The Saturday
Route
IS THAT JOAN MORSE,
THE FABULOUS DRESSMAKER, OVER there on the curb? With that fabulous
Claude-yellow heath coat, those knee-high Rolls-Royce-maroon boots
and the biggest sunglasses since Audrey Hepburn sunbathed on a
cantilevered terrace in the Swiss Alps? Well, it has to be Joan Morse.
“Joan!”
And there at Madison Avenue and 74th
Street Joan Morse, owner of A La Carte, which ranks in fabulosity
with Mainbocher, swings around and yells:
“Freddie! I saw you in Paris, but what
happened to you in London?”
One is not to find out immediately,
because the light has just changed. Joan is doing the Saturday
Route down Madison Avenue. Freddie is doing
the Saturday Route up Madison Avenue. But
they keep on walking because they know they will meet sooner or
later at Parke-Bernet and catch up on London. Or if not there, at
the Wildenstein Gallery, the Emmerich or Duveen’s or Castelli’s or
one of those places.
And so will Greta Garbo and her old
friend, George Schlee—nothing retiring about Greta Garbo on the
Saturday Route, no Garbo glasses, no peekaboo Ulster collar. And so
will lovely Mimi Russell and her sister Serena and Nick
Villiers—Mimi is not giving up the Saturday Route just because the
newspapers run headlines such as “Indicted Deb Denies
All.”
And so will Herbert Lehman, Kirk
Douglas, Norman Norell, August Heckscher, Emmett Hughes, Jan
Mitchell, Pierre Scapula, Kenneth J. Lane, Alfred Barr, Dorothy
Miller, Ted Peckham and, well, you know, everybody.
The thing is, any old boy from the
loblolly flatlands of Georgia knows how Saturday is supposed to
work out in the United States. All the old people drive down to the
railroad station and park alongside the tracks and rear back and
socialize on the car fenders until the main event, which is the
Seaboard sleeper barreling through to New York City. And the young
people drive in from all over and park along the street near the
Rexall and neck under the Bright Lights stimulation of the street
lamps.
But what about New York City? Just
because one lives in New York and is Greta Garbo, there is no need
to give the whole business up. Never mind the charisma of the
Seaboard sleeper. In New York there is the new religion, Art. And
none of your parking alongside the tracks. In New York there is a
route from 57th Street to 86th Street through the art galleries
that line Madison Avenue and the streets just off it. And,
naturally, no necking under the arc lights. In New York, on the
Saturday Route, they give each other New York’s newest grace, the
Social Kiss.
As the sound of the wet smack begins
ricocheting between the charming little buildings of upper Madison
Avenue, about noon, everyone knows the Saturday Route is on. Babs
Simpson of Vogue Magazine lives up on East
83rd Street, so she starts out near the 86th Street end, walks down
as far as 78th Street to Schrafft’s, for brunch, and then moves on
down Madison Avenue. She meets “hundreds” of people she knows. So
does Jan Mitchell, the owner of Lüchow’s and his wife, the
gorgeous, demure-looking blonde, who start out from 57th Street. So
does everybody, because everybody is starting out from one end or
the other.
“Martha!” “Tony!” “Edmond!” “Jennifer!”
“Sarah!” “Bryce!” And Tony and Martha embrace and he pastes a
Social Kiss on her cheek, and she pastes one on his cheek, and
Edmond pastes one on Jennifer, and Jennifer pastes one on Edmond,
and then Tony and Martha trade them and Bryce and Jennifer and
Sarah and Martha and Martha and Jennifer.
Irresistibly, this promenade of
socialities, stars, literati and culturati begins to attract a
train of vergers, beadles and hierophants of fashion. One whole set
is called “Seventh Avenue”—as in, “Her? That’s Marilyn. She’s
Seventh Avenue”—designers, manufacturers’ agents, who want to know
what They are wearing on the Saturday Route. Also a vast crowd of
interior decorators, both young and foppish and old and earnest.
And jewelry makers, young museum curators and curates, antiques
dealers, furniture designers, fashion journalists, art journalists,
press agents, social climbers, culture climbers, moochers, oglers,
duns and young men who have had pairs of leather slacks made or
young women in black stretch nylon pants and alligator coat outfits
who have been looking all week for somewhere to wear them. So by
2:30 P.M.. the promenade is roaring up and down Madison Avenue like
a comet with the little stars trailing out like dust at the
end.
At the Wildenstein Gallery on East 64th
Street, Greta Garbo, a turban hat on her head and a vicuna coat
over her shoulders, is standing in a corner before the
Wildenstein’s inevitable velvet-draped walls, between two drawings,
a Tchelitchew and a Prendergast. She is with a smashingly
well-turned-out woman, who is no decoy, however. All around people
are starting the business with the elbows, nudging, saying, “That’s
Greta Garbo, Greta Garbo, Garbo, Garbo, Garbo, Garbo.” Everyone
sort of falls back, except Marilyn, who is trying to peek around to
the front to see what is under the vicuna.
