A Writer's Life Read online

  Across the street from the warehouse was a vacant lot that would presently become the site of the rumpside annex of the Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital, which fronted on Sixty-fourth Street. Frederick Schillinger’s most friendly and accommodating neighbors on his side of the street, next to the school, were the proprietors of a piano factory, who accorded him exclusive delivery rights to the department stores and other retail outlets that sold their products, and also to their special customers (such as concert performers) who received pianos directly at reduced prices, or even gratis if they were very famous.

  If anyone had cornered the piano-moving market in New York City in the early twentieth century, it was probably Frederick J. Schillinger. He had earlier received introductions to pianists and to shop owners and manufacturers from his wife Eliza’s parents and other relatives who owned and operated a small factory that manufactured keyboard parts near Times Square, then called Longacre Square. The factory was well known to members of New York’s musical community, and Eliza herself, throughout her courtship and the early years of her marriage to Frederick J. Schillinger (himself an able violinist), made certain that all of her family’s clients and friends with pianos to be moved were aware of his capabilities.

  Eliza and Frederick’s three daughters and one son, Fred junior, were excellent piano players, although the girls became more accomplished as light classical singers on New York’s radio station WEAF (one of them also sang in the Metropolitan Opera’s chorus), while young Fred’s musical talents were most conspiciously noticed at his father’s warehouse after he had begun working there in 1920, having just graduated without honors from high school and with no ambition to go to college. He did not like working in the warehouse, either, but he did enjoy serenading his fellow employees at the keyboard while they were pushing pianos in and out of moving vans.

  Since no other family member would agree to take over the warehouse following the elder Schillinger’s death in 1927 of bronchopneumonia, Fred junior became his father’s successor by default, and while he would gradually replace the horses with trucks, he did little else during the next twenty-five years to keep pace with his rivals in the small but very competitive furniture-moving and storage business in New York.

  “He slowly ran his father’s business into the ground,” I was later told by Fred junior’s wife and widow, Charlotte Schillinger, who added that in 1952 he was grateful to dispense with the entire five-story building for the low price of $64,200.

  The man who bought the building, and continued to operate it for the next twenty years as a storage and moving business, was an Italian-American named Frank Catalano, a short, balding, and compactly built individual in his late forties who had successfully owned and managed other warehouses in New York and who wasted no time in revitalizing the trade at 206 East 63rd Street after he had removed all the advertising signs bearing the name Schillinger. The building was now the site of Dard’s Express and Van Co.

  The new owner named it Dard in memory of his grandfather, Dardinello Catalano, who had been born and reared in the hills of Calabria, not far from my own family’s ancestral village. A son of Dardinello Catalano who was named Salvatore left Italy at twenty-three to work as a coal miner near Pittsburgh. But within ten years, Salvatore Catalano’s ailing lungs made it impossible for him to continue with his job in the mines, and so he left the Pittsburgh area for New York, where he found work as a laborer with a construction company. A disabling injury a few years later forced Salvatore to quit and begin earning his living as the proprietor of a fruit and vegetable store near the East River on Forty-ninth Street. In the neighborhood, he met and would soon marry an Italian-American woman with whom, during the next decade and a half, he would have nine children. The second of these, a son born in 1914, would prove to be the most energetic and resourceful, Frank Catalano.

  As a child, when Frank was not helping his father in the store, he was on the sidewalks shining shoes in front of the Grand Central Post Office. As a young teenager, Frank rose daily at dawn to drive a horse and wagon downtown to fetch the produce for his father’s store before going on to class at Public School 135 on Fifty-first Street and First Avenue. During the 1930s, after persuading his father that the high cost of purchasing a truck was a prudent investment because of its time-saving value, Frank put the produce truck to use during his off-hours from the store by moonlighting as a furniture mover. Within a few years, while taking night courses to complete his high school education, Frank Catalano was buying trucks on his own, and employing his younger brothers and sisters to help with his moving and storage business, which was initially centered within a warehouse on East Forty-ninth Street. In 1952, needing more space and knowing about the mismanaged warehouse belonging to Fred Schillinger, Jr., Frank Catalano paid him a visit and found him more than eager to sell.

