Vida Pernick

Vida Pernick came of age in New York City in the 1950s where she frequented lesbian bars such as the Bagatelle, Seven Steps and Provincetown Landing. Vida opened the restaurant and bar, Grotto of the Purple Grape, in Bridgehampton, NY in 1969 which served mostly lesbian and queer clientele. The following conversation was recorded on August 1, 2019 at 12pm by phone from Brooklyn, NY to Zionville, NC.

Gwen Shockey: So, the first question I usually ask is what the first place you ever went to was that was occupied mostly lesbians or queer women – it could be a bar or another type of space – and what it felt like to be there.

Vida Pernick: I remember it very well. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the Bagatelle and that was the place in my day, in the 1950s, where it was happening. It was Bagatelle, Seven Steps, Provincetown Landing and one other place… they used to have a Sunday Tea Dance and I can’t for the life of me remember the name of that place. Those were the places in the early ‘50s.

GS: I’ve heard quite a few people mention the Bagatelle, Seven Steps and Provincetown Landing but no one I have talked to yet has spent a lot of time in Seven Steps or Provincetown Landing so I would really love to hear a little bit about your experiences in these places including Bagatelle.

VP: Well, the Bagatelle was jammed always. There was always the fear of a police raid and what to do if there was one. I was going to NYU at the time and the bar was very close to the university. Seven Steps I remember very well because the second woman that I was ever with I met there. They used to have a lot of dancing – it was a bar and a dance floor – her name was Gabby and she was Puerto Rican. She was a beautiful girl and she danced like no one I had ever seen. It was unbelievable. She was a wonderful dancer and had a great body and I was impressed with her. I used to like to just watch her dance. Somehow I managed to say hello and we got together and lived together for a while. She was a photographer. She moved in with me on 1st Avenue and 82nd Street and I made a little studio for her. But she was very lazy and didn’t want to work and we wound up moving to Long Island and then I took up with somebody else and she got very violent. I’d never had anybody punch me before. I was in my twenties then. I ran into her in Florida many, many years later and then she got breast cancer and ended up in the hospital. I don’t know what happened to her.

GS: Was Seven Steps mafia-run?

VP: I’m not sure! I did know someone who worked as a bartender at Seven Steps. Right now I can’t remember who it was but she had such vivid memories of Seven Steps. That was a place I went to maybe 15 times in my life. It was right across from Provincetown Landing. I remember that. It was down in the Village but I don’t remember what street it was on. Provincetown Landing was more of a place you would go to eat. I don’t remember it being so much of a bar or a meeting place as Seven Steps was. I remember it being more of a restaurant. The Grapevine was after the Bagatelle and I don’t remember what year the Mask on Canal Street was open. I wish I could.

GS: What kinds of women would go to these spaces? Was the clientele mostly working class?

VP: No, it didn’t matter what class you were in. Just gay women! It’s not true that it was just working-class women at the Bagatelle. It is all a bit of a blur because that’s when I was in my 20s and it was a long, long time ago. You’re in Brooklyn I understand?

GS: Yes! I live in Crown Heights!

VP: I’m from Manhattan Beach. Many, many years ago in my time there was a girl from Manhattan Beach named Dawn Green and she was a model. She was a beautiful girl. She was with a girl by the name of Lillian Brown. So it was Dawn Green and Lillian Brown which was a funny combination but at that time I was very naïve and I saw her at the Bagatelle and I asked her what she was doing there! She probably didn’t know me because I was a couple years younger. She said to me, “This is the only place in the city a girl can get a drink and not be bothered.” I was so naïve I just thought, ok she’s not gay, she’s straight! Then I would see her at Jacob Riis Park and that’s where everybody went to go to the beach because there was a gay section! If you were in the city during the summer that’s where you went! She would be walking the beach at Riis Park. Finally I had to grow up and admit that she had to be gay. So, those were the first places that I remember.

GS: What do you think made the Bagatelle such a destination spot for women?

