Here’s the anecdote. My father didn’t like dogs. He probably had some unfortunate experience in his early years that caused his lifelong antipathy. My sister Franny and I pleaded again and again to be allowed to have a puppy. He finally relented—with the provision that it wouldn’t be a female.
Franny heard of a litter of four pups in the neighborhood, but when she went to make her claim, only a female puppy was left. With little effort, we decided to lie. We informed my father that the puppy was a male. We brought her home. We named her Nick. Fortunately, my father’s dislike was limited to indifference and he never bothered to verify the dog’s gender.
When fully grown, Nick was a little over sixteen inches tall to the tip of her ears. She had a full complement of white fur and was an eager playmate. Only once was she unhappy. Franny and I dressed her in a T-shirt and tied a red bandanna around her neck. She hung her head in shame at having her doggyhood so foolishly desecrated. The T-shirt and the bandanna came off; we all immediately reverted to our shared energetic enjoyments.
We trained her not only to sit, but to accept on the tip of her snout a piece of something to eat—usually a slice of salami—and to listen to our stern command that she not eat it. After a few seconds of obedience, we, with a quick snap of our fingers, would shout triumphantly, “Okay!” and, with a quick flick of her snout she would take the salami into her mouth and down her gullet it to our repeated cries of joy. The praise and the petting that followed, with Nick’s paws pressed into Franny’s thighs, her tail and tongue wagging, almost overwhelmed the three of us. Only a disciplined restraint kept Franny and me from repeating the trick again and again until the family’s supply of salami was completely depleted.
Two years into our continuing joy—I was about fourteen by then—my mother came running up the stairs early one morning, calling out, “Joe! Get up! Nick’s had pups!” As she raced back down the steps, I shouted, “How did that happen?” Without pause, she answered, “Only one way it could have happened!” One of my mother’s few direct references to sex.
Downstairs, under the protection of the kitchen table, there was Nick, our playmate, stretched out, patiently nursing four fist-sized puppies that had yet to open their eyes. She’d somehow appropriated a sweater, a scarf, and a dish towel, and had fashioned a rather comfortable bed on which to give birth and care for her offspring.
The moment of truth for my father came after I’d gone off to serve as altar boy for eight o’clock Mass. My mother gave me a full report when I came home for lunch. The wrath for which we’d all prepared ourselves, the infuriated accusations of deceit, the thundering threats of reprisal, had failed to find expression. Apparently, my father, a man who had sired eight children, when confronted with our perfidy could see only a mother lovingly tending her newborn babies. It was all over from that moment on. No one in our household would be more concerned that Nick was getting what Nick needed, what Nick wanted, than my father. “Does Nick want to go out?” “Does Nick have enough water?” And so on and on. This, too, was my father.
I ran into Gale not long after the brief run of my flopped Cock-eyed Kite. He was taking the A train uptown from the Village. He’d seen the play. He liked it. The train arrived. There was time for me to plant my right hand firmly on his back and thank him. Then he stepped into the train, the doors closed, and the train sped on its way.
It rattled me to see him. And it would rattle me again. The phrase “to go weak in the knees” is more than an overused description dramatizing an unexpected encounter. It’s an accurate physical description of what would overwhelm me at the sight of him. It happened again at the Museum of Modern Art when we both ended up in a throng of enthusiasts who had come to see the Turner paintings. Then I saw him again at St. Marks Bookshop on Eighth Street, where he informed me that his name was no longer Gale. It was Bill, which was a diminutive of William, his actual first name. (For that reason, I will call him Bill from now on.) He’d grown a bushy beard and let his hair grow to near hippie length.
At a later date I saw him at the Metropolitan Museum commenting in a very authoritative but easygoing manner on the paintings included in a major showing of Van Gogh at Arles. I wasn’t close enough to hear what he was saying, but I noticed that the beard had been trimmed and he was dressed a bit more respectably than usual—a jacket—but at least he’d decided against a tie—which I had never seen him wear.
