Inside a Pearl (3 page)

My John was famous in our little world for his charm. The first truly out gay editor in New York, Michael Denneny, had been in love with John and was jealous when John moved in with me. Michael had met John in Boston, where John was living in a mansion at the foot of Beacon Hill with a Spanish prince, a Rockefeller, and two punk rock brothers. The house was full of valuable antiques and, as John described it, an eyebrow-raising amount of decadent behavior.

John was a pack rat. When he moved into my studio apartment in New York he arrived with twenty garment bags. And then he watched television all the time, which drove me crazy. I got him his own apartment in SoHo above an Ethiopian restaurant.

And then we moved to Paris. I bought him a tiny black-and-white TV, but our French was so bad we couldn't even follow the news. Then
I found out that I had to pay an annual
tax
for the boring, state-financed channels!

John exaggerated both the high points and the ordeals of his life to the degree of pure invention. He liked to picture his parents as monsters and his sisters as wicked, and he told horror stories about his abuse from a family member when he was twelve. It's true that there was something broken about John, something goofy and slightly off, as if a nurse had dropped him on his head. His social rhythm was sprung. He'd look around, blinking and uncomprehending. Then he'd lock into one of his horror stories about the tortures he'd suffered as a teen from his sisters, whom he portrayed as figures of pure malice, or from his stern, unforgiving parents. He'd start ranting, talking faster and faster, exhibiting what the psychologists call “forced speech.” Moods of vacant inattentiveness would alternate with spells of obsessive talk. Exchanging these stories was almost a rite of passage in America, helping establish intimacy with a new friend. No American would openly question the veracity of a horror story about the hell of childhood. It was as if we were each granted credibility and attentiveness for one story only—our own. And if, like the story of saints' lives, it was a narrative of suffering and redemption, all the better.

John would have been deeply offended if someone had dared to question his martyrdom, but in Paris people merely drooped under the onslaught of so many shocking details. John's eyes would glitter like Savanarola's and his voice would take on all the solemnity of high conviction as he recounted the whole nightmare. Later, when I met his father, slender and handsome and half effaced, and his mother, ample and serene as Barbara Bush, it was hard to believe anything John had said against them. His mother was the first female selectman of Concord, Massachusetts, or so John claimed. His family owned the huge cosmetic firm Maybelline, or so he said. After a while he stopped mentioning that connection. His father was a doctor from the South. Or so he said. John didn't like to have his veracity doubted. The Taoists, or so I've been told, say that no one ever lies, that even an untruth can express a desire, an ideal, a longed-for reality. John certainly wanted to be seen as the sweet, wounded victim—and for him victimhood was more appealing when it befell a little aristocrat. If history had been at
all real or interesting to him, he might have identified himself with Marie Antoinette. To be young, pretty,
and
beheaded would have struck him as a winning combination.

The French in general didn't seem to like such American tales of painful childhoods. “Everyone had a wretched childhood,” they'd say airily. “We must just get on with it.” Or they'd say,
“Pas de confessions!”
(“No confessions!”). I remember telling this to Jules Feiffer, and a French woman in a film he directed later is overheard telling another character,
“Pas de confessions!”
I knew, too, that anyone French my age would have lived through World War II from start to finish as well as the grim period afterward of material shortages and moral recriminations. How could any American spanking saga or Oedipal epic compare with the chilblains and lost limbs and bombings and concentration camps the Europeans had endured? There was a moment when I tried to serve Jerusalem artichokes to French friends. They threw their hands up in the air—“Oh no, Edmond! You can't expect us to eat
topinambours
. We choked on them all through the war.” I could remember in my wartime childhood revolting meals of canned bony salmon mixed with breadcrumbs and formed into patties, but then we'd never gone hungry or cold.

Anyone younger who grew up in France before the events of May 1968 revolutionized everything could remember strict Catholic (or Communist) families, school uniforms, meals during which children were expected to be seen but not heard. When French friends read in translation
A Boy's Own Story
, bizarrely what struck them most was how little supervision I'd had as a teenager. I'd never thought about that. Both the British and the French praised me for my honesty and courage in relating my sexual “secrets” in that book. A fellow American would never have singled out those qualities, since we Americans all like to bray our secrets to complete strangers on a plane or at the next table.