  After I had moved into the neighborhood, I would sometimes see Frank Catalano helping his men as they loaded or unloaded trucks behind the opened paneled doors, and once I ventured in to introduce myself and tell him about my interest in his building. He was reluctant to talk to me, and I did not press him. But I continued to see him and to acknowledge him with a few friendly words or a wave while walking to my then girlfriend Nan’s apartment, which was located on Sixty-third Street east of Second Avenue; and in 1959, after we had gotten married and began exploring the city together in my aggressively stylish, sleek white TR-3—an English sports car I bought secondhand but have maintained and continue to drive today—I parked it directly across the street from Frank Catalano’s warehouse in an underground garage where the monthly rates were low but where my low-slung vehicle was often nicked or dented by one of the wiry, wine-drinking attendants as they backed into my fenders and headlights while maneuvering larger cars with higher bumpers. It was impossible to accuse anyone, since I could never identify who was at fault, although I did complain constantly and futilely to the management about the abuse being rendered upon my beloved TR-3, whose every dent was like a hole in my heart.

  One warm autumn afternoon in 1963, after I had arrived at the garage and had lowered and snapped my car’s canvas top down, I noticed that one of the red plastic taillight covers mounted to the back fender had been smashed, and it was the third time this had happened in recent weeks. I always stored extra taillights and covers in the trunk in anticipation of their breakage, but for some reason on this occasion—though the fender itself was not damaged—I succumbed to rage. Unable to direct my frustration at the garage attendants, since none was in view, I turned toward a metal trash can that stood in front of a concrete post and kicked the can halfway across the floor of the garage, hurting my foot.

  Limping into my car and turning on the ignition, I began to gun the motor and discharge noxious puffs of dark smoke from the exhaust pipe. Then I shoved the wooden knob of my stick shift into first gear and roared up the ramp with my horn honking, alerting any and all pedestrians above that I was to be reckoned with. Arriving on the sidewalk, I saw to my left a fast-approaching garbage truck that would have blown me away had I kept going, and so I slammed my ailing foot down on the brake pedal and skidded to a stop at the curb. Close behind the garbage truck were other vehicles that were soon blurring past my windshield—taxis, limos, buses, private sedans, and vans, many of them coming from the Sixty-third Street exit of the FDR Drive along the East River and all of them now churning forward almost bumper-to-bumper on this wide westbound one-way street toward Third Avenue.

  I waited impatiently at the curb, gunning my motor but unable to advance. Looking directly across the street, I saw Frank Catalano’s tan brick warehouse with its doors closed and no one in sight. This was one of the few old buildings still here since the era of the elder Schillinger, and it appeared to be very small and anachronistic and fuzzy as it stood in the midafternoon duskiness of this street now being polluted by passing motorists and dominated by soaring rows of white brick modern high-rise apartment houses that cast deeper and darker shadows than had been th
e case when elevated trains had hovered over Second and Third avenues. Thousands of people now resided on this block, paying high fees to live in terraced apartments as high as possible, and as remotely as possible, from the horn-honking traffic and grime below. There were no cafés, no dress boutiques, no fine shops of any kind on either side of the street, and therefore no incentives for window-shoppers nor diversions for strollers. The only person I saw on the sidewalk as I sat drumming my fingers on the steering wheel while inhaling the foul air that matched my mood was a uniformed doorman who stood some yards away, close to the curb, smoking a cigarette beyond the range of the security cameras posted in the lobby of his large apartment building at 205 East 63rd Street, near the corner of Third Avenue.

  Then I heard a voice calling out to me, coming from somewhere behind my car. Turning, I saw a short, round-faced man standing near the rear fender, the one with the smashed taillight cover. He was wearing a yellow peaked cap and a dark windbreaker, and in his left hand he was carrying a fishing rod. It was Frank Catalano.

