She was a dance-mime, and that is by no means all. I was working only for tips. She was licensed to serve just beer but she stretched the license a bit to include setups. There was food in the nature of knackwurst and sauerkraut. There was a singer who was either a male or female transvestite, I’ve never known which, and there was always and forever the incomparable Valesca.
At times I supplemented my tips as a waiter by giving recitals of my light verse.
The verse was pretty raw for those days and I became something of a draw. And tips were sizable.
One night the Madam called the waiters together and announced a change of policy.
She said that the waiters (there were three of us) had to pool their tips and then split them with the management, meaning herself.
On this particular evening I had a number of close friends and acquaintances in the bar, among them the abstract painter. He was present when Valesca announced her new policy, just after closing time, in the kitchen of The Beggar’s Bar.
I told the lady that I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of pooling my tips with the other waiters and having it split with the management. The abstract painter was attracted to the kitchen by this noisy confrontation. Near the kitchen entrance there was a crate of quart soda bottles and as soon as he entered he began to hurl these bottles at the celebrated dance-mime. At least a dozen bottles were hurled at the lady before one of them struck her. The paddy wagon and an ambulance were summoned, the lady received several stitches in her scalp, and, needless to say, I was out of a job at that particular night spot.
Not long after on a bitterly cold Friday which was not Good, with the new year, 1942, just begun, I was unexpectedly evicted from my fickle friend’s apartment. My friend, the abstract painter, had taken to his bed with some malaise of nervous origin but he still desired company, and each evening he would dispatch me out upon the streets of Greenwich Village to fetch home carefully specified kinds of visitors. I was willing to oblige and so was another friend, whom we called “the pilot fish”; the nervous young painter was kept agreeably diverted most evenings of that season. But one night “the pilot fish” and I fetched home some guests of a roguish nature, and the following morning the painter found several prized articles missing. After making an inventory, he sadly decided to dispense with my company and services: I was kicked out, and I had the ticket but not the cash to pick up my laundry at “the Chinaman’s,” and barely a subway fare.
Two desperate days later, for the first and last time in my life, I made a direct and personal appeal for economic assistance: a phone call to the dramatists’ branch of a union devoted to the care and feeding of writers. I was lent, yes, lent the sum of precisely ten dollars to keep me off the slippery streets until the spring thaw set in, a season later …
In my own addled fashion I am a rather ingenious, as well as ingenuous, creature, and in those days I had a sort of pathetic appeal to certain individuals; and when the ten dollars was exhausted I dropped in for dinner at the Madison Avenue penthouse of a very successful composer of “pop” music, and I not only stayed for dinner but for the next four months, till spring arrived.
After that, it was summer and I had another friend, much less prosperous but equally goodhearted. Knowing the problems of my situation in Manhattan, he wrote me from Macon, Georgia, inviting me to spend the summer with him.
I arrived in that deep Southern town and found that he was occupying a room in an attic and I was to be billeted in the other half of it.
It was the middle of summer and it was the middle of Georgia. My room in the attic had two windows the size and shape of transoms. Let’s say it was a very wet summer despite the fact that there was practically no rainfall.
My friend had a revolving electric fan and was unable to sleep without it, due to a painful infection of the jawbone. I had no cooling electric appliance and I spent long hours at night glaring across the breathless hall between these attic rooms at my friend lying in bed with that revolving Westinghouse ruffling his hair as he chuckled over cartoons in The New Yorker, an excellent magazine at the mere sight of which I still break out in a deathly sweat.
In the dog days of August another tenant arrived in this Georgia attic, a somewhat retarded youth who worked at the A & P. This tenant sweated enough to die of dehydration, but he never, literally never, bathed or changed his socks and I mean to tell you that the odor which emanated from this nice country kid began to permeate the attic like Eugene O’Neill’s sense of doom. And if I wanted to elaborate fancifully on this item I would add that late in August a polecat moved into the attic one night and moved out before daybreak to escape that odor of doom.
I think it was about this time, still in the early forties, that I experienced a brief term of employment at a Southern branch of the U. S. Corps of Engineers. Some of you may remember the awful shortage of manpower in those days, those war years, and even I impressed the personnel manager as an employable person. He put me on the graveyard shift, which are those hours between 11 P.M. and 7 A.M., and on this shift there were just two of us in the office, a massive young man who had been prematurely discharged from an asylum and myself who had not, at that time, been committed to one. Our job was to receive and to acknowledge coded messages which would now and then come in late at night on the teletype apparatus. My co-worker was a silent, withdrawn type who glanced at me now and then with homicidally suspicious eyes. This didn’t alarm me at all. I’ve always felt at home with people like that. There was a lot of free time and I spent it writing short plays and I came and went on a bicycle, I lived at the “Y” and I had an adolescent roommate employed as bellhop at a leading hotel. We would arrive back at the “Y” room at about the same hour, and each morning he would turn his pockets inside out, littering the floor with paper money he’d received as tips, fives, tens, twenties—wartime economy seemed to work well in those days, especially for bellhops in hotels that attracted conventions.
