City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [127]
She liked to come to my little one-room apartment for dinner if other amusing people were there. Once I had her with Robert Mapplethorpe and the female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, the subject of Mapplethorpe’s book Lady. Lyon wasn’t a freak or carnival performer but rather someone who exhibited her remarkable body in the art world, at galleries and museums. She was educated and well-spoken, and when she was wearing a simple black dress with sleeves and a full bodice, she didn’t even look muscular. But there at the table (she was a good sport) she pushed her sleeves back and made a muscle. We all had to touch the huge, hard mound—she was impressive. For a while Mapplethorpe wanted to marry her.
Susan felt relaxed around David Kalstone, who was a born courtier without ever being obsequious. Perhaps my best plum was Fran Lebowitz, the comic writer, who kept us sick with laughter with her constant, dry drolleries. Fran, who was wildly famous at the time, had written a blurb for my States of Desire. Though she dressed in men’s clothes, she, too, almost never spoke about her lesbianism—certainly not in public. Later she became a sort of court jester—no, that’s mean, perhaps “funny companion”—to different rich gay or bisexual men such as Malcolm Forbes and Barry Diller and David Geffen. Forbes had a château in Normandy where he had hot-air-balloon races. While the men were swooping around outside competing, their wives were doing their nails inside and responding with various degrees of interest to Fran’s advances. When I wrote a magazine article about David Geffen, one of Hollywood’s biggest moguls and art collectors, Fran gave me some great quotes about how Geffen and Barry Diller, owner of QVC, the shopping channel, among other things, would quarrel on the yacht over who was first in line to read the one copy of Jack Warner’s biography. Perhaps Geffen quietly settled the dispute by being the one who’d bought the Warner house, one of the grandest mansions in Los Angeles.
Susan and Fran started going to fashion shows together, and Susan’s appearance at such frivolous events was noteworthy enough to make the gossip columns. America’s leading female intellectual checks out the new spring frocks—that was the sort of headlines she was getting. Then suddenly they seemed to have a falling-out. What had happened? Had Fran finally put the make on Susan? Did Susan refuse to put out? We never knew. Fran herself, though always polite, seemed less friendly around me.
Susan’s closest friend was her son, David Rieff. For two years he and I were virtually inseparable and I was very, very fond of him. He had grown up with “gay uncles” such as Richard Howard and Jasper Johns, and I seemed to be falling into the familiar mode of the queer avuncular, though in my mind we were something more like cousins. David could be as contemptuous of other people as his mother was, but for the most part he seemed admiring and vulnerable and just a bit of a puppy dog. He had his mother’s strong features and long hair and sometimes was mistaken for her, though he disapproved of being introduced as Susan Sontag’s son. He seemed more amazed by my coarseness than to be genuinely reprimanding the one time I made this mistake out of social anxiety. But soon afterward I heard him phone in a reservation at a tony Manhattan restaurant under the name David Sontag instead of David Rieff. I suppose the dependents of famous people always face that dilemma