Regardless of such noncommittal statements, his date that night was boyfriend Michael Childers.
The executives of United Artists thought they had a real box-office dud with Sunday Bloody Sunday, but they also knew it was Schlesinger’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning picture, Midnight Cowboy, and they treated it accordingly. So did some of London’s most famous residents. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton attended, as did Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier and Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret, who turned out not to be a fan of the movie. At the reception afterward, within earshot of Schlesinger and Childers, the queen’s sister, sloshed on too much gin, let out with her critique, “I thought it was horrific. Men in bed kissing!”
“Oh Margaret, shut up!” said Tony Snowdon.
The reviews were kinder; in fact, they were arguably the best of Schlesinger’s career and relatively free of homophobia. Sunday Bloody Sunday would go on to receive five Oscar nominations, including one for best picture, but there were no wins. And it did not perform well at the box office, as they say in the trades. Gore Vidal, an admirer of the film, expressed his opinion on why it didn’t succeed with the moviegoing public. “Americans are taught that either you’re a faggot, and dress up in women’s clothes and get fucked, or you’re a ‘real man’ and would die if another man puts his hand on you,” he said. “So, as a result, the Americans believe there is no such thing as bisexuality. What fascinated me about the movie was it takes for granted the bisexuality of the boy, and makes no point of it. I’ve known so many situations like that one. But it all came down to that one core: ‘How could a nice, manly, Jewish doctor have an affair with a boy who doesn’t seem to be wearing women’s clothes.’ They just couldn’t get it.”
LANCE LOUD WAS ALSO not wearing women’s clothes when he fulfilled his fantasy to live in the hotel of Chelsea Girls fame. He and his friend Kristian Hoffman had traveled east after high school graduation, and when the money from home had run out and they were evicted from an apartment on Seventh Avenue and Fifteenth Street, Hoffman returned to Santa Barbara. His more adventurous and resourceful friend remained behind in New York City.
“Lance had this sense of destiny, of being where you were meant to be,” said Hoffman. “Lance took that hunger and turned it into reality. He believed there was this moment that was waiting for him, and to be clever and rise to that moment.”
What was waiting for Lance was a man at least ten years his senior named Soren Agenoux, who lived at the Chelsea Hotel and worked as managing editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview. If Soren wasn’t love for Lance, he was destiny.
That year, Lance Loud’s life would change even more, and that change had nothing to do with the Chelsea Hotel or Andy Warhol or, for that matter, Soren Agenoux.
Back in Santa Barbara, the half dozen other Louds were meeting with Mary Every, an editor for the town’s News Press. Every knew producer Craig Gilbert, who had a deal with the PBS affiliate WNET to do documentary-style programs on five American families. Gilbert wanted upper-middle-class families like the ones that once populated 1950s sitcoms Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The happy family genre hadn’t entirely disappeared from the tube, The Brady Brunch being the most notable survivor in 1971. But Gilbert wasn’t looking for a sugarcoated family to be played for laughs in his documentaries. He wanted real families, with real houses, with real problems. Gilbert had already done some interviewing in Palo Alto and Los Angeles, but hadn’t even found one family when he decided to visit Santa Barbara.
Every thought she knew just the family he wanted, and one evening in May she took Gilbert to the William C. Loud residence at 35 Wood Dale Drive in Santa Barbara. It was there at the Louds’ eight-room stucco ranch house that he met Bill and his wife, Pat, as well as four of their five children. Gilbert described what he wanted to do: A film and sound crew would tape their day-to-day lives for four weeks and then edit it down to a one-hour program, with each of the five families getting their own one-hour special.
According to Pat Loud, everybody in the family thought it would be “fun.” Pat also had a couple of other reasons for wanting to be on TV, reasons that she kept to herself: She hoped that doing the documentary would keep her husband, who owned a mining equipment company, home in Santa Barbara more, and most important, she couldn’t helping thinking of all the people who would see the show and read about them, “and the first ones I thought of were all Bill’s women . . . they would turn on their televisions to look at the Louds, and they would weep. There we’d be, all seven of us, a portrait of family solidarity, all interwoven by blood and love and time and mutual need and a thousand other ties those poor things couldn’t even comprehend,” she would later write in her memoir.
