You see, the world is very small. It doesn’t matter how many millions more are born. It’s still that 10 percent of people who reason, who are aware of larger issues, and it’s only 3 percent of the total that’s cats and monkeys. She was cats and monkeys. And I adored her.
*
I met Josephine Herbst through Jean Garrigue and all the Village set. She had intense blue eyes and graying hair, and she was much older than everybody else. Much older. She was very much of the thirties: a thirties protester. I don’t know if she ever was a member of the Communist Party, but she was extremely leftist. Of course, nobody today can understand what that meant in the Depression period. During those poor, poor, poor years, when people literally were starving to death in the streets, ordinary people had a certain resentment of some of the big wealth. They thought the government was in the clutches of the rich. Indeed it was, still is. I mean Reagan—
Oh, my God. I said I’d never say that in the same room with the monkey.
I’m sorry, darling. I have to apologize. Never again. I’ll say Baudelaire twenty-seven times as penance.
But anyway, nobody can imagine who wasn’t alive, and seeing the problems of the Depression, the rabid leftism of someone like Josephine Herbst. She did not come of a poor family, but she was of a farming family that was self-supporting and proud and red-white-and-blue American.
As a young woman she was successful as a novelist and a journalist. She covered the Spanish civil war and knew Hemingway through all that. But she was rabidly left, and I disapproved of that. Because I had come through the Depression and had seen real poverty with a Southern accent, and I still had a sense of humor. And even the most revolutionary young men never were that hysterical or rabid, where they got absolutely tremulous in talking about it. Even in 1948 she could get all worked up and get “What do you mean by that?” She was one of those “What do you mean by that?” persons. Like high blood pressure. I didn’t like that aspect of her. I always talked to her about gardening. I learned early on that was a safe subject. And I could make her laugh.
How did I make Josie laugh? How do I make anybody laugh? I don’t know. By putting omega before alpha rather than alpha before omega. Who knows? I could make Josie smile with just impressions of other writers she didn’t like. I only had to give her impressions of someone at a party and I’d get her off politics for a minute.
I remember she took a great exception to Truman Capote. She thought he was a little puff from the South. He was not. He had a mind as sharp as a fox trap. But she, seeing that famous photo of him lying on a sofa—the photo on the back of his first novel—thought he was a cream puff from Alabama.
Then years later when I was living in Rome, I went to meet her in Naples after she returned to Europe for the first time since she’d been covering the Spanish civil war. I went right there and met her boat. Took her to a waterfront restaurant for a dinner, and I lent her my raincoat because she didn’t bring one and suddenly it was damp and cold. But she was too sensitive. I escorted her around and did everything and gave dinners for her when she got to Rome and all that and all that. But there was one evening she called me and she was feeling at loose ends. I said, “I’m sorry I can’t see you tonight because I have the proofs of
Botteghe
and I’ll be working all night to get these to the printer in the morning.” And she was offended. That’s the last I saw her.
Ruth Herschberger was also part of that rich mix of New York in the forties. I flipped for her first book of poems. She had that American idea of poetry at one end and social consciousness at the other. Then she wrote this really feminist book that was like the last gasp of Edith Wharton and before the crankiness of the fifties and sixties ladies. A very witty, wonderful book called
Adam’s Rib.
She had these flashing dark eyes and chestnut hair. Dressed very simply, but with that understated something which is American chic at its best. Even with no money, she had a way of wearing a sweater. And her skirt fitted and moved. She taught some, but she was a poet and wrote marvelous poetry. Now she is an alcoholic. She’s at Stuyvesant Apartments dead drunk right this red-hot minute. Went to bed at three A.M. with a last gin and got up at seven this morning and had a first gin. You know: the pressures of New York. Southerners were able to cope somehow.
All the Southerners in New York would get together about every ten days or two weeks and cry over Smithfield ham. There was a community, like a religious group except it wasn’t a church. Southerners always, by secret gravity, find themselves together. If somebody got a Smithfield ham, they’d call a few other Southerners. If I got gumbo filé that was fresh gumbo filé from Bayou La Batre, I’d call a few Deep Southerners. You always knew, if there was any kind of trouble, that was like cousins in town.
