Walking with the Muses

by Pat Cleveland

  I couldn’t see her face, because her back was turned and she was on the phone. But I could see her shiny raven-black hair and the black tunic and two heavy ivory cuffs she wore. Then she was off the phone, busying herself with lighting a cigarette, which she inserted in a long black-and-white cigarette holder. She lit the cigarette, took a puff, and turned to face me. Her face was powdered white, and her dark, almost onyx eyes twinkled with wisdom, as though she were thinking Delphic thoughts. She blew out the smoke through her crimson-painted lips, and it shrouded her face like a veil. She lifted her head and turned it slightly, and I got an up-close view of that world-famous profile, which reminded me of the cockatoo in one of the paintings behind her desk.

  When she spoke, it was to the maid, who was watering the plants. “Tell Grace to have a mineral water sent in.” I was still standing there on my toes, wondering what to do. Next to me was a rack of the world’s most beautiful clothes, which I assumed I would be trying on. The maid went out but returned almost instantly with the water. D.V. drank it, finished her cigarette, and handed the holder to the maid. I was concentrating on keeping my balance when she crossed her long arms across her upper torso, and said, “Oh, vous êtes élégante!” She could tell I didn’t understand, so she said, “You are elegant.”

  I am elegant, I thought, excited.

  “But my dear . . .” She stopped speaking as she walked out from behind her black desk and came over to me. She put one hand—I noticed the bright red, perfectly lacquered nails—on my left shoulder and the other hand on my right shoulder and pushed down until I was standing flat on the floor. “To be strong, you must be rooted, like a tree. Stand still and firm like a tree.”

  She walked back to her desk and pushed a button on her phone. “Grace, come in, please.” Grace arrived swiftly, along with two assistants, who began taking clothes off the rack and pinning and fitting them to my body.

  As they worked, D.V. spoke, gliding her slender hands through the air in a kind of dance, speaking to all of us. “There was a time when people would say, ‘Oh, how elegant you look today.’ You would hear the word ‘elegance’ in the air, everywhere. There is as much elegance today as there has ever been. But it is no longer essential. Some people are elegant to the bone, but if one does not have elegance, it is nothing to regret. It is individual.”

  She began flipping through the mock-up of the next issue, page after page. She took a black marker and made an X across one of the pages. “Inelegance is unsharpened pencils. Sharpened pencils are elegant.” She stopped and cocked her head slightly, as if in contemplation. “I don’t think that I have elegance; I have a certain refinement, and I keep my eye on the ball . . . too many balls. L’élégance c’est le refus. Elegance is to refuse. To refuse! It is the opposite of overdressing.” She clapped her hands, then stretched out her long arms as if to reach for the future. “So let’s get started.”

  I was soaking up every word that flowed from her lips and trying my best to apply it all, right then and there, as I modeled looks that might strike her fancy and make it into the magazine. “Discretion in every movement!” D.V. said. Was I moving with discretion? Were my roots planted deep into the ground? I felt as if I were growing into a mighty oak just by being in her presence.

  She stood, straightening out her tunic, which didn’t have a single wrinkle in it. Then she opened her compact, peered into the little mirror, and applied her rouge, painting cherry-red dots high upon her cheekbones. She looked exactly as I imagined a Chinese princess in an opera would look. She took a few twenty-dollar bills out of her wallet, handed them to her maid, and said, “Please press these bills; I’ll need them for tips.” Turning to Grace, she said, “A truly elegant person always has crisp bills.”

  She even has her money ironed? I thought. I want to try that.

  “Elegance is a form of intelligence,” she went on. “It cannot be connected with stupidity.”

  Not wanting to seem stupid, I kept quiet.

  “It’s a mysterious aura that some people have and others don’t. Elegance. You use it like a magic wand.”

  Just then, the assistant dressing me accidentally stuck a straight pin through the dress I was wearing and into my side. I jumped, but I bit my tongue rather than say “Ouch!”

