Milking the Moon (21 page)

Anyway, it was a very good party. I had a little table set up where people could do their own drinks. I had Southern fried chicken, served in a big black umbrella turned upside down. Then along about three A.M., there was just Jean Garrigue, Dylan Thomas, Ruthven Todd, and myself. Thomas was pretty drunk and began to tell some great stories. You know, we all have a favorite character. Tallulah, I might say, was mine. His was old Queen Mary. He had hundreds of stories about her. All of her equerries were beautiful young men of grand families. She always had six young men attending her when she left the palace, and they were all bribed by every antique and jewelry dealer in London to let them know if she was going to visit the shop. The really valuable and beautiful things they’d go hide. Because if she said, “Oh, how perfect,” “Oh, how perfectly gorgeous,” they had to say, “Oh, Your Majesty, please take it.” All of the people in the old country houses would hide the good paintings when she was coming on a royal progression. She’d come in and say, “Oh, I thought there was supposed to be a Van Dyck over the mantel,” and they’d say, “Well, you know, it’s at the restorer.” “What restorer do you use?” She was a terror. But anyway, when she went to these shops and they knew she was coming, they’d have a folding screen, and behind it they’d have either a punch bowl on a little stool or one of those Oriental vases people use as umbrella stands, because she had nervous kidneys, and when she had to go, she had to go. So she would just drift in back of the screen, and all the equerries would start coughing and talking all at once to drown the sound of tinkling. So Queen Mary was Dylan Thomas’s comic culture heroine.

And of course everybody adored him. He had an outdoor look in that city where everybody has an office look. He just looked English country animal. We had a lovely luncheon, just Dylan and I, at Charlie’s Gorden, and talked about everything on earth. It was Alabama meeting Wales. Edith Sitwell was another one of his culture heroines, because she adored him and was one of the people to push his career. The minute she saw some of his poems, you know, she sort of screamed a bloodcurdling scream and said, “This is it.” And Dylan loved her suite of poems for speaker called
Façade,
set to Sir William Walton’s music. As we drank our wine, we reenacted for each other the story of its first performance in London in the 1930s, when Dame Edith recited the poems through a megaphone concealed in the mouth of a huge pink-and-white mask. For some reason, a crowd of prune faces had gathered outside to protest the event, and she had to have a police escort to get to her car afterwards. Before she got in she turned and said, “I have never, at any time, desired to pull the leg of the public.” “I, however,” Dylan said to me, “do. As often as possible.”

I never saw him again after that. But of course, years later when I worked for Princess Caetani,
Botteghe Oscure
was the first to publish
Under Milk Wood.
The princess also loved his work. She had also screamed when she first read it. They had corresponded, and she published some of his most important works, like “In the White Giant’s Thigh” and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” And she had given him an advance. He had said, “I have always wanted to write a play for voices, like a radio play.” He had read Archibald MacLeish’s
Fall of the City
and thought that this was a new medium for poets. Voice plays. Since you don’t see actors or scenery, you can give total attention to the words. He said he’d always wanted to write one ever since he’d heard radio. So she gave him an advance, and off he went. Well, he was hard up, dead broke—I think his first child had been born by then. So he also got an advance from the BBC. Then he got an advance from a publisher. But since the princess had given him the first advance, she thought she should have the right to publish the work. So he sent her some pages, but it was not finished. And I was going from Paris to London for Christmas, so she asked me to get in touch with him and try to get a few more pages. I never saw him because he was down in Wales, but through John Davenport, who was something to do with one of the magazines, I tracked down a few pages more. I picked them up at a publisher’s through the good offices of John Davenport and took them back. The princess and Alfred Chester and I read this thing out loud, the three of us, and we thought it was wonderful. We were just rolling. So she said, “I understand that the BBC can broadcast this, but since I was the first to commission it, I am going to go ahead and publish what we have.” So about two-thirds of it was published in
Botteghe
under the title “Llareggub,” which looks like a Welsh village. But being a cryptographer, I always read things backwards anyway, and I saw right off where it was called “Bugger All.”

