Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  The camera shop was ideally suited as a meeting place, with a dental chair and a long, broken-down red couch—a political hangout to shoot the shit with a usually smiling, very funny, and politically astute Harvey. (A biography—The Mayor of Castro Street—was later to be written by Randy Shilts, an openly gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Randy was probably the only openly gay newspaper reporter in the country at the time.)

  Harvey Milk was the last of the storefront politicians who ran for public office with absolutely no money and whose headquarters was the store where he worked.

  Everybody was welcome in the store, and everybody dropped in. One day a young girl asked if she could put her “Save the Whales” poster in the window. We let her put up her poster and immediately pressed her into service in the back room stuffing envelopes with political flyers. The only drawback was that we had to watch our language.

  Harvey had absolutely no chance, I thought, but on the other hand I’d meet people and it might be a lot of fun.

  There was one evening meeting that wasn’t so much fun. Our guest was a middle-aged man who’d run for the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) board and won by a sizable majority. We shook hands, then sat around the table and looked attentive. He was going to tell us how to win an election. We edged closer, all eyes on him, to listen to his secrets.

  “Speeches,” he started. “You have to be prepared to make speeches. Hold meetings in halls or even on the street.” He glanced at Harvey. “You could hit the gay bars—you’re a natural.”

  Harvey had already hit the gay bars. He’d been thrown out of a few—a hippie, from out of town at that, wasn’t welcome, and they weren’t about to vote for him no matter what.

  “And mailers,” our political oracle continued. He glanced at the boxes of half-stuffed envelopes against the wall. “You just can’t send them out scattershot—pick an area of the city where they already know and like you. Lock those up and you can hit other sections of the town. And posters are always good—place them around the walls of buildings close to the BART stations.”

  I was beginning to squirm. He was telling us things we already knew.

  He hesitated. “It worked for me,” he continued. “And you might hit the bars with a speech or two on the weekends when they’re crowded with those interested in fifty-cent spaghetti and dollar fried chicken.” He smirked. “I suspect that might be most of them.”

  He looked at Harvey closely, moving so he could see Harvey from the sides.

  “A lot of the gays in town are Republicans. You might shave, cut your hair, and pick up a suit. Give ’em somebody they can identify with.”

  The BART man now realized he was talking to a bunch of amateurs and didn’t try to hide his contempt.

  “Probably the most important single thing you can do is get up early in the morning and hit the houses with small posters you can hang on doorknobs with a big picture of you and a list of other candidates on the ticket. And don’t forget the large posters—they’re the last thing most voters see before they hit the polling booth.”

  He nodded at several of his own that he had propped against the wall. In the poster he looked twenty pounds lighter and ten years younger.

  “It worked for me.”

  I couldn’t see myself wandering around the city hanging posters on people’s doorknobs. There were a lot of houses in San Francisco.

  “Who do we get to do it?” somebody asked.

  Our guest’s smile turned sour. He was wasting his time.

  “Pay a little money to some of the early risers in the Haight who want to earn a buck of two before the bars open. Or maybe the guys who deliver the morning papers—stick a hanger in every copy of the Chronicle.”

  I knew from personal experience that nobody in the Haight got up early in the morning. And that included me.

  It was Harvey who asked the clutch question.

  “What do you think all this would cost?”

  Our guest glanced at his watch, probably figuring he’d be late for a meeting of the young Republicans or Democrats or whomever.

  “I did it on the cheap—thirty-five grand.” He gathered up his posters and managed a smile. “Don’t forget me next election.”

  After he’d left we sat around the table staring at one another and then Jimmy Rivaldo, one of Harvey’s ace political advisors, stood up and emptied his pockets on the table.

  The rest of us did the same and somebody turned the cash box over on the table. Danny separated the coins from the paper and did the count. A little over a few hundred dollars.

  We were beat before we’d even started. Our only ace in the hole was Harvey himself, and he didn’t give up.

