The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  While Clemons had been working at the Book Review, its editor, Francis Brown, had put him up for membership in the Century Club, a Manhattan institution housed in a Stanford White palace, which counts many of the city’s most accomplished writers and artists among its members. “I had gone to Newsweek in 1971, and at the fall dinner with the new members I ran into Abe Rosenthal—who I had beat in by a couple of years—in his little tux. We found ourselves drinks, and he was very flustered, and said, ‘You’ve gone somewhere, haven’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m the book reviewer for Newsweek now.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t mean to say that! I didn’t mean to say that!’ It was the weirdest thing. He was deeply embarrassed and flustered. All I can think is that he was so flustered by running into this fag that he had denied a job to, on the august occasion of his induction, he just lost his head.”

  HOWARD ROSENMAN was a very good-looking twenty-two-year-old medical student in 1967, the son of an Orthodox Jewish family on Long Island. He was living a “very religious life,” wearing a yarmulke and eating kosher. He already knew that he was gay, but he had gone only so far as to look surreptitiously at a few gay magazines. Every weekend he visited his family for the Sabbath. After going to synagogue with his father on Saturday night, he would pick up his girlfriend and drive into Manhattan. “She was also very religious. In the trunk of the car, I had bell-bottom pants and a Nehru jacket, and she had a miniskirt. We would change into our uniform and we would go to Arthur, the club that Sybil Burton owned, and pretend that we were hip.” Sybil Burton was Richard Burton’s ex-wife, and in 1967, Arthur was internationally famous as the chicest nightclub in Manhattan, one of the very first places in America to be called a discotheque.

  Arthur, named for George Harrison’s haircut,* was also one of the first places where would-be patrons were forced to line up in front of a “velvet truncheon”—a nocturnal rite later made famous by Studio 54. Mickey Deans was the man who made the selections from behind Arthur’s cordon. “That was the first time I experienced it,” said Rosenman. “Because we were young and I guess fairly cute, they let us in, and we danced all night long to Otis Redding—’Sitting on the Dock at the Bay’—and Aretha Franklin—’Respect.’ R and B heaven. It was so hip it was beyond hip. Two little rooms, one room over here and the disco was in the back and then another room with a bar and the celebrity table.

  “It was the most glamorous place I had ever been to in my entire life up to then. I saw Leonard Bernstein and I saw Nureyev and I saw Liza Minnelli and I saw Peter Allen. Beautiful black women, beautiful black men. It was also hustlers and hookers and celebrities and intellectuals. It was that democratic thing that, later, Studio 54 picked up on. I had gotten friendly with Sybil by that point, and she loved the fact that I was a medical student and that I was so articulate, and I came to her, and I said, ‘Do you think I could be a waiter here?’ At that time you had to be very good-looking: it was like a prestige thing, being a waiter at Arthur. So I became a waiter at Arthur, and Sybil let me serve the celebrity table. And every night my pockets would be filled with numbers from men and women. Liza Minnelli and Peter Allen once broke a popper under my nose. And I saw Mrs. Kennedy there. And Margot Fonteyn. Sybil had a real connection to the ballet world, so she mixed that whole ballet world and the English world and English actors and actresses and socialites and Didi Ryan and Mrs. Vreeland, and it was like that. To me, it was like, Whoa!”

  Then, in June 1967, the Six Day War broke out in Israel, and Rosenman decided he should go there as a medical volunteer. “My parents are Israeli, and I had been to Israel a lot. My parents were born in the Old City of Jerusalem—my mother is fifth-generation, my father is fourth-generation. Their great-grandparents came to Palestine in the 1870s. So I had traveled to Israel my whole life growing up. My relatives had houses and villas overlooking the Old City. My family was forced to move out of the Old City in 1947. My father was born ten yards from the Wailing Wall. They were in the New City overlooking the Old City.

  “On the evening of June 4 of 19671 was at my cousin’s apartment studying for my med boards. My cousin Aryeh Maidenbaum calls me up, and I say that there are reports on the radio that the refineries in Haifa were blown up and burning, which was a disinformation report that the Israelis had put out. But we didn’t know that here in the States. All I have is my medical bag with me and my Levis. At that time, the Rothschilds were gutting Air France jets and filling them with spare parts and war materiel and shipping them to Israel, and we got on one of these jets. I got a lift through a cousin. By the time we landed, for all intents and purposes the war was over. The Israelis hadn’t attacked Jerusalem yet, but they had reached Suez and they were also pushing toward the north, to the Golan. When we landed, I was immediately taken from the Tel Aviv airport straight to the Gaza Strip to a medical field hospital in a town called Rafah. I was put into a medical field hospital as a medical volunteer.”

