Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

  This was the period in which the Wright Revolution was making its influence visible at the grass roots level; all over the Los Angeles area, soda fountains and hot-dog stands began to appear which were crude but recognizable distortions of Wright’s style. Until Christopher met Jim he had known nothing about the Wright philosophy and would probably have dismissed it as pretentious double-talk if it had been explained to him by an academic outsider. But with Jim it was different. He was an authentic disciple. At the Taliesins he had seen a vision, and Christopher could respect visions. Wright’s slogans and phrases didn’t repel Christopher when Jim repeated them; they seemed part of Jim’s lovable absurdity. Christopher sometimes accused Jim of not wanting people to live in the houses he designed—because people were so messy, they choked the rooms with furniture, cluttered them with cooking pots and books and violated the purity of their wall spaces by hanging pictures. Jim grinned, half admitting that this was how he felt.

  At the same time, Christopher admired Jim enormously, just because he was a truly dedicated architect. Jim made Christopher understand, for the first time, the interrelation of landscape and architecture and taught Christopher how to look at architecture in a new way, as an expression of various philosophies of life. (When they drove back from Mexico, that day, Jim showed Christopher the dining room of the old Coronado Hotel.) Jim even dreamed architecture. Often, when he and Christopher had been sleeping together, he would wake up and describe in great detail some vast building and its adjoining gardens in which he had been dream-wandering, drawing pictures to show Christopher exactly how it had looked.

  Part of the fun and excitement of being with Jim was that he felt free to inspect any building which was under construction. If people were at work on it, he would enter with such an air of authority that he was very seldom questioned. He would climb all over it, occasionally uttering scornful grunts or exclaiming, “Jesus!” or kicking disgustedly at its walls. Sometimes he would go so far as to knock over an insecure partition, saying indignantly, “What’s this goddam thing supposed to be for?” or, “Who do they think they’re kidding, for Christ’s sake!”

  The next weekend, Saturday the 18th and Sunday the 19th, was the last that Christopher and Jim spent together. They didn’t leave town. On Monday the 20th, Bill Caskey arrived. He had bought a station wagon (secondhand) in the East and had driven it out to California. The station wagon had been christened “The Blue Bird” by its former owner, and its name was painted on it. (Later, when people asked Caskey what “The Blue Bird” meant, Caskey would answer with his southern grin and drawl, “Honey, we bring happiness!”)

  Caskey had found a driving partner to come with him, a boy named Les Strang.[30] In his first enthusiasm, Caskey had written to Christopher that Les was “like a blond German discus thrower.” Whereupon, Christopher had become jealous and had written back to Caskey that he didn’t want to meet Les, if Les and Caskey were still having an affair by the time they arrived in Los Angeles. Christopher’s jealousy seems quite sick, considering his own involvement with Jim—even now, I’m at a loss to explain it. However, Caskey replied reassuringly—from some town on their route—that he had already lost his romantic interest in Les, who was “behaving like a mad queen.” I seem to remember that one demonstration of Les’s mad queenishness was that he had [shat] in the corner of a motel bedroom!

  Christopher took a larger room at the El Kanan for Caskey and himself, until they had chosen a house to rent. Their first night together, Christopher found that he couldn’t make love to Caskey at all; his memories of sex with Jim were still so powerful. Caskey took this very calmly. Either he minded but was determined not to show it, or he knew instinctively that Jim wasn’t a real rival. If the latter, he was absolutely right. When he and Jim met, a few days later, they became friends at once. Indeed, it was as if Caskey had established, there and then, a ménage a trois agreement with Jim. That winter, whenever Caskey wanted to go out for the night, or to bring in someone to sleep with, he would say to Christopher, “Why don’t you spend the night with Jim?” I don’t think that he and Jim had sex together—at least not often. Jim wasn’t his type. As for Caskey and Christopher, their sex life was resumed almost immediately, without any further hang-ups.

