Myra Breckinridge

by Gore Vidal

  Well, that took the wind out of those sails. He absolutely shrank into his chair, contracted before my eyes. The huge open face shut tight against my imperious gaze. Frankly I can think of no pleasure greater than to approach an open face and swiftly say whatever needs to be said to shut it. Myron disapproved of this trait in me but I believed then, as I do now, that if one is right, the unsayable must be said, and the faces that I temporarily shut will, in the long run, be better faces for the exercise.

  Buck did not agree. “These boys and girls are a cross-section of the youth of this country, no better, no worse. What they have got that is unusual and which may disqualify them from attending your Business School at Harvard is the overwhelming desire to be in show business, to have their names and faces known to all the world, to see themselves beloved by strangers, and that, believe me, is the only truly gratifying life any human can have, once they get the bug, that is, like I did, and like they have.”

  “My dear Buck,” I addressed him warmly, a husky Jean Arthur note to my voice, “you are unusual. Unique. You were—are—a star. You were—and through the reruns of your old movies on TV, you still are, permanently—beloved. Long after these two bodies, yours and mine, have gone to dust and this room is gone, and these boys and girls have all grown old and died and their descendants come and gone, you will live. Buck Loner, the Singin’ Shootin’ Radio Cowboy, astride Sporko, will ride the ranges of the world’s imagination. You are for all time. They are not and never can be.”

  I had him there. My famous one-two, learned from Myron: first, excessive flattery with a grain of truth swathed in cultured nacre; then the lethal puncheroo. His face reflected ecstasy and dismay. Myra’s round.

  “Well, honey, I see what you mean and it’s a real subtle point you got there. I mean, yes, I did make eighteen feature-length oaters, that’s true, and that bastard lawyer of mine never put in one word in my contracts about future resale to the TV even though I once said to him, ‘Sydney, there is going to be this TV just like there was radio and when it comes the Buck Loner features are going to be worth their weight in solid platinum.’ But he paid me no mind and . . . But that’s not what we were talking about. No. It was about the kids, yes.” He frowned. “Now they are good kids who for the most part come from underprivileged homes across the length and breadth of this country, and they hitchhike to sunny California in order that they might be stars, like me. They get jobs here and there to support themselves while they study at the Academy where we do our darnedest to bring out the creative potential of each and every—”

  “Can the brochure, daddy,” I said, surprising myself by the Fifties jargon that so amused Myron but rather repelled me. “You’re in business to make money, and you do.”

  He looked genuinely hurt. “Well now, honey, of course I am making money or I should say eking out an existence, real estate taxes being what they are in this high-type residential area . . .” Noticing the scorn in my face (and realizing that I am on to his conning), he quickly got away from the ticklish subject of our mutual property.

  “Anyway, I genuinely want to see these boys and girls happy because—you may laugh and probably will—I believe in Love and I try to create that sort of atmosphere here where they are as much as possible screened from the harshness of the world, which they get quite enough of working as waitresses in drive-ins and so on, not to mention the unhappy often broken homes they come from. I try to give them the glamour and excitement of show business, of fame, of stardom without the pain of failure, the terrible ordeal of real-life show business where so many hearts are broken every day, needlessly, but that’s the way it goes. Here at least they are able to perform on our closed-circuit TV and then read the reviews in our school paper which are always good and constructive. They can cut discs which are played on our Muzak-type system. They have special courses in how to give interviews to the press which they can then read in the school magazine. In fact, until it was recently discontinued, our late-night closed-circuit TV talk show was as good as NBC’s, with our stars being interviewed by a fellow student, himself a star on the order of Johnny Carson. So with all those things, for a time, within these walls, more than a thousand young men and women with stars in their eyes are happy.”

  No doubt about it, he was most effective. When he spoke of hearts needlessly broken (the sort of phrase Myron would have hooted at), I confess tears came to my eyes. For he was paraphrasing Betty Hutton after one of her many failures on television. She never had any luck, that girl. Possibly because she does not realize that she is a true goddess, as a result of all those pictures she made at Paramount during the Forties; films in which she was the demonic clown, the drum majorette of Olympus or, as Parker Tyler puts it with his usual wisdom: “The Hutton comedienne is a persuasive hieroglyph that symbolizes something deeply ingrained in modern morality: the commoner man’s subconscious impulse, when a girl evades or refuses a kiss, to knock her out, take it, and have done.”

  Never was Tyler more on the mark than when he analyzed Hutton’s “epileptico-mimetic pantomime,” in which he saw straight through the strenuous clowning to the hard fact that American women are eager for men to rape them and vice versa; and that in every American there is a Boston Strangler longing to break a neck during orgasm. Ours is a violent race.

