Born On This Day- August 26th... Christopher Isherwood

It is the summer of 1971 & I am doing summer stock in Coeur D' Alene, Idaho. Lucky me, at 17 years old, I am doing my 1st professional theatre & I am doted on & delighting in my first hot affair with a male, a fellow actor who was much older than me. Ron was 24 years old & was an actual college graduate! I had a hard time wrapping my mind around someone being finished with college & being interested in me. Ron lived in San Fransisco (I would visit several times in the next few years)!

The movie of Cabaret was to open that fall, & loving the Broadway Cast Album, I was preoccupied with how the film version would turn out. My summer lover was well aware of my anticipation for the film & he gave me a gift of the source material- The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. He promised that we would see the film together & he kept his promise. I flew to San Fransisco for a weekend & saw Cabaret in the first week of release.

I delighted in the divine decadence of my new gay life. I listened to music, went to clubs, drank, drugged & Homosexuelle erfahrungen genossen.

Through the decades, I would read many books by & about Isherwood, including his diaries & my favorites- A Single Man & Christopher & His Kind. I recently purchased a new annotated re-issue of Berlin Stories. I have always been in awe of & fascinated by Isherwood's long life together with artist Don Bachardy, whom he met on the beach in Santa Monica in 1953, when Don was just a teenager. They were together until Isherwood's death in 1986. The story is told in a first rate documentary- Chris & Don: A Love Story. Today marks the 107th birthday of Christopher Isherwood.

Born On This Day- August 24th... Stephen Fry

“You are who you are when nobody's watching.” 

Comedian, successful novelist, star of the silver screen, raconteur & wit are all part of the dazzling resume of Stephen Fry.

Perfectly cast, he played The Cheshire Cat in Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland & Mycroft Holmes in Sherlock Holmes directed by Guy Ritchie.

I thought he was hysterical as King Charles l in Black Adder. He is good personal friends with Prince Charles & his horsey 2nd wife, even though his performance in Black Adder was a parody of Elizabeth 2’s son. Other favorite performances: Oscar Wilde in Wilde with Jude Law (“a role that I was fated to play”) & 2 of my all time favorite films- Gosford Park & Cold Comfort Farm. I understand that he appears in something refered to as The Harry Potter Series of films. Please, don't make me watch them, as much as I admire Fry.

I have also enjoyed his books- The Liar, Making History, The Hippopotamus & The Star’s Tennis Balls. Fry lives in London with his husband- Daniel Cohen. He famously drives a black TX4 London cab. Mr. Fry has & maintains a nifty blog- The New Adventures Of Mr. Stephen Fry.

"My first words, as I was being born... I looked up at my mother & said, 'that's the last time I'm going up one of those.'"

Born On This Day- August 22nd... James Kirkwood

In an interesting reversal of our usual bedtime ritual, The Husband went to sleep early & I stayed up late & watched a very remarkable documentary- Every Little Step. The film travels behind the scenes of the auditions for 2006 revival of A Chorus Line to investigate the the interplay among the hopefuls. The film establishes a parallel between the events of the play itself & the offstage experiences of the aspiring performers who are auditioning. The filmmakers also work in a layer that pertains to the original inception of the musical, & its evolution from an idea by gay director/choreographer- Michael Bennett, who recorded an ensemble of dancers speaking confessionally & used that as the basis for the book of the show.

The filmmakers play those original tapes back, on-camera, resurrecting old ghosts. Composer Marvin Hamlisch also turns up revealing a racy little nugget about the history of the song- Dance: 10; Looks 3 . The film features extensive footage of the auditions themselve, on songs such as At The Ballet & I Can Do That, interweaving an aura of suspense throughout the narrative of who will eventually cast in the production itself. The title of the documentary is a reference to the lyric of that old war horse of a musical number One ("One singular sensation, every little step she takes").

Writer James Kirkwood reached the peak of his fame when A Chorus Line*, the celebrated musical, opened at the Public Theater in 1975. Executing a concept by choreographer Michael Bennett, with music by the late, great Marvin Hamlisch & lyrics by Edward Kleban, Kirkwood joined with co-writer Nicholas Dante to develop a script based on the tape-recorded reminiscences of Broadway "gypsies," the young men & women who sing & dance in the chorus lines of musicals. In 1976, his contributions to the show brought Kirkwood a Tony Award & a Pulitzer Prize.

James Kirkwood was a born in LA. His father was a director & his mother was silent film star- Lila Lee. Kirkwood was well known in the world of theater through his work as an actor, playwright, & comedian.His novels include P.S. Your Cat Is Dead (1972), Good Times, Bad Times (1968) & Some Kind of Hero (1975). He was a capable creator of popular fiction & most have gay elements, & a most of his work was adapted for the stage or screen. There Must Be A Pony is a thinly disguised story of his life with his mother that was made into a TV film with Elizabeth Taylor & Robert Wagner.

Kirkwood will always be best known for writing the book for a A Chorus Line, for which he won a Tony in 1976, as well as a New York Drama Critic's Circle Award & the Pulitzer Prize. A Chorus Line is credited with being the first Broadway musical to deal with homosexuality in a matter-of-fact way - the concept for the show came from gay choreographer Michael Bennett.

