Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  Finally the last appeal was denied; the execution was set for April 14, 1965. Capote flew out to Kansas with his Random House editor, Joe Fox. At the motel he changed his mind and decided he didn’t want to see the men. He told Smith over the phone that the officials wouldn’t let him visit. Then at the last minute he changed his mind again and drove out to the prison with Fox, arriving in time to exchange a few last words with Smith and Hickock. Fox remained outside while Capote joined twenty other men, including Detective Dewey, in the warehouse with the gallows.

  First Dick Hickock was hanged, then, a half hour later, Perry Smith. In In Cold Blood, Capote never mentioned his own presence in the warehouse but described the death of Smith entirely from Dewey’s point of view:

  Steps, noose, mask; but before the mask was adjusted, the prisoner spat out his chewing gum into the chaplain’s outstretched palm. Dewey shut his eyes; he kept them shut until he heard the thud-snap that announces a rope-broken neck…. He remembered his first meeting with Perry in the interrogation room at the Police Headquarters in Las Vegas—the dwarfish boy-man seated in the metal chair, his small booted feet not quite brushing the floor. And when Dewey now opened his eyes, that is what he saw: the same childish feet, tilted, dangling.

  A few hours later, Capote flew back to New York with Fox, clutching his editor’s hand and crying for the entire flight.

  He finished writing the final pages by the middle of June. In Cold Blood was published in four installments in four consecutive issues of the New Yorker at the end of 1965. It came out as a book in January 1966, dedicated to Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee. It was praised to the skies. Capote claimed to have invented a new genre, the “nonfiction novel,” which the smarter critics knew not to believe, but it didn’t matter. The book sold like no literary book had sold before. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks, twelve weeks as number one. The author was on magazine covers, TV talk shows, and the radio. NBC News filmed a half-hour special, Capote Returns to Kansas, that April. He had left himself out of his book, but he seemed to be everywhere else, the effeminate little man who wrote a best seller about two hardened killers.

  The book appeared the same month as the Time magazine essay about homosexuality and Stanley Kauffmann’s attack on gays in the theater. One would expect this antigay mood to splash Capote. Kauffmann, in fact, reviewed In Cold Blood in the New Republic, giving the book one of its few bad notices. This time, he did his name-calling in code: “Are we so bankrupt, so avid for novelty that merely because a famous writer produces an amplified magazine crime-feature, the result is automatically elevated to serious literature just as Andy Warhol, by painting a soup-carton, has allegedly elevated it to art?” Many people knew about Andy Warhol. But strangely enough, nobody else called Capote on his sexuality, not in code or otherwise. The homosexual panic in the lively arts did not affect the reception of In Cold Blood. It was as if books existed in an entirely different dimension. Maybe book reviewers were too polite to mention it. Or perhaps In Cold Blood was too straight for Middle America to read homosexuality into it. They never suspected that gay men know more about the rough trade world of Smith and Hickock than most family men do. There is a gay story line in In Cold Blood, but it remained hidden until those two movies were made.

  One other bad review stung Capote deeply. Kenneth Tynan in the Observer in Britain accused him of letting Smith and Hickock die in order to give his book a stronger ending: “For the first time an influential writer in the front rank has been placed in a privileged intimacy with criminals about to die and, in my view, done less than he might have to save them…. No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life.” It’s an accusation that persists to this day. But the appeals process went on for five long years. The case was heard in many courts and presented by different teams of experienced lawyers. It’s hard to know what Capote could have done that wasn’t done already. Yet the charge stuck in his craw for years to come.

  Making the charge more damning is the belief that Capote was in love with Smith: he let his beloved die for the sake of a best seller, and then paid for it for the rest of his life. Well, it makes a great story. But one does not need to fall in love with a man to become emotionally connected with him. Donald Windham makes some wise comments about Capote’s friendship with Smith and Hickock: “For although the word ‘friends’ should be put into quotation marks, he had become closely involved with the two criminals, especially Perry Smith, as closely involved as a soldier with two prisoners trapped in a no-man’s-land in a battle might be, on opposite sides but inexorably bound together.” In his book Capote identifies as much with the victims as he does with the killers, and it creates a powerful tension for the reader. I assume a similar tension existed in the author, an intense knot of fear, righteousness, pity, and survivor’s guilt. No wonder Capote’s drinking grew worse and new nervous tics appeared while he waited for the execution.

  Afterward he insisted his conscience was clear and claimed he had done all that he could for Smith and Hickock. And he threw himself a party.

  He rented the grand ballroom at the Plaza Hotel for a masked ball to be held on November 28, 1966, ostensibly in honor of his friend, Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. He invited every famous person he had met or wanted to meet. He even invited a few unknown friends, including Alvin and Marie Dewey. (Jack Dunphy was invited, of course, and he actually attended, much to everyone’s surprise. He and Capote were still a couple, but Dunphy grew more withdrawn as he grew older, avoiding Capote’s society friends, which meant seeing less of Capote. Capote bought them two “his and his” cottages in the Hamptons, then spent more time at Dunphy’s than his own because Dunphy’s place was homier and Dunphy was usually home. They were a curious couple.)

