The Gay Metropolis (3 page)

Three decades later, Merrick wrote
The Lord Won't Mind
, one of the first gay novels to become a best-seller in the seventies, and he modeled one of its beautiful young men after Bigelow.
^*
The other man sharing their apartment was Richard Barr, another Princeton graduate who went to work for the Mercury Theatre that fall and participated in Orson Welles's menacing broadcast of
The War of
the
Worlds
. Later, Barr became one of Broadway's most illustrious impresarios. He was Edward Albee's confidant and produced many of Albee's most important plays, including
The Zoo Story, Tiny Alice
and
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
? He coproduced Mart Crowley's
The Boys in the Band
in 1968, and, eleven years later, Stephen Sondheim's
Sweeney Todd
. For twenty-one years, he was president of the League of American Theatres and Producers.

Bigelow would never be as famous as his roommates, but among gay men in New York he was a legend: a great many considered him the best-looking man in Manhattan. His life proved how far good looks and good manners could take anyone—regardless of gender or sexual persuasion.

Bigelow socialized with a group of gay men whom his contemporary, the playwright Arthur Laurents, derided as “the silver and china queens.” Laurents described these gentlemen as “a class of gay from way back that was always as right-wing as possible, out of a desperate desire to belong. And they haven't changed. It's like gay couples who try to emulate heterosexual couples. Nothing could be more stupid. I mean that one is sort of the husband and the other is sort of the wife and they have to have fidelity and all this kind of nonsense—instead of seeing how lucky you are if you're two men and have freedom.”

Bigelow, Merrick and Barr selected an apartment on East 54th Street, sandwiched between the nightclub El Morocco and a store selling artificial limbs. A subway token still cost a nickel (as it had since the system opened in 1904); the rent for two rooms with a garden, plus kitchen and bath, was $45 a month; and a cluster of nearby restaurants offered shrimp cocktail, a small steak, dessert, and coffee for the grand sum of fifty cents. Instead of office buildings, Third Avenue was lined with brownstones, and it was dominated by the Elevated, whose rumblings Bigelow could hear from inside his apartment.

The nooks and shadows created by this shaft down the center of the avenue played a significant role in gay life in New York before the war: they
offered a multitude of discreetly darkened meeting places right in the heart of the metropolis. “It was a little bit spooky,” said Murray Gitlin, a Broadway dancer who remembered Third Avenue as “one of the only cruisy places” in the 1940s. “It was like being under palm trees on a summer night,” Franklin Macfie quipped. “You could very easily feel you were in Rio!”

“The city smelled totally different than it does today,” said Jack Dowling, who later worked for Colt Studios, one of the first emporiums of erotic photographs of attractive men. “There wasn't that much trash on the street, and the air had the wonderful smell of washed concrete. Downtown it smelled of diesel truck exhaust. The Village around West 11th Street, late at night, smelled of baking bread from commercial bakeries. All of the East Side, from the Thirties all the way up to the Sixties, was filled with rooming houses which had their own unique odors.”

But Otis Bigelow never went “cruising” outdoors. His good manners, beautiful features and handsome clothes made him immensely sought after at all the most fashionable cocktail parties. And even though he continued to believe that he was destined to marry a woman, he led a very gay Manhattan life.

“I had a tuxedo and tails and all sorts of suits. What I wound up doing, pretty much, when I started, was living on my looks because it was terribly social in those days. Gay bars, no. I didn't go to those until later. But there were elegant bars like Tony's on Swing Alley on West 52d Street where Mabel Mercer sat and sang.

“There were a number of places where wealthy, youngish men had duplex apartments on Park Avenue, and pretty much any day if you dropped by at five o'clock there would be people there for cocktails and, more often than not, somebody would say, ‘Well, I have tickets to the ballet and we can drop in on Tony's later.' I was polite and gorgeous, and I was always jumping up to get drinks for people. I had social graces.

“I might meet somebody at a cocktail party who would be staying at the St. Regis. I would walk him home, and he would say, ‘Why don't you come up for a drink?' And then he would say, ‘Well, why don't you stay over? We'll have breakfast and it'll be nice. Don't walk all that way home: you can sleep on my sofa.' Then there would be a little bit of this and that. It was friendly prep-school sex.”

