FLASHBACK: Between The Lions (1978 - 1983)

After being sickened by the dreck of commercial publishing, working at the New York Public Library turned out to be the perfect job for a dilettante in training.  I was responsible for publicizing exhibits in the esteemed building at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.

This photo, from 1978, looks as if it might have been taken two decades earlier.

The 70s hadn't been kind to the library.  Budgets had been slashed to the bare minimum for the research libraries--a fundraising ad depicted the landmark Carrere and Hastings building sinking into a parking lot--and Bryant Park, its back yard, was overrun with people who needed social services, not books.  Fortunately, the board hired Vartan Gregorian, an academic powerhouse who had something to prove after being passed over by the University of Pennsylvania for the chancellorship.  With his public relations and fundraising skills, he restored the institution to its proper place as one of the city's crown jewels and I got to go along for the ride.

Part of my responsibilities as the junior member of PR team was changing the exhibit posters which were rudimentary until the development office hired Sarah (below, middle), a graphic designer.  

By the time Lauren (left) arrived, our team was complete.  My portfolio had been widened to include both the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  I thrived at the library because the exhibitions were part of a never-ending, continuing education that introduced me an enormous variety of literary and cultural figures.  

One chain-smoking curator, especially, acted as an adviser:  Dr. Lola Szladits, a childless Hungarian emigre who protected the Berg Collection of English and American Literature as fiercely as a lioness defends her cubs.  Lola enjoyed what she called my "grasshopper intelligence" and direct access to Dr. Gregorian's office after my boss resigned.  The New Yorker profiled her not long after I left the library to tour Australia, a move she endorsed when the new vice president for development and public affairs, a gay man who casually mentioned he had the keys to Brooke Astor's pool house in his possession, declined to appoint me chief of the public relations office.

Sarah, Lauren and I bonded with the junior curatorial staff, too--Julia Van Haaften (hat), Bernard McTigue (center) and Bobby Rainwater (far right)--who often had toiled in the shadow of people who weren't going anywhere.  

I feared becoming a "lifer" at the library, an irony in the context of a much older gay colleague who, according to a 1994 exhibit that marked the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, was one of the first 20 documented HIV-related deaths.   We called it "Spencer's disease" after the New York Times broke the story in July 1981.  Spencer worked as a senior writer, a job so undemanding that he could spend many of his nights cruising the backroom bars in the West Village.  He was dead within six months, but not before he gave us an up-close preview of the physical horrors that would decimate so many of my contemporaries, including pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma.

My colleagues gave me a nice, if impotent, send off:  "We Want Jeffrey."  It probably was hubris to expect to have gotten the job I wanted.

Even nicer memories of the library include the Literary Lions reception that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis attended.  I overheard her introduce Charles Addams to Issac Bashevis Singer in her breathy voice:  "He's the man who draws all those awful cartoons for The New Yorker!" she teased with her incandescent smile, the same one that graces the autographed photo hanging in my bathroom, a keepsake from the 4th grade when my class wrote to the First Lady.