Liberation (92 page)

I am making an entry today merely to try to start a sequence of diary keeping. These isolated entries are almost worthless. And, I must say, the more I read the later diaries, the more I see how worthwhile diary keeping is.

Here are a few news flashes to be commented on later: Both Truman Capote and Johnny O'Shea are going to A.A. meetings. Weidenfeld seems near to making us a firm offer for our book of drawings and text. Harry Rigby says he has the money for a production of
Meeting
and they'll do it this winter with someone, but
who
(Bedford and Moriarty are seemingly out)? It seems nearly certain that I must have a contracture operation on my right hand soon. It seems most uncertain that Frankenheimer will do any film business with us. Howard Warshaw is dying—if not already dead—of cancer. Don's next show seems fairly set for the end of September at Nick Wilder's. A show in Houston ditto, sometime this winter. The prospect of a show in Chicago has dimmed.

 

August 11.
The California Assembly voted to override Governor Brown's veto, thus restoring the death penalty.

There are serious difficulties about publishing Don's book of drawings, according to Candida Donadio. It looks like the books would be so expensive to produce that nobody would buy them— thirty dollars at least.

No word from Frankenheimer. And we have turned down an extract from a book (called, I think,
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
²⁸
) about an American boy of six who is looked after by the girls of a Shanghai whorehouse in the late nineteen thirties, during the Japanese invasion. It is both cute and dirty—Disney porn, in fact.

But all is not gloom. The very sympathetic doctor, Moulton Johnson, to whom Elsie Giorgie sent me, told me today that he doesn't think it is necessary to operate on my contracture nodule at present and that maybe it won't get worse.

Also, the day before yesterday, I got my driver's license renewed. For some obscure reason, I always dread taking the test for it. Perhaps because I have a snobbish contempt for all these arbitrary regulations and therefore I feel that I shall never never be able to memorize them. As it turned out, I made one mistake—and it was the same mistake I made in my last test. But in 1973 the speed laws were different. Then, if you were towing a light trailer behind your passenger car, you were limited to fifty-five miles an hour. Now, you can go the maximum, which is fifty-five miles an hour. Last time I guessed sixty; this time, fifty.
²⁹

 

September 5.
Labor Day—and all the usual vows to restart journal keeping regularly.

Anyhow, the Swami book is plodding on. I've got to page 236. Theoretically, the end is in sight, but I still have quite a lot of material to deal with.

Just changed the ribbon. We didn't go down on the beach today. But we did yesterday, and saw something perhaps historic. For years now, there have been antifag inscriptions written up in the pedestrian tunnel under the coast highway and on the wall of the tennis courts. Last time that I remember, it was “Kill All Fags” and “A Good Fag is a Dead Fag.” This year was milder: “Fags Go Home.” That appeared sometime last week. Then, yesterday we saw that the inscription had been changed overnight, to: “Welcome fags, you
are
home.” This is on the tennis court wall only. The hostile inscriptions in the tunnel remain. We are wondering if there'll be a backlash.

Saw Elsa Laughton yesterday, down at the house next door, with several guests. She was rather drunk and seemed more aggressive than usual. As I was leaving, she came outside with me and told me that the postsurgical cancer tests she periodically has have shown cause for alarm—up from two to four, whatever that means. Poor woman, I could feel her dread—she remembers what it was like for Charles. She hasn't even told Ray Henderson yet.

Don now has the catalogue for his show. It is the most attractive of all his catalogues, with two really good reproductions of color portraits. For the first time he has a male nude and a bottomless boy.

 

September 13.
Elsa's examination proved negative, after all. We have just heard that Truman fell off the wagon while he was in the East and now he's in hospital, drying out.

On Sunday 11th, I drove up to read Vivekananda at the Montecito temple with Jim Gates and two friends of his; one of them, Robert Berg, is a
joli laid
flax-headed Canadian who is living at Vedanta Place intending to become a monk.
³⁰

Talked to Prabhaprana about Swami. She seemed very devotional and unusually emotional, altogether different. During lunch, when we got onto the subject of Swami again, she began to cry and disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes. Later, when Jim and I were alone together, he told me that she has become notorious for her drinking!

