I had several writing-adjacent jobs in the early seventies. I worked as a mail boy at an ad agency in Jackson Square. The boss there was a retired admiral who had hired me because of my service in the Navy—and, like Mary Ann Singleton in Tales, part of my job entailed raising the American flag every morning on the front of the building. Then I would push my cart from office to office, dispensing mail and free cans of Shasta soda, one of the agency’s top clients. I got to know the whole building that way, so I mined their gossip and jokes for a snappy newsletter that I published once a week. People loved it, but it tipped off the admiral that I might have a few ambitions beyond the mailroom. I was not, he informed me nicely, the mail boy in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It wasn’t like that here. There would be no meteoric rise to the top.
Another agency, a PR firm in the same neighborhood, lured me in with the title of account executive. There I worked with World Airways in Oakland when it was promoting a tricked-out 747 for private charters. It was intended for rock stars and millionaires, so it was Peter Maxed to the max with pink and orange velvet. On the day of the photo shoot for the campaign, when a male model was needed to go with the female one they had hired, I rushed home for a dinner jacket and obligingly posed with her, a glass of champagne in my hand. I remember that gig because it was the most interesting. I remember, too, the one that made me quit. One of the partners had come into my office (I had my own office!) with a pamphlet from a pharmaceutical company we were representing. “Put this into layman’s terms,” he said. “The language is very technical.” When he returned, he asked if I had figured it out. “Yes,” I said, “it’s a pill you stick up a dog’s ass to keep him from farting.” He nodded with a dim, defeated smile and left.
What discouraged me most, really, was the talk of retirement plans. These guys were dead serious about this. Their intention was to stay for the next thirty years, beneath these very fluorescent lights, arriving at eight and ducking out at noon for lunch, then trudging home at six, but they would be handsomely paid if they just stuck it out. I could think of nothing more terrifying, so I quit before it started sounding like a good idea. To bolster my resolve after I’d abandoned that paycheck, I had cards printed bearing my phone number and six words:
Armistead Maupin writes for a living.
This was my declaration of independence, my commitment, in writing, to a writer’s life, even in the face of penury. I handed the card out mostly in bars, or to guys I wouldn’t mind seeing again after a night at the Glory Holes on Sixth Street. The freelance jobs I managed to snag were interesting but seldom produced the cash I needed each month for Little Cat Feet. I expanded my old king of the Gypsies piece from the AP for a feature in Coast magazine. I wrote feature stories for Pacific Sun, a weekly newspaper in Marin County, where I described the backstage life of a Nude Encounter girl, and, later, a Levi’s denim jacket art contest at which one of the judges, Rudi Gernreich, the “inventor” of the topless swimsuit, greeted each vividly embroidered entry with an arched eyebrow, foreshadowing the high camp drama of Project Runway. Though I was clueless about it then, Gernreich and his lover, Harry Hay, had, over twenty years earlier in Los Angeles, founded the Mattachine Society, one of the country’s first gay rights organizations. Because of the vital need for secrecy, the group had been modeled on a Communist cell, which may have accounted for Gernreich’s silence on the subject once he got famous as a designer.
Another local happening that grabbed my attention was a benefit being thrown at California Hall on Polk Street by a Union Street hairdresser named Kenneth Marlowe. He was about to embark on a sex change, so he had hired the seventies remnants of a big-band orchestra (Tommy Dorsey? Benny Goodman?) and invited tout San Francisco to come dance the old-fashioned way and pay for his surgery. He called it “the ball to end all balls.” That was certainly more than enough to entice me, but Marlowe had also persuaded Sally Rand, the legendary fan dancer from the 1939 World’s Fair on Treasure Island, to perform at the event. The room was full of spry seventy-somethings, largely straight couples, as nearly as I could tell, twirling deliriously around the dance floor, while Marlowe performed as a brassy but warm MC. Sally danced, teasingly, with her fluffy white ostrich-feather fans, under what had to have been a fifteen-watt blue bulb. Kenneth Marlowe, now on his way to becoming Kate, had given himself a send-off like few have ever seen in the city.
