Inside a Pearl Read online

  “Now Rick’s my boy,” he said, sliding into a twang; “don’t you say nothin’ about Rick.”

  Some of his finest writings are profiles of American figures from the eighties collected in his first book of essays, The Moronic Inferno. Observant and perspicacious but never completely arch or mean-spirited, he gave us subtly gimlet-eyed views of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Gore Vidal, and Ronald Reagan—Martin is uncannily at home with born-agains, Cold Warriors, and their equally flawed critics. In person, Martin could make a perhaps rehearsed observation sound off-the-cuff and fresh in his plummy Oxford rasp. He’d hoard a few gems from the common junk pile of the news and then spring them on you. He’d obviously been rubbing his hands over these gleaming observations knowing they’d delight just the right connoisseur. He had a faintly satirical view of gay life, but no more than his hero Nabokov does in his funniest novel, Pale Fire.

  I accompanied Martin when we were each invited to a big party for the queen’s golden jubilee at the Royal Academy of Art. Mrs. Thatcher was there, already half gaga, dressed in a shocking cyclamen-colored suit. Martin was in the inner circle and was presented to the queen. He reminded her that she’d knighted his father, and she said, “I have no memory of that.” I was in the bigger group of those who wouldn’t be presented, but at least I got a chance to talk to the stork-skinny tenor Ian Bostridge, who came with his young son, and tell him that his music had meant more to me than that of any other singer’s.

  When I was a Booker judge the year of London Fields, I tried to get this masterpiece of Martin’s on the short list because I was sure it was the one recently published novel that people would be talking about fifty years later. The two women on the jury, while admitting the book’s superiority, threatened to resign if the novel was nominated because of its supposedly politically incorrect view of women. David Lodge, our chairman, caved. I tried to no avail to argue that the violently misused heroine was an allegory for Mother Earth, who was being ravaged—and that it was an ecological parable.

  At the same time, I wasn’t abreast of the rising volleys in political correctness in English-speaking and particularly American culture. I’d been in France too long. When I was asked to speak on the air about this “amusing” new fad of political correctness at the Maison de la Radio in Paris, I had to admit I was completely out of touch. So much so that when I edited The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, I was criticized in the United States for just including the stories I liked and only one by a minority, James Baldwin. Not in England. There I was criticized for being too sex-obsessed. Still, I had to admire the frankness of English reviewers; one English woman critic wrote, “I’ve always wondered what gay men said and did when alone. And now I know and it’s completely boring.” No one would have dared to write that in PC America.

  Lucretia Stewart was another friend who managed to endear herself to me by attacking me in print. I met her in the London house of my publisher Sonny Mehta, who gave me a memorable drinks party for A Boy’s Own Story. This was 1983. The waiters were all sniffing cocaine and trying to keep a straight face with whitened nostrils; a beautiful Weimaraner was dashing about wearing a pearl necklace. Sonny’s wife, Gita, wearing a sari, showed up late. She’d just parachuted out of an airplane with Princess Margaret’s son, David Linley (a furniture maker, and the only talented one of the royals), to celebrate her fortieth birthday, and pled breezily, “I wanted to do something I’d never done.”

  Those were such heady days. I’d never had a successful novel before and I was forty-two. Nor had A Boy’s Own Story had an easy time of it finding a home in print in England. The publisher of my previous books there, André Deutsch, had turned it down, saying it wasn’t up to my first two experimental novels. Now in the confusion and unexpected glare, I hadn’t noticed that Lucretia’s article about me—a Page Six–type column—had ended by addressing me personally (“Well, Mr. White …”), saying that though I said I was so pleased to be in England, I might be a bit less welcome when everyone turned against American gays for spreading AIDS. And here I’d thought Lucretia and I had had a very nice moment chatting together before Sonny’s party. She telephoned me the day of the publication of her article and told me in tears that her editor had added that sentence and that she would never have said anything so gratuitously cruel. But already I was catching on that all Brits in the public eye came in for their drubbings in their naughty but nice press, and all of them seemed to take it on the chin. After all, Harpers & Queen had paid me the compliment of calling me “the most maligned man in America” for writing gay fiction and for my militancy.

