Tina Dupuy has been, is and will be a lot of different things – a featured comic, a political columnist, a podcast host about sects, communications director for a congressman in the Hill. Capitol.
But one afternoon in 2013, she was just another New Yorker who locked herself outside her building on the Upper West Side. She had only recently moved in and rang the bell of a neighbor she barely knew, an elderly woman who lived next door.
The neighbor let her in and invited her to wait in his apartment until her husband Dupuy returned home. They sat in her tidy little study with her antique couch bed and embroidered pillow: “Too Much Good Is Great.”
Her name is Sheila Sullivan, at 75, she’s slim, sexy and full of energy, but so much more. floating? She has lived here, alone, for 30 years, almost as long as Miss Dupuy has lived. She told stories that made them both laugh when the husband brought the keys.
That’s great, they said to each other. See you again. Now, a decade later, it’s funny looking back on how it all started.
After that first meeting, Miss Dupuy would hear Miss Sullivan through the walls of the apartment, singing – performing tunes? There was something particularly endearing in this woman, an inviting eccentricity.
And boy, she has stories.
For a time she was working as a singer and dancer at Tropicana in Las Vegas in the 1950s and a pilot with a ponytail invited her to watch a planned atomic bomb explosion in the desert. She would never forget that cloud, that explosion.
Or the time she appeared on Broadway with Sammy Davis Jr. in a show called “Golden Boy.” She was a student under her wing who ended up getting a stressful call one afternoon when the lead actress was sick and she had to move on. Sammy is very funny and kind.
She was married to an actor Robert Culpheated up his 1960s TV show, “I Spy,” which was popular at the time for casting a Black actor to play his co-star, Bill Cosby.
Ms. Dupuy, an honest journalist, listened and quietly wondered: Is any of this true? Hardly any time for questions before the next big reveal – the daybed you’re sitting on? You won’t believe it – it once belonged to Charlie Chaplin.
Ms. Dupuy’s private life, with its real-life twists and turns, is taking place in the house next door. In 2017, when a handful of women accused then-Senator Al Franken, a humorous and liberal former lawmaker from Minnesota, of groping them, they were scorned by many. But Ms. Dupuy said she had shared his experience at a political event before President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, and she felt compelled to support the accusers.
Her article in The Atlantic, “I trust Franken’s accusers because he also groped me,” is, in hindsight, a tipping point, and Senator Franken Resigns one day after it was published.
Ms. Dupuy, during her time as an itinerant comedian in the early 2000s, was used to the limelight – but in places like Price, Utah and Scobey, Mont. Now she feels like a face of a movement, and it’s a lot.
She visited Mrs. Sullivan to feel some of the old woman’s energy. Ms. Sullivan sympathizes with what Ms. Dupuy is going through. One night at the Tropicana, Frank Sinatra called her over and said, “You’re a handsome man.” Miss Sullivan, who was denied her dream job as a flight attendant for Trans World Airlines because it was said that she had too wide hips, thought Mr. Sinatra was teasing her so she turned around. leave. When his friend followed her to apologize, she slammed the door in his face because she didn’t know the friend was Joe DiMaggio: “I don’t follow baseball,” she explained to her. Dupuy.
Neighbors became real friends. Then in 2020, Covid arrived. Their apartment building was cleared, people relocated. Even Ms. Dupuy’s husband is gone, isolated with his family in California. Only Miss Dupuy and Miss Sullivan remained.
The city is so quiet. And, Ms. Dupuy realized, so did her neighbors – she had stopped singing. The young woman visits with flowers, breakfast, fun snacks or beer, and Miss Sullivan will happily return. They met in the little courtyard outside and talked and talked.
One day, Ms. Sullivan showed Ms. Dupuy a photograph from 1965. She was walking in a line of men, including Sammy Davis Jr. and Harry Belafonte, who was strikingly tall and cold-faced. Ms. Sullivan explained it was the civil rights movement and the march in Selma. Celebrities flew to Alabama to form a human shield around the marchers, with the idea that surely no one would shoot Harry Belafonte.
