Liberation (65 page)

Don has decided to include a batch of photographs of drawings in his show. These will be of drawings which are of celebrities but not really up to standard. Don says they will look better reduced. And they will be of interest, anyhow, as celebrity portraits. Irving Blum approves of this idea.

Gottfried and Silvia Reinhardt came to supper last night. They arrived drunk and got drunker. They squabbled together like children, and they both talked to us at once, so we couldn't attend to either. Then Silvia fell asleep on the couch. But we enjoyed their visit. They are both of them warm and affectionate, in their different ways. Gottfried asked me to speak at a Max Reinhardt memorial concert which is to be held in the Hollywood Bowl on August 30. I said yes because I want to see what it's like, speaking at the Bowl. It appeals to my show-off side. What struck me again was Gottfried's extraordinary vitality. Despite his physical grossness and his Austrian air of indolence, he seems so vital, so relatively young. And under his easy good humor there is real strength, and behind his jokes real compassion and serious concern. I think he is a very good man.

 

June 13.
I've kept meaning to write in this diary because such a lot has been happening. Now all I can do is to put it all down briefly in a single lump.

On the 9th, we left for Yosemite as planned. We'd promised to meet John Schlesinger and Michael Childers at the airport at 7:10 and didn't arrive till after 7:30 because that angel Kitty had been fluffing his dear fur. But John and Michael were late too. They had just started to get into a flap and, as we came in, they had me paged—the only time I've ever heard myself paged at an airport. Otherwise all went smoothly. The rented car was actually there when we got to Merced, and we duly navigated the twisty back roads and got ourselves onto the highway that comes up from Fresno and turned off at the Chinquapin turnoff which leads to Glacier Point. I was terribly edgy, hoping that Glacier Point would come up to my memories of it and that it wouldn't disappoint John and Michael. We made the mistake of stopping at another viewpoint first which
was
disappointing because the view was only partial. And, when we did get to Glacier Point, it was swarming with schoolchildren. I don't think John and Michael really thought it worth the effort, but Don was caught at once. I knew it, when he squatted down and gazed, motionless. There was Half Dome. There was the Yosemite Fall. There were the two great falls away on your right. There were the ridges behind, with snow still on them. A chipmunk ran across the face of the precipice and a little bird launched straight out over the abyss. You saw the hotel and the meadows and the river and the tiny cars, far far below. Whenever the children stopped screaming for a moment, there was the silence and the far faint purring of the falls. Don said to me in a low voice, “It's unanswerable,” and I knew that we shared yet another secret experience.

Then we drove down to the valley and had a late lunch at the Ahwahnee Hotel. People everywhere, but that didn't matter so much. The Bridal Veil Fall was splendid. We walked right up to it and there was a rainbow in the spray. All the falls were still full from the melting of the snow water.

There was nowhere to stay. Everything booked up. So we drove on to San Francisco. It was beautiful, coming out of the mountains onto the plain, and then the sunset lighting the clouds. I hated the Fairmont; the guests seemed to be all Watergate folk but in fact they are probably little provincials out to splurge on some special occasion and therefore eager to be overcharged. They will brag about their bills later as people do about their illnesses when they are let out of hospital. Don and I snapped at each other and had a brief quarrel, which merely made me realize how beautifully we have been getting along for the past month. Next day we saw a painting by F.E. Church,
Rainy Season in the Tropics
—a marvellous romantic landscape, rather like the Andean plateau. (Later we found that Paul Wonner, whom we saw last night, is a big admirer of Church.) And then we got a plane back to Los Angeles, in the afternoon. That night on T.V. we heard that Bill Inge had killed himself. After two unsuccessful tries with pills, he gassed himself in his garage. The obscene ruthless obstinacy of despair. Now, of course, we all feel we should somehow have prevented it. But we couldn't have.