  I spent the better part of the next seven days in Diana Vreeland’s office, trying on the clothes that would be chosen to go into the magazine and worn by some glamorous model. Sometimes I stood naked before her, waiting anxiously for a dress to arrive from across town; or I’d be in an ornate dress, thinking, I’m standing like a tree—a Christmas tree. And D.V. would read my mind: “No, no, you are not a Christmas tree. Eliminate! Eliminate!” She would tell the assistants, “Elegance needs space!” The next thing you knew, they’d be ripping the bows off dresses—original designer dresses.

  “We must refuse!” D.V. would proclaim. “We must not allow the material world, and material thoughts, to settle on us.” She was like the pied piper or a guru, teaching and leading us into her worldview with complete confidence. “The space around the thing is what is beautiful.”

  Mrs. Vreeland was right about that: The space around me was becoming more and more beautiful, because I was in the presence of greatness. Vous êtes élégante became the mantra of my fashion life, a gift from the divine Diana Vreeland.

  chapter 19

  BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED

  My first great love, Kenneth/Matthew/ Diamond Stone Red Rose, standing in front of the Dandelion Fountain on Sixth Avenue, New York City, 1969.

  By the time I was in my senior year of high school, I felt like I was juggling three radically different identities that never intersected: One was the fashionable, confident young woman who hung out with society and fashion types; another was the dutiful daughter who lived at home with her mom and hateful stepfather (who was always mistreating my mother and making lewd, insulting comments when she wasn’t around); and the third was the girlfriend of Kenneth, philosopher-poet extraordinaire. Yes, that Kenneth. My sixteenth-birthday crush from the Ebony photography studio had come back into my life—in a big way.

  Before going off to Mexico to make the movie with Bobby, I’d come home from school one day to be greeted by the sounds of jazz playing on the new stereo Mom had just bought. She was sitting on the sofa chatting with a guest. Kenneth. She glanced up and said, “Look who’s here.” He just smiled and said nothing. “Maybe you two want to be alone,” Mom said, and left the room.

  As so often happens to me at critical moments in my life, song lyrics popped into my head: It’s a funny thing. I look at you, I get a thrill I never knew. That’s a pretty good description of what happened to me every time I laid eyes on this man. He had changed a lot. The boy from Mrs. Johnson’s studio with the slicked-back hair now had a wild, curly Afro. But something about him still mesmerized me and caused my heartbeat to accelerate. As we talked—he had an intimate, euphonious voice, as though his words were coming directly from God (appropriate, since his biological father was a preacher)—he told me a bit about his family, whom he’d just visited out in California, and what it was like to be the adopted son of the great jazz vocalist Billy Eckstine. Kenneth was a poet at heart, and because of his dad (who’d married Kenneth’s mom when Kenneth was a baby), he’d grown up around some of the greatest jazz artists of all time. But Kenneth claimed he was the black sheep of his family, a man with a mind of his own whose radical political ideas were becoming increasingly unacceptable to his liberal parents.

  Kenneth leaped up from the couch and asked me to come with him to visit a friend of his, a dancer who lived on the Upper West Side near the Hudson River. When we got to her tiny apartment, I felt out of place. The dancer was not only incredibly beautiful, she was also pregnant. Kenneth kept looking at her adoringly, and she looked at him the same way. I was one hundred percent certain she was in love with him—and about ninety percent certain that he felt the same way about her. (I left that little ten percent opening for hope.)
I might as well not have been there; the two of them disappeared into the tiny bedroom, leaving me by myself in the living room. I was crushed, but before I had a chance to feel too sorry for myself, the doorbell rang, and they called out for me to answer it.

  I peeked through the peephole and saw this very small, very dark man standing there holding an enormous bouquet of tulips. Ah, someone sent flowers, I thought. How nice. “Special delivery,” the man said. So I opened the door and there he stood, dressed in a long black leather coat with silver studs, his huge eyes almost all pupils. This was no delivery guy.

  The small man didn’t speak. Then Kenneth and the dancer came out of the bedroom, the man gave her the flowers, and they kissed sweetly but in a way that made it clear, even to a clueless seventeen-year-old like me, that they were lovers. Both of them gave Kenneth a look—hers one of deep longing, his one of deep irritation. She said, “We need to be alone.” Kenneth got the hint and we left.