“What’s that?” Marilyn says to Lila,
who is also Seventh Avenue, as they say. “It looks like one of
those Pucci knit things.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, relax,” says
Lila. “She can’t be in the corner forever.”
Downstairs, by the door, where the
ironwork rises up, inspired, in filigrees, is Pierre Scapula, the
interior decorator. He is wearing a leather overcoat with a sash
belt and talking in French to one of Mr. Wildenstein’s people and
in English to a friend: “It’s the most marvelous place. Seven
French sofas, and the minute you …”
Four blocks away, at 68th Street, Mimi
Russell is walking down Madison Avenue in the direction of T.
Anthony’s, the leather goods shop. Mimi, of 1 Sutton Place,
granddaughter of the Duke of Marlborough, daughter of the publisher
of Vogue, is the one girl among 14 young persons of good blood,
good bone, indicted by the Suffolk County Grand Jury, accused of
taking part in the big smashup at the Ladd house after Fernanda
Wetherill’s coming-out ball. Right now, though, on Mimi that story,
like good memoir material, is wearing as well as a checked coat,
which she has on. Right now, on the Saturday Route, she looks like
a million dollars, flanked by good-looking kids, her sister Serena,
for one, and Nick Villiers.
On the other side of the street, the
fellow with the trench coat and the two little girls in tow is
Mindy Wager, the actor.
But up at 77th Street, on the corner
near Parke-Bernet, the big fellow with the gray plaid shirt and the
striped gray tie and the plaid sport jacket is an artist, Mark
Rothko. How did he get out here? Well, he is heading for the
Rauschenberg show at the Castelli gallery, 4 East 77th Street,
where, later, Marilyn will say, “Well, some of the small ones would
be nice,” and Lila says, “Oh, for God’s sake, Marilyn, you’re not
buying lingerie.”
Rothko is standing out in the midst of
the incredible comet and saying he usually doesn’t go near the
Saturday Route with a ten-foot pole. “Yes, I go to openings,” he
says, “the openings of my friends. I am an old man and I have a lot
of friends. This time I just happened to be in the
neighborhood.”
To the beautiful people on the Saturday
Route, however, it does not matter in the least that artists, and
serious collectors, look down on the promenade as a social and,
therefore, not very hip spectacle. The fact is, the Route through
the art galleries bears approximately the same relation to Art as
churchgoing, currently, bears to the Church. Formerly, Saturday was
the big day for the collectors. Now they come around knowingly
Tuesday through Friday, avoiding “the mob”—although at this moment
at Wildenstein’s the Charles Wrightsmans are in that room of
port-colored velvet and, as always, a single painting is up on an
easel by the north light, and two others, never more, are propped
up against the wall nearby.
“I love it,” says J———, a customer and
admirer. “It’s like a game of yellow dog. Two down and one
up.”
But never mind Art in the abstract. It
is almost 3 P.M. and the whole comet seems to be veering toward
Parke-Bernet. August Heckscher has just finished up at the Kootz
(Raymond Parker’s hard-edge abstracts) and the Staempfli (those
wild things by Jorge Piqueras) and is heading for Parke-Bernet. The
fellow in the black Chesterfield, across from Parke-Bernet, near
Stark’s, is John Loeb of the Loeb & Loeb Loebs, grandson of
Arthur Lehman. All the Lehmans seem to be out on the Saturday
Route. Robert Lehman has just left Wildenstein’s. Herbert Lehman,
the Governor, the Senator, the 88-year-old patriarch, is already up
in the great meeting place, the third floor at Parke-Bernet. The
two big gallery rooms are, as always, a profusion of antiques that
will be auctioned off next week, all numbered and set out for
inspection: beechwood Louis XVI chairs of mustard yellow plush,
Zonsei armchairs of vermilion lacquer inlaid with the playing card
faces of Chinese aristocrats, draped bronze maidens holding fluted
cornucopiae out of which sprout light fixtures, a Kulah prayer rug,
a curved cigarette holder of cloisonné enamel, malachite Easter
eggs, a pair of gilded palm trees about 8½ feet high, bibelots,
silver creamers, snuff boxes, low tables, chandeliers, napkin rings
and all the assorted tabourets, bibelots and marquetry inlays of
bygone Czars, noblemen, Mayfair jousters and isolated West of
England gentry.
On the walls—more velvet—is a
crashingly forthright assortment of 19th-century paintings, all
condemned forty years ago by the avant-gardists of Paris as
“literary,” “academic” and “soppy,” but now rather fiercely, if
sometimes perversely, “in”—Messonier, von Bremen, Vibert, Millet,
Ridgeway Knight.