Miss Dupuy stared at the picture. What other memorabilia does Miss Sullivan have? The elderly woman pulled a large box and placed it on the table. Inside:
Playbill for “Golden Boy” has her name on the cast. Behind-the-scenes photos with Sammy and others.
Photos from her role in the popular 1969 play “Play it Again, Sam,” written and starring Woody Allen.
There was a letter she wrote to the head of a company that designed rockets in the space race, volunteering as an astronaut. Return address: The Tropicana.
Miss Dupuy was amazed. You can tell late 20th-century American history through Sheila, she thought.
Their backyard visits were disrupted in 2021 when Ms Dupuy, faced with rising rents and a noisy new upstairs neighbor, felt it was time to move out. She found a location 15 blocks from the block and promised Mrs. Sullivan, then in her 80s, that they would still see each other a lot.
In fact, they have become closer. Miss Dupuy’s marriage fell apart, and she focused her energies on helping Miss Sullivan with whatever she needed. “The matter of looking after an 85-year-old,” she likes to say, “they are like a toddler that you cheer up with gin.”
They were patrons at a nearby Italian place, where they ordered Cosmopolitans for lunch.
“When we walked down the street, people knew who she was,” she later said of Miss Sullivan. “It’s the way she walks, the way she dresses.”
In 2023, Mrs. Sullivan marks her 40th year in her apartment. She was always interested in looking at the mail for bills and the like, so she was completely unprepared for what came one last day in April: the eviction notice.
She owes thousands of dollars in unpaid rent, the notice stated, and she will appear on the building on the scheduled date.
She sat on Charlie Chaplin’s old bed and read it over and over. How is this possible? She lived here for so long. Now all she can hear as she reads the city form is “Get her out of here!”
When she called Miss Dupuy, her friend heard an unusual tone in her voice. Real fear.
I’ll be right there, she said.
Miss Sullivan lacks the truth. “Some terrible mistake somewhere,” she said. “I don’t know. Something is rotting in Denmark.”
Never mind the weird cockroach, the windows don’t open – Miss Sullivan loves that apartment. She said it was her dressing room, and outside, the city was her theater. Suddenly, she was afraid that she would lose it.
We will fix this,” Ms. Dupuy told her. The journalist and truth-finder in her had to work. She discovers a tangle of bureaucracy that appears to be behind the eviction notice. It’s like pulling a thread from the proverbial sweater, except it’s a sweater you’ve been wearing for 40 years and you don’t have another sweater.
She collected documents, receipts and found the original problem, when a city agency providing rent assistance to Ms. Sullivan asked for a current lease and no one responded. The agency quietly stopped paying her share of the rent.
Miss Sullivan, who had marched in Selma before armed soldiers who had been staring at an exploding atomic bomb, was now enveloped in fear that countless New Yorkers hid reputation has gone through. She began to have a recurring nightmare. “They came to pick me up and take me out,” she said. “I say no!'”
The court date approached, in an imposing gray building downtown near City Hall. The two women took the bus and arrived early. They sit in the crowded gallery and wait and whisper. A court official silenced them.
The clerk called her case, and she got up. “I’m Sheila Sullivan,” she said.
There were questions about the tenancy, and Ms. Dupuy showed her file to the clerk. The women were directed down a hallway to an office where they were asked to sit until a free attorney was available.
Miss Dupuy, to be honest, she was scared in her own right. What if she missed something? What if the process is too far to stop and she will let her friend down? She imagined Miss Sullivan, with the imprint of a certain office worker who would never take her eyes off her, being forced to leave home and look for a new home based on her fixed retirement income. How far apart will they end up living?
Finally, they were taken to a small room.
Housing court attorneys address all the ways distraught men and women face eviction with no ready answers, no jobs, no income. import. No hope. Here is this client, Sheila Sullivan, and her friend with a stack of scientifically organized documents that draw a clear line from problem to solution.
The lawyer looked at the two women facing him. Everything, she said, will be fine.
Miss Sullivan recalls that day in 2013 when her new neighbor rang the doorbell because she had locked herself. Now, to think, how it all went. It’s like a story from that picture box and Playbills.
They went straight from the court to their Italian abode. Two international people, please.
