The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  Reynolds particularly enjoyed his walks down the beach with Villela. “Honestly, if Jesus had come down, it couldn’t have caused more of a flutter. People were coming out of foxholes, they were leaping out of the grass. Eddie was a sensation and he loved it. It’s not my dish of tea. I don’t like that kind of scene.” Reynolds and his lover made an eccentric choice for summering: they bought a house on Staten Island, with a swimming pool and ten acres. “We gave a huge, great big enormous party for the Royal Ballet. A big bash. We used to give a luncheon for the Royal Ballet every time they came. Margot Fonteyn was our best friend. She was then a dame. We had buses to meet them in Manhattan which we filled with champagne and they all came out to Staten Island. There were huge pink tents. It was a huge thing. Got in all the papers. We had such fun in those days.”

  They also visited Venice frequently. “George had a great deal of money. We had kind of an unusual life. It was disgusting the way we lived.”

  They traveled with two dogs and a valet, and in Venice they always stayed at Cipriani. “In those days there were only twenty people at Cipriani. We gave a big dinner party for Princess Margaret. It was raining, and all the other hotel guests had to eat outside because we took over the whole dining room for dinner. It was only about ten people. It was scandalous.

  “I went back to Venice after George died. I was really mortified to go there because we ate at Harry’s Bar every day for lunch. The two poodle dogs would go in first. Sit at the table. And we’d come sashaying in, waving. I shudder to think what people said: ‘Who are those two outrageous boys!’

  “We used to go a lot with Truman Capote when he was young. We were having lunch in Harry’s Bar, and Truman was—I believe I can use the word—extravagant. He had a long black cape and a big black hat. Of course he was Maestro at the time—everybody bowed.”

  During this same trip to Venice, Capote was thrown into one of the canals by some hustlers. “Because of his attitude, and because of his name,” a close friend of the writer explained. In Italian, Capote meant “condom.”

  Paul Cadmus remembered Capote at an outdoor café in Venice shortly after the war. “Truman lifted his cape up and down, up and down, and said, ‘Come to Taormina! Come to Taormina!’” Cadmus recalled. The painter took Capote’s advice and met him at the Italian resort. One day Capote returned from the post office with the mail. “I bring tidings of disaster!” he shouted. “Tennessee’s play is a great success!”

  “I always liked Truman,” said Cadmus. “He didn’t give a damn what people thought of his voice or anything else. Brave little thing.”

  “He was so funny in those days,” said Reynolds. “He was young and he wasn’t on the drugs, he wasn’t on the booze. He was a midget with sort of blond hair, kind of a Dutch cut, and he was very thin. Truman worked all summer and played all winter. In those days he was brilliant. He took literature very seriously. All that glamour really went to his head. And then of course he published that scandalous thing”—an excerpt from “Answered Prayers,” a work in progress. The excerpts that appeared in Esquire in 1975 humiliated some of his most famous friends because he named names and repeated, without disguise, many of the most outrageous stories they had told him. Quite a few of his victims never spoke to him again, and his social reputation never recovered. “I was crazy about Truman when he was young,” Reynolds continued. “Truman was just outrageous. He was cute. He was a-cute. He always had something funny to say. And the best gossip. He was enchanting. I saw him a couple of years before he died in the Madison Avenue Bookshop. And we were walking down the street and he threw his arms around me and kissed me full on the lips—right on the sidewalk. But then he was fat.”

  FRANKLIN MACFIE was the youngest in a family of ten children who was enamored of all his sisters’ soldier-boyfriends during the war. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian merchant seaman and a mother with Portuguese blood, he looked like a Highlander, with vivid green eyes. By his fourteenth birthday in 1951, he had already had sex with several men. But he marks Memorial Day weekend of that year as the moment when he “officially came out.”

  “I met a man in Rockefeller Center who took me home,” Macfie remembered. “The space around the skating rink used to be a big cruising ground. He was an actor. I remember he picked me up—literally—when we got home. He carried me across the threshold like I was Irene Dunne. It was the first time I knew, the minute I started talking to the guy in Rockefeller Center, that I was going to go home with him, and I knew we’d fuck.

