The Gay Metropolis (21 page)

They also visited Venice frequently. “George had a great deal of money. We had kind of an unusual life. It was disgusting the way we lived.”

They traveled with two dogs and a valet, and in Venice they always stayed at Cipriani. “In those days there were only twenty people at Cipriani. We gave a big dinner party for Princess Margaret. It was raining, and all the other hotel guests had to eat outside because we took over the whole dining room for dinner. It was only about ten people. It was scandalous.

“I went back to Venice after George died. I was really mortified to go there because we ate at Harry's Bar every day for lunch. The two poodle dogs would go in first. Sit at the table. And we'd come sashaying in, waving. I shudder to think what people said: ‘Who are those two outrageous boys!'

“We used to go a lot with Truman Capote when he was young. We were having lunch in Harry's Bar, and Truman was—I believe I can use the word—
extravagant
. He had a long black cape and a big black hat. Of course he was
Maestro
at the time—everybody bowed.”

During this same trip to Venice, Capote was thrown into one of the canals by some hustlers. “Because of his attitude, and because of his name,” a close friend of the writer explained. In Italian, Capote meant “condom.”

Paul Cadmus remembered Capote at an outdoor café in Venice shortly after the war. “Truman lifted his cape up and down, up and down, and said, ‘Come to Taormina! Come to Taormina!'” Cadmus recalled. The painter took Capote's advice and met him at the Italian resort. One day Capote returned from the post office with the mail. “I bring tidings of disaster!” he shouted. “Tennessee's play is a great success!”

“I always liked Truman,” said Cadmus. “He didn't give a damn what people thought of his voice or anything else. Brave little thing.”

“He was so funny in those days,” said Reynolds. “He was young and he wasn't on the drugs, he wasn't on the booze. He was a midget with sort of blond hair, kind of a Dutch cut, and he was very thin. Truman worked all summer and played all winter. In those days he was brilliant. He took literature very seriously. All that glamour really went to his head. And then of course he published that
scandalous
thing”—an excerpt from “Answered Prayers,” a work in progress. The excerpts that appeared in
Esquire
in 1975 humiliated some of his most famous friends because he named names and repeated, without disguise, many of the most outrageous stories they had told him. Quite a few of his victims never spoke to him again, and his social reputation never recovered. “I was crazy about Truman when he was young,” Reynolds continued. “Truman was just outrageous.
He was cute. He was a-cute. He always had something funny to say. And the
best
gossip. He was enchanting. I saw him a couple of years before he died in the Madison Avenue Bookshop. And we were walking down the street and he threw his arms around me and kissed me full on the lips—right on the sidewalk. But then he was fat.”

FRANKLIN MACFIE
was the youngest in a family of ten children who was enamored of all his sisters' soldier-boyfriends during the war. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian merchant seaman and a mother with Portuguese blood, he looked like a Highlander, with vivid green eyes. By his fourteenth birthday in 1951, he had already had sex with several men. But he marks Memorial Day weekend of that year as the moment when he “officially came out.”

“I met a man in Rockefeller Center who took me home,” Macfie remembered. “The space around the skating rink used to be a big cruising ground. He was an actor. I remember he picked me up—literally—when we got home. He carried me across the threshold like I was Irene Dunne. It was the first time I knew, the minute I started talking to the guy in Rockefeller Center, that I was going to go home with him, and I knew we'd fuck.

“There were plainclothesmen who would cruise. It was entrapment. But entrapment was not something I had to worry about because I was young enough. They would not entrap a kid. The bathrooms on the Seventh Avenue subway, up and down Broadway, were extremely active. Ghastly odor too. And it really was essentially the same six people. A friend of mine from San Francisco wrote me a card not too long ago, when I was still in Portugal, and it said, ‘Just been visiting New York. Stopped on 42d Street—and do you know that same black man is still standing there with that same twelve-inch dick, waving it around?' It's been the same for twenty years.

