz, and Roz put her faith in her, and was rewarded ten years later when her mother-in-law signed a petition about rents in Harlem and was promptly called before the superintendent of schools to explain herself. (Roz, to celebrate, took her to hear a speech by Earl Browder, who had been Roz’s favorite American Communist Party secretary.) Actually, Larry Roose fitted easily into Roz’s world. Roz has told me that she knew right off “he was a radical at heart,” because he was already sleeping with two women when he spotted her, but Gina is probably closer to the truth of the attraction when she says to remember that “in 1940 in New York it was considered wildly avant-garde to be a Freudian psychoanalyst, like Larry”—as advanced as being a Communist or an artist, or even both. Roz’s neighbor Edmund Leites—a philosopher who got to know the building when his father moved there in the late forties, and who moved there himself thirty years later—says, “In those days, the Upper West Side was full of women who had married analysts, rented studios, and started painting.” It was the fashion then for psychoanalysts to marry painters. The artist and the analyst were the ur-Upper West Side couple—you could say the apotheosis of a brunch bohemia.
Larry Roose was a quiet, skeptical man with a dry sense of humor and a sharp mind—an authority on depression, the author of a classic essay on the dying patient. He was also a man who preferred Adlai Stevenson to Stalin, who liked his dinner at seven sharp and his house neat, and his parking tickets paid. Roz was a woman who forgot about dinner unless at least sixteen people were invited and who left a trail of disorder as long as the cord on her telephone. (Avedon took the publicity shots for “Come Back, Little Sheba” in Roz’s kitchen.) Their marriage was stormy—their children say they would hear the shouting in the dining room and wonder whether it was those sixteen people arguing about the Soviet Union or Roz and Larry arguing about the mess—but it lasted for forty-six years, and when Larry died Roz missed him so violently that she suddenly started keeping house. It was a kind of homage. Their friends say that he could never have survived her, that Roz “gave Larry a life.” They mean people and parties and gaiety and a world he had neither the time nor the temperament to create himself. My husband, who knew Larry well and liked him, suspects that “living with Roz was like living with the unconscious,” and that maybe, for a Freudian like Larry, it was irresistible.
Other people suspect that Roz’s unconscious is the craftiest thing about her. Her slips are famous. The father of her friend Anne Squadron, who was a doctor and then an Air Force brigadier general, becomes, in Roz’s conversation, “the famous Surgeon General.” Eleanor Roosevelt, who came to her friend Vivian Cadden’s wedding and presented the bride and groom with a silver tray, becomes “Eleanor Roosevelt who gave Vivian away.” Arthur Mayer, who ran the Rialto Theatre in Times Square, becomes “Louis B. Mayer.” Her friends laugh and forgive her for it; they know that Roz’s unconscious is hard at work to make them fascinating. Roz herself has never bothered getting analyzed—the only anomaly in a prototypical Upper West Side profile. She claims to have made an appointment once with the analyst Rudolf Lowenstein—Lowenstein and Heinz Hartmann had been Larry’s mentors at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute—and came home proudly with the news that “Rudi says there’s nothing analysis can do for me.” Her family thought so, too. Ron says that he’s still waiting for his mother to end a sentence, and Gina, putting it politely, says, “Mom never had trouble free-associating.”
Roz didn’t get around to renting her own studio for fifteen years. She had missed the women’s movement by a couple of generations, and Arthur Penn, who is indeed one of her good friends, says that she was like a lot of women who came out of the art scene in the Depression: “There was a double standard. The girls were artists but ornamental—intelligent, talented, yet girls first.” He means that once they married they were expected to stay at home, which is what Roz did. She studied with the painter Sol Wilson, and took some classes at the Workers’ School, on Union Square, a kind of free university where professors fired from City University during the McCarthy years were teaching. But mainly she had her children and she had her causes, and, according to Lillian Bassman, she put her energy into “creating a world for Larry and the kids and a persona for herself.”
Her headquarters—you could say her office—was the building, and her annex was a greasy spoon around the corner from the Walden School, at One West Eighty-eighth Street, where the mothers would sit and gossip and talk politics after dropping off their children at eight-thirty in the morning. (The same women meet today in a coffee shop around the corner from the 92nd Street Y, where they attempt aerobics at ten on Thursdays.) Walden was one of the stops on the circuit that, for Roz, began and ended in the building. There were certain schools where the Upper West Side left sent its children, and if the people at the Smolny Institute, up the street, sent theirs to the New Lincoln School (which eventually merged with Walden) or to Elisabeth Irwin, people in Roz’s world chose Walden. (Some of them had gone there themselves.) It was a progressive, permissive, coeducational private school, where the left was comfortable and where the right never kept its children long enough to be uncomfortable, and Roz felt an obligation to keep it “in the family.” The publishers Jeannette and Richard Seaver, who moved into the building in 1965 and were looking for a school for their daughter, remember the day Roz called Jeannette and said, “Sweetie, there’s an opening!” Peggy and Arthur Penn sent their children to Walden on Roz’s advice, and so did Estelle Parsons, who left her daughter Martha at Roz’s when Penn put her in a movie called “Bonnie and Clyde” and she had to go on location. After that, Martha practically lived at Roz’s, and her twin sister, Abbie, once stayed for half a year. “I couldn’t have done my life without her,” Parsons says. “She and Larry came to everything I did, and, let me tell you, it was not always terrific.” (Roz says, “I have such respect for Estelle. I said, ‘What are you doing in the Village? Your kids are at Walden.’ And guess what. She moved uptown and met a man in her building, and he was divorced, and they got married!”)
