The Chelsea Girls

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Hazel

March 1967

The cloying scent of marijuana wafted across the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel as Hazel returned from her morning walk, the obvious culprits yet another group of long-haired musicians, judging from the mix of duffel bags and instrument cases scattered about. They looked like they’d been waiting for their rooms for a while, and had dug in for the long haul. One man was fast asleep on a low banquette, another slung a jean-clad leg over the arm of a chunky Victorian chair and strummed a guitar.

In the past several years, the hotel had attracted a different sort of artist than had come before: Beat poets and beaten ladies of the night, rumpled folk singers and vacant-looking pop artists. They scurried down the halls and stumbled down the stairway, making the place feel overwhelmed, congested, and unseemly. Even the walls of the lobby were chaotic, filled with a riot of paintings whose tight arrangement—less than an inch between frames in some cases—rendered any serious appraisal of the works impossible.

Hazel stepped over a guitar case and breezed forward, not wanting to appear like some fussy old lady—after all, she was only forty-seven—who remembered with great nostalgia the days when the Chelsea Hotel was, if not elegant, at least respectable. The place had acquired a dirty mystique in the past seventeen years.

The communists on the first floor had been usurped by languid, underdressed prostitutes and their pimps, but none of this seemed to bother the permanent residents, who had gotten used to the parade of new bohemians who made the hotel their home for days or years at a time, the hippies, the groupies, the international artists and novelists who came and went.

She’d just completed her daily, brisk walk up to Central Park and back down along Seventh Avenue, although she always crossed to the west side at Fifty-First Street, not wanting to pass the spot where Floyd’s broken body had landed.

Floyd’s funeral had fallen on the same day that Charlie had asked Hazel to meet him at the library. Hazel had decided it was a sign that she be done with all that, done with the fierce pain of fighting against a machine that was so much bigger than she was. Floyd’s death had closed her down, she had nothing left. On her way to the service that morning, she’d dropped off a letter with the information clerk at the library and asked her to give it to Charlie when he appeared. She told her to look for a dark-haired man with a dimpled chin who would show up around noon. She’d written him that she’d moved on, found someone new, and it was best they not see each other again. It was the only way she knew that she could force him out of her life completely.

“Hazel, Stanley wants to see you,” said the Chelsea’s day clerk.

When David Bard passed away three years earlier, his son Stanley took over his duties with the incompetent enthusiasm of a golden retriever. Not that David had been the most efficient hotel manager, but where the maids tended to blandly disregard David’s directives, they openly mocked Stanley, who often laughed along with them, as if he were in on the joke.

Hazel stepped back over the guitar case and turned into Stanley’s office, where the Spanish leather padding on the walls reeked of cigarette smoke and the clutter had reached epic proportions. Stanley rose as she entered, a lanky man wearing a stretched-out sweater badly in need of a trip to the dry cleaner’s.

“Hazel, how are you?” He gestured for her to sit.

She looked at her watch. “My shift starts in five minutes.”

“That’s fine. If you’re a little late, it won’t matter.”

She’d been working the switchboard of the hotel for what felt like forever. It was a ghastly old piece of wiring beside the front desk, a throwback to another era that badly needed updating. The antiquated system often crossed lines, so Hazel would end up connecting a stoned actress on the second floor with the maudlin dress designer on the sixth, the two of them making no sense at all while refusing to hang up. There were days when Hazel was excoriated for not putting a call through fast enough, or was stuck chatting with Mr. Thomson because she was too polite to interrupt his musings. But David, and then Stanley, had let her work a couple of shifts each week in return for a free room, and for that she was thankful.

The rest of her living expenses Hazel covered with a weekly beat reviewing theater for a downtown newspaper. Lavinia, once again coming to the rescue, had connected Hazel with the editor, who allowed her to write under the pen name W. S. Pear and gushed over her reviews, which he said bristled with sharp observations. While reviewers for The New York Times and the Post still carried a lot of weight, the “in” crowd knew to look for Pear’s column for the real skinny. The work kept Hazel connected to the theater world, which she still adored in spite of how it had mistreated her in the past.

