Shooting the Gang That Couldn’t

New York — Even at 7:30 in the morning the airline ticket stewardess at the San Francisco Airport was pert and perky. “And where would we like to sit this morning?” she said to a caped and long-haired customer. “In back of the wing somewhere,” was the sleepy reply. “But ma’am, didn’t we know that our ticket was first class? We can’t sit behind the wing if our ticket is first class.” “Far out,” mumbled the customer. “Far out.” Aboard the 747 luxury liner to New York, the sleepy passenger examined her ticket while she drank the champagne-orange juice cocktail that the hostess, Miss Oroni, had served her. The ticket had been paid for by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., and it had cost $374. “Holy shit,” she thought, “$374,” and fell asleep soon after.

At 7:30 the next morning, Moondog, a New York eccentric who is blind and wears a viking costume walked by the Hotel Navaro on Central Park on his way to 54th Street and Seventh Avenue where he hung out. The horns on his helmet glistened in the bright, yellow cloud that hung over the pavement, his staff and his great fur boots were soundless on the sidewalk above the noises of early morning New York.

Upstairs in the Hotel Navaro, Lionel Stander, another eccentric, was waking up. In the bathroom, his brown eye and his half shut grey eye stared at one another as he shaved his 63-year-old face. His 23-year-old “wife,” Stephanie, a Dutch baroness, was still asleep. (“I’m going to marry Stephanie just as soon as my divorce comes through,” he would say later. “The poor girl is madly in love with me and against all my advice she’s going to marry me.”) Lionel Stander, the star of a movie, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, being filmed in New York, went to his closet to select his costume for the day. He designed all his clothes himself, and had them made up by Parente Montemario, his tailor in Rome. He passed over his babyblue brocade Edwardian suit in favor of a purple-and-silver-flecked ensemble and selected a large white ascot. He put on a midi-length light tan suede coat, a tan sombrero, stuck a cigar in his mouth, and left for work.

In Forest Hills, at the Breslin household, six children and one Panamanian maid were having breakfast. “Finish your cereal, Christopher,” someone told the four-year-old, Jimmy Breslin’s youngest. “Fuck off,” said Christopher.

Back in New York City, a few blocks from the Hotel Navaro and a few blocks away from Moondog’s corner, a gaggle of reporters who had been flown by MGM first class to New York from all over the country piled into a station wagon that had eight doors for a ride to Brooklyn. The passenger from San Francisco sat sleepy again and looked at the others. The men, maybe six of them, all wore suits and ties and ears and necks visible next to careful, short haircuts. Two ladies were both dressed in basic black and sprayed hairdos, red nail polish on fingers heavy with jewelry.

One was a reporter from Pennsylvania, and one was Shirley, a gossip columnist from Detroit, somebody’s mother who had made gossiping a career. She told the people in the station wagon of her first brush with narcotics: “It was just a few weeks ago. I was at a party and I could see some people were passing around a funny looking cigarette and I realized all of a sudden that it was pot they were smoking, and I said to Earl Wilson’s wife, ‘Look, isn’t that horrible, they’re smoking pot,’ and she didn’t seem to mind, but I thought it was terrible, and you know, the worst thing about it was, the thing I didn’t realize that’s so horrible — it’s so unsanitary the way they pass it from one mouth to another.”

One male passenger looked like a younger version of Hugh Hefner. He explained that his hair was short because he was in the Army reserves. He turned out to be a movie critic from Chicago and a friend of Hugh Hefner’s.

“What’s Hugh into these days besides pubic hair?” asked the long-haired reporter. The question offended the young man and he explained that Hef was donating lots of money to various worthy causes. “Has he still got the same old lady?” she asked, moving to a less controversial topic. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the jargon,” said Chicago. Longhair dozed off again inside her cape.