Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  Gay identity, of course, was one of those constructs.

  “Look,” Jonathan had once told Peter, “I may not have much to contribute to high-speed rail, or clean energy, or the space program, but I can damned well make America think about the gay culture we got stuck with.”

  Connor Frankel was an unlikely subject for a project like this, since he’d spent most of his life being discreet—or in the closet, as Peter’s friend Arnie had pointed out. Having always been famously taciturn in interviews, though, Frankel was now unreserved. The decorum he’d always observed because of his class, his upbringing, and/or his generation was now out the window. When Peter asked why Frankel had agreed to open up, Jonathan said only, “It was time.”

  Frankel’s work—always abstract and now very large, often with titles that alluded to history and classical culture—was top-of-the-line, blue-chip modernism. It was included in most of the world’s major museums and private collections, and was said to embody the freedoms that figures like Rauschenberg and Johns had found in chance, serendipity, and, according to one critic, “the space between reality and imagination.” Much ink had been spilled over the relationship between the homosexuality of artists of that generation and their creative strategies. Yet even now that he was talking, Frankel maintained he had nothing to add to this particular discussion. He could only talk about his life.

  A native of Bar Harbor, Maine, Connor Frankel was born into a proud German-American family that had been prosperous for generations. Then his father, an insurance executive, lost most of his money in the Crash of ’29, just before Frankel was born. And soon gone, too, was the sprawling house on a bluff overlooking great lawns and the water, where Frankel spent the first few years of his life—a place that was always the site, until it became impossible to maintain, of great gatherings of family and friends, long dinners capped with amateur musical and theatrical performances. Frankel’s mother was able to keep the family going on her salary as a teacher, and though they moved into a much smaller house in the same town, she and her husband made it a point of preserving for their children—Connor and his four sisters—a sense of family pride that was now largely fueled by their continuing pursuit of music, art, and literature. It was a family priority to secure art lessons for Connor, once he started showing the interest and the aptitude; and sister Fanny had her dancing and sister May her poems. Thus, the formative struggle of Frankel’s early years, Jonathan told Peter, was parallel with that of our nation in the world today: to work out a method or an illusion of holding on to privilege.

  The film was an artsy project for sure, but since it was widely rumored to be the coming-out story of a major American artist, it was already generating buzz. Senior press types had been applying pressure to get invited to the screening, yet Jonathan and Frankel had insisted the event remain private, only for their friends, families, and colleagues.

  “Nice place,” said Jonathan, as the three of them went down in the elevator.

  “It is,” said Peter, who had never included the hotel on his regular circuit. Its “New York–style” trendiness seemed formulated more for out-of-towners than for anyone else. The elevator, with windows onto a grand atrium several stories tall, sounded a sedative chime as it passed each floor.

  “Scorsese showed a film here, once,” said Jonathan. “The screen’s good.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Peter.

  “Though I can’t say much for the upho-ol . . . upho-ol . . . upho-olstery.”

  Had Jonathan just stammered, or slurred a word? Privately, Peter shot Aldebar a querying look, since Jonathan never did that, but Aldebar shook his head tightly, as if to say, “Not now.”

  They went straight to the green room to wait while the doors of the screening room were opened and the guests took their seats. Connor Frankel, who had attended the reception, joined them there, accompanied by his quietly genial, middle-aged companion, Wallace, whom Peter had never met.

  “Well, they’ve had their wine and now they want a movie,” quipped Frankel, after introductions. At eighty-three, despite the presidential aura he’d taken on as one of the grand old figures of American culture, he still retained the dark twinkle of the dryly quizzical teenager he was in the 1940s, back when such creatures were perhaps stranger to their neighbors than they are now. He hadn’t kept much of his hair, but what he had was bright white and smartly cut and combed. Except for the attire of a public intellectual—the shapeless-but-expensive suit, worn with a plain shirt, suspenders, and a pair of pristine trainers—he might have been a retired executive.

  “They’re gonna need another glass, when they see what we’ve got in store for them, eh, Connie?” said Jonathan.

  “Everybody came,” said Wallace. “The house is full.”

  “Good, we want that,” said Jonathan.

  Wallace named a few of the celebrities he’d greeted—a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, a reigning Broadway diva, a Hollywood action star who’d just formed a production company to make “quality” movies, as well as several boldface artists, dealers, and collectors. Mondays were the preferred evening in New York for a supposedly private little star-studded event like this one, since busy celebrities often had heavier commitments later in the week, and Mondays were usually the only evenings when theater actors and other performing arts types were free. Peter knew that Jonathan’s brother and other members of his family were out there, too, as well as Will, whom Jonathan had made a point of inviting, and Luz.

  An assistant slipped into the green room to tell Aldebar that everyone was seated. Aldebar told Jonathan, who in turn said to Peter that he was “ready to roll.” Graciously, since Peter was officially Jonathan’s date for the event, Aldebar was keeping himself in the background, handling the wheelchair and its occupant in the manner of an employee, though he was also clearly the evening’s supervising producer.

