by Honor Moore
One day that spring, my father met me at the Ritz. In those years, the side door still had a sign above it that said “Not An Accredited Egress Door”—as it had when my parents danced there during the war, as it had, probably, when their parents lunched in its vast upstairs dining room. If my father and I had eaten at the Ritz, I doubt the subject of sex would have come up, but we walked to a café nearby. Did I tell him I was no longer a virgin? Or did I simply ask him what he thought about sex before marriage? I sound more brazen than I was—when I asked the question, I mumbled, looking down at the tablecloth. My father said he didn’t think it was a good idea, sex before marriage. “Jenny and I didn’t go to bed before we married.”
I had expected him to speak as if from a pulpit and tell me he thought sex before marriage was a sin, but he did not. If he had, it would have been possible for me to go right ahead without a second thought, but because he didn’t, I was left with freedom and confusion. It was the spring of 1967, and girls at Radcliffe were losing patience with the finishing-school ethos—housemothers, milk and cookies on Saturday night for the dateless, signing in and signing out. Freshman year, you had to be in by ten-thirty on a week night and eleven-fifteen on a weekend unless you had special permission to use a rationed “one o’clock.” If “a man” was visiting your room, the door had to remain open the width of a matchbook. If you wanted to spend the night with “a man,” you had to lie, invent an aunt to spend the weekend with, for instance. Now there was no curfew and you could spend any night you pleased with anyone you wanted to, provided the houseparents had prior written permission from your parents, which all our parents gave. You wrote your name and destination on a card which you then sealed in an envelope and put in a file box on the “bells desk” at the dorm entrance: so the college could be certain in the event of fire that none of the charred corpses was yours. No one considered that the file box wasn’t fireproof.
Radcliffe hired a psychologist to discuss sex with its students. I was living in a college-owned “off campus” house for fifteen girls—all upperclassmen who wanted a less institutional place to live. The sex counselor arrived one afternoon in October. He was a youngish man wearing glasses and an ordinary suit, and when we sat down, he introduced himself and gave a delicate speech that concluded with a request for our questions. To break the awkward silence, I raised my hand, putting the question I’d dared myself to ask: “What constitutes promiscuity?” My housemates managed not to laugh. “I’d say, ah, I’d say ten partners,” the sex counselor offered. After he left, I told my friends I planned to break ten as quickly as I could, and so when a gangly graduate student, who turned out to be studying philosophy, approached me in the new Radcliffe library and invited me back to his parents’ empty apartment, I didn’t hesitate.
“Honor’s Radcliffe graduation, Rosie’s Junior High & Dee’s High School commencement (as valedictorian) are all three on June 14,” my mother wrote Pam Morton the spring of 1967. “We are trying to sift out the actual hours of the events but you may have to fly on as a mother figure!” But the family managed to come to Radcliffe Yard for mine: Mom and Pop and Gami, and maybe a sibling or two, my father standing to take a picture as Mary Bunting handed me my diploma. I wore an ecru lace dress under my cap and gown, and we had a festive lunch after outdoors at the Window Shop, a Scandinavian café on Brattle Street across from Marimekko. I didn’t mind that they all immediately flew off for the other graduations. Tim and Thom and I were already planning the summer season: “four plays of war and the city.” I was periodically stopping at Tim’s chaotic apartment, nagging him as, at the typewriter with coffee or Scotch, he crawled to the finish of his translation of Aristophanes’ Peace, which was opening in less than a month. Or he would send me on a mission—to cajole the composer, a law school student, to work for nothing: “Fuck him if you have to!” he shouted, turning back to his crumpled drafts as I flinched and strode off in search of Thom, who was kinder.