As usual, I was undone and my knees reverted to the near-useless state that was their assigned response to his sudden appearance. Rather than go up to him and say hello, I positioned myself in front of a painting next to the one he was commenting on. I would let him see me first and oblige him to make the initial greeting. I stood there. He turned his attention to the painting where I was standing, but took no notice of me. Before my agitation could get worse, I realized that this wasn’t Bill after all, but a near enough replica that made it possible for me to call it an honest mistake. Still, I was unable to reclaim my previous concentration. My equilibrium, both emotional and physical, had been so thoroughly unsettled that I was unable to summon the undivided attention the rest of the show demanded. I left.
I walked past one magnificent work of art after another, taking no notice whatsoever. Foolish, of course. Tell that to my knees.
It wasn’t nearly that bad when we would get together by common consent. I was fully aware by the late sixties, early seventies that a reconciliation—or whatever you want to call it—was never to be and it would be inadvisable for me to press my cause, persistent though the impulse might be.
One evening, while I was still living on the Lower East Side, Bill came to dinner. We had a good time. After dinner, he was stretched out on my living room couch very much enjoying the plot of a play he was telling me I should write. It was a parody of a farm girl coming to New York, living wildly among stereotypically unsavory characters, and coming not to a bad but a good end where she is rich and celebrated.
He was being goofy. The plot wasn’t all that imaginative, and he was trying a little too hard. But I had no difficulty pretending to appreciate his presumed inventiveness. It began to occur to me that he would perhaps be more than willing to stay the night. Instead of thrilled expectation, it came into my mind that this would have to be his choice. I thought of all the many times I had needed to be with him, but knew it was impossible. I resented that his preference would prevail now whereas mine had been consistently dismissed. Perversely, I decided I would not ask him to spend the night. And I didn’t.
Even as I saw him to the door, I could tell that this was not what he’d intended, but I was showing so little interest in anything intimate that he declined to make any move or say anything that would change the direction the evening had taken. He left.
I went to bed. I went to sleep. Toward morning I was awakened by a nearby voice. I was not talking to myself. Nor was I dreaming. The voice very distinctly said, “You fool! Do you think you’re going to live forever?” The meaning was: “When will this chance come again?” It would be close to fifteen years before we would see each other again.
7.
During part of this middle period, I experienced a somewhat radical change in my writing career. I began working on the television soap operas Love of Life, Secret Storm, and Dark Shadows. In no way was I dismissive of the genre, nor did I arrogantly feel I was debasing myself by lending my name to its obvious appropriation of melodrama and sentimentality. Quite to the contrary. My involvement gave me a certain respect for its achievements.
True, the characters were unfailingly inflicted with challenges that would threaten their survival or their happiness. At one point it even occurred to me that some enterprising student might, for a thesis, examine the eager sadism at the core of the soaps. (Example: When I was writing Love of Life, Bruce, a sympathetic character, had become a paraplegic because of a blow to his head when confronting a serial killer. One day, when I arrived at the apartment of t
he show’s head writer, who did the plotting, he gleefully welcomed me with the words “They drop Bruce.”)
What a putative doctoral thesis could not ignore, however, was the inspiration at the source of this devastation. Bruce and his loved ones, his wife, his son, his friends, would gallantly rise to the occasion and eventually triumph. This, I never doubted, explained the lure of the soaps, the affirmation of human tenacity, the power of love and caring. The soaps, to my thinking, responded to a basic need, the assurance that, eventually, all would, in the words of Oscar Wilde in his definition of fiction, end happily for the good people and unhappily for the bad people. And while doing all this—possibly most important of all—they would tell a good story.
