Read City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s Online
Authors: Edmund White
Typically, the book read:
I remember fishnet.
I remember board and brick bookshelves.
I remember driving in cars and doing landscape paintings in my head (I still do that).
Joe had long been a friend of Warhol’s and had even anticipated Pop Art in an early painting called 7-
Up
, abandoning that approach when he saw Andy’s work. He collaborated with Jasper Johns on a painting. His favorite work, however, was drawing. He would draw Kenward’s beautiful dog Whippoorwill or his own foot, or he would draw a boy’s legs in athletic socks or a sleeping nude man. His work was either cool and insouciant Americana or it was funny. He seldom painted, but when he did, the results were highly original and convincing. Once he did a parody of Wyeth’s painting by showing Whippoorwill dragging his long white body across the grass toward a house.
Joe would spend every summer in Calais, Vermont, with Kenward. During the summer months we’d all receive letters from Joe in his big, bold script spelling out what he was reading (
Great Expectations, Portrait of a Lady
) and gossip about who’d come to stay.
In the midst of this very regular life (reading, dinners out in fancy restaurants, very occasional tricks, constant country-and-western music, summers in Vermont), Joe fell violently in love with my old love Keith McDermott. Keith had moved back to New York after several years away in Los Angeles. I had slept with Joe a few times but it hadn’t really worked out in bed. Now Joe was overwhelmed by Keith’s looks. Whenever Keith would appear in a play, Joe would deluge him with roses. Joe was a romantic man in the most old-fashioned way, and Keith responded to the lavish treatment. Keith was also very attracted to Joe. Keith had always liked eccentrics and bohemians. With his Armani suits and vast resources of cash and his becalmed, unproductive days and nights after so many years of amphetamine-driven work, Joe appealed to Keith’s horror of the middle class and his yearning for the unusual.
Perhaps their affair started because each was the other’s ideal. Keith was the small, hairless, perfectly knit young man with a gymnast’s body and regular features—someone who’d stepped right out of one of Joe’s drawings. Joe was warm and lovable and unlike anyone else.
When the English TV series
Brideshead Revisited
was being shown, we friends took turns hosting for an episode, each cooking his best dish when it came time. Joe had no idea how to cook so he had the most expensive caviar and chocolates catered.
Joe was certainly sweet and disinterested—we called him Prince Myshkin. Later, when he had to die of AIDS at a young age, he became bitter, understandably. I’m glad I didn’t have to witness that last phase of his life.
I don’t remember how I met Richard Sennett, but dozens of roads led to the intellectual and social Rome that he represented. Dick was a professor of sociology at New York University and had written several remarkable books, including
The Hidden Injuries of Class
and
The Fall of Public Man
. He was a well-known professor and sought-after lecturer. He was also an odd combination of schoolboy nerd, flamboyant queen, and Mrs. Astor, in that he loved ideas and intellectuals and enjoyed prancing about in drag, though that was just a phase, and he entertained with charm and tirelessness in his little house on Washington Mews, a brick-paved lane just off Washington Square. The old New York Henry James gentry had lived in the big town houses on the square in the nineteenth century, and the stables and servants’ quarters had been lodged behind along the mews, except they’d been converted to artists’ studios since at least the early 1900s when cars had replaced carriages. Any sort of gracious, historic, private living space was so unusual in New York that even converted stables seemed to us the height of civilized luxury. Washington Mews and the matching MacDougal Alley across Fifth Avenue were the best addresses in Manhattan. In Philadelphia they would have been just two of dozens and dozens of quiet streets lined with brick town houses, gas lamps, and hundred-year-old trees. In London they would have been beneath notice.
Dick had been married twice before I knew him—and he would later marry a third time, to the lighthearted but formidable Dutch-born economist Saskia Sassen. In the late 1970s and early eighties when we were first friends, however, he was trying to be gay, though without much success. Maybe he was a bit bisexual, but his swooning over beautiful boys seemed more dutiful than instinctual. Dick courted one tall, powerfully built young man with black, curling hair and red, curling lips and thick, muscular legs and huge black eyes, who seemed to love Dick in his anguished way, but I doubt whether their love was satisfying to either of them.