Frank Rich: "A Chorus Line was also the first Broadway musical to deal matter-of-factly with homosexuality, & from an inside point-of-view that makes its gay men seem far more accessible than the martyrs & oddballs that typified stage homosexuals in mainstream American drama of the post-Boys In The Band, pre-AIDS era."

Like The Wizard Of Oz, A Chorus Line shares the myth of finding acceptance & identity as an outsider seeking a place that feels ineffably like home.

A Chorus Line was still playing when James Kirkwood died from AIDS-related cancer at his home in NYC in 1989.

*Tiny footnotes: I auditioned for the first touring A Chorus Line in LA & didn't get very far, as I am only a serviceable dancer ("he moves well for not being a dancer"). My pal Walter Kennedy made the cut & was offered a role at the same time that has was asked to join a well known dance company. He chose the dance troupe, without regret, I believe. When I lived in NYC in the mid-1970s, I was briefly friends with Rebecca York who played Diana on Broadway.

Born On This Day- August 12th... Radclyffe Hall

Outside of Rita Mae Brown & Fannie Flagg, I am not really all that keen on Lesbian Literature, although I kissed a girl & I liked it. But as the chronicler of the lives of famous gay people, I need to note that today is the birthday of Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly & proudly, & was the writer of what is arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.

At 21 years of age, after a desperately unhappy upbringing Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall inherited a large sum of money that left in trust by her grandfather.

Hall lived with the singer Mabel Veronica Batten, who was 25 years her senior, until her death in 1916. Soon afterwards she began a relationship with Una Elena Troubridge, a talented sculptor. She was married to Admiral Ernest Troubridge & Radclyffe Hall sued him for libel after he described her as "a grossly immoral woman".

Hall liked to be called John & cultivated a strikingly masculine appearance, sporting cropped hair, monocles, bow-ties, smoking jackets, & pipes.

Although she had enough money to live in leisure, Hall set about to be a writer. She published several novels, including The Forge (1924), The Unlit Lamp (1924), A Saturday Life (1925) & several volumes of poetry. Her 4tg novel, Adam's Breed (1926) was a best-seller & won prestigious literary prizes.

In 1928 Radclyffe Hall published the explicitly lesbian novel- The Well Of Loneliness.  The publisher, Jonathan Cape, argued on the book jacket: "In England hitherto the subject has not been treated frankly outside the regions of scientific text-books, but that its social consequences qualify a broader & more general treatment is likely to be the opinion of thoughtful & cultured people."

There was a campaign by the press to get the book banned. The London Sunday Express urged: "In order to prevent the contamination & corruption of English fiction it is the duty of the critic to make it impossible for any other novelist to repeat this outrage. I say deliberately that this novel is not fit to be sold by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library."

British Government put pressure of Jonathan Cape to withdraw the book. One official described the book as "inherently obscene… it supports a depraved practice & is gravely detrimental to the public interest".  It was ordered that all copies be destroyed, & that literary merit presented no grounds for defense. The publisher agreed to withdraw the novel & proofs intended for a publisher in France were seized in October 1928.

Several writers, including, Arnold Bennett, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, & T.S. Eliot signed a letter of protest about the banning of the The Well Of Loneliness to The Daily Chronicle. In the USA, the book faced obscenity trials, garnering letters of support from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mencken, Sinclair, Dos Passos, St. Vincent Millay, & more, & both times the book triumphed. Its first year, the book sold more than 100,000 copies. It was finally published in the UK in 1949.

Although she continued to live with Troubridge, Hall fell in love with a Russian nurse, Eugenie Souline in 1934. Despite the initial protests of Troubridge, the trio of women lived together in Florence.

At the outbreak of the WW2, the 3 women left Italy & settled in Devon, England. Hall developed bowel cancer & died on 7th October 1943. Just before her death, Hall changed her will, leaving everything to Troubridge, including the copyrights to her works. In her new will she asked Troubridge to "make such provision for our friend Eugenie Souline as in her absolute discretion she may consider right".  Troubridge only provided Souline with a small allowance. The Well Of Loneliness has never gone out of print.

Born On This Day- August 8th... Randy Shilts

Randy Shilts was gutsy, brash & unforgettable. He was a brave & pioneering gay journalist. He was the first openly gay reporter with a “gay beat” for major USA newspaper- the San Francisco Chronicle. He was among the first to bring real attention to a new series of illnesses that were causing gay men to die in the early 1980s.

I purchased & read each of his books as they were published. They remain some of the most important books & the best chronicle of American Gay History at the end of the 20th century: The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life & Times of Harvey Milk (1982), And the Band Played On: Politics, People, & the AIDS Epidemic (1987), & Conduct Unbecoming: Gay & Lesbians In The U.S. Military: Vietnam to the Persian Gulf (1993). And The Band Played On became an award winning, powerful & critically lauded film for HBO, directed by Roger Spottiswoode & starring: Alan Alda, Matthew Modine, Lily Tomlin, Ian McKellen. Steve Martin, B.D. Wong, Richard Gere, David Marshall Grant, Anjelica Huston, Richard Jenkins, & Swoozie Kurtz, most of whom worked for scale to be part of the project.