  The war had lasted only six days—an astonishing victory over incredible odds. No one doubted that these Jews could have kept going all the way to Cairo—and Damascus—if they had chosen to.

  The war transformed the way millions of Jews thought about themselves. Twenty-two years after the end of World War II, the most viciously oppressed victim of the twentieth century was suddenly its most extraordinary warrior. Jews around the world who had forgotten, or even obliterated, their origins were suddenly celebrating them. In 1969, a dramatically different kind of David and Goliath event in Greenwich Village would have a strikingly similar effect on the self-image of gay people in America, providing them for the first time with the courage to be proud.

  “I remember my commanding officer came to me,” said Rosenman. “My family was known as the Vatikay Yerushalayim, which means the Ancients of Jerusalem, the equivalent to the Mayflower generation. And so my commander came to me, and said, ‘Because you come from the Vatikay Yerushalayim, you can have the privilege of escorting the troops into the Old City.’ Which I did. And I saw Rabbi Goren* blowing the shofar at the Wailing Wall, and I saw these young Israeli soldiers crying at the wall.

  “It was the most unreal, momentous event that I ever participated in. And the sense of euphoria: the sense that the new Jew is no longer a ghetto Jew, the Jew is now cast in the mold of King David. In the Bible, King David is described as beautiful of appearance, he sings poetry, he knows how to play a harp, and he’s a warrior! In other words, he’s the warrior prince, the philosopher prince. And I remember I wrapped myself in the mantle of that romanticism. I said to myself, I don’t have to be religious anymore because I was here when Jerusalem was unified after two thousand years. I had the honor of being here. And I remember throwing away my tallis and my yarmulke.” This reaction was the exact opposite of what most Jews experienced after this conquest.

  After the cease-fire, Rosenman was transferred to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. As a waiter at Arthur, he had flirted with Leonard Bernstein. On July 1, Bernstein arrived in Israel to participate in the victory celebrations. He was going to conduct Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony on the newly reconquered Mount Scopus.

  Beginning with the Jewish state’s War of Independence, Bernstein had a blazing, lifelong love affair with Israel. “How to begin?” he had written to Serge Koussevitzky during the war in 1947. “Which of all the glorious facts, faces, actions, ideals, beauties of scenery, nobilities of purpose shall I report? I am simply overcome with this land and its people. I have never so gloried in an army, in simple farmers, in a concert public.” During the same trip, he disclosed to Aaron Copland that he had fallen in love with Azariah Rapoport, a handsome young Israeli army officer who was his guide. Bernstein was thirty, and the year before he had broken off his engagement to be married. “It’s the works,” he wrote of his new affair, “and I can’t quite believe that I should have found all the things I’ve wanted rolled into one. It’s a hell of an experience—nervewracking and guts-tearing and wonderful. It’s changed everything.” (By the following year, his romanti
c interest in Rapoport had ended.)

  Rosenman thought Bernstein was “fabulous. … Leonard is an iconic figure in Israel,” the younger man recalled. “He spoke Hebrew. And he had many lovers there. Many. I was totally obsessed with him. The whole concept of meeting any one of the creators of West Side Story became my focus. Hal and Stephen and Jerry and all of them.” Then Bernstein arrived to visit the medical volunteers in Jerusalem. “And there I was with Levi’s, white buck shoes, white jacket, my stethoscope hanging out of my pocket, wearing glasses. And Leonard Bernstein comes along, says hello to everybody, and sees me, and says, ‘I know a boy just like you. He’s a waiter at a discotheque in New York. He has the same cleft in his chin that you have.’ And I say to him, in perfect Hebrew, taking off my glasses: T am your waiter at Arthur.’ Whereupon he kisses me on the lips and invites me to this concert where Americans are flying in and ready to contribute $25,000 a ticket—in 1967. And I march into the King David Hotel, and I say to my aunts and uncles, ‘Got two tickets!’ and I brought one of my cousins.”

