Willard Maas & Marie Menken Residence

History

Willard Maas (Francis Willard Maas; 1906-1971) and Marie Menken (1909-1970) married in 1937. By 1940, they were living in this apartment building. Maas, who had published two well-regarded books of poetry, was working in publishing; Menken was a secretary and curatorial assistant to Hilla Rebay, the first director of the Guggenheim foundation and museum. Through her work at the Guggenheim, Menken became friends with the Scottish-born film animator Norman McLaren. Maas, who had discovered his attraction to men soon after his marriage to Menken, began an affair with McLaren, which developed into a ménage à trois with McLaren’s lover, the Canadian filmmaker, Guy Glover. McLaren and Glover soon left for Canada but they had awakened an interest in filmmaking in Maas and Menken. In 1943, they made Geography of the Body with a script and direction by Maas and camerawork by Menken. This film, which featured nude close ups of Maas, Menken, and British poet George Barker, became “one of the most widely screened experimental films in the the postwar years,” according to writer Jose A. Suarez. Maas followed with several more films with homoerotic themes in the 1940s through the 1960s, often made in collaboration with a male lover, and Menken, who continued to serve as cinematographer.

Maas and Menken were famous for their parties, which drew together a wide range of artists, writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals. One frequent guest was the surrealist poet-filmmaker Charles Henri Ford, a member of the Gryphon collective of experimental filmmakers, that, in addition to Maas and Menken, included Kenneth Anger, Charles Boultenhouse, and John Hawkins. It was Ford who brought Andy Warhol to his first party at the Maas-Menken penthouse in the early 1960s. At another party in 1963 Warhol met Maas’s former lover and protégé, the aspiring poet Gerard Malanga, who, over the next seven years, would play a crucial role in Warhol’s artistic productions. Eventually both Maas and Menken became part of Warhol’s Factory scene.

Other members of the Maas-Menken circle included film critic Parker Tyler, artist Dwight Ripley, author Truman Capote, poets Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, and playwright Tennessee Williams. Edward Albee became a frequent guest while participating in a writer’s conference at Wagner College that Maas organized in 1961. According to Menken, Albee “used to come here every time to eat and just sit and listen” while she and Maas drank and argued. She noted, “Then he wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. That’s supposed to be me and Willard arguing about my miscarriage.”

Despite their stormy relationship they remained committed to their partnership until Menken’s sudden death in December 1970, followed four days later by Maas’s fatal heart attack in January 1971.

Entry by Gale Harris, project consultant (May 2019), and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.