Lord Berners

From First Childhood:

Another and rather similar incursion into the realm of magic had consequences that were equally disastrous. As a child I was not encouraged to believe in the more frivolous elements of the supernatural world. On the few occasions when my mother or my nurse had told me fairy tales, their narrative style had seemed to be almost deliberately lacking in conviction. But, in spite of this materialistic policy on their part, I succeeded in amassing quite a substantial collection of fairy-story books, Grimm, Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, a volume of Russian folk-lore and an edition of the Arabian Nights, in which the fact that the text had been so carefully expurgated that it resembled a plum-pudding without the plums was amply compensated for by the Oriental voluptuousness of the illustrations. These books I used to devour with ecstatic enjoyment until at last I became completely engrossed in the fantastic world they chronicled. But I remember that I was always more interested in the pageantry of fairyland than in the personality of its inhabitants. In the story of Cinderella I was far more thrilled by the pumpkin coach, by the glass slipper, than by the young woman who rode in the former and wore the latter. Ali Baba meant less to me than the cave of the Forty Thieves; I thought more of the Chinese setting of Aladdin, of the Lamp, of the Palace of the Genii than of Aladdin himself; Rapunzel remained a vague and hazy figure while I could visualize clearly the tower from which she let down her hair.

and

Another neighbour of ours who stood out from the back. ground of more ordinary county folk was Mr. Vivian Pratt.
Distantly related to a ducal family, he enjoyed a greater consideration in the county than he might otherwise have done. Mr. Vivian Pratt was considered eccentric, but nothing more. In those days people were more naive with regard to certain aspects of life than they are now. It was said of him that he had odd mannerisms, that he was inclined to be effeminate, and there criticism ceased. Mr. Vivian Pratt had a mincingly ingratiating voice and he moved with an undulating gait. When walking through a room he looked as though he were trying to avoid imaginary chairs and tables, and he would describe elaborate circles with the middle portion of his body. His clothes had a fashion-plate neatness and always seemed a little inappropriate to the country, but when he appeared on horseback nobody could present a more dapper picture of horsiness. His get-up, however, like that of Miss Lucy Glitters when she appeared in the hunting-field, looked as if it could not have weathered even the mildest of rainstorms. .
His manners were excessive in their courtliness and he used to annoy my mother by addressing her as ”Dear lady.”

and

The only form of natural history cultivated at Elmley was the collecting of beetles, cock-chafers, caterpillars and kindred insects. This was known comprehensively as ”bug-hunting.” And, in this connection, an incident arose which may be quoted as a fair example of the ridiculous quandaries in which schoolmasters sometimes find themselves placed.

Late one afternoon, during a half-holiday, the bell tolled and an assembly was called. There was always a mysterious excitement attached to the calling of an assembly. It generally meant that some grave scandal had occurred. The air would be heavy with an atmosphere of crime. There would be wild speculation as to the nature of the offence and its perpetrators. Even the most righteous would be obsessed by a sense of guilt, for the crimes committed were frequently unconscious ones.

The whole school trooped into the large Assembly Room, where the Headmaster stood at his desk, wearing an air of tremendous gravity.

”Boys,” he said, ”in connection with this new craze for the collecting of insects, a very unfortunate word has arisen. I believe that those who indulge in this practice are known as bug-hunters, and the expression to which I am referring is a contraction of that word. Now, boys, I have not the least doubt that this word has been employed in complete ignorance. I am convinced that its true significance is one that is undreamt of by any of you. But, in point of fact, it is a very horrible and disgraceful expression, one that would bring a blush to the cheeks of your mothers and sisters, and one that no gentleman would ever dream of using.

”The word must henceforth be expunged from your Vocabulary, and any boy heard making use of it in future Will render himself liable to very severe punishment. Boys, you may go.”

and:

At last the Summer term came to an end. An eternity of time seemed to have passed since that day when I first stood, small and trembling, upon the threshold of Elmley. In stature I had not grown appreciably larger, but spiritually my outlook had widened. New expansions had taken place within my little soul. The sense of Free Will which, in the nursery, had never given me cause for thought, now seemed to be thwarted at every turn by Predestination in the shape of schoolmasters, school conventions and public opinion. I discovered, however, that physical strength and superiority in games were the most reliable assets of Free Will. Although I had not yet mastered the technique of bluff, so important in our dealings with our fellow human beings, I had already managed to acquire a certain skill in hypocrisy I was beginning to learn how to adapt the expression of such opinions as I held to their suitability. 

and finally:

I overheard one of the neighbours say that Mrs. Harvey was very ”fin de siecle.” What this exactly implied I never quite understood, but I know that she was interested in all that was going on in the world of art and literature at the time. She had known Walter Pater, Whistler, Wilde and Swinburne. But of this, of course, I knew nothing in those days, such names having never been mentioned in the family circle. My mother’s culture stopped with Tennyson. 

