10 The Guru of Romany Marie’s
1In 1930, Bucky lived in the most original housing he ever occupied, at least until he invented and lived in a geodesic dome. He had been “sleeping on people’s floors, in artists’ studios, in Noguchi’s place or Tony Salaemi’s; anywhere he could throw down a mattress and curl up. Then one day he went to look at the new Lehigh-Starrett Warehouse Building on 26th Street.
2 Until that time warehouses in New York were even more backward than the rest of the construction industry. For the most part they were old brick lofts, often located on the narrow streets of old New York, which made transporting goods to or from them in the ever-larger motor trucks a traffic horror. Their elevators were inadequate, their space badly cut up. They were as inconvenient as possible.
3 The Lehigh Building was the first really modem warehouse in Manhattan. Located on West 26th Street over the Lehigh Railroad freight yards, it occupied two whole city blocks and was twenty stories high. The elevators were designed to take the largest trucks then used so that people who rented space in it could have cargoes delivered directly to their floor without being manhandled in and out of elevators. Finished just at the time of the crash, it was still largely unrented.
4 Bucky explored it with approval he seldom gave to any conventional structure; it was a step in the right direction. When he reached the roof he found in that vast expanse only the fat water tanks and the housing for the enormous elevator machinery with a storeroom alongside. Looking at the superb view of lower Manhattan and New York Harbor to the south; the Hudson on the west with great liners snugged down in their piers, and all New Jersey beyond; and to the east the midtown towers with the still-unfinished skeleton of the Empire State Building rising above them, he decided that he wanted to live right there.
5 In a burst of real super-salesmanship, he talked the rental agent into having a window cut in the storeroom and renting it to him for thirty dollars a month. In a few days he moved in.
6 Certainly it had its inconveniences. Bucky says, “There was a lot of noise from the elevator motors grinding away right next to me. The elevators stopped running at five o’clock, which meant that I had to walk up twenty-one stories, sometimes carrying my big suitcase with the house model. But it was a fantastic place. I had the whole roof: a concrete lawn the size of two football fields, and that superb view.”
7 The people from Romany Marie’s liked to go there—what was a twenty-story walk to reach such remarkable scenery! Bucky recalls the night Diego Rivera came: “He was quite large and corpulent, so we had to stop at every floor to rest. Each floor we came to was a forest of steel columns extending two city blocks, completely deserted at night.”
8 Bucky gave some marvelous parties there. Many of the guests, including Noguchi, climbed the vertical steel ladders up the forty-foot water tanks to get a better view. Once they brought over some African drummers who were performing at the Natural History Museum. The uproar was magnificent. But as Bucky says, “When you got up to my roof you could run shrieking through New York without anyone hearing you.”
9 Bucky still loved parties of all sorts, the wilder the better. Some of his favorites were the artists’ and models’ balls given by the Kit Kat Club, which he often helped to organize. His compulsion to be always going full ahead prevented him from relaxing for more than an hour or two at a time. Sometimes at twelve or one o’clock of a Saturday night at the Hewletts’ in Lawrence, he would suddenly say, “Let’s go into town and round up some girls for the Kit Kat dance.” They were just as restless as he was, and they would all tear into New York to spend the rest of the night roaring around Greenwich Village.
10 One Kit Kat dance he did not get,to was when he took one of his quick naps beforehand and Woolly tiptoed in, stole his clothes, and went instead.
11 The Beaux Arts Balls were a favorite romp of Bucky’s. They were run by the established artists he knew and were attended by all his Bohemian friends as well as the rich society people who liked to mingle in that world once a year. They were fancy dress with an announced theme such as the Court of Louis XIV or a Night at an Indian Maharaja’s Palace. The Bohemians contrived their own costumes, but the grand prize was usually won by a social leader like Mrs. S. Stanwood Menken, who once paid $30,000 to be dressed up as the Sacred White Peacock.
