Liberation (99 page)

A nightmare, last night, that the manuscript of my Swami book had been destroyed—by fire, I think.

 

October 13.
The German translation of
Christopher and His Kind
just reached me. Now I have to compose a long letter in German to Heinz, to go with the manuscript, and, although I don't really expect any trouble—at least, not from him personally—and although I don't
really
care even if he says it mustn't be published in Germany at all—I feel a bit tense about the whole thing, as I always do before a showdown of any kind.

No time for more now. The Tynan dinner impends and I still haven't done my stint on the Swami book. How characteristic of me—thinking of Princess Margaret, I remember Browning: “next moment, I dance at the King's!”
⁷¹

 

October 15.
Missed a day because I fell and sprained my right wrist and one of my fingers. It is better today but still much swollen. I also missed out on my isometric exercises. But not my midday beads.

Meeting Princess Margaret was hardly a dance. We only got her in very short hops, and although Ken Tynan honored me by putting me at her table, I hardly got to tell her more than that I had been at a school which produced three archbishops of Canterbury in a row—that was all the royalty talk I knew; and Neil Simon's wit,
⁷²
as he sat opposite me, was altogether silenced. She seemed quite a common little thing, fairly good-humored but no doubt capable of rapping your knuckles.

Yesterday, James White came from Texas on a pilgrimage to ask The Old One if it was okay to write detective stories on the side if you want to be a “serious” novelist. The Old One told him to use another name. He is rather a sweet little randy rabbit, cruising the hedges and ditches for male mating-partners, but thrilled that he and his wife are about to have a baby after many years of marriage. He talks a poor mouth but one smells lots of money. We went to a Gays Against Proposition 6 auction at the Carriage Trade Restaurant. Prospects are better, the polls show a swing toward us, but the situation is still very dangerous. One great coup, the Catholic archbishop is on our side.
⁷³

 

October 16.
The capsules Elsie Giorgi prescribed, Butazolidin Alka, certainly did their job. Hardly any traces left of my sprain except a little stiffness of one finger. Yesterday night was a double miss— we went to one party and Princess Margaret didn't arrive before we left; we went on to another, where we found that Governor Brown had already been, made a speech and left. Got fairly drunk and took [Guy] Dill for [Laddie] Dill and complimented him on one of Guy's pictures!

Missed my isometrics again because I don't want to flex my wrists until I'm certain they're both all right.

Billy Al Bengston, at the second party, warned me against the dangerous effects of Butazolidin—I forget what they are. “They give it to horses,” he said. “But I
am
a horse,” I told him. He thought this was brilliantly funny.

 

October 17.
We had nine people to supper last night; God how I hate these chattering mobs. Up very late, slipped behind with all my chores. And now a young man named Gary Noguera is coming to interview me for
The Gay Liberation Book
. He will be late, and that will make us late for the movies, and Kitty will rage. And meanwhile the dogs down below keep barking as never before. Father forgive.

Missed my isometrics.

 

October 18.
At least I accomplished one psychologically gigantic feat today, I roughed out a letter in German to Heinz about
Christopher and His Kind
, telling him he could change it, or even veto its German publication, if he cared to. Otherwise, dogs nearly as bad, and no isometrics, because my wrist is still sensitive. Thanks.

 

October 19.
The letter to Heinz is typed up and I will mail it tonight. Today I fussed with a passage describing how I prayed to Ramakrishna at Trabuco to help me get on with
The World in the Evening
or else stop me trying to write it. So difficult, this semi-ironical, spiritual-psychological material. So hard to hit the right tone.

Boy, this is a hard dogged climb! So slow, and yet I don't really feel any doubts. It
must
be Swami's will that I finish this book. But no more prayers for literary aid!

A talk with Don on the beach—it's still warm enough to go in the water—about the above subject. We considered my life as a writer's deliberate hunt for material—beating the bushes, as it were, to flush out the game. Every artist's doings can be considered from this angle, however much he may produce quite different and convincing reasons for them. It's a good subject for farce. Especially when the doings are of the kind called good and noble.

