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Blogs by Robert A. Mills
NEW YORK, NEW YORK! IT’S A WONDERFUL . . . 10/26/2009 1:52:26 PM
I think I was twenty-five the first time I saw New York City. It was late September, the weather was comfortable and mellow, and I embarked on a mission to see my two show business aunts and interview Sammy Davis, Jr.
New York Central’s Empire State Express delivered me from Rochester to the Big Apple where I had reserved a room for the week at the YMCA on 47th Street. My aunts, Dora Maugham, and her sister, Peggy, lived in an apartment in the old President Hotel on 48th Street. Both longtime émigrés from Great Britain, they were proud American citizens; Dora was a music, dance and voice “Teacher to the Stars,” and Peggy was a seamstress for the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show at CBS.
My first glimpse of Gotham came at 3:19 PM from the wide window of the train’s club car. Scotch and soda in one hand, an Old Gold in the other, I said to myself, “Good God, look at those magnificent buildings! The Empire State! The Chrysler! The—whatever! 30 Rockefeller Plaza! New York! New York! And it’s all mine!”
From Grand Central Terminal (Crossroads of the World!) I walked, lugging my robin egg blue American Tourister Pullman, all the way to the YMCA. My room on the third floor was miniscule with its twin bed, dresser, nightstand with an Emerson radio bolted to the scarred surface next to the reading lamp, beige plastic covered arm chair near the window boasting a cloth paper blind and view of the building next door—but I had a private bath (no shower) with sink and mildly stained toilet—and a black rotary telephone: $37.50 per week (which I would expense to the TV studio in Rochester.) Dutifully, I called Aunt Dora even before I unpacked.
“Where are you, darling?” she chirped, her accent as Liverpool as it had been when she, Peggy and my grandmother, Lizzy, had left England in 1912.
“At the YMCA, on 47th.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course. . .Well, come by tomorrow, after two. Take a cab. When’s your meeting with the colored singer?” I told her not until Friday. “Good. Plan on dinner with Peg and me. Wear a shirt and tie. And a jacket.”
That evening I asked the YMCA clerk in the lobby where the nearest Horn & Hardart’s Automat was, and he told me there was “one right around the corner.” I found it easily and I was delighted; I felt just like Peter Lawford as I selected roast beef and mashed potatoes, apple pie, and two slices of Bond Bread from behind the bright and immaculate windows: $1.92.
Later I walked up Broadway and, finding the Roseland Dance Hall, I became Donald O’Connor. For two dollars I bought eight tickets and sat on a stool in the bar watching the stream of lovelies sashay by while downing a scotch or two. One diminutive damsel (Sally) caught my eye, and I used three tickets before inviting her back to my glamorous digs at the Hotel Ymca—only to be told her attentions would cost me ten dollars (an expense I could not, in good conscience, expect WVET-TV to honor.)
Back down Broadway I discovered Birdland and wandered in for another scotch and soda while standing at the bar and rubbing shoulders with New York’s hoypaloy while listening to a set by Gene Krupa and his trio. When my tab came to three dollars seventy, I left a tip of thirty cents and moseyed on.
Times Square was brilliant and noisy, traffic and people pushed and jostled, horns blared incessantly, and tourists, gawking and in no hurry at all, were easy to spot. Being a cosmopolitan man-of-the-world, I glanced at my Boliva, noted it was nearly eleven, and stopped for a nightcap at Oliver’s (a semi-outdoor stand-up bar catering to itinerants from Iowa.)
I was awakened at the YMCA at 6:30 the next morning by someone vacuuming in the hallway outside my door (a daily ritual I discovered that I would, according to the clerk in the lobby, get used to “in time.”) After a lengthy and leisurely brunch at the Automat, I walked in gorgeous weather fourteen blocks north to my aunts’ abode at the President Hotel. The doorman, resplendent with gold braid and epaulets, told me to take the elevator to the 27th floor; he would phone ahead and tell Aunt Dora I was on my way up. Wow (just like the movies!)
There were two other people in the elevator with me, a middle-aged fellow in coveralls and a black lady about my age. At the twenty-sixth floor, the elevator suddenly jerked to an abrupt stop. It seemed to hesitate roughly, then slip downward at a dizzying pace, stopping hard at an angel before plunging unabated as my feet left the floor . . .