His books read like finely crafted fiction; Shilts’ greatest achievement as a writer was that he brought novelistic skills to the practice of journalism. All 3 of his books have compelling narratives & vividly detailed characters.

Shilts received the formal diagnosis that he was infected with HIV on the day he finished the manuscript for And Band Played On. As Shilts wrote his last book, about gays in the military- Conduct Unbecoming, he dictated the final chapter of that book from a hospital bed & it was published in 1993 at almost the same time President Bill Clinton took aim at anti-gay discrimination in the armed services. Think of how he would have continued to chronicle the struggle of gay people & imagine his reporting of Prop 8 & the inevitable rise of the cause of Marriage Equality & 21^st century LGBTQ issues like bullying.

In 1992, Shilts' older brother Gary performed the commitment ceremony that joined him to Barry Barbieri, a man 20 years his junior, & the primary beneficiary of his estate.

Perhaps because Shilts remains controversial among some gays, there is no monument to him. There is is no street named for him, as there are for other San Francisco writers Jack London, Jack Kerouac or Dashiell Hammett. He isone of Gay History’s real heroes, with an effect on the gay community as important as Harvey Milk. Both were immensely important. Where's the street, building or holiday named after Shilts?

"HIV is certainly character-building. It's made me see all of the shallow things we cling to, like ego & vanity. Of course, I'd rather have a few more T-cells & a little less character."

A toast to you Randy, on your 61st birthday.

Born On This Day- August 2nd... James Baldwin

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, & this was an immutable law."

The very first "gay" book I ever read was James Baldwin's GIOVANNI'S ROOM (1956) & at 15 years old, & the tragic story did not lift my spirits. I was reading everything I could that dealt with homosexuality or by a homosexual, & the message I was getting was not positive. I had already decided at 15, that my life was not going to be tragic because I was gay. Still, I found the novel to be erotic & well written. I continued to follow James Baldwin's life & work through his exile in Europe, reading his novels, poems & essays. When he returned to the USA & was active in the civil rights movements of the 1960s & 1970s, I still admired his work & had my eyes opened by his words.

Born in 1924, he had a life of extreme hardship, growing up illegitimate & very poor in Harlem, Having his work rejected by publishers (black & Homo!), & harassed by the FBI (he had a 1750 page file on his activities). After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 & drawbacks in civil-rights movement, Baldwin started bitterly to acknowledge that violence may be the only route to racial justice. Some optimism about peaceful progress would later return, but in the early 1970s he also suffered from writer's block. Baldwin: "Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent, which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it."

In 1983 Baldwin became a professor in the African-American Studies department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He spent his last years in St. Paul de Vence on the Riviera, France, where he died of stomach cancer on November 30, 1987.

James Campbell said in the NY Times Book Review: "All the aspects of Baldwin’s character are exposed … He was magnetic, compulsively sociable, elaborately extrovert, darkly introverted, depressive, magnificently generous, self-absorbed, self-dramatizing, funny, furious, bubbling with good intentions, seldom hesitating over a breach of promise – capable of exhibiting all these traits between lunch & dinner, & between dinner & the last whisky at 4 am."

Good-Bye, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

He was quite simply, one of my favorite writers, elegant & fearless. I have been reading him for more than 5 decades & my book shelves are heavy in the Vs.

He watched & reported on the decline of this once great country of ours. Gore Vidal reminded readers of our failure of education, manners on the decline, & political leaders cynical, cretinous, & closed to the reality.  He found the values & culture of his fellow Americans to be shameful, & the state of literature & pop culture, almost, but not quite, beyond words.

He had a distaste for TV, & it was a compliment to his skillful storytelling & considerable wit that he could appear with such frequency on the most popular medium to deride popular entertainment, & be welcomed back the following week to do it again.

There were few subjects for which he could not invent a quip, often memorably dismissive. Vidal could be relied on to be entertaining about almost anything: history, politics, art, journalism, theatre, sex, morals or celebrity.  Vidal: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which cannot be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

His literary output was prodigious: collections of smart, witty, biting essays, plays, screenplays, & more than 20 novels, including 7 books about our country from the American Revolution to the Korean War known as the Narrative of Empire series.

Vidal: “Our leaders can no longer write their own speeches or books, & there is some evidence they cannot read them either. Our political system has become a game for the very rich.”

His statements found detractors. Norman Mailer went so far as to headbutt Vidal while they were in the green room, waiting to appear together on a chat show. William F. Buckley called his a fag, on air & threatened to punch him on the spot.  But, Vidal appeared to relish feuds. When Truman Capote made a comment about Vidal being thrown out of the Kennedy White House, Vidal sued for libel.

Vidal derided the term “gay” & claimed that he had had sex with 1,000s of people of both genders by the time he was 25. But the great love of his life was Jimmie Trimble, an athletics star who was to die at Iwo Jima, preserving forever the image of a kind of romantic ideal in Vidal’s mind.

