April 18. This morning, Tom Shadduck, who had come by to do our watering, noticed that the tall cactus plant—one of the ones Jim Tyndall22 gave us before he moved to North Carolina—has been stolen. We both suspected the kids who trespass continually through this property and felt the usual fury. I called George Caldwell, flattered him a bit, and suggested that he should speak to one of his next-door neighbors who is also his tenant and has a lot of teenagers in the house; I just want him scared a bit by the prospect of a scandal, because I blame him utterly for anything his sons and their friends do, it’s all this shit-permissive mealy-modern parent stuff. Rather to my surprise, Caldwell was impressed, saying that, “This kind of thing affects all of us.” He agreed to speak to his tenant.
A really interesting and horribly depressing talk, last night on T.V., about the approaching oil famine within thirty years and consequent plans for transmitting solar energy via satellites, etc. I got such a sense of a future which I don’t want to, and anyway can’t, live on into. At the same time, I quite realize that my aversion is merely romantic; I hate to part with the notion of space as something awesome, of the moon as a shining mysterious orb, etc., and contemplate a time when the earth will be surrounded by a sort of backyard full of skyjunk.
Nick Wilder brought down a New York dealer this morning named Robert Miller to see Don’s work. Nick says he was impressed. Oh, if only—
April 25. Struggles with letter and check writing have stopped me from making daily entries, as I’d hoped. But I have kept on with the Prabhavananda book—a page a day, which would mean finishing a rough draft around the end of this year, if the book is about the length I expect it to be.
Today, I heard from the other abbess of the Vedanta Society; Anandaprana. She wants me to get started on the recording of the Gita. Usual complaints about being overworked. She seemed to be running the place, just as usual. No mention of either of the swamis.
I do hope I can settle down a bit, now, and regain some slight sense at least of—I won’t venture to call it “contact with”—just ordinary awareness that the word Vedanta means anything at all. I have been incredibly alienated by these publicity trips and sealed up tight inside my “image.”
April 30. Vistas of work are now opening up. On the 26th, we had a talk to George Weidenfeld, who was visiting here, and it seems that he is quite serious about commissioning a book from us— Drawings and Dialogue is a provisional title suggested by Candida Donadio; the only objection to it being that there may be a few of Don’s paintings as well. I was prejudiced against Weidenfeld for becoming a lord but then prejudiced in his favor by his foreign accent and courtly foreign charm and his appreciation of Don’s work. . . . Also my book about Swami, now at page 53. Also the diaries of the forties and early fifties, to be brought up to 1953, at least. Also this recording of the Gita.
One memory of our English trip came back vividly to me this morning. It was on the night of April 1, which I spent up at High Lane, with Richard. I went into the bedroom in his house where I was to sleep, and opened the wardrobe, and there, hanging all alone, was Frank’s red army parade uniform! It was almost as startling as seeing his ghost, especially since I had assumed that Richard, who really hates his memory—not Frank himself, whom he barely knew—would have destroyed or given it away, long ago. Now I come to think of it, I was so shocked that I never even asked him why he had kept it. Must remember to do so.
May 1. Discovered for the first time this morning, from the dictionary, that “mayday,” the international radiotelephonic signal for help, derives from “m’aider.” This suggests a clue for May Day in a crossword puzzle: “Not waving but drowning” and reminds me that we saw Glenda Jackson as Stevie Smith in a play, while we were in London.23 She did her best, but Smith didn’t make much of a character to work with. We also saw three other plays with people we know in them—Alec Guinness as Swift,24 Gielgud as Julius Caesar, John Mills and Jill Bennett in Separate Tables; all disappointments.
Suddenly, we are on the brink of selling the Hilldale property. It will be marvellous to be rid of our tenants and their dishonesties and the sheer nuisance of paying bills and keeping an eye on the rents. And yet—we found ourselves sad and a bit apprehensive. There’s something painful about parting with land.
And this morning Don and I decided to ask John Ladner to arrange Don’s adoption for us. He seemed quite pleased to do so. He is very bright and confident, without being smart alecky. Maybe he’ll become our “family lawyer.”
When I talked to Prabha the day before yesterday, she announced approvingly that all the devotees were getting visions of Swami and “feeling his presence.” Well, I have neither felt nor seen. Just once, he appeared in a dream, but it was confused and I forget all the details. Does this distress me? No. I keep calling on him. And my mood, a lot of the time, is wonderfully happy.
May 9. The “triple anniversary.”25 Shall I ever make it quadruple?
It seems that the Hilldale property really is going to be sold. We go into escrow today or tomorrow.
All this time, I have kept on with the Prabhavananda book. Reached page 70 today. Of course, this is just jogging; I’m not really getting down to the big narrative problems.
Items from a sex catalogue (Blueboy Products) I got in the mail yesterday: Dr. Richard’s Ring (to maintain an erection), Jewelled Cock Rings, Electric Cock Rings, Leather Harness, Extasx (suck vibrator), Anal-egg Vibrator, Big Squirt (the ultimate pulsating dildo) and Big Billy—the sexy doll (“the chicken who never says no. . . . almost better than the real thing”).
