The Gay Metropolis (9 page)

In the forties, young men never felt any sense of menace on Manhattan streets or subways. “We never thought of such a thing,” said Stephen Reynolds. “There was nobody sleeping on the streets. It was glamour without danger. We dressed, which is a simple thing. You never went to the theater unless you had a black tie on. And then if you went to the Stork Club and saw Gertrude Lawrence, you'd faint. A star!”

Reynolds also made frequent visits to Harlem to hear Lena Home perform. “We would go to these nightclubs, with huge brass bands, and we'd be maybe six white people there and
six hundred
blacks, and nobody was nervous. We didn't feel like we didn't belong there. We would smell something funny, and people would say, ‘That's a reefer.' We thought the musicians were all smoking it. But I never heard of anybody saying, ‘Well, I'll try one.' Certainly not in my group.”

HARLEM'S ANNUAL DRAG BALL
at the Fun Makers Social Club was a hit in 1944. “The men who don silks, satins and laces for the yearly masquerades
are as style-conscious as the women of a social club planning an annual charity affair or a society dowager selecting a debutante gown for her favorite daughter,”
Ebony
magazine reported. “Lawyers, undertakers, truck drivers and dishwashers minced across the stage to compete for cash prizes.” And at Lucky's Rendezvous, black and white men mingled happily in an atmosphere “steeped in the swish jargon of its many lavender customers.” On upper Madison Avenue, the Mount Morris Baths in Harlem was already an interracial cruising spot, and it would remain popular for another four decades.

Philip Johnson found his first serious lover in Harlem—an extremely handsome café singer named Jimmie Daniels. Johnson met Daniels during one of his excursions uptown with the composer Virgil Thomson. The architect was enchanted by Daniels, whom he later referred to as “the first Mrs. Johnson.” There would be three more “Mrs. Johnsons” after him.

Daniels was “a most charming man,” Johnson recalled six decades later. “I still look back with greatest pleasure. I was the envy of all downtown. It was so chic in those days—it was what one did if one was really up to date. Those were the days when you just automatically went to Harlem. I had an older friend living in a midtown hotel, and he had an open Chrysler. And every evening when it was still light, we'd go up there. We knew that Harlem was the only place there was any freedom.

“We went to the house of an English lady who lived with a black actress—lesbians,” Johnson continued. “And in that house Jimmie also lived as a boarder. So it was comfortable and familial. There was also a husband around. I'd spend the night there. I tried to have him downtown; it didn't work so well. They'd say, I'm sorry we're full tonight'—a totally empty dining room. Even in New York City in the 1930s.

“He was a beautiful, beautiful kid,” Johnson recalled. “I was always interested in younger people.” Daniels was eighteen and Johnson was twenty-five. The affair ended after a year: “A terrible man stole him away—who had better sex with him, I gather. But I was naughty. I went to Europe and I would never
think
of taking Jimmie along. I had rather an upper-lower-class feeling about him. I didn't realize it at the time, but it must have galled him. Everything that I was doing that was interesting, he wouldn't be included. Terrible way to treat anybody.”

Virgil Thomson was so impressed by Jimmie Daniels's “impeccable enunciation” that he decided to write an opera “sung by Negroes.” The result was
Four Saints in Three Acts
, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein.

Daniels had sung in clubs throughout Europe during the thirties, and he became a fixture of New York nightlife. In 1939, he opened Jimmie Daniels' at 114 West 116th Street, an establishment that
The New Yorker
described as a “model of dignity and respectability” by “Harlem standards.” Ten years later Daniels was the host at the Bon Soir on West 8th Street, where “blacks and whites [and] gays and straights mingled without a trace of tension,” according to the historian James Gavin. Barbra Streisand, Phyllis Diller, and Kaye Ballard all eventually performed there.

Johnson traveled to Germany regularly during Hitler's rise to power, and he became infatuated with the Nazis. Fifty years later, the architect said he had been attracted by the Third Reich's “general aura.” His sympathies first became widely known in 1941 when William L. Shirer, a radio correspondent for CBS, published his
Berlin Diary
, an instant best-seller. Shirer wrote that the German Propaganda Ministry had forced him to share a double room at the Polish front in 1939 with “Phillip
[sic]
Johnson, an American fascist who says he represents Father Coughlin's
Social Justice
. None of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis.”

