Inside a Pearl Read online

  I wasn’t used to going out with mature men who already had strong opinions and spoke confidently of their defining life experiences. The boys I usually dated tried to fit into my crowded world because they had only the smallest, thinnest world of their own. Their feelings were often hard to sound because they themselves didn’t know what they felt. This knew how people should live and in what surroundings. He had opinions on everything that interested him, and what didn’t interest him he shrugged off. Maybe because he was involved with two visual arts—he exhibited and sometimes produced films and he collected contemporary art—he was very concerned about how everything looked. We spent a whole day at Puiforcat in Paris choosing silverware for his table. He cared how I cut my nails. He didn’t like me to be thirty pounds overweight, so we went to a Swiss spa and ate nothing for ten days. Clothes were important to This. His ex, Thomas, was regularly listed among the ten best-dressed men in the world. Thomas would fly the king of Spain’s tailor from Madrid to Zurich for fittings. They both pioneered the beautifully cut blazer-with-jeans look. Thomas’s cook/maid, who had worked for a Spanish ambassador and knew how to iron shirts expertly, gave ironing lessons to This’s maid. Once when I suggested we go to the Canary Islands for a vacation, This said the only snobbish words I ever heard from his lips: “Oh, that’s where we send our maids for their holidays—Putzfrau Insel, we call it.”

  I got an assignment from Lucretia Stewart, then the editor of Departures, the American Express travel magazine, to write about Egypt, and I invited This along as the photographer. It thrilled me to be able to offer him the trip, since I was so much poorer and was always so self-conscious about my gifts to him. He took the assignment very seriously and was up every day before dawn, since the early morning light was the best. We traveled slowly down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor in a Hilton boat, the Osiris, which served wonderful international food and provided us with a luxury cabin at water level. We’d look out our cabin at dawn at the ibises and hoopoes in tall reeds. This had never been to the Third World before and he’d agreed to come along to Egypt with much trepidation. Travel for him had always been traumatic. When he was a child, the first time he’d crossed the Alps into Germany in a car with his father, he’d fainted, so frightened was he to leave Switzerland for Germany.

  This knew a woman who worked for the Swiss embassy in Cairo who managed to get us a hotel room looking out directly on the Great Pyramid. And in Luxor, she put us up in the old Winter Palace, King Farouk’s former palace, in a room with a big, dusty balcony overlooking a huge, scraggly garden complete with monkeys. Outside our door, a servant slept on the floor, ever ready to serve us. Servitude of that sort bothered me, but I didn’t want to object lest the man be dismissed and plunged into total poverty. In Aswan, we stayed at the old Cataract Palace, with its louvered wood shutters, ceiling fans, and balconies facing the Nile. We felt we were in an Agatha Christie novel, and we pitied those tourists who’d ended up in the new, Stalinist-cement Cataract Palace.

  This had an exaggerated respect for me as “an artist” and would never let me pay for anything: “Because you are an artist—artists should never pay!” He also had a Swiss respect for work and he exaggerated how hard and long I worked on my books; I had an equal but opposite Anglophile adherence to my amateur status and a corresponding disdain for work, and I exaggerated how easy it all was: “First drafts only!” In fact, I labored over my manuscripts and walked around town sounding out phrases in my head, but I wanted to pretend it all came effortlessly to me; that was my myth of myself.

  He seemed torn between his cult of friendship and sincerity and his pursuit of celebrities. He wanted to keep up the valuable friendships he’d made through Thomas. Valuable to Thomas, who said it was easy to sell paintings by famous artists but hard to find them. That’s where the celebrities came in, since they often knew collectors who needed to sell. At the same time This didn’t want to admit he was motivated by feelings other than natural affection and admiration.

  As a result he spoke with heightened affection, even love, of even the celebrities I found the most vacuous: “Oh, I love Bianca. She is so intelligent, fighting for her little country at the UN. And she’s so warm, like a sister to me—she sleeps in bed with me, hugging me!”

