Chelsea Portraits - This Ain't no Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995 - page 168

Chelsea Royalty: Virgil Thomson
In her book At the Chelsea, Florence Turner remarks that Virgil Thomson, who hung out in
Paris in the 1920s, had nothing but disdain for his contemporaries in the Lost Generation:
Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the like.
“The Lost Generation was silly,” Thomson said. “War made lost generations, because
the people involved had no jobs to go to.”
Chelsea fixture Virgil Thomson was a heavyweight, a giant of twentieth-century music.
Hisfilmscorefor Louisiana Story wonaPulitzerPrize.WithhisclosefriendGertrudeStein,
he composed the opera Four Saints in Three Acts based on her libretto.
Thomson was also a prize-winning music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. He
wrote eight books, one of which won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award.
DAVID LAWTON
With all the Beats and the Warhol superstars, sometimes you forget that we loved
holding the door for Virgil Thomson. At that time, there had been people up in his
apartment for years cataloguing his belongings. I think he had a triplex up there,
gorgeous and refinished. It's interesting, when you're on those lower floors with
the stench and you realize that upstairs there is unbelievable splendor.
Old Virgil Thomson would be coming out of a cab, and I'd run and hold the
hotel door for him. He liked the attention.
JULIE EAKIN
Working on my undergraduate thesis was exciting because it was about the first
photographshowatMOMA,theWalkerEvansshowin1935.Duringmyresearch,
I found out that Virgil Thomson, the composer, had actually attended that very
show.HelivedontheChelsea'stenthfloor.Iwouldsendquestionstohimthrough
his secretary—I actually never talked to him directly—and then she would get an-
swersbacktome,andIwasabletosupplementmyworkbyfindingsomeonewho
actuallyattendedtheEvansshow.VirgilThomsonhadaverykeenmemory.Itwas
very exciting to feel like you had access to so much, which we did feel when we
lived there.
JOHN ZINSSER
BeforeIevenmovedintotheChelsea,thefirsttimeIvisiteditwasaround1984.1
had just gotten out of college. I'm from New York originally, so I was always fa-
miliar with the Chelsea Hotel. But my father, who is William Zinsser, a writer and