She was eating Welsh rabbit. And smoking two cigarettes and looking at two watches. Oh, Lord, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. This was a great moment, a great moment.
She was like Tallulah. Using her powers for the greater good. Rewarding those people who happened to be in the same restaurant with a performance. She knew what she was doing. At least one fork clattered. But everybody else just put down their fork. She was a prima donna in the best sense. Prima donna usually means a certain self-centered or self-consciously defined center type, male or female. And usually unaware of other people’s rights or reactions or necessities. But a real prima donna has that generosity of spirit which includes putting the shy at ease. Noticing the invisible. Putting down the bore gently. Tallulah was a perfect example. It has to do with cat and monkey sense of humor. And this, Miss O’Neil had. I think Joan Crawford probably was really a bitch from all I’ve heard about how awful she was to everybody. Including all the stagehands and all the secretaries and everybody. She just was mean. But Helen Hayes was just too sweet. I don’t think I could stay in the room with her. She was just so sweet…you’re burping from the saccharine air in the room. But the real prima donna is something else altogether. I think the greater they are, the more generous they are. And one could spend one’s life debating: Is it success and public recognition and a little bit of cash that sweetens the nature? Or is it the character which has made them able to deal with everything in a sweet-natured way when they arrived? I think it must be a natural thing, because there are so many marvelous creatures who are not at all known. I think it’s only the second-rate who take pleasure in putting people down. I’ve found that the greater the talent, usually the gentler, kinder, and especially the more humorous they are.
*
I met—and I’ve forgotten how—through one of the theater groups—a young man who had just arrived in New York from California. He’d made a film, a surrealist film, 16 mm, about twenty minutes long, that had won a prize in some California amateur film contest, and so it got to some New York amateur film contest. And it was picked up by the critics. His name was Curtis Harrington. Later he went on to direct what has become a cult film with Shelley Winters and the little blond actress whose name I can never remember. When you have met as many thousands of creatures as I have met, you have to dive way down to the murk where the seahorses live to retrieve certain names. Anyway, it was Curtis who introduced me to Anaïs Nin, because her husband, Ian Hugo, was a highly proficient amateur filmmaker. So at the New York film festival, he’d met Curtis from California and introduced him to Anaïs. Then a year later I met Hugo at the Knickerbocker.
She was beautiful, but in a funny way. She had an 1840s face. It wasn’t a twenties face. It certainly wasn’t a fifties face. It was a wide oval and rather flat. Huge almond eyes that were dark but changed colors. Sometimes dark, but sometimes dark gray. And lots of eye makeup which exaggerated the expressive pupils so much that you didn’t notice all the little crow’s-feet. You didn’t notice how old she was. Those ladies who learn in Paris go right on looking the same from 30 to 130. They emphasize the pupils in some way so it takes away from what’s happening to the skin. She was slight and rather bony, really. Very rarely did she show any flesh. Sometimes in summer when she had a very light suntan, she’d show shoulders. But she was very careful her hands were busy. Or covered. That thing of age spots on the hands—that’s what the ladies say is first visible at a certain vintage. She was all over the place being young. Skipping about and shuffling on little flat-heel ballet slippers. And swirling skirts. And she would laugh a lot. She had charm. It was in her movement. It was manner as well as appearance. But one always had the feeling that she was totally false.
She did this little baby-talk thing. I think she had a tiny little impediment of speech. And so she put a little Spanish accent on top of it. She had made this myth about being raised in Spain. I don’t know much about her early history, but I think a lot of what she said about it was invention. She was rewriting her life as a novel. I think she thought there’d been too many writers from the other countries, so she was going to be “Spanish.” But she was not Spanish, she was not French, she was not American. She was this bitch from outer space.
I saw a little of Anaïs at parties. And there was a very charming bookshop right on Sheridan Square with a delightful man who ran it. I went to one autographing and made a crown for her. I think it was near Mardi Gras, and I made this gold-leaf-and-glitter crown and took it to the bookshop. She liked that. She liked any attention.