One of Johnson's saviors was Lincoln Kirstein, who was at the center of New York's gay intellectual elite for more than half a century. Kirstein was the extremely wealthy heir to the Filene's department store fortune. He had been Johnson's contemporary at Harvard, where Kirstein started a literary quarterly,
Hound and Horn
, whose contributors included T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Edmund Wilson, and E. E. Cummings. During the same period, he was also a founder of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a precursor of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In 1933 he persuaded George Balanchine to leave Russia for America, and together they created what became the New York City Ballet.

In 1944 Kirstein wrote a letter “To Whom It May Concern” to try to bolster his friend's sagging reputation:

I, Pvt Lincoln Kirstein, have known Pvt. Philip Johnson for fifteen years. When he left the Museum of Modern Art to join Huey Long, I did not speak to him again until a few months prior to my induction into the Army, February, 1943.

In his most rabidly facist
[sic]
days, he told me that I was number one on his list for elimination in the coming revolution. I felt bitterly towards him, and towards what he represented.

Since being in the Army, I have seen Pvt Johnson frequently; both of us having been stationed at the Engineer Replacement Training Center,
Fort Belvoir, Va. I am convinced that he has sincerely repented of his former facist beliefs, that he understands the nature of his great mistake and is a loyal American …

I am a United States Citizen, born Rochester, N.Y. May 4th 1907.1 am of Jewish origin.

This statement was not solicited by any person, and is made unknown to Pvt. Johnson.

Kirstein's letter is one of the earliest examples of the incipient “gay network” of Manhattan taking care of one of its own. Eventually, Kirstein would become famous as one of the most important art patrons of the twentieth century. His salon included W. H. Auden, Glenway Westcott, and Monroe Wheeler, among many others.

In 1937, he met the painter Paul Cadmus, who pioneered his own style of “magic realism.” Cadmus believed Kirstein championed Johnson later on mostly because he thought he was a good architect. “Lincoln's always been very supportive of good art,” said Cadmus, “even when it wasn't popular. He didn't give a damn about what other people liked.”

When Kirstein met Cadmus, the talented painter had a gentle charm and a magnificent face, and many of their friends believed that Kirstein immediately fell in love with him. Cadmus said Kirstein fell in love with his
work;
in any event, the painter never reciprocated Kirstein's romantic feelings. “Quite soon after he met me, he met my sister,” Cadmus remembered almost six decades later. “I think he met her twice, and then he came to see me one day, and he said ‘Paul, I want to marry Fidelma.'

‘“But you hardly know her,'” Cadmus replied. “'And she's not like me.'”

But Kirstein was insistent. ‘“I know what I want, I want to marry Fidelma.'”

“'Please don't suddenly surprise her like this,'” said Cadmus. But “very shortly afterwards,” Kirstein took Fidelma to the Plaza and proposed to her, and she soon accepted, although the engagement spanned three years. The marriage lasted until Fidelma was institutionalized for mental illness many years later, but Kirstein continued to sleep with men all his life. Partly through Fidelma, he also kept Cadmus close to him until Kirstein died in 1996. Kirstein also bought many of Cadmus's canvases, and eventually wrote a book that was an homage to the painter's work. In the 1970s, Kirstein built Cadmus a house on the grounds of his Connecticut estate. There, Cadmus lived with his lover, Jon Andersson, and the two of them took care of dinners for Kirstein and his weekend guests every Saturday for years—sort of a friendly catering service.

“He had glamour of course,” said Cadmus. “Very dynamic. He knew everybody. He used to have very good parties with people like Callas and Nelson Rockefeller.” At a memorial service at the New York State Theater—a building that Kirstein had chosen Philip Johnson to design—Cadmus described his friend as a “benevolent hurricane.”

During the war, Cadmus began to send food packages to E. M. Forster in England, after the painter's close friend Margaret French told Cadmus that Forster had seen his work in
Time
or
Newsweek
and greatly admired it. They began a correspondence that blossomed into a fine friendship. “He was not shy with me,” Cadmus remembered. “He was very astute always. He was no ninny. And he was very scornful of people who didn't enjoy going to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. He thought those were wonders that people should see. He enjoyed visiting them very much.”

