Thanks to R. Couri Hay I got to take the QE2, first class, with my mother and Willow (who was then two) over to Southampton, giving a talk on the way.
With my cousin, Jeff Slonim, because we were both journalists, we took a blimp from Teterboro Airport around New York and over the city (the blimp was still allowed to fly over it then).
Magazines like Blue and Vogue and Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine (and many others) sent me to ride horses in India and climb Machu Picchu, drive a reindeer sleigh 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle (my reindeer ran off the path and into a bank of snow, knocking me off, then galloping for home, leaving me miles from anywhere in the wilderness as the temperature was falling) and a dude ranch in Wyoming. I went skiing in Sun Valley and Aspen, drove a Range Rover on the test course in Birmingham, England, and rode on a dogsled. I went to Egypt, the Atacama Desert in Chile, an exclusive resort in Anguilla. There was whale watching in the Victoria Straits, a hot-air balloon ride in Park City, swimming with pink dolphins in the Amazon. Literary festivals brought me to Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden. Germany, Canada, Belgium, Holland, and Spain.
I foraged for morel mushrooms in Idaho, picked cranberries in Oregon, went to Moscow pre-putsch. In 1973, while I was at the National Encampment for Citizenship, I’d visited the World Trade Center before it was finished—the top floor was a cement shell, through which the wind whipped; over the years there were parties up there, including one for me (to which I brought my dad, who was accosted by a baroness known for her predilection for S&M), and later, from our apartment in Brooklyn, I watched the second plane hit the tower and the buildings come down—before my eyes, while the same scene played on the TV.
I’ll always remember this one: I was sent to interview a mob hit man in the Federal Witness Protection Program, in Austin, Alabama, who was now running for mayor.
When I got there, I couldn’t get hold of him. He had been renamed by the Protection Program and was now called “John Johnson.”
John Johnson’s phone was busy for twenty-four hours. I was desperate. He had agreed to be interviewed. It was a farce; what kind of hit man in the Federal Witness Protection Program broke cover to run for mayor? But I had to get my story.
I assumed his phone was out of order. I didn’t drive then, but even if I had, I was too scared to drive up to a hit man’s house, uninvited. Then I came up with an idea: I would send him a telegram, saying I had arrived in Austin to interview him, as previously discussed, but his phone didn’t work.
But there weren’t any more telegram companies. I called around. Western Union didn’t do this anymore! It was before e-mail and texting, but there weren’t telegrams anymore, not real ones. What was I going to do? Even though you couldn’t send a real telegram, I saw there were still singing telegrams available.
So I called up the Gorilla-gram company. “Could you just go and deliver a message for me?”
“No. This is a singing telegram company. We can only go to someone to sing. What do you want us to sing?”
I had to make up a song for the gorilla to sing to the hit man. Better a gorilla than me!
The gorilla arrived at the hit man’s house. John Johnson came to the door at last. The gorilla sang: “Hello, I am here in town / You said you would do the interview / Is your phone broken? Or just off the hook? / I can’t get through to you.”
John Johnson got really mad. The Gorilla-gram company called me and said, “Where did you send us? This guy threatened the gorilla!”
John Johnson called me right away, too. He was scary. “What the hell are you doing? I took my phone off the hook, I was tired from campaigning. Then I went out to do some work on my car, with my buddies, and you sent a gorilla. Are you nuts? I’m coming after you!”
He had decided he didn’t want to be interviewed, but I had gotten my story, even if it wasn’t the right one, exactly.
In my normal life back in New York City I lived in a 750-square-foot basement that was freezing cold in winter. In summer, when it grew too dry, a parade of slugs entered from the tiny backyard. And there was an angry squirrel. It liked to come in and look for food. Sometimes I was there. Sometimes I wasn’t. My dogs didn’t care, but I was upset when the squirrel urinated and defecated on the pages of manuscript I had left on my typewriter.
There were a lot of fabulous times. Too bad I was afraid to enjoy most of them.
