I remember that the first day after the first night, when we were crossing the dunes to the ocean-side cabin of a dance critic, Kip and I lingered behind the others in the party and Kip said to me, “Last night you made me know what is meant by beautiful pain.”
In that loft I wrote my only verse play, “The Purification”—I had set up a little writing-table, a wooden box with my portable on it, and in that play I found a release, in words, of the ecstasy of the affair. And also a premonition of its doom.
All at once Kip turned oddly moody. We would go places together and he would suddenly not be there, and when he came to bed, after an absence of some hours, he’d explain gently, “I had a headache, Tenn.”
I had a wire that called me back to Manhattan for a week in July. I resumed the tenancy of a little apartment shared with Donald Windham and Fred Melton, for that week, and I wrote poem after poem for Kip. When the business matters were concluded at the end of that week, I returned straight away to P-town.
It seems to me now, in retrospect, that Kip had shyly discussed with me the difficulty of supporting himself in America, being a Canadian draft-dodger with no identity that he dared reveal to any employer except a sympathetic sculptor who used him as a model for his classes. And it seems that I had mistakenly assured him that I might be—in the fall—in an economic position to relieve him of all anxieties on that score. That was very likely the understanding between us.
I know Kip loved me, after his bewildered fashion. And I also know it couldn’t have been very easy to be waked up four or five times a night for repeated service of my desire.
This is not a way to write a love-story, I know.
Toward the end of August, a girl entered the scene. I did not regard her as a threat. And then one day I was on the dunes with a group that included the yet-unknown, or uncelebrated abstract painter, Jackson Pollock. Later on he was to become a “dark” man, outside his work, but that summer I remember him for his boisterous, just slightly drunk behavior. He was a sturdy, well-built young man, then, just a little bit heavier from beer-drinking than was attractive to me, and he used to carry me out into the water on his shoulders and to sport about innocently.
Oh, it was a golden time, that summer, everyone seemed lighthearted despite the war being on!
Well, one afternoon late that summer I was on the dunes with the group, when Kip appeared, looking very solemn.
“Tenn, I have to talk to you.”
He rode me into P-town on the handle-bars of a bike, and on the way in, with great care and gentleness, he told me that the girl who had intruded upon the scene had warned him that I was in the process of turning him homosexual and that he had seen enough of that world to know that he had to resist it, that it violated his being in a way that was unacceptable to him.
It was no longer tenable, the two-story shack—now that Kip wouldn’t share the loft with me. So we moved into a larger two-story habitation which was not furnished except with three cots and a table and a few chairs.
I was in a state of shock. Kip observed a law of silence and of troubled remoteness.
I determined upon a course of action, flight to Mexico. In those days there was an advertised service by which someone desiring transportation by car to some other city—in this case, another country— could contact a driver going that way and arrange to share the expenses of the journey. I applied to that service, when I’d returned to Manhattan in my state of shock, and was quite speedily introduced to a young Mexican who had come to New York by car to see the 1940 World’s Fair and who had married a prostitute in Manhattan and now was taking her home to meet his wealthy family in Mexico City. There was a total language barrier between this young lady and her Mexican bridegroom. She was a voluptuous piece and he was voluptuous, too, and when you say a man, a bridegroom, is voluptuous it’s not a compliment to him.
We had a fantastic ride south. There were three other male Mexicans in the party and they took turns at the wheel. Sometimes a road map was produced but they couldn’t follow it. We kept making involuntary detours from our route, some that took us hundreds of miles out of the way. I had come down with a terrible cough and was spitting up blood now and then but was quite unconcerned with that normally disconcerting symptom, could think only of whether or not a letter would be waiting for me from Kip at Wells Fargo in Mexico City.
As we gradually approached the Texas border, the prostitute-bride became increasingly nervous at the prospect of entering her husband’s household and I soon got the impression that things were not working out very propitiously between the pair in the sack. She looked gloomier and more separate from her new spouse and his bachelor friends each day and she began to give me nervous glances and whisper to me hints of apprehension.
(I have never been frightened of Mexicans but my mother has a terror of them. Once when she was staying with me at a hotel in La Jolla, California, an old friend and I decided to take her across the border at Tijuana. I didn’t mention this intention until the car arrived at the International Customs. She then observed that she was entering, or about to enter, Mexico and she made a great disturbance. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, never!” as if being assaulted, the heroine of an old-time melodrama, but we just ignored these protestations and drove on down. When we got her out of the car in Tijuana, she would flatten herself against the wall whenever an adult Mexican approached her, and we had to take her into the nearest restaurant and return Stateside immediately after dinner.)
Back from that little excursion to the situation on the honeymoon trip to Mexico, August 1940. We had checked into a motel in Monterrey. I had settled down in a small, hot bedroom with a book on a bed enclosed by mosquito netting when there came a rap at the door: it was the bride.
She was near hysteria. “Honey, I don’t know what I’ve got myself into. You know what I mean?”
I told her that I could imagine.
