William Inge (1913-1973) was the most successful American playwright of the 1950s, the same era he was living in the Dakota. Buddy Kent, a drag king at several downtown clubs in the 1940s noted that Holliday hung out at these clubs and “was going with a female who was a cop.” Holliday’s ten-year marriage to David Oppenheimer ended in divorce in 1958. In 1957, she won a New York Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award for her performance in Bells Are Ringing. In 1950, she won an Academy Award for her role as Billie Dawn in the George Cukor-directed Born Yesterday, which she had also performed on Broadway. She was born Judy Tuvim - tuvim in Hebrew means “holiday,” which inspired the stage name she was told to use to mask her Jewish identity, as other Jewish entertainers did at a time when anti-Semitism was particularly rampant. Judy Holliday (1921-1965) was an actress and singer who lived in the Dakota from 1953 until her untimely death from cancer. Over his career, Ford collaborated with LGBT notables such as Djuna Barnes (who was also his lover), Andy Warhol, and Gertrude Stein. Ford and Tyler also created View (published 1940-47), the influential arts magazine that introduced surrealism to the United States. In 1933, he and Parker Tyler (who was likely his lover) co-wrote The Young and Evil, which Gore Vidal noted was “doubtless the first and still most crucial queer novel written.” The 1986 American publication of the book included drawings from Ford’s partner of 24 years, the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957), which he originally drew for Ford’s private collection. His final concert was at Tanglewood in 1990, shortly before his death.Ĭharles Henri Ford (1908-2002) was a poet, artist, editor, and filmmaker who lived at the Dakota between extensive periods of time abroad, from about 1959 until his death. While living at the Dakota, Bernstein received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1980. In 1976, Bernstein left his wife, Felicia Cohn Montealegre, and moved in with composer Tom Cothran, but shortly thereafter, Montealegre was diagnosed with cancer and Bernstein returned and nursed her until she died in 1978. Perhaps his most famous concert was in December 1989 when he led an ensemble of international musicians, including those from the former East and West Berlin, in an internationally televised rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, substituting the word Freiheit (freedom) for Freude (joy), in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the time Bernstein moved to the Dakota, he had resigned as music director of the New York Philharmonic in order to pursue composing however, he continued to conduct all over the world. Two of his former residences included the Studio Towers atop Carnegie Hall and the Osborne Apartments. Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was a prominent composer and conductor for live performance whose last residence was the Dakota, moving there with his family in 1975. Clark’s biographer Nicolas Weber describes Barnard’s homoerotic “Brotherly Love” as “two muscular, athletic, naked men – in the vein of Michelangelo’s greatest slave figures.”ĭuring the 20th century, the Dakota attracted many people in the arts as residents, some of whom included these LGBT notables: A bereft Clark commissioned a memorial sculpture for Skougaard’s grave in Norway from George Grey Barnard on whom Clark had an apparently unrequited crush. Although married with four sons, he had long led a double life, spending his summers in Europe with the love of his life, Norwegian tenor Lorentz Skougaard, from 1866 until Skougaard’s death in 1885 (Clark kept an apartment for Skougaard on West 22nd Street near his own rowhouse). He died in 1882, during construction, and work was completed by his son Alfred Clark (1844-1896), who moved into the Dakota. The building was a project of Edward Clark whose fortune came from the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Constructed in 1884 in the German Renaissance Revival style, the Dakota Apartments was the city’s first major upper-middle class apartment house.
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