  Within a week or two Harvey had cut his hair and shaved and bought himself a secondhand suit.

  Two weeks after that disaster Tom and I got much more of it from the publishing front. Tom showed up with a copy of Publishers Weekly announcing that one Richard Martin Stern had just sold a book titled The Tower, whose major idea was exactly the same as ours—fire in a high-rise.

  A desparate call to Martha Winston, our book agent at Curtis Brown, the parent agency, who advised us to keep working but under no conditions should we read Stern’s book. We consoled ourselves with the thought that well, there was always the movies …

  Our consolation didn’t last very long. Two weeks later Tom waved another copy of PW in my face and this time the news was that Warner Bros. was going to film Stern’s book.

  We immediately called Richard Parks, who handled movie rights for Curtis Brown. His advice: take our outline and fill it with as many visuals as we could think of.

  Parks assured us we still had possibilities. Irwin Allen, the producer at Twentieth Century Fox, had lost out on the auction of Stern’s book. It was Parks’s idea to give him another chance. Allen had made a fortune for Twentieth with The Poseidon Adventure and had desperately wanted to follow water with fire.

  Parks put up our outline of The Glass Inferno for an auction that would close in New York on a Friday at 6:00 P.M. (3:00 P.M. in San Francisco).

  At 3:05 Parks was on the phone sounding gloomy, and our hearts sank. A moment later he gave us the good news.

  Twentieth Century Fox had made a peremptory bid for The Glass Inferno, meaning a bid that they knew no other studio would top. The deal was film rights for The Glass Inferno at $400,000 and 5 percent of the producer’s profits.

  Tom went out to get roaring drunk.

  I went to the hospital again. For somebody with atrial fibrillation, good news can be as bad as bad news.

  Neither of us shouted in the phone to tell Parks that the deal was fine with us.

  We didn’t have to.

  XXII

  THE FIRST THING that happens when you find yourself sitting on a pot of money is you discover how much you can keep and how much the government will take. Back then federal taxes were unbelievable. (I almost felt sorry for Mitt Romney, but for us the sale was a onetime thing—so we thought—while for Mitt it happened every year.)

  The answer presented itself in the form of Harry Margolis, a lawyer who specialized in setting up overseas accounts for the average man who struck it rich—like us. His fee was simple: One half of the money we’d save versus the taxes we’d have to pay the government.

  The way it would work was we’d turn over all our assets and future income to this outfit in the Cayman Islands. (Later it would be the British West Indies.) In the United States, technically speaking, we’d be broke. But if we ever needed anything, the people in the Caymans would buy it for us.

  It didn’t take much urging for us to sign on the dotted line.

  Tom and I only had an outline, so we started to work, turning out chapters we’d send to screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, bouncing around in his yacht (so we were told) in the Caribbean trying to make a single script out of two books.

  In the meantime, Allen emptied his bungalow on the Twentieth lot of all its furniture, then called in a group of artists to do p
aintings of the exciting scenes in the books. When they were through, he called in the honchos from Warner Bros., who took one look and figured that Allen was way ahead of them. When Allen suggested a coproduction deal, they jumped at the chance. (Twentieth got the take in the States, Warner the money from overseas.)

  When the The Glass Inferno came out as a book, Doubleday, our publisher, threw a luncheon for us. They had their own kitchen, whose specialty was pies—they were great pies, and since I couldn’t make up my mind, I had a slice of each.

  The biggest party was the one that Perry Knowlton, the head of the agency, threw in his brownstone in the Village. Most of the literati in New York were there (certainly the gay ones were). Perry had a private bar and everybody was more than friendly.

  I was awestruck meeting the literary guests, and Tom preoccupied himself trying to make out with the kid working as bartender. At evening’s end, the kid fled out the back.

  Myself, I left by the front door, reminding a young ballet dancer that my hotel room was big enough for two. He was very nice about it. He had a lover, he said. I complimented both of them on their good taste (money and fame, sadly, don’t buy everything), and I left for the hotel tired and lonely.