  George Plimpton provides a wonderful account of the Black and White Ball in his oral biography, Truman Capote, by letting two dozen participants share their conflicting stories. Some describe it as an overblown prom for grown-ups. Others imbue it with the magic of a grand ball in Proust. Jerome Robbins danced with Lauren Bacall. Harold Prince and his wife left after a half hour. Norman Mailer got into an argument with McGeorge Bundy from the White House about Vietnam. Knowing what had been and what would be for Capote, one can’t help but think of the party as an elaborate defense mechanism against guilt and unease. Yet for twelve hours, from ten at night to ten the next morning, famous names in tuxedos, evening gowns, and masks poured in and out of the bright hotel overlooking Central Park, and success looked very much like what a small, precocious boy in Alabama might imagine it to be.

  Fifteen blocks downtown from the Plaza Hotel, a black jazz musician named Rufus Scott leaves a shabby Forty-second Street movie theater around midnight. Heartbroken and broke, crazy with guilt, he roams Times Square in the bitter cold.

  A hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept.

  Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude.

  We have stepped from fact to fiction, to the opening chapter of Another Country by James Baldwin, published four years earlier, in 1962. The novel’s first eighty pages are extraordinary, a powerful flow of city scenes and flashbacks that carry Rufus through his last night on earth to his suicide leap off the George Washington Bridge. According to received opinion, the book falls apart afterward, but it isn’t true. There are things wrong with Another Country, but, as Randall Jarrell said in italics of the faults in a Walt Whitman poem, “they do not matter.”

  Baldwin began work on the novel before the publication of
Giovanni’s Room in 1956. The country of the title is love. But where Giovanni’s Room is about the fear and defeat of love, the new novel is about love’s triumph, which is much harder to write about. Adding to the challenge, he included race this time. His characters strive to cross the great divide between whites and blacks in uneasy friendships and heated love affairs. Complicating matters further, Baldwin put in gay men who sleep with women and straight men who sleep with men.

  Rufus, a young drummer, becomes involved with a circle of white artists in Greenwich Village; he is loved by both men and women. Scalded and scarred by racism, his paranoia turns his love of Leona, a white girl from the South, into something poisonous and ugly. Leona ends up in a mental hospital, which leads to Rufus’s nervous breakdown. After his suicide, Rufus’s younger sister, Ida, joins the circle of white friends. A rising blues singer, Ida is ambitious, angry, and unpredictable. The white friends fall in love with her just as they did with her brother. Then Eric, a gay actor from Alabama, returns from Paris, where he has fallen in love with a French street boy named Yves. While waiting for Yves to join him in New York, he begins an affair with Cass, the wife of a successful novelist.

  There is an element of soap opera in this crisscross of plots, but soap opera has its own emotional truth. One wishes more soaps had some of the dangerous power that Baldwin achieves here. He covers a remarkable range of life, from nights in New York jazz clubs to a gay white childhood in the South to a pot party on a Greenwich Village rooftop to violent marital quarrels to a straight man and a gay man talking about their lovers—and then having sex with each other just to clear the air. This novel about pain and forgiveness is scored to multiple recordings of Bessie Smith.

  It was a complex project that needed peace and concentration, but Baldwin’s life was anything but peaceful. He divided his time between Paris and New York, taking an apartment at 81 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. He remained friendly with Lucien Happersberger (there’s a lot of Happersberger in the character of Yves), but he had a new friend in his life, a Turkish actor named Engin Cezzar. Cezzar studied at Yale Drama School, and they met when Cezzar was cast as Giovanni in an Actors Studio production of Giovanni’s Room. In effect, Baldwin was bonding with one of his characters. Cezzar later wrote in a memoir that he saved Baldwin from his “incessant homosexuality” by showing him the value of pure masculine friendship. Cezzar soon married, and Baldwin became good friends with his wife. In an odd essay about André Gide written at this time, “The Male Prison,” Baldwin complains about “the phenomena of present-day homosexuality… where it is impossible to have a lover or friend, where the possibility of genuine human involvement has altogether ceased.” He admires Gide for staying married, as if a double life gives a man the stability he could never find in gay life. Baldwin’s feelings about gay love were more conflicted than one might imagine from his fiction. Whatever the truth about his feelings for Cezzar, he visited him in Turkey and began to use Istanbul as a second home, in much the same way he had used Paris.

  His personal life was placid compared to what was happening in the United States. The political climate was changing radically, and Baldwin’s career changed with it. The paperback of Notes of a Native Son had begun to sell with the success of Giovanni’s Room in 1956, but it fully took off with the rise of the civil rights movement. White readers wanted to understand the world of race, and Baldwin wrote about it clearly and passionately. Esquire and Harper’s commissioned articles from him. His next book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, appeared to high praise in 1961 and was a best seller. Baldwin became involved in the movement himself, speaking at rallies and conferences and appearing on television—people found his clarinet-toned voice and beautifully odd face as fascinating as they found the voice and face of Truman Capote. It’s a wonder he was able to finish his novel at all, which he managed to do in Istanbul.

