Cukor’s choice for the role of Larry was a young unknown amateur named John Russell, who had just left the Marine Corps. He was good looking, and Cukor still (June 1972) maintains that the test they shot of him was excellent. Some of the studio executives thought him too tall, however—he was six foot four—and this was one reason why he didn’t get the part when the film was taken over by Goulding. John Russell afterwards worked quite a bit in films and in television, but he never really made a hit. Cukor remembers that he met Russell later and that he was drunk and looked terrible.
Prabhavananda doesn’t remember that Cukor ever brought Russell to see him. But Edmund Goulding did bring Russell’s successor, Tyrone Power. Swami was, and still is, scornful about Power. He says that he asked Power if he understood what Larry is supposed to believe, and that Power admitted that he didn’t. Some versions of the story of their meeting state that Swami said, “Mr. Power, you are not worthy to play Larry!”, but Swami denies that he said this. Seeing Swami must have scared poor Power out of whatever wits he possessed, so it’s no wonder he made a bad impression. In the last analysis, Power’s lack of understanding was the fault of Trotti and the stupidities of his script.
45 I don’t remember that Denny and Willie ever got together during this visit; but it seems to me that Denny used to brag that he had been admired by Willie—at any rate from a distance—when he was in Europe before the war. Curiously enough, Denny and Willie were to die on the same day, December 16; Denny in 1948, Maugham in 1965.
[46 The American magazine.]
47 The Friendship at this period is described in A Single Man as “The Starboard Side.” The sentence about “Girls dashing down from their apartments to drag some gorgeous endangered young drunk to safety and breakfast served next morning in bed . . .” refers to Jo Lathwood’s capture of Ben Masselink. Jo was living at her apartment on West Channel Road (“Las Ondas”), only a few doors from The Friendship, throughout this period, but Christopher didn’t get to know her until later.
Peter Viertel writes about The Friendship and its owner, Doc Law, in his first novel The Canyon. He calls Doc Law “Doc Winters” and The Friendship “The Schooner Café.” He also mentions the pharmacy which Doc Law ran, right next to the bar. (The wall between them has been broken down now, and the extra space is sometimes used for dancing.)
Doc Law spent most of the daytime in the pharmacy, drunk. His drugs looked as if they had aged to mere dust in their glass jars. Christopher used to say that one could have gone in there and swallowed spoonfuls from all the jars marked “poison” without coming to the slightest harm. Here are two items about Doc from the notebook [mentioned pp. 14–15, 21, 25] (date unknown):
Doc Law, on the oil strike in New York: “They’re a long way from Christ.” . . . I go to Doc Law to plead for some toilet paper, during the shortage. Doc is in a good mood. He is printing an announcement—something about “a large assortment”—on a long roll of paper, with a rubber stamp and a ruler to keep the letters in line. “Sure,” he answers, “you can wipe your ass with me any time you want to, kid.”
48 Christopher didn’t trade the Packard in, when he bought the Zephyr. The allowance on it would anyhow have been tiny. Instead, he decided to give it to Hayden Lewis—thereby pleasing and greatly impressing Caskey, as was his intention. This started a tradition, that the Packard must always be given away; to sell it would bring terribly bad luck. And so, during the next few years, the Packard changed owners for free at least half a dozen times. It was a very tough car and lived long.
49 Sometime before this, Denny must have had the Picasso (see April 13, 1944 [in D1]) crated and removed from his apartment to be shipped east. While he was away in the East—in New York, I think—he sold the Picasso to a private buyer, someone he met at a cocktail party, I believe. Denny was very pleased with himself for having arranged this, and said that the sum of money he got for it was far more than the dealers had offered him. Fact and fiction mingle at this point—I can’t now be sure if $9,500, the figure I give in Down There on a Visit, is correct or not. Anyhow, the picture was eventually resold for something like $40,000. I think it’s now in Chicago, in one of the museums. [It is in New York, in the Museum of Modern Art; see Glossary under Fouts.]
[50 The Malibu Colony, a gated beach community.]