One lived right up above me in my winter apartment on West 10th. One day I heard this thing hopping down the stairs in heavy shoes. I looked out and he said, “Good morning.” I said, “Where are you from?” He said, “Hanceville, Alabama.” “Mobile.” Oh, Lord, here we are in the same building. From that instant we were lifelong friends. This was Donald Ashwander, who had come to New York to study orchestration with the composer Ben Weber, who was also a great teacher of music.
David Walker was a friend of Donald Ashwander’s. They had some music classes together somewhere, and Donald introduced him. Said he wanted me to meet this boy from Georgia. He was an accompanist for Aaron Copland. In fact, I met Aaron Copland through him. I adored him. There’s a Jewish sense of humor which always gets me. “We’ve been blitzed, but let’s keep our sense of humor.” Like Southerners: “We’ve been Yankeed, but we’ve kept our attitude.” I think David, for the last three or four or five years before Aaron Copland died, just really gave his whole life to Aaron Copland. I hope now he is composing again. He set the first paragraph of my story “Troubadour” for tenor, viola, and piano. It was absolutely delightful.
When I left New York, I sublet my apartment to David, and he still lives there. Since it’s the old rent laws, they have only been able to put it up to something like $30 in all these years. And the telephone is still in my name.
*
Upstairs over my 9th Street apartment was a very grand apartment. And these two actresses shared it. Marie and Miranda. One was French and one was Italian. It was one of the great lesbian love affairs of the century. But let’s don’t say that. Because the French one married and is now repopulating the earth on Long Island. The French, you see, always think: Do everything when you are young and then have lots of children and then go back to whatever pleased you most when you were very young. So let’s just say the apartment was shared by a French actress and a well-known Italian lesbian. That’s the way it was. And then above them, on the third floor, were these two young men who were both wildly gifted and worked in advertising. Gilbert Ireland and Robert Golston. Robert painted the best fake Picassos I’ve ever seen. There was a big Picasso signature, but he always had his initials worked into some little splotch of paint. If you looked closely, there was a little
R
and
G.
I remember I went to a very fancy exhibition of somebody’s collection in Rome, and by pure chance, there was this Picasso valued at so many millions, and I saw a little
RG.
Oh Lord, oh Lord. There were some wild times. I’m telling you, there were some wild times.
Through somebody who came backstage at the summer theater in Delaware, I met some people from a community theater in Nutley, New Jersey. They turned up in New York a long time after I got back and asked me to come design a production of the old Kaufman play based on the Barrymores called
The Royal Family.
I did the set rather like an apartment I had seen on Park Avenue with a double stairway going from the first to the second floor. And I made this Baroque table that had two dolphins, with twined tails, all black and gold, all made of papier-mâché, with a marble top, to go on the little landing, with a mirror above. For when the young man comes back from Africa, I made these cages of slats and chicken wire that were colored to look weathered, and I made papier-mâché parrots. The bellboys carrying in the birdcages could pull a little string in the ring that they were holding the cage by and make the parrots do their things. I stood in the wings and went,
“Caw, c-c-caw, caw.
“ It was one of my favorite parts. And you know—that double dolphin. The tabletop was taken off and it turned up at Carnegie Hall in some woman’s dance recital. She was playing a Greek nymph cast up on the shores of the Ionian Sea. Robert Golston called and said, “Eugene, you’re not going to believe this. Your dolphins were at Carnegie Hall last night.”
But anyway, while in New Jersey, I met a whole bunch of people. And there was this guy who helped backstage. He was a real tough. He was a truck driver, drove a big Mack truck. You know, New York is always—the world is always—full of surprises. He called me from New Jersey and said, “I’m coming to New York this weekend, and could I come by to speak to you for a moment?” So he came by to have a drink. He said, “Well, the gay boys in Nutley are having a big masquerade ball, and I want something really outrageous and spectacular because I’m the head of the ball committee. I thought you could design something.” Lord love a duck.
