Yesterday I did quite a lot of work on Wanderings. Now I’m going to take a look at it.
November 11 [Sunday]. Yesterday I worked all day long, from about nine to seven, in my bathrobe like Balzac, eating nothing but one orange with several cups of Sanka, and I finished the first chapter of Wanderings. What a great grace it is, to have so much work to do! I was hurrying to finish so I could show it to my darling when he got home today—but, just as I was getting up from the typewriter, he called and there’s another postponement, because he may be able to catch Alice Faye today. He says of her, “We’re like two bulls—both Taurus—and now it’s right down to the line”; because, on Monday Faye starts rehearsals for her show.118 I say I think Don and she are like Sherlock and Dr. Moriarty when they face each other at the Reichenbach Falls!119
So Don’s returning on Tuesday, not tomorrow because I have to go to USC in the morning and talk to a class there.
After eating so little during the day yesterday, I had supper with Gavin, with the result that my weight is up again, 153 and ½. On November 3—after supper with Gavin right after his return from Morocco—I hit a ghastly high, 155!
Gavin is delighted with Tangier, doesn’t want to live anywhere else, doesn’t regret leaving this place. He went to see Didion and Dunne and thinks they’ve gone Hollywood—at least he has and she is going along with it. They plan to make a new version of A Star Is Born, with Elvis Presley as the male star who is setting. Gavin also told me that he loved Clinton Kimbrough more than any of the others. He’s working on a book about thriller writers, including Conan Doyle, Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler.
Now I’m going to UCLA to research Dr. Hirschfeld and his institute, because my next chapter will be about them.
November 17. Kitty got back safe and sound—although he took such a long time leaving the plane that I thought someone must have frightened him and driven him to hide under one of the seats, so I went on board to look.
He did catch Alice Faye! The drawing was kind of a token, done in haste. But she has seen his catalogue and been greatly impressed so probably another sitting can be arranged much more easily. (Since he got back here, Don drew Jane Powell120 and she told him she thinks Faye may crack up and leave the show before they open, because she’s so terribly scared. Powell had been shocked by Faye’s appearance when they met again, but Don wasn’t.)
Now it’s dripping from moist fog, very saddening, if Dobbin didn’t have Kitty to cheer him. Also, I have the following ailments. A nasty circular red rash on the left thigh, up against the scrotum, about the size of a quarter and apparently growing. (I showed this to dear Dr. Wolff who said it was either herpes or something else and probably due to something I ate, and not to worry and to rub it with Cetaphil lotion121 and it will go away in about two weeks.) The toe next to my right big toe is very sore, as though I’d banged, even perhaps broken it, which I don’t remember doing. I have the usual lump on the ball of my left foot—it seemed better for a while, now it’s back. I have sharp arthritic pain in my right thumb. I have a painful sore lump in my mouth, lower jaw, right side, perhaps caused by my bridgework; can’t see Dr. Kurtzman about this as he’s away till the 27th.
Don likes my first chapter of Wanderings very much, I think. I shall try to get on with this in a rough draft, although I need to do much more research on Hirschfeld. All I could find so far is a journalistic book of interviews of G.S. Viereck with one chapter in it on Hirschfeld calling him “the Einstein of Sex”!
Gore is in town, with Howard. And, at the end of this coming week, Truman will be arriving. Gore says he’s ready for a confrontation! “By that time,” he said, “Burr will be at the top of the bestseller list.”
We got the proofs of our “Frankenstein” screenplay from Avon and it really is a more or less adequate version, although Hunt cut out the episode of Byron wanting to kill the butterfly and Shelley saving it, from the prologue. They can’t put this back into the first printing, as the book has gone to press, but it can probably be added later, also the scene between Polidori and the captain, when the schooner is being chased by a British coastguard cutter and Polidori says, “God bless America!”—which now seems amusingly topical, because it sounds like that other crook, Nixon, in his first statement about Watergate.