  He was invited to a dinner at the White House honoring Nobel Prize winners in April 1962. He was delighted to meet Jackie Kennedy, but spent more time with Katherine Anne Porter.

  Another Country was published that June. People who admired the essayist of race were startled to be reminded that he was also a novelist who wrote about gay sex. The novel received a contradictory mix of reviews, ranging from praise by Lionel Trilling to being called pornography by Stanley Edgar Hyman to being dismissed in the Times Book Review by Paul Goodman, who called the book “mediocre” but didn’t bother to describe the plot or name any characters. (Goodman was famously bisexual, but fiercely competitive with all other writers.)

  The novel was a best seller in hardcover and a huge best seller in paperback the following year, second in sales only to Lord of the Flies. It appeared only a few months before Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway. Baldwin and Albee both used anger and obscenity to dig into the darker side of love—Another Country is full of words that were banned from print a year or two earlier: fuck, cunt, cocksucker, and motherfucker. People were excited by the adult rawness of the language and the emotions.

  The book had many gay readers, but not all of them liked it. Forty-four-year-old Donald Vining, who worked in the offices of Columbia University, kept a copious diary from 1933 to 1975, which he later published as A Gay Diary in four useful volumes. Vining preferred plays to novels, but he did read Baldwin.

  I read late last night… Another Country, which I didn’t like a bit. Baldwin can certainly write but his sex scenes are much too explicit and since his characters’ sex tastes are by no means mine, it’s rather revolting. They seem to share an author’s taste for sweaty bodies, which I find extremely repulsive, and there is always so much crying, gasping, panting, etc.

  Sweat aside (much of the novel takes place in the summer), Vining has a point. The sex scenes are written in the language of pulp fiction, and there’s lots of throbbing and thrashing, especially in the straight couplings. Another Country went through many drafts, but the book could have used one more revision to smooth out purple patches and remove repetitions. (Every ten pages or so somebody throws his or her head back and laughs.) But ultimately it doesn’t matter. The chaos of Baldwin’s life probably fed the energy of the book, and that energy and electricity carry the reader through to the end. Even Vining stayed up late to finish it.

  But the world did not have much time to digest his novel before Baldwin hit them with something entirely new: a long essay about race published in, of all places, the 1962 Thanksgiving issue of the New Yorker. The original title was “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” A year later it was reprinted as a book, The Fire Next Time.

  Ostensibly Baldwin’s account of his dinner with Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Black Muslims, it’s a long, eloquent monologue about the cost of racism in America. Written in the cadences of a sermon, it is built out of extended perorations and the music of words. Like many sermons, it works more from sound than from argument or narrative. It is better written than any of Baldwin’s novels, yet not nearly as expressive or involving. The beautiful phrasing creates a kind of trance music, and there are more generalizations than specifics. Now and then a memorable idea comes out of these lovely clouds, but much of the piece evaporates after it’s read. The strongest idea is the threat of violence promised in the book’s title, which is addressed only in the closing sentences, when he insists that the conscious whites and conscious blacks must, “like lovers,” do everything they can to raise the consciousness of others and “end the racial nightmare.”

  If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

  The race riots that did not begin until two years later made this threat seem like the most important part of the essay. Starting in 1965, not a year passed without another inner city erupting in violence: Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Chicago, even Washington, D.C. Baldwin looked like a prophet.

  A reader in 2010 can’t help being struck by other de
tails, such as Baldwin’s skepticism about “Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years.” (He was off by only six years.) A gay reader can’t help noticing some of his own experience echoed in Baldwin’s black experience: “Ask any Negro what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him.” But the essay is not nearly as valuable now as when it was first published. Its fine phrases and lovely cadences provided educated white readers with a safe place where they could think about the damage of three centuries of racial oppression. It was far harder even to begin to think about such things in 1962 than it is now.

  The Fire Next Time came out as a short book in January 1963. Over the next few months, Baldwin’s accelerating career picked up even more speed and shifted into a new direction. Martin Luther King, who met Baldwin in 1957 after the Montgomery bus boycott, organized a prolonged campaign against segregation ordinances in Birmingham, Alabama. Weeks of demonstrations and arrests reached their climax on May 2 when the white cops attacked a march by black schoolchildren with fire hoses and police dogs. TV cameras were present, and the brutality was seen that night on The Huntley-Brinkley Report. The nation was appalled. Two weeks later, Time magazine put Baldwin on their cover as the literary voice of civil rights. The article inside emphasized his essays over his fiction and said nothing about his sexuality—this is the same magazine that three years later attacked homosexuals for poisoning American culture. People forgot Baldwin’s sex life—for now, anyway—while they spoke about black civil rights. Baldwin himself kept it out of his speeches and articles, understandably so. A person can fight only one war at a time.