  I was being praised enough that it was easy for me to forgive her. Lucretia became one of my best friends, since she, like Marie-Claude, has always had a true gift for friendship. Not only is Lucretia attentive and tender, but she’s also persistent, which is a crucial trait with someone as socially passive as I am.

  When I first knew her she was married. When her husband found out that I knew Italo Calvino and his tiny, spunky Argentine wife, Chichita, he wanted me to invite him to dinner with them. The dinner in Paris was very nearly a disaster, since the husband plied Calvino with lots of annoying questions about his “process.” Luckily I had seated Lucretia next to Calvino, who was enamored of her lovely, fair features, as cleanly drawn as those on a freshly minted dime, and her luxuriant blonde hair. Calvino had a childlike side and became intoxicated with her hair, which he kept touching, like a Nepalese seeing his first Swede and mistaking her for an angel.

  Lucretia was spiky and full of contempt for my American gaucheness. She was certain I didn’t know how to refer to aristocrats or use their correct honorifics: “Oh you saw him, did you, the Lord Rock Savage?” She complained bitterly about her mother’s cruelty: “She actually said at my father’s funeral, ‘Do you know why he was ashamed of you? It’s because you’d become so horribly fat.’” Lucretia was a natural, graceful writer, was very tender with animals, and at a surprisingly early age claimed that she’d given up sex (she was barely in her fifties). All the more surprising because she’d been known, sometimes in the pages of the London tabloids and broadsheets, for her high-flown affairs. In the settlement for their unusually civil divorce, her husband set her up in a flat in Camden Square.

  There she was raped by a marauding stranger. Luckily she wriggled out of her ropes and hit the panic button installed above her bed. The rapist was rooting through her valuables and he immediately dropped her credit cards, then fled. She wrote a shockingly honest article about the whole experience (she said she worried that when the rapist pushed her legs back he’d notice they were winter-white), and soon enough she sold her flat and moved to Greece, into a centuries-old house high up in the walled hilltop district of Naxos, the Kastro. Since then, Lucretia had been finding ways to beautify already superbly simple interiors, and whenever I visited she was always leaping up in the midst of one’s monologue and shouting at her cats: “Dido! I told you not to run away! Dido, get down from there! Yes, you!”

  A diplomat’s daughter, Lucretia had been born in Athens when her father was the British ambassador to Greece, and now she was systematically setting about learning the language and becoming a part of not only the alcoholic British expat community but also that of the sober local merchants, clergy, and social luminaries. She’d learned the protocol, and just when she’d become quite fluent knew that it was time to acknowledge their gestures of warm welcome—and began planning a cocktail party with hot hors d’oeuvres, worrying for weeks over the arrangements for her Naxos “debut.”

  She converted to Roman Catholicism and became pious, but not annoyingly so. Usually I can’t keep from sniping at the pious, but never Lucretia, since she had such a simple, pure faith, so refreshingly free of shrill dogma, so private—just a simple belief, not a position she wanted to or could defend. Her religion seemed to mitigate her otherwise foul temper. Although she had no money, with everything tied up in property, she was always ready to help out our truly poor friends. And o
f course I was grateful to her for her no-strings embrace of Marie-Claude.

  I’ll only talk about one more English friend, David Gwinnutt. He liked older men when he was young; he fancied “gentlemen,” but somehow I cut the mustard. In order to meet real gentlemen, David worked first in an exclusive hat shop, then mucked out stables and rose to be an instructor of dressage. David had a crazy streak and once got drunk and twirled around naked in my Paris apartment, peeing on everything in a broad-reaching lawn-sprinkler spray.

  But he was also an accomplished photographer who’d painted his Nikon white and once took an arty picture of just my nose in a mirror, but also snapped an oft-reproduced portrait of me stretched out in a beautiful dressing gown from Lanvin—and one of Neil Bartlett and me seated close together on a staircase. Many artists admired him, including the painter Patrick Procktor.

