Close as George and Gypsy had been before she came to 7 Middagh, their relationship intensified that November. George had never before spent so much time in her presence and was struck anew by her nervous energy. Funny and charming as he found her unselfconscious pacing, smoking, tea-drinking, skirt-adjusting, chattering activity, he also came to understand its roots in a lifelong fear that poverty, failure, and disgrace were right behind her and gaining ground. At twenty-six, Gypsy had already been hospitalized more than once with stomach ulcers. Her doctors had ordered her—unsuccessfully, for the most part—to cut down on coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes. After their editing sessions, Gypsy would confess to George her fear of what would happen when she was too old to perform burlesque. But George, who also saw the strength and resourcefulness with which his friend attacked each new project in her life, considered her stage persona among her least important assets. He loved, for example, to watch Gypsy’s face light up when she talked about her ramshackle farmhouse in the country. “For all your Norwegian ancestry, you travel by land; and you are in a true sense earthy,” he wrote to her later that year. “You are never quite so beautiful as when you are standing out on your own land and telling of the improvements you are going to make on it.”
Only a true friend would have been able to look past the “Illusion” of Gypsy’s beauty to the survivor underneath. She responded by trying to be as good a friend to George. It wasn’t easy, for Gypsy was, as Janet Flanner fondly described her, “la femme de Faction,” and George seemed to revel in formless nostalgia and unfocused longing. His expressions of sadness over never having written a second novel after his first success—and his lack of progress since his arrival in Brooklyn—were likely to be greeted by Gypsy with a spirited “Fiddle fiddle” and a contemptuous snort. George’s problem, Gypsy insisted, was that he was too much of a perfectionist. Besides, he couldn’t possibly write a serious novel here with all of the distractions the house provided. He should move out to her farmhouse and write his novel there. They could live together as writers, leaving New York behind. George declined the offer. But he acknowledged, as Flanner remarked years later, that Gypsy’s brilliance lay in her ability “to regard as common sense what others regard as outright lunacy.” Her sense of invention for life was her greatest gift.
Gypsy was glad to see that George made a special attempt to make Chester Kallman feel at home at Middagh Street. George could often be found with Chester in the kitchen in the afternoons, rendering the Brooklyn boy helpless with laughter at his southern belle impersonations of a character he called “Miss Bazaaar!” Gypsy saw something of herself in the ambitious student whose Depression upbringing, touched briefly by his mother’s theatrical career, had done little to prepare him for a literary adulthood. Certainly, she knew how it felt to be judged on one’s sex appeal rather than intelligence or talent.
It was clear to Gypsy that, as Auden’s favorite, Kallman initially felt isolated at 7 Middagh. When he arrived before Auden had finished his work, he knew better than to interrupt. From the beginning, their routine had been ordered around Auden’s work. Waiting for him to finish, Kallman sometimes went out to the garden to do some writing of his own. But time dragged, and his imagination easily wandered. He idly doodled sketches of castle walls and girls’ faces in the margins of his notebook, worked on the penciled stanzas of his “Ode to Winter,” made a list of rhyming words (“malice, callous, palace”), and another list of favorite authors’ names (“Dante, Rilke, Rimbaud, Meredith”). Once, his impatience surfaced on the page:
Upon the porch my inspiration ceases
But upstairs Wystan paces
Like a horse before it races
Intoning one by one his quickie masterpieces.
Not that Kallman disliked his situation with Auden, but he was ambivalent about a relationship in which he would always take second place. At nineteen, he was nearly the age that Auden had been when he experienced the life in Berlin that had since been immortalized in poetry and prose. Kallman, too, was considered a promising intellect in his own milieu, entering college two years ahead of his peers and surrounded by an admiring crowd of literary classmates. But these young poets and writers had, for the most part, drifted away, intimidated by the peering, impatient, domineering presence of the older, famous poet.