  Buck and I agreed to disagree. But though he is a fool, he is also a man of formidable character and persuasiveness and thus a dangerous antagonist. It will require all my genius to destroy him . . . and destroy him I must, for not only has he cheated me of Myron’s proper inheritance, he represents all that I detest in the post-Forties culture: a permissive slovenliness of mind and art. It is all like, like, like . . . “like help,” as the Californian said when he was drowning. They all use “like” in a way that sets my teeth on edge. Not that I am strict as a grammarian. I realize that a certain looseness of style is necessary to create that impression of spontaneity and immediacy which is the peculiar task of post-Gutenberg prose, if there is to be such a thing. But I do object to “like” because of its mindless vagueness. “What time is it, Rusty?”

  “Like three o’clock, Miss Myra,” he said, after looking at his watch. He knew the exact time but preferred to be approximate. Well, I shall teach him to tell time among other things.

  BUCK LONER REPORTS—

  Recording Disc No. 715—

  5 February

  Flagler and Flagler dont seem to be getting much of anywhere with the case they say that Gertrudes will is in order leaving her share of the property to Myron and Myrons will though not made by a lawyer was duly witnessed and will stand up in court leaving everything to his wife Myra so half the property is hers according to law which strikes me as perfect injustice since if it wasnt for me there wouldnt be hardly any value at all to this land even though it is Westwood the lawyers suggest I settle with her for the current going price of these acres in Westwood for land which would be in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand bucks which I am not about to pay also I got a hunch she is out for even bigger game for she has lately taken to making little jokes about what a swell team we make running the Academy I hate that woman and wish to God there was some way to get her out of my hair once and for all Flagler and Flagler are now checking up to make sure she was really married to that fag nephew thats our only hope at this point proving she wasnt married or something meanwhile I cozy her along best I can period paragraph the taking of drugs is frowned upon by this institution not only is it illegal and injurious to the health but it has been known to be harmful to the performances of those performing while under the influence some thing along those lines I must write up for the paper before the vice squad gets on my ass any more than they are now its crazy with people murdering each other from one end of L A to the other all our local storm troopers can think of is kids smoking pot which does them a lot less harm than liquor well it is a nutty world and that is for sure period paragraph dont forget to tell Hilda to send me the new French Canadian masseuse on Monday the
y say she gives a super around the world and also knows about massage remember to pick up chutney for Bobbie Dean whos cooking curry tonight

  13

  I have locked the bathroom door. Several people have tried to get in, including Rusty, but I call out to them, “Use the other john,” and they go away, doubtless thinking that I am in here with a man when actually I am simply trying to get away from the party.

  I feel very odd. I just smoked one entire marijuana cigarette, something I have never done before. In the old days Myron and I used occasionally to take a drag on someone else’s joint but never an entire stick. I always thought that drugs had no effect on me but apparently I was wrong.

  I feel like crying. The ring around the bathtub, no, the two rings, one light, one dark, his and hers, depress me. What am I doing? I, Myra Breckinridge, Woman, as I proceed in my long trailing robes across the desert. Suddenly I catch sight of my lover, a priest who has given up hope of Heaven for my body. I throw out my arms and run toward him across the silvery sands . . .

  I can hardly write. My eyes don’t focus properly but must put down all my impressions exactly for they are extraordinarily intense and important. The door of perception has swung open at last and now I know that what I always suspected was true is true, that time is space made fluid, that these miniskirts are too short for me; that time is a knee made fluid. That is hell.

  14

  A terrible hangover, the result of mixing gin and marijuana, though pot is supposed not to leave one with any ill effect, unless of course that is simply a legend cultivated by drug addicts. I am in my office, trying to prepare for the first class of the day. Only with the greatest effort am I able to write these lines. My hands tremble. I feel quite ill.

  The party was given by one of the students in the Music Department, Clem or Clint something or other. I had never seen him before but yesterday morning Gloria Gordon (who is in my Empathy I class) told me that he gave marvelous “far-out” parties and that I would be welcome to come last night as he, Clem or Clint, had admired me from a distance.

  So Laura came to Petrarch’s party, to put it stylishly, and got stoned out of her head. It was too humiliating and yet during those moments when I lay in that empty bathtub with the two rings, staring up at the single electric light bulb, I did have the sense that I was at one with all creation. The notes I made under the influence do not begin to record what I was actually feeling, largely because I was forced to break them off when a kind of paralysis set in. Apparently I was not able to move or speak until shortly before dawn when Clem or Clint and Gloria broke the lock on the bathroom door and rescued me from my gaudy reveries.

  Fortunately, they took it all as a huge joke, but I am still humiliated at having got myself in such a situation, without dignity and finally without revelation, for in the light of day I find it difficult to believe in cosmic consciousness. In fact, this terrible hangover seems to me proof that the celebrated insights of the mystics are physiological, the result of a drastic reduction of sugar in the blood that goes to the brain. My brain, deprived of sugar for some hours last night, now feels as if it were full of an expanding fluid on the verge of seeking desperate egress through the top of a papier-mâché skull.

