The Gay Metropolis (33 page)

Needless to say, Vidal had a very different point of view: “It is as natural to be a homosexual as it is to be a heterosexual. The difference between a homosexual and a heterosexual is about the difference between somebody who has brown eyes and somebody who has blue eyes.”

“Who says so?” Wallace asked.

“I say so,” Vidal replied.

It is a completely natural act from the beginning of time. … We have a sexual ethic which is the joke of the world. We are laughed at in every country of the world for our attitudes toward sex. The United States is living out some mad Protestant nineteenth-century dream of human behavior. Instead of saying, Aren't we wicked because we have a high divorce rate, or aren't we wicked because men like to go to bed with men and women like to go to bed with women, why not begin by saying that our basic values are all wrong? The idea of marriage is obsolete in our society. Everybody knows it. There are natural monogamists, there are people who indeed enjoy one another's company, but can you imagine a man and a woman who are told that for sixty years they are going to have to live together and have sex only with one another. This is nonsense. Why not begin by accepting the fact of what human beings really are. … We are open, we have something that André Gide referred to as floating sensuality. We can be aroused by this, by that, not necessarily by men and not necessarily by women. … And I think the so-called breaking of the moral fiber of this country is one of the healthiest things that's begun to happen.
^*

Wallace ended with a “politically correct” conclusion for an era when nearly everyone considered homosexuals to be sick: an interview with a gay man with a wife and two children, who explained, “I personally don't believe in a love relationship with another man. I think this is part of the gay folklore, something they try to obtain, but never obtain, primarily because the gay crowd is so narcissistic that they can't establish a love relationship with another male.” Wallace's final words on the program were: “The dilemma of the homosexual: told by the medical profession he is sick; by the law that he's a criminal; shunned by employers, rejected by heterosexual society. Incapable of a fulfilling relationship with a woman, or for that matter with a man. At the center of his life, he remains anonymous. A displaced person. An outsider?”

The program embodied all the prejudices and preconceptions of “respectable” American media outlets in 1967. In determining its point of view, the swirling changes of the sixties were much less important than the “objective authority” of psychiatrists. After watching excerpts of the program in 1995, Wallace exclaimed, “Jesus Christ! That was a good piece back
then!” He even endorsed much of what Albert Goldman said about the decline of American society. “Look,” he said, “I cannot believe some of the trash I see on television. And the sexual permissiveness with which we live in this country is frequently—to me—sexual ugliness. Grossness.”

Wallace conceded that he no longer believed that two homosexuals were incapable of a lasting relationship; in fact, he even knew that wasn't true at the time the program was broadcast.

“It's not a question now,” said Wallace. “But what I'm doing [at the end of the program] is, I'm synthesizing what we've just seen. Look: I had a good friend, by the name of James Amster”—a famous decorator, who created Amster Yard, a group of houses surrounding an L-shaped garden on East 48th Street. “He owned all of those little houses there. And he had a man, a companion. And they were a wonderful old married couple. And this was back in the fifties. Both very attractive people. Both people that I admired.” But to journalists like Mike Wallace, the fact that homosexuality remained part of the American Psychiatric Association's official catalogue of mental disorders was more important than their own personal experiences.

“Do you think it's curable?” Wallace was asked in 1995.

“I think probably, if you really want to, I suppose,” the correspondent said.

“You can replace one desire with another?”

“I don't know. I'm not a scientist. I had a good friend in Detroit, when I was in my twenties still, and working at WXYZ. And there was a guy there—good-lookin' fella—he was one of the sound guys. … What he used to do was make the sound of the Lone Ranger's horse, in a big flower box with pebbles. And I thought to myself, Well, I could understand the relationship. I found him a
very, very
attractive man. But to act out in that way …” That was something Wallace could never imagine.

The same year that CBS broadcast “The Homosexuals,” three Los Angeles men tried to counter some of the impressions of gay life conveyed by the mainstream media. In September 1967, Dick Michaels, Bill Rand and Sam Watson secretly printed the first issue of the
Los Angeles Advocate
in the basement of the Los Angeles headquarters of ABC television. The first five hundred copies of the twelve-page paper were sold for 25 cents each at gay bars throughout the city. Its precursor had been the newsletter of PRIDE, Personal Rights in Defense and Education, a local gay group founded in t966. Gay activists had been energized by an unusually brutal raid of the Black Cat Bar by the Los Angeles Police Department on New Year's Day in 1967.

Within a year of publishing its first issue, the periodical had a telephone, an IBM electric typewriter, and its first paid employee, and 5,500 copies were in circulation throughout southern California. For many people, the
Advocate
was “the first exposure we'd had to the idea that what we are is not bad,” said a longtime reader. By the mid-1970s, 40,000 copies of each issue were being distributed nationally, and the
Advocate
was the most important gay-owned and -operated magazine in America, a status it retains today.

TRUMAN CAPOTE'S FLAMBOYANCE
made him one of the few famous writers whom the public could recognize as obviously homosexual in the fifties and the sixties. The novella
Breakfast at Tiffany's
and the movie it inspired had made him a sensation within the literary world, and his charm and his intelligence made him a confidant of many of Manhattan's richest and most powerful denizens, particularly the women whom he dined with regularly at Manhattan's most exclusive restaurants.

Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher of the
Washington Post,
was one of the powerful women whom Capote befriended in the 1960s. They were introduced by Babe Paley, a Capote favorite and the wife of the founder of CBS. When Mrs. Paley arranged a lunch for them in her apartment, she warned Graham about what to expect: “Babe had said, ‘Truman's voice is high when you start talking to him, but when he relaxes it goes down.'” But Graham “certainly never thought of Truman as dainty.” She considered him “very strong—in intelligence and insights and will.”