51 They also went to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo three times during its visit to Los Angeles—on November 30 (the opening night) with Hayden Lewis, on December 4 with John Goodwin and Hayden, on December 7 with Bo and Kelley. Among the stars of that season were Leon Danielian (who danced L’Après-midi d’un faune), [Alexandra] Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Nicholas Magallanes, Herbert Bliss. Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial was on the program.
[52 Not his real name.]
53 Here are [a] few other books read during 1945—from a list in the 1945 day-to-day diary: Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave (a book I have never stopped dipping into, because it contains the essence of Cyril’s enthusiasms and lovable faults—his literary snobbery, his rash generalizations based on misinformation, his confessions of angst and ill health, his Francophilia—it is amazing how readable he is, and in an area where nearly everybody else is intolerable). George Moore’s Evelyn Innes and Sister Theresa. (These appealed enormously to Christopher at that time, with his then vivid memories of the horrors of monastic life. I still find the ending of Sister Theresa tremendous. About the work as a whole, I’m not so sure that it is the masterpiece I once thought it.) Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow (I still find the essay on Dickens very exciting). Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. (At that time, Christopher found something moving in Waugh’s sentimentality and the daringly nauseating phrases he uses, both sexual and religious; they seemed to express a special kind of sincerity. A rereading not long ago rediscovered nothing but the nausea.) Christopher was fascinated by G. N. M. Tyrrell’s Science and Psychical Phenomena (this tied in with his phase of interest in clairvoyants, see here). He was thrilled by Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room, with its harrowing bomb-detonation scene. He also read with interest and admiration James’s “Lady Barberina” and “The Author of Beltraffio,” Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures, John Collier’s His Monkey Wife—but they haven’t made any lasting impression.
1946
SINCE THERE ISN’T any day-to-day diary for 1946, I shall have to describe the happenings of that year much more vaguely and impressionistically. But before I get on to that, I’ll write something about the early stages of the Caskey-Christopher relationship.
As has been said already, Christopher got involved with Caskey partly because Denny had dared him to do it. A bit later, when Caskey and Christopher were already going together, Christopher got another kind of dare—from Hayden Lewis. Hayden warned Christopher, in his soft-voiced mocking way, that Caskey was “a bad boy,” implying that he didn’t think Christopher would be able to handle him. As Caskey’s best friend, Hayden could speak with authority; his warning was impressive, even if bitchily intended. Christopher must have known, even in those early days, what Hayden meant by calling Caskey “bad.” But the challenge excited Christopher far more than it deterred him. Caskey’s temperament, with all its unpredictability, offered Christopher a new way of life. Part of the polarity between them was that of Irishman1 and Englishman.
Their relationship demanded violence. Christopher found that, in certain situations, he could only relate to Caskey by losing control of himself, and getting really angry—which he hated doing because it rattled all the screws of his English self-restraint loose and made him feel humiliated and exhausted for hours afterwards. During these scenes, he would yell at Caskey and occasionally hit him. Caskey, who was stronger than Christopher, very seldom hit him back.2 To have provoked the blow was, for Caskey, a kind of triumph. Even when he got a black eye or a bloody nose, his face would betray a deep sensual satisfaction.
These clashes took place when they were both drunk, but their drinking together didn’t necessarily le
ad to violence. Much more often, it made them lively and noisy or intimate and quiet. From Christopher’s point of view, at any rate, drinking was a built-in dimension of their relationship; while sober, he felt, they never achieved intimacy. Christopher spent their first months together trying to get Caskey to make a real unequivocal declaration of love. But Caskey was cagey—perhaps because he instinctively realized that this was actually, underneath all Christopher’s sweet-talking, a conflict of wills. Christopher felt himself becoming seriously involved and he didn’t want to be, until he was certain that Caskey was involved, too. He was willing Caskey to give way. When Caskey had done so and become his declared lover—well, then Christopher would be able to relax, take his time and decide finally if he wanted Caskey or if he didn’t. Probably he did. He merely wanted to be able to make his decision from a position of strength. He was saying, in effect, “Just because I don’t trust you, that’s no reason why you shouldn’t trust me.”
