Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  The short novel was published in November 1958 in Esquire and simultaneously in a book from Random House with three short stories. It was reviewed well but not ecstatically. (William Goyen in the Times Book Review was full of backhanded compliments: “There is in this work the quality of doll-like glee; of creating and dwelling in a doily story-world entirely of the author’s own tatting”—while gay writers used code for their sexuality, reviewers did the same for their fag-baiting.) The book was on the best-seller list for ten weeks. It only slowly became a classic and it’s hard to say why. Holly Golightly’s speech, her American slang sprinkled with oddball French, is wonderful; the glimpses of 1940s New York are highly evocative. (Two of America’s favorite novels, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Catcher in the Rye, are both set in New York in the 1940s, a fact we often forget.) Yet none of this explains why people fell in love with it as the ultimate “coming to New York” fairy tale, even before the 1961 movie with Audrey Hepburn. I suspect that much of its charm comes from something left half-said: it’s the story of a romantic friendship between a straight woman and a gay man. Since their affection cannot end in sex or marriage, the two must explore other, less obvious ways to be intimate. They can have romance but must remain pure, the modern equivalent of courtly love. This is not our last encounter with this electric situation.

  Gore Vidal accused Capote of stealing his book from Christopher Isherwood: Holly Golightly is nothing but Sally Bowles transplanted to America. Many reviewers saw echoes, but Vidal said it more harshly. He was never objective about Capote, of course, but I believe he hit upon a truth here. Influence is difficult to discuss without making it sound like theft, but all writers learn from each other. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is very different from the short story “Sally Bowles,” yet there are striking similarities. Both feature the actual author as narrator. Both are about a friendship between a gay man and a straight woman without saying so openly. (Capote didn’t need to say it; even the reviewer at the Times acknowledged why the two friends did not become lovers.) Both stories end with the woman disappearing and the narrator not knowing what’s become of her. Yet two very different characters are put into these similar boxes. Sally is cruder and meaner than Holly; Holly is more innocent—more American, if you will. She is that curious paradox, the not-so-bad bad girl, an American type dating back to Henry James’s Daisy Miller.

  The women are different, but the approaches are so similar that it’s hard to believe Capote didn’t learn from Isherwood, consciously or unconsciously, taking structure and strategies from the older writer. Capote read widely and well. “Sally Bowles” had been around for almost twenty years in 1958. Influence is hardly a crime, but in the competitive world of postwar fiction, Capote could not admit being anything but original.

  Isherwood never accused or even suggested that Capote stole from him. He included Capote in his 1961 UCLA lecture series on new voices in the novel. But he didn’t correct Vidal when he started making accusations.

  Capote and Isherwood had similar yet different experiences when their books were made into movies. In Breakfast with Audrey Hepburn, the Capote character is played by butch George Peppard and a tale of friendship becomes a heterosexual love story. The same thing happened with I Am a Camera, the 1951 play that John van Druten made from Goodbye to Berlin, built around the story “Sally Bowles”: Herr Issyvoo is straight and tries to save Sally from her aimless life with an offer of marriage. This solution was kept for Cabaret, the stage musical made from the play in 1966. But the musical became a movie in 1972 and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen and director Bob Fosse turned the Isherwood character gay again. Times had changed and the filmmakers could go even further than Isherwood had in his book. In fact, I think their solution—Christopher almost marries Sally—is more dramatic and interesting than what’s half-hidden in the original. The movie was able to finish in 1972 what Isherwood began in 1939.

  Gore Vidal continued to go back and forth between Hollywood and New York until the end of the decade, writing movie scripts and stage plays, wishing he had time to write fiction again. He agreed to work on the screenplay of the ponderous epic, Ben-Hur so that he could finish his MGM contract and be free again.

