Lost Years (20 page)

Ivan Moffat—Iris Tree's son by her American husband—came back from the war about this time, to start working on films in Hollywood with George Stevens. He had just married a girl named Natasha [Sorokine] who had lived for some time with Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir, as a sort of erotic stepdaughter.
¹⁵
Natasha was Franco-Russian, large and beautiful and sulky; later she became lively and crazy and a public nuisance. Ivan was then extremely cute and very like Dirk Bogarde. More about them both later.

Michael Hall. He was then an actor, in his early twenties, pretty in a sly, sugary way, almost certainly Jewish though he wouldn't admit it. 1946 was the year in which he appeared as the son of Fredric March, in
The Best Years of Our Lives
. Michael didn't do anything to distinguish himself in the picture. He continued to act after this but never with much success. Later he became an extraordinarily successful, almost clairvoyant collector and seller of antiques; he could find real treasures in a thrift shop. . . . Christopher met him at a party sometime in the winter of 1945—1946. Michael made a dead set at Christopher, coming up to him and murmuring, “I'm extraordinarily attracted.” (Christopher later heard that Jay de Laval had encouraged Michael to do this, presumably because Jay still owed Caskey a grudge for walking out on him.) Caskey was present at the party, I think, but he certainly didn't mind. Michael's friend (I forget his name) was present also, and did. Christopher knew he was behaving badly, but Michael's attention flattered him, and he took Michael back to the Entrada Drive apartment. When they got there, Christopher found he hadn't a key. Michael climbed in through the fanlight and opened the door, a feat which appealed to Christopher as being sexily athletic. Michael had a plump, creamy white, extremely fuckable body. [. . .] they had an enjoyable time together. And Christopher continued to have sex with Michael from time to time, good-humoredly and without emotional involvement, for about twenty years [. . .].

Lennie Newman. He made his appearance in the Canyon, as Jay's boyfriend, sometime in 1946. He was small, blond, cute, full of giggles and screams, a hard worker, a hard drinker, a defector from the Mormons in Utah. Everybody liked him. He had absolutely honest bleary blue eyes and was so naturally friendly that he even got along with the cops; they didn't arrest him when they caught him driving drunk. Jay took him on as assistant chef at the restaurant and taught him all his secret sauces. Lennie was probably the only one of Jay's “lovers” who really loved him.

Katherine Anne Porter. I am very vague about dates here but it seems to me that Christopher and Caskey got to know her while they were still at Entrada Drive. Perhaps she was visiting Los Angeles because of some projected movie. The image she presented was that of a senior southern belle (she would have been fifty-two), extremely gracious and rather ridiculously ladylike—her “beauty” and her “breeding” were qualities to which she firmly laid claim and you had to accept them as real if you wanted to associate with her. Beneath these airs and graces, Christopher saw a tough coarse frontier woman, pushy, ambitious, fairly good-natured if handled with proper deference. Christopher and Caskey played up to her and for a while the three of them were almost friends. Katherine Anne treated them like favorite nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher's deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher's basic literary snobbery.
How dare she,
he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up
cook
in her arty finery, how dare she
presume
like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan and the others. . . . If Christopher hadn't been drinking so much at this time, he would almost certainly have been able to hide his feelings from Katherine Anne—especially since he knew they were unreasonable and unkind to a middle-aged silly woman who had never done him any harm and who, after all, did have quite a bit of talent. But one evening his tongue got loose and out popped his aggression, accompanied by a drunken laugh: “You know who you are, Katherine Anne? You're the Joan of Arc of Texas!” Real, biting insults often have an element of impressionism in them; they convey far more than they actually say. Katherine Anne undoubtedly understood all the implications of Christopher's phrase, with the mockery and contempt and hostility behind it. Her first reaction, however, was to treat it as a merely impertinent joke; she pulled Christopher's hair hard, till he yelled. (This reaction now seems to me rather sympathetic.) After this, they said goodnight—as they would have, anyway, for Christopher had spoken just as she was about to enter the house where she was staying. . . . Next day, Christopher apologized and tried to explain everything away, thereby making the situation worse. Katherine Anne never forgave him. Years later, when they were actually on the same college campus, she refused to meet him. Mutual friends urged her to pardon Christopher. She replied that she had even forgotten what it was that he had said—which may well have been true; what
she had not forgotten was what he had
meant,
and for that, apparently, no pardon was possible. . . . Thus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein.

Two other acquaintances of that period come to mind. I have forgotten their names. What I remember about them relates to the nearly fatal auto accident in which they were both involved. I think it happened on New Year's Eve—which would explain why they were drunk enough to drive out onto the Coast Highway from West Channel Road without noticing that a truck was bearing down on them. (It seems incredible, now, but in those days there were no stoplights at the intersection, which must always have been dangerous.) When they were brought into hospital, the doctors supposed that both men—I'll call them A. and B.—were dead. Both responded to stimulants, however. A. had a broken neck and a broken leg; B. had a fractured skull and several broken ribs. They needed transfusions, so Christopher and Caskey volunteered as blood donors. B. recovered fairly quickly, A. more slowly. When A. was convalescent, he asked Caskey to photograph him in drag—sitting up in bed wearing a picture hat, with a feather boa draped around the cast on his neck. Christopher greatly admired A. for doing this—he regarded it as conduct befitting a hero-queen. Years later, he seriously considered using this incident in
The World in the Evening
, when Stephen Monk is recovering from
his
accident. But it didn't ring true. Stephen is no kind of a hero; he would be incapable of such behavior.

