New York in the '50s (36 page)

“Of course there were, and still are, psychiatrists who say to a gay man, ‘Just hook up with some pussy and you'll be cured.' Now it's just the right wingers of the profession saying that. Back in the fifties one psychiatrist was famous for it—Burroughs satirized him in
Naked Lunch
.

“I like psychiatry. I went for four or five years a long time ago, and now I'm finishing another five years, an examination of the family nexus, looking at the balance of forces, of mother and father. It's very useful.”

I lay down on the couch of Freudian psychoanalysis in the fifties and rose up six years later in anger and disillusionment. For me the most accurate diagnosis of the treatment was made by Norman Mailer in “The White Negro” when he called it “a psychic bloodletting”—one in which, like the bloodletting of the Middle Ages, some patients got better, some got worse, and some were almost killed in the process. Like many other former Freudian couch potatoes, I would find aid, comfort, and insight in briefer, more interactive interludes of psychotherapy in years to come. There is little doubt, though, that Freudian psychoanalysis of the five-year, three-to-five-times-a-week-on-the-couch variety had its heyday, for better or worse, in New York in the fifties.

By the late seventies,
Newsweek
was reporting, in an article called “Psychiatry on the Couch,” that “throughout the 1940s and 1950s, psychoanalytic chic ran high, generating optimism about its potential that far outran Freud's.… Freudian psychoanalysts in particular, who account for only 10% of the nation's psychiatrists, have felt the common unhappiness of post-Freudian deflation.”

That deflation, by the late eighties, had made psychoanalysis “The Incredible Shrinking Business,” as examined in a remarkable article with that title in the magazine
Boston Business
by Caroline Knapp, the daughter of one of Boston's most prominent psychoanalysts.
Knapp reported that “classical analysis … the long-term probing process developed by Freud at the turn of the century” has become one of the least-practiced forms of treatment: “Only 2 percent of the estimated 5 million Americans who seek psychotherapy each year turn to the couch for help. The average analyst has only three patients in analysis at a time, and in the past decade, the practice has declined nationally by 36 percent.” Dr. Bernard Bandler, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, said the forties began the “fat years” of psychoanalysis, and by the fifties “we were
it
. Anybody who was anybody was an analyst.” Dr. Julius Silverberger, a psychoanalyst, summed up the current status of his profession: “The days of glory are over.… In the world of modern psychiatry, we're really just a pimple.”

In its prime, psychoanalysis seemed the best route to the American dream, especially the newly acknowledged dream of sexual fulfillment. We believed that insight on the analyst's couch would translate into ecstasy in the lover's bed, or at least lead to some kind of mutual satisfaction, if not “apocalyptic orgasm.”

If Allen Ginsberg finds fresh insights from further therapy in the nineties, most of us fifties veterans of the couch may identify more readily with a poem of Allen's old Columbia friend Donald Cook, which ends with this verse:

These days I don't see my therapist
.

But I remember everything

And I think I'm changing, slowly
.

Soon now I'll take a patient
.

OFF TO THE RACES

We were spooning up prune whip Lacto yogurt for breakfast out of the purple and white cardboard containers while we sat on the dusty floor of my crumble-down apartment on Jones Street in the Village. This was the life. Yogurt was still considered an exotic food, something you would never eat in Indianapolis or Dubuque, just as you would never in places like that be able to have a beautiful, doe-eyed Barnard graduate spend the night in your bed, and lounge
around the next morning with her wearing only underpants and one of your old button-down shirts in lieu of pajamas. In these intimate circumstances, a woman I'll call Sandy was telling me about the time she got her diaphragm a year or so before, just after she graduated from college.

There was no birth control pill on the market, and the diaphragm was considered the most effective means of preventing pregnancy. Condoms were known to break, or come off inside the woman after the man had ejaculated and was withdrawing; or in the clumsy effort of the man to wrestle one on, the rubber was sometimes abandoned in the heat of a passionate moment. In any case, a diaphragm was considered the best protection against pregnancy, and most of the unmarried women I knew in New York had one.

