Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Interesting, isn’t it, how Billie Holiday, who is said to have spoken for her people more than any other black singer, spoke through white music? It lay in tone of voice. Not for years would she be a jukebox fixture, like the bright and younger Ella Fitzgerald, of whom Billie was the dark side. But if Ella had optimistic groupies, the tragedian Billie already had her cult, mostly of the Caucasian intelligentsia, though she didn’t quite know what to do with them.

  Did she have charm? She, the woman, had charm, but her singing, while touching you at the shuddering core, oddly lacked charm. Billie’s singing had—has—no dynamic nuance: it is all an unshaded mezzo forte within a tessitura of one deep octave. Given this, the variety makes a prismatic paradox.

  David Sachs loaned me Gide’s 1925 The Counterfeiters, and also Les enfants terribles, which was the unchanged title of the translation of Cocteau’s 1930 novel. (Paul Goodman contended—wrongly—it should have been Englished as The Holy Terrors.) Cocteau’s book is strongly influenced by Gide’s, wherein Cocteau himself is nonetheless caricatured as the Comte de Passavant, a licentious poetaster. Each book deals with alienated youth, but otherwise the claustrophobic power of Les enfants couldn’t be more distant from the open-aired Counterfeiters. I was intensely drawn to both works. Indeed, as happens in love—be it with a person, a pet, an artifact—I wished in some way to be these works. But just as I was not aware of the increasing mass of individuals across America who felt they had a unique claim on the dazzling victim, Billie Holiday (as they would feel a generation later about Marilyn), neither did I realize that across the ocean at that moment scores of young people were claiming to have been the models for the faintly incestuous brother and sister, and their small coterie, who were the enfants terribles.

  Random recall:

  —Leo Sowerby said to look at people when they talked to me, not stare around the room like a child.

  The morning after that kiss, he explained quietly that he was bisexual. I’m still inclined to believe whatever I’m told, at least at first blush. Bisexual, however, since it by definition required at least two other people, implied unfaithfulness to one of them. Was this Christian, even for a person less involved than Leo with the church? (Is a person who makes love to himself by definition homosexual?)

  —Christian history already struck me as contradictory, blood soaked, and infinitely sad because it used for its identity the form of Christ on a cross. And “The Second Coming” already struck me as the perfect poem in every way except its basic premise: Was the “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” really so much more horrific than that other slouching toward Bethlehem twenty centuries ago?

  —We were faithful weekend clients of the Cabin Inn on South State Street. This vast barn featured Miss Valda Gray and her Beauties. The Beauties included Miss Carole Lee, Miss Alice Faye, and the number-one draw, Miss Jo-Ann Crawford, all of them six-foot black males in inexpensive semidrag. Accompanied by a terrific jazz quintet, they would sing (“Honeysuckle Rose,” “A Tisket, a Tasket,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) and dance with a tricky step that involved swirling their floor-length trains with tiny kicks in one direction while revolving in the other direction. Hatti mastered the step. I almost did.

  John Barrymore was in Chicago costarring in a piece of fluff with his then wife, Elaine Barrie. Their drunken spats were publicized: ’twas even rumored he spanked her on stage. One midnight Barrymore showed up at the Cabin with an entourage. Jo-Ann Crawford was in heaven. “Work it, Miss Crawford, work it, girl!” screamed the other Beauties as she crooned “Honeysuckle” straight at the star who feigned embarrassment. They left the club together at 4 a.m. Miss Crawford was never again the same.

  During final exams Maggy and I, during lunch hour in the blaze of noon, decided to peek into the Cabin Inn. The cigarette butts, the shafts of sunshine italicizing the cheap checkered tablecloths which last night looked sumptuous, the stale smell of beer, the silence, except for the clean-up women and their buckets—all this had a certain panache of its own. I went up onto the empty stage and played Debussy’s brassy Prélude from the Suite pour le piano. The cleaning women put down their buckets. “Will you listen to that! Just like Paderooskee!” Do cleaning women make such observations still?

  —The Chicago Daily News spoke of soldiers in Europe throwing babies in the air, like balloons, and catching them on their bayonets.

