Making the Scenes: the Last Chapter

The many masks of Robert Cordier

6)

That scene was powerful. I'm telling you, I don't think we will ever see any shit like that ever again. — Miles Davis

After the workshops and rehearsals ended, he would go to the jazz clubs on 52nd Street, or Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem.

“Ted Joans took me, as part of what he called my ‘Teducation’. He was a few years older and already a serious somebody on the scene, a poet, painter and a revolutionary. He knew everybody. Woke me to jazz. Introduced me to Charlie Parker, who was his roommate for awhile. Dizzy Gillespie. Coltrane. Miles. Plus of course, all the poets and painters.

Ted Joans, Fred McDarrah photo, mid-1950s

Because of him I started writing about jazz, and I guess that led to a return to poetry, in French first, then in English, none of it very good, but I performed some of it live at hipster spots in the Village and on 52nd Street and people liked it. Through Ted I met Ed Wallowitch, who threw wild parties at his apartment on Barrow Street, and through him I met Andy Warhol, he was Andy’s first boyfriend. I wasn’t gay – I mean, I dibbled and dabbled, like any curious kid. It was a pretty wide open period. Any art scene in any period is top heavy with homosexuals, and those scenes back then were no different. Everyone was experimenting, trying to bust out. Conformity and convention were for squares.

Ed took me to the Pony Stable Inn, a lesbian bar on West Fourth, and introduced me to Gregory Corso, and through him, at the San Remo, I met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and through them, at the Cedar, Frank O’Hara, and William Styron, who turned out to be a very good friend of my future wife’s, and John Cage, and through Cage, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

I was at the Cedar when Jackson Pollock tore the bathroom door of its hinges and threw it at Franz Kline.”

Namedropping: his networks were built on it.

He would meet someone with a name, drop that name to another name, drop both to the next and all three to the next, and so on, exponentiating an empire.

“That’s what you did. That’s what the scene was. Everyone was hustling. I dropped more names than are in the Manhattan phonebook, as was once said of Gore Vidal, who I met when Ginsberg was organizing for Lenny Bruce, after Lenny got busted for indecency at the Cafe Au Go Go on Bleeker.”

Signers of the Lenny Bruce petition included Vidal, Paul Newman, Bob Dylan, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, John Updike, James Baldwin, George Plimpton, Henry Miller, Joseph Heller, Woody Allen, Reinhold Neibuhr, Saul Bellow, Rip Torn, Lillian Helman, James Jones, Arthur Miller, Terry Southern, William Styron, Jules Feiffer, Walt Kelly, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Leroi Jones, Peter Orlovsky, Nat Hentoff, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, Jonathan Miller, Ira Gitler, Robert Gottlieb, Irving Howe, George Plimpton and Norman Podhoretz.

Robert met them all.

“I met Robert De Niro Sr—Bobby De Niro’s old man—and Anaïs Nin at a Caribbean restaurant in Greenwich Village.

Robert and his ex, Virginia, she was a painter, too, very good, they both studied with Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers. They split after De Niro came out as gay, shortly after their son Bobby was born, he was living with Robert Duncan, the poet—but they still hung out, and the two of them were making extra cash by writing softcore for Anaïs Nin. They said, c’mon, give it a try, but it wasn’t my bag.”

These connections lead to encounters a few years later with the jazz drummer Elvin Jones, who wrote and performed the music for Robert’s first feature-length film.

“It was called The Long Stripe,” Jones told the historian Frank Kofsky (Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, 1970). “What you’d call a blue movie.”

This was what Robert referred to as his “Swedish” period. “We made and acted in a bunch of low-budget softcore “art” pictures for Cannon Productions. All of it crap. But it helped pay the bills and let us do other stuff.”

Other stuff like Robert’s production of Antonin Artaud’s Black Sun at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Ellen Stewarts’ basement boutique, which Elvin Jones also did the music for.

Black Sun was in 1970.

Which means I’ve jumped forward more than a decade. Past Robert’s work and friendship with James Baldwin, past the Beats, past the Free Southern Theater tour at the height of the Civil Rights movement, during which he was arrested 17 times in 5 southern states. Past his film Miracles of Modern Medicine, which was seen by 2.5 million people during Expo67 in Montreal and made some 200 of them faint from shock every day. Past his work with Murray the K, for whom he did some of the first music videos shot in the United States, including the first plot clip made for Jim Morrison and the Doors, and others for Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding.

Let’s back track to 1954, then, when, to establish US citizenship, Robert married Reina Attias, an 18-year-old poet and translator, and joined the Special Services Division of the United States Army.

