Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (36 page)

Along with the constant threat of crime, Steward also had to live with various horrors relating to tattooing, for as his reputation as a tattoo artist grew, so too did visits from extremely troubled people. One day at the shop, “A man about 45 came in, tall and nervous…[and] showed me his chest, on which were half a dozen old pieces…He wanted them all covered…What I could hardly take my eyes off, however, was his tits: one of them was torn off completely, the other dangling by a thread of flesh. The cunt on the [tattoo of the] nude [girl on his chest] had been burned out with a cigarette. In the face of such masochism (and sadism) I turned weak, almost got sick. I could not shake this off for days.” Steward had also recently been approached by a man named Ralph Mills, an Episcopalian priest with a taste for extremely heavy sadomasochistic domination: “How he settles for himself the dichotomy betwixt his activity and his religion is something I’ll never know, and don’t care to know,” Steward wrote, “but I consider him to have something basic wrong with him if he can make the settlement, or at the least to be a bloody hypocrite. Ugh.”

During this lonely and vulnerable period in his life, Steward found Renslow to be a great new friend and ally. Renslow in turn was fascinated by Steward’s business, and in short order became a regular visitor down at the Tattoo Joynt. But there was more to this friendliness than Steward realized; as a businessman, Renslow saw Steward’s shop as a potential gold mine, and had already started thinking about opening a chain of such store-fronts. Since Steward was not only lonely, but also now dependent upon him for young bodybuilder-hustlers,
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Renslow had no problem milking him for information about every aspect of his business.

Renslow’s own business came under attack that October, however, when it was raided. As Steward later wrote, “The two smut-hunters from the Park District Police Force, Eli Blumenthal and Don Kelley, descended on Chuck’s studio on North Clark Street and arrested him. They had in their possession some male nudes which they said Chuck had sold or given to people.” After seizing what newspapers later described as “hundreds of lewd photos and negatives,” the police issued a warrant for Renslow’s arrest. Steward subsequently wrote Wardell Pomeroy for legal advice on Renslow’s behalf; Pomeroy responded with the name of a New York law firm that the institute had recently recommended to another individual facing similar charges. As it turned out, a municipal judge dismissed the case at its continuation on December 1, but in the process Renslow lost his commercial photography license, and with it the ability to hold any other license (including a bar license) in the city of Chicago, thus complicating his business life considerably.
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•

In December of 1958, Steward again arranged to spend Christmas with Alice Toklas in Paris, and he sent Rudolf Burckhardt some travel money so that the two men might meet there for a few days before returning to Zurich, ostensibly for a gala New Year’s Eve party hosted by
Der Kreis
—but really so Steward could open a series of secret bank accounts for his undeclared tattooing income. Steward began his adventure in currency smuggling at the Marshall Field’s candy department: “[I] laid a dollar bill on the foreign candy-bars until I found the right size (the saleswoman thought me crazy, I know) and then took one, which I opened carefully, and put my fifty c-notes inside, sealing it back up—and thus carried the five grand safely to Zurich.”

When he saw Alice Toklas in Paris, Steward noted that she had become “much enfeebled even over last year [and] very forgetful, and frequently [she] gets quite mixed up. But…she spoke quite frankly about Francis [Rose] and his h[o]m[o]s[e]x[ua]l[i]ty and his affairs, so that it was a little shocking now and then to hear her.” On Christmas Day, Toklas took Steward down the street to lunch at Lapérouse, one of the oldest and most famous restaurants in Paris; but she then grew so confused during the course of the meal that she caused a scene. Though he was happy to have given her the pleasure of his company, Steward found the experience excruciating; her deep confusion seemed to him yet another indication that she was not long for this world.

After visits with Jacques Delaunay, Witold Pick, and Pick’s latest boyfriend—a highly sexed young Arab bodybuilder named Bachir—Steward and Burckhardt engaged in various Parisian adventures including a
thé dansant
hosted by the French homophile publication
Arcadie
. Steward also made a sentimental expedition back to Rue de Lappe, where he had had his earliest Parisian sexual adventures in 1937 and 1939. The day before leaving for Zurich, Steward returned to Toklas’s apartment for an intimate discussion about her conversion to Catholicism—during which, as Steward later admitted,

The enfeebled Toklas welcomed Steward’s whopping lie with the greatest joy and relief, afterward writing him, “What wonderfully good news you gave me for Christmas—the best I’ve had since Gertrude died…You are my sweet Sam, you have made your sister and me all happy and my prayers now for you will be different ones.”

From Paris, Steward and Burckhardt traveled on to Zurich for
Der Kreis
’s New Year’s Eve gala. As a recovering alcoholic who regularly avoided the company of other homosexual males, Steward had hardly expected to enjoy himself at the party, but even so he was surprised at just how depressing he found the whole of Zurich, noting in his journal that “the people [have] such dead-set earnest expressions on their faces all the time, as if they had but two thoughts: 1) How can I make some more money, and 2) How can I hold on to what I have? Rudolf said the suicide rate was very high…Still I suppose you can’t expect the bankers of the world to be frivolous.” The only bright spot to his visit was the company of a highly intelligent and well-mannered young hustler named Antonio, arranged for him by Burckhardt, on whom Steward would later partially base his fictional character Phil Andros.