Life in the ’nineties, in a distant provincial neighbourhood such as ours, had seemed to me up till then a little devoid of charm. It was a tawdry, unprepossessing period. In the country life of the ’eighties there had been at least a certain solid grandeur; this had now given place to gimcrack. The Zeitgeist was represented by the bicycle. The costume of the period (the leg-of-mutton sleeves, the straw hats, the blouses, the masculine collars and ties worn by the women), which when reproduced on the stage nowadays raises a sympathetic smile, seemed to me at the time to be of an unmitigated plainness. Interior decoration was equally depressing. Whatever the aesthetic cult may have produced in the way of beauty elsewhere in the neighbourhood there was nothing but a welter of cane and bamboo furniture, draped easels, standard lamps with flounces, mirrors with roses and chrysanthemums painted on them, Moorish fretwork, Indian embroidery, pampas grass and palms; an effort, no doubt to escape from the cumbrous smugness of the Mid-Victorian style, but which could hardly be described as successful from an artistic point of view. 

I find it difficult to speak of Mrs. Harvey, at this distance of time, without falling into exaggeration. The impression she made on my youthful mind is too highly coloured and gilded with the sentimental memory of the past. Her personality, when she first arrived like a meteor in our midst, seemed to me so radiant, her conversation so brilliant, that it was as though she were a being outside the ordinary range of daily life, the materialisation of some personage of fiction. I had heard it said that she was like a character from one of George Meredith’s novels, and for days I struggled with Diana of the Crossways. But I came to the conclusion that the somewhat recondite epigrams of the heroine were not a patch on those of Mrs. Harvey. 

Harold Nicolson

‘It would be impossible, I feel, to actually be as decadent as Lambert looked.  I split the infinitive deliberately, being in the first place no non-split diehard (oh, the admirable Mr Fowler!), and desiring secondly to emphasise what was in fact the dominant and immediate consideration which Lambert evoked.  I have met many men with wobbly walks, but I have never met a walk more wobbly than that of Lambert Orme.  It was more than sinuous, it did more than undulate, it rippled. At each step a wave was started which passed upwards through his body, convexing his buttocks, concaving the small of his back, convexing again his slightly rounded shoulders, and working itself out in a backward swaying of the neck and head. This final movement passed off more rapidly than the initial undulations, with the resulting impression of a face upturned generally, but bowing at rhythmic intervals, as if a tired royalty or a camel slouching heavily along the road to Isfahan…..’ 

and

I did not see him again for some five years. He went round the world and sent me a postcard from Yokohama. He was immensely impressed by the beauty of American cities, and it was from them, I think, that he first learnt to see life as a system of correlated planes. It was several years, however, be« fore his very real and original talent for association was able finally to cast the slough of symbolism. When I next met him he was still intensively concerned with the relation between things and himself: it was only in his final period that he became predominantly interested in the relation of. things towards each other. His talent, which though singularly receptive was not very ‘muscular, had failed to extract any interesting synthesis from the confrontation of the universe with his own twitching heart: he had tried, and he had failed, to interpret conscious cognition by a single simple emotion But in his later period he did in fact succeed in conveying, an original analysis, implicit rather than expressed, of the diversity and interrelation of external phenomena: he was able to suggest a mood of subconscious perplexity sensitive to unapparent affinities. The conception of life as a repetition of self-contained and finite entities can be integrated only by the pressure of a compelling imagination; Lambe1t s imagination though mobile was not compelling: I suspect indeed that less power is required to disintegrate such entities, to suggest a world of atoms fortuitously whirling into certain shapes, to indicate a tremendous unknown, quivering below the crust of our convention.

Barbara Stanwyck

By Victoria Wilson

Oecasionally, Millie Stevens would take Ruby to see Pearl White “ in her Perils.” “There wasn’t much money for anything,” Ruby recalled. There wers tiInes when, in order to get a hot meal, Ruby would go into a diner, order hot water, and add ketchup to it. Ruby “tended children, washed dishes, ran errands,” she said, anything to earn enough money to go to the serials. 

and on Belasco

Mack one day took Ruby to see his longtime associate David Belasco, the maestro, the old master whose name was synonymous with the theater. By 1926, Belasco at seventy-three was considered eternal, a god. 