November 21. I forgot to mention that, when I went to the UCLA library to see what they had on Hirschfeld—not much, no biography—I ran into Marion Hargrove who told me that two of his sons have become disciples of the Maharishi, in Switzerland, and have consequently given up beer and pot, and taken to meditation. One of them had described himself as having become “a bliss ninny.”
On the 18th, Gore, Howard and Gavin came to supper. Gore is very fat (for him) at the moment; he has been travelling around promoting Burr, and Howard has come out to join him. They brought a tiresome little dog “Rat,” which was distracting. It seems to me that Gavin and Gore don’t go well together. Not that there was the least friction but the combination of them made for low-level conversation; Gore was alternately dogmatic (Nixon is certain to be forced out) and career conscious (talking about a new attempt to vote him into the Institute,122 and getting me to read him a list of its writer-members and concluding from it that they represent Jewish, East-coast, Wasp influences and prejudices—predominantly Jewish).
We have told Mark Andrews that we will not go to his wedding or the reception afterwards. I suppose I am being a bit cantankerous, or worse, pretending to be cantankerous because the simple truth is that I loathe all such gatherings, even slightly preferring funerals. But I do honestly feel that for Mark and Lydia123 to pretend that they are pledging their troth in the solemn sacred sense is a rather blasphemous farce. Instead of going off and having a five-minute civil ceremony they are camping through some kind of Zen ritual or whatnot. How dare they—when Mark was actually offering to run off with Gavin, right up to the last moment. But then, Mark is an irresponsible baby. As for Gavin, he has told Mark that he never wants to see him again. It seems that Gavin is particularly furious because Mark has been trying to window-dress the party by inviting people like Merle Oberon. Don observes that it’s all very well for Gavin to be furious now, but that he never restrained Mark’s indiscretions as long as they were living together.
The day before yesterday, we both saw Irving Lazar and decided to have him for our agent. Yesterday I wrote to Perry Knowlton at Curtis Brown and told him I don’t want Curtis Brown as my U.S. agent any more. I imagine there will be a stink about this.
We are being threatened with gas rationing and/or the closing of gas stations at weekends.
About the ailments I listed on the 17th: the rash on the thigh has not disappeared by any means—Dr. Wolff predicted it would go in two weeks, today it’s just one week—but it does look paler and much less “angry.” The toe seems quite recovered. The lump on the ball of my foot is slightly less evident. My thumb is almost okay. (These two symptoms probably respond to the weather; we’ve been having cold and rain and high wind, but today is beautiful.) I have relieved the lump in my jaw by not wearing my lower bit of bridgework.
Irving Lazar is certainly no asslicker. He didn’t say one word of praise—or blame either—for our Meeting by the River script. He just told us that he was sure one couldn’t raise the money for it. And he also said that Cukor won’t be able to raise any money to do his pictures, because he isn’t box office any more. People think he’s had it. Don likes Lazar’s frankness. So do I, at present.
December 6. A long lapse and a lot to report.
Jim Bridges claims that he has got John Calley—who worked with us on The Loved One as an associate producer or something and is now head of Warner’s—interested in A Meeting by the River. He was to read the novel over the weekend. ( Jim was determined not to show him our screenplay, which makes me think that Jim must be secretly intending to rewrite it drastically.) Well, we’ve heard nothing from Calley[,] and Jim has gone off on another of his Paper Chase promotion trips and will be away for
a couple of weeks—leaving Jack to receive Salka Viertel, who is due to arrive here almost immediately and maybe stay through Christmas!
Irving Lazar is in New York and scheduled to see Curtis Brown. Perry Knowlton answered my letter and urged me to reconsider leaving them, particularly for Irving Lazar, who, he says, is all right for film business but how can he represent me in New York, where I need “a full time representative who specializes in literary representation and has the staff and expertise to do the job.” I haven’t answered this letter because I don’t want to get really nasty and point out to Knowlton what kind of representatives he and his expert staff have been. Even if Irving turns out to have been a mistake, I do trust him to produce some action.