Immediately after opening his bank accounts Steward retreated back to Paris, where as a joke Pick had booked him into the Hotel St. Georges, a
maison de passe
^*
just off the Place Pigalle. Pick and Bachir showed up shortly after his arrival, had a good laugh about the place, “and then Pick left, and Bachir undressed, needing no urging, and screwed me lovely.”

After saying good-bye to Toklas and flying home to Chicago, Steward quickly fell back into his old sexual routine, noting that on January 12 he “had Berbich at noon, Adams
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at 5:30, and Bob Caplowitz
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in the evening, enough for one day.” Renslow approached him for a loan to pay his legal bills, and Steward noted afterward that “with many misgivings, I lent Chuck a thousand dollars…He gave me a chattel mortgage of 600 shares on Perry’s Gym, due in five years (without interest)…I do hope…this won’t mean the breakup of things between us.”

Steward also had another visit from Charlie Costello, the young hustler, circus roustabout, and criminal he had given bus fare back to New York the previous fall. Costello had made it only as far as the Chicago bus station, however, before starting a fistfight, being arrested for assault, and spending several months on a prison farm. While visiting the tattoo parlor, Costello told Steward how at the prison farm he had taken a pretty younger boy as his pogue.
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As Steward later described it in his journal,

During February and March, Steward recorded just a few noteworthy sexual incidents, chief among them an S/M encounter with Professor Hal Stevens, whom Steward had first met a decade earlier through the flagel-list Hal Baron. Chuck Renslow and Dom Orejudos participated in the encounter, which involved heavy bondage, a mock kidnapping, various forms of whipping, and then, to cap it all off, terrorizing the blindfolded Stevens by dragging Orejudos’s pet rat across Stevens’s naked back. Renslow enjoyed the encounter so much that he later described it as the beginning of his life as a sexual dominant.

Shortly after the encounter with Stevens, Steward received news that one of his longtime sex partners, a high school teacher named Robert Dahm, had been “caught…with a seventeen-year-old [student]…the police got involved [and] Bob got it: about five years, with possibility of parole in 18 months…The thousand times I told Professor Dahm not to mix business and pleasure! And on he went.” Steward then heard a similar tale of woe from Ralph Mills, the Episcopal priest, noting in his journal that Mills’s vocation had come to an end after he “picked up a sixteen year old in Delaware, one of a gang of young tough tattooed Italians who were shaking down the queers. So Ralph paid blackmail for quite a while, and then went to the police, and of course his bishop, and confessed. So now he’s out of a job.”

Steward neglected his journal as summer came on, in part because he had increasing doubts about its usefulness to the Institute for Sex Research, but also in part because he was devoting the majority of his writing energies to a new correspondence with Burckhardt, who was strongly encouraging him to write fiction, essays, and reviews for
Der Kreis
. Steward was now writing two or three letters
^*
a week to Burckhardt, and he later described them as “a diary if ever there was one.”

Steward’s business continued to be good at the tattoo parlor in 1959. In his zeal for record-keeping, he noted that he now had “a new sum for Best Day Ever ($210), a new Best Week Ever ($608); and a new Best Month Ever ($2201).” The excitement Steward felt about his correspondence with Burckhardt, his tattooing, and his moneymaking during this period was particularly important to him since his sexual adventures now consisted mainly of dullish paid encounters with Renslow’s hustlers. At the same time, however, he was having intense fantasies about being sexually dominated—this time by Renslow, who in his powerful position as both pimp and erotic pornographer had come to seem to Steward a man of considerable sexual magnetism—even more so after Steward had witnessed his dominating Hal Stevens.

As early as his erotic correspondence with “Bob” in the late 1940s, Steward had fantasized about being a male prostitute “owned” by a pimp who would whore him out to others. Now, in Renslow, Steward had actually encountered just such a dominant and “pimp.” In a journal entry written several months after the encounter featuring Renslow and Hal Stevens, Steward noted that Renslow’s “natural aggressiveness” had, during the course of the summer, “blossomed out into as fine an example of Sadism as I’ve yet seen.” As a result, Renslow began to loom ever larger in Steward’s imagination as an exploitative sexual dominant—so much so that Steward began preferring Renslow even to sailors.

Indeed, as Steward neared his fiftieth birthday, the sailors he now met were less than half his age. While he could hardly deny their vitality or good looks, he had seen and spent time with enough of them through his tattooing as to be relatively indifferent to them as sex objects. As he wrote that summer,

Renslow, meanwhile, became ever more interesting to Steward. When Renslow began to experiment with erotic films, Steward gladly participated as an extra: “Chuck decided to make a color movie of me tattoodling [a hustler named] Little Jim, putting a big peacock on his left bicep and shoulder…[I had] flab under the chin, and old skin around the jowls, [but] Little Jim [looked] absolutely beautiful and sexy as all hell…Even [in] its rough state [the film] was absolutely fascinating to me: a superb example of what Alice [Toklas] called ‘letting the reality carry the weight of it all.’”