Dick mainly liked to entertain, but not just anyone. At his house on the mews you could meet Isaiah Berlin or Michel Foucault or Susan Sontag or Jürgen Habermas or Alfred Brendel. Like most intellectuals, these men and the occasional woman didn’t want to make engagements far in advance—not in the usual busy-busy New York fashion. They never knew when inspiration might strike, and besides, socializing wasn’t part of their idea of themselves. They weren’t the sort of frivolous (or conventional) creatures who knew what they would be doing a week from Thursday. But since they were apt to get lonely like anyone else, especially after dark on a cold February night, they could always drift over to Dick’s house, where it was okay just to ring the bell. Whereas most New Yorkers were barricaded in their apartments and could be seen only by carefully arranged appointment like ministers of state, and then only after two cancellations and three postponements and a change of meeting place, Dick was always available. He was at home downstairs cooking in his modern, roomy kitchen or upstairs entertaining in his atelier-like living room with its skylights and vast airy ceilings and its grand piano. He might be scraping away at his cello while Brendel played the piano part. Or people of every sort, many of them Europeans, might be sitting on the big, deep couch and in the comfy armchairs chatting away. One of his favorites was Diana
Trilling, who was already seventy-five then and a big, lively woman with her hair pulled up in a hennaed bun, her dresses full and plain but her opinions sharp and her interest in everyone around her even more acute.
I can remember sitting beside Janet Hobhouse, the novelist, when Trilling looked up and said, “Who is this young man entering the room like a prince out of a Turgenev novel?” It was Vladimir de Marsano, my pal from Venice. “In fact he is a half-Serb, half-Italian aristocrat,” I said, “and he’s going to be in one of my novels.” Vladimir came over with his wonderful slightly crooked smile and unflinching but kind eyes and the slight asymmetry of his pugilist’s nose, as if the head of a classical statue had been copied in wax and then squeezed ever so slightly to one side. Mainly he was a high-spirited but impeccably well-mannered kid, and he did carry himself with the elegance and lightness of a Slavic prince. He had a way of standing close, as if he understood that with every quarter inch of increased proximity he was jacking up his magnetism exponentially. He knew everyone wanted to kiss him. He didn’t want to kiss people back, but he did like having that kind of power over us.
He had a tougher, bigger blond man with him, a South African student. It seemed they were devoting most of their time to the disco of the moment, Studio 54. I’d never gone there but apparently the owner, Steve Rubell, let in both beautiful nobodies and celebrities of any sort. In New York Vladimir must have been a beautiful nobody, though to old Venetians such as David and me he was mythical. Vladimir jokingly complained that he and his blond beast of a friend were so inseparable that people imagined they must be lovers. He seemed genuinely proud of the imputation—and perhaps of the reality.
Studio 54 had a giant, smiling man in the moon up above the dancers slowly shoveling a spoon of cocaine toward his nose, over
and over. This was still when many acquaintances assured me that cocaine was harmless and not addictive. People joked that it was the perfect yuppie drug since it made your head clearer and inspired you to want to work even more.
Dick Sennett’s salon was far from the Studio, though no less exclusive in its way. Dick was an ambitious if hit-and-miss cook, and he could often be found concocting a complicated dish out of the latest cookbook—something he would serve informally.
But no one paid much attention to the food or the liberal lashings of plonk. It was all a plush background for the startling mondaine reality in the frame: the good talk and the promise of even better talk. Dick knew not to quiz the great about their Subjects, their Accomplishments, but rather to tease them about their secret Vices, their hidden Charms, their unheralded powers of Seduction. He was always grabbing the hoary hand of a grizzled Oxford don and saying, “Oh, what a naughty pussycat you are! Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Such evil, evil naughty thoughts—and Deeds! Yes, Deeds, Mr. Pussy-Boy. Okay, everyone, à table, à table, and remember: Paws up!” No one quite knew what
paws up
meant, but it sounded like a cross between an eating-club slogan and a half-forgotten piece of nursery (or else Masonic) mummery. All these lonely intellectuals, their eyes hollowed out from years of reading microfiches and medieval script, their voices hoarse from gabbling to themselves over tinned beans and Bovril in unheated Rooms, were now being stroked and feted and fed. They were like feral cats being tickled behind the ears for the first time. They were purring, though still looking around anxiously for the next boot in the rear, the next nasty review by a rival in the
Times Literary Supplement
. Nor did Dick invite just the old and famous. He knew they needed young and lovely nobodies to make a fuss over them. Given the average age in the room, anyone under fifty counted as young.