But at the U. S. Engineers things were deteriorating on the graveyard shift. My co-worker and I were sinking into separate dreamworlds. Our boss kept begging us not to force him to fire us, and this continued for three months till one night some really important message came over the teletype and we blew it sky high, and then our boss thought it best to let me go and retain the services of the certified loony.
Now about those eye operations which I had off and on from the ages of twenty-nine to thirty-four. I had no Blue Shield and no Medicare but there was a reputable ophthalmologist in New York who was willing to perform these cataract operations on credit. The cost on the books was one hundred dollars per operation, but this good doctor did not press me for payment till I hit the jackpot in the year 1945.
It is peculiar to have a cataract—it was on my left eye and I paid little attention to it till someone in a bar addressed me as “White Eye”—I was only in my twenties! But rare and peculiar things have happened to me all my life, no less in youth than in approaching “age.”
The operations for cataracts in those days were performed with a needle under local anesthesia, with the head and the whole body securely strapped to the table, and the great hazard was that you would vomit convulsively during this surgery, and thus joggle the needle as it penetrated the iris and got into the lens, which is a liquid substance in a healthy eye but solidifies with the advance of a cataract. This progressive induration is what causes the lens of the eye to take on a grayish and finally whitish cast of color, and unfortunately, in my case, my eyes had always been considered my most compelling feature.
The ophthalmologist said I must have received some childhood injury to my left eye, which was now reacting with this cataract, and I had, indeed, received such an injury in a childhood game of considerable violence. This was in Mississippi and we were playing Indians and early white settlers. The early white settlers were in a shack that was being besieged by the redskins. I was an aggressive kid and I led the charge out of the shack and was hit in the left eye by an “Indian”
with a stick and he fetched a considerable clout. I had a swollen eye for several days, but no sign of lasting eye damage till my late twenties.
In my case, rare and special, of course, it took three needling operations to remove the lens of the left eye and I vomited each time during the operation and nearly choked on the vomit, which I had no choice but to swallow. The worst of these operations was performed completely free of charge in a medical college. They charged me nothing at all because I consented to have it performed before a class of student ophthalmologists, seated all about the operating table, while the surgeon-teacher delivered a lecture on what he was doing, the whole theatrical procedure.
“The patient is now in position, apply the straps. Tighter, tighter, he has a history of vomiting during the surgery. Eyelids secured against blinking, pupil anesthetized now. The needle is now about to penetrate the iris. It is now into the iris. It has now penetrated the lens. Oh, oh, vomiting, nurse, choking, tube in esophagus. My God, what a patient. I mean very good, of course, but an unusual case.” (Of course I am not quoting verbatim, but you get the idea if you wish to.)
48. High school photo.
49. On the staff of The Eliot, the campus magazine at Washington University, St. Louis. I am in front row, far left.
50. In the shoe business in St. Louis.
51. Tom in Acapulco, summer 1940.
52. In the first New Orleans apartment, 1946.
53. In the studio of the East Fifty-eighth Street apartment.
54. Aboard the S.S Ile de France in the early fifties.
55. Why writers burn up. Photo taken by Karsh in the East Fifty-eighth Street apartment.
56. At a fiesta in Valencia, Spain, fifteen or twenty years ago.
57. Tennessee.
58. On camel, by Pyramids and Sphinx, late fifties.
59. Arriving in Rome with “Gigi” in 1969, after my “conversion” to Catholicism. I was going to meet the General of the Jesuits, having been converted by a Jesuit, at the instigation of my brother. “Gigi” appears more eager for the audience even than I.
60. With “Buffo”—a pair of devoted creatures.
61. Drunk and delighted.
Young, gifted, and destitute, with a cataract in the left eye and an impressionable stomach. Oh, well, my eyes are still a compelling feature …
The other night I was feeling lively, so we took to the streets, here in New Orleans. I whispered to my companion that I was “in heat,” so we went again to that delightfully scandalous night spot on Bourbon Street which features the topless and bottomless go-go boys—all of whom are hustlers and some of whom are very pretty indeed. The one I found most attractive was serving our table—the go-go boys double as waiters as well as hustlers. I immediately asked his name. It was Lyle. He looked a bit underfed—but had lovely proportions, a clear, sweet face and a smooth, nicely curved behind. The boys wear G-strings only—so you can be pretty sure what you’re getting. I would recommend, however, that penetration be avoided, as they are most probably all infected with clap in the ass. And I’d also recommend that you get them to bathe as their hours are long and sweaty. And that you have a pubic pesticide such as A-200.
This young Lyle made a date with me for 5 A.M. and he arrived below the verandah just before I started work at four-thirty. He buzzed and was let in the gate, but I came out on the verandah and called down to him that I had just woke up and would he please return in about three hours as I had work to do. I asked him if he needed money and he replied no and went amiably off into the penumbra of predawn on Dumaine, promising to return about 8 A.M.
He has a softly nubile look and a soft Southern voice—and I contemplate no intimacy beyond the tactile—I mean the relatively chaste knowledge of his skin surface with my fingers. This restriction is particularly prudent since I am allergic to penicillin and the last thing I need is a clap.
