The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, was one of the powerful women whom Capote befriended in the 1960s. They were introduced by Babe Paley, a Capote favorite and the wife of the founder of CBS. When Mrs. Paley arranged a lunch for them in her apartment, she warned Graham about what to expect: “Babe had said, ‘Truman’s voice is high when you start talking to him, but when he relaxes it goes down.’” But Graham “certainly never thought of Truman as dainty.” She considered him “very strong—in intelligence and insights and will.”

  After her husband committed suicide in 1963, Graham came to New York more frequently to participate in editorial meetings at Newsweek, which was also owned by her company. Capote told her she should stop staying in a hotel and buy an apartment at the U.N. Plaza, an elegant new apartment house across from the United Nations where he was already living himself. When she resisted the idea because she didn’t have time to run another house, “He said in that voice [she imitated his Southern drawl], ‘Why if you can’t run it, honey, I will.”

  “And I didn’t for a moment think he would run it, but it did sort of push me into thinking, Well, maybe it’s not that hard. Maybe I should look. And then I did. I looked at one and bought it and we still have it.”

  In 1965, Capote reached the height of his fame with the publication of In Cold Blood, his classic account of the brutal murder of a Kansas farm family and the capture, trial, and execution of their killers. He had given the book to Graham to read in sections, and she loved it. At the end of 1966, he decided to celebrate his new celebrity by inviting 540 of his closest friends to a “Black and White Dance” at the Plaza. “In honor of Mrs. Katharine Graham” was handwritten across the top of the printed invitation.

  Graham had become publisher of the Washington Post only three years earlier, after the death of her husband, and she was not yet well known in New York society. Why did he choose her as his guest of honor?

  “God knows,” said Graham. “Because I was certainly an unlikely subject. … We were fond of each other. … I think if you eliminated all the worldly friends, which I guess he couldn’t choose one of, I was somebody people didn’t really know. And I obviously had just come into this position. … I suppose it was an act of imagination. Obviously, I had a great time with Truman.”

  But Graham was allowed to add only twenty couples to Capote’s list. She said that was easy—she just chose her closest Washington friends.

  There was tremendous anticipation, and almost continuous coverage of the party in the New York social pages for weeks before it took place. “The publicity had bounded and bounded and bounded,” said Graham. “The World Telegram had whole pages of what people were going to wear. It was unbelievable.”

  When it finally occurred, the Times reporter Charlotte Curtis called the guests “as spectacular a group as has ever been assembled for a private party in New York”—and her newspaper printed the entire list on its society page. (Its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was one of the guests invited by Graham.)

  It was an amazing list. Among those honored with an invitation were Harry Belafonte; Tallulah Bankhead; James Baldwin; Brooke Astor; McGeorge Bundy; Ralph Ellison; Cecil Beaton; Jacqueline, Rose, Bobby, and Teddy Kennedy; Lionel and Diana Trilling; Robert McNamara; Arthur Miller; Robert Penn Warren; Andy Warhol; Ashton Hawkins; Edmund Wilson; Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; Sammy Davis, Jr.; Blair Clark; Christopher Isherwood; and the duke and duchess of Windsor.

  If he hadn’t actually gathered together everyone who mattered in the Western world, Capote had come closer to accomplishing that feat than anyone in America ever had before. “I’d never seen anything like the [number of] photographers,” said Graham. “Never!”

  Russell Baker thought writers would “experience an instant inflation of self-esteem from the knowledge that one of their colleagues has seized Mrs. Astor’s former role as social arbiter.”

  Nevertheless, not everyone was amused. Stephen Reynolds thought it was “a boring party.” He said, “I really did. But we were thrilled to be invited. We couldn’t wait to tell our enemies. A lot of people were mad because they weren’t invited. They made up all kinds of excuses—their mother was dying, the doctor said they had cancer. I mean anything to excuse them from not going.”

  Herb Caen, the doyen of San Francisco journalists, compared it to the Super Bowl: “There was such a buildup that by the time the game was played, it didn’t amount to much.”

