If I had ideas about who I was to become, how I would integrate myself into society, those ideas changed and morphed over the years. It’s the plight of the minority. No matter how much integrity one dreams of maintaining, the times dictate otherwise; it’s a matter of a certain amount of conforming or perishing, the typecasting of history. If you were gay in those days you were a loner, a crazy serial killer, or the zany, shallow-yet-understanding best friend, who is full of styling advice and says “you go, girl” a lot. I’m guilty of giving in to those expectations, taking on some of those attributes after years of fighting against them.
About fifteen years ago I was on Hollywood Squares, which was a dream come true for me, having been a devoted fan since childhood. Just the idea of climbing those stairs and sitting in a box with eight other zany celebrities was a thrill. There were joke writers who helped the celebrities if they got caught without a witty response—something I saw as superfluous. One of the answers they wrote for me ended in you go, girl! But I thought of a better answer that was much funnier, and the first time I was called on I told my joke, which got a lukewarm laugh, if not a sort of groan. The next time I was called on I used their joke, practically shouting “you go, girl!!” at the end. I got a huge raucous laugh and a cheap, disillusioning lesson in what plays.
Things have changed somewhat since then, but being a half-out gay teenager in the 1970s, I understood even then what might be tolerable. I knew in order to be true to myself and integrate myself into the world I’d have to comply somewhat, even exaggerate. All of this informed my approach to playing Touchstone in the Spring Drama Festival. Ironic that Touchstone is written as a sex maniac who pursues women relentlessly. Instead I identified with the role of the clown who calls out fakery—another acceptable gay stereotype—and I focused on that. I made my own costume, something no one else did. It consisted of a motley coat, assembled from remnants of fabrics I’d collected. I wore it with bicolor tights I made—even though I was as insecure as ever about my thighs, which no matter how thin I got, I still perceived as hugely fat. And I made a jester hat with bells on the ends, and a staff wrapped with ribbons like a maypole, onto which I fastened a papier mâché likeness I made of my own head wearing the same hat.
Not long before our rehearsals started, a rumor circulated that the film director Alan Parker was making a movie about our school, and that he would be casting some of us in it. It turned out to be true, and it was the most exciting news any of us could dream of. Originally it was supposed to be called Hot Lunch, but that turned out to be the name of a popular porn movie, so the name was changed to Fame. I read for the part of Montgomery, the sensitive acting student who ultimately realizes he’s gay, but I had no illusions that I’d be cast. When I went on the audition, I shrugged and then read the character description aloud: “Montgomery is a skinny, red-headed boy of fourteen.” I looked straight at Alan Parker and said, “That’s none for three,” which made him chuckle. But Alan Parker did come to all of our Spring Drama Festival productions looking for bits and pieces to include in the movie. When he saw As You Like It, he decided to include me, wearing my jester hat, carrying my jester staff, and reciting one of the Touchstone monologues.
The movie was largely shot in an old high school on Tenth Avenue whose interiors looked exactly like those of PA. The experience was mostly about waiting for shots to be set up. It was good practice for anyone getting into the movie business, most of which is about waiting. That day on the set—a small classroom with a stage—there was a huge camera and a lot of technical people crammed into the room. There was a smoke machine generating smoke (I’m not sure to what effect, because there was never any appearance of smoke in the scene). Alan Parker called “action” a few times, and I proceeded with my monologue: “Now I’ll stand to it. The pancakes were naught but the mustard was good…” went the monologue that no matter how hard I ever tried, I could never make funny. I did it three or four times. That took half an hour, after waiting for two days. The footage was cut into the montage at the start of the movie depicting kids auditioning for PA, and it was my big moment. A lot of my classmates and I were extras in the crowd scenes. We got paid for our working days, and we got our SAG cards, something beginner actors dream about. Altogether, I worked five or six days over the course of that summer after graduation, and I ended up in the movie for a total of about three minutes.
