by Hiroaki Sato
Caribbean Tour
The tour of the Caribbean Islands, Mexico, and the American Southwest and South was part of his original plan, but the prospect of staging his own play in New York wasn’t, and it gave him something to look forward to, although, writing about it later, he also professed that he didn’t like the idea of having work to do while traveling.
In Puerto Rico after a flight of six hours, Mishima found the poverty “extreme” that nonetheless came with “something noble” about it. The island was also, he gathered, “the supplier of raw material for atrocious crimes in New York.” On August 29 he visited the Castle of San Felipe del Morro with Alfred Knopf ’s introduction. The following day he was in Ciudad Trujillo, Santo Domingo, so renamed, in 1936, after “the dictator”—a word he was forewarned not to use. It was “a beautiful quiet town in the Dominican Republic.” One evening he saw the bemedaled general himself: he was looking out to the sea with several of his aides and several highly polished cars and motorcycles parked nearby. It was part of his daily walk, Mishima was told. Four years after Mishima’s visit, Santo Domingo would regain its old name as Trujillo was assassinated.
In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he arrived on Monday, September 2, he had a definite purpose: to see the “real” voodoo. But the real thing was not scheduled for the time being, he learned from the rich and voodoo-follower Frenchwoman to whom he brought a letter of introduction from New York. He saw a tourist version instead. It did not completely disappoint him and he wrote a detailed account of the rite. Poverty and the flies swarming on every bit of food—fruits and meats sold in the open market—impressed him. Eight years later he would recreate the image in his afterword to a book of poems by the avowedly homosexual poet Takahashi Mutsuo, Sleeping Sinning Falling (Nemuri to okashi to rakka to): “the most fertile hilltop market enveloped in coal-black flies.”19
Still, because of the food or something else, there he came down with horrible diarrhea. Three weeks later, in New Orleans, he read about Duvalier’s coup d’état and declaration of martial law, the beginning of Papa Doc’s infamous reign. In Havana, “always packed with American tourists,” he heard about time bombs set up and exploded in the midst of “the pleasure city,” even in what was claimed to be the world’s largest nightclub, the Tropicana. Mishima was told these were the doings of antigovernment forces. “Still,” he wrote, “the sky above Havana was infinitely blue and the dark eyes of Cubans seemed alive only in pursuit of sensuality.” Less than a year after he wrote these words, Fidel Castro entered Havana.
On September 13, he was in Uxmal, Yucatán, where he came down with a high fever. The diarrhea in Port-au-Prince and the fever in Uxmal would make him associate the tropics with death for the rest of his life, though in the case of Uxmal and Chichén-Itzá, the Mayan death cult and the “death-oppressive” green of the landscape played a considerable part in it. Mishima, at any rate, was reeling as he took a taxi to Mérida to fly to his next stop, Mexico City, where he arrived on September 15, the eve of Independence Day. The next morning he opened the window of his hotel room and was enchanted to see a sea of brilliant colors: people out in parade dresses and costumes. “Here,” Mishima noted, “red is a men’s color as it was during Japan’s Age of Warring States.”
From Mexico City he flew to the border town facing El Paso, Ciudad Juárez. “El Paso,” Mishima wrote, “is a town located in that part of the state of Texas where it wedges into the state of New Mexico. . . . It looks as if Texas has managed to push aside New Mexico, barely, to stick its lips out to kiss Mexico.” He spent some time in the bright afternoon sun in Ciudad Juárez to say farewell to “the fascinating country possessing vast areas still not endowed with the benefits of culture, a country mixed with bullfights, monstrous Mayan ruins, sombreros, music, dance, ferocious tequila, poetry and cruelty.”
Mishima bought the New York Times while traveling, wherever he could get it, and looked for a notice on the staging of his play in vain. In Santa Fe (as in Mexico, the Times came a week late), he finally bought the Sunday edition—“shockingly thick, as heavy as a telephone directory, of which I once joked, ‘I can’t do bodybuilding while traveling in America so I lift the Sunday edition of the New York Times in place of a barbell’”—and read the theater section from one corner to the other but again found nothing. He began to feel uneasy about the whole venture, and the unease increased as he headed back toward New York. And some of the cities he went through may not have been entirely encouraging.