When writing my first show, Love of Life, however, I realized once again that I was full of rage, rage that my freedom had been taken from me, my freedom to write what I wanted to write the way I wanted to write it. Except that this freedom had not been taken from me. I had voluntarily handed it over; my anger should have been directed toward myself. But such are the convenient complexities of human conduct. I was able, with no pause for such a consideration, to blame the head writer, Don. He would give me a one- or two-paragraph outline of a scene, setting out what the action would be and how the plot would be advanced. It was then my job to invent the activities and write the dialogue for the characters—all of which must please Don. There were times when he would rewrite what I’d written. No one rewrites what I write unless I agree. Without exaggerating, I can honestly say that there were times when I’d have to decide whether to murder Don or to write the script. Fortunately for both of us, I chose to write the script.
And yet I could not be unaware of the devoted allegiance of the viewers, their intimate involvement with the characters. It was not unknown for a viewer to write a letter not to the actor but to the character, warning: “Watch out for Kaye. She doesn’t mean a word of what she says.” “Your husband is being unfaithful with the woman next door.” Or a hope for a greater intimacy. “If you and your mother—‘the characters’—ever come to California, you can stay with us.”
I myself was once given the privilege of being directly involved in a viewer’s intense experience of Love of Life. Don was a master of plotting. One of his more surefire plots was inspired by Joan Copeland, a superior but underutilized actress of her generation. As a privileged member of the Playwrights’ Unit at the Actors Studio, I had watched as she did a scene from a well-received play of the time: The Girl on the Via Flaminia. She was superb, unforgettably so.
But Lee Strasberg, the head of the studio (and the biggest windbag in history), appraised her work at length, careful not to include the least word of encouragement. He kept his charges in thrall by the simple expedient of withholding approval, that response actors live for.
Miss Copeland had, on Love of Life, played a dying wife and mother who had used her final months to find for her husband and daughter a successor who would give them both the love and the comfort they would desperately need after her death. She chose a warmhearted but sophisticated woman named Tammy who has chosen the small-town life as opposed to her previous Broadway stardom to help her successful recovery from alcoholism. After a shameless succession of farewell scenes between wife and husband, as well as mother and daughter, the wife went to her reward and Tammy was there to be with them in their bereavement. This led to a romance between Tammy and the husband, just as the saintly wife had planned.
Don apologized not at all that the idea came from a movie, No Sad Songs for Me. When an acquaintance once asked him, “Did you ever see a movie called No Sad Songs for Me? Don had ready the perfect answer. “Was that a musical?”
So successful and popular had Miss Copeland been on the show that Don decided to bring her back as her character’s evil sister. She was given a blond wig and the name “Kaye.” She turned up at the home of her brother-in-law, Link, and his teenage daughter, Sandy. She would woo them both, marry into the somewhat affluent family, and set herself up for life. Again, Miss Copeland was magnificent and gave me my moment.
I was on the subway, on my way to a meeting with Don, going over the script I was about to give him. A tug on my left sleeve. I turned to the woman next to me. Without preamble, she fervently said, “Oh, I hope Link doesn’t marry Kaye!” I held up my right hand as if taking an oath. “He won’t. I promise you.” No more words were spoken between us.
As something of a sequel to this, Don was plotting the return of Tammy to her career as a Broadway star. Because of Kaye and her determination to win Link, Tammy’s love life was in shambles. However, lo and behold, a Broadway producer who was an old friend sent her the manuscript of a play by a young playwright who had died but whose mother was determined that the world know of her son’s extraordinary gifts.
Tammy had sworn off her acting career but, in her present circumstance, she might be susceptible to persuasion.
During one of my Monday meetings with Don to discuss the new set of outlines, Don said, “I’m going to go get a haircut. While I’m out I want you to write that great speech we talked about that would end the play.” It would be spoken by Tammy as the pioneer farm woman to her dead son held across her knees as in a pietà. This must be the speech that would persuade Tammy to take on the part and set in motion her dramatic return to Broadway as a reigning star.
