I Must Confess

by Rupert Smith

  What had happened? My immediate thought was that he must have met some accident. Or perhaps a job had come through at the last minute, keeping him in town, unable to contact me. I didn’t care, as long as John was all right. I had to find a phone.

  I called the studio. The phone rang and rang. There was no answer. He must have left already. Maybe he’d been delayed in traffic and would appear, flushed and breathless and full of apologies, and we’d laugh about how worried I’d been. I found a seat that commanded a view of the entire concourse and waited for an hour. I called again. Still no answer. Where was he?

  Finally, I had no option but to struggle with my luggage on to a bus and make my own way to the city. I had just enough US dollars to pay my fare; I’d have to walk across town to the West Side. When I arrived I was hot, dirty and anxious. How could my longed-for homecoming have gone so badly wrong?

  I dragged myself up the last few stairs to the studio and rang the buzzer. To my intense relief, there was the sound of movement inside, and voices. I distinctly heard Kinnell say, ‘Oh shit, man!’ He must have unplugged the phone and overslept. I smiled; his unreliability could be charming in its way. Eventually I heard him stumbling towards the door. He appeared, wearing only a pair of faded jeans. I fell into his arms, savouring the touch of his warm flesh. Then I looked over his shoulder and saw, sprawled on the mattress, another man.

  I can’t recall the scene that followed without a sense of disgust. After all my happy expectations, to be let down so cruelly, so casually, it was too much. I lost my reason. I screamed, I wept – exactly the sort of ridiculous homosexual melodramatics that I’d always despised in others. Kinnell was apologetic at first, but then turned nasty. Who did I think I was, he asked, his fuckin’ wife? When I leapt across the bed and attempted to attack his new friend, Kinnell grabbed me by the wrists and pushed me to the floor where I lay grovelling at his feet. The other man dressed quickly, stepped across my prostrate form and left, remarking as he stood in the doorway, ‘Hey, John, looks like you have a little problem here.’

  It took me some time to recover from this hysterical attack. I think of it now as a kind of mini nervous breakdown brought on by my recent troubles. John was comforting, caressing me as I lay sobbing in his lap. I had to understand that this was not a marriage, he said. We were both free to take our pleasure with whoever we liked. There were no rules for a gay relationship – we could live exactly as we pleased, as long as there was love and respect on both sides. That was all I wanted to hear. He loved me, it was enough. For a long, long time to come, I told myself that that was all I needed in life. But can love ever really be enough?

  Of course I was used to the idea of free love – it was something I’d pioneered in the sixties, after all. But I still had a lot of emotional baggage that I had to get rid of. From my parents I’d inherited worn-out patriarchal ideas about possessiveness, about monogamy and the stifling of sexual desire. I had so much to (un)learn. Sex, said John, was the life force, the spring of all his creativity. We need love and friendship, he believed, but we mustn’t confuse love with sexual fidelity. To him, life was a smorgasbord of opportunities – sexual, artistic, political. This was a new way of living that we were carving out in downtown Manhattan, a community of lovers and creative collaborators bound together by trust and respect for each other as individuals. One day, he said, everyone would live like this.

  It was exciting to me, a challenge. I knew that I was at a crossroads in my life. I could either cling on to my old ideas and ‘chuck’ John for cheating on me behind my back, or I could embrace the new, wherever it might lead me. To celebrate my decision, I took John out for dinner.

  The New York years were the best of times and the worst of times. The community of lovers bound together by trust and respect had strange ways of expressing themselves, as I was soon to discover in the clubs that Kinnell had started frequenting, where there was no kick too far, no kink too extreme. In steamy back rooms, heaving knots of humanity fumbled in a confusion of hands and mouths. In basement ‘dungeons’, painted black and kitted out with an array of torture devices, men would inflict bizarre punishments on each other, twisting and stretching each other’s extremities to a point, Kinnell said, beyond pain and pleasure. And strangest of all, there were clubs where men would go to the bathroom (to use that coy American euphemism) on each other.