  The house which Caskey and Christopher decided to rent was 333 East Rustic Road,31 down in the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon. It belonged to Lee Strasberg, the director, and his wife Paula, and was fairly adequately furnished. I don’t remember how much the rent was, but undoubtedly Paula Strasberg drove a hard bargain; she was a real Jewish landlady—who, at the same time, kept protesting that she was an artist and didn’t understand business. There was a sagging bridge over the creek; it was the only entrance to the house and Caskey and Christopher were obliged to get it repaired. Mrs. Strasberg avoided paying for this by ignoring the letters Christopher wrote her about it. She also ignored the problem of a rust-eaten old car which a young actor friend of hers had abandoned on the creek bank beside the house. Christopher had to pester him for months before he bothered to find its pink slip, and then someone had to be persuaded to tow it away. (A teenager finally did and then proceeded to spend several hundred dollars, making it driveable.)

  Caskey and Christopher moved into the house on September 28, and at once started receiving visitors. That same night, they had Jim Charlton, Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens to supper. Caskey was happy to be cooking and entertaining again.

  Next day, Lesser Samuels came down, to discuss an idea he had had for another film story. The day-to-day diary doesn’t give a title, but I think this must have been The Easiest Thing in the World. More about it later. Christopher was still working on the script of The Great Sinner but only intermittently; it needed just a few finishing touches.

  On October 1, the day-to-day diary says vaguely that Christopher went “to see [a friend], with Phil Curry.” I think Phil Curry was a lawyer and that this must have been a visit to the downtown jail, where [the friend] was under arrest. He had got into trouble because a teenager he had had sex with had later denounced him. The teenager was, in fact, no innocent rosebud but an experienced hustler who had been picked up by the police and had got himself off the hook by naming names. Frau Mann rose magnificently to this occasion. She too went downtown to see [the friend], and declared to all and sundry that she found the idea that he ought to be punished absolutely ridiculous. “Absolutely ridiculous!”—I can still hear the brisk indignant tone in which she said it—this famous and highly respectable old lady defiantly heckling the Los Angeles police on behalf of her son’s [. . .] friend. However, despite her efforts, [the] poor [man] got sent to a prison camp. Christopher and Klaus Mann visited him there on December 19. He was released on February 12.

  On October 6, shooting began on The Great Sinner. On the 9th, Christopher temporarily finished work at MGM. Stephen Spender stayed that night with Christopher and Caskey, so this may have been the day when he came out to the studio to watch the shooting. It was a scene in Gregory Peck’s attic room. He is lying asleep, exhausted after an epileptic fit. Ava Gardner (Pauline) enters, rearranges his bedclothes, then becomes aware that the desk is piled with pages of manuscript. To quote from the screenplay: “In happy surprise she whispers under her breath: ‘Fedja . . . you’ve written.’”32

  Admittedly, Ava Gardner’s diction left something to be desired. Stephen bitchily pretended that he thought she said: “Fedja . . . you’re rotten.”

  During the early days of the shooting, Christopher spent a lot of time on the set. At first, he and Gottfried both had high hopes of Robert Siodmak, a director they greatly admired. But it soon became evident that Siodmak felt somehow ill at ease making this costume picture. He didn’t seem to understand the style of the period or the kind of acting that should go with it. Even his lighting was wrong, it suggested one of his modern thrillers. When the doctor came into Peck’s attic, the set was so dark that you couldn’t see it. And then the doctor spoke his line, “I need more light”—which made e
veryone who watched the rushes roar with laughter. The scene had to be reshot.

  Christopher had had such misgivings about Peck before the film started shooting that he now reacted in the opposite direction, simply because Peck didn’t immediately disgrace himself in his first scenes. Christopher tried for a while to believe that Peck was going to be very good, and he said so to all his friends. Ivan Moffat had soon perfected a fiendish imitation of Christopher describing Peck’s performance: “It’s really wonderful, you know, because he does it so simply. He opens his eyes and he says, ‘I’ve seen Christ’—just like that.”

  I should write something about Frank Taylor (see here) at this point. Frank Taylor had now settled in Los Angeles and was working as a producer at MGM. He was tall, skinny, boyish. His hair was very short and he dressed neatly, in Ivy-League-college-kid style, usually wearing a bow tie. He had professionally sincere blue eyes and lots of Madison Avenue charm. He was quite desperately enthusiastic about everything which he believed to be “in,” at any given moment. A positive thinker, he abounded in money-making schemes so grandiose that one kept expecting him to become a millionaire. His sexuality was compulsive and rather scary, he pursued his (always male) prey like a spider and seized it with his long, obscenely thin arms and legs. His wife Nan tried desperately to keep up with [. . .] him. She was small and (I guess) cute. [. . .] They had, at that time, three or four small children, all boys. [. . .]