Roz’s friend Vivian Cadden, who was an editor at Redbook and McCall’s, thinks that Walden was “the central point of Roz’s story.” In any event, Walden was made for Roz, being the sort of place where you knew that the school psychologist had been analyzed by Freud; where you took your child for an interview and the admissions director wanted to know if you had breast-fed; where the kids wore third-party buttons at election time and asked their parents, as Roz’s did, “How come none of your candidates ever get in?” In those days, the preëminent Walden family—“the dynasty,” Gina calls them—was a family named Goodman, and the patriarch of that family was Charles Goodman, a civil engineer who had helped build the Eighth Avenue subway and the Holland Tunnel. Goodman had sat on the Walden board. One of his sons was the board chairman, and the last Walden building to go up on West Eighty-eighth Street before the school closed, in the early nineties (the Day School took it over), was named for his grandson Andrew Goodman, who went to Mississippi in 1964 to register black voters and was murdered there with two other young civil-rights volunteers, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. Roz’s boys grew up with Andy Goodman and his brothers, and with the other Goodman grandchildren, and Roz came to be good friends with Andy’s mother, Carolyn, and with his aunt Annette Goodman Mark.
Carolyn Goodman, who became a psychologist and civil-rights activist, says that Roz in those days was “Roz now.” She remembers Roz taking her kids to Altman’s or Saks, putting them on the escalator, and saying “Play” before she disappeared for a couple of hours’ shopping, but she says that Roz “was on the line, all the time, and still is.” Roz started the Walden art auction and ran it for eight years. She would arrive at the last minute (“with the rest of us frantic,” Goodman says) with Klees and Chagalls cadged from Clifford Odets, or with paintings from Robert Motherwell and Jack Levine. She would smile at everybody, hang the show, and charm the rich into bidding high.
Roz used the school the way she used the building, as a resource. Peggy Penn remembers “the long phone calls, the marches, the buses to Washington, the meetings of Walden parents on Sunday afternoons about Vietnam”—or, more specifically, “about how to protect your kids from Vietnam.” (Larry did right by Roz and gave deferrals, and people say he found analysts for all her friends, from Motherwell to Alger Hiss.) Penn went enthusiastically, but Estelle Parsons failed at protest. “Rozzie was always asking me to march, she says. “I went on one march. In Washington. Rozzie knew practically everybody there, but I freaked out. The goddam trip, the sandwiches, the mobs—I couldn’t do it.” Roz never asked her to march again—she knows her friends—but she dragged everybody else she knew to demonstrations, including her children. She was never above lying for the cause, and she got the children to march on May Day by promising that Hopalong Cassidy would be there. Her last “great march” was the pro-choice march on Washington in 1992—she went with Gina—but her favorite marches will always be the old Women’s Strike for Peace marches. The New York Women’s Strike originated down the street, at 135 Central Park West, in her good friend Dorothy Monet’s apartment. And her most successful march was the Vietnam protest when she supplied so many Walden parents that she could offer a service: a bus that everybody called the Roz Roose Special stopped at the building to collect them. (“She brought the cakes and cookies,” Dick Seaver says. “Like Jesus on the Mount, she fed the bus.”) Walden extended her world. She introduced the parents to the psychoanalysts, and the psychoanalysts to the painters, and made sure that most of them spent their winters protesting—Gina says, “I was old before I realized that people lived in Washington; I thought Washington was where you demonstrated”—and their summers in Provincetown, where she and Larry eventually bought two floors in a wing of a sprawling Commercial Street complex everybody called the Kibbutz.