Kallman wanted to begin his own adventure, his own quest. If writing consisted of rummaging through one’s life, as Auden had said, and dredging up the images that hurt and connect, he needed to have a life from which to dredge. Yet Auden’s lukewarm response to his work and the assumption of others that it was not his brain that had attracted the older poet had undermined Kallman’s confidence. The two men still experienced a palpable joy when debating literature, philosophy, and music. Lately, though, Kallman had begun to complain about having a relationship with someone who “is always right.” A number of people at 7 Middagh noted with interest how Gypsy seemed to try to make up for Auden’s tactlessness by focusing her glamorous attention on Kallman, soliciting his advice and opinions.
But the Middagh Street resident who benefited most from Gypsy’s presence was undoubtedly Carson. The young writer seemed to draw pure energy from her housemate down the hall, who was as warm and welcoming as Annemarie was distanced and cool. Gypsy delighted Carson with her stories of playing the back half of a cow in vaudeville, of touring with Ziegfeld’s Follies with a menagerie of cats, turtles, guinea pigs, and a goldfish that she’d won at Coney Island. Carson was happy to listen again and again to descriptions of the strip routines of Nudina, whose specialty act involved a six-foot boa constrictor she stored under the sink in the women’s dressing room, and Flossie, who covered her breasts with a Harvard pennant and wriggled her bottom at the audience, yelling, “Oh, Daddy!”
It was a relief, too, to have the company of another woman in the house. Auden and George were used to the bachelor life, sometimes shocking Carson with the kinds of places they were willing to visit. One night, she was so appalled by the sight of the derelicts who haunted the alleys and doorways of the Bowery bars they patronized that she ran all the way to Chinatown to catch a taxi back to Brooklyn. There she sat, cold and miserable on the steps of the house, waiting for her friends to come home and let her in.
George’s adventurous nature had exposed Carson in another way as well. Her novella Reflections in a Golden Eye, which had appeared in two fall issues of Harper’s Bazaar, had created quite a scandal. The magazine’s mid-American readers saw the story of homoerotic longing on an army base as shockingly inappropriate in these highly patriotic times, with their sons and husbands facing enlistment. George’s friends at the magazine reported that a number of readers, including Mrs. George Patton, had canceled their subscriptions in protest. Such a violent response could not help but jar a young writer who just six months earlier had reached the pinnacle of literary success.
George, unperturbed, maintained that the outrage was excellent publicity, for it turned her fiction into news. But this further complication added to Carson’s emotional strain. Hard as she had tried for the past month—working at her desk for hours each day—she had still not managed to reach deeply enough into “the poetry of [her] own childhood” to find the center of The Bride and Her Brother, her developing novel. It was at times like this that Carson feared that her period of creativity was over and that she would never be able to write again. Unlike Auden, Carson could not simply make art happen by methodically processing the ideas and emotions of the day. For her, the development of a story was a mysterious, mystical process, like a “flowering dream.” It depended on faith and patience and could not be hurried or forced. It could be maddening, however, to wait day after day for her magic elixir of hot tea, sherry, and cigarette smoke to take effect, only to come up with nothing. It was also true, as her husband had predicted, that the pace of life in Brooklyn was straining her health. At times, Carson experienced a kind of aching homesickness or nostalgia, not necessarily for her childhood home in Georgia, but for th
e time when she could write easily without the pressure of having to build a career or even of knowing that her work would be read.
It was a relief, then, to curl up with a whiskey in the warmth and safety of Gypsy’s room, admiring her friend’s healthy frame in its sheer nightgown—worn, if the night was chilly, over baggy-kneed long underwear—as she moved about the room. Gypsy’s face was likely to look a little smudged late at night, since she rarely bothered removing her makeup; she kept her fine hair out of her face with a single huge hairpin. Carson was interested to discover that despite her practical intelligence, Gypsy was quite superstitious. Hats on the bed, whistling in a dressing room, and the color green backstage were all considered unlucky. For good luck, one must eat twelve grapes, one on each of the twelve strokes of midnight, every New Year’s Eve.
