Mr. Gayfer’s father was Charles J. Gayfer from England, who came to Mobile and started a quality department store of the sort they have in London. It was clothes for men, women, and children and china, glass, silver, and linens. It was right on the corner of Bienville Square. A delightful set of people worked there, little ladies and maiden aunts and spinster daughters of good but poor families. My Mr. Gayfer, Hammond Gayfer, did not actively run the department store. There were all kinds of partners and lawyers—he wasn’t interested. After he got to London and Paris, all he wanted was the arts. I think Mr. Gayfer was—cheated—shall we say? I don’t know by whom. I think he was not as wealthy when he died as he was before.
He was a rare bird, a rare creature, and a real charmer. He could charm the paper off the walls. He had studied with some of the most famous magicians, and I can remember on my birthdays, he would say, “What’s that in your nose?” And he would pull a five-dollar piece out of my nose. If I ever asked him for a dime or a nickel, he would say, “What’s that in your ear?”
He had been to Sewanee and was a classical scholar. Then his father gave him a couple of years in Europe. He had lived in London and lived in Paris. He wrote that wonderful play that was in print until a few years ago called
The Subsequent History of Mr. Jonah.
It’s a long one-act about the divorce proceedings of Mrs. Jonah against Mr. Jonah. Her complaint is, “I just don’t believe that fish story. He was gone from home forty days—I just don’t believe that fish story.” It’s a very amusing play. It has a black cook who talks in dialect—I guess that’s one of the reasons it’s not performed anymore. There is a judge trying to make everything okay for everybody, and then there is a traveling salesman. It is very funny. He wrote other plays and a lot of poetry.
Mr. Gayfer always encouraged me to write and paint and to do marionettes and to act. He never suggested what I should do, but he said, “Stay at home from school if you want to do that.” In Mr. Gayfer’s household, nothing was ever forbidden, nothing was ever encouraged too strenuously. He never said, You must do this or you must do that. He was this delightful person with whom I shared a house. He lived on that side, I lived on this side. We met at the breakfast table. We met at the luncheon table. We met on the porch to talk about books. I was a guest in his house.
The house had been built to his own design. You came onto this huge screened porch which faces Dog River. Instead of a hall, there was a living room through the middle. You go straight through and then three steps up there was the dining room, which he built to be like a little salon theater. It had a stage, a red piano, one of the most advanced kind of phonographs, and a tremendous record collection. He often had entertainers there, little concerts or little readings. The Children’s Theater did performances there on occasion; I played King Midas there once.
Outside, he had jungle. He didn’t like lawns. There were all these kinds of crazy trees and big magnolias. They had a hard time keeping me out of the trees, monkey that I am. There was one huge, ancient magnolia, and by starting in the camphor tree next to it, I could get to the first big limbs of the magnolia and get right to the top. The three huge limbs at the top were just made to sit in with your feet up and read. That was my secret place.
And I used to go exploring back in the woods. There were woods and woods and woods, with this little creek going through. And oh, the wildflowers. And snakes and birds and coons and possums and tortoises. And of course, all of that river. One of my favorite escapades was to get in this inner tube with my feet over and just float a mile down the river to this fishing bay. I’d go in and call and Mr. Gayfer would send the chauffeur to bring me back. Then there was this flat-bottomed canoe. At dawn I used to get in that flat-bottomed canoe and paddle myself across that huge stretch of Dog River and up Halls Mill Creek. Then it was all just wilderness. There were very few houses. The birds and animals, butterflies and flowers—oh it was beautiful. They would have to pry me out of that canoe. I loved that sense of skimming over the water. The chauffeur had this megaphone he finally got, and he would call out, “Where is Eugene?” all over Dog River.
