100 New Yorkers of the 1970s Part 32

George recalls "sparring around" with Dempsey in the lobby at night. "He had a great sense of humor. When he came in late and found the elevator boy asleep he'd give him a hot foot." Ethel Merman, he remembers, "had three or four husbands. In between her husbands she used to go out with different men. She used to smooch with them in the lobby.

"In those days we took in Louis Lepke, with his wife and family," says George with a smile. "He always had three or four bodyguards with him.

When he was here, he behaved himself." At other times, of course, Lepke was not so well behaved. He headed a group known as "Murder Incorporated," popularized the term "hit man," and was sent to the electric chair for his crimes.

More recent tenants include Robert Goulet, singer/Playboy playmate Joey Heatherton, and Ted Sorenson, a former presidential advisor who in the past year has been visited at the Century by both Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. Did George get a chance to shake the president's hand? "Yes.

What's the big deal?"

George Singer and Estelle, his wife of 53 years, live in Trump Village near Coney Island. They have seven grandchildren and one great grandchild. George could easily afford to retire -- in fact, he is sometimes jokingly referred to as "the richest man in the building" -- but he chooses to keep working. "Why not work till 75 or 80 if you're able?" he says.

"I think it's good for a person. Mr. Chanin, who owns this building: he's in his 80s and he goes to work most every day."

George continues to do the night shift as he always has -- "I'd rather work nights. There's more money at nights. And you don't have the bosses around. ... At night people are more in a free spirit."

How does George explain his continued success and good health? Does he have a secret he would like to pa.s.s on? "I smoke two cigars a day," he answers immediately, with a gleam in his eye. "That keeps the cold germs away. I never catch cold. It's the best medicine in the world."

Is George looking forward to Christmas? Aren't all doormen!

WESTSIDER GREGG SMITH Founder and conductor of the Gregg Smith Singers

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What might you guess about a man who has composed 60 major choral works, toured the world with his singing group, and recorded 50 alb.u.ms including three Grammy Award winners?

If you didn't know anything else about this man, you would probably guess, first, that he is rich. Then you might imagine that his door is constantly bombarded by recording agents trying to enlist his talents. And third, you would probably think that his name is a household word.

But Westsider Gregg Smith has all of the qualifications listed and none of the imagined results. This is because his music happens to be cla.s.sical -- a field in which, he says, "a record that sells 10,000 copies is considered a good hit." Conducting his choral group, the Gregg Smith Singers, who usually have anywhere from 16 to 32 voices, he performs works spanning the last four centuries of the Western cla.s.sical tradition. Gregg writes most of the arrangements himself. Last year his sheet music sales reached 60,000 copies.

The Gregg Smith Singers specialize in pieces that have been infrequently performed or recorded. But a more lengthy description of their music can only tell what it is, not how it sounds. Music speaks for itself better than any words can describe.

"None of the American composers of today are making a living," says Gregg, shaking his head. We're sitting in his s.p.a.cious but unluxurious apartment near Lincoln Center. "It's a terrible struggle. When people talk about ghetto areas, let me tell you, no one is more in a ghetto than the American cla.s.sical composer. We have more great composers in this country right now than any other country in the word, and the United States supports its composers less than any other country. ... They want so desperately to perform their music. A composer does a piece and gets a performance in New York, and that may be the last performance it ever gets."

He leads me to a room lined with shelves, boxes and cabinets filled with sheet music, some of it in ma.n.u.script. This is where Gregg chooses each new selection for his group. He shrugs at the enormity of the task.

"There are at least 400 new American compositions here, waiting to be looked at. Probably at least 100 of them are of the highest quality. ...

When we record this type of material, we don't expect to make a profit, even with the royalties over the years. Cla.s.sical records are made because the music needs to be heard. It's a second form of publication. We do it as a means of getting this music out."

The same economic rule holds true when the Singers do a concert.

Because of the large size of the group and the vast amount of rehearsal time needed to perfect new works or new arrangements, the box office receipts don't come close to meeting the expenses. The grants they receive from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts are not always sufficient. "Like every one of the arts, it's a constant deficit operation. At this point, we're not nearly as strong in fund-raising as in the other aspects."

In spite of the financial pressures, Gregg does manage to provide his Singers with about 25 weeks of full-time work per year. His group has gone on a national tour for 15 consecutive years so far. The Singers have performed in every state except Alaska. They have made four tours of Europe and one of the Far East. Their typical New York season included four concerts at Alice Tully Hall and a contemporary music festival in one of the local churches. This year the three-day festival will be held in St.

Peter's Church located in the Citicorp Center starting on April 20.

A native of Chicago, Gregg attended college in Los Angeles and founded the Gregg Smith Singers there in 1955. His talent as a conductor and arranger soon came to the attention of the late Igor Stravinsky, the Russian-born composer who was then living in California. The pair eventually recorded more than a dozen alb.u.ms together. When Stravinsky died in 1971, Gregg was invited to Venice, Italy, to prepare the chorus and orchestra for the rites in honor of the late maestro.

In all his travels, Gregg and his wife Rosalind have found no place where they would feel so much at home as the West Side. "It's a great, wonderful community for the cla.s.sical musician," he says. "It's one of the most vibrant, alive, sometimes terrifying but always exciting, places to live."

Perhaps Gregg's rarest quality is his unselfishness toward other American composers. His biggest concern seems to be: how will be manage to get all their works recorded?

"I have enough important recordings to do," he says in a voice hovering between joy and frustration, "to keep me busy for five years. That would mean literally hundreds of thousands of dollars." The money may come or it may not. But the worth of Gregg Smith, gentleman artist, is beyond price.

