Out of the Past

Anyone who knew Marcia Tucker remembers her as puckish, vivacious, and unstoppable. She founded the New Museum thirty years ago, after getting fired from the Whitney. She died, much too soon, in 2006, at the age of sixty-six. I had the pleasure not only of knowing her but of editing an excerpt from an early draft of her memoir for inclusion on Flâneur, a webzine I used to edit. (Though the zine is defunct, the excerpt can be read here. It still cracks me up.) 

Her memoir, A Short Life of Trouble (that title is so Marcia), comes out today. It chronicles her forty years in the New York art world with candor and self-mockery, and also proves she was someone you didn't want to mess with. Here's her account of meeting Clare Boothe Luce at a cocktail party: "She gave me a sweeping, head-to-toe appraisal and asked, eyebrow arched, 'And just what qualifies you to run a museum?' I answered before I had a chance to think, 'The same thing that qualifies you to think I can't.'" Among the many astonishing tales of success and heartbreak is one about her boyfriend Bob Fiore, who moves in with her in the late '60s:

He made films, which I thought of as more important and demanding, not to mention glamorous and expensive, than my own freelance work as a cataloguer of art collections and occasional reviewer for Art News. His first film, Greetings (Bob was the cinematographer), was directed by Brian De Palma and starred an unknown actor, Robert De Niro. It was an underground hit but a financial bust, saved from ruination by, I am certain, the grudging contribution of a few hundred of my own hard-earned bucks when Bob needed to buy a new blimp for the camera to replace the one that had cracked in the cold before they even had a chance to start filming.

Greetings was De Palma's second feature, released in 1968. De Niro (above, reading aloud from a book about sexual perversion) was twenty-five; it was his first big role. Pauline Kael described the movie accurately as a "pleasantly tawdry mixture of an underground film, a skin-flick, and a college revue, with a draft-evader hero and good-humored, casually obscene performances from a whole gallery of talented actors." Marcia goes on to say that that the movie

had about half a second of footage of me, enlisted as an unpaid extra for a party scene dominated by a gorgeous blonde actress who couldn't be trusted with a word of dialogue. But there I was, impossibly young and slender, with long dark braids and a joint in my mouth. One day, thirty years later, my husband and daughter rented the video and dragged me into the bedroom to see myself, frozen in time, leaning against the wall of a corridor looking convincingly stoned—because, in fact, I was.

After finishing the book I watched Greetings again for the first time since I was in my twenties, and indeed, late in the film, there's a gorgeous blonde who strides through a party scene without uttering a word, and there's Marcia, in sunglasses, leaning and smoking—young, high, and a year away from becoming the Whitney's first woman curator. Seeing Marcia in that scene was like watching a friend's home movie secretly spliced into a narrative feature. It made me wish I had known her then, before I was even born.