Liberation (33 page)

Supper with Glenway Wescott was quite spoilt by the fact that he had invited a bunch of white-collar faggots we scarcely knew; so all was leering sneering politeness.

 

May 15. We had lunch with Vera [Stravinsky] and Bob Craft and Ed Allen at their apartment on Fifth Avenue, 920, looking out on the park. It was astonishingly like earlier meals at times when Igor was sick in bed, and, after the first five minutes, not in the least embarrassing. Both Vera and Bob spoke freely and in great detail about the last days of Igor's life and about the funeral. Bob seems anxious to define the nature of his grief. The chief impression I got was that they and Ed now made up a working team which was still full of potential energy but lacked any immediate project. Vera's eyes looked yellow and tired and she seemed a bit shakier and older, but after all she had only just recovered from the flu. She was sweet and affectionate as always.

Julie Harris (who we also saw, in a poor play called
And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little
¹⁰⁰
and then had a snack with at Sardi's) was worried about her son Peter, who keeps running away from school; now he's to be put on a training ship which sails round the world. This was just a symbolic meeting. We hurried away from it to see Mishima's dreadful arty but disgustingly realistic film about a Japanese army officer disembowelling himself and his wife stabbing herself in the throat.
¹⁰¹
The morbidly interesting thing is that Mishima made it not so long before he really killed himself.

 

May 16. It rained a bit. We went to the Lincoln Center to see the New York [City] Ballet in
Jewels
. Don was in raptures; ballet really gets to him as almost nothing else does. And I was happy he was happy; it left me impressed but cool. A stylish dancer we hadn't either of us seen before, Robert Weiss.
¹⁰²
Handsome and romantic.

Supper with a man named Ron Holland, who's J.J. Mitchell's latest date. Virgil Thomson came, and Joe LeSueur. I hadn't wanted to come and I rather hated it; and Don rather hated the situation, which was that Holland, who is rich, was being bribed to give us all a meal in exchange for having Virgil and me at the party. Or, to put it in another way, J.J. was working off his “obligation” to us (being taken to Disneyland) by making his lover buy us a meal. I don't much like either Joe or J.J. Joe is so unattractive and J.J. is silly in the wrong way. Furthermore, the restaurant was tiny, French, pretentious, and crowded, and a cap came off one of my teeth.

 

May 17. Saw Peter Schwed at Simon and Schuster's—also Michael Korda, who looks like a Jewish queen in his mid-twenties. Liked him; felt embarrassed as always by Peter. They showed me the design for the jacket of
Kathleen and Frank
and, lo and behold, side by side with a photo of Frank was a photo of—Emily! That's the sort of mistake which only seems possible in publishing, and it shows a fundamental lack of interest.

I was then interviewed by Daniel Halpern, the editor of a magazine called
Antaeus
; this was arranged by Andreas Brown of the Gotham Book Mart[. T]he two of them seem to be great buddies, maybe lovers, for Halpern is quite attractive, a big fresh-faced Jewish boy with sort of Afro hair. I was slightly but not entirely charmed by him; I suspect him of being a teaser, a climber and a hustler. He has certainly collected a lot of people to contribute to his magazine and presumably for free—Paul Bowles, Lawrence Durrell, Thom Gunn, Tennessee, Gore, Roditi, Kosinski, Burroughs, Böll, etc. etc.
¹⁰³
He came with me and waited while a nice old-fashioned New York Jewish dentist put the cap back on my tooth for only five dollars. Then I met Don and we saw Garbo in
As You Desire Me
—a miserable adaptation,
¹⁰⁴
but she and von Stroheim were marvellous. And then we had supper with Vera and Bob at Romeo Salta's. When we went there, we had the right street but the wrong number; and the cabdriver shattered the myth about the rudeness of New York cabdrivers by cruising up the street on his own,
after
we'd paid him, looking for the restaurant and then running back to tell us when he'd found it! This restaurant visit was sheerly symbolic; we felt obliged to spend as much money as we possibly could. In fact we'd offered them the Colony and Vera had accepted it with pleasure, but thank goodness it was closed, this being a Monday! As it was, our bill came to over a hundred dollars. But Bob was so helpful, talking Italian to show off and ordering everything, just as if he was the host. I forget what we talked about, but it was a snug evening. They struck both of us even more than usual as being innocents. They seem hopelessly extravagant. But maybe if they really find themselves poor they will innocently accept that too.