Roz had thought, briefly, about finding a place in Taos; she had spent a summer in Taos after the war, and had been enchanted to find people dancing every night, and Frieda Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan “fighting over D. H. Lawrence’s ashes.” And she had thought about Paris, because in Paris you could go to the Louvre all day and leave your children playing on the steps, and the tourists would babysit. But she moved the party to Provincetown. For a while, she and Larry rented an apartment in a condemned sailors’ loft called Garbage Gables. (The garbage was collected once a week, on Sunday.) A lot of famous people had lived in Garbage Gables. John Reed, who helped found the American Communist Party, had stayed there, and so had Eugene O’Neill, and Roz likes to imagine him lugging his garbage down the stairs, “drunk but with great dignity.” She remembers that her parents had the same dignity, but, of course, they never drank like people with names like O’Neill and Reed. (In Roz’s world, Christians “drink” and Jews “like a drink.” Once, talking to me about a poet who came to one of her parties, she said, “You know. What was he called? The alcoholic? Robert Lowell!”)
By the time Roz moved to the Kibbutz, in 1970, a lot of her friends were already in Provincetown, including her old art teacher, Sol Wilson, who gave summer classes there. The Grosses and the Motherwells had houses, and so did the Mark Rothkos, the Hans Hofmanns, the Fritz Boltmans, the Leo Mansos, and the families of a lot of other painters Roz knew. Norman Mailer, who had once rented a studio in the apartment Roz bought, was in Provincetown, too, although when I asked him about Roz he was in a Maileresque mood, and said, “Roz was never part of the pot gang. I ran with that gang. That was the good group.” Roz’s view of Mailer is that “if Norman gave a party and the police didn’t come he was unhappy.” She suspects that she disappointed him the day he went to court and she didn’t show. “Norman picked a fight with the police to show how brutal they were,” she says. “We had to go to court to defend him. But Gina was a baby and I got busy and didn’t go.” She still counts Mailer as a mend. “All of Norman’s wives come to my parties,” she says.
Roz had discovered the Kibbutz through a friend from New York who lived there—a businessman named John Kapstein, who was in Russian cultural trade (“icons, movies, everything,” Roz says), and who rode around Provincetown in an old Russian Army jeep. Roz describes him as “the contact man for the Soviet Union and America.” She was “in conflict” about buying, she says, because “the people rent—we don’t believe in property.” But Kapstein solved her problem. He wired Roz, who was in Teheran with Larry for a psychoanalysts’ meeting, saying that he had found them an apartment “in the commune.” It cost twenty-four thousand dollars, and it was Larry who wrote the check. Roz responded to the “property problem” by telling more of her friends to buy some. (John Garfield’s widow, Robbe, soon moved into the Kibbutz with her second husband, a New York lawyer named Sidney Cohn.) And, as Estelle Parsons, who takes her family to stay with Roz every summer, says, “she shepherded all those people through their lives.” Larry always arrived in August. Every morning, he drove to the Truro golf course. He came home at lunchtime, and then he took a nap for an hour and disappeared into a room upstairs to read, leaving Roz to all the people who had arrived at the Kibbutz “for a couple of days” and who were usually still there when the boys came home from camp and demanded their beds. It was, of course, a properly progressive camp. Steve and Ron say that Buck’s Rock Work Camp, in New Milford, Connecticut, was probably the only camp in the country where baseball was optional; pickling, farming, and madrigals were the required sports; no one could find the swimming hole; and the camp teams, such as they were, went by the names the Paranoids and the Schizophrenics. Steve stopped going when he was fourteen, but Ron stayed, he says, because he had heard that the girls made out.
Steve once told me that the most conservative person he remembers meeting as a child was a black Walden friend whose family summered at Sag Harbor. “You could grow up like that—Provincetown, Walden, the building, the camp—and never meet anybody different, anybody who was not a socialist. It was comfortable and safe, but it was a totally insular community. There was an absence of debate, an absence of ideas, an us-and-them quality. The politics defined and created what was essentially a family.” It was, at any rate, the family that Roz presented to her kids, and she put so much confidence in that family that, having presented it to them, she tended to leave them there. Her “absent-minded love” was not always something that the kids appreciated. She and Larry would be halfway out the door on their way to a party when the children would have to remind their mother to call a sitter. There is one famous story about the day she took Ron and his friend Nick, who were six at the time, to the Central Park Zoo and got so engrossed in talking politics with a friend at the café that when she finally looked up it was five o’clock and the children had disappeared. She found them at Nick’s, but not before she had volunteered to take home two black children who had got lost and ended up at the Park precinct. (Vivian Cadden says, “There are lots of apocryphal stories of Roz leaving the children hither and yon, but the fact is that she had brought them with her. The kids were with her wherever she was.”) “We were relaxed with the kids” is how Roz puts it. “When that woman jumped out of the window at the Eldorado and they saw it—I only walked them to school once after that. Lucie Uninsky walked her kids every day.” But she did what Gina calls “all the right cultural things” for them. She took them to piano lessons and art lessons, and put Gina in the School of American Ballet, and by now it doesn’t bother Gina when Roz says, “Jackie Kennedy came to the opening of ‘The Nutcracker’ and said to Gina, ‘You have beautiful eyes.’ ”