He had produced hundreds of plays and helped to establish even more careers, from Mrs. Leslie Carter and Ina Claire to Maude Adams. 

Belasco was seen as a force; he’d led the theater from the nineteenth century into the modern world, from the old Madison Square Theatre on Twenty-Fourth Street to the theater that carried his name on Forty-Fourth Street. 

Belasco had started in the theater of gaslight flares forty years before and worked in a time when footlights were the dominant source of illumination on the stage, casting false shadows without control. Belasco had a notion about lighting and saw it as a way to dramatize the mood of a play. His experiments resulted in diffused light. He took a mica slide frosted with emery and oil, placed it on a series of coins, over a beam of light, and, by using silver reflectors, was able to control the spread of a beam of light. The harshness and unreality of footlights were banished from the Belasco stages. 

By 1915, Belasco was able to re-create the different lights of a day, from a morning sunrise to the light of dusk, from the threatening light of a storm to the light of the moon. By using manually operated spotlights, sometimes with up to twenty electricians working at the same time, and nonreflecting spotlights, Belasco found a way to project differently colored lights that 
didn’t clash on any number of people standing side by side on the stage. 

and

Cameras were out of their booths, housed in padded “blimps,” and Were set on wooden frames and rollers, although film was still shot through glass plates. The cameras themselves had been quieted, and for exterior shots only padded camera covers were used to reduce noise. 

For his work at Columbia, Walker had had to be inventive; the diffusion and tricks of lighting he used may have looked affected, but his reasons for Using them were practical: the studio’s sets were “cheap and phony [and] photography had to make them look like something.” 

The difference for Capra between making silent and sound pictures was enormous, and not just because of the use of dialogue. 

“Suddenly [with talking pictures] we had to work in the silence of a tomb,” said Capra. “No one, while a silent picture was being shot, was quiet, Shooting of silent scenes had gone on with hammering and sawing on an adjacent set, the director yelling at actors through a megaphone, cameramen shouting, while everybody howled if the scene was funny. 

“With sound, when the red light went on, everyone froze in his position -a cough or a belch would wreck the scene. To the nervous snit of the onstage silent actors-over having to memorize lines for the first time-the funereal hush added the willies. They shook with stage fright.” 

One silent-picture star said, “The silence from the studio was unbearable. There wasn’t that help from the director saying, ‘You’re doing fine, now a little faster.’ Nothing.” 

and on John Gilbert:
Gilbert and Garbo were to be married in a double wedding at the home of Marion Davies.
On the morning of the wedding Gilbert saw Garbo pulling out of the driveway. She did not return.
While waiting for the wedding to begin, Louis B Mayer slapped Gilbert on the back and said "What's the matter with you Gilbert? What do you have to marry her for? Why don't you just fuck her and forget about it."
Mayer‘s remark gave Gilbert the perfect outlet for his fury. Gilbert went for Mayer, who fell backward through the door of the bathroom, knocking his head on the wall and losing his glasses. Gilbert was hitting Mayer's head against the tile wall as Eddie Mannix, a New Jersey Irish tough and former bouncer and Mayer’s general manager, second in command, and keeper 0? the peace at Metro, quickly pushed his way into the room and separated ths men. Mannix, who had the seemingly jovial manners of a police chief but could just as easily put a bullet in one, picked up Mayer’s glasses and wiped his face with a towel. 

“You’re finished, Gilbert,” Mayer shouted. “I’ll destroy you if it costs me a million dollars.” 

Mayer was a great hater, and the full force of his hatred would now he focused on John Gilbert and destroying the studio’s romantic idol. 
Mayer wanted Barrymore to direct Gilbert’s first full-length talking picture, Redemption. Barrymore was in constant debt to Mayer. He frequently borrowed money against his salary and relied on Mayer to bail him out of tight financial circumstances. Midway through the filming of Redemption, Barrymore was replaced by Fred Niblo. When Gilbert saw the finished product, he tried to buy the prints and negatives with the intention of destroying them in the waters off Catalina Island. The studio refused to scrap the picture but agreed to postpone its release. 

Mayer asked Barrymore to direct Gilbert in the movie that the studio now planned to be Gilbert’s first talking picture. 

His Glorious Night was based on Olympia, a light comedy by Ferenc Molnar, about Viennese society, in which Gilbert was to play an elegant, romantic cavalry officer, a dashing figure equally adept with women and horses. The screenplay, which was largely Molnar’s script, was written by Willard Mack. 

