The Gay Metropolis (34 page)

But, she said, “I never was.”

DURING A. M. ROSENTHAL'S
tenure, gay employees were treated just as capriciously as gay issues at
The New York Times.

After his first collection of short stories was published to general acclaim, Walter Clemons stopped writing fiction. Three decades later, he said he had been concerned that if he continued, he might reveal his sexual orientation. “That's really why I gave up writing fiction: In explaining things, I thought it would show. It sort of dried me up as a fiction writer because I exhausted my safely writable experiences.” Whether that was the real reason for his writing block is probably less important than the fact that Clemons
believed
it was real. Until the 1980s, most gay writers assumed that public identification as a homosexual could quickly end their careers. “Any writer suspected of being homosexual would be immediately attacked by … something like ninety percent of the press,” said Vidal. “And the other ten percent would be very edgy in praise, for fear that the writer might be thought to be sexually degenerate.”

This fear may have been why playwrights like Albee and Williams focused on heterosexual subjects. Not everyone saw that as a disadvantage. “I always thought those guys were lucky,” Jack Kroll said about Albee and Williams, “because later on they would have had to write about gay things.”

After he had stopped writing fiction, Clemons became an editor at McGraw-Hill in Manhattan. One day in 1968 he received a call from a friend at
The New York Times Book Review,
offering him an editorship.
After he had accepted, but before he had started the new job, Clemons went home to Houston to visit his parents.

“My mother was planning to have a party the night before I flew back to New York, and the morning of the party I was up very early with my father. He went into the bedroom and came out sort of white, and said, ‘I think she's gone.' My mother had simply died in her sleep. So after the funeral and all the production, I went back to New York and I had bitten the hell out of my fingernails. I had to go for a physical at the
Times,
and the doctor looked at my hands and asked if I had been under some sort of nervous strain. I explained that my mother had just died and it was a shock, He asked, ‘Were you very close to your mother?' And I said, ‘Not especially.' Then he asked if I had had any homosexual experiences, and I said, ‘Well, yes.' It never occurred to me to lie. Ask me a simple question and I'll give you a straightforward answer. So he said that I'd better see the psychiatrist. They sent me off to a doctor. I wish I could remember his name because he was absolutely angelic.

“He asked me about my homosexual experience and when I came out and this and that. Then he asked if I was promiscuous, and I said, ‘No, I'm not now. But I have been. When I first came to New York I was on the streets and in the bars at every opportunity. But I lead a quieter life now.' At the end of the interview, he said, ‘I'm going to recommend that they hire you because you had several chances to lie and you didn't. I think you have good values and you're a good person.'”

Clemons was baffled: “Well, what did I do right?” he asked. The doctor replied, “When I asked you if you were promiscuous, you could have easily said, ‘Oh no, never.' It's perfectly natural that coming from Texas to New York you would have had sort of a wild first few years here, and you were perfectly frank about that. I like the way you talked to me.” Clemons continued, “That's why I wish I could remember his name. Who could be nicer?”

Clemons's first years at the
Times
were pleasant ones. “I was sort of unconscious of homophobia at the
Times
because I did what I think a lot of sort of polite, button-down homosexuals did in those days: I thought I was invisible.” Stanley Posthorn, who began his ascent through the corporate ranks at Time Inc. in the fifties, agreed: “I think our aspirations were limited. We were content to rise as far as we could, and conceal our gayness in doing it. I think we had to be. You did not wear it on your sleeve. You just didn't.”

At the
Times,
Clemons “didn't really think so much about whether
people were thinking about me because I thought, Nobody can see me.” But he turned out to be mistaken.

Two years after he arrived on West 43d Street, Clemons was asked to apply for the prestigious position of daily book reviewer. He was widely regarded as the most qualified candidate for the job, but it went to Anatole Broyard instead. Clemons was horrified when he learned from his colleague, John Leonard, that top editors at the paper had launched an investigation of Clemons's sexual orientation during his tryout. And Clemons was furious when he learned that three of his colleagues—including Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, already a daily book critic—had told his bosses that he was gay. “I was outraged and hurt, and thought, What has this got to do with anything?” Clemons remembered.

Shortly after Clemons had been passed over for the job as daily reviewer, Jack Kroll lured him over to
Newsweek,
where he had a distinguished career as one of the magazine's senior book critics. “Writing for Walter was definitely a moral act,” said Kroll. “He was my favorite among the
Times
critics. He was too good a man to fall in love with himself. It's so wonderful to deal with talent and sensibility.” The admiration was entirely mutual: “Jack's the best editor imaginable,” Clemons said.

Kroll had no suspicion that Clemons was homosexual. “I always assumed that he and [arts patron] Mimi Kilgore had some sort of thing. I used to think, That lucky fuck, he even got Mimi. I remember a dinner he had with me and a couple of other people at which it soon became clear that he wanted to tell us this. It was very straight and very sweet. The details have been overwhelmed by my failure to spot this—straight guys like to think they can spot this. The word I always used to describe his writing was
masculine.
And maybe I liked him too much. If you like a guy too much and you're straight, there's something that prevents you from making that connection.”

Clemons confirmed the identity of one of his accusers at the
Times
several years later, after another
Times
editor, Charles Simmons, wrote a novel in which he recounted the incident. When the novel was published, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt telephoned Clemons to arrange a meeting over drinks at the Four Seasons restaurant.

“I had never gotten over this even five years later, and I was foolish enough to think they had finally caught on about needing to get rid of Anatole Broyard and they wanted to sound me out about coming back as daily book reviewer,” Clemons recalled. His fleeting optimism was understandable because nearly everyone in the world of books considered
Clemons's criticism far superior to the work of Broyard or Lehmann-Haupt.

Clemons's failure to become the daily critic at the
Times
had “made a grievous imprint” on him. “It was the first rejection I had ever had. I had never even asked for a job before. People came to me, and asked, Would you like to do this, would you like to do that? So when I really wanted that job and didn't get it, I was deeply crushed. So I met Chris and we made chitchat for a while, and he finally said, I'll tell you the reason I called. I wanted to talk to you about Charlie Simmons's book.'

“I hadn't even seen it. So I said that I wished he had told me because I thought he was looking for someone to review it. But he said, ‘Let me read you a passage':

The first person he knew with a hyphenated name, a young attractive bachelor, took him up as a confidant and reported regularly on progress in finding a suitable girlfriend. He was unhappily married at the time and envied the bachelor's single life until one day the bachelor said, ‘I haven't had sex in two years, not since I broke up with the dancer friend.' ‘What happened to her?' he asked the bachelor. ‘Him,' the bachelor said, and he realized sexual confessions contain propositions. The second man he knew with a hyphenated name, who affected intricate designs with facial hair, who was both boyish and avuncular and who was liked by everyone for a while, prevented a colleague from getting an influential job by telling the employer that the colleague was homosexual. The colleague, over drinks in a bar one evening, said to him, ‘He didn't even ask me if I was.' And then after a pause, ‘You know what's the matter with him? He wants to be a good guy but just can't.'

“So Chris read me this passage, and I said, ‘Yes, I did say something like that.' And he said, ‘Since Charlie has published this, I have always wanted a chance to explain to you. I was too shy to open up the subject and this gives me an opportunity. I have always felt bad about this. You see, the reason I did that was that it's a very demanding job, and writing reviews can be very personal and under the pressure of the job, I thought that it'”—Clemons's homosexuality—“‘might come out in your reviews.'

“He thought it was better to prevent this disaster. I thought the explanation was worse than the original events.”

Clemons was too stunned to reply.

“Yes. I just had a friendly drink with Chris and we went on to other subjects. I went home and told my friend, and he said, ‘What! Weren't you furious? Didn't you say anything?' And I said, ‘No. I couldn't think of anything much to say.' I was seeing a psychiatrist at the time, and I brought
this up the following week, and he said, ‘You sat still for that?' So we had a discussion about not being able to express anger.”

Lehmann-Haupt's recollection of this conversation does not differ markedly from Clemons's account. Although Lehmann-Haupt denied that his motivation was to prevent Clemons from being hired as his fellow critic, he called Clemons's description of their drink at the Four Seasons “certainly a way of putting it … I mean that's the way he saw it.” He also confirmed that after “four, or five, or six hours” of drinking Scotch with Rosenthal in the managing editor's private office, he told Rosenthal that Clemons was gay.

Lehmann-Haupt said he confided to Rosenthal “personally and privately” that he thought Clemons was blocked as a fiction writer “because he doesn't accept his sexual orientation.

“And Abe nodded, and said, ‘Well, that's very interesting.' And that was, again I say, we took a number of people over similar indiscreet …” the critic's voice trailed off.

A quarter century after the event, Lehmann-Haupt admitted that it had been a mistake to confirm to Rosenthal that Clemons was a homosexual. Lehmann-Haupt also agreed that Clemons was “absolutely” a better critic than Anatole Broyard.
^*
Rosenthal said he had “absolutely no recollection either that Walter Clemons was gay or that I ever discussed it” with Lehmann-Haupt. He also denied that he had ever discriminated against any employee because he was gay.

Lehmann-Haupt recalled that during their drink at the Four Seasons, “Walter was not giving me an inch. The more I went, the more he sort of looked at me. He wouldn't even nod. He wouldn't say, ‘Look, I understand this was tough for you'—or anything that would have given me any kind of relief. And I was stumbling around trying to explain what had happened. I probably didn't perform very well. I mean, it was certainly one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through, and it got worse by the minute.”

While Clemons had been working at the
Book Review,
its editor, Francis Brown, had put him up for membership in the Century Club, a Manhattan institution housed in a Stanford White palace, which counts many of the city's most accomplished writers and artists among its members. “I
had gone to
Newsweek
in 1971, and at the fall dinner with the new members I ran into Abe Rosenthal—who I had beat in by a couple of years—in his little tux. We found ourselves drinks, and he was very flustered, and said, ‘You've gone somewhere, haven't you?' And I said, ‘Yes, I'm the book reviewer for
Newsweek
now.' And he said, ‘I didn't mean to say that! I didn't mean to say that!' It was the weirdest thing. He was deeply embarrassed and flustered. All I can think is that he was so flustered by running into this fag that he had denied a job to, on the august occasion of his induction, he just lost his head.”

HOWARD ROSENMAN
was a very good-looking twenty-two-year-old medical student in 1967, the son of an Orthodox Jewish family on Long Island. He was living a “very religious life,” wearing a yarmulke and eating kosher. He already knew that he was gay, but he had gone only so far as to look surreptitiously at a few gay magazines. Every weekend he visited his family for the Sabbath. After going to synagogue with his father on Saturday night, he would pick up his girlfriend and drive into Manhattan. “She was also very religious. In the trunk of the car, I had bell-bottom pants and a Nehru jacket, and she had a miniskirt. We would change into our uniform and we would go to Arthur, the club that Sybil Burton owned, and pretend that we were hip.” Sybil Burton was Richard Burton's ex-wife, and in 1967, Arthur was internationally famous as the chicest nightclub in Manhattan, one of the very first places in America to be called a discotheque.

Arthur, named for George Harrison's haircut,
^*
was also one of the first places where would-be patrons were forced to line up in front of a “velvet truncheon”—a nocturnal rite later made famous by Studio 54. Mickey Deans was the man who made the selections from behind Arthur's cordon. “That was the first time I experienced it,” said Rosenman. “Because we were young and I guess fairly cute, they let us in, and we danced all night long to Otis Redding—'Sitting on the Dock at the Bay'—and Aretha Franklin—'Respect.' R and B heaven. It was so hip it was beyond hip. Two little rooms, one room over here and the disco was in the back and then another room with a bar and the celebrity table.