Her children complain sometimes that her expectations for them were as low as her expectations for herself. Sometimes they complain that she had no expectations for them at all—that they grew up in the shadow of her enthusiasms—and when they do Roz tells them about Doris Lessing, who actually left her children for the cause, saying, “I’m going to build a better world and you will live in that world.” But when I asked Roz’s permission to write this piece, she spent a sleepless night and then called up and said, “Please, don’t say ‘Communist,’ because, you never know, the Republicans are in—you can’t imagine what’s happening in this country—and maybe the kids will lose their jobs.” She told me about her nephew Marvin, Lena’s son, who had gone without work as a young man because of his mother’s politics. “Lena told him, ‘I didn’t do this to you. I’m fighting against what they’re doing to you.’ ” Roz has never forgotten that her brother Ben died of a heart attack after the F.B.I. started coming around. Ron told her, “Look, the Party is discarded, no one cares about those battles.” He told me, “Maybe, to think you were actively besieged, and then to find out it’s all irrelevant—maybe she has to believe in the threat. It gives her life a context. If she was C.P., then we, the kids, have to be in danger.” Gina said, “Maybe she never really joined the Party. Maybe that’s it. Maybe she’s embarrassed.” In any case, nothing would change her mind until Ron called from California and asked if she really wanted to turn him into the only guy in Hollywood whose mother wasn’t a Communist. “She was a great mother,” Arthur Penn says. “Look at the marvellous kids she raised.”
Steve wonders. “I identified with Pop,” he says. He means with the father who spent his August mornings on a golf course and his afternoons reading in a quiet room, the father who took his children to Yankee games and lavished his attention on them, and not on “the world” or “society” or “the downtrodden,” or even the Upper West Side. Steve says, “I’m traditional,” and he adds, “Maybe I wasn’t pure enough. I wanted to go to Harvard. I wanted to play tennis. I wanted to win at tennis.” He lives in Scarsdale now—the ‘S’ word, he calls it—and sends his own son to hockey camp. He loves his mother, but he says he was lonely in his mother’s world, and decided that it was not the world for him. “Look,” he says, “there can be a terrible real cost. . . . The blacklisting of David Pressman, the death of Andy—those things were a white-liberal reality check. I was in the tenth grade, in June, when Andy disappeared. And it was clear that when you disappeared you were gone. In this struggle, people die. But the outward reaction here to Andy’s death was: Build a building, bring Ben Chaney”—James Chaney’s brother—“up to Walden for a year. The other side was: We’re not sacrificing our kids to this. Nobody would have let his son get sent to Vietnam. Nobody was going to lose his job. The brutal totalitarianism of the U.S.S.R. was not part of their socialism. The party Mom created was not ‘the Party.’ ”
Steve stayed at Walden until he left for Harvard. Ron eventually left Walden, for the High School of Music and Art, and went to the University of Wisconsin. Gina, who had followed them to Walden, went to Washington University in St. Louis. Now she lives with her family on the Upper West Side, twelve blocks from the building—“back where I started,” she likes to say. She has lived at one time or another in Munich and Paris and Los Angeles, but she says that the only time she went to the East Side as a little girl was for “galleries and Schrafft’s” on Saturday mornings with her father, and for family dinners at Nick Meyer’s house, in the East Sixties. She calls this her “traditional” part. All the children remember their shock at encountering what they still refer to as “the real world.” They had always wanted their mother to be more like “other mothers,” but by “other mothers” Gina meant mothers with sunken living rooms—“My dream was a sunken living room,” she says—and a string of pearls to go with their Bellodgia perfume, and Ron meant mothers who were on time and washed the paint off their skirts before a teacher’s conference and didn’t leave their kids on escalators or museum steps, saying “Wait here.” Ron remembers Sunday afternoons in Pomona, at his grandmother’s house: it was “barbecue and baseball,” with Larry talking on about Babe Ruth’s first home run, and all the old analysts—“Viennese analysts, with thick accents”—crying, “Ah, this is America!” But when Ron got to Wisconsin and met his freshman roommate he discovered a Goldwater Republican from a farm town in Illinois who thought he was America, and who had never heard of Freud or Marx or a building in Manhattan that wasn’t called the Empire State. Ron says that he began to appreciate his mother through other people: people like the college friend who brought his girlfriend to Apartment 94 for the weekend and was given a double bed; or the music teacher at Music and Art who had studied with Paul Hindemith and survived the camps and was teased by the kids because of his puckered mouth and old, dandruffy, double-breasted suits, and who never smiled until “Roz reached out to him.” Ron says, “My father was the psychiatrist, but the calls of desperation were also to her, and were answered by her. I got to know my mother in bits and pieces—when the acute embarrassment of youth was gone.”