“We need to make a couple of minor changes,” said Stanley. He rifled through the pile of yellowed papers on his desk before giving up on whatever he was looking for. “There’s a rock group here, called something crazy like the Chipper Skulls. These bands, I can’t keep track of them anymore. Why are they so confusing?”

She shrugged, unsure of what this had to do with her. Better not to interrupt, as he’d make his way back to his point sooner or later.

“They want to rehearse but say the rooms they’re staying in are too small. I said to them, ‘We’re not a music studio,’ but they won’t listen, and told me they’ll just practice right there in the lobby. Can you imagine?” His voice rose an octave, a sure sign that he was irritated. “However, I think I’ve finally straightened it all out. You see, they need a large room to rehearse, and I thought we could do a little switcheroo.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, your room is one of the original ones. It wasn’t chopped up, and so for a little while, let’s put you in 732.”

“You want me to change rooms?”

“Just for a little while.”

She knew what that meant. He could get more money for her current room. A paying customer. Unfortunately, she had no lease to protect her, as his father had tended to not bother with leases after the first year, either unable or unwilling to deal with the paperwork. In any case, it wasn’t as if she paid rent, so she really had nothing to stand on.

She’d lived in the same room for so long, the idea of moving scared her more than she’d care to admit. Her parents had died within six months of each other a decade ago. This was her home. “But 732 is tiny, a cubbyhole. I won’t be able to fit everything in there.”

“Right. We can put some things down in storage, in the basement.”

No way. Stanley often offered new tenants a crack at whatever was in the storage room when they first came on board, in order to get in their good graces. She imagined some wasted poet fingering her favorite lamp with the beaded shade, or the subdued watercolors she’d picked up at the flea market.

“When do you need my room by?” Panic made her voice shaky.

Stanley ducked his head. “Is it too much? I’m so sorry. It’s too much. My father would be so unhappy with me.”

David Bard would also be unhappy at the way the more valuable paintings tended to disappear from the lobby walls every so often, most likely to enhance his son’s private collection. Stanley might be goofy, but he wasn’t dumb.

In any event, Stanley wasn’t going to change his mind, and she had nothing to negotiate with. “It’s fine.”

“Great, how soon do you think you can pull the trigger? We’ll have the staff help out, you won’t have to lift a thing.”

“I guess I can be out by the end of next week.”

He looked up into space, as if calculating some complicated algorithm. “How about Monday?”

“That’s three days away.”

“It’s an easy move, you won’t even notice the difference.”

Room 732 could barely fit a twin bed. The one time she’d been inside, invited by a choreographer whose name she couldn’t remember, Hazel had noticed that the curtains were stapled to the window frame. Stapled.

But she couldn’t leave the hotel. After all these years, it kept her connected to the heart of the city. Mr. Thomson still held his memorable cocktail parties, where a few times she’d spotted Arthur Miller and his third wife, a photographer, who lived in room 614. No one mentioned Hazel’s play, probably out of politeness, and that was fine with her. She’d refilled drinks and acted as an ersatz maid, passing around the canapés and delighting in the lively conversation between artists, filmmakers, writers, and composers. She didn’t mind being on the outside looking in, as long as they let her look, and as long as she still got to write. Luckily, Lavinia was still going strong, confined to a wheelchair but making appearances at the Lavinia Smarts Acting Studio when the mood struck, and between the lively gang at the Chelsea and her nightly forays to the theater, Hazel’s life was full, if not particularly joyous. And that was fine.

“Very well. I’ll start packing.”

“I’m sorry, Hazel. I promise it won’t be forever. Just until the band’s finished up. They might even play a concert on the roof this summer. If they do, I’ll make sure you get a ticket.”

She couldn’t imagine anything worse. “Thank you, Stanley.”

After her shift, she popped into Lavinia’s apartment, where her friend was dozing by the window, her gray hair almost translucent in the sunlight. She stirred as Hazel entered. “Hello?”

“It’s me, Hazel. Sorry to wake you, I’ll come back later.”

“No, no. Come, sit.”

Lavinia had grown thinner with every passing year, her bracelets flopping around her tiny wrists, often falling off onto her lap. Her eyes, though, were as sharp as ever, her opinions strong and strident. God help the acting student who showed up unprepared for class, as Lavinia’s thundering tirades were legendary in the theater community.

