On another visit to San Francisco in the early eighties we drove up Highway 1 to Manka’s Inverness Lodge, which was still just a funky Czech restaurant, not the Craftsman foodie destination it is today. After our order had been taken by a lethargic Czech waiter with unusually long arms, Curt was prompted to remark under his breath: “Manka see, Manka do.” His wit, I noticed, had grown more trenchant and tinged with world-weariness. Or maybe I was finally noticing the man himself, now that he was no longer my high-booted Russian soldier and we could just be friends heading up the highway together to explore the cruisy shrubbery of the Russian River.
Curt died of AIDS in 1985. By then, because of AIDS, I was a fierce foe of the closet, so it bothered me when his New York Times obituary reported that he had died of “complications resulting from cancer.” I suspect that was done for the folks back in Kansas. I was glad to know, however, that it was Barbara Caruso—the beautiful, enduring Barbara—who had kept things light and loving when she scooped him off the floor of his apartment for his last trip to the hospital.
“C’mon, darling, time for us to go.”
CURT WAS NOT particularly famous when he died. He had done a few soaps and Sleuth and Absurd Person Singular on Broadway, but he had been in the second cast of The Boys in the Band, not the original. Still, he never stopped being a star to me.
He once invited me to visit him on the set of The Guiding Light, where, buzzed on my first-ever toot of cocaine, I made the captivating discovery that a soap-opera set looks like a Macy’s furniture showroom with a camera whirling frenetically in the middle. Such memories are all I have of Curt. I searched for him recently on YouTube to no avail. He endures mostly in the hearts of those who received his particular magic at a particular time, but he endures nonetheless.
In 1993 I flew to New York for the Gay Games and the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall. I made a speech about the heroes of AIDS from the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium before an audience of 50,000 people. My friend Ian was also there that night, charming the audience with a typically self-effacing opening joke: My name is Sir Ian McKellen, but you may call me Serena. Afterward, in the batter’s box, he let me know that he planned to read “Letter to Mama” the following night in his new one-man show, A Knight Out.
This was the letter I had written not long before my mother died.
The letter I had so hoped would fix things between us.
The letter I thought I had thrown down a well.
To hear my own words spoken in a Broadway theater by one of the world’s greatest actors had me weeping buckets. I wept for my long-gone mother, for all the friends I’d seen die in the previous decade, for my youthful inability to bare my heart completely without hiding behind the veil of fiction.
And then something astonishing happened: there onstage Ian began to pay tribute to his first significant love, an actor he had met in 1961, when he was fresh out of Cambridge and appearing in an amateur production with graduates of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. The actor had won Ian’s heart one night in London when they had gorged on each other and Sara Lee apple pie and the new Broadway soundtrack of Gypsy. This golden-haired twenty-year-old from Kansas had struck Ian as quintessentially all-American with his incandescent smile, his baggy Army pants, and scuffed sneakers. The romance had been brief, but they had kept up for years, as actors do—one of them on Broadway, the other in the West End.
Curt had been the first of Ian’s friends to die of AIDS.
Yes, Curt. That Curt.
Ian and I had fallen in love with the same man, ten years apart. I went backstage afterward to tell him as much, and we were both gobsmacked. The playwright Terrence McNally, standing nearby and hearing our conversation, said that he himself, as a matter of fact, had once had a thing for Curt. We laughed about that, all three of us, conjuring Curt like a hologram in our midst, recognizing the secret of his appeal: when he was with you he paid complete attention, and sometimes, when you needed it most, that could feel like forever.
