I like parties where there’s a cross section of the world. And if somebody brings a goat or a camel—like Patricia Highsmith once brought her pet tortoise to one of my parties—that makes it even better. But you have to have a cross section of the world. I always tried to have worlds in collision. Youth and old age, richness and poverty, painting and poetry, stock market and bordello. Worlds in collision. That’s what makes a party.
I’d hate to be trapped in any little nasty world, whether it’s the business world, the banking world, the garden club, the gays, the literary—I’d hate to be trapped in any little club. I belong to a union called international cats and monkeys. That’s the union I belong to. So I see everybody. I can get through picket fences and over high walls other people don’t. And I can dig out when I have to.
*
I was working in the daytime at the library and did theater at night. I was young. I didn’t have to sleep. If I got to bed at two, I was ready to get up at seven. I had steak for breakfast with red wine. The climate in New York was such that I was never tired. I mean, I was raised in lizard land. New York wasn’t humid in the way of Mobile humidity. And there was also this nervous energy in the air.
The first thing I did was for the Equity Library Theatre. Equity was trying to help all the unemployed actors, and they got some kind of grant to put on productions in the libraries. Most of the branch libraries had little auditoriums for lectures. For a production of Gorky’s
Lower Depths,
I got up early and went down to Clinton Street on the Lower East Side to those clean Jewish garbage cans and got my costumes from the garbage. After all, the play is about these people living in the slums of Russia. So I just took all the clothes that were thrown out, took them home, put them in a tub of Rinso with a little bit of lye wash, and made costumes for a cast of thirty. Everybody said it was one of the best
Lower Depths
they’d seen.
One of the persons I met in Equity Library Theatre was a struggling actress named Maureen Stapleton. She saw something or other that I had done with the library—I think J. B. Priestley’s play
Laburnum Grove.
I did this tropical set in bamboo with all this bougainvillea in the back. I also made chandeliers for that—I made chandeliers for everything, including my own apartment. And I have specially trained spiders that cover my chandeliers with spiderwebs. Well, Maureen had this friend who wanted to do a private tryout of a play script he’d written. The play had opened on Broadway and was not successful, so he’d rewritten it thoroughly. Maureen was going to direct it, and she came to me and said, “You’ve got to do the set.” Well, it was
The Merchant of Yonkers,
which became famous as
Hello, Dolly!
And that’s how I met Thornton Wilder. He was cranky, but I liked him. He had a bitchy sister who was even more cranky. They were both proper cranks, with fighting among themselves. But I liked him a lot.
And I loved this Maureen Stapleton. She was Irish American, and she was animated and fun. We had the same sense of humor. She had come to New York from Troy to get into the theater, and lived on the top floor of this dreary thing on 51st Street. I used to go to her apartment sometimes after the theater when she had these wonderful parties with Marlon Brando and Wally Cox and all those critters. This was before Brando’s big blowup to stardom; he’d only played Marchbanks in
Candida,
but he’d had much attention because of it. We played what was called “the game,” which was the same game I played later in Fellini’s garden. Charades. It was called “the game” then.
After that, I designed for a new translation of Ibsen’s play
The Master Builder,
which was at the Cherry Lane Theater in the Village. That’s the one I got the prize from
Show Business
magazine for the best Off Broadway set of the year.
It was because of that I was invited to the Robin Hood Theater in Arden, Delaware, for the summer. One of the plays they were going to do was Andreyev’s
He Who Gets Slapped,
this wonderful play about a Russian circus. And I thought, Oh, to design those costumes. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And I wanted to do
Angel’s Tree
with a good Victorian London interior with a little curved stair in the back. The minute they said the names of the plays, I’d already designed them. And they were going to do
Hay Fever
by Noel Coward. Well, I got to do
Angel’s Tree.
And we did that Depression-period play
You Can’t Take It with You.
