Not So Good a Gay Man
Page 18
The next evening I turned in my copy to Murray Fisher, my boss on the project, and went home dead tired.
When I got in my apartment, I turned on the light, and nature suddenly took its revenge for all those seventy-hour weeks. My heart sped up until I thought it was going to burst. I kept track and I was logging two hundred beats a minute (normal is about sixty to seventy).
I called an ambulance and ten minutes later I was on a gurney in an Evanston hospital. They assured me atrial fibrillation was seldom fatal. Then the nurse striped off my shirt and pants and T-shirt and they put paddles on my bare chest, just like I’d seen in so many TV shows.
The anesthesiologist made various adjustments with his equipment and asked me to count backward from a hundred.
When I got to ninety-seven for all practical purposes I died.
XXI
I DON’T REMEMBER how long I was out, maybe just a few minutes, maybe an hour. But the doctors and their apparatus had disappeared, so I figured it was someplace in between. I felt for my pulse and it was a normal sixty or so.
The doctors couldn’t tell me how often I’d go into afib. There was no specific medicine for it at the time, unfortunately. I checked in with the head cardiologist at Northwestern and he said if it happened again, just lie down until it went away.
My own doctors were a little more specific. Sit down, put your head between your knees, hold your nose, and blow out. The idea was to put pressure on your diaphragm and bring the heart back into sinus rhythm. It worked—most of the time. In the years that followed one drug after another showed up that was more or less a specific for afib.
Eventually they found one. A dangerous drug—amiodarone—because it reacted too often with other drugs. But it worked for afib.
Back at work, I didn’t know whether I had a job. I’d get an occasional sympathetic look in the hallway, and I figured they all thought I’d had a heart attack. Eventually everything was back to normal—except for an occasional head-between-my-knees routine—and I figured at least my job was safe.
The most exciting thing that happened was the appearance of a competitor to Playboy, and this one looked like it had legs. Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, it also came out of Chicago. A wealthy man named Ron Fenton had started a “Millionaire’s Club” in the style of the “Playboy Club” and—naturally—wanted a magazine to go with it. What he really needed was talent, and one by one he’d take a Playboy editor out to lunch and ask them if they wanted to edit his magazine. They all thanked him kindly for the lunch, but no, they were very happy where they were.
Fenton finally got to the bottom of the barrel. A young kid on staff who wrote the record reviews had been canned when he didn’t get along with a senior editor.
Eventually Fenton got around to our former record reviewer, James Spurlock, and made him the magnaminous offer of $150 a week for three days of work to put out his magazine. Fenton obviously knew nothing of the small army of editors who worked on Playboy every month.
Jim came to us slaveys who worked on the front of the book and asked our opinion. We had all liked Jim, were sorry to see him go, and said, “Take it!” It would be found money, since Fenton was never going to put out a magazine, but by that time maybe Jim would have put away a few bucks.
A few months later a startled Playboy editor going to work stopped at the newsstand in the lobby and spotted a new magazine titled Gallery, dated November of ’72. He thumbed through one, then immediately bought the entire stack and ran upstairs to distribute them to all the editors at Playboy.
All of us who knew Jim were totally shocked. Ron Fenton and Jim Spurlock had finally put out a magazine. The only catch was that Jim had worked on only one magazine in his entire life: Playboy. Gallery was a fairly thick magazine—as thick as most issues of Playboy. Considering Jim’s past experience, you couldn’t blame him if it looked a little like Playboy. In fact, exactly like Playboy down to the layout and the type sizes.
F. Lee Bailey, lead defense attorney in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, was listed as publisher; Ronald L. Fenton was president (and presumably moneyman); and there, big as brass, was James L. Spurlock, editor.
I had the lead, under the pen name of “James Walsh.” It was a reminiscence of Lenny Bruce that I had given to Jim when Fenton had wanted to see something. (All us “Friends of Jim” had scrambled around in our trunks to give something to Spurlock to make him look like a working editor in the eyes of Fenton. Everything was under pseudonyms, of course.)
I didn’t realize it at the time but it was probably the best piece about Lenny Bruce ever written. (No bragging here—it’s true.)
None of us expected the magazine to last long; neither did Hugh Hefner, who would try to make sure it didn’t. A competitor was one thing, a carbon copy from a publisher across the street was another. His first strike was a letter to all our cartoonists saying that if they sold anything to Gallery they could forget about Playboy as a market.
Within a few days, fleets of lawyers were flocking kitty-corner across Michigan Avenue from Playboy to Gallery and back. But F. Lee Bailey wasn’t titular publisher of Gallery for nothing. He was also a friend of Hefner’s and within a few days had convinced Hefner that he was acting in restraint of trade.
A second letter to the cartoonists followed the first saying it was all a mistake. But it was a pretty dumb cartoonist who didn’t realize that Hefner was not compelled to buy their cartoons.
I don’t know how long Jim stayed with Gallery, but he surfaced again a while later as the editor/publisher of another “sophisticated magazine for men,” titled In Touch. The first issue was June of ’74, and this time I had the lead fiction under my own name (I’d left Playboy by that time).
