City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (3 page)

I suppose that just as art was still meant to be difficult at the beginning of the sixties and only gradually became just another form of mass entertainment through the high jinks of Pop Art, in the same way politics were austere and Marxist in 1960 but had become “fun” by 1970, turning into the psychodrama of the New Left.

In fact, everything in the America I knew after 1965 was warming up, becoming more subjective and democratic and amusing and accessible. Although in my own way I, too, was moving toward the personal through my writing, I was never entirely convinced it was the right way. I still idolized difficult modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, and I listened with solemn but uncomprehending seriousness to the music of Schoenberg. Later I would learn to pick and choose my idiosyncratic way through the ranks of canonical writers, composers, artists, and filmmakers, but in my twenties I still had an unquestioning admiration for the Great—who were Great precisely because they were Great. Only later would I begin to see the selling of high art as just one more
form of commercialism. In my twenties if even a tenth reading of Mallarmé failed to yield up its treasures, the fault was mine, not his. If my eyes swooned shut while I read
The Sweet Cheat Gone
, Proust’s pacing was never called into question, just my intelligence and dedication and sensitivity. And I still entertain these sacralizing preconceptions about high art. I still admire what is difficult, though now I recognize it’s a “period” taste and that my generation was the last to give a damn. Though we were atheists, we were, strangely enough, preparing ourselves for God’s great Quiz Show; we had to know everything because we were convinced we would be tested on it—in our next life.

In the late sixties I was a living contradiction. I was still a self-hating gay man going to a straight psychotherapist with the intention of being cured and getting married. I had an almost Catholic awe before the whole institution of marriage, which I mocked at the same time. My parents were both Texans, and in one small corner of my mind I silently objected to the way Yankee intellectuals dismissed all Southerners as rednecks. Most of my new friends in New York scoffed at Lyndon Johnson because of his accent, ignoring the value of his Great Society reforms. At Time-Life I would read through Johnson’s off-the-record remarks to journalists in the presidential plane; he’d talk about “niggers” but at the same time he was determined to help black Americans get a good education. Because he used the N-word I believed him.

I was a nerd and an egghead but I was also going three times a week to the Sheridan Square gym and building up my body. I’d never liked sports and I’d been bad at them in school, but now I was spending hours every week pumping iron. When other men stared at my newly muscular body with lust, I could scarcely breathe. Their attention frightened me, though I sought it.

As a socialist I longed for the Revolution, but in the meantime I held on to my nine-to-five (or eleven-to-six) office job. And felt
bad about it. We “socialists” were so naïve that we thought no one with progressive politics should drive an expensive car or live in a big house; if he did, we accused him of hypocrisy, not realizing that an individual’s personal wealth has no relevance to his politics once he’s freed himself of self-serving arguments. At the same time, ironically, we were so uniformly and unconsciously sexist that we saw nothing strange in that all writers at Time-Life were male and all researchers female.

One day a top editor, a real New England patrician named Maitland Edey, overheard me and my researcher—and great friend to this day—Sigrid talking about feminism. Edey was genuinely curious about what rights women might still be demanding, and he invited Sigrid and me to a pleasant lunch at the top of the Time-Life Building in a private dining room. Faced with this kindly but starchy and highly skeptical aristocrat, we couldn’t come up with much. I’m sure he was disappointed by our fuzzy, halfhearted observations and was probably convinced by the end of the meal that this new, only half-formulated version of feminism was nothing but empty complaint.

I thought I wanted to be a serious novelist but I consecrated my days to journalism (for some reason I could never use my empty hours of time on the job for my own writing). My nights I gave to playwriting. I’d go out for dinner and then come back to the office and write plays until ten or eleven before heading home. I had written a play at the University of Michigan that had won a prize and was eventually staged in New York, where it received mixed reviews and closed after a month. It was about angry black servants in a white household and was out of step with the conciliatory civil rights era. The content may have been ahead of the times, but the style was passé, since it was inspired by Ionesco’s theater of the absurd and the baroque, menacing mockery of Genet’s
The Blacks
.