If I were going to live my life so far over again, the main thing I would wish for would be not to be so scared: scared of getting in trouble, scared of being broke, scared that people would not like me. If I were going to do it over again, I would not care if I got rejected or I got bad reviews or someone didn’t like me.
But I’m still broke now and it’s hard not to be scared, even though I have spent a lifetime fighting it.
Because of my husband, Tim Hunt, who is so charming and outgoing and brilliant at times, I got to meet and make friends with all kinds of people in England, people I would never have met on my own; I stayed in castles, stately homes, and a farm in Brazil, and attended a million of New York City’s most glamorous parties and events.
Because my book Slaves of New York was made into a film by Merchant Ivory, I got to be friends with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and travel around with Jim and Ismail doing promotion for that film, which was horribly reviewed in every city we went to, and only now is considered a gay classic and is screened often to sold-out audiences.
Because Tim and I adopted our baby from China, I got to have the best daughter on the planet.
The apartments and residences I got to see in New York City!
Apartments at the Dakota, with their huge gloomy rooms. Although Yoko Ono’s place was all in white, which made it not so dark. Hers was staffed by people who had—years before—snuck onto the stairwell and hung out for days (obviously before security was upgraded) until they met John and Yoko, who befriended them and hired them to be butler and so forth.
There was Asher Edelman’s apartment, an entire floor of a building occupying a block, done like a museum, room after room of massive paintings and sculpture. The ambassador from Liechtenstein, who lived on the seventy-third floor of a building not far from the UN, floor-to-ceiling glass with the city spread out on all sides, twinkling below. Jose and Mary Mugrabi’s apartment, on Fifth Avenue, high in the sky, jutting over the avenue so the cars disappeared under your feet and reemerged on the other side. You could look out at the river of traffic or you could look at the Yves Klein and Warhols on the walls. Homes of artists—like Arman—that were entire buildings with elevators. Joan Rivers’s apartment, which was the former ballroom of J. P. Morgan’s house.
Diane von Furstenberg’s studio: an entire building on, I think, Fourteenth, which was done up to resemble a sort of Turkish palazzo, all tiled and with a blue pool, very chic and “ethnic.” She lived in the top floor of the Carlyle Hotel, several floors of penthouse; to get to one of the toilets you had to climb a flight of stairs even higher up. That toilet sat on the roof in its own glass box, looking over the city.
The biggest dwelling of all belonged to Bob Guccione. This man lived in a real mansion. I think eventually some Russian billionaire bought it. Bob Senior was having a birthday party for his son Bob Junior, who I knew. You couldn’t believe there was a human being who got to live in this place. It took up a whole block. It was all stone, lined with bad Roman art. I don’t know, maybe some of it was good Roman art, but the setting made it look Las Vegas fake. The whole place was dark and massive and stone. You were greeted at the door by bodyguards and tremendous Rhodesian Ridgebacks. It went on forever. My recollection for detail on this is not so great. The marble busts, the staircases, the endless dark and huge stone rooms and the indoor swimming pool. Atria, courtyards, whatever. I didn’t get to see the whole house. Probably there are pictures of this somewhere.
You just kept looking around this place and thinking, this man made all this money by publishing pictures of vaginas.
swag and parties
My cousin Jeff Slonim once asked me, “Doesn’t it bother you that people are nice to you now that you’re famous?” And I said, “Not in the slightest, it’s much better that they are nice.”
I guess for some people who have always been rich or famous, people have always been nice to them. As far as I was concerned, people weren’t very nice; and then, when I got a little famous, they got nicer.
I didn’t care what their reason was.
I wasn’t very famous, and I never got rich, but less than four years after I had moved to New York City, I was on the cover of New York magazine, posing in an evening gown in a meat locker next door to where I lived in the Meatpacking District, which back then was still a working neighborhood. And when that magazine came out, I was so excited I went and stood in front of a newsstand staring at that pile of magazines until a drunken derelict staggered up to me and knocked me over.
I was living in that former meat locker, measuring ten by thirteen feet, worrying every month: How am I going to pay the rent?