From Jim I also heard something which moved me greatly. It seems that Krishna has now become Swahananda's attendant, looking after him as carefully as he looked after Swami. I had always thought—much as I admire Krishna—that his service to Swami had a great deal of possessiveness, and therefore egotism, in it. That he is prepared to do the same thing for Swahananda
proves
that he is a saint.

There
was
a reaction to the altering of the antifag inscription on the beach, but a wretchedly mild one. The opposition didn't even attempt to erase the “Welcome fags” sign. Instead they wrote at the side: “Fags suck.” So what else is new?

The Swami book is going very slowly. It seems to lack all substance and to consist only of protestations of admiration, love etc. All the more reason to finish it quick.

 

September 17.
I am trying to type this while listening with half an ear to a cassette of the Ram Nam led by seven guest swamis on July 18, the evening of the memorial service for Swami, in 1976. It sounds terribly straggly and jangly. You can hear that the girls are taking it very professionally, however—in fact, I suspect that the sloppy effect is created by the disharmony of the western and Hindu approaches to the music.

Tomorrow evening, we are going to the “Star-Spangled Night for Human Rights” at the Hollywood Bowl. Have just heard that trouble is expected from right-wing groups.

And then, on the 21st, Don's show. Quite aside from all the excitements and anxieties connected with this, I always feel that I am seeing his work, on these occasions, quite newly. What usually happens, when he has just done a painting or a drawing, is that I go into his studio and he holds it up for me to look at; the amount of time I get to look at it is only a few seconds, and of course it is neither framed nor hung on the wall. Furthermore, I feel obliged to make some comment, and this in itself is an embarrassment unless one particular picture really hits me hard on first sight. The moment the pictures are on walls in a gallery, I can take my time; I can come back to them again and again. It isn't until then that I really know which ones I like best—or what impression the show as a whole makes on me. Here, I am at a disadvantage in relation to our work. Because, when I show a manuscript to Don, he can take it away by himself and read and reread it, and there is no need of any comment until he is ready, after due consideration, to make one. Maybe this difficulty could be solved if Don staged minishows for me—twenty or so pictures at a time. Must talk to him about it.

 

September 20.
A new doctor has told Jess Bachardy that his cancer is spreading and that it can be only a matter of weeks or months. The new doctor hasn't even examined Jess properly, yet, but, as Don said, the fact that he is
Japanese
makes the verdict horribly convincing. We at once began to wonder if Ted could be induced to live with and look after Glade, if we paid his rent for him.

Jim Gates has pneumonia. He's in bed in his apartment but seems cheerful—at least when speaking on the phone—and says he feels better already.

The Bowl evening was a flop in one sense; nobody quite made it jell, and it was hideously mismanaged, with huge pauses and several fifth-rate acts. In another sense, the mere getting together of all those thousands of gays was, in itself, a triumph and a mutual assurance that we all really exist, along with our demands and our wrongs and our hopes. To me, and to several others I talked to later, the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was extraordinarily moving. You felt the eagerness of all those thousands to be accepted, to belong, to have a place of their very own in this land, which
isn't
free enough to accept them.

Bette Midler was as always a success of the biggest and most symbolic kind, and she brilliantly managed to scrape her bare knees in a fall so that they bled and had to be fixed up with Band-Aids in full view of the audience. This, of course, made her seem gigantically human. But she really is very sympathetic.

As for Richard Pryor, his display of aggression puzzled more people than it offended. It seems he was probably zonked. I think maybe he was merely trying to point out how regrettable it is that the minorities don't support each other properly. Anyhow, he ended by showing us what he called “my rich black ass,” but with his pants on.
³¹
And then the real mistake was made. The producer, an ass named Aaron Russo,
³²
and the director, Ron Field,
³³
both got up and apologized for Pryor, as if he had been a blackout or a failure in the sound system—assuring us that they had no responsibility for what he had said. Whereas, a few funny civilized words at this point would have pulled the whole show together and given it political meaning.