His Glorious Night received positive reviews from the critics, who said Gillbert “was to be congratulated on the manner in which he handles his speaking voice”; that Gilbert “could not have found a more entertaining vehicle for his talking debut than this delightful comedy”; and that “Mr. Gilbert can speak the English language and speak it beautifully.” ‘ 

But women in moving picture audiences weren’t as accepting of Gilberts performance. Instead of inspiring women to fantasize as they watched Gilbert on-screen, “the love scenes are so intense,” one critic wrote, that "they make the women let out nervous giggles.” 

Gilbert was being laughed at by female audiences across the country. In silent pictures he had been looked upon as the essence of male virility. Now: in his first sound picture, he was provoking laughter and discomfort.

Those who worked with Gilbert knew his demise began with the aborted Vidor-Gilbert double wedding and continued with Louis B. Mayer’s choice of Lionel Barrymore as the director of Gilbert’s first two talking pictures. Hedda Hopper, an actress in His Glorious Nz'g/at, said, “I watched John Gilbert being destroyed on the sound stage by one man, Lionel Barrymore. Barrymore had plenty of experience on the stage; Gilbert had none. 

“During the picture, Lionel was in physical misery. He had a bad hip and cook drugs to ease the pain. Around four pm. when he’d inch himself out of his chair, it took a good minute before he could start the locomotion of his legs.” 

Gilbert’s opening speech in the second reel began with “Oh, beauteous maiden, my arms are waiting to enfold you. I love you. I love you. I love you.” 

By then in pictures, said Hopper, “love was a comedy word. Use it too freely,” Hopper said, “and you get a belly laugh. Whether by diabolical intent or accident, Jack’s speech was ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ Jack was young and Virile. He was handsome but his face didn’t ht those words. When sound came on the screen from his lips, a strange meeting took place between his nose and mouth and made him look more like a parrot than a lover. In silent pictures you never noticed.” 

Of his supposedly high voice, Colleen Moore, a good friend of Gilbert’s, said, “Jack’s voice was not a deep one, but neither was it a high pitched one. His voice ,was in the middle register-the same register as that of Douglas Fairbanks and many other male stars. What ruined Jack Gilbert were three little words.” 

To Colleen Moore, it was the discomfort of the women in the audience actually hearing John Gilbert say, “ ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ right out loud for all the world to hear, [that] disconcerted and embarrassed [them]; those most ordinary but still most profound words that can be spoken between a man and a woman. In their embarrassment they giggled.” 

Louise Brooks said of Lionel Barrymore, he “was taking heavy doses of morphine . . . and was hardly responsible for what went on. Anyone could have manipulated [Barrymore] and someone did. It was common talk at the Studio before the picture came out. Everyone knew it but Jack.” In the picture Gilbert’s speech was stiff; the pronunciation of his words, exaggerated. 

Leatrice Joy, Gilbert’s former Wife, saw His Glorious Night and said, “I don’t know whether Barrymore deliberately did Jack in, but he couldn‘t have done much worse if he tried. Jack’s scenes with Catherine Dale Owen were dreadful. All that kissing and saying ‘I love you’ looked all the more ridiculous with her because she was such a cold fish . . . She made Jack look ridiculous and Barrymore allowed it.” 

Douglas Shearer, the sound engineer for His Glorious Night, told the director Clarence Brown that the engineers “never turned up the bass when Gilbert spoke; all you heard was treble. Of course it was a mistake.” A mistake ordered by Mayer? 

and on Joan Crawford:

Mankiewicz said of Joan’s moods, “You'd have to watch the way she came in. If Joan was wearing a pair of slacks, that meant you could slap her on the ass and say, ‘Hiya Kid. You getting much?’ In turn she’d be as raucous as possible. She could come back the next day wearing black sables and incredible sapphires and by Jeses, you’d better be on your feet and click your heels, kiss her hand and talk with the best British accent you had; but never in any way indicate she was different in any respect from the way she was yesterday because the following day she’d come in in a dirndl or a pinafore and you’d be down on the floor playing jacks with her.” 

Joan at thirty-one was beautiful. As Peggy Eaton, the young, dewy inn keepers daughter of simple demeanor, supposed to look fresh and innocent, Crawford, with her face framed by ringlets and a wide-brimmed nineteenth century bonnet, belied any trace of modesty or purity. Her head looked too large, her face too square-jawed, her features too hard. 

and on Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone:

Mary Benny was beautiful, glamorous, and fun. She was down-to-earth, amusing, strong, the kind of woman Jack was drawn to, women like Barbara, [Um Sheridan, and Carole Lombard. 

