Chronicles - Bob Dylan [25]
As we came through the door, I could see the rooms were already swarming with people, the bohemian crowd — a lot of old-timers. The air was thick with perfume and cigarette smoke and the smell of whiskey and a lot of people. The apartment was very Victorian, decorated with a lot of lovely things. Beaux Arts lamps, carved boudoir chairs, couches in plush velvet — heavy andirons connected with chains by the fireplace and the fireplace was flaming. I got up close to it, it made me think of hot dogs and marshmallows. Delores and I didn’t feel out of place, not too much. I was wearing a thick flannel shirt under a sheepskin jacket, peaked cap, khaki pants and motorcycle boots. Delores was wearing a long beaver fur coat over a nightgown that looked like a dress. I saw a lot of people here that I’d meet again not too far off, a lot of the folk community hierarchy, who were all pretty indifferent towards me at the time and showed very little enthusiasm. They could tell I wasn’t from the North Carolina mountains nor was I a very commercial, cosmopolitan singer either. I just didn’t fit in. They didn’t know what to make of me. Pete Seeger did, though, and he said hello. He was with Harold Leventhal who managed The Weavers. Harold spoke in a low, guttural whisper. You had to lean in close to hear what he was saying. He’d later promote a concert of mine at Town Hall.
Another guy there, Henry Sheridan, had been Mae West’s boyfriend. Mae West would later record a song of mine. Everybody was there, avant-garde artists like Judith Dunne, a choreographer whose dance pieces were based on sports activities like wrestling and baseball, Ken Jacobs, the underground filmmaker who made Blond Cobra, and Peter Schumann, from the Bread and Puppet Theatre — his play Christmas Story portrayed King Herod smoking a big cigar and one puppet in a three-faced mask who played all the Magi. Moe Asch, who founded Folkways Records, was also there and so was Theodore Bikel, who played Sheriff Max Muller in the film The Defiant Ones. Theo was an accomplished actor who also sang folk songs in foreign languages. In a few years’ time, I’d travel to Mississippi with both him and Pete to play at a voters’ registration rally. At Camilla’s place I met up with Harry Jackson, who I already knew from Folk City — Harry, the cowboy sculptor, painter, singer from Wyoming. Harry had a studio on Broome Street and would later make a painting of me, which I sat for. He also had a studio in Italy where he made statues for town piazzas. He was a rough, gruff guy — looked like General Grant, sang cowboy songs and was a heavy drinker.
Cisco brought all kinds of people together. There were union guys there — ex-union guys, labor organizers. Recently, there’d been some accounts in the national news of an AFL-CIO executive council meeting that had been held in Puerto Rico and it was pretty funny. It had been a weeklong affair, and the union bosses were photographed drinking mammoth rum drinks, visiting casinos and nightclubs — hanging around at hotel pools in flowing bathrobes, swimming the surf, wearing Hollywood-ish sunglasses — doing handstands on the diving board. It looked pretty decadent. They were supposedly there to discuss the march on Washington to dramatize the unemployment problem. Evidentially they didn’t know they were being photographed.
These guys at Camilla’s place weren’t like that, though, they looked more like tugboat captains or baggy-pantsed outfielders or roustabouts. Mack Mackenzie had been an organizer on the Brooklyn waterfront. I met him and his wife, Eve, who was an ex–Martha Graham dancer. They lived on 28th Street. Later on, I’d be their houseguest, too…sleep on their living room couch. Some