Last night we saw
Autumn Sonata
, with Rick Sandford. Liv Ullman[n] and Ingrid Bergman are wonderful, but oh God I am tired of Ingmar Bergman's delight in guilt.

No isometrics, wrist still hurts.

 

October 20.
Last night I called Mrs. Lawrence Davidson, to find out what was going on about the dog barking, which has been fierce. She says she called the next-door neighbor, a Mr. Kline, and told him about the dogs and that he wasn't at all nice but the dogs have stopped barking at night since then. I offered to go see Mr. Kline, but she said please not to until we had waited to see if the dogs will be better. Mrs. Lawrence is a truly remarkable case of a woman who switches from being a nasty screaming harridan to a tiny weak crushed put-upon mouse.

Jim Gates called to say he will very soon be breaking up with Warren, and that he'll anyhow be going to live in Morocco next summer; a friend has invited him—not a lover. The tonic effect of this on him is such that he has started to read Vivekananda again!

Gavin has rented an apartment here for a year, with an option to renew. The apartment is empty, but he has gone out and got some furniture. What always amazes me about Gavin is his gumption. All alone, with a bad leg, he has the
life-belief
to go through with enterprises of this kind, to demand to be comfortable, to create a home place without anyone else to create it for. No isometrics.

 

October 21.
Talking of Gavin, with whom we're to have supper tonight, the latest we hear of him is that he thinks he may have Legionnaire's disease but assures us it isn't catching!

A very good day of work, I think, surmounting the first of three biggish literary “cliffs” in the narrative landscape; a description of my literary block at Trabuco, which resulted in my praying to Ramakrishna about it and then finishing the first draft of
The World in the Evening
. (The second cliff is a first description of Don, at the time of our meeting; the third is a first description of John Yale.)

My darling has been his most angelic self, today and yesterday. No isometrics.

 

October 22.
Did isometrics today, by cheating the stress on my right hand slightly, so as to avoid the sprained parts. No pain at all.

A nice run down to the beach and plunge in ocean, in my new sporty blue and white Adidas trunks. They made me run better down Mabery, such is the power of vanity, even at my age; I felt quite light footed and springy jointed.

We saw the Olivier–Jones film of [Dreiser's novel]
Sister Carrie
last night. Decided, as so often before, that tragedy
as
tragedy (and comedy
as
comedy) bores me. Even when it is well done.

A phrase from one of the questionnaire statements in
The Gay Report
,
⁷⁴
which has just been sent me for a blurb: “He takes off his shoes, perhaps, and my shirt is unbuttoned or off. Or I help him take off his shoes and I feel the shoes, enjoy them, smell the leather.
I like to set an air of genteel shamelessness
.” (Italics mine.)

 

October 23.
Really commanding pillars of smoke from two brush fires, one up north, the other much nearer, around Mandeville Canyon and the Sepulveda Pass. Hot violent Santana wind, said to be blowing seventy miles an hour in the Angeles National Forest. I have stomach upset and the shits from a meal last night at Lucky's, with Tony Richardson, who claims that this is the only Chinese restaurant which serves food like the food you get in China. The fire makes me nervous, sort of, and I didn't run down to the beach today, as I should have, because of the high wind, which I hate—but already it's dropping. All I want is to get the hell on with my book. My darling is upset too, but that's from other causes—chiefly this feeling which he still gets from time to time that people don't take his art seriously, or him either. And of course, there are always reasons, good ones, for him to feel like this. So I don't know what to say, because I know that, if I do say anything, it'll be the wrong thing. What he really needs is a good disinterested friend of his own age, preferably an artist, to talk him out of this mood and into some self-confidence.
Late bulletin
: Peter Plagens,
⁷⁵
who at least counts as a serious critic, called to offer Don a trade—one of Peter's pictures for one of Don's paintings. So morale is up a bit, especially as Peter asked for a painting, not a drawing.

 

October 24.
Another morale-raiser today, a citation sent to Don by the
Art Direction
magazine for his drawing of me on the cover of the Avon paperback of
The Memorial
!