12 The Depression Beaux Arts Ball in January, 1931, was different. No one felt like encouraging wild extravagances so the theme of the ball was the World of the Future; red and silver were the colors. You were supposed to use your imagination. This was Bucky’s dish. He was determined to win.
13 He selected Mrs. Evelyn Baird, who later married Vilhjalmur Stefansson, to go with him and designed her costume—Anne was much too ladylike for the clothes of the future as Bucky conceived them. Mrs. Baird was a dashing blonde. Bucky dressed her as a twenty-first-century Amazon, with great silver breastplates over her luxuriant bosom; a Martian’s helmet with antennae on her pale golden curls; Mercury’s winged sandals bound with silver lacings up her slender legs, and a very short silver skirt made like a Roman soldier’s armor. The rest was her own lovely snow-and-roses skin.
14 As always for the Beaux Arts, the ballroom of the Astor was jammed to its capacity with a heterogeneous crowd imaginatively dressed in everything from all-enveloping raccoon togas to practically nothing. A jury of twelve famous artists each selected the girl whose costume he liked best. Then the chosen twelve paraded on the stage for demos—the audience—to judge.
15 Here, once more, the author descends from Olympus. I had imported a young lady from Philadelphia, who had made her own costume, which was a long princess-cut gown of American beauty velvet with a high cone-shaped medieval hat. What it had to do with the future I do not know. In fact, so little did we think of her chances of winning anything that we did nothing about it until John Held, Jr., suddenly chose my girl to be his finalist—he was tired of his own kilted flappers.
16 The twelve chosen beauties lined up on the stage to a grand flourish from the band. Then dead silence fell as the master of ceremonies announced their names and the rules. He then stood in back of the line and held a wand over each girl’s head in turn, while the audience signified their sentiments by applause.
17 It was a pretty even thing until the wand was held over Bucky’s girl. That produced a major ovation, with Bucky’s Bohemian friends leading the cheers. However, when he reached my girl the sound was even louder—I hoped.
18 The other girls were sent off and Bucky’s girl and mine stood alone on the stage. As the wand waved over the Amazon there was a goodly response; as it came to my medieval lady, the sound was like a typhoon. There was not a shadow of a doubt who had won.
19 Thinking back on it, the verdict was unfair. Unquestionably, Bucky’s costume was far more imaginative and much more in the spirit of the World of the Future than that of the winner. What had happened was that Bucky, as usual, was too far ahead of his time. Demos were wary and frightened of the strange new world that confronted them with specters of revolution and the crumbling of tradition. They opted for old-fashioned beauty and elegance.
20 Unfair or not, it was the only time I ever came out ahead of Bucky.
21 Bucky and Anne and Allegra survived financially during this period on his meager earnings from lecture fees and one good temporary job. Articles had been appearing in national magazines about the Dymaxion House, some good, some crazy, like those that said it revolved to face the sun like a sunflower, which it did not. There was one in House Beautiful and one in the Chicago Tribune by the art critic, Inez Cunningham, who wrote a very sensitive piece about Bucky’s philosophy and what he was trying to do, in which she said: “Here is Buckminster Fuller, a young man with an idea so sane it seems insane to most of us …the problem he elected to attack is not…merely an architectural problem, not an economic problem, not even an esthetic one. It becomes all these things incidentally, but first of all it is a feminine problem…while women are hardened by drudgery and children endangered by accident in the places called home…
22 “Mr. Fuller had a dream of freeing women and children from the housing problem but…the dream had to filter through the mind and so become a philosophy . . . Fuller felt that we had come to that state in our progress where mind must use matter instead of matter controlling mind …the problem was cosmic…”
23 Later, Fortune had a series of five articles about housing in the United States, and devoted one entire piece to the Dymaxion House as the ultimate answer to the problem of cheap, modern housing. It was very beautifully written by Archibald MacLeish, the poet who became Librarian of Congress.
