GRAUERHOLZ: I read an excerpt from this in Christopher Street.
ISHERWOOD: Oh that’s right yes. I think we have the beginning of the book in there and there’s also a bit in Blueboy. We did an absolute onslaught on the gay press because, after all, that’s where our readers are. You must never forget that if one in every hundred gays bought a book of yours, you’d have absolutely smashing sales. You’d have about a hundred thousand copies.
BURROUGHS: I see that your South American book The Condor and The Cow isn’t mentioned here.
ISHERWOOD: You read it?
BURROUGHS: Oh, indeed I did, because I went to all the same places.
ISHERWOOD: Oh, really? How exciting?
BURROUGHS: Yes.
ISHERWOOD: It might be over the page.
BURROUGHS: There were some great photos. Oh yes, here it is. Travel Books, yes indeed, sorry. Great photos. You knew, you knew Baron Wolfner, wasn’t he a character in Mr Norris? (Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood’s third novel that made him famous overnight in the early Thirties.)
ISHERWOOD: Yes, Von Pregnitz he’s called.
BURROUGHS: Right, Von Pregnitz.
ISHERWOOD: Wolfner wasn’t at all pleased. There was an insinuation that he thought I was attractive. This was when I was very young, of course. I did it really for purely dramatic reasons, I wasn’t really …
GRAUERHOLZ: That’s really a revelation because William has told me various tales about Baron Wolfner. You knew him, didn’t you see him in Yugoslavia, is that the same period?
BURROUGHS: Knew him around Budapest.
ISHERWOOD: Well, please tell me because I heard that he was a sort of extreme sado-masochistic voyeur, that he liked to see people being beaten up. I don’t really know, this may be terribly libelous. I mean by beaten up, really beaten up.
BURROUGHS: I think so yeah. But he had …
ISHERWOOD: Sort of gang …
BURROUGHS: Well, he had this sort of English public school veneer.
ISHERWOOD: He had a monocle screwed into his face, no ribbon, no security …
BURROUGHS: He died in London, I think …
ISHERWOOD: Oh really?
BURROUGHS: Yes, he escaped …
ISHERWOOD: Did he have a name was he sometimes called Yanchi?
BURROUGHS: Yanchi.
ISHERWOOD: Yanchi.
BOCKRIS: Sort of a nickname or something?
ISHERWOOD: Well, I suppose it was a diminutive, um …
BURROUGHS: It was simply his first name.
ISHERWOOD: Oh was it? I didn’t know Yanchi was a first name.
BOCKRIS: The South American book of yours is the only one out of print isn’t it?
ISHERWOOD: They’re all out of print.
BOCKRIS: No they’re not. No they’re not.
ISHERWOOD: It’s got to the point now where that’s going to be a Spring offensive.
BURROUGHS: Very good.
BOCKRIS: But your books are all in print in England, perhaps that’s what I mean.
ISHERWOOD: Oh yes, in England they are in paperback. But it got to a point here where there was almost nothing whatever except the New Directions Berlin books and they were unobtainable because New Directions has awful distribution. But now Farrar Straus are going to bring some out in their paperback series. Well, I made that rather a condition in a way, because I got tired of getting letters from people saying how can I get a copy of A Single Man, and I’m sure probably libraries have them stolen, so they are absolutely unobtainable. And that was one of the reasons I left Simon & Schuster.
BOCKRIS: Are you doing a second volume of this up until the present time?
ISHERWOOD: Oh, well, it would be much more than one volume. I have an awful lot of diaries. As soon as I came to this country I really started keeping diaries quite a bit and I suppose there are about three books that would come out. But actually I’m very interested at the moment in writing about our guru who just died, this Hindu monk, and I think I might write that first.
BOCKRIS: Is someone knocking?
BURROUGHS: Yes. Yes.
BOCKRIS: I’ll get it.
BURROUGHS: I think it’s a very beautiful …
ISHERWOOD: Hum?
BURROUGHS: I think it’s a very well set-up book, really very well set-up.
ISHERWOOD: Oh good, I’m glad. Don did two drawings for the back and the one that they used we both feel now is too noble and the other one is just sort of a mad old man with one eye – it looks very funny at night – which we’re going to have on the British edition.
BURROUGHS: Will it have a different title?