  Lauren Bacall and Jerome Robbins dominated the dance floor. Bacall was horrified when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., tried to cut in on them. “Don’t you see whom I’m dancing with?” she demanded. The historian retired, “crestfallen.”

  An actress’s complaint to Capote the next day suggested a possible difference between gay and straight—or male and female—sensibilities. She had left the party with an attractive stranger whom she had assumed was a guest, only to discover to her horror the next morning that he was just one of the detectives in black tie.

  “So,” Capote asked, “what’s wrong with that? You had a good time with him, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” she conceded.

  “Well then, what are you complaining about?”

  Three decades later, Graham said that she “loved” her party. What she remembered most clearly about the evening was her first meeting with Jack Dunphy, Capote’s longtime companion. “I’d never met Jack because Jack never appeared. You never saw Jack. When he came through the line, Truman said, ‘Now here’s Jack.’”

  Paul Cadmus was one of a handful of gay men invited to the ball by Jack Dunphy. “Truman said he didn’t want to ask ‘a bunch of fags’ to his party,” said Cadmus. The painter was not allowed to bring another man, and his lover, Jon Andersson, was furious.

  For decades Capote had kept his sex life completely separate from his elegant social life. “Completely,” said Graham. “And that indeed was the difference when it started down the sad and awful path later. And then those people started appearing.”

  “Those people” included an air-conditioning repairman whom Capote started dating, and to whom Graham was also introduced: “He wasn’t a social asset, I would say”—particularly after he proved incapable of repairing a broken air conditioner belonging to one of Capote’s fancy friends.

  The Washington newspaper publisher was one of the very few women companions Capote spared when he published “Answered Prayers” in Esquire nine years later. But as he became progressively more addicted to drugs and drink, Graham spent less and less time with him: “It just became harder and harder to see him. Because of his condition. He’d be drunk. I remember once I went out to dinner with him and he ended up in tears.”

  At the beginning, “The relationship was a very easy one. The only strains were that he absolutely demanded to know everything you knew. And if he found out that you’d withheld something, he’d get very angry.”

  Graham thought “the decline” began because of “middle age” or “writer’s block” or a combination of the two. “You know, he had his face done,” she said. “It made him look very young, in a weird way. He once took me to his face person and tried to get me to do it. And I said, ‘No thank you,’ and left. And he said, ‘You’ll be back.’”

  But, she said, “I never was.”

  DURING A. M. ROSENTHAL’S tenure, gay employees were treated just as capriciously as gay issues at The New York Times.

  After his first collection of short stories was published to general acclaim, Walter Clemons stopped writing fiction. Three decades later, he said he had been concerned that if he continued, he might reveal his sexual orientation. “That’s really why I gave up writing fiction: In explaining things, I thought it would show. It sort of dried me up as a fiction writer because I exhausted my safely writable experiences.” Whether that was the real reason for his writing block is probably less important than the fact that Clemons believed it was real. Until the 1980s, most gay writers assumed that public identifica
tion as a homosexual could quickly end their careers. “Any writer suspected of being homosexual would be immediately attacked by … something like ninety percent of the press,” said Vidal. “And the other ten percent would be very edgy in praise, for fear that the writer might be thought to be sexually degenerate.”

  This fear may have been why playwrights like Albee and Williams focused on heterosexual subjects. Not everyone saw that as a disadvantage. “I always thought those guys were lucky,” Jack Kroll said about Albee and Williams, “because later on they would have had to write about gay things.”

  After he had stopped writing fiction, Clemons became an editor at McGraw-Hill in Manhattan. One day in 1968 he received a call from a friend at The New York Times Book Review, offering him an editorship. After he had accepted, but before he had started the new job, Clemons went home to Houston to visit his parents.