June 8. Yesterday morning we went through the adoption ceremony in Santa Monica, before Judge Mario Clinco. It was done in his chambers, not in the courtroom, quickly and politely, with no awkward questions asked. He said “good luck” to us both when it was over, which made the ceremony seem like a marriage. John Ladner probably had a good deal to do with the speed and smoothness of the proceedings. We both like him very much now and think of him as “our” lawyer. We had lunch with him afterwards and drank champagne. And much much more in the evening, to celebrate Billy Al Bengston’s birthday. This would have been an auspicious day indeed, if it hadn’t been for Anita Bryant’s sweeping victory in Florida and her threat to carry her persecution of our tribe into California.26 I feel dull with forebodings. Courage. My job is to get on with my book about Swami, now at page 118.
July 4. Swami’s deathday, his first. This morning, some journalist called to tell me that Vladimir Nabokov has just died. I could give him no comment.
Have got to page 157—more than half, surely, of the first draft? I wonder if it is because I am writing this book that I feel so cut off from Swami’s presence.
Have reached a point in the story which is very difficult to handle. It is my meeting with Don. [Vernon] and Caskey I have been able to handle, because [Vernon]’s involvement with Swami didn’t last long and Caskey never had any. But Don ended by becoming his disciple. His impressions of Swami and his impressions of my relationship to Swami are of enormous importance to the book; they give me the only opportunity to get a temporary binocular view of the situation.
Aside from working with him on that, we may possibly soon be working on some project for John Frankenheimer. We met him at a lunch given by the Housemans on the 26th, and he suggested that we should meet and discuss stories. He is said to be unreliable. But, if he isn’t serious, why did he make the suggestion, out of the blue, without any prompting?
Then there is the possibility of our doing the commentary together for Weidenfeld’s book of Don’s drawings. Weidenfeld seems fairly serious about this. At least he is starting to argue that my name ought to be first on the title page, for reasons of publicity. Don insists that this doesn’t matter. I find it a bit humiliating. But I suppose it doesn’t.
And then there is still Harry Rigby on the horizon. He called, not long ago, to declare that he wants to produce our play this fall.
We’ll probably regret and curse all of these
projects, if they materialize, and feel let down if they don’t.
The escrow on the Hilldale property closed on the 29th. No more tenants, no more writing checks for the Hazel Allen loan,27 no more keeping accounts of water bills, property taxes, etc.! But also no more real estate other than the bit we live on, to keep increasing steadily in value. And the payments I’ll receive from the sale will be increasingly trimmed down by inflation.
August 7. Today I reached page 203, which is almost certainly much more than two-thirds of this draft. I still haven’t the least idea what is caught in the net. It is still entirely possible that the question, “Why are you telling me all this?” won’t be adequately answered. But, in all my long experience, I have never been able to find anything better than this fumbling way of getting down to the nerve.
I am making an entry today merely to try to start a sequence of diary keeping. These isolated entries are almost worthless. And, I must say, the more I read the later diaries, the more I see how worthwhile diary keeping is.
Here are a few news flashes to be commented on later: Both Truman Capote and Johnny O’Shea are going to A.A. meetings. Weidenfeld seems near to making us a firm offer for our book of drawings and text. Harry Rigby says he has the money for a production of Meeting and they’ll do it this winter with someone, but who (Bedford and Moriarty are seemingly out)? It seems nearly certain that I must have a contracture operation on my right hand soon. It seems most uncertain that Frankenheimer will do any film business with us. Howard Warshaw is dying—if not already dead—of cancer. Don’s next show seems fairly set for the end of September at Nick Wilder’s. A show in Houston ditto, sometime this winter. The prospect of a show in Chicago has dimmed.
August 11. The California Assembly voted to override Governor Brown’s veto, thus restoring the death penalty.
There are serious difficulties about publishing Don’s book of drawings, according to Candida Donadio. It looks like the books would be so expensive to produce that nobody would buy them— thirty dollars at least.
No word from Frankenheimer. And we have turned down an extract from a book (called, I think, The Fools in Town Are on Our Side28) about an American boy of six who is looked after by the girls of a Shanghai whorehouse in the late nineteen thirties, during the Japanese invasion. It is both cute and dirty—Disney porn, in fact.
But all is not gloom. The very sympathetic doctor, Moulton Johnson, to whom Elsie Giorgie sent me, told me today that he doesn’t think it is necessary to operate on my contracture nodule at present and that maybe it won’t get worse.
Also, the day before yesterday, I got my driver’s license renewed. For some obscure reason, I always dread taking the test for it. Perhaps because I have a snobbish contempt for all these arbitrary regulations and therefore I feel that I shall never never be able to memorize them. As it turned out, I made one mistake—and it was the same mistake I made in my last test. But in 1973 the speed laws were different. Then, if you were towing a light trailer behind your passenger car, you were limited to fifty-five miles an hour. Now, you can go the maximum, which is fifty-five miles an hour. Last time I guessed sixty; this time, fifty.29
September 5. Labor Day—and all the usual vows to restart journal keeping regularly.
Anyhow, the Swami book is plodding on. I’ve got to page 236. Theoretically, the end is in sight, but I still have quite a lot of material to deal with.
