The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  Then I began to notice that my paychecks, albeit from a dozen different banks, came from similarly named accounts; apparently all these newspapers were owned or controlled by the same person or persons or corporation. We know now that they represented early overseas investments by our government’s newly established Central Intelligence Agency. And that I was in that part of Africa where UC was growing at the same time. I sure was a lousy reporter to not pick up on anything about this. Just like my extreme isolation kept me from having any true notion of what was really going on back home.

  I got tired of writing for shitty newspapers in the fleapits of the world. On a break I went to London. I saw a sign in Mayfair for Magna-American Motion Picture Enterprises. On a hunch I went inside and asked if I might speak with someone in charge. I asked the man who came out if he had any work for a smart on-the-ball experienced reporter and he hired me on the spot. My entry into the film industry was as easy as that. Moses Rattner liked me. I would discover that all film tycoons have names like Moses Rattner. It doesn’t help to be gentile in the film industry.

  My job was to comb books and manuscripts, galleys, scripts, articles, anything with plot or story that could serve as the basis for a movie as long as it wasn’t based on a current event or the truth. Because the address appealed to me, I rented a tiny house off Fleet Street, barely more than a room and a bath, on one of London’s oldest streets, Jews Yard.

  I thought I’d be happy now but I wasn’t and it got worse. My Yaddah shrink Dr. Rivtov, to whom I’d written, wrote back, “Just call Anna Freud. She’s listed in the phone book.” And so I undertook what would turn out to be a psychoanalysis with one of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s students, Dr. William Gillespie, to improve my rotten sense of self. He was evidently sympathetic toward homosexuals and was even president of their International Society of Shrinks. “You’re rotten to the core, Maude, rotten to the core,” was an old Noel Coward song that Beatrice Lillie made famous. There will come to be a crackpot theory that UC is really caused by a bad self-image. I know it’s crackpot and everyone with half a brain knows it’s crackpot, but it persists to this day. “Internalized homophobia” is cheap-shot jargon used by amateur and quite a few professional “arbiters” of what’s “really” wrong with us. Dear Dr. Gillespie would have none of this. And, unlike Rivtov, he did not believe in changing us to straights.

  The English were still getting over the war. It bothered me that people educated at Oxford and Cambridge were forced to live in tacky bedsitters and feed coins into meters to keep warm or have a hot bath. What kind of government allowed people to so stew in such postwar juices? I didn’t have many English friends beyond a trail of pasty lads who wanted me to fuck them and fall in love with them and take them with me back to the States.

  London was filled with blacklisted American screenwriters who’d come up against Congress, Vurd and Roy Cohn and Sam Sport. (Dereck Dumster was with Roy but no one was paying him any attention yet.) They envied my job and I was able to hire a few of them. It was hard for me to fully comprehend why my own country had exiled them, had taken away their ability to make a living. As I was learning how to write for a living myself, I couldn’t conceive of being denied the right to do so by my very own people. I was so far from home as to be unaware of all the social upheavals going on over there, particularly among homosexuals. We were legal at last in England, so the Brits, like The New York Truth, weren’t writing about gay problems anywhere.

  Moses Rattner soon offered me the chance to write screenplays and I was to draw on various realms of terror I’d covered roaming the world; many of these awful places were exceptionally cheap to film in, which was Moses’s “Bottom Line.” When I described my screenplays and their subject matter rather disparagingly to Dr. Gillespie during my psychoanalysis (yes, five times a week on the couch), he said it sounded like a good opportunity to bear witness. And that this was the true calling of a writer. As he rarely said anything, much less anything of a complimentary nature, I felt I’d been knighted by the Queen. So I was meant to be a writer? This corny shit I was churning out was writing? I must confess that in all this I was finding out that I enjoyed writing even if it was shit. I loved words and language and discovery.

  My house on Jews Yard was my only safe place. As my depression continued, I hardly would leave it. I didn’t need to go into an office to write the stuff I was writing. The actors we employed spoke little English, so too many words of more than two syllables were useless. One day I heard a gurgling in my basement and found behind an old nonfunctioning water heater a cache of papers that turned out to be the love longings of a long-dead homosexual American playwright. I started to dream of William the playwright and his younger lover, whom he seems to have somehow lost. I came to feel their presence, for I summoned the young lover back for him as I lay on my mattress masturbating while I pictured them making love in this same place a few centuries ago. Thad sounded to be a most sweet young man. I’m overcome with the realization that I’m still looking for what they were looking for then. St. Arbuthom? I still can find no reference to this name in either England or Holland.