  Everyone famous he approved of, usually in ecstatic terms. “He’s the most wonderful man on earth, so kind, so generous.” His unrelenting esteem for everyone rubbed off on me, and my friends said that suddenly I was a bit Pollyannaish and no longer so tart tongued. The French weren’t sure they approved of so much enthusiasm. But it wasn’t really a matter of national character but of class. This and his successful friends were confident enough to be able to approve of people; my loser friends (except the ones in AA) only rose in their own opinion if they denigrated everyone else.

  This went with Thomas every Christmas to Gstaad, where he and Thomas were among the few Swiss who rented a chalet. Most of the real Swiss millionaires were too tight-fisted to spend a hundred thousand dollars a month on a rented chalet. The old women, the real Swiss gnomes, did their own housework, drove a ten-year-old Mercedes, ate at the local vegetarian cafeteria and had the biggest savings accounts on the planet. They wore brown woolen stockings and black sensible shoes. In Gstaad This and Thomas hobnobbed with Valentino and Elizabeth Taylor and Gunther Sachs, a German playboy they knew, as well as with a Belgian banker-baron I’d had sex with. Gunther Sachs had been married to Brigitte Bardot and was the iconic playboy of the 1960s. He committed suicide at Gstaad in 2011 when he discovered he had Alzheimer’s. My Belgian baron was an ugly but sexy and intelligent man who died of AIDS early on. His sister-in-law remained my friend, as did her husband, my friend’s brother. He, the brother, was very handsome and had once been the lover of Rita Hayworth, but he was a bit dull. The sister-in-law said that as long as the fascinating gay brother-in-law was alive she had someone in the family to talk to. After he died she had to make do with her beautiful but dumb husband.

  Although I make the eighties sound lighthearted and frivolous, I was haunted by AIDS, as were most gay men. I was diagnosed as positive in 1985. Although a diagnosis has galvanized many writers, I just pulled the covers over my head for a year. I was very depressed. I felt so isolated and read about ACT UP in America with envy. I belonged to no AIDS community in France. Larry Kramer attacked me for devoting seven years of my post-diagnosis time to Genet. Larry felt every gay writer must write about AIDS alone. I wanted to remind readers that there were these great gay contemporaries (Genet died in 1986) who had nothing to do with the disease. Our experience couldn’t be reduced to a malady. I didn’t want us to be “re-medicalized.”

  I survived because I turned out to be one of those rare creatures, a slow progressor: someone whose T-cell counts fall steadily but very slowly (nonprogressors are those even rarer men and women who never get sick). I didn’t know that when I was diagnosed; I thought I’d be dead in a year or two. I’m not a mystic and I don’t meditate, but one day in 1986 when I was meditating, in my amateurish, mud-pie way, I interrogated my body and it told me I was going to survive. It was not until ten years later that my doctor explained to me why I’d survived. People tried to ascribe my longevity to my Texas genes or my newfound sobriety, but I knew it was just a freak of nature and I could claim none of the merit just as the victims couldn’t be blamed.

  This insisted we be tested in the mid-eighties. The test had just become available and a blood sample had to be sent all the way from Zurich to San Francisco, then the results had to be mailed back—a three-week procedure. Nor would the doctor, an arrogant young heterosexual who’d interned in San Francisco, give the results over the phone. I had to make the trip from Paris to Zurich to have a consultation in person. As we were going up the snowy path to the university hospital, This suddenly chickened out. I was the one who insisted we keep our appointment. I already knew in my heart that he, with his two condoms, would be negative, whereas I, with my thousands of tricks, would surely be positive. I said
that to This and added, “I’m a good enough novelist to predict you’ll be very tender and kind with me and within a year you’ll break up with me.”

  Sure enough, the beautiful young doctor leaned back in his office chair; he’d crossed his legs and now pointed at me with one of his expensive, light tan lace-up shoes and said, “You. You’re positive.” Then he swiveled and indicated This with his shoe: “You. You’re negative.” He’d just delivered a death sentence to me, for all we knew, but there was no follow-up, no appointments made with a counselor.