  At first I went along as a tourist. Then I was a nagging wife (as John put it), constantly trying to get him to leave, to come home where I’d give him the pleasure he was seeking. Then I gave up my last shred of resistance and joined in. It was sickeningly easy. Without any restraints on my behaviour – since the death of my father and the disappearance of Nutter from my life – I didn’t really care what anybody thought. This, then, was freedom.

  We weren’t just going out to these clubs once or twice a week as a special treat. We were going every single night, sleeping for most of the day and only ‘working’ when it fitted around our social schedule. John’s career was still flourishing, the commissions coming in faster than he could complete them. But I wasn’t earning. There was the occasional cheque from England, the odd PA in a club for $50, but it wasn’t enough. The lifestyle we’d chosen was expensive.

  It wasn’t just the usual costs of food, clothes, rent and transport. Added to that was one massive bill that overshadowed all the rest: drugs. I’d discovered how New York kept awake all night: cocaine. We’d go to parties where drugs were part of the buffet, but more often we’d have to pay for them. At the height of his career, John could afford two grams of coke a day – until the work started to dry up. He had become erratic, unreliable. Like so many artists, he felt oppressed by deadlines, deadened by commercialism. He came to despise the industry for which he was working, ‘the fucking fashion vampires’, he called them. They in turn took their work elsewhere, to the latest star photographer. In New York City, there’s always someone younger and hotter waiting to take your place.

  After eighteen months, we were feeling the pinch. John had lost interest in his career, only working when I locked him in the studio. He reserved his energy for the night life. It was all he cared about, all he lived for – the next high. In his own strange way, he was faithful to me; he never had affairs with any of his hundreds of ‘tricks’, and very rarely brought them home to the studio. To him, those bodies in the dark were interchangeable, just a way of getting nearer to the oblivion that he was seeking. That was what it was all leading to, the drugs, the sex, the alcohol, the pain – oblivion. Darkness. John, so full of life, seemed hell-bent on self-destruction.

  I worried about him to the point that I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie there night after night (day after day actually) watching his unconscious form, wondering what demons drove him to this life of excess. What had gone wrong with John? Or was it I who was in the wrong?

  What few savings I’d brought with me had been used up long ago, and now John was having trouble meeting the monthly rent cheque. He didn’t seem to care; we could always move somewhere cheaper. It didn’t matter as long as he had somewhere to hide out and sleep in the daylight hours. But I couldn’t bear to see everything we’d worked for slip away – and for what? A snowstorm of cocaine, a few nightmarish hours of sexual depravity. I was going back to work.

  The opportunity presented itself in the most unlikely form: a cultured, older man I’d met at one of the bars, who sat there night after night in a blazer and cravat, sipping a drink, watching the comings and goings through wire-rimmed glasses. Occasionally he’d speak to one of the revellers, buy him a drink and give him a card. He was friendly but aloof, an amused, intelligent observer at the feast. There was something paternal about him, and I badly needed a father figure in my life at that time.

  Peter von Harden (he insisted that it was his real name) had grown up in Germany, came to New York just before the war and was now a naturalized American. His interests were as broad as mine; he could talk with authority about modern art, Victorian literature, the cri
sis in the Middle East. He was a man of strong opinions, refreshingly critical of the clubs and their ‘superficiality’, a lover of the finer things in life. He spoke with enthusiasm of an exhibition at the Guggenheim, of a wonderful restaurant on the Upper West Side, of the latest Broadway openings. Talking to him was such a joy when the most you usually got in the way of conversation at the clubs was: ‘Yeah, harder!’

  But there was one thing that struck me as incongruous: what was this civilized European and connoisseur of the arts doing hanging around in gay sex clubs? He was candid in his response.

  ‘I’m talent-scouting.’

  ‘What for? A Broadway show?’ That’s when I knew that the old urge to work had come back to me.

  ‘No. A movie.’ A movie! Even better. I’d always longed to work in films.

  ‘What kind of movie?’

  ‘A porno movie.’