Carson felt that she could tell Gypsy anything, so of course she did. Night after night, her voice drifted from behind Gypsy’s door, bemoaning the emotional absence of Annemarie, who seemed to be succumbing to her own difficulties with romance, politics, and drugs. Reeves, too, had been causing problems as, still unemployed, he hung about the house in Brooklyn. He was like a piece of driftwood, always floating along, unable to find a place for himself. It grieved Carson, who could recall happy evenings not so long before in Fayetteville, when they would sit together by the stove for a last glass of sherry before bedtime. But when he was invited to spend an evening with the Middagh Street group, his resentment began to boil over after a few drinks and a long, painful night of arguments and accusations would ensue.
Gypsy, like so many of the other women writers who frequented the house—Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, and others still to come—responded to Carson’s emotional vulnerability by trying to take care of her. As Carson later remarked, the perfect antidote to exhausting emotional or mental activity at 7 Middagh was a visit with Gypsy, who would respond to the discovery of some lovely apples in the garden with, “I will make a strudel tonight.” When their talks went far beyond midnight, she sometimes allowed Carson to fall asleep in her bed. Having grown up sleeping with her siblings, her cousins, and her “first love”—her grandmother, whose lemon verbena scent Carson never forgot—the southern writer was comforted by physical contact with her friends. She admitted later that homesickness caused her to cling “somewhat limpet-like” to Gypsy and the others at 7 Middagh. “There was a family feeling that was dear to me,” she wrote.
George’s tales of life at the house soon spread through the studios, theaters, and editorial offices of New York. It became common knowledge that the poet Wystan Auden was living and working in a ruin of a house in Brooklyn; that the ingenue-writer Carson McCullers lived with him, dutifully corresponding with her mother every day; that George Davis, who had rented the house, believed it to be haunted—or so it seemed, he murmured suggestively, what with all of the creaking stairs, squeaking doors, and ghostly whisperings that could be heard through the night.
Interest ratcheted up considerably when word got out that Gypsy Rose Lee had joined the group. The telephone on the table near the entryway began to ring constantly. Was it true that Gypsy had moved to Brooklyn? the callers wanted to know. Was it true she was writing a detective novel? Yes, it was all true, George assured each person. Not only that, but he and Gypsy were engaged.
Suddenly, the trip across the bridge to Brooklyn Heights seemed a small price to pay to visit 7 Middagh Street. An increasing number of friends, and friends of friends, began angling for invitations. So far, George and his housemates had felt constrained in their socializing by the ongoing repairs and general confusion in the house. But the miraculous had finally occurred: all the workmen had gone. Everyone agreed that it justified a celebration.
It seemed appropriate, however, to first hold a private dinner of their own before opening their doors to the outside world. As it happened, Thanksgiving Day was approaching. Benjamin Britten, whose top-floor room was now ready and who was preparing to move in with Peter Pears, would be turning twenty-seven that week. The group agreed to hold a combination housewarming, birthday celebration, and Thanksgiving feast, inviting everyone who had made their life together possible. Carson helped George compile a guest list that included Lincoln Kirstein and any friends he cared to bring, Klaus and Erika Mann and their brother Golo, Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, Reeves McCullers, Chester Kallman and his father, several friends from Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Harper’s Bazaar, the composer Aaron Copland, a favorite of Britten’s, and Beata and Michael Mayer, the grown children of Britten’s Long Island hostess, Elizabeth Mayer. At Carson’s urging, George also invited the author Richard Wright, who had so favorably reviewed her novel the previous summer. “My friend Carson McCullers was so deeply touched by your review of her book and is most anxious to meet you,” George obligingly wrote. “I am sharing a house with McCullers and W. H. Auden in Brooklyn. It is now terribly torn up but we hope soon to have a housewarming and would be delighted if you could come.” Having agreed that it didn’t seem right to expect Eva to prepare the meal, since she was one of the people they wanted to thank, Carson volunteered to do the cooking. She approached her assignment with enthusiasm, buying a case of champagne along with the ingredients for a roasted turkey with chestnut dressing and all the trimmings. However, she got off to a poor start on Thanksgiving Day. “I had bought a small turkey and the guest list was about twenty people,” she admitted years later. “After some dirty looks at me George just picked up the turkey, took it out of the house, and exchanged it for an enormous bird more suitable for the occasion.”