And she also thought, “This documentary will never air.”
Pat Loud wasn’t the only one who had severe doubts about Craig Gilbert’s project, to be called An American Family. Jacqueline Donnet, coordinating producer of the PBS show, recalled that back in the early 1970s “no one ever looked at public television. We thought that we were working on a little series like The Working Musician. Of course, there was an audience out there, but we didn’t think the family was going to make the cover of Newsweek.”
In Pat Loud’s first few talks with Gilbert, she didn’t mention her husband’s infidelities. She and Bill had already discussed getting a divorce; perhaps they would wait until their youngest child, thirteen-year-old Michelle, was out of high school before they made the big break. For all Gilbert knew, the Louds were the perfect, average American family. Pat also didn’t say much about her oldest son, Lance. Regardless, Gilbert found himself so impressed with the Louds that he decided to abandon his search for the other four families and devote all five hours to just this one. (The series eventually ran twelve hours.) Pat recalled, “That was flattering, to say the least.”
There were a few ground rules. Gilbert told the Louds that they would be filmed on a daily basis from 8 A.M. to 10 P.M. “They were to live their lives as if there were no camera present,” he said. “They were to do nothing differently than they would ordinarily.”
Pat mentioned her upcoming visit to New York City to see Lance, and Gilbert decided that her trip east might be an excellent time to start taping. He asked where Lance was staying, she said the Chelsea Hotel, and his eyes widened. It hadn’t really occurred to Pat that the Chelsea Hotel was the hotel of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, the film that her son so adored. She imagined a hotel called Chelsea being “a nice, quaint middle-class hostelry where a white-haired grandma type with a big bunch of keys at her waist clucked over boys far from home and brought them hot toddies and did their laundry.”
Gilbert lived near the Chelsea Hotel. He knew its tenants. He knew its outré reputation. He knew he’d struck TV gold. Or as Pat put it, “He got the idea before I did that the life Lance was leading wasn’t that of just any normal healthy twenty-year-old loose in the big city.”
It was there, at 222 West Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan, that Pat Loud stepped from a taxicab to meet for the first time the American Family crew, all two of them: Alan Raymond, the cinematographer, was receiving $1,000 a week for his efforts; wife Susan Raymond, the sound person, got $900. There was no introduction as the Raymonds started to film Pat making her way across the sidewalk and into the Chelsea Hotel. They instructed her to “just ignore us, like we’re not here.”
“I was like a deer in headlights,” Pat recalled.
The Chelsea Hotel.
While Lance adored the Chelsea—“I love it. All these little identical cells of people, and they’re all famous and exciting and know what to do,” he believed—Pat found it to be a seedy rip-off, its rent exorbitant, and its general air redolent of mildew and marijuana.
It was at the Chelsea that Pat met Lance’s new boyfriend, Soren Agenoux, and Lance’s new friend Holly Woodlawn of Trash fame. That first day, Lance took his mother to La MaMa, where Hair’s Tom O’Horgan came to fam
e, and where Pat was to see her first drag show, Vain Victory, starring those Warhol superstars Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling who’d romped together briefly in Flesh. Thanks to her Warhol-fixated son, Pat Loud was perhaps the only homemaker in Santa Barbara who’d heard of this transvestite triumvirate—Woodlawn, Curtis, and Darling.
After the show, over late-night coffee in a greasy spoon, Pat said she was alternatively shocked and bored by Vain Victory, Soren said he didn’t understand it and sort of apologized to his boyfriend’s mother, and Lance said it was thrilling. After all, future movie stars like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Jill Clayburgh had preceded them to see Vain Victory at La MaMa.
The next day, mother and son had a heart-to-heart talk in Central Park in which he revealed how much he’d wished that the family had tried to “understand me.”
Before Pat Loud left New York City, Gilbert met with her at a restaurant in Grand Central Terminal for a brief chat. Showing an openly homosexual person on television had never been done before. Gilbert loved the challenge but feared the repercussions. “Patty, what do you really feel about Lance?” he asked.
