Jay Landesman

Irving Ned "Jay" Landesman (July 15, 1919 – February 20, 2011) was an American publisher, nightclub proprietor, writer, and long-time London resident.

He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of the four children of Benjamin Landesman, an immigrant Jewish artist from Berlin, and his wife Beatrice, who dealt in antiques. Their son changed his name to Jay after reading The Great Gatsby during his teens.

While running an art gallery and salon in the Little Bohemia district of St Louis, Landesman founded the quarterly magazine Neurotica in 1948, based in New York City from 1949, which became an outlet for the Beat Generation of writers including John Clellon Holmes, Carl Solomon (as Carl Goy), Larry Rivers, Judith Malina and Allen Ginsberg. Dedicated to rather risqué material for its era, "contributors moved among the bases of art, sex, and neuroticism", the magazine closed in 1952 after the censors objected to an article on castration by Gershon Legman who by then had taken over the magazine.

Back in St Louis, Landesman with his brother opened the Crystal Palace nightclub in 1952; the venue was previously used as a gay bar called Dante's Inferno. At Crystal Palace, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand made early appearances. A musical The Nervous Set, based on an unpublished novel by Landesman, with a book co-written with Theodore J. Flicker, premiered March 10, 1959 at Crystal Palace, St Louis, by now based in Gaslight Square and enjoyed a long run there, but lasted only 23 performances on Broadway. Featuring Larry Hagman in a leading role, the show in New York suffered from mixed reviews.

Despite its overall failure in a more prominent location several of the songs written for the work by his second wife Fran Landesman and the composer Thomas Wolf – "Ballad of the Sad Young Men" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" – have endured. Dedicated to the emergence of the Beat Generation, and sometimes described as the movement's only musical, it has an unusual form with a jazz quartet performing onstage and a downbeat ending. Landesman followed The Nervous Set by collaborating with writer Nelson Algren on a musical version, again featuring lyrics by his wife, of Algren's novel A Walk on the Wild Side which opened at Crystal Palace in 1960. A cabaret review Food for Thought, with the Landesmans working with librettist Arnold Weinstein, opened in St. Louis in 1962 and transferred to Yale.

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