Natchez, Mississippi, to which he may have had to fly because the city had decided much earlier to forego the railroad on the ground that it would be too noisy for its quietude, felt hushed by eight-thirty in the evening, if not altogether dead, and was faintly menacing, like “a large uninhabited insect-cage.” Though Mishima did not note it, not far from there, in Little Rock, the racial turmoil that started earlier that month was escalating. He probably learned the word “antebellum” in relation to Natchez; he noted that “prewar” meant “before the Civil War” in the old city, which was reputed to have the largest number of “antebellum” houses intact.
New Orleans, especially the Vieux Carré, was “an enfeebled, emaciated, barely breathing, piteous remnant of Europe,” even though he liked it as he had the deteriorating cities built by the Europeans in the Caribbean Islands and Mexico.
In early October he arrived back in New York, at midnight. He phoned Keene in the morning and the first thing he did was to ask about the play. “Well, I know nothing about it. I think there’s been no progress,” Keene said in Japanese. The answer “considerably angered me,” Mishima wrote. Why this turn of events angered him is easy to guess. In Japan once a decision is made to produce a play, the date will be set, and the play will be staged according to schedule—especially if it is a play by someone as well-known as Mishima.
What Mishima learned several days later, when he invited Botsford and Shults to dinner to discuss the matter, was that the two started looking for a director for the production as Mishima left for the Caribbean but did not find one during his month-long absence. He accepted the explanation proffered by Botsford, a man of “aristocratic” mien and bearing, “barely thirty years old.” Botsford was born in Brussels, in 1928, a son of an Italian duchess and a wealthy descendant of an early immigrant who settled in Connecticut in the 1630s, Mishima was told. He was rich enough to do whatever he pleased; he was scornful when he heard Mishima had been in Mexico for just two weeks, saying he spent one whole year there. Still, at the time he was working for CBS TV to earn an independent income.
The meeting made Mishima decide to stay in New York until he saw his play produced, with a new plan to open the play in January. The decision in time would force him to move from a midtown luxury hotel to one in Greenwich Village. Though a celebrity author back in Japan, he was not a man with inexhaustible funds. His accounts tell us what a self-respecting sojourner with a good income could do but not indefinitely.
After arriving to New York, and also after his return from the Caribbean, Mexico, and the American South, he stayed in the Gladstone Hotel, on 52nd Street, east of Park Avenue. With the Seagram Building just then under construction on its north side, it was in a luxury area. It was a regular haunt of Marilyn Monroe, Mishima learned, and in the hotel registration he spotted names preceded by “Sir,” “Lord,” “Count,” and so forth. But the Gladstone was not in the class of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel a few blocks to the south, which was said to be for the nouveau riche, much less the Plaza Hotel, near Central Park, which Mishima heard was for the truly wealthy. (In one of his New York episodes, Mishima describes a man, obviously himself, unable to find a convenient toilet, forced to rush into the Plaza Hotel for a men’s room, where he is startled to find an old attendant.)
Initially, Mishima expected to spend about thirty dollars a day: twelve to thirteen dollars for the three meals, just below ten for the hotel, and eight to ten for the theater. That, in his estimation, was what you needed to enjoy a “both mo
dest and luxurious life” in New York. At the time thirty dollars was equivalent to half the monthly salary of a college graduate newly employed by a corporation in Japan, at least in exchange-rate terms. If you wanted to go to a nightclub you needed another thirty and, for a woman, twenty or more, Mishima added. (In another New York episode, he describes a man fresh from Japan who spends some time bar-hopping with a woman who tells him she was in Japan; back at the hotel, he discovers she, obviously a prostitute, had stolen all the cash he had on him.20)
As his stay in the city lengthened, he became conscious about money and began jotting down his daily expenses: “$1 for taxi; $13 for taking someone to lunch; $2.50 for tea; $8 for dinner alone; $1.50 for cinema and taxi; total of $26,” this, without counting the hotel charges. Deciding that twenty-six dollars a day was too much for “a puritan life” like his, he learned to use the subway, till then too scary a thing to do. In the end he switched hotels. After looking at a couple of candidates his friends found for him, he decided on the Van Rensselaer Hotel, on East 11th Street, and moved there in early December. It charged four dollars a day, and the old man at the front desk smiled at Mishima, something his counterparts at the Gladstone never did, except when Mishima checked out.