  “My mother was planning to have a party the night before I flew back to New York, and the morning of the party I was up very early with my father. He went into the bedroom and came out sort of white, and said, ‘I think she’s gone.’ My mother had simply died in her sleep. So after the funeral and all the production, I went back to New York and I had bitten the hell out of my fingernails. I had to go for a physical at the Times, and the doctor looked at my hands and asked if I had been under some sort of nervous strain. I explained that my mother had just died and it was a shock, He asked, ‘Were you very close to your mother?’ And I said, ‘Not especially.’ Then he asked if I had had any homosexual experiences, and I said, ‘Well, yes.’ It never occurred to me to lie. Ask me a simple question and I’ll give you a straightforward answer. So he said that I’d better see the psychiatrist. They sent me off to a doctor. I wish I could remember his name because he was absolutely angelic.

  “He asked me about my homosexual experience and when I came out and this and that. Then he asked if I was promiscuous, and I said, ‘No, I’m not now. But I have been. When I first came to New York I was on the streets and in the bars at every opportunity. But I lead a quieter life now.’ At the end of the interview, he said, ‘I’m going to recommend that they hire you because you had several chances to lie and you didn’t. I think you have good values and you’re a good person.’”

  Clemons was baffled: “Well, what did I do right?” he asked. The doctor replied, “When I asked you if you were promiscuous, you could have easily said, ‘Oh no, never.’ It’s perfectly natural that coming from Texas to New York you would have had sort of a wild first few years here, and you were perfectly frank about that. I like the way you talked to me.” Clemons continued, “That’s why I wish I could remember his name. Who could be nicer?”

  Clemons’s first years at the Times were pleasant ones. “I was sort of unconscious of homophobia at the Times because I did what I think a lot of sort of polite, button-down homosexuals did in those days: I thought I was invisible.” Stanley Posthorn, who began his ascent through the corporate ranks at Time Inc. in the fifties, agreed: “I think our aspirations were limited. We were content to rise as far as we could, and conceal our gayness in doing it. I think we had to be. You did not wear it on your sleeve. You just didn’t.”

  At the Times, Clemons “didn’t really think so much about whether people were thinking about me because I thought, Nobody can see me.” But he turned out to be mistaken.

  Two years after he arrived on West 43d Street, Clemons was asked to apply for the prestigious position of daily book reviewer. He was widely regarded as the most qualified candidate for the job, but it went to Anatole Broyard instead. Clemons was horrified when he learned from his colleague, John Leonard, that top editors at the paper had launched an investigation of Clemons’s sexual orientation during his tryout. And Clemons was furious when he learned that three of his colleagues—including Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, already a daily book critic—had told his bosses that he was gay. “I was outraged and hurt, and thought, What has this got to do with anything?” Clemons remembered.

  Shortly after Clemons had been passed over for the job as daily reviewer, Jack Kroll lured him over to Newsweek, where he had a distinguished career as one of the magazine’s senior book critics. “Writing for Walter was definitely a moral act,” said Kroll. “He was my favorite among the Times critics. He was too good a man to fall in love with himself. It’s so wonderful to deal with talent and sensibility.” The admiration was entirely mutual: “Jack’s the best editor imaginable,” Clemons said.

  Kroll had no suspicion that Clemons was homosexual. “I always assumed that he and [arts patron] Mimi Kilgore had some sort of thing. I used to think, That lucky fuck, he even got Mimi. I remember a dinner he had with me and a couple of other people at which it soon became clear that he wanted to tell us this. It was very straight and very sweet. The details have been overwhelmed by my failure to spot this—straight guys like to think they can spot this. The word I always used to describe his writing was masculine. And maybe I liked him too much. If you like a guy too much and you’re straight, there’s something that prevents you from making that connection.”

  Clemons confirmed the identity of one of his accusers at the Times several years later, after another Times editor, Charles Simmons, wrote a novel in which he recounted the incident. When the novel was published, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt telephoned Clemons to arrange a meeting over drinks at the Four Seasons restaurant.

  “I had never gotten over this even five years later, and I was foolish enough to think they had finally caught on about needing to get rid of Anatole Broyard and they wanted to sound me out about coming back as daily book reviewer,” Clemons recalled. His fleeting optimism was understandable because nearly everyone in the world of books considered Clemons’s criticism far superior to the work of Broyard or Lehmann-Haupt.

