The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [59]
The Christmas Tree grudged me a hideous grimace, fixing her beady eye on me like a kind of Ancient Mariness, and then turned upon Rollo with an ogle of the most vehement lechery I have ever seen. Now that I’ve been around (hey, hey) I am no longer astonished at the lubricity of these old biddies, but at the time I just couldn’t get over it.
The party went on. There were these two young princes. They were about sixteen years old and one was blond and the other dark. They were like a couple of bear cubs. They’d been evacuated to the States during the war and spoke tough American-English instead of English-English; it sounded so funny on top of their Baltic accents. As I was an actress they immediately assumed I must be an intimate of their great friend Aly Khan, and when—to our mutual sorrow—I had to disillusion them, they smoothly switched the conversation over to the possible drugging and drinking habits of several prominent movie stars they had never met.
“Say, you’d be swell in the movies,” one of them exclaimed after a long interested look at me. It did just flash past my mind then that maybe they were the ones who ought to be home with their mothers.
People started leaving. Two men I hadn’t even met came up and kissed my hand good-by; Mother Southern and her son toddled off; more champagne was opened, and the party apparently was really on.
The two young princes took me on a tour of the house. I saw what Judy meant about the strange pieces of sculpture. In all my life I’d never seen anything so spectacularly ugly. It was one of the Contessa’s hobbies, I was told—sculpting. The dogs too, the huge ones all over the place, and the litter of puppies in the kitchen were horrible, red-eyed, long-fanged beasts of an indescrible hideosity.
“The Contessa likes to surround herself with ugliness,” I said, hoping to get a laugh, but the Yellow Prince agreed most solemnly, adding with a leer, “She has some—um—rah-ther special tastes.” He said it in English-English. It was not the last time I was to be led down the garden path and out through the back gate of the private lives of the Set; but it was the first time, and it came out of the mouths of babes, and I was really curious.
“Strange tastes like what?” I asked eagerly, but was rewarded only with a wise and totally un-American shrug.
“Come along, little ones, we’re all going on to Rollo’s new discovery,” caroled the Contessa, that merry madcap, coming upon us together in the kitchen and delighted at last that age had found its level.
Rollo’s new discovery turned out to be a queer club.
One of the things—one of the many, many, many things that fascinate me about myself—is how it is possible for me to know something without really knowing it at all. I mean I seemed to have known about queers all my life, I can’t remember when I didn’t, and I generally can guess who is. I mean, it’s no traumatic shock for me or anything like that to discover that so-and-so actually is one—and yet, I swear, I was flabbergasted when I saw that club. There was a style of flirting along the bar where some sailors stood waiting to be picked up, that no starlet could hope to emulate. And the droves and droves. I had no idea there were so many. I just had no idea.
By now I was beginning to form some generalizations about the International Set (not that I ever even found out if they were the Real Thing, I mean what standards would I have to judge them by anyway?). First of all, though very few seemed to be married at the time, they were all passionately involved with one another. This had a way of making conversation rather difficult. For instance, when one of them began talking to you it was impossible to predict which of the others was going to get sore. And the reason they got sore was that it was assumed that the one talking to you was also making a pass at you, and the reason that was assumed was that it was generally true. And the reason it was generally true, was that they had nothing else to talk to me about. Past parties—past and future parties, resorts in and out of