Then years later in Rome I became friends with his widow, the delightful Caitlin. Everybody says what a bitch she was and all that and all that. Well, I’m sorry. She had a hard time raising money to feed the children and pay the rent and clothe them. And she was never a bitch. She hounded publishers for royalties. She hounded the BBC. She nagged New Directions. But she was not a bitch. I liked her very much. She had some reddish hair and this white face. Finally she took up with an Italian.

At her invitation, I went to see her son when he was performing in
The Recruiting Sergeant
in this English school in Rome. He was playing the lead, and he was perfectly magnificent. He had a natural acting style and enormous charm. You didn’t notice the other actors; he had that presence. Afterwards I was talking to the headmaster while we were waiting for him to scrape his makeup off. This very stern headmaster said, “Well, let’s hope he doesn’t end up like his father.” And I couldn’t resist saying, “You mean drunk or immortal?”

Just a Southern Boy Let Loose

There were twenty-five returning GIs who were given scholarships to the Museum of Modern Art special painting class. I was one of those. I studied drawing and painting with a wonderful painter named Bernard Pfriem, who was just a jolly soul. We had live models, and you could, on your own, throw the paint or abstract. But in the class we had classical technique, which is what I like. You learned how to use the pigments, learned how to use the brushes, learned how to draw the human face. Because the old idea is if you can learn how to draw a tree and a human figure, you can draw anything.

One of the students was Andrew Warhola. I don’t think he was a veteran or in the veterans’ class, but there were some other classes at that moment, and that’s where I met him. I liked him. He had that indefinable sense of humor which makes people survive everything. He was rather polite and well combed. He wore this plaid cap—much too big for him—and this overcoat much too big for him. He had this blond hair like a little Dutch boy. He was terribly shy. We called him Baby Andrew.

The wig was not an affectation—at least not at first. I believe he had had a fever at some moment, and the wig was to keep his skull warm in cold weather. We became great friends, and I saw a lot of him. As a matter of fact, when I sailed for Europe, it was the composer Donald Ashwander, the playwright John Vari, the ballet dancer from the Balanchine Company Jeanne Mercier, and Baby Andrew who came to the freighter to see me off. They launched me. And in a sense, I helped launch him, because early on, when I was working for the
Paris Review
with George Plimpton, I asked him to do some illustrations for one of the issues. Then George met him after he made a point of going to the New York office later. So he got into George’s world and all of that thing in New York. But he really was closer to what I would call provincial—good provincial, meaning not show-off. I never saw him even smoke a cigarette. He didn’t smoke. Alas, he fell into that New York thing of “We’re young and are going to try everything. Let’s take another bit of this drug; let’s try that drug.” He fell into that crowd, as did Truman Capote. He was shy and probably went to those parties and saw that everybody sort of came out, so to speak—became exuberant. I think he took drugs maybe as a kind of insurance that he would be part of the party. He certainly did none of that then, in the 1940s. What he might have sniffed later, I don’t know.

Of course, he created the whole school of grocery store art. I think he must have had fun doing all that Campbell’s soup. Because he really was studying very seriously. He was a serious and good draftsman. He could really draw, and he could really paint. I think at some moment, he just wanted to tweak the nose of the Establishment. Who doesn’t?

*

One of the things I most wanted to do in New York was to go to a performance by Martha Graham. For me she’s Miss Mattie T. Graham. I thought she needed something in the middle. If she’s going to be an honorary Southerner, she’s got to have something in the middle, so I just put an initial
T
and a period. The first time I saw a photograph of Martha Graham, I flipped. That face: looking like a Japanese samurai warrior of the thirteenth century. And I love that story of how she started out with Ruth St. Denis, doing Oriental dance and all that, and then at a given moment she saw Picasso paintings, and suddenly she got rid of beads and high-heel shoes and castanets and got into these old gunnysack dresses and created a whole new vocabulary of dance, which was a very healthy antidote to Russian ballet, which had sort of fallen on cream-puffy times. They weren’t doing any new works of great interest. Then here came Miss Mattie T. Graham down the highway just lassoing to left and right. Of course I wanted to see her.

