The Lonely City

by Olivia Laing

  ‘When I stopped working, I preferred other activities, many other activities,’ she once said. ‘I would rather be outside walking than to sit inside a theater and watch a picture moving. Walking is my greatest pleasure.’ And again: ‘Often I just go where the man in front of me is going. I couldn’t survive here if I didn’t walk. I couldn’t be 24 hours in this apartment. I get out and look at the human beings.’

  This being New York, the human beings tended to ignore her, though Andy Warhol did confess in his diary in 1985 to passing her in the street and being unable to resist following for a while, taking sneaky photos as he went. She was wearing dark glasses and a big coat, her signature accoutrements, and she went into a Trader Horn store to talk to the counterwoman about TVs. ‘Just the kind of thing she would do,’ Warhol reported. ‘So I took pictures of her until I thought she would get mad and then I walked downtown.’ He laughs then, adding ruefully: ‘I was alone, too.’

  The internet is full of images of her wandering the city. Garbo with an umbrella. Garbo in camel-coloured slacks. Garbo in an overcoat, her hands behind her back. Garbo drifting along Third Avenue, walking calmly between the cabs. In a copy of Life from 1955, there’s a full-page photograph of her crossing a street, islanded between four lanes of traffic. She cuts a strangely Cubist figure, her head and body completely encased in an enormous black sealskin coat and hat. Only her feet are visible, two skinny legs in blurry boots. She’s turned disdainfully from the camera, her attention caught by a gauzy explosion of light at the end of the avenue, into which the buildings seem to dissolve. ‘A LONELY FORM’, the caption declares: ‘Garbo crosses First Avenue near her New York home on a recent afternoon.’

  It’s an image of refusal, of radical self-possession. But where do these pictures come from? Most were taken by Garbo’s stalker, the paparazzo Ted Leyson, who spent the best part of eleven years, from 1979 to 1990, lurking outside her apartment building. He’d hide, he once explained in an interview, and she’d come out of her front door and look around. Once she was certain she was alone, she’d relax, and then he could sneak after her, ducking from doorway to doorway, ready to snap her out of solitude.

  In some of these images you can tell that she’s spotted him, whipping a tissue to her mouth to spoil the value of his picture. Candids, they called them, a word that once meant pure, fair, sincere, free from malice. It was Leyson who bagged the final photograph, the last before she died. He shot it through the window of the car that was taking her to hospital, her long silver hair down around her shoulders, one veined hand covering the lower portion of her face. She’s looking at him through tinted glasses, her expression a queasy combination of fear, scorn and resignation; a gaze that should by rights have cracked the lens.

  In two separate interviews, Leyson explained his behaviour as an act of love. ‘That’s how I express myself – in a strange way – express my regard and admiration for Miss Garbo. It’s an overwhelming desire on my part, something I cannot control. It became obsessive,’ he told CBS’s Connie Chung in 1990. To Garbo’s biographer Barry Paris he added in 1992: ‘I admire and love her very much. If I caused her any pain, I’m sorry, but I think I did something for her or for posterity. I spent ten years of my life with her — I’m the other “man who shot Garbo”, after Clarence Bull.’

  I don’t want to moralise about desire, be it scopophilia or any other kind. I don’t want to moralise about what pleases people or what they do in their private lives, as long as it doesn’t cause harm to others. That said, Leyson’s pictures are symptomatic of a kind of gaze that whether given or withheld is dehumanising, a meat-making of a profoundly unliberating kind.

  All women are subject to that gaze, subject to having it applied or withheld. I’d been brought up by lesbians, I hadn’t been indoctrinated in anything, but lately I’d begun to feel almost cowed by its power. If I was to itemise my loneliness, to categorise its component parts, I would have to admit that some of it at least was to do with anxieties around appearance, about being found insufficiently desirable, and that lodged more deeply beneath that was the growing acknowledgement that in addition to never being able to quite escape the expectations of gender, I was not at all comfortable in the gender box to which I’d been assigned.

  Was it that the box was too small, with its preposterous expectations of what women are, or was it that I didn’t fit? Fish. I’d never been comfortable with the demands of femininity, had always felt more like a boy, a gay boy, that I inhabited a gender position somewhere between the binaries of male and female, some impossible other, some impossible both. Trans, I was starting to realise, which isn’t to say I was transitioning from one thing to another, but rather that I inhabited a space in the centre, which didn’t exist, except there I was.

  That winter, I kept watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film that is all about masks and femininity and sexual desire. If reading about the piers expanded my sense of possibility about sex, then watching Vertigo was a way of repeatedly alerting myself to the danger of conventional gender roles. Its subject is objectification and the way it breeds loneliness, amplifying rather than closing the gap between people, creating a dangerous abyss – the very chasm, in fact, into which James Stewart as police detective Scottie Ferguson finds himself tumbling, knocked off his feet by craving for a woman who even when alive is more enigma or absence than corporeal, sweating presence.