Vidal joined the Army after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He served in a transport ship, ending the war as a warrant officer. It was while on board ship that he wrote his first novel- Williwaw (1946). The word means an Arctic squall, & the novel’s setup is the effect of the storm on a crew of hot young men in cramped conditions.

In 1948, Vidal’s The City & the Pillar was published. It is a groundbreaking novel of youthful homosexuality told against the background of the story of Sodom. At the time the Kinsey Report had just been released & homosexuality was more widely discussed, & acknowledged to exist, than ever before. Vidal: “I wanted to take risks, to try something no American had done before. I decided to examine the homosexual underworld, which I knew rather less well than I pretended, & in the process show the 'naturalness’ of homosexual relations.”  Written 2 years after Iwo Jima, the book was dedicated “to JT”.

Not shocking by current standards, at the time Vidal’s book was hugely controversial, & it was described it as embarrassing, courageous, serious, social tract. Some papers which slammed the novel would not accept advertisements for it. Vidal claimed that the book affected the reviews of future reviews he received from major publications, especially The NY Times, for his later books. “He may have been right,” The NY Times stated this morning.

In the 1950s he wrote screenplays in Hollywood: The Catered Affair, I Accuse, The Scapegoat, Suddenly Last Summer & Is Paris Burning?

Vidal wrote successfully for the theatre: Visit To A Small Planet, The Best Man (which had a well-received revival this Broadway season), Romulus, & An Evening With Richard Nixon. For TV he wrote: Dark Possession, The Death Of Billy The Kid, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, The Turn Of The Screw, State Door, & A Farewell to Arms. He found the work interesting, but only as a way to make money to buy time to write books.

I appreciate his essays the mist, but I have been lost in his elegant historical fiction where Vidal introduced real figures from the past, & combine them with gossipy asides from his fictional characters. His plots featured cameo appearances by Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James & many others. In Empire (1987), Vidal set President Teddy Roosevelt & newspaper man William Randolph Hearst in a confrontation which becomes a reflection on the press’s power to make or break a politician.

In 1968 Vidal had a stunning success with Myra Breckenridge, a very funny spoof on the shattering of sexual barriers & a send-up of the porn industry so explicit that the book itself was labeled pornography. In his best known novel, Vidal managed to strike at young people, entertainment, writing, California, the decline of civilization & to rage about his particular concern- population control. He used sex-changed title character to repeat his vigorously held contention that only zero population growth can save the planet from starvation.

Vidal: “If the human race is to survive, population will have to be reduced drastically, if not by atomic war then by law, an unhappy prospect for civil liberties but better than starving... it may already be too late to save this ark of fools.”

Essays are my own favored written expression &Vidal’s collections are my favorites of his work: Sex, Death & Money (1968),  Reflections Upon A Sinking Ship (1969), Homage to Daniel Shays (1972), Matters of Fact & Fiction, & Armageddon (1987).

The Second American Revolution & Other Essays won the 1982 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for criticism. This collection  took on born-again Christians, politicians, universities, big business, the Churches & all those in authority, with awesome range & radical, renegade instinct to rail against established authority- clerical, academic, corporate & patriotic. Vidal observed that politics had become trivialized, with substance & debate replaced by talking heads allowed only seconds to make arguments about the future of the nation & the world.

In 1993 Vidal won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction for the collection United States: Essays 1952–1992. He followed this with a second collection of essays- The Last Empire, published in 2000.

Among my favorite books of all time are his pair of memoirs-  Palimpsest& Point to Point Navigation, in which he mentions his many sexual conquests as “ nothing special”,  compared to the pursuits of his pals John F. Kennedy & Tennessee Williams. Vidal was fond of drinking & alleged that he had sampled every major drug, once.

One of my favorite Vidal anecdotes:  During the casting of his 1959 play about a political convention- The Best Man, a talent agent proposed offering Ronald Reagan the lead. Vidal: “We all had a good laugh. He is by no means a bad actor, but he would hardly be convincing, I said with that eerie prescience which has earned me the title 'The American Nostradamus’, as a presidential candidate.”

He twice ran unsuccessfully for office. In 1960 he was a Democratic candidate for Congress in New York’s 29th district, and he ran for nomination as the Democratic senatorial candidate in 1982. Vidal would appear as himself in several cameo roles, including The Simpsons. In 2009 he was awarded the annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation.

He was host for a time on the TV program Hot Line, & received the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America in 1955. His novel of the ancient world- Creation, won the Prix Deauville in 1983.

Vidal lived in Beverly Hills, NYC, Rome & Ravello on Italy’s Adriatic coast, for more than half a century, with Howard Austen, a former advertising executive who died in 2003. Vidal & Austen chose cemetery plots in Washington DC, between Jimmie Trimble & one of Vidal's literary heroes, Henry Adams. At the end of his life, saddened by the death of Austen & many close friends, Vidal still looked to no existence beyond this one. "Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it, & quite enough, all in all."

I once played Gore Vidal, or rather I based a character, rather successfully, on the writer. The play was Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound & my character was an acerbic, bitter theatre critic. Vidal did my homework for me. Vidal has been a major player in my rather insignificant life & I like to think that I am a bit similar to him, minus his intelligence, talent & nerve.

