Harvey’s decision was a shock to the local Democratic machine. The various warring factions had gotten together and divided up the city and its various official positions like it was a cake—and everybody was given a slice.
Except for Harvey. Mayor Moscone fired him from his post as a commissioner because of his ingratitude. Harvey had held the post for something less than two months. As a politician Harvey was persona non grata to the Democratic machine as well as the entrenched gay political groups.
It was only later that I saw the electoral map that Jim Rivaldo had drawn up and why Harvey had made the decision that he had. In District Five, Harvey’s vote for supervisor had swamped the competition. Being elected state representaive should be a walk in the park.
The machine put up a candidate that nobody had ever heard of—Art Agnos. Art was a small cog in the Democratic machine and had been nominated for state rep as part of the spoils. He had a respectable background in social work, but aside from that, nobody had ever heard of him.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local paper, immediately endorsed Harvey, and Harvey had every reason to believe he was on his way. He was—until just before the election, when the Guardian double-crossed him and endorsed Agnos (the only time I ever saw Harvey cry in anger). Governor Brown, who had promised to remain neutral, sent a postcard to every voter in the city, plugging Agnos. They arrived the day before the election.
All of us huddled in the camera store watching the returns being posted as they came in. At first, Harvey led (the state Democratic machine must have come close to heart failure), but toward the end of the evening, Agnos edged ahead. Harvey lost by three thousand votes.
By this time, I had other things on my mind. Tom and I ended up in court. MetroMedia had released a “made for TV” film titled Terror on the 40th Floor. It was different enough from The Towering Inferno that Twentieth Century Fox had no interest in joining our suit. MetroMedia hadn’t infringed on the movie; they had stolen the guts of The Glass Inferno, our book. Twentieth considered (probably rightly) that the TV film was an ad for their major theatrical production of The Towering Inferno.
The trial was before a judge and lasted the better part of the day. In the end, Tom and I won $10,000—“stamp money” for a major Hollywood producer.
After it was over I went to the back of the courtroom and ran into the lawyer for MetroMedia. A man in his sixties, slender, carefully combed gray hair, and several thousand dollars worth of Italian suit. I found out he was from Winnetka, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, and I decided to be hail fellow well met. After all, the case was over, and I was set to reminisce about Chicago and its suburbs.
He wasn’t having any.
“Mr. Robinson,” he said quietly, “if I had gotten you on the stand, I would have made you look foolish.”
He turned on his heel and walked away and I stared after him, crushed.
(I think it was something like eight years before I got even. Hollywood, I was to discover, specialized in two things: movies and lawsuits.)
Tom—always smarter than I was when it came to money—bought something that looked like a hunk of junk but could replace a typewwriter. It had a silly name: Apple. I spent seventeen grand on a dedicated word processor from IBM that had daisy wheels and eight-inch discs and could print a page a minute. My God, what speed! (IBM once sent over several repairmen to fix it and they told me it should be in a museum.)
We both invested in oil wells and I sold mine when oil was $15 a barrel (who knew it would hit a hundred?)
I also bought a time-share in Maui, which was all mine for a few weeks a year. I made the trip to Hana—a small town along the worst road I’ve ever bumped over, but it was worth it. I had never seen so many small waterfalls in my life. I admired all the natives who didn’t much admire us haoles. We drove to the top of the local volcano, Haleakala (ten thousand feet), but the fog had rolled in and there wasn’t much to see, and not much air to breathe.
On the fourth day, something strange happened. I came down with “island fever.” I was painfully aware that I was on a very small patch of land in the middle of a very big ocean.
We left for the mainland the next day. Various friends and relatives used the rest of my time-shares on Maui, and all were very grateful.
I had always collected old science fiction magazines and one weekend was badgered into attending a pulp mgazine convention in Dayton, Ohio. The convention was held in a local university, home for the weekend of some three hundred pulp magazine nuts. I came into the airport late and there was nobody to meet me. It took an hour for somebody from the convention to get me, and by then I was ready to go home.
The next day in the “huckster” room I changed my mind. It was jammed with tables groaning under piles of old pulp paper magazines I had never heard of: Adventure, Blue Book, Spicy Mystery, Dime Detective, etc. As a collector, I fell in love and later made posters of the covers and reconsructed hundreds of pulps from covers and interior pages saved by a local magazine authority and edited several books of the old covers and wrote introductions for several others. Pulp Culture got more reviews than any other book I wrote. Newspaper editors had never seen one, and their art departments, like I had, fell in love with the covers (all but my hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle).
I didn’t collect them as an investment but later it turned out they were the best investment I had ever made. The magazines ranged in value from $10 up to the thousands, depending on condition and rarity. I became famous for my “wall of pulps”—bookcases filled with magazines with their covers on display.
When I finally auctioned them off years later—no hobby holds its appeal forever—they brought close to $1 million. I would have made more if I’d bought Apple stock, but that wasn’t bad. I left the Dayton convention with two suitcases packed and for twenty years never missed a convention.