After the news of Floyd’s terrible death, as well as the injustices he’d suffered, spread throughout the theater district, the Broadway community banded together to mount a bulwark against the blacklist, with theater owners successfully employing actors who otherwise couldn’t get hired. The ever-changing list of producers behind each production, as well as the fact that no one knew if a show would run for three performances or three years, made organized boycotts too difficult, and so after that terrible year, the theater world began to flourish once again, unimpeded by the political machinations of Washington. Hazel, of course, was shunned from this support due to the scandal with Charlie, though even her pariah status had faded with time.

At least Joseph McCarthy was no longer around to cause trouble. He’d tried to go after the US Army in ’53 for communist subversion, but his bullying tactics finally fell flat and his popularity plummeted. When he died in 1957, Hazel was not sorry.

“I have something for you,” said Lavinia. She reached for an envelope on a side table, but her shaky hand couldn’t grasp it.

Hazel picked it up and took the chair opposite. “What is it?”

“Open it up.”

Inside were two tickets to the Tony Awards, to be held at the Shubert Theatre in two days’ time. The note inside explained they were a gift from Jeffrey Hubert, a former student of Lavinia’s who’d recently mounted a revival of Wartime Sonata to some acclaim at a claustrophobic downtown theater. While Hazel had granted the rights for the production, she’d avoided most of the rehearsals and sat through only one performance, her words too dear and painful to hear spoken out loud. The production had a small budget and a bare-bones set, and Hazel had kept her expectations low.

“How nice,” she said. “That Jeffrey is a lovely boy. Too bad I’m not going.”

“Yes, you are. I insist.” Lavinia pounded her closed fist on one knee. “You deserve to get some kudos already, kiddo. Look at that article in The New York Times, you’re on the rise.”

In a way, Lavinia was right. To Hazel’s surprise, the play had sold out and been extended, twice. Soon after the glowing reviews appeared, Hazel and the director had been interviewed for a feature in The New York Times, where Hazel spoke with bitter honesty about her experiences during the McCarthy era. When the reporter inquired about her current relationship with the famous movie star Maxine Mead, Hazel had hedged, mumbling something about how actors were always falling out of touch, that it was the nature of the business.

She examined the two tickets. “It’s out of the question. There’s no way I could sit in the audience and watch playwrights and actors accept awards, knowing that I’d been snubbed, cast out. Knowing that if I’d begun my career in the late 1950s, after McCarthy was censured and the blacklist drifted into oblivion, I would have had a clear shot at a career as a playwright.”

“Oh, stop with the self-righteous pity. You were caught in bed with the enemy, let’s not forget.” Hazel began to protest, but Lavinia cut her off. “I know, I know, true love and all that. In any event, what happened happened, the good and the bad. I would go myself if I wasn’t stuck in this wheelchair. Before you know it, you’ll be like me, an invalid, and wish you’d said yes more than you’d said no.”

“You’re far from an invalid.”

Lavinia’s voice dropped to a lower register, one that she used only when she was dead serious. “Please, Hazel. Jeffrey insists and he’ll be quite upset with me if you don’t.”

Up in her room, Hazel put the envelope with the tickets on the mantel of her fireplace. She couldn’t decide anything right now, first she had to deal with this ridiculous move. She started by blindly sorting through her clothes, tossing them into a suitcase. The dress she’d worn to the opening of Wartime Sonata on Broadway, the old winter coat she should’ve replaced a few years ago, the inside of the pockets reduced to shreds, but still couldn’t afford to throw out. She stopped and poured a glass of wine to steady her nerves. Hazel spent too much time alone these days, which meant that she could get lost in her head if she weren’t careful, the memories churning past like thunderclouds.

A knock on the door interrupted her bleak thoughts.

“Who is it?”

These days, it wasn’t smart to open your door without checking first—drug dealers roamed the hallways, and every so often someone went out in a body bag, from either an overdose or a murder—but the peephole to Hazel’s door had been painted over years ago.

A muffled voice responded.

“Who? I can’t hear you.”

The familiar voice, louder, echoed in her ears.

“Hazel, open up. It’s me. It’s Charlie. Charlie Butterfield.”