  The most disturbing section takes place after Scottie’s breakdown, which itself follows on the heels of his lover Madeleine’s suicide. Wandering the precipitous streets of San Francisco, he happens upon Judy, a chubby brunette in a Kelly green sweater who bears a passing resemblance to his lost love, though she possesses none of Madeleine’s frosty hauteur or her passivity, her near-catatonic withdrawal from life.

  In a grim reworking of the transformations effected in My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman, he takes this brash, fleshy, vulgar girl to Ransohoff’s department store and makes her try on suit after suit until he finds the exact replica of Madeleine’s immaculate smokegrey. ‘Scottie, what are you doing?’ Judy says. ‘You’re looking for the suit that she wore, for me. You want me to be dressed like her . . . No, I won’t do it!’ And she runs to the corner of the room and stands there like a child being punished, her head bowed, her hands clasped behind her back, her face turned to the wall. ‘No, I don’t want any clothes, I don’t want anything, I just want to get out of here,’ she whimpers, and he jerks her arm, saying: ‘Judy, do this for me.’ I watched that scene again and again, wanting to drain it of its power. It’s the spectacle of a woman being forced to participate in the perpetual, harrowing, non-consensual beauty pageant of femininity, of being made to confront her status as an object that might or might not be deemed acceptable, capable of arousing the eye.

  In the next scene, in a shoe shop, Judy is expressionless. She’s absented herself, withdrawing from that place of siege, her body. Later, Scottie drops her off at a hairdresser and goes home to her hotel, where he fiddles with a newspaper, in a state of agonising impatience. She comes towards him along a corridor, white-blonde now, but with her hair still down around her shoulders. ‘It should be back from your face and pinned back,’ he says furiously. ‘I told them that, I told you that.’ She tries once again to check him and then capitulates, going into the bathroom to complete the final episode of her transformation.

  Scottie walks to the window. Outside, behind net curtains, light is leaking from a neon sign, drenching the room with icy green — the Hopper colour, the colour of urban alienation, inimical to human connection; maybe even to human life. Then Judy-as-Madeleine emerges, and walks towards him, a perfect copy of a copy. They kiss and as the camera circles around them she swoons backward until it seems that he’s embracing a dead body, a prefiguration of what will shortly come to pass.

  That embrace is one of the loneliest things I’ve ever seen, though it’s hard to tell who’s worse off: the man who can only love a hologram, a figment, or the woman who can only be loved by dres
sing up as someone else — someone who barely exists at all, who is travelling from the moment we first see her towards death. Never mind meat-making: this is corpse-making, objectification taken to its logical extreme.

  *

  There are better ways of looking at bodies. One of the best antidotes I found, a corrective to Hitchcock’s necrophilia and Leyson’s stolen images of a beautiful stranger, was the work of the photographer Nan Goldin, one of David Wojnarowicz’s closest friends. In her portraits of friends and lovers, the boundaries between bodies, sexualities, genders seem magically to dissolve. This is especially true of her constantly re-edited work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which she began during the 1970s while living in Boston and continued after her move to New York City in 1978.

  These images are almost painfully intimate. ‘The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me,’ Goldin writes in the introduction to the Aperture edition of Ballad. ‘There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.’

  It’s striking, the difference between observer and participant. What Goldin’s photographs show are beloved human bodies, some of which she’s known since her teens, regarded with an unaffected tenderness. Many of her images document scenes of decadence – the wild and wasted party-going, the drugs, the baroque outfits. Others are quieter, more gentle. Two men kissing. A boy lying in the milky waters of a bath. A woman’s hand on a man’s bare back. A couple in bed, on striped sheets, the paleness of their skin emphasized by the lacy white negligées both are wearing.

  Naked flesh is everywhere in Goldin’s work, sometimes bruised or sweating, the near-translucent white of the professionally nocturnal. Bodies sleeping, bodies fucking, bodies embracing, estranged bodies, battered bodies, bodies bent on getting high. Her subjects, identified by first names only, are often half-dressed, stripping out of or climbing into clothes, washing or painting a face on in the mirror. Her work is fascinated by people in the act of transition, passing between one thing and another, adapting and refashioning themselves by way of lipstick, lashes, gold lamé, piles of teased hair.

  Goldin has explicitly said that she doesn’t believe in a single, revelatory portrait of a person, but aims instead to capture a swirl of identities over time. Her people pass through moods, outfits, lovers, states of intoxication. Forget the clunky opposition between masked and authentic selves. Instead there’s fluidity, perpetual transition. Many of her subjects, especially early on, were drag queens. She captures the process of transformation, the beautiful boys turning themselves into what she once described as a ‘third gender, that made more sense than either of the other two’. Sexual desire is likewise fluid, a matter of connection rather than category. A relief, this non-binary domain, where playing with appearance doesn’t automatically necessitate Vertigo’s toxic self-extinguishment, but is instead an act of discovery and expression.

