3 New Books That Expose the Underbelly of Seventies New York Metropolis

Myriad ghosts of New York previous are conjured in a trio of recent books chronicling gritty metropolis life within the Seventies and past. Whereas all stylistically completely different, Man Trebay’s Do One thing, Cynthia Carr’s Sweet Darling, and Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Got here Out to Write supply complementary narratives, zig-zagging by way of legendary areas—Max’s Kansas Metropolis, Caffe Cino, The Stonewall Inn—and conversing with the oddballs who made up New York’s inventive milieu. Fittingly, there’s a steady thread of self-invention—and reinvention—that connects Trebay’s anecdote-packed memoir, Carr’s poignant biography, and Romano’s “definitive historical past” of The Village Voice.

Do One thing: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York

Removed from a fast-acting glitter bomb, Trebay’s memoir begins off on a reflective be aware, because the veteran reporter sifts by way of the ashes of his dad and mom’ Lengthy Island dwelling seeking a suitcase stuffed with household images. As soon as recovered, the pictures illustrate an untraditional childhood knowledgeable by fabricated narratives—together with one about Trebay’s father’s profitable cologne firm, Hawaiian Surf.

“It goes with out saying that no connection existed between my father’s invention and the complicated social and cultural realities of Hawaii,” Trebay explains. “In an odd and coincidental manner, I see now that this ready me to come back of age in Manhattan throughout a interval when town was populated by an terrible lot of individuals whose sole driving ambition was reinventing themselves.”

Rebellious teenage years—riddled with skipping college, dropping acid, and shoplifting—gave strategy to discovering his tribe in New York Metropolis, a gaggle “composed primarily of people that thought nothing was extra logical or important than altering your title or biography or gender affiliation.” Earlier than lengthy, Trebay started to come across—and carefully observe—Warhol-adjacent personalities in haunts like Bogie’s, an East Village ragpicker’s paradise.

“Rummaging by way of the bins then you definitely usually discovered your self scrabbling for treasures alongside Holly Woodlawn, not but a Warhol star although well-established as a neighborhood character and garrulous velocity ranter, normally smelling like a goat. … Sometimes, even Sweet Darling turned up. … If I used to be drawn to folks like Sweet, it was as a result of I shared her need to metamorphose, with out figuring out into fairly what.”

From 18 to 23, Trebay held an array of wierd jobs together with bussing tables at Max’s Kansas Metropolis (a gig he deserted after discovering a half-eaten T-bone steak in a bathtub of vanilla ice cream) and collaborating together with his artist good friend Paula Hyman on a well-received equipment line named Frying Pan Ranch.

Someday whereas casually stalking Greta Garbo, Trebay found one thing apart from the elusive star: “pigeon pirates” capturing flocks of birds in a internet—maybe destined for a cockfight, a capturing vary, or perhaps a fancy French restaurant.

“Baffling because the episode was, and simple sufficient to slough off in a metropolis the place the inexplicable is an on a regular basis prevalence, it woke up one thing in me,” Trebay recollects. “With out understanding it, I had discovered within the pigeon rustlers parts of a topic—New York Metropolis itself—and, by means of it, a occupation.”

Whereas “writing was not a part of the plan as a result of … there was no plan,” Trebay had began drafting scripts for performs he fantasized about staging Off-Off Broadway. Though he’d barely earned a high-school diploma, he’d discovered invaluable life classes from new pals just like the Warhol Celebrity Jackie Curtis. Trebay determined he “may as properly give writing a crack” and known as then-Interview editor-in-chief Rosemary Kent, who let him strive his hand at profiles. “I really feel like a fraud, in fact, after I tackle my first assignments,” Trebay recounts.

In 1976, Trebay landed a full-time job helping Village Voice arts editor Alexandra Anderson. Initially tasked with modifying “pithy snippets” about cultural occasions, he was quickly working alongside workers photographer Sylvia Plachy on a weekly column devoted to metropolis life. “We share a capability to adapt rapidly to no matter life throws at us,” Trebay says of his many years with Plachy. Curveballs included the Crown Heights Riots (throughout which they “have been chased by an indignant mob … earlier than ducking in desperation right into a magnificence salon”) and an rebellion in Romania (“reporting on overseas warfare zones … was not on my lengthy checklist of life targets.”).

Whereas nonetheless discovering his manner on the Voice, Trebay—who at present works for The New York Instances—realized he had extra curiosity in overlaying “oddballs and anomalies” than celebrities and socialites. Do One thing is stuffed with passages devoted to the likes of the Paris Is Burning star Dorian Corey—who performed Scrabble with Trebay whereas her notorious mummy decayed in her closet—and Coney Island’s World in Wax Musée proprietor Lillie Santangelo, who lovingly sculpted “moonlight stranglers, despots, and two-headed infants.”

“There was a metropolis stuffed with tales like Lille Santangelo’s,” Trebay says. “We don’t stay there anymore.”

Sweet Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Celebrity

Knowledgeable by diaries, interviews, and archives together with the Jeremiah Newton Assortment, Cynthia Carr’s biography Sweet Darling paints a captivating—if tragic—portrait of one in all Warhol’s most enigmatic superstars.

Born in Queens in 1944, James Lawrence Slattery grew up in an abusive family in Massapequa Park, Lengthy Island. Tortured by gender dysphoria, he thought-about his penis a organic “flaw.” Bullied relentlessly, he dubbed college “the snake pit” and averted it in any respect prices. As an escape, he pored over film magazines and imitated his favourite stars—Kim Novak and Marilyn Monroe amongst them—within the firm of trusted girlfriends.