  —Maggy and I, accompanied by Marian Weinberg, our class’s jazz piano player, danced the “Blue Tango” for a school function. To prime ourselves we drank straight bourbon, then mugged during the performance. Nobody clapped much. We then drove to the Cabin Inn where, unbeknown to us, my parents were seated with four friends. They’d come to see what this was all about. It wasn’t so bad, they said.

  —The same percentage of people seem to be left-handed as queer. Me, I was right-handed in all ways except (this was clear from the start) in opening combination locks and in turning handsprings. Then as now I couldn’t enter a grocery store without pondering the percentage of items which, within a year, would be ingested and excreted.

  —Church and state were never a cause at U-High with its large Jewish population, but state and school were. With anxiety increasing abroad, conspicuous patriotism increased at home. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was everywhere. Rather than remain seated while it was intoned, Rosemary and I would leave the public hall or schoolroom. Mother and Father stood by us (sat by us?) despite the shock of their friends and the contempt of our classmates.

  —“Why, you’re really a nice person,” says someone after meeting me for the first time, implying they’d thought I wouldn’t be a nice person, and they have the gall to say it. I point this out, which makes me less of a nice person, thank God.

  —Did you ever meet Greta Garbo?

  I don’t recall.

  —Later adolescence, redolent of gin fizzes, menstrual ooze and semen, banana splits, Woody Herman and broken dates, and the jitters of an already-raging war that would, at the very least, revamp America’s notion of art (for maybe too brief a time) and of totalitarianism. Whereupon Dick Jacob said: “There’s a man named Alfred, who lives just around your corner, on Fifty-seventh, who will do to you what you’ve never had done.” So I called Alfred (since he was not a human but a function, one could phone the stranger without embarrassment) and we made a date for tonight. Beforehand, I rode the bike to the Piccadilly and saw The Goldwyn Follies, starring Zorina. Later at Alfred’s, he did do something to me that I’d never had done, and there went another virginity! In the words of Felix Krull, “I need not go into details—the episode [with the family nursemaid] had the usual features, too well known to be of interest to a cultured audience.” Alfred, however, turned out to be something of a pianist. On his Baldwin baby grand he played Cyril Scott’s Lento and Lotus Land, during which two figures who inhabited the shadows of his apartment wandered into the front room. One of these was James Purdy, whom I revisualize as being wraithlike and drastically blond with a troubled expression that would infiltrate his marvelous crazy prose in years to come.

  The sound of Cyril Scott inevitably revives this incident, even as the sight of the granite corner on Fifty-seventh evokes a touch of evil. Both Purdy and Zorina (the latter known to all as Brigitta), when I later knew them, professed a mild appreciation of having indirectly participated in this deflowering.

  Children’s very innocence renders them cruel.

  —In Québec at the shrine of Sainte Anne de Beaupré, still intoxicated with forbidden Catholicism, I persuaded Father to buy me an expensive gold and pearl rosary which I kept always in my pocket as the Greeks keep worry beads. Now, months later, standing with Bruce on the bridge of the Wooded Island, I ostentatiously drew the rosary forth and with flare flung it into the air, where it caught the sunlight for a moment, then vanished into the murk below. No one paid attention, Bruce was disgusted. Father at the end of the day despaired that I still hadn’t learned the value of money.

  —Often durin
g high school, then during the fifties in France, I dyed my hair. Rosemary too. Sometimes we were redheads. Sometimes blonds.

  —Why am I writing this book?

  To revive a tottering conviction, long ago banished to a dim corner of my room, that if we could Only Connect the world would have meaning. But what’s the meaning of connect? And isn’t the sense of life just as full or empty when alone? Nothing can penetrate the sumptuous solitude of Everyman, yet I have a frantic urge (many people I know do not, including composers and writers) to leave something.

  —On 2 April 1939 James Holmes is born in Pittsburg, Kansas. Unknown to each other, our lives will flow parallel and distant for twenty-eight years, when we will meet and remain together for the rest of our time on earth, with an understanding that is far more than love, and without which life would be mere existence.

  The Rorem family.

