Lost Years (51 page)

Jack wasn't in the habit of wearing underwear. So he came on stage on the first night with nothing under his shorts. After the show had been running a few days, the stage manager told him there had been complaints from ladies sitting in the front rows. Jack was to put on jockeys. When Logan heard of this, he was very angry. The jockeys were prohibited. Logan's instructions to the box-office were: “If they don't want to see his balls, they can have their money returned.”)

Bill Harris stayed at the Rustic Road house during most of January—from the 1st to the 11th, from the 17th to the 28th and from the 31st to February 3, when he returned to New York. The visit was a success, from Christopher's point of view; Bill was a model guest, helpful with household chores, always ready to make himself agreeable to callers and to keep himself occupied when Christopher had to work or go out. Aside from this, he was a cheerful, responsive companion. He showed an interest in all Christopher's doings and concerns which seemed feminine in the very best way. I think Bill enjoyed his visit too—even including his unpleasant psychic experience which is described on
see here
. This was anyhow a happy period in his life, because of Jack Fontan—and there is a peculiar pleasure in talking about a current love affair to a sympathetic ex-lover. Bill and Christopher shared pleasant memories of sex with each other. Bill knew that Christopher's interest in Jack Fontan was therefore more than merely polite; it had a quality of identification. But Bill also knew that Christopher wasn't in the slightest degree jealous, wasn't carrying even the last ember of a torch. So the two of them could be perfectly relaxed together.

On January 3, there is a journal entry about
The School of Tragedy
. Christopher is still bothered by the problem of narration—shall it be told in the third person or in the first? Christopher obviously wanted to write in the first person, through Stephen's mouth, but he saw two difficulties if the story is told retrospectively, “I fear the necessarily indulgent tone, the wise smile over the mistakes of the past”; but if, on the other hand, the story is told from day to day, in a diary, “This seems too contrived. Why should he be taking all this trouble to present his experiences, to make them into an aesthetic performance, if he is really suffering?”

So Christopher returns to a consideration of a narrative in the third person, “I . . . hear a very simple tone of voice. Something inside me
keeps saying
Candide
. . . . When I want him to be articulate, analytical, he must express himself in conversation. Ditto when he tells anything about the past. But when we're listening to his mind, we should really only get his
feelings.
Very important, this.”

In this entry, Christopher also tries to state the theme of the novel—that Stephen, who is chronically guilty because he is torn between a Quaker background and an urge toward bohemianism, discovers how to overcome his guilt “by understanding the lives of those who aren't guilty—Sarah, [Gerda,] Dr. Kennedy and the best of the refugees.”

Looking back, I feel that a novel written by Christopher with this subject matter was foredoomed. Because Christopher didn't—and I still don't—understand the kind of guilt which would make such a story credible. To a writer of my temperament, prolonged guilt is distasteful and boring as a theme for fiction. The character of Stephen Monk doesn't come to life because Christopher was bored by him. At the very end of the book, Stephen says, “I . . . forgive myself from the bottom of my heart,” but his tone rings false. The words were actually Christopher's; he had once said them to Iris Tree, but in a quite different, campy, playacting tone, with a deep comic sigh, when they were talking about sin: “God knows, Iris,
I
forgive myself—from the
bottom
of my heart.” After which they had both roared with laughter. When Stephen speaks the line one doesn't laugh. One is embarrassed.

On January 5, there is a charming anecdote about Bo and Kelley (
see here
) in the journal. For reasons of discretion, presumably, they are referred to in the journal by initials only, and nothing is said about why Kelley was in jail at that time. As far as I remember, he had been arrested on the Riviera Beach near Point Dume. This beach was perfectly safe for bare-ass swimming and sex making in 1945 (
see here
) but more and more houses had been built on the headland since then and their builders thought they had bought the view as well. So they proceeded to edit it to their liking. Those tiny figures in the far distance, away down there amongst the dunes—you couldn't see if they were nude or make out what they were doing, unless you used binoculars. So the police were called in and given binoculars and told to watch. And so there were roundups of view spoilers—one of which included Kelley. (In those days, when a queer had served a jail sentence and his straight friends asked him what he had been in jail for, he would reply, with a wry, suggestive smile, “Making a U-turn.” Such is the humor of a persecuted tribe, which isn't allowed even to speak openly of its sufferings.) This is the anecdote: Bobo took Howard Kelley a sweater to wear in jail.
Kelley spent a whole afternoon, with another prisoner, cleaning it by picking off hairs belonging to Bo and Kelley's three cats. Kelley was able to identify the hairs of each cat. They sorted the hairs into three piles and put each pile into a separate matchbox.

