At Home in the Go-Go Decade

The Sixties were nowhere more go-go than in New York. For a century, of course, the city had been a financial powerhouse, and for decades it had been an international cultural hub. But at the time when Lee and Truman started getting closer to each other, in the early 1960s, New York was the American city best poised to assume the title won for it in World War II: Capital of the World, the seat of Pax Americana. Not long before, Lee had married Prince Stanislaw Radziwill and started a family; her sister Jackie was First Lady of the United States and had created so much fairy tale glamour around the presidential administration that the era was being called “Camelot.” Truman had just scored a hit with his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the movie of which, starring Audrey Hepburn, was also a big hit. New York in those years was just a better base for Lee and Truman’s hopes and dreams than anywhere else in the world.

By mid-decade, just before the appearance of Truman’s blockbuster best-seller In Cold Blood, which made him a superstar, the material evidence of New York’s imperial prominence was right there in front of everyone’s noses, in new building projects. A new New York was popping up everywhere, in projects like Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the New York Coliseum, the General Motors building, and FDR Drive, Robert Moses’s express highway running along the East River at Manhattan’s eastern edge, partly elevated, partly cantilevered. (Many of these projects were supported, of course, by the dubious assumptions underlying the era's "urban renewal" thinking.) And some of the most intoxicating architectural forms and suggestions for “modern living” were on view at the hugely popular New York World’s Fair, which ran in the summers of both 1964 and 1965, where America’s mania for looking—at new buildings, at new cars, at the newest fashions, at the latest mass media expressions of life right now—was amped to unprecedented heights. Which may be why in 1965 Truman, flush with his In Cold Blood earnings and looking to move from Brooklyn Heights into Manhattan, chose to buy an apartment at the city’s newest “it” address, United Nations Plaza, instead of a place on one of the venerable avenues where many of his swans lived, Park and Fifth. This was definitely a place for the newly heightened condition of looking-and-being-looked-at.

From Such Good Friends:

A pair of thirty-nine-story, modernist bronze-and-glass towers, directly north of the United Nations campus, UN Plaza was designed by Wallace K. Harrison and Max Abramovitz, the architects responsible for the United Nations itself, as well as the Time-Life Building and the Metropolitan Opera House, the latter then nearing completion at Lincoln Center. UN Plaza offered an alternative to the Park-and-Fifth Avenue limestone-façade lifestyle, which was growing a little fusty around the edges. A few buyers in the new complex decided to drape or even panel over their floor-to-ceiling glass walls, but most embraced the complex’s exhilarating brightness and transparency. The place was edgy at a time when the rich were beginning to discover it was fun to be edgy. That feeling of cool grandeur clobbered you quietly when you entered the vast lobby of UN Plaza, like the Met would do the following year, with icons of modern art, contemporary crystal lighting, and acres of red carpet.

It was chiefly well-to-do business and entertainment types who bought into UN Plaza—news anchor Walter Cronkite and movie star Yul Brynner, philanthropist Mary Lasker and television host Johnny Carson, Truman’s friends producer David Susskind and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Truman’s apartment on the twenty-second floor offered spectacular views of the United Nations, the skyline of midtown and lower Manhattan, the East River and its bridges, and the borough of Queens, which at night was a tapestry of glitter laid out to the horizon. The apartment was as bright and exposed, Truman said, as his Brooklyn basement had been gloomy and secluded; and it was considerably larger, so to fill it, Truman wasted no time adding to his collection of furniture, artworks, and bibelots with new items purchased in East Side antique shops…