  10. U-High—Part III

  New York hadn’t changed in the three years since I’d been there, but I had. As one’s voice lowers, perspective widens to include the city’s echoing avenues at four in the morning. What was I doing there, aged fifteen (going on sixteen), during the summer of 1939?

  In Chicago, that spring—perhaps at the moment JH was being born—Géorg and I were cruising the empty Hyde Park. Round about midnight, over by that lilac bush we perceived a standing man, arms crossed, legs planted firmly. Nearer, we saw the smiling Irish mug and curly hair of a nineteen-year-old collegiate type. Minutes later, beneath the streetlamp on Stoney Island, we marveled at his very green eyes. Do people actually see out of green eyes? Are they useful as well as beautiful? His name was Wally. Géorg went home with him, and told me about it next day. We got acquainted. He was what we then dubbed “an ordinary person,” with all that the label infers in earthiness—none of the brainy repartee that stands in the way of sex. Learning that Wally planned to go to the world’s fair, I wanted to go to. Surprisingly, they said okay, my parents.

  Of the train, coach class, I recall nothing beyond the endlessness and, I suppose, a certain eagerness. The fair itself was less a lure than the intoxication of being on my own, for the first time ever. Once arrived, the New Yorker Hotel on Eighth Avenue was the only familiar landmark, so there I registered. Now what? I phoned Wally, the sole person I knew, at the Sloane House, not realizing the Sloane House was just across the street on Thirty-fourth. After a day or two he persuaded me to move there.

  Of the fair, somewhere out in Queens, I recall little beyond a feigned dutiful interest; I had seen all this back home in 1933. We went there several times (I think), but I longed to get back to Manhattan in time for the purposeful night.

  The purposefulness centered on Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, a block of seemingly nothing but nightclubs. I was drawn immediately to Kelly’s Stables to hear Billie Holiday, arriving at around nine to a near-empty room. But there she stood in a green and yellow evening gown, with another woman at the near end of the bar. I had a drink, maybe two or three (in New York the legal age was eighteen, and draft cards were not yet demanded for proof), smoked a Chesterfield, maybe two or three, blowing smoke rings, for which I had a talent, plus a talent for disposing of the butt with a blasé flick of the middle finger. Then I approached Miss Holiday uncertainly to ask if she might sing “Under a Blue Jungle Moon.” She sized me up, said she had made a record of it but couldn’t remember the words, and the piano player didn’t know it. She was civil, sober, not encouraging. I had no notion of how to develop a conversation, so that was that, except for the “set,” which she performed with her pianist a few minutes later, and then another some time after, both ending with “Strange Fruit.” Then I crossed the street to the Dizzy Club.

  The Dizzy Club was a basement joint with two straight bartenders, a gay clientele, and an entertainer named Daisy, whose thing was to rush about disheveled in a child’s dress shrieking Eva Tanguay’s “I Don’t Care.” On his night off, one bartender would return to the place, drunk, as a customer; likewise the other bartender on his free night. Who else should show up as a customer, when the joint down the street had closed, but Billie Holiday herself, as warm here as she’d been cold there, so attractive in her street clothes and hat, so New York, so charismatically perfumed (though this was well before the signature gardenias in her pomaded hair), so campy, as she kept up a running commentary on “Old Rocking Chair” being crooned by the pianist in the corner. My dear old Aunt Harriett—“Yeah, she was queer too!”

  Suddenly there was a hush. Billie had begun to sing, and a sense of awe filled the room. The song was “Night and Day.” How could she shift, in the space of a breath, from giddy banter into high tragedy?—because “Night and Day” was tragedy from her lips, anything was; she couldn’t not be sad with even the happiest song.

  The answer: We are what we speak. My English is not the same as yours, or his, or the Queen of England’s or even my sister’s, by virtue of the day I was born and the street I live on. Of the 116 million Japanese, each one speaks his version of that language, though to us who don’t understand that language in any version, the whole of Japan behaves according to the language, inflected in every way. A Frenchman, even if you’re married to him, differs from you by being raised more thriftily: having fewer words, he combines them more ingenuously. Conversely, we speak what we are. Mae West or Tallulah Bankhead inadvertently lent to their mildest declaration—“I like coffee”—a blush-making innuendo. Sarah Vaughan, who by academic standards had a better voice than Billie’s, was but a shallow ornamentalist in the identical repertory. Thus Billie’s background, and her reaction—conscious or not—to that background, colored her speech and her musicalization of that speech.

