Buddies (6 page)

I was as up for that show as Columbus was for new world, but when Mother and I got to the Ziegfeld Theatre and I made my habitual investigation of the streetfront photographs, I was somewhat unnerved to see that Alfred Drake had suddenly grown a beard. In the
Oklahoma!
and
Kiss Me, Kate
pictures he was clean-shaven; that’s how I liked him; and everyone else. I was just turning six and beards were strangely threatening to me. I suggested that I wait outside, but Mother, who, like some of my friends, sometimes sounds like Bette Davis, wasn’t having any. “The nerf!” she cried, propelling me indoors. “We nurtured him, and now he’s afrait of a beart!”

That
Kismet
afternoon stayed with me long after
Promises, Promises
and
Two by Two
faded into nothing. The overture, always a crucial element in my theatregoing as the unalterably novel first moment of contact, was bigger, broader, and grander than any I had yet heard, filled with Arabian cymbals and bells and gongs, and ecstatic in the “Stranger in Paradise” section, with
lots
of piano. (Much later I learned the show biz term for this, “concerto style.”)
Kismet
didn’t have a show curtain to flash during the overture.
The King and I
didn’t, either.
Can-Can
had one, a dazzling aerial view of Paris, and I eventually realized that operettas and the more serious types of musical play did without show curtains almost as a rule. An embellished curtain was a promise of guiltless fun, and a sober show meant to enlighten. I learned to distinguish lampoon from myth.

I suppose the Ziegfeld Theatre’s interior was a show curtain in itself, but I only have pictures to go by, as I don’t recall looking up. I was too intent on the stage, even covered, even dark, even waiting. Though curtained, the stage appeared to glow once the overture began—and, to my delighted horror, the overture didn’t end. It grew quiet. The curtain rose on a dark street scene in Bagdad. A tenor wandered through singing “Sands of Time.” As he reached the last note—“All that there is to know, only lovers
know
”—the gong erupted, the scrim rose, and the stage awoke as grotesquely high voices way up in the balcony imitated the cries of the faithful in the minarets of Mohammed. I gasped and trembled; Mother, who had already seen
Kismet,
assured me in a whisper, “This is only the beginning.” “No noises during the show,” I countered; I try to seize the revolutionary moment.

She was right, however. By the time the show had ended I was so enthralled I didn’t want to leave the theatre. I wasn’t alone, either. All around us were kids with parents, all the kids begging to be allowed to stay to see it again. We were entranced by expert show-shop marketing, yes, by the American musical’s typical jumble of fun—jokes about sex, picture-book tableaux, steamy choreography, and in general a surprising amount of hotcha for a show thought to be one of the last of the old-time operettas. But at the heart of all this, unmistakable even to my tender youth, was a profound commitment to the fantasy of romance. Most musicals take the love plot for granted: comedy is about courtship. But
Kismet
was about the
intoxication
of romance: “And This Is My Beloved,” “Night of My Nights,” “Stranger in Paradise.” The tender are impressionable; and I left the theatre in a daze.

*   *   *

It was not long before I was gathering such afternoons, Section Two,
Theatre Arts
magazine, cast albums, and playbills into a cult. It is at this point, I believe, that many gay men begin to share a profile, a quest, a sequence of discoveries. When I meet someone who tells me he never saw shows in his youth, I am staggered. “Where are you from?” I want to ask. Tucson? Lodz? The Sargasso Sea? Going to the theatre is
getting to the city:
sighting the place of the independence to come—for gay culture is city culture. It thrives on the sophistication and vitally needs the tolerance that cities develop. So being taken to the theatre is not the passive act it may seem. One invites it, wills it,
chooses
the event—or would a show choose you, put its name on your through an enchanting poster design, a startling song title, a performer of note?

A show was elite and you had to go.
Candide
was like that for me, from my first view of the logo illustration in Section Two, a parade of urbane-looking people bearing the credits on kites; from the charisma in the name Voltaire; from reverberations that Leonard Bernstein, Dorothy Parker, and Tyrone Guthrie gave off in jazz-classical crossover, in New York wit, in British stagecraft. Look, you want to be urbane? Go for it; it’s never too soon.

