The Tall Boy: A Memoir

by Jess Gregg

  We took to calling each other “old sport” with just enough bite in it to hide any approval. Neither of us had ever had such a good audience before, but along with this reward, there were penalties. At his best, Bill had the high spirits of a touring player, but it was equalized by his most trying feature, a relentless Midwestern honesty. To his mind, even tact was a form of lying, and all too often, he felt compelled to point out whatever truth was least convenient. “Let’s do something about that complexion, sport,” he would say airily. “Polka dots aren’t in.”

  For all his compulsive honesty, and the insults we exchanged in the name of candor, we were cautious about letting each other know too much. Sexual orientation, for instance. In those clandestine days, a misplaced trust could ruin your standing at school, and even jeopardize your eventual acceptance by a college. So we had exhausted sidestep and indirection by the time I asked him outright, “Are you queer?”

  “Naturally,” he said, without a blink. “And everyone knows you are too.”

  “They don’t know any such thing!” I protested.

  “If they don’t,” he snapped, “they probably think the Empire State Building’s the Eiffel Tower.”

  This came too quickly for logic to validate, and we stood there trying to glare at each other. Then both of us collapsed in helpless laughter. My laugh was loud, but his deafened dogs. And it was this kind of laughter, irrational, uninhibited, and usually directed at ourselves, that made our patience with each other last as long as it did.

  America’s entrance into the second war waited until we graduated from college. Although conscience kept urging us to take our part in this great global struggle, the armed services were sending out loud noises about how straight they intended to keep the ranks. The slightest deviation would be hunted down and punished, we kept hearing. “If you’re caught, it could mean court martial, disgrace, and even prison,” an older friend warned us. He had already declared himself, and his draft card was marked 4F. “Think of your family,” he urged. “Spare them the humiliation.”

  My arrest on the morals charge having already disqualified me, I did not enlist, and assumed Bill would decide against going too; but nobody ever made up his mind for him. When those greetings from the government finally arrived, he stored his clothes in my family’s attic, and made himself ready for induction. My mother and dad gave him a farewell party—twice, in fact, once when he came back on leave. Basic training had not automatically transformed him into a soldier—the olive drab uniform and army haircut merely made him look miscast. But ready or not, he was shipped out.

  The letters he fired from Europe broke every rule against sending explosives through the mail. Their very salutations seemed to detonate. He could not or would not adapt himself to army life, and with that holy commitment to speaking his mind, he attacked everything from the Supreme Commander to government-issue underwear. It was not just the Military’s incompetence, waste, and graft that he raged at, but the heaped-up hype used to justify it. “I’m tired of Days of Infamy,” he wrote, on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. “I’m ready to celebrate a day of Famy—something that civilized people can observe. Which is why I have decided henceforth to commemorate December 7th as Bette Davis Day.”

  It worsened after he got to see some action overseas. He seemed to have decided that if the Army would not conform to his standards of excellence, he would simply wash his hands of it, and ignore the war entirely. Consequently, he filled up his letters with gossip about events and personalities far from the world conflagration—events and personalities, in fact, that did not exist anywhere. “Went to the most amusing party at BooBoo, Duchess of Blackpool’s,” he wrote. “It set the Smart Set right on their Cannes. She had the chorus line from La Bore Crashing flown in to entertain us during cocktails, and after din-din, introduced the most divine redneck preacher, who made us all leap up and confess our sins. Except I couldn’t think of any of my own, so I confessed several of yours.”

  There were pages of inside revelation about the cowboy star, Buck Weinstein, and his horse, Schlepper, (“—they’re not speaking just now.”) and full reportage of the Dallas Palace Little Theatre’s all-woman Life with Father. But gradually, his letters became the trans-Atlantic edition of The Muses’ Loot. This too was pure invention, slender folios of really terrible verse, edited by the imitable Mrs. Tremble McKinley Haynes, and featuring, among many other lyric voices, the poems of Flower Bungley Basset, the Sweet Singer of Coldwater, Michigan. “Mrs. Bassett’s Jazz Phantasmagoria is too well-known to need our mention,” he editorialized, “but, reader, who can resist quoting its final lines, so pregnant with meaning for today’s mad youth?