After her husband committed suicide in 1963, Graham came to New York more frequently to participate in editorial meetings at
Newsweek,
which was also owned by her company. Capote told her she should stop staying in a hotel and buy an apartment at the U.N. Plaza, an elegant new apartment house across from the United Nations where he was already living himself. When she resisted the idea because she didn't have time to run another house, “He said in that voice [she imitated his Southern drawl], ‘Why if you can't run it, honey, I will.”

“And I didn't for a moment think he would run it, but it did sort of push me into thinking, Well, maybe it's not that hard. Maybe I should look. And then I did. I looked at one and bought it and we still have it.”

In 1965, Capote reached the height of his fame with the publication of
In Cold Blood,
his classic account of the brutal murder of a Kansas farm family and the capture, trial, and execution of their killers. He had given the book to Graham to read in sections, and she loved it. At the end of
1966, he decided to celebrate his new celebrity by inviting 540 of his closest friends to a “Black and White Dance” at the Plaza. “In honor of Mrs. Katharine Graham” was handwritten across the top of the printed invitation.

Graham had become publisher of the
Washington
Post only three years earlier, after the death of her husband, and she was not yet well known in New York society. Why did he choose her as his guest of honor?

“God knows,” said Graham. “Because I was certainly an unlikely subject. … We were fond of each other. … I think if you eliminated all the worldly friends, which I guess he couldn't choose one of, I was somebody people didn't really know. And I obviously had just come into this position. … I suppose it was an act of imagination. Obviously, I had a great time with Truman.”

But Graham was allowed to add only twenty couples to Capote's list. She said that was easy—she just chose her closest Washington friends.

There was tremendous anticipation, and almost continuous coverage of the party in the New York social pages for weeks before it took place. “The publicity had bounded and bounded and bounded,” said Graham. “The
World Telegram
had whole
pages
of what people were going to wear. It was unbelievable.”

When it finally occurred, the
Times
reporter Charlotte Curtis called the guests “as spectacular a group as has ever been assembled for a private party in New York”—and her newspaper printed the entire list on its society page. (Its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was one of the guests invited by Graham.)

It
was
an amazing list. Among those honored with an invitation were Harry Belafonte; Tallulah Bankhead; James Baldwin; Brooke Astor; McGeorge Bundy; Ralph Ellison; Cecil Beaton; Jacqueline, Rose, Bobby, and Teddy Kennedy; Lionel and Diana Trilling; Robert McNamara; Arthur Miller; Robert Penn Warren; Andy Warhol; Ashton Hawkins; Edmund Wilson; Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; Sammy Davis, Jr.; Blair Clark; Christopher Isherwood; and the duke and duchess of Windsor.

If he hadn't actually gathered together everyone who mattered in the Western world, Capote had come closer to accomplishing that feat than anyone in America ever had before. “I'd never seen anything like the [number of] photographers,” said Graham. “Never!”

Russell Baker thought writers would “experience an instant inflation of self-esteem from the knowledge that one of their colleagues has seized Mrs. Astor's former role as social arbiter.”

Nevertheless, not everyone was amused. Stephen Reynolds thought it was “a boring party.” He said, “I really did. But we were
thrilled
to be invited. We couldn't
wait
to tell our enemies. A lot of people were mad because they weren't invited. They made up all kinds of excuses—their mother was dying, the doctor said they had cancer. I mean
anything
to excuse them from not going.”

Herb Caen, the doyen of San Francisco journalists, compared it to the Super Bowl: “There was such a buildup that by the time the game was played, it didn't amount to much.”

Lauren Bacall and Jerome Robbins dominated the dance floor. Bacall was horrified when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., tried to cut in on them. “Don't you see whom I'm dancing with?” she demanded. The historian retired, “crestfallen.”

An actress's complaint to Capote the next day suggested a possible difference between gay and straight—or male and female—sensibilities. She had left the party with an attractive stranger whom she had assumed was a guest, only to discover to her horror the next morning that he was just one of the detectives in black tie.

“So,” Capote asked, “what's wrong with that? You had a good time with him, didn't you?”

“I did,” she conceded.

“Well then, what are you complaining about?”

Three decades later, Graham said that she “loved” her party. What she remembered most clearly about the evening was her first meeting with Jack Dunphy, Capote's longtime companion. “I'd never met Jack because Jack never appeared. You never saw Jack. When he came through the line, Truman said, ‘Now
here's Jack.'”

Paul Cadmus was one of a handful of gay men invited to the ball by Jack Dunphy. “Truman said he didn't want to ask ‘a bunch of fags' to his party,” said Cadmus. The painter was not allowed to bring another man, and his lover, Jon Andersson, was furious.

For decades Capote had kept his sex life completely separate from his elegant social life.
“Completely,”
said Graham. “And that indeed was the difference when it started down the sad and awful path later. And then
those
people started appearing.”

“Those people” included an air-conditioning repairman whom Capote started dating, and to whom Graham was also introduced: “He wasn't a social asset, I would say”—particularly after he proved incapable of repairing a broken air conditioner belonging to one of Capote's fancy friends.

The Washington newspaper publisher was one of the very few women companions Capote spared when he published “Answered Prayers” in
Esquire
nine years later. But as he became progressively more addicted to drugs and drink, Graham spent less and less time with him: “It just became harder and harder to see him. Because of his condition. He'd be drunk. I remember once I went out to dinner with him and he ended up in tears.”

At the beginning, “The relationship was a very easy one. The only strains were that he absolutely
demanded
to know everything you knew. And if he found out that you'd withheld something, he'd get very angry.”

Graham thought “the decline” began because of “middle age” or “writer's block” or a combination of the two. “You know, he had his face done,” she said. “It made him look very young, in a weird way. He once took me to his face person and tried to get me to do it. And I said, ‘No thank you,' and left. And he said, ‘You'll be back.'”