VP: Well, there was no other place that was large enough to contain as many women as there were! I think that’s what it was. It was large and it was well protected. Chances of there being a raid weren’t as big because it probably was mafia-owned. It was a safe place to be. In those days you could be out until twelve or one o’clock and not feel threatened. Maybe New York is safe now, I don’t know, but back then in the ‘50s New York was safe. I felt so safe being somewhere by myself and leaving by myself.

GS: About how old were you when you were going to these bars? 

VP: I was about twenty-three. twenty-two or twenty-three. I had been married only for about six weeks before I realized that was not the street I should be on so I ended that very quickly. An interesting little story was that there was a woman by the name of Regina whose father at that time was the ambassador to America from Brazil I believe and I was with three straight friends and we decided to go out to Fire Island. One of them proposed we go to Cherry Grove and we all agreed: Yeah! That could be fun! So, we go to Cherry Grove and the hotel before it burned down was a big place where there was dancing. All four of us had dinner at a restaurant called Pats which was right on the beach. You’d walk off the beach and the first place you’d find would be Pats. We all went to the dance and one by one I don’t know what happened to my friends but I wound up dancing with a group of people and somebody invited me to a party. I think it was Regina but I’m not sure. I went to this party and they had bathtub gin because that’s what they made at the time. It really was in the bathtub and it was made with grape juice I think. I remember falling off the boardwalk (laughing) and then we reached this girl’s house and she had a double bed in there – I don’t remember how many bedrooms there were, but it was one of those little Fire Island shacks – there were two women in there already sound asleep and we get in bed and I’m on the edge of the bed. So, there were four of us in the double bed and I’m there with my hands by my side with nothing happening and trying to go to sleep and I guess around seven o’clock or so I woke up and managed to put my clothes on or maybe I already was in my clothes, I don’t remember, and I walked back to where my friends were. Remember these were three straight women! The first thing I said when I saw them was, you will not believe this but I was in bed with three lesbians. (Laughing) That same girl called me up and invited me back so I went to Cherry Grove again two weeks later. I had a car so I picked her up and we drove out there, parked the car and got on the ferry and she disappears. Absolutely disappears. She ended up on the ferry with a woman who’s name I forget. She’s an artist up in New York State now. I’m not sure if she’s still alive. Most of these people are dead by now. I was alone in Cherry Grove. Totally alone. So, I found a place to sleep, probably at a hotel I guess, and I was going to leave the next day. Somebody called my name and it was a guy from the first party I went to with the bathtub gin. A guy named Pat who recognized me was sitting with this woman. They called my name and I joined them and I wound up going with her for about two and a half years!

GS: Wow!

VP: That was kind of my coming out, although I was with one of my bridesmaids. Before I got married I came out with a bridesmaid.

GS: You’re kidding me! 

VP: No, that was another story… a funny story but at the time it wasn’t funny. I was in advertising for many years as a copywriter in New York. I worked for J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy and some of the big boys. I decided to get out of advertising and I had a house in Bridgehampton and I had just started to be with someone who was Italian and an incredible cook. I think you heard about her from Sandy, her name was Enrica. She was working in Connecticut and I bought a house in Connecticut to be with her. She worked for a pharmaceutical company… I can’t remember the name right now. I bought a house because she had two children and she was not leaving Connecticut and by that time I was living in Manhattan and had a house in the Hamptons and had been with somebody else for a long time but had broken up with them and we got together and the thing to do was to buy a house so we could be together. So, I got the house in Fairfield. I commuted to New York to work and she stayed working in Connecticut. Finally I decided to get out and open a restaurant. I found a vacant building with a sign on it that said “For Sale.” I went to the real estate agent and bought it right then and there for forty-five thousand dollars. It sounds cheap now but forty-five thousand dollars in those days, in the ‘60s, was a lot! That was in the later part of the ‘60s. I opened the restaurant in ’69. 

