Liberation (46 page)

Last night, we saw Franju's film of Cocteau's
Thomas the Imposter
. It isn't well cast or acted, but it did seem to me full of haunting atmosphere; amazing that they could have made it in the sixties. Even the ruins seemed characteristically World War I. A terrible glimpse of a dobbin with his mane on fire! We went with Pat Faure. I can't help it, I don't warm to victims—especially a woman victim of a Frog who leaves her for a boy.
¹⁷⁹

Sunshine at last—but that means the Canyon is crammed to the top with cars.

 

July 17.
Ken Anderson lives in a house on the Sherman Canal in Venice, only a few doors along from where Jim Gates and Peter Schneider used to live. These little wooden shacks seem holy and pure, because they have nothing to do with the culture of the marina, whose highrises and cranes are visible in the distance. We spent a couple of hours deciding which painting and which drawings of Ken's to buy.
¹⁸⁰
Ken asked us a thousand for the painting but came down instantly to five hundred; the two drawings cost us another hundred. Ken is bearded, mild eyed, nonchalant and absolutely sure of himself. When he speaks of painting he is apt to use art jargon. He is very cool but could become friendly, I think. Later, we had supper at a French place called Puce, where they make pancakes. Kind of hippie. Boys tend to have two girls apiece and wear open waistcoats over bare bodies. The service very slow because all the cooking was being done by a little woman singlehanded, though there were two women to wait and a proprietor who did absolutely nothing but nag the help. Don thought the pancakes good; I didn't. While I was eating mine I felt like a spy trying to chew and swallow a very tough secret document before the police arrive.

Am reading, or rather rereading, Cocteau's
Thomas the Imposter
. Between the leaves, I found a photo of Larry Paxton and me, mugging and wearing derby hats, which must have been taken in San Francisco only a short while before his death.
¹⁸¹

 

July 18.
Have been dipping into my old journals of the early sixties; a mistake. Now I feel sad as shit, but must admit things are much better nowadays, at least from my point of view. Is it really good to keep a journal? I loathe doing it at the time and I get depressed when I read it. But it's such a marvellous treasure trove. I have vowed to make an entry a day throughout July, so I'll stick to this, but I protest, I protest.

Actually, the current blue phase with Don is clearing up. We had a beautiful beach morning with big waves. Don has typed out our “interview” of him for the Wyatt Cooper magazine
¹⁸²
and really it is awfully well expressed: he talks with such authority—not at all like a downtrodden kitten, as I told him.

Books I am in the process of reading—some of them for many months, already:
The Way We Live Now
, Trollope;
Forbidden Colors
and
Spring Snow
, Mishima; Nijinsky's
Diary
;
Inside the Third Reich
, Speer;
She Knew She Was Right
, Ivy Litvinov;
Mysteries
, [Knut] Hamsun;
Thomas the Imposter
, Cocteau.

 

July 19.
Yesterday afternoon another representative came around from Occidental Petroleum; this one looked like a Jewish college professor and smoked a big pipe. I shut the door in his face without saying a word; he didn't seem surprised, no doubt the others had reported on their reception. This aroused all the paranoid fury I try to suppress; I wanted to order a wholesale massacre. Only a day or two ago, we got a letter from [James] Covington, who is selling his house and moving to Miami; he is still interested in getting us and our neighbors, Elsa, John Hardine, Donald Fareed and Dr. Christian Herrmann, to sign a group agreement with the corporation, claiming that it might in the future bring us in $10,000 each. But how loathsome to take their money!
¹⁸³

Another spurt of fury today; for the second time lately, there's been a girl in the gym.

Last night we saw
Dr. Strangelove
again. It is brilliant. That endless flight over the arctic regions. Those shots of the war room at the Pentagon, with the great circle of faces. Sterling Hayden's mouth and cigar. Strangelove's obscene mechanical arm.

Faride Mantilla came in this morning to clean for us. We like her so much, better than any of the others. We really pay her less than we ought, two dollars an hour and bus fare, so we've had bad consciences. Today we eased them considerably by giving her fifty dollars toward a dentist's bill; she owed $117.

