Writer and publisher who mixed with the Beat generation and the Soho set
The death of the writer and publisher Jay Landesman, aged 91, marks the demise of one of the last links to the Beat, hip and cool roots that inform modern culture. For many budding Beat writers, Neurotica, the magazine Jay founded in the US in the 1940s, was the first place they saw their names in print.
In the 1980s and 90s, as a louche habitu� of the Groucho Club, London, Jay fell naturally into that Soho routine that moved from the Colony Room club to the French pub to Gerry's bar to the Coach and Horses (where he was banned for a while) and back to the Groucho. However, he always had his wits about him and had a shrewd eye for publishing opportunities that went all the way back to his early years in New York, where he had published Neurotica.
Landesman was born in St Louis, Missouri, the son of an immigrant Jewish artist from Berlin and a mother who ran an antique gallery. In the late 1940s, on antique-buying trips to New York, Jay discovered the post-second world war bohemian scene. In 1949 he moved to the city, where Neurotica became the platform for writers including Marshall McLuhan, Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Bernstein, John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac.
In 1950 Jay married Fran Deitsch and moved back to St Louis, where he and his brother Fred opened the Crystal Palace, a cabaret theatre bar that hosted acts including Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen and Dick Gregory, at a time when few venues outside the east and west coasts could support them. Bruce begged Fran to run away with him. The Gaslight Square neighbourhood around the Crystal Palace became the heart of St Louis nightlife and Jay was voted unofficial mayor of the district. "That means nothing," said Jay. "I'd rather be king."
He wrote an unpublished novel The Nervous Set, which was a fondly satirical take on the Beat generation. In 1959 he produced it as a musical, with lyrics by Fran and music by Tommy Wolf. Its raging success in St Louis prompted a move to Broadway, where the show closed after just a few weeks. Fran's songs from The Nervous Set persisted ? Ballad of the Sad Young Men and Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most have become jazz standards, recorded by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Shirley Bassey.
In 1964 the Landesmans moved to London and quickly settled into the burgeoning 60s scene, hosting friends from the US and London at legendary parties at their Georgian terraced house in Islington. In 1967 Jay became artistic director at the Electric Garden, the psychedelic nightclub, but fell out with the management when they insisted that he break up a screechy Yoko Ono happening which he had arranged. He was fired, then reinstated, but the club failed soon afterwards.
In 1969 he became fanatical about macrobiotics. He worked as a waiter in Seed, the macrobiotic restaurant owned by my brother Gregory and myself. When we set up our wholesale business, Harmony Foods, in 1970 we were frustrated by a long-running postal strike that affected our marketing plan. Undaunted, Jay, acting as our sales manager and using the monicker "Stan Stunning" (Fran called herself "Fran Fabulous") got on the phone and somehow persuaded health-food retailers to commit, sight unseen, to our introductory package, thus enabling them to offer a full macrobiotic range to satisfy the increasing numbers of long-haired customers who were demanding organic brown rice, aduki beans and hijiki seaweed.
Without Jay's determination, Harmony Foods might not have made it and the organic brands it generated ? Whole Earth, the original VegeBurger and Green & Black's ? would never have seen the light of day. When the dour Boston macrobiotic contingent came to London in 1971 and took the fun out of macrobiotics, Jay abandoned the organic food business for a second shot at publishing.
His Polytantric Press published hidden literary gems. In 1977 he launched the imprint with Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and published Hancock's Last Half Hour by Heathcote Williams. In the same year, he published The Punk, by my stepson Gideon Sams, which had a real safety pin through the nose of the image of Johnny Rotten on the cover. Jay sold the rights to Gideon's book to Corgi and sales went into the tens of thousands. (Mike Sarne later made it into the 1993 film The Punk and the Princess.)
Supported in his publishing activity by his devoted amanuensis Pam Hardyment, Jay could safely leave his office in Wardour Street to network at the Groucho, where he and Jeffrey Bernard could often be found napping quietly on the sofas after liquid lunches. Later, Jay moved the Polytantric office to a squat in Kentish Town, north London.
Jay was a lubricious, some would say lecherous, old rou�. His easy charm, magnetic appeal, inexhaustible line of intriguing suggestions and manipulative understanding of the feminine psyche ensured that he had a devoted following of intelligent and attractive women. Fran tolerated and sometimes befriended them, always confident in the depth and immutability of her relationship with Jay. Her own career as a poet and songwriter gave a balance to their relationship that ensured they never tired of each other.
Fran survives him, along with their sons, Cosmo and Miles, and a grandson, Jack.
? Jay Irving Landesman, writer and publisher, born 15 July 1919; died 20 February 2011
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/25/jay-landesman-obituary
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