A friend was employed in 1943 at the old Strand Theatre on Broadway as an usher, and, knowing that I was between profitable engagements, he told me that the Strand was in need of a new usher and that I might get the job provided I fitted the uniform of my predecessor. Luckily it happened that this former usher was about my height and of similar build. I was put on the job. The attraction at the Strand was that World War II classic, Casablanca, which was an early starring vehicle for Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, both hot as blazes; the cast also included that fabulously charismatic “Fat Man,” Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre and Paul Henreid, and there was Dooley Wilson playing and singing that immortal oldie, “As Time Goes By.” In those days, with an attraction like that, the movie-houses of Broadway were literally mobbed and the aisles had to be roped off by the ushers to restrain the patrons till they could be seated. It was my job, at first, to guard the entrance to one of these aisles, and at an evening performance an enormously fat lady broke through the velvet rope and started to charge down the aisle, evidently intending to occupy a seat on the screen, and when I attempted to restrain her, she struck me over the head with a handbag that seemed to contain gold bricks. The next thing I remember I was still employed at the Strand but I was now situated near the entrance, in a spot of light, and directing traffic with white-gloved hands. “This way, ladies and gentlemen, this way, please,” and “There will be a short wait for all seats.” And somehow, during the several months’ run of Casablanca, I was always able to catch Dooley Wilson and “As Time Goes By.”
The pay was seventeen dollars a week, which covered my room at the “Y” and left me seven dollars for meals. And I loved it …
Then one day Miss Wood summoned me to her office and informed me that I had been sold to MGM. It was a package deal and in this human package were Lemuel Ayers and a young male dancer, Eugene Loring; he was the first to create the balletic role of Billy the Kid.
Audrey said, “You are going to get two fifty.”
“Two fifty a month!” I exclaimed, bug-eyed at the prospect, and she said, “No, two hundred and fifty a week.” And then I knew that there was a gimmick, and I was right; there were several gimmicks. I was set to work writing a screenplay based on a dreadful novel to be transmogrified into a starring vehicle for a young lady who couldn’t act her way out of her form-fitting cashmeres but was an intimate friend of the producer who had engaged me and I was soon told that my dialogue was beyond the young lady’s comprehension although I had avoided any language that was at all eclectic or multisyllabic: and then I was asked to write a starring vehicle for a female child and I threw in the sponge.
Then, to my total disbelief—although it was quite true—I learned that I had six months’ option whether I was on assignment or not.
I bought a secondhand motor scooter over the anxious protests of my new friend, Christopher Isherwood. I had met Chris a little after I arrived in Hollywood; I had a letter of introduction to him given to me by one of my first advocates, Lincoln Kirstein. I discovered that Christopher was staying in a monastery in Hollywood. I went there and knocked at the door and the door was opened and I said, “I want to see Christopher Isherwood.” And somebody put his finger to his lips and made a sign to wait and Christopher came out and said, “We’re having our meditation.” He said, “Come on in and meditate with us.” So I went on in and sat down. I didn’t find myself meditating, but I sat there. I thought this was a very unfortunate meeting for a man I admired so much. He phoned me, subsequently, and we became great friends. We used to go out on the pier at Santa Monica for fish dinners. This was during World War II when everything was blacked out. There was an almost sentimental attachment between us but it didn’t come to romance: instead, it turned into a great friendship, one of the continuing friendships in my life, and one of the most important ones.
Shortly after I arrived in California to start employment in the movie-mill at MGM, I found what were to be ideal living-quarters in Santa Monica. It was a two-room apartment on Ocean Boulevard in a large frame building called The Palisades. It was managed by a fantastic woman, half gypsy, matrimonial
ly shackled to an unpleasant little man who was withering with cancer. Her description, and her angry little husband’s, are contained in one of my better short stories, “The Mattress by the Tomato Patch,” and as for that summer, it was as golden as the later summers in Rome.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I was soon released from employment on unsuitable projects at MGM but remained on the payroll for the whole six months’ option.
My little apartment was very close to the Palisades of Santa Monica, that high promontory over the Pacific beach which was studded with the palatial homes of such movie stars as Marion Davies.
By this time the motor scooter had been sensibly replaced by a bicycle, and each evening after dinner I would ride my bike out on the Palisades. It was a park planted with royal palm trees and fronted by a long, curving balustrade of stone: at intervals along this route were little arbors and bosky retreats. And that summer the California coast was blacked out at night, for seven miles inland, in fear of Japanese air attack. The Palisades were full of young servicemen, positively infested with them, I’d say, and when I’d driven by one who appealed to my lascivious glance, I would turn the bike about and draw up alongside him to join him in his spurious enchantment with the view.
Presently I would strike a match for a cigarette. If the match-light confirmed my first impression of his charms, I would mention that I had a pad only a few blocks away, and he would often accept the invitation. If the first one or two were not to my satisfaction, I would go out for a third. There were memorable ones, particularly a gay marine. I wouldn’t believe it if it were not recorded in my journal of that summer, but I screwed him seven times that night.