(Looking back on the situation, it seems to me that Caskey never did quite commit himself Later on, he told Christopher that he loved him, but these declarations were nearly always followed by actions which seemed meant to contradict them; he would neck with someone at a party in Christopher’s presence, or he would go out and stay away all night.)
The furthest Caskey would go, during these first months, was to say, “I like you enough.” But Christopher wasn’t discouraged; he had reason to believe that Caskey cared for him a good deal more than he would admit. Hayden reported to Christopher that Caskey had said, speaking of their relationship, “It’s so wonderful to be liked.” This doesn’t sound wildly enthusiastic, but Christopher was well aware how embarrassing it must be for Caskey to confess to any feeling for Christopher in Hayden’s presence; Christopher was certainly an improvement on Len Hanna but, still and all, he was seventeen years older than Caskey! Christopher thought he could read, in Hayden’s manner toward him, a grudging admission that Caskey had fallen for him, and that Hayden, much as he deplored the fact, could do nothing about it.
Caskey was fond of telling Christopher teasingly, “You’ve got nothing left but your reputation and your figure”—to which Christopher retorted that this was more than a lot of people could claim, at his age. Once, after they had been to an all-male party, Caskey said, “You know, I looked around and it was amazing—I realized I’d rather go to bed with you than anyone else in the room!” At the end of some heavy sex making in the Beesleys’ chauffeur’s apartment, Caskey was gracious enough to declare, “That’s the best queer fuck I’ve had in ages!” His compliments nearly always contained such qualifications.
Caskey made a strict distinction between queer and straight fucks. If you were homosexual, you couldn’t hope to be graded 1A; his greatest sexual pleasure was in going to bed with basically heterosexual men. He picked them up without difficulty and usually blew them. If he could get to fuck them, that was best of all. He used to say that straight bars were far better than queer bars for pickups. Caskey’s preferences for heterosexual men irritated and frustrated Christopher throughout their relationship. Caskey went to bed with far more queers than straights, but he never let Christopher forget that this preference existed. Christopher sometimes suspected that it was Caskey’s way of keeping him in line.
If you started to analyze Caskey’s sexuality in psychological terms, you ran into paradoxes. On the surface, he was the most normal, most uninhibited of homosexuals; he seemed very tough yet very female. He loved getting into drag. He loved straight men. But, when you looked deeper, contradictions were revealed. Caskey despised queens and didn’t think of himself as one. Never, never would he have dreamed of referring to himself as “Miss Caskey.” His attitude to heterosexual men wasn’t at all passive, he wanted to fuck, not be fucked by them. He never approached them with the mannerisms of a homosexual. Indeed, he told Christopher that, when he was out to make someone, he always dressed “very tweedy, with a tie.” And yet he most certainly couldn’t be described as a closet queen; he declared his homosexuality loudly and shamelessly and never cared whom he shocked. He was a pioneer gay militant in this respect—except that you couldn’t imagine him joining any movement.
Since Caskey refused to regard himself as a queen, one might have expected him to prefer a somewhat effeminate homosexual sex-partner. But not at all. He was seldom attracted by feminine men. In a moment of enthusiasm, he once told Christopher that he was the most masculine person he had ever met—within grade 1B, of course. This pleased Christopher, although Caskey modified the statement later and then denied it altogether.
Caskey had a love—hate relationship with Catherine, his mother, and a hate—hate relationship with his two sisters. He regarded the American Woman as a man destroyer. Sometimes, only half-jokingly, he would say that he regarded himself as a substitute—no, “alternative” would be a better word—which he offered to the American Man. Years later, when Caskey was working on oil tankers and often crossed the Pacific, he found that he had no objection to having sex with Asian girls. But this didn’t make him any less homosexual.
To judge from a photograph taken in his early twenties, Caskey’s father had been very attractive and very like Caskey. Now (according to Caskey) he was an alcoholic miser with an ugly disposition. He and Caskey quarrelled whenever they met, but Caskey didn’t altogether hate him—since he was an American Man and Catherine’s victim. I seem to remember that Caskey’s father had made a lot of money by breeding horses. Caskey himself had ridden since he was a child. He loved horses, and perhaps this was the only interest that he and his father had in common. I think Caskey’s father and mother were now living apart.
