Hey, it was the 70's. What can I say?
LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
Salon, MARCH 1, 2018
In order for me to tell this story, I’m going to have to introduce you to the Lion’s Head bar in Greenwich Village, and in order to introduce you to the Lion’s Head, I’m going to have to introduce you to Archie Mulligan, one of its legendary bartenders, and in order to introduce you to Archie Mulligan, I’m going to have to tell a fairly long story about one of Archie’stall tales, which makes this a perfect introduction to a story about Donald Trump.
It was the late 60’s, and I discovered the Lion’s Head on Christopher Street because it was next door to the Village Voice, where I was contributing freelance articles. Located a few steps below street level, the Head was narrow and dark and wood-paneled — in short, everything you would imagine a Greenwich Village bar to be. It was known as a writer’s bar, a place where you came if you were a writer with a drinking problem, or a drinker with a writing problem. It was sometimes hard to distinguish between the two, even among the fairly well-known writers who were frequently in residence. There was Pete Hamill, the newspaper columnist; Ted Hoagland, the nature writer; Joel Oppenheimer, the poet; David Markson, a novelist whose manuscript for “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” was rejected by publishers 54 times; Fred Exley, the author “A Fan’s Notes;” Joe Flaherty, the former longshoreman turned Village Voice columnist who managed Norman Mailer’s campaign for mayor of New York City in 1969; Lanford Wilson, the playwright who wrote “Hot l Baltimore;” the literary critic Wilfrid Sheed; and songwriters from Liam Clancy to Jerry Jeff Walker to Dave Van Ronk to Bob Dylan.
Presiding over all of this on the day shift was Archie Mulligan, with his wavy red hair and hawkish nose and impish grin and grandly expansive catalog of tall tales. To hear Archie tell it, he was the brother of jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, who being conveniently located on the West Coast, was unavailable to confirm this assertion of Archie’s. Archie contended that in his day he had dated some of the biggest stars — Kim Novak was one, and, Archie said, Peggy Lee and he had had such a memorable night together, she still always gave him a call when she was in town.
Archie was full of tall tales, but none taller than the tale of his three Purple Papal Papers. Archie insisted that he had died three times, had been administered last rites by priests, and had somehow risen from the dead to live again. I can’t remember the cause of his first two deaths, but the third had happened at O’Henry’s Steakhouse, over on Sixth Avenue. While working there one day, he somehow fell down the basement stairs and struck his head and died. Conveniently enough, there was a Catholic priest on the premises — priests were always nearby when Archie died — and when they couldn’t get a pulse from Archie, he administered last rites. Archie was brought back to life in an ambulance, and later the priest made a report to the Vatican about the miracle of the resurrection of Archie Mulligan. The Vatican, according to Archie, issued his third Purple Papal Paper commemorating the new miracle as they had the other two times he died.
Well, Archie of the Purple Papal Papers was bartending one afternoon around 5 p.m. when a call came in on the house phone for me. “Lucian, are you here?” he called out, covering the receiver and looking down the bar straight at me, checking to see if I was receiving calls that evening. I took the call. It was Mary Nichols, the city editor of the Village Voice. It seemed that one of Mary’s best friends owned a PR firm uptown that had been hired by real estate developer Donald Trump to promote a party he was giving that very evening for the contestants in the Miss Universe Pageant. It was to be a big, New York style shindig, and he wanted the party crowded with New York’s movers and shakers — opinion makers and businessmen and political figures and people from the media. He’d probably told her he wanted “the best people,” because Trump wanted to be surrounded by only “the best people,” as we have come to learn.
Continues...
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/28/the-night-i-chased-miss-universe-with-donald-trump/
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