 

July 20.
Cloudy morning; sunshine too late for beachgoing. Last night we had supper with Swami, who is with Pavitrananda, Bhadrananda and Krishna at the house on Malibu Road where they stay for their holiday. Swami's eyes are getting worse—he strained them working on a new translation of Saradananda's book
¹⁸⁴
—and his doctor is against letting him have the cataract opera tion. He told us how some young girls who were devotees of the Baby Krishna once insisted on feeding Brahmananda with milk like a baby, which caused him to go into
samadhi
. Swami said he couldn't put this story into
The Eternal Companion
¹⁸⁵
because people in the West wouldn't understand. The long lines of the evening breakers rolling into the bay—our eyes kept being pulled away from Swami's kind of beauty to theirs.

There's a new group going around town: Jews for Christ. And senior citizens are being referred to as Gray Lib. Incidentally, I save quite a bit of money at movies now; a lot of theaters have special rates for senior citizens.

I've been reading three long extracts from S.N. Behrman's
People in a Diary
, in issues of
The New Yorker
. Here's an abridged version of a story he tells about Siegfried Sassoon. Behrman and he had been to visit Sassoon's mother, during a visit by Behrman to England. As they were driving back to London, Behrman noticed that Sassoon was in a “dark mood.” Sassoon finally confessed that he was upset because he had been thinking about Edna St. Vincent Millay. Behrman knew that Sassoon had met Millay and liked her but sensed that now something had gone wrong between them:

 

There was an immense interval before Siegfried said anything more. We were approaching London. Siegfried went on,

“A friend of mine told me . . . someone was praising my war poems—perhaps excessively. Miss Millay said, ‘Yes, yes, I agree. But I wonder whether he would have cared so much if it were a thousand virgins who had been slaughtered.'”

“I don't believe she said it.”

“She did.” There was a pause. His cheek muscles were twitching. He was suffering.

“What's the use?” he added, “What can one do?”

Did he mean against a concentrated malice and venom of the world?—of even a fellow poet—a nice creature like Edna Millay?

“It couldn't have meant much to you,” I got out finally, “or you'd have told me.”

“It meant so much to me that I didn't tell you. It all came back while you were telling those stories at dinner.”

We drew up before the Park Lane.

“I'll call you in the morning,” he said. “Good night.”

“Good night, Siegfried,” I said.

He shook my hand. My heart ached for him.

I went upstairs to my room. I sat on the bed thinking of him. Everyone sang, I thought, except the poet.

 

This story—or rather, the way Behrman tells it, makes me dislike Behrman, Sassoon and Millay equally. Which is quite a feat. And how odd that Robert Graves made much the same remark, later, about both Sassoon and Owen!

 

July 21.
Another semivictory is announced in
The Advocate
: a revised code for Delaware, but the lewd conduct and soliciting clauses still stand.
¹⁸⁶

Last night we had supper with Jack Larson, Jim Bridges and a young director from New York, Joe Chaikin, who has been giving classes here for directors, on the invitation of the Mark Taper Forum. Gordon Davidson and Ed Parone, as well as Jim and Jack, have been attending the classes. Jim and Jack say Chaikin is amazing. He's a little stocky plump curly-haired red-blond, a Russian Jew by descent, with light blue eyes. He has a lot of charm and seemed rather impressive, though prone to sententious art talk, which may be explained by the fact that he worked with Peter Brook in England. He reminded me a bit of Richard Dreyfuss, the actor.

A heavenly morning on the beach with perfect waves. We are very near the end of “The Mummy” outline.

 

July 22.
Tomorrow is Gavin Lambert's birthday. We celebrated it by taking him to dinner at Raphael's yesterday. Before dinner, we went to see
The Stranger
, with Orson Welles. The sound system in the theater was in such bad shape that you could scarcely hear the dialogue. The drama is corny, anyhow; and I am temperamentally against all movies set in small American towns. Welles was at his best.

Mark, once again, wasn't with us, but this time he had a convincing excuse, he has sprained his ankle. Gavin talked casually and without much sympathy about this, saying how tiresome it was to have to cook for him and to have him laid up just now when Gavin needs his help in getting ready to move. We felt he was a bit bored with Mark. I asked him if he had brought up the subject of Mark's alleged thefts, and he said no, the right moment wouldn't be until after they had settled in France, because whatever money he decided to give Mark would be in francs or pounds, not dollars.