The first morning he called the front desk and asked for room service, as he had done at the Gladstone. “What room service?” was the response. The bellboy came to the phone. He said there was nothing like what Mishima asked for: eggs (sunny-side up) and bacon. But he would get coffee and toast for him. In forty minutes an extraordinarily tall (so thought Mishima, who was just about five feet and five inches) black man, dripping wet, appeared at the door with a paper bag. It contained toast, which still retained some warmth, and a paper cup with coffee. Obviously the man had gone out in the rain to get them at a nearby drugstore.
About a month earlier, on November 6, Mishima and Botsford met Mordecai (“Max”) Gorelik, who put himself forward as a stage designer. Apparently at his wife’s instigation, Gorelik, famous for his sets for Golden Boy and an old friend of Arthur Miller, invited them to supper at their cluttered, dingy apartment. But Botsford, who thought Gorelik’s design represented “old realism,” accepted the invitation just as a matter of courtesy. He had no intention of employing him. And the supper proved to be a dismal affair.
Purged during the McCarthy Red-hunt, Gorelik was by then a broken middle-aged man. He let his wife domineer throughout the supper, whose main feature was “a bowl of salad as big as a horse crib” placed at the center of the table. And though Mrs. Gorelik, a “small, slim, sharp-eyed” woman whose “smile does not form a smile,” interested Mishima as “a type,” her insistence, which was kindly but misguided, that Mishima use soy sauce on the salad did not help. The only saving grace was that Mishima had an excuse to leave early: a show at City Center at eight.
Mishima’s impression of the Goreliks was so much the worse probably because of the time he had spent at the Harvard Club earlier that day. Mrs. Laughlin, vice president of New Directions, had read Confessions of a Mask, liked it, and invited him to a late lunch. At the time the Harvard Club maintained a strict segregation between male and female, and Mrs. Laughlin had to meet him in a room adjacent to the main lobby where women were allowed. She was a “tall, unpretentious woman” with a pair of somewhat small eyes which Mishima found endearing. She was “intelligent but tolerant,” and, with the editor-in-chief Robert McGregor citing what Angus Wilson and Christopher Isherwood said in their letters recommending publication of Confessions, the session was altogether flattering.
From what Mishima chose to write, it is difficult to pinpoint what happened as regards the planned staging of his play, largely because he wasn’t fully apprised of what was going on. But in time someone Mishima called Dan was chosen as manager, and James Avantos, who, Mishima was told, directed Shelley Winters and John Bennett, as director, Hugh as stage designer, and Keith Botsford’s wife, Ann, as costume designer. Then, in mid-November, Dolores del Rio, who had agreed to play the lead role, canceled her agreement. The idea appears to have been to have a famous actress for that role, the rest to be recruited from unknown talents.
It was only when Dolores del Rio dropped out—or perhaps a few weeks earlier—that Botsford and Shults took out an ad in Show Business. A hundred or so aspirants signed up. Mishima attended a couple of auditions and saw several at a time. Once there was a tall blond who introduced himself as a former GI stationed in Japan. He turned out to be an exact copy of James Dean, his “wraith,” as far as acting went, if not his appearance; whether he looked up, smiled, or was simply fidgety, the youth was a resurrection of the late actor who remained as popular in Japan as in the rest of the world.
(Either Botsford or Shults once took Mishima to Jerry’s, a cheap restaurant at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue, and told him it used to be Dean’s haunt. They sat in a corner which Dean used to occupy. On the shelf above it was a basket full of withered flowers, “from a fan.” The waiter Louis was the same one who appeared in Robert Altman’s James Dean Story that came out that year.)