Well, there was this young actress named Jayne Fortner in the cast of Thornton Wilder’s
The Merchant of Yonkers.
We became great friends. She also wanted to see Martha Graham, who was performing for the first time in a big theater, the Ziegfeld Theater on Sixth Avenue. She didn’t have any money, and I certainly didn’t have any money. So we got into our best, and at the intermission we strolled in with the intermission crowd going back in from their cigarette on the sidewalk. We found us each a program off the floor. And we just went back every intermission for a week. We never saw the early works before the first intermission, but we saw all the important new works. And of course I flipped. It was so exciting. It was an absolutely new feeling of dance with this sort of bare stage and one or two Noguchi pieces from the sculptor who did these big crazy things she used onstage. She’d fall off of them, climb them, stick one leg through them. I thought, Oh, Lord, someday I’ve just got to meet that person. I want to see her up close.

Well, I think, since I’ve always been kind to birds and animals, Saint Francis of Assisi put in a little prayer with the Almighty. One day, when I was going to my French class, which was upstairs over the Fifth Avenue Cinema on that part of Fifth Avenue that suddenly dumps into Washington Square a block later, I came across this lady who had dark glasses and a flowered silk scarf covering everything. We got in the elevator together, and the elevator stuck between floors. It just stopped. She said, “Oh, I hope this is not going to take long.” It did. So she took her scarf off and said, “Well, let’s sit down.” And when she sat, she just sank—with no bones—into one corner with her knees up to her chin. Cat and monkey: boneless. So I did the same, just slid down, and we just sat there corner to corner. When I saw it was Miss Mattie T. Graham, I said,
“Oh,
Miss Graham!” She said, “You know me?” I said, “Oh, and your work!” I said, “Oh, Miss Graham, that moment, when you put your head through that oval opening in that Noguchi, I almost wet my pants. I was in the third row.” She laughed; we began to talk. If ever I should have had a little basket with an ice bucket and some champagne, that was the time. But the atmosphere was heady enough, just being with her. She was one of the grand people: she was interested in who I was. When she realized that I loved dance and had seen many living dancers including one week of her, she said, “Well, if you’re all that interested, you must come to one of my classes. They are right up here.”

About two weeks later, I went twice to her class. The students were girls of good family from the private schools. And she’d come to the point where she’d make them fall; some of them wouldn’t fall. They would drop to one knee and then spread out, and she’d make them do it over. She would say, “Close off your mind and FALL! Shut off your mind, girls, DROP!” You could just see that she would have preferred to teach Italian slum girls or professional dance students, because these girls were well-bred young ladies, and some of those movements they just couldn’t understand. There was one movement they could never get right. She repeated them and repeated them, and finally she said, “Oh, shit! Lead with your crotch, girls!” And I thought, All my life I’ve waited for this moment. I didn’t go to French class that day. I just walked out in a daze and wandered around Washington Square looking at nature and thanking Saint Francis of Assisi. Thank you, Saint Francis, for favors granted. Thank you, Saint Francis, for crotch leaders.

These things don’t happen just to me; they happen to everybody. But most people don’t notice. Once I saw George Balanchine hurrying down Fifth Avenue, biting his nails. Nobody seemed to notice him; I noticed him. Every day when I left Chaucer Head Book Shop to go to lunch at a little French restaurant down on 56th Street, I used to cross Fifth Avenue going west with Greta Garbo. Because she, heavily disguised, used to go to her tango lesson somewhere there. She was always coming across 57th Street from east to west at the Tiffany’s corner, and I finally realized if I got there at five minutes to twelve every day, I could go a little bit behind this thing in a big hat with dark glasses and flat shoes which I knew right away was Greta Garbo because of those legs and big feet and the way she walked. She loped. But nobody else seemed to see her.