  Once we were on the street again, I asked Kenneth who the man was. He said, “He thinks he’s the daddy of that baby, but it’s mine.” What? I thought. Then he said, “That was Miles, a friend of my dad’s. You know, Miles Davis.”

  “That was Miles Davis?” I said, not really grasping what he’d said about the baby. “I thought he was a deliveryman!”

  He took me by the arm and said, “Let’s go.” I didn’t ask where; I was simply under his spell and ready to follow him anywhere. The next thing I knew, we were in Harlem at the Apollo Theater, meeting “some friends” of Kenneth’s. We went backstage and were sitting on a dirty sofa in one of the dingy dressing rooms when Stevie Wonder came into the room and plopped down next to me. Then Ray Charles came in and sat next to Stevie, followed by Sammy Davis, Jr., whose first words were “Wow, Kenneth, who’s the pretty girl?”

  It was one of those enchanted nights when I just blended in and soaked up all the genius around me. Stevie Wonder held my hand, and Ray Charles slapped my knee every time he laughed. They chatted about Kenneth’s dad (or, as Sammy Davis, Jr., called him, “Mr. B.”) and other showbiz stuff that I didn’t understand but thoroughly enjoyed. Being there at that Harlem landmark among those legends was like the soul version of the glamorous life Bobby was introducing me to on the East Side of Manhattan. I managed to forget about the dancer who might or might not be pregnant with Kenneth’s baby. I had a ball and couldn’t wait to tell Mom all about it.

  It was early in the morning when Kenneth finally brought me home. He gave me a quick kiss goodbye. It would be another year before I saw him again.

  It’s hard, from the vantage point of adulthood, to dissect Kenneth’s appeal to my teenage self, but a big part of it was his air of mystery and his incredible sexual magnetism. He seemed to live in a world of his own—one that I would briefly enter and fall deeply into whenever he’d show up, usually very late at night. Every time I felt as if I’d known him forever and we were finally coming together. His mind moved in all directions, but when it was focused on me, I felt like his one and only “foxy lady,” to use the era’s highest compliment.

  He began arriving at my house with flowers just before midnight. From the start, I wanted to throw my arms around him and kiss him forever. But if my mother happened to be there, he didn’t let me kiss him, out of respect. It took many visits before we broke through that wall. Luckily, between my mom’s graveyard shifts and my stepfather’s odd hours as a taxi driver, Kenneth and I found an opening. Plenty of openings, actually. We were crafty: He’d stay until Mom and Sonny went to work, then leave with them. Then he’d come right back, serenading me from twelve stories below with one of the many flutes he’d started carrying around with him.

  It was a chaotic time in America. The Vietnam War had divided the country, and everywhere you looked, there were antiwar protests, black militants, and flower children who just wanted to give peace a chance. Kenneth, a twentysomething with high ideals and an ethical code all his own, was deeply opposed to the Vietnam War, and even though he was of a prime age to be drafted, he had no intention of going into the army. (Decades later, I learned that he’d already served in the military in the early sixties and had been discharged before I met him. So that explained why he never got a draft notice, like most able-bodied young men of that era.) He told me he would dodge the draft any way he could, even if it meant moving to Canada or Norway. He asked if I would go with him, and I said yes. It never came to that, of course. In any case, when Mom got wind of the idea, she hid my passport.

  On nights when he didn’t come to my place, I’d go to his room, usually at the Columbus Hotel on West Forty-Sixth Street. It was a frightening, seedy place in a neighborhood where the only women walking around after midnight were prostitutes. But when I arrived at his room—#76N, just down the filthy hallway—it was always worth the trip. I’d knock lightly and say, “Hello, it’s me.” He’d open the door, and the scent of incense would envelop me.

