Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  So began the myth that Virginia Woolf was about a quartet of gay men. Straight people who loved the play for telling the truth about marriage were confused to learn it wasn’t about them after all. Critics had second thoughts. Walter Kerr pruned his praise when he reprinted his review in book form: “brilliant” became “admirable.”

  It needs to be said here that, yes, Albee drew upon gay married life for Virginia Woolf. It enabled him to say valid things about all married life. As he later pointed out, “There’s not that much difference between straight and gay couples in their fights.” He and Williams both responded to the attacks, but not immediately. Albee told his biographer, “I know I did not write the play about two male couples.” Williams told an interviewer in 1970, “If I am writing a female character, goddamnit, I’m going to write a female character, I’m not gonna write a drag queen. If I wanna write a drag queen, I’ll write a drag queen.”

  Most of the critics insisted they had no problem with homosexuals, only with homosexual characters disguised as straight ones. It was a standard line in their attacks. If gay writers could write real gay characters, they claimed, they’d be satisfied. Ten and twenty years later, however, when gay playwrights did write openly gay characters, none of these men ever said one good word about this work—not Taubman, not Kauffmann, not Roth.

  Gay writers could not win for losing. If they wrote about gay life, they weren’t universal. But if they wrote about straight life, they were distorting what they despised or didn’t understand. Yet to quote Michael Bronski again: “Gay people are just like straight people. But straight people lie about who they really are.”

  In June 1966, six months after the Kauffmann and Time pieces, the movie of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It was a huge success. The review in the New York Times was by none other than Stanley Kauffmann (he’d been demoted from the theater pages), who said nothing about the original being a gay show in drag, only that it was “the play of the decade.” None of the major reviews of the film said a word about gay subtext. In fact, the movie appears to have stopped all such talk in the mainstream press. After hearing those powerhouse lines belted out by Taylor and Burton, the most famous heterosexual couple in the world, critics couldn’t claim that George and Martha were gay men in disguise without sounding like idiots. Taylor was already a gay icon, of course, but she wasn’t a drag queen—not yet. The general attack of culture panic began to subside by the end of 1966. Perhaps it had simply run its course, but I believe the movie helped: killing the charge against Albee, it killed the chief cause for alarm.

  Critics stopped looking so feverishly for hidden homosexuals—chiefly because they didn’t like talking about homosexuality to begin with. But the gay masquerade cliché about Williams and Albee did not completely go away. In 1969 William Goldman wrote a book about Broadway, The Season, where he went on and on about homos taking over the theater. It was stale stuff by then, his only fresh touches his repeated use of the word fag and his praise of a new play, The Boys in the Band, which he did only to slam Albee. (“Yes, those first two acts of Virginia Woolf are marvelous bitch dialogue—not as good as Mart Crowley’s bitch dialogue in the Boys in the Band—but still marvelous.”) But that takes us ahead of our story. The damage to Albee was already done. After being damned and torn apart for having the gall to write about straight people, it’s no wonder he resisted writing an actual play about gay men. The best portrait came thirty years later in Three Tall Women (1994), with the son, a preppy young man who is talked about and talked to, but who never speaks himself.

  Meanwhile, the career of Tennessee Williams followed its own curious course. After being on the cover of Time in 1962, he wrote a new play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, featuring yet another self-portrait in the guise of a prima donna, Mrs. Goforth. He broke off with Frank Merlo but continued to live with him. He found a new friend, a young poet named Frederick Nicklaus, and brought him into their household. Then Merlo fell ill. He stayed in Key West when Williams went to New York for the Milk Train rehearsals, but the two exes remained in constant contact by phone. Williams grew anxious and distracted. Milk Train opened in January 1963 to the worst reviews of his career. “Mistuh Williams, He Dead,” was the title of a piece by Richard Gilman. That month Merlo was diagnosed with lung cancer.

  Merlo flew up to New York and eventually went into the hospital, where Williams visited him daily. Williams found it easier to love Merlo in sickness than he had in health. He forgot his fears of being poisoned. Hoping to lose himself in work, Williams revised Milk Train, determined to fix it. His director, Frank Corsaro, later said, “With Frank ill, Tennessee just couldn’t cope for himself with the details of real life. Of course he told me, ‘Baby, it’s my last play.’ ” His producer, Cheryl Crawford, said, “Frankie was the only one who really understood him, really knew how to deal with him and help him. When Frankie was dying, there was a new form of grief, and maybe a new form of guilt for Tennessee to deal with, and I think it just broke him.”

  Williams visited Merlo in the hospital on the evening of September 21, 1963. Merlo looked tired and Williams offered to go. Merlo asked him to remain but not admit anyone else. “I’ve grown used to you,” he told Williams. Years later the playwright explained in his Memoirs with elegant formality, “The statement of habituation was hard to interpret as an admission of love, but love was never a thing that Frankie had been able to declare to me except over a long-distance telephone.” Williams waited until Merlo fell asleep and left to meet friends at a bar. He returned to the apartment around midnight, where he received word that Merlo had died at eleven. “They say he just gasped and lay back on the pillow and was gone,” Williams wrote two days later to his friend, Maria St. Just. “I am just beginning, now, to feel the desolation of losing my dear little Horse.”

  7. The Medium Is the Message

  Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.

  —Gore Vidal

  Mass media strongly influenced how people responded to these books and plays, and the mass media was changing. The weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek, were major powers in American culture in 1960. It’s funny now to read John Cheever’s letters and find him worrying about his reviews in Time. The New Yorker was losing its reputation for blandness and taking more risks, especially in its nonfiction. There were new weekly newspapers, too, such as the Village Voice, which first published in 1955. There were even a few gay magazines.

  ONE began in Los Angeles in 1953 (its all-caps name is from a quote by Thomas Carlyle: “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men ONE”) and was more interested in legal and political matters than in the arts. The typical article had a title like “New Deal for Deviants” or “Successful Homosexuals.” However, the magazine ran Norman Mailer’s surprisingly forward essay, “The Homosexual Villain,” and, in the 1960s, began to review novels. The Mattachine Review, a publication of the first national gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, was founded in 1955 and occasionally printed poems, such as “The Green Automobile” by Allen Ginsberg, but was even less interested in cultural matters than ONE. They ran an occasional piece about Plato or Whitman, but nothing about Albee, Williams, or camp. The publishing schedule was erratic and subscribers were few. In the Sixties ONE sold roughly 2,300 copies per issue. The vast majority of gay readers continued to hear about gay books and plays through mainstream publications. ONE’s most important achievement was to work its way through the court system as an “obscene publication” until the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the lower courts and freed the magazine to be sent through the mail. (The high court didn’t hear the case but made their decision based entirely on Roth v. United States, the same case cited in the trial of Howl.)

  Surprisingly, the most important change in media for gay people happened not in print but on television. Dramas and sitcoms remained closed to homosexuals—as they were to blacks unti
l halfway through the decade. No, the venue where gay figures could shine was the late night talk show.

  The 1960s was a golden age of the public intellectual; almost all of the major literary figures appeared on TV. It was a golden age of pretension, when people wanted to appear smarter than they were, unlike our current age when even politicians strive to seem average. But a pretense to intellect can often produce real intelligence. Time and Newsweek competed with each other in putting major writers on their covers. The New Yorker’s standing as a status symbol enabled it to run long, serious, book-length pieces without losing readers. An actual book publisher, Bennett Cerf of Random House, was a regular on a TV game show, What’s My Line? And late night talk show hosts from David Susskind and Jack Paar to David Frost and Dick Cavett enjoyed bringing important authors on their shows.

  A few of these writers were gay. They couldn’t talk about it on the air, of course, but some didn’t need to say it in words.

  Truman Capote came to television relatively late in his career. He was beaten to it by Gore Vidal, who first went on TV in 1957 to publicize Visit to a Small Planet on Broadway. Vidal’s handsome looks and smooth, patrician voice worked well in the cool medium. He seemed so respectable that he could get away with saying disrespectful things. He became a regular on Jack Paar’s The Tonight Show and sometimes appeared on the Today show with Dave Garroway and J. Fred Muggs, a chimpanzee.

  Capote had no television experience when he was invited to be on David Susskind’s show, Open End, in January 1959. Breakfast at Tiffany’s had been published two months earlier and he was there to promote it. He was between projects, a vulnerable time for any writer, but it’s safe to assume that part of him was thinking: If Gore can do this, so can I.

  He worried aloud on the ride to the TV studio in Newark in a limo shared with Norman Mailer and Mailer’s wife, Adele. He insisted he was there only because his publisher, Bennett Cerf, thought TV was the future of books.

  Norman Mailer wrote about the evening in a long, strange, brilliant essay, “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy.” (The title refers not to Capote but to television.) For all his macho windbagging, Mailer could be oddly likable, self-deprecatory as well as self-pitying, generous as well as competitive. He was fascinated by gay men and not afraid to speak his mind, for good and ill.

  The Mailers and Capote arrived at the studio and joined Susskind and his third guest, Dorothy Parker. The writers sat down, the show began—it was broadcast live—and Mailer immediately took over, holding forth on politics. After an hour of monopolizing conversation, he sensed Susskind turning against him, so he shut up, wanting to punish Susskind, thinking the show would die without him. He let Capote talk.

  The subject of the Beats came up. Mailer had mixed feelings about Jack Kerouac, but Capote despised his work. “It is not writing. It is only typing,” Capote said. Dorothy Parker agreed.

  The show ended. On their way out they stopped to look at the kinescope playback. Parker hated seeing herself and hurried off, but Mailer and Capote lingered to watch. Capote thought Mailer looked great, but that he looked terrible.

  They returned to Manhattan for drinks and dinner at El Morocco, where Capote knew all the waiters. Mailer and his wife assured him that he had been fine.

  The next morning Mailer’s friends began to call to say how much they’d enjoyed the show, especially for Capote. They kept quoting his line, “It’s not writing; it’s only typing.” Some went so far as to say that Capote had walked all over Mailer, but even those who complimented Mailer wanted to hear more about the other writer. Capote himself called Mailer that afternoon and said he was surprised by all the praise he was getting.

  Furious about being upstaged, and baffled, Mailer returned to the TV studio a few days later and asked to see the kinescope. He discovered that Capote had gotten far more close-ups than he had; he felt the show had been tilted against him. (He never acknowledges that his endless monologue may have put off viewers.) But he also saw that Capote had earned those close-ups:

  Capote did not look small on the show but large! His face, in fact, was extraordinary, that young-old face, still pretty and with such promise of oncoming ugliness; that voice, so full of snide rustlings and unforgiving nasalities; it was a voice to knock New York on its ear. The voice had survived; it spoke of horrors seen and passed over; it told of judgments that would be merciless.

  Where other people heard only a freak or a fag, Mailer heard the mystic androgyny of a new Tiresias. It’s a generous, imaginative leap, and it captures the appeal of Capote’s otherness. The next time Mailer encountered Capote in person, he found him changed, with “a new assurance to put on top of the old one.”

  Many Middle Americans in years to come would roll their eyes and sigh whenever the little man with the androgynous voice appeared on TV. But others—men and women, gay and straight—would be transfixed. Capote discovered that the fame of writing books, even best sellers, was nothing compared to the fame of appearing regularly on television.

  He finally began work on a new project, a New Yorker piece about life in Moscow like a follow-up to The Muses Are Heard. But it wasn’t clicking. He spent his time instead with his “swans,” rich lady friends like Babe Paley and Slim Keith. Then, on the morning of November 16, 1959, he read a short piece in the inside pages of the New York Times about a brutal murder in Kansas. A family of four, the Clutters, had been bound, gagged, and shot in an isolated farmhouse; nobody knew who did it. Capote asked William Shawn, his editor at the New Yorker, if he could drop the Moscow project to explore the Kansas story. Shawn said yes. Originally it was to be the portrait of small-town America stunned by modern violence, a mood piece with an unsolved mystery at the center. But while Capote was in Garden City, Kansas, interviewing neighbors with the help of his childhood friend, Harper Lee, a pair of ex-cons were arrested and charged with the murders. Capote recognized he had a full-scale book on his hands.

  He spent the first two weeks of January 1960 visiting the jail and talking with the accused, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. He then went back to New York and didn’t return until the trial in March. It’s startling to realize how quickly everything happened during the first stage of the story. The trial lasted only a week. Smith and Hickock were convicted and sentenced to be hanged on May 13. Capote immediately left for New York to write his book. He found he couldn’t work in the city so he took his boxes of notes and crossed the ocean to Spain with Jack Dunphy and isolated himself in a fishing village on the Mediterranean.

  Only then, when Capote was living with Smith and Hickock on a daily basis in his imagination, did he become truly intimate with the two men, especially Smith. Smith was shorter and more soulful than Hickock—more like Capote, in fact, easier to identify with. A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one. Capote was not allowed to correspond with Smith and Hickock—that would come later—but he wrote constantly to Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, checking on details and clarifying points and learning new developments. He was relieved when the Kansas Supreme Court issued a stay of execution to hear an appeal for a new trial.

  He worked slowly and steadily on the book, writing it out in pencil on yellow legal pads, re-creating scenes, building up portraits of the murdered family, the townspeople, the police, and the killers. It was an epic with a huge cast of characters. Capote decided that a true-crime story could be as well-written as a fine novel. He took enormous pains with the prose, and it shows.

  The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”… The land is flat and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

  In Cold Blood has had many imitators, but it remains fresh and powerful decades later. Nobody has matched its lean, elegant prose, its emotional richness, or its solid architecture. Capote made two brilliant techn
ical decisions early on. First, in the opening pages, he built up to the murder, cross-cutting between the Clutters and the killers; then he jumped over the killing and left it blank until after the arrest, when Smith and Hickock confess to the police. Second, he left himself entirely out of the story. He was not just an onlooker, as he was in The Muses Are Heard or Breakfast at Tiffany’s; he was completely invisible. Yet his presence haunts the book, like the Invisible Man whose faint outline appears only in the rain. (His secret presence is so tantalizing that, forty years later, two different movies—Capote and Infamous—retold the story simply by editing Capote back into his book.)

  It took Capote a little over three years to write In Cold Blood—everything except the ending. He and Dunphy stayed in Europe almost the entire time. Through lawyers and Dewey, he heard about the appeals and stays of execution that kept Smith and Hickock alive on Death Row. Not until he returned to the States in June 1963 did Capote get permission to write to the convicted killers. Suddenly two men who had become characters in his imagination were sending him letters. He visited them in prison and mailed them books: Thoreau and dictionaries and his own work for Smith, Harold Robbins novels and girlie magazines for Hickock. He impatiently waited for the court system to decide what would happen so he could write his final pages. His letters to Smith and Hickock are full of grave concern for their future while those to other people express frustration over the delays. I assume that both sets of feelings were perfectly sincere.