  Clemons’s failure to become the daily critic at the Times had “made a grievous imprint” on him. “It was the first rejection I had ever had. I had never even asked for a job before. People came to me, and asked, Would you like to do this, would you like to do that? So when I really wanted that job and didn’t get it, I was deeply crushed. So I met Chris and we made chitchat for a while, and he finally said, I’ll tell you the reason I called. I wanted to talk to you about Charlie Simmons’s book.’

  “I hadn’t even seen it. So I said that I wished he had told me because I thought he was looking for someone to review it. But he said, ‘Let me read you a passage’:

  The first person he knew with a hyphenated name, a young attractive bachelor, took him up as a confidant and reported regularly on progress in finding a suitable girlfriend. He was unhappily married at the time and envied the bachelor’s single life until one day the bachelor said, ‘I haven’t had sex in two years, not since I broke up with the dancer friend.’ ‘What happened to her?’ he asked the bachelor. ‘Him,’ the bachelor said, and he realized sexual confessions contain propositions. The second man he knew with a hyphenated name, who affected intricate designs with facial hair, who was both boyish and avuncular and who was liked by everyone for a while, prevented a colleague from getting an influential job by telling the employer that the colleague was homosexual. The colleague, over drinks in a bar one evening, said to him, ‘He didn’t even ask me if I was.’ And then after a pause, ‘You know what’s the matter with him? He wants to be a good guy but just can’t.’

  “So Chris read me this passage, and I said, ‘Yes, I did say something like that.’ And he said, ‘Since Charlie has published this, I have always wanted a chance to explain to you. I was too shy to open up the subject and this gives me an opportunity. I have always felt bad about this. You see, the reason I did that was that it’s a very demanding job, and writing reviews can be very personal and under the pressure of the job, I thought that it’”—Clemons’s homosexuality—“‘might come out in your reviews.’

  “He thought it was better to prevent this disaster. I thought the explanation was worse than the original events.”

  Clemons was too stunned to reply.
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  “Yes. I just had a friendly drink with Chris and we went on to other subjects. I went home and told my friend, and he said, ‘What! Weren’t you furious? Didn’t you say anything?’ And I said, ‘No. I couldn’t think of anything much to say.’ I was seeing a psychiatrist at the time, and I brought this up the following week, and he said, ‘You sat still for that?’ So we had a discussion about not being able to express anger.”

  Lehmann-Haupt’s recollection of this conversation does not differ markedly from Clemons’s account. Although Lehmann-Haupt denied that his motivation was to prevent Clemons from being hired as his fellow critic, he called Clemons’s description of their drink at the Four Seasons “certainly a way of putting it … I mean that’s the way he saw it.” He also confirmed that after “four, or five, or six hours” of drinking Scotch with Rosenthal in the managing editor’s private office, he told Rosenthal that Clemons was gay.

  Lehmann-Haupt said he confided to Rosenthal “personally and privately” that he thought Clemons was blocked as a fiction writer “because he doesn’t accept his sexual orientation.

  “And Abe nodded, and said, ‘Well, that’s very interesting.’ And that was, again I say, we took a number of people over similar indiscreet …” the critic’s voice trailed off.

  A quarter century after the event, Lehmann-Haupt admitted that it had been a mistake to confirm to Rosenthal that Clemons was a homosexual. Lehmann-Haupt also agreed that Clemons was “absolutely” a better critic than Anatole Broyard.* Rosenthal said he had “absolutely no recollection either that Walter Clemons was gay or that I ever discussed it” with Lehmann-Haupt. He also denied that he had ever discriminated against any employee because he was gay.

  Lehmann-Haupt recalled that during their drink at the Four Seasons, “Walter was not giving me an inch. The more I went, the more he sort of looked at me. He wouldn’t even nod. He wouldn’t say, ‘Look, I understand this was tough for you’—or anything that would have given me any kind of relief. And I was stumbling around trying to explain what had happened. I probably didn’t perform very well. I mean, it was certainly one of the most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever been through, and it got worse by the minute.”