Somehow, a feast was successfully prepared. Wright was unable to attend, but most of the other guests appeared. The long dining table nearly disappeared beneath the quantity of food. The champagne flowed, along with the red wine, and the conversation grew lively as the guests discovered how much more they had in common than they had realized. Auden enjoyed practicing his German with Golo Mann, who was now staying with his family in Princeton and working for the Emergency Rescue Committee. The earnest, dark-eyed young German was pleased to have this opportunity to talk with the poet, whom he had met in Switzerland years before and considered perhaps the most intelligent man he had ever met. Auden “thought truths out for himself,” Golo would observe later, and many of the ideas he expressed in passing “could have been expanded into whole books.”
Up and down the table, shouts and laughter prevailed as Kallman called to “Miss Master” to pass the potatoes, George described to Kirstein the gorgeous hunk of seafood he’d sampled on Sands Street the night before, Gypsy brushed tantalizingly past Dr. Kallman on her way to refill the teapot, or McCullers chattered over the wine about the curious fact that all of her favorite books as a young child had had something to eat in them.
For Britten and Pears, after their long stay with the Mayers on Long Island, 7 Middagh felt a little like another planet. The tall, slim, neatly dressed composer and his handsome, wide-shouldered partner smiled politely as they held out their wineglasses to be refilled. The Mayers had frequently held large dinner parties attended by artists, but none of them had included a nationally known stripper, a child author who seemed well on her way toward alcohol poisoning, or anyone like George Davis, and none had ever reached this level of hilarity. It was ironic that it was the Mayers, and not this group, who were living in an asylum on Long Island. Still, Britten and Pears harbored high hopes of making themselves at home here. New York City was the place to be to find commissions and arrange performances, both of which they desperately needed. And everyone was very friendly, generous, and terribly enthusiastic about one’s work, even if they were not familiar with it. Besides, there was no denying that the rooms were cheap.
The Thanksgiving feast lasted long into the night, long past the point of inebriation. When all the food was consumed and the champagne and wine done away with, the group moved upstairs for coffee and cognac before a roaring fire in the parlor. There, they entertained one another by singing songs, accompanying one another
on the piano, and playing a variety of games. Those who did not know Britten learned that he was a consummate pianist, as good as a concert performer, and Pears thrilled the group with his brilliant tone and strong, expressive delivery. As more logs were added to the fire and the conversation grew even livelier, a game of charades was proposed. Michael Mayer, already dazed from the experience-of-a-lifetime of having Gypsy Rose Lee sit on his lap with a gin bottle in her hand, drew the play title “You Can’t Take It with You” and tried to act it out by “failing” to carry McCullers across the threshold. (This proved difficult to pull off, since Carson weighed nothing and was easy to carry.) A game of Murder soon followed, as the celebrants turned out all the lights and slipped silently up and down the creaking stairs and through the half-furnished rooms, shrieking with delight as they hunted one another down. “The evening or rather morning ended with Peter and George Davis doing a ballet to Petrushka, up the curtains and the hot water pipes,” Britten later wrote to his friend, the violinist Anthony Brosa, “an impressive if destructive sight.”
It was nearly dawn when the group heard sirens coming from the small fire station down the block. Gypsy loved fires, as did Carson. The two women jumped up impulsively and ran out of the house. “We ran for several blocks chasing the fire engines,” McCullers recalled. “It was exhilarating to be out in the chilly air after the close heat of the parlor.” For the first time in months, she felt free of the anxiety of her work. She could hardly believe that she, Carson, was running through a street in Brooklyn hand in hand with Gypsy Rose Lee. It had been an amazing two months in the house on Middagh Street, despite the crises and setbacks, enriched by friendships such as she had never known before. Out of the despair of the summer had come this life. She was no longer alone. She had much to be thankful for.
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