GS: I’m sorry, this was the Grotto of the Purple Grape that you’re talking about?

VP: Right! We were trying to figure out what to name the place. It was going to be a wine and cheese place. One day I was driving in the car with my partner’s daughter and it just dawned on me! We were going to call it the Grotto of the Purple Grape. People called it the Grotto and some people called it the Grape. It didn’t really matter. Everybody knew where it was. The upstairs was a wine and cheese place and a bar and people loved it so much they wanted us to put in liquor. So I went for a liquor license and put in liquor. And then they wanted more than just cheese so we put in hamburgers. And then, why don’t you put in more than hamburgers! So, the next thing you know we had a full-blown restaurant. The downstairs was quite large and I found somebody in Chicago of all places that could build this cave for me. I hired him to come from Chicago, I paid his way, and he started forming a cave with wire onto which he sprayed a white Styrofoam and the place really looked like it was an underground cave. For the dance floor I went to all of the glass places that were in the Hamptons and I asked, when you’re cutting mirror what do you do with the excess mirror? “Oh! We throw it away!” I said, just keep it in one barrel for me and I took all of the glass and all the pieces and that became the dance floor, covered with all of this broken glass and then polyurethane over it in several coats.

GS: Wow! That sounds like it was beautiful.

VP: Maybe six months or a year ago I ran into a friend of mine who said they used to go to the Grotto all the time because that was the best dancing. It wasn’t the best, there were lots of other places at that time and we were just one of many. So, there was the discotheque downstairs and the restaurant upstairs and around nine o’clock or ten o’clock it would turn into somebody playing the guitar and singing upstairs and downstairs you could go dance! It was very successful. It turned out to be an unusual place. We had a lot of stars that would come: Truman Capote was one of them. There would be a lot of men who would come in to cruise the bar because we had a lot of college kids who came also. It was a mixture of everything. It was gay, it was straight, it was lesbian, it was men. It was everything. Everybody mixed very well.

GS: Did you ever feel vulnerable as a bar owner at the Grotto?

VP: I felt vulnerable once. It was wintertime and there was an area I think it was called Quogue out in the Hamptons that had mafia. When I bought the Grotto it was a restaurant that was called the Haystack and it was very rustic and I changed it into a very sophisticated Victorian place. Each booth had its own lamp and each booth was private like its own little room and there was a little switch on the wall from which you could control the Tiffany lamps and if you wanted service you would ring a bell. It was very unusual. The man who did all the work for me was mafia. I didn’t know it at the time but when I first got my beer license New York State put me through a lot of aggravation because they were trying to connect me to the man who did all the work for me. I don’t even remember how I got him but he did all the work and he put in a Juke box and a cigarette machine for me. When I sold the restaurant the guy who bought it tried to get rid of the cigarette machine but they wouldn’t let him. They kind of threatened him. There were also two incidences, once two men came up to the bar and I was bartending at that time asking me how business was and I just knew they were connected. I got a funny feeling. One night for dinner it was wintertime and it was very quiet and in comes this big group of like ten people in big black Cadillacs and I’m sure that was connected. I never tried to change the Juke box or cigarette machine and they serviced it and took the quarters and they’d give us a certain number of quarters that they would prime the Juke box with. I’m remembering some things about it when you ask me about it. 

GS: Did the police ever bother you?

VP: Actually no, the police never bothered me. It was more the fire department. The downstairs was made of Styrofoam which I guess might have been flammable. They made the buyer who took it from me take it all down. The morning I sold the restaurant we were broken into and robbed. They turned over bottles from the bar… it was quite a mess. They stole my sound equipment and money that people had given me for good luck that was up near the cash register.

GS: Wow that’s horrible!

VP: Yeah, somebody must have known something. It was a huge setback. They messed up the downstairs really badly but we went through with the closing and I had to allow the buyer a certain amount of money to repair things. But it was a healthy place to be long before it became star-studded like it is today. You could go from town to town in ten minutes and now it takes three quarters of an hour.