In Touch didn’t see many issues, probably because Jim’s main contribution to the skin field had been to add a male lead in the same photo as the girl—all in very soft focus, of course. But it was difficult for the reader to imagine himself in the same photograph as the girl when some other dude was already there.
Gallery was the fourth men’s magazine out of Chicago that I was connected with. There was to be still another. (I think Chicago had a corner on the market.)
I used to hang out in a coffee shop on the North Side, and one day the waitress asked me if I would show her boyfriend around Playboy, especially where they shot the centerfolds (off-limits to all but the model and the photographer).
Richard Leo struck me as eager as David Stevens once had. He was an hour early and I gave him a cursory look around the offices—offices like any other offices in any other company. I had a luncheon date, so I sent Rick across the street to Gallery after calling Spurlock to say he’d have a guest.
Two hours later Rick showed up looking like somebody had taken him out for a liquid lunch.
I asked him what had happened and he said he’d been offered a job—though not at Gallery. George Santo Prieto, the fashion editor, had asked him if he knew any writers. Rick’s father was a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, and of course he knew some writers. It turned out that Santo Prieto was starting his own “sophisticated men’s magazine”—guaranteed to show a little more skin than the opposition—and would Rick like to be the editor? The new magazine was titled Coq—pronounced in French, “cock.” (Clever man, Santo Prieto.) Coq looked exactly like all the others, except cheaper, and after three issues was history.
Rick became a story in himself. He’d been bit by the publishing bug and went to the South Seas, where he edited the English-language edition of the Samoa News.
After a stint of some months there, he came back to the States, went to Harvard—I’m sure they had a quota system, but the months in the South Pacific obviously qualified him. Rick left after two years and worked as an editor in Manhattan, got bored, and convinced his girlfriend that they should go to Alaska.
Not a bad idea if you were an adventurer, and Rick certainly was. Alaska was the first chunk of the United States to be bought by an oil company. Buying it was easy—the o
il company split the proceeds (not even-steven, of course) with the people who lived there. Every year every Alaskan would get a check for some thousands of dollars.
Furthermore, land was free. Stake a claim, register it, and it was yours. Except for the bears, the cold, and a few irritated Eskimos, it was a great deal.
Rick married his girlfriend (a hippie-type wedding—she walked out later to have a more legal arrangement with a bush pilot), built a cabin, fathered a son, chopped his own wood, had his own dog team, and was living the life of Richard Halliburton.
There’s more to Rick’s story—a lot more—but these are my memoirs, not his, and he’s perfectly capable of writing his own.
Which is exactly what he did.
Back in the lower forty-eight, things were not going well for Playboy. In 1972 A. C. Spectorsky had a fatal heart attack. His contribution to the magazine was actually a good deal more than anybody realized until later, when circulation began to sag. The fight was on to see who would succeed him, and Arthur Kretchmer won. It was, naturally, congratulations all around.
Except for me.
At the elevator I gave him my condolences. I figured I was the only one there who knew what was really involved. Granted that Hamling now spent most of his time in San Diego and Hefner spent most of his in his bedroom, so—ultimately—it was you who was responsible for the failure or success of the magazine.
I had failed with Rogue but I sure knew what the struggle was like.
The final straw—or close to it—was when I was asked to tie a can to Alan Watts. The magazine figured they’d published enough material about Zen and it was time to ride another hobbyhorse. I had never fired anybody who had worked for me and I didn’t know how to do it gracefully. This time I hemmed and hawed and made a mess of it, finally telling Alan that we wouldn’t be buying any more Zen articles from him. At two grand or more a pop a major fraction of Alan’s income had just disappeared. He stared at me for a moment, then looked away and said, “I know what I am—I’m a public entertainer.”
He couldn’t hide the bitterness, and I had nothing to say to soften the blow. I promised myself I would never, ever do anything like this again.
Now it was the dead of winter and in Chicago that meant the weather was vicious. Strong winds, swirls of snow, temperature about twenty-five. Kitty-corner across the street the Fanny May candy shop had caught fire, and I watched as the firemen turned it into the world’s largest ice cube.
I even caught myself thinking—vaguely—about San Francisco, where the worst that usually happened was fog in the early morning.
The phone rang, and when I picked it up I found myself talking to Tom Scortia on the other end of the line. I had bought a few stories from Tom for Rogue and thought he was going to pitch me something for Playboy. I was the wrong editor, I was about to tell him, but Tom’s excited voice made it plain that wasn’t what he wanted.
He had this great idea for a novel and wanted help in writing it. About a fire in a high-rise building and people trapped at the top, etc.
Across the street one wall of the candy store caved in and I imagined I could feel the heat.
Fire in a high-rise …
I had been in the business long enough to know when an idea smelled of money.
He had pitched it to Doubleday, Tom continued, and they had offered a twenty-grand advance. Now I was all ears—half for me, half for him, that was ten grand for each of us. How long would it take to write the book? A few months?
I took his number and said I’d call him back in an hour. He was now living in San Francisco, which was something of a plus considering the Chicago weather.
I picked the latest issue of Playboy off my desk and thumbed through it. It wasn’t like any of Spectorsky’s issues. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was like a punctured balloon with the air seeping slowly out of it.