Talking of politics, the miserable bunch of Baptists waving banners at us about Sodom as we came in seemed impotent and absurd—on this particular occasion. This was, in a way, to be regretted. Because they are neither.

 

September 25.
Last night, driving home along the Santa Monica freeway after dark, we were hit by a car wheel, maybe a spare which had fallen off another car or truck. We were in the extreme left lane, and it whizzed across the freeway from our right and hit us. Don managed to drive over it without swerving too much, though the bump was terrific. We might easily have crashed into the divider or been suddenly slowed down so that another car ran into us from behind. We might, in fact, have been badly injured or killed. As it was, we got the underpart of the Fiat somehow damaged, so that you can't turn the wheel far without scraping. And Don hurt his nose a little and I slightly grazed my shin.

Don's show opening, on the 21st, was crowded, though a lot of people didn't appear—mainly Hollywood and Movieland characters. Don thinks they were scared off by the catalogue, with its nude Rick [Sandford] and cocknude Mark Valen. Anyhow, the show certainly impressed a lot of Don's colleagues, which is what really matters. There was a feeling that this show is his best to date. I felt great excitement and relief (you always feel that when you're rooting for someone, and he brings it off )[.]

No critics yet. One sale only, but an impressive one. A collector named Taubman(?),
³⁴
who had come to the gallery to buy a de Kooning and an [Olitski], went to look Don's show over and then and there bought his painting of Paul Sorel. (Paul's reaction to this was negative, because he thinks it so unattractive. He asked Don not to divulge his name to the buyer! On such occasions, Paul's vanity seems so grotesque that one suspects it of being a camp attitude.)

Yesterday I finished the twenty-first chapter of my book about Swami. This contains the last batch of journal extracts, ending on the last day of 1975. Which means that chapter 22 will probably be the last chapter. It will have to cover very briefly the first four and a half months of 1976, when I was here and saw Swami at least a dozen times if not more—all these meetings, alas, unrecorded because I had given up journal writing altogether under the pressure of finishing
Christopher and His Kind
—then our stay in New York, England, Morocco etc.—during which period Swami died and I have to quote secondhand reports—and then our return in July, to take part in the two memorial services. What will follow all this is still vague. It may be in the same chapter, or separated, as an afterword. Some kind of glimpse of myself and how I feel about the whole thing now, and about the prospect of my own death, and Swami's relation to that.

Never have I felt as dependent on Don's judgment and taste and intuition as I do now. But I am going to read this material through and make my own notes before I show it to him. There'll also, anyhow, be quite a lot of research to be done up at Vedanta Place before I can start a rewrite.

By and large, the atmosphere at Don's opening, besides being airless because of poor ventilation, was predominantly queer, very kissy. More kisses than handshakes, yet most of them purely social. After greeting some near stranger in this manner, I became aware that a lady beside me was slightly shocked. So I observed, in a bright conversational tone, “I sure wish I had a dollar for every boy I've kissed this evening!” This at least got me a laugh. Incidentally, this more-or-less socially accepted kissing between males is still apt to be more involving than kissing women. Woman kissing is mostly done on the cheek, to save their lipstick. But, with men, there is no reason not to kiss on the lips, so one often does.

Future prospects, hopeful or not so: After a long silence, George Weidenfeld says that Willie Abrahams, Caskey's old friend who is now the Senior West Coast Editor of the publishers Holt, Rinehart and Winston, is greatly interested in our book of drawings and memories. Abrahams is coming to see us on the 30th. Harry Rigby has gone to England to try to cast
Meeting by the River
. Not one word from Frankenheimer; neither he nor Rick McCallum came to Don's show. The lump on my right palm seems definitely bigger but no fingers are contracted. My left eye seems to be dimming appreciably. And of course there is the prospect of Jess Bachardy's death, with all the problems it will bring.