The next day I had lunch with both Kate and Sally at a restaurant on the Russian Hill end of Polk Street. It was Sally’s seventieth birthday, so I ordered a cake. She blew out the candles with gusto and proceeded to tell raunchy stories about her stripper days at the Music Box (now the Great American Music Hall). Kate, not to be outdone, told us that she—Kenneth, that is—had grown up in a whorehouse in Winnemucca, Nevada, where his mother had been the madam. I was fascinated by the thought of that all-female setting for a boy who felt like a girl, so I later borrowed it for Anna Madrigal’s backstory. When it came to her essence, however, Anna was not in the least like Kate, any more than Dawn Simmons had been back in Charleston.
Some years later, to my confusion, I read a memoir by Kate Marlowe in which she described a tough childhood in Chicago, where her mother had been a gangster’s moll. Her history had a way of changing, it seemed, depending on her mood and audience. Much as I would later do with Anna Madrigal, she would grab bits from here and there, anything that caught her fancy, in her construction of a vivid life.
NONE OF THIS paid the rent, of course, so I started borrowing money from my father. It was never very much—just a hundred or two from time to time—but the old man, predictably, got more and more apoplectic, telling me I’d been a goddamn fool for quitting a real job that had a future. I was starting to think he was right. More than ever, though, the prospect of a nine-to-five job was abhorrent to me.
“Don’t ask him again,” my mother told me one night on the phone. “I’ll see what I can do.” Not long after that she mailed me a cashier’s check for a thousand dollars. “It’s my mad money,” she said mysteriously, “and I expect you to pay me back.”
Mad money? In high school that’s what a girl kept in her purse in case she had trouble with her date and had to get home on her own. Why would my mother need mad money? And how long had she been stashing it, anyway? I knew not to ask. She had given me treasured presents before—antiques mostly, like a shiny brass coal pail I kept magazines in for years, and an English miner’s lantern with red glass that still sits on our dresser at Diamond Street—but nothing could compare to the gift of a mother’s mad money to keep my reckless dreams afloat.
MOST OF US don’t know when our Moment comes. We don’t feel it at all. It’s just a passing whim, or a phone call or a snippet of conversation that leads to one thing and another and you end up with a life you would never have had at all had it not been for that first thing, that first random thing. Mine was just a funny lead I had followed up on. A young woman of Spanish land-grant heritage (her middle name was Vallejo) told me at a cocktail party about a strange heterosexual mating ritual at the Marina Safeway, so I decided on the spot to write about it for the Pacific Sun. Everything—and I mean everything—flowed from that decision. Journalism more or less failed me in that endeavor—or, really, I failed it—but a fictional entity was born who would live in me for the rest of my life.
I had no choice but to make up Mary Ann Singleton. None of the single women down at the Marina Safeway—a swooping manta ray of a sixties supermarket whose style became the template for scores of others around the country—would admit to a reporter that she was loitering in the vegetable department in her rhinestone-studded brushed denim pantsuit for the sole purpose of a little male company that night. I could see it all happening before my eyes, the circling predators, the forced titters when carts bumped carts, the not-that-subtle discussion of zucchini and cucumbers—but it was nothing that anyone, male or female, would discuss.
So I took a few notes for color (the chain’s slogan back then wa
s Since We’re Neighbors, Let’s Be Friends) and went home and made up a story, finally freed from the tiresome bonds of journalism. The young woman I invented was a bright, but decidedly naive, escapee from Cleveland—enough like me, in other words, that I could put words into her mouth with a degree of confidence. Mary Ann’s friend Connie Bradshaw, who had brought her to the Safeway to cruise, was a stewardess who fancied herself a pickup artist but inevitably failed with men. Mary Ann is approached by a creep in a white belt who asks her about snow peas but ends up calling her a bitch when she rebuffs him. She is consoled by another man who has overheard them. Mary Ann likes him. A lot. She thinks he might be the man of her dreams, in fact, until she discovers that he’s there with the man of his dreams.
