The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (14 page)

The book took off in a way that no one, not even the press mavens at Warner Books, could have imagined. The entire promotional campaign was bookended by appearances on two of the most watched talk shows of the Seventies:
The Phil Donahue Show
, coinciding with the book’s publication date and
The Tomorrow Show
with Tom Snyder, taped in the summer of 1976.

In between, there were hundreds of photo sessions, radio shows, television interviews and guest appearances at bookstores throughout the United States. During those eighteen months, the Happy Hustler persona not only merged with my own identity; it began to dominate it. I began to lose touch with any semblance of who I was prior to Grant Tracy Saxon. Good acting? Nuts? Delusional? All of the above, I guess.

Mommy joined me at the venerable Palmer House in Chicago the night before the
Donahue
taping. She took a photo of me, sitting on the beautifully appointed bed, with a wineglass in one hand and a copy of the book in the other, “studying my lines,” as it were.

“Women call me Tracy. Men call me Grant,” I read as I drank. “I’m a bright, charming young stud who will sell my body to anyone, man or woman, for the right price. I’m proud of what I do and love doing it. It sets me apart from others—and that makes my performance special. My name is Grant Tracy Saxon. Let me tell you all about my remarkable life as
The Happy Hustler
.” I am wearing a red velvet bathrobe, given to me by Thom, with the initials “GTS” embroidered on the pocket.

Mommy became part of the charade. I once heard her say, “
We
were on
The Phil Donahue Show
.”

After the taping, Mommy returned to her lackluster life in St. Louis and I hung out in Chicago, where I met a pop star on the brink of making it big. This gawky singer-pianist approached my table at Punchinello’s, a late-night theater hangout. “Aren’t you the guy who wrote that book?” he asked.

My friends at the table were hardly able to contain themselves when he delivered the next line, straight-faced, “My girlfriend brought it home for me to see. She works for the network. You were great.”

His
what
?

Before you could say “Bette Midler,” he invited me to see his show the following night at Mister Kelly’s. While I never would have envisioned an affair with him, it happened. To borrow a line from a popular song at the time: “I fell in love with him before the second show.”

Most of our clandestine trysts took place in hotel rooms all over the country while his popularity soared. I only once remember visiting him at his modest Manhattan apartment, arriving in the early evening. There were a few stuffed animals and bouquets in the lobby, left by his adoring fans. When I departed the following morning, the lobby was overflowing with gifts for him, making it virtually impossible to navigate.

As Mr. Pop Star became increasingly more famous, my level of visibility was at odds with the confines of his closet.

To this day, he remains preposterously secretive; like Liberace before him, is he in fear of losing his legion of female fans?

What my celebrity status did give me was access to Hollywood’s gay A-list, many of whom wanted to “sleep with” the Happy Hustler. Before Numbers, the notorious gay bar where transactions between older industry types and ambitious young industry aspirants have regularly taken place for more than two decades, there was the Gallery Room on Santa Monica Boulevard. While it was more low-key than Numbers, the same dance was done.

It was one of Paul Lynde’s favorite watering holes. A notorious drunk, Lynde could make that alcoholic leap from mildly bitchy to downright venal in a matter of seconds. When he approached me at the bar one evening, I was not privy to this habitual pattern of behavior. The bartender, however, was acutely aware of Lynde’s eerie transformation and, in fact, must have anticipated the imminent turning point when he suggested that I “drive Mr. Lynde home.” How I was thrust into this position, I don’t recall. It certainly wasn’t based on my sobriety, since I was undoubtedly as shit-faced as Lynde.

This was during Lynde’s heyday as the Center Square on
Hollywood Squares
. Undeniably the gayest presence on television, he was bitchy, quick-witted and often vicious. It was a particular brand of humor that previously existed only in gay bars and private parties attended exclusively by homosexuals. Trailblazing? Yes. Politically correct? Probably not.

Somewhere en route to his luxurious house in the Hollywood Hills, he began hurling insults. “You’re just another tramp,” he sputtered, in that inimitable vocal pattern. By the time I dropped him off at his house, he was railing at me, incoherently, for no apparent reason. “You hear me?” He repeated, louder this time. “A tramp.”

