The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  The same Village people we had just seen at the Blue Mill were also at Chumley’s. Not the very same people, but the same crowd of red-faced writers who drank too much, the women in long skirts who were older than the average girl, the fat men who might have been Irish claiming to be poets in the hope someone would buy them a drink, and usually some men in uniform mixed in. Chumley’s was not off limits to military personnel; it was anything but a pickup bar. It was more of a sound-of-your-own-voice bar. They did serve food, but I never knew anyone to eat there. Illy would never have gone there by himself; he went with me because I enjoyed it. I thought it was exactly what Greenwich Village must have been like in the 1930s, still living on in 1957.

  Sometimes, to please Illy, I would go with him to Mary’s, the gay bar on Eighth Street, or back to the Cherry Lane for a little dance or two. But usually not with Illy. I used to go to the Cherry Lane with Alfred, who liked to dance with me. He led, I could follow pretty well. It was never sexy. We certainly didn’t cling in one another’s arms. Men in suits and ties used to dance together there and I thought that looked silly. Like a Charles Demuth drawing.

  I never liked gay bars, because everyone was obviously there to meet someone but the pose always had to be that they were not there to meet someone, and in fact couldn’t care less. In further fact, didn’t want to meet someone. It always made me uneasy, because I only went with my friends and really wasn’t there to meet someone, so everyone wanted to meet me. Somehow they could sense it. Weird thing about men, isn’t it? They only want what they have to pursue. I wonder if the hunter-gatherer culture is ever going to end.

  At Chumley’s, Illy said, “I never came to places like this with George Platt Lynes. We always went to real nightclubs, like the Bon Soir on Eighth Street, or the Blue Note, or the Page Three, places like that. I didn’t really know there were places like this.” I guess he was still thinking about our conversation this afternoon.

  “Was it fun?” I asked.

  “It was fun because everyone always looked at us. George and his bevy of beauties. He was good friends with Jimmy Daniels, who managed nightclubs. We were late getting to a Jimmy Daniels club one evening and the place was packed. Jimmy insisted on putting another table in the front and squeezing us in. As we sat down, I heard a woman at the next table say, ‘Who’s that?’ and her friend said, ‘That’s the photographer George Platt Lynes.’ The woman said, ‘It’s like docking the Queen Mary.’”

  “And then he died,” I said.

  “And then he died,” Illy answered.

  He didn’t seem sad, only reflective.

  “Do you miss him?” I asked.

  “No. Not really. You know I’m not witty. I didn’t understand a lot of the things he said. It was sort of like a Noël Coward play. Very stylish. But if you didn’t care about stylishness, there wasn’t much there for you. I was there to meet people, but it was always older guys trying to sleep with you, hoping it would be for love. They were really never any help. After a while you just wanted to say, ‘Let’s just go upstairs for twenty minutes and get this over with. Then maybe we can talk about something.’ No, I don’t really miss all of that. It was exciting because it was a world I knew nothing about. Then I knew about it and it wasn’t exciting anymore.”

  “Will you miss me?” I asked.

  “Are you going somewhere?” he asked.

  “No. Not particularly. But someday I’ll be a George Platt Lynes chapter in your book, won’t I?”

  Illy said, “I hate this kind of conversation. Of course you’ll be a chapter in my book, and I’ll be a chapter in your book. I’ll be old and fat and disgusting and trying to get young men to go to bed with me. Everybody has to take their turn in the barrel.”

  “I don’t know that that’s true,” I said. “I think you could like somebody and stay with them a long time.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and stood up.

  I could see he had a hard-on. I guess that was his way of expressing affection. He was more affectionate with me that night. He didn’t want the lights on and held me and nuzzled me a little bit. That was going a long way for him. It honestly embarrassed me. It wasn’t the slam-bang show-off kind of fucking he preferred. I had to admit I preferred him like that, too.

  Dancing with the Royal Ballet

  Could you call it dancing, really? Wandering onstage holding a bow and arrow in a silly green hat with a feather in it? I was in the first act of the Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake. Or Lac des Cygnes, as they were fond of calling it. The Royal Ballet from London.