Hazel opened the door. Charlie stepped back as she did so, as if a gust of wind had blown him off-balance.

She put a hand to her hair, suddenly aware of how different she must look to him. In the past decade, she’d let it grow long, like the hippie girls who paraded through the halls in cutoff shorts and see-through tunics. Well, perhaps not quite as hippie as all that. But her formerly blond locks were now streaked with gray and her face, she knew, showed evidence of the hardship of her middle years.

Like many men with boyish features, Charlie didn’t seem to have aged much in the almost two decades they’d been apart. Just a few speckles of peppery gray along the temples and some lines at the corners of his eyes, but that was it.

“Charlie.”

He looked past her to the scattering of clothes and suitcases on the floor. “You going somewhere?”

She stepped back, surveying the mess. “You could say that.”

“I was hoping we could talk. Can we talk? I don’t want to intrude, but I have something important to tell you.”

She studied him, uncertain. After all this time, what did they really have to say to each other? She didn’t want to bother explaining her decisions. Nor did she want to hear his.

Charlie must have sensed her reluctance. “Look, I don’t have to come inside. Is that diner down the street still around? Can we go there and I’ll buy you a coffee or something?”

She could use a coffee. Her stomach growled. She was starving as well. Back when they were lovers, they’d order grilled cheese at the diner after their romps in bed. Back when.

“Fine. Give me a minute.” She left him standing out in the hallway as she gathered her purse and coat, smoothing her hair in the mirror by the front door. This unexpected reunion hadn’t sent her spiraling into confusion the way she might have expected it to. Then again, she’d dated men in the intervening years, even fallen in love a couple of times, although nothing lasted more than a year, usually because she got bored or annoyed. Life had moved on.

The elevator descended slowly, stopping on the fourth floor to pick up a shaggy, deep-voiced kid—Stanley had mentioned he was some Canadian poet/rock star—and a rough-looking woman he called Janis who wore a blue fur coat that looked like it’d been run over by a truck. They barely noticed Hazel and Charlie, murmuring gravelly whispers to each other as the car descended.

Embarrassed, Hazel stared straight ahead.

Out in the street, Charlie let out a breath. “Wow. The hotel’s really changed since I was there last.”

Her defenses kicked in. Only the residents had the right to disparage the place. “Not really. It’s still full of artistic types, it’s just that the mediums have changed. Films are different, songs are different. So the people who live in the Chelsea reflect that. Classical composers have been replaced by rockers, compositional painters by pop artists. Who knows what it’ll be like in another twenty years?”

“You sound like you don’t mind it.”

“The entire city is different. You can’t expect your little piece of the pie to stay the same.”

They made it to the diner and she slid into a booth, happy to have the table between them. They both ordered coffee and grilled cheese.

Charlie placed his napkin in his lap, not looking up. “My father was eventually sued, did you hear about that?”

She had. In 1962, a radio show host named John Henry Faulk had won $3.5 million in a libel suit against Laurence Butterfield and Vincent Hartnett, for damage done to his name and career during the blacklist. In a strange twist, Charlie’s father had died the night before the judgment was announced.

“I had heard. I’m sorry you lost your father.” And she was. Having lost her own, she knew how disorienting it was to lose a parent. Even one as pigheaded as Laurence Butterfield.

“I’m glad Faulk got his day in court and won. After everything my father did.”

“Right.” They ate in silence for a while. She waited him out, mainly because she had nothing to say.

He finally cleared his throat. “That note you left for me at the library, you mentioned you’d met someone else. Who was he?”

She couldn’t lie anymore. What was the point? “There was no other man. I didn’t want to see you. Floyd Jenkins had just jumped to his death. I was there when it happened. I couldn’t take it anymore.” Her sentences came out short and sharp, like Morse code. “I wanted to stop fighting, stop everything. Live my life like a normal person, whatever that is. So I left that note, knowing it was the only thing that might stop you from reaching out.”

He sat back, looking like he’d been hit. “It wasn’t true?”

“No.”

“Oh.” The look on his face reminded Hazel of a sped-up clock, whirling away. “You lied.”

“I did. Why didn’t you come back sooner, Charlie? Where were you for five months, not calling or writing, leaving me to fend for myself?”