To be sure,
A Boy's Own Story
was presented to the world as a novel rather than as a memoir, but not out of a sense of discretion or modesty. It was just that back then only people who were already famous wrote their memoirs. The victor of Iwo Jima had the right to sign a memoir, but not a battered housewife. The man who invented the rubber band
could give us his success story, but not a child who'd been locked in the basement for a decade. All this would change by the end of the 1980s, when suddenly youngsters would ask me with a hint of superiority why I hadn't dared to call my book an autobiography. I remember in 1990 on a visit back to the States reading with astonishment an agency ad in the back of the
New York Review of Books
: “Were you incested as a child? Raped by your father? You might consider going on the lecture circuit and letting us represent you.”

John was tall and slender and well mannered, with a sweet smile and a polite way of making small talk. His teeth were yellow from a sulfur drug he'd taken as a kid. People liked him, especially some women and older men who found him courtly and vulnerable. He had a very high voice, almost a young girl's voice, which sounded especially strange in a Latin country where most men spoke “from the balls” (with “
une voix des couilles
”). Everything about John was contradictory. He seemed docile and polite till he started relating his horror stories with all the half-mad zeal of a reforming saint. He “read” in a crowd as blond, but on closer inspection his hair was white, pure white. His hair color was polyvalent, if that means it had many shifting meanings. If he was looking boyish, people would laughingly deny his hair was white. “But it's blond,” they'd insist. “Platinum blond.” If he looked hungover and haggard, they'd take in his high voice, his youthful, preppy way of dressing in too-tight jeans, madras jackets, and pink, laceless sneakers and his way of tilting his head from side to side and observe that so many attempts to look young were repellent in a middle-aged man—when he was actually only twenty-five. He spoke seriously of interior decoration and his plans for the future, but it almost seemed he knew in advance he'd die young and would never work. French people were charmed to encounter a young man from the hometown of Emerson and Thoreau, but John knew more about how to do rubbings from Puritan gravestones and sell them to tourists than how to parse the essays of their nineteenth-century descendants.

Early on during our first year in Paris, he met a hairy-chested macho named Emmanuel who had a large apartment on a high floor overlooking the place de la Bastille. Not that there was much to see there except
for the building site for the new Bastille Opera House. According to one story, all Paris was chuckling that President Mitterrand had been led into a room where five models for the opera house by five different architects were on display. He'd been coached to choose the one all the way to the right, by Richard Meier, but he became confused and chose the one all the way to the left by the unknown Carlos Ott, a Uruguayan working in Canada (he thought it was the one by Meier). And that's how Paris ended up with an opera house resembling a cow palace on the outside and on the inside a bathroom lined with black and white tiles.

I started to see Marie-Claude from time to time at her “state dinners,” when she'd invite the newest celebrities of the moment,
les vrais génies du moment
. One of her prizes was Gae Aulenti, an Italian architect who between 1980 and 1985 undertook the immense job of turning the Gare d'Orsay into a museum. Gae was an intelligent, humorous, heavyset woman with short hair, cropped, unvarnished nails, and a frank, easygoing manner. She told us that the real problem of converting a vast turn-of-the-century train station into a museum was that the huge, empty vault above the tracks had to be crammed full of little squares, exhibition spaces, some five floors of them. It wasn't an easy or natural use of this space. Another problem was that the curator—who was often introduced as the granddaughter on one side of the painter Paul Signac and on the other of the founder of the French Communist Party—had decided the museum should reflect the taste of the people of the nineteenth century, not ours now, so the ground floor was full of big academic dud paintings whereas the masterpieces by Cézanne and Degas were relegated to the top floor—which many exhausted tourists never got to. When Gae needed to select the color of the entire interior she had to construct at great expense three identical models of the future museum each painted a different color, all so that Mitterrand could swan in, glance at the models and declare, “It shall be gray!” No other elected president in modern times has had such dictatorial powers over even the smallest details of his land. Of course, Mitterrand was the embodiment of grandiosity with a mania for building monuments to himself,
Les Grands Travaux.
He ended up bestowing on Paris the glass pyramid of I. M. Pei as the entrance to the new Louvre; the new Bibliotèque Nationale
(National Library) on the banks of the Seine; and the Grande Arche at the modern office center La Défense, a huge, rectangular arch lined up with the Napoleonic Arc du Carrousel at the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. The Bibliothèque Nationale, installed in four glass towers, was meant to resemble open books. After it was finally completed, one of the first things that had to be done to the building was to block out all that sunlight admitted by the glass, since light damages books—and in one stroke the whole concept of the transparent, sun-drenched towers was invalidated. Then the automated delivery system didn't work until many adjustments had been made. Worst of all was the location: the library was in a part of Paris few people visited.