  I have tried to say the worst things about Frank Taylor first, so as to get them off my chest. Having said them, I can admit that Christopher very often enjoyed being with Frank and found him intelligent and amusing; very often agreed with him politically, for he was a model liberal; very often felt his charm. On two occasions, while drunk, he actually had sex with Frank[33]—though it isn’t an experience I care to dwell on.

  What really repelled Christopher—and what repels me today—about Frank was something which was none of Christopher’s business; his dishonest, tricky bisexual posture. Frank bragged about his homosexual affairs and even sometimes demanded that they should be respected as serious love dramas. At the same time, he became maudlin over his marriage and his responsibilities as a father. Stephen Spender is deeply false in the same way, but not nearly as disgusting as Frank, because he is too shrewd to parade his sentimentality in public. They are both utterly untrustworthy—but then, one should know better than to trust them. On the positive side, they were useful to Christopher as partial models for one of his worst and one of his best literary characters—Stephen Monk in The World in the Evening and Patrick in A Meeting by the River. I believe Frank Taylor took Stephen Monk personally and was offended. He never spoke of this to Christopher, but, after the book was published, they gradually lost contact. Stephen Spender wouldn’t have been offended—he isn’t petty in that way—though he may well have been hurt. But the bond between Stephen and Christopher was and still is too tough to be broken—whatever they may write and say about each other.

  On October 14, Christopher brought Frank Taylor an outline for a movie he had written with Klaus Mann; it was based on the life of Han Van Meegeren, the painter-forger, and his dealings with the Nazis. This project was entirely Klaus’s idea; he had studied Van Meegeren’s career while he was in Holland. Frank wasn’t interested; or, if he was, he failed to interest the front office. On November 12, Thomas Mann (see Letters of Thomas Mann) wrote to Klaus, “The starry-eyed one seems to have failed—anyone who counts on the movies is throwing himself on Satan’s mercies.” (“The starry-eyed one” was evidently a family nickname for Christopher. Whether it just meant that his eyes were bright, or whether it referred to his supposedly excessive optimism, I don’t know.)

  On October 18, Christopher says in the day-to-day diary that he worked on The Condor and the Cows. He had already written some of this—the first two chapters were finished on board the Groix, but probably little or nothing since then.34 Christopher didn’t finish chapter three until November 15.

  On November 6 and 7, there are two more entries in the 1948–1956 journal—the first since May 29. They refer to a party given by Caskey and Christopher on November 4 and to the marriage of Vernon Old and Patty O’Neill[35] on November 5, with Peggy Kiskadden and Christopher in attendance. The guests at the party were Jay Laval, Bill Bailey, Hurd Hatfield, Roy Radebaugh (better known as Richard Cromwell the actor), Lennie Newman (see here), Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens, Roger Edens (who was a high-up in the music department at MGM) with [a friend] Don Van Trees, and Jim Charlton. Jim now came to the house regularly, often bringing a boyfriend with him and later screwing him in one of the two upstair bedrooms. Sometimes he showed up without having been invited; freeloading is a characteristic vice of Dog People. At thirty-eight, Radebaugh still had some of the cuteness which had made Richard Cromwell one of the homosexual pinup boys of the thirties.36 Now he had given up his movie career and taken to sculpting. He was a touching, sweet-natured tragic character who drank too much. He had a violent unrequited crush on Rod Owens. He was to die of cancer in 1960. Lennie Newman was still cooking for Jay Laval at his restaurant. Lennie had become Caskey’s favorite drinking companion. They spent many evenings out on the town together.

  Vernon Old and Patty O’Neill had been living together for some time already. I seem to remember that Christopher actually urged them to get married—or rather, urged Vernon to marry Patty, who needed no urging. If Christopher did indeed do this, his motives must have been largely malicious. He must have been harboring a grudge against Vernon, who picked up lovers and dropped them again with no regard for anything but his own convenience. Christopher must have wanted to see Vernon hog-tied, for once, by marriage.[37] And this suggests that Christopher himself was feeling hog-tied and therefore envious and resentful of other people’s freedom.