Later Forster came to America and visited Cadmus and French in Provincetown, where she and her husband, Jared, had rented a house for the summer. “I and George Tooker were their guests for the summer there,” said Cadmus. Provincetown was not particularly gay. “It wasn't like it is now. We weren't there for that. We were there to be at the beach and for working.”

Then Cadmus visited Forster in his rooms in Cambridge. “I sat on the window ledge drawing his portrait as he read
Maurice
to me”—the gay novel that was first published many years after Forster's death. “In two sessions, I guess he read the whole book to me. I loved it. He had no intention of publishing it because of his relationship with his policeman friend. That would have been very damaging to him and [the policeman'sJ wife.”

Like Forster, Cadmus considered himself a moralist: “I admire the virtues of long-term friendships and all the things that Forster writes about: tolerance, sympathy, and kindness.”

MURRAY GITLIN
was working in the terminal cancer ward of the Brooklyn Naval Hospital and dreaming about becoming a dancer when he got out of the navy. “On nights off I would come into Manhattan. Servicemen—all of us in uniform—were treated like royalty. You were given tickets to movies and concerts.” When he was eighteen he went to Radio City Music Hall “alone, in my uniform. I wasn't what you'd call a hot sailor. I was too fat. Anyway, I sat there, and this tall blond man came—not old—and sat next to me.

“I felt something and I began to tremble. And he put his hand on my thigh, and I thought to myself, Well, I've got to do something. So he kept
fooling around. In the orchestra of the Music Hall! I believe the movie was
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
. So he asked me if I would like to come to his hotel room, and I said yes. It was called the Hotel America, on 47th, between Sixth and Seventh. It was like a hotel that Tennessee Williams would have stayed in, in New Orleans—louvered doors and very rinky-dink. I was as nervous as a cat. And when we got to the hotel, he said, ‘You wait down here for a few minutes and I'll go up.' He told me the room number, and then he said, ‘You can come up and I'll let you in.' I said, ‘Great.' And then I went up and I knocked on his door and he opened the louvers and we hugged one another and kissed. And I said, ‘I love you!' He turned out to be a cocktail pianist from Asbury Park. There was nothing unusual about him. He was very corn-fed and very middle of the road. For me it was a great release and a great experience. And we saw one another several times after.”

In the East Fifties near Lexington Avenue, the friendly woman owner of the Cloisters served excellent food and enjoyed playing matchmaker for her numerous gay patrons. William Wynkoop remembered, “If you went in and there wasn't a vacant table, she would say, ‘Oh, as you can see, every table is taken. Would you mind sitting down with somebody else?' Another single male. And I met three or four guys there that way.”

Wynkoop's future lover Roy Strickland was working at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island when he was invited to a Manhattan cocktail party with forty other gay men in 1942. “We were in a building overlooking the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. When one of the fellows I met found out I was from Huntington, he said, ‘Well, you must go over to Fire Island a lot. I said, ‘Fire Island, what's that?'”

The man recommended Ocean Beach, which had a gay hotel before Cherry Grove and the Pines became the island's principal gay outposts. The following summer Strickland wrote away to the Ocean Beach Chamber of Commerce for a list of hotels. He chose Sis Norris's (named for its owner), which had a bar overlooking the bay and a clientele that included a number of Russian ballet dancers.

“One day I was walking down the beach and I looked up in the sand dunes, and here was a guy standing there completely stark, buck naked,” Strickland recalled. “And I thought, Well, I'm going up and investigate. I went up and we got together. We had sex in the dunes on a blanket. This was my first experience on the beach. It was wonderful: the hot sun beating down and the sound of the waves. Afterwards we started talking, and he said, ‘What do you do?' He was a bit older than I. And I told him I worked at Grumman's. He said, ‘Well, what do you want to do after the
war?' And I said, ‘I think that I would like to move to New York, and I'd like to get into display work. I think I could do as nutty windows as they do at Lord and Taylor's and Bonwit Teller's and R. H. Macy's, and McCreery's.' We chatted some more. And then when I was about to leave, he said, ‘Well, look me up after the war. I'm display director at Bonwit Teller's.' I nearly died.”