Anaïs was always surrounded by people. She was an eighteenth-century coquette. A
salonnière.
Someone who would gather artists and painters and encyclopedists for her Thursdays and rule charmingly. Except that she often put people down who weren’t there that night. And we all do. It’s natural. But she had a little nastiness about her. She was more often glitter than real gold. She was not fun, and that’s the worst thing you can say about anybody, I guess.
I could see how she used people. I could watch her charm the pants off of anything: male, female, young, old. She had lots of lovers off and on and didn’t always remain friends with them because they saw through her to the essential bitch. She liked to be cruel finally because—I don’t know, I think she was trying to prove something—I don’t know what—to her father, the famous composer Joaquin Nin.
At one point she went around with Anthony West, son of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West. I think they were lovers for a while. He was a real sour-puss. He was even crankier, nastier, and bitchier than she. You’d think that being the acknowledged illegitimate child of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, he’d dine out in New York on it. But instead he was a sourpuss. I mean a SOURPUSS. I never saw the man smile. I never saw a glint of wit in his eyes. It was as though the shadow side of Rebecca West and the shadow side of H. G. Wells came out in him. It’s like a man I knew in Rome who was half British aristocracy, half Italian aristocracy. He had the absolute worst qualities of both. And I think she got Anthony West into bed real soon, and she led him around as though there were an invisible ring in his nose. She didn’t exactly say, “Tony, come with me.” But that was the effect.
She was intensely feminine. And she led everybody on, male or female. The Italian actress Miranda really took a crush on her, and Anaïs led her on. She was the Circe. What in the South the boys would call a goddamn tease. But for everything alive, anything warm-blooded. I have an idea she was probably trisexual. She would go for male, female, and unknown spirits. She would probably have had sheep, dogs, and a camel if she could get one. Anything warm-blooded. I don’t think nymphomaniac would be the right word—it’s been used too much.
And she loved to be Circe to young men, young painters, young poets. Young men who were—I hate to use the word
sensitive.
Let’s say young men who were conscious, something that young men in America aren’t. When the last high school football game is over, they are just a potato for the rest of their lives. It’s about time for the American males to be liberated. They’re still living under that sort of football player and clever businessman role. And they never grow up. You know, get drunk on Saturday night and that’s about it. But in every country, only 10 percent of the young men are conscious. And Anaïs loved to be Circe to these wayfarers. I think she liked to initiate sexually healthy young men. Plucking young men out of puberty and into adulthood was one of her hobbies. I can’t say this is true; that is only my impression. As a student of human endeavors on this busy planet, I can only say that was the strong impression I had.
Anaïs quickly realized that I was thoroughly conscious. I’m not flattering myself, but by what I talked to her about, I think she saw that I was perhaps in spirit a little older than my statistic. And she sort of little by little ceased the coquetry and we really had a couple of enchanting conversations. For one of her birthdays, I organized a surprise party in her apartment. Of course, I called her and told her an hour beforehand so she could be properly surprised.
There was a whole bunch of young men and young lesbians and the man who had the bookshop in the Village. Whoever I could round up at the last minute, because the idea came at four in the afternoon and the party took place at seven. I think that her husband was coming back late that night and they were having something the next day. But she was a next-door neighbor and she was having a birthday, so I improvised a party.
When I did parties, I always had surprises, and I always made people wear funny things. Not silly. But, in other words, don’t be yourself when you come to a party. That’s the moral. Be an aspect of yourself we haven’t seen. Or be somebody else you think you might like to be for four hours. Because it’s a party. It’s not the end of the working day. It’s a PARTY. But this birthday party was improvised at the last minute, so I gave everybody paper bags to put on their heads from the grocery store. Or a piece of crepe paper. It’s always wise to have brown paper bags and tempera and a few feathers hanging about somewhere. You never know when you’re going to need them.
There was one really boring girl at the party. There were a lot of lesbians who just fainted over Anaïs, and there was this one particularly boring, probably virgin lesbian—no makeup, straight hair. I made her wear these curtain pulls for earrings. “Why, I can’t do that.” “Yes, it’s a party.” By the end of the evening she was twirling those curtain pulls.