I didn’t get money but I did get a lot of presents. And I was and am very appreciative of this. I think the presents I was given should be recorded. It wasn’t like I was a movie star who is rich and gets paid a lot and gets tons of swag, constantly. If you are nominated for an Oscar, you get to go to a golden room before the event and pick out anything you want. But you already have so much money, you don’t really appreciate or need those things. For me, it was different.
It didn’t last long. But I got to be famous enough, briefly, that Orrefors gave me crystal champagne glasses, incredibly thin; Villeroy and Boch said if I attended their event I could pick out a thousand dollars’ worth of their beautiful china. Montblanc gave me pens. When I went to the North Pole with Paige, she organized, through Columbia Sportswear, for us to receive warm boots. At perfume launches I was given bottles of perfume. Wonderful designers like Vivienne Tam and Lillian de Castelbajac (of Morgane Le Fay) and others gave me dresses and other clothing.
It was amazing!
The people who really would be thrilled for a lifetime are poor people. Like me.
I got invited to parties. Some of these parties, a half million or more must have been spent. There was a party for Russian Standard vodka where the vodka company owner rented the Statue of Liberty and the island and had boats take out guests to the place at night. There were luminaria set everywhere, huge Indian pillows to sit on, and bars with endless champagne and caviar and vodka. There were bands playing and you could climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty, which, at that time, wasn’t even open to the public.
There were parties at the Guggenheim and the Whitney and in the Temple of Dendur and at the Museum of Modern Art. Parties for book launches and new corporations and jewelry. There were dinner parties in unfinished office towers, high at the top. There were lavish weddings at the Pierre. I wish I had kept a diary, because the parties said a lot about the times and the people.
BACK IN THE EIGHTIES I was lumped together with Jay and Bret, a couple of other young writers, and we were dubbed the Literary Brat Pack. Here’s what we had in common: the fact that our books were not supposed to become big sellers and were never expected to get any attention, but actually did. They developed huge readerships among college kids, who went out and bought those three books and read them—not because they were assigned in a class, but for fun.
I knew each of my two packmates a bit.
I did get to meet many interesting people, though. Mentioning just a few, who have died: Joan Rivers, warm yet driven to achievement; Ismail Merchant; my brother-in-law the Formula One driver James Hunt, about whom the movie Rush was made and who was dark and brooding; Earl McGrath, a farm boy from Wisconsin who was president of the Rolling Stones’ record company, then had an art gallery and was married to Camilla McGrath, a genuine Italian countess.
The half-French and half-American Princess Anne of Bavaria. Robert Mapplethorpe, David Bowie, Steven Sprouse. Larry Rivers, the painter who liked to talk about his youth and his love affair with his mom’s armchair, into which he masturbated daily. Victor Hugo (with his deranged Hispanic accent, who was Halston’s boyfriend), Fred Hughes (Andy’s manager, who adored titled Brits most of all)—all kinds of lovers, loners, and other losers.
There was Ahmet Ertegun, hilarious and totally charming. How does the son of a Turkish diplomat end up being the hero—the rescuer, the savior—of American rhythm and blues music? The vicious and clever poet-artist-critic Rene Ricard, mesmerizing and tricky as a rattler. And so many more.
You never get to be truly close to the characters in New York. The glimpses are fleeting; you meet people for dinner or at parties and events—for the most part they are not your colleagues or comrades or co-workers. You may not even like them. But all represent intensely burning stars that make up the galaxy of New York City, and when one dies the city is dimmed and diminished. And now I’ve come to realize, a lot of the time the people you really can’t stand in the end are often the most memorable.
Which is awful, because the people you can’t stand should be forgettable.
my new home
The Greek Revival house I bought was a simple, old upstate New York farmhouse, common to the region, filled to the ceiling with garbage, with broken walls and trees growing in through the porch. Inside were bloodstains and someone had scrawled in spray paint KILL MOM on the wall at the top of the stairs.