Already, he has called Universal and they have agreed in principle that Don and I should get some money from the sales of the paperback of our “Frankenstein” screenplay, which is just out. The two parts of the T.V. film were shown on NBC, on November 30 and December 1. Many people called us about it, all professing to have enjoyed it despite its faults—no, not quite all, Cukor was frank, so was Billy Bengston. We thought it even worse than it had seemed in the projection room at Universal. Aside from all the faults I’ve already mentioned, another, a quite basic one, appeared; the picture hadn’t been shot for television—that’s to say, it was hopelessly lacking in close-ups and therefore the players’ reactions were lost; in many scenes, they were far far away from you, wandering about in the backgrounds of the big sets. We’ve been cursing Jack Smight for being “a television director”—would that he were! Hunt Stromberg called from Texas, trying to placate me by quoting from various “rave” notices, including one by Cecil Smith in the Los Angeles Times. I told him he had betrayed us, but I didn’t raise my voice. He just kept repeating that he was sure we would get an Emmy!
Gavin left for Tangier on the 26th. We haven’t heard from him yet.
For a long time now, Jack Larson and Jim Bridges have been raving about The Open Theater Company. Having met Joe Chaikin, its director, we were inclined to think we’d hate it, because he’s so pretentious when he talks about the drama. But at last we felt obliged to see it because the company is breaking up—chiefly, as far as we could gather, because three or four of the top people in it are such prima donnas that they couldn’t bear to be with each other any longer, having stuck it out for ten years! So, on the 26th, we drove down to Huntington Beach and saw a performance at the Golden West College, and then again, on the 29th, we drove to Costa Mesa and saw them, in another show, at the Orange Coast College. The first performance was called The Mutation Show and the second Night Walk. Nearly all of it is movement, partly dancing, partly miming, partly tableau, partly just mugging at the audience—accompanied by animal noises or noises imitating the rhythms of human speech, also there are drum beats and other percussive sounds. Very little intelligible dialogue. These are not improvisations; indeed, it is obvious that they have been very carefully rehearsed. They hold you for quite a while; then the lack of structure—or perhaps I’d better say quite brutally “plot”—begins to be felt. All the more so, in a way, because the actors are really good at what they’re doing. Talent minus structure equals cuteness; the greater the talent the greater the cuteness.
On December 1, we went to a farewell lunch for the company at Jack and Jim’s house. Seen offstage, they nearly all seemed charming, unpretentious, friendly, really lovable. A big blond young man named John Stoltenberg, who manages the show and is also a writer, was dangerously affectionate, a true dog person who would have moved into the house and our basket, it seemed, if he had received one pat too many.124
At Vedanta Place last night, Swami asked me if I had had any experiences. That’s the word I always use when I ask him the same question and so it staggered me for a moment, but of course he didn’t mean it in the same way. Anyhow, I found myself instantly in a state of emotion. I told him that if I hadn’t met him my life would have been nothing, that I knew this now, and that I like best to meditate on his room because I know that Maharaj is there. My voice was shaking and tears ran down my face. Swami didn’t say anything but his face became aloof in that way it does, when he is in a spiritual mood—“deserted,” one might call it, because you feel that he is “out of himself.” We were silent for a long time.
After supper at Vedanta Place and the reading, I went to Nick Wilder’s gallery to put in an appearance because a new show was opening and I want to declare my solidarity with Nick on every possible occasion—tomorrow he is to come down here and look at Don’s work and discuss showing it in the gallery in the near future. (Don is worried because he has nothing new, he says, to show Nick and of course I am urging him as usual to give Nick a chance to react to the paintings.)
