City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [60]
Jimmy had met an Egyptian from Alexandria named Bernard de Zogheb, who wrote texts in a hilarious macaroni language consisting of morsels of French and Italian. He’d already done Le Sorelle Brontë with the Little Players. Now Zogheb, who’d been a tourist guide in Egypt and mixed up all his languages, asked Merrill to tell him the story of Phèdre. Jimmy said, “I can find you a copy in a day,” but Zogheb countered, “Oh, no, I don’t want to read it. Just tell me the gist of it.”
Once Jimmy had summarized the plot for him, Zogheb wrote out his ballad opera—that is, new words to familiar pop tunes. Thus to the tune of “Honey,” Phaedra (played by the Lady Bracknell–like puppet personage Isabelle) sings:
Ah, Zeus, come son pesanti
Tutti le quel ornamenti
Which is a very funny translation of “How these vain ornaments, these veils burden me,” I’ll admit.
I guess the whole matinee, as was widely intoned, could be called “a delight.” But a smoldering little Marxist inside me resented all of these well-heeled cultural figures in the audience cooing over the Players’ wit and charm. Phaedra’s maid, Oenone, was played by Isabelle’s puppet maid Elsie Lump. I thought humor about maids was on a par with tasteless New Yorker cartoons about bums.
After the “opera,” a select inner group filed over to the nearby Central Park West apartment of the duo pianists Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale, where caterers (quietly paid by Merrill) served twenty guests a light supper. David Kalstone was a little in love with Bobby Fizdale. Bobby and Arthur had been lovers years before, but now they were more close companions and artistic partners. In the old days the two had spent a lot of time in Europe with titled people and composers, performing concertos for two pianos by Poulenc, Virgil Thomson, John Cage, and Paul Bowles. One of Jimmy’s favorite pieces of music was Fauré’s Dolly Suite played by “the boys,” Gold and Fizdale, a lemony, edgy, sometimes sad, sometimes frothy duet written for Debussy’s stepdaughter.
I remember those mornings in Stonington when the high-ceilinged rooms were full of sunlight, we were drinking our morning coffee, Jimmy had just come down from his workroom with a draft of a poem to his newborn goddaughter Urania living just downstairs, and the naïve sophistication of Dolly Suite was playing tag with our caffeine highs. David and I had both loved “Urania” but asked Jimmy (heart in mouth, for who were we to correct the master?), “Isn’t it just a bit … cold?” Jimmy slapped his forehead and said, “Oh, God, I left out the human feeling!” He then dashed back upstairs and descended half an hour later with a version that made us weep. Dolly Suite was the theme music to those glorious, preposterous days.
By the time I knew the “boys,” Arthur’s hands were acting up and Gold and Fizdale were turning to writing cookbooks and biography, producing a much-acclaimed life of Misia Sert—one of the principal patrons of the Ballets Russes and a Polish beauty painted by Renoir. Sert was also a friend of Cocteau and Picasso, and Mallarmé had written verses on her fan. Wits and women who organize salons are the hardest subjects for biographies since they say clever, quickly forgotten things and facilitate everything and create nothing. They’re crucial cultural figures whose fame and utility vanish when they die.
Misia was a perfect topic for the boys, however, since they were as worldly as she in their way. They were great hosts who cooked so well they had their own TV show. They had known musicians on every continent and were close friends of both Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, not to mention the dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq, who had been Balanchine’s wife and star until she contracted polio and eventually he dropped her. The boys were so social that their list of tony acknowledgments was like a page from the Almanach de Gotha; so reluctant were they to leave out even the dead, if they were sufficiently