This one, I knew, I must have.
Candide!
I remember reading Brooks Atkinson’s review in
The New York Times,
which opened with some reference to the Flying Dutchman—so would the vaults of imagination swing open! My friends only knew Captain Video and Sky King. I had always sensed that I was destined to know more than anyone around me, and somehow I comprehended that the theatre was going to be my education.
The King and I
and
Kismet
had not quite connected me to anything; they were autotelic pleasures. But
Candide
was interdisciplinarily instructive.

This would be my eighth-birthday visit and luckily the faltering run lasted just long enough for me to get there, quiet as a postulant throughout the interminable ride to the Martin Beck Theatre. Divining that this was a momentous occasion, my dad had nabbed us front-row seats; and all the grown-ups around us thought it was so cute that this little boy was blissing out at sitting close. It’s cute at age eight, perhaps; but it would seem less cute than suspicious later on when I counted the amenities of theatregoing more heavily than those of making the team. Real men don’t care where they sit at a musical. Real men don’t watch spellbound, taking in every move that Barbara Cook and Irra Petina make, memorizing the show like a camera. I wonder if I sensed, even then, that a lot of things real men don’t do were the most stimulating things done.

By this time my parents had begun to realize that they had called up a monster in me. My older brothers played touch football and my little brothers played Candyland; I played show albums. Who were their heroes? Mickey Mantle and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Mine was Alistair Cooke. My mother took to calling me “The Changeling.” Perhaps I was too sophisticated, or too self-important in my sophistication. When our maid Sarah Lee Patterson purloined my
Mr. Wonderful
souvenir book, I fired her. I was nine years old.

My brothers were flabbergasted; my mother, for once, speechless. But Sarah Lee had been generally screwy, using the carpet sweeper on the lawn, eating TV dinners frozen, right out of the box, and spending her days in her room writing a movie script decorated with colored stick-on stars and stolen from
Raintree County,
with Sarah Lee all set to replace Elizabeth Taylor. Sarah Lee knew I had the goods on her, and went quietly. And lo, when the smoke cleared, it turned out that she had been systematically looting the house of treasures great and small. “Bud fired the maid” became a catchphrase in the family, admiration and horror at once. Real men don’t fire maids at the age of nine. Real men have no relationships with maids whatsoever.

Theatre governed my existence to the extent that I can chart my
Bildung
through the titles:
Peter Pan,
my first chance to see the magic worked upon someone younger than myself—my brother Andrew, who crowed at Mary Martin.
New Girl in Town,
my first
musical noir. Auntie Mame,
my first nonmusical.
Redhead,
my first inkling that not everyone loves musicals to death, when my dad abruptly got up after ten minutes of—I must admit—infantile nonsense, told me he’d meet me in the lobby at five o’clock, and left.
Salad Days
(in London), an experience in culture shock: the playbill cost money, Britishers tend to cluster in the middle of the house (leaving me alone in the first row, cowering under the souvenir program), and the level of production was far below what Broadway took for granted.
Flower Drum Song,
the first show I saw twice, first with Mother and then in one of those dynastic theatre parties in which every living relative takes part, serried along an entire row of seats. My littlest brother Tony, who was so excited by
The Music Man
that he couldn’t sit down once the curtain went up, did not take to the solemnity of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and wandered in and out of the house in search of the men’s room, the candy counter, and other arcana, to my digust. Worse yet, my dad happily sang along with the orchestra during the overture—and I mean aloud, improvising lyrics when memory failed. “No talking during the show!” I explained. He just tousled my hair and went right into “Grant Avenue.” You can’t get anywhere with someone like that.

Not many real men get into musicals. My dad and Oscar Hammerstein II are the only two I know of. The rest of us do almost as a matter of course. Why? One possibility is what I call the
Candide
theory: musicals make you smart. I got more out of that one show—in lit, music, and social history—than some people got out of four years of college. Its overture taught me what a rondo and a Rossini crescendo were before I knew the terms. The auto-da-fé scene introduced me to McCarthyism. (My father caught the parallel and explained it to me during the intermission.) From Voltaire I leaped to Diderot, Leibniz and the Enlightenment, from Tyrone Guthrie to Olivier, Gielgud, the Old Vic, and the Kembles, from Dorothy Parker to the New York wits, from the word “satire” to the notion of irony. If I followed
Candide’s
allusions and implications to their ends, I would know everything.