Off to the left is the auction hall
where porters in green uniforms are lugging Adam settees, pedestal
desks, dwarf cabinets and other formidable objects out onto the
stage while John Marion of Parke-Bernet chants in his pulpit. But
everybody is waiting for the two pièces de
resistance, two serpentine-front Chippendale commodes with
splayed feet.
G———, the young man who is selling
commodes, looks a little anxious, but his wife, a blonde, is
looking beautiful mainly, and his friends are not going to let this
be too serious an occasion.
“G———, where are you going? You look so
cross.”
“I’m going to see Marion,” he says.
That would be Louis J. Marion, the president of
Parke-Bernet.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not hunting for
me, looking so cross.”
Meantime, the comet is going full
force, around and around the gallery rooms and in and out of the
auction hall. Governor Lehman is looking at the Rousseau—that is
Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau—the picture of the cows moseying
around the marsh puddle. Jan Mitchell and his wife are looking at a
sketch Gainsborough did for some gal’s portrait. Norman Norell, the
dress designer, is walking into the auction hall. August Heckscher
is sitting in the back row. Mrs. Edmund Lynch, whose husband is
Lynch, as in Merrill Lynch, is walking out. Emmett Hughes is
looking in through the back door.
“It seems to me that in the last year
this place has become very social,” says
Emmett Hughes. “It’s a little like those little cafés on the Via
Veneto used to be.”
Society, the bright young people, the
celebrities, Seventh Avenue, the vergers, the beadles, the
hierophants are bubbling up on all sides.
“Darling, don’t keep telling me you’re
not going to buy anything. Go buy a
malachite egg or something.”
“Of course, I know what to do with two
eight-foot-high palm trees. You put gas jets in the top and
…”
“ … What do I do? One doesn’t do anything, but
you’re a darling to ask …”
“ … Oh, go to Hell. I think you read
that some place …”
“ … the thing is, I was in his studio.
But too blinding …”
“ … Smart set?
Everybody is from Kew Gardens …”
“ … Good Lord, the galleries …”
“ … This place is getting to be the
coffee break …”
“Tony!”
“Martha!”
“Edmond!”
Wet smack!
Then—pow!—the second of the two
commodes is sold, for $10,000, just like the first. And everybody
feels it, even those who paid no attention at all. When the last of
the heavy business is over at Parke-Bernet, it is like the warning
bell at the Metropolitan, and everybody starts to wind up the
Saturday Route. It is as if someone let the magic out.
. August Heckscher is out by the
elevators.
“Do you have change for a quarter?” he
says.
Then he heads off to the telephone
booth.
Of course, it is not all over yet. Ted
Peckham and about 19 others have headed down to the Parke-Bernet
garage for the auctioning of the last item on the list, No. 403, a
Mercedes-Benz limousine, built three years ago for $16,000, with
Naugahyde inside and on the roof, and a roll-up glass partition and
portholes. The garage is rather basic-looking, you know, for Parke-Bernet. The door is
up and it is already dark outside.
Ted Peckham smiles arcanely all through
the chanting and picks up the Mercedes for $3,800.
Somehow it seems like an awesome
acquisition.
“Ted, boy, can I be your
chauffeur?”
“Sure,” says Ted. “In fact, you can buy
it. It’s for sale if you want to buy it.”
Outside, on Madison Avenue, G———and his
wife—she has on a plain suede coat lined like mad with sable—are
smoking and breathing easier. They now have a small entourage in
their magnetic field.
Across 77th Street, Kenneth J. Lane,
the jewelry designer, is walking up Madison Avenue with his hands
in his pockets and his tweed coattails flying out like
wings.
Up at Staempfli’s, Phillip Bruno is
winding up the Piqueras show. He says goodbye to Paula Johnson of
the Osborne Gallery—she hadn’t been able to get up to see the
Piqueras until now—with the proper social kiss. It is really
getting black outside now, and colder, but he still has some kid in
his office who is looking at about a dozen pieces of jade-green
sculpture resting on a pile carpet.
“Looks sort of like the ruins of
Karnak,” says the kid, who has the biggest black Borsalino hat on
Madison Avenue.
Mr. Bruno suppresses a few immediate
responses.
“Well, they won’t look like that on
Tuesday.”
Tuesday—another opening! And four days
from then, Saturday, like filaments skidding toward the mother
lode, all the old people and all the young people will stride down
to the Avenue and rear back alongside the pedestals and socialize
until the main event, which will probably be another prodigious
serpentine-front commode with splayed feet at Parke-Bernet, and get
the wet smacks echoing between the limestone fronts, while Joan
Morse finds out, to be sure, just what did
happen to everybody else during the warm season in
London.