Mabel's Comeback

An unlikely habitation for ghosts is the 27-story Manhattan apartment-hotel called One Fifth Avenue. Yet last week ghosts were astir in that swank Greenwich Village tower. They had moved in with the new tenant in 24-A, a spry, 60-year-old, brown-eyed grandmother from Taos, N. M., with long greying bangs, hornrimmed glasses, a thirst for new experiences. The new tenant's name is Mabel Dodge Luhan. After a quarter century she had come back to open a new salon.

Ghosts present were the members of Mabel Dodge Luhan's famed pre-war salon at 23 Fifth Avenue, vividly recalled in Vol. Ill of Mabel's autobiographical succes de scandale, Intimate Memories ("it makes me sick in my solar plexus," said D. H. Lawrence). Dead & gone are many a writer, artist, anarchist, psychiatrist, birth-controller who enlivened that salon --Big Bill Haywood, John Reed, Isadora Duncan, Arthur Brisbane, Lincoln Steffens, Amy Lowell, Edwin Arlington Robinson. On the site where Mabel once "proceeded to startle, delight and dumfound the town," where she "caught men between the eyes, held them magnetized, fascinated, charmed, as men will be by the allure of a woman's lively calling essence" -- nothing now remains to mark the spot except a gaping excavation.

In 1917 Mabel renounced civilization, later divorced Painter Maurice Sterne, married the Indian, Tony Luhan, whose laconic realism appealed to her. ("What is your religion," asked Mabel. "Life," said Tony.) Rhapsodizing over sagebrush, Mabel then declared: "The rumble of New York came back to me like the impotent and despairing protest of a race that has gone wrong and is caught in a trap."

Indirect reason for Mabel's salon comeback was sinus trouble. In Manhattan to consult a specialist (he discovered an infected tooth), she was convinced by her son, Novelist John Evans, that a salon is needed. Mabel hopes to get a crowd like the old one ("They were young. They were magnetic. They had radiance."), is sure there are "youngish people who crave for something more satisfying than cafe society."

Lined up for her first at-homes were Civil Libertarian Roger Baldwin, 56, Novelist-Playwright Thornton Wilder, 42 (to elucidate James Joyce's Finnegans Wake). Next one will feature Psychiatrist Abraham Arden Brill, 65, who first titillated her old salon with Freud's teachings. The young people, suggests Mabel, seem somehow warier nowadays. Her main interests today are science, psychology, religion. Radicalism, believes Mabel, is "old hat." Still at Taos is Husband Tony. Explained Mabel: "He is coming for a visit in February, but he doesn't like New York. . . . He is an outdoors man."

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