  ‘Go on, flapper, your way wend,

  Life will get you in the end.’”

  It was a curious departure for a young man so furiously committed to speaking the truth; but perhaps absurdity was the only note left to a voice already hoarse with protest. When I finally wrote to him demanding that he either report what the hell was going on over there, or to stop writing to me at all, his answer by return mail confined itself to a single word, routine, but repeated seventy-five times. This ended with advice to go fuck myself, followed by a six weeks’ silence.

  Resuming our correspondence took effort and a slice of humble pie: I submitted a sheaf of really blank verse to the editor of The Muses Loot. “Mrs. Tremble McKinley Haynes thanks you for your splendidly lyric vision,” he wrote back benignly. “So does our Mrs. Bassett. So does our newest contributor, a friend of yore and a friend of yours, the unforgettable, nay, immortal, Vera.”

  By the time the war was over and Bill returned to the United States, I had moved to New York, and was living on University Place in Greenwich Village. “What gives with this town?” he demanded over the phone, the day he disembarked. “It’s dirty and deafening and ought to be replaced immediately.” We met for a drink at the Astor Bar. Whatever he may have felt about his stint in the army, it had accomplished wonders in transforming his appearance. He was as good as handsome, standing a lot straighter, with his blond hair cropped short, and his face so tan that the eyes blazed blue as gas flame. However, it was the same old Bill when it came to blurting out what was on his mind. “Oh, God!” he groaned, when I suggested he stay on in New York and share expenses. “We’d strangle each other in ten hours.”

  Somewhat to my relief, he took the train back to Los Angeles the next night. A month and three letters later, he was back in Manhattan, climbing the lopsided stairs to my small apartment. There was nothing for him on the West Coast, he explained. He knew no one there anymore, and besides, Hollywood was no place for an actor.

  Once he had moved in, the apartment shrank a size smaller each day. Bill’s energy had the surge of rush-hour traffic, and even when I persuaded my landladies, the Misses Mittelstaedt, to rent us an adjoining room, I kept feeling that a four-lane highway had been routed through the place. Within a week, he was holding down two part-time jobs—three, if you counted volunteer work for a national theatre organization. In between times, he made the rounds of Broadway producers. I kept imagining him bursting into their offices, just as he did when he came home at night. “Okay, okay, okay!” he would cry. “Everyone off their butts, let’s see some action here!”

  In a way, it was what I had been missing. After a long day of working alone, it was good to break for dinner with someone, and sit across a table, laughing and talking nonsense. Yet even this relaxation got lashed by tempest, once Bill managed to land the lead in a modest Off-Broadway production of Hamlet. Every night when we met at some spaghetti joint after his rehearsal, he would ruin his digestion and mine by acting out the day’s ordeal. He had studied the role since kindergarten, to hear him talk, but the stage director, whom he always referred to as T.U.T. (That Utter Turd), was refusing to abide by this superior knowledge. The dueling that resulted between them was not confined to the ramparts of Elsinore, and only ended with a coup de grace from the critics, whose faint praise closed the show.
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  Apparently untouched by this disappointment, he plunged into any work he could find. It was providential that Miss Emma Mittelstaedt, the elder of our landladies, should die just then, and we helped move the dusty contents of her antique shop up to the apartment she had shared with her sister. Here, the knick-knacks and what-nots waited, piled up and unsorted, like artifacts in a crypt. Only a wall separated Miss Harriet’s quarters from ours, and late at night, we could hear her wandering through those heaped-high rooms, grieving, sometimes singing a few notes of a song her sister had loved. “Spooky,” Bill said; but when she went for a week’s rest at her relatives’, he was ready. Recruiting me, he worked open her spring-lock door with a plastic collar-tab, and we sneaked into her dim, airless parlor. It took two days just to hide the junkier bric-a-brac—fringed lampshades, dusty bead flowers, and a really tacky papier mache bust of King Tut. Even then, the rooms looked haunted, so we re-painted the walls, re-upholstered her armchair, and washed all the windows. When Miss Harriet came home, Sunday night, her fluttering cries of rapture pierced the walls like shrapnel. “Oh, boys, what a wonderful—How can I ever thank—What can I do to repay you?”