He took a moment before answering, as if gathering courage. “My father had me hospitalized upstate, supposedly for my epilepsy, but basically he wanted to keep me out of the way. I’d made too much trouble.”

“You were involuntarily committed?”

“Yes. They drugged me, I had no idea where I was, or what day it was. As soon as I got out, I tried to contact you through Mr. Bard—I figured the FBI was still tapping the phones. Then, at the library, I got your note.”

For years, she’d assumed he’d deliberately stayed away, repulsed by her toxicity, like so many others. Her heart broke for him, for both of them. “I thought you were keeping your distance because you didn’t want to be associated with me.”

“I should have been clearer in my letter, but I was worried they’d find out somehow and come after me again. After I got your answer, I just took off. I traveled abroad for a time, before coming back and getting a job with the government. Not as a federal agent—the hospitalization dashed any hope of that—but I worked my way up, and it’s a decent job, a good one, to be honest.”

“What exactly do you do?”

“I work for an agency that tries to decipher Russian codes.”

After all this time. “So you’re still obsessed with Russian spies?”

“I am.” He pushed aside his plate. “To be honest, that’s why I reached out.”

He hadn’t come to declare his love, then. Of course not. She chided herself for even considering the possibility.

“We recently uncovered some Soviet cables. It turns out a Soviet agent called Silver was the linchpin of all the activity that was going on back in 1950: Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Harry Gold.”

Other than Rosenberg, who’d been executed along with his wife in ’53, the names meant little to her.

Charlie continued. “I saw your interview in The New York Times and I realized you might be able to shed light on some questions I have.”

“I doubt that. I don’t know anything about those people.”

He tapped a finger on the table. “In that article, you mentioned that Maxine convinced you to cast her in the play when you were both in some tunnel under the Chelsea Hotel.”

The journalist had pushed Hazel for stories about her and Maxine during the original production, catching Hazel off guard. She wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise, but he’d seemed to love the drama of it.

She nodded.

“I wouldn’t have thought twice about it,” Charlie explained, “except that it brought back strange memories, of after we’d been ambushed. I remember being pushed through a long, dark passage. There were bare light bulbs and a dank smell. Was that the tunnel?”

“Yes. That’s how we got you to the ambulance, to avoid the press.”

“Where is it, exactly?”

“It runs between a town house on Twenty-Second Street and the hotel on Twenty-Third. Before that, we’d used it to avoid the photographers lurking out front for Maxine.”

Charlie, unable to contain his excitement, knocked over his water glass. He waited until after the waiter cleared up the mess with a dish towel to continue. “One of the cables discussed a near miss one night, back in 1950, when the Feds were on the trail of Silver, but then he disappeared. On Twenty-Second Street. I looked up the FBI’s reports, and they say Silver went into a town house and vanished into thin air. They staked it out for days, but never saw him leave.”

“You think he went into the tunnel and out through the hotel?”

“That’s what your article made me wonder. How did you get access to the town house?”

“David Bard gave Maxine a key.”

“Did he give any other residents a key?”

“For God’s sake, Charlie, I have no idea.” She noticed him flinch, and regretted her harsh tone. “You think that maybe this Silver was connected to the hotel in some way?”

“I wondered about it.”

“In that case, he could be any of the commies who lived on the first floor in those days. The place was full of them.”

“He wouldn’t have been that obvious.” Charlie looked around, as if he was worried someone was watching them.

She almost laughed. As if anyone cared at this point. The world was full of tragedy, on the brink of disaster, if you read the newspaper headlines. Charlie’s hunt for a communist spy was almost quaint. Poor guy was stuck in the past. His colleagues probably ridiculed him. Hazel considered herself lucky she’d been able to move forward with her life, even if it had been stunted, instead of living in the past the way he was.

He lowered his voice. “One of the ways the spies confirmed each other’s identity, when they first made contact, was with a Jell-O box top that was ripped in half.”

A vague memory of Charlie talking about Jell-O box tops drifted back to her. She played along. “Right, they each had a section. Proof they were on the same team.”

“You remember!” He sat back, pleased. “As I was reading that article, something else occurred to me. Do you remember the man Maxine dated, Arthur something?”

“Arthur. Right. I don’t recall his last name.”