  The next morning I went downstairs for breakfast and noticed Tom in the bar, looking unhappy and remorseful. What he was remorseful about was not losing the barboy but the possiblity of losing me as his collaborator. He knew I would have to apologize for him to everybody at the agency.

  For just a moment I wavered. Did I really need him? All collaborations are the same—each partner feels that they’ve done 60 percent of the work but are getting only 50 percent of the money. Tom swore on a stack of bar napkins that it would never happen again, and I caved. I put my hands on his shoulders and told him that come what may, we were partners. (We really were—we wrote four more books together.)

  By this time Allen had hired a cast for the movie, with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen heading it, plus Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain, and—ahem—O. J. Simpson. The gag in Hollywood was that if you were out of work and needed a gig, see Allen—he’d hire you.

  We met Newman and McQueen in an elevator one day and Newman struck us as a nice guy but McQueen was full of himself and repeated back everything we had researched about fire captains (his role).

  A few months later was the premiere. My sister-in-law went to the beauty parlor at nine in the mornng and told them not to let her out until four. Her son, eighteen or so, bought a powder blue tux with white ruffles. I was tempted to ask him what he was going to charge …

  I walked the red carpet and discovered how fleeting fame can be when somebody on the sidelines said in a loud voice to a friend, “Who the hell is he?”

  After the premiere there was a party in a huge ballroom for charity. I recognized Groucho Marx and that was it, but my sister-in-law had a tablet and kept score of all the celebrities she recognized. I wished my mother were still alive and seeing what had become of her son who spent his evenings in the kitchen typing on his old Underwood.

  It was great to get back to San Francisco—I had almost forgotten how beautiful the city was. I went back to the camera shop and wrote flyers and a few speeches. It was one thing to write them, and quite another to hear Harvey speak them. He had the ability to make them come alive (Sean Penn studied news clips of Harvey and imitated his voice for Milk.)

  A month of doing nothing and I began to feel bored. Tom had acquired a lover (a slim, handsome young man nicknamed J.J.) and had come up with a great idea. His tentative title was The Prometheus Crisis, about a new, huge nuclear reactor in Southern California that our villain intends to blow up.

  I thought it was a terrific idea. We wrote an outline and then let our agent shop it while we went ahead writing the novel itself.

  We lucked out once again. Peter Bart (then with Paramount and now editor at large of Variety) and his moneyman, Max Palevsky, optioned it for two hundred grand. It was real Hollywood this time. A limo met us at the airport and we ended up at the Beverly Hilton, which had great room service.

  After we were settled, we met Bart and Palevsky at Bart’s home. Tom talked business with them and I entertained Bart’s little girl with origami—paper birds that flap their wings when you pull on the tail. (I was oddly proud when I found out recently that the little girl I had met so long ago was now a registered nurse.)

  John Carpenter tried his hand at a script, and even Tom took a turn. Then the project was blown out of the water.

  The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon, was released to great reviews and tremendous box office. In The China Syndrome, the plant almost blows up but Lemmon saves the day. In Prometheus, the plant actually does blow up and takes most of Southern California with it. Prometheus turned out to be one of the many projects in Hollywood that look great and then sink.

  We were vastly disappointed and so were our agents and, of course, Harry Margolis.

  Once again back to the camera shop. Tom and his lover bought a house in Sausalito, and I had bought one near the Castro section of San Francisco, a short walk from the shop.

  I had just finished remodeling it when Harvey dreamed up a terrific idea—a Castro Street Fair. One of the exhibits was a “dunk it” pool, where you threw a ball, and if you hit the target, the ledge on which the “target” sat would collapse and whoever was sitting on the ledge would get dunked in the pool of water at the bottom.

  Harvey was a popular target.