  I slept with a lot of men. It was the easiest way to lasso loneliness. Nights were long in London. I was always cold. Usually no guy my age had a decent flat or seemed to bathe regularly or could afford to do something about his teeth, still rotten from the bad nutrition of war. London still had many scars from the war. No one made much money, and I picked up a lot of checks.

  I was trying my best to figure out what “bearing witness” amounted to. My current slate of screenplays included alligators in Haiti, a teenage interfaith love story in Ireland/Northern Ireland, a teenage interracial love story in Cape Town (being shot at the same time and with the same cast and crew as an interracial western), and a murder on the moors. Moses wouldn’t go for anything “too classy” and he definitely vetoed any sort of “message.” I sensed it was time for me to father something more serious. But since a Freudian psychoanalysis takes a long time, there wasn’t any challenge in being in too much of a hurry.

  I found myself thinking of Daniel a lot. He seemed to be the last man, maybe the only one, I remember holding fondly. I missed America, and he came to embody that. I knew he was a doctor practicing in Washington. I often jerked off thinking of him.

  Then one day Moses told me he was sending me to Hollywood. I was going to write a Rust Legend Production! I was going to be paid a quarter of a million dollars! I was to adapt Bleak House by Charles Dickens. As a musical! It was going to be a piece of shit. There was no way it could not be a piece of shit because Rust Legend only made pieces of shit. The good doctor and I agreed it wasn’t a bad moment to investigate a more remunerative life back in my homeland.

  FRED GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

  Rust Legend.

  He came west from Tarpoo, Nebraska, “plum spot on,” he liked to tell you, “in the dead center of the heart of this country, where I was born as Graham Puss. My students—I was a sixth-grade schoolteacher—were constantly telling me how handsome I was. ‘You ought to be a movie star, Mr. Puss,’ they constantly said to me. ‘You’re so very very handsome.’ Behind my back they entered my photograph in a talent contest and the judge from MGM came right to my door in Tarpoo and knocked and I said, ‘Who is it, please?’ and he said, ‘A very good fairy,’ and I opened the door and without even waiting for me to pack—‘You won’t need your old clothes,’ he said; ‘we’re going to give you brand-new ones!’—this nice sweet man whisked me to Hollywood, where I immediately started my training to become a movie star.”

  What would Dickens have done with Rust Legend? What would I do?

  “I was assigned to my first movie and you’ll never guess who was its star! Cary Grant! Cary took one look at me and said, ‘I must have you for my very own immediately!’ and he took me back to his apartment, he lived in an apartment in those days, on Fountain (way before he and Randolph Scott had their ocean love nest in Santa Monica), and he locked me up. That’s what he
did. He wouldn’t let me out! I was locked up in Cary Grant’s apartment, never to see so much as the lights of Beverly Hills. ‘I don’t want anybody to meet you! You are so very handsome they will want you too,’ he said. I had to find a way to break out! I had to run away from Cary Grant! He had guards watching me every minute he wasn’t there! His chauffeur, his doormen, his maids, his secretary, everyone was warned by Cary not to let me out ‘under pain of exile from my kingdom should my divine morsel who is so very very handsome get out of my apartment!’ His voice, that beautiful mellow voice, could turn ugly. He wasn’t all smiles and charm by a long shot. ‘You are the most handsome young man in the whole wide world,’ he said to me each night as he tried to cuddle me in bed. I was afraid he would stick that thing into me yet again, or worse want me to stick mine into him. He was insatiable. This was not a life I wanted to live. It was not the life of an MGM starlet. And I had no way even to get a message to Mr. Mayer! Mr. Louis B. Mayer. The head of the MGM studio himself. The very man who was responsible for my being whisked out here from Tarpoo. I wasn’t allowed to use the phone! Each day there was a new biddy standing over me, sterner and more threatening, and taller, than the last. I don’t know how he found so many big tall strong forbidding women. They all had arms like Tarzan. I learned later he got them all from Central Casting. What actress wouldn’t do anything for Cary Grant? The cheapskate didn’t pay them a dime. They all thought they were auditioning and I was grading them. No wonder they acted with such determination. I still have black-and-blue marks from some of those Ten Ton Tessies. But I found a way! You cannot outfox foxy Rusty. One of the biddies was smaller than the others. She said she was a stand-in. Vilma Villa Lobos, the Brazilian matadoress, couldn’t come. She’d been gored to death on the set the day before. Let me tell you, I jumped her stand-in fast! I got her arm around her back and she screamed uncle and I escaped wearing her clothes, which were just my size. Cary was very angry. He didn’t speak to me for years. By then I realized that acting was not for me. I had to be Number One. I had to become the great and popular and enormously successful movie producer I am today. And so I have, so I have. I have worked my ass off but I am here. You are here. We are making this great great movie. I have lived to see it all come true, day after day, movie after movie. Star after star. Oh, I am so tired today. Nancy wanted me to fuck her so badly last night but I said, ‘Nancy, I’m so tired, we’ll do it tomorrow night. My boots ain’t made for walking just right now.’ That’s a song she’s going to record and it’s going to be so big that Frank will want her back.”

