Liberation (71 page)

Jim Bridges claims that he has got John Calley—who worked with us on
The Loved One
as an associate producer or something and is now head of Warner's—interested in
A Meeting by the River
. He was to read the novel over the weekend. ( Jim was determined
not
to show him our screenplay, which makes me think that Jim must be secretly intending to rewrite it drastically.) Well, we've heard nothing from Calley[,] and Jim has gone off on another of his
Paper Chase
promotion trips and will be away for a couple of weeks—leaving Jack to receive Salka Viertel, who is due to arrive here almost immediately and maybe stay through Christmas!

Irving Lazar is in New York and scheduled to see Curtis Brown. Perry Knowlton answered my letter and urged me to reconsider leaving them, particularly for Irving Lazar, who, he says, is all right for film business but how can he represent me in New York, where I need “a full time representative who specializes in literary representation and has the staff and expertise to do the job.” I haven't answered this letter because I don't want to get really nasty and point out to Knowlton what kind of representatives he and his expert staff have been. Even if Irving turns out to have been a mistake, I do trust him to produce some action.

Already, he has called Universal and they have agreed in principle that Don and I should get some money from the sales of the paperback of our “Frankenstein” screenplay, which is just out. The two parts of the T.V. film were shown on NBC, on November 30 and December 1. Many people called us about it, all professing to have enjoyed it despite its faults—no, not quite all, Cukor was frank, so was Billy Bengston. We thought it even worse than it had seemed in the projection room at Universal. Aside from all the faults I've already mentioned, another, a quite basic one, appeared; the picture hadn't been shot for television—that's to say, it was hopelessly lacking in close-ups and therefore the players' reactions were lost; in many scenes, they were far far away from you, wandering about in the backgrounds of the big sets. We've been cursing Jack Smight for being “a television director”—would that he were! Hunt Stromberg called from Texas, trying to placate me by quoting from various “rave” notices, including one by Cecil Smith in the
Los Angeles Times
. I told him he had betrayed us, but I didn't raise my voice. He just kept repeating that he was sure we would get an Emmy!

Gavin left for Tangier on the 26th. We haven't heard from him yet.

For a long time now, Jack Larson and Jim Bridges have been raving about The Open Theater Company. Having met Joe Chaikin, its director, we were inclined to think we'd hate it, because he's so pretentious when he talks about the drama. But at last we felt obliged to see it because the company is breaking up—chiefly, as far as we could gather, because three or four of the top people in it are such prima donnas that they couldn't bear to be with each other any longer, having stuck it out for ten years! So, on the 26th, we drove down to Huntington Beach and saw a performance at the Golden West College, and then again, on the 29th, we drove to Costa Mesa and saw them, in another show, at the Orange Coast College. The first performance was called
The Mutation Show
and the second
Night Walk
. Nearly all of it is movement, partly dancing, partly miming, partly tableau, partly just mugging at the audience—accompanied by animal noises or noises imitating the rhythms of human speech, also there are drum beats and other percussive sounds. Very little intelligible dialogue. These are not improvisations; indeed, it is obvious that they have been very carefully rehearsed. They hold you for quite a while; then the lack of structure—or perhaps I'd better say quite brutally “plot”—begins to be felt. All the more so, in a way, because the actors are really good at what they're doing. Talent minus structure equals cuteness; the greater the talent the greater the cuteness.

On December 1, we went to a farewell lunch for the company at Jack and Jim's house. Seen offstage, they nearly all seemed charming, unpretentious, friendly, really lovable. A big blond young man named John Stoltenberg, who manages the show and is also a writer, was dangerously affectionate, a true dog person who would have moved into the house and our basket, it seemed, if he had received one pat too many.
¹²⁴

At Vedanta Place last night, Swami asked me if I had had any experiences. That's the word I always use when I ask him the same question and so it staggered me for a moment, but of course he didn't mean it in the same way. Anyhow, I found myself instantly in a state of emotion. I told him that if I hadn't met him my life would have been nothing, that I knew this now, and that I like best to meditate on his room because I know that Maharaj is there. My voice was shaking and tears ran down my face. Swami didn't say anything but his face became aloof in that way it does, when he is in a spiritual mood—“deserted,” one might call it, because you feel that he is “out of himself.” We were silent for a long time.