After a few weeks, a friend named Nicky Holden, whom Bigelow thought of as someone “on the fringes of society,” introduced Bigelow to “an important acquaintance. It turned out to be an older man of thirty
who owned a house on Beekman Place,” Bigelow recalled, someone who had made his fortune in the printing business. “He was Jewish and not terribly attractive, but a wonderful man—a funny, witty, cultivated man. He started to invite me to dinner and take me to the theater.” His name was Robert Goodhue and he drove a custom-built Packard V-16 convertible. “You cannot imagine what
that
was like! You could hardly turn around a corner it was so long! It was black with red trim and wire wheels and red leather and a rumble seat. After a couple of weeks, he said, ‘I'd like to get out of town for the weekend. Would you like to go to Atlantic City?' Well, that's where you took somebody cheap. So I said, ‘I don't think Atlantic City.' And he said, ‘How about Williamsburg?' And I said, ‘I'd love to.' It's funny—I did such a dramatic thing. He was so nice to me, and he used to like to kiss me, though I wouldn't let him kiss me on the mouth. He'd always say, ‘You're so beautiful!' We got to Williamsburg and we had this marvelous great big double room. So I said, Well, he deserves it. And I like him. So this eighteen-year-old kid, being very sophisticated, said, ‘Well, you've been so nice to me, would you like to see me as I really am?'” The answer was “Yes!”

“So I took off all my clothes and let him do me. Well, he thought that was wonderful. I didn't mind. So that became something that we did once in a while when we got back from the theater.” When their relationship ended, his patron dissolved into tears—and handed his young friend an envelope that contained a check for one thousand dollars.

Bigelow carried the check around for months because he was afraid the bank might report him to his uncle—and he wouldn't know how to explain the check. After he enrolled in Hamilton College, he finally confided in a sympathetic dean, who he thought was probably gay. The dean assured him he could rely on the bank's discretion, and Bigelow deposited the check in his account.

He immediately bought a 1933 Ford Roadster, “a wonderful car,” for the huge sum of one hundred dollars. The other nine hundred was enough to provide him with plenty of spending money for the rest of his college career.

At Hamilton, Bigelow wrote a play, which John C. Wilson, a “class” producer, optioned. Wilson asked him to come to New York in the summer of 1942 to rewrite it. In Manhattan, Bigelow met Maury Paul, a portly gentleman from Philadelphia, who was the original Cholly Knickerbocker society columnist for Hearst. It was Paul who coined the term
café society
one night at the Ritz right after World War I, to describe the unprecedented
new groupings of old money with new. Paul noticed that these disparate fun lovers had learned to be friendly in public, even though they would never invite one another to their homes.

“He was supposed to be so evil, but he never laid a glove on me,” Bigelow recalled. “He was amused by me.” One day Paul took him downstairs to the basement storage room of his apartment house, which was jammed with luxurious furs. “Pick out a coat!” Paul commanded. “I have fifty of them!” Bigelow chose a floor-length raccoon coat but promised to return it. “I don't want it back,” the columnist shouted. “Keep it!” Another time the two of them spent an afternoon together at the Liberty Music Shop on Madison Avenue, listening to classical music. “I was just so thrilled by it. We came out with two packages of everything we had listened to and he gave one to me. It was my introduction to classical music—a lifelong pleasure. He was wonderful.

“Once when I went by to see him, there was the handsomest young man I had ever seen: beautifully dressed, beautifully groomed. He was the guy he was keeping. It was trade Maury had picked up, polished up, dressed up. Straight. He came in once or twice a week from New Jersey. Maury bought him a house. The young man was married and had a child. That was his arrangement. Strange man; as nice a man as you would ever want to meet.”

Then Bigelow finally fell in love with a sailor: “the most beautiful person I ever saw. It was instant.” He met Bill Miller at a party, and fifty years later Bigelow still remembered the moment. “A Frank Sinatra recording of ‘I'll Be Seeing You' was playing on the phonograph. We went out and had dinner. So I was in love, and he was in love. He was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and we kind of spent that month together.”

Bill Miller is also famous among his contemporaries as one of the most gorgeous men in 1940s Manhattan. Paul Cadmus drew him, George Piatt Lynes photographed him, and everyone wanted him. Miller was by far the most powerful attraction Bigelow had ever felt. “We were at the Waldorf-Astoria in the suite of some wealthy man who invited us to stay over in the spare bedroom,” Bigelow remembered. “We were in bed. I looked at Bill, and I thought, ‘I can't live without him.' And that was that.” Bigelow finally admitted to himself that he really was gay. “I had to face the fact that I had changed.”

