I think part of it is that I am observant, and most people aren’t. Most people going from one point to another can’t tell you afterwards what they might have seen. They’re in their head. They ain’t free. They just ain’t free. They’re still resentful of something that happened at point A or nervous at what’s going to happen at point B. And being a backwoods little ole Southern boy going out into the wide, wide world, maybe I just kept my eyes open. Or it’s the subtropics, maybe. You know, everything dies or rots. They die first and then rot or they rot first and then die: it’s the humidity and the heat. If the malaria won’t get you, the stink will. So you live in the moment. That’s what the blacks can always teach us. They are very conscious of everything. Twenty-four hours a day. Rebecca would be cooking at the stove and humming to herself, and she’d say, “That’s a mighty pretty june bug. Did you see it?” I’d say, “What june bug?” “Well, he’s crawling between the screen and the sill.” I’d go look, and here’d be this shiny blue-green june bug crawling along. She would have noticed because she noticed everything. Open eyes. And I suppose the people I really like are those who have their eyes open.
I remember one evening—it was one of those April days in New York City when there is a wind that blows these little playful clouds across a clear blue sky. This was just at twilight when there was an iris blue sky. New York can have these extraordinary moments. Not many. And everybody would sort of be smiling. Curtis Harrington and I were going across Fifth Avenue on 57th Street, and I saw Greta Garbo with this man I recognized as George—I can’t think of his last name—a longtime companion. I don’t think they were lovers. He was friend and gallant.
And I said, “Curtis, there’s Greta.” Being the movie fiend he is, “Oh! Oh! No! I don’t believe it! You’re joking! It’s somebody else!” “Oh, no,” I said, “that is Greta Garbo. I see her every day.” “Where do you see her every day?” I said, “I cross Fifth Avenue behind her respectfully.”
We strolled behind her, and when she looked over her shoulder once and saw me, I guess I smiled. What do you do? And I had realized that after awhile, Greta knew that somebody was following her every day. Even though I stayed half the Fifth Avenue width behind her, I guess she saw me because she saw everything, too, looking behind those dark glasses. Anyway, she turned the corner on the next street going downtownwards. We followed. She stopped and looked in a jewelry shop window. She looked at us, and then she went in. And we went right away and looked through the jewelry store window. She saw us. And she knew we were not fans who would come up to her. Then she did a little act, trying on lorgnettes like you’ve never seen. And holding up necklaces. Always with her eye on her public. And that was another great moment of my life. We had our own private Greta Garbo performance.
And once I was on a bus with Dame Edith Sitwell. We were the only two people on a Sixth Avenue bus in a snowstorm. I had been downtown shopping for castanets. That’s the story of my life: out shopping for castanets in a
snowstorm. There were no taxis. So she got in the bus. I knew who it was; you cannot mistake people like that. She was twelve feet tall and extremely aristocratic. She had topazes this big and a garnet that big. She was all in black velvet and furs and this black velvet turban. She didn’t sit down; she just held on to the two seats and had to bow her head because she was too tall with her turban. She was looking and looking. When she saw what she wanted, she just rapped with one of those stones on the metal partition that was between the seats and where the door opened. She said, “I will descend here, please.” The driver was in the middle of the block, but he just stopped the bus and opened all the doors.
I actually met her once years later in London. I had been to see John Lehmann, who’d accepted my story “Love with a Drum” for
London
magazine, of which he was the founder and editor. This old Daimler pulled up as I was going out the door, and this chauffeur and footman reached into the back and pulled out what looked like a folding easel. It unfolded and unfolded and unfolded: Dame Edith. Her first line is one of the greatest entrance lines I’ve ever heard. She said to the secretary who was opening the door for her: “Has Mr. Lehmann found some more mousy geniuses for me to approve?” What a great line. I sort of fell at her feet. I said, “I’m not bold enough to call myself a genius. And mousy I’m not. I’m from Mobile, where the cows fly high.” And she roared with laughter. Being the tall, ungainly girl with two brothers, she knew that Boy Scout song in England:
Oh, the cows they fly high in Mobile,
The cows they fly high in Mobile,
Oh, the cows they fly high
And they’ll shit in your eye,
Oh, the cows they fly high in Mobile.
She just laughed and laughed. She said, “I’ve always wished to visit the American South.”