At 21, he was put in charge of the Army Theater at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. His staging of Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin was singled out for a rave review by Clurman in The Nation, as was an anti-McCarthyist adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which earned him rebukes from the army’s censors.

Around the same time, he was “aggressively courted” by John Ashbery, who translated Robert’s poem “Une Nuit” for Folder. “It was his first French translation. I introduced him to the writings of Antonin Artaud and Raymond Roussel, and when he received his Fulbright and went to Paris to write his book, I put him in touch with Michel Leiris, who had known Roussel as a young boy, and Roussel’s nephew, Michel Georges Napoléon Ney d'Elchingen, who was then married to my friend Francine Tollon, the French Woman’s golf champion.

She was a wild one.”

Two years later, back in Paris in the Pergola, an all-night gay gigolo bar on the rue du Four, John Ashbery introduced Robert Cordier to James Baldwin.

The three men talked for five hours. “Jimmy was in a great mood. He had been blocked for months but had just finally cracked free, Giovanni’s Room was coming out of him in spurts, and when he heard I was in theatre and that I was an Artaud devotee, and that Reina and I had translated Escurial, by Michel de Ghelderode, which he had seen Julie Bovasso mangle at the Tempo in New York, and that I knew Clurman, he started to tell me about a project he had, a play based on the murder of Emmet Till, the kid the KKK had lynched in Mississippi just a few months before.”

Robert had left military service by this time and had started his own theatre company, Playmakers, Inc., in Tinton Falls, a borough in Monmouth County.

He was also working for free with Julie Bovasso at her Tempo Theater on St Mark’s Place. “I met her a few years before, when she was doing LaMama stuff. She had started her own theatre, in the parlour on the main floor of an apartment, after walking out on the lead in Paul Goodman’s Faustina at the Living Theater. The Becks wanted her to improv the end of the play, face the audience and just express her feelings spontaneously. They were into that sort of thing. She thought it was pretentious. Which it was. The Tempo was less arty, but it still took risks, not least of which it didn’t have a license. Every other night the cops would show up and say, ‘Hey, Julie, how are ticket sales tonight? How much you got in the register?’ And then they’d clear her out, all 30 bucks or whatever, saying they’d close her down otherwise. But I had helped her bring Jean Genet over for The Maids, her first production, which put her on the map and landed her an Obie. And 20 years later, she was John Travolta’s mom in Saturday Night Fever.”

Anyway, Baldwin saw Escurial, and he knew Genet, and so he said to me ‘Why don’t you do my play in your theatre?’

‘Jimmy, I said, I do summer stock in New Jersey. Where am I going to get 20 black actors?’

That set him off on a bit of a rant but I calmed him down and the next day, I introduced him to Jean Vilar. Daniel Sorano was in Vilar’s troupe at the time. He was half Senegalese. And Vilar was taking him to play Giomo in his Lorenzaccio on Broadway. The same Lorenzaccio that I got canned from seven years before, with Gérard Philipe, who, none of us knew, not even him, was dying. His doctors didn’t tell him. And what’s weird here is that when Gérard died, they buried him in his Don Rodrigue costume, from El Cid, and when Daniel died, they buried him in his Cyrano costume. Except for the fake nose. That his wife kept.

Me, when I go? I’ll be lucky if I have a clean pair of underpants.”

In Paris, in 1959, he dated Méret Oppenheim, whom he had met at the Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) through Ted Joans, who was deep into the Surrealist scene by then. Through Oppenheim he re-met Man Ray, and the exhibition’s co-organizers, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who he already knew—his theatre company had its offices in the same building as their studios at 128 Front Street in Lower Manhattan—sat to his left at the opening night dinner. Duchamp sat to his right.

Together, they dined on Oppenheim’s “Cannibal Feast”—a naked woman lying on a dining table, her face painted gold and her torso covered with food.

“Cannibal Feast” was, arguably, the first happening in Europe. Robert, however, was already familiar with the concept; he had attended the musical happenings of John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s, and he had seen what is widely considered the first full happening, “18 Happenings in 6 Parts”, by Allan Kaprow, John Cage’s student, first during a picnic on George Segal’s New Jersey chicken farm in 1957, and then at the Reuben Gallery on Fourth Street, six months before EROS, in May of 1959. Between 1960 and 1962 he did a few more happenings with Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel, in Paris and New York. Three years later Robert directed a homage “happening” to Duchamp at Julian Beck’s Living Theatre in New York.