After dropping out in 1961 and incomes a cosmetology license, Slattery started a metamorphosis involving hormone remedy, girls’s clothes, make-up, and a brand new title: Sweet Darling. However as Carr’s guide reminds us, Sweet didn’t determine as a drag queen—or a homosexual man.

In tandem with this reinvention, Sweet started hanging out on Christopher Avenue—choosing pockets and turning methods if wanted. A budding friendship with Jackie Curtis led her onto Off-Off Broadway levels to star in oft-improvised productions akin to Glamour, Glory, and Gold and Useless Victory.

Earlier than lengthy, Sweet had joined Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn as a well-liked member of Andy Warhol’s interior circle. Immortalized in Warhol’s radical feminist spoof Ladies in Revolt, the scrappy trio of Sweet, Jackie, and Holly is among the many most amusing threads in Carr’s guide. “Generally we loathed each other and generally we cherished each other,” Holly recounts. “We shared laughs, tears, make-up, and medicines. However when it got here to sharing the highlight, it was each broad for herself!”

Though Sweet routinely handed as feminine, she had horrible enamel and was consistently dropping caps at inopportune moments. “One evening the three of them have been at Ratner’s,” Carr writes. “Sweet started stuffing her purse with dinner rolls, then bit into one and misplaced what Holly known as ‘the final tooth in her head.’” This telling snippet additionally speaks to the power poverty Sweet confronted—she was no stranger to sleeping on couches, stealing garments from pals, and climbing out of lodge home windows to skip the invoice.

As Carr factors out, the notoriously stingy and fair-weather Warhol was uncharacteristically beneficiant with Sweet, who was his poised and glamorous date to many events and openings. Not solely did Warhol often pay for Sweet’s hormones and dental work, he despatched her a colour TV when she was in failing well being.

Like Trebay’s memoir, Carr’s guide is brimming with anecdotes—detailing the whole lot from Sweet’s eccentric efficiency résumé to iconic picture shoots with Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Francesco Scavullo, and Peter Hujar.

Poignantly, it additionally highlights Sweet’s sharp, dry humorousness. When the lump in her abdomen—a tumor that led to lymphoma—turned too huge to cover, she informed pals she was pregnant. And when Hujar got here to {photograph} her on her loss of life mattress—totally made up, with a long-stemmed rose by her facet—Sweet displayed a expertise she’d been perfecting for years: taking part in a dying film star.

She was “tenting it up,” Hujar later wrote. “Enjoying each loss of life scene from each film.”

The Freaks Got here Out to Write: The Definitive Historical past of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Modified American Tradition

A former intern who spent eight years writing for the Village Voice, Tricia Romano dives deep into the pioneering various weekly’s historical past with an formidable 608-page quantity divided into 88 chapters—her very first guide.

Overlaying a broader timeframe than Do One thing and Sweet Darling, The Freaks Got here Out to Write begins with the 1955 founding of the Village Voice—by novelist Norman Mailer, editor Dan Wolf, and psychologist Ed Fancher—and stretches into the current day. It’s additionally a far much less narrative affair resulting from its format: basically a prolonged interview with—and about—an intensive forged of characters. Ringing in at greater than 200 people, Romano’s forged is launched however as soon as, in a devoted part populated by everybody from Voice legends like Vince Aletti, Lester Bangs, and Lynn Yaeger to convicted criminals akin to club-kid killer Michael Alig and former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Pulled immediately from conversations, Romano’s chapter titles present a transparent thought of what to anticipate: “You’re hiring all these Stalinist feminists.” “We’re in opposition to gentrification, and we’re for fist-fucking.” “We had a bomb scare as soon as a month.”

All through the guide, there’s loads of store discuss—hirings, firings, management modifications, feuds between staffers—that will solely attraction to hardcore media nerds. However there’s additionally a wealth of candid accounts detailing the evolution of New York Metropolis and the Voice itself.

The guide’s title is justified by accounts of unsolicited tales arriving on the Voice—some mailed in, some slid underneath the door. The paper additionally favored unseasoned writers. When he bought the Voice in 1977, Rupert Murdoch informed the workers, “I’m so glad to be in a spot the place nobody has a journalism diploma.”

With or with out levels, Voice writers rose to the event of overlaying the whole lot from the Stonewall Riots to the blackout of 1977 to the AIDS pandemic to the delivery of hip-hop. Within the midst of all of it, the Voice grew and adjusted, hiring its first feminine editor in chief, Marianne Partridge, in 1976 and making strides to make use of Black and homosexual writers.

“The Voice that we knew? It actually begins within the mid-’70s,” longtime contributor Greg Tate tells Romano. “As a result of it actually was in a position to outline the New York it was chatting with and for, that was not being spoken to.”

Exemplifying that follow is the Voice’s 1986 cowl story on efficiency artist Karen Finley—penned by Sweet Darling writer Cynthia Carr. “L’Affaire Karen Finley!” particulars not solely Finley’s food-centric provocations—akin to her efficiency piece Yams Up My Granny’s Ass—however the public outrage Carr’s story elicited. “Abruptly, all these cans of yams have been showing within the workplace [on] folks’s desks,” Carr recollects. “It was a bit scary for me, really.”

Throughout that very same period, Michael Musto started writing the Voice gossip ditty “La Dolce Musto.” From humble beginnings as a slender column accompanied by a tiny picture, it expanded right into a two-page unfold overlaying events, nightclubs, celebrities and—importantly—drag queens like RuPaul. “I used to be the one one overlaying this, just about,” Musto says. “Now little children are operating round in drag, as a result of they’ve seen Drag Race. I believe it’s nice. It’s the world I helped battle for.”