  That isn’t to say that the portraits shy away from showing failures of intimacy: glitches and hiccups, moments of ambivalence or unravelling ties. The subject of Ballad is explicitly sexual relationships. As a body of work it traverses the poles of connection and isolation, capturing people as they drift together and apart; moving on the unsteady tides of love. Some sequences – ‘Lonely Boys’, maybe, or ‘Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues’ or ‘Casta Diva’ — show individuals in states of solitude and longing, lounging on beds or gazing through windows, that classic Hopperesque image of the person in a state of paucity and enclosure. The beautiful Dieter with the tulips, its powdery grey light, the papery striped flowers, the softness of his face. Tough Sharon, hand thrust into the waistband of her blue jeans, a little square of plaster stuck on to her jaw. Or Brian, lying on the middle one of three double beds in a dingy, barely furnished hotel room in Merida, Mexico, 1982.

  Others plunge to the opposite extreme, showing scenes of contact, even congress. A naked boy and a nearly naked girl kissing on a stained mattress on the floor in a New York apartment, their torsos pressed together, their slender legs entwined, one delicate foot cupped upwards, exposing a filthy sole. Or Nan herself in purple ankle boots and maroon socks, her pale legs bare, straddling her lover’s chest, his hands just grazing the edge of translucent black knickers. The loveliness of touch, the rush of contact, the high of simply embracing, like Bruce and French Chris on a towel scattered with stars on the beach at Fire Island.

  But if sex is a cure for isolation, it is also a source of alienation in its own right, capable of igniting precisely the dangerous forces that swept Scottie off his feet in Vertigo. Possessiveness, jealousy, obsession; an inability to tolerate rejection, ambivalence or loss. The most famous image in Ballad is a self-portrait of Goldin after her then-boyfriend battered her so badly that she was almost blinded. Her face is bruised and swollen, smashed around the eyes, the skin discoloured to a ruddy purple. Her right iris is clear but the left is suffused with blood, the same scarlet as her painted lips. She stares into the camera, damaged eye to eye, not so much letting herself be seen as willing herself to look, conducting her own act of remembrance, adding herself to the archive of what goes on between human bodies.

  This desire to show what really happened, no matter how shocking, had its roots in childhood experience. Like Wojnarowicz, whom she first met when they were both living in the East Village, Goldin grew up in the suburbs, amidst a climate of silence and denial. When she was eleven, her eighteen-year-old sister killed herself, lying down on a train track outside Washington D.C. ‘I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction,’ she wrote. ‘Because of the times, the early sixties, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behaviour, beyond control.’

  Like Wojnarowicz, she used photography as an act of resistance. In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.’ It wasn’t enough just to take the photos; they also had to be seen, shown back to their subjects. On Twitter, of all places, I’d once come across a handwritten, Xeroxed flier, advertising one of the first of the periodic slideshows she organised of Ballad: 10 p.m. on a May night at 8BC, a club that opened in 1983 in the basement of an old farmhouse, back when the East Village was almost derelict, block after block burned out or converted into shooting galleries.

  In 1990, Interview published a conversation between Goldin and Wojnarowicz, one of the wide-ranging, intimate exchanges between artists that Andy Warhol had envisaged when he first dreamt up the magazine, two decades before. It opens with them in a café in the Lower East Side, joking around over the size of their calamari and struck to discover their birthdays are only a day apart. They talk about their work, discussing anger and violence, sexual desire and their shared wish to leave a record.

  Close to the Knives had only recently been published, and towards the end of their conversation Goldin asks David what he’d most like his work to achieve. ‘I want to make somebody feel less alienated – that’s the most meaningful thing to me,’ he says. ‘I think part of what informs this book is the pain of having grown up for years and years believing I was from another planet.’ A minute later, he adds, ‘We can all affect each other, by being open enough to make each other feel less alienated.’

  This sums up exactly how I felt about his work. It was the rawness and vulnerability of his expression that proved so healing to my own feelings of isolation: the willingness to admit to failure or grief, to let himself be touched, to acknowledge desire, anger, pain, to be emotionally alive. His self-exposure was in itself a cure for loneliness, dissolving the sense of difference that comes when one believes one’s feelings or desires to be uniquely shameful.

  In all his writing there is a stepping back and forth between different kinds of material, some very dark and full of disorder, but
containing always astonishing spaces of lightness, loveliness, strangeness. He possessed an openness that was in itself beautiful, though he sometimes wondered if he was only capable of reproducing the ugliness he’d seen.

  Then too there was his sense of solidarity, his commitment to and interest in people who were different, who stood outside the norm. ‘I always consider myself either anonymous or odd looking,’ he once wrote, ‘and there is an unspoken bond between people in the world that don’t fit in or are not attractive in the general societal sense.’ Almost all the sexual encounters that he records — hundreds, if not more — attest to an extraordinary tenderness towards other people’s bodies and desires, their weirdnesses, the things they want to do. The only time he sounds truly hostile is when coercion or cruelty of some kind is involved.

  If I had to pick a single paragraph, it would be this one, from Close to the Knives, about an encounter he had on the pier.

  In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.