I went to the opening screening with Kevin, whom I remained close with for years. It was the late fall of the following year, a big day at the Ziegfeld Theatre, at that time the last real movie palace standing. I reconvened with some friends I hadn’t seen since graduation, more than a year before. That movie was an immortalization of the time we spent at Performing Arts. A manifestation of our dreams and expectations. And though we were secretly so proud to have gone to such a school, thrilled that our story was preserved forever, we acted very blasé about the movie, as teenagers are wont to do. But seeing the old gang, we couldn’t hide our enthusiasm—hugging each other, declaiming how much we missed each other and really meaning it. It was a validation for me. These were people I loved who loved me back. No delusion. I’d made real friends in the real world, independent of my family and the community, and no one could take that away from me. We sat in the back of the house and smoked (yes, in those days everyone smoked in movie theatres) careful not to seem too enthusiastic, overly critical of the tiny details about PA that the movie got wrong.
Two or three students from our class remained together at Juilliard, and there was a bigger group of about six or seven at Purchase who stayed together, but by the time of that movie premiere, most of us were already flung to the far reaches of our destinies. I had moved into another realm, and I acknowledged, sadly, that those years, maybe even the best of my life, were in the past.
14
In June of 1978, just after graduating high school, I took a taxi to Kennedy Airport with way too much luggage, and boarded an overnight plane for Paris. I got it into my head that I had to see Europe. The Avedon exhibit had convinced me that Paris was heaven on Earth, and there were constant references made in my evening classes at Parsons to the art abroad, the galleries in Florence and Rome, and especially the Louvre. In that year, between puppet shows, selling sketches, and whatever money I made from IS New York, I managed to amass a little over two thousand dollars, which was more like seven thousand dollars today. The plan was to fly to Paris, spend a month there, spend three weeks traveling by rail to destinations in Italy and Spain, then fly to London. Two months abroad. I made one reservation at a cheap Paris hotel on the Left Bank, and I bought a Eurail Pass that would get me anywhere I wanted to go on the Continent. I had no other plans or reservations. I had it in my head that I would let the spirit move me. I went entirely on my own. No tour, no group, no friends. I was seventeen.
I made very little of the goodbyes to my family. I was afraid my mother would try to stop me if she had more than a minute to consider what I was embarking on. Determined to be chic in Paris, I packed two enormous suitcases with all the clothes I’d made for the trip—a grey suede jacket, jumpsuits, and paper-bag pants, a BeDazzled jean jacket. On the plane I wore a massive, taupe gabardine thrift-shop trench coat, which I thought was the perfect attire for the mystery and drama I might encounter on the night flight to Paris. I had no fear. I sat in the back of that plane full of excitement, thinking of what a glamourous time I had in store. I had more than enough money for the two months away, having also budgeted to buy myself some new clothes.
About an hour into the flight out of JFK, terrible dread set in. The old falling backwards feeling came over me even as I hurtled forward at an amazing speed through the dark of night. The magic plans for adventure were replaced by panic that grew and grew to the size of the very continent I was heading toward—the huge, lonely mass of unknown: Europe. I was terrified about finding my way, about speaking foreign languages, but mostly about being alone for that length of time with no one to talk to. It seemed like a
great idea in the planning—I love being alone—but suddenly the prospect, when it was upon me, was harrowing. I made it through the flight only by telling myself I’d turn right around the minute we landed and take the next flight back to New York.
When we landed my better self prevailed, and the daylight eased my panic a little. I ventured from Charles de Gaulle and then on the Métro to the center of Paris to find my hotel. I misread something and I got out at the wrong stop. I emerged from underground up to the banks of the Seine on that hot, sunny morning, drenched in sweat, my luggage and baggy layers of wool weighing heavily on my back and my spirit. I schlepped up the banks of the Seine through a marketplace. Everything was for sale: mattresses, paintings, postcards, wicker baskets, birds and chickens in thin wire cages. On I trudged, desperately trying to recapture the bravery I had when I left New York, stopping in my tracks every fifteen minutes in a panic to frisk myself for my passport and my American Express Travelers Cheques. The map I got from the airport diagrammed a jumbled maze. I walked and walked for what felt like hours till I found rue Saint-André des Arts in the Sixth Arrondissement. I couldn’t be too far from the Hôtel Saint-André des Arts, but for some reason I could not find it. Welcome to Paris! I walked up and down the block at least three times. Finally in desperation, I piled myself and my bags into a taxi and said in my best French accent: “Hôtel Saint-André des Arts, s’il vous plaît.” The driver chuckled. Then he launched into a torrent of rude foreign syllables, destroying whatever confidence I had in my sad high-school French, which I’d been boning up on those weeks in advance. Without moving the car an inch he pointed to a shabby brown edifice with gold letters, right in front of the taxi: HOTEL ST ANDRE DES ARTS.