  In the fall of 1948, the Israeli army captured Beersheba, an important crossroads with biblical importance. Bernstein played three piano concertos in a row for the first time in his career: the Mozart in B-flat, K. 450; Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto; and Rhapsody in Blue, which he offered as an encore.

  In 1967, the concert on Mount Scopus was the climax of Bernstein’s trip. Before he conducted Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, Bernstein recalled the concerts he had given in 1948. “The idea of resurrection at that time was momentous,” he remembered. “After all this land had just been reborn. But still the ancient cycle of threat, destruction and re-birth goes on; and it is all mirrored in Mahler’s music—above all the expression of simple faith—of belief that good must triumph.”

  Rosenman was seated next to Felicia: “Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein—with her and the kids. And this was so emotional because he was celebrating the hegemony of the Jews over the divided city of Jerusalem after two thousand years of a diaspora. It was very heavy. And on the downbeat of the Resurrection, on Mount Scopus, with the Old City in front of us and the New City behind us, on the downbeat of the Resurrection, the wildest feeling of exhilaration and elation swept over me. The celebration of Jewish hegemony over the holy city of Jerusalem after two thousand years. I couldn’t believe that I was there. With Leonard fucking Bernstein.” The songwriter Adolph Green remarked that Bernstein had “a look of almost angelic peace on his face.”

  Up to this point, Rosenman had never slept with a man. But he made love with Bernstein immediately after the concert on Mount Scopus.

  “He was incredible,” said Rosenman. “All that passionate energy, right there. He had the most wide-ranging knowledge of anybody that I ever met until then, about everything. Whether it was musical philosophy or the theater or opera or history or geography. It bowled me over. I was dazzled. I had never, ever seen an intelligence like this. He was also revered, you know. And he was unsure of himself. As much as he was confident, he was equally insecure. He was extremely humble. And sweet and teaching, much like a pedant, but not in a bad way, in a good way—the way Sondheim is like a don. It was very exhilarating. And very hip and wildly sophisticated because there I was being very, very friendly with Felicia.”

  Rosenman thought Mrs. Bernstein was probably aware of their affair: “She treated me like a real star. She had unmatched social grace, manners, and poise. She was very cool that way, whether she knew or not.”

  Mike Mindlin and Frank Yablans were making a documentary about the conductor’s trip called Journey to Jerusalem, and Bernstein got Rosenman a job on the movie as a gofer. Altogether, his liaison with the maestro lasted three weeks.

  Rosenman had chosen an incredible moment to come out, and he stayed in Israel for the rest of the summer after Bernstein left. “The first communities that actually got together in Jerusalem after the war were the gay Arab and gay Jewish communities,” he said. “There was a park called the Independence Garden in Jerusalem where the Arabs and the Jews would meet. And I brought an Arab home to the King David Hotel, which I thought was both very glamorous and very audacious. The whole summer was exciting that way because anybody who was worth his salt, who was a Jew, who had any Zionist connection, came that summer. I was flipped out about it. Number one, it was like F.A.O. Schwarz: being gay was like a new toy. And there were many Israeli Defense Forces personnel. And the atmosphere was so euphoric and so free, it was surreal. It was delicious. The country was partying all summer. And every Jew from every country in the world seemed to be there. It was unbelievable. Action central.”

  In the fall, Rosenman returned to America. He took a leave of absence from medical school and never returned. “I went home and told my family that I was no longer religious, that I was leaving medical school, and that I was experimenting with alternative lifestyles. I remember once having a fight with my father. I had the album of West Side Story under my arm, and I said, ‘See this? I’m going to sleep with every one of the principals involved with this show.’ And my father said, ‘You’ll never make it in the world of the goyim.’ Rosenman’s boast nearly came true: eventually he would have affairs with most of West Side Story’s progenitors. “It wasn’t just that I was a star fucker,” said Rosenman. “I was a talent fucker. If someone had a real talent, or genius, no matter what it was, I was turned on to it.”

  PART OF STANLEY KAUFFMANN’S proposed solution to the “problem” of the homosexual playwright was to provide him with the freedom “to write truthfully of what he knows, rather than try to transform it to a life he does not know, to the detriment of others.” When Mart Crowley read those words one Sunday in Los Angeles, he decided to accept Kauffmann’s challenge.