24 Officials of the American Radiator—Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company had read some of the articles and noted that the bathrooms in the Dymaxion House were supposed to be mass-produced and cast all in one piece. In 1930, they hired Bucky to design such a bathroom. He spent six months off and on in Buffalo doing so. Technically it was highly successful; practically it was a failure. The Plumber’s Union got wind of it. Horrified at the idea of a bathroom that could be hooked up to the mains by four simple connections instead of all the lovely make-work of intricate separate connections for bathtubs, sinks, toilets and, hopefully, bidets, they blasted it in their trade paper. This so terrified Standard Sanitary that they hid Bucky’s bathroom in the subcellar of a warehouse and never mentioned it again.
25 This was a disappointment, but a worse blow followed. The head of the research department had come to Bucky’s apartment and admired it enviously. One month, in 1931, Bucky forgot to pay the rent while he was away on a trip. The research man offered the rental agent a big raise in rent, so when Bucky returned he found himself out on the street again. “That was the end of my having a place that I lived in regularly,” says Bucky.
26 At this time, as business sank to new lows, the hotels in New York had hundreds of empty rooms. As a way of attracting people they would ask Bucky to show his model house in a hotel and give him a parlor in which to exhibit it. He was not supposed to sleep there, but he did. The parlor would not have any bed linen or towels, but he and Noguchi would suborn the night clerk, buy paper towels, and sleep on air mattresses under the model.
27 Late in 1930, Bucky went into the publishing business. George Howe of Howe in the Skies, Architects, who was one of the few members of that profession whom Bucky admired, was financing the publication of an architectural magazine called T Square, sponsored by the Philadelphia Sketch Club. It was a very advanced, sophisticated little paper run by two young Philadelphians named Levenson who did the publishing, wrote many of the articles, and did all the legwork.
28 In 1930, Charles Scribner’s Sons, who owned the copyrighted name of another T Square, a reprint magazine for their important publication Architecture, called upon them to cease and desist using the name. Howe decided he would no longer back it. The Levensons came to Bucky to see if he could help them. In a flash flood of optimism and a surge of idealism he decided to take it on himself as a medium for publicizing his ideas and nudging the architectural world into the twentieth century.
29 To raise the necessary capital Bucky cashed in all his insurance policies, including his navy life insurance, which had somehow survived his financial crises. He changed the name of the magazine to Shelter and prepared to make it over in his own image.
30 The first thing he did seemed completely insane—he cancelled all the advertising. When he notified the advertisers of this, in the midst of the depression, they were dumfounded. Typical of Bucky is his explanation for the apparently suicidal move: “I felt compromised because your advertising contracts required that you come out on a certain fixed date and I said, ‘Anybody publishing on a deadline is obviously being forced; he is doing it to make money, and he is not coming out only when he needs to. I put my magazine on a spontaneous basis. It would come out when we had something to say, and when we were ready to say it and say it right.
31 “And I said, ‘The magazine is going to pay for itself.’ So I charged two dollars a copy, and the subscription rate was for so many copies in whatever amount of time it would take for me to publish them.”
32 The extraordinary thing was that Bucky succeeded with his very unorthodox, laissez-aller system of publishing. By November, 1932, Shelter had an average circulation of 2,500 copies, which at two dollars each represented a very comfortable gross return. It equalled the circulation of the well-established Architectural Forum.
33 As Bucky intended, it was paying its way, “though it did not pay me anything for editing it, and I edited all of it.” In fact, it was a drain on his minuscule resources, because, aside from the time and energy he put into it, publishing and printing the book in Philadelphia required him to make numerous trips there.
34 The reason it succeeded was that it was very skillfully edited, and represented very advanced thinking in the architectural field. With his enthusiastic persuasiveness Bucky induced very good people to write articles for it—paying them peanuts, naturally. In addition, he discovered brilliant young men who were eager to have a forum for their ideas. In his very first issue the “guest editor” was a young architect named Philip Johnson.