Born On This Day- July 31st... Colin Higgins

Colin Higgins was one of Hollywood's most beloved directors & screenwriters. He is responsible for one of the most influential films of my youth- Harold & Maude.

Born in the South Pacific island of New Caledonia to an Australian mother & American father, Higgins moved with his family to Redwood, CA from Sydney in the 1950s. After attending Stanford University for a year, he dropped out to hitchhike across the country. His travels took him first to the Actors Studio in NYC & then to Europe where he volunteered for the Army as a sports reporter for The Stars & Stripes. He eventually returned to Stanford to receive his degree in English & later attended film school at UCLA. During his final year, he wrote the screenplay for Harold & Maude.

While today it is considered to be one of the greatest of Hollywood films, Harold & Maude was a huge flop when it opened during the Christmas season of 1971 with little fanfare or advertising. The unusual romance between a young man & a much older woman, starring Bud Cort & my muse- Ruth Gordon, struck a chord with audiences & soon became a cult favorite around the world. His stage version ran for just 9 performances on Broadway, but ran in Paris for 7 years.

Following the success of Harold & Maude, Higgins went on to write & direct some of the most successful films of the 1970s &1980s:  Silver Streak, Foul Play, 9 to 5, & The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas.

In 1986, Higgins established a foundation in his name. The Colin Higgins Courage Awards recognizes ordinary but remarkable individuals who have endured overwhelming hostility & hate, yet have handled themselves with the utmost grace as they educate & enlighten others about the LGBT experience. Each winner receives $10,000 as part of the prize.

In addition to the Courage Awards, the Foundation also funds film scholarships & has supported over 390 LGBT groups, ranging from the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to gay, lesbian, bisexual & transgender outreach & AIDS prevention programs in places like as Fayetteville, Arkansas & Biloxi, Mississippi.

In 1986, he also completed a mini-series based on Shirley MacLaine's book Out on a Limb, which turned out to be his last film project. Higgins died of AIDS in 1988.

Born On This Day- July 27th... Carol Leifer

After graduating from Binghampton University with a degree in Theatre, Carol Leiferstarted in stand-up after accompanying her then boyfriend Paul Reiser to his gig at Catch A Raising Star. She enjoyed a successful career doing stand-up & appeared on Late Night with David Letterman more more that 25 times. She moved to writing & has won Emmys for her work on The Larry Sanders Show, SNL, Rules of Engagement (also executive producer), & most famously- Seinfeld(she has been dubbed- the real Elaine). She once opened for Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas.

In September 2007, Leifer won an auction for the handwritten notes used by Michael Vick during his apology for his role in dogfighting.

On her 40th birthday, Leifer had a revelation: "I suddenly had this really mad desire to have an affair with a woman, I was divorced. I was childless. I figured there's got to be one more way to really tick off my mom. I told Lori that I kind of had this crush on her, & she was, like: 'No way. I'm not going to be a science experiment for some straight girl!'"

"I used my patented line that I've used easily for the last 20 years—'Well, what would it hurt if we just made out?' Heard the song lyric- 'I kissed a girl & I liked it'? Well, I kissed a girl & my head spun around."

“When I first started talking about being gay onstage I felt it wasn't working. The audience was like, You seem straight & now you're talking about being gay, what? I just kind of gave it up. But now I think I wasn't completely owning it, because it works completely now. I talk about having been married, and then I met this woman & my life spun around & we've been together for almost 14 years. & the audience always still applauds when I say how long we've been together, which is pretty amazing for a comedy club. I own it so much now. It wasn't the audience. It was me.”

Leifer currently is a staff writer on Modern Family & is nominated for an Emmy this year. She lives in Santa Monica with her longtime partner- real estate developer Lori Wolf, Chihuahuas- Cagney & Mini Mo & their son. Love her.

Born On This Day- July 23rd... Gavin Lambert

I met Gavin Lambert at a coke fueled, debauched, all-male party at the home of producer Robert Fryer in the Hollywood Hills. The year was 1973 & it was the only period that I was briefly considered an ingénue. I actually didn’t mind being objectified & passed around. I liked being the object of desire, & being a bit of a slut, I was feeling very democratic & exceptionally open minded. I was hungry for experiences, & was not above putting out my crack for my crack at show biz.

I had smoked a joint that must have been enhanced with something extra, because I don’t remember how I ended up in bed with the handsome older man. In the early morning hours we started in for round 2, & when the little strands of conversation revealed that this man had written the novel & screenplay for one of my favorite movies from childhood- Inside Daisy Clover, featuring my favorite actor- Ruth Gordon, I went absolutely nutty, stuttering & muttering: “Oh my god, oh my god, that is my favorite movie, I love that movie! Oh yeah, that feels so good. Tell me about working with Ruth Gordon! Do that again, but slower, harder & lower! Oh, I can't believe you created that movie. I love that movie! Will you autograph my ass?” I think I ruined the hot mood with my sudden outburst of fandom.