But then the director decided that the summer theater public wasn’t good enough for
He Who Gets Slapped,
and I quarreled with her. Argued and argued and argued. We didn’t come to blows, but there was a one-week break in the middle of the season, and I said, “Well, I don’t think I can come back for the second half of the season.” It was easy enough for her to find another scene designer in New York City for the rest of the summer theater season, because everybody wanted to leave New York for the summer. So I went back to New York.
Well, I’d sublet my apartment, so I couldn’t get back into it for two weeks. Now, in the summer theater company there was an actor whose name you often see in theater magazines. He directs now. But he had this actor friend who came every weekend to see him when he was playing. It was this guy that I thought must be about forty. For me, forty was ancient. He always had these dark glasses and this crew cut. He helped a little with makeup. When I was doing Mr. Sycamore, the old eccentric who lives with the family in
You Can’t Take It with You,
I was having trouble dealing with a bald wig. You have to get it just right so you don’t see the join. I knew how to do it, but I was having trouble. “Oh,” he said, “put the collodion on and then settle it. Don’t do any makeup until you do that final gentle pull when the collodion is set. Then you put the base on and then the makeup.” Anyway, he showed me how to do it, and I thanked him. Well, when he heard I was leaving and didn’t have any place to stay, he said, “Oh, come and stay with me. I’ve got gobs of space.” He said, “My sister lives on one floor and I live on one floor and there is another floor.” He said, “Come on for those two weeks when you are waiting. It would be fun to have you.”
Well, I arrived from the train station with a Rinso carton full of paintbrushes and tubes of paint. I had this battered suitcase from Mobile. And I was in these ratty summer clothes. I gave the address he’d given me. It was Central Park West. Well, I’d never been to Central Park West. I didn’t know what that meant. We arrived at this very grand apartment house. And this doorman—eight feet tall, with ice mantling his summit—looked at my luggage and said, “Service entrance is on the side street.” And I went. But anyway, this guy, whom I just knew as a friend of a friend, was the man who played the Shadow on the radio.
He was immensely wealthy. He’d been doing the Shadow as long as there was radio. Well, when I got there, it turned out that his sister had brought a whole bunch of friends in, so every room was taken, except a won
derful private room on her floor; I took that one. There was a john in my bedroom, but for the bath I had to go down a floor and go through a bedroom and the dressing room of the Shadow. Because he was always recording or broadcasting, I barely saw him except late at night when he was finished, and we’d have drinks together when he came in. The servants showed me how to go down and find the bath. His bedroom was two stories high. It had a bed with sterling-silver bedposts and black velvet curtains because he was the Shadow. And there were these two rooms of mirrored cupboards. After I’d been there four days, I had to open a couple of them. I had to.
It was all wigs. He had a crew cut and could go through all stages from no hair to longer than shoulder by twilight. He could go from pale blond to Italian black, through all the stages of Irish red, Sabine Hills red. And there was a hairdresser permanently employed who lived in the household.
But he had said to me, “Will you paint something over my bar? I’m having my bar remodeled. Paint something that was like your
Hay Fever
set or whatever you want to do.” I said, “All right—that will be my thank-you note.” So I did this little mural for him over his bar, and then I moved back to Greenwich Village.
That Rich Mix of New York in the Forties
Right after the war, before I left for New York, I had worked
briefly in the Haunted Book Shop in Mobile, putting the poetry section in order. One day I came across an errata slip that had fallen out of the poetry bookshelf. Cameron and Adelaide, of course, had all the latest books of poetry, whether they sold or not. Some of them stayed ten years on the shelf, twelve years on the shelf. They always got what they thought sounded interesting. A Southern bookshop. Well, this errata slip fell out. It was on good paper and I liked the typeface and I was fascinated by what was on the page. So I went on safari. It took three days going through all those poetry books to find the one this had fallen out of. It was a book called
The Ego and the Centaur
that had just come out from New Directions. And I thought, Oh, when I go to New York, I’m going to have to go to New Directions and buy me a copy for myself. Because when I was talking about it, somebody was in the shop and right away bought
The Ego and the Centaur.