She told him, “I believe in teaching kids responsibility for their own actions. He’s been wanting to come here for a long, long time. Lance is . . . well, gotten himself into a pretty weird scene. I can’t keep bailing him out. I encourage him to stick it out so he can see I’m not going to swoop in and carry him back to the sterile and safe family hearth. I want him to grow up, and that’s a job he’s got to do on his own.”
What Pat Loud did not do was criticize Lance for being homosexual or living openly with his boyfriend. “If Lance seems not to care what others think of him it’s not a cover-up,” she told Gilbert. “His attitude is ‘Here I am the way I am,’ and he means it.”
What she also knew is that “Lance would be all right. I knew that after visiting him.”
Back home in Santa Barbara, Pat found Bill recovering from a bad sunburn, which he’d gotten “lolling around a pool,” as he put it. No one working on the American Family series asked about Bill’s affairs with other women, but there was, in Pat’s words, a “thickening of the atmosphere around the house as the filming went on.”
That atmosphere exploded on camera when Pat called Bill “a goddamned asshole,” and a couple of episodes later she revealed to her brother and sister-in-law why she was getting a divorce. “If we had any sex life, that could be kind of nice. But it is kind of a courtesy thank-you-ma’am thing. I’m too young for that, too old for women’s lib, but I’m too young for that. We don’t have any rapport anymore. And everything’s more obvious now—lipstick, powder, and gunk on his shirt. It has turned into a game.”
Viewers had never heard such sexually explicit dialogue on television, and that such intimate details of an unraveling marriage came from not a fictional character but a real person would only compound the shock value.
In the following episode of An American Family, Pat asked Bill for a divorce. Actually, she simply informed him she’d hired a lawyer, gave him the lawyer’s card, and said it was time for him to move out of the house. “At least I don’t have to unpack my bags,” replied Bill, just back from a business trip—or was it a pleasure trip? They could have ended the taping right there—except Pat came down with a bad guilt attack, typical for good Catholic girls. “Almost a million dollars had been poured into filming the Louds,” she explained. “I felt an obligation to live up to our part of the bargain. . . .”
Meanwhile, Craig Gilbert dispatched another film crew to Europe to record Lance’s journeys there. Ensconced in Paris, he imagined himself Edith Piaf in an apartment overlooking the Seine and sang atop an upright piano. Lance would be the only family member to speak directly into the camera, very much the way the actors did in Chelsea Girls. In one such interview, he looked into the camera to say, “New York has so many things that really do interest me or that could interest me that for . . . for my own good, I think I’ll just have to stay. Even if I really don’t want to. In fact, I guess I really don’t. It is so much easier just to go home. I could get a little job and make everyone happy on a day-to-day type basis and get a little money and live by myself in my own apartment or something.”
Later, once he decided to leave New York City and return to Santa Barbara, he donned a floppy picture hat and flowing scarf, and made sure to be the very last passenger off the airplane to greet family and camera on the tarmac. He was now sporting blue eyeliner and lipstick, and back at 35 Wood Dale Drive he showed his sisters, Michelle and Delilah, how to apply such extreme makeup. Delilah told him he looked great.
During the taping, his four siblings never called him a fag or fairy or queer, and there was no eyeball-rolling at his theatrics. “I was so influenced by him, in the idea of being outrageous,” Lance said of Andy Warhol. “When the cameras were on me I was really thinking, you know, Chelsea Girls and Bike Boy and stuff like that when they were filming. I was just so taken with it. I felt like I was in Chelsea Girls II, the sequel.”
Off camera, the Raymonds broke the cardinal rule of cinéma vérité. While the Loud family let Lance go his way, Alan and Susan Raymond told him to tone it down—he was coming off too flamboyant, too outrageous, too gay.
Lance didn’t see it that way. He thought he was being “terribly avant-garde” and not trying “to dress like a woman or femmy.” Only later, when he saw the twelve-hour documentary, with each sequence laid out one after the other, would he then realize, “I came off like a big fag.”