Mitterrand also built the Bastille Opera House and the sprawling Finance Ministry spanning a highway (it collapsed soon after it was inaugurated but was quickly propped back up). Mitterrand gave Paris a new science museum in a former abattoir. Next to it he erected the Cité de la Musique. Of all his projects only the Louvre pyramid is a complete success, and that only for people on the political Left. In France I quickly learned that everything is political, even an opinion of a building. When the pyramid was unveiled I could tell who was a Socialist and who was a Gaullist according to their approval or dislike of the building; it was absolutely systematic. In America we wouldn't usually confuse aesthetics and politics, whereas in France everything is arranged according to extra-artistic allegiances. For instance, I learned that literary prizes such as the Médicis, the Femina, and the Goncourt, which determine sales figures in France, alternate among the three top publishing houses in a nearly unvarying way. One year a prize will go to Gallimard, the next to Seuil, and the third to Grasset, no matter the actual merits of the candidates (the collective noun is “Galligrasseuil”). A masterpiece published by some less prestigious house would never win, for instance, nor would a superior book from a publisher in the wrong sequence (“Oh, no. This year it's Gallimard's turn!”).

Undoubtedly these remarks show what an anthropological approach I took toward “the French.” Later I came to disapprove of this spirit of observation and speculation about the national character of what the Peace Corps calls “our host country nationals.” I came to think that
individuals should be judged on their merits and not used to build up a portrait of a whole nationality. I'd read somewhere that tracing national character was a puerile pursuit, not one to be encouraged, but one that Americans are especially prone to. Only about 30 percent of Americans have passports, and half of those have traveled only to Mexico or Canada. We are an insular, incurious nation—but there I go again.

In many ways Mitterrand was the best friend French capitalists ever had. Because he was supposedly a Socialist, the labor unions came to heel. For that, he'd mastered all the progressive rhetoric necessary. Although many bankers and investors initially fled Paris for New York, soon they came trickling back, especially when Mitterrand realized his more extreme policies (taxation of the rich) wouldn't work. I heard that Marie-Hélène de Rothschild said that New York was impossible because rich people there only socialized with other rich people of exactly the same level of wealth, and that our New York rich people worked long days and had to be in bed by ten, making social life impossible. No one had amusing artists or writers to dinner. And besides, everyone in America ate asparagus with knives and forks, instead of with their fingers as civilized people did.

I realized the rich had come home to Paris and were reassured the night I was asked to accompany the French editor of French
Vogue
to a masked ball given for a cause at the Palais Garnier, the old opera house. The two hosts were Madame Mitterrand and Madame Chirac (at that time wife of the mayor of Paris). For the first time every rich woman felt safe to bring out her jewels, no longer afraid they'd be confiscated. The evening started with the entirety of Verdi's
Un Ballo in Maschera
starring Pavarotti. Then in the lobbies there was a sit-down dinner for hundreds, followed by an actual masked ball. TV cameras were wheeling about lighting up one woman after another and televising her gown. It was the sort of stuffy evening I hate except to tell others about it. Years later, my partner Michael and I went to Elton John's fiftieth-birthday party, where hundreds were in costume. Elton was dressed like an eighteenth-century courtier with tiny cannon explosions going off in his white wig. He and his lover arrived in the back of a freight truck decorated inside like an eighteenth-century drawing room. Trumpeters lined the entranceway.
We were entertained by black singers from America singing spirituals and formally dressed couples from Wales demonstrating ballroom dancing onstage. Michael recognized every rock star attending, but I'd never heard of any of them. We were seated with Ismail Merchant, of the filmmaking duo Merchant and Ivory, and his date, a beauty who turned out to be Mr. Naples, who'd been flown in for the occasion. He turned and asked me in Italian who was the man he was accompanying. At another grand dinner, given by Diane von Furstenberg to launch a new perfume, I was seated next to France's then most famous model, Inès de la Fressange. I asked her what she did. The others at our table gasped. She thought it was funny and explained she'd just come back from India and was opening a dress shop of her own. In those days Diane von Furstenberg lived in Paris, not New York, and she was with André Elkan, the editor of
Panta,
an Italian magazine similar to
Granta.
He was doing a book-length interview of the very old Alberto Moravia, who was always seated in the corner.