  Their season opened the day after ours closed. It was that tight. They had come from London short of enough dancers to cover the little stupid roles–the prince’s pals in Swan Lake, lords and ladies of the court in Sleeping Beauty,–so they had auditions in our rehearsal room and I went. Why not? Illy was above that sort of thing, but I had never seen this company, and what better way?

  Leslie Edwards conducted the auditions. He picked me right away without my dancing a step. Size, I guess, and nice legs.

  Margot Fonteyn was the company’s real ballerina. With no opposition. I guess on the company’s first visit everyone wanted to see Moira Shearer, because she had just made The Red Shoes. But somehow, Margot deposed her. Probably by sucking up to Ninette de Valois, who ran the company. But who knows, and who cares? She was a true ballerina–particularly by Edna McRae’s standards. Edna always said, “The ballerina is the person who sets the atmosphere on stage in which the rest of the company dances.” That was true of Margot Fonteyn. The company would be galumphing around, doing this and doing that, all nicely executed and perfectly acceptable. A little pas de chat here and a little tour en l’air there. Then the music would signal the approach of the ballerina and she was there. You could feel the electricity in the air. The dancers stood straighter and the audience moved up to the front edge of their seats. Something was about to happen.

  Fonteyn was a lovely dancer. She moved lyrically and had a kind of unified way of moving all in one piece that was unique to her. No one leg here and another arm following there. Each movement seemed to be all of one piece. She wasn’t gangly. True, she had no real attack, which I think is a highly overrated quality, but there was this enormous force of personal charm. Like that moment when the prettiest girl at the party arrives. Suddenly everything is different. Partly because she is there, and partly because we know she is there and we think differently about her than we do other people. Star quality–part of it comes from the star and part of it comes from us, so desperately needing something different from ourselves. Something better, more beautiful, more exciting. We aren’t even jealous. We don’t want to be it. We are content to regard it and be thrilled.

  I have always been disappointed that I never saw Gaby DeLys, the French music-hall star. She evidently was all star quality and nothing else. James Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan, worshiped her and wrote a musical for her to perform in when she first came to London from Paris. They were in rehearsals and Barrie was sitting in the darkened orchestra frozen in horror at what he was seeing on the stage as Gaby rehearsed. She realized he was there and came down to the footlights and said reassuringly, “Baa-ree, I know, I know, I know. I can’t sing, I can’t act, I can’t dance. But it will be all right.” And it was. She simply came out of the wings in one of her outlandish getups, feathers flying in all directions, and the audience loved her. So much so, they never noticed her singing, acting, or dancing. And couldn’t have cared less if they had.

  Fonteyn could dance beautifully, but there was nothing particularly thrilling about her dancing. She was what was thrilling.

  With Fonteyn, you saw the ballerina concept in action. She led her company like a princess leads her court, and they responded to the magic of her presence. They were proud to be the possessions of someone so wonderful. They were right.

  Of course, Margot didn’t dance every night, but when Svetlana Beriosova or Rowena Jackson or Violetta Elvin or Nadia Nerina danced one o
f her roles, you knew they were trying to live up to the legend.

  Backstage Fonteyn did not kid around. Her magic began at the dressing-room door. No one came near her as she stood in the wings, all powdery white in her feathers, those Asiatic eyes glittering. She was already a swan. All you could have offered her was a handful of golden grain, perhaps. Only her partner Michael Somes could approach her, and he did in a big, kindly way. He didn’t dance brilliantly, but he was big and very handsome and dark. Like Laurence Olivier. A movie star. He had a noble presence, too. I’ve seen pictures of a younger Fonteyn when she was partnered by the embarrassingly made-up and mannered Robert Helpmann. He always looked like a drag queen at the Folies-Bergère. I can’t imagine the two of them onstage together. Margot must have heaved a sigh of relief when Michael Somes came over the horizon.

  Margot took forever to get out of her makeup and into her street clothes after a performance, but her loyal fans would wait patiently at the stage door no matter how long it took. Not so much for autographs, but just to see her. When she finally did come out, sometimes after midnight, they would gaze adoringly as she moved slowly in her mink towards her waiting car.