  Vidal has told his Ben-Hur story many times, his role growing in importance with each telling. The most trustworthy version is the first in his excellent essay, “Who Makes the Movies?” When Vidal rewrote the front half of the movie (English dramatist Christopher Fry rewrote the second half), he needed to find motivation for Messala (Stephen Boyd) wanting to destroy his friend Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and his family. Vidal had an idea which he shared with director William Wyler:

  “As boys they were lovers. Now Messala wants to continue the affair. Ben-Hur rejects him. Messala is furious. Chagrin d’amour, the classic motivation for murder.”

  Wyler looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

  Vidal said he’d put it between the lines and only people who cared about motive would even notice. Wyler agreed to try it, but insisted, “Don’t ever tell Chuck what it’s all about or he’ll fall apart.” Not everyone is convinced by the story. Ben-Hur himself, Charlton Heston, says he remembers reading new lines for the encounter and they didn’t work. He also points out that “Don’t ever tell Chuck” sounds suspiciously like the punchline of a tale about Laurence Olivier wanting to play Iago as gay to Ralph Richardson’s Othello. The director said go ahead, “but for God’s sake don’t tell Ralph.” Heston thought both tales were apocryphal. Nevertheless, in the scene in the finished film, Boyd gazes at Heston like a famished wolf.

  Vidal wanted to write his own novel set in ancient Rome, one about the last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate. But as soon as he escaped MGM, he was hired by Sam Spiegel to adapt Suddenly Last Summer at the insistence of Tennessee Williams. He did what he could to circumvent the censors, making Sebastian’s sins vague and mysterious. Afterward, he had a new idea for a play about politics. Instead of going back to Julian, he wrote The Best Man. He wrote it quickly—plays can be written faster than novels—but it whetted his appetite for a brand-new career. Isherwood announced the change in his diary when Vidal next visited California in 1960.

  Gore is running for Congress and full of politics, which, he rather hints, is his alternative to writing. (As a matter of fact, his play, The Best Man, is probably the best thing he’s done…) He is sure Jack Kennedy will win, and he expresses enormous admiration for Kennedy, as the happy-go-lucky kid who turned tough and ambitious. “Russell” in his play is obviously part Kennedy, part Gore.

  What one feels and rather loves in Gore is his courage. He’s most definitely not a crybaby. He has a great good-humored brazen air of playing the game—constantly using the latest fashionable expressions, such as “grimsville” and “closetwise.”

  Gore Vidal was a sexually active gay man who lived with another man, yet he was not afraid to run for Congress—and as a Democrat in Republican Dutchess County. There was a half-hearted whispering campaign about his sexual preferences, but the press described him as only a bachelor who knew many movie stars. He won more votes than any other Democratic candidate ever had in his district, but he still lost the election.

  It was not cowardice but raw practicality that led so many gay authors to write about other things besides their sexuality in the 1950s. A knowing silence was a good strategy for the time being. But homosexuality was so despised in some circles that even silence could be seen as a threat.

  II

  The Sixties

  6. The Great Homosexual Theater Scare

  In 1958, while working on the screenplay of Suddenly Last Summer, Gore Vidal took Tennessee Williams to Palm Beach to meet Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie. Vidal knew Jackie because they shared the same stepfather, the much married, much divorced Hugh Auchincloss. Williams had no idea who the Kennedys were, but the young couple were certainly familiar with the famous playwright. The four drank cocktails and did a little skeet shooting—Williams was a better shot than the se
nator from Massachusetts. When Kennedy stepped forward to take aim, Williams whispered to Vidal, “Get that ass!” Vidal told Williams he shouldn’t cruise our next president, then repeated the remark to Kennedy. “Now, that’s very exciting!” said Kennedy with a grin. Williams later told Vidal, “They’ll never elect those two. They are much too attractive for the American people.”

  Williams returned to Key West and Vidal to Edgewater. Two years later Kennedy was elected president, and the Sixties began.

  Tennessee Williams was now very famous and very rich. His work was regularly produced on Broadway; Hollywood bought up all his plays, even quieter ones like Summer and Smoke. It was the height of what he later called “the catastrophe of success.” He did not live extravagantly, but wealth added to the unreality of his life. He could have fallen apart without fame and money, yet they definitely accelerated the process.