In the meantime Tom and I had once again lucked out when it came to writing books. Skip Steloff, a former submarine officer, had a great idea for a story. It was pure thriller, and Skip had connections with Warner, who were interested in the screen rights.
Steloff’s idea dealt with a rogue US submarine in which—for reasons of plot—one of the crew slowly loses his mind over the purpose of their mission. The two plot threads were where the hell was our nuclear submarine, fully loaded with armed nuclear missiles, and what did the now unreliable crew intend to do with them. We titled the book The Gold Crew (submarine crews, one a blue crew and the other a gold crew, went down for six months at a time).
Warner loved it but the catch was they wanted a book first. Steloff approached Arthur Hailey, author of Airport, but he wasn’t interested. The next stop among thriller writers were Scortia and Robinson. The book would be published by Warner Books (a new imprint at the time), and Warner Films would make the movie.
The money offered was, for us, mind-boggling: $200,000. Tom and I knew squat about submarines, so we started to map out our research. We went down to San Diego and interviewed sub crews. We divided them into two groups. One were the submariners themselves, and the other was their wives. A woman who finds herself husbandless for six months out of the year had to have a much different view of things than her husband. I wouldn’t have bet money on how long many of the marriages would last.
Next I went to Groton, Connecticut, home of most of the submarine pens, and was cordially welcomed but that was all. The officers were familiar with The Glass Inferno and had a pretty good idea of what we had in mind. The closest I got to a submarine was a few hundred yards away, but even then, the sight was chilling.
A number of writers—and artists—had been there before us, and most of the information we got was from them. Few of the captains and admirals they interviewed had seen fit to censor the same things. An article in a Reader’s Digest told us the maximum depth a nuclear sub could go, and Kelly Freas, a science fiction artist, was kind enough to let us see his sketchbook—what was left of it after an admiral had torn out what he consider
ed to be incriminating pages. But enough were left to give us a pretty good idea of what the interior of a nuclear submarine looked like. Tom and I had lucked out.
Back in San Francisco, Tom and I decided to split the writing of the book in two. Tom would handle all the above-water scenes, and I would handle all the scenes in the interior of the submarine, with its increasingly nutty—and dangerous—crew. We would alternate the chapters for a sense of pacing.
It worked out pretty well, and both Tom and I were convinced we had a bestseller. We became hermits while working on the book. There are always interruptions, but not all of our guests were turned away.
One early evening there was a knock on the door, and when I opened it standing in front was a young man—maybe in his early twenties—in sloppy blue jeans and a big smile. I was not happy. He had interrupted an important chapter.
I asked him what he wanted and he said, “Tom sent me.” It took me a moment to make the connection. Tom Youngblood was a tall, handsome Texan (rumored at one time to be a Maplethorpe model—the one with a flower growing out of his butt) that I and a few others usually had breakast with.
The stranger at the door frowned at my blank face and added, “Tom said it was your birthday.”
I’m not a slow study and figured that Tom had sent me a birthday present. I took my guest down to the Neon Chicken for a quick supper and then back to the house, still engrossed in the book. Once inside my guest finally introduced himself: Eric Ashworth.
I told him I was working on a book and he took a quick tour of the living room, with two movie posters—one for The Power and the other for The Towering Inferno—hanging on the wall.
But he still didn’t give me any idea of what he was really there for, though it was becoming increasingly easy to figure out. (Later, I found that Tom’s gift had cost him $100. The kid probably had a wealthy patron who was sending him to the University of California in Berkeley, but $100 had been enough for him to break his vows. I was only partly right.)
I pointed at the stairs leading to the second floor. “The bedroom is up there.” I wanted to get it over with so I could get back to the book.
He gave me an odd look, then climbed the stairs.
“You really don’t talk much,” he said. It finally occurred to me that he’d come over because I was something more than just a trick.
I followed him up a few minutes later, opened the bedroom door, and then abruptly stopped. The floppy blue jeans had been a disguise.
I was looking at a man who could have given Michelanglo’s David competition.
I didn’t have much to say after that, either. I thought I’d known a lot about sex, but in truth I had known very little besides the old in-and-out. Then it finally occurred to me that Eric had come over to the house for something more than $100.
He was more than friendly in bed and essentially taught me that there was a huge difference between making love and “having sex.” I didn’t know how many people in the Castro knew this.
I still didn’t know why, but for whatever reason, Eric liked me and wanted me to like him. That part wasn’t difficult at all.
Downstairs he looked at the posters again, then said, “You’re a writer, aren’t you?” Tom had probably told him.
“I try to be,” I said.
When the truth came out it was more than flattering. “You’re the only writer I know,” he said. “I want to go to New York and get into publishing and I thought you might give me some contacts.”
In a way he was using me, but at least he was honest, and a dozen names quickly came to mind. I scribbled a few names on a sheet of paper—agents I knew, a few publishers, then hesitated a moment and at the head of the list I wrote “Craig Musser.”