  In the journal entry of November 6, Christopher writes that, “Caskey is endlessly busy, home building. . . . He never ceases to carpenter, sew, paint, cook.” Christopher adds, “Sometimes I ask myself uneasily, what will happen when the home is built?” Christopher says nothing against Caskey here but he goes on to express a lot of guilt and self-defensiveness about their way of life: “I’m being confronted, at last, with the problems of the Householder—and who ever dares to say they are less than the problems of the Monk? . . . No doubt the life in Santa Monica Canyon is empty, vain, trivial, tragic, indigent of God. But that’s no reason not to live here and try to do the best you can.” The best Christopher could do was to make japam (not very regularly), see Swami now and then, and keep assuring himself that he would restart his novel as soon ashis bread-and-butter chore, The Condor and the Cows, was finished. Meanwhile he continued to drink too much and his guilt pressure continued to build up.

  Christopher also refers in this entry to the surprise victory of Truman over Dewey in the elections—which took place, that year, on November 2. Like Salka, and many many others, Christopher rejoiced in the discomfiture of the pollsters even more than in the defeat of Dewey.

  On November 19, Brad Saurin[38] is mentioned for the first time. Brad was a very tall blond, amusingly attractive, more than somewhat crazy young man who had served with distinction as a pilot in World War II. He was queer, sexually wild, [. . .] and a joker. He looked deceptively “nice” and upper-class, especially when his pretty gold hair was smoothly brushed and he was wearing a uniform—he was still in the air force, or at any rate [in] the reserve. His father was (I think) a general, a good grey career soldier, courteous, intelligent. Brad’s brother,39 a handsome heterosexual dark boy, was an avowed communist. His existence was a serious blot on Brad’s military record, but one of the most impressive things about the Saurin family was that neither Brad, nor his father and mother, would express even a formal disapproval of his doings. They saw him frequently—I believe he had an academic job in San Francisco—and they publicly defended his right to his own political opinions.

  At that time, Brad was having an affair with Jay Laval. On November 25, Brad invited Christopher a
nd Caskey and Jay to a party at his parents’ house. So I guess General and Mrs. Saurin were as broad-minded about Brad’s queerness as they were about his brother’s communism.

  On November 29, Christopher finished chapter four of The Condor and the Cows.

  On December 9, he finished chapter five.

  On December 16, Denny Fouts died in Rome. I don’t remember exactly when or how Christopher got the news. A letter written to Christopher by John Goodwin from Agadir, Morocco, on January 9, 1949, refers to a cable Christopher has sent him—so Christopher must have heard about Denny earlier than this. In his letter Goodwin says that he last saw Denny in Rome in November.40 Denny had had a friend with him, Tony Watson-Gandy. It was Tony who later came to Paris, met John again and told him about Denny’s death. “He had found Denny dead in the John and immediately rushed him to a hospital in case he should still be alive. There was an autopsy and it proved to be his heart. He apparently had had a bad heart for a long time and since I had left Rome he also had had a bad case of flu. It was not suicide nor drugs. Of course people will say so and it really makes no matter. Tony said that his face showed no pain so that it must have been a sudden attack without agony.”41

  On December 18, Christopher finished chapter six—and was therefore more than halfway through the book.

  Gian Carlo Menotti is mentioned in the day-to-day diary as having come to supper that night. Menotti and Christopher had met each other for the first time back in July or August, when they were both working for MGM. Christopher was charmed by Menotti’s vitality and they saw each other often. When Caskey arrived home, Menotti promptly made a pass at him, unsuccessfully. Christopher was a little annoyed by this but then decided that Latins will be Latins and must be excused.

  On December 22, Ben Bok and his girl Coral were married, and Christopher was at the ceremony. Peggy disapproved of Ben’s marriage even more than she had disapproved of Vernon Old’s. She told Christopher in a tone of deep distaste that Ben and Coral were only getting married because they wanted sex so badly. Peggy also found Coral’s family [not to her liking].