  I could never go on this way about any musical executant other than Billie Holiday, not Schnabel or Callas or Belle Tannenbaum, for what have they given to great music that was not in the music already? Even with composers I’m shy of rhetoric, though despite the ken of our increasingly philistine intelligentsia, one Olivier Messiaen is, by the nature of things, worth a hundred Itzhak Perlmans. Since in jazz (as I wrote earlier) performer and composer are one, or become one, definitions swerve. Billie could make a masterpiece out of a lousy tune. And she entered my life early enough to become—like a mother duck to a lost baby chick—imprinted on my uninhibited consciousness. So I grant her all.

  Out in the dawn of Fifth Avenue, after the Dizzy Club, if Wally wasn’t around to lead me back to Thirty-fourth with his green eyes, I’d go home with whoever asked (and someone always did)—it seemed simpler than saying no. One hitch lay in my being so often drunk. I didn’t drink because people bored me (that would come) or because I bored myself, but because I needed to become uninhibited enough for sex. Not that sex, as such, inhibited me, but the craving to be passive shamed me as much as it excited me. Was this craving due to a stringent Quaker background that gears one to turn, so to speak, the other cheek? What then of aggressive Quakers? More likely it was pure narcissism.

  There’s a Cheever story with the line: “You just talked yourself out of a good fuck.” Well, I drank myself out of many a good fuck, passing out more often than putting out. As on a silver screen showing an old movie I see Ned, with the resilience of youth, disentangling himself from another New York bed that looks like a battleground, tiptoeing away from a sleeper who is already a forgotten lover. I clearly remember my final night on the East Coast, being in a man’s car on the West Side Highway. He was trying to grope me while driving. At around 180th Street, when I wouldn’t come across, he reached over me and opened the door, saying calmly, “Get out!,” which I did, and lived to tell the tale. Next day I took the train back to Chicago earlier than I’d planned.

  Each week brought news of Hitler’s advance through eastern Europe. I could not grasp then, and cannot now, why any one could want to subjugate another person, let alone an entire civilization, to the point of obliteration. Why not make the point by composing a symphony?

  Back in the Windy City I became a prodi
gal son, impressing the family with what I portrayed as the conquest of Billie Holiday. At the piano I worked out the chord changes of “Night and Day” in Billies key of Aflat, in case I were ever called upon impromptu to accompany her. (I never was.)

  Later that summer we removed for a month en famille to a log cabin on a lake in Twig, Minnesota, a dozen miles out of Duluth, taking along our cousin (Mother’s niece) Kathryn Nash. Kathy was between me and Rosemary in age, with long thick hair—red-gold, like the gilt-edge pages of a Bible—framing her ruddy features. She had spent the winter with us, which included a fling with D., and now would round out the year in Twig. The log cabin having no toilet, we used an old WC twelve yards away. Which means that in my fastidiousness I shat no more than five times that month. Day after day went by when, despite prunes and processions to the hut with Kathy carrying an enema with rubber attachments, I would just sit there, moody and clenched, on the wooden hole six feet above a pile of rotten leaves and human dung and buzzing flies. My constipation was such that, although I’m more or less “regular,” as the Ex-Lax ads used to say, even today, twenty thousand bowel movements later, I’m still queasy each time I go.

  Excitement consisted in going by day to a Duluth drugstore and gorging on cherry pie à la mode followed by devil’s-food cake, and by night to a country club where we danced to Glenn Miller’s “Sunrise Serenade” and to Ella Fitzgerald singing “Don’t Worry ’bout Me,” the first five notes of which, in rhythm and pitch, were identical to the first five in “You Go to My Head” (an octave pickup to a quarter-note triplet finishing on a half note). Every evening at sunset Mother and I each drank two cans of beer—not one, not three, but two. And I wrote stories in the telegraphic style of Dos Passos.