Authors: Edmund White
When my play had won a prize at school, my name had been noted in a three-line article in the
New York Times.
A New York playwrights’ agent wrote me, asked to see my “property,” read it and decided to handle it. She ultimately found a young producer-director whose parents were temporarily rich and could afford for the moment to indulge their son and his expensive hobby. His name was Rhett Goldstein, a compromise between romantic gentile fantasies and solid Jewish realities. He wore country tweeds but was indelibly urban. He was the first person we knew in New York who lived on the Upper East Side in an apartment with new store-bought furniture in a building with a doorman. He had a painting in a gold frame with a little light over it.
He was terribly funny in an unfamiliar New York way. He had a psychoanalyst and his highest word of simultaneous criticism and approbation was “neurotic.” His best friend was a neurotic actress who longed to be pitied. She and Rhett would
rent wheelchairs, sit in them with little plaid blankets folded nicely over their knees and order in pizza, hoping to draw some sympathy from the delivery boy. Rhett was always perfectly turned out, a tall man with shellacked black hair and broad shoulders who lived on amphetamines lest he gain weight. He went on eating binges, usually rum-raisin ice cream, which he’d confess to proudly: “I don’t know why I’m getting so neurotic,” he’d say. He shaved above his nose to keep his eyebrows from growing together. He was only four or five years older than we were but seemed much more sophisticated. He’d been to some sort of business school but never spoke of it. He read expensive new bestsellers in hardcover rather than dogeared paperback classics: Jacqueline Susann rather than Milton. He spoke of “trash” with connoisseurial relish, but he knew the names of celebrities in every domain, thousands and thousands of names, including the most exalted and rarefied. No social situation could have taken him by surprise, although he impressed us by trembling when he lit his cigarette. He often said his nerves were shot and the only cure was to iron his shirts and slacks for an hour. He ironed all his clothes, even his boxer shorts, even his sheets. He had a lot of free time and compulsive ways of filling it.
He did a very funny imitation of my agent. He noticed little things about people; after half an hour with Einstein he would have been capable of saying, “Did you notice the dandruff?” He listened to show tunes and knew all the lyrics which he had to keep himself from lip-synching. At Sardi’s or Joe Downey’s or Casey’s in the Village he could be extremely polite—a bit unsmiling and rigid, a tad imperial—with a new person, but if he didn’t like that new person, when the new person went to the toilet Rhett would mime vomiting, a finger down his throat, and even whisper the word “Gag.”
Randall was falling in love with Rhett, at least Randall would talk about him all the time, his fascination disguised as mild
satire. “Oh, that Rhett is a stitch,” Randall would say. “He plays solitaire for hours alone in his apartment, all dressed up in his Paul Stuart suits. Do you think he’s gay? I’ve dropped plenty of beads but he’s never picked up a single one.”
In March, just before we began rehearsals, Randall moved out of our apartment. I had seen his part in my play (a small one but the “title role” as he pointed out) as my way of winning his love definitively. Far from it. He was worried that people would imagine he’d been cast simply because he was my lover. He wanted people (which people?) to think he’d seen the article in
Backstage
, sent in his head shot and résumé (the very résumé I’d typed, even written, exaggerating his credits) and been summoned to an audition from which he had emerged victorious.
I tried to see things from his point of view but if I’d become Arthur Miller I’d done so to win Marilyn forever—of course she herself had not been dead for long and I should have paid more attention to the end of their story. Randall wasn’t even very nice about it; all I wanted was reassuring lies. But with the same aplomb with which he’d thrown his college roommate’s dry ice out the window he packed his bag.
Now every square inch in the West Village is expensive if run-down, but then Randall was able to find a room in a boarding house on Eleventh Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues for fifteen dollars a week, breakfast included.
I arranged to feel pity for Randall’s things as he packed them one by one in a cardboard suitcase: his one good blue crewneck sweater, the pegged pair of black pants he’d bought for the Martin Luther King march on Washington, the drip-dry white shirt, the black penny loafers, the four pairs of Argyle socks, the three pairs of dingy Jockey shorts with the broken elastic seams…. How would he survive without me?
