The Real Joe Ades (Vol. 1)

I first wrote about sidewalk pitchman Joe Ades, aka The Peeler Guy, for the New York Press in 2005, because I was fascinated by his dandyish getup and Cockney patter and shifty glances from under brows that looked stuck on with spirit gum. He seemed to have wandered out of the pages of London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew’s classic treatise on London street life in the age of Dickens. Later, in 2006, I had the honor of writing about Joe for Vanity Fair, a publication not in the habit of profiling the likes of unlicensed peddlers, to put Joe’s situation baldly. Our peddler was given a five-page spread, which came right after, as if quite natural, a six-page spread of party pix from V.F.’s annual Oscar bash. After looking at photos of Lindsay Lohan, Uma Thurman, Madonna and the rest, you flipped the page . . . and there was Joe, our resident grafter with the beetling brows and silvery muzzle of a pirate’s beard.

Joe was a grafter from age 15, first in England, his place of birth (all true grafters are Englishmen); then in Australia for over two decades, roughly the period of his middle age; and then in New York for what, regrettably, proved his remaining 16 years. Until I was allowed to trumpet his name, he was mainly known to Greenmarket regulars and the lucky tourists who enjoyed snapping his picture as he sold his fabled potato peelers.

On February 1, he died in his sleep at the age of 75. Two days later, as a mark of his new fame, he received an obituary in the New York Times, which mentioned, among other things, “his expensive European suits and shirts” and his “radio announcer’s” voice. That’s not quite how I would have put it. But I blame myself. Let me explain:

The reason Joe merited five full pages in the glossiest of glossy magazines can largely be put to his somewhat improbable glamour factor in three major areas: He lived in a prime Park Avenue apartment; he dined out nightly at the finest restaurants; and when pitching the peeler he typically sported a suit by Chester Barrie of England, a shirt from his Turnbull & Asser collection, a puffy pocket square and a tie whose knot never slipped from its grip on the Adam’s apple.

A torrent of tributes came in over the Internet immediately following the announcement of his death. While scanning these postings, I came across one, by a David Galbraith, that pulled me up with a guilty twinge. Galbraith, while thoroughly respectful of the deceased, questioned the prevailing image of Joe as some kind of English aristocrat who had a fortune socked away; and he began to pick apart the myth (as he took the liberty of calling it) by zeroing in on the maestro’s clothes, like the child in the Hans Christian Andersen tale who blurts that the emperor has nothing on.

For the sake of the Truth (grandiloquent phrase!), I would like to correct, or “shade” more accurately, the existing portrait that I advanced in VF. I mean no disrespect to Joe, who became my friend after being my subject and remains for me a towering figure. (Full disclosure: I hope to write a book about Joe Ades that will cover even more of his history, his lifestyle and his importance as a New York public figure.) Joe himself was made uneasy by a certain direction I took in the VF article and was looking to set the record straight with Dennis Hamill of the Daily News, who approached Joe late in 2008 with the idea of writing about his life with Estelle, his beloved fourth wife, who had died a year earlier. The story was to run on Valentine’s Day; and so it did, under Hamill’s byline, but after Joe himself had died.

Wait. I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the clothes for a moment. I stand by Joe as a natty dresser, but since the VF article, his suits have been described by others as “bespoke,” “expensive” and “European.” All these strike me as hyperbolic.The last two terms I would call misleading, while the first, “bespoke,” is just plain wrong: he did not go in for custom suits, and not necessarily because of the cost.

One of his sisters was married to a tailor trained in Paris and Savile Row, and when Joe was a boy of 15 or 16 but launched already as a full-time grafter, he had this relative make his suits.The sister’s husband’s name was Jack, and he had a solid practice for years. But Jack was a very conservative tailor, and Joe at 15 had a taste for the flashy. He tried another tailor or two, but he was always disappointed. He’d start by falling in love with the cloth, but he never liked the finished product.