TEN
I MISSED VIETNAM, AS STRANGE AS that sounds. I missed that rough-hewn fellowship of men and the allure of those dusty villages. Most of all, I missed the sense of purpose, however delusional, that I had found there. So, when my friend Mel called me in Charleston to ask if I wanted to go back to Vietnam as a civilian, I told him yes without a moment’s hesitation. Mel and I had been friends when he worked as a staffer for Admiral Zumwalt in Saigon. Now he was working at the White House and had an interesting scheme up his well-starched sleeve. How would I like to organize some Vietnam veterans who would return to the war to do good works in the name of “Vietnamization”? (That was Nixon’s term for leaving the war in the hands of the South Vietnamese, without losing face or appearing to surrender.) He would be up for reelection in a year, so he needed a distraction from the hordes of antiwar veterans spreading like crabgrass on the mall behind the White House. He despised those long-haired peaceniks, obsessed over them, especially a cocky Yalie named John Kerry, late of the Brown Water Navy, who had created the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and was getting press for it.
That’s where Mel’s scheme came in. What Nixon needed, Mel felt, was a counterpropaganda force of veterans who were not ashamed of their role in the war and were willing to talk about it to the press. But such an entity had to be organized, and it should not, under any circumstances, appear to come from the White House.
And so the Cat Lai Commune was invented. I named it that to give it a hip, countercultural ring, though no one seemed fooled, since most of the group were good ol’ boys recruited from conservative veterans’ organizations. After a month of preparation, ten of us boarded a chilly C-140 transport plane, flying out of Alaska for Vietnam with a load of helicopter parts and a ton of blood. Once in Cat Lai, a port town in the lower Mekong Delta, our job was to build a twenty-unit housing complex for disabled Vietnamese naval veterans. It looked less like a complex than a motel, and a crappy one at that, since only a few of us knew how to lay cinderblock or install windows. I earned my keep by writing inspirational pieces about our experience, one of which was published by William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. Though there were Vietcong nearby, we worked without guns or uniforms, unless you count the royal-blue nylon T-shirts we wore to identify ourselves to the locals. For two sweltering months we were a high-profile, right-wing Habitat for Humanity.
Our main job, of course, was to talk to the press. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times drove out from Saigon to meet these odd-duck veterans who had returned to the war as civilians because they believed so deeply in the cause. Gloria Emerson, the celebrated Times correspondent, seemed to smell a rat but decided, incorrectly, that we’d come back as an act of penance, having committed atrocities of one sort or another during our time in-country. My usual rap was that most veterans weren’t like John Kerry and his followers: we were proud of our military service and had not ended up as “potheads and radicals.” No one guessed we were doing the work of the White House, specifically the team of Chuck Colson, Bob Haldeman, and John Erlichman, the infamous Dirty Tricks Department that would eventually cost Nixon the presidency with the Watergate burglary.
Back in Charleston, I kept in touch with Holger Jensen, the AP correspondent I had met in Cat Lai. I was already longing to escape the closet-sized steam bath of South Carolina, so I asked him if he could set me up for a job interview at the AP. I arrived at the bureau in New York with my cumbersome reporter’s scrapbook under my arm—all my greatest hits: the Spanish moss blight, the Chitlin Strut, the Gone With the Wind hoax—but they refused to look at it. They said they wanted to see how well I worked under pressure, so they put me in a glass isolation booth that looked like a discard from a fifties quiz show. There, in less than half an hour, I arranged the pertinent facts of Lucille Ball’s 1961 wedding to comedian Gary Morton into a plausible AP story. Thousands jammed the sidewalk outside of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church as America’s favorite redhead blah, blah, blah .
. .
Three days later I got a call at the News and Courier, saying that I had passed the AP test, and that, luckily, there was an opening in the bureau in Buffalo. I didn’t say no on the spot, for fear of sabotaging the offer, but back at Tradd Street, Miss Beth, in a rare moment of lucidity, confirmed my suspicions. “Honey, from what I hear tell, Buffalo is one place you do not want to shuffle off to.” I put off answering the AP for several more days when, to my mortification, they called me back. They’d just had an opening in the San Francisco bureau. Would that be preferable to Buffalo?