Roz’s day usually goes like this: She heads for the Y for what she calls her workout (“I brought Claire Bloom once; she didn’t want to go alone”), and then she heads downtown to her studio, at 41 Union Square, and stops off at a couple of galleries, makes the rounds of everyone else’s parties, and falls asleep at the theatre or a concert or an opening. Sometimes she will skip the opening or the concert, but rarely the studio. The studio is her secret garden. I have visited her there, but some of her oldest friends have never seen it. The most she will tell them about the studio is “Billy Crystal’s uncle has a gallery in the building.” Peggy Penn, who is a family therapist, thinks that maybe the real conflict in Roz has had to do with commitment—the commitment she needed for her painting, and never really acknowledged, and the commitment she persuaded herself she owed to other people. Penn says, “She was uncomfortably enthusiastic about you, and you had to separate yourself from the description,” but she was always uncomfortably unenthusiastic about herself and her own talent. For years, she refused to sign or date her paintings unless a collector or a museum (the Hirshhorn has a Roz Roose) talked her into it, and when the painters at 41 Union Square had their “open studio” weekend late last year she sold two of her best paintings to Gina’s children for sixty cents but ignored the calls of a German collector who had offered her fifteen hundred dollars for one. Usually, she gives away her paintings—along with her cake plates, her jewelry, and anything else you admire. Nick Meyer, who finally talked his way into her studio a couple of years ago and was so taken with her work that he bought eleven paintings, says that she followed him around a supermarket in Provincetown that summer, trying to give him back the check he had sent her. Roz has been going to Union Square since she posed for Raphael Soyer and Reginald Marsh at One Union Square—the building where Arshile Gorky had his studio—and she treats 41 Union Square the way she treats the building. She knows everybody; she has organized, introduced, and entertained, and created a world. But it is her world, and she guards it at least as stubbornly as she guards her alarming opinions. Lionel Gilbert, who has had studios in the neighborhood since the sixties, remembers the parties she gave downtown when they were both in a building on Twenty-second Street, and all the painters would come, “but never Larry.” She never invited Larry. Gilbert says, “Roz likes showing work, but she’s self-effacing.” He thinks that her painting suffers for it. “She puts paint down, and something is resolved that way, but when it doesn’t work it’s a mess. . . . She’s clever with people, but in politics and painting she’s intuitive, she’s beyond reason.”
Steve says, “Remember, she was the youngest of six children, she was an immigrant, she was estranged from herself.” He thinks that Roz decided early on that everybody else was brighter, better, much more talented than she was, and that she has never really changed her mind. She brings a few of her paintings home. There is one large and quite lovely oil over the piano. It is a study in blues, oranges, and greens, with wheeling forms and a shadowy, bearded figure, vaguely familiar, that I took for Solzhenitsyn (“You see, Solzhenitsyn is against capitalism, too,” Roz had announced one morning, handing me the Times) but that Roz tells me is Cézanne and his bicycle. There is a sepia etching. There used to be a still-life of a vase of flowers. She gave it away. “Every time I’m feeling low, I paint flowers,” she says, and it may be an indication of a mood she otherwise hides assiduously from her friends that most of them have a Roose flower still-life in their apartments. Roz prefers paintings like “Murder on the Sidewalk,” which is a dark abstract slashed with white—she painted it after reading a story in the paper about a young film editor who was shot on the street, trying to save someone else—but her flowers are beautiful, and sad. “I don’t use real flowers. I know flowers,” she says, and she does. Her apartment is full of flowers and plants, and her living room, with its windows turning onto the Park, looks almost like a greenhouse. There are palms fanning up onto the ceiling and flowerpots on every sill. The shelves are crammed with art books, and with books her friends have written, and with Old Left literature. (She knocked on my door last month with a copy of the May, 1962, Monthly Review with Adam Schaff’s essay on “Marxism and Existentialism,” and a stained paperback of a Khrushchev tract called “To Avert War, Our Prime Task.”) And the walls are covered with paintings, so many that they blur, and you really have to look at them close up to see them clearly. When you do, you find—along with the Soyers and the Grosses—drawings by Motherwell, Matisse, Bonnard, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and lithographs by Renoir and Chagall. Roz has collected art the way she collected people—eclectically. She bought Persian miniatures and Baroque angels and Puerto Rican saints, and she owns a lot of African sculpture, some of it picked up over the years from brocanteurs and some acquired in the course of six weeks that she and Larry spent in Africa. (“Michael Wood, the famous flying doctor, gave us a ride in his plane.”)