EASTSIDER LIZ SMITH Queen of gossip

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Like most of the kids she grew up with in Fort Worth, Texas during the Great Depression, Liz Smith was star-struck by the movies. "They told me there was a whole world out there where people were glamorous, where men and women drank wine with dinner and wore white tie and tails and drove cars with the tops down and danced on gla.s.s floors," she recalls, smiling dreamily. Her soft, languid accent, dripping with Southern charm, echoes through the coffee shop at the NBC building in midtown.

Despite her cordiality, she somehow gives the impression of being in a great hurry. And for good reason: Smith is probably the hardest-working -- and certainly the most successful -- gossip writer on the East Coast.

Unlike Rona Barrett, the queen of Hollywood gossip, Liz Smith does not have a large staff, but relies on a single full-time a.s.sistant and part-time "leg man" in California. Nevertheless, she manages to turn out, each week, six columns for the _New York Daily News_ (syndicated nationally to more than 60 newspapers), five radio spots for NBC, and two television spots for WNBC's _Newscenter 4_.

"The minute I get up, I go to work. I get up at about nine, and go right to work," says Liz. "I look at the paper right quick, and go right to the typewriter, and work till I finish the column at one. I work in my apartment because I would never have time to get up and dress and go to another place. I would never get to meet my deadline. ... I work all the time. I work a lot on the weekends because that's the only time I can even vaguely make a stab at catching up. ... I just about kill myself to get everything done. I don't know if it's worth it."

For all her complaints, Liz believes that gossip-writing is well suited for her personality. "I can't help it. I'm just one of those people who likes to repeat a tale," she explains. "I'd be reading every newspaper in America that I could get my hands on and every book and magazine anyway, even if I weren't doing this job."

When she was hired by the _Daily News_ in February, 1976 to start her column, Liz was no stranger to the New York celebrity scene; she had already been in the city for 26 years, working mainly as a free-lance writer. "I made a lot of money free-lancing. Even 15 years ago, I never made less than $25,000 a year." Besides writing for virtually every ma.s.s market publication in America, she spent five years ghostwriting the Cholly Knickerbocker society column in the old _Journal American_. Her many contacts among the famous, and the resurgence of interest in gossip, also helped persuade _Daily News_ editor Mike O'Neill that the paper could use a gossip column in which the personality of the writer came through.

Within weeks of her debut, Liz broke some of the sensational details of Woodward and Bernstein's _The Final Days_, which was about to be excerpted in _Newsweek_. She added the TV and radio broadcasts to her schedule in 1978, and avoids duplicating items whenever possible.

Her best sources, says Liz, are other journalists. "Because they know what stories are. I know a lot of very serious and important writers who have a lot of news and gossip and rumors and stuff that they don't have any place to put, so they're apt to give it to me. They have impulses to disseminate news; I think real reporters do feel that way."

Liz says that, generally speaking, she prefers writers to all other people.

Asked to name some favorites, she bubblingly replies: "Norman Mailer.

I just think Norman is a genius. Oh G.o.d, I love so many writers. My favorite novel recently was Peter Maas' book, _Made in America_. ...

There's Tommy Thompson, who just wrote _Serpentine_. Nora Ephrom, Carl Bernstein are friends of mine. Norman Mailer is a friend of mine.

Oh, I could go on forever."

An author in her own right, Liz wrote _The Mother Book_ two years ago; it sold approximately 65,000 copies in hardcover and 200,000 in paperback. "It kind of wrote itself," she says modestly of the acclaimed collection of anecdotes about mothers. Someday she would like to try fiction; at present she is working on a book that she describes as "a history and philosophy of gossip and what it is and what it's all about."

An Eastsider for half her life, Liz says her neighborhood "has the lowest crime rate of any police district in New York." Most of the restaurants he frequents are on the Upper East Side. They include Le Plaisir, Gian Marino, Szechuan East and Elaine's.

For years she saw her therapist at least once a week; now she pays him just occasional visits. "It helped me enormously in writing. I quit having writer's block. I quit putting things off. I quit making myself miserable.

I accepted my success, which was hard, because a lot of writers: they don't want to succeed. They don't think they deserve it. It's like people who don't want to be happy.

"Well, I mean you can be happy, you know, if you let yourself, and if you do your work. The most important thing in the world, I think, is to do your work. If you do your work, you'll be happy: I'm almost positive about it."

EASTSIDERS TOM & d.i.c.k SMOTHERS Stars of _I Love My Wife_ on Broadway

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As the Smothers Brothers, they were perhaps the funniest, most original American music and comedy team to come out of the 1960s. Their 10 alb.u.ms sold in the millions, and for three seasons they had the most controversial show on television, _The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour_.

When CBS abruptly canceled their contract in 1969 for seemingly political reasons, they became a cause celebre by suing the network and winning a million dollars in damages. After 18 years of performing together as a team, they retired their act in December, 1976, saying that their brand of satire had been "stated," and that repet.i.tion would bore them. The brothers parted on friendly terms, each determined to make his mark separately as an entertainer.

This past Labor Day, they were reunited as a comedy team -- not on television or in a nightclub, but on the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on West 47th Street, where they instantly breathed new life into the long-running musical _I Love My Wife_. Cast in the roles of two would-be wife swappers from Trenton, New Jersey, they insisted on being billed not as the Smothers Brothers, but as d.i.c.k and Tom Smothers.

However, anyone who laments the demise of the Smothers Brothers act should catch the show before the six-month contract runs out on March 4.

d.i.c.k Smothers, as Wally, a smooth-talking pseudo-sophisticate, and Tom Smothers, as his naive, b.u.mbling friend Alvin, a moving man, wear their roles as if they had been written for no one else.