Fedora, Rollerina, and why I am stuck in New York City

It started when I stepped on my laptop.

I learned that when you step on a laptop screen, it makes a satisfying crunching sound, but the satisfaction is extremely short-lived.

That horrifying incident happened right after the Eurovision broadcast ended. I immediately phoned Apple to see if I could get it fixed quickly. My friends Ken Kleiber and Josh Koll were over to watch that cheese smorgasbord, and they came with me to the Mac Hospital.


Fedora

Fedora pours a mean gin martini

And good thing. After I turned my laptop in, I correctly required a drink. We walked into Greenwich Village, and I directed them to Fedora’s, just north of 10th Street on 4th Street, in one of the Village’s several geographic improbabilties. I’ve known about her place for a while. She’s famous for being a Village staple. Every night, she descends from her upstairs apartment to attend to her long-running restaurant/bar. Fedora has been hostessing for a half-century.

The moment we walked in, I saw her. This tiny, 90-year-old lady behind the bar, simultaneously out of place and so emphatically in charge of the room! I went right over, sat on a bar stool, and introduced myself.

Finally, Fedora! She made us some gin martinis, and the bottle threatened to weigh her over.

Fedora had bad news. She had recently broken her back.

“How did you do that?” Ken asked.

“All those years of lifting beer and wine boxes,” she said.

“Oh! It was a beer-related injury!” I said.

There's nothing to not love about Fedora

So even though a year ago she was full of energy and nowhere near retirement, this year Fedora had to admit that age had caught up with her. She was retiring.

“I’m renting it to the people from the Waverly Inn,” she said.

That meant, of course, that the glitterati are about to take over this place. This handsome, messy claptrap of a downstairs bar, with the ignored wooden phone booth and the rat’s nest of wires left over from years of casual, D.I.Y. improvements. Of the plain wooden bar rail worn smooth and shiny by decades of tipsy forearms. Of the secret stairway, sealed behind plaster in 1932, when Prohibition was at an end and speakeasy rules were no longer required.

Now Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, who had for years been making overtures to Fedora for her space, had won, and if his habits are any guide, he will turn this neighborhood joint into a place where only the elite have the phone number. He’ll keep the bar. But he’ll clear away the dust and commodify the anonymous history to make it exclusive.

Fedora rattled off Carter’s home address, which I won’t give here, but I will say that it’s next door to her own son’s home.

But she’s tired. There’s something majesterial about seeing an older person admit the fight has been well fought.

No one can say Fedora didn’t see it through. She started in 1952, she told me, or was it 1953? The bar itself opened in 1919, not long after the building itself was built and purchased for nearly nothing. Her son, the dentist, has his practice upstairs, and he sent his Tony Graham Manhattan cartoon poster, from 1977, down to the vestibule. I saw it and was instantly 10 again. My parents bought the same poster, in color, for me in 1981, I think, at the Washington Square Art Fair.

It hung in my room until high school, and I memorized every tiny joke on it. It was an early Where’s Waldo, in which you had to struggle to find the icons amongst the long-running New York stalwarts. There was a streaker in Spanish Harlem, and King Kong on the Empire State Building, squished in bold black ink lines amongst the bygone pubs and stores and galleries and Blimpies with the old logo. I had memorized that poster. You might be able to blame it for winding me up here in Manhattan, pining for all that’s lost. (Including Tony Graham, who I met as a child but died nearly 20 years ago.)

Such as Fedora. I am so powerfully thankful (pause. let me remember that. I am aware of my gratitude in this moment) that I got to meet her and hang out with her for a few hours, and drink her gin martinis. This was the New York that I moved here for, of the dusty wires and low ceilings and countless nights spent by anonymous drinking locals, and now it’s vanishing. It’s mostly gone, replaced by trendy lounges that pretend to be Old World and forgotten when, in fact, they require you to know telephone numbers that you will never be privy to.

Fedora asked me my name, and she remembered it. I am now a part of the history.

Midway through our evening at Fedora’s, a table for four came to eat. Among them was what looked to be a woman, although few true women would dress in a pillbox hat with fingerless lace gloves. She smelled wonderful and had a lilting Southern accent. Her companions eventually left, and someone identified the stately woman as Rollerina. She was herself a stalwart of a dead Manhattan. She was a city fixture in the 1970s, when she would roller-skate everywhere, and she was an icon of Studio 54. Someone played her in the movie.

We took some pictures with Rollerina (also spelled as Rollerena), and she must have taken a liking to us, because she invited us to go out with her for the night. She led us to a nearby bar on Christopher Street.

Rollerina demanded an escort

Actually, she led me. Ken said she took a definite liking to me. She took my arm without it being offered, because I am too modern and gauche to have proffered it.

As we strolled at a pace I can only describe as antebellum, Rollerina told me that she had once been drafted from her home in Gravelsnatch, Kentucky, to serve in Vietnam. She declined to say how long she had been there, but she said it was enough. Afterward, she decamped briefly to Chicago in 1968, departing just before the convention to arrive here in Manhattan, where she has stayed ever since. She is now retired (from a law firm, I learned later). She barely gives interviews, she says, except for the one that she gave tonight to the reporter for the New York Times, who is preparing a farewell to Fedora. That’s why we found her there.

“Kiss my dingleberry ring!” she commanded, holding aloft a black, blocky ring on a slender, feminine hand. “It will make you immune from gonorrhea.” Of course we kissed it. The sense of play was powerful.