It wasn’t fatal, I thought; the magazine would last for years … but the touch wasn’t there.
I called Tom back and said sure, I’d be out there in a few weeks, but I wanted to do some research first. I didn’t know a damn thing about fighting a fire in a high-rise except I guessed it would be tough.
Which meant there would be a lot of visuals, which always made a book—or a movie—sell.
I hired a friend to go through the Hancock Building, the tallest building in Chicago at the time, to see what they had for fire prevention. Myself, I went to the Illinois Institute of Technology and thumbed through their files looking for information on fire fighting. One thing I found out early was that fires are difficult to fight above seven floors—a fireman’s ladder doesn’t reach much higher than that. (Since then I’ve never booked a room in a hotel above the seventh floor.)
The last thing I did was read a copy of Arthur Hailey’s Airport, one of the earlier “tech” thrillers, all about the operation of an airport, complete with interesting characters and more interesting disasters. I divided the book in three, then each third into chapters, and a brief summary of events in each chapter.
It was, admittedly, “monkey see, monkey do.”
When I got to San Francisco I rented in the same apartment building as Tom so we’d be close during collaboration. The apartment building on Red Rock Way was nicknamed “Pneumonia Heights” because the fog rolling in from the bay hit there first. But on sunny days you could see the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and at night the twinkling lights outlining it.
Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all.
The next day Tom slumped in with the bad news.
He’d misunderstood Doubleday. It wasn’t twenty grand, it was ten. Half on signing and half on delivery. Deduct 10 percent for the agent, and we were faced with turning out a major book for $2,250 each. I was suddenly glad I had taken a year’s leave of absence from the Bunny.
I called up Martha Winston, our agent at Curtis Brown, and she was encouraging. It was a good idea and she could probably sell it on the basis of three chapters and an outline.
Tough—but doable—and Tom and I set to work blocking out scenes and writing short synopses of the characters.
Every morning I’d walk down the hill for breakfast and through a section of the city called the Castro. There was a camera shop along the way with a dog sniffing around in front, peeing on all the trees, inspecting the passersby, and if he really liked you, showed his affection by humping your leg.
A week of trying to find a restaurant that served decent bacon and eggs and this time the owner of the shop was out in front playing with his dog—“Kid,” a black mongrel that would play with anybody who wanted to play with him. This was the Castro, after all, and both of us knew the other was gay. (So was most everybody else I met.)
Harvey was dressed like a hippie and looked like a hippie complete with beard, mustache, and ponytail. But he semed friendly enough and didn’t hold a hand out for any spare change.
“What do you do?” he asked.
I told him I was a writer and had moved to San Francisco to write a book. He waved at the camera shop and said it was just temporary. He was running for supervisor.
“My second time. I got more than fifteen thousand votes last time.”
In Chicago the best we had done was muster a hundred brave souls for the kiss-in at City Hall Plaza—one that nobody noticed.
“What’s it take to win?”
He shrugged. “Fifty thousand.”
Never in a hundred years, I thought.
He shooed Kid back into the shop and said, “How would you like to write speeches for me?”
At first I thought I had better things to do. But I had made a lot of good friends in Chicago, The Paper (née Chicago Gay Pride) had been a hoot. And this was one way of making friends. At heart I was a gay politician, junior grade, and holed up in an apartment thinking up novel ways of frying people was already starting to wear thin.
“How much?” I asked.
He grinned. “You got it all wrong, friend—we don’t pay you, you pay us.”
“So who do I work for?” I asked.
He held out his hand. “The name’s Harvey Milk.” He spent about five seconds sizing me up. “C’mon, we’ll stir some shit.”
Jesus Christ—how could you write speeches for a guy with a name like that? The moment he was introduced, the audience would bust out laughing.
He recommended a decent ham-and-egger and an hour later I was back in my apartment trying to think up names for a fire chief, one of our heroes. We hadn’t thought of a villain yet.
But we had settled on a title.
The Glass Inferno.
Catchy, we thought.
The next week I spent an occasional evening in the camera shop meeting the staff and making a stab at writing a few words for Harvey. He was easy to write for since we both had the same political outlook. The shop had a back room with a long table where we gathered around to stuff envelopes with political flyers. The front of the store was where Harvey and his lover, Scott—a blond who had no right being that handsome—worked. Harvey was the politician, Scott his manager. Danny was a young kid who kept the stock in order, filed the envelopes of photos when they came in, and tried his hand at taking photographs. He was a good student—some years later he was one of the ace photographers in the city when it came to the gay community.
The store itself was a meeting place for Harvey’s friends and for people Harvey could convince to vote—for him. Harvey knew perfectly well that power came from the ballot box, and the only way he could get it in San Francisco was if all the gays voted for a gay man as supervisor. There were other gays running for political office, but they all relied on the patronage of “friends of gays”—straight politicians who would bullshit with gays for their votes. When the going got rough—and it wasn’t long before it did—they would all fade into the woodwork.
Harvey reasoned that an out-and-out gay man couldn’t change his identity for political expediency any more than a black man could change the color of his skin. The game was to get gays to vote for Harvey so they would have one of their own in the office.