The fire last night got really quite scary. We watched it from our deck while eating an omelette and drinking with Bill Franklin. Don was seriously concerned; I either couldn't or wouldn't believe it would get to us, though, actually it seems that it might well have if the wind had been stronger. It was coming down Mandeville Canyon, which is an extension inland of our canyon.

Yesterday I did no work at all on the Swami book, which is sinful tamas, and today I shall only do a token stint. This is disgraceful. My Chinese gut-ache persists.

 

October 25.
Jim Gates phoned this afternoon to say that he is moving out of their apartment and going to live on his own. He will soon have a salaried job with his real estate company and no longer have to depend on percentages from closed escrows.

Am feeling (and look) bulgingly fat after a rich dinner at Perino's, given us by David Hockney last night; Mark Lipscomb and John Ladner were the other guests. In honor of the occasion, Mark was done up in a neat suit, instead of wearing those terrifically sexy cutoffs in which he often appears on the most unsuitable occasions. I am really very fond of him, except when aiding and abetting Carlos [Sagui]. And John was charming as always, and David very lovable in his Bradford millionaire persona.

 

October 26.
Last night, The Downer declared that Los Angeles would be a dull dreary place if it wasn't for the big Jewish population. At which I spoke out, having had a few drinks—not nearly as violently as I did that time to Sue Mengers, but violently enough. I'll have to watch myself when he's around, because I don't really like him and I shall show it if I'm not careful, which'll be upsetting and inconvenient for my darling. Ah,
why
couldn't dear Rick Sandford be in The Downer's place? But that's Rick's fault.

 

October 27.
Feeling depressed. Morris Kight just admitted to me that it looks like we'll lose on Proposition 6. I certainly realized this to begin with, but had then begun to hope—and indeed things have been looking much better. Of course it's also true, and not just a phrase, that we have won a victory of sorts just by getting ourselves into so much prominence.

By today's mail I got a letter from a Craig Smith, living in Illinois, apologizing for an attack on my writing and character. I do dimly remember such a letter but I remember it as being anonymous. Should I answer him? I know it might well entangle me in correspondence; he sounds like a neurotic, maybe psychotic nuisance.

A sweet evening with my darling, snugly watching
Dead End
, which seemed almost incredibly stagey, though politically daring, I suppose, in 1937. When one contrasts those
Dead End
kids with the beautiful young black murderers John Ladner has to deal with, it becomes farcical.

Jim Gates just called to tell me he has found an apartment. He told me how, after he had been away from Vedanta Place for six months and had already met Warren, Swami had asked him to come back. So Jim said to Ramakrishna: “I feel responsible for Warren. If you want me to come back to Vedanta Place, then find someone to be with Warren instead of me[.]” Which Ramakrishna has now done—but much much too late—or so it seems.

 

October 28.
A cable from Peter Viertel yesterday to say that Salka died in her sleep on the 26th. Gavin tells me today that Peggy Hubrecht, whom we saw a lot of in Tangier while staying with him in 1976, has cancer of the liver.

We went to see
The Razor's Edge
film last night. The religious part is insufferable, all sweetness and cardboard, and Tyrone Power has a stunned look throughout, but the worldly Maugham comedy-drama scenes really work; I liked Clifton Webb and [Anne] Baxter best. Don preferred [Gene] Tierney. When we go to the movies with Rick, the atmosphere is one of extreme aesthetic seriousness. He and Don notice every nuance of direction, lighting, cutting, acting, set design; they concentrate on the film as though it were a chess game. I can't properly participate in this, because I can't seem to get a meaningful high, as they do before we go into the theater. Still I enjoy it at secondhand.

 

October 29.
We had supper with Leslie Caron last night, at Jeanne Weimer's(?) apartment.
⁷⁶
Despite the cuisine of la belle France, the lamb was tough. Leslie seemed much more Frenchified and even had difficulty finding English words[. She] frequently hesitated. Aaron Co[pl]and was there, deaf and vague and dull; altogether another of these utterly unfruitful parties, which Don hates just as much as I do.