  “Well, if you could spare it,” Bill said, modestly, “I’d like that unusual bust of King Tut—” (He sent it as a token of his regard to T.U.T.)

  This had been the first time he and I had ever worked together harmoniously, and we tried it again the next year, when Bill heard that Gian-Carlo Menotti was looking for someone to assist him during the rehearsal of his latest opera, The Consul. Bill’s experience with this medium was limited to having been quartered at the great opera house at Wiesbaden during the war. He couldn’t even read music. However, in two nights of grueling study, he let me teach him how. Whistling Puccini, he met the composer and nailed the job.

  This was Bill’s breakthrough into important theatre, but in many ways it was a disappointment to him and an ordeal for everyone else. He would not compromise. To safeguard Menotti’s work, he tolerated no shortcuts or excuses—in rehearsal, tangled with tenors, wardrobe women, and Union representatives. “Even with me,” said Menotti, a darkly handsome falcon of a man. “To insist always on perfection is—” His shoulders heaved. “—a terrible burden for all.”

  Tell me! I thought. At long last, my novel had been accepted by a publisher, and one day, I asked Bill to take some galley proofs back to my editor on his way to rehearsal. On the subway, he checked over my spelling, which was always fallible. Then, since he was at it, he re-structured my grammar, improved the vocabulary, and reinstated the kind of comma-crazy punctuation that Henry James had rejoiced in. “Just suggestions,” he explained later; but the suggestions were in eradicable red ink, and when he handed them in, my editor was furious. “On whose authority did you make these changes?” he fumed.

  “The Queen of England’s,” Bill retorted crushingly. “It’s her language!”

  There was always a certain grandeur in his inability to process his opinions. This really flowered after the prestigeous Joshua Logan decided to direct a play I had written, and we were suddenly lifted into a sphere of sensitive egos. At a party honoring Sir John Gielgud, I overheard Bill telling the great actor that he had walked out on his Hamlet. John, the kindest of men, did not take offense, but I did, and on the way home, told Bill off. He defended himself fiercely. “Somebody’s got to tell the truth in this business,” he cried. “Otherwise we’ll lose our whole basis for acting and writing.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said dryly. “Yeah, Bill, sure.”

  He faced me indignantly. “Do you think I only said I didn’t like John’s performance because my own Hamlet failed?”

  “It certainly crossed my mind,” I said.

  He marched on, disgusted by my cynicism. When we got home, he pulled out the manila envelope of reviews that had carped at his performance, and, to show me that truth works both ways, underlined in blue pencil all the critics’ negative opinions and mailed them at once to Sir John.

  If such Olympian integrity was difficult to live up to, it was nearly impossible to live with. Tension kept accumulating between us as time passed, and the occasions for shouting at each other multiplied. Bill’s threat of moving out began to occur more often; and yet, when we weren’t arguing, we still made each other laugh. And there was something else too—by some mad fluke, even against our wills, we had come to depend on each other.

  Still, good times, bad times, all detonated when Josh Logan phoned to say he had no further plans to direct my play. The disappointment was crushing, and I took to my bed, unwilling to even think about it. Two days of this was enough for Bill. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he burst out, “face up to things for once!”

  I put a pillow over my head. He snatched it away. “You always do this,” he persisted. “Hide away from anything unpleasant.”

  I sat up furiously. “So do you!”

  “When did I? Just name once I ever did!”

  “All the time! You hide every day of your life, you’re scared shitless that people ’ll find out you’re queer.”

  “All of us are scared of that! You’re scared, yourself!”

