The Hotel Chelsea is a Mecca for artists, writers and musicians, and one of its more memorable guests was Brendan Behan, who finished two books there, writes Frank Gray
In the final months of Brendan Behan's life - he died in Dublin on March 20th, 1964 - it had become clear that there was probably nothing short of a miracle that was going to save him from his headlong dash into self-destruction.
A messy denouement had been foreordained since Behan's Palm Sunday-like sweep into New York in September 1960, in preparation for his play The Hostage. Behan's triumphs, such as The Quare Fella and Borstal Boy, had steadily yielded to illness, alcoholism, diabetes and cirrhosis among them.
Despite the hangers-on, there was no shortage of those who wished to help him break his deadly dependency, and who is to say that, had he been able to reciprocate their support, he might have completed another quality play, such as the aborted Richard's Cork Leg.
Forty-three years later, the news from New York is that Behan is not forgotten, although just a handful of his contemporaries survive. Among these is Stanley Bard, the enduring manager of the Hotel Chelsea at 222 West 23rd Street. Bard is little changed, apart from being beset with concerns over the future of the 11-storey Chelsea, which stands like a gloomy prop in an Alfred Hitchcock thriller midway between the Empire State Building and Greenwich Village.
Stanley's father bought the Chelsea in 1939 - it went up in 1882 and has been mainly operated as a residential hotel - and managed it until the 1950s, when he deferred to his son, who has been checking the Chelsea's vast array of unusual customers in and out of the hotel since.
Many patrons believe that period to have been the golden age, a time when any bohemian who was anybody would meet up at the Chelsea. Customers included Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, writer William Burroughs, playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, poet Allen Ginsberg, science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, and the writer of The Lost Weekendand an alcoholic himself, Charles Jackson. Then there was Brendan Behan who, but for the good will of close friends, relatives and associates, might have died at the Chelsea.
AMONG THOSE WHO were desperate to find a temporary abode for the Irishman when his welcome was fast being worn out at other hostelries in the city was publisher Bernard Geis. His claim to fame was the successful publication of the best-selling novel Valley of the Dolls.
Supported by Katherine Dunham, a modern dance troupe leader and a resident at the Chelsea, he approached Stanley Bard in the hope that he would find digs for Behan who had been in and out of hospital, and jail, and had been declared persona non grata at the Hotel Windsor, another Bohemian haunt. Also present as part of what amounted to a rescue mission were Rae Jeffs of Hutchinsons Publishing, Behan's first major publisher. Jeffs was committed to extracting more non-fiction commentaries from Behan. Finally, it was the turn of Beatrice Behan to liberate herself from Dublin for the voyage back to New York in the knowledge that if she did not repatriate her husband to Ireland, no one would. Behan himself had no desire to return.
Bard, now a septuagenarian, liked and respected Behan but was under no illusion how troublesome he might be. "I knew he was in and out of problems. His publisher, Bernard Geis, asked me to help him out." Geis was not living at the hotel at the time but he knew a lot of people who were. "We thought about it and decided it would help him and stimulate him a lot more than other more commercial hotels," says Bard. "We thought he would respect the hotel . . . I told Bernard that we would try to help him."
Behan curbed his tendency for excess, at least some of the time, but was not above treating the hotel's corridors and passageways like an electric train set, occasionally spreading disruption onto the street. But according to Bard he proved manageable.
"Of course, he drank himself to death, but when he was with us he finished two books with the help of Rae Jeffs." Bard has been under pressure lately, following news that a partnership managing the Chelsea is planning a major refurbishment, or gentrification program, something that would change the character of the hotel. The future is much in doubt. At present, the Chelsea looks much like it did at the end of the 19th century; some years ago it yielded to the call for a fax machine to be installed, but as of this writing e-mail communication with the front desk is still absent. Bard likes it that way, as it enables him to maintain the personal touch where the spoken rather than the electronic word prevails in the hotel's lobbies and hallways.
Behan's stay there in 1963 probably cost Bard a tidy sum in laundry and other normal hotel expenses. Bard won't say, but it is understood that Katherine Dunham absorbed much of the costs, but not before wrangling some cash out of Behan. "He was a good customer and . . . I loved writers and loved what the hotel stood for," Bard says.
But one stigma Behan could not escape was the linkage of his name with that of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Beatrice Behan, more than once, said that one sure way to get up her husband's nose was to compare him with Thomas. The Welshman died at nearby St Vincent's Hospital in New York in 1953, a full decade before Behan's arrival.
One can speculate that Thomas's death, after a long drinking bout that had begun in the Chelsea, cut too close to the bone for Behan's liking - he would succumb to the effects of alcoholism 11 years later, at the age of 41. Like Thomas, Behan was on a promotional tour, to tout himself and his plays, notably The Hostage. Also like Thomas, this included a long stay at the Chelsea, a cornerstone of Bohemian tolerance on 23rd street in New York's midtown, west side.
"He hated the comparison," Beatrice Behan told me. "Brendan said there was no such comparison." It is difficult not to conclude otherwise, although Thomas's mortal binge of 18 shots of whiskey that spring night of 1953 appears to have been more spontaneous than was Behan's long alcohol-aided path to self-destruction. Nor was Thomas hell-bent on abandoning life in the old country for adulation in the new, as was Behan.
If the Irishman's health had held up, it has been speculated that he and Beatrice would have separated and he would have dug his heels ever deeper into the Irish-American soil of Manhattan. Eventually, Beatrice and Jeffs wrested Behan free and found a berth for him for the voyage back to Ireland later that year. His health had deteriorated so steeply that it was to be his last visit to the US.
Outside the hotel, there are a series of plaques paying tribute to some of the more famous patrons. Behan's reads as follows: "In memory of Brendan Behan, 1923-1964. To America, my new-found land. The man that hates you hates the human race."
