Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (21 page)

•

Over the next few days, when not shepherding Emmy Curtis on sightseeing expeditions around Paris, Steward was setting up and keeping various sexual rendezvous and at the same time congratulating himself on having acquired the Julien Green diary for Kinsey.

July 23, his forty-third birthday, brought Steward the usual depression about advancing age and lack of accomplishment, but this year his various projects (and ongoing sexual success) kept him from feeling it too deeply. His old friend Emmy Curtis helped, too. “Emmy took me to Maxim’s—plusher than plush—and then on the Bateau-Mouche, which lasted a bit longer than necessary…In the evening [we went] to see Alice—with much trepidation on my part—but she seemed to like Emmy, and talked endlessly until 12:30.” Two days later, Steward had another meeting with Julien Green. “[I] gave him some of my dirty pictures,” Steward noted, “at which he seemed overwhelmed. Then we went to lunch and talked endlessly until 4:00 o’clock, about art, literature and mainly sex. He said he would introduce me to the charming young Polish boy I saw at his house.” The novelist telephoned the next day, and invited Steward to come around again for a visit. Steward then finished out the week with three more sexual encounters, one of them with Jacques Delaunay.

On Sunday, he took Emmy to see Tamara Toumanova dance
Giselle
. Steward was in fact devoted to this sweet old schoolteacher friend eighteen years his senior, for she had become very dear to him over the years. She had recently become a little more vague and confused than usual, and also begun to show symptoms of polycythemia, the serious bone marrow disorder that would ultimately result in her death. Wanting to make the Paris visit as special for her as possible, he arranged that they spend Monday together, too: “We climbed up to Sacre-Coeur, and amongst other things located Genet’s little house [in Montmartre], which we photographed. [I] bought a small pissoir as a souvenir…and then stopped at Gallimard on the way home to pick up
Le Langage Populaire
.”
^*

On the twenty-ninth he wrote up yet another adventure, of having a series of portraits of himself taken while posed as rough trade: “Midsummer madness in Paris! Your old mother went…to the photographer Rudolph (de Rohan, 5 rue Medicis) to have her picture taken as rough trade—in jeans, etc. R[udolph] a fantastic Yugoslave auntie, white skin and red wig.” From there, he continued on to Julien Green’s, where the two men passed the time “looking at [Green’s] photos—hundreds of erotic ones, not many sexual. He gave me about 20 very nice ones which may give me difficulty with the
douane
…Later I conceived the idea of copying some pen and ink sketches, and must ask him if he will lend them for a little while.”

Two days later, Steward saw the proofs of the photos taken by Rudolph de Rohan, noting that they had “turned out to be very good—a couple—but scarcely ones for the yearbook at DePaul.” He spent the later part of the week copying some of the drawings in Green’s collection, and at their next meeting Green even offered to take Steward “to the male brothel, Saids—[which he said would cost me] 3000 francs.” Steward, however, declined, for he had limited funds, and moreover was experiencing a good deal of sexual success without paying for it. Over breakfast several mornings later, he noticed a handsome young black man who turned out to be a Chicago-based dancer for Steward’s friend Katherine Dunham. “Thus before noon [of August 7],” Steward wrote that night in his diary, “I had his lovely body in my arms and his big black cock in my mouth.”

The brutal fantasies of
Querelle
were by now so firmly established in Steward’s mind that when he “saw a blindingly beautiful Querelle type,” after attending a church service at the Église Saint Germain, he decided that he absolutely “had to have it at all costs.” He subsequently invited the eighteen-year-old ruffian out for a beer and stayed on the town with him until two in the morning—at which point Pick stole the stud out from under him via a quickly concluded financial discussion. When the thug reappeared the next day, Steward had him up to his hotel room for sex, but afterward noted, “
Rien
. Pick had got all the gravy.”