  They went through a door and a small hallway, then mounted the shallow stage. Houselights were on, and applause erupted as Jonathan and Frankel reached center stage. Peter and Jonathan stood to one side as the assistant adjusted a microphone that had been preset on a stand for Jonathan and gave Connor a handheld one.

  “Welcome,” said Jonathan, in a small voice that amplification made sound only smaller. The crowd became instantly silent. “Thank you all for coming. I’m touched that you all came out to see a movie that’s basically just two old men talking.” Audience laughter. “I hope nobody was expecting Spielberg.” More laughter.

  From where he stood, Peter could see that there were no empty seats. It was a nicely designed room, he thought: simple blond wood panels, discreet lighting, nicely arced rows that raked upward at a gentle angle. Then he saw what Jonathan meant about the upholstery. The seats were covered in a ghastly purple plush that was splotched with yellow suns and white crescent moons. At least the room’s sightlines were good. Peter spotted Will and Luz sitting in the middle of the room, near the back. When he caught their eye, he smiled, and Will saluted back.

  “Most of the time, a film set is like a reactor,” said Jonathan—“a hundred people running around like mad, trying to make a place where this nuclear fuel, the performances, can combust. In this case, it was just Connor and me. But I think we combusted a few times, didn’t we?”

  Laughter, as Jonathan turned to Frankel.

  “We’re still friends,” said Frankel, smiling but not elaborating.

  Jonathan, his comedic timing intact, gave his friend a second, then moved on.

  “Well, he says it all in the film,” said Jonathan. “Just remember, folks, it’s a wo-or . . . wo-or . . .”—he stopped, then regrouped—“a wo-ork in progress. God—like my ability to speak, apparently.”

  The audience’s reflexive snicker in response to the wisecrack was dampened by the shock of seeing him falter.

  “OK. So please enjoy,” said Jonathan. “And then we’ll have some supper, after. I hope you’ll stick around.”

  The houselights dimmed as Jonathan and party left the s
tage and were shown to a VIP box on the side of the room. The film started not with titles but a close-up of Frankel sitting silently, apparently thinking about a question he’d been asked, then beginning to speak: “I always knew I was an artist, since I was three. . . .”

  The look and grammar of the film was richer and more elegant than Peter had expected. Passages of Frankel speaking, and of him and Jonathan in conversation, seated next to each other, were interspersed with the still photos that Jonathan had collected. Now and then the strains of a Bach partita, played on a classical guitar, would enhance the mood. And those shots of Frankel and Jonathan in conversation were anything but standard talking-head stuff. Jonathan had used not one, nor two cameras, but many. Some shots focused closely on a face, or part of a face, or a hand or gesture, in sequences that seemed to reveal a hidden choreography of emotional “tells”—each moment being the portrait of a thought or a feeling. And the lighting for these shots came from all around the men and was so bright it could almost have been coming from the sun. It was as if their conversation were taking place in heaven.

  But the real surprise, for Peter, was that the film’s theme was adulthood, rather than age, or coming out, or modern times per se—adulthood as a phase of personal fulfillment that Connor contended Americans had been drifting away from since World War Two. It began to come into focus after a question from Jonathan.

  JONATHAN: Can you help me understand who we are today, Connor—you and me? In our twenties we try so hard to become the individuals we think we should be or really are. Then life goes on and the question becomes, who are we now? Do you think we become more or less ourselves, as we age? Or both?

  CONNOR: Hmm. I don’t know. Aging, for me, has never been primarily about the physical organism. It’s about the mind and what happens to it over time. When we were kids we used to talk about being “big.” And that’s really stuck with me—big, rather than old, or mature, or successful. Big encompasses not just what you know and have done and may own, but ambition, intention—your understanding of how big life can be and how much of it you want to occupy.

  Something about the film’s sound design, too, was heavenly. Each of the men’s voices was richly textured and utterly resonant, affording full enjoyment of Jonathan’s lively New York-Jewish inflections and Connor’s muted New England ones. These were voices one wanted to listen to.

  CONNOR: The tragedy is that no one is promulgating any ideal these days of what it means to be an adult.

  JONATHAN: Are you speaking globally?

  CONNOR: No, no—here in America. The Chinese get it. Look at the difference between Shanghai and New York. We’re still bumbling around with our Ground Zero site, because of our 9/11 wound, and Shanghai puts up the world’s second-tallest building in two years. We may fetishize their lack of human rights, but in many ways the Chinese are more grown-up than we are. The world is theirs, and we’re amusing ourselves to death.

  JONATHAN: You’re equating tall buildings with adulthood.

  CONNOR: I sure am. [both men laugh] Infrastructure—you know what I mean.

  JONATHAN: I think I do. But we’re here to get it on camera, darling.