They accepted Dean’s “wraith” because he was so good, although both Botsford and Co. and Mishima agreed in their dislike of the method acting famously promoted by the Actors Studio—“a cradle of Marlon Brando and James Dean, the reform factory for Marilyn Monroe.” Still, Mishima once visited the studio to see Lee Strasberg discuss acting with students.21
Botsford and Co. also professed to dislike having the playwright hanging around during the auditions, and Mishima had no choice but to stay away after a few sessions although he loved to discuss with Botsford and Co. the men and women who had just left. Once he began to do so, there was no more word from the men, not even about the progress on the negotiations they were supposed to be undertaking with well-known actresses to replace Dolores del Rio.
Broadway Diversions
Meanwhile, Mishima saw as many musicals as he could. He knew “New York intellectuals” disdained musicals, as they did Cecil B. DeMille’s movies, but regular plays were somewhat difficult for him because of his inadequate command of English—just as they had been during his first stay in New York five years earlier. Including My Fair Lady, he saw the following musicals and wrote comments on them, even while lamenting that the playbills did not give the outlines of the plays so he might make errors.
Happy Hunting: book by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse. Ethel Merman, “Queen of Musicals,” was satisfactory and her Mutual Admiration Society utterly enjoyable. But the book was beneath comment and the overall production disappointing. (Mishima, who took “admiration” to be “administration,” had seen her in Call Me Madam, in 1952.)
The Most Happy Fella: book, music, and lyrics by Frank Loesser. “Deeply moved,” Mishima wrote. “New York intellectuals attack The Most Happy Fella as too sentimental but to an eye familiar with the Shinpa this isn’t that sentimental and this is likely to be the musical that the Japanese would find most attractive.” An Italian operetta superimposed on a vineyard in the American West in the 1920s, it represents well “the international aspect of the United States.” Mishima noted that at the time the union rules required every Broadway show to begin at eight-thirty and end a little after eleven.
My Fair Lady: music by Frederick Loewe; book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Mishima professed not to understand why the lead actor Rex Harrison was regarded as “the embodiment of sex appeal among English women,” but he nonetheless admired his “suave and austere” acting, saying Harrison was comparable to the kabuki actor Kikugorō VI in his “delicate and agile moves.” (Onoe Kikugorō VI, who established a school for acting, was especially famed for his accomplished dancing.) Mishima concluded his lengthy comment with: “The beauty of the society ladies who line up in the final racetrack scene made me despair, reminding me of so many of the bit actresses who appear on the Japanese stage.” He saw it at least twice—once, on the ticket that Strauss’s secretary extracted from the Mark Hellinger Theater by “intimidating” them by sa
ying, “A famous Japanese playwright is coming to write about American theater, so make sure to reserve the very best ticket for him,” and another time, on a scalper’s ticket that cost $30, on December 21. “For a while after I saw it the first time,” he wrote, “I didn’t understand why people were making such a big deal of it, but as I saw other musicals, I came to think it was after all an outstanding one.”
New Girl in Town: book by George Abbott; music and lyrics by Bob Merrill. “This type of nostalgic musical in America loses some of its attraction with foreign viewers like us; we do not feel nostalgia for a particular era and particular customs and manners. For example, Westerners would simply feel odd to see the customs and manners in Japan’s Rokumeikan era.”
South Pacific: Mishima had seen this musical in 1952 and had been impressed by “Bali Ha’i.” This time he saw an amateur summer-theater production in Lambert, New Jersey. He could hear multitudes of insects shirring outside the tent. (He also saw Macbeth in Central Park with an occasional airplane flying low, drowning the speeches on stage.)
Li’l Abner: book by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank; lyrics by Johnny Mercer; music by Gene de Paul. Mishima noted that the choreographer and director Michael Kidd, famous in Japan for choreographing Guys and Dolls, was also the greatest attraction of this show, and wrote he was particularly impressed by the bride-catching scene, in Act II. The setup of the comedy obviously did not bother Mishima: it has to do with what a peaceful village might do when the government chooses it for an atomic bomb test site because it has nothing to commend itself. His citing a well-known Japanese theater critic who saw the show and praised Kidd’s choreography tells us that it was a great privilege for a Japanese to see a New York musical in the late 1950s.