Most of the apartment is painted white, and so is most of the furniture, some of it by design and some because an old building housepainter—a camp survivor I remember only as Eugene, who had lost his mind and would spend his lunch hours stretched out in my bathtub, repeating, “Have a nice weekend”—had decided that white was nice and spread it over everything he saw. Roz, who didn’t want to hurt his feelings, made do. “I never cared about things,” she says. “I wanted money for people, for travel.” She lives on investments that Larry left her, but the fact that Larry had money in the market is not something she admits to everyone. She wants you to know that she has never spent money on herself—that everything she owns was “a bargain.” The huge Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph in the dining room cost seventy-five dollars, in Paris after the war; the mahogany table, with three big leaves, was a hundred dollars, in Nyack; the six handsome Federal chairs, with their original bronze stars, cost ninety. But Roz is sly, and she also wants you to know that they are worth a fortune now.
In the old days, Roz had a car, and she drove to her studio. No one would willingly drive with her, because she was a terrible driver. She would brake in the middle of traffic to call to a friend she spotted, and sometimes she would even get out and run into a store or a gallery for what she called “just a look around.” Her happiest moments, her children say, were during transit strikes, when her friends were desperate, and actually got in. Once, she offered a neighbor a lift downtown, where he had an appointment, and immediately turned around and headed north, toward Harlem, where he left her at a gas station, arguing over her monthly bill. Carolyn Goodman tells a story about a friend Roz saw waiting for a bus on Central Park West and offered to drive to work. First, Roz stopped at the Cohns’ for a cup of coffee. “I always have coffee with Robbe,” she said as she left him. “Watch the car.” Then she drove to Russ & Daughters, on the Lower East Side, for cheese. Then it was Grand Street for a sale. Finally—it was three in the afternoon by then—she pulled up at the studio of an artist she knew named Joe Kaplan. The day was shot, so her friend went in and bought a painting. Roz says, “It was a steal.”
Roz’s cars were technically Larry’s cars—they had medical plates—but every cop in Manhattan knew they were really her cars and came, reluctantly, to recognize them: the blue DeSoto, the gold Plymouth, the black Chevy, the blue Ford. The cop near Saks would hear Roz screech to a stop in the middle of the street, across from the front door, and plead, “Roz, you can’t do this anymore.” And Ron (who keeps one of her parking-ticket collages hanging in his house in Santa Monica) remembers the day his father came home from work and found a Central Park West patrolman sitting in the kitchen, his gun and holster on the table, eating Roz’s pot roast and voiding fifty tickets. (Ron says she drove the cops so crazy that Larry once considered offering his psychiatric services to the Police Department.) Sometimes she paid—Lionel Gilbert says that every six months or so she would grab a bunch of tickets, stuff them in a bag, and head downtown to “negotiate”—but usually she counted on charm and pot roast. When the city nearly went bankrupt, in 1975, her friend Sidney Cohn told people, “It was Roz Roose.” Her last car was a black-and-white Dodge Dart, and when it was a day old she “ran in somewhere” and left the keys in the door. Larry said, “That’s it, no more cars,” and Roz never complained. She deferred to Larry in everything but politics.
Roz is usually in a rush—running late, running for a taxi or a bus, running somewhere—and she was rushing down Broadway the other day and tripped and fractured her knee, and the doctor grounded her. She hates being grounded, although she has her phone and she has always spent so much time on the phone that Gina, watching her pack for a trip once, is said to have cried, “Mommy, you can’t go anywhere! You haven’t packed your phone!” And she has her friends: they hover like hens, bringing her food, making her coffee, keeping the party going. It is a kind of revenge on the woman who has always arranged everything for them—their marches, their marriages, their analysts, their husbands’ funerals—and has never let them arrange anything for her. Roz says they drive her crazy. Otherwise, she refuses to complain—about the arthritis in her hands, or the insomnia that has kept her up most nights since Larry died, or even the pain in her knee now. And Roz has the building. The neighbors call. The doormen call. Benny Vergez, who has worked in the building for nearly thirty years, dotes on Roz, despite the fact that he is Dominican and a Catholic and her politics must horrify him. Benny brings mail to her door, and lectures her the way he lectures the plants he waters for her, summers, when she goes to Provincetown. He keeps her up to date on the building gossip; he is famously discreet and would never do that for anybody else. Taki and Taso Mastakouris, the grocers who opened a corner store on Columbus Avenue in 1990, and now, on Roz’s advice, stock everything from smoked mozzarella to smoked salmon, drop everything to deliver Roz one bagel and a cup of coffee, and usually refuse to let her pay. And I imagine that Harry Oppenheimer, the butcher who once banned Roz from his store after she started using his order phone to make her calls, would have sent a porterhouse if anyone had told him. Everyone else in the neighborhood heard about Roz’s fall, and then it seemed that everyone in the country heard; I was visiting one day when the phone rang and it was “Courtney, in Chicago,” who turned out to be a stranger who had helped Roz up and taken her home after another fall, on Ninety-third Street in 1993, and became her friend. Courtney flew back to New York to see Roz, and Roz, of course, had a brunch. It was only a small brunch, not like the old days. Leo Braudy, the man who introduced me to Roz when I moved into the building, says that in the old days “Roz was very interested in the famous people, the interesting people, the Freudians and their pipes, Steven Marcus and his pipe.” Braudy met Roz when he was twenty-six. He is an English professor now, and he has written a book about fame called “The Frenzy of Renown.” It starts with Alexander the Great and Jesus Christ and ends with Elvis, and, while it doesn’t include Roz, Braudy says that by any standard Roz is famous herself. “It wasn’t the Algonquin Round Table. Nobody sat around Roz’s table making stabbing, slashing remarks. Her parties were my dream of New York.”