  A snapshot from the mid-1930s of Connor at the “big house” in Bar Harbor, during his family’s last summer there. The house, a mass of porches and gables and big windows, is in the background. In the foreground, on the lawn, stands Connor in a summer suit with his regally outfitted mother and his four sisters, all of whom are wearing similar white frocks with oversized bows in their hair.

  JONATHAN: That’s a beautiful house. Do you remember it well?

  CONNOR: Oh, I do, I do. That house was a whole world to us. My sisters and I could be anything we wanted there. And I don’t mean just playing. There were books and artifacts. We had a great big globe of the world, and a little one of the moon, and a brass telescope, so we could see the real thing. Father collected fragments of medieval stone sculpture that we used to play with—saints and griffins and such. And there were two pianos—one in the parlor and one in what we used to call the playroom.

  JONATHAN: Nice.

  CONNOR: Wanna hear something funny? We had several seascapes in that house—oil paintings—including a Frederic Church and a Thomas Cole. Can you imagine? They’d painted them right there, in Bar Harbor. It was quite a little artists’ haven, at one time. [chuckles] Those were gone, everything was gone, by the time that picture was taken. The house was practically empty by then.

  In the photograph, Connor looks a bit dreamy, despite his very proper attire, while his mother looks proud of her neatly put-together flock. Fanny, the oldest sister, is posing hard; Olive, the youngest, appears to be squirming a bit in her fine garb; the middle girls, May and Elizabeth, seem natural and relaxed. May’s smile, which looks illuminated from within, as the camera draws in close on it, says everything about the carefree world that had already been lost.

  And what helped a viewer see beneath the surface of the photo was the use of the Ken Burns effect, as the film’s editor had explained to Peter and Will on their weekend in Hudson—the strategic panning over or zooming into or out of a still shot, which subtly shifts the focus of an image as it successively recrops it. Used with the right stills, the editor said, the technique can unlock vastly more information per frame than a viewer usually takes in. In a film by Ken Burns himself the technique might reveal, in just a few seconds, the grief of a Civil War soldier whose friend lies dead at his feet, as well as the horror of war itself, as the camera pulls back to reveal an entire battlefield of such losses. And then the shot goes further, and we notice there’s snow on the ground and smoke coming from the chimney of a house on the hill, in the background. Who lives there, we think, and what was the nation like for them on that day in 1864?

  JONATHAN: You mention this concept of “big.” Can you say more about that?

  CONNOR: Well—just kids acting big, full of themselves, beyond their years. But isn’t that a great thing, to have a big idea about yourself? It’s all very well to look, oh, I don’t know, youthful, but most American adults these days don’t even come across as adults—you know, with any authority or what we used to think of as maturity.

  JONATHAN: Gravitas.

  CONNOR: Nor gravitas. [pauses] Remember Andy Hardy’s father? Can we reference Judge Hardy?

  JONATHAN: We can reference anything you like.

  Peter looked around. Did anyone know who Andy Hardy was? The audience was rapt, becoming immersed in the world of the film—a world in which ideas were lovingly exchanged, examined, evaluated. One obvious comparison was to My Dinner With Andre, though Jonathan’s film seemed to slip the viewer even more effortlessly than Malle’s into a state of mind in which thoughts can be as compelling as movie stars.

  Fascinating.

  A snapshot of Connor in the early 1940s: He’s standing in back of the garage that served as his art studio, at his family’s new house in Bar Harbor; he’s dressed in baggy pants and a T-shirt, and holding an abstract painting that shows the strong influence of Paul Klee.

  CONNOR: I was trying so hard to be an artist. [chuckles] But of course that’s the way you become an artist. The place we moved into had a free-standing garage—a broken-down thing, just a shack—so that’s where I made my studio.

  JONATHAN: You were clearly taking yourself seriously.

  CONNOR: Yes, I was—and I had the support to do that, from my mother and father, and my teachers, and from a world that expected such a thing. I wonder how much support there is nowadays for bringing one’s self and one’s culture forward and upward? We’re encouraged to make a lot of money, aren’t we, and carry the right accessories, and live very conspicuously....

  JONATHAN: Conspicuously?

  CONNOR: America’s become one big reality TV show.

  The audience giggled—as much at Connor’s disdainful tone as at the idea itself. Peter giggled, too, but when he glanced over at Jonathan, to see if he was enjoying the screening, he saw that his friend had fallen asle
ep.

  Poor dear.

  A photograph taken from a magazine, from the mid-1950s, of Connor and a fellow painter, now also quite well known, who was rumored to be Connor’s lover at the time. They’re sitting at a table improvised with a plank and some cinder blocks, sharing a glass of wine in a studio in lower Manhattan that they occupied together for two years. On the table is an Indian brass candlestick caked with the melted wax of several candles. It’s a staged shot, taken by a friend of theirs, and the two are in mid-conversation but the look between them is unmistakable.