Dick was what the French call a
mythomane
, which involved a
flexible and always entertaining approach to the truth, which he never twisted to his advantage. He wasn’t trying to impress anyone or get ahead with his tall stories. No, he was just daydreaming out loud, expanding the narrow repertory of the actual, adding a herbaceous border of the imaginary to the dull gravel path of the real. His mythomania could also be a form of nearly oriental politeness. For instance, he met Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky at nearly the same moment. To Susan he said that he, like her, had just survived a serious cancer, whereas to Joseph he said that like him he’d just had a nearly fatal heart attack. No one much minded when the truth came out that Dick was in perfect health, both in the past and the present. People just smiled a bit sheepishly and shrugged. No harm done…
I heard three versions of his childhood from him. Once he was raised by socialists on Chicago’s South Side. Once his parents were a “radical” lesbian pair in Minnesota. And once, when we were strolling through the Île St.-Louis in Paris, I said, “Isn’t this the most beautiful perfect place?” and he said, “I’m so glad you like it. I was raised here by my French aunts as a child just after the war,” and he vaguely waved toward a darkened
hôtel particulier
along the Quai de Bethune. But why, if he’d grown up there, did he grope for words in French and have such an incomprehensible accent?
Then there were all the different versions of why he was no longer a concert cellist—his paralyzed hand was one. But it wasn’t paralyzed. Another was the time he’d vomited into his cello. But why did he play so many wrong notes, even though he had a scarily professional way of freezing his face and breathing through his stiffened nostrils as if he were a Japanese temple-guardian devil or a Dostoyevsky character on the verge of an attack? Dick loved music and he enjoyed concertizing, though it was all pretty hard on the ears. And, hey, does the cello have a hole large enough to vomit into? I think it has just two narrow S-curves on either side of the strings.
But who were we to complain? Dick provided us all with lots of good stories and half our conversation was devoted to his latest inventions and his most notable outrages. Did I tell you about how even though he was nearly bald and the fringe was all gray he tossed back an imaginary braid and exclaimed, “Well, as a blonde…”? Or did I tell you about last night at dinner when he came down the stairs in a little pink dress with shoulder straps, though his shoulders are horribly hairy? And then he changed midmeal to the little black dress? He obviously was nostalgic for the eighteenth century when public acts had been expressive, similar to acts of artistic invention. People are still telling Dick Sennett stories. Just recently, some twenty years later, I met someone who claimed he’d advised Dick on his wardrobe during the drag epoch.
He was wonderfully encouraging as a friend. He hired me to be the executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities even though I was only marginally an academic and had never been an administrator, except briefly at
Saturday Review
. The part-time job paid me just twenty-two thousand dollars a year—and my main duty was getting everyone coffee and telling Dick Sennett stories. In many ways, however, I was a good choice. I liked most people, I wanted to know all about their scholarly pursuits, I was even-tempered, and I had a small reputation as a writer. I was teaching a fiction workshop or two at Columbia and another one at New York University. I had a low rent and few expenses.
Dick did everything to encourage me. When I wrote a play, a fairly tedious one, he decided we should give it a reading at the institute. Val Kilmer, at that point a young, unknown actor, agreed to read the young lover. In real life Kilmer’s lover was then reputedly the much older Cher, who would wait for him outside the door in her limo every evening after rehearsals. No fool Cher—she wasn’t about to let this treasure (a drool-makingly young, masculine heterosexual beauty) escape from her. The other actors were Bob Gottlieb’s wife,
Maria Tucci, and David Warrilow, one of the leading interpreters of Samuel Beckett. Later I would see him perform in French in Paris, and no one there would believe he wasn’t born French, so perfect was his accent. He told me that he’d so hated being English that he’d “acted” his way into being a French actor with total conviction. He had a brief movie career in
Barton Fink
and
The Last Days of Immanuel Kant
, but he was too depressed and drank too heavily to be a Hollywood actor. Maria Tucci, whose father was Niccolò Tucci, the Swiss-Italian writer, had had to sacrifice her acting career because of a sick child, but eventually she returned to the stage—and to television in
Law & Order
.