I needn’t have worried. No matter what he wore, he always looked splendid given the intaglio sharpness of his features,
his long Grecian nose with the small, concealed nostrils, the tender boyishness of his nape, his royally noncommittal smile and the disconcerting way his eyes darted suddenly to one side—yes, of course, a tic he’d developed to recenter his floating lenses, but, to the uninitiated, a sure sign of intriguing inner conflict.
I always wanted to be wonderful—above merely human behavior, unexpectedly kind, uniquely understanding—and with Randall I was once again wonderfully idiotic. All smiles, I walked him to his Eleventh Street boarding house where he’d be living just next door to Mario, a friend of ours who made paper flowers, limped, smiled all the time, laughed at the wicked things other people said but never uttered an unkind word himself.
Mario was a good-hearted nineteenth-century bohemian, a flower-making Mimi, immersed in a mean-spirited twentieth-century bohemia corrupted by the need for more and more money just to survive. Mario survived by listening to everyone and smiling as he continued to make big paper flowers painted Edwardian colors—taupe, puce, bisque…. Perhaps he liked Randall so much because he, too, was a throwback to the nineteenth century. Randall was the B.B. (that is, Beautiful Boy), the Shropshire Apollo, Jude the Illustrious. Soon enough the B.B., who’d ruled men’s hearts for thousands of years, would be traded in for a new icon, the Butch Clone. Ganymede must give way to the Eagle—the name, oddly enough, of the best-known leather bar of the seventies, where everyone wore mustaches, creaked becomingly and had showboat muscles. Classic beauty was being replaced by body fascism.
During rehearsals Rhett became determined and efficient. Points of sweat broke out on his unsmiling face, which he mopped at with a heavily perfumed white breast-pocket handkerchief. The actors resisted him; they hadn’t yet found their actions, worked out their motivations, uncovered the subtext.
As the writer, of course, I felt I knew the answers to all their questions. A natural ham, I wanted to demonstrate to the actors which words they should emphasize and where they should speed up or pause significantly, but Rhett told me one must never, never give a “line reading” to an actor—did I know nothing about building a character?
I soon saw that if I wanted to be wonderful I shouldn’t come to the rehearsals at all. I had read the memoirs of a Broadway director who’d declared that rule number one should be to ban the author from the theater. His work was done and all he could do now was meddle. He could find nothing new in his own work. His method was to impose meaning on words; the actor’s job was to release a sense of believable life through a sequence of well-chosen actions. The writer was always correcting misreadings of his lines, whereas the actor should be encouraged to ignore the letter for the spirit of passion.
When I objected once to how broadly a scene was being played, Rhett snapped at me,
“Writers!
You guys never realize that we can’t pull it out of a hat. The cast is very shaky—they’re going through a delicate chrysalis stage. I promise you you’re going to be satisfied with the final product. Remember, we’re all working for
you
but you’ve got to allow us our own crazy working methods or else you’re going to spook everyone. Your sighs and frowns are making us very neurotic.”
My desire to be wonderful outweighed any brutish urge to protect the integrity of my play. In my extreme vanity I was sure my script was so lively and original that it must be actorproof. After all, hadn’t my class at the U. of M. been in awe or at least stitches? Everyone, that is, except our professor, who’d detected in the last act a faulty resolution of the MDQ—a criticism I’d mocked upstairs at the Pancake Palazzo but that now came back to haunt me. Graciously I stopped going to rehearsals. Rhett applauded me for being so professional.
I missed Randall. His distinctive body odor of very dry geraniums baking in the sun still clung to the sheets, but there was no small Virgilian boy to wake up to; now I counted sheep alone without a Corydon to tend the flock. At the office I pecked away at captions or roamed the corridors looking for someone to bullshit with, all the while knowing that eight blocks south and four long blocks west the cast was piecing together my play. I ate my TV dinner at home alone, too poor to own a TV. I cruised up and down Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street, hung out at Julius’s bar, drank too much, went home too late, too often alone. It seemed strange that my play was being done and because of it I had lost Randall, my lover and my best friend.