Don left. I thought for a few minutes, then wrote the speech. It began, “I have slaughtered the stallion and the mare.” She goes on to tell of the near-demented devastation she has wrought upon all her land, her response to the betrayed love that had been the substance of the play. Her last words to her dead son are “Rest now. And wait for me.”
Don came back, his hair shorn. He read it. With a somewhat surprised shrug, he said, “It’s a great speech.”
Tammy took the part, and many were the times the speech was repeated during the soap opera play’s rehearsals and, of course, on the play’s tumultuous opening night.
Months later, at a party, a young man who easily anticipated the hippie movement that lay in the not-too-distant future—untamed hair, “distressed” clothing, an indifference to hygiene (and sexy in the extreme)—recited for me, word perfect, the entire speech. I never saw him again.
At another point a friend of mine who was watching the show asked, “What kind of play is it?” Rather loftily, I said, “It’s a Eugene O’Neill play written by García Lorca,” thereby inadvertently giving a measure to my writing ambitions as well as to the sad distance between my aspirations and my achievements.
Another advantage of soap-opera writing was the opportunity to be shameless. Utterly and completely shameless. For Secret Storm I was one of a team of co-writers. We did the plotting together.
In one sequence, there was a sympathetic character named Kitty, a single mother, who struggled to care for her little boy aged about four. An evil man who’d been spurned by Kitty brings made-up facts before the civil authorities, who declare Kitty to be an unfit mother. Her little boy will be taken from her. When did that happen? My doing: on Christmas Eve, of course. Decorated tree. Presents. He’s taken away.
Wait, there’s more. Kitty, alone, hears voices outside singing Christmas carols. Enraged, she flings open the door. There, two waif-like urchins are piping away in their child voices. She invites them in and gives them all the presents. How shameless could I get? Now you know.
On to Dark Shadows. When I taught at Columbia and NYU and at the 92nd Street Y, more than several times at the first session I would be asked by one of my students, “Are you the Joe Caldwell who wrote Dark Shadows? I would confess. My authority immediately went up a notch.
A team of three writers would plot the show in the presence of the producer, Dan Curtis. These were extended, agonizing meetings during which Dan would practice putting golf balls. After one long session, he mentioned as something of an afterthought, “I want a vampire for the kids for the summer.”
One of the other writers, Ron Sproat, and I left, headed for a gay bar on West 23rd Street to have a drink and commiserate. What’s a vampire but a serial killer? You track him down, drive a stake through his heart, and move on to the next bright idea.
By the time Ron and I got to either our second or third drink (dry bourbon Manhattans with George Dickel bourbon—the name was irresistible), we had decided to give the serial killer a singular idiosyncrasy that would invest the character with an emotional life, which would in turn give us something to write about. We would make him a reluctant vampire. Forever he would mourn his expulsion from the human family.
The bloodlust that nourished him and gave him immortality brought him more shame than satisfaction. His only restriction was that he must finish his nocturnal predations and be safely stretched out in his coffin before the sun came up. As you can see, the opportunities for imaginative tribulations that lie at the heart of the soap-opera genre made the writing at times quite enjoyable, especially if you consider that the vampiric identity as an outcast, whether a viewer realized it or not, was familiar to Ron and to me as gay men—the exclusion from the human family, the prohibited fulfillment of shared love, etc. Central to the vampire were yearnings that made him vulnerable and even sympathetic. Ron and I shared with him those vulnerabilities.
Thanks to our Dickel decision, the show took off. The number of viewers, most of them teenagers, reached its peak: Dark Shadows became a cult classic. Little did they suspect why, but it’s really quite obvious. The show was all about compulsive sex. Name the teenager, including oneself, who didn’t, in near-vampiric desperation, feel at one time or another, “I’ve got to have it or I’ll die!”
It is with a particular glee that I savor the realization that Dan Curtis, a committed homophobe, had his greatest success with his most famous character, Barnabas Collins, a vampire, a man knowingly created by two gay men, who in their own way were dramatizing their own plight.
In the Shadow of the Bridge Page 8