  I did find the party interesting, at least in its early stages. Of those present, I was one of the oldest, which did nothing for my sense of security so laboriously achieved in those long sessions with Dr. Montag. But I was a good sport, laughing and chatting and, all in all, behaving not as a teacher but as just plain Myra Breckinridge, a beautiful woman not yet thirty. As a result, several of the young men showed a sexual interest in me but though I teased them and played the flirt, I did not allow any intimacies to occur or even indicate that they might be welcomed at some future time. I preferred to be Greer Garson, a gracious lady whose compassionate breasts were more suited to be last pillow for a dying youth than as baubles for the coarse hands of some horny boy.

  But sex does not appear to be the hangup with this crowd. They wear buttons which, among other things, accuse the Governor of California of being a Lesbian, the President of being God, and Frodo (a character in a fairy tale by Tolkien) of actually existing. This is all a bit fey for my taste. But one must be open to every experience and the young, in a sense, lead us since there are now more of them than there are of us. But they are peculiar creatures, particularly to one brought up within the context of the Forties. They are quite relaxed about sex; not only do they have affairs with one another, they also attend orgies in a most matter-of-fact way, so unlike my generation with its belief in the highly concentrated sort of love that Leslie Howard felt for Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo. Yet despite all this athleticism, their true interests seem to be, in some odd way, outside sex. They like to sit for long periods doing nothing at all, just listening to music or to what they regard as music. They are essentially passive; hence the popularity of pot.

  Of course, my generation (chronologically, not spiritually) began all this. We of the Fifties saw the beginning of Zen as a popular force. Certainly our Beats were nothing if not passive in their attitude to life and experience. They were always departing, never arriving. Neither Myron nor I shared their pleasures or attitudes for we were, despite our youth, a throwback to the Forties, to the last moment in human history when it was possible to possess a total commitment to something outside oneself. I mean of course the war and the necessary elimination of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. And I do not exaggerate when I declare that I would give ten years of my life if I could step back in time for just one hour and visit the Stage Door Canteen in Hollywood, exactly the way that Dane Clarke did in the movie of the same name, and like him, meet all the great stars at their peak and perhaps even, like Dane’s buddy Bob Hutton, have a romance with Joan Leslie, a star I fell hopelessly in love with while watching Sergeant York. But where is Joan now? Where are all those beautiful years of war and sacrifice and Pandro S. Berman films? None of this will ever come again, except in gray cloudy miniatures on the Late Show, and soon, I pray, in the sinewy prose of Myra Breckinridge as she reworks and completes her late husband’s certain-to be masterpiece Parker Tyler and the Films of the Forties.

  But what will the current generation think of my efforts? That is the question. I find that any reference to the stars of the Forties bores them. “Who was Gary Cooper?” asked one young thing last night; to which another girl answered, “The one with the big ears,” thinking he was Clark Gable! But they all find Humphrey Bogart fascinating and he may yet prove to be my bridge to them.

  Conversation from last night.

  “Like experience isn’t everything, Myra. I mean like you also got to have it deep down inside you.”

  “But what is it?”

  “What’s deep down inside you, that’s what it is. What you are.”

  “But isn’t what you are what experience makes you?”

  “No, it’s like what you feel . . .”

  Like. Like. Like! The babble of this subculture is drowning me! Although my companion was a lanky youth of the sort I am partial to, I simply shut him out and watched the group that was dancing in the center of the room, a dozen boys and girls gyrating without touching one another, each in his or her private world which is the key to the game of the moment: don’t touch me and I won’t touch you. While the operative word is “Cool.” Like fun? Like crazy!

  Of the dancers, Rusty Godowsky was easily the most exciting and certainly the most attractive, in his faded chinos and checked shirt, whose top two buttons were missing, revealing a smooth muscular neck at whose base, just below the hollows of the collarbone, tendrils of bronze hair curl, looking as if they would be silky to the touch, unlike the usual male Brillo. Soon I shall know for certain their texture. Poor Mary-Ann.

  “He does dance well, doesn’t he?” Mary-Ann sat down in the place which the metaphysician had vacated, without, I fear, my noticing his departure. Obviously she had seen me watching Rusty. She is not entirely stupid.

  “I was studying h
im for posture.” I sounded colder than I intended, but she had taken me by surprise and I dislike it when people observe me without my knowledge. “I will say he moves very well when he dances,” I added with a degree of warmth which encouraged her to smile shyly.

  “That’s being an athlete. It’s just when he walks he sort of lumbers.”

  “Well, we’ll soon take care of that,” I said briskly, and indeed I shall, poor bastard.

  Mary-Ann chattered away, unaware of my designs. “We’ve been talking about maybe getting married in June after we finish the course-that is, if we can both get work. Of course I can always pick up a little money modeling. I’m not really crazy about a career, you know. Fact, it’s just to be with Rusty that I’m taking this music course, to keep an eye on him. With all these pretty girls around and wild for him, I can’t take any chances.”

  “You make a charming couple.” I noticed again how extraordinarily attractive she is, with that fresh unclouded complexion I so love-and envy, for the texture of the skin of my face is not all that Helena Rubinstein would desire. In my day I have been too much a sun-worshipper and the skin must pay a price for the spirit’s refreshment, and I was certainly refreshed by those long sunny afternoons at Jones Beach and amongst the Far Rockaways.