  These autobiographical sexual updates were a regular part of our daily script conferences: I heard how Mitzi and Nancy and Carol and Helen and Virginia, the most favored of Rust’s women friends, “my girls,” a number of them old enough to be his grandmother, were all desperate for him to fuck them. I had to look him straight in the eye each time and say sharply, “Rust, this is me, Fred,” to snap him out of wherever he was. And he would slap his forehead with his palm’s heel. “Oh, yes, of course.”

  Well, at least I was in Hollywood. The months I’d spent writing a script for Rust called Beyond the Mountains, Beyond the Stars, had been no fun at all. Originally based on Bleak House, it was now set in a Tibetan monastery, high up in the Himalayas, “where Monsieur Benny Henri can design glorious wafting robes of gauze and tulle and net and chiffon, in all the colors of the cosmos, with the timelessness of the timeless.” And: “So that Heinz-Herbert Montoya, Jr., can design sets of unsurpassable majesty and magic.” In other words, not just any old monastery. But also, of course, with monks. “Avec monks,” Rust would joke. Bleak House took on a new meaning.

  I had made a certain English film for Moses, Lest We Sleep Alone, the first thing I wrote that Dr. Gillespie and I were proud of, that was distinguished in Rust’s mind because it contained a good deal of what was then referred to as “full frontal nudity,” male of course. He would often ask me shyly, almost blushing, “How did you have the courage to do that! I mean, you showed Oliver Reed’s penis! And Alan Bates’s penis! However did you get them to disrobe so … completely?” I explained that this scene was filmed exactly as written in the classic novel it was adapted from, which had been in print since 1930, so the censor finally allowed it. The actors were drunk and Oliver played with his cock just before the camera rolled so his looked much bigger on-screen, and hence for all time, than Alan’s, which was not really the case. “Ooooh,” Rust gurgled. “Imagine going to the set and being able to see all that!”

  Someone had told him about Bleak House, with its lawsuit that is never resolved. Well, he’d been involved in any number of those. He’d also discovered an old novel about monks at the top of the world that appealed to him. And then, in speaking to Lollymae August, a Lovejoy Disciple, he secured the right to film his film in any Disciples of Lovejoy temple around the world that he chose. Why not bake all this into the same rich cake! “Gone with the Wind is about a lot of things.” Many hours of “conferences” turned Bleak House into a Disciples of Lovejoy monastery, and all those wretched lawyers in Chancery became monks. In his high concern for an author’s due, Rust looked around for the agent who represented “the Dickens estate” to make his deal with. “We don’t want to make too many changes in the basic material if we don’t have all the rights.”

  I had had absolutely no interest in writing this script. The more I had said no, the more Moses called me to announce further increments in Rust’s offer. I wound up with that quarter of a million dollars. I figured, yes, I would sell my soul for that. Well, perhaps I could write the great Hollywood novel about Rust Legend. Take the money and run. Take the money and get outta town.

  I had thought a lot about those monks. And my own life as a developing homosexual. I had accumulated plenty of evidence that homosexuals had an image problem and needed all the help we could get. I had learned enough from Moses how to publicize stuff, to get “causes” in the papers. Those interracial love stories had made a lot of money. They were only banned in the American South. I convinced myself that Rust could be useful. I would persuade him that we could make a great contribution to modern civilization if we dealt with the problems monks had in such isolation.

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Their attraction to each other.”

  “Attraction?”

  “You know. They want to fuck with each other.”

  “You expect me to show that in a multimillion-dollar Rust Legend Production, nine of which are among the highest-grossing films of their year?” He was fond of uttering this phrase catechistically, often in concert with “I have the taste of The American People.”

  “Perhaps Beyond the Mountains, Beyond the Stars could become the highest-grossing film of all time! Controversy sells!”