  The night I saw her leaving the theater she was pale and drawn with fatigue. Why was I there? I must have eaten in the neighborhood and was passing back along the sidewalk on my way to the subway. But even fatigued, she smiled that rich, warm smile of hers and flashed those brilliant eyes and everyone went home satisfied.

  Margot Fonteyn was born in Hong Kong, and there was something Oriental in her background. Perhaps Indian. Which probably explains the dazzle she had that was not typically English. She was like an undulating wave that glittered where its breaking edge reflected the sun. This is not English.

  The moments I remember backstage include an evening when Svetlana Beriosova was dancing Swan Lake. She was the daughter of the regisseur-ballet master, you know-of the old Diaghilev company, Nicholas Beriosov. So she descended directly from the ballet of the czars. She had an incredible Russian profile and those curvy long legs and arms only the Russians seem to have. I passed behind her as she was preparing to go onstage from a downstage-right corner, just near the electrician’s box, and I could see clearly how thick with powder her strong, square back was. All those muscles flexing and working under that smooth white surface. I realized how strong women could be, had to be, to dance a ballerina’s role. Hour after hour of effort that is akin to throwing the javelin or doing the hundred-yard dash. This is no joke, I thought to myself, as this tigress prepared to pounce and devour the stage, her partner, and the entire audience.

  And, too, passing very close to Rowena Jackson, about to go on in the pas de deux of Les Patineurs, Frederick Ashton’s ice-skating ballet. Her pretty doll-like face under the rakishly tilted little toque hat, trimmed with fur, was impassive. Quite still under its layer of lipstick and thick mascara and heavy powder. I realized that the face of a dancer is just another part of the machine, like the feet and the hands, the thighs and the back. Everything is there to create the effect. The face is just part of it. If your body can’t weave those sinuous effects, those whirlwinds of flashing limbs, those icepick flurries of racing across the stage on the points of your toes, then a pretty face cannot carry you through. Pretty faces know that and do not pride themselves on prettiness: one more of the healthy aspects of classic dance.

  I always enjoyed being part of the dance world because it was a place of no faking. There was no escape. Every day of their lives, you could see them in class. In a glance you could tell where they ranked in the pecking order of pirouettes and piqué turns. Did their feet point correctly? Were their legs slender enough, and were they in good proportion to the rest of their body? Could they do multiple pirouettes? Double tours? Entrechats? More than four? Did they move with grace and beauty when that music played? It was all there before your eyes, to please you or disappoint you. No faking. So dancers seldom bragged. It was too easy to be caught out.

  Georgina Parkinson certainly had the most beautiful face in the Royal Ballet–something like Tamara Toumanova or a dark Garbo. But there was no impresario to move her above the position to which she was entitled. One of the six princesses in the Swan Lake dance done with huge feather fans, that was enough for now. She would advance later as her technique allowed. It was so very fair, and I liked that.

  I liked the huge and glamorous sets of the Royal Ballet, too: great sweeps of forests and palaces with pillars leading off forever. Everything was very grand. They did one ballet called Birthday Offering with six ballerinas and six cavaliers. All the firepower the company was capable of. I think Frederick Ashton choreographed it for the queen’s birthday. The tutus were large and sumptuous. There were feather tiaras in the ballerinas’ hair. The cavaliers wore curly wigs with locks of hair stuck down in front of their ears. Each ballerina had a color that suited her: blue for Rowena Jackson, red for Beriosova, white for Anya Linden, and so on. Then Fonteyn came out all in black and gold, and it was royal. It was a kind of sumptuousness that would have been entirely out of place in an American ballet company. But for the Royal Ballet, it was their thing. They reveled in it and so did I.

  When I talked about it later to Illy he said little. But I think he envied me the experience. And he envied me, too, I think, the ability to have done those meager little walk-ons without damaging my ego. That he couldn’t do.

  Fire Island

  When the season ended Illy asked me if I wanted to go to Fire Island with him. To Davis Park. I had never been there.

  “We can run around naked on the beach,” he said.