I checked in and was led up steep, narrow stairs that felt like they’d give way under the weight of my luggage, to a room that possessed a Zola-esque rawness, with slanting floors and an austerity that filled me with even more dread. It was dingy in a way that a JAP from Brooklyn, who had only stayed in bourgeois luxury hotels for family vacations to the Bahamas and the like, had never experienced before. It was a stifling little room located in the back of the building, no window, lit solely by a single sconce above the bed. The walls that weren’t filthy exposed brick were painted a soul-crushing brown. The bed was a tiny damp cot made up with old linens that were sheer with wear. The bathroom was a dingy shared concern down the hall. Worse, my room didn’t have a lock on the door, which I only discovered that night, when I tried to get to sleep. I jammed a chair up to the door in order to keep it shut. I fell asleep at midnight as though bludgeoned on the head, and I awoke a little after 2:00 A.M. in more of a panic than on the plane the night before. It was a dread that had actual physical attributes: My arms and legs ached and my stomach churned. I was all alone in a dark city where I was sure that everyone else was sleeping peacefully through the night. I called my mother and cried.
At 3:30 A.M. I left the hotel and started to walk through the dark city. And something incredible happened. As I walked I noticed the lights of a storefront where the shadows of bustling activity played on the drawn curtains. Then a few blocks later I noticed another such place. And a few blocks later, I came upon a third, this one with a lit sign: PTISSERIE. I braced myself and went in. I stood for a long while at the counter, enraptured by the sugary smells of baking. After a long contemplation, I pointed at a small strawberry tart. A baker with greasy black hair sneered at me. My attempt to smile was not reciprocated. With the tart in my possession I stepped back into the street and took a bite. Sweet, but not overwhelmingly, the freshness of the strawberries came through. After the third bite I let myself believe how good it was; the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten in my young life. As I backtracked to my hotel I stopped into another pastry shop and bought what looked like a large éclair that was filled with hazelnut pastry cream—the second most delicious thing I’d ever eaten. From that moment I felt I could at least try to handle whatever new depths of fear and dread I would encounter in Paris. Knowing those pastry shops were open in the middle of the night soothed my nerves to the extent that I was able to continue.
The next day I purchased a small red book of arrondissements from a tabac nearby, another thing that made me feel a bit more secure, and I set out to see the Louvre, which was the reason I took the trip in the first place. I arrived on foot at the museum, which in those days created an entirely different impression than it does today. It was before the I.M. Pei pyramid, and before the travel and tourism boom of the 1980s and ’90s. The Louvre was so elegant then. The entrance was through the front door, a very grand front door, not a descent on an escalator into the basement of a glass prism, as it is now. Before the relentless throngs of people started showing up in the 1990s, desperate to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa, the Louvre had a dusty, deserted quality. It was an intimate experience and, paradoxically, it felt grander for that. There were pictures hung on walls, enough lights to see, and a few other people meandering through the deserted galleries. Looking at art there seemed more an individual experience, just you and the pictures. It was easier to form a real opinion, as easy to not like something as it was to love it. Now in most museums all over the world, there’s a lot of design and glass and stanchions and guards and so much wall text telling you what to think.