Mary and Jack were uneducated, but Jack, like Barbara, read and wanted to learn. For Mary, being Mrs. Jack Benny was the be-all and end-all. What interested Mary was learning to buy the right silver, the right jewelry (the bigger, the better), the right clothes (she shopped incessantly). Mary had taste, but most of it was copied from Edie Goetz, older daughter of Louis B. Mayer and one of the leading hostesses of Hollywood. 

Mary was Sadie Marks, a shopgirl from Seattle with no credentials and little sophistication. She strove to be a great Hollywood hostess like Edie. Mary wanted to be Edie Goetz (when the Goetz cook died, Edie’s response: “How could she do this to me?”). If Edie Goetz fired her butler, Mary fired hers. 

Mary could be cruel and unpredictable; at times she threatened to send her adopted daughter back to the orphanage, and Joanie Benny found it difficult to relax around her mother. 

The Bennys lived in a Georgian mansion in Beverly Hills with roses and pansies lining the front walk and a large swimming pool and playhouse in the rear. Mary would look at their spiral staircase and say, “Joan will look lovely coming down those stairs, a bride.” 

The Bennys’ parties, particularly their New Year’s Eve celebrations, were lavish, filled with people who to Mary were the right crowd: Barbara and Bob; Frank and Nancy Sinatra; George Burns and Gracie Allen; Jimmy and Gloria Stewart; Ray and Mal Milland; Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; Errol Flynn; Gary and Rocky Cooper; the Humphrey Bogarts; the Robert Montgomerys; the Ronald Colmans; Ann Sheridan; Bob and Dolores Hope and others. 

The Jack Benny Hour, sponsored by Jell-O (“Jell-O again,” Jack would say at the opening of each show), had aired on Sunday nights at seven since 1934. 

Benny had created 'a radio family that seemed real to his listening audience. His comedy was sophisticated and childlike. Jack was the butt of most of the comedy situations, the guy the others picked on. Benny’s style of comedy had been influenced by Frank Fay; each had headlined at the Palace in New York. Like Fay, Benny sauntered onstage, without props or funny suits hr a Stooge. Like Fay, Jack didn’t tell jokes but told stories around events of the day that seemed ad-libbed. And like Fay Benny took his time and never rushed the punch line.

The final excerpts from Blake Bailey's Cheever

ONE WEEK after his final session with Hays, Cheever managed the long drive to Yaddo for the annual board meeting, Tappan Zee Bridge and all. He was aghast, however, by what he found there: the eighty» one-year-old Elizabeth Ames was virtually surrounded by homo! sexuals, despite her stern assertions about excluding them whenever possible. This was the same “terrifying ambivalence,” thought Cheever, that he’d detected in his own mother-that is, an impulse to condemn perversion on the one hand, and to castrate her son on the other, the better to ensure “a gentle companion” in her lonely old age. Actually, Cheever wasn’t quite sure about some of Ames’s entourage, but at least one-Ned Rorem-he knew to be “a famous cocksucker”: “N[ed] who I’ve been told claims, in his public confession, to have been blown and buggered by half the French Academy . . .” The “confession” was Rorem’s recently published Paris Dimy, a remarkably candid account of gay culture that had elevated Rorem to the status of “America’s official queer, goyim division,” as the author put it. 

That night Rorem had an unexpected visitor: Cheever, festively waving a fifth of Scotch. For three hours or so, he went on and on about his recent psychotherapy, his drinking problem, the link between writing and screwing, and finally, when the bottle was empty, he put a hand on Rorem’s leg. “I was reluctant,” the composer recalled, “since I wasn’t particularly attracted to him physically. But Cheever sort of broke my heart, he was so wistful. ‘I simply have to,’ he said.” Cheever seemed “very naive sexually”---he only wanted oral sex, as if Other possibilities hadn’t occurred to him-and afterward he was “like a high-school boy, romantic in the extreme”: “I’ve never felt this way before,” he said, claiming that he hadn’t been with a man in some thirty years, and meanwhile caressing Rorem in a way that seemed “sort of cursory.” 