  “No, no, no! Do you think so? Let me think about this for a moment.” He went into his toilet. He often did this in the middle of meetings. He went in there to masturbate. His half brother Andre, with whom he lived, told me that. “Everyone thinks Rusty pees a lot. Unh-unh. He jerks himself off. And by the time he finishes he’s reached his decision.”

  Indeed, he did have America’s taste. Nine of the highest-grossing films of these years were indeed Rust Legend Productions. Weepies, love comedies in which no one ever fucked, out-of-retirement reappearances by former goddesses with barely enough mileage still left in them, all “swathed” in what he called over and over and over “my gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous clothes.” For him, women’s clothing was the key to his success. That half brother of his supervised the costumes. He was a good copycat. Women in shopping malls longed to wear them. It’s hard to work a huge and varied wardrobe into a monastery of monks, but Rust would manage it.

  When he came out of his private toilet he said, “I cannot do anything like what you are suggesting. My monks, if anything, will be admiring of the famous love goddesses I shall have swathed in my gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous clothes.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to do something pos
itive for our people?”

  “Our people? What people are you referring to? I am an American!”

  “Rust, we are homosexuals.”

  “Young fellow, beware you do not go too far.”

  I tried to pursue my line of argument but he suddenly got up, pulled closed the blinds, pulled closed the drapes, sent Fat Pearl, his enormously overweight secretary, who sat outside his door on the tiniest of typing chairs to buzz people into Rust’s locked office, out to an early lunch because she always overheard everything. Leading me to a sofa on the far side of his lair, he took my hand and held it throughout the following.

  “Listen, Freddie, I am going to tell you the truth about Hollywood. It goes beyond Cary and Randolph Scott living together as lovers. Or Barbara Stanwyck marrying What’s-his-name for a beard. Or George Cukor being fired from Gone with the Wind because Clark didn’t want a fairy director. Or the many many many of us hiding as I must for fear of our lives and livelihood. Jimmy Dean, that gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous young man who died, was murdered by Jack Warner. That is correct. The Jack Warner who owns Warner Brothers studio. He was murdered, Jimmy was, because he was homosexual and because Jack, to whom Jimmy was under contract, hates homosexuals. Hates! He makes puking noises if the subject comes up. When I go there for dinner he looks at me and says, ‘You are not one of those nelly fairies like Jimmy Dean, are you, Rust?’ And then he makes the puking noises as if he’s throwing up. He does this sitting at the head of his dinner table. Around this table are great great great stars, trying to eat. Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Jimmy Cagney—all of them are embarrassed for me and averting their eyes. Mr. Warner goes on: ‘I used to love Jimmy until I found out he is a fairy. I loved him so much I took out a big insurance policy on his life in case anything happens to him. He’s uncircumcised. Did you know that about Jimmy? My big young star on the rise is uncircumcised. He’s a queer and he’s uncircumcised and he’s about to go to Metro to star in a film for them behind my back. What kind of gratitude is that? You tell me. Roz, you are a fair person. Tell me what kind of gratitude is that?’ Everyone sat there like we were all encased in cement. Finally Bette spoke up. Brave Bette. No wonder our people, as you so sweetly call us, worship her. ‘Jack, stop this immediately! You might show some gratitude if for no other reason than that he is making you more money loaning him out to Metro than you ever put into him. Now stop it and eat this marvelous dinner!’ And then she turned to me: ‘Rust, darling, ignore Jack. He can be a monster, as I well know.’ That Bette, what a pal. What wasn’t being said out loud was that Jimmy Dean hated Jews as much as Jack Warner hated homos. I mean our people. I mean your people. I don’t know what I mean. Jimmy had been fucking with Sam Sport and learned that Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen and their Jewish mafia mobs were secretly investing huge sums of money in the Warner Brothers studio to save it. So Jimmy really had to be eliminated. Which he was. Jack had him bumped off in that car crash. And Jack sent a huge display of flowers to the funeral with ‘Goodbye Jimmy you ungrateful uncut fairy’ spelled out in red roses. Now you please tell me how I am going to make a movie in this town that portrays affectionate men. I can’t even live with my lover without calling him my half brother! The very president of our biggest union, Peter Ruester, blabbed names of commies and fairies at those awful congressional hearings. The names he named will never work in this town again. So if you have any notions of bringing enlightenment for ‘our people,’ get over them. In fact, it might be safer if you left town. With your opinions you could easily be murdered too.”