Sandy said she had gone to a gynecologist on the Upper East Side whom a friend recommended. She told the doctor she wasn't married, but she wanted to be able to make love with her boyfriend, and she didn't want to get pregnant. The doctor, a distinguished-looking man in his mid-forties, didn't say anything, but he fitted her for the diaphragm, told her how to use it, and she thanked him and got up to leave. He walked her to the door of his office and uttered a line she would always remember. “Well,” he said, “you're off to the races.”

Sandy laughed when she told me the story, amused rather than angered by the doctor's presumption of her promiscuity. She and I both took it as an indication of the jealousy of an older man for a beautiful, intelligent, “nice” young woman who could have sex with whom she chose, with a freedom that was not available in his own generation.

In a sense, most of us who came to New York after college in the fifties were, as the doctor put it, off to the races of sexual experience and experimentation. At least that was true of those who stayed on and lived in the city for more than a year or so. The big communal apartments with multiple roommates of the same sex which many of us joined after college began to break up after the first year or two at the most, with traditional marriages and moves back home or to other cities, and that early era of relative innocence and sexually pure pajama parties ended then too. Those of us who remained in New York as singles got our own apartments, alone or
shared with only one other person, who was usually a close enough friend to allow overnights with someone of the opposite sex and who would vacate the place for an important evening or weekend, which allowed the romantically involved roommate to use the place as a temporary love nest. Armed with cigarettes, booze, and our own psychoanalysts, we lit out for what Huck Finn called “the territory ahead,” which for us was not geographical but sexual, lying not to the west but in the bed, the new American frontier of the fifties.

We were still discreet about our affairs, though, unlike the following generation, which blatantly celebrated its sexual freedom as a sort of political triumph. In this as in other realms, if we were silent, it was not out of apathy or inaction but adherence to a code of privacy. We also were still respectful of our parents, who seemed to be looking over our shoulders and who made periodic visits from home. At least in part for their sake, we kept up appearances of the old propriety.

“You weren't supposed to just go out and ‘do it,'” Helen Weaver remembers. “I didn't even allow myself to have a double bed until I'd moved into my third Village apartment. In the first two apartments, I slept on these little bitty single beds so no one would think anything was happening. But they were inconvenient, to say the least, so first I bought one of those hideaway jobs, where one twin bed slides out from under the other and makes a sort of double alongside the top one. The trouble with those is that just when things get interesting, somebody falls in the space between.

“After I got my first real double bed, my parents came to visit from Connecticut. Of course, I had to hide all Tommy's clothes and shaving stuff in the closet. I'm giving them the tour of my apartment. My mother pins the double bed, which takes up most of the tiny bedroom, and announces, ‘I don't understand why Helen has to have such a
large
bed.' She really didn't know, and I didn't enlighten her. What could I say—the better to get laid in?”

When my own parents came to the city from Indianapolis or my girlfriend's parents visited from out of town, we hid each other's belongings or took them back to our own places, making sure especially to rid our respective bathrooms of intimate items like toothbrushes—not to speak of diaphragms—so the folks wouldn't think we had sunk to the sin of living together without being
married. At least we could all keep up the pretense that we were not engaged in what seemed then the ultimate flouting of society's values, even in New York, even in Greenwich Village.

Meg Greenfield recalls that “when parents came to visit, we kicked out the boyfriend, defended the kind of life we lived, and got some good dinners at a restaurant we liked but couldn't afford to eat in too often ourselves, like Peter's Backyard. They'd go back to Seattle or Indianapolis and say, ‘How long is this going to go on for?' But we tried to protect them from knowing that ‘this'—our single, bohemian lifestyle—even included overnight guests of the opposite sex, in a kind of undercover living arrangement.”

Calvin Trillin says, “Very few unmarried people lived together then. I know I would have thought it was quite an unusual arrangement to be living with someone. It was awkward, complicated. I'd have been unable to explain it to my parents.”