I was doing this big thing and talking about it with Adelaide and waving it. Then somebody in there said, “Well, I’ll buy that.” So I thought, Yeah, sure, it’s a bookshop. I’ll have to go to New Directions.
When I got to New York I kept asking the
View
people, “Have any of you-all met a poet from the French part of Indiana called Jean Garrigue?” I thought it was a man. Jean Garrigue. Well, life being what life is like, and the interwovenness of it all, somebody from somewhere—I can’t think who, it may have been Seymour Lawrence—and I were strolling down Christopher Street, having dined in a little restaurant, and he said, “Oh, look, there’s somebody you ought to meet.” And there was this charming-looking little thing with egret nest curls. Huge blue eyes; you could see across the street they were blue. And she was wearing these dirty slacks, sweeping the sidewalk in front of this slum building on Christopher Street between Sheridan Square and West 10th. Anyway, he said, “You Southerners from the provinces.” And he said, “Jean Garrigue, Eugene Walter.” I said, “WHAT? What? I’m your errata boy.” She thought I was saying erotic boy. Then I told the story about the errata slip. We became great friends. Her building almost backed up to mine in that block. We’d been two years vibrating at each other and didn’t know it. All these things happen to everybody, but most people don’t notice.
Jean Garrigue was Something Else Again. Even before I met her, I considered her America’s only Baroque poet. She wrote her own free verse, except it wasn’t free verse. Just as Walt Whitman has a secret meter, if you read Jean Garrigue aloud, you discover this secret American rhythm. And she was writing about everything: animals, vast landscapes, and vast concepts. She was not one of the race of professor lady poets, saying, “I don’t feel so well, I’m unhappy, nothing goes right, America’s a terrible place to live, there are no men in America or all the men are cavemen in America.” They never have any idea of a civilized male creature. It’s either the Neanderthal or the priss. Anyway, Jean Garrigue wrote big.
And that was surprising, since she was a lady of the old school. A lady. But also a bawd, as all the great eighteenth-century ladies were. Could carry on any kind of conversation. Loved the same sort of dirty jokes that I like. There were a lot of the beginnings of liberated ladies in New York who were tough and nasty. Bitchy, mean, sexually unsatisfied, and putting off the very men who were attracted to them because they had spirit. It was that beginning of the women’s lib thing, though it wasn’t called women’s lib then. But then there were people like Jean Garrigue and a whole bunch of Southern girls who stayed ladies except they learned to say “fuck.” They still had a certain graciousness and, above all, a sense of humor. What some of those New England girls didn’t have was a sense of humor. The men called them the scissors girls. If you weren’t careful, they’d cut your balls off. The scissors girls. Later it was called women’s lib. Jean Garrigue was just an exceptional creature. With this irresistible smile and these blue eyes. She was petite, and she dressed very well. Sometimes she wore slacks and a loose blouse in the bohemian way, but if she was going uptown, she had on a tailored Chanel suit. Her hair was some honey colored. She was adorable. Imagine Emily Dickinson after two glasses of elderberry wine.
It was only revealed much, much later that she was multierotic and the lover of Josephine Herbst, the novelist and revolutionary. But she also had a long list of male lovers. She was not an erotic whiz kid. She was not what was called a nympho. She had a feminine thing of comforting people. I think that kind of lady just goes to bed with guys they feel sorry for. “Oh, poor darling. Poogie, woogie, woo.” And I think she was a passionate woman in the eighteenth-century sense. It didn’t always show. She wasn’t lighting one cigarette after another and hiking her skirt up to her navel. She was a lady, but eighteenth-century: she knew everybody had to have sex.
She died of cancer while I was in Rome. Everybody on earth called me long-distance. Everybody. “Eugene we’ve got— Are you sitting down? We’ve got some news.” By the time I’d had twenty-four hours of this, I thought, People love catastrophe. Now I know why the Greek kings killed the messengers who brought the bad news. Just cut their heads off after they’d given their message. I wanted to bomb the Bell system because I heard so many times that she died of cancer. We had just been corresponding and talking about how we could meet in Paris.