I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (11 page)

When Henry returned I started to give him back his seat, but he shook his head and sat where I had been sitting. Mrs. Onassis, at that point, finally asked me a few questions about myself and my life and I began to stutter out some answers. I was obviously nervous to be talking to her. When I am nervous my boyhood stammer often returns to haunt me. Beneath the table I felt Vrreeland’s hand reach over and gently give my knee a few reassuring taps as the “M” in “M-M-Mississippi” was having a hard time m-m-making it past M-M-Miss’sippi’s lips.

On another occasion, Henry took me to a benefit honoring director Harold Clurman, who, along with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, founded the Group Theatre. When we arrived Henry saw that he was seated next to Kim Stanley at our table and he switched his place card with mine so I could be her tablemate. Stanley and I hit it off and she wanted to hear all about my southern gothic past and teared up when I told her about the deaths of my mother and father when I was a child. She told me her own mother was an interior decorator and her father was a philosophy professor and she teared up even more when telling me about her brother Kenny, who was a pilot during World War II and “never came back home to be my brother.” She all but ignored Arthur Miller, who was on the other side of her at the table, thankful, it seemed, to talk about anything other than theater and the lore of her own talent at such a dinner. When Clurman got up to make his rambling acceptance speech, Stanley, like Vreeland at that earlier dinner, reached over and patted my knee. Stanley then grabbed my hand and clutched it with such force, such feeling, it seemed as if, in that moment, it was the last tether left her.

“I knew you and Kim would get along,” Henry told me as we rode home from the party that night. At first I had heard my brother’s name when he said it and not Miss Stanley’s. At the sound of my brother’s name in such a sentence I felt my throat tighten. Tears, confusingly, came to my eyes. “You’re wounds of a feather, you and Kim,” Henry said, yet sensed the moment he said it the comment itself had wounded me. It had. I heard not only pity in it but also derision. “Sorry, Miss’sippi,” he said. But he was wrong. It wasn’t just Mississippi I had fled in my move to New York. It wasn’t just my brother and all he stood for in his ease at living all his life in such a place. It was the pity I felt back there as an orphan, a sissy one at that, and the derision the pity had deformed itself into once I came out of the closet as a teenager. Henry’s presence in my life up until that moment had been a kind of banishment of such pity, such derision. His acceptance of me helped me to accept myself. He reached out to cup my face in his hand—for the first time as a form of apology—and for the first time I turned away from him.

The next month or so he invited me to even more events and more parties as a kind of “apology tour,” I see now as I look back on it. Then the invitations—indeed, his very presence in my life—began to taper off until one night at a society function up on the East Side that had to do in some way with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we became bored—or maybe that was when he finally decided it was I who bored him and not the party. Whatever the reason, when such a feeling of social ennui at such a party began to nudge at us we played a game of his devising called spot the doyenne. That night I beat him at spotting his adored Lily Auchincloss, whom he had once deemed “the doyenne’s doyenne,” and I even laughed at my having beat him at beckoning her to our side. After a bit of conversation, as we watched Mrs. Auchincloss walk away toward others at the party, Henry reached over and cupped my face in his hand. Surprising me, he turned it toward him and looked right at me. His eyes were welling as mine had in the car that night he’d said my brother’s name when he was talking about the saddest woman I’d ever met. He willed them however, to stop their welling. I watched his will at work. “You no longer need a passport,” he said, revoking himself, I know now, from my life. “You have attained your citizenship.”

I was to see Henry only a few more times before his death in 1994 from liver cancer when he was only fifty-nine. But I never stopped loving him in the way we loved each other—tentatively, platonically, totally. I went to his memorial service at the Metropolitan Museum, at which his dear friend David Hockney spoke so movingly. Hockney was one of the many friends of Henry’s who became, for a while, a friend of mine. I went up to David afterward, each of us welling up the same way Henry had when he knew before I did that we weren’t going to be seeing each other anymore. David and I hugged. We, unlike him, could not will our tears away. We reminisced about Henry.

