Day 17: Loose Ends in Terrible Heat

July 31: Last day in New York City: JFK Airport to Huntington Hartford Museum to Auto Club to Macy’s to Monster House


Talk about white-knuckled driving! Laura Anne and I took off for JFK in the dark and the whole way seemed to be over high narrow ramps that hung in the air over nothing, with everyone passing us speeding. She got off to L.A. without a hitch and all the gritty way back oil tanks and factories reminded me of driving with Tony Soprano. I parked the car in the $12 a day lot and consulted the AAA guide for the nearest auto club office, which turned out to be off Columbus Circle.
Like Sister Laura, I was accustomed to walking the distances in Manhattan, so in spite of 100º heat I started uptown. Islands of coolness beckoned: the underground mall that made the transition to Park Avenue, the Disney store, where the hottest item was the talking, moving Jack Sparrow doll for $75, and a shop that sold archival photos of the Rat Pack and stars of stage, screen, and television.
The spookiest block was the sidewalk where Anne Baxter collapsed from a stroke in 1986, another coincidental location that I knew from the Elizabeth Arden Red Door nearby. In the cool spot on the sidewalk, I leaned against a nearby building and cried silently for her and Charlie and all the beloved gone too soon.
On Columbus Circle I tried to gain access to the former Huntington Hartford Museum, which had been given to Farleigh Dickinson University and later became a visitor center for the City of New York. From a haughty and handsome concierge in the Warner Building I learned of the remodeling of the Edward Durrell Stone building that Hartford, heir to the A&P fortune and editor of Show Magazine in the 60’s, had commissioned to house his idea of modern art. Two of his most memorable exhibits had been a Faberge egg show and a Salvador Dali retrospective. Now the building was fenced off and guarded and rimmed with garbage, including the contents of someone’s purse thrown up against the fence in the back.
My connection with Hartford was through his estate in Hollywood, now Runyon Canyon Park, once the proposed site of an ambitious Frank Lloyd Wright Country Club and Hotel Complex. The chamber of commerce, local homeowners, and the principal of Hollywood High had successfully stymied the construction of the futuristic “play resort” in 1947. Although a Lloyd Wright-designed museum was also canceled, a pool house and stone caretaker’s building had remained at the site, along with the ruins of other buildings dating back to 1929 and added to in the ‘50’s. After Hartford abandoned it for other investments, the estate had sat empty for thirty years, becoming a park in 1984. This urban wilderness was the history-haunted canyon where most of Charlie’s ashes had been scattered, illegally, in 2003, the place he had come to love most in the world.
Huntington Hartford had managed to dispose of most of an 80 million dollar fortune, funding an artists’ colony in Pacific Palisades, buying an island in the Bahamas, and pumping more of his millions into the gorgeous but short-lived Show, best know as the inspiration for Playboy. Hartford’s saga was sad, but he lived on, now in his 90’s, somewhere in upstate New York. His name remained on none of his projects; even the theater he had founded in L.A. had been renamed for Ricardo Montalban. The current museum renovation would obscure the gleaming marble facade of the triangular-shaped skyscraper and open it as a state of the art design facility overlooking Central Park.
Two blocks on, the AAA office was secreted on the second floor of an office building at 1881 Broadway and 62nd I waited in air-conditioned comfort for the opportunity to get free guides and maps for New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Middle Atlantic states, the Virginias, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, all on the Steinbeck itinerary. The whole package, in plastic carrying bags, weighed about ten pounds, a burden I looked forward to carrying 40 blocks back to macy’s. My one purchase the day before had turned out not to fit and I needed to exchange it.
Navigating the subway to 34th Street meant a few more minutes of air conditioning. I traded the blouse that didn’t fit for a skirt that did and luxuriated in the coolness for a couple of hours; the macy’s bill was due on the first of August, but I forgot. to bring it with me and it would become an impetus for a quest later.
Late in the afternoon, as the day cooled and a short shower refreshed the air, I schlepped the en pounds of AAA Travel Guides back to 27th Street and moved my car into a secure spot around the corner. In the morning I would get one of the Rodeo Bar spots to load in my luggage. The inconvenience inherent in moving the car about to avoid tickets was one explanation for New Yorkers’ not keeping cars. Most of the cars parked on Laura’s street had out-of-state plates.
Laura had a Pink Panther reception to go to after work, so I took one of the free movie passes I had brought from some promotion in L.A. and went around the corner to a multiplex. The animated feature Monster House was a movie that I would need to add to my repertoire in teaching elementary school, although I had been displaced in the last round and I had no idea what grade level I would be teaching in the fall. Knowing the latest kidflicks was indispensable to connecting with my students; the lessons implicit in Finding Nemo (survival skills), Cars (Route 66), and Spongebob Squarepants (marine biology) could always be applied to the material at hand. Monster House was a story of childhood bonding, with the Freudian overtones of the house as a manifestation of the female persona. It reminded me a little of a cartoon ‘Burbs, but the neighborhood freaks were not really evil, just misunderstood.
Sister Laura’s cinematic experience, outdoors on the roof of a building in the heat of sundown, had not been as pleasant. She returned ahead of schedule, wilted from the heat and thirsty. After a few drinks, we turned in early. Tomorrow would begin the return leg of my cross-country travels, a perilous task not often undertaken by a woman alone, at least in the literary annals of the American Roadtrip.