After supper at Vedanta Place and the reading, I went to Nick Wilder's gallery to put in an appearance because a new show was opening and I want to declare my solidarity with Nick on every possible occasion—tomorrow he is to come down here and look at Don's work and discuss showing it in the gallery in the near future. (Don is worried because he has nothing new, he says, to show Nick and of course I am urging him as usual to give Nick a chance to react to the paintings.)

This opening was for Bruce Nauman.
¹²⁵
Nauman had surrounded the walls with white doorless cubicles. The rest was up to you. You were supposed to go into one of them and take any position you liked, accompanied by as many people as you wished. Nick told me that one of Nauman's other shows had featured a long narrow corridor down which you walked toward a television set. As you approached it, you saw yourself in the set, getting smaller and smaller. I've left out a lot of other details, but that was the general idea.

I have now finished the second chapter of
Wanderings
in a very rough form. It deals with the Hirschfeld Institute period of my stay in Berlin and my preliminary attitudes to the city and its boys and to Hirschfeld's sexology. And now comes the problem of covering the rest of my time in Berlin. How to deal with the characters from my books? Should I simply quote from my own descriptions of them? I don't want to make this merely a handbook and guide to my fiction. I want to cover the ground as quickly as possible because, after all, it is fundamentally an introduction to the American material, an answer to the question, why did I go to America.

But how deeply all this interests me! I don't think I have ever felt so challenged and turned on by any other project. I'm merely in a flap because I feel I can't possibly get it all “in.” But of course the thing I must remember is that I can “get in” anything that I really want to get in. What I have to do is just write all of it down and then take a good look at it and then begin “packing.”

I see this book essentially as a study of successive attitudes to my life. It is true autobiography, not memoirs.

 

December 8.
Nick Wilder came down yesterday morning to look at Don's work and talk about the show Don is to have at his gallery. Before he arrived, Don and I had an argument about what to show him. I begged Don to show some of his paintings and small ink drawings as well as the big portrait drawings. Don was very dubious about the paintings, afraid that Nick would be put off by them—which was only natural, after the negative reactions of Irving Blum. But I argued that a dealer is like a lawyer, you can't afford to have secrets from him if you want him to represent you, and Don agreed and we finally picked out about a dozen paintings—that's to say mostly the blotty watercolors.

Well, to Don's amazement and to my much smaller amazement but huge joy and relief, Nick loved the watercolors and was altogether impressed by Don's versatility and said that he wants to give Don a show in which the whole front room of the gallery is full of the watercolors with a few drawings in the back room. And, when we met Nick again, yesterday evening, at the opening of a show of Charles Hill's work, Nick told Don that he had nearly called him that afternoon, because “I can't get your paintings out of my mind.”

And Kitty was so joyful and said that he would always listen to Drub's advice in the future, and he exclaimed—thinking of all the painting he would do for this show—“Now I can begin to live!” And honestly I believe, if I had been told I could have one wish granted to me (within the bounds of possibility) this would have been it.

Another bit of good news, though hardly in the same category, is that Calley is really interested in our
Meeting by the River
project and wants to go ahead. Jim is back here, just for today, because Salka arrived yesterday. She plans to stay with them through Christmas and maybe longer, if Jack and Jim will accompany her back to Switzerland early in the New Year, to go skiing.

A rather drunken fan on the phone, a few days ago, told me, “I've read several of your books.” I asked which ones. This baffled him for a moment, then he marvellously retorted, “A man like you—you're a man who's
beyond titles
!”

To return to Nick. He said that he wants Don's show [to] be very important—either in May or early next fall, “in prime time.” What's so marvellous about Nick is that he is quite consciously out to alter Don's image—from that of the celebrity-hunting portraiteer who got the chance to draw famous people through his association with Isherwood to that of a serious artist who has to be respected for his talent. I get the impression that Nick thinks Irving Blum doesn't really take Don seriously.