  “And all during the war too!” I yelled. “When you couldn’t handle the pressure over there, you hid away with games and high camp! The Muses Loot, for God’s sake! Flower Bungley Bassett! Vera!”

  That really burned him. “At least I went to war” he shouted. “I served! You took the easy way out. Declared yourself! Pulled the pillow over your head!”

  His voice was too penetrating, and the bronze ashtray by my bed too handy. I slung it at him, deflecting my aim at the last instant, so it hit the fireplace instead, taking a chunk out of the marble. For a moment, our eyes met, shocked, incredulous. Then he slammed out of the room.

  He took an apartment of his own only seven blocks away, not a Siberian distance even by New York standards, but it was nearly a year before we ran into each other again. Both of us were polite, even pleasant, but this meeting did not lead to another. Mutual friends kept us abreast of each other’s careers. He sent congratulations when I got a job as an assistant to my idol, Elia Kazan, but his own job with Menotti had not lasted—he had finally been a shade too outspoken. However, the experience had propelled him toward musical theatre, and eventually he was staging productions for the Metropolitan Opera. When the Met presented a new opera for which Bill had provided the libretto, I showed up to applaud. He had done the same for me, coming to the out-of-town opening of my play, A Swim in the Sea, which Hal Prince had produced. His project did not have a much longer life than mine. We were both sympathetic when the other’s work failed, but remained coolly distant if it had even partial success. When we met at a cocktail party, Bill, now known by the more dignified name of Henry, was looking very maestro in a silvering beard and a cape. He asked after my mother, whom he had always been fond of. She had been dead for three years, and I was shocked to realize how long it had been since he and I had last spoken.

  And it was quite a few years more before we spoke again. Not because we were still feuding; we just weren’t in the same part of the world at the same time. Bill’s familiar candor having alarmed Sir Rudolph Bing, head of the Met, he spent more of his time in Europe now, staging operas, teaching singers to act, managing music festivals. Surprisingly, he sometimes sent postcards from Rome or Graz, or even Texas. “Boheme again, bitch soprano, new ami, marvelous weather.” And always, at the end of the message, a stylish exhortation, “Thrive!”

  But was he himself thriving? I had no way of knowing anymore. Curiously, it was my younger sister who put me on his track again. Unknown to me, she had kept up a correspondence with him over the years, and she phoned me now in concern. “He hasn’t been well, and now I can’t get hold of him at all,” she said. “His answering machine breaks off in the middle with an awful sound, and there’s no way to leave a message.”

  I called his number, and had the same experience. I phoned again the next day, thinking the problem would surely be fixed by th
en. It wasn’t. Nor was it any different on the third day. At last I went over to his address to check out the situation, and learned he had had a heart attack, and was at Roosevelt Hospital. “He has a phone by his bed,” my informant said, “but if you call, don’t be upset.”

  I did call, and I was upset. His voice was faint, and betrayed no interest in me, himself, or the world. I asked if I could come see him. “It wouldn’t be convenient,” he whispered, and hung up.

  I shrugged, and told myself I didn’t give a damn anyway. So the next day, I went to see him.

  It was a mistake. He was gaunt and pale, and his eyes, unwelcoming. “I told you I didn’t want to see you,” he whispered.

  I replied in our old mock-insulting way, “Then you should’ve begged me to come. I’d have stayed away.”

  He would have turned from me, but the nearly invisible tubes taped to his face, arms, and body, didn’t allow him much freedom. He closed his eyes so that at least he needn’t see me seeing him.

  I sat down beside the bed, searching for something to say. It wasn’t easy. The past was too hurtful to discuss, the future too uncertain, and we no longer had any mutual friends to dish. I babbled along about the weather and the traffic. It wasn’t very interesting, but that made no difference since he wasn’t listening.

  It was a reprieve when the nurse came in. “Now, how’s our patient today?” she cried. The stretch of her smile laid bare her long teeth, and tightened the cords in her throat. “Are we ready to have our temperature took?”