She then admitted that the marriage had yet to be consummated and other admissions and wails of trepidation continued for an hour. She had perched herself in an attitude of more and more permanency on my bed and at last I thought it best to inform her that I was quite ineligible as a surrogate for her bridegroom. And I told her why. She nodded sadly and there was a little respite of silence, during which perhaps the germ for Kingdom of Earth was first fecundated in my dramatic storehouse. At last she sighed and got up.
“I guess you’re lucky, honey. Female hygiene’s a lot more complicated than men’s …”
When we arrived in Mexico City, the party deposited me at the YMCA. Such was my indifference to material matters that I left a lot of my clothes in the trunk of the car. And I think it must have been five or six years later that they were returned to me by the bride with a sweet note accompanying the package, mailed from Mexico City, expressing her happy recollections of the trip we’d enjoyed together.
There are so many gratuities of kindness in my life that I’ve never properly acknowledged.
I passed a lonely week, that August of 1940, at the Mexican “Y.” Only one incident during the week returns to memory. I was once descending the stairs when I encountered an elderly American queen wearing make-up. She greeted me like a close friend of long standing and she soon invited me to visit her room and look at her album of souvenir photos. (The kind of photo collection called a fag’s album.) There was one picture that I remember distinctly, it was a photograph of Glenway Wescott in the bloom of his youth, skinny-dipping in a mountain lake of very clear water.
After the week in the capital city, I went on to Taxco by bus. There I joined a group of American students who drove me to Acapulco. We arrived at dusk at a seaside resort called Todd’s Place, charmingly primitive, and with a very rough surf. We went swimming that night with the surf roaring in. I contrived to be washed repeatedly against and over the most attractive one in the group. I think he got the general notion but could not be separated from his companions.
Later I was at the Hotel Costa Verde over the rain-forest and the
still-water beach which were the off-stage background for Night of the Iguana. That summer much of Mexico was overrun by Nazi Germans. A party of them arrived at the Costa Verde, jubilant over the fire-bombing of London which was then in progress. There was an attractive girl in the party and I said “hello” to her one morning. She glared at me and growled, “Sorry, I don’t speak Yiddish.” Apparently she assumed that all Yankees were Jewish.
It was there in Acapulco that summer that I first met Jane and Paul Bowles. They were staying at a pension in town and Paul was, as ever, upset about the diet and his stomach. The one evening that we spent together that summer was given over almost entirely to the question of what he could eat in Acapulco that he could digest, and poor little Janie kept saying, “Oh, Bubbles, if you’d just stick to cornflakes and fresh fruit!” and so on and so on. None of her suggestions relieved his dyspeptic humor.
I thought them a very odd and charming couple.
That summer between swims I worked on the first draft of a play called Stairs to the Roof, and enjoyed long conversations with another young writer who had just been forced to relinquish his residence in Tahiti due to wartime conditions. We lay in adjoining hammocks along the sleeping-verandah, drinking rum-cocos and talking until the numbered cubicles were cool enough to enter for sleep.
And some Mexican boys did catch an iguana and tie it up under the verandah, to be fattened for eating—but nobody cut it loose.
The check (advance royalties) from the Theatre Guild was mysteriously delayed and delayed in the mails. I think the proprietress of the Costa Verde was about to bounce me when the check arrived without a word of comment. It was not until I was on a bus back across the border that I noticed in a theatre column of the New York Times that Miss Miriam Hopkins had been cast in Battle of Angels and that rehearsals were about to begin.
Kip died at the age of twenty-six. It was just after I had completed my professionally abortive connection with MGM, and I had come through St. Louis and witnessed the death of Grand on the Feast of the Epiphany, and had just arrived back in New York.
The phone rang one day and an hysterical lady said, “Kip has ten days to live.” A year before I had been told that Kip had been successfully operated on for a benign brain-tumor, and so I accepted her report with shocked credence.
He was at the Polyclinic Hospital near Times Square.
You know how love bursts back into your heart when you hear of the loved one’s dying.
Donald Windham accompanied me to the hospital for my visit, I was afraid to go alone. As I entered Kip’s room he was being spoon-fed by a nurse: a dessert of sugary apricots. He had never looked more beautiful, although the sugar syrup dripped from his mouth. His wife was there, too. They were calmly discussing taking a trip to the West Coast in a train compartment.
Kip’s mind seemed as clear as his Slavic blue eyes.
But his vision was limited.
“Tenn, sit there in the corner so I can see you.”
(The range of vision is always very limited in terminal brain cancer cases, I believe.)
I sat there and he inquired about my life on the coast.
I longed to leap up from my corner and embrace him, but I observed the ritual of sprightly dissimulation.
“It seems that when I had that tumor cut out last year they left some sutures in my brain, and that’s why I’ve had this setback.”
“That’s right,” said the wife, as if confirming the statement of an infant.
“I’ll be all right when they get the sutures out,” said Kip.
But his eyes kept saying things to me that controverted the undignified prattle.
“Nothing went wrong till I started to stumble on the street.”
“You won’t anymore,” said Wifie.
“Kip is tired,” said the nurse.
I rose and reached for his hand and he couldn’t find mine, I had to find his.
When Donnie and I left, we went straight to the nearest bar.
After several drinks, I went to a Japanese shop and bought Kip a lovely cream-colored Shantung robe and the next day I brought it to him.