Days after graduation, again wearing the ecru lace dress, I stood on the stage of Agassiz Theatre on a stifling afternoon to present Alfred Hitchcock, who was briefly in Boston, an honorary membership in the Harvard Dramatic Club. It was Tim’s idea of course, but it was I who commissioned a calligraphed certificate, which I signed as president and which Tim and Thom signed as artistic directors of the Harvard Dramatic Club Summer Players. Licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, begging at the offices of deans, and from parents, we raised $10,000 to put on the four-play season, and Tim hustled three enormous, very noisy air conditioners from his father. Outside Agassiz flew an orange banner I’d had made, proclaiming our season:
Peace Trojan Women
Measure for Measure
In the Jungle of Cities
Though I was residing in an apartment on Trowbridge Street with two Radcliffe friends, I was living with the graduate philosopher in his parents’ apartment on Massachusetts Avenue. He insisted that I come home every night between the day of work and the evening rehearsal; he’d cook me supper, and we would go to bed until I had to drive back to the theater. Tim barely spoke to my new boyfriend, who had volunteered to photograph rehearsals, and after I introduced him to my mother, she told me she certainly wouldn’t want to have an affair with him. I should have kept this new life private, the delicious suppers and my unruly orgasms, to a soundtrack of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Each of the productions ran for two weeks, and as the summer progressed and our success grew, we forgot how hard we were working. We were competing again with the Loeb, whose summer season was to culminate with “White House Happening,” a play by Lincoln Kirstein with John Lithgow as a humanized president with an illegitimate half-Negro son. On our side of the street, Tim, the showman, and Thom, the poet and intellectual, were a great combination. Peace, Aristophanes’ antiwar play, became a rock-and-roll musical, and, as Cassandra in Trojan Women, Channing, in oversize war fatigues, spoke her prophetic lines in a blaze of white light. Tim did Measure for Measure as a comment on the corruption of the city, and Channing was Isabella to Paul Schmidt’s Duke—Paul was older than us and a veteran of years in Paris as a student of Marcel Marceau and Jacques Charon. He was a star of Boston and Harvard theater, a friend of New York School poets like Frank O’Hara, and the first man I’d ever known who described himself as “queer” even as he flirted outrageously with women. We considered it a privilege that he showed up for openings, French-movie-star resplendent in the manner of Alain Delon, wearing a white linen suit, so when Tim announced that “Schmidt” was “on board,” we were astonished. Tim and Luke and I had seen the Boston Opera’s production of Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza in which the director Sarah Caldwell had used video, then still extremely experimental. Now we rented a video camera, a monstrous piece of machinery on casters, and got our hands on six big television monitors, which the assidous techies secured from Agassiz’s nineteenth-century proscenium and balcony. When Paul returned as the duke to Vienna, his entrance was broadcast live to every corner of the theater.
At our triumphant cast party at Tim’s parents’ house on Cape Cod the Sunday after we opened, we read about ourselves in the New York Times: “I had a talk with Tim Mayer, a lanky, shaggy 23-year-old who appears to be the latest example of a recurrent Harvard phenomenon, the genius-director. One of them comes along every few years, puts on a few plays, and becomes a celebrity in the miniature world of Harvard: freshmen look up to him, the Harvard Crimson and the Boston papers sing his praises, understrappers rush to execute his orders. Like so many Harvard types, Mr. Mayer plays his role rather past the hilt.” The reporter didn’t think Measure for Measure exactly worked, but he described the duke’s televised entrance as a coup de théâtre. “Mr. Mayer is so joyfully, so youthfully, so prodigally, so infectiously in love with his own virtuosity that it seems almost churlish to complain the play has been sacrificed to it.”
I’d moved on from the p
hilosopher by sleeping with his best friend, then with a campus figure who strode through Widener in a black cape, who took me to parties in New York where the talk was of Norman Podhoretz’s memoir of growing up a New York intellectual, Making It. I had been accepted to Yale School of Drama in theater management. I said I was honing my skills for the day when Tim and Thom and I would start a real theater, but really I was marking time. I’d received enough praise in the fiction-writing workshop I’d taken my last semester of classes to believe I could write, but I didn’t know how to begin. In New Haven, I rented an apartment in a new high-rise and dressed for the opening party in a flimsy lavender dress. A directing student with dark eyes asked if I was an actress, and I crossed the room to introduce myself to Gordon Rogoff, the head of the directing department, who was a friend of Paul Schmidt’s. I’d bought series tickets to the New York Film Festival—there was a new Godard and I planned to drive down. But I had crew, tearing tickets for the Jacobean melodrama ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford, which was opening the professional repertory season.
