At 94, She Had One of Her Best Years (and Made Sure Her Friend Did, Too)

Betty Gordon enjoyed reconnecting with a famous former paramour. But her favorite part of 2024 was helping out a friend in trouble.

Recent years have been difficult for Betty Gordon, a former actress, bar owner and downtown bon vivant who struggles with serious health and financial issues. But in 2024, well into her 90s, she still accomplished remarkable things.

Ms. Gordon wrote and self-published her first book. She saw the first volume of a comic book portrayal of her fascinating life. She rescued a struggling friend and celebrated it all with a festive reunion in her honor at the Greenwich Village bar she once owned.

“It has been a truly wonderful year,” she said this month from her apartment on East 26th Street in Manhattan. “I’m basking in it. I feel very lucky, very chosen.”

Ms. Gordon, who moved to New York in the 1950s, when she was in her mid 20s, was once immersed in the downtown theater scene. She was married to the jazz saxophonist Hal McKusick and later had a yearlong romance with Frank Serpico, the undercover cop whose story was portrayed in the 1973 film starring Al Pacino.

In the 1990s Ms. Gordon took over the Stoned Crow, a dive bar on Washington Place in Greenwich Village, where she dressed in low-cut blouses and ran the pool table with iron-fisted resolve. The bar closed in 2010, and Ms. Gordon fell into ill health. Hospitalized several times in the last two years with congestive heart failure, she sold jewelry to pay for basic needs.

But her friend, the illustrator Ian Spence, was doing even worse.

A former Stoned Crow patron and employee, Mr. Spence, 56, had withered into substance abuse, and Ms. Gordon agonized over his decline. Then she made a proposal secretly designed to pull him back from the edge: She would write a children’s book if Mr. Spence would illustrate it.

The charming book — “Phoebe the Cat and Her Curious Dog Dream” — was published in July and shot to No. 1 in multiple categories on Amazon, selling 2,366 copies in July alone, and it rose to No. 57 of all books on the site. At one point, Mr. Spence noted, books set at Hogwarts were trending lower on the list.

“We were outselling Harry Potter,” he said with a chuckle.

Soon, others sought Mr. Spence’s talents for their own projects. But more important, his life was back in order, just as Ms. Gordon had planned. Not only was he sober, but he no longer needed the four anti-anxiety medications he had been taking.

“Seeing him like this is so heartwarming,” Ms. Gordon said. “He has turned into a happy, fruitful, creative and sober human being, and all that marvelous talent came pouring forward in the book.”

Now, Mr. Spence is writing a biography of Ms. Gordon in serialized comic book form, and most days they spend a couple of hours working on it. The first volume was published in time for the November reunion at PubKey, the bitcoin-themed bar that has replaced the old Stoned Crow. The timing coincided with Ms. Gordon’s 94th birthday, and scores of old friends, patrons and admirers packed the joint, including Aviva Davidson, the former artistic director of the nonprofit Dancing in the Streets, and her ex-husband, Jack Davidson, both of whom introduced Ms. Gordon to Mr. Serpico in the early 1970s. A New York Times article about Ms. Gordon in July led to her reconnecting with Mr. Serpico by telephone, and she heard from many other old friends, too; some were at the reunion.

“Overwhelming,” she said.

On Dec. 14, Ms. Gordon and Mr. Spence celebrated Christmas at her apartment. He gave her the new hardcover edition of the book they produced together, the one that she wrote, and that saved his life.

Around the New York Region

A look at life, culture, politics and more in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

• The Deadly Lure of Subway Surfing: For more than a century, people have climbed atop a train car in New York City in search of a thrill. Now social media has attracted a new generation of daredevils.
• An Elite School and the Criminal It Hired: Saint Ann’s School hired Winston Nguyen as a middle school math teacher knowing he had been imprisoned for fraud. Then someone began soliciting graphic sexual images from its students.
• How Congestion Pricing Would Work: If all goes as planned, most drivers will begin paying new tolls on Jan. 5 to reach the heart of Manhattan. See how much it may cost you.
• Keeping the Lights on in Little India: Three neighboring South Asian restaurants with string light-filled windows survived for decades in the East Village. Only one remains as Sixth Street’s “Curry Row” moniker fades.
• Sunday Routine: Joyce Short, who has worked with New York Junior Tennis and Learning for decades, takes a popcorn break in between classes and plays pickleball with friends.