Craig, a little older than Eric, was working on a series of fantastic kaleidoscopes that he was selling for ten grand each (Smithsonian magazine once published an article about Craig). He was the best friend of my friend in Alaska, Rick Leo. Craig had gone to Harvard for several years for a little polish, learned how to dress, worked out in the gym to get biceps and pecs, and finally went to a plastic surgeon to sculpt his face. (Rick was straight as a string but Craig was not, which didn’t affect their friendship at all.)
Craig was a self-made man, and to finish his education, he became a rent boy. He didn’t need the money; he came from a wealthy family. It was an education that he didn’t spend too much time on, and when he tired of it, he went into advertising and ended up handling a camera account.
I was quite sure he and Eric would love to meet each other.
After Eric left—by this time we were good friends—I called Craig and told him I was sending him an 11. A few days later Craig called to tell me he’d watched a young man consult a piece of paper as he looked down the apartment buttons. Craig asked if he could help and Eric said, “I’m looking for a Craig—a Craig Musser.”
As Craig put it, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
They were lovers for a while, then drifted apart and Eric got a job working in the Candida Donadio literary agency (its client list included Thomas Pynchon, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Mario Puzo, among others). Eric had been a literature major at Berkeley and had a flair for the business. A few years after working for Donadio, he became a full partner (“The Donadio-Ashworth Agency”) and had a respectable client list of his own.
I had dinner with him years later and in one sense it was old home week. He was a somewhat older but very handsome man, and a small part of me kept wondering if he would still go for a hundred.
I was a fool for even thinking about it, but one does not always think with one’s head. In one sense, I thought, it was really a compliment. In practical terms, I owed him far more than he owed me.
XXIII
HARVEY MAY HAVE lost the race for state representative, but the election returns had a silver lining. District elections had passed in the city—meaning the supervisors were elected by district; you didn’t have to run citywide. If we looked at the map that Jimmy Rivaldo made, it was obvious that Harvey had a lock on District Five.
There were some changes in Harvey’s little group. John Ryckman had left and his replacement was a young woman named Anne Kronenberg. Wayne Friday, a political friend of Harvey, was convinced she was too good to be true. In Wayne’s mind was the possibility that Anne could be a “plant” by somebody in the competition who would faithfully report back to her boss what Harvey was planning to do. He grilled her for two hours and was finally convinced that if she was too good to be true, Harvey was a lucky man.
There was very little in the way of pay—her salary was usually what was left in the cash drawer at the end of the day. And there was also a good deal of doubt whether she could handle Harvey, who had his mercurial side. Harvey had worn out Scott, Ryckman was good for one term, and the question was: How long would Anne last?
The low and irregular pay didn’t seem to bother her, and much to everybody’s amazement, she seemed to have no difficulty in “handling” Harvey.
The other addition to Harvey’s little group was Jack Lira, a slender, smallish man who had moved in as Harvey’s new lover. All of us figured that Jack was trouble. He drank too much, he demanded attention, and if he didn’t get his way he threw a tantrum. None of us liked him, and he didn’t like any of us.
His appeal to Harvey was that he was great in bed. Harvey was painfully aware that he was in his early forties, not an age that would normally attract younger gay men. He also thought that he could “straighten” Jack out, help him to become much more of a normal human being. Every time Harvey began to doubt his own good intentions, Jack would strip and curl up on the mattress.
His primary asset, we all figured, was that he was a “hot” number and knew it. He resented the attention that Harvey paid to the rest of us and made it obvious to Harvey. He was a political liability, resentful of the time Harvey spent campaigning, and not afraid to show it.
It was a situation that slowly spun itself out and finally
ended in tragedy.
Sixteen candidates ran for supervisor from the district. Harvey, of course, won. The gay community was ecstatic.
In 1977 Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to a prominent political position in the United States.
When the figures started to come in, all of us gathered around the television set and held our breath. When it was final, that Harvey had won, the camera store quickly filled with well-wishers, all of whom claimed to have played a part in Harvey’s victory. Bottles of champagne were passed out as if they were cans of Coke. Outside, the street in front of the camera shop was jammed. The newly elected Sheriff Hongisto rode up to the front door sitting on the back of Anne Kronenberg’s motorcycle. There were chants and shouting and huge applause when Harvey appeared in the doorway. When the other candidates and their financial backers showed up to congratulate him, he wouldn’t let them into the shop, claiming it was jammed (which it was).
The next day Harvey held a victory march from the camera shop to city hall. There was a parade of his supporters following him, but he walked with his lover, Jack, at his side. Jack didn’t mind that at all—once at Harvey’s side he was Somebody.
The trouble was that he wanted to be at Harvey’s side all the time and resented it when Harvey had to act as a supervisor. That was, in Jack’s mind, all Harvey’s fault. One night Harvey had to spend some extra time at city hall—he was usually home around six—and made the mistake of not calling Jack and telling him he would be a little late. Jack of course, interpreted this as proof that Harvey cared more about his work than he did about Jack.
When Harvey got home the front door was unlocked and he was surprised to see a trail of campaign flyers and Coors beer cans leading from the front door to the second floor. He followed them up, stopping when the trail ended just outside a curtain strung across the porch. On it was a note reading “How do you like my last act?”
Not So Good a Gay Man Page 20