“We used to have something that we called Lucky Pierre. That was a
ménage à trois
. The guy in the middle was Lucky Pierre. And it was rather common; I'm sure it still is. Especially if you're a kid, you know, for lovers to pick up somebody.” Macfie started smoking pot as soon as he discovered the San Remo. “The first guy I met was Alvin, who took me to the Henry Hudson Hotel on 57th Street. I was about fifteen. There was a wonderful woman lying in bed who looked like Jan Sterling, who was called the Lady Barbara. She had a makeup case and she rolled joints. And he asked me if I had ever had any. And I said, ‘Of course.' But I hadn't. And
I sucked on it and knew what it was and loved it ever since. I just knew this is what I'd been waiting for: the minute it went down my throat, I knew this is love. Even better than dick.

“And the combination was unbeatable. In fact, that's what the doctors would say. They say that it's almost impossible to treat a syndrome where the person is getting pleasured on two levels like that. You got to give up one or the other, or preferably both. Because there was no frustration to work with. You know: you're far too happy to be here.

“In Manhattan, there were straight guys who would be aggressive. And there would be people you would go home with who would be dangerous, who would go a little crazy—who would suddenly turn hostile. Especially if they were on that borderline. Because of the pressure, there wasn't really a gay community. You had your gay friends, of course, but if you had a regular job or a family here, you also had straight friends which somehow were usually kept separate. There was no sense of gay community at all.

“People were far more split about it all, and forced to lead a far more schizo double life. I mean hiding from the parents, hiding from other businesspeople. And having the erotic painting on the bedroom wall to turn around. I saw more than ten of those. You know, so you could just switch it around in case mother came. It sounds funny, but what the few big gay people thought didn't matter, in relation to the enormous, huge society around you—theater, movies, literature. Everything was antigay, in the sense of not admitting it existed. And the boredom of having to laugh at gay jokes. Ones that were tasteless and offensive. That was all tiresome. So it did make you very unhappy. You felt excluded. You also felt like, Oh, it's going to mean misery and unhappiness. You would meet so many men who would be working in offices, who were really striving to create a straight image—going out with women and pretending. In the fifties acting straight was very important. I don't know how many dates I had in that period with guys older than me—working age when I was in school—where they would say, ‘I'll meet you Friday at 11:30 ‘cause I'm taking this girl out after office hours. The date will be over by 11:00. I'll meet you at 11:30 in the Village.' That was really a standard operating procedure on a Friday night.

“One thing I've always liked about being gay is that you used to be able to go into a bar and you would meet anybody from Leonard Bernstein on, up, down, and sideways. A completely democratic society. I came from a very humble family, and I would never have learned a lot of the things I
learned if I weren't gay. I simply wouldn't have been exposed to the variety of people. That was a great blessing, actually.”
^*

“Sunday brunch was at home. Generally if they thought you were really a hot trick, they would have a few friends over to show you off. ‘Come on over! I have a friend here.' And then, ‘I can't wait till he comes and sees you! Oh, no, don't put your shirt on!' Or ‘Why don't you take a shower now. He'll be here in two minutes.' And then you come out and meet the friend. ‘Oh, new friend! You sly thing.' Being young and a trick—probably most of the people I went home with didn't have lovers. There were a few who lived together and were lovers obviously. But most of them were lonely men, I suppose. It just didn't seem that men lived together as openly as they do now.”

Macfie vividly remembered a terrifying party in a private home in Forest Hills, Queens, in 1953. “There were a couple of kids my age and we had dates with older guys, and it was at the house of one of the older guys. I think probably the guy who had the house had had a few pieces of neighborhood trade or something. Somebody obviously knew he lived there and they saw a party going on, and they rang the bell. It was three local toughs. And they came in and started terrorizing the twelve of us.

“It was very, very scary. I mean like wielding knives that they had picked up. It got very frightening. I was really ready to run. I really felt like this is going to be one of those murder scenes—you're going to see twelve bloody queens on the floor.