The day before yesterday, I spent the whole day downtown at the American Booksellers' Association convention, being interviewed and autographing copies of
Kathleen and Frank
in paperback. While there I had to endure lunch with several of the Curtis representatives. They were all married men, talking about the girls they were seeing here in Los Angeles in a way which took you back to Dorothy Parker. It was depressing. I kept very quiet and I think they were aware of this, but at least they kept off fag stories—to my relief, because I didn't want to have to speak up and make everybody uncomfortable and yet I knew I would have to. The real literary star of the day was the actress who had played in
Deep Throat
!
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There was a line right down one side of the gigantic convention hall to get her autograph.

 

June 14.
Swami has had another setback; he very nearly developed pneumonia while up at Santa Barbara, but managed to give his lecture and then insisted on being brought back to Hollywood, so he could see his doctor. He's better now but weak. The Father's Day lunch has been postponed until June 23. I saw Swami briefly last night. When I left, he said, “God bless you, Chris.” I said, “I'd much rather have
your
blessing, Swami.” I don't know what made me say that; it wasn't just a corny compliment. And I don't know exactly how Swami interpreted my meaning; anyway, he laughed.

I forgot to record that Swami told us, last time we were with him, that he hadn't slept more than two hours, the night before. I asked, “So you made japam all night?” And he answered, almost comically, “What else should I do?”

I ate with the boys at the monastery yesterday, before the reading. The two who most impress me at the moment are Bob Adjemian and Abedha (Tony Eckstein). I feel a very strong current of love from Bob, which is all the more impressive because he doesn't demonstrate it by looks, words or general behavior. And Abedha, that sour, moody little Jew, is now, it seems, almost uncannily happy. Either he's gone a bit nuts, or something essential has happened to him. But I don't think he's nuts. Last night he told me that two of the other monks—Jim Gates is one of them—are doing the worship every day. “And that makes it wonderful here,” he added, or words to that effect. It was as if he'd said that the monastery had been moved to the ocean and that therefore they were now getting wonderful sea air.

When I meditate nowadays, I try to conjure up the shrine with all of them sitting in it, and I say the meditations Swami told me to say as if they were being said by different monks and nuns in turn, or else speaking in chorus. In this way I can join in with them and lose myself for a few moments. It is much easier to say “we” than “I” when trying to avoid distractions. (In doing this, maybe I'm reverting to Kathleen's preference for group worship, after all!) Bob is one of the people I chiefly think of. Also Beth [High], Abedha, Gauriprana.
⁸⁶
And then I remind myself that, at this very moment (7 a.m. to about 7:45) Swami, Krishna and Abhaya are meditating in Swami's room. So I mentally join them.

I talked to Lenny Spigelgass this morning, asking him if I should risk going to see Mike Laughlin's film at a projection room at United Artists studio.
⁸⁷
He warned me earnestly not to. “They're longing to get us, Chris. You and I are too well known. Don't do it!” Lenny thinks the strike may be over quite soon, however.

Lenny said of Bill Inge, “In the last few months, there was nothing there.”

One thing I forgot about my visit to Swami last night. When I came in, I prostrated as usual and touched his feet with my head. As far as I was concerned, that was it. But, as I started to get up, I saw his hand extended over me. In my dumb vague way, I thought he was holding out his hand for a handshake, so I tried to take it. Immediately, he raised it a little, out of my reach. So I reached up for it. He raised it higher. And then I realized that he was blessing me! I was quite embarrassed, but he didn't laugh.

 

June 17.
On the 14th, I had lunch with Dr. William Melnitz
⁸⁸
at the UCLA faculty center, to talk to him about Max Reinhardt, in preparation for my speech at the Bowl. He says that Max was just like Gottfried to look at (before Gottfried got so fat) and that he resembled Gottfried in many ways, but that Gottfried didn't love his father as much as Wolfgang did—at least, not in the early days. I got the impression that Melnitz doesn't like Gottfried very much. And disapproves of his book about Max.
⁸⁹

Melnitz thinks that Max's greatest theatrical talent was for working with actors. It didn't matter who they were. He treated the students at the Reinhardt School in Los Angeles just as he had treated his biggest stars in Berlin. I said I'd heard that the Los Angeles students performed so impressively because Max had trained them like animals, teaching them every move and every intonation. Melnitz denied this absolutely, saying that Max very often left an actor free to develop his performance in any way he chose. He was a wonderful audience and enjoyed the rehearsals more than anybody else.