  Once I invited David to go to France with me to a château in Uzès that belonged to a very rich Englishman, Gordon Turner. Someone in his family had patented the brake or something. Gordon’s family paid him a very large yearly allowance to stay out of England, being Plymouth Brethren—and he’d refused to get married. He’d gone to Paris in 1945 when he was forty-five and taken up with a small aristocrat: “He was tiny, absolutely bijou.” They had bought a fairy-tale castle together in Normandy and improbably combined the avocations of hunting stags, doing needlework, and raising a variety of roses of very special provenance: “The comtesse de Paris, who’s the wife of the pretender to the throne, don’t you know, gave me the most wonderful roses from her estate in Morocco.” This by way of referring to the Bourbons’ forced earlier exile for a time from France. Gordon and his little aristocratic lover lived happily together for decades hunting and doing bargello together in front of the fire—until the Frenchman died of old age.

  I had been introduced to Gordon by Bruno, one of YSL’s top assistants, who was dying of AIDS and who had been given a generous settlement by Pierre Bergé. He’d become Gordon’s confidant and convinced him to leave the fairy-tale castle in Normandy with its painful associations and to buy this place in Uzès. There Gordon lived in great state (ten servants in white gloves lined up at the entrance path to greet us). The château was an eighteenth-century extension to a medieval tower, at the top of a small village. Next to our bed in the tower was a biography of the very butch Duchesse d’Uzès, who’d been a pioneering pilot. David gave Gordon spurs from his stable as a gift, and Gordon was delighted with what I thought of as a rather naughty gift.

  He lived not only with the dying Frenchman but also with an aging fantastical alcoholic American drag queen named Douglas, who drifted wispily through the salons in scarves and organdy. The only other bright spot was an English society doctor, Patrick Woodcock, who lived nearby and came to dinner one evening. Woodcock was a friend of the English actor Alan Bates and many other celebrities and had been the model of the gay doctor character played by Peter Finch in John Schlesinger’s groundbreaking gay film from 1971, Sunday Bloody Sunday.

  Bruce Chatwin would come through Paris, suffering from a mysterious “wasting” syndrome, though he never named it. He said it was a rare disease you got either from eating whale meat or from being around Chinese peasants in Fukien. Bruce couldn’t bear to be afflicted with an ordinary disease that was killing everyone around him. He always wanted to be rare, exotic, unique. Robert Mapplethorpe had first sent him to me in New York and we’d had sex immediately, standing by the front door, half undressed. That was what people did in the late seventies in New York. I’d been impressed by Bruce’s odorless body, constant laughter, and jewel-bright eyes, but we never slept together again. Every time I saw Bruce after that, usually while we were dining in an expensive Paris restaurant, I’d recall us that first time sniffing each other’s genitals like dogs—and he’d be regaling the table with his latest anecdote, sounding out and working up a version of the novel he was working on. I saw him several times while he was researching and writing On the Black Hill and The Songlines, his Australian novel. Interestingly, or tellingly, the real-life stories he told me were much gayer in the original than those ending up in the book.

  Bruce was a relentless raconteur; you felt that his audience didn’t matter as much to him as his need to polish and reshape the same story at a different table the following evening. He lived in London in a tiny flat on the top floor of an Eaton Square mansion. He was more concerned with the address than with the actual living space.

  One evening he had what I took to be a peroxided rent boy with him, but later, I realized was Jasper Conran, the wildly successful clothing designer, son of the famous designer Sir Terence Conran, and favorite of Princess Diana. Bruce and Jasper were lovers, it seemed, for a long time, though ultimately Bruce went back to his wife, who nursed him until he died. Since he was a connoisseur as much as he was a compulsive raconteur and writer, and since he had worked as an auctioneer at Christie’s, he had an almost pharaonic urge to pile up goods to be used in the afterlife; his wife would have to return the extravagant daily purchases.

  John Purcell, when he was still my roommate, couldn’t bear Bruce’s monologues, which demanded too much respectful silence and close listening. John wanted to drink and be casually merry with an older man who would ask him questions about himself, and he hated Bruce’s long involved narratives about Australian aboriginals, which amounted to drafts of his next book. His art seemed to be entirely oral, a form of performance art. I assured John that Bruce kept crowned heads mesmerized with his soliloquies. John’s only reply was a spat-out “They can have him.”

