The Gay Metropolis (18 page)

“A man tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You're wrong,'” Helms recalled. ‘“The man who deserves most credit is Arthur Laurents.'”

“How would you know?”

“I'm Steve Sondheim,” the man replied.

Thousands of gay Americans fell in love with
West Side Story
when they were children in the fifties. And for legions of kids of all persuasions, the show provided them with their first concrete notion of romantic love. To many gay adults coming of age in the sixties, the romance, violence, danger, and mystery so audible on the original cast album all felt like integral parts of the gay life they had embraced. The lyrics of “Somewhere” in particular seemed to speak directly to the gay experience before the age of liberation. In 1996, it was one of the songs chosen for the first mass gay wedding of two hundred couples in San Francisco, presided over by the city's mayor, Willie Brown.

But none of the collaborators (or their 1950s contemporaries) ever suspected there was anything gay about their very heterosexual love story. (Coincidentally, Larry Kert, who starred as Tony, was also gay.) “It was never an issue that we talked about,” said Murray Gitlin, who fell in love with the show when it opened. “I never thought about it as gay.”

“There is one sensibility all four of us share which is much more important and really
does
inform the work,” said Arthur Laurents. “We're all Jews. Think about it and what it means. Creative work is undoubtedly the sum of the creators but certain elements take a bigger role than others at different times.
West Side
can be said to be informed by our political and sociological viewpoint; our Jewishness as the source of passion against prejudice; our theatrical vision, our aspiration, but not, I think, by our sexual orientation.” Gore Vidal agreed that the sexuality of the authors was irrelevant to their work: the fact that they were gay didn't mean that they couldn't do “boy-girl stuff. I mean boy-girl stuff is no different from boy-boy stuff.”

Sondheim reacted angrily to the suggestion that there might be anything gay about the lyric of “Somewhere.” He said, “If you think that's a gay song, then all songs about getting away from the realities of life are gay songs.”

On one level, this debate simply highlights the similarities between the
experiences of Jews and homosexuals in New York City: two oppressed minority groups who have struggled mightily, and very successfully, to travel out of invisibility and assimilation to proud self-declaration.

Regardless of whether the collaborators' portrayal of prejudice was shaped more by their gayness or their Jewishness, together they had created the most vibrant musical portrait of twentieth-century Manhattan ever mounted on the New York stage—an achievement that is still unrivaled today. The show has been performed tens of thousands of times in almost every major city in the world. “What we did was to aim at a lyrically and theatrically sharpened illusion of reality,” Laurents explained. What they achieved was a show that remains remarkably ageless.

When the show opened on September 26,1957, the New York critics were enthusiastic. “The radioactive fallout from
West Side Story
must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” Walter Kerr wrote in the
Herald Tribune
. He praised “the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we've been exposed to in a dozen seasons.” In the
Times
, Brooks Atkinson called it “a profoundly moving show… as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.… Everything contributes to the total impression of wildness, ecstasy and anguish. This is one of those occasions when theater people, engrossed in an original project, are all in top form. … The subject is not beautiful, but what
West Side Story
draws out of it is beautiful.”

It was not, however, a big commercial success. It was
too
hip and
too
smart—too far from “I Love Lucy” and too close to the sensibility of the urban sophisticate. “It was a big hit with theater people but not with the audiences,” said Sondheim. “It never sold out for very long,” said Harold Prince. “It's an important show, but most shows that are important are not smash hits,” Prince said. The smash hit on Broadway that year—the one that took most of the awards and made the most money—was
The Music Man
, the musical comedy whose “Seventy-Six Trombones” were perfectly in tune with the white-bread taste of the fifties. Only after Hollywood had produced a broader and coarser
West Side Story
with Natalie Wood did the show become a box office smash. “The picture failed for me,” said Laurents. But it was the movie and its soundtrack that finally brought big profits to its creators.