“He cut me out of the herd at the exact moment I was ready,” I told David. “He knew that need in me. He was the first to really know it.”

“He cut me out of it too,” David quietly said. “That’s exactly what he did.”

I walked slowly down those steep steps of the Met that evening and wandered out alone into the herd heading down Fifth Avenue. It is where, back in the herd but alone, I have wandered—this kid called Miss’sippi who misses Henry—ever since.

*   *   *

One of the last parties Henry took me to was a New Year’s Eve one at Howard Moss’s apartment. Henry lived on 9th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and Howard on 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth. Howard lived in a studio with a terrace in the back, but on New Year’s Eve without the use of that terrace the place was as packed as a well-edited paragraph at
The New Yorker,
where Howard had been the poetry editor since 1948. I staked out a corner with choreographer Paul Taylor, who wasn’t much of a conversationalist. In fact, I began to suspect he was an idiot savant whose only idiom was dance. When I began to bemoan the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell to Paul he looked at me blankly and said he had no idea what I was talking about. I could not imagine a gay man not knowing who Falwell and his Moral Majority were. This was at the height of the hate they were fomenting against Paul and me and all the other gentlemen of a certain sort jostling about us, this smattering of smart homosexuals of cultural New York of whom one or two were even smartly dressed.

I’ve often wondered if that party was the night Henry handed me off to Howard, for the latter did land in that place in my life that Henry vacated. It all had the Shakespearean precision of a too-well-shaped narrative—even a stratagem—and it was certainly convenient, since he only had to walk around the block to execute the handoff. Henry knew I wanted to be a writer and Howard had entrée into the publishing world that Henry didn’t have for all his lofty connections in the city. Indeed, the respect given to Howard and his opinion in the literary establishment of the time was best summed up by W. H. Auden’s clerihew dedicated to him:

Is Robert Lowell

Better than Noel

Coward,

Howard?

Such a clerihew possessed the drollery that Howard himself possessed but that could be mistaken at times for a rather overly dear fussiness. But it was just such fussy dearness in others that Howard disdained. “There’s nothing more dreary than pretense,” he once whispered to me surveying the room at a boring function held at the apartment of some literary apparatchik he had taken me to. “Well, perhaps those drapes there are.”

I became friendly with Edward Albee through Howard and he and I began to talk about Moss, who died in 1987, when I was visiting Edward down in his loft in Tribeca one afternoon. “He was such a gentle, sweet man,” said Edward. “What I also responded to in him—like you—was that he was quick to spot pretension and preposterousness. There’s always a lot of that to be spotted in artistic circles. And you need someone like Howard—sweetly and gently since those were the stalwarts of his nature—to call it out.”

I first met Edward at that New Year’s Eve party at Howard’s—he was one of the two smartly dressed guests—but he couldn’t recall when he had first met Howard. “I just can’t really remember—starting back during my formative years in New York City—when Howard wasn’t around. I left home in 1948 when I was around twenty and moved straight to Greenwich Village. There was a ten-year period there between ’48 and ’58—like your own between ’74 and ’84—when I really learned everything and educated myself. We were all around each other, all of us who were to make it in the next generation, all the painters and poets and everybody. Nobody knew anybody and yet everybody knew everybody because none of us was famous at that point. We were all just at the cusp of doing stuff in that ten-year period.

“I had my own mentors back then, you know, a whole generation of them,” said Edward. “You need all that. You have to have that. It’s harder now. Everyone is so protected from everyone else these days. And it’s too expensive now to be a struggling artist in this town. My second apartment here was on Henry Street on the Lower East Side. A sixth-floor walk-up. It was sixteen dollars a month. One of my later apartments was underneath Howard in that brownstone on 10th Street between Sixth and Fifth. That’s when we really became close, when we were upstairs, downstairs neighbors.

“But back in the late 1940s and early 1950s there were only a few hangouts with their specific denizens. There was the Cedar Bar where all the painters would go and … hmm … lie down. I assume I must have first met Howard back then at one of those places. I don’t remember when I actually met anybody, I’ve met so many people in my life. I just knew him forever. But it was probably in the early 1950s when our paths crossed. He was already at
The New Yorker,
so he was the impressive one. I was the impressed.”