  I loved England, but its upper classes seemed maddeningly lighthearted and privileged to me. I remember one evening walking near Regent’s Park by myself and feeling lonely. A troupe of youngsters in evening clothes with posh accents stumbled past drunkenly. I felt so alienated, I who belonged nowhere, who was cursed by AIDS, who was no longer young, who was broke and always would be. I guess in Paris everything was so alien that I never compared myself to anyone; everyone was incommensurable. But in London, because of the familiar language, I felt close enough to the culture to envy the bright young things. Giving in to self-pity is considered a great sin in England, but it was one I was guilty of committing.

  Chapter 16

  Susan Train, an American so old she had “no age” (as the French say), had been running the office of French Vogue since the 1950s. Susan remembered that when she’d first arrived in Paris, she’d had so little money that she’d bought fabrics and devised shawls for herself. The art of tying the shawl or foulard or scarf is one of the mysterious talents of French women. In the early eighties, the French Minitel, a forerunner to the computer (it was a keyboard and small screen that made use of the phone lines), was employed by people I knew as a place to advertise for hook-ups. Little girls were writing, “I’m ten and live on the boulevard de Courcelles. Meet me on the corner for sex in your car, bring an Hermès scarf.”

  People would do anything for an Hermès scarf, with its traditional design and loud colors. Girls and teens alike shared this taste with their mothers. Everyone seemed to be the same age in Paris. Rock stars on TV were all old, like Johnny Hallyday, Serge Gainsbourg, or Véronique Sanson, and Juliette Gréco was still giving a concert on her eightieth birthday. Girls didn’t want green hair or facial piercings or black leather, but were content to wear pearls, black dresses, and heels, carry handbags, and dress up their good suit with an Hermès scarf for accent. The look that was in was “bcbg” (bon chic bon genre), which could be translated as “preppy.”

  The Minitel was given free to phone subscribers in lieu of fat telephone books. It was a bulky box with an eight-inch screen—a bit like a small television. You could make transportation reservations on it with your credit card and obtain theater tickets. The cruising facility was the ligne rose (pink line), where users typed out their preferences for all to see. It took some doing to learn the abbreviations. JhCh TBM pour plan hard, pour SSR, look Santiag meant “Young man (Jeune homme) l
ooks for (cherche) a very handsome guy (trés beau mec)—or, alternately, very well-hung (très bien monté)—who wants rough sex (plan hard) and safe sex (sexe sans risque) who wears Western-style cowboy (“Santiago”) boots. Users could click into a private dialogue with another subscriber, their comments unavailable to the other onlookers.

  I met many men this way and also through more traditional cruising in parks, bars, and back rooms and on the street. One of Mitterrand’s first acts when he was elected president was to legalize homosexuality and to abolish the vice squad (police mondaine). Napoleon, out of deference to his gay second consul, Cambacérès, had legalized homosexuality, but then the pro-Nazi Vichy government had recriminalized it. There were movie theaters where guys went to meet Arabs. I heard that there was even a ring of firemen available for a fee, but I never obtained this precious number. On July 14, Bastille Day, the firehouses were open to the public for all-night dancing and I’d often go to stare at the pompiers in their stylish silver helmets.

  Due to the new freedom, gay men would jump over the fence at night on a warm evening and have sex in the Tuileries Gardens as they had been doing for centuries anyway according to a book called Sodome au Bucher (Sodomy at the Stake).

  Since I lived on the Île Saint-Louis, I’d go to the gardens at the tip of the island where there were steps leading down to a quay right next to the water. On the stone walls were giant metal hoops used to tie up boats in the past, I supposed. It was so beautiful to see the lights of passing barges dancing on the Seine, to feel the coolness floating off the water, and to embrace a tall, dark stranger. If I liked someone, I could invite him home, which was only two blocks away. John Purcell was usually out drinking or back in America. Once I crouched in the bushes in the park and attracted the eye of a muscular man twenty years my junior. He came home with me. He had the smallest penis I ever saw and a beautiful body, and insisted on being the active partner despite his little cock. I was happy to play my passive role since he was so ardent, so beautiful, and such a master at kissing and frottage. I doubt that most women can understand how romantic anonymous sex can be, mainly because women are often more vulnerable and female sexuality is slow to ignite, though eventually it burns with such a bright flame and can be doused only slowly. What men like about anonymity is that it allows free rein to any fantasy whatsoever. There are no specifics to contradict the most extravagant scenario.