“Oh what good children we are!” Cheever wrote the next day. “How I rush to present myself at the breakfast table at eight AM, bright, shaven, proof of the fact that I did not get drunk last night and dn something I should not have done.” For the next week or so, at any rate, the two were a couple: buzzing around the countryside in Cheever’s roadster, having picnics together and chatting about one thing and another while Cheever gulped gin from a thermos. “[He] was obsessed with homosexuality,” Rorem later wrote, “as though hoarding lost time. Learning about my orgasm fantasies (squalid, narrow and sadomasochistic), he was anxious to show that bis were elating, like being on a crimson staircase toward a silver tower that bursts open to a sky of golden stars.” With Rorem’s assistance, Cheever ascended those stairs three or four times a day, and his long struggle with impotence was nowhere in evidence. Nor was he very discreet about things-once they did it under a Ping-Pong table-seeming almost to invite discovery: “My God, there’s Hortense [Calisher]! . . . They know! . . . But I’m glad. . . . No I’m not.” Several years hence, while writing THe Later Diaries, Rorem described the liaison and likened Cheever to Proust’s Baron de Charlus, though be deleted these bits on the advice of his publisher’s lawyer. “I wouldn’t have minded,” Cheever remarked, once the book had been safely expurgated. 

and

Ames’s conduct as director had always been a bit on the peremptory side, and now that she was all but totally deaf and a little demented, too, she’d become a tyrant. “No!” she shouted into the telephone when an eminent critic called (during working hours) and asked to speak with a resident artist. At the time, the critic in question was visiting the ladylike Anne Palamountain, wife of the Skidmore president, who vividly remembers her own first visit to Yaddo. It was late at night, and her new friend Cheever had proposed that she and her husband follow him (amid a lot of antic shushing, lest the despot be roused) to a back door of the Trask mansion; making their furtive way into the main hall, they encountered an equally apprehensive Philip Roth creeping down the stairs. “Ames had everyone terrified,” said Palamountain. It got so bad that Cheever himself had begun to dread the place-“the demesne of a powerful and weary old lady,” whom he blamed, moreover, for cultivating “the company of emasculated men” and hence leaving him at the mercy of Rorem and the like: “There are never any attractive or available women and in my desperation for company I find myself drinking with homosexuals.” Still, a part of him would always be fond of Mrs. Ames, and he took care to relate his decision to her in the most gracious possible terms: “This, of course, has nothing to do with our long and affectionate friendship, or with the fact that you have been my most intimate confident [sic]. Without Yaddo, as you’ve managed it, it would have been impossible for me to be a writer. . . . [But] I am convinced that a change is in order and I know you have the strength and intelligence to assess such an opinion.” At the subsequent board meeting, when Ames conceded her resignation, Cheever spoke movingly of her “imperturbable, humorous and fair” treatment of the (very) odd assortment of artists she’d hosted over the years: “This is a life and a triumph.” 

and

As it happened, Holmes was also depressed at the time: for twelve years he’d been eclipsed by his lover’s achievements, and it was gratifying to be needed by an even more famous artist, whom he found charming besides-albeit in a “childlike” way, said Rorem. “III, with the air of Florence Nightingale tending the wounded, has seen John often, and found tranquility therein, the way maniacs are said to find tranquility as babysitters.” The two met at various posh hotels (“I like to remember that we have made love in The Drake, the Plaza and the Hilton,” Cheever wrote Holmes, “and I would like to feel your gentle hands on my cock in a hundred more hotels”), and as a result Cheever noted a vast improvement in his general outlook. But Rorem took a dim view. One day Cheever was visiting the Academy when he noticed the secretary chatting with Rorem on the phone, whereupon Cheever asked to say hello to his old friend: “We must have words together,” Rorem said balefully. Cheever hoped to avoid even speculating on such a conversation, and really had to admit that parting with Holmes would be little more than a “physical inconvenience.” But who needed the inconvenience? “That the pleasure I take in Jim’s company should in any way seem destructive is to me unimaginable,” he wrote Rorem. “I know how long your association has been and I can only imagine the depth of your love but I think that neither Jim nor I are inclined to challenge this.” 

The beginning of the end came, in any event, when Holmes manifested his “lack of maleness” by commenting on the upholstery of a given hotel’s furniture (“Suddenly an abyss opens between them”)Since, however, the affair had provided Cheever with a crucial degree of equanimity where Max was concerned, he tried for a while to mold Holmes into a more pleasing form: “I think I am not particularly susceptible to the beauty of men,” he wrote Holmes, “but I love your smile because I know it to be genuine and your eyes because I think them level and manly”; as for the paramount purpose of “large orgasims” [sic], they served to “put a man’s feet back on the stern path we know life to be.” 