GS: What was it like to open a business at that time as a woman and

Actually, I have to tell you. There was a woman by the name of Gwen Saunders and her name was a magical word because she owned some of the hottest bars that were in New York and also a gay bar in the Hamptons called Out of This World. Gwen probably was connected to the mafia. I can’t imagine owning that many bars in those days and not having that kind of protection behind you. Especially in the city. She was from Georgia and she used to go for a short time with Pat Smith who owned some of the bars in the city. She and Gwen went together for a short time. But Gwen was absolutely the Queen of whoever would own bars in my day. You could be sitting on a plane next to someone who was gay and they would know who she was. In my day there were coded ways of notifying somebody that you were gay. One way was to ask was to say, “Are you a friend of… “ I can’t remember what the phrase was… but it was something like that. So much of language that we were using in that day is used today. Pat Smith was very bright. I think her family was mafia but I’m not sure. They were in New Jersey and I think they had the garbage circuit. I think that’s where she came from. She was with Gwen for a while and I think she learned about the business from Gwen and then she went on to open a couple of her own places.

GS: Did you go to the bars Gwen owned?

VP: Well she owned the Grapevine! That was one of them! She had a men’s bar also further up. The Grapevine was on 2nd Avenue or 1st Avenue in the 20s. I don’t remember what avenue but it was in the 20s.

GS: Sandy Rapp mentioned a couple bars and I’m not sure you would remember anything about them but one was called the Hotline.

VP: No, I never knew that one.

GS: How about the Mystique?

VP: Mystique? Hmm no but somebody told me there was a place they used to go to called the Mask. It was off Canal Street.

GS: Was that a lesbian bar?

VP: Yeah. I friend of mine that I just talked to the other day mentioned the Mask to me and I had never gone there, I didn’t know the place.

GS: Ok interesting. So, did you meet Gwen Saunders?

VP: Oh yeah! We became very close friends. I take it back. We were friends. The person that I was with for a number of years was from North Carolina and Gwen was from Georgia I think… South Carolina or Georgia. Anyway the person that I was with had a crush on Gwen and after we broke up she would be in touch with her. Or try to be in touch with her. Gwen would always call me and say, “Guess who I heard from the other day? Roseanne.” Roseanne was a genius in a lot of ways but she was a little crazy in a lot of different ways. I was with her for about eight and a half years. So, I kept in touch with Gwen and Gwen moved to Florida and she owned a couple of units in Fort Lauderdale and on occasion we would get together. We would have dinner or see each other or speak on the phone. She passed away a number of years ago. She was quite a lady. She was just a very nice lady and I’ll tell you why. When I had my restaurant and she had her place in the Hamptons she would send so many customers to me to help me get started. I had never been in the restaurant business or the wine business or the liquor business – I don’t even drink! I don’t care for drinking. For me, it was an adventure that I jumped into not knowing what I was doing and it turned out to be very nicely successful. I was very happy with it.

GS: Yeah, it sounds like she was really supportive of you.

VP: Very supportive. We used to have baseball games against each other and one of the boy that used to wash dishes for me who we used to call Bubbles would be in the outfield when we played baseball and if a ball was ever hit out to where he was he would scream “Oh, my nails! My nails!” 

GS: (Laughing) That’s amazing! How long was the Grotto open Vida?

VP: My partner Enrica at the time developed an inner ear infection and it was very bothersome especially in the hot kitchen and because she had a problem health-wise I sold it in 1976. The man who bought it loved the basement so he named it The Splunk. Nobody really knew what a “splunk” was so he finally changed the name to The Woodshed and it was called The Woodshed for 20 some odd years. After he sold it, it just became one restaurant after another. It was a lot of fun. It was in a good time, a simpler time.

GS: Do you remember the address by any chance?

VP: The only address I remember is that it was Montauk Highway. 

GS: Was there a pretty big lesbian community out in Bridgehampton?

VP: Not so much in Bridgehampton, the lesbian community was mostly in East Hampton. I guess it was north of the highway up in the hills of East Hampton. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there. I can’t remember all the names but I never wanted to live there. There were a lot of people that I knew and it was easy to get hurt. If somebody had a dinner at their house for example and didn’t invite me… so I never lived where a lot of people were. Now that I’m eighty-six it doesn’t matter and I’m very happy to be here in a community where there are all gay people called Carefree Cove. There is a Carefree Cove in For Meyers in Florida. It’s all lesbian. Two women, Gina and Jackie, started the community. They are no longer associated with it. Other people took it over. The other one, in Fort Meyers, they still own that. There are RVs as well as housing. That one is just women. Here, up in North Carolina, it’s men and women. There are about ninety lots here. Maybe eighty are buildable and there are about thirty houses already built so there is still room for a lot more. I’m the oldest one up here I think. There is one other woman who is older than I am here. Most of the women are in their fifties, sixties and early seventies. It’s a nice place to get away.

GS: How long did you live in the city Vida? In New York?

VP: Well, I was from Brooklyn so the city was my backyard. In my day you could get to the city from Manhattan beach in twenty minutes by car. The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was built and that made it very accessible. I probably left to go out to the Hamptons in 1969. I built my house in ’65 or ’66 and would go out to the Hamptons from the city every weekend but moved out to the Hamptons in 1969. I was in my mid-thirties. I think I was thirty when I did that.

GS: Did you ever experience a bar raid when you were going out to gay bars?

VP: Yes, I did in Cherry Grove. There would be a red light and a siren that would go off and the police would come over from the mainland and you’d drop your partner and rush to find a man and men would rush to find women. Those were strange days, the Stonewall days. It was very frowned upon in those days. I remember once dancing with somebody and looking up into the faces of about four or five people that I knew from Manhattan Beach that had come over to look at the queers. That was the most embarrassing… if I could have gone through the floor I would have.

GS: Were you out to your family?

VP: Yeah, I was out to my family. They figured it out and confronted me with it. It was not something they were happy with but they learned to live with it and learned to be happy with it. Most of my partners were nice people except Roseanne who was nuts. Now I’m with someone who I’ve been with for about eight, nine years and I’m so lucky to have someone in my life at this time.

GS: That’s wonderful!

VP: It is wonderful.

GS: Did you meet where you live now in North Carolina? No! We knew each other. We had mutual friends. We knew each other for many, many years. Enrica who I was with for forty some odd years developed Alzheimer’s and she had it for over twenty years. It was very sad. When she developed it she didn’t like water and was afraid of water. She didn’t want to take a shower or wash her hair. A friend owned a beauty salon in Florida and somebody told her to call me because I was having a problem with Enrica and she did and she would come over and help me to get Enrica to wash her hair and get pretty for me, which is the way she would put it, “Come on! We’re going to get pretty for Vida!” We wound up one day… actually she was single for quite a while and we were driving in the car and she said, “You know I’ve been around for a long time and there’s nobody out there.” And I heard myself say: Nope! There’s nobody out there for you except me! That’s how it started! We’ve been together about nine years and we have a house up in Carefree Cove and she’s got a house in West Palm Beach and I’ve got a house in West Palm Beach.

GS: Sounds magical!

VP: It is, it is!

GS: Have you been back to the Hamptons recently?

VP: No, not recently. I went back about eight years ago. I wanted to take my wife because she had never been. So, I took her back and I have a lot of friends who are still alive. We rented a house for about a month. My house is gone, right by the ocean. The only thing that is left is the swimming pool. There’s a huge two-story house there now. Everything has changed. I just was so naïve. I jumped into everything not knowing what I was doing! I wound up in real-estate after selling the restaurant and then I retired. Come visit Carefree Cove someday!

GS: I would love that! Well thank you so much Vida.