IN HIS
1954 short story, “Two on a Party,” Tennessee Williams offered a succinct description of the way the artistic demimonde viewed everyone outside the world they inhabited. This passage relates how Billy (in real
life, the poet Oliver Evans) and Con (Marion Black Vaccaro) enjoyed cruising sailors together:

It was a rare sort of moral anarchy, doubtless, that held them together, a really fearful shared hatred of everything that was restrictive and which they felt to be false in the society they lived in and against the grain of which they continually operated. They did not dislike what they called “squares.” They loathed and despised them, and for the best of reasons. Their existence was a never ending contest with the squares of the world, the squares who have such a virulent rage at everything not in their book.

Within this self-consciously bohemian milieu, there was intense sexual and intellectual cross-pollination—not just among gay artists, but also between them and their more experimental heterosexual colleagues. In this era before the gay liberation movement, sexual nonconformists often felt less pressure to label themselves as exclusively homo- or heterosexual. With less political importance attached to one's self-identification, it may have been easier to be bisexual, especially because most sexual encounters were dealt with so circumspectly.

Michael Butler was the extremely good-looking son of the founder of Butler Aviation, a Chicago businessman who occasionally dabbled in politics, and an internationally famous polo player. He was also a close friend and bad-boy companion of John Kennedy. In the sixties, he would become famous as the producer who brought the musical
Hair
to Broadway and to stages across America and around the world.

Butler is a self-described member of a tiny minority: those adults who are equally attracted to men and women.
^*
In the early 1950s, he first became enamored of three-way romantic relationships after an extended affair with one of Hollywood's biggest male stars and the actor's wife.

In 1955 Butler married the nightclub singer Marti Stevens. After flying to England on their honeymoon, Butler bought a black Rolls-Royce Coupe de Ville convertible with gold trim from a British relative; then the bridal couple motored through Europe. “We mostly got married to get away from our families,” said Butler, although they also enjoyed each other's company.

By the time they had reached Venice, Butler's friends sensed that he was bored, so they introduced him to Rock Hudson. There was immediate chemistry between them. “Rock was a simple guy: very sweet,” said Butler. For the next two weeks the two of them drove around Italy—and
flaunted their new affair from Butler's Rolls-Royce convertible. Meanwhile, Marti Stevens went off to visit her close friend Marlene Dietrich.

Word of Hudson's Italian liaison quickly reached his Hollywood handlers, who were horrified by his lack of discretion. They ordered him to take the next ship back to America—without Butler. “He always said I stood him up,” said Butler, “because he didn't give a shit about the studio.” But Butler stayed in Europe, and visited Deauville with Michael Todd. There, Butler met a new lady whom he went “bonkers” over and took her to the Hotel du Cap d'Antibes outside Cannes.

Jack Kennedy was also touring Europe that summer with Jacqueline, although he was still recovering from his latest back operation. According to Butler, Kennedy left his wife to meet Butler in the south of France, and the two of them went sailing in the company of Butler's new girlfriend on his 120-foot gaff-rigged schooner. “It was just the three of us,” said Butler. “You can imagine what happened. It was a scene. Jackie always thought
I
was the troublemaker. But Jack was also presidential timber in that category. He was still on crutches from the operation, but that didn't stop him. He was something extra-special. I really loved him.”

In Newport a year later Butler and Kennedy repeated the same arrangement on another sailing trip with another “very famous” woman. “It was a good arrangement for us,” Butler said.

Gore Vidal, a child of the fifties, has always insisted “there are no homosexual or heterosexual persons, only acts.… I never in my life accepted that these two categories existed. And when they began on ‘gay sensibility' back in the sixties and seventies, I said, ‘Well, if you think there is such a thing, what does Roy Cohn have in common with Eleanor Roosevelt?' Other than they liked their own sex.”

The novelist, essayist, and biographer Edmund White is similarly skeptical about the notion of a gay sensibility. “What we can discuss … is the gay
taste
of a given period,” he wrote in
States of Desire
. “A taste cultivated (even by some heterosexuals) or rejected (even by many homosexuals). What we can detect is a resemblance among many gay works of art made at a particular moment—a resemblance partially intended and partially drawn without design from a shared experience of anger or alienation or secret, molten camaraderie.” Elsewhere, White argued that “any discussion of a group's sensibility (the ‘black sensibility'? the ‘Jewish sensibility'?) is too general to be useful.”