More Cheever

Blake Bailey


Both were charming, difficult personalities, and both were at their best with each other on the rare occasions when they met. If anything Bellow was the more prickly of the two, alert to slights of any sort-especially from goyim-but with Cheever he felt “no sense of rivalry,” and certainly never a hint of Yankee condescension. As he remarked in his eulogy, “It fell to John to resolve these differences [of background]. He did it without the slightest difficulty, simply by putting human essences in first place.” Reduced to their essences, the two were fundamentally alike. “We share not only our love of women but a fondness for the rain,” said Cheever. Or, as his wife would have it, “They were both women haters.”

and

A week or so later-after a day “like a witches [sic] tooth” Cheever came home from his Italian lesson and found a letter from a stranger in Philadelphia informing him that Time magazine had panned the collection.” The collection was titled Stories and included work by Cheever and three other notable New Yorker writers: Jean Stafford, Maxwell, and Daniel Fuchs. (The early Time review-“News” from the Defeated”--wasn’t really that bad: it called Stafford “the biggest name and most accomplished craftsman of the group” and didn’t mention Cheever at all, though the four were collectively praised for their “competence.”) The idea for the book had originated a few years back, when Cheever had met Stafford at a party given by their mutual friend Margot Morrow. Someone had asked the two why they hadn’t published more story collections. As Cheever wrote in his “Authors’ Note”:

The writers explained that-aside from the indifference of publishers-to collect short stories is something like marrying many times and collecting all your wives under one roof on a rainy day. Furthermore, collections of short stories are usually reviewed in tandem or four-in-hand and in an atmosphere of combativeness (X is more sensitive than Y) that overlooks the fact, known to most writers, that to make sense out of life is an exertion of uncommon cooperativeness.

and

On the day of the award ceremony (“a gathering of nearly 1,000 writers, publishers and booksellers in the grand ballroom of the Commodore Hotel,” reported the Times), Cheever was very nervous. After Clifton Fadiman presented him with a plaque and a check for one thousand dollars, Cheever recited a very brief speech “in a swift ‘ mutter that verged on unconscious discourtesy,” as one observer recalled. He spoke about the loneliness of the writer and how much the writer depends on the “good opinion of strangers”; fortunately, said Cheever, there were still so many readers in America who, “beset with an unprecedented variety of diversions, continue to read with great taste and intelligence.”* The audience sat in rigid silence, straining to hear, but suddenly it was over and Cheever was replaced on the dais by Randall Jarrell-then the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress-who proceeded to deliver a jeremiad that vividly contradicted Cheever’s sunny View of the American reading public. As long as people preferred Peyton Place to the works of Proust, said Jarrell, they would be “enemies of [their] own culture”; he also said some hard things about South Pacific and the like. (As Cheever wrote a friend afterward, “Randall Jarrell, who had just washed his beard, made a long speech, the gist of which was that Bennett Cerf is a shit, that South Pacific is shitty and that people who look at the sixty-four thousand dollar question are virtual cocksuckers.”)

*Among Cheever’s papers is a draft of a speech he wrote for some unknown occasion subsequent to the March 11, 1958, National Book Award ceremony: “It is very gallant of you to come here tonight and it is also quite gallant of me, since I find this kind of thing quite difficult. The last time I spoke to any sort of gathering was in receiving an award and in this connection I said how much a writer desires the good opinion of strangers. Three newspaper men in the audience reported . . . that from my manner, my demeanor on the platform I needed the good opinion of strangers in the worst possible way.”

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He had kept an eye on Updike ever since the latter’s stories had begun appearing in The New Yorker in 1954; he told his Barnard students that Updike was one of the most promising writers of his generation, though almost in the same breath he remarked that Updike seemed a bit too talented-“too pretty”---for his own good. But in the hospital his better nature kept reproaching him, and he couldn’t resist writing; second note to the publicist: although, alas, his opinion of the novel hadn’t changed, for the sake of his own “peace of mind” he wanted to reiterate that he considered Updike “unusually brilliant.” And to Maxwell (their common editor at the The New Yorker) he also wrote of his troubled conscience, repeating that he’d been “disappointed” by The Poor/rouse Fair but had liked Updike’s most recent story in the magazine-except, that is, for “the shaven armpits of the poor girls playing ping-pong. One should never remark idly on the armpits of ladies.” Such a punctilio went to the heart of a certain dialectic between the writers.

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“It was nice while you were away to have a dry toilet seat,” his wife greeted him when he returned from the hospital, or so he reminded himself whenever he was feeling especially ill-used. Mostly he “one dered how he might deploy such a perfect insult in his fiction. Again and again he weighed it for this or that story or novel, until finally: almost twenty years later, he gave it to Farragut‘s despicable wife in Falconer.