For 50+ years, the “go to” guy for bitchy, witty & perceptive gossip about Hollywood was screenwriter, novelist & biographer Gavin Lambert, who has died. For much of the 1950s & 1960s, he lived in Hollywood, the inspiration & setting for most of his novels, including The Goodbye People (1971), The Slide Area(1960) & of course, Inside Daisy Clover (1963).

Armistead Maupin: "Decades before it was fashionable, Gavin Lambert expertly wove characters of every sexual stripe into his lustrous tapestries of southern California life. His elegant, stripped down prose caught the last gasp of old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivaled."

Lambert wrote the biography- Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000), about his friend & roommate at Oxford, director Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life, O' Luck Man, If ). Lambert & Anderson founded the short lived but influential film journal- Sequence(1949-51), while at Oxford. Unlike Anderson, who was tortured throughout his life by guilt about his homosexuality (he fell for happily married, heterosexual young men), Lambert was gaily gay. He had a series of fulfilling relationships.

Lambert had an affair with director Nicholas Ray, whose films- Bigger Than Life (1956) & Bitter Victory (1957) Lambert wrote the screenplays. His longest relationship, however, was with Mart Crowley, who wrote the influential gay play- The Boys In The Band (which I acted in- Boston, autumn 1972). The couple had a home together in L.A.

Lambert wrote & directed Another Sky in 1955, & the film was shot in Morocco. The rather modest film tells the story of a young English woman who discovers her sensuality in North Africa, a reflection Lambert's own sexual liberation in Tangier. He lived in Morocco from 1974 to 1989 on the suggestion of writer Paul Bowles, whom he met in L.A. at the home of Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy.

Inside Daisy Clover(1966) was made into a film from Lambert’s novel with a screenplay by the author. Directed by Robert Mulligan, it tells the tale of how the fame & fortune of a young star, played by Natalie Wood, leads to misery & a nervous breakdown. Lambert first met Wood when he went to Hollywood as an assistant to Ray on Rebel Without A Cause. In 2004, Lambert wrote a revealing biography of the star- Natalie Wood: A Life, admitting they had shared at least one lover. According to Lambert, a 17 year old Natalie Wood lost her virginity to Lambert’s boyfriend Nick Ray. Lambert's biography includes Wood's relationships with Elvis Presley, Robert Wagner, Warren Beatty, Paul Mazursky, & Leslie Caron. In his book, Lambert claimed that Wood frequently dated gay & bisexual men, including Nick Adams, Raymond Burr, James Dean, Tab Hunter, & Scott Marlowe. Lambert also said that Wood helped support his lover- playwright Mart Crowley making it possible for him to writeThe Boys in the Band(1968).

Lambert's best screenplays were adaptations with gay overtones: Sons & Lovers (1960), based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence, was Oscar nominated, The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone (1961), from Tennessee Williams' novel, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (1977), & Liberace, Behind The Music (1988).

He wrote biographies: On Cukor (1972), Norma Shearer: A Life (1990), & Nazimova: A Biography (1997) which was the first full scale account of the private life & acting career of lesbian actress Alla Nazimova. He also wrote GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind (1973). I own them all. Lambert was able to interview & gain personal remembrances of those involved with the classic 1939 film, including dismissed director George Cukor & star Vivien Leigh .

I have reason to believe that before his death in 2005, Lambert was working on a book- The Greatest Sex in Hollywood: The 1970s, where I was to be mentioned in the chapter- Live Fast & Die Young, but I was probably there as a footnote. Mr. Lambert was every inch the gentleman to me. Today is his birthday. He would have been 88 years old.

Born On This Day- July 21st... Hart Crane

Hart Crane was born & raised in Ohio. His father was the inventor of Life Savers candy & he had a mother who was an overbearing, flashy hypochondriac. The parents fought bitterly & eventually divorce, providing the young poet a very unhappy childhood.

Crane finally had enough & dropped out of high school to move to NYC in 1916. For 7 years, he split his time between Cleveland & NYC, working at his father's factory, a copy editor, & writing poems that were published in small literary magazines. He often needed to borrow money from his father to survive.

As his work was published, some praised his work, but most critics scoffed at it. Crane has often been criticized as incomprehensible; he was certainly that for me when I attempted to get through his work in a class in American poetry.

Tormented by his attraction to other men, Crane did have a rapturous love affair with a Danish sailor- Emil Opffer who was the inspiration for the epic, erotic poem-Voyages. The poem was the center piece of his first book- White Buildings, in 1926, Crane was indubitably gay, which lead to a lifetime of problems both social & personal. His failed love life was partly due to his obsession with men from the Navy. Ernest Hemingway (they share a birthday) noted: "Poor Hart Crane, always trying to pick up the wrong sailor." Booze contributed to his downfall, under the influence, he would become flirty, frequently in the wrong situations, at the wrong times.

Later in life, Crane made an attempt to play it straight to please the people in his life. Though he tried, he was miserable. Drinking & rough trade bearable, yet made his life worse & worse.

In the early 1930s Hart attempted to marry a girl, Peggy Crowley, the recently divorced wife if his good friend, writer & critic- Malcolm Crowley, but everyone knew it was a sham.

