Odds and Ends

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LANFORD WILSON’s Lady Bright has his boyfriends sign a wall. This offer was in the program for one production of the play!

H.M. KOUTOUKAS affected a “twee” personality, but was deep-down shrewd. He sold ads on a 1964Cino program!

German countess RUTH YORCK (author, Lullaby for a Dying Man, Cino, 1964) lived on the same block as the Cino. She had fought for modern cinema, painting, and music in Europe, and in America for the U.S. to enter WWII. Her wisdom and spirit inspired us. Her girlhood portrait by Kokoschka hung above her mantel.

Most shows played on the floor, some on a small, slightly raised stage against one wall. But some (LANFORD WILSON’s Home Free and The Madness of Lady Bright, l. and r.above) were done on a high, wall-to-wall stage across the middle of the room. Audiences and waiters had to go up stairs, across the stage, and down stairs to reach the bathroom, kitchen, and half the tables. Waiter CHARLES STANLEY (c.above) met this challenge with daring balletic leaps when orders were many and showtime near. ‘Lady Bright’ Photo by JAMES D. GOSSAGE.

A play about the Cino, H.M. KOUTOUKAS’ brilliant, eccentric “Turtles Don’t Dream” played but one notorious night at, of all places, Carnegie Hall. It presented the Caffe as the temple of a “cobra cult” (i.e., amphetamine ring) in danger of running out of the “sacred white powder.” Harry, it seems, hadn’t quite written an ending by opening night, so CHARLES STANLEY came striding down the aisle scattering torn-newspaper confetti as “The Amphetamine Angel.” These photos are from a 1978 revival at Theater for the New City.

After JOE died, the illegal Caffe’s mysterious protection from the police mysteriously vanished. We received many summonses. During the run of the show above, HELEN HANFT and STEVE DAVIS often had to hop offstage and sit at a table when a patrolman wandered in.

MICHAEL SMITH’s notice of JOE’s death in The Village Voice.

Newsweek’s mention of JOE, May 1, 1967. Has anyone a clearer copy?

In 1979, a New York paper called Other Stages (editor LEAH D. FRANK) published the first important series of articles about the Cino by participants. Here’s MARY BOYLAN’s.

In 1967, while I was in a hospital, British documentary director Peter Whitehead shot my The Warhol Machine , I discovered when JAMES D. GOSSAGE sent me this photo. (BOB SHIELDS fires at DONALD KVARES. MAGIE DOMINIC interferes. HAAL BORSKE watches.). Mister Whitehead says he has no idea where the film is.

The same moment in performance at the Cino. BOB SHIELDS shoots his lover MAGIE DOMINIC instead of The Warhol Machine, DON KVARES (Bob’s mother ANN SACHS is barely glimpsed at right) Also lost: Warhol films of BOB HEIDE’s The Bed and SOREN AGENOUX’s Chas. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, scenes shot in the Cino by ANDY MILLIGAN, and a short on a young actress’ life in New York partly set in the Caffe. Photo by JAMES D. GOSSAGE.