Sometime in the spring of 1946, Denny Fouts returned from New York. I don't remember if he intended staying long on Entrada Drive; if he did, it is obvious that the apartment would have been too small for him, Caskey and Christopher, however harmoniously they might have been living together. But that problem didn't arise, because Denny and Caskey started quarrelling almost at once, and so Caskey and Christopher had to get out. No doubt there was jealousy on both sides, chiefly on Denny's. It must have irritated Denny to discover that Caskey and Christopher were now seriously involved with each other and that he had therefore lost most of his power as Christopher's “Satan.” As for Caskey, he had probably sensed, from the beginning, that Denny regarded him with fundamental contempt—as just another boy, another pawn in the sexual chess game. And
now Denny, that sly old chess player, had made a crude amateur mistake; he had challenged Caskey from a position of weakness. Caskey saw his advantage and pushed their quarrel to the point at which Christopher had to choose between them.

Thus it was that Christopher's friendship with Denny ended. Christopher was sorry, of course. Denny may have been sorry, too—yes, I'm sure he was. But he accepted the situation with his usual arrogant show of indifference. He was in one of his self-destructive moods, ready to break with anyone who wouldn't submit to his will. Christopher, who was also capable of such moods, understood this perfectly. Though he had sided with Caskey, his sympathies remained with Denny. Looking back on the two relationships, it seems to me that Christopher and Denny came closer to each other than Christopher and Caskey ever did.

My impression is that Denny soon left the Entrada Drive apartment, subletting it to someone else, and went back East again, on his way to Europe. He never returned to Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Caskey and Christopher hunted around for a place to live. They were very lucky. Almost at once, Salka Viertel offered them her garage apartment. It had just become vacant and they could have it cheap. The apartment was on top of the garage, in a white wooden building which was next to but somewhat behind the house, so that the apartment windows overlooked the garden and had a glimpse of the ocean.

It was small but cheerful and full of light—one long narrow bed-sitting room, plus a bathroom and a balcony on which you could sunbathe without being overlooked, provided you lay on its floor. This balcony greatly appealed to Christopher, who loved having sex out of doors.

The Mabery garage apartment had other more important advantages over 137 Entrada Drive, as far as Christopher was concerned. Unlike Entrada Drive, it was relatively private because it was too small to hold a party in and because it was part of an impressive-looking home on a respectable street—beach acquaintances and other near strangers were scared of wandering in there uninvited. On the other hand, if you were in the mood for company, you could get it by merely walking downstairs and into the main house; Salka was always glad to see you and she usually had visitors. Salka was the most perfect landlady-hostess imaginable. Caskey and Christopher were free to visit her at any time, to use her kitchen, to borrow her books. She welcomed any friend they brought with them. Yet she would never dream of coming over to the garage apartment without first phoning to ask permission; and she tactfully
avoided confrontations with the people Christopher and Caskey didn't choose to introduce to her.

Salka's “salon” was still in full operation. All sorts of celebrities came to the house, not because Salka made the least effort to catch them but because they wanted to see her and to be with their own friends, who were also her guests. Actually, Salka was a somewhat self-effacing hostess. She greeted newcomers warmly and got them involved in conversation with earlier arrivals, then she disappeared into the kitchen to see how things were going. I remember her most vividly at this moment of greeting; she was strikingly aristocratic and unaffected. Her posture, the line of her spine and neck, was still beautiful; you could believe that she had been a great actress. I think most of her visitors were sincerely fond of her but perhaps they tended to take her for granted. It is slightly shocking to find that, in the indexes to the collected letters of two of her “stars,” Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann, Salka's name isn't mentioned.
¹⁶

Christopher liked living next door to the “salon,” as long as he was free to take part in it or leave it alone. A party anyhow lost some of its horror for him when he didn't have to use a car to get to it and could escape from it so easily. He found many of Salka's guests really interesting and he enjoyed introducing them to Caskey. Also, by doing so, he was promoting Caskey's new career—for Caskey usually made a good impression on them and thus got to photograph them.

Garbo seldom if ever attended the “salon” and Caskey never got to photograph her, but she was in and out of Salka's house a great deal, during the daytime. (I think she and Salka continued to discuss film projects, although it was now becoming evident that she didn't seriously intend to make another film.) Once Garbo had gotten used to seeing Caskey and Christopher around the place, she was absolutely at her ease with them. And, if Salka happened to be out when she arrived, she accepted them as substitutes. Being unemployed, with the whole day on her hands, she was ruthless in her demand to be talked to and walked with. Unlike Salka, she hadn't the least hesitation in shouting up to the garage apartment and even climbing the stairs, to find out if they were home or not. At first they both quite enjoyed her visits; she was lively and campy and easily entertained. Then she became a nuisance. And one day, Christopher found himself whispering to Caskey: “Imagine—if someone had told
us, six months ago, that we'd be hiding under this bed, to avoid going for a walk with Garbo!”

Christopher valued his privacy all the more because he had started working again,
¹⁷
on a project which he found absorbing, even though it involved a great deal of copying. During the summer and fall of 1946, he made a typescript of the handwritten diaries which he had kept from the beginning of 1939 (his arrival with Auden in the States) to the end of 1944. There had been big gaps in his diary keeping; these he now filled with bridge passages of explanatory narrative. He also revised and expanded many of the diary entries. This produced a typescript of at least 130,000 words—a very conservative estimate.
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