Most evenings, the apartment really did feel like an abbey. Hammarskjöld rejected nearly all dinner invitations and spent his evenings reading—Joseph Conrad was a favorite—often as Bach or Vivaldi played. Then he would lie down in a spartan twin bed, a phone beside him, ready to ring in the event of some international crisis, and fall asleep alone.
Occasionally, however, an eclectic assemblage of guests turned the place into a lively salon. Hammarskjöld counted among his friends the composer Leonard Bernstein, the poet W. H. Auden, the columnist Walter Lippmann, and the novelist John Steinbeck. Even Greta Garbo, a notorious recluse and the person who confined Hammarskjöld to the slot of second-most famous Swede in New York, sometimes surfaced in his apartment. Amid the worldly curios and guests romped a vervet monkey, a gift Hammarskjöld had been given on his African tour in January, during a stopover in Somalia. He named him Greenback, for the slight tint of his coat, and let him swing on a vine hanging from the banister. Never housebroken, the animal soiled Hammarskjöld’s shoe and wet his collar, but this did nothing to spoil the secretary-general’s affection. “Dag is crazy about the little monkey,” Ralph Bunche, one of the few colleagues to earn an invitation to Hammarskjöld’s, wrote after one dinner just before he left for the Congo.
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