The Chelsea Girl Murders Read Online Free PDF Page B

schools covering every available space. The walls were full of paintings, and there was sculpture scattered around the seating area. A papier-mâché woman in a swing hung from the middle of the ceiling. The black-iron fireplace was guarded by two snarling black griffins. Above the mantel was a carved wood tableaux depicting different artists at work. On the mantel were two strange silver filigree vases that looked like ancient Phoenician cremation urns, flanking a bust of Harry S. Truman. Behind the lobby desk, where the mail was held in hundreds of tiny cubbyholes, there was more art—on the walls, even the ceiling. Some of the art was very good, by famous and nonfamous artists, some was very bad. The mix seemed democratic and nonjudgmental, like the hotel itself. It was otherworldly, yet warm and welcoming at the same time.
    It was easy to imagine you were in another time because the lobby had only barely been modernized over the years, and the mix of furniture and styles gave it a timeless quality. I imagined the place around the turn of the century, when Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt took tea in this marble-walled lobby. In the 1950s, Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb, brooded over his creation here, and Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. In the 1960s, Janis Joplin gave Leonard Cohen a blow job on an unmade bed upstairs “while limousines [waited] in the street,” inspiring him to write a song about it, and the delicate and doomed Edie Sedgwick, Warhol Superstar and Youthquaker, kept setting her room on fire. There is a famous picture of her sitting in the lobby with kohled eyes and bandaged hands, waiting for the management to find her a new room. Some of this I knew through Tamayo, and some just as a New Yorker who had long admired and been curious about the Chelsea.
    While I was daydreaming about a young Edith Piaf taking refuge here with composer Virgil Thomson, a man with dyed apple-red hair came in with a black-and-white dog, who yapped at me and wrenched me back into the present. They were followed by a man with a horrible black toupee, who stopped just inside the glass doors and looked around.
    After him came an elderly lady, elegantly dressed, accompanied by a solicitous young man who addressed her as Mrs. Grundy.
    â€œI’ve been experimenting with new textures and surfaces, Mrs. Grundy,” said the young man. “A fine-weave bleached denim instead of canvas, also a shaved velour stretched over a frame, if I could have a half hour to show you, Mrs. Grundy …”
    â€œI have to run now for a meeting. But call my assistant, Ben, and make an appointment to show me your portfolio,” she said. “And please, call me Miriam.”
    It was Miriam Grundy, the widow of the late, great poet Oliver Grundy, a well-known patron of the arts and a genuine Chelsea legend. Miriam Grundy—that explained why, though a tiny lady, she had such a big presence. Miriam Grundy was larger than life, the darling of the avant garde as well as the Old Guard. The details of her life had grown mythic. When she was in her twenties, her family fled Europe and the Nazis for America, where young Miriam met Oliver Grundy, a poet, scion of a wealthy WASP family, and a married man. Their affair had caused a terrible scandal, and details of the divorce appeared in the penny papers along with some of the steamy love letters Miriam and Oliver exchanged, the filthy parts replaced with dashes. After she and Oliver married, they abandoned high society and ran around with beats, surrealists, and other bohemian artist types. High society welcomed them back in the 1960s.
    Now, this rich widow’s name showed up, boldface, in the gossip columns all the time, attending everything from high society Museum of Modern Art benefits to downtown performance art shows at avant joints like P.S. 22 and Here. What a life she had had. She’d escaped certain death in Europe, had a grand love story, had become a