  He was frank, I had to admit. But a movie was a movie, and I needed work, especially as I had just noticed John handing over the last of the week’s money in return for a few ampoules of amyl nitrate. I swallowed hard.

  ‘Interesting. Tell me more.’ He was impressive, persuasive. Peter von Harden, it seemed, was the leading producer of erotic gay films, professionally shot on 16mm stock, using a roster of star talent that he’d recruited from the clubs under exclusive contract to his ‘studio’. Now he was in pre-production for his most ambitious project to date, and was looking for a new star. There was a loaded silence. I wondered if he knew who I was? Or was I just another body?

  ‘Do you think you could use me?’

  ‘My God, could I? With your name on the credits,’ (he did know who I was after all) ‘we’re practically guaranteed an Oscar!’ We laughed. ‘I can make you a big, big star by the end of the year.’

  Where had I heard that before? But I was older and wiser now. I knew all about the promises that hungry older men would make to beautiful, talented youngsters. I was interested only in one thing.

  ‘How much do you pay?’ He thought for a moment, scanned the ceiling, looked back at me, took a drink and finally named a figure. It was enough – just. It would enable us to keep the studio for another month. Peter gave me a card and arranged to meet me the following day at the swanky New York Athletic Club.

  I took care to look as if I meant business: a smart blazer, a clean white shirt and tie, neatly pressed slacks. I didn’t want my director, whatever the movie, to think that I was some starry-eyed amateur ready to be pushed around and exploited. Von Harden was equally impressive, clearly at home in the lavish marble halls and oak-panelled bar of the NYAC, where the waiters and porters treated him with a respectful familiarity. We ordered whisky sours and talked business.

  I now think that, in a different time, Peter von Harden could have been one of the truly great auteurs. His love of cinema, his deep learning, his visual flair, could have created masterpieces. But here was a man, like me, fatally out of step with the times, a man whose vision had galloped ahead of the mainstream, dooming him to work in the despised fringes of the industry. Looking at his films today, I realize that he could have been greater than, say, Derek Jarman, a vastly overrated film-maker who took von Harden’s basic ideas and watered them down for mass consumption. But Peter couldn’t compromise like that.

  The project that he outlined to me that afternoon was a remake of Douglas Sirk’s fabulous 1958 melodrama Imitation of Life, one of my all-time favourite films. I remembered how shocking we’d found it back in the fifties, with its story of a brilliant young actress (Lana Turner) and her friendship with a poor black servant. Von Harden’s version would transpose the basic theme of racism and inequality to a gay context. I’d play the Lana Turner figure, of course, the beautiful but vulnerable actor who embarks on a reckless affair with a poor black garage mechanic. We talked for hours about the subtle interplay of cinematic reference, the daring theme of miscegenation, the fascinating use of my public persona in this challenging new context. The film, which von Harden grandly announced would be entitled Imitation of Sex, would start shooting on Saturday at a friend’s uptown apartment.

  I must confess that, for the first time in my life, I was actually ashamed of something I’d done. Imitation of Sex was not what I had expected: there was little demand on my acting experience, there was no dialogue (a few ‘oohs’ and ‘yeahs’ were dubbed on later), but I was expected to ‘perform’ in other ways. Fortunately, my co-star was an old hand and soon set me at ease. ‘Forget about the camera, Marc,’ he advised me, ‘let’s just do it.’ All I could think about was the fact that this sacrifice would enable John to carry on working.

  There wasn’t much plot to get in the way of the action: a rich white New Yorker is enjoying a Jacuzzi at home when the doorbell rings. He answers the door wearing only a pair of scanty briefs, to discover a tall black man dressed in oil-stained overalls. My understanding was that the visitor wanted to come and ‘wash up’, although this was never made explicit in the film; narrative cohesion was not one of von Harden’s strong points. Soon we were back in the Jacuzzi. It took two days; I was paid half my money at the end of each day’s shoot.