And I told Mr. Gayfer about the toy theater I longed for. So he had a carpenter make this rather wonderful reproduction. Then I made these marionettes. But there were also some made by Madame Alexander, the famous doll maker. Mr. Gayfer, for some reason, was in touch with her to get dolls for Gayfer’s Department Store. So he got from her a set of characters which he gave me. And I had made, more or less invented, a control you could operate in one hand, so I could do one-man shows. That’s what I did in prisons and oyster camps and schools and out in the middle of nowhere. I did all those for free. And then when I did birthday parties for well-heeled Mobilians, I charged. They loved me at birthday parties because I could keep the children absolutely quiet for thirty minutes. So the parents were always delighted to have me. I did
Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Tom Tic Toe, The Child That Cried for the Moon, Sleeping Beauty,
and then I had a little thing called
The Clown in the Hat,
where there was this normal-size opera hat, a man’s evening hat, and there was something in it. The children would just know there was something in it. Because there would be something moving, and finally there were two eyes that came up out of it and then this face. It was a clown. It was all very slow, and finally the children would be just about to pee in their pants. Then he puts one leg up very carefully and climbs out. He would run around the hat and come down to the audience, and he’d say to the children, “Boobaloobaloobaloo!” and run and jump back in the hat. Children love any sign of disrespect. That was one of my greatest numbers. That’s all there was to it. The clown in the hat.
When I said, “Mr. Gayfer, I don’t want to go to school today. I have a performance with the marionettes on Friday, and I really want to make some new scenery.”
He would say, “You don’t have to go to school. It is much more important that you paint the scenery. You don’t learn anything from school. School is just something invented to keep children away from home so their parents can have some peace. If you want to find out anything, it’s all here.” His house was papered with books. He had
The Complete English Poets.
That’s where I first read Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell. I just discovered them on my own and fell desperately in love with those poems. “The Garden” by Marvell: “What wond’rous life is this I lead! / Ripe apples drop about my head…
”
I just flipped.
Mr. Gayfer was a true patron of the arts. He was one of the people who gave money to restore the old ceilings of the Bethel Theater on Church Street across from City Hall. That was the Little Theater, which became Aimee King’s Children’s Theater. He helped all kinds of painters and writers and black singers—any black singer. He paid their tuition. One of his friends was Marie Stanley, who wrote that scandalous novel of the twenties called
Gulf Stream,
in which the black heroine commits suicide. She started a national debate: Do blacks commit suicide?
There were all kinds of people, famous singers and entertainers, passing through. He knew all kinds of people from his
Wanderjahre
in Europe. Alexandra Dagmar, a famous variety actress from England, lived in Mr. Gayfer’s house the same time I did. She had danced in the chorus of the original
Pinafore
as a girl. While in England she had invested in some sort of real estate near Grand Bay or Theodore. It was supposed to be a peach orchard. When she retired and decided to come here, she discovered that the peach orchard she bought was underwater. It was a swamp. Mr. Gayfer took her in, and she lived with him for a while. He opened his house to all sorts of people. She was three thousand years old when she lived with us, but she was still a variety actress. She got up at six o’clock every morning and had the blackest of black boiled black coffee. You could smell it a mile away, that hard-roasted coffee and hard toast with marmalade. Then at six-thirty A.M. she went to that red piano and sang one of her hit tunes. I loved it.
When I was a sophomore in high school, Mr. Gayfer had these friends in for the summer, and one of them was this very young man with bright red hair and greenish white skin named Robert Penn Warren, who was writing his first novel,
Night Rider,
in the backyard, in the Chinese pagoda, where the pheasants had lived until the cats ate them. The pagoda had a card table, a folding chair, and Robert Penn Warren writing
Night Rider.
Then on the front porch, Conrad Albrizio, the Italian painter, was painting a view of the river from the porch. And his wife, who was Imogen Inge, was writing her first novel,
The Breath.
I was dyeing cloth for the Children’s Theater. So it was like a little art colony.
Then, of course, years later I knew Robert Penn Warren in Rome, when he was a Fellow at the American Academy. Ralph Ellison and I interviewed him together for the
Paris Review.
Ralph Ellison brought his tape recorder, and I brought my notepad. Ralph printed a literal and scrupulous transcription of his portion of the interview, and I—re-created—from my notes my portion of the interview. Life being what it is, Robert Penn Warren quarreled with Ralph Ellison over his part of the interview but had only the kindest things to say about mine.