  “You gotta take it easy,” he said, slowly shaking his head, but he spoke in a manner that was more avuncular than admonishing. Embarrassed by the thought that he had seen me at my worst, foolishly enraged because someone had cracked an inexpensive and replaceable piece of plastic, I sat and said nothing.

  “You’re young yet,” he went on. “Whatever it is, you shouldn’t let it get to you.…”

  Carefully laying down his fishing rod near the edge of the sidewalk, Frank Catalano walked in front of my car and assumed the posture of a crossing guard, raising his arms high and gesturing with his hands for the traffic to halt. After it did, he nodded in my direction.

  “Okay,” he said, keeping both arms raised, “it’s your turn.”

  As I pulled out into the street, spun to the right, and passed him, I heard him say, “I like your car.”

  “Thanks, Frank,” I replied, calling him by name for the first time.

  In 1973, as Frank Catalano anticipated turning sixty, although it would not happen until the following year, he decided to quit the moving business. He and his wife, who had served as his bookkeeper, had more than enough money to live comfortably in Florida for the rest of their lives, and their two college-educated children were now both self-supporting, married, and residing far from New York City. Their daughter, Luanne, was a homemaker in Michigan, and their son, Frank Catalano, Jr., was an attorney in Oklahoma. What the elder Catalano now wanted to do was not retire from work but, rather, embark upon a new career that would allow him to do full-time what he liked to do best—go fishing. He would operate a charter-boat business in Key West, Florida, and spend his days as a seafaring captain and fishing guide. For many years he had regularly taken time off from the warehouse to drift in the currents of the East Coast and the Caribbean, and one day while angling in the Point Judith fishing grounds near Galilee, Rhode Island, he struggled with his catch for nearly two hours before hauling in a 746-pound, ten-foot-long tuna. A photograph of him posing next to the hanging fish appeared in Movers News, a publication sponsored by the New York City Movers Association, which had elected Frank Catalano to serve three terms as its president.

  Although he terminated his business on Sixty-third Street in 1973, it was never his intention to sell the building outright; he would retain it as a rental property, and eventually it would be inherited by his daughter and son. Meanwhile, he turned over the empty warehouse to a real estate firm, which in turn leased it to a lanky, blond, wealthy twenty-seven-year-old land developer from Sarasota, Florida, J. Z. Morris, son of multimillionaire Robert Morris, who had financed the construction of many shopping centers and condominiums in western Florida after making a fortune in the grain business in his native Indiana.

  His son J.Z. (for Joseph Zol) grew up in New Harmony, Indiana, where he was flying solo in his own plane at sixteen. Following his graduation from Indiana University in 1969, he moved to the Caribbean island of Jamaica, where in the early 1970s he completed a development project along the six-mile beachfront of Negril. In 1973, during a prolonged stay in New York, and while ambling along Sixty-third Street one day, he noticed the rental sign on Frank Catalano’s warehouse and telephoned the leasing agent. After receiving permission to inspect the premises, he detected a not unpleasant equestrian fragrance rising through the dank and hollow interior of the building, and he observed the sheen that had been formed by horses’ bodies rubbing along the wooden sides of the freight elevator that carried him from floor to floor. He was charmed by the place. And since he could obtain possession of it for an initial sum of $65,000, plus an annual rent of $20,000 to Catalano that guaranteed a long lease and a renewal agreement—and since J. Z. Morris also had no pressing financial problems at the time—he assumed control over the property in a leisurely manner, making little use of it for the next two and a half years except when parking his Rolls-Royce behind the paneled doors of Catalano’s onetime garage on the ground floor.