Bigelow's life was complicated somewhat by the fact that he had met a man named George Gallowhur earlier in the summer, another “older man” with a slightly higher public profile: a dashing thirty-seven-year-old industrialist who lived in a brownstone in Turtle Bay, an elegant group of
houses surrounding a common garden in the East Forties. Gallowhur's neighbor across the rhododendron was Katharine Hepburn. A few doors down was Philip Johnson, the future architect. “George was family to me,” Johnson remembered. “He was a rich boy around town who worked.” Johnson described himself and Gallowhur as “chickenhawks”—gentlemen who preferred the company of younger men.

The striking, tall, blond Swedish American had made a fortune by inventing Skol, the first successful suntan lotion. While still a student at Princeton in 1926, Gallowhur drew attention to himself by crossing the Atlantic in a fifty-four-foot cutter. Afterward the undergraduate joked to
The New York Times
that he had considered asking for caviar when the skipper of an ocean liner turned off course to ask whether his tiny craft needed any assistance.

Paul Cadmus remembered Gallowhur as someone who “gave the appearance of being very, very businesslike and a straight American,” but who actually “loved to go in for sailors and things like that.” Gallowhur fell madly in love with Bigelow, who found him “stunning,” but did not reciprocate his feelings. To entice the young undergraduate, Gallowhur made the young man an extraordinary offer.

Bigelow was about to enter his final year in the Naval Reserve Officer Training program at Hamilton. If the student would live with him, Gallowhur would purchase a ship. Then he would donate it to the Coast Guard—on the condition that Bigelow would become its captain. Bigdow was convinced that Gallowhur had the power to keep his promise, and to specify that Bigelow could not be sent to the Pacific.

Bigelow was still seeing Gallowhur when he met Bill Miller, “so I had to tell George I couldn't see him anymore.” Gallowhur begged him to reconsider. “Let me give a dinner party for six people,” the industrialist suggested. Bigelow could bring Bill, who would sit next to Gallowhur at dinner; afterward Bigelow could choose between them. “Give me a chance!” Gallowhur pleaded.

Bigelow agreed and brought Miller to Turtle Bay. After coffee had been served, Gallowhur took Bigelow aside. “Have you made your choice?” he inquired.

“Yes,” said Bigelow. “It's Bill.”
^*

Bigelow and Miller had only one more week together before Bigelow had to go back to college. “We were
so
happy,” Bigelow remembered. “I went back to school and he went back into the Coast Guard.” The sailor wrote Bigelow a single letter: he said he was “dead” without him, and Bigelow believed that Miller was shipping out.

In November, Bigelow returned to New York for Thanksgiving. He was glum, thinking that Miller might have already perished at sea. In Manhattan, he stayed with George Hoyningen-Huene, a famous fashion photographer for
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
. Hoyningen-Huene had been born in St. Petersburg at the turn of the century; his parents were a Baltic nobleman and the daughter of the American minister to the court of the czar.

The photographer was forty-two when Bigelow met him, and he kept himself fit with regular visits to the gym—a custom that would become almost universal among a certain class of gay men three decades later. After Bigelow had done some modeling for his host, Hoyningen-Huene tried to coax him into bed.

When Bigelow refused him, Hoyningen-Huene became furious, and started to shout: “You're doing all this moping around about that sailor Bill! Did you know that Bill has been living in Turtle Bay with George Gallowhur since about three days after you left?”

Bigelow was stunned. It was the “crudest thing” he had ever experienced.

It was also his awakening.

FIFTY YEARS LATER
, like many men of his generation, Bigelow resisted unpleasant memories of gay life in the 1940s—and deplored its more democratic style in the 1990s. After he finally acknowledged to himself that he was gay, he never worried about becoming an outsider because “gay society at that point was so hermetic and so safe and so wonderful. Everybody was very classy in those days. There was no trade. There were no bums.” (He said so moments before he described Maury Paul's kept boy.) “Everybody that you met had a style of elegance. It was not T-shirts and muscles and so on. It was wit and class. You had to have tails and be polite. Homosexuality was an upscale thing to be. It was defined by class. There wasn't dark cruising.”