 

May 18. We had lunch with Jens Yow, who really is a very sweet good-natured person. We picked him up at the Morgan Library where he works; it is like the inside of a pyramid, so massive and seemingly theft- and dirt- and bombproof, and packed with treasures. Jens still sees Lincoln [Kirstein] a lot, so I complained to him of my sadness at the utter rejection of the two of us by Lincoln and his refusal even to answer the peace note I left for him last February. Jens said he couldn't understand it. According to him, Lincoln isn't at all crazy at present.

That afternoon we went over to Brooklyn and saw Paul Cadmus and his friend Jon Andersson. They were both very nice to us, but Don doesn't really like Paul, he finds him cagey and sarcastic and full of bitterness. Paul looked healthy. He had an unbecomingly long hairdo; it's all white now.

Then we saw
Follies
¹⁰⁵
which was ghastly, although Don liked it a little bit more than I did, and suddenly the birthday was a failure, because I hadn't arranged a birthday supper to top it off. We hurriedly tried to call people and couldn't get anyone. It
was
my fault, of course, but Don's birthdays are always tricky, because he will not say beforehand what he wants or doesn't want to do, and he doesn't like it if I tell people in advance. I had been dreading this birthday for several weeks, and I was thankful when it was over. We came back gloomily to eat at home—soup out of a can—this was my punishment. When we got back to the house we found the tenants in a state of fury because, as they claimed, the new owner—who wants to get them all out of the building because their rents are fixed—had sent two men to tear down the door which protects the staircase, thereby exposing them to burglars. They had already sent for the police and were planning legal action. We were a bit worried, wondering if we'd be harassed with stink- or firebombs or beatings-up as the representatives of Maurice Grosser!

 

May 19. We saw Brian Bedford in
The School for Wives.
He was better than either of us had ever seen him before. As Don said, it was so wise of him to switch from romantic leads to a character part. With his Tony Award, he is very much
Mr.
Bedford, and the matinee audience—largely school kids—ate him up, whistling and stamping. Brian received us afterwards in his dressing room, wearing a very short robe and repeatedly rearranging his bare legs; very friendly and gracious, but he showed no further enthusiasm for
A Meeting by the River
, not to mention the film of
A Single Man
. . . . In the evening we had supper with Elaine de Kooning,
¹⁰⁶
Joe LeSueur and his friend Alan Martel. I like her, hadn't met her before, and it seems she dug me. The utter silence of Alan Martel gradually becomes infuriating and aggressive. I had fantasies of wiring his chair and giving him an electric shock. And, altogether,

why why why does one spend such evenings? In this case the answer was that we met because Don wants Elaine to arrange a sitting for him with de Kooning. Which is quite sufficient, as far as I'm concerned—except that nothing
was
arranged. When we got back home, we found that there had been a small fire in the house next door. Needless to say, the thought occurred that this might be another broad hint from the new landlord that we should all move out.

 

May 20. Judge Isaacs, a friend of Virgil Thomson, who is a specialist in housing disputes, assured me on the phone that there was nothing to worry about; he had talked to the new landlord who had convinced him that he was not a crook and had not had the door removed for malicious reasons, but because a large piece of furniture had to be carried upstairs! (This doesn't explain, however, why the corresponding door in the other part of the building was also removed at the same time—or so the other tenants told us!)

I spent the rest of the day running around seeing this person and that. (My disinclination to record any more of this dreary and tiresome visit is now so strong that I'll only mention two or three more items.) In the morning I went to see Pavitrananda. We spent about an hour together, of which I found the first three-quarters extraordinarily trying. I felt like someone who understands the language of the birds, but not well. Pavitrananda's weird vowels and speech rhythms seem at first utterly nonhuman but, if you strain your concentration to the utmost, you find you can
just
make out what he's talking about. However, shortly before I left, we began to communicate, mentally rather than verbally. Once again, the wonderfulness began to shine forth from him, as I have seen it shining many times before. This old silver-haired scarecrow was shining and saying joyfully, his eyes full of tears, “Repeat the name of the Lord, that's all that matters,” and I was filled with joy and bowed down before him without any taint of politeness and then went out and wandered about Central Park feeling elated.