Just changed the ribbon. We didn’t go down on the beach today. But we did yesterday, and saw something perhaps historic. For years now, there have been antifag inscriptions written up in the pedestrian tunnel under the coast highway and on the wall of the tennis courts. Last time that I remember, it was “Kill All Fags” and “A Good Fag is a Dead Fag.” This year was milder: “Fags Go Home.” That appeared sometime last week. Then, yesterday we saw that the inscription had been changed overnight, to: “Welcome fags, you are home.” This is on the tennis court wall only. The hostile inscriptions in the tunnel remain. We are wondering if there’ll be a backlash.
Saw Elsa Laughton yesterday, down at the house next door, with several guests. She was rather drunk and seemed more aggressive than usual. As I was leaving, she came outside with me and told me that the postsurgical cancer tests she periodically has have shown cause for alarm—up from two to four, whatever that means. Poor woman, I could feel her dread—she remembers what it was like for Charles. She hasn’t even told Ray Henderson yet.
Don now has the catalogue for his show. It is the most attractive of all his catalogues, with two really good reproductions of color portraits. For the first time he has a male nude and a bottomless boy.
September 13. Elsa’s examination proved negative, after all. We have just heard that Truman fell off the wagon while he was in the East and now he’s in hospital, drying out.
On Sunday 11th, I drove up to read Vivekananda at the Montecito temple with Jim Gates and two friends of his; one of them, Robert Berg, is a joli laid flax-headed Canadian who is living at Vedanta Place intending to become a monk.30
Talked to Prabhaprana about Swami. She seemed very devotional and unusually emotional, altogether different. During lunch, when we got onto the subject of Swami again, she began to cry and disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes. Later, when Jim and I were alone together, he told me that she has become notorious for her drinking!
From Jim I also heard something which moved me greatly. It seems that Krishna has now become Swahananda’s attendant, looking after him as carefully as he looked after Swami. I had always thought—much as I admire Krishna—that his service to Swami had a great deal of possessiveness, and therefore egotism, in it. That he is prepared to do the same thing for Swahananda proves that he is a saint.
There was a reaction to the altering of the antifag inscription on the beach, but a wretchedly mild one. The opposition didn’t even attempt to erase the “Welcome fags” sign. Instead they wrote at the side: “Fags suck.” So what else is new?
The Swami book is going very slowly. It seems to lack all substance and to consist only of protestations of admiration, love etc. All the more reason to finish it quick.
September 17. I am trying to type this while listening with half an ear to a cassette of the Ram Nam led by seven guest swamis on July 18, the evening of the memorial service for Swami, in 1976. It sounds terribly straggly and jangly. You can hear that the girls are taking it very professionally, however—in fact, I suspect that the sloppy effect is created by the disharmony of the western and Hindu approaches to the music.
Tomorrow evening, we are going to the “Star-Spangled Night for Human Rights” at the Hollywood Bowl. Have just heard that trouble is expected from right-wing groups.
And then, on the 21st, Don’s show. Quite aside from all the excitements and anxieties connected with this, I always feel that I am seeing his work, on these occasions, quite newly. What usually happens, when he has just done a painting or a drawing, is that I go into his studio and he holds it up for me to look at; the amount of time I get to look at it is only a few seconds, and of course it is neither framed nor hung on the wall. Furthermore, I feel obliged to make some comment, and this in itself is an embarrassment unless one particular picture really hits me hard on first sight. The moment the pictures are on walls in a gallery, I can take my time; I can come back to them again and again. It isn’t until then that I really know which ones I like best—or what impression the show as a whole makes on me. Here, I am at a disadvantage in relation to our work. Because, when I show a manuscript to Don, he can take it away by himself and read and reread it, and there is no need of any comment until he is ready, after due consideration, to make one. Maybe this difficulty could be solved if Don staged minishows for me—twenty or so pictures at a time. Must talk to him about it.
September 20. A new doctor has told Jess Bachardy that his cancer is spreading and that it can be only a matter of weeks or months. The new doctor hasn’t even examined Jess properly, yet, but, as Don said, the fact that he is
Japanese makes the verdict horribly convincing. We at once began to wonder if Ted could be induced to live with and look after Glade, if we paid his rent for him.
Jim Gates has pneumonia. He’s in bed in his apartment but seems cheerful—at least when speaking on the phone—and says he feels better already.
The Bowl evening was a flop in one sense; nobody quite made it jell, and it was hideously mismanaged, with huge pauses and several fifth-rate acts. In another sense, the mere getting together of all those thousands of gays was, in itself, a triumph and a mutual assurance that we all really exist, along with our demands and our wrongs and our hopes. To me, and to several others I talked to later, the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was extraordinarily moving. You felt the eagerness of all those thousands to be accepted, to belong, to have a place of their very own in this land, which isn’t free enough to accept them.
Bette Midler was as always a success of the biggest and most symbolic kind, and she brilliantly managed to scrape her bare knees in a fall so that they bled and had to be fixed up with Band-Aids in full view of the audience. This, of course, made her seem gigantically human. But she really is very sympathetic.
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