35 Each issue was built around a particular theme and, true to Bucky’s principles, was not published until he felt that it was a complete entity, expressing the best and latest thinking on that particular subject. Often the theme was beyond the mentation of its time. For example, his second really big issue was on environmental controls, with pictures of black smoke pouring out of the factory chimneys of New York to show the pollution going on. Its emphasis was on ecology! This was in 1931, when even most intellectuals had never heard of the word.
36 Bucky did not use his own name or even his Dymaxion trademark on the publication. “I called myself 4D,” he says, “because I had learned that the jealousies of designers and artists, particularly artists, are just terrific; and they don’t like to concede that the other guy is right. I decided I was not going to buck that; I just would not take a position.”
37 During all this time Bucky continued to roost at Romany Marie’s. “I did all my editorial thinking sitting at tables there. It was such an extraordinary place, testing me, educating me.” He was becoming more and more a fugleman of that unique establishment.
38 True to her gypsy forebears, Romany Marie had a strong streak of mysticism, and mystics gathered around her. Chief among them was Gorchiev, the Russian guru of a strange cult that mixed oriental theologies with Western philosophy and some of his own ideas in a brew that appealed strongly to many people in search of a faith in a world in flux. Bucky had many conversations with Gorchiev, who added to his enlightenment without converting him or diverting his basic train of thought—an impossibility.
39 To his embarrassment, Bucky himself was becoming a bit of a guru to many of the truth-seekers there. His mechanistic-metaphysical universe with its Supreme Intelligence, his modern transcendentalism, drew them powerfully.
40 “I found myself being followed by an increasing number of human beings, particularly women, who were beginning to make me into some kind of messiah,” he says. “I became a cult, and that was exactly what I did not want to be. In other words, I did not want to get into social movements or special ideologies. I had become so absolutely powerful in guarding my personal disciplines—the organic me—that I could control my behavior under almost any circumstances, so what I now did was deliberate.
41 “I shall never forget my New Year’s resolution of January 1, 1933. I decided to shake off the cult, and the only way I could do it was to be very unpleasant to my “disciples.” I premeditatedly began to drink, and having known the patterns of the brothel, I made myself extremely offensive, doing things that I ordinarily would never do, drunk or sober. As a result they soon began to avoid me.
42 “Between 1933 and 1941 I drank deliberately; I drank copiously. Then I saw that it was harmful to my design revolution, so I stopped immediately. Forever!”
43 Prior to that, in September, 1932, Bucky came to another decision that completely changed the pattern of his life. It became evident to him that Franklin Roosevelt was going to be elected President of the United States and with him a great liberal majority in Congress. Bucky believed, rightly, that the New Deal would mean an entirely new world in which the liberals would get a great chance to put their ideals in concrete form—“to get things done.” So he decided “to stop kibitzing around,” and get into the mainstream of action.
44 The first thing he did was to wind up Shelter magazine. He informed all his subscribers that he was going to dump everything he had into one great final issue and close up the magazine.
45 Once again he dumbfounded everyone, because his magazine was on the point of becoming really successful. But Bucky said, “I am not doing things to make money. The success lies in what already has been done; and I’ve gotten credit for the new ideas I have put forward. That is enough.”
46 This is Bucky’s late, ex post facto explanation of his action, but it is only partly true. There were other motivations. His restless mind, teeming with ideas, seeking ever-new experiences and knowledge for its grist, never could be satisfied with a routine, however stimulating and creative. In addition, Shelter was about to begin making money, and Bucky at this stage had a moral repugnance for any enterprise of his that did. It was almost as though he felt it might corrupt him in spite of himself, as though it were, in the Orthodox Jewish phrase, trej—unclean.
47 He escaped that easily. Shelter closed with no outstanding debts, but all the money Bucky had put into it—the equity of all his insurance policies which was his only capital—had disappeared.
48 Bucky had one other reason for moving on. In numerous engineering sketches drawn on odd scraps of paper, on tablecloths, later on carefully prepared scale drawings in Shelter, and finally on the drawing board of his brain, a new form was taking shape that he fervently believed would move the design science revolution a significant step forward.