  He was still with Frank Merlo, “Little Horse,” moving back and forth between their modest three-bedroom house in Key West and various apartments in New York. The handsome, black-haired Merlo was his majordomo as well as his boyfriend, looking after their homes, arranging schedules, paying bills. Merlo loved Williams more than Williams loved him; the imbalance produced guilt and paranoia in the playwright. He often avoided returning to Key West when Merlo was there alone. At times he even believed Merlo hated him and wanted him to die. Donald Windham once saw Williams take a drink Merlo had mixed for him and pour it down the sink. “Poison,” he muttered to himself, thinking nobody else was present.

  Williams was becoming more and more unhinged. He still drank heavily; his use of barbiturates and amphetamines produced extreme mood swings. His hypochondria worsened, and he was certain each play would be his last. Of course, his writing suffered. The emotion that powered his best work grew wilder, sloppier, and more baroque. He followed Suddenly Last Summer, his post-therapy play, with Sweet Bird of Youth, a masochistic extravaganza about a gigolo, Chance Wayne, who returns to his hometown on Easter weekend and is castrated by his ex-girlfriend’s vengeful father; Chance is accompanied by a mad, pill-popping actress, Alexandra del Lago, aka the Princess Kosmonopolis, often read as a self-portrait of the author. Next came Period of Adjustment, a domestic comedy of sorts that might be called a Tennessee Williams Christmas play, if one can imagine such a thing. Afterward, hunting for a new project, Williams took out an old short story, “Night of the Iguana,” and ran it through his typewriter again, first as a one-act, then as a full-length play. It would be his last commercially successful production, and perhaps his last artistic success as well.

  A comic, sometimes poetic drama about lost souls grabbing at last chances in a small hotel in Mexico, Night of the Iguana is also full of autobiographical fragments, but they are quieter, less shrill. One nice touch is Miss Jelkes’s elderly grandfather being called Nonno, which was Merlo’s Italian nickname for Williams’s grandfather, Reverend Dakin, when he lived with them in Key West. There is nothing overtly or even covertly gay in the play, yet the emotional drama never feels forced or stifled.

  Williams went to New York in October 1961 to supervise rehearsals. Miss Jelkes was played by Margaret Leighton and Maxine, the foul-mouthed owner of the hotel, was played by Bette Davis. True to her own form, Davis fought with Williams, with director Frank Corsaro, and with her costars, whom she accused of upstaging her and sabotaging her performance. (She dropped out early in the run and was replaced by Shelley Winters.)

  Before the company left for out-of-town tryouts, Williams did an interview for the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section to promote the new work. The piece ran on November 5, 1961. As usual, he moaned about his life, saying he was exhausted and ill and this was probably his last play. Next to the profile, however, was something unusual, a think piece from the new drama critic, Howard Taubman, “Not What It Seems.” The opening line declared: “It is time to speak openly and candidly about the increasing incidence and influence of homosexuality on New York’s stage.” Taubman, whose background was in music, worried that there were too many gay playwrights and they only wrote about gay men disguised as straight men and women. “Characters represent something different from what they purport to be. It’s no wonder they seem sicker than necessary.” He named no names (it would’ve been libelous in 1961), but the interview with Williams stood directly beside it.

  There is no record of how Williams responded—or if he even saw the article. But Taubman’s piece was the first shot in the prolonged, incessant bombardment of a charge that became an obsession with mainstream critics during the next few years.

  Night of the Iguana opened in December to rave reviews. The play had a long, successful run and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Time magazine put Williams on its cover in March 1962. Nobody said anything about gay disguises in this play or any other—for the time being.

  A few months later, on October 13, 1962, a startling new drama by a new playwright opened on Broadway: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee.

  Albee had already received attention for several short plays produced downtown. Virginia Woolf was his first full-length work, but he did not come out of nowhere. He had a long apprenticeship before his so-called overnight success.

  The adopted only child of a wealthy couple on Long Island, he had attended Lawrenceville prep school with James Merrill, another son of money, before his family sent him first to a military academy, then to Choate. He was at Trinity College in Hartford for three semesters before he was expelled for skipping classes. In 1949, when he was nineteen, he got into a bitter quarrel with his parents one morning, phoned for a cab, and left home, breaking with his family for good and moving to Greenwich Village.

  He had known he was gay since puberty—“I took to it, as they say, as a duck to water.” In New York, he found first one boyfriend, then another—William Flanagan, a composer who was only five years older but became his artistic mentor. Flanagan was smart, witty, original, and malicious. His music was respected by his teachers, Aaron Copland and David Diamond, but his career never took off. He and Albee shared a weakness for alcohol and melancholy; they were known in the downtown gay bar circuit as the Sisters Grimm. Albee later said he never smiled in the old days only because his teeth were uneven. Nevertheless, he maintained the straight, thin-lipped frown like a cut made by a scalpel long after his teeth were fixed. The Sisters Grimm were regulars at the San Remo, at Julius’s on West Tenth Street and at the College of Complexes (later called the Ninth Circle), also on West Tenth Street, where the mirror behind the bar was covered with clever graffiti written in soap by patrons. It was there that Albee saw the phrase, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

  He supported himself with various jobs, including delivering telegrams for Western Union. After he turned twenty-one, he received twenty-five dollars a week from a trust fund set up by his grandmother. He was already writing, but slyly, almost secretly. He tried poetry, novels, then a verse play, and finally prose plays. A one-act titled Ye Watchers and Ye Lonely Ones juxtaposed scenes of two boys in love with scenes of two grown gay men. One man asks the other, “Why do homosexuals always write rotten love poetry to each other?” The other replies, “Because homosexual love is rotten, too.” Albee showed his work to Flanagan but almost nobody else.

  The 1950s saw the rise in New York of what became known as off-Broadway. The Provincetown Playhouse had been around since the First World War, but it was now joined by the Living Theatre, Circle in the Square, Café La MaMa, and Caffe Cino. Albee and Flanagan went to these theaters often, seeing revivals of O’Neill and Williams, and imported work by Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet. Here is where Albee learned what a play could be, not in the commercial houses of Midtown.

  A few weeks before he turned thirty, Albee had a new idea for a piece, a dialogue between two men on a bench in Central Park. He wrote it slowly and steadily over the next two and a half weeks, then revised it and finished just before his birthday. The first person to read The Zoo Story was F
lanagan, who was knocked out by it. He immediately showed it to their friends and acquaintances—Copland, Thornton Wilder, Richard Howard, William Inge—whose responses ranged from mild amusement to wild approval. But one-act plays were hard sells, even downtown, and nobody knew what to do with it. Flanagan’s former teacher, David Diamond, sent the play to friends in Germany, who loved it, translated it into German, and gave the one-act its world premiere at the Berlin Festival of 1959—on a double bill with Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. Albee was present for the performance, witnessing the first staging of his work in a language he didn’t understand.

  This foreignness feels perfectly appropriate. Zoo Story belonged to a new kind of playwriting: spare, abstract, minimal. Critics were trying out the term “Theater of the Absurd” for this new antirealism, yet there is realism, too, as there was in the work of his contemporary Harold Pinter. Albee’s play is an exchange between two strangers, unhappy loner Jerry taunting married middle-class Peter into intimacy—Jerry ultimately achieves intimacy in suicide. We now think of this as Albee’s “gay play.” And there is a sexual edge to the situation, which resembles a pick-up, but it’s addressed in only one line, when Jerry confesses that for eleven days, when he was fifteen, he was “a h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l.”

  The first English-language performance was a reading at the Actors Studio, which was considering a production. “That’s the best fucking one-act play I’ve ever seen,” said Norman Mailer afterward, but the Studio didn’t know what to make of it.