I said, “What did you have in mind?”
He said, “Well, I’m blond and my hair is naturally curly, and I’ve always liked those photographs of Lillian Russell.”
I said, “A hat. I’ll make you a hat that will end hatdom.”
I got this reinforced cardboard and glued some rather fine lightweight chicken wire to it. I made this sort of tree of life with all kinds of different fruits and different flowers and different little stuffed birds. I had these invisible wires that held the tree up.
The Nutley boys had rented a ballroom somewhere in Brooklyn for their gay ball. So we all gathered—everybody in the apartment house—the two actresses and a very old lady from across the street who had been a vaudeville star—and had a party on the top floor of Golston/Ireland because this guy was going to get into his wig and hat there. It took him an hour to do his makeup. So the boys made martinis and we were talking about a new show, and when he came out for me to adjust his hat, I was thunderstruck. There was this beautiful Lillian Russell. I mean gorgeous. With this blond, upswept, turn-of-the-century wig. Perfect makeup. I mean, Perc Westmore couldn’t have done it better on Joan Crawford or Mae West. He’d shaved his chest, but then here were these fuzzy animal arms. He had a clean white shirt, tight blue jeans, and Keds. He won first prize. Lord love a duck.
Now Robert DeVries, the painter, lived upstairs over me in my winter
apartment. He was tall and very handsome and very pleasant. A little quiet, a little shy. I introduced Marie, from my summer place, to Robert, this tall blond friend of mine in my winter place. And Marie and Robert had an oh so sensitive evening together and ended up in bed. Then they had this passionate affair that I knew about, of course, but pretended not to. I mean, if you are taking your garbage out onto 10th Street at seven in the morning and see your upstairs neighbor, the beautiful blond painter, coming out giggling with a French actress, who theoretically would have been sleeping in her own apartment on 9th Street, all you can do is say, “Good morning,” and go on and put your garbage out. And after the morning giggles were heard over thirty times, I could only corroborate my initial impression.
I have a feeling that he might have had friendly sex with other art students, but that this tragic heroine—French, oh so sensitive, with a great sense of humor—might have been
the
love affair. This was
l’affaire du siècle
for him. She was not conventionally pretty. She was dead white skin. I mean, you could put her on Atlantic Beach for two months, and she’d still be dead white. It’s that kind of French skin. Brown hair and huge, luminous eyes that could change from gray to almost blue, or be blue and suddenly change to almost amber, according to the room and the season. And she was an extraordinary actress.
Anyway, then Miranda caught on. She came to me because I had trunkloads and trunkloads of dry lapels. People came to cry on my shoulder, because I’m a Southerner and I always know how to make that little drink and say, “Do sit down and here, have this; you’ll feel better. Tell me about it.” I think there’s something, not about me, but about all Southerners. Call it patience and the willingness to converse. To say, “Sit down and tell me about it.” It’s a Southern thing.
Then I had Robert asking my advice. He said, “I really love Marie, but Miranda loves Marie.” He said, “I think Miranda is going to hire some people down on Mulberry Street to knock me out. Because Miranda is beginning to follow me around New York.” He said, “I see this figure with a very masculine stride in this raincoat with the collar up. This hat with the brim pulled down. I recognize Miranda from two blocks away, and she is following me.”
Then Marie came, so I had all three. I had to make appointments to be sure they didn’t meet coming in or out of my front hall. Actually I started a comedy play about it once and never finished it.
And I didn’t give any advice. I just let them talk. If you just listen and guide them to tell more about this part, or more about that part, and never express an opinion, they’ll come to a decision themselves. Advice is making people think for themselves, then they think you are brilliant. You don’t have to say a word. Just pass the Jim Beam and smile and nod. And say, “Tell me about it.” And if they reach a moment of dreadnought, put on music. Mozart’s a better psychiatrist than Freud. Drown them in Jim Beam and Mozart, and it’ll all work out. And they thanked me profusely for my wisdom.