One day, the Raymonds followed Lance to a fashion show at the Santa Barbara Museum. He arrived with his friend Jackie Horner, and they were both wearing makeup—Horner, swathed in a blue feather boa, had put black dots around his eyes, while Lance stuck to his basic blue mascara and lipstick. Even though both of them had tickets in hand, the museum guards wouldn’t let them through the front door because of the way they looked. The Raymonds’ camera and sound equipment was also a bit much. Finally, Jack Baker, the fashion show director, intervened. “The museum director wanted me to guarantee that they would behave,” said Baker, who had been Lance’s and Jackie’s art instructor in high school.
“The Santa Barbara matrons thought we were monsters. That scared me,” said Lance. But then, amazingly, Edie Sedgwick materialized, like a calming tonic. She introduced herself. “I haven’t seen you for eons!” she told Lance, giving him a kiss. It was true—not since that day at the beach with her dog and the college boys playing football and her tirade about all those fags in New York City. How could he forget?
Lance asked where she’d been.
“I’ve been put away for a while!” she said.
A Santa Barbara matron, intrigued by the cameras, asked Edie who she was. “Edie Sedgwick Post . . . temporarily,” she replied.
Lance knew what the erstwhile Andy Warhol superstar really wanted. She didn’t care about him, but rather was “drawn like a moth to flames by those cameras.” She looked frail, sickly, horrible, and Lance believed “that I was standing there with a ghost of myself in the future. It would seem like ‘Oh, look, there’s Lance, and that’s what’s going to happen to him.’ ”
Lance and his friend drove Edie home. There in the foyer of the Sedgwick manse were dozens of bottles of pills, displayed openly like so much candy for the kids. They said good-bye.
The next day, a week before Thanksgiving, Lance received a phone call from Jackie Horner, who told him, “Edie Sedgwick is dead of an overdose.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1972, Frenzy
Buoyed with his initial opinion that “this is one of the great books that has been made into a great film,” Anthony Burgess consented to join Malcolm McDowell for a one-week publicity tour of New York City to promote A Clockwork Orange. The travel-phobic Kubrick remained behind in England that January, “controlling everything,” said McDowell. The two men’s press day began with a limousine pickup, which invariably kicked off with Burgess asking McDowell, “Have you shit today?” McDowell
told him yes, at which Burgess launched into a scatological dissertation until their first interview of the morning. That was Monday.
By Wednesday, however, McDowell noticed a distinct change in his publicity date’s attitude toward Kubrick and his film. “Burgess realized he’d been cheated because he wasn’t paid anything for A Clockwork Orange,” said the actor. Years earlier, Burgess had sold the film rights “for a few hundred dollars,” he groused. Regardless of how the film version performed at the box office, Burgess would see no profit points. Worse, “Kubrick went on paring his nails in Borehamwood,” complained Burgess, leaving the publicity chores to McDowell and the novelist, who was even called upon to attend the New York Film Critics’ Circle Awards on Kubrick’s behalf. There at Sardi’s restaurant, Burgess got his revenge, since he quickly won the hearts and laughter of the assembled film reviewers when he shouted out, “I have been sent by God—Stanley Kubrick—to accept his award!”
It had been, by all accounts, a very rough few days of interviews for Burgess and McDowell.
On the Today show, Barbara Walters attacked the film’s graphic sex and violence. Four teenagers had recently raped a nun in Poughkeepsie, New York, and it was inaccurately reported that they were dressed à la the droogs. Perhaps Walters had not yet seen Fritz the Cat (released by little Cinemation, flush with cash from its recent Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song bonanza), in which a female donkey is chain-whipped and gang-raped by her rabbit-biker-boyfriend and two other characters of indeterminate species. (Robert Crumb called the film an “embarrassment for the rest of my life,” and promptly killed off Fritz in a subsequent cartoon by having a female ostrich plant an ice pick in the back of his cat skull.)
As it turned out, the Poughkeepsie culprits hadn’t seen A Clockwork Orange. Burgess recalled, “I was not quite sure what I was defending—the book that had been called ‘a nasty little shock’ or the film about which Kubrick remained silent. I realized, not for the first time, how little impact even a shocking book can make in comparison with a film. Kubrick’s achievement swallowed mine, whole, and yet I was responsible for what some called its malign influence on the young.”
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