Rollerina was charming, but drifting through her perfume (Acqua de Parma, which she attempted to give me a bottle of) was the distinctive note of Miss Haversham Havisham [Per Albert Williams’ supercilious comment, below]. Her past was her world, a theme I understand completely. Nothing is the same, she said. All the things that were lost became her refrain. The old, great places are gone, and she lost around 500 friends to AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s. Christopher Street was quite the place then, she said. “You can Google it,” she told us, her new gaggle of young men, by way of instruction.

But she still dresses as Rollerina. She never once lifted her pink veil for us. She has no taste for the drag queens of today. “I like to sit on the subway and people think I’m a lady,” she said, sniffing at the muscled, Amazonian caricatures of femininity on offer today.

The magazine people are keeping the sign. (Photo by Ken Kleiber)

She knew Halston. She knew Warhol. She lived through the hurricane twice, and for her survival, she was rewarded with obsolescence.

Now Fedora goes, albeit after a long and rich life. She will never settle for being a shadow. Nor will Rollerena.

I’ve been in New York City for 17 years this year. That qualifies me for a long-termer, but I can’t enter the world that Fedora and Rollerina made. That fact tantalizes and tortures me. Their planet was one of amplified community, intense playfulness, and of course, unspeakable horror.

I inherit their diminished world, but thank God I smelled their perfume and downed their martinis before it was all over.

Last week, I was in Chicago and I pined to move back. But a night like this couldn’t often happen in Chicago. There may not be many more nights like this left in the old gal named Manhattan, but while they’re still here, it’s why I’m still here. When the last rat-trap becomes a pastiche of itself, I guess it will be time to finally go. Unlike Rollerina, I will lift the veil.

11 Responses to “Fedora, Rollerina, and why I am stuck in New York City”

  1. Dianne Yodice

    Hi Your article on Rolla was fabulous. She is a dear friend of mine who always refers to herself as my lesbian mother. Incidently I am a hetero middle-aged female who goes way back to the Studio 54 days.

  2. Rick Longo - Burrows

    Rollerena who is a friend of mine and actually blessed me back in the 70’s with her wand sent me this link to read. Thank you for paying tribute to someone who is not only forever embedded in the fabric of this city’s history, but brings so much joy to others and who still is devoted to seeing that other’s lives are enhanced by her activism and volunteerism. Her legend will live on forever.

  3. Richard Oszust

    Lovely article. I too, was blessed by her wand back in the ’70s, so I guess it worked because I’m still here, and TOO MANY others aren’t. God bless, Rollerina!

  4. A. Ashley Hoff

    The article was fabulous, a fitting elegy for an age all-too-often described as “bygone.” As long as there are those who not only remember, but celebrate, the style of the past, it won’t be dead. New York, rise up and reclaim your individuality! It’s why people flock to bask in your presence!
    I was proud to share the night with you, the genteel Fedora, and the fabulous and wise Rollerena.
    Cheers!

  5. Albert Williams

    It’s “Miss Havisham,” not “Haversham. If you’re going to make pretentious allusions to Dickens get the names right.

  6. Bill DeMuth

    I don’t know Rollerina, nor do I know Fedora – or should I say I didn’t know them, until now, at least a little… What a wonderfully evocative piece you’ve written. Thank you for giving me the chance to indulge in a little sentimentality and nostalgia for my own past. A pleasure to read.

  7. Doric Wilson

    Thank you for taking me back to 1959 and my arrival in NYC.

    Fedora’s was one of the first establishments I entered. I remember when you came into the restaurant you were at the top of a step. Fedora would be deep in the room and would call out over the heads of the dinner, “Are you one?” It became the catch phrase of the 1960s. Henry, Fedora’s husband, was one of the best bartenders in this city.

    Form the 1970s on, a play of mine never opens in NYC without Rollerena there to bless the production. She was there last Friday at a very special performance of my play “Street Theater” an the Center. For the first ten years, I was on the committee that organized the March (Parade). We marched uptown in those days, and just about 23rd Street, we would be met by the Good Fairy of Gay Lib zooming and twirling the other direction, giving us all her special benediction. That her wand was a circus baton, made it perfect.

    Thank you again for a perfect article.

  8. Jack Phelan

    AHHH THE DAY’S OF FEDORA’S AND ROLLERNA, I KNEW AND KNOW THEM BOTH. I WAS LUCKY, TO RUN IN TO ROLLERINA . A YEAR AGO. AHH GOOD TO SEE SOME GREAT MEMORIES ARE STILL HERE. IST TIME AT 18YRS. AND MY 1ST TIME AT FEDORA’S AT 21YRS, AND ABOUT 4 MONTHS BEFORE IT CLOSED. REALLY THE SAME, WOW, AND I WAS LUCKY TO HAVE MY VIDEO CAMERA WITH ME, AHH. AND THERE WERE SONE OF THE SAME FOLKS THERE FROM YEARS AGO. LIFE CHANGES, IT’S WHAT IT DOES BEST, BUT OH THOSE THINGS THAT JUST BECOME MEMORIES. WONDERFUL MEMORIES. THANK’S TO YOU ALL. IT’S MADE A GREAT LIFE. JACK PHELAN

  9. james anastos

    rolla rina is my lesbian god mother and im verry proud of her for all of the things she has done in life and
    i wish her many more of the things to come all i want for her is the best that life can offer