Those Were the Daze

It was the shady but gentlemanly drop-in for journalists, mobsters, Hollywood stars, and more than one novelist, editor, and journalist. Now it’s reopening as Zeppelin under new management. But could the place Jack Nicholson called his Greenwich Village refuge ever be the same? Readers, grab a Kleenex. A regular reminisces.

More than a few people, journalists and civilians, have asked me about a bar which features in my most recent novel, The Good Life. In the book, the bar is called Evelyn’s, and I have assured the journalists that it was entirely fictional. Of course, most of my friends, and several hundred of Manhattan’s veteran night-crawlers, recognized Eveyln’s, described in the book as the after-midnight hangout of “restaurant people just getting off their shifts, the line chefs and managers, the musicians and the made guys and the character actors who specialized in playing made guys, along with the kinds of directors and writers who had not yet been to rehab or who were in between visits and wanted to get down, sometimes in the company of A-list actors, without fear of reading about it in the gossip columns the next day.”

The fictional Eveyln’s was inspired by Marylou’s, which opened its doors as a restaurant in the spring of 1981 on West Ninth Street in Greenwich Village. The eponymous proprietress was Marylou Baratta, who’d previously owned a fish market and who soon became something of a downtown version of Elaine Kaufmann. Like Elaine, she was a constant, not to say voluminous, presence, and she liked to hang out with her customers, many of whom were famous, or infamous. Jack Nicholson, who was pals with Marylou’s brother Tommy Baratta, was an investor and an occasional patron, and his involvement made Marylou’s a kind of East Coast clubhouse for the bad boys of Laurel Canyon, for the Chateau Marmont crowd: directors like James Toback and Oliver Stone, actors like Eric Roberts and Harvey Keitel. Cooking for Jack—believe it or not, a lean-cuisine tome using Baratta’s recipes—even came out of it; Nicholson wrote the introduction. I first went there for dinner in the company of Albany laureate William Kennedy, who was then making Ironweed starring Nicholson. I can honestly say I don’t remember anything about the food. It was Italian.

For 20 years, Marylou’s was an institution with a split personality. By evening it was a fairly unremarkable Lower Fifth Avenue–area restaurant with a smattering of celebrity diners; after midnight it became a sort of latter-day speakeasy, a lounge for the late-night lizards who didn’t care to dance, and didn’t necessarily want to put themselves on display at the more fashionable watering holes like Nell’s or MK. Marylou’s, after hours, was not about being seen. It had the feeling of a hideout, a bolt-hole, a secret clubhouse. It was literally underground—down a set of steps from the Ninth Street sidewalk. There were no cameras, no paparazzi. And while I saw a fair number of gossip columnists there over the years, often in the presence of badly behaving celebrities, I can’t recall reading a single item about misbehavior at Marylou’s. What happened at Marylou’s was off the record; it was like one of those watering holes on the savannah, at which the zebras drank unmolested beside the lions. Anyone who was at Marylou’s at three in the morning was probably doing something he shouldn’t be doing, and there was a code of honor among the miscreants.

When I say “bad behavior,” I don’t mean bad manners—in that sense, everyone was on their best behavior. It was good policy to be polite because some of the regulars were genuine, full-time criminals, the kinds of guys who had taken oaths in blood, and who were very quick to take offense, which added a certain frisson to the proceedings. The presence of these guys attracted the actors who played them on-screen—actors like Chazz Palminteri, Dominic Chianese, Joe Pesci. Robert DeNiro made appearances in the early days, and in the ’90s I would sometimes see James Gandolfini hulking around. This made for a weird hall of mirrors effect, the actors and the gangsters engaged in a strange feedback system of mutual admiration and imitation. Who knows? Maybe it was the actors who came first, and the tough guys who followed.

I remember an old-school gentleman by the name of Geno Durante who was reputed to be close to the Colombo family. He favored dark shirts and pink silk-shantung jackets. Durante was like catnip for the actors. They studied his style, mimicked his accent. One night Durante introduced me to an associate of very distinguished bearing, a dapper, diminutive man with whom I had a long conversation about literature. Seeing him a few nights later, I put my arm on his shoulder and was instantly lifted from the ground by a hulking giant who pinned me against the wall until my former friend gave me the nod. “Don’t ever come up behind a guy,” he told me when I was finally on my feet again.

At 3 a.m., movie stars fraternized with bartenders and leg breakers, and everyone was traveling incognito. The only person who consistently violated the code of omertà was “the Baron,” a gray-haired, ponytail-wearing hipster with a ruined, cherubic face and a perpetually shiny complexion. “Hey, here’s Jay McInerney! The famous novelist!” the Baron would say, when one joined him at the head table toward the back of the room. “This is Abel Ferrara, the world-famous director! And this is Joey Beans, who used to be a hit man for the Gambinos.” The Baron was a world-class star-fucker who was way ahead of his time. Despite his alleged aristocratic origins, he was a democrat who believed in a value-free scale of celebrity. He was as happy to meet a famous model as he was a famous wife murderer; and he wanted all of us, murderers and actors and directors alike, to know each other, and to know that he knew us. His big mouth was tolerated because he was the honorary host of the party (as often as not sitting beside Marylou herself.) We were all there to see the Baron. He had what we wanted, the little packets full of pixie dust that made us feel younger, smarter and better-looking, that extended the night well past legal limits, that made us talk and strut and preen and fuck till long after the sun had risen outside.

As long as you were inside the door by 4 a.m., you could stay forever, or so it seemed; closing time just meant the time that the door was locked to further entrants. I don’t ever recall anyone telling me I had to leave. One night, after a disgruntled, would-be patron was denied entrance after four, he called the local precinct out of spite to report after-hours drinking and drug abuse. I remember a waiter coming into the back room and saying, “Anybody who’s doing anything he shouldn’t be doing had better stop doing it.” Some three or four minutes later, a policeman walked the length of the place, looking up at the ceiling, saying in a loud voice, “I certainly hope I don’t see anything I shouldn’t be seeing.” Oh, no, officer—nobody here but us vampires.

This kind of thing couldn’t last forever, although, astonishingly enough, it lasted for two decades. Fittingly, this particular chapter in the history of New York nightlife came to a close in the pivotal year of 2001, a few months before September 11th. Belatedly, officialdom took notice of the illicit activity on West Ninth Street; surveillance of the premises led to a night of multiple drug busts. As the word spread the next day, more than a few illustrious regulars thanked their guardian angels for keeping them home that night. Legions of graying Marylou’s veterans were amazed to learn that their old haunt had survived, if only barely, into the new millennium, that it had outlasted the endless nights and squandered days of their own youth; at least one of them pausing for a moment to try to recall the texture and flavor of those nights—the heady cocktail of wit and nonsense, beauty and squalor, promise and menace—when we were foolish enough to live as if the dawn had been revoked forever.