  Crowley was a thirty-year-old Mississippian “with a sugarcane accent” whose ascent out of obscurity began after he learned that Elia Kazan was shooting a movie in a cotton patch near his hometown of Vicksburg. Crowley went over to schmooze with Kazan, and the director told Crowley to look him up if he ever came to New York. So he did, which led to “a rather glamorous production-assistant period: Butterfield8, The Fugitive Kind”—and, eventually, close friendships with Natalie Wood and Dominick Dunne.

  When Kauffmann’s piece appeared, Natalie Wood was paying for Crowley’s analysis as a Christmas present. The unemployed scriptwriter was house-sitting for a friend in Hollywood and feeling alternately “ambitious, disappointed, down, out [and] enraged.” He figured he had nothing to lose because no one he knew of had “really written this ‘uncloseted’ play. Some people wouldn’t speak to me anymore. … And most would think I was nuts. But I was broke and depressed.”

  The Boys in the Band was the first “uncloseted” look at gay life inside a New York closet—with all the brittle intelligence, bitter humor and exaggerated pathos on which white, male, middle-class gay life thrived in this era. Crowley took his title from A Star Is Born, in which James Mason tells Judy Garland, “Relax, it’s three A.M. at the Downbeat Club, and you’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band.”

  The title worked. The action takes place in a single evening, at a birthday party hosted by Michael, a profligate writer who is briefly on the wagon. Leonard Frey gave a brilliant performance as Harold, the guest of honor whose introduction of himself at the beginning of the second act immediately became famous: “What I am, Michael, is a thirty-two-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy—and if it takes me a while to pull myself together and if I smoke a little grass before I can get up the nerve to show my face to the world, it’s nobody’s goddamn business but my own. … And how are you this evening?”

  When Crowley first showed the script to his agent, she was so embarrassed that she couldn’t even look him in the eye. She whispered, “I can’t send this out with my name on it. Why, it’s like a weekend on Fire Island!” But the agent hadn’t absorbed the changes already wrought by an amazing decade, while Crowley had perfect timing and perfect pitch. Twenty-fou
r hours after leaving his agent’s office he was in Richard Barr’s apartment; Barr and Charles Woodward, Jr., agreed to produce his new play on the spot.* Then Crowley sat down with the director Bob Moore, whom he had known at Catholic University in Washington, and together they cut the script in half. “It worked as a play when Bob and Mart together trimmed it down to a workable size,” said Murray Gitlin, the former Broadway chorus boy who stage-managed the first workshop production of Boys on Vandam Street.

  The word of mouth was extraordinary—even before the first public performance in 1968. At least eight of the nine characters were gay men, while the uninvited guest at the birthday party insisted that he really was in love with his wife, despite the steady taunts of his host. Crowley told colleagues that the married character was based on his friend Dominick Dunne. The gay characters ranged from the passing-for-straight formerly married Hank, who hadn’t come out until he was thirty-two, to the flamingly gay Emory, who called everyone Mary. Gitlin had recruited Cliff Gorman for the role of Emory, and Gitlin said it was a “transforming” moment when Gorman first read for the part. After the opening, Gorman gave frequent interviews to make sure that everyone knew that he really was a happily married, beer-swigging heterosexual (“You Don’t Have To Be One To Play One,” a Times headline explained).

  On opening night, Crowley was jittery. “You think they’ll laugh?” the playwright asked Bob Moore.

  “Mart, they’ve been laughing at fags since Aristophanes. They’re not going to stop tonight.”

  Moore was right. Along with the musical Hair, which was shocking Broadway audiences that year with its own explicit language (“sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty”) and a cast who stripped down to their birthday suits, Boys became the sensation of the 1968 season. Crowley immersed himself in every detail of the production, spending $20 from his own pocket for just the right “green Rhine wine glass” for one of the boys to drink from and shopping with the actors to find the perfect clothes—a trip that got featured in Women’s Wear Daily (“The Clothes The Boys Wear On Stage Are Woven Into The Fabric Of The Play”). Seven months into the production, the play had already earned its backers a $70,000 profit, and $5.95 seats were being scalped for $25. A Presbyterian minister even brought the cast across the river to address his Brooklyn congregation. “As Christians,” he explained, “we must look at one another with love and compassion.”