  There were tricycle races and art exhbits and booths selling food and beer. It was a huge success, and a lot more people were aware of Harvey afterward than before. In his secondhand suit and a neat haircut he looked like a real candidate. As a politician, Harvey’s ace in the hole was his sense of humor, the one thing the other candidates didn’t have. Harvey was rapidly becoming a “character” in the race for supervisor—you could always rely on him to provide a spot for the six o’clock news or a dozen lines on the front page. Reporters and photographers were picking up on him.

  I still didn’t think he would win, but he was certainly doing better than when he started.

  Tom and I began still another book, The Nightmare Factor, dealing with a tainted blood supply. But I don’t think either of us had our hearts in it. In one sense, I think the public had typecast us. “So what happens this time? Who dies? And who cares?”

  For myself, I was devoting more and more time to Harvey’s campaign. Much to my pleasant surprise, it looked like he had a chance in the supervisorial race.

  A few months after the Castro Street Fair was one of the first Gay Pride Parades. Hundreds of thousands of people lined Market Street waiting for the spectacle to follow. You could hear the roar of motorcycles in the distance and then the “dykes on bikes” showed up, a number of them braless.

  There were marching bands, various political organizations marching, and floats of all kinds, the most popular being those sponsored by the bathhouses, with musclemen in Speedos gyrating to music from phonographs. Most of the supervisors got into the act, riding along in open convertibles.

  (After he was elected, the most popular politician was Harvey Milk, sitting on the edge of the backseat of a BMW and holding up a sign reading “I’m from Woodmere!” The crowds lining the curbs went wild, and I wondered if Harvey had ever thought of running for mayor.)

  When the parade came to an end everybody decamped to a huge mall in front of the city hall to lounge on the grass, eat hot dogs and ice cream bars, and look around to see who else was there also looking around. I noticed one partygoer who looked familiar. When he was much younger, he’d driven me crazy in Chicago, always flirting and always inaccessible. As a kid, he’d loved the power he had over older men. He was paunchy now, his hair receding.

  Age levels all of us.

  It was the real start of the campaign season, and Harvey was everywhere, giving speeches in bars, meeting people on street corners, and playing host to everybody who came into the camera shop.

 
; It all paid off. There were open slots for six supervisors, and Harvey came in seventh. Not bad, not bad at all.

  There was a victory party in a former pot supermarket a few blocks off Castro, and Harvey was surrounded by well-wishers. The surprise of the evening was when Mayor Moscone showed up to congratulate Harvey.

  The owner of the restaurant snooped to hear what they were talking about and promptly told everybody what he had overheard. Harvey had mentioned casually that the mayor must now have a number of commissioner positions he could hand out.

  The mayor smiled and said why didn’t Harvey make an appointment and drop around to see him in city hall when he was free.

  Harvey grinned and said he just might do that.

  Once the rest of us heard about it, there was a lot of gossip about just what Harvey might wind up being commissioner of. Harvey was very proud and said he was well on his way to becoming “head queen,” lording it over every other gay politician in town.

  None of us guessed what he was going to do next.

  By this time a flood of gays were moving to San Francisco. The number went as high as one out of five (I think that was too high, but then, I never counted). Housing prices went up and many of the older inhabitants took the money and ran. (Who wanted to live in a neighborhood of gays?) The Castro was now a stop for tourist buses, visitors from Dubuque and Harrisburg, their faces pressed against the windows hoping to see two men kissing in a doorway.

  The buses dropped the Castro when a young man ran after one of them throwing rocks and screaming, “We’re not freaks! We’re not freaks!”

  What Harvey did next was to run for public office again—this time as state representative from District Five. Harvey had found being a commissioner was a very boring job—he wanted to be elected to a position that really meant something. It finally occurred to me that Harvey enjoyed running more than sitting in an office twiddling his thumbs. Scott had left, and his replacement was John Ryckman, an old-style Democrat who knew most of the old money on the North Side. (I didn’t notice any of it coming our way.) Most of us who had worked on Harvey’s previous campaign were tired. But there was an aura of excitement around Harvey when he was fighting politicians.