Howard continues to impress me with how he hovers about me in the most unexpected moments. Once when I was going to interview Michelle Williams for one of my Q and A’s for The Daily Beast Web site I stopped in a used bookstore on Smith Street in Brooklyn a few blocks from the brownstone she and Heath Ledger shared before his death. Michelle had agreed to the interview because she had loved a cover story I had written on Heath for
Vanity Fair
even before she had met him herself. I had done the interview with Heath in Prague, where he was filming
A Knight’s Tale.

I knew Michelle loved poetry and found a first edition of Howard’s
Selected Poems
at that shop on Smith to give her as a present. When I surprised her with it, I told her Howard had been a mentor of mine and she gasped, for Howard had written a poem that had helped her in her grief over Ledger’s death. She had recently been trying to find it again and could not recall its title. She quickly scanned the table of contents and gasped again.

“Here it is,” she said. “‘The Pruned Tree.’ That’s the title. This poem helped me so much after Heath died. So much.”

“You know, Michelle, when I was in Prague doing that interview with Heath at one point we took a stroll across the Charles Bridge and I asked him if he wanted to smoke a joint,” I told her. “I had sneaked one over in a rolled-up sock in my suitcase. He said yes. So we stopped and watched the moon rise over the Vitava River and took turns taking tokes. I got really stoned with him. At one point I thought that was one of the coolest things to have happened during one of my interviews. But because of the way Heath died that memory doesn’t seem so cool anymore,” I said, knowing by acknowledging it I was also acknowledging my own burgeoning use of drugs more menacing than marijuana.

“Thank you for telling me that,” she quietly said, then just as quietly read aloud the words of Howard’s poem:

“As a torn paper might seal up its side,

Or a streak of water stitch itself to silk

And disappear, my wound has been my healing,

And I am made more beautiful by losses.

See the flat water in the distance nodding

Approval, the light that fell in love with statues,

Seeing me alive, turns its motion toward me.

Shorn, I rejoice in what was taken from me.

“What can the moonlight do with my new shape

But trace and retrace its miracle of order?

I stand, waiting for the strange reaction

Of insects who knew me in my larger self,

Unkempt, in a naturalness I did not love.

Even the dog’s voice rings with a new echo,

And all the little leaves I shed are singing,

Singing to the moon of shapely newness.

“Somewhere what I lost I hope is springing

To life again. The roofs, astonished by me,

Are taking new bearings in the night, the owl

Is crying for a further wisdom, the lilac

Putting forth its strongest scent to find me.

Butterflies, like sails in grooves, are winging

Out of the water to wash me, wash me.

Now, I am stirring like a seed in China.”

When I visited Edward Albee down at his loft he and I had discussed that very poem by Howard as one we both loved. “I was first attracted to Howard because of his poetry,” Edward said. “I admired his work so. Howard was a brilliant, brilliant poet. Very much influenced, I’d say, by Auden. And Elizabeth Bishop, who was a dear friend. But his poetry was more than brilliant; it was moving. He was an elegist, I suppose, except when he was not being one. All his poems are about Howard’s perception of reality.

“Speaking of which—reality—I tried to persuade Howard not to buy that house of his in East Hampton where you’d often visit him,” Edward continued. “It really didn’t have anything to do with him. It was very modern. Too modern. It was a strange little house. It just didn’t suit him. It wasn’t proper for him. I kept showing him houses. Older houses. With all sorts of wonderful areas for books. Lots of little rooms hidden away. I thought he would have been happier in such a house. He did like to get away from the place and visit me in Montauk, as that awful dinner party you came to with him attests.”

Edward was right. I’d often visit Howard at his home in the Springs section of East Hampton and we’d ride over to Montauk to have dinner at Edward’s place. The dinner party Edward mentioned was for his mother, Frankie. He had invited Howard and me along with Joanna Steichen and Elaine Steinbeck, “two widows at their peak,” as Howard described them on our drive over.