At Yale, administration meant service, not intense collaboration with boy geniuses; I had to give up the film festival. I paid no attention to the little voice inside me that kept insisting I was in the wrong place here in New Haven—but where else could I go? The press agent for the Yale Repertory Theatre, who thought it was ridiculous that I was tearing tickets, took interest in me, and included me when he had lunch with Harvey Sabinson, David Merrick’s press agent who taught publicity, and Herman Krawitz, the assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, who was head of the theater administration program. That fall, when I visited Cambridge and the Loeb for the world premiere of a play of Tim’s, there was already talk of the next summer at Agassiz, but in the late spring Harvey Sabinson got me an interview for a publicity job at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I remembered the tedium of begging Tim for completed scripts, of cajoling people into working for nothing; I was ready to move on. My resignation was seen as a betrayal and it ended my friendships with Tim and Thom, but that summer, for the first time, I was a paid professional, having, as my mother put it in a letter to Pam, “a heady summer as press agent for the Berkshire Theatre Festival, rubbing shoulders with William Gibson, Arthur Penn, Elaine May etc.” My employer was Lyn Austin, a woman who had been producing plays in New York for two decades. I put to work the publicity skills I’d learned at the drama school, and by the end of the summer I managed a great coup: a photograph from one of our productions on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. “They were all so enthusiastic about her when I went up for an opening,” my mother continued in her letter to Pam. “It made me very proud.”
14
The Family Cracks Open
* * *
In September 1968, my mother published a book, The People on Second Street, the memoir of Jersey City. She appeared on the Today show and was photographed for a spread in Life magazine, which also included a review of the book by Kim Myers. There were photographs of her returning to Jersey City, photographs of the past in Jersey City, and a portrait of our entire family. She traveled the country giving readings and talks, and the book went into a second printing. Her friend and Washington neighbor Eugene McCarthy nearly won the New Hampshire primary on an antiwar ticket, and Johnson withdrew from the presidential race. My mother spent the spring campaigning, first in Indianapolis, where she introduced the candidate and his wife to her old Democratic friends, and later in several primary states, where she did advance work for Mrs. McCarthy. In Washington, she and my father gave a small party to present the senator to some of their colleagues from the civil rights movement who were skeptical of him. Knowing exactly who his audience was that night, he did not say a word about race. My mother was furious and told him so. My brother Paul, who had also worked for McCarthy, had shifted his support to the McGovern campaign. “I am beginning to feel he is a Montague and I am a Capulet,” my mother wrote Pam, “and discovering to my horror that people could break up over such crises!” In August, my mother and Paul had both gone to the Chicago convention, and were gassed outside the Hilton, a spectacle I watched on television in the Berkshires. That year changed my mother’s life. She had journeyed out into the world; she now had an identity, she felt, independent of my father’s. And, like many, she saw and experienced violence in Chicago that challenged her faith in institutions she had never questioned.