 

December 12.
This afternoon, Julian Jebb is due to arrive here with his assistant, Rosemary Bowen Jones, and we are to be in the grip of the BBC for a week.
¹²⁶
Am at present sulking about this, wishing to Christ I'd never agreed to it, even wishing I'd agreed to go to Berlin because maybe once I was there I'd have remembered something interesting. Now it seems to me that Berlin was one of the least important episodes in my life, which is nonsense of course—but it does bring home to me that my life in those days was a pretty shabby little affair in comparison with what I have had since.

The day before yesterday, Don and I went down to Palm Springs to see Truman Capote and John O'Shea; they had two other men with them, sort of business types, and Truman insisted with his devilish gleeful whim that we should smoke pot, and I got very aggressive, feeling I was being pushed around. However, we emerged from the situation—thanks to Don—without getting into a quarrel. Only result next day was that I weighed 155 (not due to pot but cracked crab!) and today, after abstaining from practi[c]ally everything, as I fondly imagined, I weigh 155
and ½
!

Last night, Salka came to supper here, with Jack Larson. She is so shaky and deaf and it is sadly dreary and exhausting being with her. You have to shout and she takes forever understanding what you're saying. I had to bear the brunt of this, naturally, but I really wish I had been quite alone with her. Don detected in her face a look of obstinacy and I can understand this—when you get in that state you are all the more obstinately determined to be part of the scene, so you instinctively make it impossible for others to talk about their own affairs in your presence; at least you try to. Actually, I was distracted from my efforts to cope with Salka by hearing snatches of a fascinating conversation Jack was having with Don. Jack was telling how Jim suffers when an actor puts him down for being gay. Jon Voight did this during the rehearsals of
Streetcar
, telling [ Jim] (or anyhow implying) that he couldn't possibly understand the play because he couldn't understand how a man feels about a woman! Jack says that Jim sheds tears on these occasions and smashes things when he's alone, later, in his room.

(The above sentence is misleading, as I now see, rereading it. I meant to say that Jim will shed tears in Jack's presence—not in the presence of the actor—while he is describing what took place, and then, later, go into his room alone and smash things.)

 

December 20.
The filming is all over, thank God. I quite enjoyed the first day of it, the 17th, because we were out of doors, on Muscle Beach, and I clowned around, jogging and sitting on the swings and then under a palm tree, reading from
Goodbye to Berlin
. But the day before yesterday and yesterday they filmed in this house, mostly in my workroom, and disturbed everything and made me feel jostled out of my nest. (To restore my morale, I've made a point of restarting work on
Wanderings
,
and
doing a small entry in the 1950 journal,
and
writing up this diary.)

Just the same, I think the interview may turn out quite well, and I feel Julian handled it not only professionally but tactfully, as far as I was concerned. I like his assistant, Rosemary Bowen

Jones; she is one of those smiling unflappable British treasures who can manage everything without being bossy. I also thought that the sound recordist, David MacMillan, was sweetly sympathetic as well as being powerfully sexy; I felt quite dizzy while he was attaching the mike to my shirt. He is—small world!—the boyfriend of Ann Gowland, Peter and Alice's daughter—and, less creditably, a member of the Francis Ford Coppola film colony in San Francisco.
¹²⁷
The cameraman, Bryan Anderson, I liked less; he acted a bit over-virile, maybe because I was saying a good deal about being queer in my answers to Julian's interview questions. Bryan has an Asian wife named Tamiko—I mean racially Asian—she is technically an American and speaks perfect English. Tamiko is a palmist and an astrologer. She knew at once that Don belonged to one of the earth signs—by looking at his hands, she claimed. She asked Don—not while I was there—“How long have you and Christopher been married?” Don firmly informed her that we don't regard ourselves as married: “We want to avoid the mistakes the heterosexuals have been making.”