Roz passes the time at home talking about her parties. “Let me tell you about my famous parties,” she will say, apropos of nothing, in the middle of a conversation. She can describe them all, from the guests to the food. There was the War and Peace party, in 1968, when “all the Russian movie stars came.” There was the Salvador Allende party, in 1973, when the minks got stolen and “the Swedish ambassador to Chile came.” There was the Reopen the Rosenberg Case party, ten years later, when Ossie Davis, E. L. Doctorow, Grace Paley, Joseph Papp, Paul Robeson, Jr., and Raphael Soyer (among others) came, and “Vincent carved.” (Roz means when she “borrowed” my husband to slice a turkey, and he fled after four hours, three turkeys, a roast beef, and a couple of hams.) And there was the Children of El Salvador party, in 1984. She threw that party with her friend Annette Mark, who described it to me by saying, “The whole thing with Roz was, it’s a serious subject but you have a great time.” That party got so big that Roz had to move it out of the building and into her cousin Marsha’s penthouse, on Riverside Drive—“I had made a match between Marsha and one of the Goodman boys,” she says, meaning her friend Billy Goodman, who was nearly fifty when she made it—and even into the penthouse next door. “I knocked on the door,” Roz told me. “I said to the woman, ‘You’re a mother. Would you lend us your house?’ So the doors were open. It was for medical supplies. The Salvador women cooked. We made fourteen thousand dollars.” That was her favorite party—the one, she feels, where she was at her most resourceful, having talked the manager at Fairway into donating the food. Admission was only fifteen dollars, so that anyone who wanted to come could afford it. Roz told me, “I always said, ‘Let the people come.’ ”
It’s getting hard to find women like Roz. There is, of course, nobody quite like Roz, but there used to be a lot more women in New York with something of the same spirit, women who would like to have run the world but who ended up doing (mostly) good by opening the door, women who, in a crisis, called up everyone they knew and said, “I’m having a party.” Some of those women were old money, like Marietta Tree; some had arrived on a boat to a hardscrabble life, and eventually made their way to Central Park West, like Roz. Roz is famous for being generous, but maybe the most generous thing about her is that she thinks the people she likes are just like Roz Roose—kindly, quixotic, exasperatingly oppositional people who if anyone bothered to introduce them would happily take the Upper West Side and turn it into a Masada. In a way, she’s right.
You could say that her art is people. You could call this nurture or activism or ambition or social energy or noblesse oblige or—Roz would prefer it—Marx. It is, in any event, in disrepute now. People who go to the barricades today tend to be self-righteous and sanctimonious and “correct”—solitary in their ambitions—and Roz was never correct and certainly never solitary. She had “convictions.” She wanted to come to the party, and so she gave the party. She is a champion of lost causes—she thinks that lost causes are the glamorous causes—but her weapons have always been charm, guile, ebullience, and agitprop, and the best stuffed cabbage in New York. She’s not an innocent; she knew her options. She grew up in a man’s world. In the world I came from, she would have “volunteered”; in the world my daughter comes from, she would be running for President, “on a third-party ticket.” She wasn’t a Motherwell or a Rothko, although she tried once to find Rothko an apartment in the building. She says, “I did what I could. He wanted a Park view.” And she wasn’t rich. Her friends often are. She confers her convictions on all her friends. (I fight with Roz about Stalin the way I used to fight with my mother about sex.) They are a thorny gift. ‘Take it, it’s yours,” as she likes to say.