I was in my second year at Yale Drama School, and that spring the black students formed an alliance, and one of them, my friend Pamela Jones, asked me to ask William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain, if we could reserve Battell Chapel as a venue for Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, who was flying in from California to give a speech as part of a Black Arts Festival. I had never met Bill Coffin, but he knew who I was because of my father and my brother, and he said yes. And my new boyfriend approved. I had fallen in love with Arnold Weinstein, a man almost twenty years older than I was. He was the first older man I’d slept with and the first to make love to me in daring, experimental ways. He used words that scared me like “pussy,” but that was not the part of him I loved. I loved his miraculous silvery curls, his button-shiny brown eyes, and how he touched me. He wrote poems and plays and lyrics and opera librettos, and if he wasn’t talking in puns and swervy off-rhymes, he was scrawling fragments on scraps of paper that he left all over his turreted faculty apartment. He believed, for instance, that you should write the lines of a play first and then decide what character said them—and so when he was writing a play he stayed up all night, wild-eyed, looking on the side table or the bureau or searching the cracks of the sofa for the right little squiggle of paper. I’d follow him, searching too, reassuring him the scrap of paper would turn up, until he kissed me, until he put his tender, precise hands under my short skirt and we fell onto his narrow university-issue bed. He wore wonderful Italian cashmere turtlenecks, and his beautiful Italian trousers were held at his narrow hips by a braided cordovan belt with a shiny brass buckle. But being with him was turbulent, the poetic part of him often nudged into rage by a small frustration, a professional slight, or the political situation, which in 1969 supported both his idealism and his anger. The part of him that ranted also shot up speed and vitamins under the supervision of a Central Park South doctor, even snorted the odd whiff of heroin with his best friend, Larry Rivers, the famous New York Pop artist whom Arnold considered “great” and with whom he had once had a brief homosexual affair.
I was trying to write Sylvia Plath–like lyrics, often after evenings of too much drink. I had kicked the diet pills, Dexedrine, that I’d been taking since Indianapolis—one day after running out, I’d gotten so depressed, my insides so heavy I could barely walk. Change is the only constant, I remember saying to myself, looking at the bookshelf I’d painted bright orange enamel as I tossed the orange pills into a wastebasket. That spring, an actor, a fellow student, asked to photograph me nude. He had a girlfriend and so, naïvely, I had no suspicion of his motives. The day he came to my apartment it was raining, and we drank Scotch; he photographed me, then pushed me down, coming into me. It was that involuntary coupling, rather than sex with Arnold Weinstein, I believed, that made me pregnant during the spring of 1969; I was on the pill but often forgot to take it. I managed to get a psychiatrist’s excuse and had a legal abortion at Yale–New Haven Hospital, keeping my secret from Arnold, the photographer, my parents, and all but two or three of my friends. Recovering in his apartment, I told Arnold I was ill and did not want to sleep with him: the doctor said I had to keep from having sex for six weeks. When I contracted an infection and got really sick, I told Arnold about the abortion, though not about the nude photography, and he flew into one of his rages, this time at me. How could I meddle with something so sacred as a child? His child! He would have married me!
The night we had that fight was the night of Bobby Seale’s speech, and I woke up at 2 a.m., Arnold not th
ere, having slept through the enire evening and its aftermath. The murder of a New Haven Black Panther that night led to the arrest of Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panther Party; the ensuing trial would eventually lead to May Day, 1970, a massive demonstration in New Haven, to which I’d travel from New York City with my women’s consciousness-raising group. But in the spring of 1969, the women’s liberation movement, which had begun roughly a year earlier, had not made its way to the Yale School of Drama—even so, I knew that I did not want to have the photographer’s child, and though I believed I was “in love” with Arnold Weinstein, the playwright, I understood there could be no domestic tranquillity with him. And I could hear my mother on the subject of premarital sex: Don’t come home pregnant.
The abortion was months behind me the day the family began to crack open. I had quit the drama school and was moving to New York, to the Chelsea Hotel, to write. It was a morning during August of 1969, and we were in the Adirondacks. You can’t count on sun in those mountains, but that day was clear and as I walked the boardwalk toward my mother, I imagined her sunning on the big porch over the boathouse, her skin getting darker and darker, burning into me how pale I was. Two weeks earlier, Arnold had visited me in the Berkshires, lain in my bed surveying the shelf of books by Mao and Marx and Herbert Marcuse I’d assembled to impress him, complained that the theater where I worked did nothing worthy, then turned and fallen into an uninterruptible sleep. The next morning he departed on the bus to start his new revolutionary improvisational theater in Chicago, and I hadn’t heard from him since. I’d wanted to go to Chicago with him, but, he said, I wasn’t “helpful” enough. Again I’d made a decision for my independence without meaning to, and so I was grieving as I approached my mother. But I put a lift in my walk and pretended I was enthusiastic about moving alone to New York.