  “There were plainclothesmen who would cruise. It was entrapment. But entrapment was not something I had to worry about because I was young enough. They would not entrap a kid. The bathrooms on the Seventh Avenue subway, up and down Broadway, were extremely active. Ghastly odor too. And it really was essentially the same six people. A friend of mine from San Francisco wrote me a card not too long ago, when I was still in Portugal, and it said, ‘Just been visiting New York. Stopped on 42d Street—and do you know that same black man is still standing there with that same twelve-inch dick, waving it around?’ It’s been the same for twenty years.

  “We used to have something that we called Lucky Pierre. That was a ménage à trois. The guy in the middle was Lucky Pierre. And it was rather common; I’m sure it still is. Especially if you’re a kid, you know, for lovers to pick up somebody.” Macfie started smoking pot as soon as he discovered the San Remo. “The first guy I met was Alvin, who took me to the Henry Hudson Hotel on 57th Street. I was about fifteen. There was a wonderful woman lying in bed who looked like Jan Sterling, who was called the Lady Barbara. She had a makeup case and she rolled joints. And he asked me if I had ever had any. And I said, ‘Of course.’ But I hadn’t. And I sucked on it and knew what it was and loved it ever since. I just knew this is what I’d been waiting for: the minute it went down my throat, I knew this is love. Even better than dick.

  “And the combination was unbeatable. In fact, that’s what the doctors would say. They say that it’s almost impossible to treat a syndrome where the person is getting pleasured on two levels like that. You got to give up one or the other, or preferably both. Because there was no frustration to work with. You know: you’re far too happy to be here.

  “In Manhattan, there were straight guys who would be aggressive. And there would be people you would go home with who would be dangerous, who would go a little crazy—who would suddenly turn hostile. Especially if they were on that borderline. Because of the pressure, there wasn’t really a gay community. You had your gay friends, of course, but if you had a regular job or a family here, you also had straight friends which somehow were usually kept separate. There was no sense of gay community at all.

  “People were far more split about it all, and forced to lead a far more schizo double life. I mean hiding from the parents, hiding from other businesspeople. And having the erotic painting on the bedroom wall to turn around. I saw more than ten of those. You know, so you could just switch it around in case mother came. It sounds funny, but what the few big gay people thought didn’t matter, in relation to the enormous, huge society around you—theater, movies, literature. Everything was antigay, in the sense of not admitting it existed. And the boredom of having to laugh at gay jokes. Ones that were tasteless and offensive. That was all tiresome. So it did make you very unhappy. You felt excluded. You also felt like, Oh, it’s going to mean misery and unhappiness. You would meet so many men who would be working in offices, who were really striving to create a straight image—going out with women and pretending. In the fifties acting straight was very important. I don’t know how many dates I had in that period with guys older than me—working age when I was in school—where they would say, ‘I’ll meet you Friday at 11:30 ‘cause I’m taking this girl out after office hours. The date will be over by 11:00. I’ll meet you at 11:30 in the Village.’ That was really a standard operating procedure on a Friday night.

  “One thing I’ve always liked about being gay is that you used to be able to go into
a bar and you would meet anybody from Leonard Bernstein on, up, down, and sideways. A completely democratic society. I came from a very humble family, and I would never have learned a lot of the things I learned if I weren’t gay. I simply wouldn’t have been exposed to the variety of people. That was a great blessing, actually.”*

  “Sunday brunch was at home. Generally if they thought you were really a hot trick, they would have a few friends over to show you off. ‘Come on over! I have a friend here.’ And then, ‘I can’t wait till he comes and sees you! Oh, no, don’t put your shirt on!’ Or ‘Why don’t you take a shower now. He’ll be here in two minutes.’ And then you come out and meet the friend. ‘Oh, new friend! You sly thing.’ Being young and a trick—probably most of the people I went home with didn’t have lovers. There were a few who lived together and were lovers obviously. But most of them were lonely men, I suppose. It just didn’t seem that men lived together as openly as they do now.”