Now that I had an agent and
The Blue Boy in Black
had had a
production, I felt I must go on writing plays. I knew almost no one in the theater aside from the actors who’d starred in my play, Cicely Tyson and Billy Dee Williams. And I scarcely knew them; not till years after the fact did I read Cicely had married Miles Davis. She was totally mysterious as a person—I didn’t even know where she’d been born or if she had a boyfriend.

I read the “News of the Rialto,” about showbiz, every day faithfully in the
New York Post
. I immersed myself in the gossip-column tittle-tattle of who might be replacing whom in a certain production and whether the new Murray Schisgal comedy might or might not be in trouble on the road.

In those days, before Xerox copiers, faxes, and computers, the chief problem facing a poor playwright was making copies of his work. I swore that if ever I became rich I’d endow a free script-copying foundation for the indigent young. Sometimes I would compose plays directly onto mimeographing stencils. I’d make my agent, Sylvia Herscher at William Morris, read my scripts off the stencils. If she didn’t like them, I wouldn’t waste the money having copies run off.

She never liked my plays after that first one, which she’d ushered onto off-Broadway. She disliked
Mrs. Morrigan
, my play about a divorced woman slowly going crazy who turns into what used to be called a nymphomaniac. Much of the play was devoted to my protagonist’s anguished exchanges with the grotesque imaginary figures who haunted and hectored her. Nor did Sylvia like my ritualistic play about a violent, incestuous family who sacrifice one of their own members to appease a dark god or exorcise the curse of some ancient tribal crime (I can’t really remember the plot). I rewrote that play several times, but Sylvia remained unconvinced. Nor did she like my comedy of manners
Madame Steiner
, nor my gender-switching one-act
Trios
, which I would eventually present in a staged reading to a few friends, who were polite. I had a weeklong affair on Fire Island with Mart Crowley, who’d just written the
hilarious
Boys in the Band
. I made him read
Trios
; when he finished it, he looked up and asked, “Is this supposed to be funny?”

It never occurred to me to seek out a new agent, even though Sylvia was actually more famous for the musicals she worked on for fifty years as producer, publisher, and agent. Nor did I think I should give my plays to one of the casual little cabarets springing up off-off-Broadway, despite the fact that my lover, Stan, sometimes performed at the Caffè Cino. The owner, Joe Cino, would stand at the back of the theater manning the rumbling, hissing espresso machine while a drag queen emoted about the horrors of aging in Lanford Wilson’s
Madness of Lady Bright
. The stage was just eight feet by eight feet and there were fewer than twenty tables, most of them empty. A hat was passed by the actors at the end of each performance. I remember seeing Warhol actress Mary Woronov cracking a whip onstage and growling sadistic curses. I remember an incestuous brother and sister calling mournfully for each other in
Home Free!
—another Wilson one-act. Leonard Melfi, a scruffy heterosexual who sweated and shook and laughed painfully while making constant frightening little jokes about his funny looks, wrote cabaret comedies until he was whisked away by the producer Carlo Ponti to Rome, where he wrote the one-page idea for
Mortadella
, a vehicle for Sophia Loren. In the movie Loren tries to smuggle a huge Italian sausage through American customs.

In 1970, when I met Carlo Ponti, who was Loren’s husband, he pushed my hundred-page film script aside and asked why I couldn’t be brief and to the point like the great Melfi. He didn’t like my scenario because it satirized Italian men. Americans like me were so used to self-satire in the style of Mort Sahl and Elaine May and Mike Nichols that it astonished me when smaller, prouder nations didn’t welcome satire at all, especially if written by foreigners. A comedy was fine, such as
Divorce, Italian Style
, but a satire about Italy by an American was most unwelcome.

Chapter 4

I admired a theater director called Joe Chaikin and would attend the rehearsals of his company, though not often. I did nothing often. As though I knew how compulsive I could be, I was almost afraid of developing habits. And as a writer I defended myself against—and this will sound even crazier—immersing myself in my own period.