“Arthur was in food packaging.”

She couldn’t help it, a bubble of laughter escaped. “As were several hundred thousand other people at that time. Arthur was an ass and a manipulative son of a bitch, but he was just a boring corporate guy in the end. Nothing special about him.”

“Which would make him the perfect spy.”

She pushed her plate away. “You’ve got to be kidding.” Now she was no longer hungry, and exhaustion overcame her. All she wanted was to go back to her room and sleep. How disappointing Charlie had turned out to be. It would have been better if he’d never come back, so she could retain her memories of their glorious affair without this melancholy overlay. “Why would you care about a spy from years ago? He’s probably dead by now, or gone back to Russia.”

“Because we’ve connected Silver’s identity with that of an agent who’s still going strong, according to recent cables. Different code name, but all our data points to it being the same guy. We know he’s in his mid-fifties now, which would make him around thirty-seven or -eight back then. If we can identify him, we’d bring down an entire network.” He paused, eyes steady on hers. “I was wondering if you might remember the night in question, when they lost Silver’s trail, in case you maybe saw the person but didn’t know it.”

“I can’t remember what happened last year, never mind in 1950.”

“It was July third.”

Ben’s birthday. Every so often, Hazel wondered what it would have been like if her brother had lived. She would have had someone by her side during the crisis, the kind of guy who’d have charmed Laurence Butterfield within five minutes and in the next breath convinced him to invest in the production. Then again, if her brother had been alive, she doubted she would have achieved the heights that she did, writing and directing a show on Broadway. That drive had sprung from her need to live up to the family legacy but had been replaced by ambition of her own, ambition that she never even knew existed. The taste of success had been delicious, but left her grasping for more, just as Ben’s death had taken a chunk out of her heart.

Charlie wasn’t letting up. “Your play opened a few weeks later.”

A sharp memory came back to her, clicking into place like one of those View-Master stereoscopes. She was dressing to go out. Maxine was upset. “July third was Maxine’s birthday. She was weepy because Arthur hadn’t reached out to her.”

“I see.” Charlie waited. “Nothing else?”

“We went to an opening of a show, some awful musical revue. I took her to cheer her up.”

“Any sign of Arthur?”

“Later, after the show. We all went to a bistro and had coq au vin.” Hazel gave herself a mental pat on the back for her acuity. “Really, you actually think Maxine was dating a spy?”

As she said the words, a strange feeling ran through Hazel, like a shiver, or a warning. She remembered all the intrigue surrounding Maxine’s relationship with Arthur, the hold he had on her. The bruise. He’d been around that age—mid-thirties—give or take a few years.

No, Charlie was just getting her all worked up again. The idea was ridiculous. “Why don’t you ask Maxine about him? She’s the one who’d know if he seemed spy-like.” Still, after all these years, she couldn’t talk about Maxine without a bolt of fury shooting through her.

“Have you seen or heard from her recently?” asked Charlie.

“No. Not at all. Not once.”

“Right. I’d heard she gave names to Roy Cohn.”

“She certainly did.”

The waiter came by and dropped off the check. Charlie pulled out his wallet and left a few bills. “She’s in town, she’s been asked to present an award at the Tonys on Sunday.”

Hazel’s mouth went dry. She wondered if Lavinia knew and hadn’t told her. “Is that so? She hasn’t been on the stage since Wartime Sonata.”

“She’s a movie star now. Everyone wants a piece of her. Trust me, I’ve been trying to reach her through her agent and her manager to ask her some questions, but can’t get a response for the life of me.”

Hazel stifled the urge to punch Charlie in the face. A movie star. The idea of Maxine being welcomed back by the theater folk she’d betrayed, of all of them applauding while she glided onstage in some fancy gown, smiling and blowing kisses, of Charlie calling her a “movie star,” brought back everything Hazel had held so dear and lost. She’d suffered mightily, and no one cared.

How dare Maxine even show her face? The grudge Hazel had carefully nursed since the blacklist turned malignant and dangerous.

Charlie tucked his wallet into his pocket, oblivious.

Hazel kept her voice even. “I have two tickets to the Tonys. I hadn’t planned on going, but maybe you could speak to her there.”

Maxine wouldn’t get away with it, not this time.