  Macfie vividly remembered a terrifying party in a private home in Forest Hills, Queens, in 1953. “There were a couple of kids my age and we had dates with older guys, and it was at the house of one of the older guys. I think probably the guy who had the house had had a few pieces of neighborhood trade or something. Somebody obviously knew he lived there and they saw a party going on, and they rang the bell. It was three local toughs. And they came in and started terrorizing the twelve of us.

  “It was very, very scary. I mean like wielding knives that they had picked up. It got very frightening. I was really ready to run. I really felt like this is going to be one of those murder scenes—you’re going to see twelve bloody queens on the floor.

  “And then the most outrageous queen there turned around and said to everybody, ‘Get ‘em, girls! GET ‘EM!’ And somehow absolutely galvanized everything. Suddenly we realized, Well, there are twelve of us and there are three of them, you know. GET ‘EM! And we got ‘em. We just all jumped them and threw them out of the house. Everybody was petrified, to be honest. And afterward we were, like, ‘Weren’t we brave?’ Twelve men of various ages attacking three teenage boys! But it was scary. You did feel like you were being terrorized. And queens were not known to carry guns in those days.”

  Then Macfie went to see Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. It was love at first sight, and he began to stalk the actor: he found out where he lived and followed him around for several years. They were in the lobby of a theater when Macfie first approached him. The crazed fan said, “This is who I am and you’re going to see this face a lot. Get used to seeing this face following you!

  “I could read the New York paper and tell you where he was going to be in three nights,” Macfie remembered. “I knew that much about him and his life at this point.” Eventually Macfie got Clift’s telephone number from a newspaper columnist and he called him at home. “I said that I was United Parcel Service and I had a package that came from Mr. Brooks Clift, which was his [older] brother—and I knew wherever he lived at the time, in Nebraska or someplace. I said we have the name, but the address is not clear. Do you want us to send it back or send it on to you? He was a little bit cautious, and he said, ‘OK,’ And I got the address.” Clift lived on the second and third floors of a brownstone on East 63d Street.

  “It was during the World Series, and I went and rang the bell. The maid let me in, and he was up on the third floor in the bedroom, and in the living room the television was on. He was a big baseball fan, strangely enough. He was one of those kind of straight types. And he came downstairs. I was adjusting the television set, which was flickering, and he was wearing gray khaki pants and a white shirt. He looked quizzically at me, and he said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m fixing the television, as you can see.’ And he smiled and we started talking. Nothing happened that time. Eventually he had something to do and I left. I used to patrol the house quite frequently and see Liz [Taylor] and Deborah Kerr and everybody going in.”

  When Macfie began his pursuit, he wasn’t sure whether Clift was gay or not. “I don’t think we actually knew ‘Monty is gay.’ Not in the fifties. I think people learned when they realized that Liz was madly in love with him and he wasn’t responding. There was something wrong with anybody who didn’t respond to Elizabeth Taylor if she was in love with you. Mainly you always felt like he was watching you and making all these kinds of judgments that you would never know. He’d look at you and you’d think, Is he thinking that I’m a complete asshole? Is he liking me? Does he want me to leave? Does he want me to talk? Does he want me to shut up? You’d get very little response from him. It went on for a period of three years. Whenever he was around New York and I could find him and get in and talk to him.”

  After many months, they finally had sex together. “I think three times. Once on the staircase. He was not interested in admiration and adoration at all. He was far more interested in a little bit more of an I-don’t-give-a-fuck-who-you-are-do-you-want-to-suck-my-dick attitude. A sort of tradey attitude. Which was very stupid of me—I could have done that very easily. But I was madly in love with him. He was the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life. Monty was for the eyes. It was the eyes and to get a laugh. It was one of those people that if you could get him to laugh, to really, actually laugh at something, you felt that you had achieved some great catharsis for him. I just felt I’d moved a mountain.”