ISHERWOOD: No, no. No, no. (Allen Ginsberg’s secretary Richard Elovich arrives.)
BURROUGHS: Ah Richard! Would you like a drink?
ELOVICH: A beer.
GRAUERHOLZ: Then we probably ought to head out.
BOCKRIS: Right. Is it very near here where we’re going? (We’ve been invited to dinner at a nearby loft.)
BURROUGHS: Well, it’s sort of betwixt and between, almost too near to take a cab and too far to walk. I don’t mind walking really. It’s about eight blocks or something.
BOCKRIS: Well Christopher enjoyed going into those bars across the street, didn’t you?
ISHERWOOD: Oh, yeah, it was fantastic. I had been there ages ago. It was just so incredibly classic. I mean it was just so absolutely The Iceman Cometh, and then they were having fights in both bars. One fight seemed very serious, coming up in the absolutely classic fashion, very dangerous … But I was, I felt hardly dressed for it, if you know what I mean. I once got stuck absolutely in the midst of Harlem because the taxi driver lost the way and I was dressed up to go to The Institute of Arts and Letters, so I had a sort of something in my hand. I think it was a briefcase, and I said to myself, because I had to go into a bar to phone, I said “You’re a Doctor!” and I rushed in in the way I imagine a doctor getting very quickly through to the hospital because his patient … and sort of “don’t bother me!” They didn’t like it at all. Oh it’s a terrible feeling. At least I imagined it was a terrible feeling, but you can’t possibly tell unless something happens to you … We’ve been in Morocco quite …
BURROUGHS: Oh, really, where?
ISHERWOOD: Well, we went to see Gavin Lambert, who was plowing cachia, and then he took us around on a bit of a tour. We went to Shawan and Fez and Marrakesh, and then out to the coast where we saw Paul Bowles.
BURROUGHS: Oh, how was Paul?
ISHERWOOD: He was in a very good mood, very sort of benign, and also Mrabet was there. And, it amuses me – I don’t know why it was quite so funny – but there was a young man, quite a young guy, who was sort of obviously just learning the ropes, the sort of Tangier ropes, and he had a pipe, a kif pipe, which he was very proud of and he brought this thing out with great circumstance. You know, he wanted to draw attention to it, and then he said to me – and I suddenly thought it was just like a Victorian scene in a drawing room – he said to me “Do you mind if I smoke?” And I said – just like a Victorian lady – I said “Not at all, I love the smell of it.” And then, of course, the poor boy could not get the pipe to light. It was thoroughly embarrassing. And sort of he was trying to be very salty with his … and the damn thing simply wouldn’t work.
BOCKRIS: I had no idea Sally Bowles was named after Paul Bowles until I read it in this book. I never thought of it. It’s so obvious if you think of it.
ISHERWOOD: Well, I mean, it’s just that I hardly knew him, I just thought he was very cute. He was twenty. I just sort of picked around for a name and it was going around in my head, you know, and what would go with Bowles, oh Sally Bowles, that’s it! But Paul said in his autobiography that I was superior. I suppose I was, what, about 26 – and he was 20.
BOCKRIS: Where did you meet him?
ISHERWOOD: In Berlin.
BURROUGHS: My first visit to Berlin was not long ago, two months …
ISHERWOOD: (Very intrigued) How did it seem to you?
BU
RROUGHS: Well I’d never seen it before and I went there for a reading with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag, and I went and saw the Wall. The area between the East and the West is populated by thousands of rabbits.
ISHERWOOD: Don’t the guards shoot them?
BURROUGHS: It would be very improper.
ISHERWOOD: Does it seem menacing now?
BURROUGHS: Well you could see that it could be menacing (chuckling) if you did the wrong thing.
ISHERWOOD: But they don’t mind tourists coming and gaping?
BURROUGHS: No, no. Tourists come and gape and they have sort of platforms where they can go up and see the Wall.
ISHERWOOD: But do people come through still or they don’t?
BURROUGHS: I just don’t know. I guess someone did. Allen went over to see some poet who was in bad graces with the Communist Party. And we also saw Beckett. Beckett was living in the Academy building.
ISHERWOOD: Oh, really?
BURROUGHS: Yes, in the Tiergarten. He gave us an audience for about twenty minutes.
ISHERWOOD: I always imagined Beckett was somewhere always living in France.