I had seen San Francisco on my way to and from Vietnam. I had stayed at the Powell Hotel off Market Street and taken a cable car into the hills. A Gray Line tour bus had taken me to the gravesite of my favorite nonexistent person, Carlotta Valdes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. My friend Peggy Knickerbocker, then the wife of fellow Navy-man and Chapel Hillian Jay Hanan, had pointed out the Chinese movie theater in North Beach where the Cockettes performed (What did she just say?) and taken me to a party in Sea Cliff, where one of her friends, a straight guy I didn’t personally know, embraced me with alarming tenderness when he learned I’d just returned from the war. (Southern men, in my experience, never did such things for fear of instant emasculation.) When I processed out of the Navy on Treasure Island, I had stared across the crystalline blue bay at the shining white towers of the city and wondered, ever so idly, if I could see myself living there.
It had certainly seemed preferable to Buffalo.
I MADE TWO significant purchases before I drove west to California: a white Opel GT and an Irish setter–colored houndstooth tweed suit I had seen advertised in Playboy magazine. The Opel GT, if you remember, was a sort of low-slung mini-Corvette. You practically had to lie down to drive it. You yanked a crank near the gearbox to make the headlights rise out its sleek, featureless nose. It had no trunk whatsoever, or even a hatchback, so there was barely enough space behind the seat to stuff my new houndstooth suit and my framed ancestral portrait of Grandpa Branch. That suit, by the way, came with a pair of matching knickers as an alternative to the trousers. Clearly, I thought I would be someone considerably more debonair by the time I arrived in California.
I mentioned my new job to a trick I’d picked up at the Battery. “Oh, you’re gonna love San Francisco, honey. They have fifty gay bars there.” My response was as primly aghast as you might expect from a young Republican with a white Opel GT and a knickers suit. “No way. I would never go into one of those.” Needless to say, I was in one of those on my first night in town. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I felt a tinge of melancholy when I broke the news to Miss Beth. She was becoming foggier all the time—and more than a little infirm, so I worried, probably without warrant, that my absence from her house would be difficult for her. I knelt by her chair in the shop and shared my excitement about having a chance to live in San Francisco. She understood completely. That city is just as lovely as Charleston, and the people are so elegant. The ladies put on gray suits and white gloves just to go shopping. To me, this sounded suspiciously like Kim Novak in Vertigo, but I let it go. Maybe San Francisco had actually been that way, once upon a time; maybe Miss Beth was remembering that time and not the Hitchcock movie. I chatted with her a few minutes longer before she cut short our conversation by asking me my name. I told her my name, though she had known it very well for several years.
Well, you’re a very nice young man. You should meet the young man who lives upstairs. I think you’d like each other very much.
In her genteel senility, Miss Beth had just fixed me up with myself.
It was the perfect benediction for my road trip west, since, after a lifetime of stifling pretense, I would finally get to meet myself in San Francisco.
I HAD DRIVEN as far as Clinton, Iowa (pop. 26,000), when an unimaginable phone call interrupted the trip. My friend Tom, an artist and a fellow member of the Cat Lai Commune, had invited me to stay in his houseboat on the Mississippi River. We were having dinner in town that night in his parents’ dining room, a quaintly antimacassared scene out of Norman Rockwell. Tom’s mother took the call in another room. We could hear a succession of polite murmurs before she brought the phone to the table, yanking the cord behind her like a torch singer with an obstinate mic. She looked like she’d just won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.
“It’s the White House,” she whispered to her son, covering the receiver with her hand. “A Mr. Holderman . . . Holleran . . . something. They want you in the Oval Office on Tuesday. President Nixon wants to see you, Tom! They’ve been trying to reach Armistead, too! Should I tell them you’re here?”
It occurs to me now that I could have missed this moment completely. I’d been on the road for four or five days, with five more to go, and I wasn’t checking in with anyone along the way. Had I not been invited to stay at Tom’s houseboat, had Bob Haldeman not called at suppertime, I would have been unreachable on my cross-country odyssey, thereby missing out on one of the more surreal episodes of my life.