“No visitors,” it said on his door. Inside, it was deathly still.
“May I leave this for him?”
The wife, also excluded from the death room, nodded and took the parcel.
Kip’s brother sent me, from Canada, snapshots of Kip posing for a sculptor and they remained in my wallet twenty-some years. They disappeared mysteriously in the sixties.
Well, Kip, you live in my leftover heart. How gentle and kind you were when you drove out to the beach at P-town, and told me to sit on the handle-bars and let you drive me home and on the way, how gently and honestly gently, you told me that our love-affair was finished, now, since it was turning you homo.
Have I told you how, when the girl who was Elaine (Tynan) Dundy’s sister arrived to pick up Kip that summer in P-town, while I was on the balcony packing my gear to move out, I heaved one of my riding boots down at the lady: missed her, but not intentionally … ?
I first met Tallulah Bankhead that same summer in Provincetown, before my flight to Mexico. She was the first actress I had thought of in connection with Battle, which I was then hoping might be produced, and she was playing in a Pinero play, I believe, at the Dennisport Playhouse. I rode a bicycle down from Provincetown to see her in the play and she was fabulous in it, very beautiful, and I was more than ever convinced that she should play the female lead in Battle. I went backstage and was introduced to her. She was all charm and said she would be delighted to read the play. However, I heard no more after that from Tallulah about the play. I’m glad, for Tallulah’s sake, that she didn’t land in Battle, but I’m sorry for poor Miriam Hopkins’ sake because Miriam did. It was a disaster, of course, and poor Miriam had to bear the brunt of it, as did I.
When I knew her later, Tallulah always impressed me by her honesty and her gallantry and her lack of shame. It is a quality I have discovered in Southern ladies of a certain kind. There are certain kinds of Southern ladies who could be called tramps, if you want to use abusive language toward ladies. I suppose you could say Tallulah was a tramp, in the elegant sense. I remember she never wanted to interrupt a conversation for bodily functions, and if she was carrying on an animated conversation with me and had to pay a call of nature, she would ask me to accompany her into the bathroom and sit on the edge of the tub while she completed her story and the call of nature. This didn’t shock me, in fact it delighted me by its forthrightness and lack of embarrassment. This is a quality that Anna Magnani also had. I guess you could say that Anna was also a Southern lady, although a Southern Italian lady. Well, I don’t like ladies of excessive propriety, with the exceptions of my mother and sister. They were both victims of excessive propriety but naturally I find it easier to get along with ladies who not only tolerated but seemed to get along best with a very free way of life, excepting, of course, my sister.
Nobody has ever known Tallulah Bankhead. At least, they have never written about her in a way that showed any real comprehension of her nature. Tallulah was not a sexual animal. I think that sex was not a matter of any particular importance to her. She was a Narcissan, and one of the great humorists of our time, she was always one of the wittiest people I have ever known.
I will now tell you about the closing of a Broadway-bound play in Boston and the munificence of a firm of New York producers which was, at that time, the most prosperous in the American theatre and the most prestigious … oh, why be diffident about it, the surviving members of that firm couldn’t care less now. It was the Theatre Guild, the play was, of course, Battle of Angels, and the time was around Christmas of 1940.
The play was pretty far out for its time and included, among other tactical errors, a mixture of super religiosity and hysterical sexuality coexisting in a central character. The critics and police censors seemed to regard this play as a theatrical counterpart of the bubonic plague surfacing in their city.
I was
summoned to a suite at the Ritz-Carlton on Boston Common. All the big brass of the Guild was present, except their playreader, John Gassner, who had persuaded them to produce my play and was understandably absent. Among those present were the director, Miss Margaret Webster of the United Kingdom, dainty little Miss Theresa Helburn, of the light lavender hair, who was co-administrator of the Theatre Guild with Mr. Lawrence Langner, who founded it.
“We’re closing the play,” I was coolly informed.
“Oh, but you can’t do that!” I cried out. “Why, I put my heart in this play!”
There was a slightly embarrassed pause before Miss Webster spoke up quite eloquently with this one-liner: “You must not wear your heart on your sleeve for daws to peck at.”
Miss Helburn said, “At least you’re not out of pocket.”
Whereupon my agent, Audrey Wood, inquired, cannily, “What about money?”
The pause after that one-liner was less embarrassed than calculating.
I continued to gaze, I hope not piteously, at either Miss Helburn or Mr. Langner, and for the first time they gazed, or probably just glanced, at the unabashed face of my agent.
“Well, now,” said Mr. Langner, “we’ll give him a hundred dollars to go away somewhere and rewrite the play, and if it’s submitted again in the spring, we will consider the rewrite for next season.”
Financially, the situation was like this. I had run out of my thousand-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, my two-week Boston royalties did not quite cover those paid in advance, and I had just about train fare back to New York and my room at the “Y.”
The hundred dollars looked big in this situation, since a dollar was worth a dollar in those days, and that hundred took me to Key West, Florida, where I met Marion Vaccaro and lived in a cabin behind her mother’s boardinghouse, and worked like hell’s hammers on the rewrite of Battle.
Memoirs Page 9