The Chester Barrie answered his need. Here was a wellmade suit off the peg, and Joe recalled, more than 50 years later, in a thrilling voice as if it were yesterday, his first encounter with a Chester Barrie: “It was in Blackpool. A firm called Orie’s. I bought a jacket, a sports jacket. I loved it; it fit so well. I was hooked on their thing ever since. Always different, unusual cloths. And you could stay up all night in them and do whatever you wanted to do—and they’d still be good the next day.”

If England is considered part of Europe, and as Chester Barrie is an English suit, I suppose Joe’s suits could be called European, but I think it more accurate to call them English. And could one properly call them expensive? Joe bought all his clothes at discount. He’d wait for a sale to come around and then buy things in multiples. In January 2006, for instance, he flew to London, along with Estelle, and picked up seven Chester Barries at Harrods, which was having a sale on his brand. A single suit was going for roughly half its normal thousand pounds. He amassed his collection of shirts the same way.The Turnbull & Asser store in Manhattan runs an annual Father’s Day sale, and Joe was usually one of the first to rummage among the tables then.

Galbraith, the blogger, was the keen-eyed one who fixed on Joe’s clothes and is quite correct in his surmising that the clothes did not set Joe back a fortune. But Galbraith comes to this conclusion based in part on a false assumption—that, judging by the width of the lapels, the suits “may have been from the early ’80s.”

Joe put too much wear on his suits to have them last for 20 years. I have no actuarial numbers regarding their average length of life, but I doubt if even the oldest among them made it as far as 10 years old. So how explain the wide lapels as seen in a recent photograph?

The Chester Barrie is now bespoke, but during the years it was ready-to-wear—years when Joe was wearing the label—it was the kind of suit that never changed. A recent edition would have looked much the same as a relic from the 1980s. “They’re very old-fashioned,” Joe once told me with the sheepish air of a loyalist. But it’s all a matter of spin, is it not? What some call old-fashioned, others call classic. And “classic” is the word I used—with care—to describe his suits in VF.

One last word about the suits. The fact that he wore them at all on the job, these fancy duds while peddling peelers, was not, as some New Yorkers supposed, a sign of eccentricity but a carry-over of standard practice among the grafters of postwar England, or at least among the cream of the profession.The idea behind the dressing up was expressed by Joe in the form of a maxim: “You should never look as though you need the money when you’re selling something.” Along these lines I once inquired if he dressed for women or other men. “Other men,” he replied on the instant. “You know they’re looking down on you because you’re selling something on the street for two and six pence or whatever it is. So there’s always a certain kick out of knowing that you’re better dressed than they are.”

Let's move on to the dining habits. A review of the facts will show, I think, that he did live up to his myth in this area. “Food,” he once declared with aplomb, “is the only thing I pay full price for.” He rarely booked a table in advance. Instead, he simply showed up early (at sixish, say) and took his chances. Elio’s, Jean Georges and Centolire were some of his regular haunts over the years, not to mention La Ripaille, his son-in-law’s place on Hudson Street.

I dined with him often in the last year and a half, his widower period when he missed Estelle. Last August 15, according to my notes, my wife and teenage daughter and I met him for dinner, at his insistence, at the tony Gotham Bar & Grill (not his usual stomping grounds), where he’d come right after a full day’s work at the Union Square Greenmarket. Now in the softly lit interior of the slowly filling restaurant, a service assistant in a purple tie bearing a basket of bread and tongs went round the table to each of us in turn naming and describing the selection of breads and pointing to each with the silver tongs. There were white epi rolls, green olive rolls, multigrain rolls and hazelnut focaccia. My wife and daughter and I were timid. We each took only a single roll, but Joe, on being shown the breads, pondered his choices and pointed to one, pondered again and pointed to another, pondered again and pointed to a third, all with a quiet air of engrossment.We had thought, my wife and daughter and I, that we were exhibiting good deportment by taking only a single roll, but Joe, with his unselfconsciousness, demonstrated the best behavior.