A subsequent bar pickup turned nasty, with the fellow revealing himself to be “a [complete] sadist—ropes, scissors, belt.” The encounter was the most authentically violent and dangerous Steward had ever known; he later noted in his Stud File, “[I] tho[ugh]t my last hour had come.” It ended in a substantial beating as well as in stab wounds from the scissors. The following day, Steward remained in great pain, and also “found great difficulty in eating…because of my ruptured throat.” He concluded by noting, “This was a shocking experience…I was psychically unprepared.”

While Steward was not yet weary of Paris, he was physically injured and sexually exhausted, and he knew from his past experiences that with the Feast of the Assumption in mid-August, most of Paris would shut down for vacation, and the streets become empty and dull. He therefore strategically bought himself a train ticket for Brest, made a few last-minute purchases, and ended the afternoon by taking Emmy to the Musée Grévin.
^*
There, almost in spite of himself, he picked up an American air force corporal in uniform and bought him dinner. After sex that evening, the corporal begged Steward for seven thousand francs so he could fly back to England and not lose his stripes for overstaying his liberty. “Like a fool, I fell for it,” he wrote afterward, “—and that’s the last I ever expect to see of [the money]…Anyway, I had him, but $20 is too much for your old mother to pay for second rate goods.”

•

Leaving Emmy behind to fend for himself, Steward boarded the train the next morning for the long, slow ride to Brest. Though it was a journey of 375 miles, he was determined to pay homage to the city he had come to know so well through Genet’s novel, and about which he had now fantasized continually for more than two years.

Genet had lived in Brest briefly before World War II, and had based much of
Querelle
on his experience of this maritime city at the farthest reaches of the rugged Breton coast. An orphan born the same year as Steward, he had moved from orphanage to reform school to prison as a young man, and had been stationed in Brest in 1938 while enlisted in the Second Regiment of the Colonial Infantry under false pretenses (for, as a former convict, he was officially prohibited from joining the military). Brest had long been one of the great military and penal centers of France, with prison labor used in the construction of naval ships; by all accounts, it was a rough, oppressive military-dominated garrison city. After stealing four bottles of an aperitif from a bar, Genet had spent a week hiding out from the police in the backstreets before being betrayed by an accomplice and imprisoned. These autobiographical details and the foggy, phantasmagorical city in which they had been set were the raw materials from which Genet had crafted his violent, dreamlike, and highly sexual novel.

Steward had fantasized endlessly about Brest while translating
Querelle
, but the most picturesque parts of the old city were just then in complete ruin. The Allied bombardment of the port during World War II had destroyed most of the dismal landmarks Genet had described, and now only their place-names remained. “The rue de Siam, and rue Telegraphe…The town is all rebuilt and the old Brest all gone. And none of the new [buildings are] finished,” Steward wrote of it. “Dark and sinister and quiet at night.”

Staying at a cheap new hotel built on the site of Genet’s old Hotel de Siam, Steward tried mightily to commune with the spirit of the novel by prowling the dark streets, and in fact on his first night he found that “an old sailor-boxer took me by the hand in [La] Recouvrance.”
^*
But of course the real Brest could never live up to Genet’s tortured erotic evocation of it, or to Steward’s equally tortured fantasies of
Querelle
. As he wrote Kinsey: “What a poor dead mysterious town it is—all new buildings not quite finished—dark wide silent streets at night—certainly worse events than those G[enet] wrote about could happen now. La Feria, the tavern, is gone in a bomb, I fear. The hotel I live in is brand new. Still, in its way it is an even more wonderful setting for a 1952
Querelle
.”

He also added, somewhat impatiently, “Did you ever get the letter I wrote about Julien Green’s diary, or didn’t you want it, for [Green] has as yet heard nothing [from you] on the subject.”

On his last day in the city, Steward photographed the door to a place that might have been La Feria, the bar in
Querelle
.
^*
He also narrowly escaped being jackrolled. In a last-ditch attempt to score with a French sailor, and thinking as well of Genet’s Lieutenant Seblon, Steward left a note in the local pissoir. But when at long last a naval officer showed up looking for sex, he was too old and too ugly; Steward didn’t want him and sent him away.

