St. Louis Magazine – July 2019

Continued on p. 102

earnest donations had sent a message:
People needed Left Bank Books to exist.
Clueless about bookkeeping, taxes,
and management, the new owners took
advice anywhere they could find it.
“We were beautifully naïve,” Leibman
remarks, “and I think it was that naïveté
that kept us going forward.”

Getting bored is not allowed.

–ELOISE

Left Bank was one of the first indies to
regularly bring in authors, and one of
Kleindienst’s favorite readings was an
early one by Cornel West. He spoke, to
an embarrassingly small audience, in
the middle of a raging thunderstorm.
“Everybody was hanging on every
word,” she recalls. Then lightning split
the sky and the computers went down.
She tiptoed downstairs and found the
office flooding, electrical cords sub-
merged. Somehow, she got the com-
puters back up. At the next deafening
crack of thunder, West asked, “Should

we stop?” and all 20 people exclaimed,

“No!” So he kept going, his thoughts

converging in a brilliant climax, and

just as he finished, the storm stopped.

“Right that second,” Kleindienst recalls.

“Like God flipped a switch.”

Celebs staying at the Chase often

dropped in: Tom Baker, better known as

Dr. Who; Tom Hulce, who played Mozart

in Amadeus; the Russian poet Yevgeny

Yevtushenko; Jerry Garcia; Andy Wil-

liams; Gregory Hines. Toni Morrison

read at Left Bank before she won the

Nobel. Larry McMurtry spent hundreds

of dollars there on poetry books.

Former staffer Nikki Whittaker Mal-

ley, whose parents owned an indepen-

dent bookstore in Indiana, remembers

“somebody asking Anthony Bourdain,

who was just unabashedly going after

vegetarians, ‘Aren’t you worried about

offending people who don’t eat meat?’”

She switches to his easy cadence: “‘Nah.

There’s so little protein in their systems

that they’re never going to be able to

defend themselves.’

“When someone has created art

that moved you, you actually already

have a relationship with that per-

son,” Malley says. “It’s just that they

don’t know it. And in those minutes

of meeting them in person, you get

to realize that relationship. You

can connect the person to all the

ideas and emotions that person has

sparked in you. That’s why it’s such

a powerful and delicate experience.

When they are gracious, it makes

their art even more powerful for you.

And if the artist does not have that

kind of generosity and grace, it can

be devastating.”

I make as much noise as I possibly can.

–ELOISE

One of the bookstore’s original

founders, Larry Kogan, had gone

to prison for throwing a firecracker

during an antiwar demonstration at

Washington University. His incar-

ceration was later found uncon-

stitutional. But Kleindienst says

“the Red Squad” of the city police

department—Bomb & Arson—paid

regular visits for years. And in early

fall 1979, a detective called to ask

whether Kleindienst knew where

Mac McCann was.

McCann ran Mor or Les, a lesbian bar

on South Grand that had just been fire-

bombed. The word twining through the

grapevine was that for some inexplica-

ble reason, police suspected that she’d

bombed her own bar.

“I have no idea where she is,” Kleindi-

enst said, taking the long way around the

truth. Then she panicked. The bookstore

was the signup spot for bus rides to the

upcoming National March on Washing-

ton for Gay and Lesbian Rights. What

if the police showed up and seized the

clipboard that held everybody’s name

and phone number? She ran across the

street and thrust the clipboard at Karen

Duffy, owner of Duff ’s Restaurant. “Can

you hold on to this for a while?”

In 1998, after the fatwa against Salman

Rushdie was thought to have been

lifted—though no one knew for sure—

Left Bank invited him to do a reading.

Borders had pulled The Satanic Verses

from its shelves; Left Bank had not.

In 1999, a publicist called to offer

Henry Kissinger, and

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JULY 2019

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