Well, as I said, I met Hugo backstage at the Knickerbocker Music Hall, where I was doing this marionette production. The surrealist artist Corte Seligmann had designed these crazy puppets, and I had made them. And Charles Henri Ford, the surrealist poet, had written this little thing about one puppet looking through a keyhole and describing what he sees. Anyway, Ian Hugo came backstage and introduced himself. That wasn’t his name. And I carefully have avoided knowing his Morgan Guaranty name. For years he ran the Paris office of Morgan Guaranty. But when the war began he went back to New York, and they gave him an honorary post. But I only knew him as someone who made very beautiful engravings—little perfect engravings signed “Ian Hugo.” He came backstage and said, “Oh—those marionettes—I’ve always been interested in marionettes. I always thought it would be such fun to make a film with marionettes.” He said, “I do a lot of amateur films with my 16 mm. Would you be interested in writing a script?” I said, “Sure.” A film with marionettes? Yeah, why not? So I gave him an idea of a story about a magician and his marionettes and he liked it and I did a script for him called
The Dangerous Telescope,
a phallic joke, of course. He liked it a lot, so he said, “We’ll do it.” So I started making the characters. Got the cardboard, the wire, and all that. He sent the script to Anaïs in California.
Anaïs would go to California for part of every year and live with this young forester who was one-third her age. And I was told by one authority that she arranged it so as never to meet him by daylight. She told Ian Hugo that she was teaching courses in creative writing at various establishments. She told everybody in California that she was there to do research, but she had to go back to New York very often because she had this ancient father there who was an invalid. This went on for years. I remember she had this little room at the top of her apartment building. It was the top floor of this modern building on 33 West 9th. I was 31 West 9th, in that old brownstone with the garden for the summer. On the second story of this two-story top apartment they had a little workroom, and she had this wooden cabinet marked LIES, so as not to forget what she had told.
Hugo knew perfectly well because he was no fool. He knew she was carrying on. He was a very intelligent man who put up with all of her shit for years. He loved her. But boy, did he have the blondes. He was already carrying on with any dizzy blonde he could get while she was carrying on the big passionate love affair with Henry Miller in Paris. The minute she left for California, he said, “Well, Eugene, I don’t think we ought to work on this script today because I’ve got a conference at the bank.” I remember once we were saying we’ve got to finish such and such. And he said, “Oh, come Friday, when you get back from work. Come and have a drink at seven and we’ll look at the script.” So I got there about ten minutes after seven. Rang the doorbell. No answer. So I rang the bell again. Then I heard voices in there, so I just sort of went down in the elevator and came back up and rang again, and he answered, quite flustered and flushed with all his hair—what was left of it—all in his face. Wrapping his robe around him. And here came this voluptuous blonde out of the bedroom. One of those, you know, who can’t come through a door. She had to throw something out. She was wonderful. I never found out who she was. She looked country America. Probably she was a waitress or something. Usually it was actresses. She was dressed in rather Sears, Roebuck or Woolworth style. But she was a charmer. She had that natural gift. She just didn’t come through the door. She threw something out. Oh, Lord.
Anyway, Anaïs read the script in California and said, “Oh. They have to be human actors, and I’ll play the lead.” And she rushed back to New York.
I’ve forgotten through whom I got permission to film in the Rhenish castle on the Hudson. The nephew of the man who sank the
Lusitania
had built a Rhenish castle which had been in ruins since World War I, and I got permission to film there, so we would go on Saturdays and do the scenes of the film in this ruined Rhenish castle on the Hudson, miles from New York City. But Anaïs came back and was directing Hugo how to direct the film. I can still see his horn-rimmed specs as he was looking down and figuring something out about the camera. And she would say, “Well, let’s do this, and why don’t I come down this path?” He said, “Now wait, Anaïs, we are not making the film yet. I’ve got to figure out the camera.” You know, “Let me get this right.”