I think another reason these things happen to me is because I have no cross to bear and no ax to grind. I’m not bearing a cross, and I’m not grinding an ax. I’m just a Southern boy let loose in the big world.
*
There was a man I met in New York named Joseph Cameron Cross, a Wall Street broker. His father was one of the founders of that famous men’s club in San Francisco, where the guys all dress in Roman costume and get drunk, go swimming and all that. But he wanted to be an actor. And his daddy, who was a banker, said, “Oh, Joe, don’t be silly. Nobody in the Cross family would ever be an actor. You are going to be a banker.” So he was a banker. But he was stagestruck all his life. And he made a point of always knowing actors and actresses. He had a whole raft of forgotten actresses and ballerinas. Took a different one to every first night. He’d been courting the theater crowd since he was a guy twenty-nine years old who moved from San Francisco to Wall Street to do some of his father’s brokerage business. I suppose he must have been sixty-five or sixty-seven at that moment.
Well, Joseph Cameron Cross always had two seats reserved in front row center for everything. I mean everything. Opening night of the Met, opening night of the ballet, opening night of this, opening night of that. If he wasn’t going, he would call up some young actor or actress and just give the tickets away.
He somehow knew the two actresses who ran the Robin Hood Theater in Delaware and who later for one season ran the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, where I worked on the Ibsen play. I met him through them. Then I also realized that he knew and went to the parties of Hazel McKinley, the sister of Peggy Guggenheim. The crowds all impinged on one another in a way I don’t think would happen in London or Paris or Rome.
Anyway, I became friendly with Cameron Cross. And he said one night that we were going to the theater; he had three seats for Edith Evans in something—I don’t remember what. He didn’t say who was coming along, but it turned out to be this woman who was terribly tall. I mean, she was tall. Even though she occasionally sagged, she constantly remembered to stand straight. Joseph Cameron Cross came to about her shoulder. He was rather dapper and not too tall. But he was very well dressed always, very grand. And very rich. And she had dyed red hair which she obviously did herself because it was different shades in different patches of hair. There was one bit over her left ear which was almost purple. She must have gotten the wrong mix or something. She had dead white skin. And she must have put on that mascara with a teaspoon, you know. Just dug it up and went flip, flip, and dug little holes to look out of. And she had rouge in the old-fashioned way. I mean right on the cheekbones, a well-defined patch of rose red. And then seventeen shades of scarlet, orange, and one patch of purple hair. She was dressed in black, something silk or satin that was an old dress, cut on the bias. There was some black lace somewhere. And she had two wristwatches. She had a very fancy little wristwatch that was gold, and she had—it wasn’t a Mickey Mouse watch, but it had something on it like that, with a plastic band. Right together these two watches. And she was wearing tons of pearls. To my eye, it looked as though half of them were real and half were fake. Then she had this flashy diamond ring. And she was carrying—God bless the lady; I had not seen one since I left Mobile—she was carrying a reticule. In the fabric that matched her dress. She was swinging her reticule. And she had a little brass-headed fruitwood cane, very slender, very elegant. She must have been ninety-five.
And Joseph Cameron Cross said, “Oh, Eugene, you know Nance O’Neil,” which caused me to simply faint dead away on the pavement. I said, “Ohhhh.” Crash. Because of course I had read the history of turn-of-the-century theater, and I had read about this American actress Nance O’Neil, who came from a village of three hundred in Iowa. One of those run-away-from-home tough teenage girls who became stars. And captured the civilized world. She had a voice she could bounce off the other end of Carnegie Hall without even trying. She could seem to be whispering, but it would knock the wall out of the theater in the back. And I’d read about how her real name was something like Phoebe Hebershloffen. Eliza O’Neill and Nance O’Field were those Restoration actresses who were among the first females to appear on the stage in Jacobean England. So she took Nance and O’Neil from Nance O’Field and Eliza O’Neill because she felt she was a new movement of liberation for women in the theater in America.
But there’s something about that particular generation. I have a funny feeling that the Virgin Mary said, “God, let me into the act. You’ve been doing it long enough.” So then She had some influence at court because when you think of Gertrude Atherton, Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Nance O’Neil, and—oh, that’s just the beginning. There are lots more. Think of some of the ladies who were all born roughly in the eighties and nineties. There was just a bumper crop in America. There was something about extraordinary women coming up in America at that moment. Like a planetary conjunction or something.