On April 26, 1932, while on board a cruise ship in the Caribbean, Crane was badly beaten after an altercation with a member of the crew that he had made a pass at. The following morning, a female friend found him sitting in his room, remote & ashen. She told him to dress for lunch & left. Shortly before noon on the 27 April, Hart Crane was seen on the deck, looking down at the water. Crane said: "Goodbye, everybody!" & jumped overboard to his death. His body was never recovered.

The most devoted of all the writers & artists who venerated Crane, Tennessee Williams, left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico at the spot that Crane drowned. William’s family buried him in St. Louis.

His life is a truly troubled tale of a talented man trying to find where he belongs. His poetry confounds me & his life leaves me circumspect.

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered & too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step & know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, & to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

& what surprise!

& yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, & all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

& through all sound of gaiety & quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness

My occasional lover- James Franco is fascinated by Crane's legendarily difficult, brilliant poetry, as well as his personal demons. We were talking about Crane just the other morning while sipping champagne in bed. Franco wrote directed, produced & starred in The Broken Tower as his Master Thesis in Film at NYU. I caught it on the Sundance Channel. The film is a bit of a mess. It's filmed in black & white, its plot can be hard to follow & its pacing is much slow, & there are many seemingly aimless silent scenes that follow the back of Franco's head while he stalks around various streetscapes.

Franco: "Crane was very comfortable with his sexuality, to the point that it intimidated, even scared, a lot of his friends in the poetry world. I wanted the film to have something of that same in-your-face quality."

Born On This Day- July 14th... Post Apocalyptic Bohemian Favorite, Arthur Laurents

"Writers are the chosen people. I am happiest when sitting alone & putting my daydreams & fantasies down on paper.”

As the story goes... late for his place on a panel discussion, Arthur Laurents burst on to the stage draped in mink & announced: "Behold, a living legend!". Stephen Sondheim, also on the panel, looked up & said: "Wrong on both counts".

I just ate up his pair of memoirs- Original Story By & Mainly On Directing, chock full of great dishy theatre & Hollywood stories. He is important to me in the many ways. I admire him & his work, but most especially because he wrote the book for my favorite musical- Gypsy, which I find to be a near perfect piece of theatre. He directed 3 revivals of Gypsy,including my favorite version with my good close personal friend Angela Lansbury in 1974, & Tyne Daley in 1989 & 2009’s Patti Lupone outing.

In 2010, at 92, he directed a revival of West Side Story, a classic for which he wrote the original lean & strong book. In this production, it was Laurents's conceit to have most of the the Sharks & their girls, who are from Puerto Rico, speak & sing in Spanish & the cast would all be young & if not Puerto Rican, at least Hispanic. Laurents has explained that the idea came from his partner of 52 years- Tom Hatcher (Laurents & Farley Granger were lovers in the late 1940s), who saw & loved a production of the musical in South America. It was also Hatcher that urged Laurents to revive Gypsy! with Patti LuPone, so that the Sam Mendes directed production with Bernadette Peters would not be the last Gypsy in Laurents's lifetime.

Laurents has won 4 Tony Awards & been nominated for 6 Oscars, winning for the screenplay of The Turning Point. He was by all accounts, a real son of a bitch... but, what a talent.

His career had barely started when he was drafted into the Army in 1941. Laurents spent the war years writing training films & radio propaganda shows. He had also had come to terms with his homosexuality, & he soon lost count of the sexual experiences he had while in the Army. In Original Story By, he speaks of his lifetime of gay encounters, referring to his partners as “those unremembered hundreds.”

As a gay man living as openly as possible during some of this country's most dangerous times, Laurents was a role model of discretion & living the way he wanted to, despite public opinion & cruelty against homosexuals everywhere.

The last line of Laurents's memoir- Original Story By, speaks of Tom Hatcher, who was Laurents' partner for more than 50 years: "As long as he lives, I will." But, Hatcher died in 2006  & Laurents, in his 93rd year, adjusting to life without him. When they first became a couple, Laurents claims his mother was more disturbed that Hatcher was a gentile than that her son was gay.

Laurents led a wild life: "I drank an awful lot, I drugged an awful lot. But I think I have a built-in governor, because at any point I would say OK, I've had enough, & I'd go home to bed. I assumed everybody could do that. I was never one for going to bars, that kind of thing. I was a hopeless romantic. Well, no one could have that much sex & be entirely romantic, but the dangerous side never appealed to me."

But Hatcher was the great love of his life & their life together is one of the great love affairs. Laurents: "Tom & theatre, that's what my life has been. & that's what my book is - an effort to say thank you by doing what I can to make the theatre indestructible & to keep Tom alive."

"From Tom's pool, you can see into the heart of his garden. In summer, we swim laps every day. Often, we walk through the park, then sit on that bench, looking at the view. Yesterday, we sat there a little longer than usual, just looking at the changing light, not saying anything. But Tom reads my mind: 'You're going to live 20 more years,' he assured me."

Laurents worked in many genres. The stage was his first love, & he wrote for it for 65 years, creating comedies, romances, & serious dramas that explored questions of ethics, social pressures & personal integrity.