And now we come to the crux of the matter—the prime Park Avenue eight-room apartment. He really lived in such a place, but he thought it would give a false idea to include its mention in VF. The apartment belonged to his wife, Estelle, and was not a prize he had earned with the peeler. He himself had been living alone in a small apartment, before Estelle. It was a small apartment on the Upper East Side, but not on glorious, vaunted Park Avenue. Joe was residing at the former address when Sheila Anne Feeney of the Daily News, in a funny, sprightly-written account, brought him his first exposure in New York, in September 1994. By 2005, when I came along, he’d made it to Park Avenue, and I was determined, in one way or another, to work this angle into my story, knowing full well there was gold in these hills. It was like a setup out of O. Henry: a man of low station, in this case a peddler, living the life of the genteel rich. (The story when published in VF bore the title “The Gentleman Grafter”—a play on O. Henry’s The Gentle Grafter.)

I prevailed on Joe not to stand in my way. The apartment angle had to go in. All the more so because of a glaring (or so I deemed it) lack of a peg. I saw no immediate peg at hand, and during our time together, which stretched over months, I pestered Joe to help me find one. He didn’t understand the term at first. “A peg,” I told him, “is the news event you hang a story or profile on.” He soon caught on, and I have no doubt that could he see what I’ve written here he’d nod with a look of satisfaction and tell me his passing is the peg for this follow-up.

We never found that other peg, but the story was accepted even without one. I brought in Joe and Estelle’s apartment but was vague about Joe’s relation to the apartment. I did say Joe had moved in with Estelle after living alone in a one-bedroom apartment, and I did describe the wealthy Estelle as a fine-boned lady “of independent means.” I see these now as sops to my conscience. They were meant as hints to the attentive reader that Joe, as fine a grafter as he was, was not on Park Avenue because of the peeler. As he said to me once in reference to his business, “I make a good living. That’s all it is.” This I did not include in the profile. As it happens, it was something he told me later, after the piece had already appeared, but had he told me before it appeared, even then I would have suppressed it, as running counter to the demands of the genre. (While I won’t disclose how much he grossed yearly—Joe swore me to secrecy, and I’ll respect his wishes after his death—I will say that he made more than most freelance journalists and earned what would be considered a comfortable middle-class income for most people—even in NYC.) And the peeler is spinning money still. Ruth, Joe’s 51-yearold daughter, can now be seen working the tool at some of the same plots blazed by her father. Joe was a spender as well as an earner, and the peelers were intended as Ruth’s inheritance.

Evidently some readers took at face value Joe’s installment in lofty purlieus. His first day at work after the profile appeared, he was plagued by a “nark” who had seen the profile or heard about it from someone else. In grafter lingo, a nark is a heckler or any person who messes the pitch. This one nark stood in the crowd and fingered Joe as an enemy of the people.

“This man lives on Park Avenue!” he shouted. “He don’t need the money. Look at him in them fancy clothes. Shame on him, taking poor people’s money. Other men out here struggling to make a dollar, and he goes home to Park Avenue.”

Joe was getting a taste of the future. This line of attack was to come again from other narks and jealous types (rival market-traders mostly), and although he never lacked for an answer (“You don’t get to Park Avenue by selling something that’s a phony! You get to Park Avenue by giving value for money!”), I think he found the resentment a strain and was eager to put his image to rights when Dennis Hamill came knocking last year. Hamill went on to write a piece that revealed the lovely apartment on Park Avenue to have been a rental all along, for well under $4,000 a month. One of those unbelievable steals under the protection of rent control. Hamill presents these housing tidbits with little comment, as if in passing. Their inclusion by him in what amounts to a love story should be taken, I think, as the work of Joe, who wanted these private facts made public, to silence the narks and all the others who felt that because he lived on Park Avenue he was too well off to be grubbing for dollars.

Joe took over the apartment’s lease on December 1, 2007, two weeks after he lost Estelle. In the year and a half remaining to him, he had no trouble making the rent. The peelers more than covered his nut, and he still had plenty to spend on dinners and to spoil his grandkids at every chance.

Call it a fitting irony. In the end, he showed that he really did belong on Park Avenue after all.