  In 1976, J. Z. Morris hired a construction crew at a cost of about $700,000 to gut the interior of the property and make the upper three floors rentable as offices or studio apartments. He sublet the lower two floors and basement to a restaurant partnership for an annual sum of $46,000; the partners had the intention of transforming it into an elegant Art Deco dining duplex they would call Le Premier. The restaurant partnership was also committed to spending an additional $1.5 million on reconstruction, renovation, and the removal of the freight elevator, which it would subsequently replace with a kaleidoscopic brass-railed staircase that would connect the upper and lower dining areas. The main dining room on ground level—once having borne the weight of trucks and horses—would eventually become resplendent with polished mahogany floors, and the room would be enclosed with salmon-colored walls and a five-tiered ceiling emitting soft beams of pinkish light. Delicate lace curtains embroidered with peacocks would cover the large front window that faced the sidewalk—a window as wide as the paneled doors it had replaced—and the tables would be surrounded by pearl gray suede-covered chairs and banquettes. An antique hand-carved bar imported from Paris would be positioned along the eastern wall behind the laced peacocks, while other walls would be adorned by female figures posed coquettishly within stained-glass Art Deco mirrors.

  Upstairs, the theme would be replicated, with Art Deco pendant lights hanging from the ceiling, and the walls decorated with murals including one showing a loose-gowned eighteenth-century woman frolicking in the woods with a satyr and other mythical creatures of obviously lecherous intentions. There would be fewer tables upstairs than on the floor below because the second floor was to function as a kind of club, with dues-paying diners having access not only to more privacy but also to a small room in which they could play backgammon or cards, and that would contain humidified lockers in which members could store their cigars and smoke them in the second floor’s piano bar.

  After the freight elevator had been removed, J. Z. Morris was obliged to install an enclosed staircase along the western edge of the building, to be used by his tenants who were renting space on either the third, fourth, or fifth floors. He himself temporarily moved into the fifth floor, establishing a small office and a pied-à-terre, and decorating it in a style that unavoidably drew attention from many of his Sixty-third Street neighbors. A delivery truck arrived one afternoon carrying a glass cockpit and the wingless silver fuselage of a World War II naval fighter plane that he had purchased from a salvage company in Maine with the idea of utilizing the truncated plane as a combination objet d’art and telephone booth in his office. Among the observers who stood watching along the sidewalk as the fuselage was hauled up by cable along the front of the building to the roof, from which it was lowered through a large hole onto the fifth floor, was a beautiful young Chinese woman who decided that she now had a neighbor who was sufficiently eccentric and financially well-off to justify her interest.

  Her name was Jackie Ho. She occupied a penthouse apartment in a modern building
a few doors east of the warehouse. She was a slender, athletic woman of twenty-six who spent two hours of every afternoon in an East Side gym when she was not spending similar amounts of time in a gym in Hong Kong. She regularly traveled back and forth between the two cities. She had been born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a Chinese family from Canton, and from her hillside home in Hong Kong, overlooking the harbor, she was within walking distance of her rental properties, from which she earned a hefty income. When she was not in Hong Kong or New York, she often indulged her passion for skiing and the après-ski life—in Austria, Switzerland, and Chile—in the company of such men as the son of a leading German industrialist, a jet-setting French financier, and King Hussein of Jordan. An occasional dinner companion of hers prior to her dating J. Z. Morris was the onetime vice president of the United States, Spiro T. Agnew, who often visited Asia as a business consultant after leaving office. She had dined in New York with Agnew at La Grenouille on the evening before she had seen Morris standing on the sidewalk with the truck men as they unloaded the fuselage. Jackie Ho was subsequently introduced to J. Z. Morris at a cocktail party held in the Sixty-third Street apartment of an Argentine woman who helped run Valentino’s shop on Fifth Avenue, where Jackie bought her dresses. Two years later, in 1979, Jackie Ho and J. Z. Morris were married. At the same time, since he continued to conduct most of his business from Sarasota, Jackie Ho became his rent collector and manager for the building at 206 East 63rd, where, should anyone be tardy with the rent, she would react with the cantankerous temperament for which Cantonese women are renowned and dreaded.