BURROUGHS: Well he was just there to direct his play. John Calder, my publisher, was there and he said, well, he would see us all briefly. All, by all I mean Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, Fred Jordan, Professor Hollerer and your reporter. An audience.
BACHARDY: Has he been directing his plays for a long time?
BURROUGHS: Yes, yes, indeed, he always directs his plays. He feels he’s the only one competent to do it. According to John Calder, he’s really a brilliant director. I’ve never seen what he’s directed.
GRAUERHOLZ: I was curious to know whether you’ve been doing anything in the movie business recently?
ISHERWOOD: I was commissioned to adapt Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel The Beautiful and the Damned and it came out awfully well, we felt, and we really preserved the book. The dialogue was between 70–80% Fitzgerald, and everybody liked it, and then, suddenly, there was a change up in the higher office and they decided no more Fitzgerald. A bad bet! He’s done for! Or something.
BOCKRIS: But, you know, Gatsby made money. They made money before it came out, from selling rights.
BURROUGHS: I cannot believe that they made money on that film.
BOCKRIS: Well, I can understand your attitude, but I read in Time Magazine that just through selling all sorts of rights they broke even. Is The Last Tycoon also a flop?
ISHERWOOD: It was better than we expected.
BOCKRIS: Did you basically enjoy it?
ISHERWOOD: Well, I, I, I mean, I was a bit bored with a lot of it.
BURROUGHS: It’s always been my contention that the best movies based on books are made from bad books. Treasure of The Sierra Madre: great film, the book … Marathon Man’s a great film and the book is … Because you don’t have anything in the way. You just have to say (demonstrating with his hands) “Well, here’s the idea,” and you can handle it anyway you want, you don’t have to defend the classics. I always thought Fitzgerald is not for the movies. That dialogue is wooden, the plot is nothing. It’s all in the prose that can’t be gotten onto the screen – like the last three pages of this great English prose. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not a movie.
ISHERWOOD: Oh absolutely yes. I think it’s unmakeable.
BURROUGHS: And then I can think of any number of bad or second-rate novels that would make great films.
BOCKRIS: The only book of yours that’s been done as a movie is Goodbye to Berlin, right?
ISHERWOOD: Yes, I mean that really was, I don’t know, there are other things that could have been done, I think, like A Single Man might …
BOCKRIS: But you had two movies out of that book and a couple of Broadway shows?
ISHERWOOD: Yes.
BACHARDY: All that remains is a TV series.
ISHERWOOD: Have they ever filmed any of your books?
BURROUGHS: No.
BOCKRIS: Aren’t they considering Junky? Isn’t that on the boards?
BURROUGHS: Oh no, it’s not on the boards at all.
BOCKRIS: You know Penguin is re-publishing Junky this February. They’re doing it in the original version. The version that was published in ’53 was heavily censored …
As the conversation breaks up James Grauerholz suggests we move on to dinner: “Shall we go?” Christopher and Don go into the bathroom. We all mill around getting our coats on and generally arranging ourselves. A lot of shouting back and forth.
BOCKRIS: Are they in the urinals? (Going into urinals with tape recorder.) Is this an inspection of the urinals here?
ISHERWOOD: Yes.
BOCKRIS: This is an unusual bathroom isn’t it? It’s nice, roomy. (Coming back into living room.) This is a great typewriter too. What kind of typewriter do you have?
BURROUGHS: Oh it’s just an old Olympia.
BOCKRIS: It’s one of the best typewriters ever made. I have one of these myself … (All walk downstairs and into the street. A stirring icy wind is blowing down the Bowery.)
BURROUGHS: I’m sort of partial to walking. I think by the time we got a cab … it’s easier this way. (To Isherwood) The way to walk is just lean forward like this (Burroughs leans into the wind).
I knew Robert Mapplethorpe before he was famous. He was one of the most fascinating people to talk to among my generation. That’s why I taped this piece on the way to the airport with him. Along with Hell/Sontag, The Captain’s Cocktail Party and the Isherwood/Burroughs, it best evokes those far away, halcyon days in the Seventies when life still seemed infinitely rich with opportunity, creativity and joy. This whole book is about heroes. Robert was one of my biggest heroes.