The building has changed. When Roz moved in, the rents were controlled, and the lobby was peeling, and the biggest apartment on the third floor was a dormitory for the women in something called Phil Spitalny and His All-girl Orchestra. Old black men ran the elevators. The landlord’s answer to security was a used glass cage—it looked like a foreman’s cage from a sweatshop—inside the front door. And the neighborhood was rough. The tenements began a few doors west of the Park—“just past Howard Fast’s place,” Roz says—and the police had already designated the corner one block west, on Columbus Avenue, “the bad corner” of Manhattan. Dick Seaver remembers that back in the fifties, when he showed his wife, Jeannette, New York for the first time, she took a look at the neighborhood and said, “I’ll never live here!” The landlord lived in the building then—his name was Sheldon, and his wife’s father had built the Turin in 1909, lost it in the Crash, and eventually raised the money to reclaim it—and, while he was notably tightfisted when it came to service, it has to be said that he had a weakness for the kind of people who made it “the Kremlin” and then “the building.” Pauline Kael, who was seriously underpaid at this magazine and had to leave the building in 1970, when her rent was raised by fifty dollars, says that when Sheldon heard about her moving out he called and told her to forget the money—and that she would have stayed if she hadn’t already been “halfway to Massachusetts.” By that time, the building was a family, and the only dormitory was the Roose apartment, which sometimes had so many stray demonstrators camped there that they spilled out into the ninth-floor hall. It was “a cross between chaos and vanity,” Steve says. Roz’s party was in its heyday then, and Roz invited everyone she saw—meaning everyone she ran into when she went to the market to pick up extra food. “At ten, the bell would ring, and it would be the whole building coming,” Peggy Penn says. “It would never have happened in our building.”
But the building got old. People started dying. Michael Heidelberger, who was known as the father of immunochemistry, died three years after the building threw him a hundredth-birthday party. Florence Bower, whose family had helped found the Forward—the paper Roz’s father liked reading—died. Milbourne Christopher, who was a famous magician, died, and Sandor Rado, who was a famous analyst, died, and so did Joe Julian and René d’Harnoncourt and Marinka Gurewitsch and Arthur Gold. And Larry. Roz has thought a lot about death since Larry died. She will look at a big photograph of Larry in their bedroom—his last photograph—and shake her head and say, “Death is mysterious.” She asks me if I ever think about death. She says that when Charlie Rose asked Arthur Miller that question Miller said, “Not more than once or twice a day.” But then the phone rings, and I hear her advising a friend—“Listen, I adore you, and I worry about you”—or talking about the Republicans, or rattling off opinions, with what amounts to a reviving clarity. She is coming into her own: the pronouncements that used to sound comical or ingenuous sound shrewd now, which probably they always were. (California is “a sunny place,” and her description of Parsons’ latest play was two words: “Estelle dies.”) She has a new enemy—William Safire. I listen to her talk about Safire, and it’s clear that the good old bad days are returning. It is a climate she finds exhilarating. When she puts on her makeup, and her new pink sweater with the notched collar, she is beautiful—like one of her old pictures—and so vain that you have to keep her from taking the brace off her knee whenever the doorbell rings.
Roz still misses running into Pauline Kael in the elevator. (“She asked me to fix her bra strap once. I was so thrilled.”) And she wishes that Alexander and Andrew Cockburn, the journalists, had stayed. (“Their father wrote for the London Daily Worker, he was a famous Communist” is how she describes them.) But she was pleased when a philosopher called Marx Wartofsky, who was actually named for Marx, moved in, and she was ecstatic the day she stepped into the elevator and discovered a new tenant named William Hurt. Hurt had dogs, and Roz, who wanted to ask him to brunch, started walking my dog. She would ring the bell, grab the leash, and say, “You’re so busy! I’ll take Romeo.” He kissed her once, after the Academy Awards. By then, the tenants had tried halfheartedly to buy the building. A couple of years went by before the landlord sold, and when he did, it was not to them. He sold to a real-estate speculator named Francis Greenberger, who turned it into a co-op, at some profit to himself, and people who were referred to in the building as “the new people” started buying apartments, at prices that Roz suspected could feed whole Central American countries for a year. The elevator men were put into braided uniforms and became doormen. The glass cage disappeared, and a decorating committee hired “consultants” to advise it on the proper marbling of the lobby paint. Eighties millionaires bought apartments and went bankrupt, and sold them to newer millionaires, and, while Roz was solicitous—she says “property is bad,” but she remembers the details of every real-estate deal she could have made and didn’t, “on principle,” and she knows what every apartment in the building went for—a lot of the new people were not the sort of people whose idea of a great night out was dinner with Alger Hiss. Some of them had never heard of the Spanish Civil War, let alone the civil-rights movement here. They were “in business,” and some of them were even Republicans, and they would see Roz working the lobby—talking to everyone, her sneakers unlaced, her Zabar’s bags spilling onto the floor—and hurry into the elevator as if Roz were a bag lady who had wandered in off the sidewalk. James Walsh, the theatre producer, who has lived in the building for eighteen years and loves Roz, told me once that his bottom line for the new people was Roz. Did they love Roz, too? Did they appreciate Roz? Did they know what she represented? If they didn’t, they would always be the new people. If they did, they became “the building.” ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment