Stonewall (11 page)

Paula Strasberg, the wife of Lee (head of the Actors Studio), and herself a respected coach, once said to Jim, “I don't care
how
you get the part. It's only when you get the part that you know if you can do any good work.” Jim wasn't able to proceed on that advice, but he came to cherish nearly everything else he heard at the West Forty-sixth Street Actors Studio. In the early sixties, it was decidedly
the
place for theater people; every actor wanted to be accepted as a member of the hallowed Studio. In Jim's case, he won admission by a hair.

During the interview, Lee Strasberg told him peremptorily that he was underage, and then asked him who his two favorite actors were. Despite his mask of naïveté, Jim could be shrewdly calculating; he answered “Marilyn Monroe,” knowing that she was close to the Strasbergs. Then he named Montgomery Clift, and said that whenever Clift performed “something unusual happened.” (He omitted telling Strasberg that on first arriving in New York, he had found out Clift's address, gotten wildly drunk, and crooned “Monty, Monty” under his window; he had awakened the next day in Clift's guest room, but never got to meet him.) Jim added that he had first heard about the Actors Studio after asking one of the Phoenix Theater actresses he most admired where she had studied. Strasberg was apparently taken with all of Jim's answers, and decided not only to admit him to his own private classes held at Carnegie Hall, but to give him a full scholarship.

Jim ended up studying with Strasberg for nearly seven years. Where others found Strasberg self-aggrandizing and pretentious, Jim found him almost wholly admirable, something of a surrogate father. “Lee changed my life,” Jim says simply. “I was a very smart kid, and a sensitive kid, but I was very much out of touch with my own feelings.” Going to class became more important to him than anything else in his life, more important than holding down a job and eating, even more important than going for an audition. Strasberg sent him to other teachers besides himself: to Master Chang, a t'ai chi teacher on Canal Street, and to Sevilla Fort, a black dancer who taught Jim that he didn't have to wait until he could do something perfectly, or better than anyone else, before taking a chance; it was okay to do the best he could, so long as it
was
his best.

Jim briefly found “true love” in Strasberg's class—with Frank, a fellow student. They lived together for a while in a twenty-nine-dollar-a-month garden apartment on Forty-sixth Street (sublet from Richard Hepburn, the brother of Katharine Hepburn). When he and Frank broke up, two of Jim's heterosexual friends decided that he needed a girlfriend, and for a while Jim had an affair with the woman they introduced him to. But he never pretended to be straight, and in the world of the Actors Studio never had to. Homosexuality was commonplace among members of the Studio, though no one talked openly of it, or ever publicly declared—in the later style of gay liberation—his or her orientation. In the early sixties, to be a declared homosexual would have been like asking to be an unemployed actor.

The same attitude held even in the far-out reaches of the Living Theater, which Jim got connected with in 1962, a year after joining the Actors Studio. By then, the earlier distinction between Broadway and off-Broadway theater had blurred, and avant-garde work had started to move from off-Broadway to the coffeehouses, lofts, churches, cellars, and storefronts that Jerry Tallmer, drama critic of
The Village Voice
, had labeled in late 1960 “off-off-Broadway.” In the world of the avant-garde—still fermenting in the early sixties, but soon to burst forth—Judith Malina and Julian Beck's Living Theater (“The Living” in the jargon of the cognoscenti) was considered by many the most radically innovative. It was self-consciously political, prided itself on its interracial company, combined communal living with theatrical experimentation in its Fourteenth Street space, and mounted a sweeping assault on mainstream American values.

Yet even at the Living Theater, homosexuality was more practiced than spoken of. By 1962 Jim was sharing an apartment with the Living Theater's stage manager and performing in its production of Auden and Isherwood's
The Dog Beneath the Skin
, but he almost never heard any open talk about the same-gender love and lust being played out all around them. Still, he valued his stint with the Living Theater. He had known few Jews or blacks while growing up in East Providence—blacks lived on South Main Street, not in his neighborhood, and Jews were rich people who owned big houses on Blackstone Boulevard; now he finally got intimate exposure to both, and took easily to both (indeed, in Jim's view, gay people have a sixth, sympathetic sense that draws them naturally, compassionately to other outsiders).

He was particularly drawn to Joe Chaikin, a member of the Living Theater who had made a strong impression in the company's path-breaking
play about junkies,
The Connection
. In 1963 Chaikin would form his own group, the Open Theater, with which Jim would get involved and which, in the minds of many, would come to epitomize the theatrical ferment of the decade. Jim credits Chaikin with actually saving his life at a point when he was feeling down about being gay. Chaikin simply took him to bed, cuddled and kissed him, made him feel good about himself.

Still, there was only one avant-garde theater in New York in the early sixties where it was thoroughly okay to be gay: the Caffè Cino, the earliest (1958) of all the off-off-Broadway experimental groups and a significant if rarely credited crucible for an emerging gay male sensibility. The Cino was the brainchild and alter ego of Joe Cino. Born in Little Italy, he had originally intended to become a ballet dancer, an unlikely aspiration for an Italian-American boy, but when he was in his twenties that passion had given way to a
somewhat
more seemly preoccupation with theater. (In the early-morning hours after the Caffè had closed its doors to paying customers, Joe Cino, stark naked and by then overweight, would perform solo dances under the stage lights in nostalgic tribute to his youthful dreams.)
⁶

The Caffè Cino, at 31 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village, functioned as a coffee shop cum performance space and was essentially an extension of Joe Cino's own apartment (he usually slept on a mattress in the back room). He packed the small Caffè with assorted
chotchkês
, glitter, and crystal, hung paintings by Kenny Burgess (a Cino waiter) on the walls, and constructed a tiny (twelve-foot) stage surrounded by tables and chairs that accommodated no more than fifty people.

A large espresso machine stood on a counter off to the side. It produced the countless pots of brew that, together with sandwiches and sodas, provided the Caffè's fare (and sustenance—it never got a dime in arts grants). The wall behind the espresso machine was covered with pictures of movie stars, opera divas, and unidentified beauties of both genders. Each evening Joe Cino, usually dressed in a trademark black cape, would start the performance with a flourish—“It's magic time!”—and would then retreat behind the espresso machine to serve up coffee and, now and then, to follow along (audibly) with the proceedings onstage.

A number of gay male theater artists who later became well-known—Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, Marshall Mason, Robert Patrick, Jean-Claude Van Italie, Paul Foster, William M. Hoffman, Tom O'Horgan, Neil Flanagan, H. M. Koutoukas, Doric Wilson, and Ronald
Tavel (not to mention nongay playwrights like John Guare and Sam Shepard)—worked at some early point in their careers at the Cino, as did a bevy of future stars, including Bernadette Peters, Harvey Keitel, and Al Pacino.

Joe Cino encouraged a kind of gay-hip atmosphere. Years before an emergent gay movement helped to legitimize such subjects, Cino's favorite injunction to gay male playwrights was “Get real, Mary!”—that is, “Let's bring the gay thing out into the open!” The result was a large number of plays with gay male themes or characters, including some—like Lanford Wilson's
The Madness of Lady Bright
, Tom Eyen's
Why Hanna's Skirt Won't Stay Down
, and Robert Dahdah's campy, if not overtly homosexual, production of
Dames at Sea
—that have achieved the status of classics. And the message that it was okay to be gay filtered out beyond the Cino circle itself. Arthur Bell, later a prominent gay activist and
Village Voice
columnist, recalled that for him and others, the Caffè “exemplified the freedom that was to come.… The Cino group made me want to assert my own gayness to the world.”
⁷

Jim Fouratt found his way to the Cino in the early sixties. He performed the role of a Mae West-like spider in
Fairies I Have Met
, a play based on the poems of Oscar Wilde (the playwright, Allen James, later committed suicide), and acted in several plays by Joe Bush, who in the fifties had written the first “outing” book,
Famous People Who Are Gay
. Ondine, born Robert Olivo and later a Warhol star, was part of the Cino while Jim was performing there, and much talked of as the possessor of the largest cock in North America. Intrigued, Jim accepted Ondine's invitation one day to view his prodigious organ in the bathroom. When they got there, the cock proved to be prodigious indeed, but all Ondine wanted to do with it was shoot it up with a hypodermic needle. Apparently he couldn't get off unless someone was watching.

The experience scared Jim. He was not yet twenty, and did not want to become part of the endemic drug-taking at the Cino. Indeed as the sixties wore on, Joe Cino, always drawn to intensity and ecstatic abandonment, himself became increasingly addicted to speed—and increasingly paranoid. When his lover, John Torrey, the Cino's electrician, was electrocuted while doing a lighting job in New England, a despondent Joe moved closer to the edge. On March 31, 1967, he carved up his own body with a kitchen knife. A hundred and twenty people gave blood at St. Vincent's Hospital in an effort to save him, but he died three days later, aged thirty-six. Friends and associates
tried to keep the Caffè Cino going, but it closed its doors for good in 1968.

Jim acted at the Cino during its heyday, and although he never became a central figure in its operations (or its mythology), he did a number of eye-catching turns—including a pathbreaking nude scene (“I was primarily worried about how my dick was going to look”) in which he was sexually abused by, among others, Jesus, Mary, Dale Evans, and Roy Rogers, and which ended with him ecstatically fucking a TV set.

Robert Heide, one of the Cino playwrights, thought Jim was “incredibly pretty, something like the famous photo of himself that Truman Capote put on the back jacket of
Other Voices, Other Rooms.
” And he also thought Jim was a good actor, a hypertheatrical, incandescent presence, with an almost “Marilyn Monroe aura about him.” Heide was among the few who also recognized that Jim was “super-intelligent,” even if he himself wasn't admitting to it much, preferring the then current “Let's be cool” style.
⁸

Jim and Bob Heide never had anything more than a brief flirtation, but did hang out together for a time. They shared much: the notion that theater was somehow going to save their lives; sardonic amusement at all the “straight” Actors Studio–Living Theater types who were somehow available for gay sex; and, too, some mutual friends—Jim Spicer, the Living Theater's general manager, who ran its Monday night “new playwrights” series at the Cherry Lane Theatre, and Ron Link, the stage manager and director with whom Jim shared an apartment for a time.

Hanging out in the Village in the early sixties meant a mix of bars and coffee shops. There were far fewer gay bars than in later years, and those that did exist were run by the Mafia and subject to frequent police raids. Jim, Bob Heide and their friends frequented (as did Yvonne Flowers) Lenny's Hideaway, a cellar bar on Tenth Street off Seventh Avenue South, as well as the popular gay dancing bar (about the only one in existence at the time) that adjoined the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce Street. Sometimes, too, they would go to the Old Colony, Mary's, and the gay and straight artists' hangout, San Remo, on MacDougal Street, which specialized more in drama than in sex (Jim Spicer's habit of draining black Russians and throwing the glass on the floor barely raised an eyebrow).

Coffee shops were also places to rendezvous. Mother Hubbard's in Sheridan Square was a special favorite. Open all night, it was famous for its apple pie and its generosity to actors. Owner-manager
Adele Speare (the gay crowd called her Mildred Pierce in tribute to her Joan Crawford-like looks and her Cadillac) offered a hamburger, apple pie, and coffee for ninety-five cents—or for nothing if you were one of the out-of-work actors she favored. Around the corner from Mother Hubbard's was Pam-Pam's, where another generous woman, Clara, let Bob Heide and Ron Link run up a $500 tab at one point. And across the street was Riker's, where a large gay crowd would go after the bars closed.

For those single-mindedly on the prowl for sex, there were the all-night Everard Baths, the balcony at the Regency Theater (which showed old movies) on Sixty-sixth Street, the men's rooms at assorted subway stops and at Rockefeller Center, the working-class Howard Baths in Newark, and the McBurney and Sloane House YMCAs (Stella Adler, with whom Heide was studying acting, would archly tell her classes, “Now, I don't want my boys running around the YMCAs!”).

Alcohol was still the preferred drug in gay circles in the early sixties, but mescaline and LSD were finding advocates. One Living Theater actor specialized in mixing mescaline and apricot nectar, and Johnny Dodd, a waiter and co-lighting designer at the Cino (he died of AIDS in 1991) would throw periodic LSD parties in his apartment on Cornelia Street—the apartment from which in 1964 Freddie Herko, a dancer with the James Waring company, made a naked ballet leap out the sixth-story window to his death. When Bob Heide showed Andy Warhol the spot on the street where Herko had landed, Warhol nonchalantly said, “I wonder when Edie [Warhol's superstar, Edie Sedgwick] will commit suicide. I hope she lets us know so we can film it!”
⁹