•

Once back in Paris, Steward assisted Emmy with her packing, her banking, and her luggage before taking her out for a final “farewell” dinner at the Wagenende. With her departure, he felt himself falling into a depression, but then at the Café Flore he met an acquaintance who “talked so long and well of sex in Italy that he convinced me I should go to Rome for a week.” By the next day Steward had noted in his diary, “The die is cast.”
^*
After one last escapade—an all-night six-way
partouze
featuring four young French workmen and a fellow American tourist—Steward packed his bags and caught his flight to Italy.

“Rome!” Steward wrote two days later. “Even the air smells thick and rich—of melons, hay, fountains, lights, people…[It’s] lovely to look at…[I] walked until late, taking in everything…It’s fantastic—colored ochre and red…And the grandeur of its dimensions!” Quite apart from loving the look and smell of the city, Steward was particularly excited by the good looks and candid stares of Roman men, who seemed to him far more lively, direct, and sexually engaged than their more formal and reserved Parisian equivalents—and indeed, many of them were just then actively caught up in trading sex for money, for postwar conditions had left many Italians desperate for currency, and the streets were now crowded with well-heeled, sex-hungry tourists.

His first stop, however, was the house just off the Spanish Steps where Keats had died, for Steward admired Keats above all other poets. “Visited its little museum, wept,” he noted in his diary. He then described the heavy cruising scene in the nearby park of the Villa Borghese: “A boxer came and sat down beside me. Very sexy, about 35…‘Tony’ or some such. We ate…an expensive dinner [and] after sex in the hotel, he took me for 4000 lira.”

Sex between men in Italy, Steward soon learned, nearly always involved some form of payment.
^*
Steward had few qualms about paying in general, and in Rome none at all—for the Roman men were handsome, the act of payment carried its own powerful erotic charge, and the cost, given the exchange rate, was almost fantastically low.

Steward was not alone in coming to Rome for an erotic getaway; since the end of World War II, large numbers of American tourists had flocked there, with American writers and artists in the vanguard. Tennessee Williams had been visiting regularly since 1948; Samuel Barber, Gore Vidal, Frederick Prokosch, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, James Merrill, Bernard Perlin, and many others were resident or semiresident in Rome at this time, creating a substantial artistic community of young, dynamic English-speaking homosexually active expatriates. The world of Roman men-for-hire in which they moved was probably most vividly evoked by Tennessee Williams’s 1950 novel
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
, the story of a faded American actress who seeks oblivion in her many anonymous sexual encounters with young Roman hustlers—just as, during that time, Williams had done.

After a busy second day of sightseeing, Steward met up with Glenway Wescott’s lover, Monroe Wheeler, and learned from Wheeler that a number of their Paris acquaintances had recently arrived in Rome, too, including Francois Reichenbach and James Purdy. While Steward and Wheeler had their dinner, Steward caught sight of “Tony,” the hustler who had stolen his four thousand lire; but he was sanguine about the robbery, later noting only, “I see now he’s one of the best professionals in Rome.”

Two days later Steward met up with James Purdy for breakfast, then took a taxi alone to the English Cemetery, where he plucked some “shrubbery and clover from Keats and Shelley’s tombs” and meditated in silence by Keats’s grave. Then, after a quiet lunch, he cruised the Baths of Caracalla and the Terme di Roma, finding the latter “Fantastic. Full of tired American queens. Francois Reichenbach…took an American boy from me. And [I met] Tennessee Williams! [But] where were the vaunted pretties?”

Steward was delighted to encounter Williams, and particularly under such louche circumstances, for he was a great admirer of Williams’s work—particularly the short stories, in which Williams had daringly presented various dark, often masochistic homosexual dramas without hiding behind the tiresome change-of-sex strategy he so often resorted to in his plays. “[The] stories of
One Arm
have haunted me for years—the title one, and ‘Death and the Black Masseur,’” Steward later wrote Williams, “[and] I shall dream and think of the description of the motorcyclist in ‘Two on a Party’…for years to come.” In the same letter, Steward recalled to Williams their brief, amusing conversation while chatting in the Roman cruising spot: