Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  “Myra Breckinridge was quietly distributed to bookshops without as much as a whisper of publicity,” the newsweekly informed its readers. “No advance advertising, no copies sent to Publishers Weekly. No review copies distributed to newspapers or magazines . . . in defiance of all the usual prepublication rituals.”

  Time magazine asserted that Little, Brown had “coquettishly” pleaded with critics that the book not be reviewed at all since “the sexual problems of the title character represent a suspense element vital to the novel’s enjoyment.” Time scoffed at the surprise of Myra/Myron’s metamorphosis, revealing that anyone who’d been “down to the local fag bar” would guess the secret. Joining the gay-bashing bandwagon, Newsweek charged that Myra Breckinridge “becomes, in the end, a kind of erotic propaganda for homosexuality.” (Vidal couldn’t disagree there. “Myra favors anything that would limit population,” he volleyed back.) And the New York Times, still smarting from its The City and the Pillar hissy fit twenty years earlier, wrote in its dismissive pan that the book went from “high camp to low bitchery.”

  In a way, the cautious Eugene Vidal, after his initial doubts, offered the best defense of Myra Breckinridge’s creator: “Most of us worry about being popular, but him, never,” said the father of Gore Vidal.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES’S antipathy toward homosexuals did not end when it began reviewing Vidal’s novels again with Julian in 1964. Only the year before, the Gray Lady printed a five-thousand-word, page-one article titled “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern,” by staffer Richard Doty, who deeply regretted the city’s harboring of “probably the greatest homosexual population in the world,” and went on to reveal how “the overt homosexual has become . . . an obtrusive part of the New York scene,” as well as a “subject of growing concern of psychiatrists, religious leaders, and the police.” The newspaper of record had recently promoted A. M. Rosenthal to metropolitan editor, and it became his crusade to clean up the city for the upcoming World’s Fair in 1964, and beyond.

  “Everyone below Rosenthal spent all of their time trying to figure out what to do to cater to his prejudices,” said Times reporter Charles Kaiser. “One of these widely perceived prejudices was Abe’s homophobia. So editors throughout the paper would keep stories concerning gays out of the paper.”

  Or, in the case of the Richard Doty article, in the paper on page one. The result was that gay bars were increasingly raided. Theaters like the Gramercy Arts, the New Bowery, and the Writers’ Stage were closed for showing such gay-themed underground films as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, and Jean Genet’s Chant d’Amour.

  And it wasn’t just homosexuals who got attacked. Lenny Bruce was arrested and convicted on obscenity charges for using four-letter words and Yiddish words like “schmuck” in his act at Cafe Au Go Go.

  Ironically, it was the Times’ publication of one of its more infamous anti-homosexual tirades of the 1960s that inspired Natalie Wood’s ex-secretary to write The Boys in the Band.

  On January 23, 1966, Mart Crowley opened that Sunday’s New York Times and, as was his custom, went right to the Arts & Leisure section, soon to be known as the Gay Sports Pages. There, at the top of page one in bold type, Crowley saw the heading “The Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises.” Almost as shocking as those words was the byline. The essay had been written by the newspaper’s august theater critic Stanley Kauffmann, who took the opportunity this particular Sabbath to bemoan the state of the American theater for its lionization of homosexual playwrights who wrote “a badly distorted picture of American women, marriage, and society in general.” Kauffmann didn’t name “the three most popular playwrights,” all of whom just happened to be homosexual, but there was no mistaking the objects of his criticism: Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee. “Why can’t they just write about their own kind?” Kauffmann wanted to know, and, in essence, leave heterosexuals alone to enjoy the theater of lesser talented, or, better yet, dead playwrights. (Kauffmann’s diatribe wasn’t the first of its kind: In 1965, psychiatrist Dr. Donald Kaplan attacked Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the Tulane Drama Review for being “homosexual theater.”)

  Vidal, Albee, and others were incensed by Kauffmann’s bigotry—“Short people can’t write about tall people?” Albee asked many years later—but, at the time, they didn’t express their disgust in letters or phone calls to the almighty Times.

  Crowley, once he’d put down the Sunday Times, taken a sip of coffee, and pondered Kauffmann’s thesis, found a small morsel of hope at the core of the essay’s narrow-mindedness. He kept coming back to three sentences that Kauffmann wrote, “If [the homosexual] is to write of his experience, he must invent a two-sex version of the one-sex experience that he really knows. It is we who insist on it. Not he.”

  Eureka! “Why not me?” Crowley thought.

  Homosexual playwrights writing homosexual characters? “It was an interesting notion that no one had done this before,” said Crowley. “It would be refreshing to let it all hang out. And what did I have to lose? Nothing.”

  The thing Crowley hated about plays that did dare to include a gay character or two is that they invariably turned sexual orientation into a surprise factor, the big revelation reserved for the third act. “Well, life is not like that,” he believed. “Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the play.”

  If Vidal wrote Myra Breckinridge in a four-week burst, Crowley took only a week longer to complete the first draft of The Boys in the Band, inspired by an all-gay birthday party he attended in Los Angeles with his good friend Howard Jeffrey. Broke and out of a job, Crowley wrote the play while house-sitting actress Diana Lynn’s manse in Beverly Hills because “I had to sublet my own house to a European actor making a bad movie in Hollywood,” he recalled. In his former life as Natalie Wood’s secretary, he’d written a screenplay, Cassandra at the Wedding, in which the actress would play twin sisters, one of whom is lesbian. “Natalie was game, but Darryl Zanuck pulled the plug,” says Crowley.

  “Too many dykeisms,” Zanuck had complained.

  Then Crowley wrote The Decorator, a TV pilot for producer Dominick Dunne. It was to star Bette Davis as an interior designer, but the network didn’t pick it up. By 1967, Crowley had “nothing to lose” writing about eight, possibly nine, homosexual men at a party in Manhattan in which one of the characters is given a hustler for his birthday present.

  Crowley had nothing to lose—except his mind, in Dominick Dunne’s opinion.

  The two men were at opposite ends of the Hollywood totem pole. Dunne was vice president of Four Star Television. Crowley was Natalie Wood’s former secretary. One night, regardless of their employment disparity, they found themselves together at a party in Malibu for the Royal Ballet of England, a fete that featured much wine, grass, line-dancing, and ogling of the most beautiful dancers in the world. Taking a break from the voyeuristic rites, Dunne asked his unemployed writer-friend to take a walk on the beach. Both men slipped off their shoes. “I’m worried about you,” Dunne began. “You’re drinking and not working. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Crowley replied. “I’m busy. I’m writing a play.”

  “Great. What’s it about?”

  Crowley told Dunne as much as he knew about the gestating project. “It’s about a bunch of gay guys getting together at a birthday party.”

  Stunned, Dunne tried to be diplomatic. “Well, Mart, I think it’s great you’re writing a play. It’s good for you. It’s therapeutic. . . .”

  “It’s going to be terrific. It is terrific!” Crowley exclaimed.

  When Dunne asked the play’s title, Crowley said he liked The Birthday Party but Harold Pinter had beaten him to it. Then there was Somebody’s Children, but it was too maudlin. “How about The Boys in the Band?” Crowley asked.

  Dunne didn’t know what it meant. Crowley explained: It’s that line in A Star Is Born when James Mason tells a distraught Judy Garla
nd, “You’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band.”

  Still stunned, Dunne realized his friend could not be deterred. “Just don’t let it throw you if it doesn’t get produced,” he offered weakly.

  Crowley said he wasn’t worried. He was going to the East Coast in a week. Natalie Wood had already talked to her fiancé, Richard Gregson, whose agency, London International, had offices in New York City. Gregson would get him an agent to represent the play. After all, “I knew people were not going to jump to perform this play. But that’s what made it different.” He just knew it.

  On his plane trip eastward, Crowley never considered that London International might not represent his play. That possibility occurred to him only later, when he met the agent Janet Roberts. It was clear from their initial, tepid handshake that the meeting was pro forma, a courtesy to Gregson—and nothing more.

  Crowley hand-delivered his typed manuscript to Roberts, and she offered to read it that very afternoon while he went around the block to see Bike Boy, the Andy Warhol movie playing in a run-down movie house nearby. When he returned to her office, Roberts was “a changed woman,” Crowley noted. And not in a good way. She sat at her desk, straightening pencils, scooping up cigarette ash into little piles, patting everything down, and never once looking Crowley in the eye. Finally, she said something. “I don’t know anyone I can send this to,” she began. “I don’t know why Richard sent you. We couldn’t possibly send this play out on our letterhead.”

  Crowley asked why not.

  “This is, why, it’s like a weekend on Fire Island!” she exclaimed in horror.

  Crowley thought, “Not a weekend, darling. At best a day, I obey the unities!” But he didn’t say that. He just sat there.

  Roberts did offer him a smidgen of hope regarding a possible production. “Maybe in five years,” she said. “Maybe ten years, but not now.”

  Crowley choked as the walls of the agent’s office started to tighten around him. Maybe Dominick Dunne was right. Maybe no one wanted this play. “What about Richard Barr?” he blurted out. “Could you send it to him?”

  “Of course I know Richard Barr,” said Roberts. “Why him?”

  “Anyone who had the courage and foresight to produce Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would be right for this play. Would you send it to him?”

  Roberts went back to her neat piles of cigarette ash. Again, she avoided looking at Crowley. “We couldn’t officially submit it to him.” Finally, she came up with a compromise: “We’ll ask his opinion.”

  With Diana Lynn having returned to her Beverly Hills house and that European actor still renting Crowley’s West Hollywood apartment, the author of the possibly moribund Boys in the Band suddenly found himself without a home, money, or options. In New York City, Crowley was staying with friends, the actor Robert Moore and his partner, George Rondo. The day after Crowley’s humiliation at London International, the phone in Moore’s Eighth Avenue apartment rang. It was Janet Roberts. She wanted to speak to Mart Crowley.

  “Well, I don’t know how to tell you this,” she began. “I’m really surprised. Can you have drinks with Richard Barr and Edward Albee this afternoon at five o’clock? At Barr’s apartment?”

  There, six hours later in Richard Barr’s apartment, Mart Crowley listened as the producer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? told him that he wanted to stage his play, The Boys in the Band, at the Playwrights’ Unit, a theater devoted to new plays that was operated by him, Albee, and fellow Virginia Woolf producer Clinton Wilder. It would be a workshop situation. There would be only five performances.

  Barr was enthusiastic in his praise of Crowley’s play. Albee let Barr do the talking. Crowley noted, “Edward didn’t say he liked it. He didn’t say he didn’t like it.”

  Since the Playwrights’ Unit had a backlog of unproduced plays written by other young, promising writers like Sam Shepard, Terrence McNally, and John Guare, they didn’t have an opening for at least three months. Maybe there would be a slot in January to get the play up and running, and to see what they had. Crowley blurted out, “Could Robert Moore direct?”

  Albee, of course, knew the actor from his upcoming Broadway production of Everything in the Garden, in which Moore played the supporting role of a man murdered by neighbors who operate a suburban brothel. Yes, Moore would be perfect to direct The Boys in the Band, it was decided. Since Albee’s play was scheduled to open that November, Moore could direct Crowley’s play during the day when he wasn’t at the Plymouth Theatre being murdered at night.

  “It was October 1967,” Crowley recalled. “Out on Fire Island, I polished The Boys in the Band.” Moore helped with rewrites; he made several suggestions, especially with regard to rearranging some of the dialogue and scenes—that is, until Crowley exploded, telling him, “I asked you to direct The Boys in the Band. I didn’t ask you to fucking rewrite The Boys in the Band!”

  Moore shot back, “I’m only directing this play to get you out of my apartment!”

  While the show’s respective playwright and director, Mart Crowley and Robert Moore, may have had “nothing to lose,” the actors they chose to be their “boys” did. Laurence Luckinbill, Leonard Frey, Cliff Gorman, Kenneth Nelson, Frederick Combs, and Keith Prentice had assembled, among them, an impressive résumé of New York stage credits, including such well-known titles as A Man for All Seasons, Fiddler on the Roof, The Fantasticks, A Taste of Honey, and The Sound of Music. In other words, they weren’t novices, and they all risked future employment by playing homosexuals onstage in the year 1968.

  Agents traditionally send their clients the script before an audition. It was different with The Boys in the Band. The actors had to go to the theater to read the play. There were two reasons for this departure from tradition: the work’s unconventional subject matter, and the fact that the New York agencies put up an unofficial boycott of the play. Luckinbill’s agent, the same Janet Roberts who was now Crowley’s reluctant agent, told her actor-client, “Don’t get involved. It will wreck your career.” Compounding her lack of faith in the project was Roberts’s fear that representing the play might expose her as a lesbian who was married to a gay man. Luckinbill, however, needed the work.

  So did Leonard Frey. “I read the play and, well, I must do this because I’m out of work and it is a play. Playing a pockmarked Jew fairy didn’t make me hesitate a bit,” said Frey.

  Cliff Gorman had just appeared in Hogan’s Goat with Faye Dunaway and was down to his last two weeks of unemployment insurance when his agent informed him that they were casting a North Carolina production of The Knack at the Playwrights’ Unit. He was told, “There may be a part in it for you.”

  The Unit, however, had already cast that show by the time he showed up for the audition. “There’s nothing in The Knack,” a casting director told Gorman, “but we are doing a play here at the Unit, an original play called The Boys in the Band. Now, it’s about homosexuality, that’s the theme. To be quite frank with you, the play’s been cast, but there’s one part that nobody wants to do. It’s the part of a very effeminate homosexual. We’ve tried to get actors who are overtly gay to play the role, they won’t do it. There’s something that turns them off about it and they can’t. Would you like to read for it?”

  Gorman said, “Yeah, I don’t give a shit.”

  He read, they liked him, but the next day they informed him, “Very good, but someone else is doing it.” Then they called a day later to tell Gorman that the other actor had decided against playing such an outrageous homosexual. “You wanna do the role?”

  “Yeah, I don’t give a shit.”

  Others in the cast were less experienced or had no experience whatsoever on the stage. Like Reuben Green, who was a good-looking print model. Or Robert La Tourneaux, whom Crowley spotted at the popular tea dance at Fire Island Pines, and thought looked right to play the empty-headed hustler, the show’s “birthday present.” Robert Moore took one look at La Tourneaux and nixed the idea. “You’re so Hollywood
in your casting,” he told Crowley.

  “He’s only got eleven lines in the play,” replied Crowley. “How bad can he be?”

  Although he studied at the Yale School of Drama, Peter White had virtually no professional experience onstage. He worried about ruining his career before he got started in the business. But, “They’ve got respectable actors who have careers,” he thought. White didn’t even have a career, yet. He knew the legendary movie actress Myrna Loy, and it was she who convinced him to take the role. “Peter, if you want to be an actor, you’ve got to take risks,” she told him.

  But no sooner was White cast as Alan, the party’s interloper who may or may not be gay, than his agent fired him for accepting the role. “We all lost our agents,” White recalled.

  Shortly before The Boys in the Band opened in late January for the first of its five performances at the Playwrights’ Unit, White asked Crowley if the Alan character is gay or straight. “I don’t know,” said Crowley. “Make up whatever you want, just don’t do it tonight.”

  Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge hit the bookstores almost to the day that Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band opened in New York City. It was January 23, 1968, and the wicked six-degree temperature that night kept more than a few of the theater’s two hundred seats unsold. Crowley, Robert Moore, and Richard Barr were milling about among the empty seats in the back rows at 15 Vandam Street. Crowley suddenly came down with a bad attack of dry mouth. He had trouble swallowing but managed to ask Moore, “Do you think they’ll laugh?”

  Moore told him not to worry. “They’ve been laughing at fags since Aristophanes. They’re not going to stop tonight,” he said.

  The next morning “word somehow got out,” said Crowley, and despite the cold rain, a line of black umbrellas stretched down the street for more than a block beyond the theater’s box office. Crowley told himself, “Wow! It’s like the third act of Our Town out there! Minus the funeral.”