  Von Harden had assured me that his films played on a very small, exclusive art circuit; imagine my horror when, a couple of months later, I saw Imitation of Sex advertised at one of the sleaziest grind houses on Times Square, with a poster blazoning my name (above the title, at least) and a still that left little to the imagination. I was mortified, but, strangely, Imitation of Sex became one of the biggest-grossing adult movies of its time. It wasn’t the direction I’d seen my career going in, but I had no choice.

  I couldn’t bear to go and see Imitation of Sex. John, of course, went time and again and said it was ‘hot’, though whether he was referring to my performance or to the ‘action’ in the cinema itself I wasn’t sure. Years later an American fan sent me a video copy of the film which, he reported, was doing good business as a classic reissue. I watched it for the first time, and was agreeably surprised. My performance as a drugged-up New York party boy was genuinely affecting (not for nothing had I been studying the guys in the clubs!), and the frank sexual content still had the power to shock. Now, of course, we’re used to nudity and sex in every medium, from rock videos to major motion pictures. Many of the ideas that von Harden pioneered in the seventies have entered the mainstream. And, of course, the ‘adult’ market is thriving, with entire cable channels devoted to pornography. Imitation of Sex and all the other films I made with Peter von Harden stand up pretty well against the trash that’s churned out today. Our films weren’t pornography, they were erotica. And as such, they have an appeal far beyond the crudely sexual. I see their influence everywhere.

  Our next project was a remake of the popular Steven Spielberg hit Jaws, shot on a weekend trip to Fire Island. I played a sun-worshipper who’s attacked by a shark (von Harden himself swam underwater with the fin) and rescued by a lifeguard, who drags my semi-conscious body to his hut and practises mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was an even bigger hit, and enjoyed massive mail-order sales in a super-8 version.

  After that, we made title after title. There must have been dozens, maybe even a hundred; I can’t remember most of them now. A few highlights: a remake of Hitchcock’s suspenseful Rear Window as Back Passage; a tribute to Chaplin (The Great Dick Taker), in which I played an SS Officer who gets his come-uppance at the hands of a bunch of boisterous GIs; a rare venture into the horror genre, Night of the Giving Head. Fortunately for me, plans to rework the great spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars were abandoned.

  I was in my physical prime, working out daily at an East Village gym, taking sunbeds. I looked good. The money was coming in: good money, but not enough to keep the old studio. We were obliged to take a more modest apartment on Avenue A, and to ride buses and subway trains instead of taxis. But we survived. On Peter’s advice, I placed an advert with my portrait and phone number in the Village Voice offering massage. I had healing hands, and soon I had a regular clie
ntele who’d come up to Avenue A for a therapeutic rubdown.

  My heyday in this other Hollywood lasted nearly two years. That’s a long time in the adult market; by rights I should have received a special lifetime achievement award. But audiences are notoriously fickle, and soon they were looking for new stars. The ‘clone’ look was all the rage: clubs were full of men with walrus moustaches, enormous muscles and leather chaps. To me, they looked ridiculous: hyper-masculine on the outside, but all too willing to discuss the latest quiche recipe once you got them home. I decided to bow out of the industry on a high. My last film for Peter von Harden teamed me with some of the legends of gay erotica, on exclusive ‘loan’ from other studios: Kip Noll, Al Parker and Casey Donovan. Together we made cinema history in what I consider to be von Harden’s masterpiece, a tribute to his idol Ingmar Bergman entitled The Seventh Inch.

  When I retired from film-making, I discovered that I was quite a celebrity in New York City. It was the time of the disco boom: chic new night clubs were opening all over town, where the glitterati mixed with the street kids in a hedonistic utopia, fuelled by the exciting new dance sounds and by the inevitable shovels-full of cocaine. Free from the demands of von Harden’s gruelling shooting schedules, I threw myself into the party life, enjoying my fame. I knew them all: Liza Minnelli, Truman Capote, my old friends the Jaggers, Andy Warhol (‘I love your films,’ he said one night as I stood in the queue for Studio 54) were all close friends. I was out every night for nearly two years.