My last memory of “Mr. Lynde” is the sound of his Gucci loafer kicking my car door before I could speed away.

Sal Mineo proved to be an inspiring antidote to the mounting resentment I felt toward the sugarcoated balladeer and television’s favorite fairy.

Mineo, nominated for an Oscar in his youth, had gained a reputation for being a rebellious artist as an adult. He directed and starred in a production of
Fortune and Men’s Eyes
that featured a very young and hunky Don Johnson. According to those who saw it, the prison sex scene between Mineo and Johnson was shockingly realistic and hot.

We met in San Francisco. Mineo was performing James Kirkwood’s
P.S. Your Cat Is Dead
a few blocks down the street in San Francisco’s North Beach, where I was appearing in yet another gay play with yet another porn star (Jack Wrangler). However, comparing Wrangler to my former costar, Culver, would be like comparing Pamela Anderson to Marilyn Monroe.

Wrangler was a monster of duplicitous self-creation. In those days, he was passing himself off as a former child star, the son of a big television producer and the musical comedy performer Dolores Gray. The veracity of these claims has been challenged over the years, but no fiction compared to the truth of Wrangler’s incarnation as the devoted husband of singer Margaret Whiting, many years his senior, before he died.

If one wanted to see acting at its most honest, Mineo’s Vito was just the ticket. He immersed himself in the role of the quirky gay burglar with a joy and intensity that was rare to experience; he was summoning all aspects of himself, including his sexuality, to create the full-bodied Vito. In many instances, gay men playing gay men distance themselves from the character while straight men playing gay men tend to comment on it. In both scenarios, the underlying message is, “This isn’t me.” In an artistically viable way, Mineo was saying the opposite: “This is me.”

If Mineo’s theatrical excursion was sublime (and it was), mine was ridiculous: I was appearing in a gay version of
Camille
with Wrangler in the courtesan role (in this case, named Rusty) and me as his ill-fated (in more ways than one) paramour. At a climactic moment of the play, moments before Camille/Rusty croaks, Wrangler clumsily stumbled around the stage wearing a turquoise kimono-type schmatta, deliberately opened, with his sizable member flopping in the breeze.

Mineo seemed unfazed by my appearance in the oily
Rusty
. What impressed him, clearly, was my openness as a gay actor and his perception that Hollywood had mistreated me. I sensed that my being out of the closet (at twenty-six) was something he wished he had been able to do ten years earlier.

During our brief friendship, he invited me to have lunch with him at Universal, where he was shooting an episode of
Columbo
. Mineo insisted we eat in the VIP dining room and proudly introduced me to everyone in sight, including the mighty Lew Wasserman. This gentlemanly behavior was as “openly gay” as anything I’d ever experienced in Hollywood.

I thought back to my first visit to the Universal lot, only days after I’d arrived in town, to audition for
Ironside
. If I was not yet jaded, five years in L.A. had robbed me of a hard-to-retrieve exuberance.

Mineo had purchased the film rights to a novel about a love affair between a male hustler and a female hooker living on the streets. “I want you to be in it,” he told me at the conclusion of our lunch. Even though the film was never realized, Sal Mineo’s vote of confidence instilled me with a belief in myself that I desperately needed.

Even though Sal was able to secure television jobs, his stature in Hollywood had taken a nosedive for one reason only: he was not in the closet. Pundits would say that it was because he couldn’t make the transition from juvenile to leading man, but that’s specious testimony in defense of Hollywood. Sal could have acted any role.

The sexy man and I talked about the art of acting and how the closet played havoc with one’s ability to create in a safe space. “The town is full of gay actors, some of whom are stars,” Sal said. “And their work would be improved immensely if they let go of all the bullshit that drives Hollywood.”

P.S. Your Cat Is Dead
was an opportunity for Sal to reestablish his chops in his hometown, where he would potentially be rediscovered for his uncommon skill and charisma.

A few days later, I heard the news on the radio, barely able to piece together the few words I could remember: “Mineo. Academy Award nominated.
Rebel Without a Cause
. Murdered. West Hollywood. Thirty-seven years old.”