In 1961, in his apartment on Christopher Street, he hosted the famous “Funeral for the Beat Generation”.

Baldwin was there—he’s in the centre of the photo below, to the right of Robert, as were Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, De Hirsh Margules, Shel Silverstein, William Styron, Ted Joans and Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs.

“Fred, who took the photo, he was with the Village Voice, was running some sort of “Rent a Beatnik” ad as a joke in the Voice, but people were taking it seriously, and Ted Joans was actually making a living reading poems at parties to rich squares out in the suburbs. 

The scene was definitely over.”

Fred W. McDarrah photo

In 1964, he helped James Baldwin, by then the godfather of his daughter, re-structure and stage the Actors Studio production of Blues for Mister Charlie on Broadway.

He then became artistic director of the Free Southern Theatre, a troupe composed of six white and six African-American actors. He directed performances of Bertolt Brecht’s Rifles of Senora Carrar, Sean O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman, and Martin Duberman’s In White America in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana.

In 1965, he created another NYC happening, Le grand masturbateur, this time with Robert Rauschenberg, Salvador Dali, Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow at the St. Regis.

Later that year, Robert and John Ashbery were holed up in a farmhouse rented by James Baldwin in the south of France to write The Stoning Machine, a script for a feature-length film to star Jan Cremer, whose 1964 erotic autobiography, I, Jan Cremer, was translated into 12 languages, and sold 12 million copies. The film was never made. A copy is currently available on Amazon for $1,275.

And around this time, Méret Oppenheim gave him a copy of Déjeuner en Fourrure, the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon she first made, as a tease, for Pablo Picasso, in 1936.

By the time I met him, he’d long lost the spoon, and any proof of the artwork’s providence.

“Too bad,” said the auctioneer we asked to appraise it. We were hoping to sell his collection, to pay his debts. He hadn’t paid his rent in three years. By the time we found out, it was too late to stop his eviction.

This was in 2018. Two years later he died of COVID-19 complications in his room on the Man Ray floor of the EHPAD Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse, one of the first people he met when he moved to Paris at 17).

Expo67, Injun Fender, the Black Panthers, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Michael McClure, Andy Warhol, John Palmer, William Styron, Deidi von Schaewen, Loulou de la Falaise, Sam Shepard, William Burroughs, Salvador Dali, Jean Seberg—so many elements are missing in this potted history. Not to mention his last three decades as a theatre director in Paris. Some of these are well covered in our film Ghost Artist, which has its US premiere this week at the Film Anthology Archives in New York City. Tickets and information are here.

I’m going to close off by giving the floor to Xavier Durringer, a student of Robert’s in the 1980s, when Robert was running the Acting International school, an un-official Actor’s Studio spinoff, and doing productions of mainly American plays, which he had translated and adapted into French, at Théâtre Marie Stuart. Among his more than 100 productions there was Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaiken’s Savage/Love, which had a run of 950 performances.

A novelist, actor and director, Durringer has worked with everyone in French theater and cinema from Karin Viard, Gérald Laroche and Patrick Chesnais to Jane Birkin, Sandrine Bonnaire and Johnny Hallyday.

After the most recent Paris screening of Ghost Artist, Xavier spoke to the audience. Below is a translated excerpt of his speech.

Robert, my master, my mentor, was a talent revealer. He brought out so many fine actors, among the best of my generation and the generations that followed. And till the very end of his life, he stayed young and creative. But he was too atypical for the established, institutional theater and cinema world of France, so they never recognized him. He should have been running any one of the big national theatres, La Colline or L’Odeon, but they never gave him his due. If they gave him any financial support it was so small it wasn't worth it. Because, really, they didn't want him. Because he was too disturbing and disruptive, in the sense that he was always ahead of the others. And since he was always ahead of the others, his timing was never right for the institution, which is always 50 years behind. He was ahead of everything. And isn't that what's important? Today, in France, we care only about buzz, our theatre and cinema is bourgeois and safe, focused on comedy, without social issues, without political issues. It’s just there to entertain, not to engage. Robert showed us what performance could be, committed and powerful and at the same time fun to watch. That was Robert, my master, the fixer, the revealer, young and creative to the end.

Thanks for reading, sharing, liking, commenting and subscribing. Our next podcast/ newsletter combo will focus on the upcoming wine harvest in France. Joining us will be Master of Wine Olivier Humbrecht of Domaine Zind-Humbrecht, one of Alsace’s, and the world’s, greatest winemakers.

But before, here’s one last look at my good friend Robert, in an outtake of Ghost Artist, shot during one of his last acting classes.