Anyway, I didn’t really fall to the sidewalk. Spiritually I collapsed in a heap and was speechless for an hour. I was absolutely floored. But my self-propel button made polite conversation. She was quite happy when she realized I knew who she was, because she had not appeared on the stage in a long time. She said, “Nowadays, I only do sitting-down roles. Duchesses in Henry James. I’m sitting down at parties being aphoristic.” Because at first, with me, she’d been sort of: “Who is this little ape?” And after we got over the fact that I was from the Gulf Coast and had lived there all my life, I guess her thought was, Well, he’s never been to the theater. But when she found out that I knew all about her and her history, she really softened up. She had a great sense of humor. Of course, you cannot be a great actress or a great actor without having somewhere, no matter how hidden, a sense of humor.
I couldn’t watch whatever the play was. Who can watch Edith Evans when sitting next to Nance O’Neil? Afterwards we went to this very fancy restaurant where they obviously knew her and where obviously Joseph Cameron Cross had tipped them to do a sort of silent fanfare whenever she appeared in the door. I remember we went through this revolving door which the doorman in uniform pushed to start. She more or less did a star first act entrance. Joseph and I were trapped in the revolving door because she took a long moment to adjust her reticule, take her silk scarf off of her head, and take her cane from that hand to this hand. So Joseph and I were in separate compartments of this revolving door, and the doorman was waiting outside with two other people to see when he could push it. I’ll never forget that entrance. Joseph and I stayed there trapped in the revolving door. And Joseph wasn’t impatient. He was beaming. I wasn’t impatient. I was beaming. We beamed at each other through our glass cages. And the headwaiter was saying, “Miss O’Neil, ah, Miss O’Neil,” while she just did her first act entrance.
So we went to this table, and right away they brought a larger bouquet. There were bouquets at every table. They took away our little one on this table and brought a bigger one. And they were bringing the menus and she said, “Jacob, I’ll have the same as always.” “Yes, ma’am.” Joseph ordered champagne, because when you entertain stars, you have champagne. She sipped a little, and they brought her a gallon of beer. What the usual was, was the biggest Welsh rabbit you ever saw in your life. A washbasin of Welsh rabbit. A pile of toast, I swear to God, over a foot high. She was smoking cigarettes two at a time. And someday I must do a drawing or painting of what I saw as I glanced down and saw the very beautiful gold Cartier watch and the Felix the Cat watch. The diamond ring, one cigarette lit, two pieces of toast, another cigarette in a little ashtray smoking there, and a fork. All the time saying, “Oh, I was crazy about Oscar Wilde. He wasn’t a sissy at all.” And I thought: They don’t make them like they used to.
Then I said to her—I don’t know where I read it or how I heard it, but I knew that Lizzie Borden was absolutely stagestruck, and so under another name and heavily veiled, apparently she went every night to the theater when Nance O’Neil was playing in Boston. She had sent flowers, you know, and finally she got somebody, some gallant who worked in the theater who noticed that she came every night, who said, “Would you like to meet Miss O’Neil?” And of course, she fainted on the sidewalk. So she was introduced, and she would go taking presents and oohs and aahs. And finally one season she invited Nance O’Neil and all of her company to her, Lizzie Borden’s, mansion on the Hudson. And Nance O’Neil said, “I won’t say I was nervous being in a house with Lizzie Borden. After all, there were a lot of us together. You can be sure we looked out for each other and made it a point never to be alone with her. And to notice how sharp her dinner knife was. But,” she said, “there was one thing that I do remember as striking me. She would often make me repeat for her at teatime Medea’s famous speech.” And I said, “Which famous speech of Medea’s?” At which Nance O’Neil suddenly was Medea right there in that restaurant. “Often the night of thunder I have a message from the gods on high. They ask me why I have not slept. Why in the morning I will touch no food. And then I’d tell them of my sleepless night and why I did not sleep. Because, I tell them, this house smells of blood….” And the idea of teatime on the Hudson with the cucumber sandwiches and Lizzie pouring tea and Medea in the living room. It just gets to me. It just gets to me. Oh, Lord.