Every single room had fire damage and big holes cut in the floor, here and there, because obviously no one had ever been warm inside that house in 160 years. There had been attempts to install propane heaters, oil heaters, wood-burning stoves, potbelly pellet stoves, and electric heaters; there had been nothing but freezing cold people in there for all that time. The floors were rotten, the ceiling was broken, the walls were crumbling, there was the garbage.
It was my riding teacher, Stasia Newell, who had first told me about the property. She was, to me, a goddess, a guru, a Zen master. She didn’t care whether anybody liked her or not! I spent my whole life wanting to be “liked,” except in my writing. My writing, I wanted to be unlikable—but I even wanted to be liked for writing unlikable stuff.
Stasia was different. As I say, she didn’t care if she was liked or not. For women, generally speaking, that attribute is what makes them leaders.
She walked like a panther on the face of this earth. She was hard and tough and rock-and-roll. She was androgynous and beautiful and unpretentious. She drove a tractor and could use a chain saw and could ride a horse on a hundred-mile endurance ride and do so elegantly. There was no more ferocious, exotic creature on the planet.
If only she weren’t also a great salesperson, explaining to me how whoever lived in this house, right on the Finger Lakes National Forest, was going to be very happy there! How it would be in a family for generations and while the rest of the world got more and more built up, NO ONE could ever build up the place around here because it had the Finger Lakes National Forest on three sides. How it would always be a part of the beautiful forest.
I am not sure what else she said. I just knew I HAD to have that place. And, after all, it would have cost a hundred grand just to put my mom’s rickety house back in some kind of shape.
No one had spent a dime on that farmhouse in at least thirty years, apart from cutting a new hole in the floor to attach to another heating system that didn’t provide warmth. It couldn’t be warmed, not when the windows were hundred-year-old nonthermal panes set in rotten wood frames, not when the walls were filled with straw and bits of paper that wasn’t real insulation. There was a basement full of water and ancient dripping fiberglass put up by some previous inhabitant, which dangled uselessly to the floor.
When I emerged from looking over the place, Larry appeared—my soon-to-be new neighbor. He lived in the trailer up the road. He was dressed in an East German military mechanic’s outfit, a one-piece jumpsuit. I think he had been wearing that since before the Berlin Wal
l came down, which may have been the last time he had seen another person. He was very sweet, but it had been a long time since he had spoken to another human being, and he needed to make up for all those years of silence. Remarkably, he was able to materialize every time I went out, holding a poem he had written for me. He had never been off Logan Road. He had lived with his mother until her death. Until our falling-out I had promised that some day I would take him to Walmart, where he had never been. His brother, with whom he lived in the trailer, had a truck—but this brother wouldn’t give him a ride.
My offer was accepted for the 1850 farmhouse with forty acres surrounded on three sides by the Finger Lakes National Forest.
I saw it in July and got a contractor to look at it in August. The contractor was a local, grumpy, Kool-smoking guy—if you wanted to say that a guy who was hiring his sister and his sister’s wife and his father to build my house was a contractor. He was, but to me, that made him a construction worker. A real contractor had a crew who weren’t relatives.
But I hadn’t closed on this house yet. I couldn’t get the owner to complete the paperwork. The contractor kept telling me, “Look, if it wasn’t for waiting for you to close, so I can get the work done while the weather is still good, I would be in the Adirondacks, I would be hunting bear.”
I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to have this man—highly recommended by Master Stasia Newell—renovate the house. So I was very anxious. Later I realized I was overreacting. Bear hunting season didn’t even open for months.
The contractor said that while I was waiting for the property to close I should just come and live in his house. He called his home “the cabin.” I was like, no, I was not going to go live with this contractor, but he kept mumbling that he lived with his girlfriend. She owned a year-round Christmas shop on the Glen, where the lake was located, specializing in elves, Norwegian sweaters, and handmade velvet Christmas tree blankets, the kind that hide the base of the tree where it has been cut off and put in a stand full of water. (Although later I found out they weren’t actually handmade—they were mass produced in a Christmas tree blanket factory in China and she cut off the labels and sewed on her own.) His home, “the cabin,” was empty.
Scream Page 17
