In New York a few days ago, like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945), I paid a visit to PJ Clarke’s tavern on Third Avenue. Similarities ended there, I hope.
The classic movie, adapted from Charles R Jackson’s novel, depicts a five-day binge by a washed-up alcoholic writer. And okay, I had two beers during my visit. But that was over lunch, in the dining room at the back.
Clarke’s is famously a Manhattan “hold-out”: a standalone low-rise surrounded by skyscrapers. Since it was taken over by the original Paddy Clarke in 1902, in fact, it has come down in the world.
It had four storeys back then but lost two during development of the 47-floor building behind it.
The many celebrities who have frequented it down the decades include Frank Sinatra and song-writer Johnny Mercer, whose experiences combined in one of the classic ballads of lost love.
As sung by Sinatra and countless others, One More for My Baby (and One More for the Road) features a broken-hearted protagonist talking to his therapist, ie the barman, at a “quarter to three” in the morning.
Mercer wrote it in Clarke’s, on a napkin. But the line “Set ‘em up, Joe,” was poetic licence. The regular barman at the time was a Tommy Joyce. Mercer rang him afterwards to apologise for not being able to fit his name in.
The nearest I got to poetry while there, by the way, was when discovering that our waitress, a former Angela Fitzpatrick, was from Cavan.
After declaring her a “neighbour”, I learned she was married into the Wylies, a famous Monaghan GAA family, whereupon we both waxed lyrical about the heroics of brothers Drew, Ryan, and Brent, who once supplied the entire full-back for Ballybay. I might write a song about them yet.
But leaving Clarke’s for a moment, while staying with Joyces, there is no escaping the literary one, even in New York, a place he never visited.
After posting a picture of my travels there on Twitter, I was contacted by Glenn Johnston, a man I knew only through that platform – and mainly for his prodigious collection of Joyce’s books.
It turns out that, although Limerick-born, Glenn lives in New York. So one thing led to another and, 24 hours later, he was giving me an Irish literary tour of lower west-side Manhattan.
Featured sites included a former location of The Little Review, which first published Ulysses in serial form from an address now occupied by a “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu” studio, and the courthouse in which the magazine was prosecuted for obscenity. In a happier reinvention, that is now a library.
But our tour also extended to a man who did make it to New York, and in remarkable circumstances.
Many’s a young artist has run away from his parents to achieve freedom of expression. John Butler Yeats – father of WB, Jack, Lily, and “Lolly” – ran away from his children, more or less, aged 68, and spent the last years of his life painting and hosting a salon at his home at West 29th Street.
Then there was Brendan Behan, whose shorter stay at the nearby Chelsea Hotel in 1963 is immortalised on a plaque there, quoting the dedication from a book he wrote on the premises: “To America, my new-found land: the man that hates you hates the human race.”
The Chelsea must be the world’s most storied (as opposed to storeyed) hotel, most of the best narratives dating from a time when it was cheap enough that bohemian types could stay in it for months or years on end.
Hence the many other plaques, noting for example that Arthur Miller wrote three plays while a resident from 1962 to 1968; that another Arthur (C Clarke) wrote 2001: a Space Odyssey there; and, as the most poetic inscription puts it, that Welsh poet Dylan Thomas “lived and labored last here . . . and from here sailed out to die.”
To enjoy such heritage vicariously these days, modern guests pay $900 a night and more.
Not all former celebrity residents feature on plaques, however. There is no mention of Nancy Spungen, whose short chaotic life with Sid Vicious ended in the Chelsea, 45 years ago this week. Nor is there a plaque on the front to Charles R Jackson, whose Lost Weekend was all too autobiographical. Long dependent on alcohol and barbiturates, Jackson did kick his addictions for a time but found he couldn’t write sober, so relapsed during his last days, when resident at the hotel. His fatal overdose in 1968 was ruled a suicide.
Although praised for its realism, the movie version of his novel had a more optimistic conclusion than the book.
Like Sinatra in the quintessential recording of One More for My Baby, Milland smokes his way through the final scene. But where the former stubs his cigarette out in an ashtray before exiting the bar, the latter – having vowed to write another book – drops his into an unfinished glass of whiskey.