Mr. Gayfer was in love with Aimee King, who was this tiny little lady, and an actress, a great actress. Had she not been of a strict Presbyterian household, poor darling, she would have gotten to New York and become a sensational actress. Her story is another novel. She married David King from King’s Landing, and he came down with tuberculosis on the honeymoon. She nursed him for twenty-something years. Finally she left him in Sante Fe, which is where you went in those days if you were tubercular. Some said she was Mr. Gayfer’s mistress, but I think they were merely engaged to be married. She and her husband had agreed to divorce. Then he died. Then Mr. Gayfer died two weeks later.
Aimee King started this Children’s Theater at the Little Theater downtown, after school. Gifted rich children paid double, gifted no-money families had scholarships. Cross section of Mobile society. She did scenes from the classical mythologies of all civilizations: Greece, England, Persia, China,
Arabian Nights,
and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” We had to look at pictures from the period and learn a little bit about the play. Then we would improvise scenes from the story. Then she would give us a script, and we learned it and rehearsed it and did it with a full orchestra.
I did a lot of scenery for the Children’s Theater, dyeing cloth for the costumes. I had learned from a Frenchwoman who came to Gayfer’s, a representative of some fabric firm in New York, that the most beautiful fabrics were double-dyed. You dye a cloth one color and then dip it in another. You can mix the two dye vats together and dip it once, but then something else happens. All the great French silks are dipped first in one color and then overlaid with another color. I must have dyed three thousand miles of unbleached domestic for Aimee King. She was a great costume designer. She could take an old doormat and make it look like mink. She could take cheesecloth—that soft cheesecloth they sell for dust rags—and make floating ladies like you wouldn’t believe. I remember once she had a scene of Josephine and her ladies, and even from the second row you would have sworn that was a rare and precious fabric, but it was three layers of that cheesecloth, each one a different color, cut on the bias. The figures just floated. Most women, I would say 101 percent of all females, look better in skirts cut on the bias. When it is cut like that, it has the possibility of movement, and no one can see your old ass moving.
To me, if you are going to make theater, you’ve got to know how to dye cloth, you should design costumes, and paint scenery. To get it the way you want it. And you have to write the plays to get the plays you want.
I often stayed alone on school nights in this little studio above the Children’s Theater on Water Street in downtown Mobile. A port city was marvelous all night every night. A wonderful carnival of restaurants and bars. Then on the weekends I would go to Mr. Gayfer’s house on Dog River. That was my childhood.
Not a usual childhood. I was always turned loose. I was accepted as an individual entity. Not as a child, not as a little boy, not as a state, not as a student, not as a little beast. I was an entity. No one ever told me that I was a child, you see.
*
I never really liked school, but I was fortunate in some of the teachers I got. I liked kindergarten, because we made things out of paper and glued things and dressed up as things and played music. I can remember having wonderful lunches in a brown paper bag. They were bacon-and-tomato sandwiches made on Smith’s bread. They were always on the top inside the paper bag. But we always repacked our lunch the minute we got to school and put the sandwich on the bottom so the tomatoes would squash with the mayonnaise and go into the bread. So you’d have this squashy tomato sandwich with the crisp bacon and mayonnaise. It’s divine.
I went to first grade on Old Shell Road and had Miss Jones. I already knew a little bit about how to read because my grandmother had taught me to read from the names of the colors in the watercolor box. I could read
ultra-marine, indigo, rose madder, mocha,
and all that. So I didn’t like the first-grade textbook that said “Baby Ray had a dog. Baby Ray loved the dog. The dog loved Baby Ray.” Well, for me, how could that compare to
ultramarine, indigo, rose madder, and mocha
? So I was mostly bored in grammar school. I was always way ahead of my classes, because I could read far more advanced things than the assignment. And I just couldn’t listen to some of that yuck. I was so lucky with my teachers because they more or less turned me loose and just let me sit in the back of the room at my desk and draw. When I was a sophomore at Murphy High School, I had Miss Annie Lou White. We all, if we’re lucky, remember a teacher who “opened the door” for us. They’re not teachers. They don’t teach. They huff and they puff, they squeal and they squeak, they grasp and they hasp, and they open doors and windows, and they slam doors and windows, and they suddenly say, “Oh, dear, next week is the last day of school. Write a paper.” They’re the great teachers. I call them lid lifters. In everybody’s life, there are teachers like that. She was mine.