Claire Bloom wasn't up to
Hedda Gabler
; she seemed merely vulgar.
¹⁰⁷
We saw good old Myrna Loy afterwards.

 

May 21. Just before having lunch with Virgil Thomson (who I'm slowly becoming quite fond of ) I met Clinton Kimbrough in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. He was just off to England with the girl he is going to marry. He had a bit of a beard and looked tired but pleased with himself and his life. I was glad to see him. I have always rather liked him, or at any rate wished him well.

In the afternoon, Don and I went to see Truman Capote in his apartment in one of the buildings on the United Nations Plaza. He has almost the only tolerable view in New York, because he looks down the river, instead of across it to that junkyard, Brooklyn. You see lots of barges heading seaward, making white wakes in the grey water, and the park is below you, bright green, and then the U.N. building in profile, looking so slender that you can hardly believe it's packed from top to bottom with diplomats, and to your right is lower Manhattan with the chief skyscrapers in the foreground, including the two towers which are to become higher than the Empire State.

Truman looked bulky and unhealthy and seemed somewhat listless and sad. A wise little old child who has stayed indoors too long, with his toys, collections of glass paperweights, jeweled boxes and other treasures, including a marvellous ivory (Chinese?) banana, half peeled. Of this, he remarked that some people who saw it were completely fooled and went away saying that Truman was a slob, to leave fruit lying around in that condition.

He is probably worried about his novel which he says he can't finish; he already has seven hundred pages of it. Also, his life must be full of anxiety—though that's something one can never be sure of, with another person. He is now forty-seven, so when I first met him he must have been twenty-three. There was a photograph in the apartment taken about that time, with the Paleys[,] and he looks so cute and sexy in it, an impudent little blond with a smooth sturdy body, wearing nothing but a check cap on the back of his head and a pair of white shorts.
¹⁰⁸

He told us that Cecil Beaton has written an indiscreet show-off book about his relations with Garbo, including their fucking.
¹⁰⁹
Truman thinks it will do Cecil a lot of harm.

I have asked Simon and Schuster to send Truman a set of proofs of
Kathleen and Frank
. I begged him to write me his opinion of it, no matter what.

In the evening we had supper with Vera, Bob and Ed Allen. Bob and Ed were busy unpacking boxes of books which had just arrived. It seems unwise to do all this work when they may be leaving the apartment so soon, but I could feel that the excitement of unpacking had cheered them all up, even Vera; it was their first project since Igor's death. Bob kept remarking that they had far more books than they could possibly find room for and that they would have to get rid of a lot of them. “So help yourself,” he added. But when I noticed and asked for a novel by Ford Madox Ford,
The Fifth Queen
(?),
¹¹⁰
Bob said that Stravinsky had liked it, or Mad
am
had liked it, implying that it was a bit sacred. He and Vera pressed me to take it, nevertheless, but I took the hint instead and left the book lying on the table.

Our flight back to Los Angeles next morning was our first on a 747. We were both nervous at takeoff and held hands, but the huge thing got itself off the ground without apparent trouble. There were lots of empty seats. The hostesses tried to be arch and were merely rude; the food called itself “gourmet” and was merely lukewarm.

We got back to find that Jim Gates had washed his own bed sheets and had not taken the car to work that morning (although I'd told him he could) because he figured we'd be needing it as soon as we arrived. He had also packed his bags and had Peter move them back to the house in Venice. Even Don, who continues to suspect all Jim's motives and actions, has to admit that this was thoughtful.)

 

June 3.
Yesterday we finished nearly twenty-one pages of the “Frankenstein” teleplay. It is a ghastly chore, we are going so slowly; at this rate we shan't finish before the middle of September. Don is upset because he feels he is a drag on me. Actually he is and he isn't. He is a drag when he's typing because he simply cannot sit quiet and work something out, it drives him up the wall. And yet without him I wouldn't work on the fucking thing at all. And he does very often have good and even brilliant ideas. Oh I wish to Christ we had never started it. But then we have to earn money somehow.