CHAPTER 26
               

Determined to increase his onstage stamina for the L.A. production of
P.S.,
we had just made a date to play tennis. Hyperventilating, I began making phone calls, hoping I’d find out that what I’d heard on the radio wasn’t true.

Mineo, my only role model, was killed shortly after leaving a rehearsal at the Coast Playhouse, where he had been rehearsing for the imminent opening. Because Mineo’s sexuality was less secreted than that of most actors of his stature, his untimely death was not taken as seriously as it would have been if he’d been closeted or heterosexual. Because he was known to be gay and more than a little rebellious, Hollywood disassociated itself from the bloody murder, delivering the not-so-subtle message that Mineo’s provocative passing was something that he probably deserved.

The homophobic Hollywood beat went on.

During a drunken night at Numbers with a sour Wayland Flowers (sans Madame, unfortunately), someone named Billy convinced me to make an appearance in Provincetown as the Happy Hustler. No one seemed to ask what I would do. Strip? Re-create moments from
Dirtiest Show in Town
? Read excerpts of the book?

“Stand-up,” a friend suggested. “You should do a stand-up act.” At this point, I was game for anything, so I hired a comedy writer of sorts and, after about three days of writing material, I was flown to P-Town to make my nightclub debut as a stand-up comic.

“You know what sign I was born under?” I asked the audience. “For sale.” You get the picture. I went on at about midnight and was pretty wasted from drinking a yummy combo of vodka and cranberry juice.

No one cracked a smile, let alone laughed. I assumed my stand-up career was a one-nighter. But the following day, two outlandish dykes who ran the Post Office Café asked me to appear on the bill with dragster Arthur Blake. “You’ll sing a little, dance, do some of your material,” Phyllis slurred. “It will be faaabulous, honey.”

For the entire summer, I was a glorified chorus boy for the high-strung star of the show. Mr. Blake was one of those people who took himself so seriously that you felt you had to as well.

He had a brief Hollywood career, dressed as a man, but began doing drag outings in L.A. and created a sensation. Without wigs or outlandish costumes, he made Bette and Gloria and Tallulah come alive.

That was decades ago, before the drag revolution. Arthur was well into his seventies and had decided it was high time that he put on a dress, so he had some wild costumes made, including a Queen Elizabeth outfit. He was a stout man and the monstrosities he wore were hung in the backstage area, where another chorus boy and I nearly threw up from the combination of heat and the stench of the glittering—albeit sweat-soaked—gowns. The fact that we’d probably had five or six cocktails didn’t help.

I grew to love Arthur and I believe he really loved me. I’d listen to him tell stories about being out in the Fifties and Sixties. How brave he was.

One weekend, my friend Charles Pierce showed up. I had met Pierce when I first came to L.A. Carley (my darling friend from Goodman) and I stumbled into his show when he was appearing at Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip. I was captivated by his freedom onstage.

Craig Russell was also appearing in P-town that summer, along with Lynne Carter. The quartet made up the list of America’s Preeminent Female Impersonators. At a drunken party, I coaxed them all to pose, and I’d throw out a name. “Tallulah,” I’d shout and they’d all “do” Tallu. Russell was renting the home of artist Hans Hoffman for the summer.

I went to the soiree with Shane, a god with long golden locks who was a bartender/hooker. I took advantage of both of his talents, free of charge. I arrived at the party on roller skates, as an homage to Raquel Welch in
Kansas City Bomber
. Arthur loaned me a red boa that was nearly the length of a city block.

I forgot to mention that Shane was an aspiring actor. Well, one afternoon a gaggle of us were poolside, swilling down drinks, and we decided to do a staged reading of
The Boys in the Band
. I would essay the role of Michael and Shane would play—you guessed it—the Cowboy in an art-mirrors-life pastiche that was lost on no one.

On the other side of the country, Thom was making tons of money, so, without my input, “we” moved into his dream house, complete with a swimming pool and tennis court. I was getting ten percent of Thom’s profit, an arrangement that was a bit skewed considering he wrote the book in one weekend and I’d spent nearly two years promoting it.

During one of our screaming matches, I came to a conclusion that was painfully true. “You’re the pimp,” I shouted, hoping our new neighbors would hear every word. “And I’m nothing but your whore.”