25
Robert Mapplethorpe Takes Off
Saturday, October 16th 1977, 2 pm. Robert Mapplethorpe is going to California on a TWA flight. I am arriving at his fifth-floor Bond Street studio loft to join him on his trip to the airport. The elevator door opens into Robert’s studio and he is hovering somewhat nervously ten feet away standing on now one now another high heel cowboy boot. He leads me into the sitting area of his beautifully appointed loft. Sam Wagstaff stands and shakes hands. As the tape goes on Robert has just given me the four photos to be used with this interview.
VICTOR BOCKRIS: It’s a really beautiful day. Have you been outside today? It’s so great. (Robert is walking round apartment, making last minute preparations. He is wearing tight jeans, a corduroy jacket, and tinted sunglasses.) Why are you going to California?
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: Just to take pictures.
BOCKRIS: Where are you going to be in California?
MAPPLETHORPE: Los Angeles for a few days and then San Francisco.
BOCKRIS: Do you like LA more than San Francisco?
MAPPLETHORPE: I’ve never been to San Francisco.
BOCKRIS: I used to go out there a lot, but I don’t like that much anymore. (Robert walks nervously into the next room checking suitcases, looking in drawers, whispering to Sam who has followed him.) I shout: DO YOU HAVE A CAB COMING AT TWO-THIRTY OR ARE YOU JUST GOING TO PICK ONE UP?
MAPPLETHORPE: We’ll just pick one up. We have plenty of time.
BOCKRIS: Yeah, we’re in no big hurry.
MAPPLETHORPE: (He comes back into room putting a cellophane bag in his coat pocket.) I was just reading the review of Patti’s new album in the New York Times.
BOCKRIS: Oh, yeah, that John Rockwell thing. I read that yesterday. Yeah. I heard some of her new stuff on the radio this morning. It sounded real good. Is she happy with the new album?
MAPPLETHORPE: She was until this review. But she’s in Europe so I don’t know. It’s not very nice what they say on her picture.
BOCKRIS: Oh I didn’t notice that even. (Walk over, read caption under photo: “has lost some of her individuality.”) Oh yeah, that’s nice. You did Television’s cover for their album. How’s that come out?
MAPPLETHORPE: I’m quite happy with the picture. I can show it to you. But they want something le
ss professional so they’re going to use a xerox which I don’t mind. I like what they’re gonna do (gets portfolio to show me picture).
BOCKRIS: They’re going to use a color xerox.
MAPPLETHORPE: Yeah. He’s a complete dictator, Tom, and it’s alright because in the end he knows what he wants. You know it’s not a matter of … I have the xerox too.
BOCKRIS: Great. I’d love to see that.
MAPPLETHORPE: That’s rough (showing me color xerox).
BOCKRIS: I like the quality. I like the skin tones.
MAPPLETHORPE: Nobody’s used a xerox.
BOCKRIS: I don’t understand it. These things look really great. I love it.
MAPPLETHORPE: Yeah. The thing I don’t like about it is they always look the same. I mean they’re always good. You can’t miss. But the fact that nobody did it yet … I mean that, with a really elegant black border, will look great.
BOCKRIS: What’s the album like?
MAPPLETHORPE: I don’t know. I haven’t heard. They’re just in the studio now.
BOCKRIS: You shot the cover as soon as they got the contract?
MAPPLETHORPE: Yeah. They wanted it immediately ’cos he was sort of fanatical about having it come out the way he wanted it so he wanted to start from the start so that he could …
BOCKRIS: Begin the package first and then make the record that goes in it. That’s a good idea.
MAPPLETHORPE: He doesn’t want the art director to touch it. I don’t really like his music. It’s just too abstracted for my taste.
BOCKRIS: But he’s a very interesting guy, isn’t he. Tom Verlaine?
MAPPLETHORPE: I guess.
BOCKRIS: People say he’s so dictatorial.
MAPPLETHORPE: I think that’s a mistake though. You know, it’s alright with this situation. I don’t mind it for the album, and he got a very good producer to do his album, somebody who worked with The Beatles. But Tom’s taken over and that’s a mistake because there is a reason for a producer, especially on your first album. And if he’s not willing to listen to anybody …
BOCKRIS: I thought it was a real pity Richard Hell left Television. I think a lot of people did. Do you know him? He was interesting because he was so sort of energetic, he had a crazy face and stuff, and I just understood that they had horrible arguments and he’d basically been forced out.
Beat Punks Page 24