Vidal thought the fifties were a time when “you got very good at projecting subtexts without saying a word about what you were doing.”
His proudest achievement in this regard was to imply a homosexual relationship between Ben Hur and his Roman rival in William Wyler's film. Vidal said Wyler permitted his subterfuge on the condition that he kept Charlton Heston ignorant of his mischief.
^*
The censors were not “rocket scientists,” said the screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. “If a director was subtle enough and clever enough, he got away with it,” she said. One of the greatest on-screen contortions occurred when Rock Hudson pretended to be a gay man in
Pillow Talk
to try to get Doris Day into bed. It was “tremendously ironic,” said Armistead Maupin. “Here was a gay man impersonating a straight man impersonating a gay man.”

Tennessee Williams's iconoclasm was very much on display when Vidal took him to lunch with Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy in Palm Beach a couple of years before JFK became president. According to Vidal, “At one point… the Bird [Williams] muttered in my ear, ‘Get that ass!' I said, ‘Bird, you can't cruise our next president.' The Bird chuckled ominously. ‘They'll never elect those two. They are much too attractive for the American people.' Later, I told Jack that the Bird had commented favorably on his ass. He beamed. ‘Now, that's
very
exciting,'” the future president said.

The painter Larry Rivers was “so convinced of being heterosexual I could be homosexual.” So the first time he met Frank O'Hara in 1950 at a party given by John Ashbery, he started kissing the New York poet behind a curtain. “From the earliest moments of our friendship we were enthusiastic about each other's work,” Rivers remembered, and in 1957 they collaborated on a series of lithographs which combined O'Hara's poetry with Rivers's images. This partnership did not “exclude all sorts of sexual undercurrents,” Rivers recalled. “'What are you working on?' was interwoven with ‘What are you doing later on?'” It was also the sort of era when someone as talented as O'Hara could go “pretty quickly from a Christmas job selling postcards at the Museum of Modern Art to being one of its most outstanding curators.”

To O'Hara's biographer, Rivers explained. “I was in a rather conventional tradition of men who are mainly heterosexual… who when they get with men who are homosexual act as if they are allowing themselves to be had. So he would get me aroused enough by a blow job for me to get a hard on and then screw him in the ass. That was about what it was about.

… One night I'd be with him and the next night I'd be with a woman. It got to be funny.

“I was also introduced to the ever-critical pipe-smoking lay analyst Paul Goodman, who told me I must be sick for refusing to go to bed with him,” Rivers said. “'But, Paul, you're married. You have a beautiful wife and child. What future would there be for me?'”

Gore Vidal recalled a romantic adventure with Jack Kerouac. “I wouldn't go to bed with an actor or with a writer,” said Vidal. “Or with anyone well known. But that doesn't mean I haven't. As everybody in the world knows, I fucked Kerouac. He rang me [in August 1953] and said, ‘I got this friend. He's a junkie and he killed his wife, and he wants to meet you.'” The friend was the writer William Burroughs. “So we met at the San Remo,” an Italian restaurant and bar that was one of the great gay-straight Greenwich Village meeting grounds of the fifties. “Then Jack got so stoned, Burroughs was disgusted with Jack, and he left,” Vidal continued. “Then Jack and I end up in the Chelsea Hotel. His idea, may I say. Though he was quite attractive that night. Relatively. He describes it all in a book called
The Subterraneans
, in which I am Arial Lavalina, the author of
Recognition in Rome.”

Here is Kerouac's version of the evening in
The Subterraneans:

repairing the three of us to 13 Pater a lesbian joint down Columbus, Carmody, high, leaving us to go enjoy it, and we sitting in there, further beers, the horror the unspeakable horror of myself suddenly finding in myself a kind of perhaps William Blake or Crazy Jane or really Christopher Smart alcoholic humility grabbing and kissing Arial's hand and exclaiming “Oh Arial you dear—you are going to be—you are so famous—you wrote so well—I remember you—what—” whatever and now unrememberable and drunkenness, and there he is a well-known and perfectly obvious homosexual of the first water, my roaring brain—we go to his suite in some hotel—I wake up in the morning on the couch, filled with the first horrible recognition, “I didn't go back to Mardou's at all…”