No one I knew then “lived together” in the way that became commonplace for couples from the sixties onward—not even people in the Village, who considered themselves liberated from all middle-class phoniness. The only exception to lovers living together were those of the same sex. Harvey Shapiro remembers, “You and I knew homosexual couples, but you didn't think of them that way. You just thought of them as couples, two men or two women who lived together, who shared their lives together like a heterosexual couple would do if they were married.”

We never questioned the morals of our homosexual friends, whom we thought of as the writers or artists they were, ones who could find a greater freedom and acceptance in New York than they would in the provinces from which they and we came. We were enjoying greater freedom for our own lifestyle that wouldn't have been approved of back home, and so we were sympathetic to others seeking the same liberty. We had liberated ourselves from our parents' views and customs, but not from their visits, and we heterosexuals kept up the pretense of a kind of cultural virginity in our separate living arrangements.

“This was the era before the double nameplate on the door,” Gay Talese says. “A girl who was staying at your apartment overnight or for the weekend never picked up the phone. Nan and I always had separate apartments before we were married. Even if you were living
together most of the time, you still had separate mail drops and phone numbers.”

Once when I used the apartment of a former girlfriend to work on a book, her mother asked her to tell me not to answer the phone, since people who heard a man answer in her unmarried daughter's apartment “would think it ‘more than strange.'”

But it was not only parents we were trying to hide our liaisons from, but also the neighbors. “When I was living with Tommy in my walk-up on West 13th Street,” Helen Weaver remembers, “there was a snoopy woman on the second floor who watched us. We always left the apartment separately—he'd go down the stairs first. One morning we were feeling great and we walked down together. The woman flew out her door as we passed and said, ‘That's better—less furtive!'”

Gay Talese: “You didn't have women in your apartment and feel comfortable about it. I remember trying to slip in and out when the super wasn't there. Or if he saw you, the super then had something on you. You might have to buy him off.”

Hostility of apartment supers was especially strong in the Village, where the landlords tended to be from the older Italian generation and considered us college grads from the provinces to be wild bohemians. The super of the building where my girlfriend Sandy lived had been very friendly and helpful to her when she moved in, but after he saw her leaving the apartment with me one morning, he never spoke to her again, and did no more repairs he had been so happy to do in the beginning.

Dan Wolfe, the original editor of the
Village Voice
, tells me that by the sixties, when the hippies were moving in, the old Italians were telling him how much they missed “you bohemians.” We were Chamber of Commerce types compared with the pot-smoking youth who came after us. But compared with the folks and the friends back home, we unmarried young men and women were living it up in the sexual capital of the country.

“It wasn't just that there was more sex in New York,” Calvin Trillin says. “There were lots more single people here our age. It wasn't unusual to be single in New York, while everyone at home in Kansas City was married. The big difference was you could be twenty-six or twenty-seven in New York and be single and it was considered
perfectly normal. You did have to get married by your thirties to be normal. Thirty was the pressure time.”

I remember feeling the pressure myself as I neared that landmark age, which seemed the end of youth. You were considered a bit odd or out of it in Indianapolis if you hadn't married in your early twenties; in New York the stigma began to appear at thirty, when people started to become suspicious in the same ways folks were back home at an earlier age. Were you normal? Were you unattractive, unbalanced, or sexually screwed up? Men were suspected of homosexuality, while women were rarely imagined to be lesbian, but more often “frigid” or “neurotic.”

The thirty stigma hit home one night when I was having drinks at the San Remo with a former girlfriend who'd become a pal, and we were both lamenting a temporary lack of love interest in our lives. I mentioned a man I had recently met whom I could fix her up with, and told her he was a lawyer in his mid-thirties. She asked if he'd ever been married, and I said no. She said thanks but no thanks, and I asked why not. She said, “I'd rather go out with a man who's been divorced by then than a man much past thirty who's never been married at all.” I asked why, and she said, “He's likely to have mother problems, some kind of weird mother problems.” I quickly finished my drink and ordered another; I was twenty-nine at the time. (I was married for the first time just before my thirty-second birthday.)