After seeing Melnitz, I went with Don to visit Guy Dill and Charles Hill in their studios. Guy lives in Venice, on the corner of San Juan and Main Street, in a building from which boats used to be launched into the canal which once ran along Main. Now, all the interior walls have been knocked down, and the boarded floor of a former room is now just a low platform in the midst of the one great bare barnlike enclosure. Here Guy sleeps and eats in the presence of his concrete pillars, tension pieces and other artworks. Some of the tension pieces (he showed us photographs of them) are huge contraptions in which heavy blocks of concrete are involved and strips of metal are kept bent by wire cables bolted down to the floor. Guy says that he is considering switching from concrete to pumice because it will be so much easier to handle in bulk. The whole place is kept as tidy and clean as a showroom.

Guy is a tall very well-built boy with a rather puffy red face—the kind one describes as “meaty” and associates with football players. He wears his hair longish. Though not exactly handsome, he is extremely attractive and also intelligent. He projects quiet confidence and an air of intention; you feel that his works express just what he wants them to. Among the most self-revealing of them, perhaps, are some early “objects”: these are old faded adventure books such as you would find on the twenty-five cent tray outside a used bookstore; Guy has tied them up like parcels with black insulated wire (which has cruel-looking spiky knots in it, suggesting barbed wire) and has thrust jagged pieces of glass between their pages. They are astonishingly ugly, and they really made me react to them. I felt curiously outraged and almost scared. (Would the effect have been stronger if the books had been valuable, and/or sacred (Bibles, for instance)? I'm not sure. Maybe that would have seemed merely corny.) On the surface, Guy is nice mannered and friendly. He was really pleased to see us, I think.

Charles Hill and Paula have their studio in the building which is rented by Billy Al Bengston; it used to be a (semigay) bar. It is now a very tall room because the bar's false ceiling got burned in a fire and had to be taken down. Charles and Paula sleep on a platform which is about three-quarters of the way up the wall. The place is untidy because Charles is using every inch of it. His tattered paper paintings—most of them at least as big as flags—look like mummy wrappings. Charles buries them in the earth, so that the dye runs and they turn pale and moldy; if they show signs of falling apart—and they all seem about to—he stitches them onto a paper backing. Lately, however, he has switched to making tangled cutout designs like winding creeper-stems within an oval outline. To us, the most interesting items in the studio were a collection of photomat pictures for which Charles has posed—he somehow got the use of a photomat machine in privacy for a week or two.
⁹⁰
In many of the pictures he is naked to the loins, camping in dance postures, sometimes with a female wig and makeup. He has a terrific ally sexy lithe smooth brown body, and a whole new aspect of him seems revealed. He also makes films in which he is the only actor, but we didn't see any of these.

Then we went to have supper up at the Alexanders' house. On the way back, just as we got to the bottom of Las Tunas Canyon, the brakes of Don's Fiat began to seize. He had barely enough mobility to get us across the highway—otherwise we might easily have been hit and killed. Then the car wouldn't budge an inch. Don walked to the Las Tunas Isle Motel and phoned the Auto Club. The repair truck came quickly; it had been in the neighborhood. Two big youths, one of them sweetly pretty, jumped out and put a dolly under the car, since it couldn't be towed otherwise. Both boys seemed to be enjoying their job, although they are on the all-night shift and sometimes get called out of their beds. They kept laughing and joking and clowning, but they knew exactly how to handle the situation. The pretty one's name was Morgan. They drove us to Adelaide, and there we found that the wheels had somehow come unlocked! The boys asked for ten dollars and we tipped them an extra five, for making this tiresome experience so pleasant. Later we realized that they had never asked Don for his club card or given him the usual form to sign. Were they going to pocket all the money? If so, bless them and preserve them from being found out.

On the 15th, I got a cable from Stephen Spender, telling me that Jean Ross died last month and giving me the address of her daughter Sarah Cockburn. It was truly considerate of Stephen to do this. Have written to Sarah.