“And then the most outrageous queen there turned around and said to everybody, ‘Get ‘em, girls! GET ‘EM!' And somehow absolutely galvanized everything. Suddenly we realized, Well, there are twelve of us and there are three of them, you know. GET ‘EM! And we got ‘em. We just all jumped them and threw them out of the house. Everybody was petrified, to be honest. And afterward we were, like, ‘Weren't we brave?' Twelve men of various ages attacking three teenage boys! But it
was
scary. You did feel like you were being terrorized. And queens were not known to carry guns in those days.”

Then Macfie went to see Montgomery Clift in
A Place in the Sun
. It was love at first sight, and he began to stalk the actor: he found out where he lived and followed him around for several years. They were in the lobby of a theater when Macfie first approached him. The crazed fan said, “This is
who I am and you're going to see this face a lot. Get used to seeing this face following you!

“I could read the New York paper and tell you where he was going to be in three nights,” Macfie remembered. “I knew that much about him and his life at this point.” Eventually Macfie got Clift's telephone number from a newspaper columnist and he called him at home. “I said that I was United Parcel Service and I had a package that came from Mr. Brooks Clift, which was his [older] brother—and I knew wherever he lived at the time, in Nebraska or someplace. I said we have the name, but the address is not clear. Do you want us to send it back or send it on to you? He was a little bit cautious, and he said, ‘OK,' And I got the address.” Clift lived on the second and third floors of a brownstone on East 63d Street.

“It was during the World Series, and I went and rang the bell. The maid let me in, and he was up on the third floor in the bedroom, and in the living room the television was on. He was a big baseball fan, strangely enough. He was one of those kind of straight types. And he came downstairs. I was adjusting the television set, which was flickering, and he was wearing gray khaki pants and a white shirt. He looked quizzically at me, and he said, ‘What are you doing here?' And I said, ‘Oh, I'm fixing the television, as you can see.' And he smiled and we started talking. Nothing happened that time. Eventually he had something to do and I left. I used to patrol the house quite frequently and see Liz [Taylor] and Deborah Kerr and everybody going in.”

When Macfie began his pursuit, he wasn't sure whether Clift was gay or not. “I don't think we actually knew ‘Monty is gay.' Not in the fifties. I think people learned when they realized that Liz was madly in love with him and he wasn't responding. There was something wrong with anybody who didn't respond to Elizabeth Taylor if she was in love with you. Mainly you always felt like he was watching you and making all these kinds of judgments that you would never know. He'd look at you and you'd think, Is he thinking that I'm a complete asshole? Is he liking me? Does he want me to leave? Does he want me to talk? Does he want me to shut up? You'd get very little response from him. It went on for a period of three years. Whenever he was around New York and I could find him and get in and talk to him.”

After many months, they finally had sex together. “I think three times. Once on the staircase. He was not interested in admiration and adoration at all. He was far more interested in a little bit more of an I-don't-give-a-fuck-who-you-are-do-you-want-to-suck-my-dick attitude. A sort of tradey attitude. Which was very stupid of me—I could have done that
very easily. But I was madly in love with him. He was the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life. Monty was for the eyes. It was the eyes and to get a laugh. It was one of those people that if you could get him to laugh, to really, actually laugh at something, you felt that you had achieved some great catharsis for him. I just felt I'd moved a mountain.”

WALTER CLEMONS
was a brilliant young writer in 1959, full of promise. That year he published a collection of short stories called
The Poison Tree
. Mostly drawn from his Texas childhood, they were written in a spare and elegant style. When they brought him the Prix de Rome, he had established himself as a writer to be reckoned with. Clemons had grown up in Houston, the son of a father who was “sort of a village atheist” and a mother who was a “strict puritan” and a Methodist but who never went to church after she was married. Clemons's early experiences with Catholicism, and his subsequent uprising against it, are typical of the way many rebels embrace, and then replace, early ecstatic experiences. There is a certain kind of iconoclast in whom Catholicism invariably induces a ferocious atheism after an initial period of piety. Clemons was that kind of Catholic.