It's worth pointing out -- even if it's rather obvious -- that the Chelsea Hotel would never have become the 
world renowned rebel mecca that it is (or was, if you prefer) if Stanley Bard had hired security guards to rid the Hotel of the weird and/or inebriated. In response to a question from reader "Miss H" regarding whether the ban on gathering in the hallway would preclude the legendary staging of a scene from Aida historian Sherill Tippins writes:
That was the splendid Katherine Dunham, an anthropologist, choreographer, and expert practitioner of Voodoo. Stanley said she had asked him whether it was all right to rehearse for Aida in her room (for the Metropolitan Opera), and he'd said that was fine. Then he got a call at home that she'd arrived at the hotel in a limousine with a pair of real lions and (according to Stanley) taken them upstairs in the elevator. He insisted that she take them out, but she got some rehearsal in first.
Dunham and the composer George Kleinsinger were the ones who rescued Brendan Behan by bringing him into the Chelsea. Dunham's dancers tended him around the clock. Still, he would escape out into the halls, find the portly, 73-year-old Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn on her way downstairs, pick her up like a little doll and give her an affectionate shake, saying she was the best little Irish-American Communist he'd ever known.
Stanley did eventually ask Dunham to leave--not because of the lions, but because her Voodoo drums were bothering the neighbors.
Charlie Rangel has a bill in the House tight now formally honoring Katherine Dunham's contribution to American dance.
I'm sure some may say that we don't want lions (or drunks like Behan) wondering the halls, yet the point is that the Chelsea was once a magical place where the odd and unusual were part of the everyday fabric of our lives. And that's waht we are struggling against: a return to boring normalcy. Let's send Tilley and his guards to a Red Roof Inn at a truck stop in Cleveland where they belong. -- Ed Hamilton
(Photos: Katherine Dunham, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn)
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