The question arises, had Caskey been subconsciously on the lookout for a substitute father and was he now casting Christopher in this role? Yes, I think he was, to some extent. In Caskey’s case, however, the father figure wasn’t to be merely a stand-in for Mr. Caskey Senior; it was also a father confessor. The Caskeys were Catholics with a streak of black Irish Catholicism, and Bill Caskey, just because he had “lapsed,” was the blackest of the lot. He betrayed this when he declared that he couldn’t stand converts; the only Catholics he had any use for were born Catholics. Once, Caskey came near to asking Christopher right out to be his father confessor—when he muttered (drunk but nevertheless still embarrassed) that he wished Christopher would tell him whenever he did anything wrong.
Christopher was touched by this. And he was very happy indeed to find that Caskey was religious; it made him realize that he couldn’t have lived with a boy who wasn’t. He didn’t at first mind at all that Caskey took no interest in Vedanta; it was enough that they both recognized the function of a shrine and could therefore kneel down together in any Catholic church.
The trouble was that both Caskey and Christopher were entering upon their relationship with powerful feelings of guilt. Caskey felt guilty not only as a lapsed Catholic but also as a dishonored navy man. (He had a tattoo on his arm which he had acquired during his days in the service, and he wore it as an emblem of nostalgia and a badge of shame. Later, he had another one added to it.) Christopher felt guilty as a failed monk. Neither of them would admit to their guilt, except by the violence with which they reacted against it. Their guilt feelings were self-regarding at first. But by degrees they began to involve each other in them. . . . There will be much more to say about this, further along in the story.
Nevertheless, despite growing tensions, they managed to have a good time together. Christopher enjoyed being with Caskey as long as the two of them were alone. Even the entertaining he enjoyed sometimes, at any rate after the guests had left and the strain was relaxed. And his sex life with Caskey was certainly enjoyable, within its limits.
“Limits” seems a strange word to be using, for they did everything in bed which normal homosexuals do—cocksucking, rimming and fucking. Rimming was the most satisfactory, from Christopher’s point of view, because of its grossness. Caskey had a coarse animal smell which Christopher found excitin
g, when he was dirty and full of liquor and his fuzzy body was rank with sweat. Licking his sweaty armpits and belly fuzz and dirty asshole brought back memories of the Berlin hustlers—but Christopher had been much more fastidious in his youth, nowadays he was able to enter into the spirit of the thing. (How lucky they both were not to get hepatitis!) Caskey insisted on fucking Christopher, if Christopher was to fuck him. Christopher was thoroughly in favor of this, in principle; he believed (had, in fact, just then decided) that the true beauty of homosexuality lies in a balanced active-passive relationship. In practice, Caskey didn’t really like being fucked. So Christopher let himself be fucked more and more often, until the time came when he stopped fucking Caskey altogether. Christopher could enjoy being fucked only if he found it possible to reverse gear psychologically and feel that he was giving himself and being possessed. He couldn’t ever quite feel this with Caskey, who was smaller than himself and anyhow, from Christopher’s point of view, unalterably female. Caskey might be tougher than any bull dyke but Christopher still couldn’t see him as a stud. So the two of them were forced to playact. (They both were aware of this—no longtime sex partners can deceive each other—though of course they never discussed it.) Caskey would strip and put on a pair of cowboy boots. “You want to get the shit fucked out of you?” he would ask. Christopher would press the sole of one boot against his erection as Caskey greased Christopher’s asshole and his own cock. But, at this point, something was missing and had to be faked—for Christopher must now roll over onto his belly and relax to let Caskey’s cock into him. What was missing was some sort of token (at least) of violence and resistance, some hint of rape. And this was unthinkable. To try it would have been ludicrous. They just had to ignore the gap and get on to the fuck scene as quickly as possible—like actors covering up a joint in a crudely cut script.
Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951 Page 13
