It was the late '60s and the early '70s when Dennis, and his brother Dave and I met on Saturday nights for movies, pool and a little drinking at the Spotlight bar on 52nd Street and Broadway, where we were nicknamed by the bartender Gene as, Rings, Champ and Specs.
Dave could blow smoke rings better than the guy puffing away on the Camel billboard in Times Square. Dennis was not a pool hustler, but could play like one. No one at Broadway Billiards would play him for even split time a game of straight pool. And I was Specs, only because I wore glasses. Neither of us had girlfriends at that time, so we weren't pulled apart by dates and "romance."
Since the brothers lived on West 55th Street, Times Square was not far away. In that era it had its XXX-rated seediness, streetwalkers, but lots of regular movie houses running the new releases. It was, and still is, a destination for New Yorkers and tourists alike. The Crossroads of the World. There used to be a saying that if you hung out at Hotalings newsstand, where newspaper from all over were sold (pre-Internet) you would eventually meet someone you knew.
Given that our Saturday nights started out in the late '60s we saw three of Sidney Poitier's movies when he was of course becoming box office candy.
I don't remember the order, but when we saw 'Guess Who's coming to Dinner' the scene where the Katherine Hepburn character scolds and tongue lashes her gallery employee Hillary, and then fires her for her outspoken bigoted views on the possibility of having a black son-in-law, is met by the full theater audience with raucous cheers and clapping, as much for Hepburn's delivery as the words. The times, they were a changin'. Poitier is not even in the scene and the audience is lapping the movie up.
I remember some of the criticism the director Stanley Kramer took for not having Hepburn's niece Katherine Houghton and Poitier give the world an inter-racial kiss. I think it's shown in a rearview mirror. Kramer was angry with that criticism saying look what he's presented for God's sake: a black and white couple who want to get married.
Then there was 'In the Heat of the Night' and Virgil Tibbs has to deal with a rose-tinted eyeglass sheriff played by Rod Steiger, who is not happy about a having Black "boy," despite being a Philadelphia detective, in his town. Eventually, of course, they camp out in the Sheriff's house late one night and polish off some alcohol.
There is of course the slap heard around the world when Poitier, as Virgil Tibbs, smacks the white wealthy plantation owner in the greenhouse, Eric Endicott. Again, the audience is loving it.
And 'To Sir with Love,' the Poitier character who can't get a job as an engineer because of race, who has to take an assignment in a tough neighborhood London high school as a teacher and deal with a room full of white teenagers whose only thoughts are about sex, drinking and probably beating someone up, who of course throws the curriculum overboard, wins their respect, and dances in a beautiful, funny fashion with one of his white colleagues played by Judy Geeson. Lulu's song of course is as popular as the movie. The audience loved it.
Going to the movies is not the experience it was, a viewing shared with hundreds, perhaps near a thousand people. The Cineplexes are measured by "screens" and the audience may as well be in their living rooms, isolated from any other mass of people. The times, they are a changin'.
When Poitier won the award for the 1963 movie 'Lilies of the Field' the movie wasn't on anyone's radar. But it was correctly viewed by the voting academy members whose votes fittingly earned Sidney Poitier the first Oscar awarded to a Black performer. I only ever saw that movie on television years after it came out.
Being the reader of obituaries that I am, I took great delight in the detail given the Sidney Poitier sendoff in the NYT by William Grimes.
The acting road of Poitier's formative days came through New York. And like any actor on that road, he struggled mightily. William Grimes tells us Poitier took all sorts of menial jobs, had but $3 in his pocket when he arrived in New York, and saved his nickels so he could sleep in pay toilets on cold nights.
Pay toilets. A nickel. The mechanism depicted above is what was on a pay toilet door, a sort of vending machine/parking meter that needed a nickel to have the lock disengage and allow you access to a toilet. Unlike a parking meter, there was no time limit, but someone could come by and roust you out.
These pay toilets were still around in the '60s, in Penn Station, Port Authority Bus Station, Grand Central Terminal and just about anywhere there was a men's room. I never knew if the women's room had pay toilets, but eventually the pay toilets were legislated out in New York City. You could poop for free, if you found a toilet you wanted to use.
Arrived in New York City with $3.00 in his pocket There is a great scene in the Tony Curtis, Debbie Reynolds 1960 movie where Curtis, an aspiring musician, tries to get a room at the Time Square Dixie Hotel on 8th Avenue, but doesn't have the $7 for a room. The place was too swanky.
The Dixie Hotel. Swanky. Before the Port Authority Terminal was built on 8th Avenue the Trailways busses left from the back of the Dixie Hotel. There was a giant turntable in the garage that turned the buses around to head back out. I remember this because this was how my mother and I traveled for 12 hours, in the '50s, pre-New York State Thruway, to see her Army nurse buddy in the summer who lived on a farm with her husband and daughter in Brushton, New York, near Malone where the bus let us off, near the Canadian border. I can still hear the bus gears changing.
Malone, New York I later learned was where the gangster Bugsy Segal was incarcerated in the 1940s for a while. Malone's principal industries are farming and correctional facilities.
Greyhound Bus lines had their own terminal across from Penn Station, and somewhere else on the West side. Seedy places if there ever were seedy places. They seemed to be filled with broken glass.
The Dixie Hotel has long since morphed into the Carter Hotel, and basically functions as a welfare hotel. No more busses though.
Times Square is no longer the XXX porn palace it once was. It is now 2022 and one of the brothers, Fourstar Dave, has passed away. The other brother is someone I no longer hear from, and he lives in Ohio with his third wife. I'm 73, married 46 years and have two married daughters in their 40s, along with two granddaughters.
Can I be this far removed from those three Sidney Poitier movies?
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment