DOROTHY DEAN

Dorothy Dean - sometimes referred to as "the black Dorothy Parker" because of her acerbic wit - was the door person at Max's Kansas City. She was born December 22, 1932 in White Plains, New York and died of cancer on Friday, February 13, 1987 at the Hospice of St. John in Lakewood, Colorado. (Her obituary appeared in the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder on February 15, 1987.)

Dean graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College with a degree in philosophy, studied art history at the University of Amsterdam on a Fulbright Scholarship and received a master's degree in fine art from Radcliffe/Harvard University in 1958.

Her various jobs included working as a slide librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at Brandeis University, an editorial fact checker for New Yorker magazine and a free-lance copy editor, proof-reader, researcher and re-writer for publishers such as Avon and New York Times Books. After moving to Boulder, Colorado she worked as a free-lance copy editor and for 2 1/2 years as a proofreader at the Daily Camera.

A memorial service was held for her at St. John's Episcopal Church in Boulder on February 22, 1987 - the same day that Andy Warhol died.

Bob Russell [Max's bouncer]:

"Dorothy Dean started working the door at one point. She started as sort of an assistant when I was working the door upstairs. She went to Radcliffe. I met her in Boston. There were a bunch of people that came to New York from Harvard at the same time that Dorothy did...

Dorothy was very slight with harlequin glasses, and her purse was half the size she was. She had worked for several magazines, but she drank too much and was incredibly bitchy. Her obsession was with gay men. She had this one man who she was completely in love with. She used to call him the Sugar Plum Fairy. Lou Reed refers to him in his song, Take a Walk on the Wild Side. She was often found in leather bars in the West Village in pursuit of the Sugar Plum Fairy. That was her love, and then Lou Reed became the focus of her life.

Mickey didn't like black guys at the bar hitting on white women. He wanted to get rid of these two guys, so he sent Dorothy Dean to do the job. After agitating with them for a while, she told them to leave, that they were 86ed - 'First of all, my name's not yo. Secondly, I'm not your sister, and thirdly black is not beautiful, it is pathetic, get out.' And they left." (HR35)

(Sources: Daily Camera obituary, February 15, 1987 (thanks to David Cotner of Hertz-Lion); Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin, High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max's Kansas City (NY: Thunders Mouth Press, 1998))