The story struck a nerve with readers of this Marin newspaper (especially the women), so the editor asked me if I would consider following Mary Ann’s adventures from week to week. He was launching a new San Francisco edition of the paper and thought this would work nicely in the city. I agreed on the grounds that I could follow other characters as well, including the winsome boyfriend of the gay man Mary Ann had met at the supermarket. (He was Michael Huxtable back then; in his second incarnation his last name became Tolliver.) I named this new venture “The Serial” and had pancake-sized promo stickers made that I personally slapped on every light pole on the cruisy blocks of Polk Street. I was filled with hope.
That came crashing down five weeks later when the San Francisco edition of the Pacific Sun folded. The editor told me that “The Serial” had easily been their most popular feature, and proved it by bestowing the title on another writer, Cyra McFadden, who created her own hilarious and acerbic (and eventually best-selling) satire about yuppies in Marin County. I fell into a funk, realizing that I was flat broke again. Somehow I managed to land another paycheck at the San Francisco Opera, where I wrote press releases and diva profiles in a windowless room. My boss was Maestro Kurt Herbert Adler, a blustering Austrian-born tyrant who commanded a backstage brigade of nervous, scurrying women. I knew nothing, and cared less, about opera. I faked a lot of it with an encyclopedic book on the subject that my mother sent me at Christmas. She had inscribed it: “For Teddy, our new ‘Opera Star.’” She was understandably elated that I had found steady employment.
Maestro Adler was an unrelenting homophobe—no small achievement when you’ve run an opera company for two decades. On Christmas Eve he summoned half a dozen staffers to his office while he made decisions about casting the fall season. For part of this time he was on the phone with Leontyne Price, one of the great sopranos of the day, on whom he unleashed a torrent of gooey Viennese charm, the likes of which we had never seen. He even blew kisses to her dogs. I’m not sure why the rest of us had to be there for this moment, except perhaps to hear that the maestro actually knew the names of her dogs. Then Adler pored over a long list of proposed singers. One of them, a famous tenor, really raised his ire. “No!” he yelled, slamming his hand down on his desk. “I vill not knowingly hire another fehrrry in this house.” It was unnerving, to say the least, since I realized he must talk this way all the time, and that no one here would dream of calling him on it. I don’t think he meant the fairy in the room. He had not hired me, after all, knowingly or otherwise, and I was far less worthy of his attention than Leontyne Price’s dogs.
At some point in that scrambling rat race of an opera season, I received a phone call at my desk from Virginia Westover, a society columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, whom I had come to know casually at opera fund-raisers.
“Listen,” she said. “I was at a party last night, and Charles McCabe was going on and on about your serial in the Pacific Sun.”
Charles McCabe was a senior columnist at the Chronicle, a crusty, hard-drinking Irishman with a roadmap of a nose to show for it. He wrote essays about shaving and other manly pursuits, like his love of Ranier Ale, which he called Green Death. Some people found him misogynistic and homophobic. I was one of them.
“He must’ve hated it,” I said to Ginnie.
“No, no. He thinks they should have something like that in the Chronicle. I don’t know if it was just loose talk, but I thought you should know.”
I wasted no time in contacting McCabe. He wrote back to say that the paper needed young blood, since the columnists were nothing but “a bunch of old farts about to fall off the hooks” and I was “just vulgar enough” to fit in at the Chronicle. He arranged a meeting with the editor, Charles deYoung Thieriot, whose great-grandfather had founded the paper in 1865, when it was called the Daily Dramatic Chronicle and covered the various “entertainments,” fleshly and otherwise, of the Barbary Coast. When it came to the newspaper’s contents, Charlie Thieriot’s chief concerns were said to be society parties and duck hunting, since that was how he spent his own time. He had personally designed the masthead for the “Social Scene” column, a sophomoric effort in every way, since its crude curlicue lettering looked like something from a 1935 high school yearbook.
I dug out a blazer and a tie for the interview. The editor proved to be a gentleman, a little reserved but kind. He was nervous about running fiction in his newspaper (make your own joke here), so the title of the serial would have to indicate that it wasn’t actual news. And he wanted to be clear about one other thing:
“This will have to run five days a week. Eight hundred words a day. Not weekly, the way you did it before.”
“I understand.”