We have a scene in “The Mummy” in which Kay dreams that the mummy kisses her; she wakes and finds white dust on her lips. This suggests a title for our film, “Put your Mummy Where Your Mouth Is.”

Gavin wants to use one of Don's drawings of Selznick as an illustration in his book about the making of
Gone with the Wind
. And Bryan Forbes, who had tea with us yesterday, wants Don to draw him so Bryan can use the picture on his next book, I think it's his autobiography. Bryan didn't seem to have changed a bit, full of bounce and good nature as ever. How kind he was to Don around the time of Don's London exhibition in 1961. He took our play with him, saying he wanted to send it [to] some theater in London he's connected with.

 

July 23.
This morning we finished “The Mummy” outline in rough; it still seems to need something doing to the ending.

Last night, supper with Rudi Gernreich
¹⁸⁷
and Oreste Pucciani;
¹⁸⁸
Shelley Winters, Bill and Peggy Claxton and an actress named Diane Ladd were there. Rudi wore a thick red burnous which made him look absurd. Oreste looks exactly like Radclyffe Hall. Oh yes, and their precious stud Frog, Jacques Faure,
¹⁸⁹
the defaulting husband of Pat Faure, was there too; I forgot him, which shows, I guess, what a racist I am at heart. Shelley did all the talking. Peggy still had on her dead white and black geisha makeup. God, what an idiot bore evening. Then we went on for a short dip in Bryan Forbes's birthday party. I do like him. And at least there were some groovy boys. Also an English rock star, Elton John—who, Bryan had previously assured us, is a real respectable married gay, twenty-four, made over a million last year and shares it with his lover-manager, also young. I find something particularly touching and charming in the abandon with which an English gay boy dresses up to the teeth and throws himself into the role of a Californian. Saw one of them doing it at that party.

 

July 24.
We still haven't quite finished “The Mummy,” but almost. Don had a bright idea for the ending, while we were on the beach this morning—a revelation that the nurse is now working for the mummy. But it will take some fixing.

Yesterday we saw Dan Luckenbill and talked about the two stories he gave us to read. Later, Don told me that he thinks Dan regards me as having a closed mind; that I have my own standards and apply them to every story I read and if they don't fit, that's too bad. Dan is right, but I don't apologize for that at all; it's the way I have to be. Real broadmindedness is for noncreators. What did disconcert me was hearing from Don that Dan had told him he was once in a class of mine on some campus and had shown me a story and that I'd made much the same criticisms of it as I made this time. I mean, I was disconcerted to find I had forgotten this so completely.

Later we went to see
Butterflies Are Free
, ghastly stuff, thick entiment sprinkled with Jewish jokes. But Edward Albert, whom we used to see at the Palisades gym, gave a really moving and noble performance as the blind boy. He is quite beautiful but not slickly so and he makes you believe he is in love with the girl—how seldom can one say that about an actor! His emotion is very Latin in a good sense, and when he plays anger he is warm, not nasty. Considering the dialogue he had to speak, this was a genuine personal triumph. He got absolutely no support from anybody else in the cast.

 

July 25.
We still haven't finished “The Mummy,” because we can't quite decide on an ending. I really wish we could have a cloudy morning, tomorrow. These brilliant warm mornings lure us down to the beach after we've worked less than three hours, which isn't nearly enough.

Michael and Pat York came yesterday afternoon; he to be drawn, she to photograph me. The drawings didn't turn out well. Don says Michael sat all right but somehow didn't project. Indeed, he later fell asleep! Pat took about a hundred pictures of me, talking all the time. And then, at her request, I showed her some of my albums, which she loved seeing. I think it jolted her, though, when I told her that, for me as a queer, the difficulty wasn't to be able to fuck a woman but to be able to fall in love with one—which, I said, had been out of the question throughout my life. She would have much preferred it if I had said the opposite, because then my falling in love with a woman would have been touching and romantic and my impotence something to be saddened by—in other words, I should have presented homosexuality as a disability, which is how women like to think of it.