Of course, gays have to. At any rate, we have to know more than the straights know: have to understand what we are as well as what they are—have to find
our
unique place in
their
culture. For some of us, isolated in the straight system, the stage gave off one’s first whiff of the gay tang. Certain clues led one to postulate the existence of another system, a secret one. One saw signs in the behavior of the male gypsies and gratuitous torso bearings, in questionably quaint rhymes and sly jokes, even in Daniel Blum’s emphasis on male body shots in his
Theatre World
annuals. I remember looking up
Kismet
in one of these volumes and being surprised by a photograph of Steve Reeves, that icon of pre-Stonewall calculus. The photo caught an insignificant moment of the show and was clumsily cropped; it didn’t belong in a book. Why was it there? Because Reeves in Arabian pajamas was too toothsome not to be included? Obviously Blum thought so; his
Theatre Worlds
were like certain New York parties: always room for the beautiful. This is an exclusively gay notion, and coming upon it through my cult told me I wasn’t alone.

Overtly, I pretended membership in the straight club; this was the 1950s. Yet we cultists found our way around it: for taking up theatre as a hobby was not unlike coming out in code, reserving a place in a possible gay future without having to challenge the hypocrisy of the social contract. Kids always want to be like each other, have what they all have and fashion clubs of belonging; to have something different and join one’s own club was to practice for later, when the system was no longer secret. Thus, liking musicals was like a legalized coming out. The connection made sense: what other profession is as gay-identified as theatre?

Indeed, an ancient queen who has been everywhere and known everyone once told me that gay was invented in a theatre, in 1956. Yes, there were the Greeks, but all their secrets were lost. Petronius? Fragments, dreams. Ronald Firbank was a fluke and Noel Coward was an abundance of suave, not a sexuality. No, the queen tells, gay came about at the City Center revival of A
Streetcar Named Desire
in which Tallulah Bankhead played Blanche DuBois. Everyone who attended that production was instantly struck gay, the old queen says, including the usherettes, the candy sellers, the stage crew, and—on Tallulah’s good nights—even those who were passing outside the theatre. This must be gospel. What else is common to this scattered, unwieldy, and inherently contradictory condition we term the “gay community” but a bent for the stage? We all go; we all look upon those who don’t as unintellectual, uncultured, gross. True, we don’t all want the same thing from it. Some want a poetry of life, some a keen comix, some a colorful immortality. But I notice that
A Streetcar Named Desire
has all of these, as well as the two basic gay characters, the stud and the queen.

If attending theatre educates, putting it on stimulates, which is why most of the men who write, produce, stage, perform, or even drum hype for the theatre are gay, with emphasis on musicals. Why musicals? Because gays love boas and sequins? Or because they have been attracted by a unique form of music theatre that sophisticates all arts so deftly and—on occasion—profoundly that it sweeps other pastimes and enlightenments to the side? Musicals aren’t a fetish, then: they are the stimulation of the cultivated.

This is why many of us get into playwriting in youth, laying down versions of our favorite shows, adapting novels and plays, even attempting originals. When I was scarcely old enough to stand I was herding my parents into my living room for cameo pageants, written, scored, and acted by our boy. This may be why I never liked little off-Broadway musicals, with their simplistic composition and undecorated staging style—mine were no smaller and no more terrible. Off Broadway was tyke theatre. It was the racy wisdom of grown-up Broadway that I prized—not the glamour, but the self-knowledge.

Yet, years later, as we graduates of this eccentric college congregated and met in the metropolis, I learned that some of them did not have any perspective on themselves at all. The theatre had instructed them, but never let them go to learn about other things. Socially, professionally, even sexually, they were unversed and unmotivated. They were overgrown precocious kids, using their love of theatre to protect them from all the other loves they could not collect. Disreputably dressed, showing up everywhere bearing bags containing the day’s haul of records, books, or memorabilia, sporting the breath of a dragon, and blaring idiotic trivia about record matrix numbers, they put something of a punk on the image of the buff. And, of course, they were always gay.