The president wanted to “recognize” us for our volunteer efforts in Vietnam. The urgent necessity that this happen on a particular day—this Tuesday!—should have been a red flag. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, though. I was thinking about how much fun it would be to call the AP in San Francisco and tell the bureau chief I’d be a few days late for work because the president wanted to see me in the Oval Office.
All was revealed on a crisp blue morning in October, when our limousines nosed through a crowd of protesters at the White House gates. Nixon’s nemesis, John Kerry, had been planning this demonstration for weeks, so we were there to show the world that Nixon cared about veterans. It also gave him a good excuse to stay indoors during the protest. But even from the Oval Office you could hear them, a rolling surf-roar of outrage led by a charismatic young Turk who would one day seem as stiff as Nixon himself in his unblinking defense of unpopular foreign wars.
When the ten of us entered the Oval Office, I recognized the niche by the door, those three little shelves with a scallop-shell cap whose contents have changed with each new president. Nixon—or, more likely, his wife, Pat—had chosen half a dozen ceramic pheasants for that spot. I had already seen those birds in a magazine when Elvis Presley came here to be made a “Special Agent-at-Large for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.” There was no such position, of course, but Nixon, having received an earnest letter from the King, had agreed to the meeting in the belief it would make him look cool with “the kids.” Elvis, we are told, wanted desperately to atone for having inspired the Beatles, whom he regarded as a deeply degenerate influence on the youth of the nation.
I myself witnessed Nixon’s burning need to be accepted by the young. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip when he stepped forward to shake our hands, and his body language suggested nothing so much as a jittery freshman at a fraternity rush party. We were just a bunch of twentysomethings, and he was president of the United States, yet he hadn’t a clue as to how to be natural with us. It didn’t help that he was using a dry professorial tone that might have succeeded as a speech but failed utterly as conversation. (“Now, let’s see what would happen if we were to get out just a bit too soon . . . a month too soon, three months too soon, four . . .”) It sounds strange to say that I was suffering for him, but I was. His discomfort was palpable.
So, as leader of the group, I made a little speech of my own, trying to inject a lighter note as I told the president about our lack of experience at building houses and the way that Gloria Emerson, the Times journalist, had grilled us about the atrocities that might have secretly motivated our return to Vietnam. That got a rise out of him, if not exactly the rueful chuckle I had imagined. “Yeah, of course,” he muttered with the darkest of scowls. “She is a total bitch.” She was already on his Enemies List, I realized, and there was a whiff of brimstone in the air that made me decide to drop the subject. (When I saw Emerson again at a booksellers’ conve
ntion in the nineties, I couldn’t resist telling her about Nixon’s response. She loved it as I much as I thought she would, and said she would wear that designation as a badge of honor.)
The president, as it turned out, saw only one chance to be one of the guys, and he took it when we were talking about our affection for the Vietnamese people. One of us pointed out that our mamasan, the middle-aged woman who cooked our meals in Cat Lai, had always warned us when the Vietcong were around.
“And those little girls,” said Nixon, looking directly at me. “When they’re riding down the street on their bicycles with the tails of their silk ao dais blowing in the wind . . . they look like little butterflies.” This observation might have sounded sweet had it been made, say, by Mrs. Zumwalt, but coming from a man with jowls and five-o’clock shadow, it seemed drenched in drool. I realized, to my horror, that Nixon was trying to talk sex with us—a little wink wink, nudge nudge with the troops—but, as his lousy luck would have it, he had chosen to do so with the only cocksucker in sight.
I told this story to the noted historian Douglas Brinkley in 2002 when he was writing a book called Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. (In those days Kerry was energetically preparing to run for president in 2004.) The next time Brinkley called me in San Francisco he said that he had just checked out my account of those twenty squirm-inducing minutes with Nixon in the Oval Office.
“Checked it out? How?”
“You’re on the tapes,” he said.
The tapes. The tapes. From the tape recorder Nixon had secretly installed in the Oval Office. I was on them?