This opening was for Bruce Nauman.125 Nauman had surrounded the walls with white doorless cubicles. The rest was up to you. You were supposed to go into one of them and take any position you liked, accompanied by as many people as you wished. Nick told me that one of Nauman’s other shows had featured a long narrow corridor down which you walked toward a television set. As you approached it, you saw yourself in the set, getting smaller and smaller. I’ve left out a lot of other details, but that was the general idea.
I have now finished the second chapter of Wanderings in a very rough form. It deals with the Hirschfeld Institute period of my stay in Berlin and my preliminary attitudes to the city and its boys and to Hirschfeld’s sexology. And now comes the problem of covering the rest of my time in Berlin. How to deal with the characters from my books? Should I simply quote from my own descriptions of them? I don’t want to make this merely a handbook and guide to my fiction. I want to cover the ground as quickly as possible because, after all, it is fundamentally an introduction to the American material, an answer to the question, why did I go to America.
But how deeply all this interests me! I don’t think I have ever felt so challenged and turned on by any other project. I’m merely in a flap because I feel I can’t possibly get it all “in.” But of course the thing I must remember is that I can “get in” anything that I really want to get in. What I have to do is just write all of it down and then take a good look at it and then begin “packing.”
I see this book essentially as a study of successive attitudes to my life. It is true autobiography, not memoirs.
December 8. Nick Wilder came down yesterday morning to look at Don’s work and talk about the show Don is to have at his gallery. Before he arrived, Don and I had an argument about what to show him. I begged Don to show some of his paintings and small ink drawings as well as the big portrait drawings. Don was very dubious about the paintings, afraid that Nick would be put off by them—which was only natural, after the negative reactions of Irving Blum. But I argued that a dealer is like a lawyer, you can’t afford to have secrets from him if you want him to represent you, and Don agreed and we finally picked out about a dozen paintings—that’s to say mostly the blotty watercolors.
Well, to Don’s amazement and to my much smaller amazement but huge joy and relief, Nick loved the watercolors and was altogether impressed by Don’s versatility and said that he wants to give Don a show in which the whole front room of the gallery is full of the watercolors with a few drawings in the back room. And, when we met Nick again, yesterday evening, at the opening of a show of Charles Hill’s work, Nick told Don that he had nearly called him that afternoon, because “I can’t get your paintings out of my mind.”
And Kitty was so joyful and said that he would always listen to Drub’s advice in the future, and he exclaimed—thinking of all the painting he would do for this show—“Now I can begin to live!” And honestly I believe, if I had been told I could have one wish granted to me (within the bounds of possibility) this would have been it.
Another bit of good news, though hardly in the same category, is that Calley is really interested in our Meeting by the River project and wants to go ahead. Jim is back here, just for today, because Salka arrived yesterday. She plans to sta
y with them through Christmas and maybe longer, if Jack and Jim will accompany her back to Switzerland early in the New Year, to go skiing.
A rather drunken fan on the phone, a few days ago, told me, “I’ve read several of your books.” I asked which ones. This baffled him for a moment, then he marvellously retorted, “A man like you—you’re a man who’s beyond titles!”
To return to Nick. He said that he wants Don’s show [to] be very important—either in May or early next fall, “in prime time.” What’s so marvellous about Nick is that he is quite consciously out to alter Don’s image—from that of the celebrity-hunting portraiteer who got the chance to draw famous people through his association with Isherwood to that of a serious artist who has to be respected for his talent. I get the impression that Nick thinks Irving Blum doesn’t really take Don seriously.
December 12. This afternoon, Julian Jebb is due to arrive here with his assistant, Rosemary Bowen Jones, and we are to be in the grip of the BBC for a week.126 Am at present sulking about this, wishing to Christ I’d never agreed to it, even wishing I’d agreed to go to Berlin because maybe once I was there I’d have remembered something interesting. Now it seems to me that Berlin was one of the least important episodes in my life, which is nonsense of course—but it does bring home to me that my life in those days was a pretty shabby little affair in comparison with what I have had since.