I wandered the galleries of the Louvre filled with awe and my usual growing sense of dread. I didn’t really know what I was looking at, and I felt defeated as I progressed. I was a museum habitué back home, but this was different; this was a deluge. It was my trip to the Louvre. So much to see and not nearly enough time. So much iconography and symbolism—so much history to grasp. It was too much for me—which I realized after returning three or four times that week. So enigmatic and unconquerable, the Louvre. I cried a lot on that trip. I was ripped in half between hate and love. Inspired by the Manets and Degas, tortured by the Renaissance, confused by the neoclassicals. This ambivalence fit perfectly into my overall impression of the city. I wrote the following lines in my sketchbook: “Feeling inspired and angry. I promise to conquer the Louvre if I live through this trip. And I might come back permanently!”
* * *
The trip was never meant as a fashion pilgrimage. What I really wanted was to learn about art; my focus was on museums. But I did manage to see a few of the famous shops like Hermès on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and Dior on the avenue Montaigne where I caught a glimpse of a lady who, in the middle of July, was dressed in dove-grey flannel, the tightest midcalf-length skirt I’d yet seen, seamed stockings, high-heeled grey suede shoes, and a small pigeon-colored hat with a pom-pom. She was being waited on, while holding a leash with a curly grey poodle on the other end that matched her suit. Straight out of Avedon.
The great pleasures of food were impossible to escape in Paris then. No matter how unfriendly a place, the subject of food aggressively reached out to even those with no interest. It lent a false feeling of security and well-being that offset a little of the disdain I was met with those weeks. For every rude encounter there was a soothing pastry or cassoulet. It seemed that any little place one wandered into from the street had some perfect dish of food that was brought to the table with very little ceremony and a sneer. There was no such thing as bad food, whether it was in a proper restaurant or the most insignificant café. Perhaps because of my very limited culinary exposure at that time, and because food in the United States was so middling by comparison, every bite seemed revelatory. Even the breakfast at the scary hotel was sublime. Each morning, aching from sleeplessness and the culture shock that came in the night, I’d stumble down the stairs, greeted by that sublime café au lait, bread, and butter.
On my second night in Paris, in an unremarkable bistro near my hotel, I ordered the first thing on the indecipherable menu. Something called “vol-au-vent.” A small puff-pastry cylinder arrived at the table filled with a mysterious seafood, my first taste of crab—made better by the breaking of the rules of kashruth. It had the special flavor of tarrago
n, which I had never tasted before—another revelation. It was probably meant as a first course, but I was too scared to order anything else; it had gone so well to that point, I decided not to press my luck, I paid and left.
On one of my last evenings in Paris, as I wandered the quai des Grand Augustins, I came upon a restaurant called Lapérouse. It seemed way too fancy for me, but I was starving, and I felt brave, so I walked in. Right from the start I was treated with politesse, and having been exposed only to incredible rudeness for most of the trip, this made me even more paranoid than usual for the first half hour, sure the waiter was setting me up for a great embarrassment. He spoke a little English, and he indulged me with a few friendly words. He even described the dishes on the menu and made recommendations. And in that wonderful, plush belle époque décor, facing Notre-Dame Cathedral as the sun was setting, everything eased. It was a small oasis of pleasure where there was no work involved. No studying or analyzing. No fear of misunderstanding, no hostility. Nothing to do but sit there and soak up the luxury and eat the incredible food. I remember the price of the dinner was probably equal to the cost of all the food I’d eaten those entire two weeks in Paris, but it was worth it. What I learned at that moment was that I would never enjoy touring Europe in youth hostels, waiting for kindness to show itself. Those weeks I learned that ease of travel abroad—comfort, good food, and a sense of safety—is expensive. Travel might be fun, but on my terms. Terms that had more to do with restaurants like Lapérouse and less to do with the Paris Métro.
A month in Paris wasn’t in the cards for me. What was supposed to be a fun adventure turned into an angsty taking of emotional inventory. Even doing my best to adjust, there’s something sad about being alone abroad for great stretches of time. And insomnia is especially less fun in a foreign place. After two weeks in Paris I proceeded to Rome for a week and Florence for a few days. Then another week in London. There were benefits to seeing the Vatican and Westminster Abbey by myself for the first time. The Uffizi Gallery was there to be soaked up in my own way. There was no one else to wait for or accommodate—no other opinions to process.
I.M. Page 17