City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [123]
I heard three versions of his childhood from him. Once he was raised by socialists on Chicago’s South Side. Once his parents were a “radical” lesbian pair in Minnesota. And once, when we were strolling through the Île St.-Louis in Paris, I said, “Isn’t this the most beautiful perfect place?” and he said, “I’m so glad you like it. I was raised here by my French aunts as a child just after the war,” and he vaguely waved toward a darkened hôtel particulier along the Quai de Bethune. But why, if he’d grown up there, did he grope for words in French and have such an incomprehensible accent?
Then there were all the different versions of why he was no longer a concert cellist—his paralyzed hand was one. But it wasn’t paralyzed. Another was the time he’d vomited into his cello. But why did he play so many wrong notes, even though he had a scarily professional way of freezing his face and breathing through his stiffened nostrils as if he were a Japanese temple-guardian devil or a Dostoyevsky character on the verge of an attack? Dick loved music and he enjoyed concertizing, though it was all pretty hard on the ears. And, hey, does the cello have a hole large enough to vomit into? I think it has just two narrow S-curves on either side of the strings.
But who were we to complain? Dick provided us all with lots of good stories and half our conversation was devoted to his latest inventions and his most notable outrages. Did I tell you about how even though he was nearly bald and the fringe was all gray he tossed back an imaginary braid and exclaimed, “Well, as a blonde…”? Or did I tell you about last night at dinner when he came down the stairs in a little pink dress with shoulder straps, though his shoulders are horribly hairy? And then he changed midmeal to the little black dress? He obviously was nostalgic for the eighteenth century when public acts had been expressive, similar to acts of artistic invention. People are still telling Dick Sennett stories. Just recently, some twenty years later, I met someone who claimed he’d advised Dick on his wardrobe during the drag epoch.
He was wonderfully encouraging as a friend. He hired me to be the executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities even though I was only marginally an academic and had never been an administrator, except briefly at Saturday Review. The part-time job paid me just twenty-two thousand dollars a year—and my main duty was getting everyone coffee and telling Dick Sennett stories. In many ways, however, I was a good choice. I liked most people, I wanted to know all about their scholarly pursuits, I was even-tempered, and I had a small reputation as a writer. I was teaching a fiction workshop or two at Columbia and another one at New York University. I had a low rent and few expenses.
Dick did everything to encourage me. When I wrote a play, a fairly tedious one, he decided we should give it a reading at the institute. Val Kilmer, at that point a young, unknown actor, agreed to read the young lover. In real life Kilmer’s lover was then reputedly the much older Cher, who would wait for him outside the door in her limo every evening after rehearsals. No fool Cher—she wasn’t about to let this treasure (a drool-makingly young, masculine heterosexual