On January 13, Christopher had Norman Mailer to dinner, with Salka Viertel (who probably helped cook). The day-to-day diary also mentions “Ted and Mrs. Anderson, John and Mrs. Hamlin” as guests. I'm pretty sure that Ted Anderson and John Hamlin were paraplegics, and that it was Ted who had given Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman (
see here
) a lot of advice while
The Men
was being written and filmed. Indeed, I think the character played by Brando in the film was to some extent based on Ted Anderson. In the film, Brando marries Teresa Wright and they go through the problem of an impotent paraplegic married to a sexually potent and physically active woman. At the end of the film they are still together, however. Ted and his wife finally split up, but that was after a fairly long marriage.

Norman Mailer was in town (I think) because of a project to film his novel
The Naked and the Dead.
(There were many delays and the picture wasn't actually made and released until 1958.) Norman and Christopher got along well together. Norman, in those days, was a deceptively quiet and polite young man who amused Christopher by his sudden outbursts of candor. They didn't meet often, but I am unable to put a date—unless it is this one—to my memory of Norman entertaining a fairly large group of paraplegics at Christopher's house.
¹
According to my memory, Christopher had asked his paraplegic guests in advance if there was any available celebrity they would like to meet. All had agreed on Mailer. He arrived on time, neatly dressed, demure and sober. The women present were obviously reassured. Then he began to tell stories about his army life—perfectly harmless funny little stories, with no horrors in them, no sex, no venereal disease. All that was startling was the dialogue. “By that time, the sergeant was beginning to get a little bit impatient, so he said to me—” Mailer kept the same nicey-nice party smile on his face as he continued, without the least change of tone, “Why, you mother-fucking son of a bitch, another word out of you and I'll ram this mop right up your ass!” The male guests roared. The women blinked and tried to smile—reflecting, no doubt, that they had read talk as rough as this in Mailer's novel; coming from
his
mouth, you couldn't call it vulgarity; it was practically literature.

On January 17, Aldous Huxley and Christopher met and talked about their film story
Below the Equator
(see page 207 [
note
]). On the 23rd, they met again, this time with John Huston. I think it was Huston who had originally suggested that they should write a story for him to direct. Meanwhile, on January 19, the day-to-day diary records that Christopher saw Lesser Samuels about a movie story. This must have been
The Vacant Room
, a ghost story set in a Los Angeles bungalow court. I think the original idea was Lesser's, but Christopher was particularly interested in showing that a “haunting” can take place in an unremarkable small modern building.

On January 22, Russ Zeininger, Curtis Harrington, Bill Harris and Christopher drove to The High Valley Theatre in the Upper Ojai Valley (
see here
) to see a performance of
Ethan Frome
. It had been adapted by Iris Tree (who was later sued by the owners of the authorized adaptation, which Ruth Gordon had played in New York). Iris, Ford Rainey and Betty Harford played Zeena, Ethan and Mattie. Oliver Andrews, Betty's future husband, designed the set—which is the only part of the production I remember, because it was so absurdly arty. Oliver decided that the bobsled was the symbol of the whole tragedy and that it therefore ought to dominate the stage throughout. So there it was at the back of the set, standing on its end and looking like an expressionist war memorial. This in itself would have been stupid rather than absurd. But then the moment came when Ethan and Mattie had to convert the symbol into a stage prop. Placing the sled in a horizontal position on top of a steep structure which represented a hill, they climbed onto it and rode it offstage. The hazards of this ride were ridiculously realistic. The heavy sled shook the lightweight hill to its foundations and, a moment later, it could be heard and felt hitting a bank of cushions behind the scenes with a force which seemed sufficient to carry it straight through the wall of the theater. The whole audience gasped—but it was the wrong kind of gasp, expressing concern for the fate of Ford Rainey and Betty Harford, as if they had been circus acrobats risking their lives. At that instant, they ceased to be Ethan and Mattie. This farcical stunt annihilated their characters and nullified the rest of the play.
²