I suppose my reasoning went something like this: A writer must be eternal and universal; if he falls prey to the fads and fancies of his own period, he’ll disappear when his epoch ends. Therefore he should discreetly sample it but make all the great writers and thinkers of the past and of every culture his true contemporaries. I belonged to no clubs and could not be labeled with any sticker except
gay
and
WASP
. Still, at that time
gay
was a secret designation and
WASP
was so general as to be meaningless. Only later did Jewish comedians make the idea of a WASP (and a Jew) funny.

I felt I had this admirable surfeit of negative capability precisely because I wasn’t a Harvard man or an aristocrat. I had no visible markings. I considered myself lucky to be invisible. I was a free agent. No one owned my soul. If anyone asked, I’d say that a Midwestern intellectual had nothing glib about him. It didn’t occur to him that he could social-climb through making references to Flaubert or Baudelaire. If an Ohioan read
Flowers of Evil
, I argued,
he did so because he liked the poetry. No one back home would ever be impressed by his knowledge of any topic, especially not a cultural one—which he’d do well to conceal if he didn’t want to be considered a ridiculous egghead. Does anyone think this way now? In the age of the Internet, of fifteen-minute fame and above all such local fame (“I’m famous to the fifteen people who read my blog”), in a time when cultural space is so segmented and time so speeded up, does it still make sense to worry over how to construct a lasting reputation? Will any reputations last?

I took fiction so seriously (which I thought of as art) that I wanted my prose to be un-American, not of any era, unidentifiable because it was original. Of course I didn’t do much to realize these preposterous ambitions. I was too busy writing unproduceable plays and meeting new people and killing time at work.

Joe Chaikin had a lover, the playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, but apparently Joe and I had a brief affair. At least in the early 1990s, when I was writing a biography of Jean Genet and asked the librarian at Kent State for copies of Jean Genet’s letters, the librarian wrote back, “Perhaps you’d also like copies of your own love letters to Joe Chaikin.” I couldn’t recall ever having been in love with Joe. I can picture only one hot summer night with him in his little apartment, his body covered with curly hairs, his face and back lightly filmed in sweat. There was something unhealthy about him, I thought—and soon enough he had to have open-heart surgery, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak normally. He incorporated that disability into his work; earlier for no apparent personal reasons he had learned sign language and worked with the deaf on the stage. He had a great sweetness and intelligence about him—an intelligence of the senses and of the instincts.

I thought he should stage my play
Mrs. Morrigan
, but he was far more attracted to plays he and his company would piece together
during months and months of improvisation, though the final text might be set down and polished and shaped by van Itallie.
America Hurrah
, a trilogy of plays produced in 1966, was a watershed anti–Vietnam War protest, one with expressionist elements (puppets designed by Robert Wilson) and dialogue that sometimes sounded like Beckett and sometimes like Ionesco. Chaikin directed only one of the three plays. Another play that van Itallie developed with Chaikin was
The Serpent
, performed in 1969, which toured all over the world in the following years.

Chaikin had worked out a kind of theater that would suddenly lurch without transition into enactments of repressed feelings. A man picking up his dry cleaning would suddenly click into a slow-motion rapturous embrace with the woman working in the shop.

One of the participants in the Open Theater, as the troupe was called, was an actor who in those days had a caveman virility and a brooding, almost scary presence—Gerome Ragni. He had been a member of the Open Theater since its founding in 1962 and starred in its production of Megan Terry’s 1966 play,
Viet Rock
, perhaps the first theater event to protest the war in Vietnam. Ragni then went on to write the words and lyrics for
Hair
, which also used Chaikin’s stage techniques. Later, after the success of
Hair
, Ragni lost his manly good looks and became a sort of clown, with a white man’s Afro and gaudy, flowing tie-dyed clothes. He was always stoned and talking and baring his teeth. His script for his next musical, the short-lived
Dude
, was originally two thousand pages long. His apartment had a narrow, plush birth canal as its entryway. Everyone laughed at him.