“You can write a story that will just . . . keep on going?”
“Absolutely.”
“Forever?”
“Yes sir.”
My heart was in my throat. How the fuck was I going to do that?
TWELVE
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN AND GETTING good at masturbation, I went on a cross-country bus trip that could not have been more charged with erotic stimuli. My Explorer troop was headed to Philmont Scout Ranch in northern New Mexico, and, along the way, we slept at Army bases where uniformed privates with a buddy-buddy air and bulging muscles would lead us to the mess hall and show us our cots before taps. One night at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, they took us to a movie in a Quonset hut. It was Twilight for the Gods, starring Rock Hudson. I had seen the actor before in Giant and Written on the Wind, but my libido had yet to rise to the occasion. Here, however, Hudson played a sea captain in the South Pacific who was always shouting and climbing rope ladders in a storm. He was taller than anyone in the movie, maybe even the world. His Adam’s apple was the size of an apple.
By the time I was grown up and living in San Francisco, I had heard about the size of other parts as well. Hudson frequented the baths and had a legendary sex life, and the lucky guys who had a shot at him tended not to keep the information to themselves. So, when someone I picked up at the Lion Pub invited me to a gallery opening in Palm Springs that counted Rock Hudson among the hosts, I was seriously tempted. The other host, he added, was someone called Prince Umberto de Poliolo, who ran the gallery and consorted with one of the lesser Gabors—Magda, as I recall.
But was this really the right time to be leaving town? The Chronicle had approved “Tales of the City” in principle but had wisely requested six weeks’ worth of episodes to establish a safe backlog before they started to run it. I had submitted thirty installments for their approval, keeping the gay content limited to Michael Tolliver’s appearance in the Marina Safeway, for fear of scaring them off. Even then, though, they were dragging their feet, refusing to set a firm start date. I was a wreck for months. I just sat around at Little Cat Feet, waiting and worrying.
So maybe a little getaway was just what I needed.
WE WERE GREETED at the Palm Springs airport by a friend of the guy from the Lion. This man had hazmat-yellow hair and the tightest, tannest face I had ever seen on someone his age, whatever that was. He drove a powder-blue Lincoln Continental convertible, with the top down. As we cruised through the balmy desert afternoon, he would look over his shoulder at me and speak with casual affection of hi
s good friend Lee (“Lee always says . . . Lee hates it when I . . . Lee almost bought that house”). I finally took the hint and asked if he meant Liberace, having suspected as much when he pulled off the road twice to change his rings. He had a lock box in the trunk full of hideous diamond rings and, apparently, liked to keep them rotating.
The gallery, disappointingly, was not the high-ceilinged salon I’d conjured up from Ross Hunter movies. It was just a storefront on the main drag packed with shiny, pastel people drinking white wine out of plastic glasses. I don’t remember what the art was. If Magda’s prince was there, I never knew it, since there was no telltale regalia in the room. Rock Hudson certainly wasn’t there. It was mostly a gathering of merry gay men and a few old ladies with architectural hair.
One of the people in that crowd was a guy named Jack, who told me in the course of an animated conversation that he had once been Rock Hudson’s live-in lover. His unspectacular looks didn’t immediately suggest that. He was balding and in his early thirties (exactly my age to the day, we would later discover), though he emanated a certain feral charisma on which his confidence seemed to ride. Rock wasn’t there that night, he said, wasn’t even in town, in fact, but I was welcome to join him—Jack—and a few others for a party afterward at a house in Indio. I had no idea where Indio was, but it sounded like a workable plan. My friend from the Lion had already left with the guy with the rotating diamond rings, so I was free and easy.
THERE WERE A dozen people in that house in Indio. All men. Many of them seemed to have some connection to Rock Hudson—a gardener, a trainer, an optometrist. It was just a tract house without a tract, sitting alone in the midst of a moonlit plain. There were sodas and snacks on a butcher-block island in the kitchen. I was offered a drug by our host—a pill, as I recall, or maybe a tab—so I asked Jack what it did. It’s TT1, he told me. A relaxant that’s given to women during childbirth. That was all the information I needed. In those days if something had a name you took it.