Throughout February, Christopher worked on the two film
stories, with Huxley and with Samuels. Mike Leopold came down to stay with him several times; Christopher also saw Russ Zeininger and Don Coombs. He had supper with the Stravinskys, Jo and Ben Masselink, the Kiskaddens, the Zinnemanns. The Zinnemanns often showed their guests a film, after supper. On February 25, Dr. Bors (from the Birmingham Hospital,
see here
) was one of the Zinnemanns' guests. He proudly announced that he had brought a film of his own which he was going to run for them. It turned out to be a documentary of an unusually bloody operation, shot in color. Some of the ladies present were so revolted that they nearly vomited. But Dr. Bors was happily unaware of this. He left under the impression that he had provided everybody with a delightful evening's entertainment. (A few days before this,
The Men
had been screened for the patients at Birmingham Hospital. Christopher had gone there to see it.)

On March 5, Samuels and Christopher finished
The Vacant Room
. Christopher continued to work with Huxley on
Below the Equator
and Samuels was asked to give them his advice—they met three times. When Samuels and Christopher turned in a copy of their story to Christopher's agent, Jim Geller, Christopher typed a special title page for it: “
The Vacant Room
. A Masterpiece.” The joke fell flat, because Geller couldn't get anybody interested in the story.

Christopher saw Mike Leopold only four times that month. I think Christopher must also have been going to bed with Jim Charlton, because only one other sex mate (Zeininger) is mentioned in the day-to-day diary and because Christopher and Jim had supper together often.

On the 16th, Christopher had supper with the Huxleys. Gerald Heard and Michael Barrie were there, also a hypnotist named Leslie LeCron
³
and his wife. On the 22nd, the LeCrons invited Christopher to have supper at their house. There were no other guests. I think it had been more or less agreed in advance that LeCron would try to hypnotize Christopher. Christopher himself was skeptical. Several people had tried to hypnotize him already and had failed. He told LeCron this, and LeCron replied that the failure had probably been due to Christopher's attitude. Christopher expected a hypnotist to overpower his will. “That's the wrong attitude,” LeCron told him, “you have to cooperate. I can't make you do anything as long as you think of me as an opponent and keep bracing yourself to resist me. My will isn't stronger than yours. You mustn't think like that.”
LeCron certainly didn't look as if his will was stronger than Christopher's, or anybody else's. From Christopher's point of view LeCron's amiably harmless appearance was reassuring and it undoubtedly contributed to the success of their experiment. As far as I remember, LeCron told Christopher to fix his eyes on one of LeCron's eyes and begin to count backwards from one hundred. Very soon, Christopher found himself relaxing from an upright to a horizontal position on the sofa. He lay there in a comfortable sprawl, feeling, as he said, like a puppet with all its strings loose. He was quite conscious and rather amused by his condition. He told LeCron that he knew he could assert his will but that he simply didn't want to. He remained in this light hypnotic trance for several minutes, until LeCron roused him by snapping his fingers.

Christopher's relaxation had been even deeper than he had realized. This only became evident to him after he had left LeCron's house and was driving home. He experienced a state of euphoria so intense that I can recall it as I write these words. Christopher was no longer an individual driver, keeping a wary eye on other drivers—alert for possible drunks, slowing down to force tailgaters to pass him, pulling out to avoid being trapped behind slowpokes. He was part of the traffic, moving in perfect harmony with all the other cars, like a dancer in a ballet. Never once, that evening, did he have to brake or accelerate abruptly; when he changed lanes, he described faultless curves, slipping into his new position with exactly the right amount of spare distance between himself, the car ahead and the car behind. Christopher thought of himself as being a well-adjusted driver. He was seldom consciously nervous even in bad weather and heavy traffic. But now he realized how tense he ordinarily was.