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Cheever’s worries deepened when the ten-year-old Ben befriended an effeminate boy named Richie Henry, whose family had moved to the carriage house next door.
(“Effeminate” was Cheever’s invariable epithet for the boy, and it appears to have itch the mot juste “At the time I had no idea of my sexuality,” said Richie, a very good-humored (and gay) man in his fifties when we spoke. “My family never made an issue of it. But later I asked an old junior-high friend if she thought I was effeminate, and she said, ‘Yes, I certainly did.’ ”)
For two years or so, the boys were almost inseparable: they’d disappear for hours, playing Monopoly or reading in the basement, or else go for long bicycle hikes and stop by the woods to explore. As for Cheever, he couldn’t help seething whenever he laid eyes on Richie: “ [He] often stands with both hands on his hips in an attitude that I was told, when I was a boy, was the sign of a congenital queer. . . . He is attached securely to my son and I do not like him.” But of course the source of his misgivings was a taboo subject, such that Cheever’s erratic behavior was an all-but-total mystery to the boys. Once, they returned from a long bicycle hike and were sitting Under a tree when Cheever “came rip-snorting out of the house” and began shouting at Ben about some nominal grievance-this while looking at the other boy, whose bicycle he kept shaking for emphasis: “He seemed to be directing his anger at me,” Richie remembered, “and at the end of his tirade he threw my bike on the ground. I was flabbergasted.” Nor could he fathom Cheever’s coldness one Halloween, when the boys went trick-or-treating together; Richie was already in costume when he came for Ben, and Mr. Cheever gave him a very hard stare before finally calling his son to the door. As it happened, he was “rigid with indignation”: “A friend of Ben’s,” he wrote Weaver, “who has always seemed to me on the delicate side, showed up at the door in high-heeled shoes and an old evening dress, rouged to the ears and blooming.” Ben, especially, was nonplussed by it all. His father seemed forever berating him over trifles: You’ve been gone how long picking blueberries? And that’s all the blueberries you’ve picked? And why didn’t you go to the football game with everyone else? Where have you been all this time-? “What I claim to feel is that he has turned his back on the beauty of the autumn day, the green playing field, and the decent people,” Cheever wrote in his journal, “but what I really fear is that he has been indulging in the vices of my own youth, smoking cigarettes and masturbating in the moldy-smelling woods. . . . So I seem to pour onto his broad and tender shoulders all my anxiety, my guilt.”

He wanted to be the right kind of father-not like his own father, in short, the dreaded “passive father” of Freudian lore. This meant enticing his son onto fields of glory: reminding him to practice his soccer passes (“although he would sooner take his tame mouse for a walk”), kick a football, and by all means learn a seemly love for baseball, that sine qua non of American manhood. “When I was seven years old,” Ben remembered, “he told me that if I picked a team, he would take me to a game, and after that he’d help me follow the standings in the newspaper. He gave me a list of teams.” Ben picked the Baltimore Orioles, and Cheever asked why. “Because Oriole is such a pretty name,” the boy explained. And yet Cheever persevered. One of the great morbiditieé of his own youth had been an effeminate wing (the fault of a passive father), and his own son would be spared that, if possible. As Ben wrote in “The Boy They Cut,” Cheever would often coax his indifferent, exophoric son to play catch with him.

We’d go outside. He’d throw the ball at me. I’d drop it. “I’m sorry,” I’d say and pick the ball up and throw it back.
He’d throw the ball again. Again I’d fail to make the catch.

“Sorry,” I’d say. . . . “For Christ’s sake, stop apologizing,” he’d say. “Okay,” I’d say. “I’m sorry.”

But at last they discovered a mutual love of the outdoors: Cheever delightedly taught his son how to fish, and Ben became an avid reader of Field (7‘ Stream (which, he said, “you could read without having any questions about your sexual identity”). When he expressed interest in a twenty-two-dollar kayak kit (“Hours of Paddling Fun!”), Cheever bought it for him at once, and wasn’t the least dismayed when Ben wrecked the thing a week later in the Croton River; he promptly bought him another, better kayak. Ben-nothing if not eager to please, and sensing he was on a roll of sorts-zestfully took up a lot of manly chores, like felling trees and splitting wood, for which his grateful father paid him fifty cents an hour. Sometimes after these exertions the boy would reward himself with a bubble bath-until one day his father found him reclining among the suds. “Who do you think you are?” he roared. “Some kind of STARLET?”

Nobody could say he didn’t care-and really, at bottom, he had almost nothing but sympathy for the sensitive little boy. When Ben would leave the dinner table in tears and go hide under his bed, his father would sometimes lie on the floor beside him and (as Ben recalled) “talk to [him] through the dust bunnies.” And there were many times When the boy would get scared at night and crawl between his parents-then wet the bed. “We did the best we could,” Ben decided, many years later.