  We’d make love amid the candlelight and the incense. I’d die a thousand little deaths and leave the material world completely, until it was nearly dawn and time for me to go home. This went on all summer, and no one knew. I visited him wherever he was. Sometimes it was a place on the Bowery, where I’d literally step over bums in the doorway to get to him. I didn’t care. I’d have gone to the end of the earth to be with him, and when I got there, the incense, the candles, and the sensual sounds of Ravi Shankar and Indian ragas would take over my senses and blot out everything else. Kenneth was a fantastic lover and teacher, and from him I learned the ancient Indian sexual traditions of tantra and the Kama Sutra.

  After lovemaking, we’d take midnight walks into Central Park and look up at the stars. He’d tell me about other worlds, other planets; I could have listened to that soft, honey-smooth voice forever. America was firmly in the space age, and Kenneth was my rocket ship, taking me to places I’d never even imagined. With his help, I became an uninhibited, liberated woman. I started wearing bell-bottom jeans and love beads and allowed my hair to go natural, wild and long, because he liked it that way. The two of us truly entered the Age of Aquarius, which I had merely sung about with the cast of Hair back in Mexico. We wanted to spread harmony and understanding throughout the world.

  And then he disappeared.

  I continued to go to high school and to my modeling go-sees, secure in the knowledge that he was somewhere on the planet. Respectful of his freedom, I genuinely had no desire to possess him. In my soul, there was no separation between our time together and our time apart. It was as if we were two drifting galaxies, each in our own rotation—and when we came together, it was the Big Bang all over again.

  Eventually, he got back in touch. He told me he was into something that he couldn’t talk about because it was too dangerous, and that the FBI was after him. That something, I’d find out later, was the Black Panthers.

  Then he disappeared. Again.

  The next time he came back, he said he’d been in California. He looked more like Jimi Hendrix than ever, with his hair grown into an enormous ball. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful in my life. His dark eyes had a new light. He was dressed in a T-shirt and bell-bottoms with fringe. He said he’d come back to town to perform his poetry for a dance company.

  He unwrapped a goatskin rug and showed me a musical instrument he’d brought back with him. It was a bassoon made of cherrywood that he’d converted into a transverse flute, an instrument that was roughly three feet tall. When he played it for me for the first time, he seemed to go into a trance. The flute had only four keys, but in those four keys he found an infinite variety of sounds; he played as if possessed by a divine energy, moving his body with the music. He was stumbling into a new sound, beyond jazz, what we now call New Age. He was a true pioneer, but at the time, no one understood what he was doing. He would play for strangers under the stars, and then we would go wherever he was staying and make love.

  Birth control pills had just become widely available; I made an appointment with a gynecologist and g
ot a prescription. Once I started on the Pill (which, to my pleasant surprise, enhanced my figure), my liberation became complete. I felt as free as any man.

  In the meantime, Kenneth changed his name to Matthew, and his outlook grew more biblical. He was determined to heal the world with his music, so at night we’d sit under the little dragon and bear constellations, and I’d listen as he played to his creator, whom he called Jove. I joined Matthew on his path to spiritual fulfillment, soaking up everything he told me about the nature of the mind and reading the poems of Kahlil Gibran. Thanks to Matthew, who gave me a black book to write in, I began keeping a journal, where I recorded drawings, thoughts, dreams, and everything that happened to me (a habit I have continued to this day). We swore off meat and went macrobiotic, eating lots of hippie food and smoking the hashish that Matthew liked, which took us to what we thought were higher and deeply philosophical states of understanding. We listened to Paul Horn and made love to Ravi Shankar and the Doors. I was crazy in love.

  Or maybe just crazy? I suppose many people would think so, but to me, it all felt like a form of meditation. As I gazed up at the night sky, my head filled with his music, I truly felt one with the universe, expanded. It was an almost out-of-body experience.

  chapter 20

  STORMY WEATHER

  Me outside Carnegie Hall, where I celebrated after having just graduated from high school, June 1969.

  I finally graduated from high school in 1969 in a big ceremony at Carnegie Hall; I was almost nineteen. I told Mom I wanted to take the summer off, at least until September, when I would go to college—maybe. What I really wanted was to spend every possible minute with Matthew.