Laurents made his exit, upstage center, in May 2011. This is a partial list of his contribution to popular culture:

Librettos: Gypsy, Nick & Nora, West Side Story, The Madwoman of Central Park West, Hallelujah, Baby! Do I Hear a Waltz?, & Anyone Can Whistle

Direction: Anyone Can Whistle, La Cage aux Follies, The Madwoman of Central Park West, Gypsy (1974, 1989 & 2008), I Can Get It for You Wholesale (with a very young Barbra Streisand) & Invitation to a March

Plays: Invitation to a March, A Clearing in the Woods, The Time of the Cuckoo, The Bird Cage, Home of the Brave, & Jolson Sings!

Screenplays: Anastasia, The Turning Point, The Way We Were, Gypsy, West Side Story, Bonjour Tristesse, Summertime (from his play The TimeOf The Cuckoo), Anna Lucasta, Home of the Brave, Rope, Caught, &The Snake Pit

Has your life been touched by any of his work? I would be interested to know. If you are a fan, what is your favorite version of Gypsy?

This still gets to me every time... good-byes & regrets.

Born On This Day- July 10th... Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

I have often thought of my spouse as rather Proustian. Like the famous French novelist, the Husband’s art always has as a main theme- Time, & like Marcel Proust, he takes a very long time to produce his work. There are 12 volumes of Proust’s novel- A la Recherche du Temps Perduwhich was published over 14 years. This monumental work changed the traditional narrative to recreate the sense of memory, the past together in thought with the present, as each moment of the present becomes the past.

One of the Husband's rather Proustian pieces

It is a landmark in gay literature. Volume 4 - Sodom & Gomorrah has long sections about homosexuality, & the entire novel contains gay characters, considerations, & experiences. Proust was not really at home with his sexuality. His trysts were most often with the lower classes & with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse. He also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, who gave the name for the novel’s love interest, Albertine.

When he went to male brothels & sex clubs, Proust liked to be whipped & humiliated & who among us does not? Wealthy from his inheritance, he typically slept during the day & wrote at night, lying in his blue bed, in his bedroom, which was walled with cork for silence. The bedroom is on permanent on display at Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

Born in 1871, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was the son of a wealthy Catholic doctor & his Jewish wife & grew up in Paris near the Champs-Elysées. He had his first asthma attack at the age of 9 & suffered from it for the rest of his life.

His father died in 1903, & his mother in 1905. Before their deaths, Proust mixed with the richest & highest of society in France ,mostly in the Paris Town Houses or at the country estates & chateaux of his wealthy friends. He based many on his characters on real life people. After the deaths of his parents he increasingly withdrew from social life & lived mainly in the bedroom of his apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann. His last public appearance was at the New Year's Eve ball given by the discreetly gay Comte de Beaumont in 1921.

I have only read volume #1: Swann’s Way, but my bucket list has me reading the entire work before I check out. I suppose I need to get started. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is considered to be the greatest novel of 20th Century.

Things I Will Miss: Nora Ephron

My opinion has proved unpopular during many conversations through the decades, but Nora Ephron is responsible for what are for me a few of the most very twee & disagreeable films of the end of the 20^thcentury: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless In Seattle, & You’ve Got Mail. This may make me seem as if I am not a fan when, in fact, I am a big fan. Even those films that irk me so much are smart films in an age of dumb films.

Ephron also was responsible for screenplays for favorite films- Silkwood, Heartburn & Julie & Julia (which she also directed), but I remain an avid admirer of her essays, often published first in the New Yorker, Esquire, New York, & NY Times magazines & gathered in her collections: Crazy Salad, Wallflower at the Orgy, Scribble Scrabble, I Remember Nothing: & Other Reflections, & I Feel Bad About My Neck: & Other Thoughts On Being A Woman.

She was my generation’s Dorothy Parker & as I consider her writing today, & look for quotes, I note that that her words are musical, like tap dancing prose.

I always enjoyed Ephron’s appearances on TV talk shows & interviews in magazines. I find it hard to resist a really smart, very funny woman.

Thinking about her today, upon learning of her passing & because I am zany for lists, I was drawn to these 2 lists from her last book:

What I Won't Miss:

Dry skin

Bad dinners like the one we went to last night

E-mail

Technology in general

My closet

Washing my hair

Bras

Funerals

Illness everywhere

Polls that show that 42 percent of the American people believe in creationism

Polls

Fox TV

The collapse of the dollar

Bar mitzvahs

Mammograms

Dead flowers

The sound of the vacuum cleaner

Bills

E-mail. I know I already said it, but I want to emphasize it.

Small print

Panels on Women in Film

Taking off makeup every night

WHAT I WILL MISS:

My kids

Nick

Spring

Fall

Waffles

The concept of waffles

Bacon

A walk in the park

The idea of a walk in the park

The park

Shakespeare in the Park

The bed

Reading in bed

Fireworks

Laughs

The view out the window

Twinkle lights

Butter

Dinner at home just the two of us

Dinner with friends

Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives

Paris

Next year in Istanbul

Pride & Prejudice

The Christmas tree

Thanksgiving dinner

One for the table

The dogwood

Taking a bath

Coming over the bridge to Manhattan

Pie