In the second week of rehearsals the blocking had been completed and everyone knew where he or she was supposed to be going. The cast now did a walk-through of the entire play with book in hand; “Let’s put it up,” Rhett said as though referring to the Big Top.
Like a moron who waits for his own name to be pronounced during an introduction and ignores the other person’s, I paid no attention to Rhett’s staging and just listened for my own lines. When I complained that everyone was whispering my text or muttering it without any understanding, Rhett covered his face with his hands, then at last asked through them, “You don’t want much, do you? An actor is a very fragile thing, a delicate instrument you can easily overwind. They’re feeling a bit wobbly right now, like invalids the first day out of bed.” … Properly abashed, I again stopped attending rehearsals until Rhett called me up frantically to tell me that the leading man was great in all the scenes where he had to seduce someone or turn violent, but he couldn’t remember his lines or even pronounce half the words. Some serious rewrites were going to have to be done rapidly.
“Couldn’t we replace him?” I asked.
“Are you
kidding!
He’s a name. We’re into the last ten days of rehearsal … and the posters have already been printed.”
“Right.” My friends all teased me that I said “right” when I meant “wrong” and “yes” when I meant “no.” Apparently the “right” that meant “wrong” was softer and more drawn out and reflective, less certain than the one that retained its primary meaning. Of course, I was such a pushover that only a disinterested connoisseur of my moods would have bothered working out the nuances; my actions were always obliging. I was relentlessly wonderful.
With a pride in my virtuosity I began to hack away at scene after scene, replacing large blocks of dialogue with strong actions for the leading man or sexy moments where he could improvise
ad libido….
Rhett had received a visit from a famous older director and playwright whose assistant he’d once been. That man had watched a run-through and exclaimed, “It’s wild, but it should be wilder. The props should all be outsize—giant mirror, giant comb. When the black butler rapes the white master he should coat himself with tin foil, as though it were medieval armor—he’s a
knight
, get it?” Rhett took careful notes and spared no expense nor extra hours of rehearsal in implementing these suggestions.
Snippets began to appear in the papers announcing the upcoming premiere. My picture was taken though never used. An Italian journalist interviewed me about the American race question, but the interview was never published.
The week of previews began. For the first one I sat alone in front of strangers and heard their reactions. The man behind me kept saying to his wife in a running commentary: “So, my God, he’s wandering around like a sleepwalker, he really is writing just stream of—oh, shit, he’s not going to dig up that tired old trick, is he? The theater of the absurd is over, folks. And has she just switched into
verse?
Look, now they’re all
talking in unison, I guess it’s supposed to be funny, like one of those thundering Verdi choruses, but it isn’t funny, it might seem to work on paper, but onstage it’s a big dud. Eeek! He just squeaked through that one, but the audience looks thoroughly confused, the parodies are all off-target, and anyway, why should we be parodying grand opera or Racine or Ionesco in a play about race relations, for Christ’s sake!”
I sat there, my ears burning scarlet, fascinated by the rapidity and rightness of this guy’s commentary; he was young, already balding, wearing corduroys even in the heat, and his wife looked vexed with him or the play. During the intermission—luckily, unluckily—a friend came up to congratulate me and after that the critic behind me was silent. Suddenly I was seized by dread. I recognized that what had seemed snappy and up-to-date in Ann Arbor was leaden and passé in New York. I knew my play was going to flop. I’d read enough reviews to realize that in the case of a new play the writer gets all the notices. Yet I didn’t panic. Somehow I felt indifferent to the outcome, perhaps because my Marilyn had already abandoned me, perhaps because I had scarcely participated in the rehearsals, possibly because in my naïveté I still imagined I was in the capable hands of professionals who knew more about the theater than I, a school kid, could ever hope to know. To have a bad case of opening-night jitters would be vulgar and would needlessly tax other people’s patience.
Not that I had any sense of solidarity with the cast, whom I scarcely knew. My agent had to tell me to send the leading lady roses; I was so broke they cost twelve of my last twenty dollars. At the final curtain my agent told me to rush backstage and thank the cast effusively; everyone except Randall looked at me as though I were a stranger.