  For some time This and I had planned a romantic trip to Vienna. We went that afternoon. We stayed in the city’s oldest hotel, the König von Üngarn, right in the shadow of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Of course it was all beautiful and we had time to visit Mozart’s apartment around the corner, but that night I was in anguish and couldn’t sleep, not because I was afraid of dying but because I knew my wonderful adult romance with This was doomed. I kept getting out of bed and going to the toilet, which was at the end of a long corridor. There, at a safe distance, I’d close the door and sob. I felt so bereft. On my third trip to the bathroom This woke up and padded down the hall and comforted me, though with my bleak “realism” (my most French attribute) I was profoundly inconsolable.

  This invited me once to Gstaad, but since I don’t ski and was in the throes of writing my best short story, “An Oracle,” I shut myself away in the chalet and didn’t even attend Liz Taylor’s party. I do remember that Liz gave Pashmina shawls to all her guests. (I eventually met Liz and Audrey Hepburn when they were auctioning art in Basel for an AIDS charity.) The central piece of gossip that year was that everyone laughed at Valentino for thinking Tina Turner was going to come and be the guest of honor at his Christmas party. He declared her the greatest singer of our day, but when she turned him down he called her “a washed-up cow.” Stories like this were endlessly repeated—as well as ones that pictured Thomas’s new love, the beautiful George, as an idiot and a gold digger.

  The jet set, I concluded, amused itself by attacking one member or another. They were led by “Zip,” Nancy Reagan’s friend and gay walker, the New York socialite and real estate heir Jerry Zipkin. Their conversation consisted mainly of their schedules—where they’d been and where they were going. If you weren’t going to Gstaad or Venice or Marrakesh or New York or Paris, they lost interest in you. Many of them were interested in the business of art, and they flew to art auctions in various countries or to Art Basel in Basel or eventually to its sister exhibition in Miami. They thought collecting art somehow made them artistic and bohemian. After all, most rich people collected cars or houses or jewels or wives.

  There was always a lot of drama at table. Once Thomas was seated next to the rich British Picasso collector Douglas Cooper. When Thomas bragged he’d just bought a Picasso from a dealer in Italy and described the canvas, Cooper stood up and said, “That painting was stolen from my château in France, and you must hand it over immediately or I’ll denounce you to the police.”

  Ever so coolly, Thomas replied, “Please stop threatening me. Switzerland has no legal reciprocity or extradition agreement with France. If you don’t ask for it nicely, I’ll put it up for auction—with all the proceeds going to a Swiss orphanage.”

  Cooper backed off quickly and Thomas returned the painting at a tremendous loss.

  In This’s modern jewel-box apartment on the Zurichberg I always felt like someone from the Third World. I was so afraid of breaking something or smelling something up (from This I’d learned to light a match in the toilet after shitting to disguise the odor).

  He had a little side table by Jean-Michel Franck that was worth fifty thousand dollars. His couch was by Jean Royère, the great French furniture designer of the fifties. The lights in their brightly colored canisters were fifties Stilnovo from Milan. Over the fireplace was a big Mao drawing by Warhol, which showed what a great draftsman he could be when he set his mind to it. On another wall was a Warhol hammer and sickle painting. I suppose these Communist subjects were less costly because less popular among the airhead rich. On the floor were beautiful rugs of sea grass bound with cloth at the borders. Above the couch was a huge beach scene by Eric Fischl. This often said this painting comprised his retirement fund. When he needed an extra million for his old age, he’d just sell the Fischl. He also had a disturbing Francesco Clemente in his bedroom, a self-portrait with a knife in his guts and bloody-looking Italian words. Up and down the staircase of his apartment were photographic portraits of contemporary artists, including the monklike Clemente by Jeannette Montgomery Barron. This probably wouldn’t like me describing his apartment, for fear of robbers or the Swiss internal revenue. When the French version of House & Garden described and photographed the malachite collection of one of my friends, burglars wasted no time stealing it, while leaving untouched other objects worth much more. No one in This’s social circle wanted their house featured in a magazine spread.