  WALTER CLEMONS was a brilliant young writer in 1959, full of promise. That year he published a collection of short stories called The Poison Tree. Mostly drawn from his Texas childhood, they were written in a spare and elegant style. When they brought him the Prix de Rome, he had established himself as a writer to be reckoned with. Clemons had grown up in Houston, the son of a father who was “sort of a village atheist” and a mother who was a “strict puritan” and a Methodist but who never went to church after she was married. Clemons’s early experiences with Catholicism, and his subsequent uprising against it, are typical of the way many rebels embrace, and then replace, early ecstatic experiences. There is a certain kind of iconoclast in whom Catholicism invariably induces a ferocious atheism after an initial period of piety. Clemons was that kind of Catholic.

  To placate his paternal grandmother, young Walter was sent to a Catholic elementary school, and his grandmother picked him up every Sunday to take him to Mass. But his parents never went with him. “They were lolling around the house reading the Sunday Times. I had to uphold the religious honor of the family.”

  Clemons’s churchgoing created an immediate crisis: “About the first thing you’re taught is that if you don’t go to Mass on Sunday, you go to hell,” Clemons remembered. “I was under the belief that I was going to go to heaven and I was going to be orphaned while my parents burned in hell. So I used to sob in school. I went through the third grade, and the oppression got worse and worse, and I was taken to a Catholic child psychologist who couldn’t get my secret out of me—about hell. He was a good Irish Catholic, Dr. Joe Malloy. He said, ‘I don’t know. Something is scaring the hell out of that little kid in the Catholic school, I think you ought to take him out of the parochial school and let him go to public school.’*

  “I went through various religious stages. I was very devout in early elementary school, and I became very, very devout in adolescence. I can time it exactly because I can remember the embarrassment of being in Mass on Sunday where you kneel down and stand up and kneel down. It was at that age when you never know when you’re going to get a hard-on, and you just don’t know what to do about it. I think I was afflicted by some sort of religious grief that has to do with a hard-on, of being in a Catholic Mass and being deeply depressed by the music, and getting teary. So I was very religious during my initial erection stage, when I was ten or eleven. It was very much connected with sexuality. Of course, if I become very devout at the moment I’m having erections in Mass, there will be some guilt.

  “I remember that as soon as I became active sexually I totally lost interest in Catholicism because I found
that I could not go to confession and say I was sorry. I became a hardened sinner.” He also became an atheist. “I think the religiosity was a substitute for sex. It’s a fervent emotional experience, and then I didn’t need that anymore.”

  In high school, Clemons read Freud. He had the classic experience of young gay people all over America from the fifties through the eighties. “I read that it was an immature phase in sexual development, so I thought if I could just hang on, the grown-up stuff would start. I knew it was a bad thing.

  “My picture was in the Houston paper because I won some kind of an essay contest when I was in high school and I got an anonymous telephone call from a guy who’d seen my picture in the paper and had read about the award. We chatted for a while, and then he asked, ‘Are you gay?’ I don’t even think I was aware of the term gay until some years after that. He must have thought that since I was an essay writer, I must have been an incipient fag. I sensed what he was talking about, but I said, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ But I did know. I told people at school that I’d had this peculiar phone call, and that he said, ‘Are you gay?’ I told them I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘Oh yeah, I have a good time.’ And made a schoolyard anecdote out of it. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  Until he read James M. Cain’s Serenade as a teenager, Clemons encountered nothing gay in the culture, although he was aware that he was attracted to male movie stars, like Dana Andrews and Errol Flynn.

  “I also had a very vivid childhood nightmare that I blush to even remember. It was a dream about nighttime at a deserted circus ring, and there’s a group of elephants, one of whom filled his trunk with water and stuck it in my behind. If that’s not a sexual dream, I don’t know.”

  A student two classes ahead of him at Lamar High School was thrown out after the rumor went around that he’d been caught doing something in the shower. “He went and finished at San Jacinto High and then came back to receive his diploma at Lamar. He walked out on the stage and was met with thunderous applause—a generous ovation. It was very brave of him to come back, and everyone was sorry it had ever happened. This was in June 1945.