  That sounded good to me. We were so citified. Always taking off our clothes in dressing rooms and practice studios and cheesy bedrooms but only naked for those few moments. Then back into our beat-up corduroys or jeans, tired sweatshirts or shabby sweaters, and old Navy peacoats and on our way. Illy had such a wonderful body, it would be a treat to see it running wild and free on the sand.

  So we went. He had friends who were renting a house for the season and weren’t going to go out until the middle of June. So we could rent it from them for a week. From a Friday to a Friday.

  The other boys in the dressing room at the opera talked about going to Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines, which were where all the homosexuals went. Nobody talked about Davis Park.

  Off we went to Davis Park on a Friday afternoon. A train ride to Patchogue, changing at Jamaica. I’ve always had great fear of changing trains, personified for me by the Jacques Tati film, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. The scene where all the passengers rage from one platform to another trying to catch their train and finally miss it altogether encapsulates all of my most deep-seated mid-western fears. The Jamaica change was idiot-proof. You just walked across the platform and there it was. I, of course, had to ask three people to make doubly sure. Illy lounged along behind me with a look of amused tolerance. He had no idea where he was going, either, but he had a knack for shrugging off the responsibility onto the nearest nervous person. Yet, when he had to go somewhere on his own, he handled it well.

  Our train pulled into Patchogue and we hurled ourselves into a taxi. A row of them was waiting for the train, like racehorses champing at the bit. All the other passengers seemed to know the drill, rushing at the cabs, throwing themselves and their luggage in pell-mell, and away they went. We followed suit and were in the cavalcade rushing for the waterfront. A boat was waiting at the pier and the passengers tossed money at their taxi drivers and rushed down the pier. There seemed to be some urgency in what they were doing, as though the boat had a very strict schedule and to miss it was unthinkable. We were to find out later that there were boats every few hours and water taxis were available at any time, so if you missed the boat you could hire a little water taxi. But these were New Yorkers. Transportation is serious stuff. You don’t fuck around with fitting into a schedule. You make that plane, train, boat, bus and don’t anybody get in your way.

  Weirdly enough, once we hit the long wooden
pier at Davis Park, the people rushed away, never to be seen again. Some of them were met by friends with wagons; and throwing the luggage in, they rumbled off across the boardwalks. You frequendy heard the rumble of wagons on the wooden walks in Davis Park, but rarely saw people. It must have been like that in the French Revolution. You heard the tumbrels rolling, but you ignored the beheadings.

  Davis Park wasn’t like Cherry Grove. There were no screamers there. There didn’t seem to be anyone at all, as a matter of fact. Just a few lines of little cottages strewn through the dunes, low shrubs flung around them in a careless way, and boardwalks connecting them all in a checkerboard fashion. There was one little store down by the dock where the boat came in.

  There was no electricity in Davis Park. There was a telephone booth down by the pier, but that was it. We had kerosene lamps. I knew how to light and take care of kerosene lamps, because we had always had one in Michigan for those stormy nights when the lines went down.

  How much the light we live in changes the emotions we have! When people lit up the nights with candles, everything must have seemed so much more dramatic, all flickering shadows, faces carved into high cheekbones and deep eye sockets. Evil or danger lurking just beyond the circle of light from the fireplace and the candles. And no streetlights. It was dark out there.

  Davis Park was like that. The kerosene lamps threw off a bit more light, but the corners of the rooms were dark. A naked body seemed so much richer in texture and form, lying across a rumpled quilt. When you stretched your body across the one lying under you on the bed, it was nothing like the movies. It had no relationship to things you had seen in photographs. It was there in its own right, recalling nothing. You slid your arms under it, your penis in between the warm thighs. A mouth opened in the shadows to pull in your tongue. Quite a different world. We forget–most of us don’t even guess it was different. And how much more so when you went to bed when the light went and got up when the sun arrived. Those long winter nights must have been pretty great for the peasants. That’s when you stored up all the energy to get through those hustling summers when the sun went down at ten-thirty at night and you were out there bringing in those sheaves as long as you could see something. Not to mention getting your ass out of bed at four-thirty A.M. when the sun came up. Whew. Must have been some workout. Now we get up at the same time, go to bed at the same time. Keep the lights on when it gets dark. No wonder everyone’s bored. Talk about no change in the routine.