  Of course, This had many friends and entertained often. Like MC, he called up people all over the world and received them generously whenever they came to Zurich. His apartment with its bright colors, luxurious furniture, and many lights sparkled when guests arrived. There was a separate apartment upstairs for guests. His table always looked beautiful with its Hermès plates, Puiforcat silverware, and lots of small bouquets. The food, which he prepared himself, was always exquisite and often ended with a homemade kumquat sherbet. Around his table, I met John Waters; the photography collector Baroness Marion Lambert; Bice Curiger, a curator of the Kunsthaus Zurich; Jacqueline Burckhardt, an editor of Parkett and the granddaughter of Jacob Burckhardt, the art historian who invented the concept of “the Renaissance”—and many other beautiful and fascinating people. Bob Colacello, the Warhol biographer, regaled us with tales of his encounters with King Victor Emmanuel’s aged daughters living in exile in Portugal. He, who’d grown up a poor Italian American in Brooklyn, was thrilled to be able to show his old mother pictures of the royal Italian princesses.

  For Bice and Jacqueline, I wrote several articles for Parkett, including one on two Princes: Prince, the pop singer and composer, and Richard Prince, the photographer and master of appropriations.

  This was my first and maybe only grown-up affair. It was a comfort and challenge to spend time with a mature, successful man, a fully formed personality, someone who could trace the contours of his personality, who was never undecided about his tastes, who understood his aversions, who had opinions. Most of my boyfriends had been twenty or thirty years younger than I and poor and dependent on me—very safe for me. I had always had the upper hand. This was sufficiently different from me to keep me enthralled. I’d known about contemporary art in the sixties, the heyday of Pop Art. While working at Time-Life Books in New York, at lunchtime I’d gone to a gallery nearly every day. Then I’d lost track of all the new developments, though in the early 1970s, when I’d been the arts editor of another magazine, I’d learned a lot about contemporary painting from our art critic, David Bourdon, who’d previously been the art critic for Life.

  Now, ten years later, I was catching up. Thomas had a beautiful series of self-portraits in pastel by Francesco Clemente, including one where he was exploring his own bowels, candle in hand; over his fireplace hung a powerful, iconic horse by Susan Rothenberg. He had a stenciled portrait of himself by Warhol. Thomas’s idea was to collect paintings done since the early Warhol and to deal in paintings done from the Impressionists up to the Warhol “disaster” series and the electric chairs. That way he’d never be in competition with his clients to secure a prize painting.

  As a novelist, I was intrigued by the economics of painting. Whereas serious novelists, even celebrated ones, could barely survive, the top painters were very rich. It was all because a painting was a unique object whereas a book was a multiple. No wonder so many writers turned to the visual arts—Burroughs to painting and Ginsberg to photography. That was the only way they could make money. (Ginsberg also got a mil
lion dollars for his archives.)

  It took ten critics, two dealers, and twenty collectors to get an artist on the cover of Time, whereas a novelist had to convince eighty thousand readers to buy his book to win a comparable fame. For this reason, the painters could be more daringly experimental than the writers, who had to please so many more culture consumers, many of them with brows firmly in the middle. Painting—and heavily subsidized arts like ballet and poetry and “serious” music—were obliged to be avant-garde in order to seem flamboyantly original. Fiction and theater, which were expected to earn their own keep, had to maintain a broader appeal.

  This knew both the painting world and that of cinema (which needed thousands of paying customers in order to survive). Certainly feature films were doubly cursed, since they needed a huge fan base in each city to fill those theater seats, whereas a novel could go out into the wide world and nab a reader here and another one there—no more than half a dozen in any one city.

  This invited me to the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals for many years in the eighties. They were completely different from each other. In Cannes, we’d stay at the Carlton, the chicest “palace” along the Croisette. Would-be starlets would hold bikini sessions on the beach nearby for amateur male photographers. Huge billboards all over Cannes advertised the newest films. The major films in competition would be screened in an ugly modern building accessible only by the red-carpeted stairs. Invited members of the audience in evening clothes would mount the two dozen stairs to the exhibition hall while velvet ropes and policemen held back the adoring crowds and busy photographers. Even though it was only May, the days were already long because France is so far north, and it was strange seeing all these heavily made-up female stars in strapless sequined gowns in broad daylight. The men had to be in tuxedos, no exceptions, though once a handsome young guy went nude with the tux painted on his body and he got in—after all, it was all show business, feverishly in pursuit of as much publicity as possible.